Sustain What?

It’s hard to stay centered on issues around sustainable development and climate policy when the fragility of nations — economicaly, politically or otherwise — is in the foreground. (Sure we should get off fossil fuels as quickly as possible as Bill McKibben and Rebecca Solnit and so many others wisely counsel in the face of the latest Gulf war. But even best-case possibilities on that track will take many years, so oil and gas are still vital.)
Without functioning democracies, forget about climate policy
That’s why I focus periodically here on the vital need to maintain the kind of political systems and norms that are vital for any progress on deeper themes. In February, 2025, I hosted a conversation with scholars at the V-Dem Institute in Sweden who, for a decade, have been charting nations’ vital signs in ways that reveal drift either toward or away from autocracy.
Their 2025 report was gloomy but focused on analysis showing that, in recent decades, countries that had moved to control by a single individual or cabal could experience u-turns back toward democracy. My first Sustain What conversation with them is here: Amid the Worst Surge Toward Autocracy in a Century, Here’s How U-Turns Toward Democracy Can Happen.
No bright spots this time in Trump’s America
In our discussion of the V-Dem Project’s 2026 report, I kept pressing Staffan Lindberg and Marina Nord for good signals, but we came up empty. The section on the United States — no surprise — is very grim. Read these nuggets, but don’t weep; get busy! Sustained civil resistance across society is an essential precursor for restoration of good governance.
Their new report, like last year’s, noted that the autocratization trend remains strong around the world and is measurably worse than in the 1930s. We discussed a range of situations, from efforts to influence the upcoming election in Hungary to questions around what comes next after the youth-driven uprising in Nepal.
I hope you’ll take time to listen, and SHARE, and let me know what you’re doing to defend humane democratic government from the local to global scale.
Here’s Lindberg describing the evidence that the current global situation is worse than the 1930s:
Thanks to those who tuned in live.
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Here’s the post-show post of my conversation with planetary-intelligence analyst Adam Frank on the roles of science and fath in human affairs, the arguments for and against humanity’s sustainability, the need for multi-generational approaches to addressing climate change and so much more.
Please listen to the full show and, as important, SHARE it. Sharing is the only way we grow the Sustain What community.
Here are a couple of highlights if you’re in a hurry. We started out talking about threats from space given the dramatic meteor explosion over the U.S. Midwest. Frank pointed to his recent Everyman’s Universe post positing that if dinosaurs, way back when, had had the planetary defense technology we are developing now, we wouldn’t be here now:
Here Frank described the vital challenge of reintegrating the human journey within the biosphere’s constraints.
Here Frank describes how he tries to use practices he learned in Buddhism and meditation to pull back from the zone-flooding dread around us: “You’re only given so many hours on this planet. So spending every moment of it in terror, you’re not helping anybody. You’re not helping the future by being freaked out 99.9 percent of the time.”
Please considering chipping in, if you can afford it, so I can justify the time it takes to do this work and keep most of the output open to all.

Thank you Aviva Rahmani, BCz, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.


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Just in case you missed the live event, here’s my Sustain What conversation with two passionate climate communicators, both with experience in broadcast news media, pursuing distinct strategies via online video. Each has a very distinct vision of the path to action, and - as I exclaimed during the show, that’s exactly what’s needed. The climate challenge, and audiences out there, are both far too prismatic for one approach to be “right.”
My guests:
* Chase Cain, who recently left NBC News after a decade focused on climate change reporting there, has launched a YouTube channel aiming to bridge cultural gaps by highlighting stories forging closer, and more relisient, relationships between people and nature.
* Betsy Rosenberg, a former CBS radio journalist who has spent decades trying to engage audiences on the vital need to stem global warming and conserve the natural world. Her current platform, also on YouTube, is Code Green:
In our conversation, a listener on Facebook, Courtney A. Kaaz, posted this great question:
Make more desalination, hydroelectric dams, that chemically filter water, make breakwater piers that also clean the water, explain how you can use solar in a way that is actually economical in real time. All of Texas could get on board if you can give us economical, safe water and solve our toxic summer oceans, ponds and lakes.
Cain offered an answer that completely syncs with my view that often the best way to gain traction on energy and resilience choices that can improve climate outcomes doesn’t involve focusing on that grand, and divisive, thing called climate change:
I think what i think part of what [Courtney] is saying is she didn’t also say the word climate, and in a place like Texas that’s probably what’s going to reach people.
If you say climate you’ve lost the Fox News audience but we need and want the Fox News audience. I’m not saying that everything I’m going to do is devoted toward that. But I do want to create content that is accessible and as an invitation to those people.
…The Fox News audience probably spends more time in the outdoors, probably spends more time in nature than an MSNBC audience or an MSNBC audience, whatever it’s called. So they love the outdoors. They love nature. I just don’t know that they’ve connected the dots to how some of these policies are impacting the things and the places that they love. And so if we bridge that divide, then gosh, you’ve just won a huge segment of the American population, which would, I think, almost overnight flip our politics.
That closing assertion about a quick flip is pretty questionable (and Rosenberg expressed a very different view and strategy) but Cain’s core point is important.
Please watch and share the full show and weigh in.
There’s more background in the curtain raiser post that preceded the show:
And here’s my related conversation with Sammy Roth, the former Los Angeles Times climate columnist who’s moved to Substack:
Thanks for reading Sustain What! This post is public so feel free to share it.



