My Writing

• I spoke with , writer of Bird History, about the origins of bird names, why birds offer such a rich lens on American history, and what our changing relationship with them can tell us about conservation and progress. You can watch, listen, or read the transcript. Here’s one of my favorite excerpts:

Robert: In the 1400s, the English had this endearing practice of giving birds people names. You had Tom tit, Jenny wren. There’s also a bird called a pie, and they called it Margaret pie, or Maggie pie, and that just became magpie. There are other birds that this happened to as well. There was a bird called a daw, and they named him Jack, so that became Jackdaw.

There’s a bird called a redbreast that they named Robin. Robin redbreast became so popular and attached that the original redbreast fell away. That name has spread all over the world too. American robins are named after English robins, which were just a nickname. It was like we had all these birds flying around and we’d call them Steve, and that just became the name that we call them. This is something that has a six hundred year history. It shows that people, the culture, and history have these long through lines for the birds we see around us all the time.

• My essay, Powering progress: The quest for energy abundance, came out several months ago as part of Big Think’s special issue The Engine of Progress. I’m relinking to it because a few weeks ago the featured it in their recap of the Climate and Energy tracks from Progress Conference 2025. I strongly recommend checking out the recap for great talks by , , and many others.

  From “Powering Progress”:

Progress runs on power. There is no progress without energy. Our ability to harness energy has enabled enormous strides in agriculture, industry, manufacturing, transportation, and medicine. The more energy available to a society, the wealthier it becomes.

• My series on The Odyssey is still going strong. Last month I wrote about Why Odysseus Turns Down Immortality. The next session is Thursday, April 9. We’re having a great time, join us!

  • You can watch sessions 1, 2, 3, and 4 on Interintellect’s Youtube channel

    Get tickets here!

• I created a new landing page on the website I’m calling Marginalia. It’s a place for me to post shorter pieces or blog style reflections, not full essays. I generally won’t send these out via email, but I’ll share them on notes and in these recaps.

  • Growing up and saying goodbye

I told him it was just me teasing, that I actually love watching him grow. He’s such a big boy now, and I love him. He smiled and went back to his cookie.

I put him to bed and knew, once again, I had just said goodbye forever to another version of my little boy.

(Mike Riggs gets it; so does “To have a child is to fall in love with a thousand beautiful strangers.”)

• Moments that come and go

I appreciate Impressionism much more since I had kids. I get what an artist like Monet was trying to do now. Trying to hold on and capture a moment before it disappears into another.

• One more note about parenting while we’re on the subject:

Ideas I enjoyed

• Motorcycles and Cows: My brother took a three week motorcycle trip across India. He wrote a great, and often quite funny, essay about the experience:

“Always eyes are forward in India, never left and right.” He continued on his diatribe, explaining how common it was for cows to wander into the street. With four or five examples, he sounded like nothing more than that Fred Armisen meme from Parks and Rec, where the answer to every infraction is “straight to jail.” Here, any possible circumstance ended with “cow.”

“You are driving on highway? Cow.

You are crossing street? Cow.

You see market, want to stop? Cow.”

I assured him I would keep both eyes forward, always on the lookout for cow.

• Listers: A Glimpse into Extreme Birdwatching: Multiple people sent me Listers after listening to my podcast with Robert, and it’s easily one of the best things I’ve ever watched on birding. Also a good example of why I do things like the podcast and these posts in the first place — as said “A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.”

• I know I’m late to the party, but I just discovered ’s blog, and I’m loving it. In The anti-Promethean backlash he makes a very important, but often overlooked distinction between environmentalism and the anti-progress crowd. They’re related, but “it’s critically important not to conflate the two.”

It was primarily through environmentalism that the anti-Promethean backlash manifested itself and exerted influence over events, yet there is no fundamental, necessary connection between concern for the health and beauty of the natural world and antipathy toward — in Francis Bacon’s formulation, the use of science and technology “for the relief of man’s estate.” Indeed, as is now becoming clear in the context of climate change, it is only through the continued development of our technological powers that we can hope to arrest and reverse the immense damage we have caused.

I content the misanthropic views often attributed to environmentalism are not representative of the movement writ large. Environmentalism can be positive-sum and as Lindsey says, “must be judged as a large and necessary step forward in human progress.”

• In a similar vein, wrote a great story for , Can Abundance Include Nature? Certainly! Plus, restoration will become even more of an imperative as land is decoupled from production. More from less means more marginal land taken out of production and the need for tools to restore it.

• Speaking of decoupling land from production, I’ve been pondering what will become of ranch and grazing lands if synthetic beef makes traditional ranching obsolete. In The AI Revolution No One’s Talking About: How Artificial Insemination reshaped the American beef supply by , she shows how artificial insemination is improving dairy economics and what that means for beef production. It’s a good example of how technology is revolutionizing food production in often surprising ways.

• On that note, years ago I worked on an investment to grow and export blueberries in Peru. does a nice job in Chasing Counter Seasonality explaining how and why it became such a booming sector. His article How packaged salads took over America is another great read on the technology in agriculture and food systems.

• Why Are American Passenger Trains Slow? by is an excellent economic and historical explanation of why we don’t have high speed passenger rail in the US. The answer is much more interesting than the US doesn’t know how to build.

• Are screens bad for children? An excellent interview of by . One takeaway from the conversation is how important discernment and judgment is for a parent. Simple rules like no screen time are easy to enforce (and easy for others to comprehend), but taking the time to be thoughtful and discerning, and teaching kids to do the same, opens up far more opportunities for growth.

One last thing

• Give your kid a pencil and pad of paper. You’ll be surprised what they come up with!

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I feel it most in Monet’s series of the same landscape in different light and seasons. The kids and I take the same walk many times a week, and like Monet painting the same scene, I watch it change each time and witness the moments come and go.

When we started on these walks the kids were in strollers. Before long they were tottering and babbling at the cows and horses. Now they speed ahead on their scooters. I try to hold the moments, to memorize them, but they evaporate so quickly.

I’ve started to see paintings on these walks. It’s never a perfect match, but a specific painting will come to mind. Sometimes it’s the mood, color, or perspective. I marvel that my here and now can be connected across time and space with an artist’s there and then. It makes the moment much more precious.

Last night Clark (3yo) said, “okay, daddy. I’ll stop for you. How do I stop growing?” His earnestness, the recognition that his growing up was breaking my heart, bowled me over.

I told him it was just me teasing, that I actually love watching him grow. He’s such a big boy now, and I love him. He smiled and went back to his cookie.

I put him to bed and knew, once again, I had just said goodbye forever to another version of my little boy.

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In this conversation, Robert shares the origins of bird names before we move into why birds offer such a rich lens on American history and what our changing relationship with them can tell us about conservation and progress.

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Transcript:

Editor’s note: The transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Origins of Bird Names

Grant Mulligan: Let’s jump right in. One of my favorite bits of yours is that you are a bird name enthusiast. On X and in many of your posts, you talk about where bird names come from. I’ve got Monet’s painting “The Magpie” behind me. How did magpies get their name?

Robert Francis: In the 1400s, the English had this endearing practice of giving birds people names. You had Tom tit, Jenny wren. There’s also a bird called a pie, and they called it Margaret pie, or Maggie pie, and that just became magpie. There are other birds that this happened to as well. There was a bird called a daw, and they named him Jack, so that became Jackdaw.

There’s a bird called a redbreast that they named Robin. Robin redbreast became so popular and attached that the original redbreast fell away. That name has spread all over the world too. American robins are named after English robins, which were just a nickname. It was like we had all these birds flying around and we’d call them Steve, and that just became the name that we call them. This is something that has a six hundred year history. It shows that people, the culture, and history have these long through lines for the birds we see around us all the time.

Mulligan: I had no idea that it went back to the 1400s; that is a long time. Obviously people would’ve had names for the birds around them, but the fact that they were just common names, that weren’t particularly descriptive, and yet those names have stuck through time cracks me up.

Birds and American History

Mulligan: You already jumped right into where I was hoping to go, history and birds, and how these two things are tied together. What is it about birds in particular that make them relevant to recounting history, particularly American history?

Francis: Nowadays, we often think about birds as window dressing, something that’s fun and interesting to talk about and think about. There are people who like watching birds, but we feel like they exist out there. They lead just completely separate lives from ours.

If you go back through history, birds were woven much more deeply into people’s daily lives. We used birds to stuff our mattresses with bird feathers. [Wild] birds used to be a regular part of people’s diets. What’s most interesting to me is seeing how all of the conflicts and contradictions that are core to American history and identity can be seen playing out in our relationships with birds. Conflicts over race, over gender, over class, and conflicts between the north and the south all show up in the ways that people have treated birds over time.

There are reasons that birds are special; that they’re different than other classes of animals. When we push the wilderness back, when we live in cities, other than rats and squirrels you don’t see a lot of mammals. But birds, we can’t keep them out. I live in New York City, and it’s one of the best places for seeing birds in the country. Central Park is flooded with migrating birds every fall and winter. New York skyscrapers are famous for being homes for peregrine falcons and kestrels that nest and hunt pigeons and rats. Birds follow us around. It’s a very normal thing to see a really wide range of birds in the city.

We don’t have this same city/nature dichotomy in the same way that you might expect with other classes of animals. You can’t keep them out. Over the country’s history we have tried to push back the wild and kill off the animals we see as vermin, like bears, wolves, and coyotes. Birds are still with us, and they stayed with us, and if you keep your eyes open, you know you’ll see them. We don’t live separated from nature as much as we pretend, and birds are maybe the best demonstration of that.

Mulligan: I think you’re right. One of the reasons birding has been such a hobby of mine for many years is that everywhere I’ve traveled there are birds. I grew up in Arizona and they’re part of the backyard fabric. I still feel like I’m home when I hear certain calls, like a cactus wren or Gila woodpecker, birds that have these narrow ranges that are close to my home. Then I’ve traveled to Wisconsin and there are different birds there. South America, Europe, you see birds everywhere. You can see them in Paris. You can see them in the jungles of Costa Rica. There’s something about birds in particular. I hadn’t quite thought about what makes birds so different compared to mammals, that they can still be such a core part of our storytelling.

How did you get interested in the intersection of birds in history? I know people who like history books. I know people who like birding. I’ve never seen people meld them together in quite the way that you do. What brought these two passions together?

Francis: Several years ago I was in a book club reading The Power Broker by Robert Caro, and I was marveling about this guy who dedicated so much of his life to writing about one person. Caro spent 10 years writing this book about this, until then, obscure bureaucrat in New York that had a fascinating life and a huge impact on the city. Somebody worth writing a 1,200 page book. Then he spent the next four decades writing about Lyndon B. Johnson. I was having a conversation with a friend in this book club about, if you were in Caro’s position, what would you spend your life writing about? My friend asked me this, and I said something like birds and US history. She said “you should write that book.”

That got the wheels turning in my head. I was familiar with birding history and ornithology. There’s a lot of writing about famous and influential ornithologists, but there isn’t so much about how ordinary people interacted with birds. I think now we associate birders with people who have this hyper fixation, who like to learn all the bird names and go just look at birds. Today that’s what interacting with birds looks like. But over the last 400 or more years of America’s history, that’s a pretty recent development.

People still relied on birds for their income. They saw birds as pests. They used birds to decorate their hats. There were a lot of different ways of interacting with birds, and the more I looked into it, the more that I saw how deeply it went into so many people’s lives. In ways that are surprising. Not just their lives and their incomes, but the conflicts that we have as a society.

This fits within the broader field of environmental history, of understanding our relationship with nature. Taking a longer view, there are many different kinds of people that lived in the United States, and all of those people, all those classes of people, had different relationships with nature and different relationships with birds.

Mulligan: I remember going to Wisconsin where I first fell in love with birds. I’d live with my grandparents during the summers, and my grandpa loved robins because he said they were proud birds. They always had their heads held up high and their chests out. And I think he would see a robin and stand up a little straighter.

He and my grandma also loved house sparrows. I asked them, “why do you like house sparrows so much?” It’s because the sparrows never left. All the other birds leave, and in the winter, when they’re lonely, those still come to the feeder. Sparrows were friends who stayed with them and had deep meaning for how they went about their lives. Those aren’t stories that get told often, but as you’ve gone through this history, those stories are very real, and they do give us a sense of the fabric of the day to day life of average Americans.

Francis: Yeah, exactly. I’ve been reading recently about this idea of honorary pets, birds that are wild, but that we see as somehow connected to us. One writer talked about bringing them into our moral community, like these robins. You wouldn’t kill a robin, right? You wouldn’t kill a bluebird. You’d go hunting for a mallard, you’d go hunting for a Canada Goose. They’re food. But these other birds, like Eastern bluebirds, they’re special, and we protect them. We like them. We feel involved in the daily dramas of their lives.

New York City also loves its celebrity birds like Flako, the Eurasian eagle owl that escaped the Central Park Zoo and lived in the wild for a year before that. There’s Barry, the barred owl that lived in Central Park. There was “Hot Duck”, a mandarin duck that lived in Central Park too. These are pieces of people’s lives that they get invested in. People are drawn to that sort of connection. Even if they don’t think of themselves as birders, birds still have a way of intruding into our lives and making us feel that connection.

From Exploitation to Protection

Mulligan: You write a lot about these relationships and how they’ve changed over time, including economics of ornithology and how we used to think of birds as pests instead of something valuable. There was a cultural change that happened there. Let’s do a brief history of how we went from direct use of birds and exploitation to measuring their value, and then more aesthetic/cultural values. What was it like and how did we use birds when more direct engagement and consumption was part of everyday life?

Francis: Yes, right. That’s how I think about this broad arc of history of our relationship with birds. The movement from exploitation to protection over the last several hundred years, and the revolution that it took for taking our relationship with birds from one where they exist to be consumed to one where we see birds as deserving protection in their own right.

This change took place over a pretty short period of time, around the turn of the century. It wasn’t just a change in people’s values, although it was that, it was really a revolution. A legal revolution, a cultural revolution, an economic revolution, and a social revolution in how we relate to nature. There are many forces behind that. There were sportsmen, wealthy gentleman hunters, who saw people who were hunting birds by the thousands, by the tons, to bring to urban markets. They were killing all the birds that the sportsmen themselves thought that they were owed or had a right to, so they sought to change laws to make it so that the only people who could hunt were people who hunted like them.

The sportsmen helped lead the transformation of wildlife laws that we still have in the United States today. Which is you can’t sell birds. There’s no market for birds. It goes against federal law. You can hunt them for your own use. You can give them away, but you can’t sell them. So they achieved this change to destroy and eliminate the market for birds, which used to exist at an enormous scale. The markets had led to the extinction of passenger pigeons and the near extinction of a lot of other species of game birds. That was one axis that this change took place on.

Another one was the feather trade which is related. In the late 1800s it became really fashionable for women to wear hats that had feathers on them, which led to the mass hunting of herons, egrets, gulls, terns, and really anything that had attractive feathers. That gave rise to bird protection movements that were again largely driven by wealthy northerners, often women, who tried to end this practice and campaigned to end it. That led to the founding of the Audubon Society and other conservation groups.

Another axis here was, as you reference, economic ornithology. Before the 1930s and 1940s there were ineffective insecticides that farmers could use to protect their crops. There was this common belief that the only thing standing between the crops and these insect hordes were birds that would eat insects and insect eggs. There’s an entire government division that was created in the 1880s to study the impact of birds on agriculture. It became widely accepted that insectivorous birds, as they called them, were responsible for and sometimes solely responsible for protecting crops from complete destruction by insects.

Finally, there was this cultural change where certain birds came to be seen as innocent and worthy of protection. There were a lot of Audubon and other conservation leading organizations that worked in schools to change perceptions and teach children that birds should be protected. And teaching the public that birds should be protected as well. In the Progressive Era, you had these moralizing improvement movements that sought to improve working conditions and were part of a broader movement for societal improvement. Birds were one facet of that to create widespread protection.

All this culminated in 1918 with the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. It completely banned the market for birds, banned killing a long list of birds, except for a few that people were still able to hunt, the game birds that we think of today. This is more than 100 years ago, and it’s still the foundation of bird protection that we have today.

The last thing I’ll say about this is we went from this place where you could go to the store and buy robins, you could buy a whooping crane, you could buy passenger pigeons, all for your dinner. You could buy hats with feathers from great egrets on them. They were hunted in Florida. You could go out and catch a mockingbird, keep it in a cage, and keep it as a pet. We’ve gone from that to where all these birds are protected. Birds are doing better than they were for the most part, 130 years ago. But I think we’ve also lost a bit of intimacy with nature. We don’t need to use them. We might appreciate them from a distance, and a lot of people do, especially with bird feeding. But I think we also have lost touch with the birds that we’re still surrounded by.

Changes in cultural values

Mulligan: That’s a great summary of several decades worth of bird conservation history. I’m curious what you think motivated some of these changes? I’m interested in the idea of progress, and one of the things that jumped out to me was the change in robins in particular. You have a great essay about robins on the dining table. It seems to me that there’s some element of agricultural progress that changed things. Farmers were killing birds competing for the crops, and then a government agency said no, we have more science, we can actually show that the birds are beneficial, not harmful.

At the same time, as you get more food and cheaper food, it’s much easier to go to McDonald’s and get a burger than it is to go hunt a robin, cook it up, and put it on toast. I’m curious from the perspective of robins as a case study, because you’ve written so eloquently about them in multiple essays, how that change in culture might be a function of progress among other dimensions.

Francis: That’s an interesting question. There were a number of ways that people would consume robins and consume other birds as well. Some was subsistence hunting, so people needed food and hunted whatever they’re proximate to. On the other side is consuming birds as a luxury good. Often you had those two acting in opposition to each other. There were the affluent northerners who often had this idea that it was poor southerners, and particularly blacks, they called them pot hunters, that were responsible for killing a lot of birds that they thought should be protected.

Mulligan: Tell me about how robins were consumed because I thought that was a really interesting story. Robins on toast and robin pie. So who was eating them? Why and where? Where did the change happen specifically around the time that the cultural norms were changing for migratory birds. Was it aligned with this idea that we’re over exploiting birds, whether for food or for hats, or were they on their own trajectory?

Francis: This is all wrapped up together. Robins were a very interesting species because they’re migratory. They spend their summers in the northern part of the country, and they gather in huge flocks in the South. If you live in Massachusetts, you might see robins during the summer in small groups, a small handful of them here and there. They’re a beloved companion during the spring and summer months.

If you live in the south, you see them by the hundreds of thousands, sometimes tens of thousands. At least this was the case 100 or so years ago. They weren’t eating your crops. They were just hanging out in these massive flocks and people there saw them as this explosion of natural abundance. They were a resource that was waiting to be taken.

In the North, you had these preconceptions and evolution in understanding that occurred during this time. As birds migrated, the same birds that people were hunting in the South were the same ones that were visiting you in the North. They were killing your robins, and you saw robins as protectors of your crops. If they’re killing them in the south, that means these southern pot hunters, who you already are prejudiced against because they’re poor, they’re black, and they’re using unsportsmanlike methods to shoot robins, are directly harming your crops. So you see these campaigns. Some are more benevolent. They’re trying to educate people about robins. Some are more aggressive and racist, really, to try to change laws, impose laws from the outside, and to get people to protect birds that you see as your own.

Again, the ways that the people in different parts of the country and on different economic lines are consuming robins are different in upper class restaurants where you might have them serving robins on toast. What I saw references to from these newspaper articles that were 150 years old, is that lower income people often eat robin pot pie or something like that. So I started writing this essay thinking that I’m going to find some interesting ways that people used to eat robins. But really, what I discovered is that there are much deeper class and economic conflicts that resulted in campaigns to protect robins.

Mulligan: I find the robin stories fascinating because it’s not only a great way to look at the history of how birds got protected, but it tells us so much about how environmental values change over time and the way that they are imposed. Part of me thinks what a great achievement the Migratory Bird Treaty Act is. We don’t kill all these birds. We understand the science of how they migrate, how important it is that we protect them across their entire path, particularly where they breed.

It’s also hard not to think at times that it’s an example of environmental protection going too far. Is there a reason why you couldn’t have a catch limit on robins in the same way that where I’m from in Arizona we’d go hunt mourning doves and quail? We could do it in a sustainable way, in a particular season. It strikes me as the classic all or nothing environmental protection approach that we’ve had for a long time. I’m curious how you think the robin and some of these stories relate to modern challenges that we face in conservation and getting good environmental laws on or off the books appropriately.

Francis: It’s interesting thinking about what birds we consider eligible to be food and which ones we don’t. I think the reason that a mallard is food, or a chicken, for that matter, is food, but a robin is not, is a reflection of class and history and values. Could you sustainably hunt robins? Of course.

Do I think that that means we’ve gone too far with protection? One of the developments of this conservation movement, really this revolution in our relationship with nature, is going from this idea that anything in nature is yours to consume. America was a boundless country, and anything you could capture and eat and hunt was yours to consume. What this revolutionary legal change did was say that actually birds are wards of the state. They belong to the government, and it’s the government’s prerogative to determine what and how much you can take. Because these are our collective nature, our collective heritage, I guess you could say.

It’s a reflection of our collective values. What we decide can be hunted and what shouldn’t is imperfect, but I also don’t know a better way to make those considerations within the bounds of what protection actually looks like or what the limits should be in order to protect birds to the degree that they need to be.

I will say on the other side of this is that we had this understanding that birds were important and necessary for agriculture, and then we stopped needing them. We discovered in the 40s effective insecticides, effective pesticides, effective ways of protecting crops from insects. People stopped needing birds to protect their crops, and then this created ecological dead zones as a result of mono-cropping. As harmful as hunting was for many species of birds, the transformation of the country into farmland, the destruction of wild and the great American prairie, the over application of pesticides and insecticides, and the decimation of insect life in the country has been just as harmful. We think of hunting as being harmful to animals, but there are other ways that we interact with the natural world that are much more damaging. There isn’t much legislation to prevent those harms from being done or I should say that they’re not aggressive enough to prevent the widespread loss of biodiversity that we’re seeing today.

Mulligan: That’s a super interesting point, because it gets to some of the interesting arcs of conservation and environmentalism over time. Aldo Leopold and A Sand County Almanac, or some of these others that come before the Migratory Bird Treaty Act is passed, they’re very much focused on direct exploitation. We are over hunting. There were bison, there were egrets, there were herons. Passenger pigeons are a great example; we’re just wiping them out because we’re being completely unthoughtful about how many we can take.

But environmentalism shifts later on to - we don’t need these species anymore. We don’t rely on them for clothing nearly as directly. Don’t rely on them for food nearly as directly. We don’t rely on them as an ecosystem service for keeping down pests. You lose those values, and so in return, you get the intrinsic values that really rise to the forefront of how we talk about these things.

But we’re also talking about indirect taking. The things that we’re doing like habitat loss or other things, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring book being the best example. We’re spraying DDT to solve one problem, but this leads to thin shells that nearly wipe out the bald eagle, the symbol of America. Through birds, you get not only the history of America, but how conservation and environmentalism has really evolved over time and for different reasons.

One of the things that I’d be curious to get your take on is what it might look like going forward. There’s probably still indirect things that we need to solve for. Then I’d be interested in your take on what active restoration might look like, and if there’s something in bringing birds back and not just keeping the harm from being done. Is there something on the horizon you’re excited about, about the act of restoration? What are the indirect things that are still going on that we might have overlooked and/or most people may not know about? And then we’ll get into where you see restoration and conservation for birds going from here.

Modern Challenges and Opportunities for Conservation

Francis: It’s really complicated. One of the big challenges with conservation today, or the way that the challenges facing birds have changed over the last 100 years, is in this era of market hunting around the turn of the century, what really needed to happen is people needed to stop killing birds. Birds were being killed by the millions, by the tons, and a lot of the changes that needed to happen were just to stop doing that. Once that happened, a lot of species could recover.

There were also issues with ecological destruction and habitat destruction that were happening at the same time. The United States did a lot of wetland restoration especially to restore habitats for migratory waterfowl which happened to be the birds that hunters were seeking. One of the most significant conservation successes was restoring the populations of most widely hunted birds, not just through protection and regulation, but also through creating the ecosystems they needed in order to thrive.

Going forward one of the big challenges is that there isn’t just one change that everyone needs to get behind. Something similar to just stop killing the birds. There are a multitude of threats. Each species faces its own array of threats and risks that need their own distinct understanding of what’s challenging, of what’s harming, and what’s killing off a particular species and what needs to change in order to protect that species. There are broader threats, above all climate change and habitat destruction, but I remember reading about one of the biggest mortality factors for prairie chickens is flying into barbed wire. It took a long time for people to understand that this was actually a pretty significant cause of their mortality. The remedy for this is putting tape or tags on barbed wire so that they see the fence and don’t run into it. This is something that affects a small number of species but affects them pretty severely, and it’s a specific change that needs to happen.

You multiply this for dozens and dozens of species that have lost more than half of their population in the last 50 years. Again, there are things that will help a large number of species like the lights out movement to protect birds from crashing into windows which kills a billion birds every year; that’s a big one. But there are a lot of distinct challenges that each bird faces.

You asked what I’d like to see. I’m not an expert in conservation or ecology. History is where I spent most of my time. But one thing that I have seen is that, again, at the at the turn of the century, when this conservation movement was really growing in power and was able to achieve these really incredible gains in conservation, it was a political movement that drew across hunters and conservationists and farmers and children all on the same page about changes that needed to happen. Today, you have tens of millions of people who are birders. You have 50 million people who have bird feeders outside their homes. I see this as a natural constituency. People who are interested in birds, interested in their welfare. Birders spend something like $100 billion every year on things related to birds and birding. Travel, equipment, whatever.

But birders don’t behave like a constituency. There are a lot of different changes that need to happen in our relationship with nature to protect birds and stop their sometimes precipitous population decline. But I don’t think the solution is a scattershot approach. I think it is to create a movement that puts pressure on politicians to regulate and fund in such a way that birds receive the protection that they need, whatever that might look like.

Mulligan: I do think the constituency and the economic numbers are interesting. People really care about birds. To your point, when I was a wildlife biologist, I’d stay in these little motels outside of wildlife refuges and other places where I was doing surveys. You would be surprised at the percentage of people in these small towns that are there just to bird and how big an economic driver it is for many places whether they’re bird Meccas or an opportunity to see a particular species. How do you organize those people together to get outcomes or funding who would want to make some changes? I think that’s a super interesting question.

Extinction, restoration, and favorite birds

Mulligan: Switching gears away from the history of birds and conservation progress, you’ve written a lot about bird extinction. If I gave you the chance to see a single specimen of one of these extinct birds, which one would it be? And, if different, what would you love to see thriving as a restored species if we could rewild and bring back a species to its historic range? What would you be most excited to see of what we’ve lost?

Francis: I spent a lot of time thinking about passenger pigeons. I think that they’re interesting and beautiful, but I don’t know that they’re that outstanding. They look like a mourning dove, just bigger. The reason that they’re so notable, or were so notable, is for their numbers. I love asking people to guess how large they thought passenger pigeon flocks could get, how many birds might be in them? People will say 1000 or maybe 10,000 in flocks. But estimates are that they could get up to 2 billion birds, which is a number that you can’t even comprehend.

There are these stories of people watching flocks of passenger pigeons fly over in a stream a mile wide, going at 60 miles per hour, and passing overhead for 14 hours from sunrise to sunset. We hear stories about the massive herds of bison thundering across the plains being like that, an indispensable American scene. I think these massive flocks of passenger pigeons were similar. Sometimes they’d fly over Chicago or St Louis, and people would stand on their roofs and shoot into the flood pouring over their heads.

It makes me really sad that I’ll never get to see that. I have seen the last passenger pigeon. Her name was Martha. She’s owned by the Smithsonian Museum, so they had her own display a while back. So I got to see her. It did feel like an emotional experience being close to something that used to be such a force of nature, but through over-hunting and exploitation of the environment they disappeared.

There are a lot of people who get excited about deextinction, and I will say that’s something that I’m pretty skeptical of. I think if they ever manage to claim to bring back a passenger pigeon, it won’t be the same thing. I think that they really are gone, which is deeply tragic, but it’s also a reminder of the fate that could fall on any species of bird or any species of living thing. We have a deep duty to protect them, because nothing’s inevitable. The extinction of the passenger pigeon wasn’t inevitable, and the preservation of robins is not inevitable either.

Mulligan: Mine, if I could see one, is a Haast’s eagle from New Zealand. They were big enough to hunt moas. I don’t know if I want to see a lot of them back. Sounds a little frightening to go for a hike with my kids someplace where there’s eagles big enough to haul off moas. The passenger pigeon, that feeling of what it must have been like to watch a flock fly over, I could’ve done that forever. You and I have actually spent time seeing bison together out in Rocky Mountain Arsenal Wildlife Refuge. Wouldn’t it be great if if we could go back and see some passenger pigeons? Now a couple shorter questions. What makes the Carolina parakeet so interesting?

Francis: So there used to be a species of parrot in North America called the Carolina parakeet. It was the only species of parrot native to North America. Their range stretched from New York to Iowa down to Florida. It was adapted for cold weather. We have accounts of sellers and explorers seeing flocks of parakeets in the winter. They’re beautiful and charismatic, and they also went extinct. The last confirmed parakeet died in a zoo in 1918. I don’t know that the species itself is so exceptional; there are a lot of species of parrots, but it’s the one that was ours. It’s the one that we had here. I’ve kept John James Audubon’s painting of the Carolina parakeet as my phone background for the last several years both because it’s a beautiful painting and because it’s a reminder of what we’ve lost and what we still need to preserve.

Mulligan: I’ve got 12 Audubon prints behind me here on the wall. I don’t have the parakeet on it. I’ll have to also get it into the rotation. Favorite bird artist?

Francis: That’s a great question. There’s a lot of good ones to choose from. I think if you look at my apartment and see who’s best represented, it would be Charley Harper. He did a lot of abstract bird art. If you have the Merlin app on your phone or anything from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, he designed those logos years ago. I have some posters that he did for the National Park Service. It’s just fun, abstract ways of representing recognizable and beloved bird species.

Mulligan: Charley Harper images are some of my favorite puzzles to give at Christmas time. A lot of people get Charley Harper puzzles for me. Favorite state bird?

Francis: This one might be Utah’s, which is the California gull. It’s almost a joke. One state picked a state bird that’s named after another state. But there is actually a really good story here, which is when the Mormon pioneers first settled Utah, there was a plague of crickets that threatened to ravage their crops, and these gulls came in and feasted on these insects. The settlers attributed that to saving their crops that year. Since then they’ve had a revered place in Utah culture and society. I grew up Mormon and grew up sharing these stories about the miracle of the gulls, and it’s a deep connection. Many states picked their state birds in the 1920s or 1930s by having school children vote on which bird they wanted. Even though Utah’s bird is named after California, I think they have a much deeper connection to their state bird than maybe any other state.

Mulligan: I’m not surprised that your favorite has a detailed history to go with it. My favorite is the cactus wren. I can’t see one of those and have a bad day. They’re great. Such a cool sign of home for me. And I should go back to my favorite artist. I give a lot of Charley Harper puzzles, but Mincing Mockingbird is my favorite. If you haven’t checked it out, they do some great stuff. It’s a husband and wife team. They do detailed artwork, and then very silly, meme-y style birds that I give out as thank you cards all the time.

Before we get to our final question, thank you Robert for doing this and coming on with me. A reminder to everyone listening that you can find Robert’s Substack Bird History or find him on X where he posts, I wish I could call it a tweet, about bird belt buckles, bird names, and other great bird trivia. I always get a kick out of what Robert has to say there. My final question then is what’s your favorite place to spend time outdoors?

Francis: I mean, no place is a bad place to spend outdoors. I would say Cape May, New Jersey. For the last six or seven years, I’ve gone down for every fall migration. It’s at the bottom tip of New Jersey above the Delaware Bay, and it acts as a natural funnel for birds migrating south. They gather at this tip to wait for favorable weather to fly across the 14 mile wide Delaware Bay. You can see thousands and thousands and thousands of birds. I’ve had days where I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of northern flickers, thousands of blue jays, thousands of swallows and thousands of warblers. It’s a really exciting, fun, fun place to be. Birders gather in almost as big as numbers. It’s a place with a lot of stories and a lot of connection.

Mulligan: Thank you for the time of day. It was great talking with you. Hope everyone reads your Substack, Bird History, and I look forward to Republic of Feathers coming out. Happy to be an early reviewer to get a peek; I don’t know if I can wait till the actual publication date. Good luck with your writing, and I can’t wait to read it.

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Editor’s note: My salon series on The Odyssey continues on Thursday, March 12. The session will cover Books 9-12 (only 76 pages). A few seats are still available, and you’re warmly invited.

Get tickets here!

It isn’t until Book 5 that we meet our protagonist. We find Odysseus …

sitting by the shore as usual, sobbing in grief and pain; his heart was breaking. In tears he stared across the fruitless sea.1

Calypso, after seven years and at the direction of Zeus (himself influenced by the dogged Athena), will let Odysseus leave if he chooses. His first words immediately reveal the core of his identity. Metis, his skillful cunning. He presumes the gods are up to their usual tricks; the offer of passage back home must be a scheme against him. Calypso calls him a “scalawag” and praises his understanding of “how these things work.”2 But there is no trick, and Odysseus will make his first, and most consequential, decision.

Calypso has offered him immortality if he agrees to stay, but he refuses. Why, in Zeus’ name, would he turn down an eternity on a mythical island of plenty with a beautiful goddess?

The answer lies in nostos, or homecoming, the central theme of the epic. It’s where we get the word “nostalgia.” Odysseus is weeping on the shores of Ogygia, nostalgic for home. Let the suffering it will take to get there be damned. Odysseus craves nostos. But his homecoming can’t be achieved by simply setting foot on Ithaca. Homecoming means reclaiming his identity. He longs for himself.

In immortality Odysseus would lose himself. The verdant island has “sights to please even a god” with an ageless goddess who desperately loves him, yet it is devoid of society and pursuit.3 Without society, there can be no relational identity. He is a husband and a father. A king. None of these have any meaning away from home. Without pursuits, the multitudes he contains have no outlet. There are no tools for a master shipbuilder and no ways to apply his nimble mind. For Odysseus, to choose immortality would be to choose everlasting ennui.

During his first tentative reentry into society among the Phaeacians, his heroic identity reemerges when he is goaded into competition and wins. He is not simply returning home. He is returning to his conception of self. Odysseus’ choice to forsake Calypso and regain himself through his nostos offers a lesson for modern readers. Identity is forged through persistent action.

Action requires courage and suffering. In spurning Calypso, who is reminding Odysseus she surpasses Penelope in beauty, this is what he tells her:

But even so, I want to go back home, and every day I hope that day will come. If some god strikes me on the wine-dark sea, I will endure it. By now I am used to suffering—I have gone through so much, at sea and in the war. Let this come too.4

“Let this come too.” For a man who, we will learn, has gone through years of tribulations between the war and landing on Calypso’s island, it’s a much bolder statement than it seems at first blush. He knows he will endure an incredible amount of suffering along the way. He has no illusions that the journey will be easy, yet he sets out anyway. He has confidence in his own resilience and metis. As Wilson says in the introduction, “it is the kind of cleverness that enables one to prepare for any new challenge and come out as a winner.” One of Odysseus’ most common epithets is “much-enduring.” Odysseus knows he possesses the endurance it takes to get home.

The times I’ve been most disconnected from myself, when I’ve felt most lost, were the times that I was afraid to “let this come too.” I saw minor obstacles on the horizon and convinced myself they were as fearsome as Scylla and Charybdis. I used them as excuses not to leave the harbor. Humans have a tremendous capacity to adapt, endure, and reinvent, but only if we act. And we act in accordance with who we believe we are. Do we see ourselves as capable? Are we willing to “let it come too” knowing we have the courage, metis, and endurance to find our way?

Odysseus reminds us of what we can endure and what we might find if we do. Ourselves.

Join us!

Find all the information you need to sign up and follow along here. Join us on Thursday, March 12 for Books 9-12.

I hope to see you there! If you enjoyed this essay, here are more links related to the salon series.

• Watch past sessions on Youtube

  • Session 1

  • Session 2

  • Session 3

• Essays:

  • Session 1, Don’t die without reading The Odyssey

  • Session 2, Reflections on the Telemachy, Books 1-4 of The Odyssey

• Interintellect Hostcast podcast with Joao (summary on X)

• X thread on fun little details I’m learning, updated as I reread The Odyssey

Get tickets here!

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• I had a great conversation on the Hostcast with (summary on X). We talked about progress, abundance, and The Odyssey.

• Reflections on the Telemachy, Books 1-4 of The Odyssey. The second in a series (Part 1) related to my Interintellect salon series on The Odyssey.

  It got me thinking about how we treat the strangers who show up on our shores today. We educate and then force international students back home. We have random lotteries for H-1B visas instead of policies to keep high-skilled workers here permanently. Visa wait times and renewal processes are longer and more harrowing than some of Odysseus’s tribulations. If that’s how we play host to the most talented strangers, how likely is it we’re treating our more ragged guests well?

  The xenia described in The Odyssey is not a great guide to immigration policy. Xenia is about how individual guests, not a diaspora, are treated. It covers brief encounters, a guest passing through, not settlement. Yet I think xenia still has something to teach us. The formal protocols of xenia are oddly comforting. More than that, the rules of xenia are coherent. There is morality in clear rules of the road.

  A few seats are still available for the next session on February 12, and you’re warmly invited. We’re having a blast!

  Get tickets here!

Ideas I enjoyed

• Magical AI Crayons by Brendan Mulligan, on AI and creativity. I’m biased because he’s my brother, and I helped edit the piece, but (X) and (X) enjoyed it too!

“Leonardo da Vinci had to be a master chemist to break free from the limited pigments available from natural materials. Now, every child has access to over 100 colors in a box that costs their parents less than a sandwich. Professional artists may scoff at the lowly crayon, but is there a more common art tool in the American home? Every household with a child likely owns more pieces of colorful art than a workshop could produce throughout the entire Renaissance. Their beauty lies not merely in their variety but in their simplicity – hand a box to a toddler and without instruction they will put them to use immediately.”

• The Case for Conservation Abundance by . Many environmentalists see the necessity of an abundance agenda. We need to push back against the narrative that environmentalists are nothing but obstructionist.

“The question facing our country and the world more broadly is not whether a massive amount of energy infrastructure and housing will be built, but where, how and when. And those are questions that conservationists can and should help answer. If conservation values and research can be included in siting, designing, and building more of what people need, then both nature and people will win.”

• Economic development is key to addressing climate change by , , , and The conclusion seems self-evident, but common climate policy arguments suggests it isn’t. It’s a paradox because one of the arguments I’ve heard most from climate hawks is that we should do something to help the poor countries that can’t adapt as they’ll be disproportionately affected. That argument acknowledges wealth and economic development are beneficial for adaptation, yet policies are proposed to make people poorer. This paper helps illuminate the folly.

• How Will the Miracle Happen Today? by . I’ve said many times that it feels like the universe wants to help me, so I love Kevin Kelly’s use of the word “pronoia.” What a great explanation of the idea to go along with an important condition: one must be open to the gift.

• From :

Exciting new projects:

• and Charles C. Mann have a new podcast coming out. I can’t wait to listen!

• Silverlinings.bio from Raiany Romanni-Klein: A gorgeous, informative, and fascinating website for exploring longevity.

• will be writing about industrial policy in Alaska. He’s looking for contacts, reach out!

• Dream internship to work with .

• is writing a book “for serious thinkers working with complex ideas who want to speak well under pressure. The core problem isn’t talent or confidence. It’s the absence of a system for getting better.”

Book Notes

Odyssey by Stephen Fry:1

I listened to the audio version of Odyssey by Stephen Fry. Narrated by Fry himself, it’s an excellent companion text to Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. Fry’s Odyssey is the perfect complement because he doesn’t just retell the story of Odysseus, but he weaves in the related myths referenced but not fully explored in Homer’s epic. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a Stephen Fry story; erudite, witty, and entertaining.

I imagined Fry poring over an ancient version of a vessel tracking tool as ships sailed away from Troy, telling each ship’s story in turn. I particularly enjoyed the chapter “The Cursed Children” about Orestes’ revenge for the death of his father, Agamemnon, and the conclusion of his cursed family’s tale. The story culminates with a trial in Athens that marks the beginning of civic justice and the end of the gods’ roles in the everyday affairs of men. It’s in these side quests, the stories adjacent to, but not directly told in The Odyssey, that Fry’s version shines.

Highly recommended for those interested in Greek mythology and going beyond Homer, but not quite ready to pick up Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides.

One last thing

Get your early literacy stage kid a label maker (X thread):

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Editor’s note: This evening we return to our salon series on The Odyssey. This session will cover Books 1-4 (only 75 pages). A few seats are still available, and you’re warmly invited.

Get tickets here!

I didn’t plan this follow-up to my earlier essay, “Don’t die without reading The Odyssey,” but I’m having too much fun with The Odyssey not to keep writing about it. Here are a few ideas and reflections that came to mind as I reread The Telemachy, Books 1-4 of The Odyssey.

Mythology as delight

In Book 1, a line jumped out at me:

“With that, the owl-eyed goddess

flew away like a bird, up through the smoke.”1

I didn’t get the reference. Why is Athena called owl-eyed? With a little help from ChatGPT, my constant reading companion, I learned that Athena was symbolized by an owl and an owl’s presence is a sign of her blessing. That ancient association is one of the main reasons owls are still symbols of wisdom today. I had no idea.

Only a few weeks ago, I woke up to two great horned owls duetting (a kind of mating dance) outside my window. It was a delightful experience in its own right, but now when I see those owls in the neighborhood I have the added joy of laughing to myself that the gods must be wishing me a blessed day. The more I learn about Greek mythology, and the more I connect it to the world around me, the more delightful the world seems to become.

This extends to common language. Greek roots and mythology permeate English. There are too many examples to count, but let’s start with the obvious. Our word for a long, arduous journey — odyssey — is the title of the book. Doesn’t it make a road trip in a Honda Odyssey, packed with young kids, far funnier and more pleasant when you can compare your own plight to that of Odysseus? I too have traveled in the presence of what felt like a screaming, multi-headed monster and collapsed in exhaustion at my destination. More whimsy like this in our culture, please.

Mentor(ship)

Mentor is another example of a word lifted straight from the pages of The Odyssey. He is an important character, especially in Books 1-4.

“When Odysseus sailed off,

this was the friend he asked to guard his house

and told the slaves to look to him as master.”2

This is not the real Mentor, ineffectually managing Odysseus’s home, from which we get our word “mentor.” It’s a reference to the wisdom of Athena. She disguises herself as Mentor to guide Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, when he sets sail for news of his father and counsels him along the way.

What struck me as I read passages of Athena mentoring Telemachus was the way she encourages and teaches him to trust his own judgment and abilities. This is the foundation of good mentorship, ancient or modern.

“But Mentor, how

can I approach and talk to him? I am

quite inexperienced at making speeches,

and as a young man, I feel awkward talking

to elders.

She looked straight into his eyes,

and answered, “You will work out what to do,

through your own wits and with divine assistance.

The gods have blessed you in your life so far.”3

The best mentors help their mentee through a “becoming.” What Telemachus wants to become is a grown man able to take matters into his own hands. Becoming can also mean something more subtle. A mentee could want to become a lover of art, become a better father, or simply become more knowledgeable in a given domain. What matters is a mentor able to encourage and direct and a mentee with judgment and the ability to act. So it is with Athena and Telemachus.

But mentorship need not require heroic commitment or divine intervention. Assistance towards becoming can be temporary, bounded by topic, and unconstrained by relative ages. We should all be looking for more ways to offer encouragement and direction for those seeking to become.

Xenia

Family lore says I’m a descendant of an Irishman who came to America during the potato famine. I don’t think of myself as an Irish-American; my heritage just doesn’t come up that often. There is one exception, and it’s not St. Patrick’s Day. It’s immigration.

I think about that ancestral grandfather and what it must have felt like to be an Irish immigrant in the mid-1800s. When he set sail in search of a better life, I wonder whether his wildest dreams could account for how good his distant grandson has it? With the xenophobia he faced, I doubt it.4 Today I can write under the byline Mulligan about The Odyssey and my name triggers thoughts of golf, not destitution. “We” Irish have come a long way.

I couldn’t get this anecdote, or thoughts about immigration more broadly, out of my head as I read The Odyssey. One of the dominant themes of the story is xenia. Xenia is a moral and sacred code governing norms of hospitality between hosts and strangers, and the first four books are one big moralizing lesson in how to uphold it properly.

Within the first few pages of Book 1, good and bad examples of xenia are laid out. Telemachus welcomes Mentes (Athena in disguise), feeds him, and honors him before he even learns his name. The suitors camped out in Odysseus’ absence show anti-xenia behavior. They overstay their welcome, destroy wealth, and show no gratitude. Throughout The Odyssey, good hosts uphold xenia and are rewarded for it. Monsters and villains who violate it court catastrophe. The poem’s moral universe revolves around xenia. Without it, society decays.

It got me thinking about how we treat the strangers who show up on our shores today. We educate and then force international students back home. We have random lotteries for H-1B visas instead of policies to keep high-skilled workers here permanently. Visa wait times and renewal processes are longer and more harrowing than some of Odysseus’s tribulations. If that’s how we play host to the most talented strangers, how likely is it we’re treating our more ragged guests well?

The xenia described in The Odyssey is not a great guide to immigration policy. Xenia is about how individual guests, not a diaspora, are treated. It covers brief encounters, a guest passing through, not settlement. Yet I think xenia still has something to teach us. The formal protocols of xenia are oddly comforting. More than that, the rules of xenia are coherent. There is morality in clear rules of the road.

Join us!

Find all the information you need to sign up and follow along with the series here. Can’t make it this time? Join us on Thursday, February 12 for Books 5-8.

I hope to see you there! If you enjoyed this essay, here are links to more of my thoughts on The Odyssey so far.

• Session 1, Introduction: Don’t die without reading The Odyssey

• Interintellect Hostcast podcast with (summary on X)

• X thread on fun little details I’m learning, updated as I reread The Odyssey

Get tickets here!

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Editor’s note: Tonight (Thursday, Dec 11) we kick off an salon series on The Odyssey! Tonight’s session will be an introduction, so don’t worry if you don’t have time to read anything beforehand. A few seats are still available, and you’re warmly invited.

Get tickets here!

Why read a nearly 3,000-year old poem? The short answer is because Christopher Nolan is making it into a movie. Earlier this year, my brother sent me this photo with a text: “should we read the book before this comes out?”

My brother had never read The Odyssey, and I hadn’t for decades. We both felt a little sheepish about the gap in our bibliography. Plus, everyone knows the book is always better than the movie.

The idea of a salon was born.

The greatest story ever told

The Odyssey is not a stuffy old poem. I’ve come to love The Odyssey the way Tolkien fans love The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) for its epic quest and deep mythology. Ostensibly, The Odyssey is about Odysseus’ long journey home following the Trojan War. But that’s like saying LOTR is about a man delivering a ring. It’s a coming of age story about Odysseus’ son Telemachus. It’s an examination of women’s agency, told through Odysseus’ wife Penelope. It’s an adventure story interwoven with layers of ancient mythology. The Odyssey is arguably the greatest story ever told.

More than a classic, The Odyssey is the foundation of Western storytelling and the archetype of the hero’s journey. We’ve all heard references to the one-eyed Cyclops, the irresistible call of the Sirens, Circe, and Calypso. The characters and stories in The Odyssey are our shared heritage. And despite being nearly 3,000 years old, its themes of homecoming, identity, and hospitality remain as relevant as ever.

And then there’s the divine drama. Today athletes pray to the same God and hope to be the chosen victor. In The Odyssey, the gods have chosen sides: Poseidon wants Odysseus to suffer; Athena thinks he’s suffered enough. The clash between gods is more dramatic than any clash between even godlike mortals could ever be.

Constraining herself to the exact number of lines in the original poem, Emily Wilson’s translation is accessible and cuts straight to the heart of the epic. No need to be familiar with archaic language. The Odyssey, especially this version, is wildly entertaining. To paraphrase , “don’t die without reading The Odyssey. It’s not worth it.”

It’s better together

But why a salon? My brother and I could have read the book alone. Because The Odyssey is an oral tradition. It’s not a story meant to be read quietly to oneself. It’s meant to be shared.

The beauty of Interintellect salons is that they aren’t lectures. They’re collaborative discussions. We could have agreed to read the same book and met once. But by breaking it down, meeting over multiple sessions, and making it a live event we get a far more robust experience.

When you attend a salon, you’re actually co-creating and shaping the discussion by bringing your unique perspectives and life experiences. No need to be an expert in classical literature. I’ve done the research to help add context, but everyone sees and is compelled by something different: moral, literary, emotional, historical, or personal. When we read together we expand what’s visible.

When I reread The Odyssey last month to prepare for the salon, I was surprised by how quickly it felt relatable and relevant. The first great lesson for me came from Emily Wilson’s introduction. She explains that The Odyssey doesn’t start at the beginning of Odysseus’ journey, but in the middle of things (in medias res). We don’t hear from Odysseus directly until Book 5 (The Odyssey is split into 24 books, essentially chapters). It’s such a simple idea, but it immediately helped me fix a structural problem in an essay I was struggling with.

The second surprise was how strongly the book’s great theme of hospitality, or xenia, resonated. Characters and entire societies are judged by how they treat strangers and how welcoming they are to guests. In The Odyssey, good hospitality is a moral and sacred responsibility. Guests have responsibilities too. Anyone thinking about immigration or social trust would benefit from a thorough reading. Closer to home, xenia shaped my 2026 New Year’s resolutions. I hope to host far more dinner and weekend guests in the coming year. I want my home to be a place of warmth for any guest needing a respite on their journey.

That’s what stood out to me. What will we discover together?

Join us!

This salon is for you whether The Odyssey is your favorite book, was forced upon you in high school, or it’s your first time. We’ll be meeting once a month from December 2025-July 2026 to keep the reading load manageable (roughly 75 pages or fewer per session).1 Can’t catch tonight’s session? Join us in January when we begin reading the full text in earnest!

Find all the information you need to sign up and follow along here. I hope to see you there!

Get tickets here!

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Without further ado …

During a conversation at the 2025 Progress Conference, author and economist asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, “If you could have more of one thing to have more compute, what would the one thing be?” Altman responded with a single word: “Electrons.”

In other words, artificial intelligence (AI) requires massive compute, and massive compute requires massive amounts of energy. OpenAI plans to invest $500 billion in new data center infrastructure through its Stargate project. This will require ten gigawatts of new capacity. For comparison, that’s enough to power roughly 8 million U.S. homes. And OpenAI isn’t the sole firm building that kind of infrastructure.

Energy is the fundamental constraint for more than AI. It is critical to all forms of progress — past, present, and future. It’s no wonder, then, that energy abundance — how to achieve it and what’s holding it back — was the talk of the 2025 Progress Conference.

The bottlenecks are familiar and numerous. Permitting and regulatory barriers are slowing infrastructure deployment of all kinds. The domestic supply of labor, raw materials, and manufacturing capacity needed for the energy transition is insufficient. Political and NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) opponents are holding back existing technologies, such as nuclear reactors. Breakthrough technologies, such as fusion, need further scientific advancements.

But there are signs that the progress community is finding ways around all of these obstacles.

Energy fuels progress

Progress runs on power. There is no progress without energy. Our ability to harness energy has enabled enormous strides in agriculture, industry, manufacturing, transportation, and medicine. The more energy available to a society, the wealthier it becomes.

There’s a reason that Lewis Strauss’ famous line about “energy too cheap to meter” — delivered in 1954, when he was chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission — has stuck in the public consciousness for more than 70 years. The quote is rarely remembered in full, but it’s worth recalling the entire statement as a reminder of why energy abundance and affordability are important:

“It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.”

Strauss’ vision of a future where energy is so cheap that it isn’t worth the effort to measure individual usage looks a lot like the visions of progress shared at the conference.

“Climate and Energy” was technically just one of six tracks at this year’s Progress Conference — and a “mini track,” at that — but all six connected to energy abundance in some way, either explicitly or implicitly. Altman’s answer to Cowen makes the connection between the “AI Protopia” track and energy. The “Metascience” track looked at how we can accelerate scientific progress for technologies like fusion. Several speakers in the “From Policy to Real World Change” track spoke about building public support and clearing regulatory hurdles to deploy nuclear energy.

Outside the “Climate and Energy” track itself, the “American Dynamism” track may have been the most energy-focused.

In conversation with Big Think’s Foster, writer Dan Wang spoke about China’s incredible pace of energy deployment. In 2024 alone, it added 429 GW of new power generation capacity, while the U.S. added only 51 GW. China’s engineering state is not going to let energy be the limiting factor for its industries, but the same cannot be said for the U.S. There will be no such thing as American Dynamism without more energy.

Not only is American progress deeply reliant on how we address energy abundance, so is the planet. According to Climate Action Tracker, we have sufficiently lowered emissions so that we no longer need to fear catastrophic warming scenarios of 3-5 ℃, but we have not escaped the negative consequences that will come from already missing the target to keep warming below 1.5 ℃. As technologist and writer said, citing his friend and climate researcher Jesse Jenkins, this means “we are no longer totally fucked, but we are we are not yet unfucked.” And while the language may be crass, there’s an important lesson here. Our ability — or inability — to deliver a more abundant, cleaner energy future has major repercussions. We must do more, faster.

