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We live on a human-heated planet, wrapped in a persistent pandemic and now dangerously destabilized by a rogue superpower.
We're also facing a relentless "infodemic" that will keep producing more Babel than brilliance if we don't all dive in and try to build a cooler relationship between people, our planet and each other.
In June 2021 I launched this twice-weekly Sustain What dispatch on Bulletin to offer solution-focused stories and discussions using tactics and sources gleaned through three and a half decades on the resilience and environment beat, mainly for The New York Times.
My mission is to help you discover and spread actionable steps to take amid all the simplistic "climate crisis" "extinction crisis" "hoax" "sustainability" shouting.
I've already prompted the Washington Post to fix a glaringly unethical advertising design it was publishing for ExxonMobil. I've helped amp up pressure on Mexico and relevant U.S. agencies to save the last 10 or so vaquita porpoises on the planet (including in Spanish). I've teamed up with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala to make the case for boosting girls' rights and education access as a climate strategy. I sparked fresh commitments from the new administrator of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to focus on boosting communities' capacity to cut climate risks before the next flood or storm.
But I need your help, too.
In all those years of reporting and writing for some of the best news outlets on the planet, I've learned that fostering story sharing and solution-seeking dialogue can more demonstrably shift things toward better outcomes than simply telling stories.
That process requires crosstalk, outreach and sustained collaboration. That's where you come in.
If you're not part of the Sustain What community already, please subscribe here to receive my posts by email. I promise not to overload you. (Follow me on Facebook or Twitter at @revkin for blow-by-blow output!)
Here's my mission message, which also drives my work building an Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at Columbia University's new Climate School:
Let's get busy!
Notes on the stories I mentioned above
Here's the story on the Washington Post's advertising ethics and another on my message about similar fossil-fuel ad issues to my former employers at The New York Times.
Here's the first story I wrote here in the reasons the imperiled vaquita is still worth fighting for. I'll be writing another piece shortly on vital steps to take take before this winter to give the world's smallest and rarest cetacean a fighting chance to avoid extinction.
Here's my conversation with FEMA administrator Deane Criswell on spreading the preparedness drills that are common in earthquake country to flash-flood zones.
Hope is a verb
As a parting vision of hope, here's video from a reporting trip I did with New York State biologists tracking the recovery of the endangered Atlantic sturgeon after two centuries of overfishing: