The Sustainability Agenda

In this episode, we talk with Professor Harriet Bulkely about the effectiveness of different approaches to climate governance and the possibility of a green recovery. Climate governance is particularly complex because of the need for urgency, yet as with any governance, it needs buy-in. She contrasts climate action at the city level vs. national and multi-national efforts and talks about top-down vs. bottom-up approaches, and in particular on the power of cities and communities adopting climate initiatives of their own choosing and solving in ways that fit with the local needs. Professor Harriet Bulkely holds joint appointments as Professor in the Department of Geography at Durham University and at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development Utrecht University. Her research focuses on environmental governance and the politics of climate change, energy and emerging urban management approaches to climate change. She's published 8 books and more than 60 research papers.

In this episode, we discuss the social and ecological impact of so-called renewable energy, and how to actually think about the impact of its development, with Dr. Alexander Dunlap. Dr. Dunlap says a more accurate term for industrial-scale renewable energy is Fossil Fuel+, because of the intense hydrocarbon extraction and mineral extraction required, and the complex and large supply webs required to make the large technological apparatuses involved in these projects.He identifies and discusses five key elements we should think about to get a more complete picture of particular renewable energy projects, what Alexander calls Fossil Fuel+ development: 1) Raw material extraction; 2) Land contracting; 3) Social and economic and ecological costs; 4) What is the energy going to be used for; 5) What is the waste generated when it's decommissioned.Alexander focuses on the many facets of the extraction process, as well as the exploitative nature of the big companies coming in with big renewable energy plans and having large local impacts on indigenous peoples that were underprepared and uninformed of the consequences.--Alexander is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Development and Environment at the University of Oslo. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology, his PhD thesis examining the social ecological impact of wind energy development on the indigenous people of Oaxaca, Mexico. His work has critically examined police military transformations, market-based conservation, wind energy development and other extractive projects.Photo: UiO

In today's interview with writer Andri Snær Magnason, we explore Andri's use of his writing talent as a force for activism. One of Andri's focuses is to use language to make clear scientific concepts which can often feel foreign and unrelatable, while also invoking time intimacy to bridge the emotional gap we often feel toward future generations. He calls this time intimacy, where we can feel a connection across the generations who are intimate to us, our grandparents and future grandchildren, to feel a sense of timeHe shares the unique perspective of Icelandic people, who live in a land in which natural events seem to leave geological timeframe and happen at human speed. Glaciers shrink, have huge water sinkholes, and threaten disappear; new mountains form; volcanic fumes form, and so on. In some ways the warming of the planet is good for local climate, but they have to fight against their instincts that it's not a good change to see this local warming, it actually means humanity is in grave danger.Through everything, Andri aims to be optimistic and focused on what he can do to raise awareness and create change, to bring rationality and understanding of the climate crises to the public. He fights against momentum to simply harness and tame nature, such as with the eagerness to build dams all throughout the Icelandic highlands, and poetically wonders whether our sense of beauty was part of the immune system of the planet that was meant to protect us from this strain. --Andri Snær Magnason is an Icelandic writer who has written novels, poetry, plays, short stories, and essays. His work has been published or performed in more than 30 countries. He was awarded the Icelandic literary prize in 1999, for the children's book and play Blue Planet, and again in 2006 for the non-fiction book Dreamland, a critique of Icelandic industrial and energy policy. His latest book, On Time and Water, explores our relationship to time in an age of ecological crisis.

Dr. Arran Stibbe, a renowned professor of Ecological Linguistics, explores how language shapes our environmental perceptions. He discusses the powerful influence of words on societal values, particularly in the context of neoliberalism. Stibbe emphasizes the need to reframe our narratives around sustainability and personal ecosophy. He critiques media representation of environmental issues, urging a more accurate dialogue about climate change. Finally, he highlights the importance of inclusive ecological storytelling to foster a deeper connection with nature.

