When We Are with Alex Steffen – Details, episodes & analysis

Hey Folks—

This is episode zero of my new casual podcast for subscribers.

Give it a listen to find out more (it’s about 10 minutes long).

Here’s the show description: “The climate crisis is no longer something happening to other people, somewhere else. It's changing all our lives, right now. Few of us are ready. Join renowned climate futurist Alex Steffen and guests as we show the patterns behind the chaos, learn how to build smart climate strategies, and laugh at the absurdity of daily life in discontinuous times.”

If you like it, you’ll also be able to add it to your podcast feeds on many platforms.

I hope you enjoy When We Are!

—Alex

- I have a brand new piece in Mother Jones, Trump Won’t Confront the Climate Crisis. He’ll Feast Off It. (I don’t write the headlines…)

- Stay connected on social: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky

- Check out my books: Worldchanging and Carbon Zero

- View my TED Global talks on sustainability and cities.

- I’ve spoken with the media hundreds of times. Recently, I was featured in a NY Times Magazine piece, "This Isn't the California I Married." My writing was the jumping-off point for an episode of This American Life titled Unprepared for What Has Already Happened, as well as the podcasts Without; The Big Story; Everybody In the Pool and 99% Invisible’s Not Built for This series.

- Visit my Bookshop shop to get China Miéville’s The City & The City and discover some of my other top reads.

“We know we need to move, but how soon do we need to do it?” is a question I get a lot.

There are no simple answers: every personal climate strategy is a unique set of solutions for a particular set of problems. But some of the key questions we need to ask ourselves are:

* What are we gaining by staying put? Are there future events (e.g., a child’s graduation, retirement, a job promotion) we’re looking to see through before we go?

* What are the costs of climate relocation, and will we be more or less able to meet them later?

* How close to a moment of loss in value and capacity (or even catastrophic direct climate impacts) is the place we are now? How late will be too late?

In this delightful brief tour of the tempo of discontinuity, I try to answer those questions by suggesting three basic indicators.

Which ‘indicator light’ is flashing where you live?

- Alex

A bunch of you have asked when my next personal ruggedization classes will be. I’ll be more formally announcing this in my next letter, but my next live Ruggedize Your Life: The Basics class (a concentrated 101 in planning a personal climate strategy) will be held on Thursday, January 30th, from 11:00 am - 1:00 pm Pacific Time.

If you know you want to take the class, click the link below to save your spot:

Ruggedize Your Life: The Basics

Thursday, January 30th, from 11:00 am - 1:00 pm Pacific Time.

Class will be recorded and the recording sent to all registered participants the following week.

More soon.

Alex

- My next Crash Course on Personal Ruggedization will be in February, details to come. (You can read a description of the last course here.)

- Stay connected on social: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky

- I have a new piece in Mother Jones, Trump Won’t Confront the Climate Crisis. He’ll Feast Off It. (I don’t write the headlines…)

- Check out my books: Worldchanging and Carbon Zero

- View my TED Global talks on sustainability and cities.

- I’ve spoken with the media hundreds of times. Recently, I was featured in a NY Times Magazine piece, "This Isn't the California I Married." My writing was the jumping-off point for an episode of This American Life titled Unprepared for What Has Already Happened, as well as the podcasts Without; The Big Story; Everybody In the Pool and 99% Invisible’s Not Built for This series.

- I have a new podcast, When We Are, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast and other podcast platforms around the world. Please check it out, rate, review, follow and share these episodes. Thank you!

In this brand new When We Are podcast, I discuss why our concept of “natural disaster” — a sudden and unexpected calamitous natural event bringing great loss from which we then recover and return to normal life — is less and less useful for understanding the world we now live in.

I also briefly discuss the movie Jaws.

Please note that When We Are is now available on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and other platforms, if that’s how you prefer to do your listening.

Please also help me spread the word by sharing, or rating and reviewing the show wherever you listen.

Want to tell someone about this newsletter? Please share.

Thanks,

Alex

- I have a new piece in Mother Jones, Trump Won’t Confront the Climate Crisis. He’ll Feast Off It. (I don’t write the headlines…)

- Stay connected on social: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky

- Check out my books: Worldchanging and Carbon Zero

- View my TED Global talks on sustainability and cities.

- I’ve spoken with the media hundreds of times. Recently, I was featured in a NY Times Magazine piece, "This Isn't the California I Married." My writing was the jumping-off point for an episode of This American Life titled Unprepared for What Has Already Happened, as well as the podcasts Without; The Big Story; Everybody In the Pool and 99% Invisible’s Not Built for This series.

- Visit my Bookshop shop to get John Vaillant’s Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World and discover some of my other top reads.

Hey folks—

We’ve moved from the era when avoiding the planetary crisis was the most pressing mission on Earth, to one where avoiding further catastrophe is now a subset of the challenge of responding to a climate and biosphere now in crisis.

Could there be a better time to have unchecked corruption, reinvigorated predatory delay and a general collapse of competance in Washington, D.C.?

In this impromptu podcast, I talk Trump, the lost Orderly Transition, and why reactive, forced climate response is so costly, unfair, and zero sum. Luckily, reactive, forced climate response seems to be mostly what we’ll get for at least the next half decade.

Here’s the Bill McKibben quote I bumbled:

"The most important news of last week, though you would have had to search hard to find it, was that the carbon dioxide monitoring station at Mauna Loa recorded the biggest single-year growth in co2 in its 66-year-history, rising 3.58 ppm."

Apologies as well for the work-from-home moment at the end. (My family happily and unexpectedly tumbled in the door to announce the end of my work day.)

To brighter days and better news…

Alex

PS: I’m teaching another Ruggedize Your Life: The Basics class on Thursday, January 30th. Details here.

Hey folks—

How do I remain an optimist about the human future, even as the planetary crisis worsens?

A few thoughts.

Alex

PS: A little more to chew on:

* More here on the mythological universal conversion event, and how we might think more clearly about the future.

* Why real optimism springs from grasping what fights are now winnable and why outspoken optimism is actually critical to winning those fights.

* The long-running debate about whether “optimistic” or “resolute” is the right description of this stance, and whether “steely-eyed optimism” splits the difference.

* I’ve written many times about how predatory delay is not only a strategy for playing out the end of the unsustainable, but is itself as a waning industry, for example here.

Reminder: My next live Ruggedize Your Life: the Basics class (a concentrated introductory course for planning a personal climate strategy) will be held a week from today, on Thursday, January 30th, from 11:00 am - 1:00 pm Pacific Time. (Yes, class will be recorded.)

Click the button below to save your spot:

- If you like this new podcast, When We Are, please rate, review, follow and share these episodes. Thank you!

- Stay connected on social: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky

- I have a new piece in Mother Jones, Trump Won’t Confront the Climate Crisis. He’ll Feast Off It.

- Check out my books: Worldchanging and Carbon Zero

- View my TED Global talks on sustainability and cities.

- I’ve spoken with the media hundreds of times. Recently, I was featured in a NY Times Magazine piece, "This Isn't the California I Married." My writing was the jumping-off point for an episode of This American Life titled Unprepared for What Has Already Happened, as well as the podcasts Without; The Big Story; Everybody In the Pool and 99% Invisible’s Not Built for This series.

Hey folks—

If you feel, right now, like you are waking up to a magnitude of upheaval you didn’t expect — if you feel really unsure about what it means and what you should do to manage the resulting chaos in your own life — you are not alone.

Working through this sudden collision with planetary reality is work we will all be forced to take up in the next few years.

In this podcast, I unpack discontinuity, and the ways in which it demands new thinking. That need for new thinking can leave us with feelings of personal discontinuity and alienation from our surroundings... and of a sense of disconnection from the futures we once imagined for ourselves and our children.

This presents an opportunity, though. Discontinuity is not devastation; disaster springs from our unwillingness to acknowledge it. We can reimagine the lives we’re building to thrive in discontinuity — just as we can rebuild our communities to increase their durability and capacity for change. The loss of continuity is not the end of the story, it’s the beginning.

In a strange way, letting go of the world we expected to have can give us back a future we want.

Alex

PS: My next crash course in personal ruggedization will begin at the end of the month. Details in my next newsletter.

- This new podcast, When We Are, is also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast and other podcast platforms around the world, should that be your preferred way of listening. Please subscribe, rate and review.

- My work was mentioned in two news stories last week, one in The Atlantic about the breakdown of sense-making in social media and one in The Guardian about the California fires. Also, though this piece didn’t reference my work, regular readers will notice a lot of my regular themes: That Giant Sucking Sound? It’s Climate Change Devouring Your Home’s Value. Finally, a reader asked where they might find this interview I did back in 2022: How to ruggedize your life and prepare for... whatever comes next.

- I have a recent piece in Mother Jones, Trump Won’t Confront the Climate Crisis. He’ll Feast Off It.

- Stay connected on social: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky

- Check out my books: Worldchanging and Carbon Zero

- View my TED Global talks on sustainability and cities.

- I’ve spoken with the media hundreds of times. I was featured in a NY Times Magazine piece, "This Isn't the California I Married" and My writing was the jumping-off point for an episode of This American Life titled Unprepared for What Has Already Happened, as well as the podcasts Without; The Big Story; Everybody In the Pool and 99% Invisible’s Not Built for This series. I also spoke recently with PBS News Hour about why there are no climate havens.

