Friends in New York: Check out our curated event calendar for Earth Day and the rest of April. Park gatherings, DJ sets, gallery shows, spring migration walks, music festivals, theater shows, film screenings.

“If we would remember that we are first and foremost Earthlings, a term describing our shared heritage that should never have been ceded to science fiction, we might start paying more attention to what the planet itself has to say.” — Marcia Bjornerud in Wrinkled Time

For most of my life, I did not feel like an Earthling. The world was alive and I did not notice it.

Growing up, on the walls of my house, there were giant, gorgeous images of plants. My mom is a professional photographer of gardens and botanicals and she filled the home with her prints. To me, they were anonymous decorations. I didn’t stop to see the flowers (in the house or in the landscape) and certainly did not know their names. I suffered from a condition - which has a technical term - of “plant blindness.”

Beyond the walls, I could see a wild ecosystem: a tidal salt marsh at the edges of the Long Island Sound. On the scale of days and seasons, there unfolds a show-stopping performance of earthly happenings. Daily, the tides swell to submerge the cordgrass and recede to reveal the fiddler crabs scurrying out of their muddy burrows. Seasonally, the marsh fades to brown in the winter, hosting a diverse duck population, before enlivening to emerald green by summer, when egrets wade among the waters and a pair of ospreys nest and fish between the coves. The marsh now captures my full attention, but as a kid, I barely noticed the show was happening.

Somewhere inside - especially as kids - we have the seeds of an Earthling in us. I’m reminded of it whenever I play with my nieces and nephews. The adoration of a favorite animal, the wonder at the shape of a seashell, the impulse to pick up a pinecone and hold onto it the rest of the day. On the family computer, I used to make Powerpoint presentations about kangaroos and present them to my parents, fielding questions and concerns about wallaby behavior, while mispronouncing it willoby. I suspect it happens to many of us: the seed of curiosity in nonhuman life naturally goes dormant as we get consumed by human happenings.

In my case, the seed remained dormant as I went deep in the digital direction, toward virtual and augmented reality. Studying and working with those technologies, I felt that immersive experiences could deepen presence, facilitate empathy, and even lead to transformation. For a living, I made many more presentation decks, but none of them were about kangaroos, unfortunately.

Things shifted during the pandemic. The Great Pause in human happenings made space for the rest of the living world to recover and offered an invitation for us to notice it. I spent those years living in San Francisco, where ecology is all-encompassing. Paradoxically, but predictably, in the land of silicon and artificial intelligence, the screen started to lose its allure. My VR headset became a paperweight. I was magnetized instead by the simple act of noticing, sensing, (and photographing) my immediate surroundings.

I learned that the living world is the ultimate immersive experience. I discovered how to see and feel new dimensions of nature with the help of friends and partners, books and magazines, podcast interviews and YouTube videos, backpacking trips and botanical garden walks. And it was transformative - I started to engage with landscapes and lifeforms not as objects of human attention but as subjects with agency and perception all their own.

I found myself in new relationships. I recognized a plant. I heard the voice of a bird and remembered its name. I craned my neck at the crown of an ancient tree. I touched a rock that is 430 million years old. I smelled the blooms of a streetside magnolia. I breathed the thin air of the mountains and it steadied my turbulent mind. I swam in the frigid ocean, pushing my body against a big wave.

I felt like an Earthling.

This is a piece of my personal story, but I sense it emerging in so many of us - not a transformation into something else, but a remembering of something within.

Earth Day is a ritual to reflect on this shared reality: we are all Earthlings. It’s an elemental and physical feeling, more than an identity. Available in every whisper of wind or bite of fruit or watering of a houseplant. We are in reciprocal relationship with the living world - whether we notice it or not - wherever we are.

How else can we cultivate a collective sense of ourselves as Earthlings? In my last Earth Day essay, I wondered if a fresh impression of the Overview Effect - seeing our home planet from space, awash in the awe offered by the original Apollo missions - might be a unifying and galvanizing force. This month tested that hypothesis, when the Artemis astronauts became the first humans to see the Earth from deep space in 50 years.

The livestreams and photographs from Artemis II delivered on the overview. But I’m left wondering if we felt the effect. Did you? It was joyful, relieving, and deeply human. Still, the photos from the Orion capsule were scrolled past in our social media feeds and buried beneath the torrent of visual content. For me, the planetary perspective engaged the mind but did not land in the body. It felt distant, digitized, disembodied - like something was missing from the picture.

Feeling like an Earthling is a direct, sensory, embodied experience. The complement to the view from 252,756 miles away is the view right outside your window.

Today, I’m holding two images of the Earth in my mind. One is planetary: the crescent blue marble, tilting under the horizon of the moon, in Reid Wiseman’s Earthset photograph. The other is local: a glimpse of the oak outside my apartment in Brooklyn, with a cardinal perched on its budding branches, singing loudly during breeding season and fluttering back-and-forth to my fire escape to fuel up on some sunflower seeds.

Seeing with this bifocal perspective - the planet and the place - I feel fully, and deeply, like an Earthling.

Brendan George Ko has a singular way of photographing the living world. In his images, landscapes shine with subjectivity, imbued with stories and spirits. He is a visual artist based between Toronto and Maui whose work has been awarded and exhibited widely, with stories published in the New York Times, New Yorker, Vogue, Bloomberg and more. I’ve admired his work for years: in particular, his unique approach to capturing plants, which we explore in this conversation.

It was a joy to talk with him and ask about his practice and protocol to photograph the spirit of a place. The conversation ranges from his time working with the voyaging canoes of Hawaii to learning about the social life of forests from Dr. Suzanne Simard. We explore the idea of kuleana, responsibility to the places we love, and his latest project to document the world’s oldest trees. Best to take this one on a walk outside.

Listen to the conversation

Scroll down for highlights and timestamps from the interview.

Links

Read the transcript with images and links here.

Mentioned in the conversation:

• The Haunted Landscape (2023-2025)

• Moemoeā by Brendan George Ko

• Polynesian Voyaging Society (PVS)

• The Social Life of Forests (New York Times)

• Saving the Butterfly Forest (The New Yorker)

• Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve

• Dr. Suzanne Simard’s new book When The Forest Breathes

• Plant Intelligence collection on the Earth Action Index

Subscribe now

Highlights

The first land that spoke to me (01:30-06:00)

Revisiting the landscapes that shaped Brendan’s childhood - living in the Four Corners region (New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado) and first encountering the spirits, stories, and indigenous history that define the place.

“I often tell people that that landscape was the first place, the first land that spoke to me. It gave me comfort in that feeling of being isolated and alienated. And it kind of became the basis of my spiritual connection to the landscape.”

How to photograph the spirit of a place (08:30-12:30)

We go deep on his recent project The Haunted Landscape - when he returned to the Four Corners after 23 years to rediscover the spirits of the landscape of his childhood. We talk about Brendan’s protocol for respectfully documenting landscapes and his take on building a practice of place where you live.

“As soon as I arrive, I do protocol. I ask the land: Hey, I come here with respect and good intentions. I hope to be respectful while I'm here. And part of the responsibility I feel is to convey how special this place is, how sacred this place is, and to be able to capture its spirits and give it to an audience to further understand that place and why it's so special.”

Protecting Hawaiian culture and making Moemoeā (19:50-31:00)

Recounting the origins of Brendan’s connection to Hawaii , learning the history of the Hawaiian Renaissance and building a sense of kuleana (“responsibility”) to the place.

“The symbol of the Hawaiian Renaissance is a voyaging canoe named Hokule'a, which was born in 1975. I started doing work with the voyaging canoes in 2016, where I volunteered - I don't know how many hundreds of hours - and got to go serve as a crew member. I worked as the documentarian and as a general deckhand and educator and facilitator, driving people around…

It became like a thing where I just showed up. Doing the comparison between New Mexico and Hawaii - I started off as an outsider in both places, but by me showing up and showing my love all the time and respect for the culture, I was accepted into it. And that's why I will always call Maui home, because it's the only place that I've ever felt deeply connected to. And that was through kuleana - feeling responsible to that place."

Voyaging canoes and learning “the talk of the sea” (31:20-39:00)

Brendan shares stories from the voyaging canoes and the recent revival of indigenous Polynesian navigation. He introduces us to the work of the Polynesian Voyaging Society and legendary navigators like Papa Mau, preserving the practice of wayfinding by signals in the sea and stars.

“Hokule'a and PVS - Polynesian Voyaging Society - have this hybrid wayfinding. They still don't use instruments, but they make it work. And they took the voyaging canoe outside of its traditional realm, which is the Pacific Ocean. They went into the Atlantic Ocean. Hell, I even saw the voyaging canoe in the Great Lakes, which is a crazy thing. And so that wayfinding - so much of it was lost and so it was gained back.”

Plant personalities and the social life of forests (45:30-55:40)

On the obsession with native plants: portals to imagine what a landscape looked like before humans arrived. Learning about the intelligence of forests from his time documenting Dr. Suzanne Simard for the New York Times.

“I have such a fascination with endemic species of plants because they're like - for lack of a better term - freaks. Like they exist in one place. And that place made them so different, so queer, that you can't find them anywhere else… So that's where I'm obsessed with plants, because to me they're part of the landscape. They are like the figure that the landscape has formed. And that's why when I take photos, they're like portraits. I treat them like I would a human.”

On climate change and frameworks for action (1:00:20-1:11:00)

We talk about his ongoing project to photograph the world’s oldest trees while we still can: The Scale of Time According to Trees. We revisit a 2021 piece for The New Yorker when Brendan visited the Mexican highlands to document the restoration of a small critical forest where millions of monarch butterflies overwinter. I asked Brendan how he thinks about climate action and systems change.

“That perspective - me developing more of a discipline around the spiritual understanding of the world around me and how I'm a part of it - really helped inform me. When I was doing the voyaging canoe work, it was when Hokule'a was going around the world to share Hawaiian sustainability. The name of that voyage when it went around the world was Malama Honua, which is take care of the earth, take care of the environment around you.”

Preserving the sacred and kaona (1:10:00-1:15:00)

We close on the meaning of sacredness and protecting the places we love.

“Years ago, someone asked me, what does sacredness mean to you? And I told them, it's something that should not change. It's something that is so good that it should just be kept the way it is. Because there's something deeply special about it and it's ineffable… The only thing that could describe how special it is, is a poem - a lot of indigenous perspective are very poetic. It's not so direct. In Hawaiian culture, it's called kaona. It's a deep meaning of something that is in-between the lines… I want people to understand that these places are very special and should be kept as they are.”

Read the full transcript with images and links here.

You can keep up with Brendan’s work on Instagram and his website. He recently published his 2025 scrapbook, an annual tradition that weaves the year’s photography with poetry he writes.

Thanks for your attention. As always, you can explore the evolving Index as an early bird:

Visit the Index

Personal carbon footprints have long dominated climate discourse. How do we move beyond this limiting framework and direct our energy to changing systems? Ryan Hagen has been exploring this question for more than a decade. In 2018, he started a climate action newsletter that grew to reach 200,000+ subscribers, alongside his nonprofit Crowdsourcing Sustainability. His work has been recognized by the UN, TEDx, and LinkedIn as a top voice on the green economy. He recently released his first book: Your Guide to Climate Action: How to Move Beyond Your Footprint and Make a Big Impact. These days, he lives in Burlington, Vermont.

In his book, Ryan writes that the most important individual action in the face of climate crisis is to talk about it. He has a gift for doing just that. I felt the best medium for this message would be a live conversation, which we recorded and you can listen to here. Our conversation ranges from impacting “mid-level systems” and “multisolving” to climate dance parties and the sunsets over Lake Champlain.

This is our first go at an audio interview. If you listen and feel called to offer your feedback, please drop me a note.

Listen here - link will open in your browser. Highlights from the conversation transcribed below, edited for length and clarity. Hear the full context in audio.

MB: The subtitle of your book is How to Move Beyond Your Footprint and Make a Big Impact — which reminds me of Katharine Hayhoe’s idea that the most important thing you can do for climate action has nothing to do with your carbon footprint. Why is “beyond your footprint” the message people need to hear right now?

RH: The first thing that comes to my mind is another quote, from Bill McKibben — he says something along the lines of, the most important thing an individual can do right now is be less of an individual. And that’s the same idea.

I made it the subtitle of the book for multiple reasons. One of them is because I think we really are at a point in time where we need to do that. We need to move beyond our footprints. We need to change these bigger systems we're a part of. There are studies out there that say, if we only worked on our footprints, we could reduce emissions by like 20 to 35 percent, something like that, which is significant. But that’s still less than half of what we need to do. And if that’s all we ever do, we’re going to fail miserably at solving this problem…

… There’s been a lot of disinformation and misinformation campaigns to get people to continue thinking about environmental issues as a personal footprint problem. And so I just think it’s really important to kind of call it out — I’m not saying those actions aren’t important, because they are — but it’s really important that we also start thinking beyond them. What are the other levers of power, and how can we act together to change these mid-level systems that we all belong to, like our schools and our towns, our states, our companies? Because that’s where the real leverage is and where the real change is going to happen.

MB: You started your climate journey in 2013 when the carbon footprint conversation was still really dominant, famously spread by fossil fuel companies to keep us focused on individual behavior. What do you think is changing in the culture where there’s an opening to propose and drive forward ideas about systems change?

RH: It's a good question. My mind goes to just the urgency of the issue. If the world had started taking action back when I was born in 1991, when the first Conference of the Parties (the climate COP) had just happened, maybe we could have nudged our way to getting emissions to zero. But instead of flattening out emissions around then and going down, annual emissions have gone up by about two-thirds — about 67 percent — since that time. They might be flattening right now, or soon in the next handful of years hopefully. But they haven’t yet, and the problem has gotten worse and worse and worse… And I think because of the timeline of how little time we have left to change everything, there’s kind of that forcing function of we can’t just play around with the margins anymore. We need dramatic transformation of how things in society work and how the economy works.

MB: I’m curious about your own self-education about systems thinking — were there books you read, or people you looked to for wisdom, that informed your thinking about how systems work and how they can be changed?

RH: A few things are coming to mind. One is that since maybe the second half of college, I've just been a very curious person. Endlessly curious about the stuff that interests me, wanting to understand it at the root level. Always asking why multiple times and trying to figure out how things actually work. And then once you start caring about climate change, you realize climate touches everything…

… In terms of who I read on systems thinking: Donella Meadows has a book, Thinking in Systems. And then someone who learned from her — who I quote in the book multiple times — is Dr. Beth Sawin. She learned from Donella Meadows and has her own book and her own work. I think both of them are brilliant thinkers in that space. There’s also the famous Limits to Growth, which is still on my reading list… It’s a really important framework for us to consider more frequently, because we are all part of these systems and they’re all interconnected, and what we do impacts them. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and small and like you can’t change anything. But we’re all part of these systems and we all inherently have some power within them.

MB: When you were building a theory of change around climate, which systems feel like the ones most within our influence?

RH: I think it’s going to be different for different people. That’s where someone kind of needs to sit down, probably with pen and paper, list out those systems you’re a part of, and think through: who are the decision makers in these places? Do I know them? Do I have a relationship with any of them? Which of these places do I have the most relationships in? Which of these places do I spend the most time, or which ones make me the happiest or give me the most energy? Asking all those questions, you can start to better understand where to focus your limited time and energy, because it's going to be hard to change all of them…

… If you're trying to figure out the potential for impact, it's going to take a little time. Start by looking through the list of systems you're a part of. Let’s start with the town or city that you’re a part of: that one might actually have the work done already for you. You can go online and type in your town’s name and then “greenhouse gas emissions” or “climate action plan.” Either way, there’s a tool called Crosswalk Labs. You can just type in your town or your city, and it’s going to tell you the probably hundreds of thousands of tons of emissions coming from your town every year, or in the millions if you’re in a bigger city. You can start asking these questions and even guessing if the answer is not out there, just to relatively size up the opportunity for impact in these different spheres. And combining that potential impact you could have with the power and relationships you have in each of these places — that’s the stuff to start pondering when you’re figuring out where you want to plug in and take action.

MB: Could you introduce us to multisolving — what it means and how it applies to communicating about climate?

RH: Multi-solving is when you take one investment of time, energy, or money — one action — that’s going to result in multiple positive benefits. I think the best way to learn about this is to go read Beth Sawin’s book called Multisolving, or check out her nonprofit, the Multisolving Institute, because she literally coined this word.

The idea is that instead of an action just reducing emissions and addressing climate change, it’s also doing things that are going to benefit your community in the present day. If you focus on building out more bike lanes, that is going to not only reduce emissions because it gives people an opportunity to bike instead of drive — it’s also going to make people in your town healthier because they’re exercising more, it’s going to reduce healthcare costs, it’s probably going to make people more productive at work, and bike lanes also help local businesses. It’s all these co-benefits, these kind of like second, third order effects of one action that you might not immediately think of, that make this one investment really worthwhile…

… And it’s also really powerful for organizing, because some people are going to care a lot about climate change, and others might care a little, but it’s not going to be their main thing, and others might not care at all — but a lot of people are going to care about all those other things we just talked about. Depending on who you’re talking to, you can focus on the positive co-benefit they really care about. That can be their reason to get behind the thing. And that’s great. Everyone still wins.

MB: I’m interested in how you determined the ten actions to include in the book, and why you put them in the order you did. What are the top three most effective actions in the book, and why did you lead with those three?

RH: So they’re not really ranked. “Talk about it” is first because I think it’s the most fundamental. So if there were to be a number one it would probably be that. Just because you need it for all the rest, pretty much for all the system stuff. And when you talk to people about it, it has the ripple effect of, you know, we’re a social species and once they realize you care about it, they’re more likely to care about it. If you're talking about the actions you're taking, they're more likely to join you, especially if you ask them kindly. And to get the people power we need to influence decision makers and get decisions made in a climate-positive way, we need to be able to talk to other people and organize and find common ground and build relationships with each other. This change-making is really about building relationships…

… The next four or five are kind of lumped together. Chapters ten, and eleven are about electing climate champions and helping make your town or city climate-positive. I put those together because they are local civic engagement, being part of your community, part of your state, helping change those systems and getting your representatives to take action. The next two are helping make your company climate-positive and getting a job in climate — both really impactful. And then the one after that is how to help make your schools climate-positive. Those five are all lumped together because I see those as the juiciest mid-level systems…

… After that I get into reducing your footprint — which is good and worth doing… Making your money climate-positive, which is honestly the one people have brought up the most. I think because it’s not thought of as frequently, and it can be quite powerful in a subtle way. And then the last one is the activism chapter, about civil resistance and peaceful protest… There’s also donating to impactful nonprofits.

MB: What do you feel are the invitations for people who feel time-bound or limited in their capacity to engage in high-friction systems change?

RH: Yeah, that’s real. We’re all really busy. I would recommend — and this is actually at the very start of Part 3, on finding your place in the movement — there’s a Venn diagram by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. I’d recommend people fill out that diagram to find what their specific climate action might be that’s most aligned with them. You draw three circles and answer three questions: What brings you joy? What are you good at? And what’s the work that the world needs doing?

Doing that, you start to get a sense for which action or which direction is most aligned with who you are and what you’re going to be energized by and actually do… And then just try whichever ones on that list feel like they resonated or you were curious about.

The list is a menu of actions. It’s not “do all these things.” It’s find the thing you want to try first and see how it goes. In terms of time, just start small. If you only got an hour a week, start with an hour and commit to doing that over and over. As you start to make progress, you can build it up. And my other thought is: this isn’t true for everyone, but from the data, we’re all glued to our screens way more than we should be, myself included. And if we feel like we have no time, it might be worth first thinking through what we can cut out that we don’t actually care about and that isn’t benefiting our lives.

MB: I honestly struggle with this tension of slowness and urgency in this work. Being in the living world, being in nature, we’re invited to slow down, see things on longer timescales. Deep time. There are huge benefits to taking the long view. At the same time, the problem is so urgent and we need to make transformations instantly. How does that manifest for you after your years doing this work?

RH: I think it comes down to moving as quickly as we can while taking care of ourselves. That means we're probably not going to move as fast as we want to. But not letting that stop us from continuing forward… It comes down to doing our best, taking care of ourselves, living a good life, and trying not to burn out — because I did. When I was doing Crowdsourcing Sustainability, I shut it down after five or six years. There were a few reasons: Part of it was financial, but part of it was also that I burnt out. And if you burn out… you want to be able to keep going; you want to be able to keep doing the work. This is a marathon. It feels like a sprint, and we have to finish the marathon as quickly as we can. But we’re going to be doing this work for decades. It’s going to take a while to get to zero emissions globally, and then still we’re going to have to deal with the impacts of that way hotter world. So we’ll have to keep building resiliency, repairing and restoring ecosystems, figuring out new ways to draw down carbon from the atmosphere to get our temperature back to where it's safer…

… When you take care of yourself, live well, and make sure you have good energy, joy and laughter — that also makes things happen faster. If you’re in a movement that has music and dance and joy, more people join that movement… It’s awesome just because it’s more fun. But it’s also going to make you more effective at whatever you’re trying to do.

MB: You mentioned Dr. Johnson and her Venn diagram, which was also a huge inspiration for me. The paperback version of her book is coming out. I don’t know if you saw this: she’s doing climate dance parties around the country, like the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. It’s probably the coolest and purest manifestation of that idea of making this movement fun.

RH: Shout out to Ayana — if she ever hears this, come up to Burlington. You’ll get a big showing for the dance party.

You can keep up with Ryan’s work on his Substack, website, or check out his book. Soon, you’ll be able to find Ryan’s recommendations on the Earth Action Index platform. Stay tuned ~

Visit the Index

Amanda Monthei is a writer, podcaster, former hotshot and wildland firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service. Since her years working on the fireline, she’s written widely about wildfire and climate for publications incl. The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Outside, and Mountain Gazette. She produces and hosts the excellent Life with Fire podcast: a home for in-depth conversations with leaders in the field about wildfire resilience, prescribed burns, and more. These days, she’s living in Missoula, MT, getting her MFA in creative nonfiction.

Amanda and I met at the Banff festival. I was struck by her clear-eyed POV on individual agency in the face of climate crisis. Inspired by her great longform work on solutions like prescribed fire and beaver dam analogs, I invited her to share some stories and recommendations with the Index community. Check out our conversation below and explore her contributions here ~

Michael Bass: Before the podcast, the published pieces, and even your seasons on the fireline—I’m curious what first pulled you into working on fire. Was there a person, an experience, a book that helped set you on this path?

Amanda Monthei: I knew a few women in college (back in northern Michigan) who were fighting fire during their summer breaks to pay for school. I was pretty interested in what they were doing and then suddenly realized one day that I had agency and was also more than capable of trying it, too. I signed up for a few fire classes at the university where I got my undergrad degree in English and ended up getting my first fire job in northern Idaho the following summer. I read a few books about fire in the meantime (Fire on the Mountain and Young Men and Fire for two notable examples), which further amplified my interest not only in fire but in eventually wanting to write about it.

MB: Reading your words, there’s a beautiful balance of adventure storytelling, nature writing, direct advocacy, and a grounded voice that says: I’m a real human. AI could never. I know you’re working on some writing focused on growing up in Northern Michigan too. How would you trace the origins of your narrative voice?

AM: Something strange that has emerged in recent years is that my writing voice is quite a bit different depending on whether I’m writing memoir (usually in the form of essays about northern Michigan, fishing, skiing or some combination) or about fire/climate/ecology.

My memoir/essayist voice has a bit more levity and leans more heavily into humor and observation/reflection—on this side of things, I’ve been most inspired by the work of Jim Harrison (also a Michigander), David Sedaris, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Brian Doyle and Ernest Hemingway in his Nick Adams Stories. On the ecology/wildfire/climate (more broadly, the journalistic) side of things, I’ve been inspired largely by Rebecca Solnit, Joan Didion and the Macleans (both Norman and John).

My objective at the moment is to begin blending the levity, reflection and observation from my personal essays with some of the more hardlined reportage/research I’m doing in the wildfire/climate spaces. I think this intersection is where the magic happens, which is probably why I admire Solnit and Didion’s work so much.

MB: You’ve spent seasons as a hotshot in the west, so much we could talk about there. For someone looking to understand what it’s like on the fireline—the work of hotshots, smokejumpers, incident commanders—what’s a favorite story that feels true to the experience? (Your own work counts too.)

AM: I can’t recommend Kelly Ramsey’s book Wildfire Days enough, especially in terms of amplifying the day-to-day life of a woman on a hotshot crew. Kelly has this stunning ability to observe and contextualize her surroundings and experiences on a hotshot crew in a way that skirts the usual narratives that we generally read about in wildland firefighting—you know, the Big Tough Dude vs Big Scary Fire narrative. Her ability to bring vulnerability and a more feminine perspective to this experience resonated deeply with me, but I think anyone who is interested in fire and firefighting—regardless of gender—would dig this one.

Otherwise, I’d love to toot my own horn here and suggest my podcast, Life with Fire, which is really just me asking simple questions of extremely smart people who are doing incredible work in the wildfire space, whether through policy, research or in practice, on the ground.

I also recommend my friend Zeke Lunder’s work (checkout The Lookout)—he’s based in Northern California and much of his content centers on that area, but many of the key takeaways of the work he does in the wildfire space can be extrapolated to other areas and ecosystems. My favorite part of Zeke’s work is that he’s very no-bullshit in his delivery/approach, and has significant experience in the wildfire world. Like, if Zeke is mad, surprised or upset about something (the way a fire was managed, for example), you can trust it’s for very good reason.

MB: We’ve talked about your time living in Michigan, Washington, and Montana - are there local groups working to protect and steward the places most meaningful to you, that you’d recommend people check out?

AM: I love what Mt. Adams Resource Stewards is up to in southcentral Washington and the Columbia River Gorge. They really embody values of community stewardship, collective action and using fire and land management as a means to finding shared values and solutions that work for everyone—all while meaningfully reducing wildfire risk, sharing essential skills and ecological knowledge with community members, and engaging more and more stakeholders in the process of sustainable and resilient land stewardship. Even if you’re not in the area, I’d recommend just looking into all the things they’re doing to improve ecological literacy and skills-based learning in their area, which has included starting a Prescribed Burn Association and running an annual Prescribed Fire Training Exchange!

MB: These days you’re in Missoula, a perfect spot for many outdoor hobbies of yours, like fishing and skiing. Not so much surfing? Any can’t-miss spots that more people should know about?

AM: I’m hoping to get out and start doing some recons this winter particularly into the Bitterroot Mountains (for skiing), to Lolo Pass (for skiing and hot springs), and along all the different intersecting rivers in this area for some winter flyfishing. There’s a manmade wave on the Clark Fork River in downtown Missoula that I look forward to being humbled on this spring. I’m sort of a Beginner+ surfer, which means river waves are probably beyond my pay grade but I’m no less curious. Also very excited to explore more offerings at the local community arts center (shout out to the ZACC!), where I learned how to do printmaking this fall, which has proven to be a lovely creative-but-not-writing-based hobby for the winter months!

Follow Amanda’s work on her website, Substack or Instagram.

You can see all the recommendations from our contributors by exploring the Index platform as an early bird ~

Visit the Index

This is the newsletter of the Earth Action Index: a discovery platform for climate and ecology. This week, sharing a project update to close out the year.

Dear Earthlings,

This season, we’ve been zoomed into place.

In conversations with many of you, the same wish kept surfacing: to connect more deeply with your places. In distracted digital times, there is a cultural craving for presence and engagement with our immediate surroundings. What can we do here?

Now, the Index can help you participate in place. We’ve been calling this collection of tools “the field guide of the future.” It’s been a joy to watch our early birds test these tools from Sydney and Mumbai to New York and Raleigh - and see their home places through a new lens. You can explore your place, where you might be traveling for the holidays, or anywhere that sparks your curiosity:

Explore your place

Thank you for every conversation, vision shared, and feedback offered in 2025. Appreciate you and sending great energy for the year ahead ~

Placefulness vs. placelessness

For so many of us, exploring a place evokes a childlike sense of wonder. A flash of standing small beside your parent in the park, learning: acorn, robin, cardinal, dew, cumulus. The simple act of noticing and attending to something outside of us.

But the architecture of adult, online life often stands between us and this timeless joy. The information ecosystems we spend our time swimming in are global, incessant, and overstimulating. Content appears out of context. This leaves the places we inhabit to fall out of view. Today’s technologies make us think and scroll globally - but very few of them help us engage and act locally.

The Index is our attempt at an alternative: refusing the situation we have been designed into. In the spirit of Jenny Odell’s writing: we “refus[e] to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough.” Against the placelessness of online life, Jenny argues for placefulness: an attentive engagement and participation in our surroundings.

Placefulness is a feeling. A sense of connection to the here and now. Aware of the light changing, the plants blooming, the migrations unfolding. Tuned into the community happenings in the area this weekend. Familiar with the depth of history that unfolded here and the questions that are shaping its future. It’s a feeling that starts as attention and grows into devotion.

