LISA EDELSTEIN - From Acting to Directing, Writing & Visual Art

LISA EDELSTEIN - From Acting to Directing, Writing & Visual Art

Interviewed by Mia Funk & Aaron Bennett

How can the arts help us examine and engage with social issues? How do our families shape our views, memories, and experience of the world?

From her role as Dr. Lisa Cuddy on the hit Fox series House M.D, to her starring role as Abby McCarthy in Bravo's first scripted series Girlfriends' Guide to Divorce, Lisa Edelstein's range of roles are as diverse talent. Some of Edelstein's feature credits include Keeping the Faith, What Women Want, Daddy Daycare, As Good as It Gets, and Fathers and Sons. She played a Holocaust survivor and adopted mother in the drama television series Little Bird. The story centres on a First Nations woman who was adopted into a Jewish family during the Sixties Scoop, as she attempts to reconnect with her birth family and heritage.

Lisa’s career began by writing, composing, and performing an original AIDS awareness musical Positive Me at the renowned La Mama Experimental Theater Club in New York City. In the wake of COVID, Lisa began to paint using old family photographs as starting points. Her incredibly detailed paintings capture intimate relationships and spontaneous moments with honesty and compassion.

LISA EDELSTEIN

I have always thrown myself into everything, and that includes terrible things, because I want to have the whole experience. Even if I know it's going to hurt for better or for worse, that has been how I've lived my life. And so it's given me a lot of information and allowed me to play a lot of different roles and understand a lot of different points of view.

I'm the kind of person who – I don't do well in lectures - I don't like sitting for a very long time, but if I can listen while I'm drawing or painting, then I will actually retain more of what I'm hearing because it's connected now to what I've actually made while I'm listening to it. When I look at my paintings, I remember what I was reading at each section of the painting, so that's the way my brain works. And I think a lot of people who are creative, that's the way their brain works, where we need to develop one skill in order to develop another. And using your imagination is key to all of it.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

In watching your acting, you have this air of sensitivity and vulnerability, and then, in a split second, you can become very piercing and strong. And this duality is really interesting to watch because it makes you unpredictable. And then, looking at your paintings, they also have this duality where you may be depicting your family and their everyday candid moments, and we sense their private lives, and you set up these enigmatic stories that make us want to know more.

EDELSTEIN

In the paintings, the imagery that I'm looking for are images that don't feel posed or, even if they were intended to be posed, there are things in there that weren't necessarily meant for public display. So I am really interested in telling secrets in that way. You know, I've always made things made objects, but always very privately. And being married to an artist, I started to realize, and he started to really encourage me that that expression not be just kept in a drawer. And during the lockdown, when there was nothing else to do, I had all this time to really explore and give myself permission to see that part of my life as something that should be valued and exercised.

Character Evolution: Growing with a Role

House was very well written. Since Hugh Laurie was the star of the show, they'd frequently shoot his coverage first, and then they would reverse, and I could do my coverage. I think part of the beauty of being in a long-running television show is that, in season one, you're playing the role they wrote. By season two, they're writing the person you're playing. You start to build your voice, and they start to merge, and so by the time you get to season three, you're much more like full human beings having this dialogue.

The Journey of 'Little Bird' and Representation of Trauma

The Canadian Indian Residential School system was a network of boarding schools for Indigenous peoples funded by the Canadian government's Department of Indian Affairs and administered by Christian churches. Over 150,000 Indigenous children were forcibly taken from their homes and placed in residential schools nationally. From the 1960s until the 90s, the Canadian government was trying to resolve the problem that the residential schools, run by the Catholic Church, were based on the idea that said: you save the child and kill the Indian. So they removed thousands of Indigenous children from their homes and families and erased their culture so they could become "regular normal people" in the world.

