Finding Paths to Progress Behind Hot Headlines
The world is burning, flooding and polarized, and full of opportunities
In my first Sustain What dispatch, I explained why the Web needs a fresh conversation space for breaking deadlocks around climate change and other wicked sustainability challenges. Here’s more on the themes and approaches you’ll engage with in this project.
Risk and opportunity
One overarching goal in my quest is getting a clearer view of the core drivers of risk – risk to human communities facing climate impacts and environmental hazards or assaults on violent resource frontiers; and risk to species, ecosystems and wild places as the human imprint spreads to every planetary nook and niche. When it comes to climate, we often focus too much on what's changing global temperature and how that's tweaking weather events and too little on what's creating glaring vulnerability on the ground, and for whom.
I love how Diana Liverman, a University of Arizona geographer long focused on climate change, put it in a recent Sustain What webcast discussion: "When we talk about climate risk, some people still just think it's the probability of the heat wave. But we need to think about risk not as the probability of the heat wave, but the probability of harm."
Another goal is finding and generating opportunity – the potential for science, innovation, education, social movements and, yes, communication, to cut risk and spread wellbeing.
Urban heat is a choice
The images at the top of this post were taken in Portland, Oregon, at the peak of the deadly Pacific Northwest "heat dome" event by Vivek Shandas, a Portland State professor helping Portland and other cities shape cooler paths on a human-heated planet. The greener wall takes temperatures from deadly to hot but survivable.
Climate change worsened the heat wave, for sure, with worse on the way.
But even as we work to slow warming, climate vulnerability is a choice. I'll be writing more on heat solutions in the weeks ahead. Explore this planning tool charting a tale of two Portlands - hotter or cooler - that Shandas helped develop.
For a super-quick example of built vulnerability, take the insane, but not unprecedented, flooding impacts in parts of Europe earlier this month. Most policy discourse and headlines center on slowing climate change by cutting emissions driving warming.
Disaster geography
Important science will gauge how much global warming influenced local rainfall. But that's a distraction. The world has to get far more serious about slowing warming, as I've written for more than half my life. But that focus misses two deep and scary bodies of science:
One is "paleoflood" studies showing, through analysis of layered sediment and other evidence, that devastating deluges have occurred through the centuries (including in cooler climates). That's as true for heavily populated parts of the United States (e.g., the Northeast, Texas, California's Central Valley) as it is for the flood-ravaged parts of Europe.
I'm writing a post on this with input from some amazing scientists, but here's a vivid hint in the disaster geography around Blessem, the German town that became a wrenching meme in recent days through an aerial image showing a biblical-scale hole in the earth. That photo, released by the local government, didn't show the wider view. In my tweet here you can see, via Google Earth, that an enormous sand and gravel pit had been excavated in recent decades just on the edge of town, providing a ready destination for the vast flows of water that demolished part of the town.
The second sobering body of science is work by geographers charting what two American researchers, Walker Ashley and Stephen Strader, aptly call "the expanding bull's eye effect." Communities worldwide are building vulnerability faster than climate is changing.
This simple diagram shows what this looks like in a hypothetical river floodplain. But they and others have done hundreds of studies showing this around the world (and for far more than flood hazards).
Here's a rough guide to how I'll break things down on Sustain What.
Climate change is part of something bigger
While I’ve written more words on human-driven climate change than any other issue, I still hold by what I said when asked this question in 2008: “Obviously climate change is the biggest story on your plate right now, but looking ahead what do you see?”
I replied that climate change is not the story of our time. I said, and still believe, that climate change is a subset of the story of our time, which is that we are haltingly coming of age on a finite planet and only just now recognizing that it is finite. The story of our time is how we confront the full suite of environmental and societal imbalances attending the “great acceleration” of the last 70 years or so, and what we do with that awareness to limit harms now and regrets in the decades ahead.
If you’re wondering why I don’t put climate change ahead of other challenges, just look at how the pandemic demonstrated that you can’t make sustained progress transforming energy systems and cutting climate risk if the worldwide spread of a virus shuts down economies and burdens the poorest countries with waves of persistent infection. It's all connected.
And look at how the extreme storm of weaponized disinformation around our political processes in the United States threatens basically any kind of progress. There’s little about the dysfunction in Washington that is climate-specific. It's vital to recognize the interdependence of all of these challenges.
One could propose that a "democracy emergency" in the United States (and a few other keystone countries) is bigger than any "climate emergency."
As a first step toward building a better human relationship with climate, we’ll try to break down paralytically grand concepts like the “climate crisis” into addressable components – from local to global scale.
As I touched on above, there are two prime fronts in the climate challenge: cutting deep and dangerous exposure and vulnerability in the world’s many climatic and coastal hazard hot spots now and doing everything possible to slow warming by cutting emissions of heat-trapping gases.
There’s an urgent need to do both because any climate benefits from emissions progress will take decades to meaningfully emerge and because robust research shows that loss and damage from extreme weather events is still mainly a function of that "expanding bull's eye" - not (yet) global warming.
Former Vice President Al Gore missed this when he wrote his first book on global warming in 1992 but corrected himself in 2013.
Gore initially wrote that adaptation to climate change is a "kind of laziness, an arrogant faith in our ability to react in time to save our skins." His prime concern, shared by many environmentalists, was that industries and allies were using the argument to distract from the need to move away from unfettered burning of fossil fuels. Even though it's hard, Gore later stressed the "moral imperative of pursuing both policies simultaneously, in spite of the difficulty that poses."
That second message too often gets lost even now.
Life, wild and managed
I’ll also focus on efforts to sustain wild places and ecosystems and revive environments that were polluted, paved or plowed and are now poised for renewal. Here, too, my experience helps, including the months I spent reporting on the violent clash in the Brazilian Amazon between ranchers and their backers and rubber tappers and Indigenous communities trying to make a living from the living forest.
It has become ever clearer that environmental progress on the world's far-flung resource frontiers can't be sustained without sustaining the livelihoods and rights of people in and around threatened ecosystems. And in places where there are no local guardians, as is the case on the high seas, the fast-growing capacity to track activities from a distance can fill gaps, as the success of Global Fishing Watch demonstrates.
The unnatural side of disasters
Climate change has been, in many ways, “a disaster epic in slo-mo,” as the headline on one of my short pieces on sea-level rise once explained. But I’ve also written extensively about other potent hazards, from devastating hurricanes to tsunamis to earthbound asteroids, and humanity’s halting responses so far.
In sifting for best practices, I'll connect you with experts such as Samantha Montano, who teaches emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy and is the author of the forthcoming book Disasterology - Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Climate Crisis.
We'll explore both technological and traditional means of boosting community preparedness in zones where the tug of fertile volcanic soils or productive coasts continues to lure communities into harm's way. I think you'll appreciate the simplicity of the message Renato U. Solidum, a leading volcano scientist in the Philippines, uses when he speaks to communities in imperiled places: "The volcano owns the land."
The polluted communication climate
A substantial portion of the output here will center on communication. Too often, people who care about climate change, food futures, protecting biological diversity and the like have seen the communication task as telling a better story - one good enough to defeat heavily bankrolled narratives arguing for the status quo.
That was me through my first couple of decades of science journalism.
Don’t get me wrong, narratives matter. But they are grossly insufficient when the goal is progress on a phenomenon as monumental and systemic as planetary climate disruption driven by heat-trapping emissions from sources as variegated as a Beijing power plant, a Houston traffic jam and tropical forests being burned to make pasture for beef cattle.
And, as I began to learn around 2006, stories are grossly insufficient when the tug of political or cultural affiliation is competing with an argument shaped by data. Culture wins, almost every time. Even within my family and my wife’s kin, startling, yet explicable, divisions exist over everything from climate change to the Trump presidency to vaccination.
A particular focus on Sustain What will be examining situations where the new information environment we’re immersed in is helping or hurting the actual environment or human societies, and where tweaks or breakthroughs can tip things away from darker outcomes.
On the up side, think of how Twitter has allowed youth climate campaigners to coordinate and amplify messages worldwide. My favorite hashtag, and chant, from 2019 was #WeVoteNext. Here's video I shot when Greta Thunberg led her first Fridays for Future rally on American soil, at the United Nations.
But the value of social media and online connectivity goes far beyond messaging. I can't think of a project more emblematic of what's possible than Earthrise.education. As I touched on in my first dispatch, before and during lockdown last year, students in Iowa and Massachusetts sifted satellite imagery of Amazon forest conditions and identified areas where illegal gold mining was spreading into the territory of the Yanomami tribe in the Brazilian portion of the vast river basin. Their work helped alert a Reuters reporting team. The resulting multimedia story helped prompt a federal judge, just days later, to order the expulsion of the miners.
Of course the pressures remain, but so does the opportunity to refine and expand such monitoring and response systems.
Finally, we'll periodically check in on the latest efforts in the creative arts, from theater and film through music and online data-driven visualizations, in energizing communities and accelerating environmental action.
I'll close this dispatch with the ice equivalent of an hourglass used by the climate artist Carter Brooks to mark (unbidden) the drip-drip passage of time during my performance of Liberated Carbon at a climate summit in San Francisco a few years ago:
What examples of the up side and down side of online communication most vex or excite you? Post a comment or send me a note at the link below.
Send me feedback (including corrections!), tips, and ideas here.
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