Full transcript between Bill Weir and our Authors on Climate Words host and Climate Books coordinator, Rebecca Gerny. This conversation was recorded on April 17, 2024.

Rebecca: So hello and welcome to Authors on Climate Words. I'm joined today by Bill Weir, the veteran news anchor, writer, producer and host of The Wonder List and author of the new book, Life (As We Know It Can Be): Stories of People, Climate and Hope in a Changing World. Thank you so much for joining me, Bill.

Bill: Oh, thank you for having me. It's so great to talk to you.

Rebecca: Yeah, so first I'd just like to start by asking you to introduce yourself in your own words. How did you come to be doing the work you're doing and what draws you to this specific work?

Bill: Of course, Rebecca. Yeah, so I have a very non-traditional, circuitous career. I was a transient kid moving up. My folks split up and my mom was a very sort of zealous evangelical who decided that her dreams were directions. And so God wanted us to leave my hometown in Milwaukee and start moving around the Bible Belt when I was a kid. So I went to 17 different schools in six states growing up and then would spend my summers with my atheist, wilderness-loving dad in the mountains of Colorado. And it created this really interesting worldview and turned out to be great training for a job in journalism.

I started out covering sports because it was sort of creatively liberating and I could have a schtick. I started in a tiny little market in Minnesota, then worked up through Green Bay, Chicago, LA, covered the amazing Michael Jordan years and saw some amazing things, but then just got bored with it. And when 9-11 happened, I quit. I just said, I don't want to do local sports anymore. I spent a year as sort of a Hollywood cliche. I was in LA at the time. My friends were writers and actors and I fell in love with the scripted world and tried to make a go of it and because I'd been on the air in LA, I was able to get meetings and sell some projects. And I really immersed myself and that was a year that I really immersed myself. I'd always loved writing, but in the art of storytelling, in the craft of screenwriting, in the math of, why, you know, Dune or Star Wars or the Odyssey or a great joke, what makes those things work, you know?

After about a year of sort of doing this and realizing nothing was going to get made, I got an amazing offer to live out my other fantasy, which was to become a network news anchor and correspondent. And I didn't think I had a path to that because I was this smart ass sports guy. But this person at ABC News took a shine to me and I started and I spent 10 years there, first at Good Morning America, I anchored on the weekends and along that journey and then went to Nightline.

And that experience was the first time I really got to explore internationally. Diane Sawyer was the anchor and she liked my writing and said, “why don't you go explain China? Some interesting things happening in China.” You know, this is like 2005 when people thought of it as this communist, Maoist place. And Disneyland was just about to open there.

And so that blew my mind. I thought that's what I want to do. I want to just go around the world and try to connect and understand the similarities, the differences. And then I moved over to CNN where I got a show called The Wonder List and I got to do just that. I pitched it as I realized my 11 year old daughter was going to turn my age in the year 2050. And so I wonder how many elephants will be left in Botswana? You know, how many tigers in India? How many glaciers in the Alps? Will Venice still be above water? And that became the wonder list. And we shot that in 30 countries around the world. And I got to really experience the best of human nature, these blue zones of longevity or pockets of happiness from Bhutan to Vanuatu to Greece.

And then in about 2016, after that election, it changed the landscape at CNN and TV and those series weren't doing as well. And it was much more about breaking news. And that's when they created a climate desk at CNN. We were the first network to really start calling it a climate crisis. So the language around it.

For context, I suppose I should back up and say that in my ABC years, early on, my very first story I got sent on, probably in 2003 or something, was to do a story up in Boston on sea level projections and some kind of crude animation that Harvard or MIT had done. And at the time, the conversation was still in a place where you had to balance out reports like this and find somebody who thought it was nonsense and put them in the piece, you know? And I put in this guy who made a joke about, “hey, I gave up using hairspray, what do you want from me?” You know, conflating like the ozone layer with global warming and just, I cringe when I think about that story. But I hadn't learned enough, we weren't talking about it in the right ways in newsrooms, certainly at that point.

But by 2006 or 2007, Al Gore was, you know, the Inconvenient Truth was in the public consciousness and IPCC reports, they won the Nobel Prize. And we actually did a two hour prime time special on Earth Day. And I was live on the Great Barrier Reef underwater. We had a reporter on every continent and Diane Sawyer turns off the light in Times Square. And I thought we had sort of turned a corner in the conversation and how we talk about it.

But then the Obama administration kind of went all in on health care and the great recession, the economy crashed, and what was sort of delicate bipartisan support around climate just evaporated and hasn't gone back.

And so 2016, 2017, finally a network is saying this is a full-time beat, that this is not a menu item that we talk about to pollsters during election years, “like how do you rate climate?” It's the whole restaurant - everything else, economies, foreign policy, healthcare, shelter, transportation is a climate story in some ways, is built in a place in balance.