Hey folks,

This is a bit of a longer podcast, where I unpack some of the uncomfortable realities of this present moment in the planetary crisis — and why we need a new approach to solutions thinking and chosen optimism.

Some of the ideas discussed:

* How I’ve been reluctant to engage the more conflict-generating parts of climate foresight in public, but am done being circumspect.

* The violent reaction to knowledge, expertise and authority being recontextualized by discontinuity.

* Moving from a time of climate action as solution to climate action as harm reduction.

* The staggering scale of needed climate responses, and their steepening nature.

* The impossibility of saving many communities from grim futures, even if we mount a currently-implausible set of national and international ruggedization and mass-relocation efforts.

* The necessity of responding as effectively as we can, despite the certainty that much will be lost, in unfair ways, and millions face some pretty tough futures.

* The need to envision and articulate futures of relative safety, partial stability and limited inequity — and to embrace building rapidly and at scale to secure those futures.

* The default future of brittle places: brittleness traps, unofficial abandonment, transapocalyptic local collapses.

* How anti-climate right being far more aggressive and focused on destroying our capacities to respond than largely liberal climate advocates have been in trying to build them up.

* Trump’s attacks on climate diplomacy, environmental law, climate planning, clean energy, disaster preparedness and response, risk management, even basic science itself.

* The billionaire predators and their allies who foresee luxury survival compounds for themselves — and walls, debt and profitable exploitation for everyone else. People who look at the breaking of the future as their chance to try to cement their hold on dynastic wealth and unchallengeable power.

* The need for building rugged sustainability into the fabric of communities in relatively safe places, both for its own sake and as a counter-balance to reactionary disaster exploitation. Successful climate response demands a giant building boom.

* The less we build, the tighter the climate-relocation bottleneck will get.

* Why personal climate strategies are no longer luxuries, and time is short.

As always, thank you for tuning in.

Alex

The Guardian covered my work recently, in a piece titled, “‘All of his guns will do nothing for him’: lefty preppers are taking a different approach to doomsday.”

- Find me on Bluesky.

- Check out my books: Worldchanging and Carbon Zero

- View my TED Global talks on sustainability and cities.

- I’ve spoken with the media hundreds of times. I was featured in a NY Times Magazine piece, "This Isn't the California I Married." My writing was the jumping-off point for an episode of This American Life titled Unprepared for What Has Already Happened, as well as the podcasts Without; The Big Story; Everybody In the Pool and 99% Invisible’s Not Built for This series.

This podcast, When We Are, is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast and other podcast platforms around the world. Please rate, review, follow and share these episodes (it helps more people find the show). Thank you!

The Trump gang has continued their chaos attack on America, most recently by gutting the next National Climate Assessment, including dismissing the group of scientists and experts preparing it.

In this podcast, I quickly explain:

* What the NCA is, and why it’s so useful.

* Why clear climate assessments, delivered through transparent processes, are so critical to climate foresight — both in America and around the world.

* What it means for each of us, as individuals, to try to make good future decisions when the best climate foresight is increasingly private, proprietary and developed behind closed doors, available only to large companies and very wealthy individuals.

It’s not cheerful material, but it’s important. Thanks for taking the time to listen.

If you’re interested in learning how to make sense of and manage climate discontinuity in your own life, you might consider taking my introductory class, Ruggedize Your Life: The Basics

My next live class will happen on Thursday, May 15th from 11:00am - 1:00pm Pacific Standard Time on Zoom. (Class will be recorded for those who cannot attend live.) Registration is open and filling up. (A few low-cost seats remain for those who need them — use code RYLSAVE100 at check out).

» You can learn more about Ruggedize Your Life: The Basics.

» Skip straight to registering yourself for the class.

My personal climate strategy classes were recently featured in The Guardian in a piece titled, “‘All of his guns will do nothing for him’: lefty preppers are taking a different approach to doomsday.”

Notes for this podcast:

“Being too far ahead is the same thing as being wrong.” —James Allworth

If you talk about the future, you risk having a market that's still unprepared to see the value in what you're offering to them. But sometimes what was too far ahead becomes exactly what people now need to know.

We're seeing a sea change in climate foresight. An abrupt collision with reality, that is snapping forward a whole set of conversations about strategy, the future and the perils and opportunities of our moment.

One fundamental change that's happening right now is the understanding that the planetary crisis IS our world. This is not an issue, but an era, and planning for life in that era is the only kind of planning that will work.

The suddenly widespread discussion of 3ºC futures is a perfect example. While it is possible we may end up at 3ºC sometime towards the end of the century, I don’t think it’s a very likely outcome. But 3ºC is an attention-arresting number: the magnitude of change it would bring is so large, thinking about it becomes a wind tunnel for testing all sorts of institutional assumptions.

A second change is a spreading realization that accelerating future risks aren't future dangers, they're present losses.

A recent Allianz SE commentary says what I've been saying for 20 years, but it offers an important benchmark about how fast the debate is moving now.

What’s unsuited for the climate we now live in, is worth less than we think. The scale of the brittleness bubble around us, and how, on our current trajectory, without an absolutely massive reallocation of resourses towards climate response, we will see much of the world suffer devaluation and capacity erosion.

A third shift is an abrupt recognition of the scale of the gap between what is needed and what we have.

Our widespread failure to adapt to new conditions.

Trump's chaos attack on the nation’s climate science and risk mitigation capacities.

The growing importance of places being either organically safer than elsewhere (by virtue of geography or luck, or readily ruggedizable, or both).

Why on a three degree trajectory, relative safety becomes the most valuable commodity in the world. (27:48). And right now, it is still seriously underpriced (that won't last forever).

A forth emerging change is the understanding that our encounter with discontinuity is only the beginning.

Why it's incorrect to think that the end of continuity equals collapse.

The kinds of big moves demanded now themselves change the world, undermining the value of the brittle and out-of-date and increasing demand for rugged and responsive systems, communities and institutions.

Effective strategies today make that discontinuous world advantageous.

Huge opportunities that exist within discontinuity. The competition to realize those opportunities is itself a major change dynamic. There’s growing awareness that the prizes to be won in large-scale climate response are of a far greater magnitude than discussions of “green business” or the clean economy would lead any of us to believe.

We're in a new moment, and being “too far ahead” is turning out to be ready for the present.

Thanks for tuning in,

Alex

This is part of my new podcast, When We Are, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast and other podcast platforms around the world. If you found this discussion helpful, please subscribe, rate and review the show so that we can reach more listeners. Thank you!

- Find me on Bluesky.

- Check out my books: Worldchanging and Carbon Zero

- View my TED Global talks on sustainability and cities.

- I’ve spoken with the media hundreds of times. Recently, I was featured in a NY Times Magazine piece, "This Isn't the California I Married." My writing was the jumping-off point for an episode of This American Life titled Unprepared for What Has Already Happened, as well as the podcasts Without; The Big Story; Everybody In the Pool and 99% Invisible’s Not Built for This series.

Reminder: My intensive Crash Course in Personal Ruggedization begins Tuesday. Registration ends tonight at 11:59 pm Pacific time.

Ready to sign up? Click the button below.

Or click this link https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule/21f79c52/?appointmentTypeIds[]=73970428

Recognizing when we are can be a life-changing experience.

In this podcast I explore how, for a growing number of us, it no longer feels enough to simply acknowledge that climate change and the planetary crisis are real, or even to sound the alarm about the magnitude of the problems we face.

Instead, we find ourselves wanting to talk about our life, work and future in the context of unprecedented discontinuities — and the disruptive responses they demand.

This crisis is an era, not an issue. We want to be in conversation with others about how it feels to live in this new era, not simply agree (or argue) about it’s seriousness.

There is, in short, a deep hunger for the meeting of context and connection in our relationships. Real connection is grounded in a shared experience. For those who’ve seen what’s happening, shared lived experience of profound discontinuity is the foundation for meaningful conversations about the world as a whole.

That shared experience is also what gives real depth to discussion of our hopes, dreams and ambitions. One of the things that older worldviews can’t encompass is the notion that continuity is gone, and we won’t be getting “normal” back — and that discontinuous change also opens up new possibilities.

When every discussion of the planetary future (to the extent it’s discussed at all) centers on how bad it’s getting, there’s no opening to discuss the genuinely profound opportunities in front of us. (Which, in some settings, is the point of keeping the conversation grim, as I’ve written.)

What a relief it is to find yourself in company with folks whose outlooks don’t instantly veer apocalyptic with the demise of past certainties! It’s so liberating to talk with people who — without denying the seriousness of the crisis — are open to the huge new opportunities ahead of us, the ambitions for change at scale that might prove transformative, the kinds of lives that can prosper because they are better-suited to the world as it is. Who understand that discontinuity is the job.

As I wrote before, about the ways old thinking hampers our understanding of this moment,

Events being unprecedented does not make them beyond comprehension. The loss of continuity does not mean a descent into blind chaos. We can learn to thrive amidst discontinuity, disruption, upheaval. There are thousands of people teaching themselves how, right now.

Those of us who understand unprecedented discontinuity as the beginning of the future (and not simply as the end of the past) may still be few in number, but we’re starting to have the most important conversations anyone is having, anywhere.

If you want to be a part of those conversations, you’re in the right place.