Anuradha Vittachi, the show’s accomplished presenter and new media pioneer, was part of a broad-based civil society partnership that took on the superhuman task of live-streaming interviews around the clock from within the Bella Centre, helping a global audience of up to half a million viewers per day make sense of a conference that was described as a “last chance” to protect humanity from the ravages of climate change.

Vittachi has interviewed many accomplished humanitarians, government officials, parliamentarians, and civil society luminaries — President Gorbachev, HH Dalai Lama, and Mother Teresa, among others — since she and husband Peter Armstrong, a broadcasting legend in his own right, founded OneClimate.net as a news source and dissemination outlet for global civil society.

Anuradha interviewed me about Resilient People and Climate Change, the soon-to-be-launched non-governmental organization I’m behind the founding of, and why psychological and sociocultural impacts of climate change are so crucial to address on a global scale.

Without further ado, here’s the three-part interview (19 minutes total):

I find it hard to believe that the last time I posted to the Realistic Sanctuary blog was May 2009.

Here’s why. I started writing exclusively on HuffPost between June and December 2009 as well as traveling to conferences like the Tallberg Forum and the U.N. Climate Conference in Copenhagen, pursuing journalism as a way to understand what economic and climate crises mean for human beings the world over.

Even still, trusted friends and readers have said I need to keep this blog — and the RS “brand” — alive, even with HuffPost.

So, in that spirit, here’s a roundup of articles I wrote last year with a promise to be more diligent in updating the Realistic Sanctuary blog.

Nature

Conveying the Campaign Message: The arts and advertising can galvanise public and political will in tackling global warming. But shared concern for human health is a better motivator than polar bears, finds Sanjay Khanna. – Oct. 22, 2009

(Note: This was the “most tweeted article” in Nature’s special “Destination Copenhagen” issue, perhaps indicating a widespread interest in finding more meaningful ways to communicate the climate issue to the public.)

HuffPost

Copenhagen Meltdown – Dec. 17, 2009

Politicians Can Count on Popular Despair After Copenhagen – Dec. 15, 2009

Are You Resilient? If So, Encourage Psychological and Social Resilience Wherever You Can – Oct. 15, 2009

New Dr. Strangeloves and the Prospect of Geo-Engineered “Adaptation” – Sept. 8, 2009

From Climate Science to Climate Justice: Climate Change a Symptom of Man’s Inhumanity to Man – Jul. 11, 2009

The Tyee

Copenhagen Meltdown – Dec. 17, 2009

Politicians Can Count on Popular Despair After Copenhagen – Dec. 14, 2009

Hope you’re able to sample even some of the articles here, and to enjoy them.

More to come and soon!

Dubbed “The New Yorker Summit: The Next 100 Days,” the U.S. policy-centric event assembled leading intellectuals to discuss the state of the Obama administration, the economy, the environment, geopolitics, health care, climate change, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the challenge of Pakistan, you name it.

Speakers included Malcolm Gladwell, Naomi Klein, Esther Duflo, Jeffrey Sachs, Nicolas Nassim Taleb, Mary Anne Hitt, David Kilcullen, and Seymour Hersh.

“In times of trouble like today, pessimists die quickly.”

Enjoy my attempt to unpack, and kindly let me know what you think!

And regarding that excellent blog-which I feel absolutely delighted to write for, by the way-I’ll now be posting there quite regularly and also here.

At the moment, though, I’m juggling furiously. So, if you appreciate the writing that pops up on this blog from time to time, I do value your patience and promise to work out a more tenable (and regular) blogging schedule during the next couple of months.

In 100 words or less, what should the next president do in his first 100 days to address the planet’s most pressing problems?

My two cents?

Coordinated Nationwide Public Information Campaign on Economy and Climate
Today, the global economic meltdown and the climate crisis are key forces affecting civil society. That is why the new president will need to bring to public awareness sound climate science and policy aimed at supporting innovation and civic sustainability. Americans need the new presidential administration to help them understand the grave ramifications of environmental degradation and profligate energy use. Within its first 100 days in office, the new administration should conduct a massive, nationwide public information campaign encouraging every citizen to cooperate on making their locales more humane, inclusive, and resilient to predictable economic dislocation and climate chaos.

Now, the rationale. Under the past eight years of the Bush administration, coordinated efforts to downplay the reality of climate change induced widespread confusion among the U.S. populace about the nature and extent of the threat of global warming, representing an incalculable setback to public education and actual work done to mitigate the potential scope of damage. (In a recent report on the Yale Environment 360 website, New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert asks, “But can a new U.S. administration act swiftly enough to compensate for two terms of inaction? And if so, what must it do?”)

In answer to Kolbert, a good starting point is to make certain credible, actionable information about our current predicament reaches the American public rapidly. To achieve this end, the imprimatur of the U.S. government is required as is a U.S. president who’s willing to be a key spokesperson in a nationwide public education initiative. This initiative, as noted above, would focus citizens on developing the kind of local resilience that could provide support amid increasingly intense economic and climatic disruptions.