I was so excited to be offered that role in Little Bird. They sent me the scripts, and I read them, and I wept so much just reading those scripts because the story is so profoundly sad. And I was really very honored to be playing a Jewish Holocaust survivor caught up in a very difficult story. I was also honored to be on set and a good part of the time that I was there. We were on Indian reservations, having a cultural sharing time, listening to their stories, and really just being a witness to what they experienced. So a lot of that was very profound for me working on that project, and being able to tell the story that my character owned was, of course, really personal to me just being Jewish. A lot of times, being Jewish, we don't necessarily get to play Jewish. So it was really important to me that I honor that story the best that I could.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You’re always taking on challenging roles and, from the beginning, you’ve used your art to expand awareness of social issues.

EDELSTEIN

When I did my show Positive Me, we were in the middle of a horrible crisis. The AIDS crisis was very real to me and my friends and not real to the people that I knew from New Jersey. They thought it was government hype. They didn't believe in it. And so I couldn't even fathom that. And I had taken a class with Elizabeth Swados about writing satire, and she was very encouraging in terms of what I was doing. And so maybe it was just gumption. I just thought, Okay, then this is what I'm going to do!

I had the first ever lesbian makeout scene on network television on a short-lived show called Relativity. That was another role where I felt really honored to be asked to do that, having been in and around the gay community my whole adult life. In the club scene, it was like all my friends were gay. So I was really happy to represent doing that.

Mrs. Abo’s Class by Lisa Edelstein · Courtesy of the Artist

The Importance of Arts and Education

My favorite teacher was in second grade. I had a teacher named Mrs. Abo who let me write all my homework assignments in rhyme. And it was like such a simple thing. I asked her if I could write all my homework assignments in rhyme. And she said, "Absolutely!" And she gave me permission to be wildly creative while still doing my work. And little moments like that can really change a kid's life. And I lobbied with this group called the Creative Coalition. We went and lobbied in DC to really fight for the arts being added to the STEM programs to make them STEAM programs because they're so interconnected. It's creative imagination that got us to the moon. It's science fiction stories that are getting us to Mars. It's like that. You know, playing the piano helps you in math. It's all part of the beautiful development of the brain, and it helps so much for learning other things.

Photo credit: Mitch Stone · Courtesy of the artist

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Aaron Bennett with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producers on this episode were Sophie Garnier and Aaron Bennett.

The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk. Additional production support by Katie Foster. Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).
Listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

 
logo-white-space interviews podcasts.jpg
Interviews - FEATURED
CARLOS MORENO
CARLOS MORENO

Originator of the 15-Minute City Concept · Author of The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time & Our Planet

It all starts at home. As a university professor, I have observed the process of transformation of different generations. We need to find a sense of life. We need to find a sense of belonging to our humanity, but to have this sense of life, we need to find a sense in our local communities.

NICHOLAS KRISTOF
NICHOLAS KRISTOF

Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalist · NYTimes Op-Ed Columnist
Author of Chasing Hope, A Reporter's Life · Coauthor of Half the Sky · Tightrope · A Path Appears

I'm trying to get people to care about a crisis in ways that may bring solutions to it. And that's also how I deal with the terror and the fear to find a sense of purpose in what I do. It's incredibly heartbreaking to see some of the things and hear some of the stories, but at the end of the day, it feels like–inconsistently here and there–you can shine a light on problems, and by shining that light, you actually make a difference.

GUILLAUME LAFORTUNE
GUILLAUME LAFORTUNE

Vice President · Head of the Paris Office
UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network

The SDSN was set up to mobilize research and science for the Sustainable Development Goals. The development goals were adopted in 2015 by all UN member states, marking the first time in human history that we have a common goal for the entire world. Out of all the targets that we track, only 16 percent are estimated to be on track. Currently, none of the SDGs are on track to be achieved at the global level.

