Earlier this summer, I spent about a week in Josephine County, Oregon — a couple hours south of where I live in Eugene. It’s a stunning place. Gorgeous valleys. Towering forests. Lovely people. And it bears the distinction of having deadliest wildfire smoke in America, per estimates published in Nature.

I wrote a piece about the community for The Guardian today. (UPDATE: You can also hear me talk about this on Oregon Public Broadcasting).

Subscribe now

I’d like to share a bit more here about a family I won’t forget. I met them because I was driving down Redwood Highway, near the border with California, and saw a little shop called “It’s a Burl” along the road and decided to stop. The place looked like a little fairytale wonderland — all made of wood, driftwood for doorframes, twisting treehouses out back. As I got closer I noticed little wizard faces carved into what seemed like every surface. I literally heard a woman chasing her kids around the property and chanting “fee, fi, fo, fum!” It’s another world in the best way.

Inside, I met Sara, who runs the woodworking gallery, and learned about its core product, which is art made from a wood called “burl.” Maybe you know this but I didn’t: Burl is that knotted, cancerous-looking growth you might see attached to the trunk or branch of a tree. Usually formed because of distress or disease. It’s kind of gross looking until you cut it open and see the swirling patterns inside. Burl is one of the things Sara and her mother, Joy, love most in the world. To love burl is to believe you can make something beautiful out of whatever is in front of you, and you do that by looking into the heart of the wood, accentuating its natural patterns, and figuring out what it wants to become, not what you wish it to be.

Joy and her late husband, Harvey, started the gallery years ago. They moved to Oregon from California in part because it seemed wetter and cooler and therefore safer from fires. Harvey died in the summer of 2013 after weeks of wildfire smoke exacerbated his illness. You can feel his presence in the gallery, and the love they share. You can also feel what it means to keep loving a place even when it’s dangerous to do so.

I hope you’ll read the full piece. (Also check out the work of photographer Ricardo Nagaoka and editor Jessica Reed, who has a lovely Substack). Swing by the gallery if you find yourself in southern Oregon. And let me know what you think about this story and about the burl-ness of being alive in 2026. Does living in this climate-changed world mean we have to learn to accept and love the more-dangerous places we all call home? Is accepting that giving up? Can we do both — figure out a way to keep pushing for reduced emissions and also love the world as it changes?

I welcome your thoughts. Thanks for taking time to read this.

John

Paris hit 104 degrees Fahrenheit this week.

People are swimming in canals — some 40 of them drowned as they tried to escape the sweltering temperatures, according to the country’s prime minister.

All of this in a place where only about a quarter of households have AC.

NPR had a recap of the heatwave this morning — mentioning all of the data points above, plus the fact that this is the second heatwave to hit Europe this summer, and it’s just June. I was struck, however, not by the (quite harrowing) specifics of this climate disaster but by how much it feels like very many other moments.

NPR’s Rebecca Rosman played a statement from a French news anchor, Patrick Cohen: “We’ll be talking for a long time about the June 2026 heat wave,” Cohen says in the piece, “as a test, a milestone and, perhaps for some, a revelation.”

He compared this heatwave to another deadly one in 2003. “This time,” he says, “it’s impossible to deny the country’s climate is changing before our eyes.”

This time.

I’m going to quibble with the “this time” of it all.

Because we knew back in 2003 that the connections between heat and climate change — driven primarily by burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas — were driving crazy temperatures. That heatwave, which is estimated to have killed several tens of thousands of people, actually birthed the field of “climate attribution” science, in which researchers look for human fingerprints on specific weather events.

From a 2019 piece I wrote for CNN:

After that disaster [the 2003 heatwave in Europe], scientists for the first time used “climate attribution” techniques to show that human-induced warming very likely doubled the risk of that event. It’s now possible to see human fingerprints on these catastrophes. Hurricane Harvey in Texas; the 2016 floods in Baton Rouge; Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, which killed an estimated 2,975 people, according to an analysis by George Washington University. Each was linked to – or was shown to have been made worse by – global warming.

I understand the news-y desire to talk about the present moment as if it were unprecedented. The events of France are shocking. They’re tragic. They also are part of a longstanding pattern of Earth Amnesia that has been repeating itself for decades.

We news folks love a dose of myopia.

But this time isn’t new.

It’s a product of our inability to ditch an addiction to fossil fuels.

And it’s an addiction we’ve had for many decades now.

I owe much of my career to Ted Turner, the CNN founder who died on Wednesday.

I spent more than a decade working for his Cable News Network, hearing stories about him coming down to the newsroom from a penthouse in Atlanta’s CNN Center — in a bathrobe, no less — to give early-morning marching orders. By the time I got there, in January 2009, the day before Obama’s inauguration, Turner had parted ways with the network. The lore of this person who smoked cigars and sailed competitively and said what needed to be said, even when the world wasn’t ready to hear it, loomed large in that place. I was grateful to be working at a company that maintained much of his brashness and fearlessness — that wanted to promote an informed, global public.

Then, in 2022, I was honored to be named the first Ted Turner Visiting Professor of Environmental Media at the George Washington University.

I developed and taught courses at GW on the history of climate media, environmental filmmaking and sustainability journalism in an effort to honor a man who truly had an outsize impact on the way my generation sees our relationship to the planet. (I’m now teaching versions of these courses now at the University of Oregon. I’d invite you to read some of my students’ work from GW and from my U of O class. It was a great honor that one of my students, Katherine Gunning, had her film screened at the DC Environmental Film Festival this year. I think Turner would have been proud of that).

Turner is and will be remembered for many things — from his reshaping of the news landscape to his $1 billion contribution to start the United Nations Foundation.

I want to highlight a less-appreciated and still critically important slice of his legacy — and that’s the role he had shaping the way young people see environmental issues. Much of that shaping came in the form of the 1990s cartoon series “Captain Planet.”