Enough said. The Worldchanging article includes 47 valuable contributions from people like Danah Boyd, Jamais Cascio, Jeremy Faludi, Paul Hawken, Bill McKibben, Pierre Omidyar, Darius Rejali, Howard Rheingold, Bruce Sterling, John Thackara, and many, many other fine thinkers. Read the full article here; it’s worth it.

- from Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Sixth edition, Volume 2 N – Z

“But it would fair for the new administration to point out how conservative ideology, the belief that greed is always good, helped create this crisis. What F.D.R. said in his second inaugural address – ‘We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics’ – has never rung truer.”

- Paul Krugman, “The Obama Agenda,” Nov. 7, 2008, New York Times

Given crisis conditions in politics, the economy, the environment – and, by the way, world hunger and charity, too – the term “perfect storm” has infiltrated the current dialog about pretty much everything.

You might say a perfect storm of perfect storms has led to the growing usage of “perfect storm.”

First, massive hurricanes and cyclones are on the rise.

Second, there’s an economic crisis, caused by intense economic volatility, but is it really a perfect storm? (If you ask me, it was a storm caused by human imperfection, namely greed, making it an “imperfect storm.” But I digress.)

Third, carbon emissions are way up, leading to more rapid climate change, melting of polar ice, influenced by a series of factors – human, industrial, oceanic, and otherwise – that some are also calling a perfect storm.

And, fourth, Obama’s election victory has led pundits to say that his victory resulted from a perfect storm of (a.) political miscalculations by the Republicans and (b.) the economic meltdown that began in September with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and A.I.G.

Nevertheless, the question remains: Why is the term “perfect storm” being used so often at the moment?

In all likelihood, it’s because myriad varieties of “especially bad situation caused by unfavourable circumstances,” which feed “particularly violent” (real and metaphorical) storms, are now increasingly commonplace rather than anomalous.

That’s why, in a real and collective sense, these bad situations represent the perfect storm that’s caused the usage of “perfect storm” to achieve a new normalcy.

And that makes perfect storms something we’re going to have to learn to get used to, whether we like it or not.

Over the past five years, executive editor/co-founder Alex Steffen and his global posse of contributors have painstakingly built up a treasure trove of valuable insight into the politics, technology, strategy, and tactics of sustainability, and they are currently preparing to celebrate their five-year anniversary on October 1, 2008.

How? With a retrospective selection of the 8,500 articles that they’ve archived since their founding-and, on October 1, with a BIG announcement (sorry, I don’t have any insider information on what it might be).

As an occasional contributor to Worldchanging since July 2007, I’m honored that fourarticles I wrote for the site have been chosen as part of the retrospective.

Solastalgia and the Mental Affects of Climate Change

Re-Shirt: Reimaging the Cotton T

The Paradox of Innovation: The People’s Car Comes to India

Identifying the Urban Garden with Mobile Phones

The impact of Worldchanging has been tremendous: The site and the companion book have made a real difference in the debates surrounding everything from addressing climate change, to building resilient communities, to fostering eco-design innovation that supports humanity’s basic needs.

In fact, Worldchanging has covered so many salient environmental issues that my brief summary can’t possible do justice to the site’s phenomenal depth and breadth.

Which is why I happily suggest you peruse Worldchanging, a site replete with sane, intelligent, dynamically written articles, blog posts, and practical resources.

Worldchanging’s commitment to positive change has made a difference in my life; I hope it makes a difference in yours.

“The Arctic sea ice cover appears to have reached its minimum extent for the year, the second-lowest extent recorded since the dawn of the satellite era.”

- National Snow and Ice Data Center, Press Release, September 16, 2008

“The unthinkable – a government buyout of much of the private sector’s bad debt – has become the inevitable.”

- Paul Krugman, New York Times op-ed

It’s been quite a week.

For one, according to a joint announcement by the National Snow and Ice Data Center and NASA, the Arctic sea ice retreat continues unabated: “While slightly above the record-low minimum set Sept. 16, 2007,” the NASA web site explains, “this season further reinforces the strong negative trend in summer sea ice extent observed during the past 30 years.”

Translation: “If you take reduced ice thickness into account, there is probably less ice overall in the Arctic this year than in any other year since monitoring began,” said Dr. Martin Sommerkorn, senior climate change adviser for the World Wildlife Fund’s Arctic Program.

Meanwhile, the U.S. federal government has attempted to mitigate a historic market meltdown by releasing hundreds of billions of dollars, if not more, to Wall Street-the kind of wholesale attempt to bolster the U.S. financial system that hasn’t been seen since the Great Depression.

Translation: Get me a scotch-no, the cheap stuff.

What it all means

Today, it’s common knowledge to climate scientists-and non-scientists like me who monitor the scientific data around climate change-that rapid melting of Arctic sea ice cover and the Greenland ice sheet is correlated with disruptive, perhaps irreversible, climatic shifts.

Analogously, disruptive, potentially irreversible, global economic changes may be indicated by the Bear Sterns Cos. merger with JP MorganChase, the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac takeovers by the Federal Reserve, the partial acquisition of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. by Barclays PLC, the fast-tracked marriage between Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc. and Bank of America Corporation, and the US$85 billion cash loan from the Fed and the Treasury Department to American International Group Inc. (AIG).