CHARLIE HERTZOG YOUNG
CHARLIE HERTZOG YOUNG

Award-winning Climate Activist
Author of Spinning Out: Climate Change, Mental Health and Fighting for a Better Future

There's that old saying, “blessed are the cracked for they shall let in the light.” For a lot of people like myself, I think it's true that losing your mind can be a proportionate response to the climate crisis. Those of us with mental health issues are often branded as being in our own world. But paradoxically, being in our own world can actually be a result of being more connected to the outside world rather than less. And in the context of climate change, it may be fairer to describe people who fail to develop psychological symptoms as being in their own separate anthropocentric world, inattentive to the experiences of the billions of other human and nonhuman beings on the planet, unaffected by looming existential catastrophe. There are layers and layers of insulation made up of civilizational narratives that dislocate many people from climate chaos and those whose psyches buckle upon contact with this reality are the ones deemed mad. But this pathologizing is a defense mechanism employed by the civilized or by the dominant culture, which ends up subjugating those of us whose minds stray from accepted norms. There are lots of studies that show that certain forms of psychosis are actually a form of meaning-making for communities that feel like they have no sense of purpose. We've had generations and generations of trauma visited upon the human species by picking apart communities and our intimate relationships with nature. Especially since the 80s, picking apart our inability to even consider ourselves as part of society in a meaningful sense .That kind of pulling apart means that we're locked in

SHARMEEN OBAID-CHINOY
SHARMEEN OBAID-CHINOY

Oscar & Emmy-winning Director
Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge · A Girl in the River
Forthcoming Star Wars film starring Daisy Ridley

As a filmmaker, I've always made films about extraordinary women whose lives are faced with extenuating circumstances who've had adversity thrown at them and who've risen to the occasion. And when I began to look at Diane's story, for me, Diane is a fashion designer, but she's so much more. Her central ethos is woman before fashion, and we felt it was very important to take that ethos and weave it into the spine of our film, and make it about the woman.

INGRID NEWKIRK
INGRID NEWKIRK

Founder & President of PETA - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

I think things do change because of agitation. So agitation is vital. I mean, nobody who is in a cause should be there to win a popularity contest, whether you're working for children or the elderly or working for peace animals, it's all against nonviolence, aggression, domination, and needless cruelty and suffering. It's all for respect. So you have to be vigorous. You have to use your voice. You can use it politely, but if people don't listen, at PETA, we escalate. So we always start off with a polite letter, a polite entreaty. We always try to, as I say, do the homework. So we have the options that we put out on the table to say, look, instead of doing this, you could do that, and we will help you transition to that.

DANIEL GOLEMAN
DANIEL GOLEMAN

Psychologist
Author of Emotional Intelligence · Optimal · Ecological Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is how you manage yourself and how you handle your relationships. Are you aware of what you're feeling? Can you use that awareness to handle emotions, to be positive, to be sure your upsetting emotions don't overwhelm you? This then helps you to tune into other people's emotions, to be empathic, and to put that all together to manage relationships well. It turns out that's what makes an engineer highly effective. I think it's what makes anyone highly effective. 

DUSTIN O'HALLORAN
DUSTIN O'HALLORAN

Emmy Award-winning · Oscar-nominated Composer · Musician
1 0 0 1 · Silfur · Transparent · Lion

The album 1 0 0 1 is really like a journey from our connection with nature to where we are now, in this moment where we're playing with technology. We're almost in this hybrid space, not fully understanding where it's going. And it's very deep in our subconscious and probably much greater than we realize. And it sort of ends in this space where the consciousness of what we're creating, it's going to be very separate from us. And I believe that's kind of where it's heading – the idea of losing humanity, losing touch with nature and becoming outside of something that we have created.

JEFFREY ROSEN
JEFFREY ROSEN

President & CEO of the National Constitution Center
Author of The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America

That idea of planting seeds for future generations came from the Tusculan Disputations. There’s something especially empowering about Cicero. And it's very striking that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and so many in the Founding Era viewed this manual about overcoming grief as the definition for achieving happiness. And I think it's because it's a philosophy of self-mastery, self-improvement, and self-empowerment.

BERTRAND PICCARD
BERTRAND PICCARD

Explorer & Aviator of the First Round-the-World Solar-powered Flight
Founder of Solar Impulse Foundation & Climate Impulse

The goal with Climate Impulse is to revolutionize aviation and show that we can decarbonize aviation. Of course, it's not yet a jumbo jet with hydrogen. It's a two-seater airplane. If we go around the world nonstop with two people on board, this project can become like a flagship of climate action.

ED ZWICK
ED ZWICK

Academy Award-winning Writer, Director & Producer
Glory · The Last Samurai · Shakespeare in Love · Thirtysomething
Author of NYTimes Bestseller Hits, Flops & Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood

My intention was to write about my experiences, obviously, but also I felt that there was a little bit of a counterintuitive approach, which is to talk about some of the inner experiences of the creative process and being a director, being a writer, and I felt that that would open the window a little bit wider. I liked that it wasn't just a behind-the-scenes look. It is that, and I think it's full of fun anecdotes and little reveals, but it is to be a real book. It presumes to be a memoir, like many of the memoirs that I have loved of creative people in the past.

ALAN POUL
ALAN POUL

Emmy & Golden Globe-winning Executive Producer · Director
Tokyo Vice · Six Feet Under · Tales of the City · My So-Called Life

I think all great work comes from the need to say something. And so this is the challenge for young artists and also maybe one of the essential elements that can never be completely taken over by AI because there has to be something you feel has not been said, and you feel an urgent need to say it. In fact, you can't not say it. That need to express is what gives birth to unique expression, which is where all of our visual, performance, and creative arts come from. 

JONATHAN YEO
JONATHAN YEO

Artist

What are you trying to do with a portrait? On a basic level, you're trying to communicate something about the essence of who someone is. You're trying to figure out who they are, not necessarily who they present themselves as. The two things can quite often be different. You're trying to find ways of showing that through their face, their posture, or any other context. My instinct is always to try to reduce down to the essential elements. We read faces. It's obviously very, very deep in our DNA, really our survival instinct. We are programmed to read faces in a very fine-tuned way.

DR. RUPERT SHELDRAKE
DR. RUPERT SHELDRAKE

Biologist · Author
The Science Delusion · The Presence of the Past · Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work

The idea that the laws of nature are fixed is taken for granted by almost all scientists and within physics, within cosmology, it leads to an enormous realm of speculation, which I think is totally unnecessary. We're assuming the laws of nature are fixed. Most of science assumes this, but is it really so in an evolving universe? Why shouldn't the laws evolve? And if we think about that, then we realize that actually, the whole idea of a law of nature is a metaphor. It's based on human laws. I mean, after all, dogs and cats don't obey laws. And in tribes, they don't even have laws. They have customs. So it's only in civilized societies that you have laws. And then if we think through that metaphor, then actually the laws do change. All artists are influenced by other artists and by things in the collective culture, and I think that morphic resonance as collective memory would say that all of us draw unconsciously as well as consciously on a collective memory and all animals draw on a collective memory of their kind as well. We don't know where it comes from, but there's true creativity involved in evolution, both human and natural.

Featured
ANGANA CHATTERJI · SIDDHARTHA DEB
ANGANA CHATTERJI · SIDDHARTHA DEB

What Do the June 2024 Elections in India Mean?

I think that the 2024 national elections in India signaled a slowdown in its slide into authoritarianism, but did not halt it. The BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) and the ways in which it secured votes merit analysis. In his June 4th victory speech, Narendra Modi's rallying cry was "Bharat Mata Ki Jai" (Hail to Mother India), a slogan promoted by Hindu nationalists. It objectifies and feminizes the state, linking control over women and control in general to nationalist assertion. "Bharat Mata" is also associated with "Akhand Bharat," or undivided India, the once and future homeland of Hindus. Modi did not show humility in his speech. Instead, he emphasized the exceptionalism of a third consecutive win, stating, "I believe that the country will write a new chapter of big decisions. This is the Modi guarantee." Nevertheless, he also talked about his government's efforts to weed out forms of corruption, which is ironic given the BJP's recent collusion in the electoral bond scandal.

MICHAEL CRONIN
MICHAEL CRONIN

Author of Eco-Travel: Journeying in the Age of the Anthropocene
Snr. Researcher · Trinity Centre for Literary & Cultural Translation

The idea of a kind of inert world that is simply there for our pleasure, enjoyment, and exploitation has proved to be catastrophically mistaken because we see it with flooding, we see it with forest fires. We see it with acidification of the oceans. We see it with the continuing rise in temperatures that the world itself, the more-than-human world is fighting back. It has taken on its own agency. And therefore, the idea of a pyramid, a hierarchy, is no longer operative.