And so having resisted being pigeonholed into a beat most of my life, I realized this is the one beat that includes all the others and I am fascinated by it. I love the natural world. I ache at what we've done to parts of it. I know how it can come back. And depending on the day, I get to focus on massive problems or giant moonshot solutions and everything in between, all of the flavors of emotions.

And I do think the words and how we talk about it, it just informs everything. And the studies show that the majority of people who really care about this topic, talk about it with friends and family rarely or never. Nobody wants to be the buzzkill. And so that sets up what I've discovered as pluralistic ignorance. It's a perception that you're outnumbered by people who don't get it or don't care. And the opposite is true. It's two to one. Americans are in favor of strong climate policies. And when you dig down into even wind energy, and would you live within five miles of a solar farm? Across both parties, 70, 80% of people are like, yeah, “bring it, you know?” I want to be part of the indigenous energy of my community. There's nothing more independent.

And, you know, anyway, so I love talking to you. I rattled on too long. I wanna know what you wanna hear, but I do love the idea that the language we choose and how we describe the problem and how we communicate over all of this is so key right now.

Rebecca: Yeah, and you even start in your book by framing that stories and storytelling are going to be the solutions to this crisis. Even how you described the kind of network change or just the general news change that climate wasn't even an issue and now it's on the table, just the way we talk about the issue and the way that it's framed and shared globally really does kind of affect policies and what actual change happens.

But yeah, I kind of wanted to focus first just on your book which came out yesterday, congratulations! It originated, I believe, as a series of letters that you were writing to your newborn son. Can you just maybe share a little bit about the origins of this project? And how it became the book

Bill: Of course. Yes. Well, you know my daughter, I tend to use my kids as sort of human units of measurement, in terms of time, you know? Like my daughter really informed the wonder list. And then she was 16 and I became, after a divorce from her mom and years on the climate beat, my new partner and I, she very much wanted to be a mother but didn't think she could conceive. And miraculously it happened. And so we were delighted. I was delighted to be a father again at 52, especially a son. And my daughter was thrilled to be a big sister.

And so it was such a blessing, but I'm holding this little squirming bundle, and looking out at a world in lockdown. This is April of 2020, height of the pandemic. And then I went on to cover the George Floyd protests and having covered climate, it just felt like we brought this kid into a dystopian film, you know?

And so just as a cathartic record of this crazy stuff that was going on, you know, revolution in the streets, essentially, upheaval politically. I just started writing these letters like, “hey, welcome, welcome to the party, kid. Sorry, we broke the place.” But I'm going to look for hope and I'm going to, you know. It's our job to be first responders and just, I don't know, it was talking to myself, talking to other parents, maybe voicing it to him. And then that got some interest when we published those and turned into the, “like, why don't you make that into a book?” And at first, I was supposed to turn this in a couple of years ago, actually. And the early drafts were so dark. And because I was just in sort of that, I was full time immersed in the fire hose of peer reviewed dread and warnings. When I was a generalist anchor, I was distracted by other things, you know, but this was like, “oh my goodness.” And then you really start to meet sources and develop relationships with scientists. You have a glass of wine with some, a paleoclimatologist who gets very emotional when they talk about what they know and what no one else kind of sees yet. And so it was dark and my editor was like, “where's the hope?”

Then both as a deliberate choice to focus on the helpers and the dreamers and the doers and balance out all the dread with some action, turning anxiety into action. I started to find amazing stories that lifted my spirits, seeing how much was there.

And then a senator from coal country, Joe Manchin, changed his mind at the 11th hour and the Inflation Reduction Act got passed and the Infrastructure Act got passed, which the alternative is nothing happening, right? At a time when we actually need some signal that society gets this. And you can quibble about it and as a journalist at CNN, I have to be sort of ambivalent about the policy. Certain things in it really excite me like the Civilian Climate Corps, the idea that young people can get together and work on landscapes, learn about heat pumps or whatever, because I'm really preaching connection with each other out in the world.

But that law passing uncorked all of this enthusiasm from the people I talk to all the time. And suddenly it was like, wow, this is amazing. And that led to new stories about clean tech entrepreneurs and new sectors exploding. And I got to do special hours about the transformation.

And four years later the book comes out, it's a much more hopeful thing. And I think just authentically, it was not just Pollyanna-ish, “wow, nuclear fusions are just around the corner,” kind of stuff, but the practical tools that are already here, already on the shelf, already available can make things 20, 30, 40% more efficient. And with enough of those buckshot ideas in every surface of our lives, we can make massive change for the better and really fast time, I think.

And, but all of that begins with a better story. And Dr. Martin Luther King, I've been saying, did not say, I have a nightmare. People understood the nightmare. He said, I have a dream and it looks like this. And nobody seems to say, “wow, wouldn't it be cool if the school buses run on sun instead of choking us with diesel fuels at drop off and then we could plug the classroom into this electric school bus. And it's a battery source after dark.”