We are working on tools for placefulness. Building a kind of information ecosystem that invites us to connect with the living ecosystems we inhabit. Rather than “living in the news,” with feeds that pull us up and out of place, we come wielding technology that pulls us back downward into the neighborhoods where we live our lives.

2025 is a moment when technology and nature are often considered in stark opposition - especially in the AI discourse. For good reason. But there is nuance and potential for alternative futures here. As David Gruber, featured our recent Project CETI piece, shared in the NYT:

“What I’ve come to know is that technology and nature do not exist in a zero-sum universe where the ascendance of one side is the downfall of the other. Instead, these tools can give humans an opportunity to feel more tethered to the flora and fauna that surround us.”

As AI innovation races along, it’s a critical mission to pursue alternative potentials of the technology. To create a counterweight against the models that will only further disconnect us from nature. The newest features in the Index use technology - powered by open-source citizen science, AI web search, and human recommendations - to connect us more deeply to the living world.

Experiments in placeful technology

Today, maps are a familiar model of technology that tethers us to Earth. But most of the maps we interact with are funhouse mirrors of the human world: street names, property lines, and so on. Traces of the more-than-human have been scrubbed or subdued: the plants and creatures present, the geology that shapes our landscapes.

What does technology that reconnects us with the living world look and feel like? Tools that helps us not only perceive what’s happening in our place, but participate within it? We are experimenting with a few different ways to connect with place:

• Field guide: Open a hyperlocal guide to the plants, creatures, and fungi present in the current (micro)season of your place. It will refresh as the world around you does.

• Seasonal foods: Check a grocery list for your in-season foods here and now, alongside the best seeds to be planted at this point in the year.

• Communities to join: Join and support existing community efforts to protect, beautify, and advocate for your place.

• Deep time: Expand your view to the scale of hundreds of millions of years, to see the ancient seas or mountain ranges that shaped the land.

• And more to come ~

Last week, I checked the field guide before a walk in Prospect Park, and read that I might see white-throated sparrows, northern cardinals, and red-tailed hawks particularly active this week. Lo and behold, within a few miles, I spotted all three species paused to perch on bare branches.

It’s time for technology that invites our attention back to the places we inhabit. They are calling out for our care and participation like never before. The future must be placeful.

Explore your place

Dear Earthlings,

The conversation between humans and whales opened a new chapter this week. For the first time, we can translate any audio into the vocalizations of sperm whales. We still don’t understand the meaning of their language - but we’ve learned how to sound like whales.

It’s a milestone built on a fifty-five year legacy. Roger Payne’s Songs of the Humpback Whale, released in 1970, was the first invitation to listen to cetacean communication. The record was a watershed moment - of oceanic proportions - for the early environmental movement. Carl Safina described its release as “A momentous turning point in the human relationship with life on the planet.” Humpback songs soundtracked early ‘70s environmental campaigns, appeared in pop music, arrived in ten million National Geographic magazines, and even sailed into space as part of the Voyager’s Golden Record. Critically, the album ignited the Save the Whales movement: “Within a few years, whale hunting was largely ended.”

Now, Payne’s mentee David Gruber, founder of Project CETI, is carrying the torch - hoping to spark a similar surge of energy. CETI is applying AI to listen and eventually understand what whales are saying: to translate their complex vocalizations that predate human language by millions of years. They moved closer this week.

This Fall, in the clamshell amphitheater at the Frick Collection, I witnessed a live performance by Garth Stevenson: the double bassist who plays in concert with whales. His short show sent chills down my body, and reawakened my awe for the ocean - making an enduring memory from the Atmos Blue Renaissance gathering.

For more than 15 years, Garth has rehearsed his recreation of the calls of humpback whales. In fact, he practiced by playing along with Payne’s record. Floating on tiny boats in Baja and Antarctica, balancing his standup bass, he amplifies the music with an underwater speaker. Soon, the whales breach the surface, and join him in a chorus of calls. An interspecies concert. Listening to Garth’s performance, mixed with the real field recordings, I couldn’t tell: Where does the human music end and the whale song begin?

This question became shockingly and magically relevant on Tuesday. Project CETI released its Whale Acoustics Model (WhAM): an AI system able to transform any audio into the sounds of sperm whales. This is a first-of-its-kind generative model of animal communication. WhAM is like a performer with formal music training, who closely studied the sounds of sperm whales to recreate their rhythm - not unlike Garth Stevenson.

It’s been a staggering two years of progress for the team at CETI in Dominica. Last May, CETI discovered the sperm whale phonetic alphabet. This November, they published research to prove whales have vowels. Now, in December, CETI can translate any audio into the acoustic signature of sperm whales - a series of rhythmic clicks called a coda - with uncanny precision. Diving in Dominica, and observing whales with drones, CETI researchers have learned about their female-led social units that share vocal dialects.

AI models now enable us to classify and generate whale language. CETI is far from understanding what these sounds mean and will not broadcast these vocalizations to real whales. Instead, WhAM provides an ethical research tool: scientists can run experiments with synthetic whale sounds rather than disrupting actual whale communities with messages we don’t yet understand.

I’m endlessly fascinated by the potential of bioacoustics and interspecies communication. To bring us into closer connection with the living world. To expand our understanding of intelligence beyond human limitations. To inspire protection of more-than-human life. Project CETI is one node in this vast field, and we’ve been curating many other signals of interspecies connection on the Earth Action Index.

Invitations from the Index

For more, explore this collection of invitations to dive deeper into the movement to decode nonhuman language.

Project CETI: Understand what whales are saying

🐋 Support their research and 🎧 Listen to sperm whale codas

It sure seems that David Gruber is constantly speaking at in-person and online events, so stay tuned on the Project CETI socials to keep up with their work.

Find related recommendations.

Earth Species Project: Decoding nonhuman communication

🐦‍⬛ Explore their work and 🎧 Test their model

As Project CETI focuses its scope on sperm whales, the Earth Species Project casts its net to any vocal species in the living world. Founded Aza Raskin, Britt Selvitelle, and Katie Zacarian, ESP also uses machine learning to analyze the sounds of more-than-human life. Released after 7 years, their flagship NatureLM model was trained on decades of bioacoustic archives and human speech, and can already detect and classify the sounds of thousands of species. The two projects are in direct conversation: in the WhAM paper, it’s clear that ESP leads the way on audio analysis and classification, but CETI has made the first breakthrough on audio generation.

Find related recommendations.

More-Than-Human Life Project at NYU Law

📅 Attend a future MOTH Festival and 💡 Read stories from Ideas Hub

The MOTH Project is a close partner to Project CETI, working as their guides to navigate the legal and ethical implications of interspecies communication. Led by César Rodríguez-Garavito, the group advances the rights of nature with a collective of lawyers, scientists, indigenous leaders, writers, artists, musicians, and more. Housed at NYU Law—but venturing on field expeditions to the Amazon, Chile, and beyond—MOTH is a leading light in the movement and a “convener, connector, and incubator for ecocentric experiments.” For the public, the group hosts programming, podcasts, and gatherings worth following along.

Find related recommendations.

Interspecies Internet

📰 Subscribe to the newsletter and 📹 Join the slack

The Interspecies Internet is the think-tank bringing this conversation to the people. I subscribe to their newsletter to get looped into their monthly lecture series, which I always try to tune into. From them I’ve learned about our efforts to decode dolphins, that primates go by individual names, and that plants do “talk back,” if we can learn to listen. — Hannah Seckendorf

Find related recommendations.

The Sounds of Invisible Worlds

📰 Read the essay and 📹 Watch her TED talk

The late Karen Bakker was a leading voice in the field of digital biacoustics, bringing us closer to the worlds of animals and plants. She wrote wonderful books on the subject and has a great TED talk too. I especially love this longform essay she published in Noema, arguing: “Sonics is the optics of the 21st century.” The piece surveys everything from astronomers converting cosmic data into audio, to biologists learning to decipher elephants’ infrasonic sounds, and even plants’ ultrasonic signals. TLDR: We now know the elephant word for honeybee.

Find related recommendations.

Appreciate your attention, more soon.

Michael & the Index team

Subscribe now

For the last fifty years, the Canadian Rockies have hosted a cultural festival unlike any other. A celebration of the mountains themselves: Earth-shaping, water-making, life-giving ecosystems. At the Banff Centre Mountain Film and Book Festival, mountains are arenas for adventure, keepers of culture, and bellwethers of our fate in a time of climate crisis.

The festival is firmly rooted in the foothills of the Rockies. But, like many of its guests, the event itself has become a globe-spanning traveler. Screenings in forty-five countries across all seven continents—including at McMurdo Station in Antarctica—amount to the largest film festival tour on Earth. Every year, its curators embark on a global expedition to share stories of other expeditions. Catch the film tour near you.

In past years, I watched the official selection on its stop in New York. With a press pass this year, I traveled straight to the source in Banff—for the golden anniversary of its flagship festival and a special Fire and Ice Symposium. Its central question: How can storytelling inspire action on worsening fires and vanishing glaciers?

Three icy days in Banff crystallized something for me: our relationships with fire and ice need to be reimagined. To face the urgent and proximate threat of fire, we need patient stewardship. To meet the gradual vanishing of glaciers, we are called to urgent care.

It’s 3:30 in the morning in Banff. The village is monochrome and mute. The November full moon is the largest and brightest of the year—a supermoon. Its pale light reveals a panorama of peaks. Everywhere you look: jagged crests of ancient limestone, cloaked in snow, reflect and shine like flood lights. It feels like a stadium, designed by glacial architects.

