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PODCAST

Sustain What?

Sustain What? is a series of conversations, seeking solutions where complexity and consequence collide on the sustainability frontier. Revkin believes sustainability has no meaning on its own. The first step toward success is to ask: Sustain what? How? And for whom? revkin.substack.com

science social sciences

All Episodes

60:23

How “Adversarial Collaboration” Can Improve Research...

Sustain What? ·

2025/09/16

I hope you’ll watch and share this fresh and fascinating discussion of a project hosted at the University of Pennsylvania aimed at fostering “adversarial collaboration” when researchers - as just one example - clash in the literature over data that could reveal why humans tend to hold fast to certain beliefs and when and how they update them. I can’t imagine a more important question these days. My guests were project co-director Cory J. Clark and Gordon Pennycook, an associate professor of

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68:02

Skip the Pundits and Headlines for a Moment to Marvel...

Sustain What? ·

2025/09/08

The death of John Prine early in the early weeks of the pandemic was a wrenching blow for his many fans among both audiences and fellow musicians. As I wrote in the weekend curtain raiser, among songwriters I deeply admire, no one is on a higher plane than Prine. Around 1975, just a few years after I began learning guitar and singing, a college roommate, Aron Wolf, introduced me to Prine’s mix of touching, hilarious, folksy, bittersweet compositions. (I sorely miss Aron, who went on to a fantastic

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63:18

Reviewing the Climate Science Critique Done for Team...

Sustain What? ·

2025/09/03

I hope you’ll listen to this valuable discussion with three authors of a voluminous new report critically reviewing the conclusions of President Trump’s climate science “red team” report on clima,te science. (You can explore a rough transcript here.) You’ll meet authors Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M, who co-writes the The Climate Brink on Substack; Bob Kopp, a longtime climate scientist at Rutgers who you may have gotten to know through my post on climate tipping points; and Pam McElwee, a professor

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53:07

Surviving Trump, Thriving with Solar - an Update from...

Sustain What? ·

2025/08/24

Bill McKibben and I differ on some issues (the decarbonizing role of nuclear energy is one; big theories of change are another) but we agree on a lot and vive la différence given the inevitability of “response diversity” facing wicked stresses.And he’s right that the accelerating surge of solar electricity generation, from Pakistan rooftops to African villages to the California and Texas grids, is a powerful and hopeful force amid so many dire signals.Here’s what he said about Texas, renewable

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53:53

From Kauai to Your Town - How Data Can Help Cut...

Sustain What? ·

2025/08/15

This is the podcast post for my Sustain What conversation eploring how cities, counties and perhaps your community can use data mapping and visualization tools to get ahead of climate risks as people and property increasingly sprawl into flood, fire, heat and storm danger zones - and as human-amped climate change intensifies some of those hazards.Watch above and share this post, or do the same on LinkedIn, Facebook, X/Twitter or YouTube:My guests were Alan Clinton, planning officer for the County of

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102:32

From Juneau to the Himalayas, Get Used to Potentially...

Sustain What? ·

2025/08/13

I pulled together a quick live Sustain What event today zooming out from the latest dramatic glacial lake outburst flood generated in Suicide Basin up in the mountains above Juneau, Alaska. That’s pretty far from most of us, but the challenge posed when glaciers block rivers and suddenly disgorge vast volumes of water extends to the Himalalyas, where millions of people live downstream of such deadly dynamics. This webcast starts with my overview of current events, I include this video snapshot I

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65:03

A Fresh Look at Climate [In]Justice (and Trump 2.0)...

Sustain What? ·

2025/08/12

I hope you’ll listen to, and share, this conversation on climate policy in the age of Trump (and lots more) with the wide-ranging Harvard economist Cass Sunstein. Sunstein worked under two presidents - Barack Obama (social cost of carbon) and Joe Biden (Homeland Security) - and has a new book out encapsulating his argument for a morals-based global accounting system for carbon: Climate Justice: What Rich Nations Owe the World—and the Future.Sunstein actually has several books in the pipeline,

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59:11

Podcast: How Trump is Threatening Public Lands and...

Sustain What? ·

2025/07/28

Public Domain is a valuable Substack project founded by journalists focused on U.S. public lands and the agencies responsible for managing those assets for all Americans.Here’s the podcast post of my conversation with two co-founders, Chris D'Angelo and Jimmy Tobias. You can watch and share on Facebook, LinkedIn, X/Twitter and YouTube.Here’s one excerpt. I asked Jimmy Tobias how it feels to cover agencies starkly up-ended from their traditional role (I allude to the “fire dpeartment” in the sci-fi

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54:52

When Weather-Control Conspiracies Threaten Public Safety

Sustain What? ·

2025/07/25

Here’s the podcast post for my Sustain What episode looking at:* The recent sabotage attack on a TV station’s weather radar in Oklahoma* The spread of unfounded extreme-weather conspiracies by Republican lawmakers and attention-hijacking online figures* How opacity around government and industry tests of weather modification methods has provided an enduring hook for conspiracy mongers to build on(Read James Rodger Fleming’s paper “The pathological history of weather and climate modiﬁcation: Three

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93:08

Exploring Trust and Mistrust in Climate (and Other)...