I think we lack the capacity for imagination for the worst that can happen on a planet out of balance and surprises like Maui wildfires and hurricane Ian, like, “whoa, this is not what we're used to.” So we lack that capacity, but we also lack the capacity to imagine the best case, communities that can be built.

Rebecca: Yeah, and I really appreciated that balance throughout your book. And I think probably because it started as these letters to your son and your son and then later your daughter are kind of who you're speaking to throughout, like the language that you choose. And also because you are a communicator, you really manage to boil things down in a really helpful and understandable way. And I'm wondering if there was any opportunity or a place where you were thinking about your audience or who would be reading your book and what was the kind of process of deciding that language and how you would communicate on these topics?

Bill:I think it really just comes from, you know, the Malcolm Gladwell sort of 10,000 hour rule of just reps of trying things out and trying to tell this story. I take it as a serious sort of responsibility as a storyteller that if I can't make the biggest issue humanity has ever dealt with compelling for a TV audience in three minutes or something, well, I need to be a better storyteller, like I got to figure out. So I'm constantly trying to look at these stories and how this is going to connect the dots with folks. When most of the general public, even when there's wildfire you know, New York to Seattle, and you can see it and taste it. People don't directly connect the dots between that phenomenon, that disaster, and the air we can't see, the carbon dioxide molecules and the methane that's causing it. And so how do I connect those dots? How do I draw somebody in?

The Wonder List was very much about, I wanna remind people about these just wonders of the world that we all agree are so special, but can go away in a blink if we're not careful. And so sort of you bait them with travel porn and then jerk the rug out with the existential threat. But then you turn in the story to the helpers and the doers who know a way to save it and are trying to do something. And take the viewers on that ride. You want understanding. The hippocampus in the brain just fires up when, and that's why the movies, these great movie lines that we can quote, stick with us. It's that moment when realization, understanding, and emotion sort of forge together into something like, wow, okay, Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader's his dad, what? You know, like those are the moments you want as a storyteller. And even in a three minute climate piece, I'm trying to do that.

And you talk to enough folks who just don't get the physics about it or can't think about sea level rises like a bathtub going up when it's not and it's much more complex. Ultimately we're fighting against years of messaging that has demagogued this topic and confused people deliberately. Which is the result of dozens of lawsuits right now from states and municipalities suing big oil companies for basically lying to the public and making it seem like,” oh, this is natural.”

And just calling it global warming at first was confusing. Warming is nice, people like warmth. Calling it the greenhouse effect. Nobody's afraid of a greenhouse. That's where we get our tomatoes and flowers. And some people like to use metaphors like we need to marshal together like World War II, when we nationalized every factory and drafted every young man. But that doesn't work because, in that case, it was easy to do that because the enemy was so obvious. They had, they dressed in scary uniforms with jackboots and it's easy to see who we're fighting and get angry and go after them. And it's not really like a space race, because it's 198 countries all trying to do the same thing, enemies and allies, and so we shouldn't be racing each other.

And so I was telling, sort of bemoaning my lack of language on how to describe it to a character in the book and a character I was interviewing up in Maine, a fisherman scientist named Marty Odlin who just wanted to be a fisherman, but also studied robotics and Carnegie Mellon and Earth systems at Columbia, so a really smart fisherman. Came back, he realized that the ecology of the Gulf of Maine had changed so much, it doesn't make sense to be a fisherman anymore. So he started an ocean repair company. And he said, it's a Godzilla. We've created a Godzilla out of too much carbon dioxide, stuff that was in the earth, kind of like the origin story of that monster. We accidentally unlocked this thing. And at first it helped us, doing the heavy lifting. Those fuels built the modern world, but got so big. Now it's killing our fish and ruining our skiing and everything that's fun and free about life on earth. This thing is ruining. We should get mad and go kill that thing.

And that was a light bulb moment for me to make it about that. That's the challenge. And everyday thinking, are you making Godzilla bigger? Are you chopping them up and putting them back underground where he belongs? And you know, what's your idea to kill and chop up Godzilla? Is it direct air capture? Is it, in Marty's case, he was using kelp rafts to pull down carbon and hopefully bury them at the bottom of the ocean. And the whole carbon removal industry will be a trillion dollar industry in my kid's lifetime, but nobody today is even talking about it.

I do think that the powers that be, the folks in the C-suites of the big corporations that are fighting any sort of meaningful energy transition, they like it that we're muddy about the language around this topic and that it's not just crystal clear the way it would be if it was against Hitler or it was about beating the Russians to the moon. Like, that's an obvious thing.