CAMILLA HAWTHORNE
CAMILLA HAWTHORNE

Co-Editor of The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity
Author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean

A Black geographic perspective for me was really helpful in trying to clarify how we can simultaneously understand Blackness as a global project, that is anti-national, that transcends borders, but that also takes on really specific meanings and practices in different places, engagements with Black geographies that are looking just beyond the framework of North America.

ITA O'BRIEN
ITA O'BRIEN

Intimacy Coordinator · Founder of Intimacy on Set
Author of Intimacy On Set Guidelines

For years, people spoke about how awkward or embarrassing it was to perform the intimate content. And what they're speaking about is feeling horrible. If something's awkward, that squirm, that ring in the body, it feels embarrassing. That's actually an emotion that is not professional. That is not allowing the actor to stay feeling listened to, heard, empowered, autonomous. And so that they can just get on without any of those concerns and do their job to their best ability. And that's the awareness that we brought. So, we're saying, it is not suitable in our workplace for anybody to feel harassed or abused. 

SY MONTGOMERY & MATT PATTERSON
SY MONTGOMERY & MATT PATTERSON

Author | Illustrator

I did know that I wanted this book about turtles to also be about time. It's one of two big questions in philosophy. The one big mystery that I had tackled in a previous book, Soul of an Octopus, was the mystery of consciousness. The other big hard problem in philosophy is time. And I felt, you know, who better to lead me in this exploration than turtles, who live in some cases for centuries, who've been around...they arose with dinosaurs, yet they survived the asteroid impact. They are the embodiment of patience and wisdom.

ANDRE DUBUS III
ANDRE DUBUS III

NYTimes Bestselling Author
House of Sand and Fog · The Garden of Last Days · Ghost Dogs · Townie

All creative writing is that act of reaching for the pieces to put it back together again. And with the memoir, the essay, it's human memory. Your memory for your own existence. With fiction, it’s a dream world where you're reaching for the shards. Writing is a free fall into the writer's psyche, and if you want some clarity on what you believe, just write something sincere and emotionally naked and read it back to yourself, and you'll see a lot of what you believe, what you think, what you fear, regret, and desire, etc.

LUDOVIC SLIMAK
LUDOVIC SLIMAK

Paleoanthropologist · Author of The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature

This book is not just about Neanderthals. It's a book about us. I wanted to warn humans, to say there is something in us that is so efficient and dangerous. We've effectively collapsed many things and are now inducing the collapse of natural environments on the planet. And after that, we might even cause the collapse of ourselves as Homo sapiens.

PAOLA SPINOZZI
PAOLA SPINOZZI

Coordinator, Phd Programme, Environmental Sustainability & Wellbeing · University of Ferrara
Co-editor of Cultures of Sustainability and Wellbeing: Theories, Histories and Policies

The humanities are all about representing the world, while the sciences are all about knowing the world. But I believe the roles are deeply intertwined, and that literature, the humanities, philosophy, history, and the arts are all ways of knowing the world. They do exactly the same thing in our understanding of the world. And it is really important to try to put these things together to bring people closer in talking to each other.

MACIEJ HEN
MACIEJ HEN

Award-winning Author & Filmmaker
According to Her · Solfatara · Segratario

I wondered who could be a better narrator of the story of Jesus than his own Jewish mother? When I was young, as a European Greco-Christian, I was aware of some of my Jewish history, but writing According to Her, I tried to imagine the story of someone considered to be a Messiah or prophet by some Jewish followers. What could be the genuine story of something that really happened or was told? This led me to write a realistic novel about how it could have been.