Bottlenecks to the bottleneck

Insofar as energy is the fuel to all progress, it also suffers from the same barriers faced by the rest of progress — especially when it comes to building physical infrastructure. “Building and transforming the energy sector is fundamentally a physical problem, and it’s hard,” noted Mekala Krishnan, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute, during her session titled “The Hard Stuff: Navigating the Physical Realities of the Energy Transition.”

Energy abundance can’t happen without reindustrialization to supply the raw materials and manufacture the essential components of our energy system. China is the leading refiner for 19 of the 20 strategic minerals crucial for the energy sector — and they can restrict those exports at any time. Delivery times for transformers, a critical component of the grid, are more than 100 weeks on average as manufacturers struggle to keep up with demand. More prosaically, rapidly expanding and modernizing our energy system requires lineworkers and electricians. Where will that workforce come from? There’s a projected shortage of roughly a million electricians in the U.S. needed for the energy transition.

Reindustrialization aside, shovel-ready or even completed generation and transmission projects can languish for years because of our sclerotic permitting and regulatory systems. At the end of 2024, roughly 2,300 GW of new capacity was stuck in interconnection queues awaiting approval to connect to the grid. If even a fraction of those projects were connected, energy capacity in the U.S. would increase dramatically.

Achieving energy abundance will undoubtedly require new technological breakthroughs as well. Krishnan’s research at McKinsey suggests 50% of the clean energy transition depends on finding ways to scale existing technologies faster. The other 50% depends on new technology. At a place like the Progress Conference, there is no shortage of optimism that, with the right policies and approaches, we can get there on both fronts.

New (and old) technologies are on the way

The solutions discussed in several sessions and informal conversations suggest an “any and everything” assault on the barriers to energy abundance is already underway. Some attendees are pursuing fundamentally new technologies, while others are fighting an uphill battle against NIMBYism to accelerate deployment. More often than not, they’re doing both at once.

Roots of Progress Institute fellow — who led an unconference session titled “The Potential of Fusion Energy” — believes that, given recent advances, the first working fusion reactors will be deployed within the decade. Casey Handmer and his team at Terraform Industries are working to make carbon-free synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air. If these moonshots are successful, they could be bedrock technologies for a carbon-free, energy-abundant future.

Theoretically, nuclear power should already be delivering on that promise. Instead, it’s the poster child for how progress in the U.S. has stagnated — despite the urgent need for clean, reliable base load energy, only two new nuclear reactors have entered commercial operation since the creation of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the 1970s.

During a lengthy lunchtime discussion, I heard conference attendees debating whether nuclear can ever regain its footing. While solar and batteries have been plummeting down the cost curve, it is still struggling to overcome the regulatory and public support hurdles preventing it from following a similar trajectory.

Nuclear is in many respects a test of the progress community’s ability to get America and Europe building again. Lessons from the YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) movement and increasing attention to the topic suggest that the public support, political will, and regulatory reforms necessary to restart nuclear power are on the way.

Accelerating home electrification

When it comes to developments in energy, new forms of generation get much of the attention, but I was most excited to hear about advances in the deployment of batteries at the Progress Conference.

Progress Conference attendees were given the opportunity to tour several offsite facilities, including the headquarters of Impulse Labs, which makes a futuristic induction cooktop with a built-in battery that can boil a pot of water in seconds. During the tour, I saw the cooktop in action, and while the speed at which it boiled water was incredible, that wasn’t what astonished me. It was how it melted a large bag of chocolate chips.

The chocolate melted faster than an ice cream cone on a summer afternoon, but the truly amazing thing was that the cooktop could then keep the temperature steady. For over an hour, there was a hot pot of chocolate ready for dipping — no need to worry about it burning or seizing. The technology is so good and the user experience so compelling that I was tempted to buy one then and there. I wanted to make an impulse purchase (please forgive the pun).

So, what does all this have to do with energy? A couple of things.

The first has to do with accelerating home electrification — a core piece of the broader energy transition. We simply aren’t getting cleaner, more efficient technologies, like batteries, into homes fast enough. There are too many costly steps.

Consider the typical path for switching from a gas to electric cooktop. Normally, you need to account for expensive retrofits like upgrading electrical panels, running new wiring, and installing a high-voltage outlet. The Impulse cooktop avoids all this because its integrated battery supplies the power that would normally require a dedicated circuit. Simply plug into an existing outlet, and start cooking.

This is not a trivial detail. Lower emissions aren’t enough to convince consumers to adopt new technologies at scale. Impulse Labs is showing how to get batteries into homes through better performance and economics. As Impulse Labs CEO said on the tour, “I didn’t even come at this from a climate angle. I came at it from a ‘we can make better devices’ angle.” That’s what the energy transition is going to take.

Impulse’s built-in battery can also lower customer energy bills. Energy usually costs more when demand is highest: in the late afternoon and evening. No one is adjusting dinner time to avoid higher energy rates, though, so using an electric cooktop typically means paying a premium for energy. Impulse’s battery can be programmed to charge when energy prices are low, though — you can then use that stored energy at dinnertime, when rates are highest. This is called peak shaving, and not only does it help the customer save money, it helps with grid management by reducing peak loads.

Revolutionizing the grid

If Impulse Labs is showing how batteries can transform home energy management, Base Power is showing how batteries can transform the grid.

Typically, energy generation (supply) and energy consumption (demand) need to match almost perfectly, moment to moment, for the grid to function properly. Too much generation (supply exceeds demand) or too little generation (demand exceeds supply) can both result in grid failures that lead to outages and blackouts.

Batteries break this temporal link between supply and demand. When aggregated, they can operate as virtual power plants: charging when supply is high and demand is low, and discharging when demand is high and supply is low. This ability to smooth peaks and valleys in demand is the fundamental advantage of batteries.

Before the conference, I didn’t understand how much the location of batteries matters. In a session titled “The Grid is the Bottleneck to the Energy Revolution,” , COO and co-founder of Base Power, explained why installing batteries in homes, at the point of consumption, is a boon for the grid: In the same way that the integrated battery in the Impulse cooktop saves on upgrades to the panels and wiring in a house, Base’s batteries reduce the need for upgrades to the grid itself.

The grid typically works like a one-way street. Electricity travels from distant power plants along high-voltage transmission lines and then through lower-voltage, short-distance neighborhood distribution lines to homes. These lines have finite capacity, so every time new generation comes online, more transmission has to be built to carry it. By installing batteries at the point of consumption, Base can increase the capacity of the grid.

Base does this by storing energy locally to ease congestion on long-distance lines. According to Lopas, this is crucial because the U.S. grid already consists of 642,000 miles of transmission lines and 6.3 million miles of distribution lines — expanding and maintaining these lines has become more expensive than power production. Base is reducing the costs of maintaining the grid by maximizing the capacity of our existing infrastructure.

Nonetheless, there’s no avoiding the need for labor, raw materials, and manufacturing capacity to build batteries and get them into homes. Base Power’s approach still demands that we address those barriers to energy abundance.

Powering progress

At the Progress Conference, I heard no sugarcoating of the challenges to achieving energy abundance, nor any underselling of the importance of getting energy right, quickly.

The progress community is a clear-eyed bunch, yet they remain undaunted — they have a clear sense of what needs to be done and a collective urgency to do it. New technologies and strategies are already on the ascendancy. We have every reason to be hopeful that an energy-abundant future awaits, despite how much work lies ahead.

In his opening plenary, , founder of Institute, said that much of the value from the Progress Conference comes from bringing everyone together to be energized. How right he was. We’re going to need a ton of energy, literally and figuratively, to fuel more progress.

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“To me, Abundance is about achieving what’s already possible, Progress is about making more possible. One aims to be on the production possibilities frontier, the other to push out the frontier.”

Jason then asked:

“This implies that the progress movement isn’t focused on achieving what’s already possible. Do you think that? If so, why?”

It’s a great question, and as I started to respond I realized it was turning into an essay. So here it is.

I agree with Jason that Progress and Abundance “overlap 80–90%, and if you’re outside both of them you should probably think of them as variations on the same thing.” But if we’re trying to tease apart the 10–20% of Abundance and Progress that don’t overlap, I do think that progress is more, if not absolutely, focused on the not yet possible.

This is the crux of our friendly disagreement:

“After this year’s Progress Conference, Charles Mann suggested: “Abundance wants to make sure everyone has a house. Progress wants to make those houses better.” But IMO, the progress movement is interested in both of those things, so that’s not how I think of the distinction.” (emphasis added)

I, on the other hand, think the distinction has merit. I see Progress as primarily interested in Abundance as an intermediate step toward pushing out the frontier.

Take a YIMBY policy like single-staircase reform as an example. I think that’s an Abundance policy because the focus is on correcting an immediate, arbitrary constraint on housing supply that gets us closer to an existing production possibilities frontier (PPF). Housing is too expensive; this has several negative effects, and Abundance is working to correct the problem.