Anyway, that's stuff I wrestle with all the time and want to be able to have people thinking about it in terms that it's not a prescriptive, weird conversation about starving polar bears. But it's an ever present thing now that we're living, that we all have to live with, process through, race for, but also hope around and sometimes laugh at. All of the emotions that we have for life apply here and we'll cycle through all those stages in different ways.

And that also was something I went for in the book. I wasn't just trying to gather practical tips like how to build a more efficient home that's safer, that doesn't burn down and where to live and how to think of that. But I also was trying to gather tips from the giants of psychology and tap into both Abraham Maslow's theories of human motivation, like what do we need and what do we want? And Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who basically invented hospice care and gave us the five stages of grief. And that helped me sort of frame these ideas in another way. You throw out a bunch of different conversation starters, I hope, that's my hope.

Rebecca: Yeah, totally. And I was curious. I'm glad you mentioned the carbon Godzilla, because I think that as a reader looking for words, I thought that that was a really interesting framing and again, kind of coming from this perspective of speaking to your son or talking to children, kind of making this something that's understandable. And as you said, not something that's warm and fuzzy, but a true fight.

I appreciated that word and I think that sometimes even in climate words we're focused on very practical words and kind of like very literal situations and having metaphors for things, even related to the media or these, not humorous, but relatable examples are really helpful.

And I also did wanna ask you about Maslow's hierarchy of needs and how that kind of became the framing for your book. And when did you kind of realize that that was the path you wanted to take or the framing that you needed in the book? And why is it important to think about those needs when we're thinking about the climate crisis?

Bill: Well, I was trying to back way out, like open my aperture all the way when I started this. Both as a letter to my kid about how to live, how to survive in this world. A letter of apology for it. Like, here's how we let it get this way. Here's the thinking. Here's some examples from history of sinners and saints that I think we can learn from.

But also, when you think about your personal responsibility in this space, like, what do I drive? You know, can I fly? What kind of food should I eat? All of those things, what I think is a morally responsible thing to do and just say is “what are the choices I'm making here and are they the best for me?”

And I started thinking about, you know, systems change. We can't fix climate change without sort of a culture change about how we consume. And why do we consume the way we do? Well, it's because, as Yvonne Chouinard, the CEO and founder of Patagonia, would say. He became an iconoclast because he's such an environmentalist while having a clothing company mess. He would say to his customers, look, “when you're buying my puffy vest, are you buying it because you're cold or because you're bored? Or because you're lonely, because you think somebody at school will notice you?”

And when you start thinking about it, and that wants and needs, you can't help but come across Abraham Maslow, who was this OG of psychology, who basically invented a third rail in psychology. At the time, it was the Freudians who just thought everything is the unresolved issues from childhood that play out for the rest of our lives. And then there are the behaviorists who theorize we're sort of like rats in the maze, where we get punished with shocks in life or rewarded with treats. And Maslow came up with humanism, which is, year we're both. We're all of the above, we're messy. But mostly we're like scaffolding, pieces of scaffolding. We’re people, we're social animals and we can be built together into amazing communities or we can be built into weaponized and tearing each other apart.

He came from this horrible background. As a kid in Brooklyn, his mother was just an awful human the way he described her. And then there were anti-Semitic gangs in his neighborhood. So he had hid out in the library and just became obsessed with human motivation and wrote a theory of it in 1939, which sort of exploded in the world of psychology and made him famous. And then it became known as the pyramid of needs. And if you imagine a triangle or a pyramid with five layers, he's like, this is what everybody has to cycle through.

We have to meet these needs. At the bottom is what keeps us alive. It's air and water and a certain temperature and sleep. And if you don't meet those needs, nothing matters. Level two is your safety needs. It's shelter and it's an economy and its rule of law. It's the stuff that breaks down when I'm covering a hurricane somewhere. It's where governments are sort of built around and religions are built around your safety needs if you do these things.

And then once your belly's full and the door is barred, you wanna belong. So level three is love to partners or tribes. Level four is esteem needs. You wanna feel valued and special and important to your tribe. And then at the very top of the pyramid, at the time he called it self-actualization. Like whatever you're meant to be, you should be. And a lot of people use that as a license to go to Woodstock or to go into the corporate world and follow your bliss for profit motives.

And his pyramid of needs was manipulated. He was really used by marketers, admin, which buttons to push. No longer am I just selling you a car to meet your safety needs or get you back and forth to work. I'm gonna meet your love needs and your esteem needs because your neighbors are gonna, ya know.

And looking back at how in my life, my pyramid of needs, because of the stories I was told about, through advertising and growing up as a kid, latchkey kid, TV generation. My worth was determined by my consumption. Like what am I driving? What am I wearing to the mall? And so that really helped inform me.