Comics, Music, Ethics & AI
Comics, Music, Ethics & AI

Eisner Award-nominated Comic Book Author KYLE HIGGINS
Emmy-nominated Producer KARINA MANASHIL & KID CUDI on the Making of Moon Man

So, as we started talking and going through what this could look like. What a new black superhero in 2024 could look like? What would the threats be? What the world might look like if it's maybe not even five minutes in the future? I would argue it's like two and a half minutes in the future. And then what kind of really complex, emotionally layered journey we could put this character through?

Reshaping Our World
Reshaping Our World

Climate Change, Education, Mental Health & Advocacy for Nature

Climate change gives us a chance to re-imagine the world in a way that every single human being can participate in. And so whether you're in a remote part of the United States or some other country, when you learn about climate change, it shouldn't just be the science. It should be the opportunity. –Kathleen Rogers, President of EarthDay·ORG

Songs of Nature
Songs of Nature

Musicians, Writers, Ecologists & Philosophers on the Mysteries of the Natural World

The natural world has its own sonic language. Its own fingerprints. And that's one of the beautiful things about being out here. There is another acoustic environment, another sort of sonic fingerprint, and it is always changing. Every day is a sort of a different sound picture. I walk out the door and you do hear it changing over time. The leaves are coming in now, different kinds of bird song. The wind sounds different. It's a wonderful thing to be around and experience.
—Max Richter

TARA ISABELLA BURTON
TARA ISABELLA BURTON

Author of Here in Avalon · Social Creature · Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World 
Self-Made: Curating Our Image from Da Vinci to the Kardashians
So this idea that we can present ourselves as works of art, that we can create ourselves has always had a particular sort of aristocratic coding, historically associated with monarchs, who create their public image and their public persona, including through fashion. Today, if we don't self-promote, self-create, and self-brand, will we find the right partner? Get into the right college? Even secure the best job?

BRYCE COON
BRYCE COON

Director of Education · EarthDay.ORG

If you talk to a young person about the climate crisis, they tend to have one of two responses. They either feel like we're not doing enough, and they're advocating for more. The other response is that students would just shut down and wouldn't want to talk about it. I believe introducing climate education is key to addressing that climate anxiety and providing students with climate optimism, hope and solutions.

KATHLEEN ROGERS
KATHLEEN ROGERS

President of EarthDay.ORG

The world recognizes that plastics have imperiled our future. Many environmentalists, myself included, view plastics as on par with, if not worse than, climate change because we do see a little light at the end of the tunnel on climate change. Babies vs. Plastics is a collection of studies, and we particularly focused on children and babies because their bodies and brains are more impacted than adults by the 30, 000 chemicals that assault us every day.

The Unseen Invasion of Microplastics in Our Lives
The Unseen Invasion of Microplastics in Our Lives

Interview with KATHLEEN ROGERS
President of EarthDay·org

Microplastics and nanoplastic pollution are currently blanketing the planet. They are in the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink, infiltrating our bodies and even brains and human embryos. Coca-Cola alone sells 100 billion+ single-use plastic bottles each year, ending up in landfills and the ocean. Earth’s population will reach 9.8 billion people by 2050. Two-thirds of humans will become city dwellers. Our waste will drive a mounting worldwide crisis.

POORVA JOSHIPURA
POORVA JOSHIPURA

PETA U.K. · Senior Vice President
Author of Survival at Stake: How Our Treatment of Animals is Key to Human Existence

I wrote Survival at Stake because I've been working in animal rights for nearly the past 25 years. Throughout that time, one common question has been asked: Well, shouldn't we deal with human issues first. But animal rights are human rights. Animal rights is environmentalism. These things are not distinct. And that's the point I was really trying to make in my book. I was inspired to write it because of the COVID-19 crisis. It just brings us back to the point of why it is so important to teach people, young people, and young men the importance of being kind to everyone, animals included. If you teach them that, I think the other lessons start to much more automatically transfer over.

LEWIS DARTNELL
LEWIS DARTNELL

Astrobiologist · Science Communicator
Author of Origins: How the Earth Made Us · Being Human: How Our Biology Shaped World History

The challenges facing our society at the moment effectively are the unintended consequence of a solution we found in the late 1700s when society was running out of energy, we had no more timber, and we realized we could dig underground for ancient fossilized woodland, which is basically what coal is from about 300 million years ago. The consequence of burning all that coal and then oil was a release of carbon dioxide, changing our atmosphere and warming the planet. So, it's a problem born out of our ingenuity and resourcefulness, but I'm confident that we will find the solution out of our ingenuity and resourcefulness.

SASHA LUCCIONI
SASHA LUCCIONI

Founding Member of Climate Change AI
AI Researcher & Climate Lead · Hugging Face

My work is really about figuring out how, right now, AI is using resources like energy and emitting greenhouse gases and how it's using our data without our consent. I feel that if we develop AI systems that are more respectful, ethical, and sustainable, we can help future generations so that AI will be less of a risk to society.  The way I got into this field was working on the environmentally beneficial applications of AI, and I do believe that that's an impactful way of using AI techniques because there's so much data about the climate, satellite data, and sensor data, and the way to go about this is to work with domain experts. AI is never going to solve the problem on its own, but it can be a tool. So I think that there's a lot of promise there.

DR. SHIV SOMESHWAR
DR. SHIV SOMESHWAR

Fmr. European Chair for Sustainable Development & Climate Transition · Sciences Po
Development Clinician focused on Cities & Nation States

How do you have economic growth that is socially equitable and environmentally sustainable? It's not just that you have ecological sustainability; hence, that is sustainable development. Because lots of examples of economic, ecological, and ecologically sensitive growth need not be socially equitable. That's why this whole emphasis on just transition is not just about climate, but it's also about justice. It's about social equity in economic growth. Unlike in Europe, where there is now the call for degrowth or a circular economy, most parts of the world would look at you blankly if you talked about degrowth because they are hungry for growth. And so sustainable development is about managing these trade-offs.

From Ancient Wisdom to the Language of the Earth
From Ancient Wisdom to the Language of the Earth

Scientists, Artists, Psychologists & Spiritual Leaders Share their Stories and insights on the importance of connecting with nature, preserving the environment, embracing diversity, and finding harmony in the world.

JAY JORDAN & ISABELLE FRÉMEAUX
JAY JORDAN & ISABELLE FRÉMEAUX

Artists, Activists & Anarchists Seize Wetlands from the French Republic
Authors of We are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones
the story of a 40-year struggle to preserve 4,000 acres of wetlands from being destroyed to make way for an airport

DOUG LARSON
DOUG LARSON

Award-winning Scientist · Ecologist · Professor Emeritus · University of Guelph
Author of Cliff Ecology · The Urban Cliff Revolution · The Dogma At My Homework

I think one thing I learned from looking at the ancient trees is that there is no great benefit to anything of growing quickly and accumulating vast resources. Growing slowly and patiently and with fewer demands on the environment in which you live is just as healthy and perhaps more healthy than the endless hunger for more and more and more, which we see as a characteristic of our species.

THOMAS CROWTHER
THOMAS CROWTHER

Ecologist · Founder of Restor
Co-chair of the Board for the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration

Global restoration really means finding and empowering the millions of local communities, indigenous populations, and farmers who are promoting biodiversity. Restor is a digital platform, sort of like Google Maps, but for restoration. So rather than seeing coffee shops and supermarkets, you will see conservation projects and Indigenous-led restoration initiatives. And that means you can find a currently on Restor - I think we have around 140, 000 - so you can go on there for free right now and find thousands and thousands of these amazing heroes of nature. And you can zoom in and you can see every single tree on the ground. You can see every bush and you can fund them or you can buy their coffee or you can go visit their projects and do ecotourism. There's a myriad of ways that we can all support their efforts by also improving our own lives. 

We need to be cutting our emissions so that we can allow nature to thrive and help us along the way. For far too long people have been squabbling about emissions. We should do this or we should do that. Climate change is way too big for us to be squabbling about things. We need to do everything now. When we grow the same crops every year, the soil gets more depleted and all the nutrients are lost. I've heard quotes that if we cannot find agricultural systems that rejuvenate the soil instead of depleting it, we are signing our death warrant. It's like we need to be promoting healthy soils if we're going to have any agriculture in the future.

