My Columbia Chapter Ends, But Great Work Lies Ahead

I thought it worth sharing the note I sent to Columbia Climate School colleagues today - my last day as an officer of the university and the last day of my initiative on communication and sustainability there. Happy to answer questions in the comment thread.

A pre-pandemic gathering of scientists, artists and others focused on climate communication, including climate scientists Gavin Schmidt (lower right) and Kate Marvel (standing)

Dear all, 

I had a great run developing the Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and then Climate School starting in July 2019. For practical and budgetary reasons, sadly but amicably, today marks the end of this chapter of my lifelong push to make communication matter in pursuit of progress on sustainability challenges. (My colleague Dale Willman, who ran our Resilience Journalism Project, left for new adventures in April.)

I’ll always be grateful to Alex Halliday, and donors who supported us, for recognizing that any effort to understand and safeguard the biogeophysical environment can’t succeed without also working to understand, and master, the communication environment. As has become ever clearer, from the confounding infodemic that surrounded the pandemic to the explosive rise of AI, the communication environment is changing far faster than the “natural” one.

I wish the best to the leadership, faculty, researchers and students who are working to transform the Climate School from a bold concept to a self-sustaining world-leading hub for knowledge and skill building and impact.

Although I moved to the Maine coast a year ago, I’m happy to keep advising students and collaborating with others at Columbia or elsewhere working on relevant frontiers. You can reach me through my Columbia alumni email - ar667@caa.columbia.edu. My work ahead increasingly will center on mentorship, speaking, workshops and consultancy, along with a return to writing books, working on film projects and, after a decade-long gap, recording another album of my music. I’ll keep writing my Sustain What column, with a bit of a hiatus while I reorganize my to-do list. I’ll also keep running a variant of my Sustain What webcasts, which attracted close to 3 million viewers through some 400 episodes in my time at Columbia. 

The initial vision was two-pronged: 

• Building a learning and doing hub for media innovation at the Earth Institute and then Climate School, filling a gap between traditional journalism and conventional communication departments. As with everyone, the pandemic drove our Initiative mostly online in early 2020. That shift made it harder for us to build climate and sustainability communication into classroom teaching - to my great regret. And we couldn’t keep doing the face-to-face convenings that helped bridge arts, journalism, sciences and other fields. One great example came as lockdown kicked in and we squeezed in an unforgettable live meetup including “cli fi” author Kim Stanley Robinson and teen climate activist Alexandria Villasenor. 

• Building a Sustainability Communication Network, spanning sciences, arts and more. That effort was essentially the beta test for what has become an array of cross-disciplinary Earth Networks that carry on. I’m particularly happy to see the Climate Imaginations Network pursue a large part of what I envisioned in our early try. 

A benefit of moving online was spilling the network building from the campus to the planet. Since we began in early March 2020, the Sustain What webcast not only reached more than 2.8 million viewers; it also connected more than a thousand guests - many of whom would never have found each other without the hub we provided. When I hosted a live followup webcast with Kim Stanley Robinson and Alexandria Villasenor, thousands of viewers tuned in. The same was true for my unforgettable conversation introducing the “renegade economist” Kate Raworth to her hero Herman Daly. We hosted poetry slams, a sci-fi play reading, climate music. Student-run “friendly takeovers” gave young emerging scholars and doers from Columbia and other schools experience running public-affairs programs. I’ll continue to offer students anywhere the chance to develop and host such conversations.

I’m particularly pleased with the webcast track I called “Thriving Online,” which is now an open resource consisting of dozens of communication conversations.

Dale Willman and I also ran a range of training modules and workshops both for the Columbia community (for instance, on tactics for withstanding online abuse) and journalists - mostly notably through our Heinz-funded climate-risk reporting training for the all-female Global Press network.

I hope you’ll stay in touch.

Andy Revkin