In this episode, we meet with Dr. Joel Bakan to discuss the growing sustainability focus of multinational corporations. He is a professor of law at the University of British Columbia, and a legal scholar and commentator. A former Rhodes Scholar and law clerk to Chief Justice Brian Dickson of the Supreme Court of Canada, Bakan has law degrees from Oxford, Dalhousie, and Harvard. His critically acclaimed book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (Free Press, 2004) was published in over 20 languages. The book inspired a feature documentary film, The Corporation, written by Bakan and co-created with Mark Achbar, which won numerous awards, including best foreign documentary at the Sundance Film Festival. His most recent book is The New Corporation: How "Good" Corporations are Bad for Democracy (Penguin Random House, 2020); it is the basis for his second feature documentary film, The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel, which Bakan wrote and co-directed with Jennifer Abbott.

In this episode we talk with Danny Dorling, social geographer and Professor of Geography, about his views on many topics, much of which relates to large changes we see in society, and what things are slowing down. Through examining data, Danny aims to address arguments which are often very political. We have a real short-termism that prevents us from looking at the future, and from learning from the past. One area he has looked at is the increasing inequality in places like the UK, where 10 million households are facing destitution. We’re living in a very interesting time. Large portions of the population have welcomed certain changes to their lives caused by the pandemic, like not commuting. It’s hard to know if some of these changes will be adopted in some form for the long term, and how might we adapt them to work? Danny has looked at turning points in history and how to achieve social change. Some curious things Danny has seen through looking at data include that general elections don’t have a huge effect on the number of children people have or attitudes toward race. In hindsight, he examines how countries change, how they’ve evolved over time to become more or less equitable. Due to the great inequality in many countries, he says that population growth is not the problem with climate change. You have the top 10% producing the majority of carbon emissions while the bottom 50% is really small in comparison. Aside from the extreme inequality, we’ve reached mass affluence in rich parts of the world, like the UK and United States. So now people have a relative level of comfort, no ice on the insides of your windows, we’re not in a time before tractors were invented to work fields like our great grandparents. We’re at a point with automation in factories, relatively done with technology for basic life, where the biggest innovation of the year is a phone you can bend. That, in a sense, is showing things slowing down. There’s so much embedded carbon in the things we buy, a culture of buying too much, too much consumption. We buy more clothes than we will ever wear out, and also it’s normal to buy things that have built in obsolescence. We also have an instinct to explore and travel that’s going to be hard to combat as we learn to slow down. For the way forward, Danny has optimism that through looking at examples like Finland which ranks highly on many social success measures, we can understand what’s working and apply it more broadly elsewhere. -Danny Dorling is a social geographer and Geography Professor at the University of Oxford in England. He is a prolific writer who has published with many colleagues, including more than a dozen books on issues related to social inequalities in Britain and several hundred journal papers. His most recent book released in 2020 is entitled Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration — and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and our Lives.  In 2006, Danny started working with a group of researchers on a project to remap the world (www.worldmapper.org). Prior to Oxford, from 1991 to 1993, Dorling was a Joseph Rowntree Foundation Fellow and from 1993 to 1996 he was British Academy Fellow at the University of Newcastle. From 1996 to 2000, he was on the faculty of the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. From 2000 to 2003 he was Professor of Quantitative Human Geography at the University of Leeds. From 2003 to 2013 he was Professor of Human Geography and also in 2013 he was Professor for the Public Understanding of Social Science at the University of Sheffield. He is an Academician of the Academy of the Learned Societies in the Social Sciences and was Honorary President of the Society of Cartographers from 2007 to 2017.