‘Captain Planet is summoned by committee’

“Captain Planet” aired from 1990 to 1996, and Turner co-created the show with Barbara Pyle. There’s a wonderful 2021 piece about Pyle in The New Yorker, and the piece also does a nice job of summing up the framework and ethos of the series:

Superheroes are usually bachelors who act alone, then retreat to their caves. Captain Planet, by contrast, is summoned by committee. In the show’s mythology, Gaia, the spirit of the Earth, has sent five magic rings—representing Earth, Wind, Water, Fire, and Heart—to five young people around the globe. Each ring grants its bearer the ability to control an associated element at will (Heart summons a mixture of kindness and telepathy); meanwhile, the kids can “summon Earth’s greatest champion, Captain Planet” using “their powers combined.” Captain Planet’s only weakness is pollution itself; his stated purpose, as the theme song says, is to “take pollution down to zero.”

It doesn’t hurt that Gaia is voiced by Whoopi Goldberg!

Each episode starts with the statement “our world is in peril.”

And in each episode, these five young people — each from a different part of the world, underscoring the international mindset that was the bedrock of so much of Turner’s work — come together to summon Captain Planet to stop pollution or heal our relationship with the environment and non-human world. I’m an old millennial, and I remember the show being a true part of the fabric of growing up in the 90s. This was true even though I was a kid in Oklahoma, where oil and gas were king.

The show dealt with global warming in a direct and clear and anti-fossil-fuels way back in the 1990s

I now teach a course to juniors and seniors called “A History of the Climate Crisis: As Seen in the Media,” and I show Ep 26 from Season 1 of “Captain Planet.” The episode is titled “Heat Wave,” and it’s almost ridiculous how prescient the storyline is.

Here’s the gist: A femme-fatale villain named Dr. Blight creates a forcefield around the island where Gaia/Whoopi/Mother Earth lives. She starts burning coal, oil, gas and wood and pumping those gases into the forcefield, thus creating a realistic greenhouse effect. “Burning these fossil fuels will increase the concentration of carbon-dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere — and keep in more of the sun’s heat!” she declares gleefully, as if narrating a science textbook. “We’ll have such fun making life on Earth too hot to handle,” her co-conspirator, a computer named MAL, says.

The dome gets hotter. Seas start rising. Tidal waves hit the shores. Gaia/Whoopi is weakened and faints. The Planeteers, as the protagonist kids are called in the show, ultimately summon Captain Planet to bust up the forcefield, stop the burning of coal, and return Gaia/Whoopi’s island to some sort of natural atmospheric balance.

“Gonna take pollution down to zero,” the theme song declares during the credits.

Reminder, dear reader: That actually is the goal of global climate negotiations — brining carbon pollution down to net zero to slow catastrophic warming.

My students typically laugh at certain moments of the episode that haven’t aged terrifically. Some of the Planeteers are dressed more for a guest appearance on Baywatch than for environmental activism. And Dr. Blight is absurdly menacing as she cackles and insists that more and more coal should be burned. (She also flirts with her computer and calls him names like “baby cakes,” which they love). Students often say that she seems a little too one-note as a villain. Today’s climate villains are shrewder and hide behind the modern-day gods of economic growth, jobs and patriotism, they point out. Yet they’re always charmed by the show. And every class comes away from the screening with one key takeaway: Holy shit this show was way ahead of its time.

It dealt with the greenhouse effect and fossil fuel pollution in a clear-eyed way that is enviable when viewed from 2026. Unfortunately, there is more hand-wringing now — less boldness in saying what must be said, which is there’s no room for fossil fuels in the modern economy, and they need to be phased out and “down to zero” ASAP.

At a moment with the news media and academia are getting rocked by fear and self-censorship, I hope the boldness with which Ted Turner approached his life — telling it like it is, even when that was unpopular, especially when that was unpopular — lives on. That fearlessness and prescience are critical parts of his legacy. I see those ethics being embraced and celebrated by the generation of students I have the privilege of getting to work with. I don’t think it’s fair to lean on them to create the future we want — all of us have a part in that — but I do take comfort in seeing how alive they are, how much they want to create a better world with Ted’s boldness.

RIP, Ted. You are missed, and your legacy is very much alive.

So just to get this out of the way: In this house, we stan the Winter Olympics. That’s true even when there aren’t human-size Bialetti coffee pots dancing around the opening ceremonies.

Costume for Pride 2026, check.

Anyway. This is a climate newsletter. And so there is one important warming-minded issue I’d like to raise about these Olympics, however colorful they may be.

That is the issue of industrial snow.

And specifically whether or not we see machine-made snow on TV.

Real snow is hard to come by

As the world warms, real snow is getting harder to come by. Ski resorts all over the world are (and have been) turning to machine-made or industrial snow — basically pumping water and a dust-like particle through a giant fan to create fake powder.

They’re also stockpiling snow in warehouses through the summer to then rolling that snow out again at the start of the next season, reports Rob Hodgetts for CNN.

There aren’t reliable figures on the percentage of fake snow at the Milan-Cortina games. But based on the fact that organizers did build giant water reservoirs in anticipation of the games, and that lower-elevation athletes had been complaining about rain-like conditions, we can guess it’s a not-insignificant proportion.

From Reuters:

For Milano Cortina, established resorts such as Livigno, Bormio, Cortina d’Ampezzo and Antholz-Anterselva have expanded infrastructure already in place for elite competition, adding reservoirs, pump stations and snow guns to meet Olympic requirements.

In Livigno alone, more than 600,000 cubic metres of snow have been produced since mid-December for freestyle and snowboard events, with production accelerated during short cold spells, said Nemanja Dogo, executive technical manager at snowmaking specialist TechnoAlpin, which has supplied systems to several Olympic and World Cup venues.

A snowstorm just before the games bailed out some degree of the no-snow panic. But it remains true that Alpine areas are warming faster than the global average.

In the years since Cortina held the Winter Olympics in 1956, the average February temperature has increased 3.6 degrees Celsius, according to Climate Central.

(Global temperatures are nearing a 1.5 degree increase, on average.)

Many of the towns that could host the winter Olympics will not be able to in the future. Of the 93 sites that have hosted Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, only 52 places remain “climate-reliable” into the 2050s, according to a 2024 study in the journal Current Issues in Tourism. For the Paralympics, which are typically held after the Olympics in March, the number is even lower: 22 locations.

‘Snow acknowledgments’ for fake snow?

Which brings me back to the title of this email.

Perhaps the games should include “snow acknowledgments.”

Meaning: Tell us whether the snow we’re seeing is real or fake. Widen the lens to show us when a ski course is a ribbon of white on a brown landscape. Share the percentage of snow that’s being made industrially to host these events.

Doing so would help people grasp the consequences of global heating, which is driven primarily by burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests.

The term “snow acknowledgement” comes from an undergrad student of mine. Last week, one of her peers brought this Museum of Science Instagram video to class to lead a discussion about how the media communicates news of vanishing snow.

Why not just acknowledge the nature of the snow at the top of a broadcast? she asked (She says she’s seen a discussion like that on social media somewhere; I can’t find it, at least not using the term “snow acknowledgement.”)

The term is a nod to land acknowledgments, which celebrate the indigenous history and ownership of land at the start of some events and broadcasts.

It’s a little flip, I’ll admit, especially in the context of colonization and the theft of indigenous land. Still, I do think there’s something useful in the term.

Think of it as an ‘AI Generated’ label. Say the snow is fake

The first Winter Games to use artificial snow were held in Lake Placid, New York, in 1980. Reliance on fake snow has only grown since then.

The LA Times describes the slippery progression:

Twelve years ago in Sochi, Russia, when temperatures rose into the mid 60s — so warm some snow groomers worked bare-chested — 80% of the snow used was artificial. Four years later more than 90% of the snow in Pyeongchang, South Korea, was man-made. Then came the 2022 Games in Beijing, the first to rely completely on fake snow.

There are times when broadcasters and officials acknowledge these facts. But NBC and the International Olympic Committee could do much more to make transparent where the snow comes from in Milan-Cortina and at future Winter Olympic games.

Withholding that information creates a false image of functional winter.

So give us the equivalent of an “AI Generated” label.

Just say it when it’s true: The snow is fake.

Thank you all for reading. Give me a shout and let me know what you think about the term “snow acknowledgment” — and I’ll pass along your thoughts to my students.

For more on snow and winter sports, check out this NYT piece on the extreme drought in the West. (Those of us in Oregon are desperate for snow and are complaining about it constantly; two of my students, Josie Brown and Alisa Ashton, wrote about the decline in snowpack in December).

Bloomberg also has some super-useful context.

Also check out Protect Our Winters, which is doing this work all the time, not just during the Olympics when TV viewers are paying attention.

As a reminder (did you need a reminder?) that the U.S. has an outsize role in the thawing of our winters, and the general wrecking of the atmosphere, check out another NYT piece on the Trump Admin’s assault on climate regs.

Thanks and more soon!

Warmly,

John

I’m typing this from Oregon, where it’s been 60-something all week. At atmospheric river has been dumping feet of rain instead of snow, which was the case last December. The result is that parts of Oregon and Washington state have been flooded to the point of large-scale evacuation. Inflatable boats came to the rescue.

I moved here from D.C. last September. Friends there, and in the Northeast, are complaining to me about frigid temps and pesky snow all around.

“This is the coldest D.C. December I can remember,” a friend said this week.

At a time of runaway climate change — and when many of us move around quite a lot — how is a person expected to intuit what’s “normal” when it comes to the weather?

Short answer: none of this is normal

First off: None of the weather we experience today is “normal.”

All of today’s weather exists in a climate that’s between 1 and 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than it would be if not for billions of tons of fossil fuel pollution.

That doesn’t mean that humans “cause” every weather event, but it does mean that we’e changed the background conditions in which those events develop. (We also are getting better at identifying our fingerprints on individual weather events. You can search through these websites on “climate attribution” studies for more detail).

Likewise, “natural disaster” is no longer an appropriate term in this era.

I like Michael Mann’s suggestion of “unnatural disaster.”

But, kinda like “fetch,” those linguistic shifts aren’t happening.

(Sorry, I had to make a late-stage millennial joke at some point…)

How abnormal is critical

Knowing none of this is normal is part of the mind puzzle that is the experience modern weather. More important is knowing how abnormal this moment might actually be. And that is just incredibly difficult to ascertain these days.

In a sense, this comes down to our memories of the weather. If we could remember the entire temperature record from the early 1800s (before the Industrial Revolution and all this fossil fuel pollution and warming) til now, we’d be pretty set. We’d know how to play any given day in a long history of changes boiling across many decades.

Our weather memories don’t work like that, of course.

First, we don’t live long enough to feel the full extent of the climate crisis. (This is an obvious point but also a profound one; our storytelling also fails to capture this scale).

Second, our memories of the weather are actually super short.

Research led by Fran Moore found in 2019 that, on average, the memory bank we access when deciding if a given day is “hot” or not is only two to eight years long.

Let me just repeat that the climate crisis is playing out on the order of decades, centuries and millennia. (CO2 pollution creates warming for 1,000 years).

Yet we are unable to feel those changes.

Our weather memories are estimated to be two to eight years long.

This creates profound risks. Moore’s findings have been compared to the (apocryphal) story of the frog in the boiling pot of water. In that tale, the temperature turns up so slowly that the frog fails to notice what’s going on and eventually is boiled alive.

It’s a semi-apt metaphor for our perception of global warming.

It’s also untrue. A frog jumps out of slowly-heated water.

(I find that point pretty comforting, actually).

The better metaphor, to me, is tinnitus.

The buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere and the slow rise in global temperatures are like a ringing in our ears. They grow so slowly that we fail to hear.

Weather apps don’t do this justice

We of course do have data to tell us what’s happening to the weather.

That data can help us decide whether a given day’s weather is unusual.

Yet that data is both difficult to access and misleading.

If you dig through the Apple Weather app, you can find a comparison to “the Normal Range” for the day’s weather. If you click on “averages” you see more detail.