As it happens, tonight is the Beaver Moon. Fitting to be here in Banff, where beavers have Main Character Energy. The beaver is the national animal of Canada; the insignia of the Canadian Pacific Railroad; the ecosystem engineer that shapes rivers all over the country. I can’t escape it: on the bus to Canmore, a huge portrait of a beaver looms over my seat. On the trails, I stumble on their riverside lodges. In fact, when Walt Disney was asked to design Alberta’s version of Smokey Bear, he created Bertie Beaver to carry the message of fire prevention and suppression. More on that later.

Beavers, elk, grizzly bears, and more roam this more-than-human neighborhood, of rushing rivers and subalpine forests. Black-and-white magpies flutter among the branches and red-capped woodpeckers tap at the trunks of larch trees. Within five minutes of hiking, I encountered two elk chewing on dogwood branches. They must know about its medicinal value. In town, every garbage bin is a locked bear box. One of the main pubs is named after local legend The Boss, the grizzly who is said to have fathered more than 70% of the bears in the national park.

This is the immediate habitat of the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity: a contemporary academic campus with towering glass windows and swaying Tibetan prayer flags. Year-round, it’s a gathering place and residency for outdoor athletes, artists, adventurers, scientists, indigenous leaders, environmentalists and more.

The centre’s 50th anniversary festival was a balancing act. On one hand, guests were stoked to see “Radical Reels” of athletes doing 1440° stunts on mountain bikes and climbers scaling 9a routes. On the other, Banff hosted a sobering and solution-oriented conversation on the climate catastrophe. Here, the impacts of climate change are strongly felt. To the north, the city of Jasper suffered a destructive wildfire in summer 2024. Between the towns lies the Columbia Ice Field, a defining force of the Rockies that has seen rapid glacial melting in the last two decades. This is a place shaped by fire and ice, and these are the people working hardest to understand, adapt, and tell the world about it.

Reimagining our relationship with fire

Fire historians have a word for this era: the Pyrocene. An age shaped by extreme fire. Memories and images of burned communities and scorched landscapes are seared into our minds. Red suns and orange skies, go-bags and Watch Duty, fire insurance and adaptation, evacuation and rebuilding—this is the vernacular of the Pyrocene.

This is the personal reality for Sasha Galitzki, an aerial artist who lost her home to the Jasper fire in 2024. She is the subject of the short film Embers (dir. Trixie Pacis), an intimate portrait of her reckoning with wildfires and persistence in rebuilding her life and art. It’s a story of reclaimed agency. The scenes of Sasha’s aerial performances—hanging from scarlet-red fabrics among ice-blue glaciers and burned-black woodlands—will stick with me as symbols of resilience.

To this stark truth, speakers at the Symposium offered solutions and advocated for a reimagined relationship with fire. The headline host for the fire discussion was Dr. Amy Cardinal Christianson—whose warmth, wisdom, and infectious laughter lightened the day. She’s an indigenous fire specialist and host of the Good Fire podcast. Her mission, in essence: “Putting good fire on the landscape.”

For Christianson, the best thing we can do in the face of worsening wildfires is to work with fire as a tool for stewardship: carefully burning select tracts to support ecosystem health and prevent massive fires from mounting. This is the practice of “good fire,” “cultural burns,” or the more surgically-named “prescribed burns.”

For centuries, First Nations across what is now Canada have practiced cultural burning as a way to care for the land. Low-intensity fires—typically in the spring and fall—return nutrients to the soil, stimulate new plant growth, and clear the fuel that would otherwise feed catastrophic wildfires. This is a long-term, patient, and proactive kind of stewardship. Only recently has this practice started to earn its proper place in discussions of government fire policy.

Historically, the state’s relationship to fire was defined by antagonism, suppression, and prevention. This is the lineage of Smokey Bear and of Bertie Beaver: no fire, under any circumstances. But this dogmatic message has exacerbated the disastrous wildfires we see today, as fuel load builds up over time. As drought worsens, fire creates the conditions for more and more of itself.

Amanda Monthei, a former wildland firefighter, writer, and host of Life with Fire, offered a perspective to rebuild our sense of agency. Individuals can participate in fire resilience—like home hardening and building defensible space—and there are many indigenous fire stewardship initiatives to support. One invitation for action surprised me: joining prescribed burn gatherings in your community.

Monthei introduced me to “Prescribed Burn Associations,” or PBAs: groups of landowners and civilians that collaborate on healthy prescribed burns in their area. An experiential action, a literal gathering around fire. PBAs have popped up all over the US—over 130 associations in places as diverse as Kansas, Oregon, Arkansas, North Carolina, and California—with emerging equivalents in parts of Canada. Find if there’s a Prescribed Burn Association near you.

Awareness of the benefits of healthy fire and patient land stewardship is growing. But stigma remains deeply lodged in public and political imagination. The work of storytellers is to shape a balanced, reciprocal relationship to fire—and to rebuild our agency to adapt.

Learning to listen to the ice

“The glaciers speak so slowly and quietly that most among us have forgotten how to hear them.” These opening words from Robert Sandford—dubbed “the Winston Churchill of water”—helped frame the purpose of the symposium and of the 2025 UN International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation.

It’s essential that we learn to listen to the ice. Glaciers in ranges like the Alps, Andes, and the Himalayas together provide the drinking water for 2 billion people—22% of the world’s population. We’ve always relied on glaciers, nature’s most capacious “water towers,” for the freshwater that comes downstream. The Great Vanishing of glaciers is not only an urgent question of sea level rise, climate imbalance, or disappearing habitat; it reveals the delicate interdependence between people and ice.

While the ice only whispers, there is an community of glaciologists, explorers, artists, and more who have spent decades tuning into their expression. (Outside of Banff, a new short film, Crying Glacier, invites us to listen directly to the sounds of the melting Morteratsch). At the festival, I met a constellation of these messengers, who create films, exhibitions, VR experiences and more to give the glaciers a megaphone.

Dr. Andreas Linsbauer is a leading glaciologist in Switzerland. In his home country, one quarter of ice volume has been lost in the last 10 years. He articulated the rapid decrease of “mass balance,” and gave a banking analogy to explain the draining principal of glaciers. Expenses (ablation) are far outpacing earnings (accumulation). Greenhouse gas emissions are to blame. Linsbauer is a pioneering science communicator, having created VR and site-specific simulations that visualize possible futures for glaciers, depending on the climate path we take.

Scientists help us visualize and understand disappearing glaciers. It’s the work of storytellers to visceralize our relationship to the ice.

“The glaciers are alive,” says James Balog, incidentally echoing the title of Rob Macfarlane’s recent book about rivers. Balog is a photographer and explorer known for his iconic Extreme Ice Survey. Starting in 2006, he set up timelapse cameras at the world’s largest glaciers, shooting 1.5 million images over 15 years. His jaw-dropping dispatch of melting glaciers was first translated into the film Chasing Ice (2012), and at this year’s festival, he shared the follow-up Chasing Time (dir. Jeff Orlowski-Yang and Sarah Keo, 2024).

In the timelapse footage, the ancient disappears in an instant. Ice sheets release calves the size of entire cities. I lean forward in my seat. My hands prop up my head, holding a heavy awe.

You might imagine an artist with this longterm exposure to glaciers carries an intense amount of weight and grief. What emerges from Balog’s work is something even more powerful: an energized love and kinship with the ice. He listened so closely for 15 years that he emerged with the unabashed conviction of their aliveness. And at 73, he’s come to the conclusion: “We are part of nature’s life force, spirit, and soul.”

What is the functionality of these stories? What is the purpose of polar expeditions—like those of Børge Ousland, Vince Colliard, and Caroline Côté—pushing new limits and livestreaming to the world? It’s more than raising awareness. It’s an invitation to experience and absorb an intimate relationship with the ice.

Still, I was grasping for solutions and grounded invitations for action. I walked up to Dr. Linsbauer and asked: How can we be solution-oriented when communicating about glaciers? There is no easier answer. We can only show what will be saved in the best-case climate scenario. The actions we need in the face of melting glaciers are the same diverse solutions to the wider climate crisis: from renewable energy and regenerative agriculture to public transit and circular economies and beyond. For glaciers, there is no specific corollary to prescribed burns. There is no moonshot intervention (despite expensive attempts at glacier blankets, or “geotextiles,” to slow melting).

The bridge from storytelling to action on glaciers is not a straight line. Glacier action is, at its core, about systemic change—an all-hands-on-deck effort to cut emissions and reshape the conditions that created this crisis. I left the Symposium with a few specific recommendations, like supporting efforts like Jim Elzinga’s Guardians of the Ice, attending an Indigenous-led glacier tour with Tim Patterson’s IceWalks, or donating to leadership-focused Girls* On Ice, led by Dr. Alison Criscitiello and Jocelyn Hirose in Canada.

Tuning into the reality of the glaciers—through secondhand stories or firsthand experiences—is an urgent invitation to feel our reciprocal connection with the ice. Our lives are tightly entwined. And listening is the foundation of any healthy relationship.

Cut back to 3:30 in the morning in Banff. I’m waiting for a Poparide carpool back to the airport in Calgary for my flight home. Standing alone in this valley, carved by glaciers in the last ice age, 20,000 years ago. My relationship to fire and ice took new shape after three days of exposure to these stories, ideas, and solutions.

Banff surprised, saddened, and supercharged me: to continue the work of amplifying solutions and fostering connection with the more-than-human world. I traveled here for a festival of films in categories like “adventure,” “climbing",” and “environment.” But by the end of my three days, I started to see them through a different lens: as love stories between people and planet.

