In late December 2019, 17-year-old high school junior Avi Schiffmann was tracking early news reports about a new virus out of Wuhan, China. At the time he was working on a side project to teach himself web scraping and decided to use the new virus as his subject. From his bedroom near Seattle, he coded a website and sent it into the world where it went viral, becoming one of the world’s most trusted resources for reporting about COVID cases, deaths, and recovery.

In January 2020, an Oxford University professor and mother of triplets, Sarah Gilbert realized that her team’s years of quiet, underfunded research might play a role in developing a vaccine against the new virus. When the genetic sequence of the virus was published, she sat at her kitchen table and sketched out the blueprint for fast tracking the vaccine. Her triplets (each studying biochemistry), became the first human subjects. While the vaccine was called an "overnight" miracle, it was actually the result of years of unglamorous, patient effort that was ready to step up when the moment demanded it.

Climate change is far bigger and more complex than a virus, affecting every person and life form on the planet.

Most of us are worried about our future, feeling a creeping despair as a glacier collapses in Nepal, wildfires consume our forests, El Niño looms on the horizon, and the governments we’ve trusted to secure our future seem to be stuck in the extractions of the past. The very rich are building bunkers; the very poor are already starving for food and medical attention. Our earth angels are leaving the room and too many of the rest of us are silently dusting the patio furniture while hoping for a gentle rain.

Estimates are that over 160 million people are working on climate change issues. Somewhere out there, heroes, such as Avi Schiffmann and Sarah Gilbert, are working on projects which might become solutions. However, our job isn’t to just wait for the heroes to show up.

We have an active role to play in creating our future and we can build on what we learned during the pandemic.

COVID startled us. Everyone talked about it … worried about it … learned new ways to organize life … together.

We learned to work at home, avoid crowds, use zoom, order groceries and take-out meals, line up six feet apart, home school our children, check on loved ones. New Yorkers regularly applauded first responders, Sir Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard) publicly read a Shakespeare sonnet every day while Dolly Parton read bedtime stories, and an 80 year-old friend offered free yoga sessions on zoom. At one point, we even talked about the need to rescue the crude oil industry as usage plummeted.

What we learned during the pandemic, could help us cope with climate change, which is no longer a dark cloud looming in the future. It is here now, primarily caused by the life-style we humans created over the past few hundred years. We’re already seeing the effects and they are destined to get much worse unless we figure out how to overcome our addiction to fossil fuels and stop treating Earth as merely a department store for humans.

START HERE: share our feelings about climate change

Many studies are showing the same thing … most people are worried about climate change while few of us are talking about it or sharing our feelings and worries. Not talking about it leaves us isolated and frozen, incapable of figuring out what to do.

                      The ONE, almost universally recommended STEP 1

Acknowledge your feelings and talk about them with friends, family and neighbors. Sharing your feelings relieves stress, builds connections and reduces the sense of being isolated and alone.

PRACTICE ROUND:

Here’s an easy way to tiptoe into sharing your feelings … tell us in the comments how you’re feeling about climate change … (I’ll go first in the comments):

Leave a comment

I know many of you hate or dread AI (and there are reasons to do just that), however, I find it an interesting, patient, and available conversation partner. So, with tongue-in-cheek, I asked:

Because AI doesn’t know me from thee, its response has little to do with me personally and offers an interesting response in general, so I’m sharing it here:

                                   So, the question appears to be: 
                          what do we need to know or understand 
                              in order to call ourselves “educated?”
                            Perhaps the real challenge is the word:
                      "educated" indicates an impossible end-point:
     when, in truth, there will always be more to learn and understand.

What do you think? …

Leave a comment

It’s a two-question day … do you ever ask AI questions that you probably wouldn’t ask another human?

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Sometimes, it’s just a matter of focus. I did know the fact indicated below, however, I never thought about it in these terms or in relationship to the Nepal tragedy.

I had an idea … but it was a tiny, off-the-wall idea, not important, not even serious. It was so fluffy I couldn’t think of a word to describe it. So I googled: “word for a small, passing thought.”

AI Response (partial): The perfect word for a small, passing thought is fleeting.

At first, I was irritated. I knew that word and really wanted something more interesting and clever. However, I also knew that my prompt wasn’t very helpful so I wrote: “let's make up an adjective/noun word ... blip ... ...”

Response (partial): Let's do it! [some of them are quite fun; others are duds.]

• Blippet: A tiny, single passing thought.

  • Example: “I had a quick blippet about what to cook for dinner, but it’s gone now.”

• Blip-notion: A thought that pops up on your brain’s radar and immediately vanishes.

  • Example: “Don’t mind me, that was just a random blip-notion.”

• Blippy: Used to describe a mind that keeps jumping from one tiny thought to the next.

  • Example: “My brain feels a bit blippy today; I can’t focus on one task.”

• Bliptual: Describing a thought that exists for only a split second.

  • Example: “It wasn’t a full epiphany, just a bliptual idea.”

• Blipfrizzle: The exact, slightly chaotic moment a small thought sparks in your brain and immediately burns out.

  • Example: “I had a brilliant idea a second ago, but it just went blipfrizzle.”

• Blip-and-miss: A thought so fast, if you blinked, your brain missed it. Could also be “blip-and-run”.

  • Example: “Catching that idea was impossible; it was a total blip-and-miss.”

• Blipwhip: A thought that hits your brain fast like a whip, then snaps right back out.

• Bliptoneum: The hypothetical, subatomic particle of a thought that only exists for a microsecond.

  • Example: “My brain didn’t form a full concept, just a lone bliptoneum.”

• Blip-synaptic: An adjective for a thought that fires across a single synapse and immediately dissipates.

  • Example: “I experienced a blip-synaptic urge to check the fridge.”

• Micro-bliption: The technical clinical term for a minor mental hiccup or transient thought.

• Blipskiff: A tiny, weightless thought that drifts across the surface of your consciousness like a small boat.

  • Example: “A sudden blipskiff of nostalgia sailed through my mind.”

• Bliptide: An adjective describing a mind quietly rippling with tiny, passing ideas.

  • Example: “She sat in a bliptide reverie, letting the tiny notions come and go.”

• Blipsigh: A thought so small and fragile that thinking it feels like a quiet breath.

• Brain-piffle: A thought so small, fluffy, and insignificant it feels like a tiny puff of air.

  • Example: “Don’t mind me, that was just a little brain-piffle.”

• Thought-pop: A micro-idea that bursts into existence with a “pop” and is instantly gone.

  • Example: “I had a total thought-pop about my keys, but now I’ve lost it.”

• Whiffle-wit: A tiny, breezy thought that enters one ear and exits the other before you can grab it.

• Synap-spark: An adjective or noun for a single, isolated neural firing that fails to form a full memory track.

  • Example: “It wasn’t a memory, just a random synap-spark.”

• Cognula: (Plural: Cognulae). A miniature, embryonic particle of a thought.

  • Example: “My mind is completely blank except for a few drifting cognulae.”

• Neur-unfocused: The exact mental state of having dozens of tiny, unlinked thoughts floating around.

• Mind-mote: A thought as tiny and weightless as a single speck of dust dancing in a sunbeam.

  • Example: “A quiet mind-mote of sadness drifted through her afternoon.”

• Glance-thought: A thought that doesn’t stop to look at you; it just glances your way as it passes by.

  • Example: “He caught a glance-thought of his childhood home.”

• Vapor-notion: A thought so fragile and misty that the mere act of focusing on it makes it evaporate.

• Ponder-pass: A thought that walks right past your conscious mind without stopping to chat.

  • Example: “It wasn’t a deep realization, just a quick ponder-pass.”

• Glimmer-glance: A thought that shines a tiny light on you for a split second, then looks away.

  • Example: “I caught a glimmer-glance of an old memory.”

• Mind-mirage: A mental image that appears on the horizon of your brain and vanishes the moment you look closer.

  • Example: “The solution was a total mind-mirage; I saw it, then it was gone.”

• Brain-whisper: Soft, quiet, and easily missed over the noise of the day.

  • Example: “A tiny brain-whisper reminded me to lock the door.”

• Echo-notion: It feels like the faint reverberation of a thought rather than the solid thought itself.

  • Example: “I had this strange echo-notion, but I can’t quite piece it back together.”

• Mind-murmur: A thought so faint it sounds like background rustling in your head.

  • Example: “Amid the chaos, a small mind-murmur told him to stay.”

• Psyche-sigh: A thought so incredibly brief and gentle it feels like your mind just took a quick breath.

  While AI didn’t give me what I was looking for, I’m not sure I would have found the answer I wanted without going through the exercise.

I have a new spirit animal and she brought me a story:

Many long years ago, a wolf-sized animal changed her mindset. The world under her feet was shifting … massively. Call her Paki.

Paki hunted small animals on land and, sometimes, caught fish in the river. However, because massive tectonic shifts had created abundant aquatic life along the rivers and floodplains near the Tethys Sea, she began to focus her hunting there. Her body already gave her two advantages in water: she had dense, heavy limb bones that helped her stay submerged and she could hold her breath while diving for fish.

Gradually, as Paki became more adept at catching fish and taught her young the same skills, the shoreline became their primary source of food. Some of her pups swam a bit faster and held their breath a little longer. They thrived, ate well, and multiplied rapidly.

Over time, Paki and the generations that followed her depended more and more on their fishing skills. Life favored the ones who could swim faster, dive deeper, and hold their breath longer.

Millennia by millennia they grew larger, became more powerful swimmers in deeper waters and adapted to spending more time under water. Slowly, their lives on land dropped away and they developed into the giant underwater animal we now call a whale.

And, what, pray tell, does that whale ancestor have to do with anything?

It’s highly unlikely that Paki sat down and contemplated her future over a cup of tea, called up the stats on where the most edibles were hanging out, and plotted her future. However, what she must have done in her own way was … pay attention.

We don’t know how long it took Paki to notice that she ate better when she was fishing the riverbanks. We don’t know if she read the latest books on holding her breath. And, we don’t know how many nights she went hungry because she went back time after time to her old hunting grounds and found nothing to eat. However, somewhere along the line, her focus changed and she committed to hunting in water, to honing her own skills while teaching her children to hunt in water. I like to call that New Thinking.

Paki had millennia to notice what was working. We don’t have that kind of time, which is why I keep looking for people who are paying attention faster.

I’d like to suggest one example: Moein Nodehi, who came to my attention through this poster on Bluesky. It’s a simple but nuanced description of a complex system, and it made me curious enough to find out whose work it was.

Everything about his architectural website surprised me and lured me into signing up for his newsletter, which surprised me even more when I found myself reading every word of each one. His writing has a way of handing you a whole system in a sentence.

A recent email opened with a line that’s stuck with me since:

                                             air conditioning doesn’t cool anything 
               it just takes the hot air from inside a building and throws it into the street. 

Millions of buildings doing that at once, he argues, is a good part of why cities run hotter than the countryside around them. Here’s one of his building concepts that just made me yearn to be there:

The more I dug, the more it made sense that he’d end up thinking this way. Nodehi grew up in a refugee camp and later returned to a city that had been bombed into rubble and needed to be rebuilt from nothing. It’s clear that’s where his obsession began. It left him convinced that buildings should be resilient the way ecosystems are resilient: able to absorb a shock and keep functioning. His company, Biotonomy, has since been recognized by the United Nations, the Government of Spain, and the city of Málaga for work toward the UN’s sustainable development goals … proof, maybe, that a mindset forged in crisis can turn into something the rest of the world wants to learn from.

Here’s a simple graphic about reusing water, posted on his LinkedIn. I don’t have the engineering chops to know what it would take to scale an idea like this, but I believe it’s the kind of thinking these hazardous times are calling for.

In many ways, Nodehi reminds me of Sergey Zimov who is almost single handedly trying to rewild the Siberian tundra permafrost. If you missed that incredible story (with its own movie), you can read it here:

There are more people … probably many more … who are saying:

We Don’t Have a CO2 water energy whatever problem … We have a thinking problem!

Let’s listen to them!

Hope. We seldom hope that the sun will rise … because it does it every day. We almost never hope for snowfall in Key West, Florida … because it has never, ever fallen there.

                                   In between the inevitable and the impossible, 
                                                            is Hope's garden.
                                                         WE are the gardeners.

                                                      Hope is a boundary word: 
                                                      life, here where it vibrates; 
                                                    death, there when it shrivels.

                                   We don’t often talk about death … it is inevitable.
                    We don't often talk about climate change ... it seems inevitable ...
                   and complicated and dreadful and political and just too depressing.
                               Have we given up hope ... six minutes before sunrise?

                          Have we forgotten the one unpredictable uncertainty … US?
                  
                        Perhaps no one told us that 160 million of us globally 
                         are working on climate solutions.
                        Maybe we haven't heard that a microbiologist in Brazil  
                        won the World Food Prize because she found a biological 
                        replacement for synthetic fertilizer, and oh, by the way, 
                       that might reduce emissions by 230 million tons per year.

                        Or, maybe we haven't met the mad, Russian physicist 
                        trying to rewild the Siberian permafrost to keep it 
                        from thawing and releasing massive methane.
          
                        Or the former CEO of Patagonia whose sights are set on 
                        rewilding entire continents.

                        Perhaps we don't know about  the teenager who celebrated 
                        her 16th birthday by planting 200 trees (and started a petition 
                       to enforce a plastic bag ban in Uganda)
       
                        Or the young Instagrammer who focuses on the environment 
                        and social justice and was included in 2024 in Forbes' 
                        30 Under 30 list of notable young professionals.

The human species is known for its big brain and ability to use tools to solve problems.

Even when we can’t see them, those big brains are spinning, finding problems to solve, looking for better ways to do everything.

We’ve been distracted … by politics and wars … by fear and greed.

We’ve looked away. Now it’s time to talk about what’s important. Every one of us can talk to our family, friends, and neighbors … we can tell the stories of the millions of people around the world who are working for us, with us, to save life on our planet.

We can support hope, because if hope dies, all is lost.

Please find and share stories that remind us of who we are and what we love enough to protect it.

»»And a snippet for Deniers: Exxon says climate change is real. It’s not enough, however it is a beginning.

Recent Related Posts:

8/17/2026 — #95

Last weekend I experimented with Nextdoor, the social media app for neighborhoods. I wanted to check out what I had been reading about “Climate Silence” from Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, since it seemed aligned with my own experience. On the app, I explained briefly the issue of “climate silence” and asked people whether or not they were having climate conversations. While many of the responses involved “mentioning” climate, it didn’t sound like many were having real “conversations” about it.

Santa Barbara is mostly blue territory with a pretty vocal red segment. The online responses mirrored that divide with most of the comments representing a strong awareness of climate change with also some adamant deniers leaning toward “it’s a hoax or all about money or control.” There were 4,765 views and 208 comments. As the weekend progressed, about half of the comments turned into a relatively civil debate among four people with opposing views on the data and projections.

As I live in a blue bubble, I was taken aback to hear people actually deny common climate projections and insist that “we will never give up fossil fuels.”

By Monday morning, I was in a downward spiral. Fortunately, I was also in the midst of a new book.

The author has a pragmatic view of hope: not as a vague act of wishing, but as the mindset or worldview that we must have if we are going to move toward a better future. His words made me stop and think about what builds hope for me. The answer didn’t exactly surprise me but it confirmed a path I’ve been on for awhile … beauty, especially the wild beauty of places, people, animals, and plants who create, sometimes over millions of years, unique ways to live within their own environment.

The variety is endless. Using color, structure, and anything that seems to be available or edible, we … all of us, every living species of us, have found a way to live and reproduce. From tiny peacock spiders with their incredible colors to venus flytraps that would eat those minuscule spiders if they lived in the same neighborhood.

Beauty is subjective and not guaranteed; but, obviously, not impossible. We see it often enough to know that it awakens something deep within us and creates a desire to protect it. I can spend endless hours wandering through my photo collection reliving moments of beauty. That makes me laugh because that’s also what I do on Bluesky where photographers from around the world share their moments of beauty … moments I would never get to see in my own life and travels. Most of those images come without words or requests, and are simply the act of sharing what the photographer found captivating.

As I thought about this continuous flow of love for the planet’s wild beauty, I realized that it is a form of conversation as we, the receivers of these images, “like,” “comment,” or “share” the images received. If we think about these images, it would be easy to discount them … they seldom pay bills, or show up on accounting sheets. Most of them don’t even impress a lot of people. They are just there, a moment of beauty that makes us feel connected, hopeful, maybe even a little bit in love.

While we haven’t yet figured out what to do with the climate predictions about our future, I believe most of us want to protect this world we live in. Somewhere along the way, money may have blinded us to the importance of the wild beauty around us. Somehow, the numbers folks (and I used to be one) convinced us that “everything that counts can be measured.” They are wrong … I was wrong.

What lies ahead of us may be hugely complicated and daunting, however, I believe we have a steady guide … a North Star so to speak … call that beauty, call it love, or just call it life … life as it has evolved with its infinite variety that includes us. Whatever is truly important to you (with the possible exception of billionairehood), love it and protect it.

And, let’s talk about it … build it into our HOPE mindset and hold onto it in the challenging days ahead of us. Not all of us will understand the path we’re on. Be patient but hold the mindset of hope for our future firmly in place.

I just did something I hope none of you do.

This afternoon I read an informative article about the coming El Niño. I thought it was fascinating because it talked about possible impacts on agriculture around the world. I was going to leave a pointer to it but couldn’t remember the title or author so went off to do a Notes search on “ el niño” … that’s what I hope you don’t do.

Suddenly, I have a new understanding of why we are where we are.

What I saw were way too many posts with blazing images, screaming headlines, AI climate pornography, and HELL-CHARTS galore. I could feel my blood pressure ratchet upward as I scrolled.

Some of those authors weren’t listening when Maya Angelou said:

“Hope and fear cannot occupy the same space at the same time.”

No wonder people aren’t having conversations, who would want to chat about doom and gloom. I am appalled, and, all I can say, dear Readers, is protect yourself from this type of mental assault.

We need to understand what’s coming. We need to protect ourselves and everything we care about. We do not need to be bullied in the process.

Thirteen years ago, this piece of art earned me an invitation to an event that continues to affect my life trajectory. It was at the South Coast Bioneers conference that I heard two talks that have stayed with me over the years. The one I remember in detail was told by two teenage Girl Scouts who launched a project to save orangutans and their habitats which were being destroyed by palm oil plantations.

The other speaker was Bill McKibben who talked about carbon and what was coming in the way of climate change. The only thing I remember from his talk was feeling dread and fear. McKibben is an excellent speaker, passionate, enlightened, logical. My fear drowned out too much of his message.

(By the way, we are lucky to have here on Substack. I try to read every word he writes and he still scares me.)

Thirteen years later, as climate news keeps getting harder to ignore, I apparently decided to spend the rest of my life energy writing about this subject. It wasn’t a conscious decision, it just turned out that my attention would not be pointed in any other direction.

Suddenly stories started swamping me … hopeful stories about what people are doing around the world: restoring land, saving endangered species, recognizing the rights of rivers, rewilding the permafrost of Siberia, creating sponge cities, turning a failing farm into a safari site just outside London. The practical optimist in me latched onto those stories as if they were a life line … and perhaps they are.

That’s what I’d like to explore with you … stories of hope … WildBeauty Conversations and how they might help us slow what’s headed our way..

Sometime in the last few weeks, that remembered story about Girl Scouts and orangutans teamed up with the issue of climate silence and convinced me that stories might be what saves us … because they can draw people into conversation and conversation is often the lead into action. The more we talk about what we can do to slow climate change, the more we will actually do … and there are actually a lot of ways make small changes that add up.

At first, the idea of passing along great stories for people to share seemed like an easy idea, however, the more I thought about the Girl Scout story, the more it seemed to need some context around it. Since it’s about orangutans and their habitat, it might not seem exactly like a climate story. It’s more of a David and Goliath story or what I call a “spark” story … a story that starts with the love of a small, ordinary hero and encourages action against a huge adversary.

Spark stories stay with people, ignite feelings of being capable and powerful. To help recognize stories that gift us with new confidence and possibility, I broke the story down into elements, called “candles.” Here it is … the five candles of a spark story:

Conclusion: You may remember the discussions about palm oil … if so, the public awareness that surrounded that issue was largely the result of two young girls who fell in love with orangutans and then decided to do something to protect them.

While the Girl Scouts organization did not take palm oil out of the cookies (saying the palm oil was needed for quality and shelf life) … however, they did agree to four important things:

1. to join the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) along with the bakers who supply the cookies

2. to adopt the GreenPalm Certificate System and put that on every box of cookies

3. instructed its bakers to use “as little palm oil as possible,”

4. agreed to educate over two million active Girl Scouts about deforestation, wildlife preservation, and the global environmental complexities of the food supply chain.

Not bad for two girls who had barely reached their teen years. They went on to receive several awards for their work and this video retells the story in their own words.

WildBeauty Conversations: now, it’s your turn:

Below is a pdf version of this story along with a simple guide for conversations if you want to gather friends, family and neighbors into a conversation about our future. One thing we can all do about climate change is talk about it. It may not seem like much but it can change everything.

Conversations help us bridge the gap between knowing a problem exists and actually knowing what we might do about it or how to adapt to it. It gives us the comfort of knowing that we are in this together.

I look forward to bringing you more stories that fit these “5 Candles” so you can use them for conversations with friends or in your meeting groups. And, of course, if you come across a story that gives you hope, please share it with me.

Feel free to pass this along.

Spark Story About Girl Scouts And Orangutans

336KB ∙ PDF file

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And, where are Madison and Rhiannon these days? Turning into bright, passionate young leaders, of course.

Further Reading:

Girl Scouts Story Further Reading

233KB ∙ PDF file

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And, just a reminder about what we want to save … thank you Bluesky photographers:

We have become a doubting society. When someone does something completely unexpected … like voluntarily becoming an ex-billionaire, we wonder “What’s the catch?”

I am a biased fan of Patagonia, having followed it since the 1990s when I was primarily interested in their approach to innovation. My interest spiked again during the COVID years when I followed their actions through my step-daughter who worked for them in Reno. She reminded me of their 2018 proclamation: We’re in business to save our home planet. Everything I’ve seen, then and now, seems consistent with a company that was truly trying to be a good employer and a good citizen in a challenging environment.

Still my interest waxed and waned until I happened onto two books at almost the same moment. Their stories of adventure, business, and concern for our planet weave together like chapters in a shared book.

Reading them also made me want to see how Chouinard’s experiment in donating a company to the planet was turning out.

From its beginning Patagonia has never been a “normal” company.

Its location was picked based on surfing conditions and its products came out of Chouinard’s tinkering with his own rock climbing equipment. His first distribution center was the trunk of his car, and the whole point was funding his own climbing adventures.

Years later, when his little venture had turned into a highly successful outdoor clothing company and other business books focused on globalization, disruptive innovation, and network economics, Chouinard published a paean to corporate culture: Let My People Go Surfing.

He’s always recognized the tension built into running business: quality versus profit, employee lifestyle versus cost efficiency, meeting customer demand while protecting the natural world. He recaps this tension in the second edition of his book:

That last line is the story he wanted to tell … not just for Patagonia, but for the industry and business in general. Step-by-step, he began to construct a blueprint for what would later be called a “benefit corporation” … a for-profit company that balanced making money with helping society and the environment.

In years when corporations were hiring consultants to develop public Mission & Values statements, Patagonia was assembling theirs through a thousand conversations with employees, customers, suppliers, and careful observations of their effect on the environment around them. And, when they developed a process, material, or tool that helped them live up to their own values, they encouraged other companies to use them also.

When Patagonia decided to contribute one-percent of sales to the environment, it co-founded an organization to spread that idea. Now there are almost twelve-thousand companies making a one percent contribution to the planet.

When Patagonia developed a scorecard to measure their own environmental impact, they also shared it with the apparel industry and co-founded what became Cascale, the organization that monitors and coordinates the Higg Index used by 40,000 organizations.

From the beginning, Patagonia talked about their values. They hired employees who shared their values. They created child care centers for employee kids, sent employees off to work on environmental projects (with pay), encouraged employees to play and work together to protect the environment … together.

When it came time to think about changing the structure of Patagonia, it was far more complicated than going public or selling to another company. The company had become a force for nature. Fortunately, the Chouinard family was in agreement. While the Chouinard children work at the company, they weren’t interested in running the company nor in being wealthy. They all wanted to find a way to keep the company true to its values … and profitable enough to help protect the planet.

It took almost two years of talking about all of the possibilities and to identify the critical issues: First, the company still had to make money that could flow toward protecting the planet. Second, the values had to stay in place and be immune to some future owner who might not share them.

So, was there a catch here?

Sometimes, in our over-publicized world, it’s easy to make assumptions about the motivations of others. After Chouinard made public his decision to give Patagonia to the planet, there was a certain level of negative response that claimed it was a tax avoidance scheme. Or greenwashing. Or a PR stunt.

It has been almost four years since the announcement. Tax filings and internal reports show that the Holdfast Collective has poured over $180 million into environmental advocacy, land restoration, and local grassroots organizing. Skepticism has faded as the money seems to be following its stated purpose.

Yvon Chouinard will celebrate his 88th birthday in November. He’s still working (harder than he should, he says) but also still fishing and spending time outdoors. The company is still contributing one percent of sales to the planet. Plus all of the profits of the Holdfast Collective are contributed to environmental non-profits — roughly $100 million a year.

As always, Patagonia remains committed to radical transparency (to themselves and to the outside world) as demonstrated by their 154-page Work in Progress Report, 2025 (below). It is a detailed accounting of where they're succeeding and where they're still falling short, including the plain admission that they put 182,646 metric tons of CO2e into the atmosphere last year. That kind of public self-grading is a rare level of transparency for any company. However, it has become standard procedure for Patagonia, a company standing rock solid on its own values.

My take on Patagonia’s decision is that the money flow is critically important to caring for our planet … but may not be the biggest factor in the long run. Patagonia has created a model which can be used by other socially-driven entrepreneurs who are guided by something other than personal wealth.

Patagonia is the first. I don’t believe it will be the last to recognize that having a livable planet is worth more than being on the Forbes’ list of billionaires (something Chouinard hated).

After all, it was Thoreau who said, “What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?”

Bottomline: I am now an avid and more informed fan of Patagonia and am grateful for their generosity to our planet. May their profits continue to grow.

Patagonia Progress Report 2025

130MB ∙ PDF file

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More Info:

WildBeauty: ReWild, available September 21, 2026, will feature Patagonia and many others working to save our planet.

The Good and the Bad in Patagonia’s New Impact Report, Suston Magazine, November 13, 2025

How Sustainable is Patagonia? Better Trail

at The Case for Brand offers a case study about Patagonia’s development of a values statement

How Patagonia is Doing Sustainability Differently, Sustainability Magazine, by Lucy Potter, November 13, 2025

It was the first day of InnovationConvergence 98, an annual gathering of innovation leaders, and it started with the news that the road between LAX and Santa Barbara was flooded: completely closed. That meant the Hollywood panel scheduled to be our first evening’s speakers couldn’t show up and that attendees who flew into LAX were being re-routed on a four-hour journey through the desert.

Fortunately, long before Zoom, a few attendees who were tech-savvy had already arrived and they managed to set up a remote audio system for the panel. Additionally, a lot of the desert-weary bus riders showed up for dinner in time for what turned out to be a well-worth-it discussion with the Hollywood innovators.

The next day, one of our guests told a story about traveling along the beach road and hitting a fish. If it had been anyone else, I would have doubted the story.

That was my experience with El Niño 1997-1998, what is now considered a benchmark “Super El Niño” and is historically classified as one of the strongest El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events in recorded history.

I wasn’t climate aware in those days. Like many, I just called it weather. I didn’t know that this same El Niño caused severe droughts in Indonesia and the Amazon, devastating floods in Peru as well as California, and massive coral reef bleaching. I also didn’t know that it temporarily warmed global air temperatures by about 1.5°C. It was easy to be ignorant in those days.

While I was totally unprepared in 1998, we have a lot of support in today’s world and here’s a recap of some of the best advice I’ve found.

Predictions and Preparations: Big Question: Do you have a plan?

Ca Emergency Planning

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We know another El Niño is brewing with indications that it might be an unusually strong “super El Niño,” possibly “the most intense event in generations.”

We also know that this is a repeating climate cycle superimposed on the long-term global warming trend. Therefore, a strong El Niño today can trigger more severe impacts than an equivalent event would have caused back in 1998, because it occurs against a much warmer baseline.

NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, July 2026, puts the odds at 96–98% chance the El Niño persists through winter 2026–27 and roughly 63–81% odds of it peaking as a very strong/super event around Oct–Dec 2026.

While scientists cannot predict the exact day-to-day severity of this specific El Niño, they know its historical patterns well. Depending on how intensely it pairs with background global warming, the results could range from typical seasonal disruptions to severe, localized weather catastrophes like unprecedented droughts or devastating floods. Because the exact ceiling of its impact remains uncertain, the best approach is to heed early warnings and prepare in advance.

Here are some regional projections for the West Coast:

• Southern & Central California: Expect an amplified storm track. This brings a highly elevated risk of above-average rainfall, flash flooding, and landslides, as well as a heightened risk of high-tide coastal flooding.

• Pacific Northwest (Oregon & Washington): The pattern shifts the opposite way. The region is favored to experience a warmer and much drier winter than average, which will likely lead to reduced mountain snowpack and thinner early-season bases for skiers.

General preparation recommendations include:

Clear gutters, secure roofs, and stock emergency supplies before October 2026 to prepare for the heavy rainfall hitting Southern and Central California, or plan for water conservation and low snowpack if you are in the Pacific Northwest.

Regional Recommendations:

For Southern & Central California (Heavy Rain & Flooding)

• Clear drainage systems: Clean out property gutters, downspouts, and nearby storm drains by September to prevent local street flooding.

• Inspect roofs and slopes: Fix loose roofing tiles and install plastic sheeting or sandbags on bare hillsides to prevent mudslides.

• Build an emergency kit: Pack a 72-hour supply of water, non-perishable food, flashlights, and a backup battery for power outages.

• Review insurance coverage: Check your policy coverage since standard homeowners insurance requires a separate add-on for flood damage.

• Sign up for alerts: Register with local county networks like the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services to get real-time evacuation and weather notices.

For the Pacific Northwest (Warm & Dry Conditions)

• Conserve residential water: Expect a lower winter snowpack and implement water-saving habits early to mitigate summer drought risks.

• Maintain wildfire defensible space: Clear dry brush, leaves, and dead vegetation from around your home, as a dry winter can prolong fire seasons.

• Adjust winter recreation plans: Anticipate a shorter, warmer ski season and check operational updates directly with local resorts before buying season passes.

For Coastal Residents (High Tides & Erosion)

• Monitor King Tide schedules: Combine high El Niño sea levels with winter storm surges to prepare for severe beach erosion and tidal flooding.

• Secure shoreline property: Move outdoor furniture, boats, and loose coastal equipment to higher ground before late autumn storms arrive.

We’ve entered a challenging time on many fronts: climate, politics, and economics. however, most of us will have to weather the storms as best we can … which means being prepared.

If you have a plan, congratulations! Now, ask your friends and neighbors if they have a plan. Here is a very brief pdf overview, specially prepared for seniors.

Ca Emergency Planning

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975.284 … dewey decimal number for Montgomery County, Maryland, a place I lived for two years long, long ago. We arrived in the spring and I was dazzled by the profusion of azaleas and blooming trees. It seemed as if someone had passed a mandate about how many of each needed to be in every yard. Silver Spring was a gentle place with Sligo Creek gracefully running a few blocks from where we lived during those not so gentle Watergate years.

I’m not quite sure what led me to this particular book shelved far away from my common browsing area of the library, telling a story about a place a full country and fifty years away from my current life. That part of Maryland, sitting at the northern tip of Washington, D.C., was spectacularly green in a way I was not familiar with in my growing up years in Kansas, nor in the land I had recently fallen in love with as we completed my Vietnam-returnee husband’s Marine Corps duty in southern California.

Mike Tidwell, the author, tells a story of the town next door: Takoma Park, and of a life I might have lived and a grief I would have felt had I stayed.

Trees. Giant trees on shaded streets. Dying. I’ve never experienced the death of a tree I knew personally.

I’ve lived in the west long enough to see the devastation of the pine bark beetle which killed millions of trees and turned vast wilderness tracks brown. However, that was a comprehensible enemy: an insect. The same for the wildfires that have swept through California and the western forests of North America, fueled by heat and a drought. I had a sense that we could fight the beetle and practice better forest management for the wildfires. And, the drought would end. Surely.

Wood Vaulting: burying downed trees to save the future?

A major thread of this book is about the efforts of Dr. Ning Zeng, a climate scientist at the University of Maryland and friend of the author. Dr. Zeng is on a mission to start burying the downed trees underground in a way that would prevent the release of the planet-heating gases they would naturally emit if they were allowed to decay or burn.

The article on wood vaulting in More Info: below expands on Professor Zeng’s work, and adds:

Because many things have changed under the current administration, I asked AI if this project was ongoing and received a positive, and welcomed, reply.

And, what about the question of you and your neighborhood trees?

Although this book is about how climate change is affecting life in one small city, the horrible thought is what might be happening in all our neighborhoods. As the planet continues to heat, increasingly severe storms, dying trees, flooded basements, will force all of us to deal with the daunting challenge of a steadily advancing disaster.

Toward the end of the book, when Professor Zeng is about to bury his first logs on a farm outside Baltimore after months of bureaucratic delays, 2023 temperature reports showed a significant spike and Mike became doubtful that Zeng’s process could offset the current rate of CO2 being released into the atmosphere fast enough to make a difference. He recaps the strategies that Professor Zeng calls “the three legs to the stool of climate solutions: mitigation, sequestration, and adaptation.”

1. Mitigation … switch to clean energy.

2. Sequestration … pull carbon out of the air and store it.

3. Adaptation … learn how to live with the negative impacts as they occur.

Doubting that these solutions would happen fast enough, Mike’s question was: Isn’t it time to test solar geoengineering?

That question definitely made me shudder and head back to AI with my own doubts. It turns out that there are a lot of people working on high tech possibilities, including testing the fringes of solar geoengineering. Some results are intriguing, but none that completely avoid the risks of tinkering with something as important as our sun or clouds. Of course, as Mike points out: we’re already at risk.

The full responses from AI are listed in the More Info: section below.

Here on the west coast, in an urban environment, I haven’t seen the kind of changes Mike describes; however, a few years ago, I spent two years in an RV in a campground called Pinezanita in the mountains east of San Diego. In spite of its name, it was primarily an oak forest where I discovered granary trees, the acorn storehouse of woodpeckers, and fell in love with a grandmother oak.

Those two years calmed my spirit. The thought that something might happen to that gentle land and those sun sparkled trees, fuels my energy for this work. Here’s what I know:

1. climate change is happening.

2. there are countless people around the world working to make things better … rewilding lands, creating sponge cities, putting solar panels in formerly unimaginable places, building wind farms at sea, creating coral reefs, bringing back keystone species, and discovering new ways to end our dependence on fossil fuels.

3. we are all in this together. We all have a role to play. After four rather free-form years here on Substack, I’ve now dedicated my posts to wild beauty, something we could be losing in the upcoming times. In addition to the weekly post, I’ve introduced a quarterly publication: WildBeauty … what if? to gather and share some of the stories about the beauty we might lose if we don’t make the necessary changes soon. The next issue (ReWild) will be released September 21, 2026.

Climate change is the darkest dark looming on our horizon; however there will be heroes. People who leap tall buildings to find new tools for this struggle; people who do the little things like having neighborhood meetings to talk about reducing our dependence on fossil fuels; community gardeners who build food security, cities like Paris deprioritizing cars, kids wearing climate t-shirts:

Right now, we’re not making changes rapidly enough to stop global warming. Solar geoengineering seems like it might be an easy answer that would let us keep our consumer, fossil-fuel based lifestyle.

That’s probably not the way it’s going to work. We are going to need to make changes and make them together. We need to talk about what’s coming, form stronger bonds with our friends and neighbors, and find our own ways to be part of the solution. And, we have to get off fossil fuel.

One place to start is with our attention. In these days when political news drowns out almost everything else, we can deliberately pay more attention to the reality of climate change and listen more to the organizations that are focused on the environment and the actions being taken around the planet.

Some of the writers here on Substack regularly bring news from the front lines of climate change. Here are two posts I’ve enjoyed recently:

Earth Hope🌎

One man, one million cars' worth of pollution eliminated

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3 months ago · 97 likes · 12 comments · Amanda Royal

Nature Reclamation

The Beauty of Rewilding: Restoring Ecosystems From Within

For most of the twentieth century, conservation followed a particular script. Biologists would identify endangered species, protect specific areas, and manage them intensively—controlling which species were present, which were absent, sometimes carefully mowing meadows or burning forests to maintain a particular ‘desired state.’ It was conservation as c…

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3 months ago · 53 likes · 11 comments · Christina Egerstrom

Also, here’s a draft preview of a two-page spread that will be in the next issue of WildBeauty: what if … ? It’s one of my favorite stories of rewilding, followed by an inspiring, short video about one of the projects happening in South America.

Kris Tompkins, one of the rewilding pioneers who will be featured in the next issue, says we need to “earn hope” through our actions. I think that’s spot on. Retelling stories like the one below is an easy way to earn, and share, hope. The video is helpful and hopeful.

More Info:

‘Wood vaulting’: A simple climate solution you’ve probably never heard of, Grist, Kylie Mohr, July 23, 2024

Ai Responses On Climate Change

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7/17/2026: #94

I found the conversation very balanced about the damage being done and what is being done to balance the flow of information without causing harm to creatives.I feel like I have a slightly deeper understanding.

Feel free to share.

Ai Conversation On Ai Without Sources

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Ai Conversation Full Version With Sources

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Doug Tompkins was 47 and at the top of his game when he decided he had climbed the wrong mountain.

That thought took my breath away as I wondered: is it ever too late to change mountains?

About Doug Tompkins: Impatient to be out living his life, he dropped out of high school (actually expelled) and began exploring, ski-racing, and rock climbing. At 21, he wound up in San Francisco where he and his new wife borrowed $5,000 from a bank and started a company making rock climbing and camping equipment. They called it The North Face because traditionally the coldest, most unforgiving, and most challenging route to climb a mountain (in the Northern Hemisphere) was its north face and the new company was dedicated to the mission of outfitting extreme mountaineers and explorers against the harshest of elements.

From his close friend and climbing buddy, Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, Doug adopted Chouinard’s MBA philosophy (Management by Absence) and continued to take long excursions throughout his leadership of The North Face and later Esprit. The first of his epic trips came days after the birth of his first daughter. It began with the idea of making an adventure movie and turned into a 5,000 mile surfing-skiing-climbing road trip with Yvon, and three other friends determined to climb Mount Fitz Roy in Patagonia.

While the movie is not up to today’s high-tech standards, it is gripping and the only word that came to mind after watching them fight the weather and spend 31 days holed up in a snow cave, was a very long “why?” (I also agree completely with one of the YouTube commenters, “the unsung hero here is the camera man.”)

The high point for me was when Yvon Chouinard, one of my all-time heroes, especially when he went on to donate his company to help the world avoid climate disaster, showed that he could apparently bake bread out of almost nothing in the middle of nowhere.

Doug returned from that trip and went on to lead Esprit, a fashion industry phenomenon, for over two decades until he realized it wasn’t what he wanted to do. Almost instantly, he sold his share of the company to his now ex-wife for $150 million and followed the call to protect Patagonia, the land he had come to love.

Kris Tompkins was 43 and CEO of Patagonia when her mountain appeared, grinning and inviting her to drop everything. She had shepherded the company from its roots as a small business making climbing pitons into a major corporate leader in the outdoor clothing market with a mission for climate sustainability.

Doug met Kris and the ground shifted. Their visions joined like separate rivers into one powerful force for protecting wild beauty. It melded them into a fierce partnership of action based on their shared philosophy: Commit then figure it out.

Together for two decades, they fought all the obstacles of politics, earthquakes, and suspicion as they inched forward toward the dream of creating national parks that would guarantee the protection of the lands into the future. They bought large parcels of land and building infrastructure needed to protect it; spending their own funds and soliciting more from friends around the world. They met and listened to people in the communities surrounding the lands, creating jobs, turning former poachers into wildlife protectors and kept pushing the idea of national parks.

Even Doug’s death in a kayaking accident at age 72, did not stop the dream. Kris carried on and recently accomplished the vision of adding over 14.8 million acres to the national park systems of Chile and Argentina, thus also protecting 30 million acres of shoreline.

Kris didn’t stop there. She has now built an international organization, Tompkins Conservation, advocating rewilding for the total Earth, one continent at a time. Her definition of rewilding means creating “fully functional ecosystems.” As she says in this video: “We’re going for the whole horse.” Meaning the entire planet.

What is your vision for Planet Earth?

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While it may not be a Tompkins-level mountain, my wild idea is to help people understand and fall in love with the beauty of the world around us.

P.S. This story will be featured in the quarterly WildBeauty: what if …? with other inspiring stories of rewilding and conservation. Publication date: 9/21/2026. Paid subscriptions include free digital and print copies of each quarterly publication.

Also print copies will be available to everyone through Buy Me a Coffee and will be announced when they are available.

More Info:

More about Doug Tompkins

England faced starvation. While beginnings are often hard to pinpoint, let’s start this story toward the beginning of WWII. England imported nearly two-thirds of its food and German U-boats were disrupting their supply chains. The British government responded with a “Dig for Victory” call for landowners to plow their pastures in order to plant food crops. On the 3,500 acre Knepp Estate, Sir Merrick Burrell patriotically responded to the “War Ag” movement by turning toward dairy farming.

The war also devoured forests across the country, including ancient trees and even Sir Merrick’s elm boards which he had been carefully seasoning for the family’s coffins.

Sixty years later, Knepp Estate was in the hands of new owners (Charles Burrell, the great-grandson of Sir Merrick and Isabella Tree, his wife). They had spent almost two decades trying to make their farm viable, however, nothing had worked particularly well. It was time to make a decision. Selling land that had been in the family for generations was not an option, so they asked themselves a new question:

“What would this land do if we stopped telling it what to be?”

That question might be the true beginning of this story, for their answer changed everything. However, to get there, they had to move beyond common wisdom.

We know our planet is threatened by an exploding population and years of treating nature as a resource to be exploited. While pumping the oil and gas stored underground fueled our industrial age and the energy-hungry lifestyle of the modern world, it also over-filled our atmosphere with a heat-increasing gas that tipped the sensitive balance of our ecosystems.

There is a plethora of stories being told about potential ecological disasters to come. However, this is a different story, a hopeful story about Nature’s ability to not only heal but to blossom.

In 2001, when Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree asked themselves that crossroads question, the decision they came to required breaking with the common wisdom of the day. An old saying in England said that in ancient times a squirrel could travel from London to Leeds and never touch the ground, leaping from tree to tree.

That belief fueled the premise that the land had to be managed to keep it from reverting to deep, dense forest. Fortunately, Charlie and Isabella were introduced to the work of Frans Vera*, a Dutch biologist who developed a different theory picturing Western European primeval forests not just as "closed-canopy" high-forest conditions, but as land that included pastures and forests. He also stated that those landscapes were shaped and maintained by large wild herbivores.

With that possibility in mind, they developed a plan that focused on letting the land rewild itself by removing the fences, taking out water diversion structures, and, most importantly bringing back large herbivores … long horn cattle, ponies, deer, pigs … to shape the environment they need to thrive.

The biodiversity results have astonished everyone.

Nightingales came back.

Turtle doves and Purple Emperor butterflies surged, and white storks nested for the first time since 1416. The long horn cattle, ponies, deer, and pigs became herds, and without a predator, the herds needed to be culled which led to an onsite butchery.

People are now going on safari in England. Knepp has become a destination for people yearning to experience nature once again.

See the full visual spread in WildBeauty: ReWild, September 21, 2026.

(Sent in digital form to paid subscribers and available in print to patrons.)

This video, told by the people who made this daring decision to change directions, makes my heart sing. One of the things I love about it is that it’s not a manicured park, it’s messy, because Nature is messy. It’s people learning from and respecting the wisdom of ecosystems. It’s letting pigs be pigs.

The story of Knepp is just one of the hopeful stories I’ve found on this WildBeauty journey. There are so many more and most of them never make the nightly news.

Some stories are too good to keep. Share this one with someone today.

See the full visual spread in WildBeauty: ReWild, September 21, 2026.

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More info:

*Frans Vera, Wikipedia

TALK ABOUT IT! Your voice is powerful

We’ve stopped talking about Global Warming … not because it’s not happening but because it’s too big, too overwhelming, too depressing, and too far away compared to the never-ending antics of trump. We need to be speaking up on both issues. There are brilliant independent journalists following the twists and turns of trumpville, but not so many reporting on the state of our life-giving planet.

I’ve signed up for that beat and will be bringing you stories to talk about with your friends and family. Whether at the dinner table or at coffee with a friend, share a story. It’s not your job to prove a point, just share a story and listen. Feel free to share questions or experiences in the comments. We’re all on a learning curve with this stuff.

For instance, after years of hearing numbers like 431 ppm, I finally badgered AI until it found a metaphor: blood alcohol, that helped me understand. Story below.

Al Gore highlighted a scary number that actually meant little to me.

In February, 2009, in a TED talk in Long Beach, Al Gore dramatized a number related to climate using a mechanical lift ladder. I remember the visual but didn’t remember what number he was talking about … just that it was bad and getting far worse. So, I asked AI and learned that the number he was illustrating was atmospheric carbon dioxide and at that time it was 387 ppm vs today’s 431 ppm.

Parts per million, 387 vs. 431 is an increase but it doesn’t sound all that bad. It took three rounds before AI got down to my level. The metaphor that worked for me: blood alcohol. Alcohol in our blood is powerful and has an outsized effect on our brains, impairing judgment, slurring speech, and disorienting balance. Long-term it can shrink brain tissue, disorder memory, and contribute to mental health issues.

In all states but one, the legal limit of blood alcohol concentration for a driver is .08% (in Utah, it is .05%). Carbon dioxide is a powerful, natural substance, for both humans and the planet … part of our breath of life. However, just like alcohol or oxygen in our own blood, the difference between a healthy baseline and a dangerous toxin comes down to the dose.

The best estimate of scientists is that 350 ppm is the maximum healthy level for the planet. Staying with our blood alcohol metaphor, our planet is now driving drunk.

And Sergey Zimov in his trying to stop the permafrost from thawing is somewhat like a bartender trying to close the bar on an already rowdy crowd.

Since 1996 Sergey Zimov and family have been funding and doing all the work to rewild the permafrost by bring back large, hooved animals. He has been able to make progress on this effort because the global science community wanted to study the permafrost and brought funding into the project.

Unfortunately, the war between Russia and Ukraine has stopped the flow of scientists and money. If you or anyone you know would like to help this effort, here’s the website: https://pleistocenepark.ru/ Or, here’s their Patreon page.

The park is situated in the remote Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in northeastern Siberia. It operates as a large-scale scientific experiment to recreate the ancient mammoth steppe ecosystem by reintroducing large grazing herbivores, which researchers believe will help prevent permafrost from thawing.

Pleistocene Park is located just 5 kilometers (about 3 miles) south of the town of Chersky, Russia. However, it takes roughly 1 to 2 hours to travel there by boat in the summer along the Kolyma River, which is the fastest route in the region. This is a massive undertaking in an isolated area with almost no supportive infrastructure.

Up there, in that frozen world, snow is warm (comparatively) and acts like a warming blanket. The hazard of permafrost thawing is based on the relationship between three important temperatures:

                                                Winter air temp <- 40 C>
                                                       Snow Layer 0 C
                                                       Permafrost <-7 C>

Big hooved animals dig through the snow to get grass, letting the cold air reach the ground and keep it frozen. In big enough numbers, musk ox, bison, horses, and maybe some day, the de-extincted hybrid wooly mammoth might be able to keep the permafrost frozen.

More information:

Documentary: A Russian Scientist’s Plan to Save the Planet This includes a nail biting story about a cross-country trip to bring back musk ox. Dad Sergey is the physics guru, but son Nikita can fix anything, anytime, anywhere. However, parts of the movie had me on the edge of my seat wondering if his genius would run out.

60 Minutes (6 years ago): Siberia's Pleistocene Park: Bringing back pieces of the Ice Age to combat climate change

Last September, looking at the world around us, it was hard not to feel disheartened by the combination of political, social, and environmental threats. What kept repeating to me, however, was that we’re all in this together … all 8+ billion of us. We’re all tenants of the same planet, breathing the same air, drinking water that has been cycling through clouds and rivers and all living bodies since long before any of us arrived. Even our one lone trillionaire depends on functional ecosystems to stay alive.

I’m in the final chapter of this life, and I’ve made a commitment to lean toward the solutions: to do what I can, with what I have. My tools are modest: a decent eye, a lifelong habit of writing, and a willingness to look as far into the world as I can and then share what I find.

What I’ve found, even in this short time, has changed me.

In spite of everything that is genuinely wrong, there are thousands (perhaps millions) of people working to protect our only home. The scale ranges from huge, expensive projects to tiny community efforts. And, slowly, it feels like we’re getting smarter: understanding what makes ecosystems function, how keystone species can restore degraded lands, the way cities can redesign their infrastructure into sponge cities to absorb rising waters. Governments are beginning to extend legal rights to nature itself, and even one obsessed Russian scientist is attempting to rewild the permafrost tundra before it thaws and releases a catastrophic surge of stored carbon.

When I committed to documenting this learning journey into nature, art, and ecology, I honestly wasn’t sure I’d find enough material to sustain it. Turns out it’s like drinking from a fire hose. Every week brings new people, new projects, new reasons to pay attention. And, almost every day, I find something that gives me hope.

We still have far to go. The Great Wall of Money remains largely unmoved by what the planet needs. However, I am genuinely grateful to have found a small way to be part of the conversation; to be a witness, and sometimes a voice, for what’s at stake. I have fallen in love with the wonders and mysteries of this world and with the people who are working, stubbornly and creatively, to protect what we love.

My science background is thin and almost everything I’m learning is a stretch. Turning what I’m reading and watching into words and images that can be shared with readers takes real effort and, often, repeated attempts. I am thankful for the extensive world of YouTube, for the science communicators here on Substack who share their knowledge so generously, and for every researcher who makes their work accessible to curious non-experts.

(AI disclosure: after each issue is complete, to make sure the science is sound, I run it through Claude to check facts and presentation. Any errors that survives this process are entirely my own.)

Volume 3: Evolve is now complete and available. Paid subscribers will find the digital flipbook in the footer below. If you’d like to support this work, print copies are available at Buy Me a Coffee ($15) or the flipbook version ($5). For print orders, you’ll be asked to share your mailing address — shipping is free for US addresses.

Buy Wildbeauty, a collage of wonders

Here are a few of the 36 pages for those of you who just want to see what all of this is about (each issue is organized in 2-page spreads):

Volume 4: ReWild is already in progress and Peacock Spiders (and Jurgen Otto who has taken so many photos of them) will be some of the stars of the upcoming issue.

In a conversation with a friend today, she asked if I knew the story behind Butchart Gardens in Canada. I didn’t, so she gave me the bones of the story: an ugly hollowed out limestone quarry and the woman who looked at that abandoned, gray pit and decided that it should be a place of beauty. That was enough to send me to YouTube, which happens to me more and more frequently now … someone mentions something, a small hook catches, and off I go looking for the rest of the story. I found a short video that captured a bit of both the history and the story; however, it wasn’t until I found an old black-and-white photo of the original pit (in a YouTube “short”) that I started to comprehend the degree of imagination (as well as work and money, of course) it took to make this transformation. All found on YouTube.

That has now become a pattern. Google can answer a question; but YouTube gives me an experience—the place, the people, the environment of how something actually happened. Over time, it has replaced Google as my first stop.

I didn’t always use it this way. For years, YouTube was like a button box. When something broke (such as software, an appliance, a setting I couldn’t find), I’d go there searching for a quick answer. Useful, but not addictive. Then a retired friend started sending me her finds: a Middle Eastern orchestra, a Jewish comedian, a blues singer I’d never heard of. It didn’t fix any problems, but they enchanted me and piqued my curiosity about what else I might find there.

Try this yourself: pick something you’re curious about, no matter how small. Something a child might ask, like: “Why is there air?” YouTube doesn’t judge questions, it just offers possibilities. Asking that question yielded old Bill Cosby clips, (naturally) but also a channel called Geography by Geoff and an explanation about why commercial flights avoid the South Atlantic. Fascinated, I watched the whole thing. The answer was more tangled than I expected, but I came away knowing a bit more about the world than I had ten minutes earlier: not bad for a Tuesday afternoon.

Here’s where it’s gone beyond curiosity and entertainment. For years I’ve wanted to make what I think of as an “iceberg book.” The visible book part is just the tip. Below the surface, a reader who wants more can follow threads to other sources of greater understanding.

Almost by accident I’m starting to incorporate that metaphor into Wildbeauty, my quarterly collage of wonders. The original idea was to help people fall in love with the beauty of our world with a blend of photographs, art, and short articles about nature, art, and restoration projects. Now, part of my process is to find powerful videos that tell more of the story and invite readers into an even deeper understanding of the place, people, and details of the projects or ecosystems at work.

YouTube has become my learning lab. Hunting for the right video to share means I watch a lot of the wrong ones first, and somewhere in that sorting I wind up gaining differing opinions and insights that help me understand the subject better. It also leads me to people who have a gift for explaining complex subjects. That’s how I found Geoff Gibson, whose video about commercial flights and the South Atlantic sent me down a rabbit hole that twisted through South America and Africa and connected the world of international travel to population patterns and economics. It turns out he’s also on Substack, writing as @GeographicGoeff at The Bight.

I came across Stephanie Sammann, another Substacker, the same way and her channel The Infinite Biosphere has become one of my favorite places to understand more about the natural world. Her video about jumping spiders made me fall in love with them. Can you watch this and not fall in love also?

(Don’t miss the comments from all the people who keep these too-cute spiders as pets!)

A caution: since YouTube has gotten more popular (and lucrative for popular creators), AI-generated filler is creeping in, the video version of clickbait: high ad-to-content ratio, low everything else. It’s usually easy to spot: overly dramatic titles, run times padded well past what the content needs, narrators who are never shown, recycled old photos, stories billed as a “little known mystery” that take an hour to tell. Skip those and there’s a wide world of wonders beyond: experts, devoted amateurs, and people generously sharing their passions.

I’d genuinely like to know how you use YouTube, whether as a tool, a rabbit hole, or both.

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And keep an eye out: Volume 3 of Wildbeauty is coming on Solstice, and more than a few of its articles started exactly the way this post did — with a question, a spark, or a random thought, followed by rooting around in YouTube (and Google), with no idea of what I’d find.

*BTW … Just checked GoDaddy: anyone with $7 grand can buy YouTubeU.com. Hint hint, YouTube.

6/17/2026: #93

There are enough stories to fill an encyclopedia — and that’s exactly the problem. The world doesn’t need more collected information right now. It needs people taking action, experimenting, finding new ways of doing old things, learning from the 4 billion years of wisdom already built into the living world. And, it needs witnesses, people like us who read or hear the stories and pass them along to our friends and acquaintances.

Of course, the problems haven’t gone away, or even gotten smaller, yet. Last week I wrote about a Russian scientist who is almost single-handedly trying to keep the permafrost from thawing — an event that could trigger catastrophic carbon release. It’s one of the most important stories I’ve ever stumbled into, yet the current political situation almost guarantees that he will run out of money long before he can implement his ideas. (There is a Patreon account if you feel moved to support this effort — https://www.patreon.com/c/PleistocenePark.)

If you missed it, here is the story about Sergey Zimov who has been called one of the smartest people on the planet. Definitely one of the most determined.

So many stories need to be shared that I was feeling overwhelmed — which is how a mission statement turned into what someone insisted on calling a manifesto. That word conjured visions of a grizzled guy in a hoodie counting home-crafted bombs in a leaky shack. So I dialed it back to a simple guideline: Why WildBeauty?

This exercise reminded me that one of the most useful things I can do is amplify success stories and the remarkable organizations already working toward a better, more survival world. This week I fell into Yellowstone to Yukon — a project that’s been gradually stitching together 2,100 miles of Rocky Mountain wilderness since 1993, from the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem all the way to Canada’s Yukon Territory.

The idea is deceptively simple: grizzly bears, wolves, caribou, and other animals don’t recognize state lines or property boundaries. They need to move — seasonally, generationally — and when habitat is fragmented by highways and barriers, it is a slow death sentence. Y2Y has spent three decades building corridors: negotiating and working with over 800 partners: landowners, governments, Indigenous nations, scientists, and businesses across two countries and seven jurisdictions, creating an interconnected web of wild lands where wide-ranging species can actually roam.

The latest milestone — 200 wildlife overpasses and underpasses in the region — is the kind of news that deserves a lot more attention than it gets. One of the newest is a repurposed bridge in northern Idaho, now a safe crossing for deer, elk, and grizzly bears. Small gestures, large stakes.

If you have four minutes to spare, this video is worth every second. — it shows both why animals need room to roam and the scale of what Y2Y has built.

Current estimates are that 90% of the remaining two million people in Gaza are internally displaced … basically, they’ve lost their homes, schools, and almost all of what life was like before.

Before we get to the satellite views, here’s a current video from Bisan from Gaza who ends the video at the Gaza sea saying “We’re still trying to find joy and peace.”:

AI Overview: (direct quote) Yes, satellite mapping provides the most objective, precise, and verified evaluation of physical destruction in Gaza, cutting through competing political narratives and media blackout zones. Because the war zone remains strictly restricted and highly dangerous for international journalists and ground investigators, independent orbital data acts as the ultimate truth teller. [1, 2]

1. The Technology Used to Verify Damage [1]

To bypass the “different stories” or propaganda from conflicting sides, scientists rely primarily on two types of satellite data:

• Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR): Utilized heavily by the Conflict Ecology Lab (run by researchers at CUNY and Oregon State University), SAR sends radar pulses from space to the ground. It measures the exact 3D structure of buildings. If a building is intact, the radar signal bounces back cleanly. If a roof has collapsed, or a structure has been pancaked into rubble, the signal scatters wildly. SAR works at night and penetrates clouds, smoke, and dust. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

• High-Resolution Optical Imagery: Satellites from entities like Planet Labs allow investigators to visually count craters, identify completely leveled towns, and cross-reference exact dates to see exactly when and where a neighborhood vanished. [1]

2. The Current Data and Findings

Rather than relying on vague estimates, the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT) continuously maps individual structures. UNOSAT analysis confirms: [1]

• Mass Structural Collapse: Approximately 81% of all structures across the entire Gaza Strip are damaged. [1]

• The Granular Breakdown: The satellite data categorizes specific levels of damage. UNOSAT identified 123,464 completely destroyed structures, 17,116 severely damaged structures, and 33,857 moderately damaged structures. [1, 2, 3, 4]

• Residential & Infrastructure Wipeout: Over 320,000 individual housing units have been rendered unlivable. Furthermore, satellite mapping of the ground grid indicates that 77% of Gaza’s entire road network has been completely pulverized, heavily cratered, or blocked by military obstacles. [1, 2]

• Total Erasure of Towns: Visual satellite archives prove that entire municipalities, such as the northern Bedouin town of Umm al-Nasser and central Al-Mughraqa, were systematically and completely flattened down to the dirt by heavy engineering equipment. [1]

3. Exposing New Dynamics and Post-Ceasefire Realities

Satellite tracking does not just map historical damage; it tracks real-time territorial shifts. Recent independent open-source intelligence (OSINT) and Al Jazeera investigations using satellite updates expose a critical disconnect between official political statements and the reality on the ground: [1, 2, 3]

• Permanent Bases: Satellite imagery captured the construction of 40 distinct Israeli military outposts deeply entrenched inside Gaza. [1, 2]

• Ceasefire Violations: The data reveals that eight of these heavy military bases were built completely from scratch after the October 2025 truce went into effect. [1, 2]

• Geopolitical Realities: Satellites show massive earthmovers digging deep trenches and walls along a shifting “yellow line,” proving that military forces have moved westward and now physically occupy and control roughly 60% of the Gaza Strip’s internal landmass. [1]

The Limits of Space Mapping

While satellites provide a highly precise tally of structural damage, scientists emphasize that they have limitations. A satellite looking straight down can miss internal structural compromises. A building next to a blast site might look perfectly intact from orbit, yet its foundation can be completely cracked and unsafe for human habitation. [1, 2, 3] #

P.S. From a strictly carbon emissions standpoint, the most costly parts of war actions are the massive amounts of fuel used during active combat, the fires triggered by bombings, and—most significantly—the carbon-intensive materials like cement and steel required for post-war rebuilding.

As they say:

The only musk ox I'll ever meet was in a Nevada museum. Seeing a living one remains one of my oldest bucket list dreams — which is part of why this story caught me and won't let go.

Somewhere in frozen Siberia, a man is trying to save the world one hooved megafauna (such as musk ox, bison, horses or yaks) at a time. In a lab, scientists are trying to do the same thing by resurrecting the woolly mammoth. Both may have the right idea. Only one of them might be in time to help save us.

First, let’s look at the high tech approach: Colossal Biosciences is a well-funded ($10+billion) company trying to bring back extinct animals including the woolly mammoth. Founded by entrepreneur Ben Lamm and world-renowned Harvard geneticist George Church, they believe the mammoth would help mitigate climate change.

Why would a mammoth be helpful? It’s all about snow.

While snow is cold, the question is relative to what? In the lands of permafrost where the ground remains frozen year round, the average ground temperature might be -7 C degrees. That chilly condition is what keeps vast stores of carbon — locked in dead plant and animal matter — from being released into the atmosphere. Measurements show that permafrost holds twice as much carbon as is currently in the Earth’s atmosphere and, if it melts, that released carbon could trigger a cascade of catastrophic climate warming.

And the role of snow? It actually acts as a warming blanket. The average air temperature in permafrost winters ranges from -15 C to -50 C. Snow, being frozen water, is zero degrees centigrade, actually warming the permafrost below, leaving it vulnerable to higher seasonal temperatures.

And, how does the mammoth help? Constantly looking for grass, hooved megafauna trample the insulating snow, knock down invasive trees, and scrape away ice, exposing the ground to extreme cold, trapping carbon, and preventing the permafrost from melting.

Judging the Colossal de-extinction approach: Assuming it’s do-able (and ethical), there’s still a major problem … Colossal doesn’t expect to have calves until 2028 and those young mammoth-elephant hybrids won’t be where (nor in the numbers) needed to save the permafrost.

So, let’s look at a low tech, against-all-odds possibility. Sergey Zimov is sometimes called a “pathological optimist” — someone who believes things will work out despite overwhelming evidence otherwise. But that’s not quite right. Sergey Zimov is more of a pathological pessimist: utterly convinced that melting permafrost will trigger an unstoppable cascade of carbon release that will end life as we know it. That’s what keeps him up at night.

Sergey is driven by the belief that only proven possibility to avoid catastrophe is to return the ecosystem that maintained the permafrost tundras … megafauna by the millions. He has started with a handful of musk oxen, some herds of horses and yaks, and, recently, a dozen bison. He has calculated the reproduction rates and thinks it can be done in forty years or so. Most people believe he is a crazy, Russian scientist, however, some scientists who have listened to him have concluded that he’s the smartest person they’ve ever met.

And where is all of this happening? Pleistocene Park, fifty-five square miles of land in northeastern Siberia, near an abandoned Soviet ghost town, and a five and a half hour flight from the nearest real town.

Whether optimist or pessimist, it’s easy to think of Zimov as a crazy man when you consider the constraints: the location is truly in the middle of nowhere, no highways, no airfield, only a twisting river somewhat big enough for barges carrying cargo containers of animals carefully secured in their own stalls.

Recently, a young film-maker, Luke Griswold-Tergis, intending an in-and-out photography lark, wound up going back for eight years, collecting film for a movie, and wound up being part of a 35-day road trip from hell with a dozen bison. It’s nail-biting to even watch, howeer, they and the bison arrived safely. That trip is part of the movie.

The Movie: Pleistocene Park, aka The Mad Russian Scientist trying to save the world from climate change.

The permafrost world most of us never think about holds a key to our future. This story might become buried history, a fossil in a future world without us … or it might become a hero’s story we will repeat long into the future.

It is well worth watching every bit of this two-plus hours movie. Here’s a quick overview:

Pleistocene Park, the movie

Overview:
The most unlikely set of heroes you might ever imagine ...
set in the mosquito-infested, muck-deep frozen Siberia ...
with a soundtrack cousin to Deliverance ...
challenged with nothing less than saving the planet ...
Pleistocene Park inches toward an impossible vision: 
great herds of megafauna, hooves thundering,
pressing carbon back into permafrost submission.

The Drama: 10 million square kilometers of Siberian permafrost starting to melt.

Main characters:
- Sergey Zimov, the ultimate optimist, who lives on coffee, cigarettes, and physics
- Nikita Zimov, who can fix anything even when there’s neither duct tape nor spit available
- Luke Griswold-Tergis, a young film-maker on a lark who gets caught up in the drama ... for 8 years and a 35-day, heart-stopping road trip
- Endless science researchers measuring and calculating the permafrost*
- Shaggy animals galore, most of them way too far away
- Woolly mammoth bones everywhere

Zimov may be a pathological pessimist about the permafrost, but there’s something stubbornly hopeful about watching a handful of shaggy animals in frozen Siberia and believing they matter. That’s the thing about rewilding — it asks us to take the long view, to act on behalf of a future we may not live to see. The musk ox in that Nevada museum was merely a stuffed replica. The ones arriving at Pleistocene Park are very much alive. That feels like the right direction.

Footnote: Until recently, permafrost was not factored into the global warming modeling.

More:

TED: Can Wooly Mammoths Save the World with Luke Griswold-Tergis

De-extinction: digital lab tech supports a mammoth project, Nature

Revival of the woolly mammoth, Wikipedia