The issue, if you look even more closely, is that these “normals” are calculated from 1970 to present. The World Meteorological Organization defines “pre-industrial” temperatures as those from 1850 to 1900. 1970 is well within the “industrial” era.

The result is a comparison that likely underestimates the amount of warming we’re experiencing. Given our goldfish memories of the weather, this is both significant and dangerous. Weather apps could help us feel these changes on a day-to-day basis. That might promote deeper thinking and emotional understanding of what’s happening to the planet as we continue to junk up the atmosphere. Instead we’re left floating through time, unable to feel how much is changing all around us.

It’s a classic example of what Daniel Pauly has termed “shifting baselines.”

I worry about this because if we can’t feel global warming in a day-to-day way, how can we be expected to fix it? Instead, we’re left to guess at what feels normal. And, in my case, I’m left to guess at why this December feels way more like summer.

End notes from the field:

Shout-out to my students at the University of Oregon who presented their environmental journalism in a public showcase in Eugene last week.

One of their stories focused on the lack of snow in Oregon this year. Another on an almost-extinct flower and the woman trying to protect it. Another on the very-Oregon phenomenon of “glacier funerals” and the limits of that way of thinking.

You can see a bunch of their recent work at willamettedammit.substack.com.

I’m genuinely curious if you all think our short “weather memories” are significant when it comes to climate confusion and inaction. Shoot me a note and let me know.

I’ll include some of your thoughts in the next newsletter.

Thank you for reading, and please consider sharing this with a friend!

— Sutter

It was 2009 when I first knocked on Shelton Kokeok’s door in his village near the Arctic Circle. I didn’t know who lived inside. I was there for a CNN story on his tiny community, Shishmaref, and its plans to relocate because of the consequences of a warming planet — the thawing permafrost and disappearing sea ice.

Shelton answered the door with a characteristic smile — the kind that made his cheeks bump his bifocals. His blue house sat right at the edge of the Chukchi Sea — on a crumbling bluff that I described at the time as “falling into the water in snowmobile-sized chunks.” Inside, Shelton had hung dozens of photos of family members. Some posed with game animals common in the area: moose, caribou, seal. Others stood for school portraits in front of colorful backdrops. A wooden clock ticked on the wall and chimed the hour. A cassette-deck radio crackled with the weather forecast. The air smelled of seal oil, a tangy staple of the village.

Shelton was in his mid-60s then. He told me about how much warmer it’d been getting because I asked about that. I asked about the ice. It had been disappearing and thinning, he said. He watched that process, year after year, from his window.

I asked about relocation. The community had voted to relocate because of warming and that was the reason for my visit. That probably would have to happen, Shelton told me, but he didn’t want to leave this home. Already, he had helped his neighbors pull their homes back from the dangerous edge of the coast and toward safety.

That’s why his house was all alone on that bluff.

(The coastline of Alaska is eroding as the permafrost thaws, destabilizing the land. Sea ice that once protected the coast has been retreating for decades).

That’s the kind of guy Shelton was: Helpful, strong, capable, selfless. He told me stories about fending off polar bears and making it through winters of 40-below. About adapting to a world that always seemed to be changing too fast around him.

Today would have been his 81st birthday.

He died earlier this year at the age of 80.

Well, sort of.

No one in Shishmaref really dies. That’s something else he taught me.

In Shish, stories cross generational lines

Over the years, I knocked on the door of Shelton’s blue home many times. Whenever I did, he wanted to talk with me not about the ice but about family.

Often about his wife, Clara, who he doted over, cleaned and cooked for, and spoke to in a voice that was soft and kind — reassuring even as she lost her memory and then passed away. They spoke to each other in Inupiaq, the indigenous language that’s still taught at the school in Shishmaref (or Kigiqtaq, as the town is known in that language).

Shelton talked about his kids, too — Frieda, John, Warren and Norman. Especially Norman. We spent hours speaking about the kid nicknamed “Boy.” It was Norman’s photo that sat on his coffee table next to the radio. It was Norman who was his one biological son — the rest he adopted after his brother, who previously was married to Clara, died in a plane crash. Shelton told me their wedding was about love but also about taking care of family. About duty. About a way of remembering. Shelton named his son Norman after his brother, Norman, who died in that plane crash.

His child also would meet a tragic fate.

The younger Norman fell through thinning sea ice on a hunt in 2007.

Norman’s friends couldn’t rescue him.

That year, 2007, the ice was at a record low. Shelton blamed global warming for Norman’s death. You couldn’t trust the ice like you used to, he said.

In this chart, you can see just how much the sea ice had declined that year.

Shelton cried easily talking about Norman. And he spent hours just looking out the window from his little blue house, staring at the sea, thinking about him. After Norman’s death, and especially after Clara’s health started to decline, Shelton’s big smile and satellite-dish ears were rarely seen around this tiny village of about 500.

Little could comfort him except for an important custom.

‘What’s in a name?’ Shishmaref edition

There’s a tradition in Shishmaref that people live on through their names. This isn’t the kind of namesake thing you encounter elsewhere, necessarily. (My middle name is David, after my dad, for example, but that’s different from this way of naming). Traditionally, when someone in Shishmaref dies, the next baby born in the village is named after them. That baby takes on the name and, very often, the traits and mannerisms of the deceased person. It’s almost a form of reincarnation.

After Norman died, at least two Normans were named after him. (They’re now teenagers and I’ve spent lots of time with both of their families. At least one of the Normans wants to become a hunter just like his namesake, despite the risks). Shelton found so much comfort in the existence of these Normans — the fact that they carried on the hunting traditions that he’d taught his own son. I’m told that both of the younger Normans attended Shelton’s funeral. And that a choir sang in Inupiaq.

The ‘Shelton’ that could live to 2100

Because of how he felt about Norman — past, present and future — I know Shelton would be pleased to learn that there’s at least one child named after him, too.

That child is Shelton’s great-grandson.

The boy was given Shelton’s Inupiaq name, Ugasuk, which the family believes creates an even stronger connection between the generations than an English name could, John Kokeok, Shelton’s son, told me this September when I visited Shishmaref.