We started the Earth Action Index with a name—and have spent many months growing into it. Time and again, we hear questions about “action.” A word that activates associations for so many of us. Advocate, campaign, volunteer are common refrains: all valid verbs that we embrace and amplify. With the Index, our intention is to widen the aperture of action—to honor the diverse ways each of us can show up for the Earth. Echoing the evergreen wisdom of the late Joanna Macy:

Action isn’t a burden to be hoisted up and lugged around on our shoulders. It is something we are. The work we have to do can be seen as a kind of coming alive. More than some moral imperative, it’s an awakening to our true nature, a releasing of our gifts. (Schooling Our Intention, 1993)

I love this idea of action as a kind of coming alive. A way of being—a sharpened awareness, a deepened sensory connection, an active relationship with nature. Seen through this lens, action can be colored by delight, wonder, and awe. And it begins, as always, with attention: choosing to direct our energy to the living world around us.

Read on for a menu of invitations for action and happenings in NY.

Explore the Index

This week’s invitations

Interact: The first global map of fungal networks

🗺️ The Underground Atlas from SPUN

A stunning visualization of what was once invisible beneath our feet. Scientists from the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) used environmental DNA and machine learning to predict where crucial concentrations of fungal biodiversity are found. They discovered hotspots in unexpected places, from the mountains of Ethiopia to the grasslands of Colombia. The trouble is: 90% of global fungal biodiversity is located in unprotected areas. SPUN’s research serves a sweeping effort to conserve these networks, which are critical carbon sinks and symbiotic partners with global plant life.

See related recommendations

Watch: A thermal animation about marine heatwaves

🎥 In Hot Water (2min)

This month, the planet reached a critical tipping point: the widespread bleaching of coral reefs, due to rising ocean temperatures and acidification. The devastating loss has unfolded over decades. This short 2min animation makes the problem vivid and visceral, using innovative thermal imaging. By “painting with heat,” form matches content perfectly. Nomint, a London-based animation studio, employs meticulous craft to visualize the cascading effects of marine heatwaves.

See related recommendations

Support: Adopt a heat-resilient coral

🪸 Coral Gardeners

Coral reefs can feel so far away from our lived experience—but their fate is entwined and interconnected for all of us. One of many ways to participate in the solution to warming reefs is by replanting resilient corals.

Coral Gardeners is a leading force in the movement to restore the coral reefs—and adopting a coral is the best way to support their work. With each adopted coral, the group is able to collect a fragment from a resilient coral species in the wild and place it in one of its nurseries in French Polynesia, Fiji, and Thailand, where it will grow to maturity. After over a year, your coral will then be outplanted onto a degraded reef to help revitalize the ocean ecosystem. — Hana Subrahmanyan

See related recommendations

Explore: Find a James Turrell installation near you

☀️ The Atlas of James Turrell (by me!)

Speaking of atlases. This week, photos were revealed for Turrell’s largest Skyspace yet in Denmark, due to open in 2026. Recently, I struggled to find a global map or database of his public installations. So I decided to create one. Check out this tool to find a Turrell near you wherever you might live or be traveling.

In his Skyscape series, the sun and clouds cycle overhead, unfolding a spectacle of earthly light and color that lulls us into quiet awe. Years ago, I learned that the physiology of awe—the posture that best fosters the emotion—is craning your neck upwards. At something larger than yourself.

See related recommendations

Happenings in New York

Here and now in Brooklyn, the persimmons are ripening. On a walk with Chimeras Collective, we found one introverted tree by the lakeside in Prospect Park. Releasing fruit with each gust of wind—soft, sweet, smushed, radiantly orange. In synchronous step with the sugar maples, themselves turning shades of vivid persimmon.

For friends in New York, we curate a calendar of earthly events in the city. The plan is to support more places soon. Check out highlights below or view the full calendar.

• Corpse flower is blooming at NYBG on Friday 10/31 (link)

• Three Sisters Harvest at BBG on Saturday, 11/1 at 10:30am (link)

• Fall Forest Weekend at NYBG on Saturday and Sunday from 11am-4pm (link)

• Friends of the Farm Community Market at Farm.One on Sunday, 11/2 from 12pm to 5pm (link)

• Fall Climate Walk: The High Line to Little Island on Sunday 11/2 at 12pm (link)

• Billion Oyster Project: Oyster Tasting at Barlume on Monday 11/3 at 6pm (link)

• Wine as Experience at Index Greenpoint on Wednesday 11/5 at 7pm (link)

Appreciate you — back soon.

Michael & the Index team

Subscribe now

Here and now in Brooklyn, I’m attuned to the fading glow of the goldenrod in Prospect Park. On late summer walks, its saffron yellow blooms blanketed the trails—it was the main botanical character. Now, the goldenrod slowly withers and disperses its seeds. The Fall is a time of release, of sharing that which you worked all summer to create.

Read on for platform updates, invitations for action, and upcoming events in NY.

Join our early bird community

In the spirit of the season, we are delighted to invite you to explore the evolving world of the Earth Action Index. Inside, you’ll find curated recommendations for earth action and local nature insights for your place. And you’ll join our very first early birds who have generously shared their feedback over the last few months. A huge thank you for your participation. The website and browser extension are still in beta and growing every day. We welcome any thoughts you have to share—your feedback helps shape the future of these tools.

Explore the Index

This week’s invitations

Learn where the birds are migrating this Fall

🔗 Interact with the Bird Migration Explorer

The Fall migration is underway—and if you’ve ever wondered where the birds go—this is your tool. The Bird Migration Explorer from Audubon charts the movement of 450+ species, tracing their routes and revealing the challenges for conservation. It’s a stunning document of the miracle of migration, and a rare “bird’s eye” view of how hawks, thrushes, oystercatchers, pelicans, and more retrace the same pathways year after year. — MGB

See related recommendations

Hear from Jane Goodall and honor her legacy

🗞️ Read in Imagine5 (5m). 🎧 Listen on On Being (50m). 🎥 Watch on Netflix (1hr).

Spotlighting these interviews to remember Jane, who passed away on October 1.

With her trademark grace and clarity, Jane Goodall speaks about the importance of individual action, compassion, and the deep connection between people and the planet: “Even in the middle of the city every breath we breathe is from the natural world.” Her words carry the weight of decades of experience and offer a hopeful, grounded vision for the future. — Ellie Drenth

See related recommendations

Help activate environmental voters this election

📞 Find phonebanking slots with Environmental Voter Project

Ahead of November elections, the Environmental Voter Project is making a GOTV push across the country. As Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson reminds us: “The environmental movement has a voter turnout problem: 8 million environmental voters did not vote in the 2020 election.” This is the problem EVP exists to solve—they identify inactive environmentalists and turn them into consistent voters. It’s a year-round effort, with phonebanking and canvassing opportunities in local, state, and federal elections. — MGB

See related recommendations

Upcoming events in New York

For friends in New York, we curate a calendar of earthly events in the city. The plan is to support more places soon. Check out upcoming highlights below or view the full calendar.

• Oko Farms Benefit Concert pres. by Aerthship x Public Records on October 21 at 7pm (link)

• Manhattan Climate Changemakers Hour of Action on October 21 at 6pm (link)

• Pioneer Works: Expansion of the Universe on October 23 at 7pm (link)

• Usal Upstate Mushroom ID Walk on October 25 at 11:30am (link)

• Fall Harvest Festival at Brooklyn Botanical Garden on October 25 at 11am (link)

Appreciate you — back soon.

Michael & the Index team

Subscribe now

Thank you for being on this journey with us. This Summer we have been working diligently—outdoors, as much as possible—to bring the Earth Action Index to life.

The digital garden is growing: full of stories of solutions, ideas for a better future, and tools to take action. New entries are planted every day.

In July, we welcomed a global community of volunteer editors who are contributing entries and offering personal recommendations for earth action. The Editorial Fellows joined from all over the world: from Melbourne to Miami, New Orleans to Santiago. It’s a wonderful group—thank you to the fellows for their participation.

Join the early access community

In the next month, we are inviting a small group to explore the Index platform and browser extension and offer feedback. Here’s what’s involved:

• Get early access to the prototypes

• Schedule a meeting with our team for 30 minutes to share live feedback (bugs you encounter; notes about how the Index could be more useful for you)

• Receive more regular emails with updates to the platform as it evolves

If that all sounds good to you, fill out the 1min form below and we’ll be in touch:

Sign up to get early access

Recommendations from our editors

While we have you—here is a menu of timely entires from our editors.

Attend: Sun Day: Join the global day of action on September 21st

Harnessing the energy of the original Earth Day, the writer Bill McKibben is leading the charge for Sun Day on September 21st, 2025. Find the Sun Day event in your city to celebrate the power of solar energy and stand up to fossil fuel billionaires.

Read: Is A River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane

In a word: “Yes.” It could have been a one-page book. With shimmering prose and gripping adventure stories, Robert Macfarlane makes his case for rivers as living beings—deserving protection in law and recognition in our imagination. “There are few things as powerful as an idea whose time has come.”

Advocate: Stop Trump and EPA from dismantling climate protections (Evergreen Action)

We have until September 15 to flood EPA with the voices of the people to save the endangerment finding. Submit a comment today reminding Lee Zeldin to do his job and uphold EPA's mandate to protect us from climate pollution.

Interact: The Welikia Project: Explore the native ecology of New York City

Travel back to the year 1609 in this interactive mapping tool and visual time machine from the New York Botanical Garden: the culmination of 30 years of work by Eric Sanderson. Type in any address in the five boroughs and learn about the native flora and fauna that defined that area, before New York was transformed into a concrete jungle.

Watch: Ocean with David Attenborough and Sign: End Destructive Fishing in Protected Waters

At 99, David Attenborough now understands that the most important ecosystem on Earth is not on land—but in the sea. In this stunning, legacy-leaving documentary, David offers a direct plea: to protect marine conservation areas, to stop industrial fishing, and to allow the ocean to recover its vibrant vitality. The included petition is the official campaign tied to the film.

Consider: Can’t put solar panels on your roof? Plug-in ‘balcony solar’ may be for you (Washington Post)

“Balcony solar” is the future of DIY renewable energy. It’s already the present in Germany, where more than 4 million solar panels hang off of apartments. In this column, Michael Coren offers practical advice for getting started with these portable units, for renters and households that can’t install rooftop panels.