PETER D. DITLEVSEN
PETER D. DITLEVSEN

Professor of Physics, Ice, Climate & Earth at the Niels Bohr Institute

What happens if we lose the Greenland ice sheet and pass the tipping points and Earth systems shut down?

If that shuts down, roughly speaking, the climate of Northern Europe would be like the climate of Alaska. So, climate models that actually simulate what happens when it's shut down, would say that England becomes like Northern Norway, which means that food security and things like that will be threatened because you cannot grow many crops in Northern Norway. And other models say precipitation changes, so places that are wet might become dry, and so on. So, these are of course severe consequences for Europe, but in some sense, this is going in the opposite direction of global warming. We're all talking about we're getting into a warmer world, but I'm talking about a cooling here. But the warm water that does not then flow from the tropics into the North Atlantic will stay in the tropics. And there, you're not contra-balancing global warming. There you will have the heating on top of the global warming. And that I see as maybe the largest problem we have is that the tropics become even warmer. And we have to realize if you live in a place where mean temperatures are maybe late thirties Celsius and or rise to the forties livelihood becomes very difficult.

DR. BARRY SCHWARTZ
DR. BARRY SCHWARTZ

Psychologist · Author of Why We Work
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

In 2004, the internet was just getting started in a major league way, and already the choice overload was a problem. I would say that from the modern perspective, 2004 seems like the 18th century, and as near as I can tell, all of these changes, every single one of them has made the problem substantially worse. The idea that you can get information to help guide you through - well, yeah, but what information do you believe? What's trustworthy? What's being motivated by an opportunity to sell you something? So there is a haze, there is this fog that we're operating in. And I think we just sort of give up in resignation and look at recommendations and hope that they're legitimate because how else do you get through the day?

KOHEI SAITO
KOHEI SAITO

Author of Slow Down! How Degrowth Communism Can Save the World
Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism

The Green New Deal presents itself as a kind of radical policy. If you look at the content, it's just simply the continuation of what capitalism wants to do. It's a massive investment in new, allegedly green industries, with the creation of more jobs with higher wages, but these are not the things that socialists or any environmentalists should be actually seeking because we recognize that capitalism is basically the root cause of the climate crisis and the misery of the workers. If so, I think it is high time to imagine something radically very different from business-as-usual capitalism.

The Long Tradition of American Jewish Critiques of Israel & Their Suppression
The Long Tradition of American Jewish Critiques of Israel & Their Suppression

American Jews were interested and involved in Palestinian rights all the way back to 1948. There's this idea that it came about just now or in the 1970s, but actually as long as there's been a Nakba. As long as there's been Palestinian refugees, there’s been American Jews concerned with that, too. I would say that a lot of times these American Jews were very well informed and spent time in the region, and they came to these conclusions often not in the United States, but over there where they were talking to the Israeli left and meeting Palestinians and seeing a situation that they don't feel is ethical or sustainable.

BEN FRANTA
BEN FRANTA

Founding Head of the Climate Litigation Lab
Senior Research Fellow at University of Oxford’s Sustainable Law Programme

For 40 years, the American Petroleum Institute has hired economists to argue it would be too expensive to try and control fossil fuels and that climate change wasn't that bad. The same go-to consultancy firm has been involved in every major climate policy fight from the very beginning and hired by the fossil fuel industry, but what are the courts going to do? It's not just the historical deception. It's an ongoing deception.

MICHAEL STICKA
MICHAEL STICKA

President/CEO of the GRAMMY Museum

It's actually right in our mission statement that “we celebrate the music of yesterday and today to inspire the music of tomorrow.” And we do it through our exhibits. We have 35,000 square feet of galleries. We travel exhibits, really, all over the world over the world for the past 15 years. And through our education programs, we really focus on the next generation of music's creators and leaders. We do that through really specific curricula that is designed to educate particularly young people, K-12, about the business of music, especially for those who want to go into the industry.

 
 

CLICK FOR MORE

PODCAST INTERVIEWS