The baby boy’s name is Wade “Ugasuk” Kokeok. He was born on July 12 to Carter Kokeok and Carmen Turner. Wade, not unlike Shelton, has had a hard time of it so far. Carter told me recently by phone that the boy was born premature at 31 weeks and only was discharged from the hospital in early November, nearly four months after his birth. He’s a fighter like Shelton, though, too. “My papa was a little bit stubborn, and Wade is also kind of stubborn in a way,” he told me. He’s determined to get well.

Carter told me he hopes to bring Wade home to Shishmaref in the not-too-distant future. For now, they are staying in the Seattle area for follow-up appointments.

Can a village be reborn, too?

It’s foreseeable that Wade could live to the year 2100.

I wonder what that world will look like.

Will Shishmaref have to relocate?

So much of the climate crisis exists on timescales that stretch our imagination and understanding. CO2 stays in the atmosphere and oceans, contributing to warming, for 1,000 years. It’s like we’re alive in that future — or at least our pollution is.

I’m fond of saying that climate change is a story that lasts longer than any human lifetime. It’s one reason I think we’ve failed to do more in response to warming. It’s hard for us to feel the changes we’re unleashing in a quotidian sort of way. It’s only when we really stretch our collective memories and stand back that we can see.

Shelton’s story, and Wade’s, help stretch my memory.

In Shish, stories and people do last longer than a lifetime.

We need those stories if we’re going to make sense of what we’re doing to the planet.

There may come a time when Shishmaref, the community, can no longer exist in its precarious location on the Chukchi Sea. (This fall, nearby villages were devastated as remnants of Typhoon Halong caused widespread flooding, wrecking 700 homes and killing at least one person, according to the Associated Press. Some homes floated away with people inside. It’s estimated that hundreds were displaced).

If Shelton can be reborn, I have to wonder if the village can be reborn, too.

Thanks for taking time to read this piece. Give me a shout and let me know what you’d like to see more of as this newsletter gets moving again.

I’m so glad to be reconnecting with this community. Thank you for all the recent feedback. What I heard from you is: Keep writing, we like this! So I’m going to :)

A special thanks to John and Kate Kokeok, as well as Carter Kokeok, for reminiscing with me about Shelton and working with me to keep his story alive.

I’ll be thinking about Wade and wishing him a swift and continued recovery.

And a happy birthday to Shelton. May you rest in peace.

— John

It’s been nearly 10 years since the Paris Agreement on climate change — a radiant moment of hope for the world’s efforts to curb fossil fuel pollution.

I wrote a column for CNN today about how much has changed in the decade since.

And, more importantly, about why we must refuse to give up hope.

Some of the activists I spoke with warned against a view of climate action that’s too U.S.-centric and overly warped by the retrograde pull of the Trump Admin. I do think there’s some truth in that framing. And I do think it’s clear how the public feels:

… 89% of the global public surveyed in a 2024 study favored stronger political action on climate change.

“That is a supermajority,” said Mark Hertsgaard, executive director of Covering Climate Now, the group behind a media collaboration called the 89 Percent Project. “And it’s a [super]majority that doesn’t know that it’s a majority. People in that majority think that they’re 29% of the population. They think they’re a minority.”

But even in the United States, positive trends hold: 79% of registered voters surveyed in May 2025 said they support the US being part of the Paris Agreement and 75% support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

The point: We have more power than we give ourselves credit for.

I also wrote in the piece about how I keep a memento from the Marshallese delegation to Paris on my desk, all these years later (and all these desks later; I’ve moved three times since then! I’m a professor in Oregon these days)…

On the day the Paris Agreement was adopted, I spent hours with the delegation from the Marshall Islands, a nation of low-lying islands in the Pacific that fears being subsumed by rising seas. I’d visited the country earlier in 2015 for a CNN article. I’ll never forget a woman telling me that the sound of the ocean, which used to lull her to sleep, had become threatening after waves crashed through her home and flooded it. Her family had decided to move to Arkansas to get far away from the water and that sound.

The Marshallese delegation in Paris gave me a palm frond ribbon to remember them by. I kept it in my pocket as I relayed news of the agreement to viewers around the world.

It’s sitting on my desk as I type this, 10 years later.

It reminds me that the optimism and the urgency of that moment have not been forgotten.

I know it will help to have that little memento around as I watch news coming in from the COP30 talks in Brazil, which start Monday. I can’t help but feeling a little naive for having written, in 2015, that “this is the end of fossil fuels” — referring to the Paris Agreement. It wasn’t, of course. But it doesn’t change the fact that we know that’s the direction the world must head if we are going to stabilize the atmosphere. And if anything, we know, 10 years on, that getting there is entirely possible.

Thank you all for reading this post. Please feel free to share the newsletter with a friend. It’s been a WHILE since I’ve been active here, but I’m going to start posting more. Please shoot me a note and let me know what you think. What you’d like to see more/less of. How you’re feeling about the state of the climate 10 years on, etc.

Warmly,

John

John here from the BASELINE series. I know your minds are likely elsewhere right now, but I’m excited to share a few links and give you a Covid-era update.

Kottke is still doing Kottke

Despite this film not existing yet, we are somehow all over the media this week:

• Vox’s David Roberts interviewed me about the idea of using documentary to counteract “generational amnesia” on the climate crisis. (I think that happened because AR Siders, whose work on “managed retreat” from the coasts in the climate era is truly vital, tweeted at him and told him about BASELINE).

• The blog Kottke picked up on that conversation.

• And so did NPR’s “On the Media,” which featured the project this weekend.

Kottke (what up Web 1.0!) had a great description of BASELINE:

Taking a page from The Up Series, director John Sutter is making a series of films that revisit four geographic locations every 5 years until 2050 in order to document the effects in those areas due to climate change. The name of the series is Baseline and it’s a reference to the concept of shifting baselines, which the trailer above defines as “a phenomenon of lowered expectations in which each generation regards a progressively poorer natural world as normal”. The four areas the films will focus on are Alaska, Utah, Puerto Rico, and the Marshall Islands.