In this episode, we talk with Roman Krznaric about the necessity of overcoming our society's short-termism and discounting of future generations. Roman argues we need to see beyond the immediacy of the pandemic that we're in and recognize the challenges and injustices that we are passing on from one generation to the next if we do nothing. It's challenging, however, when addressing these long term injustices; it requires thinking about them for sometimes decades or centuries ahead. But with COVID we have a collective sense of crisis, a crisis that is one of the only ways we can achieve change. We have a transformative opening which may give space for transformative ideas like a circular economy or Universal Basic Income.Roman talks about what it means to be a Good Ancestor (the title of his recently released book). He cites Jonas Salk, the creator of the polio vaccine, who believed that we were only going to be able to deal with the great problems we're facing, such as the destruction of the natural world, nuclear threat, and more, if we expand our time horizons. For Roman,  being a good ancestor is having a good long term vision. In Wales, Roman notes, there's a Future Generations commissioner; in Japan there's a citizens' assembly, a local decision making approach called Future Design. When people are tasked with representing future interests they weigh long term investments more heavily and also find the overlap between what benefits the population now and in the future. Roman also touches on the 6 different kinds of long term thinking featured in his book: deep time humility, a legacy mindset, intergenerational justice, cathedral thinking, holistic forecasting, transcendent goals.One form of intergenerational oppression Roman discusses is discounting - a form a very standard cost benefit analysis in which the further in the future someone is, the less weight is given to them, so the interests of 100 people of today might be valued the same as the interests of 23 people from 50 years in the future. In contrast, he discusses 7th generation thinking of several Native American peoples.In the end, Roman advocates for empathy, citizens assemblies like Japan's Future Design, rights for future people, and shifting off our our growth addicted economies to regenerative economies.Roman Krznaric is a public philosopher who writes about the power of ideas to change society. His latest book, The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short Term World, has been described by U2’s The Edge as ‘the book our children’s children will thank us for reading’. His previous books, including Empathy, The Wonderbox and Carpe Diem Regained, have been published in more than 20 languages.After growing up in Sydney and Hong Kong, Roman studied at the universities of Oxford, London and Essex, where he gained his PhD in political sociology. He is founder of the world’s first Empathy Museum and is currently a Research Fellow of the Long Now Foundation.Roman has been named by The Observer as one of Britain’s leading popular philosophers. His writings have been widely influential amongst political and ecological campaigners, education reformers, social entrepreneurs and designers. An acclaimed public speaker, his talks and workshops have taken him from a London prison to Google’s headquarters in California.Roman has previously been an academic, a gardener, and worked on human rights issues in Guatemala. He is also a fanatical player of the medieval sport of ‘real tennis’ and has a passion for making furniture.

In this episode, we dive into understanding denialism and justice dimensions that are gaining visibility with Professor Kari Norgaard. She talks about how we collectively experience and shape things as a society, and how denialism pertains to the various interconnected issues and movements of our time. Dr Norgaard has been reflecting on how the COVID-19 pandemic has brought various issues to more of a public light. She has been focused on climate change and racial inequality for a long time, and in her 2011 book, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life, she explores the issues of denialism, how we do it culturally, and in the United States in particular, how we have formed the capacity to ignore really large problems and try to put everything on the individual. There is more to denial than individual attributes. We live in this society where you can't really talk about things that are disturbing. Fortunately, Dr Norgaard says that there is starting to be greater recognition and awareness of our capacity for denial, and pursuit of change. Movements like Black Lives Matter bring people to collectively address and feel accountable for the society around us, changes we need to make, choices we make, and what we think is possible. Dr Norgaard also sees the intersectionality of many different justice issues, acknowledging that everyone will have their own sense of immediacy based on their own family history.Dr Norgaard has also worked closely with the Karuk tribe and sees that native peoples have extensive knowledge about the ecological sciences and fire.Lastly, Dr Norgaard talks about the importance of language; only when we collectively have the words to describe the important concepts and issues of our time can we talk more fluently about the world we live in.-Professor Kari Marie Norgaard (B.S. Biology Humboldt State University 1992, M.A. Sociology Washington State University 1994, PhD Sociology, University of Oregon 2003) is Associate Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at University of Oregon. Dr Norgaard trained as a postdoctoral fellow in an interdisciplinary IGERT Program on Invasive Species at University California Davis from 2003-2005 and from there joined the faculty as Assistant Professor at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA from 2005-2011. She joined the University of Oregon faculty in 2011. Over the past fifteen years Dr Norgaard has published and taught in the areas of environmental sociology, gender and environment, race and environment, climate change, sociology of culture, social movements and sociology of emotions. She currently has two active areas of research: work on the social organization of denial (especially regarding climate change), and environmental justice and climate work with the Karuk Tribe on the Klamath River.Norgaard is Past Chair of the Environmental Sociology Section of American Sociological Association and author of Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life (MIT 2011). She is recipient of a University of Oregon Faculty Excellence Award in 2017, the University of Oregon Graduate Mentoring Award in 2011 and the Pacific Sociological Association's Distinguished Practice Award for 2005. Her latest book Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People: Colonialism, Nature and Social Action was published by Rutgers