And so I basically used his pyramid as the structure and did chapters on air and water and shelter and food and then get up to the love and esteem needs where I started addressing it to my daughter Olivia who's now 20 years old and is in a different place in her life where those issues matter much more than a little boy.

Again it just helped me look at things like just shelter, I always took for granted. I worked in construction you know and never questioned why we build homes with skinny little walls and giant furnaces and air conditioners when it should be the other way around. And that's just a story that a culture just would tell itself. You know how trends take off and behaviors change? I was raised never ever to get in a stranger's car. Now I use my phone to call a stranger to come pick me up in his car every day. The story changed. And those big narratives vary by region or country.

But the more we tell these positive stories where suddenly your love and esteem needs are fulfilled by being the right kind of consumer. If you're a conspicuous consumer with your passive house and your solar panels. “Wow that guy's cool” as a result of that, not some sort of hippie nerd. Then once that story changes around social license and how we fill our love and esteem needs, we can make healthier choices in the end, right? Just encourage people to do those on their own. Because people seem to be very opposed to any sort of legislation to forge these things. But in light of that, why not tell a better story?

Rebecca: Yeah, and I appreciated how you do take this really kind of age old method that yeah, we all learn in psychology class when you were young and kind of reclaim it or use it to really frame, that both the ills of the climate crisis, what we're going through and what's going to really challenge us and then how to address those. And you bring up so many different people working on different solutions around the world which adds to that layer of hope, which I really appreciated.

And yeah, just all of the ways that just those simple words like air and water and shelter can really help us talk about the climate crisis in a particular way. And I guess I'm curious, are there any other words throughout your career or time that you've been working tangentially to the climate crisis and then directly in it that you found are particularly persuasive or just help have really helpful conversations?

Bill: Yeah, it's a good question. I think that again it's more a sense of avoiding those third rail, obviously polarizing words. A good example is, a couple years ago, I went down to this community at the very southern tip of Louisiana, Ille de Jean Charles, which was mostly a Native American community there. And because of subsidence, the ground is sinking because there's no sediment coming down the Mississippi and sea levels are creeping up. They've lost 95% of their land. They were once farmers then they were like crabbers and fishermen. And now, and every 10 years, they have to raise their houses. And now their houses are literally on stilts that just are so bizarre to see. And they won a $50 million grant from the federal government to relocate the entire town. They found an old sugar plant farm about 50 miles north inland. And they were going to build homes and a community center.

And I was just going there really to do sort of the psychology around like, how do you do that? And what was so fascinating is most of half the town refused to leave because they saw it as a land grab and or they didn't believe that there was really a dire threat. They were going to stay there until they were underwater, literally. They wanted to be able to just make this new town exclusively members of their tribe which federal anti-discrimination laws prevent. So all these interesting thickets about managed retreat and the complications of it all.

And I was going out with a couple of scientists and we needed a boat. And so he had friends, these two brothers, middle-aged guys, maybe 50s, who had a fish camp out in the bayou. And if you haven't seen it, their definition of a fish camp is like a cabin built in the marsh, out in the swamp. And they've watched the changes come up. And as we're going out there, I realized these two guys were much more entertaining as characters for my TV piece than the scientists. And I realized that they disagreed about climate change. And it was purely their politics. One was Republican, one was a Democrat. Their news consumption habits were completely different. And here's two members of the same family. Same blood, same part of the petro state of Louisiana, very oil and gas dependent. Culturally, that's their heritage. And yet, they completely saw this story differently. And I see that all the time. But they could still connect and relate over the shared concern. They didn't have to agree. They just knew it was happening.

And that's the thing that I find sort of fascinating. I was doing a story about a community on Salisbury Beach, Massachusetts, right up on the New Hampshire border. They've watched their high tide get higher and higher and higher on this pretty little barrier island of summer homes, mostly. And because Massachusetts won't replenish sand on private property, the locals have to go in, the neighbors, buy their own sand. They pooled together $600,000. They brought in 15,000 tons of sand. They thought it would last four or five years. It washed away in a single storm. And now they want the state to help them. But talking to the people on the ground there, the realtor who is very much invested in saving Salisbury Beach for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which, or at least importantly, is emotional. Like your grandkids, like your whole family's memories at this place, you can't imagine it washing away. He refuses to believe in climate change. He's like, “yeah, they've been warning us since the 70s, we're still here,” that kind of mentality. And he's like, “I'm not a climate change guy.”

And his neighbor though is like, “I used to be that, not a climate change guy, but now this is not normal. We've had four storms in the last two years that were off the charts. And at this rate, we're gonna lose this place.” And for him, it's a different conversation. “Of course we can't afford a million dollars a year of sand to save this place.” Whereas the first guy says, “no, this is just a string of bad luck. We absolutely need the sand.” So how do they navigate that space without getting into politics? Ultimately, we're just arguing about what to do about physics. Here comes physics. How do we prepare for it? Can we afford a million dollars worth of sand a year? Because there's a billion dollars of property values behind those dunes.