A friend messaged me after I posted the Kottke link saying that his homepage used to be Kottke.org. I’ve been obsessed, too. And I’m going to start reading again. (For those unfamiliar, Kottke is like THE original tech-culture blogger. Think 1998-original.)

So, anyway, all that was kinda fun.

Kids are helping us make this film

Now, the update: Partly because of Covid and mainly because it feels right, we’re starting to ask kids in these four locations to help us make this film.

It’s been wild and fun so far. We’ve sent cameras to a few young people in Utah as a pilot, and plan to send them to the other locations. (The iPhone SE 2020 isn’t super expensive as phones go, and they shoot 4K video with an adjustable frame rate.)

I’ll report back on how this is going soon. But I also wanted to say a quick thank you to other creators who are working in this space, which MIT broadly has dubbed “co-creation.” (Check out a report MIT’s Co-Creation Studio). Also take a look at the work of Pam Sporn, who’s been making films with high school students in New York for decades. And Paloma Martinez, whose short film “Crisanto Street” has been an inspiration to me as we’re trying to figure out this new mode of filmmaking.

Again, more on this soon. Meantime, have you seen interesting examples of “co-created” films? (Looking at you, iReport alums!) If so, please send ‘em my way.

I’ll leave you with a closing thought from John Lewis. These words have been bringing me comfort this weekend. He’s such an inspiration during this dark time. (I’m proud to have been repped by him while I was living in Atlanta). Rest in power.

John

John Sutter here from the BASELINE series. It’s been a while! I hope this finds you safe and healthy and surviving this terribly difficult time. It’s a little weird to think about updating you on this climate change film amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Everything is on hold right now, and the world’s attention rightly is elsewhere. But I do have a couple bits of news that I’d like to share with this core, supportive group. (Warning: This is a much more me-heavy newsletter than usual. My apologies!…)

1) ‘TEDx: Climate beyond a human lifetime’ is now online / is probably the new ‘Tiger King’ …

Pre-pandemic, I gave a talk about BASELINE — and about the concept of “shifting baseline syndrome” — on a v large/ v intimidating TEDx stage in Dallas.

I was, you know, terrified. And I’ve been told I glanced down at the safety-blanket computer monitors a LITTLE too much. But I’d love for you to take a look and spread the word. It posted online this week. And it’s my first time doing something like this.

Here’s the talk:

And here’s what the theater looked like during the tech check 😳

You can find other 2020 TEDxSMU talks here. They’re all wonderful, but I think this newsletter crew would be super into Alicia Eggert’s talk on “making time tangible.” (It involves her saving toenail clippings and collecting her bf’s bellybutton lint.) And Camille Seaman’s talk about photographing Antarctica, year after year.

2) I’m hosting a climate podcast for Foreign Policy magazine, and the first episode is out now…

One other bit of me-news to share: I’m hosting a new podcast for Foreign Policy about solutions to the climate crisis. It’s called “Heat of the Moment,” and I’ve had that damn song stuck in my head the whole time I’ve been recording these interviews and voice-overs. (“Heeeeeat of the Moment….”) Anyway. There are 12 episodes. The gist is that I interview someone interesting/important in the climate space — Joseph Stiglitz, Katharine Hayhoe, Varshini Prakash, Christiana Figueres, among others — and then FP commissions field-reported stories that go with that theme.

Here’s the first episode. They come out week-by-week.

If you do take a watch/listen, let me know what you think. I’m pretty new at both of these things — podcasting, and giving talks to large auditoriums full of velvety chairs. I’d value the feedback. (If you dig the TEDx talk, btw, you can go here, click “share” and then click the “TED recommends” button to flag it to Big TED).

3) Climate + Covid-19 = a lot

Phew. If you, like me, have been thinking a lot about the (sometimes overblown but still interesting) intersections between Covid and climate change, here are a couple op-eds I’ve written recently for CNN that are sort of my way of working through it:

• What does air pollution have to do with Covid-19?

• The pandemic isn’t fixing climate change

Emily Atkin (you should subscribe to “HEATED” if you don’t already) has been digging into these connections in a short-run podcast that’s worth a listen, too.

Also: When you’re finished with “Tiger King,” read this, and thank Rachel Nuwer for some really important context… Then check out “The Hottest August,” which is a super fascinating/creative documentary by Brett Story … kind of a poetic look at anxiety and future-dread in one month — August 2017 — in New York City. (No, that August wasn’t TECHNICALLY the hottest, but, you know, whatever…). Follow that link and you can “rent” it from a theater and stream the film online this week. It’s also airing on PBS on April 20. So, a little pre-Earth Day viewing perhaps.

One last note concerning Earth Day: I’m working on a couple CNN pieces about the 50th anniversary of that event, and, more broadly, the state of environmentalism over that critical half-century. Have any thoughts? Please shoot me a note. Big wins that are overlooked? Conversations that feel like they’re on repeat, decade after decade? This group so often informs my writing in helpful ways. So, THANK YOU. In advance.

Again, hope everyone is safe and healthy out there.

More soon.

John

John here from the BASELINE project.

Before we get rolling, I wanted to say a quick “thank you” on this Giving Tuesday for your attention to and ongoing support of this project, which is visiting four locations on the frontlines of the climate crisis, every five years, until 2050. And a request: If you’re thinking about year-end donations, please consider BASELINE. Donations through our fiscal sponsor, UnionDocs, are tax-deductible in the US. And they’ll go toward what I believe is the critical cause of us creating a climate documentary on an unprecedented timeframe, something just a little bit closer to Earth Time. This is a life’s-work sort of project for me. I truly do appreciate any support you’re able to offer. Also, if this is not the right time for you, totally cool. Maybe forward this email to a friend, encourage people to sign up for the newsletter, or retweet one of these guys?

We’re already 30% of the way to our goal. (Thank you!)

BASELINE + HEATED + an (almost)-unwinnable game!

One other bit of housekeeping: Check out this conversation about BASELINE and other rad climate storytelling projects hosted by the Nieman Foundation. Featuring yours truly, Emily Atkin (subscribe to HEATED if you don’t already, it’s a newsletter for people who are pissed about the climate crisis) and Rosanna Xia from the LA Times. (Rosanna’s mondo feature on sea level rise in California is a true must-read… and that’s not even to mention the badass game the paper developed that helps you weigh all of the non-good options facing you as a town on the California coast).

I’m at the top, in the Mr Rogers sweater. Followed by Rosanna and Emily. Then Q&A.

OK, now three quick notes on projects I know you’ll love. Because they deal with the climate crisis and environmental change and humans, all on impressive timescales.

And then I have one more favor to ask re: an upcoming interview.

Walking the path of human migration

First project you’ll love: Paul Salopek’s “Out of Eden Walk.”

Many of you probably have read about Paul’s effort, with support from National Geographic, to walk the ENTIRE path of human migration out of the Horn of Africa, into Asia, across the Bering Strait, to Alaska to… who knows. It’s freaking wild.

Here’s the map:

Reminder: HE IS WALKING THIS.

I mentioned this to a friend recently to which the friend replied: What, I’ve never heard of that? (You know who you are). So on the off chance you, too, are not following Paul’s incredible journey, please checkout his Instagram and Twitter and make it a habit. The trek is wonderful and beautiful and sad and historically rich. You won’t be sorry. Plus, I love that Paul popularized the term “slow journalism” in reference to the deliberate and thoughtful process of taking in material, processing it, and telling a BIG story.

Here’s how he described it in a 2015 interview:

"Slow journalism allows me to make hidden connections that you miss when you travel too fast," he said. "The world is complicated, and we require more than just short bits of information."

It’s obvious that BASELINE takes inspiration from this work. Paul was the first Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard. And I cooked up this idea for the BASELINE series on that fellowship earlier this year, too. (If you’ve got a big idea you need a few weeks/months to workshop, I highly highly recommend that program).

A manifesto against ‘short-termism’

Second, please take a moment to read this wonderful essay on “short-termism,” which Richard Fisher, who is a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, calls “civilization’s greatest threat” and “one of the most dangerous traits of our generation.”

This is just the top of it:

Modern society is suffering from “temporal exhaustion”, the sociologist Elise Boulding once said. “If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future,” she wrote in 1978. We can only guess her reaction to the relentless, Twitter-fuelled politics of 2019. No wonder wicked problems like climate change or inequality feel so hard to tackle right now.

That's why researchers, artists, technologists and philosophers are converging on the idea that short-termism may be the greatest threat our species is facing this century. They include philosophers arguing the moral case for prioritising our distant descendants; researchers mapping out the long-term path of Homo sapiens; artists creating cultural works that wrestle with time, legacy and the sublime; and Silicon Valley engineers building a giant clock that will tick for 10,000 years.

3. Also: A 1,000-year camera

Then there’s this: A 1,000-year camera by the artist/philosopher Jonathon Keats.

From Vice News:

Keats’ placed his Millennium Cameras at four locations around Lake Tahoe. Each camera is made of copper and is only 2.75 inches long and 2.25 inches in diameter. Inside the camera is a sheet of 24-karat gold pierced by a small hole. As light passes through this small hole, it causes a reaction with the rose-colored pigment inside the camera, which causes the color to fade where the light is the brightest. This will slowly imprint an image on the pigment over the next 1,000 years.

I’m obsessed with this idea because it forces people to think on Earth Time, which is very difficult to do. I chatted with Keats briefly last week, on my way to family Thanksgiving. We’re going to do an e-mail Q&A about his project. And that’s where the other favor comes in: What do you want to know from Keats about his “Millennium Camera”? What other projects — artistic, journalistic, scientific, otherwise — have you seen documenting long timescales? If you send me some questions and ideas, I’ll include the best of them in a future newsletter.

Thanks for following along, and for being part of this!

More soon.

— jds

This newsletter is written by John D. Sutter, director of the BASELINE documentary series. Sutter is a National Geographic Explorer and CNN climate analyst. Follow him on Instagram, and consider making a tax-deductible donation to the project. Email him with tips.

I’m writing to invite you to the first public talk about the BASELINE series, tomorrow at 5:30 p.m. on Harvard’s campus in Cambridge, Mass. (For those of you not in-around Boston, keep reading! There’s a preview below…)

Here are the details, courtesy of the Harvard Center for the Environment, which is co-hosting the discussion with Nieman and C-CHANGE.

Note the photo of me back when I had hair. Ahem …

There will be a follow-up panel with Naomi Oreskes (“Merchants of Doubt”) and Dan Schrag, director of the Harvard Center for the Environment. We’ll talk about how “shifting baseline syndrome” messes with the way all of us are processing and talking about the climate crisis. Come say hello if you make it! And if you’re not in the area, please consider sharing the invite on FB/Twitter, or telling a friend.

I’ll share a video of the talk with this group soon.

‘We’re living in this 10% world’

A little mini-preview just for you newsletter subscribers: I’ll be showing part of a video interview that Edythe McNamee and I conducted earlier this year with Loren McClenachan, a historical ecologist at Colby College, in Maine.

McClenachan has spent months and months digging up archival evidence of environmental changes that are largely going unnoticed, because they happen slowly enough they don’t really-truly trigger our oh-s*** alarm sensors. One of the best visual examples: She collected archival photos of “trophy fish” caught on one dock in Key West, Florida, over about 50 years. At the start, in the 1950s, the trophy fish were taller than humans. By the 2000s, when she visited, they were circa forearm-size.

The first shrunk by about 90%, according to McClenachan.

What happened? Overfishing, regulatory change, a host of things. The critical point for our purposes is that the fishermen were smiling just as big in the 1950s as they are later, when their trophy catches are decidedly less trophy-ish. They, like us with regards to climate, fail to fully grasp these sweeping, longterm changes.

“We’re living in this 10% world,” she said.

I found this work incredibly sad-inspiring. Instead of wallowing, though, it’s one reason I’m digging into archives for visual evidence of change in the four BASELINE communities, which I’ll be revisiting every five years between now and 2050. I have to hope that seeing these changes more clearly can help us address them.

Hope to see you tomorrow, and thank you for your support!

More soon.

—jds

This newsletter is written by John D. Sutter, director of the BASELINE documentary series. Sutter is a National Geographic Explorer and CNN climate analyst. Follow him on Instagram, and consider making a tax-deductible donation to the project. Email him with tips.

Hey everyone — John here from the “BASELINE” project.

Two quick bits of good news to share with you today.

Check us out in Nieman Reports

First, “BASELINE” was featured this week in Nieman Reports. (!!)

Here’s an excerpt:

Storytellers, like scientists, tend to work on Human Time. We think in daily (minute-ly?) deadlines, weekly meetings, annual performance reviews. Journalists are particularly guilty of a now-now-right-now bias. Out of necessity, we’ve been conditioned to think second to second, tweet to tweet. Decades, centuries, millennia—the timescales of our planet—they usually don’t land with urgency in our in-boxes…

In light of the climate crisis, however, this blind spot could have planet-ending consequences.

Take a read. You’ll meet a sweet researcher, John O’Keefe, who has been taking notes about the same trees at Harvard Forest, in Massachusetts, for nearly 30 years. (If you really fall in love with him, as I definitely have, also check out this book, “Witness Tree,” as well as said tree’s Twitter feed).

Also: UNIONDOCS

Second, “BASELINE” now has a crowdfunding page online through UNIONDOCS, our fiscal sponsor. We have some initial funding from the National Geographic Society, but we are raising funds for 2020 production costs. Consider making a tax-deductible donation through that page. Or share it with a friend. Anything helps. And I PROMISE not to turn this newsletter into an eternal NPR pledge drive.

Thanks, and more soon!

—jds

PS: Photo at top by Edythe McNamee, “BASELINE” director of photography.

PPS: A few of you guessed it. The first location in the series is Shishmaref, Alaska, which is a place I wrote about for CNN in 2009 and 2016, and I place I really-truly love. (There’s a tease for another one of the locations at the top of this email…)

Here’s one little scene from our first shoot in Alaska, earlier this year:

This newsletter is written by John D. Sutter, director of the “BASELINE” series. Sutter is a National Geographic Explorer and CNN climate analyst. Follow him on Instagram, and consider making a tax-deductible donation to the “BASELINE” series.

Maybe you were a follower of CNN’s “Two Degrees” series back in the day (wherein “the day” = 2015). Maybe you found this on my Twitter feed. Maybe I met you in a hallway and harassed you into signing up for this thing. Regardless, I’m pumped to have you here to talk about a NEW climate-change project I’m developing with support from the National Geographic Society, the Nieman Foundation and others.

Four locations. Every five years. Until 2050.

It’s called “BASELINE.” And the idea is wild enough I think you might like it: I plan to revisit four locations on the frontlines of the climate crisis every five years. Until the year 2050. Think of it as the environmental version of the “Seven Up!” series. (That’s the one where Michael Apted has been interviewing the same “kids” every seven years since the 1960s. The kids were all 7 at the start; now they’re in their 60s.)

The point of this project is to counteract “shifting baseline syndrome” as it applies to the climate crisis. Here’s one definition for that wonky term I find useful:

In normal-speak: Environmental change happens slowly enough that we don’t tend to see how wide-ranging and truly alarming these changes actually are.

I want to stretch the timescales over which we’re telling the climate story — to turn a consistent lens on four communities and refuse to look away.

Here’s a visual hint about ONE of the places I’ll be telling you about:

Any guesses on the location? Follow along here for an answer, and for updates on my travels. I expect the eventual output of “BASELINE” to be a feature-length documentary series, with the first installment focused on the year 2020, and new editions being released at five-year intervals (at least) until the year 2050.

Important: I need your help

Consider this the start of a big (really big!) conversation. Just like with the “Two Degrees” project, I’ll need your help to pull this off.

Questions? Thoughts? People I need to meet? Please reply to this email.

Thanks for following along.

And more soon.

—jds

This newsletter is written by John D. Sutter, director of the “BASELINE” series. Sutter is a National Geographic Explorer and CNN climate analyst.

There’s a problem (OK, many problems…) inherent in the way journalists have been telling the story of climate crisis: We don’t live long enough to actually see it. Academics call this “generational amnesia” or “shifting baseline syndrome.” Wonky terms, sure, but they hit on something big and true. The climate emergency plays out over decades and centuries. We journalists — I’ve been a journalist at CNN for a decade — tend to work by the hour or minute. Often, we’re so caught in the churn that we are totally missing the BIG BIG story of the century. Over time, events that now feel extreme will come to feel normal. That’s already happening, and it raises the prospect the public may never truly be alarmed by the climate emergency. (And, yes, I know there’s some alarm at the moment. But we’ve been doing this for 30 years).

This “Baseline” project will explore antidotes to our collective climate amnesia. With a grant from the National Geographic Society and support from Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, I’m developing a “Baseline” documentary series and am working with a handful of climate-frontline communities to collect visual evidence of changes that span decades and generations. Think of the doc as the environmental version of the “Seven Up!” series by Michael Apted. The filmmaker interviewed a bunch of seven-year-old kids in the 1960s, and then returned to talk with them again every seven years. The “kids” are now in their 60s, and the project is still going. I plan to do something similar through the lens of climate, repeatedly returning to a handful of communities over coming years and decades. The goal is to make visible and emotional the massive environmental shifts that are happening all around us.

To be clear: This is a LONG HAUL, multi-generational effort. I want this project to outlast me, and I’m 30-something now. It’s a wild idea, and I’ll certainly need your help and support and interest in order to make the “Baseline” project work.

Sign up here for occasional (monthly-ish) updates on the project, and for ways you can help “Baseline” succeed. And thank you for your time! —John

This newsletter is written by John D. Sutter, director of “BASELINE.” Sutter is a National Geographic Explorer and CNN contributor focused on the climate crisis.

Sign up now