The Myth of "Nobody Saw it Coming"

The more we know about disasters, the more we realize that most were preordained. Covid 19 or Katrina, the current fires in California or the deep freeze this past winter in Texas. None of them were what we would call Black Swan events.

We are certainly, because of climate change, complexity and complacency, going to be experiencing more such events, we had better become much better at disaster preparedness.

If we know these disaster events are coming, how can we get better at dealing with the consequences? Fire season is yet to reach its peak this year, hurricanes are starting early and we know that more infrastructure and buildings will collapse.

Therefore, the area of disaster management should be one of our number one priority, just as it has been for my guest Dr. Samantha Montano, the author of Disasterology: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Climate Crisis 

My WhoWhatWhy.org conversation with Samantha Montano:

We All Have A Role To Play In the Biggest Story of 2019

We think that politics might actually change the world for better or for worse. It probably won't. It's certainly more likely that climate change, weather, and rising sea levels will have a far more profound impact. The recent UN report on climate indicated that we could be facing existential risks within 20 years. So what is the world to do?

Jeff Goodell, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, takes us deep into not the debate but the story of the particle reality in The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

My WhoWhatWhy.org conversation with Jeff Goodell:

Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Justice

We have seen that in almost any area of public endeavor, changing the status quo is almost impossible. The combination of entrenched special interests, coupled with the basic human resistance to change, in an era where change is a constant, creates a level of cognitive dissonance and fear that makes changing public policy almost impossible.

So what do we do when the only alternative to change is catastrophic for our health, for our planet, for our economy and for the peoples of the world?

Such is the case with Climate Change. While the science may be clear. The road ahead is anything but. In this we face an unprecedented situation as the world’s leaders gather in Paris this week

That’s why people like Wen Stephenson (What we're Fighting for Now Is Each Other: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Justice,) are so passionate about the cause and see it not just from the point of view of science, but as a moral and social imperative.

My conversation with Wen Stephenson:

Capitalism vs. The Climate

It was actually Winston Churchill, not Rahm Emanuel, who said that we should never let a serious crisis go to waste.

A crisis often creates a great opportunity to face, to talk about, and even sometimes to act upon issues that had been previously frozen

Or, as Donald Rumsfeld once inarticulately put it, sometimes the only solution to an unsolvable problem, is to create a bigger problem.

It could be said that climate change provides such an opportunity. That in seeking to address the issues of man made climate change, we will have to drill down into the very issues that caused it in the first place. That’s what Naomi Klein does in her new work This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate.

My conversation with Naomi Klein:

The environment...now!

There are always those people who seem to be on the cutting edge of whatever the public meme might be. Psychologist Mary Pipher is one of those. Before anyone else, she saw the need to empower our daughters and changed the landscape of girls around the world.

She later anticipated the “sandwich generation” that would cause so many baby boomers to take care of their aging parents, and she long ago was prescient about the trials and tribulation of immigrants in America.

Now she turns her attention to our environment. And while the issues have been around awhile, you get that sense that Mary’s decision to take it on, means we’ve reached some kind of tipping point in our public consciousness.

Mary Piper is the best selling author of Reviving Ophelia, The Middle of Everywhere and Another Country, now she takes us on the journey of The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture.

My conversation with Mary Pipher:

Generation Hot

Among all the problems that young people need worry about today, perhaps the one that will haunt them the longest are the issues of Global Warming and Climate Change. Environmental writer, Mark Hertsgaard, in his new book Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, describes the future for roughly two billion young people around the globe, under the age of twenty-five, who will be coping with ever-worsening climate change for the rest of their lives.

My conversation with Mark Hertsgaard.

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Can we really rethink civilization

Al Gore, in An Inconvenient Truth, warned us of a "planetary emergency" as a worst case scenario. According to Dianne Dumanoski, award winning author and long time environmental journalist, ecological catastrophe is no longer a worst case scenario--it is inevitable. In her environmental history, The End of the Long Summer: Why We Must Remake Our Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth, Dumanoski provides a dismal forecast for the future based on vast quantities of scientific data, which indicates that the ideal climate which has allowed life to flourish on earth for thousands of years is overdue for a seismic change, with or without the help of humanity. Combine this startling fact with the appalling ecological abuse which people have wrought in the last century and it might seem that our days are numbered.

Dumanoski's view of the current crisis delivers an urgent warning that our civilization must prepare for a future of radical uncertainty. She argues that we must rethink the fundamental doctrines of our current culture: growth, progress, and the control of nature. Beyond the buzzwords and hype of "sustainability" or "clean energy," we must learn how to survive Nature's return by nurturing self-sufficiency, flexibility, community, and diversity. All probably good ideas, regardless of our fear of climate change.

My conversation with Diane Dumanoski:

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