These are really, really hard, very psychologically charged, loaded conversations that communities are just now starting to have. The five stages of grief, cycling through, you know, the idea of losing a place like Salisbury Beach, it's hard. And because the other ironic piece of that is if not for the gentleman who denies the science, if not for him, he was the organizer that brought in the 15,000 tons of stand. It'll be people like that that help communities hold on and sort of fight and adapt. And you need those people as allies. If he was a fatalist who thought they were doomed, maybe he wouldn't have done that. And it would have taken out a couple of houses instead of just their sand piles, you know what I mean?

Rebecca: Yes, yes, so coming together regardless of the language or there are certain things that are kind of polarizing, rather than yeah getting stuck on that, really get into the heart of the issue.

Bill: It's an opening to take whatever agreement you can. If your neighbor doesn't want to believe everything in the IPCC reports and they think it's part of a cycle or whatever. What you can agree on are, these are steps we can take, regardless of the cause. Maybe we should build like this, and maybe we shouldn't rebuild here, and maybe we should... And I guess it's more or less starting conversations around the idea that Maslow, when he wrote the Pyramid of Needs, or that first paper, he acknowledges specifically, this theory is written in a time of peaceful abundance, and emergency conditions are rare at this point. Hitler invaded Poland a couple months after he put out the paper, and so that sort of changed that sense of things.

But when emergency conditions are no longer rare, when it comes to air and water, and suddenly, communities are going through weather whiplash out west where it's drought, mega drought and then atmospheric river and now we have to, regardless of whether we agree on man made climate change or you want to be angry at ExxonMobil for making that happen or not, neighbors can agree on how we recharge our aquifers together. Or let's figure out a system so we're not dumping this out into the ocean the way we've always done it because we can't afford to do it that way anymore.

It's folks in desert communities encouraging each other to rip out lawns and put in xeriscaped yards and use less water for the good of everybody. And how that conversation happens or how those nudges happen in the most holistic, healthy way, maybe in some places they are like very much animated by the latest scientific stuff and they understand the sea surface temperatures and all that. And in other places around the country, it'll be purely about aesthetics or about some other motivating factor. And as hard as it is in an election year to lean across the fence of and talk to a neighbor maybe who has a different yard sign than you, the thing you can agree on is your shared love of a hiking trail or a fishing hole or, hey, “did you hear about the utility, our public utility wants to do this? Do you think that's right? Maybe we should do that.” And just talk about things much more on the sort of bottom of the pyramid of needs form about how is our air? You know where our water comes from? Did you read that story about our water supply?

What I've visited in the Wonder List, the healthiest, happiest communities were the ones who were most connected to each other and in tune with their ecosystem. And whether it's Native American intimacy and feeling like you're literally part of the family, that these landscapes are like members of your family, which I find beautiful.

Or the story in Iceland is that fairies and trolls and hidden people live in the landscapes and before you excavate you must get their permission. That's their way of expressing their reverence for nature. In Bhutan they tell little boys that if you kick a rock down a hill for no good reason just to watch it bounce down, you will have to pull it back up in the next life with your genitals.

The stories around our connections with these things. I feel like we need an American updated version of these sorts of reminders. And regardless of what happens globally or politically, communities can really strengthen themselves and improve the environments around them. I mean, New York City, where I live is like this.

The New York Harbor is an ecological success story. It was an open sewer when I was a little boy. Last year a humpback whale swam in.

Rebecca: People are gonna swim across the Hudson.

Bill: Yeah, exactly. And so is it pristine as when the Dutch found the place? No, but is it a lot better than it would have been without the Clean Air and Water Act, without dedicated folks, helpers going, “hey, what if we got a bunch of oysters in that water”.

You know, just trying to move things. Doesn't have to be utopian. All we can, we're consumed with dystopia. Doesn't have to be utopian, because there's no such thing, but it became protopian, next year we'll be a little bit better than this year.

Rebecca: Yeah, and I appreciate your, you have such a global perspective. You've traveled and been all around the world, and yet, it seems like the solutions you're talking about are when we turn to our immediate communities and when we're actually rooted in the place that we are. It's obviously important to think about the world as a whole, but the solutions and the agreement that really matters is where we are.

So I'd love to know, I know you've traveled to a bunch of different places and seen so many different climate solutions and climate disasters. I'm wondering if there are any places that are particularly important to you personally and kind of like what is your community? And yeah, what inspires your work?

Bill: Yeah, I mean, I've been so lucky to go to so many places and I'm personally most invested, in the American West is where my early memories and love with my dad were forged. So I'm always thinking about the mountain landscapes out there. What's happening to the alpine species and the water and the Colorado rivers always has been a lifelong fascination for me. But there are days when I've just got a huge map over my desk and I got little pins or wherever we've been and can look back and go, I wonder what Josue is doing in Cuba. Or the kid I met, you know, in Namibia when we were looking for black rhinos.

