When we think about building sustainable cities, our focus often turns to what we should eliminate such as single-use plastics and gas-fueled appliances. What if the future of urban resilience isn’t only about reducing what we consume, but actively reimagining what we discard?
Right now, food waste represents one of the largest systemic challenges in our urban ecosystems. When organic scraps end up in landfills, they decompose anaerobically and release methane, a greenhouse gas significantly more potent than carbon dioxide. Then there’s also the matter of all the resources such as land, water, and labor that were used to create the wasted food. At the same time, our construction sector relies heavily on carbon-intensive, extractive materials like traditional concrete.
A team of designers and researchers from my undergrad alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, decided to connect food waste with the needs of construction industry into a single, elegant solution. Their project asks a radical question: What if yesterday’s citrus peels and coffee grounds could become building materials?
The Science of Circular Construction
The project, emerging from Penn’s Weitzman School of Design, transforms discarded organic waste into durable, biodegradable building pavers.
Here is how this circular process works:
Harnessing Natural Binders: Instead of relying on energy-intensive synthetic polymers or Portland cement, the team extracts natural binders from citrus rinds and other fruit scraps. Pectin and cellulose fibers create structural bonds naturally when processed correctly.
Low-Carbon Fabrication: The mixture of shredded organic waste and natural binders cures with minimal heat and pressure compared to standard concrete manufacturing, dramatically slashing embedded carbon emissions.
Load-Bearing Utility: The resulting pavers are strong enough for outdoor walking paths, patio spaces, and urban gardens, providing a functional alternative to conventional masonry.
Return to the Soil: Unlike concrete—which remains rubble forever—these biomaterial pavers can eventually degrade naturally at the end of their lifecycle, returning nutrients back to the earth without shedding toxic microplastics or chemicals.
Rethinking Waste as a Resource Stream
What makes this project so compelling for community agency is its local potential. We don’t need exotic, imported materials to create sustainable infrastructure. Every neighborhood already produces tons of organic matter every single day through local coffee shops, juice bars, grocery stores, and home kitchens.
By viewing our urban waste streams as raw material pipelines, we can decentralize manufacturing, reduce municipal hauling costs, and create localized economies that turn kitchen trash into civic assets.
The Togetherhood Takeaway
Resilience means closing the loops in our daily lives and recognizing the hidden structural value in the things we throw away.
Audit Your Household Waste Stream: Look at your kitchen trash this week. How much of what you throw away is organic matter that could be composted or repurposed? Supporting municipal compost programs keeps organic material out of landfills where it causes the most damage.
Champion Circular Procurement: In your workplace or local community projects, advocate for bio-based and circular materials. Whether choosing reclaimed wood, mushroom packaging, or bio-composite tiles, prioritize products designed with their end-of-life in mind.
Support Student & University Innovation: Breakthroughs in urban sustainability often start in university design labs. Follow and amplify the work of interdisciplinary research hubs working on biomaterials, circular textiles, and regenerative architecture.
The materials to build a greener world are already in our hands—and in our compost bins. When we learn to design with nature rather than against it, our cities become cleaner and healthier.
One of John Rucker’s Boykin Spaniels delicately carrying an ornate box turtle to safety. Photo from Nature Conservancy
I’m hoping that this year I will be able to adopt a dog. My foster dogs have helped me heal from the loss of my soul dog, Phineas. I will never get over losing him, and I’m also ready to welcome another dog into my life for their whole life. One thing I’d love to do with my future dog is to train to be a therapy team in chemo units and for kids reading to dogs programs at the New York and Brooklyn Public Libraries. Today, I learned about another opportunity that I’d love to look into, merging my love of dogs with my love for nature.
When we talk about climate adaptation and wildlife restoration, our minds usually jump to solutions that range from high-tech solutions like satellite tracking or automated drone monitoring to letting nature take her course and reclaim the land and seas. But across the world, some of the most effective conservation tools ever deployed run on four legs—or a quick game of fetch.
Conservation dogs are quietly transforming how we protect fragile ecosystems and wildlife. By training dogs to use their olfactory superpowers—which are tens of thousands of times more sensitive than ours—scientists and local communities are locating endangered species, tracking invasive pests, and stopping illegal wildlife trafficking in fractions of the time it takes human teams. (A mind-blowing fact about the sensitivity of a dog’s nose: Bloodhounds have an olfactory capability that can even reach up to10 million timesas sensitive as ours!)
My love for dogs runs as deep as my love for nature so learning how dogs can promote conservation has me wondering if this is a future career path for me, and a type of work I can do with my future dog. The talent of these pups is a powerful reminder that our smartest path forward often isn’t trying to out-engineer nature or just leaving nature to clean up our mess, but learning how to partner with her for the good of all species, including humans.
Precision Tracking in the Field
The real-world impacts of conservation canines span across oceans, prairies, and geographic borders:
Prairie Turtle Monitors: At The Nature Conservancy’s Nachusa Grasslands in Illinois, a famous squad of retired Boykin spaniels (trained by handler John Rucker, a retired high school English teacher from North Carolina) helped scientists track threatened ornate box turtles hidden deep in tallgrass prairie. Thanks to their soft mouths, the dogs gently picked up and retrieved the turtles without causing a single injury, locating more turtles in two hours than human researchers could find in a full week. Talk about efficiency!
Pangolin and Ivory Detection: Organizations like Working Dogs for Conservation (WD4C) deploy sniffer dogs to transit hubs and border checkpoints across Africa and Asia. These dogs detect hidden ivory, rhino horn, and pangolin scales with breathtaking accuracy, disrupting illegal poaching networks before products leave the region.
Saving the Right Whale: Off the coast of New England and Canada, specialized detection dogs ride on the bows of research boats to sniff out North Atlantic Right Whale scat from over a mile away. Finding these samples allows marine biologists to assess whale stress levels, pregnancy rates, and diet without ever disturbing these critically endangered and majestic ocean giants.
Invasive Species Eradication: In New Zealand and Hawaii, local conservation teams rely on dogs to hunt down invasive pests like rats, stoats, and Argentine ants that threaten native bird populations. What would take human teams weeks of destructive searching, a trained dog can pinpoint in a single afternoon. Give these dogs a raise!
Locating Invisible Plants: In the American West, dogs sniff out invasive weeds before they bloom above ground, allowing land managers to eradicate problem plants before they overtake native grasslands and fuel wildfire risks. How devastating can invasive plants be if left to run amok? Kudzu, a fast-growing climbing vine known is know as “the vine that ate the South” because it’s now so pervasive and seemingly unstoppable. It was brought to the U.S. from Japan in 1876. 150 years on, we’re still dealing with its destruction.
A Model for Local Agency
What makes working conservation dogs so compelling for community resilience is their low barrier to technology and high degree of local agency. You don’t need a multi-million-dollar lab or proprietary software to run a successful conservation dog program. You need dedicated handlers, strong local knowledge, a deep respect for animal behavior, and imagination.
It re-centers conservation work on human-animal partnerships, bringing local communities directly into the field as active custodians of their own ecosystems.
The Togetherhood Takeaway
True resilience means expanding our toolkit beyond human tech and recognizing the ecological allies already around us.
Reframe How We View Nature’s Capabilities: Technology is vital, but biological solutions are often faster, cheaper, and less invasive. Look for opportunities in your own community where natural processes (a community members of all species!) can solve structural problems.
Support Local Working Dog Programs: Look into organizations like Working Dogs for Conservation or Rogue Detection Teams. Supporting non-profits that train shelter dogs or rescue breeds for wildlife research gives animals a second life while protecting vital habitats.
Become an Active Observer: Dogs succeed because they pay hyper-detailed attention to their environment. Take a cue from our four-legged partners this week: practice active observation in your local parks or urban green spaces to better understand the biodiversity right outside your doorstep.
We can’t tackle the ecological crisis alone. One of our best partners in building a sustainable future is sitting right at our feet, tail wagging and ready to help.
adidas Cooling Vest – an Innovation for FIFA WORLD CUP 2026™. Image is free to use from here: http://bit.ly/4p61XLk
If you’ve been following the World Cup matches over the last few weeks, you’ve witnessed some of the most intense athleticism on the planet. To win, teams aren’t just strategizing against their opponents—they’re actively managing nature’s wrath. A brutal summer heatwave has blanketed the host cities, pushing the physical limits of human performance to a dangerous breaking point.
To keep players from overheating, teams turned to outer space engineering. As reported by The Athletic, players are donning specialized cooling vests and silver space jackets during warm-ups and half-time breaks, using materials originally designed to keep astronauts safe in hostile conditions.
It’s a brilliant feat of adaptation. As we watch multi-million-dollar athletes use aerospace technology to perform at the top of their game, it begs the question: will all of us eventually need this kind of adaptation to survive on a warming planet?
The Illusion of the Tech Fix
There’s a dangerous comfort in high-tech climate solutions. When we see space-age cooling gear or air-conditioned stadium hubs, it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that human ingenuity will always engineer a way out of a crisis. We tell ourselves that as the planet warms, we’ll just adapt our way through it.
But this World Cup is exposing the deep inequality of technological adaptation. We can build specialized, high-conductive cooling gear for elite athletes, but we can’t wrap a space jacket around the construction workers building the stadiums, the transit staff moving the crowds, and the local communities whose power grids are strained to the limit by the surrounding infrastructure. In my own Brooklyn neighborhood, ConEd has to reduce everyone’s voltage to avoid a blackout for several days. If you aren’t a million-dollar-athlete (and I’m certainly not!), then you’re asked to adapt in a way where you give up something that provides comfort. In many parts of the world, air conditioning doesn’t exist at all. What becomes of them when the heatwaves are the summer norm, not an anomaly for a few days?
When Adaptation Hits a Hard Wall
This is the exact tension at the heart of our ongoing climate choice. Adaptations like cooling vests are vital for immediate safety, but they are a backstop for a privileged few, not a solution. When open-air stadiums face temperatures that FIFA deems unsafe for play, we aren’t looking at a management challenge—we’re looking at a systemic failure that’s much bigger than FIFA.
If we rely entirely on tech patches to shield us from a changing climate, we’re choosing a path of continuous, exhausting defense. Real progress happens when the friction of these extreme events forces us to move past temporary fixes and start investing in systemic mitigation—greening our local grids with renewables, restructuring our public spaces with natural shade from trees and vegetation, and designing infrastructure that works within the planet’s boundaries rather than trying to out-engineer them. We’ll never beat nature in the long game. We can’t burn down (or overheat) our home and expect to be able to live in it. That goes for our built homes as well as the planet we share with every other living being.
The Togetherhood Takeaway
Resilience means recognizing the difference between a temporary shield and long-term safety.
Audit Your Local Shields: Think about the adaptations you rely on during a heatwave: your home’s AC, the food and drink you consume, neighborhood cooling centers (our public libraries in New York stayed open despite the 4th of July holiday to give people a cool place to go), the clothing you wear, etc. Are these available and sustainable for your entire community over the next decade, or are they temporary fixes? What will you do if summer temps over 100 degrees become the norm, when heatwaves are simply just how summer goes?
Look for the Living Infrastructure, and Advocate for its Expansion: Tech is great, but nature is often a more effective, efficient, and less expensive cooling mechanism. Support local initiatives that plant urban tree canopies, install green roofs, and create public shade structures that cool entire neighborhoods and cities, not just individuals.
Advocate for the Whole Team: True community agency means ensuring that climate protections apply to everyone, not just you and your household. When local labor advocates push for mandatory heat-safety standards for outdoor workers, back them up. Survival and comfort shouldn’t require elite status.
We can’t out-engineer a warming planet with silver jackets alone (though they are arguably cool in more ways than one!) Our collective and individual future depends on our willingness to cool the planet we all share.
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Photo by Brendio.
If you’ve been watching the international matches lately, you’ve likely seen a familiar scene play out after the final whistle. While thousands of fans stream toward the exits, dodging discarded cups and food wrappers, the Japanese supporters stay behind. They quietly move down the rows, filling large blue bags with garbage—not just their own, but the litter left behind by total strangers.
To the western eye, this looks like an extraordinary act of volunteerism. But to the people doing the sweeping, it isn’t an extraordinary act at all. It’s simply routine.
This viral tradition first broke onto the global stage during the 1998 World Cup in France. For nearly thirty years, these fans have acted as unofficial ambassadors, proving that how we treat our public spaces is a direct reflection of our collective character. It forces us to ask a vital question about our own neighborhoods: Why do we treat shared spaces as someone else’s problem?
The Root of the Ritual
In the West, we’re often socialized to believe that public maintenance is a service we pay for through taxes or ticket prices—that it’s someone else’s job to wipe down the counter or pick up the stadium floor.
But in Japan, civic responsibility is an educational milestone on par with reading and mathematics. From their first days in elementary school, children participate in osouji jikan, or 15 – 20 minutes of daily cleaning time. Because schools don’t hire janitorial staff to clean up after the children, the students themselves sweep the halls, clean the desks, and care for the physical structure. Many hands and hearts make the work go quickly because everyone does their part.
This creates an entirely different relationship with the built environment. When you spend your childhood cleaning your own classroom, you grow into an adult who can’t look at a littered stadium step without seeing a collective failure.
Leaving No Trace
This behavior is anchored by an ancient proverb: Tatsu tori ato wo nigosazu, “the bird taking flight does not leave the water muddy.” It means that when you leave a place, a job, or a situation, you should do so gracefully—cleaning up after yourself, settling all your affairs, and leaving things in pristine condition for those who come next. It pairs with the core Japanese aesthetic and moral value of awareness and respect for others (omoiyari).
When we view our shared space not as temporary commodities to consume, but as shared ecosystems to protect, our behavior naturally shifts. True sustainability isn’t just about big corporate climate policies or high-tech recycling grids. It’s found in the everyday culture of respect for the places we inhabit and the people who will occupy them after we leave.
The Togetherhood Takeaway
One of the ways to build a strong sense of community resilience is by caring for our shared public spaces, and right now you can embrace this idea and act.
Adopt the Bird’s Philosophy: This week, practice the art of leaving no trace. Whether you’re spending an afternoon in a public park, a seat on the subway, or a local coffee shop, make it a point of pride to leave the space cleaner than when you arrived.
Reframe the Labor: Take a moment to notice the people who clean up your workplace, your local streets, or your apartment building. Acknowledge that public cleanliness is a human effort, and make their jobs easier by managing your own footprint.
Teach Local Custodianship: If you have children, nieces, or nephews, involve them in the active maintenance of their spaces. Normalizing the idea that cleaning up is an act of community care builds the foundation for a more resilient future.
We don’t own the places where we gather—we are gifted them by the people who came before us and we borrow them from the people who use them after us. Let’s make sure the only remnant of us we leave behind is a space that’s even better than we found it.
We are currently watching the redrawing of New York City’s energy map from two opposite directions at the exact same time. One boundary is shifting hundreds of miles away in the Canadian wilderness; the other is moving right at your apartment window frame.
For decades, the city’s grid has felt like a massive, untouchable black box managed entirely from the top down. But as the climate transition accelerates, a fascinating dynamic is emerging: we are realizing that achieving true resilience requires a dual strategy—coupling massive, industrial infrastructure with hyper-local, decentralized community power operating at an individual apartment level.
Two recent breakthroughs show exactly how this macro-micro puzzle is coming together.
The Macro Frontier: The Deep Wire from Canada
This month, the energy landscape downstate underwent a monumental shift with the activation of the Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE). This 339-mile, high-voltage direct current line runs underground and underwater all the way from Quebec straight into Astoria, Queens.
This is infrastructure engineering on a massive scale, designed to funnel 10.4 terawatt-hours of clean Canadian hydropower directly into our local electricity market—enough to meet up to 20% of New York City’s entire energy load. Since the closure of the Indian Point nuclear plant, the city has leaned heavily on fossil fuel plants, causing local emissions to spike. The arrival of this deep wire is a vital macro-level act of mitigation, helping to displace those dirty peak plants and clean up the regional grid baseline.
The Micro Frontier: The Fight for Balcony Solar
But while the city hooks up to Canadian dams, a parallel revolution is brewing right on our brick facades. The state Legislature just passed the Solar Up Now NY (SUNNY) Act—the balcony solar bill—which is now heading to the governor’s desk.
Historically, participating in clean energy has been a luxury reserved for suburban homeowners with vast roof lines, leaving millions of apartment dwellers entirely shut out of the transition. The SUNNY Act flips this dynamic by allowing New Yorkers to legally hang small, portable solar panels from their windows or balconies and plug them right into a standard wall outlet without needing complex utility agreements.
These plug-in panels max out at 1,200 watts. They won’t power an entire building, but they allow everyday renters to generate their own green electricity to shave money off their utility bills. It turns passive energy consumers into active participants in the grid. Even ConEd has backed the bill, noting that these tiny, localized generation devices pose minimal risk to the broader infrastructure.
The Synergy of the Ecosystem
True urban resilience is built in the space between these two extremes. We cannot run a global metropolis solely on window panels, but we also cannot foster a culture of sustainability if regular citizens feel entirely disconnected from the systems that power their lives.
The macro grid gives us the foundation we need to survive; the micro panels give us the agency to be engaged in the decision-making process for our future.
The Togetherhood Takeaway
Building a clean future means looking at the energy transition as an ecosystem that requires both major public investment and local, individual action.
Track Your Baseline: Take a look at your next utility bill. As big projects like the Champlain Hudson line come online, pay attention to where your power is actually sourced and keep an eye on how the regional mix is shifting.
Watch Your Windows: Keep an eye on the progress of the SUNNY Act. If it signs into law, audit your own apartment’s sun exposure. Even a small window setup is a vote for decentralized energy independence.
Support Local Legislation: Change happens when state and local representatives push bills that democratize access to green technology. Call your representatives and remind them that climate policy needs to work for renters, not just property owners.
The future of energy isn’t just arriving through a massive pipeline in Queens—it’s also setting up shop on our fire escapes and windows.
We are currently watching two seemingly unstoppable forces collide. On one side is the relentless corporate race to integrate artificial intelligence into every corner of our digital lives. On the other side is a fragile, aging energy grid and communities across the country that are refusing to let massive, resource-hungry data centers steamroll their neighborhoods.
The environmental toll of this digital gold rush is undeniable. A single AI query can use ten times the electricity of a standard internet search, and the data centers required to process these models require billions of gallons of water for cooling and unprecedented amounts of power. Trying to slow down this technological train feels nearly impossible.
But what if the sheer velocity of the AI boom is exactly what forces our hand? What if this crisis becomes the ultimate catalyst that forces tech giants and governments to finally accelerate the green energy transition?
The Corporate Collision Course
For years, tech conglomerates have enjoyed a sterling public relations narrative centered on ambitious net-zero carbon pledges. But the energy and resources demands of generative AI are obliterating those goals. To keep their AI systems running, these companies need power immediately, and they are quickly exhausting the capacity of our current infrastructure.
This is where the leverage lies. Tech giants cannot afford to let their AI ambitions starve for power, but they also cannot afford the reputational destruction of abandoning their climate goals to say nothing about the potential that these ambitions have to create more havoc on an already delicate planet. This paradox could force an unprecedented shift in corporate behavior: Instead of waiting for municipal utilities to green the grid, could tech companies put their massive balance sheets to work—directly funding utility-scale solar, wind, and geothermal projects to create the very clean energy they require and that would benefit people and the planet?
Friction Breeds Innovation
Local communities are proving that they are not passive backdrops for industrial expansion. From Virginia to Oregon, residents are organizing against the noise, land use, and water strain of new data centers.
This hyper-local resistance is creating a massive operational bottleneck for tech companies. When communities refuse to lie down, companies cannot just build bigger; they have to build smarter and they have to listen to these concerns to build partnerships with local residents. This friction could bring about a wave of structural innovation. Advanced liquid cooling systems that eliminate water waste, architectural designs that blend into local landscapes because they’re quiet and unobtrusive, and decentralized data centers that can operate on microgrids without straining the local town’s power supply would be wins for communities, tech companies, and nature.
Government action often lags until a system faces a breaking point. The sheer, unyielding demand of the digital race might be the exact pressure needed to force regulatory policy. Imagine a world where we have modern our grids that run on abundant clean energy and embrace radical efficiency.
The Togetherhood Takeaway
AI often feels like a runaway train, an inevitability. But it needs energy to operate. there isn’t any way around that. If we in the climate community flip the script, it could just be the lever that redirects its energy toward real, meaningful progress.
Audit the Corporate Promises: This week, look at the AI tools you use and research the climate pledges of the companies behind them. Hold them accountable to the idea that digital progress cannot come at the expense of ecological stability. Write to them. Call them. And call your reps to demand that they demand these companies keep their climate pledges intact, especially if they want to expand data centers in your city or town.
Support Local Demands: When communities near you advocate for stricter zoning laws and resource transparency from data centers, back them up. Local friction is the primary driver of corporate innovation. Show up at meetings and again, call your reps on the local, state, and national levels.
Advocate for Grid Modernization: The conversation around data centers is ultimately a conversation about our grid. Support regional policies that prioritize upgrading transmission lines and scaling renewable energy storage. Start with your local utility company. Contact them and find out what they’re doing.
We may not be able to stop the digital race, but we can demand that the machinery running it is built in a way that preserves the planet for all beings who call this home.
Smokestack collapses as an industrial site is demolished among residential homes. Community photo from Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting website: https://brockovichdatacenter.com/
We’re told the future is in the cloud. But the cloud isn’t an ethereal, weightless concept; it is a physical network of massive, energy-hungry data centers that require vast amounts of land and water to survive. As the race to build out artificial intelligence accelerates, these industrial hubs are quietly rewriting the landscape of rural and suburban communities across the country.
Often, the decisions to build these facilities happen in closed-door corporate and political meetings, leaving local residents to deal with the aftermath without having their voices heard and considered. The results: overburdened power grids that fail to provide for communities; strained water tables that bleed faucets dry; noisy cooling systems generating air pollution; a loss of jobs and decimation to the local economy. The list goes on and on.
Brockovich’s initiative isn’t about halting progress; it’s about establishing radical transparency to make sure the stories and concerns of communities aren’t sidelined by business and politicians. By creating a centralized map where community members can log the location, environmental impacts, and local concerns surrounding data centers, she’s turning isolated complaints into a powerful, unified database.
When a multi-billion-dollar tech company enters a small town, individual residents often feel powerless to ask for accountability. The company is big and powerful, and the individuals are made to feel small. But Brockovich knows data can be an equalizer. When communities unite their voices and aggregate their lived experiences onto a single map, they create a visible, undeniable record – the power of one amplifies with the power of many. They shift the conversation from corporate promises to real-world impacts to people.
The Reality of Local Agency
True sustainability cannot be achieved if we sacrifice the resilience of our local neighborhoods for the sake of digital expansion. Brockovich’s map is a tool for local agency. It reminds us that technology must serve human communities, not the other way around. By tracking these facilities together, people and communities ensure the human and ecological costs of our digital infrastructure are out in the open, where they belong. This projects makes the invisible visible.
The Togetherhood Takeaway
Resilience means refusing to let your local environment be managed entirely from the top down.
Check out Erin’s initiative, Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting: At her website for this initiative (https://brockovichdatacenter.com/), Erin has so many resources of information paired with ways you can take action right now. It’s the most comprehensive and actionable resource I’ve ever seen on this topic!
Look Beyond the Screen: This week, find out where the data centers that power your digital life are actually located. Are they concentrated in specific regions, and how is their resource consumption affecting local utility bills or water tables? you can start by looking at resources like https://www.datacentermap.com/ and click “Explore Map” to see how the data centers are clustered around the world.
Demand Transparency: When local officials debate zoning laws for new industrial technology, show up and ask the hard questions about long-term power and water usage. Contact your local official’s office to find out when these meetings are happening. Collective accountability starts with local inquiry.
The digital future is being built on real ground. We have a responsibility to protect our communities and all beings who call them home.
A Gulf Coast storm followed by snowmelt in January 2025 temporarily increased the Mississippi River’s outflow, sending a surge of sediment through the delta and into gulf waters. NASA.
We often talk about climate change in the future tense, but the physical reorganization of our world is already happening in real-time. It is a story of where we can stay, where we must leave, and how we might restore the land and waterways that connect all species that share this planet. For more than a century, people have built rigid concrete defenses against rising sea levels and in an attempt to dam and direct rivers to suit our immediate needs. But the physical reality of our planet is now demanding a total reorganization of where—and how—we live together as part of an ecosystem that is far bigger and more powerful than us rather basing our construction on the belief that people can dominate nature.
As we face this transition in mindset and practical living, we are guided by a fundamental climate choice first formulated by physicist and former presidential science advisor Dr. John Holdren:
We basically have three choices when it comes to our changing climate: mitigation, adaptation and suffering. Holdren acknowledges that we’re going to do some of each. The question he asks us is what the mix is going to be. Increase one of the three, and we will do less of the second and third. To many minds, this is the goal: the more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be.
Following on from his framework of these three pie pieces, I’ve been thinking about three distinct pieces of research that point us toward where the climate transition is leading us.
1. The Physics of Departure: The Sinking Gulf
A new study recently published in Nature Sustainability brings the urgency of Dr. John Holdren’s triad into sharp focus for the American South. In the Gulf Coast, specifically around New Orleans and the surrounding delta, researchers have identified a compounding crisis: the land is physically sinking (subsidence) at the same time the ocean is rising. This is a perfect storm that threatens one of the most culturally rich cities in the U.S.
The Acceleration of Relative Sea-Level Rise
Using high-resolution satellite data and GPS monitoring, the study reveals that the land in this region is moving downward at a rate significantly higher than previously estimated. This creates a Relative Sea-Level Rise that is often double or triple the global average. While the world discusses centimeters of rise over decades, communities in the Gulf are dealing with inches of lost elevation in just a few years.
This subsidence is driven by a combination of natural sediment compaction and human activity, including the extraction of groundwater and fossil fuel. Because we have dammed the Mississippi River (as discussed in our next section), the natural delivery of new sediment that used to replenish the delta has been cut off. The land is starving for the very silt that used to keep it above water.
The Limits of Adaptation
When the land physically disappears, the limits of adaptation are breached. We reach a point where holding the line with higher levees and stronger pumps becomes a mechanical impossibility. We cannot prevent a flood with a tablespoon while the tap is turned up to full blast. This is rapidly shutting down the option mitigation. Therefore, it forces the zero-sum choice Holdren warned us about: New Orleans must choose between managed retreat—a proactive, planned relocation—or unavoidable suffering for those left behind.
Relocation in this context is not just a logistical move; it is a cultural crisis. To avoid mass suffering, we need a framework for place-making that moves entire community networks together. If we don’t plan for the transfer of the community—the music, food, heritage, and social bonds—we risk losing the soul of the Gulf to the rising water.
2. Working With the Water: America Undammed
While the coast sinks, our inland arteries are being liberated through a radical shift in infrastructure policy. As reported by theNew York Times, the United States is currently undergoing a massive effort to dismantle thousands of obsolete dams—many of which have outlived their 50-year lifespans and now pose significant safety risks to downstream communities.
This is proactive adaptation in its purest form. For over a century, we treated rivers as plumbing—static pipes to be redirected, blocked, and controlled. Now, we are learning that a free-flowing river is a far superior neighbor than one trapped behind aging concrete.
The Multi-Species Dividend of Restoration
When a dam is removed, the results are often instantaneous and transformative. By restoring the natural flow, we allow for the return of sediment—the literal building blocks of the land—which has been trapped in reservoirs for decades. This sediment is what naturally replenishes deltas and keeps coastal lands from sinking, directly impacting the crisis seen in and around New Orleans.
Furthermore, removing these barriers restores migratory paths for fish and wildlife that have been blocked for generations. It is an act of biological reconciliation that allows species to move toward cooler waters as temperatures rise, a key component of the Deep Adaptation required in a changing climate.
The Safety and Financial Calculus
Beyond ecology, the Undammed movement is a response to the mechanical failure of the 20th-century model. Aging dams are increasingly unable to handle the 1,000-year flood events that are becoming more frequent. Removing them is a strategic choice to avoid the catastrophic suffering of a dam failure. By restoring natural floodplains, we create massive, landscape-scale sponges that can absorb and slow down water surges, protecting human infrastructure by working with the water’s energy rather than trying to stifle it. We’ve made water a foe when we’re much better off giving it the room it needs to be our friend.
3. The Nomad Century: The Infrastructure of Global Movement
If the sinking Gulf represents the limits of adaptation and the undammed rivers represent the liberation of nature, then Gaia Vince’s book Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World represents the inevitable human response: The Great (Human) Migration. We are moving toward a reality where the map of human habitation must become as fluid as the climate itself.
To manage this transition without catastrophic suffering, we must move away from the 20th-century model of fixed borders and toward a 21st-century model of managed movement. Given our current geopolitics, this is getting more complicated (and contentious) by the day. There’s no doubt that this requires a radical rethink of our global systems across three specific pillars:
The Digital State and Portable Identity
In a world of mass movement, your identity cannot be tied to a physical piece of paper in a desk drawer that might be lost to a flood or a fire. We need a global framework for Digital Identity—portable, secure, and internationally recognized credentials that allow migrants to carry their medical records, professional certifications, and legal standing with them. This ensures that a doctor from a submerged coast can become a doctor in a receiver city on day one, rather than being trapped in a cycle of structural suffering and economic, intellectual, and talent waste.
The Rise of Receiver Cities
The green zones—latitudes in the north that will remain temperate—must proactively prepare to become Receiver Cities. This is the ultimate test of Holdren’s triad: by investing in massive adaptation now (housing, high-speed transit, and sustainable food systems), these regions can prevent the mass suffering of unplanned, chaotic arrivals. These cities must be designed as expandable machines, utilizing modular architecture and circular resource loops to integrate millions of new residents while maintaining ecological balance and social structures.
Deep Adaptation and the Preservation of Culture
Scholars like Jem Bendell have expanded on this reality through the framework of Deep Adaptation. It acknowledges that because global mitigation failed to prevent significant warming, we must now pivot toward valuing what we want to keep. As communities move, we must build systems to archive and carry forward the culture of humanity—languages, traditions, and social structures—so that when we relinquish the land, we do not lose the soul and the history of the people who lived there.
The Togetherhood Takeaway
We cannot command the planet to stay still. Our survival depends on our ability to move with the land and the water, rather than against them.
Audit the Mix: Look at your local climate initiatives. Are they focused on mitigation (reducing the cause), adaptation (living with the effect), or is your community opting for future suffering by ignoring the problem?
Audit the Choice: Demand that your leaders explain their Holdren Mix. Are they spending on adaptation now, or are they effectively budgeting for future suffering?
Map Your Resilience: Research the topography of your own region. Understanding whether your land is rising or sinking changes every conversation about long-term infrastructure and property.
Map Your Role: Research your own local geography. Is your community positioned to be a receiver of migration or a sender? This changes every conversation you have about local infrastructure and zoning.
Advocate for the Flow: Support local river restoration projects. Undamming a waterway is an act of long-term climate insurance for your entire watershed.
Practice Fluidity: In a Nomad Century, the most valuable skill is the ability to form deep community connections quickly.
Redefine Home: In a Nomad Century, home must shift from a static point on a map to a commitment to community resilience, wherever that community ends up.
The map is changing. To honor the planet and each other, we must have the courage to move with it. Will we each find it within ourselves to do the mitigation and adaptation needed to limit suffering? That remains the most potent question on the table today for every country, policy maker, and person. Eventually, nature will demand an answer.
Just after graduating from my Master’s program at University of Cambridge / Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) last summer, I went to Stockholm, Sweden for vacation. While I was there, I stayed in a beautiful neighborhood that was a perfect melding of nature and city infrastructure.
Thanks to a very serendipitous bowl of soup, I learned from a waiter that this neighborhood had a secret – it had been transformed from a toxic, industrial wasteland into a living lab for climate action.
I had the opportunity to interview incredible people for this piece including the former finance minister of Sweden, the lead architect, energy and climate researchers, and the team members of ElectriCITY, the collective leading the district’s sustainability efforts. Their inspiring blueprint can be adapted and applied in every city, including my hometown of NYC.
This Friday, the world celebrates a staggering milestone as Sir David Attenborough turns 100. For a century, he has served as one of nature’s fiercest advocates and storytellers, moving from showing us the beauty of the wild to imploring us to take a stand for nature’s survival and our own. His career proves that meaningful change is rarely a sprint; it is a relentless, lifelong commitment to shifting how we see the world and our place in it. I, like so many other people, have been profoundly influenced by him and his passion for our natural world. Graduating from University of Cambridge, as he did, after studying Sustainability Leadership set my life and career on a new course.
Doubling Down on the Blueprint
I have been thinking a lot about this long-term perspective lately, especially with the publication of my latest feature in Smithsonian Magazine. I spent months diving into the story of Hammarby Sjöstad, a neighborhood in Stockholm that set out with intensely ambitious sustainability goals in the 1990s.
When the project initially fell short of its targets, the community did not abandon the mission. They doubled down. A group of neighbors got together and created ElectriCITY Innovation. They treated their failures as data points and evolved their strategy, eventually creating a circular-economy blueprint that cities across the globe can adapt and apply. You can read the full story of their decades-long journey toward resilience in my new feature:
Whether we look at Attenborough’s hundred-year legacy or Stockholm’s thirty-year urban experiment, the lesson for our own communities remains clear: sustainability requires the stamina to stay in the game when things get difficult.
Celebrate the storytellers: Take a moment this Friday to watch a piece of Attenborough’s work and reflect on how his perspective shaped your own understanding of nature.
Audit your long game: Look at a sustainability project in your own neighborhood that feels stalled. Instead of viewing a missed goal as a failure, ask how you can double down and pivot the strategy like Stockholm did.
Share the blueprint: When you find a solution that works, document it and share it. Evolution happens when we learn from each other’s experiments, failures, and triumphs. Sustainability is not a one-and-done task. It’s a process of continuous improvement.
Nature and our cities both require us to think in decades, not just days. To honor Dr. David Attenborough and the beings with whom we share this planet, let’s keep building for the next century.
Christa Avampato 