Economic stabilization

I suggest that melting sea ice and ice sheets are to climate change as the collapse of financial institutions is to economic change: Just as sea ice and ice sheets around the world have helped to maintain climatic stability, key financial, insurance, and real estate institutions have played a similar role in the stability of the postwar global economy.

Traditionally, investment banks Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., insurers such as American International Group, and mortgage backers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have existed alongside commercial banks and regulatory bodies, contributing to the overall health of the economic climate, ensuring it doesn’t heat up too fast or go stone cold.

Central to global trade and commerce, these organizations have played a pivotal role in helping the U.S. to become a net beneficiary of foreign investment. And given their significant place in the economic climate, they can be likened to “financial ice sheets,” so fundamental are they to maintaining the stability of the global economy.

Melting ice

Economic and environmental realities are converging.

The growth in debt held in today’s global financial markets, for example, has occurred not in isolation but rather in parallel with the rise in carbon emissions, which have not only contributed to a warmer planet but also to the melting of Arctic sea ice cover and the Greenland ice sheet, and to the emergence of ever more potent storms.

Hence, the Theory of Melting Ice Sheets, which is my rudimentary description of the dynamics of today’s economic crisis.

The Theory of Melting Ice Sheets states that the stability of the global economy is based on the viability of economic ice cover, which weakens as key “financial ice sheets,” such as Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and AIG, give way to tides of rising debt…and storms of investor uncertainty.

Unresolved debts

The global economy of manufacture and consumption, which allowed more than a half century of economic stability and growth, has been integral to the twentieth century’s environmental decline.

Furthermore, it has masked the ravages of climate change and the build up of aquatic, terrestrial, and atmospheric toxins.

In other words, slow and creeping climate shifts have given way to accelerating change, from quickly melting ice sheets, to rising sea levels, biodiversity loss, and bioaccumulation.

That’s why the six decades of growth that preceded the current economic crisis have also concealed massive, off-balance-sheet environmental debts, including the need to clean polluted air, land, and water, and to address declining biodiversity.

The experts who monitor environmental health conclude that these hidden environmental debts-called “externalities” by economists-are a clear and present danger.

Soon enough, our environmental debts will start to compound the current economic crisis.

Exiting long-term growth

The twinned forces of economic and environmental decline are contributing to the twenty-first century’s speed and anxiety, and to the long-term shrinking of the global economy.

It would seem that we’re exiting a phase that, since the end of World War II, has been allied with economic growth and the creation of middle-class consumers in the West and, over the past 15 years, in Brazil, Russia, India, and China.

Now, with the economy breaking apart unpredictably-fractured by warming oceans of hidden debt-increased economic volatility is the order of the day.

Who’s on first?

Those left standing in these tumultuous times, including Goldman Sachs Group and Morgan Stanley (and commercial banks such as the Bank of America), will determine the relative stability of this volatile economic cycle and of global markets, just as the relative stability of the global climate will be influenced by the remaining sea ice cover.

As for Goldman and Morgan Stanley, without the market buffer provided by former competitors, these firms will exist in a fish bowl, their results influencing mood swings on Wall Street and Main Street-and reverberating in the hindbrains of increasingly risk-averse brokers, investors, and bankers from New York to Mumbai.

Now, how about that scotch?

For additional insight, read my post “Nine things to do as Arctic ice — and Wall Street — melt” on Reuters.com.

This blog post has been revised:

Updates and Correction: September 20, 2008

Substantive updates to this post since September 17 when it was originally placed online: New title, intro, two quotes, and corrections of my usage of the terms “sea ice” and “ice sheets.”

Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine who in 2006 wrote the bestseller, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change.

Earlier this year, in February 2008, Kolbert, certainly one of the most well-informed U.S. journalists and citizens on climate-related challenges, was interviewed by the Pittsburgh City Paper about what has “changed about the climate since Field Notes was first published.”

To that she responded: “A lot…. The data that’s been coming in has always been on the very high end-in many cases, in the very high end-of what people had predicted. In the community of researchers, there’s just a huge level of anxiety about what we’re doing, and very little, ‘Well, maybe things won’t be as bad as we thought’ anymore. They tell you, ‘Maybe we’ve just been way too conservative.’”

Let’s read between the lines. When the climate scientists refer to being “way too conservative,” they’re talking about underestimating how severe droughts, floods and other weather effects might be over the coming two decades or so, how badly agriculture and economies would be damaged and whether or not there is any long-term hope of the planet ever having the kind climate that has nurtured and sustained humanity for a million years.

In other words, when scientists talk about a “new” climate, it’s important in our brand-besotted culture to remember they don’t mean “new and improved” à la Tide detergent; they mean unpredictable and devastating with no turning back the clock.

The last published question of the interview was, “But can a market economy even be sustainable?” Kolbert’s telling response: “That’s the question of our time. And unfortunately we’re going to find out.”

Hm, are Kolbert, and the climate scientists she interviews, right? And, if so, do they want to be?

My educated guess is, no, there’s no satisfaction here in being “right,” that is, in winning the argument about how extreme climate change may be; rather, Kolbert, et al., probably wish that this were all just a bad dream.

Trust me, so do I.