And that really helps ground me, because we tend to be so egocentric, in the idea that there's people's choices and the pyramid of needs of the other seven and a half billion people around the planet is so different and so many folks don't have the luxury of trying to fill their love and esteem needs with yoga retreats or social media clicks. They're too busy trying to get water and food and shelter at the bottom of the pyramid, the best way they know how.

And in some places where the society is healthy, I'd argue they have more love and esteem needs because they are spending their days the way we evolved to be in sort of sweaty outdoor projects with other Homo sapiens, working in unity together. Now we've developed with technology sort of this golden age of isolation and depression and addiction and distraction because the screen is just never going to be the same as a hug or a handshake.

That's the other thing. I sound like a grouchy old dad. Like, “put down your phone and get outside.” But that's going to literally save us. Like, we can't figure that out.

I've been such a nomadic kid all my life. I don't really have a sense of like, I'm saving my home lake or I'm saving my hometown the way a lot of other folks. So my heart is sprinkled all over the world. I'm rooting for so many different people.

I just wrote a piece, it's coming out on Earth Day. It's my fourth letter to River. And most of the past ones have been sort of a litany of what happened this year, here are the big disasters, here are the big policy changes, whatever. This one I wanted to focus specifically on a win, which is a woman I met in Colombia, named Rosa Mira Guillen, who started as a landscape architect, got hired to build a zoo in her native Colombia, and fell in love with this little monkey called a cotton-top tamarin. It looks like a Dr. Seuss sort of character. And they only exist in Northwest Columbia. And there's not many left because of deforestation and poaching for the illegal pet trade. So this woman decided, I'm gonna save this monkey. I'm gonna use this as a charismatic species, really to just start rebuilding forests. And so she's been planting forests for 20 years. And this is not something you can do with drones, no matter what somebody tells you. This is shovels and sweat and understanding the ecology.

She got pulled into a guy named Charlie Knowles who made a lot of money in Silicon Valley, loved wildlife, wasn't a biologist, but knew how to throw parties and raise money. And he created these expos where he would connect big money philanthropy with people like Rosa Mira who are like science proven boots on the ground. Whereas the other big NGOs are like, “give us our money, your money and trust us for we're going to do this soup to nuts.” This was like venture capital for the monkeys and for the forests. And that she met some angels who just have been supporting her. And then when she wanted to buy a ranch next door for $1.2 million, a thousand acres, her donors couldn't afford it. And they say, “well, why don't we crowdsource this? Tell you what, we'll use satellites and break it up into acres.” And anybody can make a one-time donation to buy an acre of this forest in perpetuity and then you can watch it in real time as Rosa Mira brings back the forest as this scrub brush turns into like broccoli tops. And I did that story and it aired once and enough people kicked in, they bought the ranch. She just signed the papers and these monkeys don't know they're the luckiest endangered species because of a kind woman on the ground looking out for them, but also a bunch of helpers around the world looking down with the satellite. The idea that helpers can be connected through technology and supercharged in ways like this, who knows? But we have such wonderful capacity, I think, and the same big brains that make our problems can fix them if we start telling each other the right stories, I think.

Rebecca: Yeah, and I appreciate that balance that technology is dividing us and isolating us, but it also can create closer communities and connect us to people all over the world who are doing this work. And yeah, so there is that balance.

Bill: Yeah, it's a tool like anything else, like a flame or a blade, depending on who's holding it, it can save your life or it can really hurt.

Rebecca: As we're wrapping up, I'm just curious, our listeners are climate curious kind of students and our organization is really focused on how we can be more precise and impactful with language and words. And I'm wondering if you have any advice to our listeners about the power of words or word choice and our storytelling in the climate movement. You've shared a bunch of different kinds of advice so far…

Bill: Yeah, I mean, ultimately, I think the simpler we make it, the better. Am I as a person, is my company, is my neighborhood, are we a net positive? Are we doing everything we can to heal as much of the earth as we can? What is our value? What is our true value statement, what's our mission statement? And I think whether you work in the C-suite of a big company or you're in creatives or in accounting, everybody kind of knows if we're doing everything we could.

The power we have maybe as consumers, maybe as voters, I like to think those things add up in fundamental ways. I'm certainly gonna teach my kids to lean in heavy and be civically engaged. And ultimately though, I don't know, I wish I had a set of phraseology that I knew was sort of universally effective in this space. I mean, I think calling it carbon Godzilla and just saying, “hey, are you making it bigger or chopping it down?” Simplifying it as much as we can is super important.