Sustain What? ·

2025/07/20

This evergreen Sustain What conversation on trust and mistrust in climate science and scientists is - sadly - more relevant than ever. It was organized early in the pandemic by Gil Eyal, a sociologist at Columbia University focused on attitudes toward expertise (he literally wrote the book on this - The Crisis of Expertise).Instead of running this Sustain What show, I was one of three discussants, along with the Cambridge climate-policy researcher Mike Hulme (author of Why We Disagree on Climate

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55:29

What Technology Can, and Can't, Do to Boost Flood...

Sustain What? ·

2025/07/14

This is the podcast post of my Sustain What conversation with top experts on the role - and limits - of technology as a means of cutting losses when people live in harm’s way. The issues raised in the Texas tragedy (and travesty) resonate well beyond that state’s Flash Flood Alley.My guests were Jim Moffitt, a pre-Musk Twitter engineer focused on social media as a path to flood safety; Nashin Mahtani, director of Yayasan Peta Bencana, a realtime disaster mapping platform in Indonesia; and

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69:56

How to Feed 9 Billion People Without Trashing and...

Sustain What? ·

2025/07/02

Here’s the podcast post for my Sustain What conversation with Michael Grunwald, the prize-winning environmental journalist and author whose latest book,We Are Eating The Earth, explores the destructive connections between people’s plates and forces wrecking ecosystems and overheating the climate. The book also charts sustainable paths forward with no sugar coating.Also on hand was Washington Post food columnist Tamar Haspel, who’s most recent book is To Boldly Grow. Read her columns here. They were

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36:05

Resurrect George Washington to Defy Wannabe King...

Sustain What? ·

2025/06/30

File this post in the “sustainability of democracy” track.I just had an unplanned pop-up Sustain What conversation with the wide-ranging author Paul Greenberg about his bitingly satirical novella, A Third Term, and hope you take time for a listen. (I’ve known Paul for decades through his invaluable writing on fish and conservation.)His new work of fiction, in which George Washington is resurrected to confront a current-day president, “The Tyrant,” is a wild ride that is just the sort of prod we all

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56:37

A Day for Showing Your Climate Stripes, and Trying...

Sustain What? ·

2025/06/21

Today is #ShowYourStripesDay, aiming to sustain the push initiated years ago by UK climate scientist Ed Hawkins to use cool and warm colors to depict long-term climate change in ways that might grab attention and ultimately change choices and behavior.I’ve explored this innovation and related ones for a long time, most notably in a Sustain What webcast on Show Your Stripes Day in 2021. I’ve reposted that episode in Substack’s player above.As you will learn (or already know if you watched it way back

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55:37

Meet Kate Marvel, the NASA Climate Scientist Who's...

Sustain What? ·

2025/06/20

Here’s my Sustain What conversation with Kate Marvel, a prominent climate scientist and communicator whose first book, Human Nature - Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet, is a bracing and deeply personal tour of climate science, planetary history and the array of hopeful and/or heartbreaking environmental futures ahead, depending on choices made or avoided now.Thank you, Matt Burgess and cliff Krolick, for being among subscribers who watched live on Substack. Please subscribe to catch future

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54:22

A Visual Tour of American Character(s)

Sustain What? ·

2025/06/19

Given how Trumpism seems deadset on squeezing the dizzying diversity out of the United States, it seemed a great time to reach out to Peter Guttman, a world-roaming photographer who’s spent decades portraying the full prismatic wonder and weirdness of us.Please watch and/or share this conversation here or on Facebook, LinkedIn, X (at my handle @revkin) or YouTube.Here’s a snippet focused on one of the grassroots voices pushing for Juneteenth as a national holiday - LaVerne Ross of the Calvary

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31:05

From Communities to Corporations - How to Cut...

Sustain What? ·

2025/05/27

When I was building my sustainability communication project at Columbia University, I was recruited to be an author of a chapter on “communicating risk for decision-making” in what would become the 2022 Global Assessment Report from the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. I couldn’t participate fully in the end (boring reasons) but gained a valuable view of the depth and breadth of expertise brought together by these periodic reports. Explore some of the results here:The pandemic,

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53:07

A Poet and a Picker Explore Everything from Romania's...

Sustain What? ·

2025/05/19

Whenever you need a break from the dueling pundits, have a listen to one of my Sunday Sanity shows. For those who missed us live on Sunday, here’s an audio and video antidote for Trump’s lock on our brains - a conversation, poetry reading and picking party with a couple of remarkably creative humans - the provocateur poet Andrei Codrescu, who you may have heard as a frequent NPR commentator in decades past, and masterful bluegrass and trad musician John McEuen, best known for his 50 years in the

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20:47

Trump's Freezing Unidata - Just Another Boring...

Sustain What? ·

2025/05/09

Updates below | The effect of Trump’s initial blitzkrieg assault on science is like a multi-armed monster eating away at budgets, agency staff, technical systems and the spirits of thousands of scientists and other staff who support them - and citizens who rely on the innovations that flow from research, and students pondering careers in everything from meteorology to medicine.And Trump loves it when concerned people like me or you get fixated on the potency of his impact. But I have to set aside my

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64:46

A Teaching Framework Helping Students (or Others!)...

Sustain What? ·

2025/05/01

Here’s the video and podcast version of my Sustain What conversation with two Maine-based educators and a superstar student taking on tough problems in their communities that have links to the wider world. Learn all the background in my “curtain raiser” post:We were joined for a bit by Radhika Iyengar, a colleague of mine during my time at Columbia University. She’s working on an online course with Jeff Sachs on the Ages of Globalization.There were wonderful comment contributions and questions from

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