In this episode, Professor Frances Fox Piven talks about this unique moment in United States history in which there is an extensive social movement against fascism. While brought to life by a revulsion and anger at police brutality against African American people, it also carries a host of grievances related to the strength of neoliberalism in the United States. Frances talks about the many ways in which collective action and popular power manifest; not just through strikes or the withholding of labor but also the withholding of other forms of cooperation in obeying the rules of our society. Children can refuse to go to school; people can refuse to obey traffic laws. The complexity of our society and its interdependence increases our popular power.She also talks about the deep economic issues stemming from both consumer capitalism and a level deeper, with the love of “stuff” and dependency upon fossil fuels. There is substantial work to be done to create alternatives to the use of fossil fuels when right now entire sections of the country are heavily dependent. The U.S. needs to find its way to a Green New Deal through the disruptive effects of mass movements. Voting and forming non-profits aren’t enough to stop some of the most powerful interests in American and world politics. Looking to the past, Occupy Wall Street was a success in that it drew attention where it was needed, and in the present, the current Black Lives Matter movement is taking the next step in demanding action to address spiraling increase in inequality in U.S.With November around the corner, Dr. Piven is counting on the current movement to help with electoral victory in 2020. She calls this an exciting and promising time, with hopes that the active protesting can continue to change the course of policy in the United States and create better well-being for the American people. Professor Piven is a renowned social scientist and life-long advocate for working people and the poor. The publication of Regulating the Poor, her ground-breaking book with Richard A. Cloward, ignited a debate that reshaped the field of social welfare policy. Her other books include Poor People’s Movements, The Breaking of the American Social Compact, and Challenging Authority. Dr. Piven has been a recipient of Fulbright and Guggenheim awards and has been a visiting professor at the University of Amsterdam, Hebrew University, and the University of Bologna.Dr. Piven was a founder of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) and was a co-founder of the Human Service Employees Registration and Voter Education Campaign, which led to legislation popularly known as the “motor voter” bill. She serves on the boards of several advocacy organizations, including Project Vote and Wellstone Action. Her many honors include the Shirley Chisholm Lights of Freedom Award from Community Voices Heard and the Puffin Prize for Creative Citizenship.

In this episode we dive into a discussion with Rob Nixon on climate change denialism, the difficulty of understanding and drawing attention to "slow violence," and in particular, the power of social media and using story and image to to translate scientific knowledge into powerful currents that catalyze social sentiment and action. As Rob discusses the dangers of the science denialism permeating a very significant minority in the U.S., he mentions the importance of the upcoming November election in the U.S., with potential fallouts including defunding WHO and defecting from the Paris Accord. However, he also sees that environmental justice is growing in importance within environmentalism. More people are realizing the overlap between public health concerns and environmentalism, such as the unequal climate impact that we are already seeing affect poor parts of the world, and new energy is coming to the movement as a result.Rob also talks about cultural values, and the idea that over generations people develop a culture and relationship with the environment. Culture and symbolism play a large role in making public statements of cultural values. On the digital front, we've seen the power of social media with George Floyd and the swell of the Black Lives Matter movement. Rob raises the question of how we can translate moments of digital massing into structural change. Slow violence is a concept to help retain attention in situations in which the damage is continuing but the event has ceased, such as the aftermath of war with toxic chemicals from depleted uranium land mines. This concept also applies with climate change and distributive justice across generations.If we are to tackle something like COVID or even bigger, climate breakdown, we face some large challenges. We need collaboration and government to invest in precautionary institutions. Daily life lived at the nanosecond with constant interruptions, but we're also needing to think in vast geological sense.Rob Nixon is the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Family Professor in the Humanities and the Environment. He is affiliated with the Princeton Environmental Institute’s initiative in the environmental humanities. Before joining Princeton in 2015, Nixon held the Rachel Carson Professorship in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was active in the Center for Culture, History and Environment. He is the author of four books: London Calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (Oxford); Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond (Routledge); Dreambirds: The Natural History of a Fantasy (Picador); and Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard). He has published extensively in the fields of environmental studies, postcolonial studies, nonfiction and contemporary literature and has delivered lectures on six continents. Throughout his career, he has sought to engage in both scholarly and public writing on environmental concerns and social movements, particularly as they pertain to the global South. His areas of particular interest include environmental justice, climate change and the interface between the environmental humanities and the public humanities.