And nobody pickets gas stations. There are people who care about this enough to go picket pipelines. And it's just a different relationship we have with our daily lives. And I understand the urge for direct activism to disrupt, like make everybody stop and pay attention to the story. But then there's the backlash that comes from that strategy as well that has to be considered.

I think it's mostly just a way of less about specific words and more about looking for opportunities of connection and community building. And that's all aspirational for me. I'm a shy loner. I'd rather be in the woods than knocking on doors. But the character that I've ultimately found the most inspiration with, which was right under my nose the whole time, is my stepmother, who when I was a kid was my evil stepmother, but is now my beloved. She's closer to me than my actual mom. And after my dad died, she was living in western Colorado and it was just too hot for her, too much land. And she's the first climate migrant I know personally. She picked out literally, she said, where do I live? I want the temperature range to be in this moderate range. And she looked at the map and picked out the Oregon coast where she had been on vacation. And then she specifically visited city by city to figure out the vibe of the community, the politics. And then she asked the realtor, how close do I need to be to the coast in order for me to get this breeze? And then she picked a little town. And then she literally knocked on every door and said, I'm throwing a housewarming party for myself. Please come. They all came. And then, she's like an organizer and she's like, “what do we do if there's an earthquake? Like, okay, who's got a generator? I have a chainsaw.” Like she put together a climate adaptation plan with her neighbors. And it just was like, that's it. That's what it is.

It's doing that sort of, you know, knocking on doors and connecting with people about, hey, do you see the news? What are we gonna do in that situation? And then taking it from there.

Rebecca: Yeah, thank you. I think that that's definitely something we work on as well as like, how can we bring people together? How can we find things that we agree on, regardless of where we come from, or what our politics are? But what are those things that are really the core of the issue?

Bill: So whatever personally motivates you. Whether youre artistic, whether you're a numbers person, whether you're the kind of person that can go to a Public Utility Commission meeting and put together the bullet points of what happened and informing the community like “here's what they're up to.” You need those people. You need accountants to work with the Bird NGO. There's so many ways to be that helper, I think, in our lives. And it turns anxiety into action. I think it's also therapeutic. It gives you a sense of agency. Like I'm doing my little bit. And believe me, I can talk myself into saying, it's not making any difference. What am I doing? But you gotta do it.

Rebecca: Hope is an active verb.

Bill: Yeah, it is exactly. You gotta earn it. You got to generate it.

Rebecca: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, just to finish and close, we usually like to end by asking our authors if there are any other words that have been coming to you recently, climate related or not, that have been something you're focused on or have been of particular interest to you?

Bill: You know, one that is…I talk about in the book specific things like passive house construction, which I think people are gonna be talking a lot more about, super energy efficient homes, which we were invented in the United States, but really perfected in Europe, but are now making a big comeback. Agro Voltaics is a new favorite word of mine, which is basically putting solar panels in the farm fields and letting cattle graze in the shade there in ways that doubles the productivity for the farmer of his land and gives him another income stream.

I was just talking to somebody in the Rosemary Guillen story about biodiversity credits and whether we can create some sort of market just for nature for nature's sake. The carbon offset credit market is tricky and problematic and needs reform and we can't offset our way out of this issue. I think that word might be thrown around a little bit more.

Am I in the right space for you? Is it that sort of thing? Or you think about it?

Rebecca: No, yeah, it's a very open-ended question. It's whatever you're thinking about.

Bill: It's whatever pops in my head, right? Yeah, well, the one that I just, the story that got a lot of attention, and it's just the name of a single-celled algae that might be causing the fish in Florida to behave bizarrely and spin into these death spirals. Gambier discus is the name of this organism, and that is the leading suspect in the spins, these bonefish, or a sawfish rather, which are critically endangered in Florida. They lose maybe four or five a year. They've lost over 35 so far this year and they don't know why. And we think it might have something to do with the hot ocean temperatures.

And so there's all these others like new whack-a-mole type problems that pop up that you don't think are directly related to the climate crisis. And maybe this one isn't. We don't know enough about it yet.

Bill: Because they did a study a few years ago in the Keys and tested hundreds of harpin and bonefish and 100% of the fish had at least a dozen pharmaceuticals in there because of being flushed through the folks out into the sea. And so those are other issues that aren't even sort of directly climate related, but are a whole other host of systematic issues.

And I do talk to folks, I was just talking to an entrepreneur up in Canada who's part of this round table of CEO level guys who have made their money and now they want a legacy and are really trying to be disruptors across entire sectors and across packaging and clothing manufacturing and everything that makes these systems so dirty in the first place. I'd like to think there's more groups like that out there.

Rebecca: And I just appreciate you sharing all these different words from very specific contexts and then the kind of more broad words that we've discussed earlier in the interview. So yeah, thank you so much.

Bill: My pleasure, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.