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Most of you already know I’ve been writing and performing songs for 30 years, mostly hidden behind my journalism. Only a few of my tunes cross directly over into my “beat” - and none more so than “Liberated Carbon,” which I wrote as the United States invasion of Iraq played out in the early 00’s and which I included on my first album, A Very Fine Line, in 2013.
I’d first touched on how oil access delineates areas of global interest and conflict in 1991, as I explored yesterday:
But I thought it worth posting the annotated lyrics to my song as the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz and American, Israeli and Iranian salvos continue, and the oil (and gas) impacts of this new Middle East war move to the foreground. Do check the footnotes!
Dear subscribers. I really would appreciate your help SHARING this post, or others, with friends or colleagues who might appreciate what I’m trying to do with Sustain What.

LIBERATED CARBON
music and lyrics © 2013 Andrew Revkin
It took a thousand generations for our species to rise.But gathering and hunting was no way to get by.We yearned to burn more than dung and sticks.Then someone came along and said, “Hey, try lighting this.”He opened up the ground and showed us coal and oil.He said, “Come liberate some carbon. It’ll make your blood boil.”Liberated carbon, it’ll spin your wheels.Liberated carbon it’ll nuke your meals.Liberated carbon, it’ll turn your night to day.Come on and liberate some carbon, babe, it’s the American way.Now I got peat swamp fossils running my TV.BP’s black label burns in my S.U.V.We can light up the planet like a Christmas tree.They say that things are getting hot but, hey, we’ve got A.C.Liberated carbon, it’ll spin your wheels.Liberated carbon it’ll nuke your meals.Liberated carbon, it’ll turn your night to day.Come on and liberate some carbon, babe, it’s the American way.Pump those electrons and that gasoline.No sweat or hurry, just turn on a machine.We sent an army to the desert to keep this country free,And to liberate some carbon, baby, for you and me…Liberated carbon it’ll spin your wheels.Liberated carbon, it’ll nuke your meals.Liberated carbon, it’ll turn your night to day.Come on and liberate some carbon, babe, it’s the American way.
There are various performances online, including with John Munson, the bass player from the Minneapolist band Semisonic, at the 2018 National Geographic Explorers Festival, and with melting ice chunks onstage at a Play for the Planet event in San Francisco.
To support my music side, you can buy my album, A Very Fine Line, on Bandcamp or buy Liberated Carbon as a single.
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There’s a lot going on.
For me, at least, one vital counterpoint is music — writing it, performing it, and convening with musician friends to talk about it. (If you happen to be in Downeast Maine this Thursday, March 5, come hear my first effort at an event in which I talk and sing about my interrelated life tracks in journalism and songwriting.)
Today, I want to introduce you to a dear old musical friend, Vince Bell. I hope you’ll listen to our conversation and his music above (recorded a few days ago), and on his vincebell.com website. He’s just dropped a wonderful song from his second spoken-word album (words spoken over marvelous music from a spectacular ensemble he convened in 2024 in Brooklyn, N.Y.). The song and album are “Break My Heart”:
Vince’s roots are well worth understanding. Here he was singing his song “The Sun, Moon and Stars” back in 1977, having emerged from Houston to join a remarkable cohort of Texas bards including Lyle Lovett and Nanci Griffith. Here’s Griffith’s interpretation of the song.
In December 1982, just as he was getting into high gear and recording his first album, his life and musical journey were derailed by a near-death encounter with a drunk driver in Austin.
He suffered brain damage and the near amputation of one arm. It took him a decade of grinding effort to rebuild his ability to sing and pick guitar. In 2009, he wrote “One Man’s Music,” a touching and sometimes-amusing memoir of his journey back to health and creativity.
I can’t recall my first meetup with Vince, but it was in New York City in the mid 1990s when he was beginning to tour in support of his 1994 album “Phoenix.” The name of this collection of spellbinding songs reflected his physical and professional ressurection. I consider it one of my “desert island” records. Here’s “Mirror, Mirror”:
We became friends and I’ve had the utter pleasure of backing him up on mandolin or guitar in some shows in the New York Region.
“Is it hot enough for you, yet?”
I’ve also visited him a couple of times in his Santa Fe home and got a chance to play slide guitar in this take on his great song about pollution - “Local Charm”:
For a Dot Earth post way back in my New York Times days, he explained its origins:
Vince says: “Local Charm was a joint in the old Harrisburg part of Houston down by the ship channel. I lived there for a few years among the railroad tracks and the rust. The imageries in this piece were my backyard.” An excerpt:
Miles and miles of twisted trash,railroad tracks in all directions.Whining ‘dozers climb like antsin holes they can’t get out of.Above the filth so wide and deeppyrites spire before the sun.Where water taps as clear as glassbefore it gets to here.Is it hot enough for ya, yet?
Beyond his music and wordsmithing, Vince is an absolute paragon not just of resilience, but of dogged determination to squeeze the joy and creativity out of whatever life brings his way.
I sense that’s a pretty rare quality.
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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe