Category: Uncategorized
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Why Media Coverage Matters?
Credit: MeCCO/CU Boulder As our world warms and many of us feel the effects of the climate crisis first hand, the media coverage of climate change, which is making heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, and storms stronger, has declined substantially (also see the work of the Media and Climate Change Observatory at CU-Boulder, which created the figure…
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America at 250: This is NOT What Democracy Looks Like!
As our country celebrates its 250th anniversary, we are living through a particularly fraught period of US history with attacks on democratic participation and freedom of speech coming from inside the federal government. Across the country, the effects of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions, which weakened protections in the Voting Rights Act, gave the executive…
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Persistence vs Burnout
It’s been 18 months since Donald Trump started his second term in the White House. Since then, his Administration has limited our civil liberties, cut our social services, targeted immigrants, and attacked scientific integrity and the scientific process. Americans have responded with unprecedented levels of protest. In fact, there were three times as many protests in the early months…
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Climate Scientists are Apocalyptic Optimists Too
What I learned from Stefan Rahmstorf’s keynote at the GLEN conference. This week, I traveled to Germany to deliver a keynote address at the International Conference on Environment and Society organized by the German Longitudinal Environmental Study (GLEN). The program collects longitudinal data on environmental attitudes and behaviors in Germany, which are now publicly available…
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Why Science Can’t Save Us from the Climate Crisis
source: Nature 2026 Ever since IPCC chair Bob Watson informed me that “science was necessary but not sufficient” and “only one small input” in the polcymaking process over a meal at the UNFCCC Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) meetings in 2001, I’ve been trying to understand the role that science plays in…
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A Tale of Two Wildfires:
How Inequality Mediates our Recovery from Climate Shocks A lot of my recent research has been focused on understanding how climate shocks motivate social change, and the ways that process works in reality. To that end, I have studied the effects of the Palisades and Eaton fires that struck LA County in January 2025. Julie…
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Reclaiming Our Political Power
The Apocalyptic Optimist Podcast is BACK! Over the years, my research has explored many aspects of how we can build lasting and effective political power and civic capacity. In fact, I’ve written three books specifically about this subject: Activism, Inc – focused on youth political participation, why the Left keeps losing, and how to fix…
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Service as Resistance: How Service Corps and Volunteer Programs Reinforce our Civic Fabric.
This week, I had the opportunity to conduct a site visit with the EarthCorps program out in Seattle. The visit is part of our multi-year Workforce Development and the 4Rs project, which is evaluating the effects of federally coordinated volunteer and service corps programs that focus on building resilience and supporting disaster response and recovery.…
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Could Redistricting Efforts Energize the Pro-Democracy Movement?
Whenever I speak about civic and political engagement in America, I always start by discussing the most common way that Americans participate in our democracy: voting. Even though many people choose not to vote, it is still one of the most common forms of engagement and an act that most people do at least once…
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How to Expand Resistance and Build Solidarity?
As Trump’s second term continues (we are currently only 1 year and 4 months into his 4-year term), we are seeing continued resistance to the administration and its policies. There have been a series of days of action that have turned out millions of Americans to march and chant in peaceful protest (most recently in…