More soon

Wishing you a great rest of the summer. We can’t wait to share the Index with you.

Sign up to get early access

— Michael & the Earth Action Index team

This week marks a milestone for the Earth Action Index: the conclusion of three months of learning at the Climatebase Fellowship and creating our first working prototypes.

This Spring, the seed of the Index idea has bloomed quickly—in unexpected ways. We built tools that transform any climate story into an interactive experience.

One prototype tool is a browser extension. You can activate it on any story or website related to climate or ecology. The Index understands the content of the site and intelligently offers connected actions from our curated database. Every story becomes a trailhead: a starting point that leads to branching pathways to participate.

Today, sharing the story of how we got there—and a preview of where we are going. Thank you to the collaborators, advisors, and friends who have contributed so far. We made more progress this season than I could have imagined:

1. Surveying the solutions landscape with Climatebase.

2. Refining a focused mission for the project.

3. Building prototype tools that bridge story and action.

4. Next: Growing the Index and inviting user testing & feedback.

Share

1. Surveying the solutions landscape with Climatebase.

The Climatebase Fellowship was a tour of the topography of the climate movement: the peaks of success stories, the valleys of persistent challenges, and the solutions still on the horizon.

Exploring biochar and mangrove forests, regenerative agriculture and heat pumps, it became clear that climate solutions only scale for their co-benefits: the reduction in cost of living, the restoration of biodiversity, the promise of healthier and safer communities. As Buckminster Fuller wrote:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Across the movement, people are proving that their solutions are simply better (and sometimes cheaper) than the incumbent alternatives. We met a community of individuals who are approaching solutions from every angle imaginable, and filled the Index database with our learnings. A group of fellows from Climatebase joined our team as contributing editors, tasked with researching relevant stories & actions.

Highlights included guest speakers like Jonathan Foley (CEO of Project Drawdown) and Jigar Shah (fmr. Director of Loans Program Office at the Department of Energy). The best sessions were hosted by imaginative pragmatists: people who are steadfastly implementing solutions and insisting that a better future is within reach.

2. Refining a focused mission for the project.

In March, the pitch deck for the Index was 45 slides. In June, it is only 5. Building something is a challenge of reduction, not addition: whittling ideas to their fundamental function.

At Climatebase, the entrepreneurship refrain was: “Get obsessed with a problem, not attached to a solution.” I have been occupied with the same problem for 10 years. Our conventional media does not offer meaningful pathways to interact with stories—or to affect the outcome. Disempowerment is dominant. We can’t help but feel helpless.

The story of the planetary crisis is not one to be passively consumed, scrolled past, or skimmed by. Overwhelmingly, people want to be a part of the solution. 62% of Americans say they feel a personal sense of responsibility to help reduce global warming (Yale 2024). It’s not the job of journalists to connect stories with actions that individuals can take and collective efforts they can join—but it is ours.

The Index bridges the gap: when we finish reading the news or watching a film and think “What can I do?,” the tool instantly offers you invitations. It is this moment of emotion when we need a menu of options to channel our energy into deeper attention and collective action.

3. Building prototype tools to connect story and action.

I read a fascinating longform New Yorker story about the potential of geothermal energy. Now what? How is this enormous effort relevant to me as an individual? What are the branching pathways of attention and action that emerge from this trailhead?

We have created two working tools to help answer this question. The first is a Chrome extension (the Index “to go”) and the second is a web platform (the Index “to stay”).

Extension: A flexible tool that you can activate on any piece of climate or ecology media you find online. With the click of a button, the Index understands the content of the site and then searches our curated database for the most relevant actions: a community to join, an active petition to sign, a book to go deeper, a film to understand it visually. Our editors research and map these “constellations” of actions, populating the database and improving the tool as an intelligent companion for reading the news.

Platform: A digital “bookstore” full of stories of solutions, tools to take action, and ideas for a better future. Wander through the sections of the Index to discover entries that inspire and invite action. Every entry is a node in an interconnected network: opening a story about fire-proof architecture or a book about the new science of plant intelligence leads to a rabbit hole of connected entries. The extension pulls from the stories, tools, and actions that live persistently on the platform.

Now we are preparing to share these tools for testing by this community soon.

4. Next: Growing the Index and inviting user testing & feedback.

The quality of our tools hinges on the quality of our curation. In this next phase, we are growing our team of contributing editors who bring their expertise and curiosity to the project. The critical thinking of curating stories & actions is not a LLM-able task: it’s something that requires combinatorial creativity, rigorous research, and trust.

If you or anyone you know might be interested in joining us as a contributing editor (lightweight part-time engagement), please reply here.

This Summer, we are refining on our prototypes with an eye towards inviting the feedback of initial user testers in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for updates here.

Thank you for your attention and support so far. We’re just getting started.

Share

In 1967, there was only one color image of the whole Earth. A lone blue island shimmering in the silent black sea of space. By 1968, there were two photographs. The satellite photo ATS-3 (1967) and astronaut Bill Anders’ Earthrise (1968) captured collective imagination and helped galvanize 20 million Americans to advocate for environmental action on the inaugural Earth Day in 1970.

Images of the whole Earth, once shining with singular aura, have since been dimmed by infinite reproduction. The wonder has waned. The whole Earth—in its beautiful complexity and indivisible oneness—has been flattened into a stock image, an emoji, a default iPhone wallpaper. Scrolled past, drowned out, taken for granted.

Our moment of climate crisis calls for a renewal of awe and a reinvigoration of wonder. We yearn for a fresh impression of the “overview effect”: the emotional impact of perceiving our shared existence on this fragile Earth from outer space. Here are two choice testimonies from astronauts Roy Garan and Edgar Mitchell. “I felt deeply interconnected and interdependent with everyone and everything,” says Garan. “You develop an instant global consciousness... an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it,” reports Mitchell. For more overview expressions, explore Emergence Magazine’s immersive story and film about the Apollo 8 astronauts.

Captured in those first images, the overview perspective lit a cultural spark—and people have been trying to keep it burning for 55 years. The Whole Earth Catalog also emerged from that moment, offering a manual for planetary thinking that continues to shape how I approach this work. Recently, people have tried to approximate the overview effect through viral Instagram accounts, Will Smith-narrated Netflix shows and Felix & Paul’s virtual reality experiences that all chase the verisimilitude of the real thing. One of my favorite photography books, Earth from Above by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, is due for a 25th anniversary edition this year. All are worthwhile. I can’t say the same for commercial space flight, which now offers “the real experience” to a precious few billionaires and their chosen pop stars, at unnecessary cost.

The catalytic cultural moment of ATS-3 (1967) and Earthrise (1968) may never be rivaled. Those first images stunned because they appeared from nothing—filling film negatives with light no human had ever seen. We have since lost this collective beginner’s mind, numbed to the view of Earth from above, as common as zooming out on Apple Maps. When images are omnipresent, imagination is overlooked. How can we restore expansive wonder in an age of instant answers? Will it take discovering life on another planet, like last week’s findings from the planet K2-18b, to awaken our awe?

A constellation of writers, artists, scientists, and experience designers are refreshing the overview effect for 2025—not through a single, stunning image, but through a sustained surge of cultural energy. Today, the overview effect finds us not through passive consumption, but through active practice. It’s a way of seeing the Earth that sharpens with attention, repetition, and imagination. Opportunities to feel this kind of awe are all around us, as Dacher Keltner explores in his book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder (more in my 2023 essay on awe and practice).

The daily practice of overview is at the core of the Earth Action Index project. It’s as much about exercising imagination and chasing wonder as it is about attending events and signing petitions. On this Earth Day, I’m sharing a brief menu of links that inspire overview thinking and invite earth action; each one worthy of a gesture of attention.

Read

Watch

Subscribe

Interact

Support

There are so many impactful organizations to consider supporting. No right answer and no pressure. Today’s recommendation is associated with the first Earth Day.

Participate

Appreciate your attention! Please leave a comment if you have insights or resources to share about the overview effect and Earth Day actions. More soon.

Subscribe now

Tuning into the climate discourse, the loudest voices are a chorus of experts and entrepreneurs, scientists and activists. As it should be. The space is crowded—with a high PhD-per-capita—and enough armchair experts to fill many stadiums. It’s intimidating, and it can imply that expertise is a prerequisite for participation. But I always remind myself of the value of being a beginner: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few” (Shunryu Suzuki).

I brought the beginner’s mind to Mobility & Transportation—the theme of last week’s Climatebase Fellowship. The multiplicity of means to move people and goods around the world account for 23% of global carbon emissions. We explored solutions ranging from hyperlocal urban planning and individual purchase decisions to speculative technologies and continent-wide infrastructure projects. Here’s a rough map of the solutions landscape that’s been on my mind this week:

• Low Emission Zones: Urban policy that restricts polluting cars from certain areas (see: NYC congestion pricing).

• 15 Minute Cities: Cities designed so that everything you need is within a 15-minute walk.

• Electric Mobility: Of course, battery-powered cars, bikes, trains, and eventually: planes. Two weeks ago, BYD unveiled a car battery that charges in 5 minutes. Meanwhile, I visited a Rivian charging station outside Joshua Tree: a luxury lounge with aesthetic tchotchkes to pass the time of their slower 25min charge.

• Bike and EV Infrastructure: Bike lanes and bike sharing systems, plus electric vehicle charging stations. Twice last week, I listened to Laura Fox from Streetlife Ventures who stood up the Citi Bike business and grew it to serve 1.5M riders. I also heard a pitch from the founder of it’s electric, who is building curbside EV chargers in cities.

• Efficient Aviation: The most promising solution today is Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF), which remains too expensive and needs to be scaled rapidly. One of the most interesting companies I found is AIRCO, who once created vodka and perfume from captured CO2 and now uses a similar method to make SAF.

• High Speed Rail: All public transit is preferable, but high-speed rail (186mph+) is coveted as an efficient alternative to short-haul aviation. Last month, France unveiled yet another beautiful high-speed rail car: the TGV Inoui.

All of these solutions (and more) will be necessary. This is a full-court, all-angles approach. Thinking about transportation, I gathered a collection of links that excite me about the many possibilities ahead. What follows is a menu of offerings to choose from, go deeper, and take action.

Watch

Read

Imagine

Advocate

Support

Appreciate your attention! Please leave a comment if you have insights or resources to share about the future of mobility—and how we can co-create it together. More soon!

Subscribe now

Abundance has arrived: just in time to fill the vacuum of vision among American liberals. In a moment when there are too few positive projections of the future, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have the courage and conviction to present one. The authors were compelled by the urgency of the climate crisis—and their book explores bold strategies to solve its most elusive challenges.

A vivid vignette of 2050 opens the introduction, featuring an ensemble cast of advanced technologies. Solar and wind combine with nuclear and geothermal energy to power homes at no cost. Vertical farms and cultivated meat factories create copious food and leave agricultural land to rewild. Desalination plants make salt water drinkable. Automated factories in low orbit produce miracle medicines, delivered to your house via drone. In this future, there is no crisis of climate nor affordability—Americans have more than enough housing, energy, transportation, innovation, and healthcare. This is the world that Klein and Thompson are working towards.

Rarely do we encounter this kind of imagination among the factuality of news and presentism of politics. Worldbuilding is a technique usually reserved for filmmakers, game designers, and speculative writers. Alex McDowell, production designer of Minority Report and director of the World Building Institute at USC, defines its promise: “Imagining or portraying something that doesn’t yet exist in the world is a way to enable it to exist.” In McDowell’s practice, the goal is to create future reality—not science fiction. He approaches worldbuilding by surveying the nascent technologies of the present, and imagining how those seeds might sprout in the future. At their best, richly detailed stories can have a feedback loop to reality:

“If we were able to tell a convincing story that would immerse an audience in a completely different kind of outcome, then we could thread that back into the present; we could discover the steps we would have to take to push toward that direction.” — Alex McDowell (Future of StoryTelling film)

In their more-than-enough manifesto for the future, Klein and Thompson apply the work of worldbuilding to the practice of politics. What Abundance does—that no science fiction storyteller would ever dare—is propose a policy pathway to build the world they imagine. The authors believe that only government can create the conditions for this abundant future to exist. Political participation is paramount. In this piece, I’ll briefly explore four dimensions of the book and what room it leaves for us to co-create the world they envision.

Share

1. We need a liberalism that builds: strive for outcomes and remove bottlenecks.

The thesis of Abundance is simple: “To have the future we want, we need to build more of what we need.” So what’s standing in the way? Most of the book investigates the long history of government regulation and burdensome bureaucracy that have stymied progress—in blue states, especially.

The problem we faced in the 1970s was that we were building too much and too heedlessly. The problem we face in the 2020s is that we are building too little and we are too often paralyzed by process.

The liberalism that once built highways, cities, and space programs has been replaced by a liberalism that disassembles, delays, and second-guesses (see: California High Speed Rail). Klein and Thompson position Abundance as a new bipartisan political order, one that reorients politics toward shared outcomes and a fundamental question: “Can we solve our problems with supply?”

2. Clean energy abundance is the prerequisite for all societal progress.

The book left me with a core conviction that clean energy is not a separate sector or environmental agenda item; our means to meet the climate crisis are the same efforts that will energize the economy, improve human health, and increase innovation. This is a critical reframe:

It is an all-purpose national affordability policy and an innovation policy. Simply put, energy abundance might be the single most important technological bottleneck of our time.

The world installed more solar power in 2023 than it did between 1954 and 2017—yet we are still nowhere close to meeting baseload demand. Achieving even a middle-road climate scenario would require building “two 400 MW solar facilities every week for the next 30 years.” This is the work of rebuilding our world.

3. It’s time for a new era of environmentalism, shifting priorities from conservation and regulation to implementation.

Klein and Thompson offer a sobering rebuttal to cautious NIMBYs and degrowth liberals: “Either we build faster or we accept catastrophe. There is no third option.” While the doctrines of conservation and regulation remain relevant, this era requires a new priority. Let’s call it implementation—a favorite word of the authors and Ayana Elizabeth Johnson alike—where progress is measured by what gets built rather than what gets blocked. The task of implementation is shared among the public and private sector, and extends to individuals too:

“In the next few years consumers will need to replace about one billion machines with clean alternatives…. Electric cars accelerate faster and run quieter than cars powered by combustion engines. Induction stoves boil water in a fraction of the time it takes those little licks of fire. These advantages are not universally known—and because new technologies are more expensive than mature ones—subsidies need to be generous, and advertising needs to be everywhere.”

Electrifying our homes with heat pumps, induction stoves, community solar and more—in other words, decarbonizing your life—is an key part of co-creating an abundant future. Here is a great resource from Rewiring America:

4. Government is essential to scale solutions and invent technology, but only if we renew our institutions.

Klein and Thompson offer a refreshing (read: surprising) level of confidence in government’s ability to solve big problems and take risks. For all of the their criticism of government regulation and liberal proceduralism, the authors extoll the virtues of “state capacity” at its best: Operation Warp Speed scaling a nascent mRNA COVID vaccine in ten months; DARPA inventing the internet, the personal computer, GPS, and more; Josh Shapiro’s I-95 rebuild taking twelve days instead of five months.

Government is capable of addressing the climate catastrophe and affordability crisis, if we embrace the project of renewing our institutions—instead of tearing them down.

Now the government has taken on the task of decarbonization and the responsibility of coordinating a once-in-a-century transformation of America's built landscape. But it is doing so with laws and agencies and habits that are better designed to block green construction than to allow it.

It’s unclear which politicians will rise to take the Abundance mission statement and transform it into a policy agenda and a cohesive political message. On the energy front, look to local leaders. As climate scientist Zeke Haufather told the New York Times: “Energy is actually, in many ways, much more of a state issue… A lot of what gets built and when it gets built is up to state governments and local public utility commissions.” Look out for leaders who speak of an abundant future—maybe they will have the courage to build it.

Appreciate your attention! This is only a glimpse into Abundance—much more to be said—I suggest finding the authors on one of your favorite podcasts. Keeping tabs on this ongoing conversation and will share more entry points for action as they arise.

More soon,

Michael

Subscribe now

Today is the first day of Spring. In the spirit of this season of new beginnings, I’m excited to introduce the Earth Action Index.

In one sentence: I’m building a new platform to curate stories, amplify climate solutions, and connect individuals with actions they can take. With this Substack, I’ll keep you updated on how the project evolves and share curated collections of links.

Read on to learn about the project, the purpose of this newsletter, and key influences on the Index.

How did I get here?

I live by a simple mantra: follow your curiosity. In recent years, my life has been animated by awe for the living Earth. Nature is an infinite canvas for curiosity. It energized my photography practice, inspired my writing, and enriched my everyday life.

As this curiosity has grown, so too has my concern about the climate crisis. The problems are palpable. Doom is dominant. And then, at an autumn event at Pioneer Works, I heard a simple statement said with such confidence that it flipped a switch in my mind: “We have all the solutions we need,” says Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. “We need everybody to find their role in implementation.”

I have since been transformed by curiosity about climate solutions. This force has fueled a multi-month curatorial project, amassing an archive of more than 2,000 links—stories, books, artworks, communities, organizations, products, and more that are inspiring or inviting of “earth action.” This month, I joined the Climatebase Fellowship to accelerate my education of the challenges we face and the constellation of solutions. A better future is possible and within our reach.

Now I am committed to expanding that archive and creating a platform to explore its contents: the Earth Action Index. It’s the beginning of a winding journey, and with this newsletter, I’m inviting you along with me.

Share Earth Action Index

What is the Earth Action Index?

The Index will be one resource (among many) to explore the question: What can I do to help with climate solutions? The idea emerged from a few observations:

• We have all the solutions we need to address the climate crisis—and millions of people are working to implement, scale, and share them.

• Stories of progress and visions of the future are pervasive—but are scattered in siloed sources and drowned out by doom and gloom.

• Solutions journalism can be effective at inspiring action—but storytellers rarely suggest what individuals can do to participate.

• There is a cultural renaissance to reimagine our relationship with the living Earth—and many people are more motivated than ever to take action. Where can they start?

My goal is to build an editorial platform that connects the dots—curating stories, amplifying solutions, and guiding people toward meaningful action. It will be a digital space to explore interconnected content and discover personalized ways to contribute to climate solutions.

Subscribe now

What is this newsletter?

Before we launch the platform, I'll use this newsletter to share project updates, reflect on new learnings, and share curated collections of links—offering a glimpse of the content the Index will eventually host. Your feedback will shape the project as it evolves—thank you to the many friends and mentors who have already advised on the project. Please reach out if you’d like to discuss.

As a writer and photographer, I’ve often hesitated to share unpolished work. With the Index, I’m leaving that behind and building “in public.” You’ll see the content morph, the design evolve, the team grow, and the platform pivot. The name might even change! I’m embracing the journey—and inviting your participation along the way.

Leave a comment

Influences & Inspiration

There have been many references that have inspired me—here is a sampling of a few key influences on the project.

How can you support the Index?

If you are excited about this project, please do share the newsletter and the links inside with friends or colleagues.

Katherine Hayhoe, the Chief Scientist at the Nature Conservancy, says the most effective personal action to catalyze change is to: “Start a conversation about why climate change matters and what people can do about it.”

Appreciate you—more soon!

Share Earth Action Index