I think Progress is concerned with that type of reform only insofar as it’s an intermediate step to clustering talent and reaping agglomeration benefits for a broader goal, like recreating the conditions that led to the incredible output of 15th-century Florence. In other words, expanding the possibilities frontier.

The key point is that Abundance is focused on removing localized, arbitrary constraints that prevent us from using the technologies and capabilities we already have. Single-staircase reform allows for building types we already know how to construct but have been artificially prohibited from building. Progress, by contrast, is about adding new understanding, technologies, and capabilities that expand what is possible in the first place.

I think you could say the same about the distinction between Abundance and Progress related to medical and science reforms. The FDA drug approval process needs reform; immediately viable treatments are reaching patients much too slowly. Fixing that is an Abundance issue because it’s focused on an arbitrary bottleneck. Progress wants the reforms on the way to other metascience breakthroughs that fundamentally alter how we discover new therapies and increase human longevity.

Does it matter?

To answer Jason’s question directly, no, I don’t think Progress isn’t focused on achieving what’s already possible. But I think that what’s possible today is merely a stepping stone to the future the Progress community is focused on building.

If Abundance is an intermediate step on the way to Progress, it’s no wonder that we’d see many of the same people at each conference. And I think it’s fine, as Jason says, to “think of the abundance movement as part of the progress movement,” especially for those who aren’t deeply enmeshed in both communities. But for those who are, I think the distinction matters.

It’s an important because Abundance and Progress require selling different stories and visions. We need different approaches and messaging to convince a city council to revise local building codes than we do to inspire and recruit talent to automate and revolutionize homebuilding.

Abundance is much more political. The thing about being on the production possibilities frontier is that there are multiple places on the curve you can be. Whether we produce a little more of this or a little more of that requires political tradeoffs. Progress right now feels largely above that fray, and I want it to stay there. I want Progress to stay focused on a world of dynamism and possibility over the long-term.

If you’re interested in learning more about Abundance and Progress, read my recaps from each conference:

• Abundance is how we deliver on the promise of liberty

• Powering progress: The quest for energy abundance

Also, I’d love comments on this post. I’m thinking out loud here, so please tell me where you think this distinction breaks down, or whether you see examples that challenge it. Am I getting the line between Abundance and Progress right?

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My awakening began when I saw this inscription on the National Archives.

“This building holds in trust the records of our national life and symbolizes our faith in the permanency of our national institutions.”

Something about the phrase struck me. I wasn’t in town for the Abundance 2025 conference because I had an abiding faith in our institutions; I was there because I wanted to reform them. The hallowed tones sparked my curiosity, and I entered to see what could inspire such lofty language. Inside I found the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights. The scales fell from my eyes, and I saw America in an entirely new light.

I walked out a born-again American.

Abundance and the American Project

It was the day before the conference on my first visit to Washington, D.C. What started as a sightseeing stroll turned into an 11-mile pilgrimage through the city. I didn’t get back to the hotel until almost midnight because I couldn’t stop myself from walking to every monument and memorial on the Mall. I felt energized by a sense that nearly 250 years into the American Project we’re still a young country striving to build a nation that can deliver on its founding ideals. Over the next two days at the conference, undoubtedly influenced by a latent patriotism stirred by my first visit to D.C., I came to view Abundance as a continuation of that messy, never-ending quest.

Abundance is not simply about building more and cheaper stuff, nor is it simply a necessary corrective for sclerotic government institutions. Abundance is part of the long tradition by which we, the citizens and government of the United States, do the work to actually secure “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Abundance is fundamentally about enabling liberty and protecting against illiberalism.1

Abundance is an enabling condition of liberty

To understand the connection between Abundance and liberty consider housing, the most salient Abundance topic. Almost everyone agrees housing is too expensive and we need more of it. But housing abundance isn’t simply about more, cheaper, and denser; it’s about letting people live the life they want, where they want. We’ve arbitrarily and unnecessarily limited the ability for someone to choose for themselves, and liberty isn’t really liberty without choices.

People aren’t self-selecting as city, suburban, or rural people, as though they were choosing between three options based on their personal identity or taste. At least not entirely. In reality, the choice of where to live is constrained by artificial scarcity, and we’re rationalizing “our choices” to maintain a sense of agency.

That’s what happened when my wife and I moved from the Bay Area to the Denver suburbs. There were plenty of quality-of-life reasons we could cite as motivations for the move. Unpleasant BART commutes and navigating around the homeless to get to work were chief among the reasons to look elsewhere. A desire to live closer to the mountains or my parents in southwest Colorado were good reasons for choosing the Front Range. But none of those are the reason why we moved. We wanted a family, and having one in the Bay felt out of reach. Housing was simply too expensive.

We’re happy with our choice six years later. We have a nice house, reasonable commutes, and disposable income left over to travel with the kids. But we lost plenty in the transaction, too. Chief of which is opportunity. For the ambitious and intellectually curious, the opportunities in the Bay Area far surpass those in the middle of the country. Sometimes I wonder where my career would be if I were still surrounded by wildly ambitious folks in a city full of possibilities. In a world of price parity, a world of real choice, I doubt we would have left the Bay.

On the face of it, trading maximum opportunity for a higher quality of life hardly sounds like a tragedy. Yet played out over and over across many lives, it really is. How much human potential has gone unrealized because a lack of housing affordability pushed it from where it can best flourish? How many individuals have missed out on making full use of their talents? The consequence of housing scarcity is that we’ve put an artificial cap on human capital.

Housing is just one example. We live in a world full of arbitrary restrictions that have slowed building and innovation to the detriment of choice and opportunity. Abundance is about removing these constraints and creating the enabling conditions for liberty.

Abundance is an antidote to illiberalism

Abundance is not only an enabling condition of liberty, it’s a defense against a slide into illiberalism. Nowhere was this clearer at the conference than in discussions of family abundance. In a working group on “Abundance for the Family” hosted by and , they defined family abundance as “allowing people to have the kids they want to have.”

There were academic discussions about cost-disease and broken institutions, but even in a hotel ballroom filled with wonks the discussion was more visceral. We were all parents wrestling with not only how to provide our kids with a good life, but if and how we could bring more life into the world. There was a real sense that people in that room had fewer kids and smaller families than they would like, if only the village it takes to raise a child were up to the task.

This isn’t empty rhetoric about how we’d all have more kids if only there was an Abundance agenda to make raising them cheaper. I heard writer Dan Wang discuss his new book, Breakneck, on several occasions at events in and around the conference. The topic from the book that he repeatedly spoke about most passionately wasn’t the difference between infrastructure in an engineering state vs. a lawyerly society, but China’s one-child policy. A policy that resulted in more than 300 million abortions and 100 million sterilizations. China’s leaders believed in and feared a zero-sum world in which population growth would inevitably lead to scarcity and disaster.

Herein lies the real crux of Abundance. We’re either building, innovating, and growing to create new opportunities for people, or we’re contracting and fighting over what remains. History has shown us over and over the horrors that come from a lack of abundance, either in mindset or reality. Abundance is an antidote to zero-sum thinking and policies that lead to illiberalism.

Abundance isn’t a half-drawn horse - it’s a bull

There was much debate about what Abundance actually is or should be at the conference.2 Steven Teles, in one of the gathering’s best speeches, presented six “Varieties of Abundance.” The Abundance community, as wrote post-conference, still looks “a little like the half-drawn horse meme.” There are indeed many details to sort out.

The details are critically important, but I’d argue that capturing and communicating the bigger picture of Abundance is at least equally important. Rather than think of Abundance as a half-drawn horse, I suggest that Abundance should be thought of as Picasso’s bull. In Picasso’s lithograph series, he attempted to draw a bull in as few pen strokes as possible until he had captured only the essence of the animal.

It’s as though Abundance started in the middle somewhere, maybe column three. Caught between details and rough geometric shapes, the inclination among the policy crowd is to add more detail, to shift to one of the depictions on the left. It cannot be ignored that the specifics must come to actually deliver policies and reforms that lead to Abundance. But to quote David Brooks’ criticism of the overall Abundance movement, it can be “too modest and too wonky.” To make Abundance resonate with people, I think the storytelling could stand to strip away detail and highlight the Abundance movement’s moral and emotional center. We need people to understand that the essence of Abundance is making good on the promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Abundance is the reanimation of the American Dream

The vibe of Abundance 2025 was much more understated than the patriotic feelings I’ve described thus far. The conference was not a pep rally for true believers with a singular vision. There was real disagreement and a willingness to grapple with issues that defy easy answers and partisan purity. But in that pluralism I saw a unifying opportunity for the Abundance movement to reanimate the belief in the American Dream.

Don’t take ‘dream’ here as a tangible concept measured by home ownership, upward mobility, or GDP growth. Think of it as a literal dream, almost fantastical, yet real enough that you feel like you could reach out and grab it. The original vision of America itself, on display in the National Archives, still feels like a dream, right? More than a nation, it’s an ideal that even in the best of times leaves us wishing we could do better, get a little closer. Our ideals will probably always have an asymptotic quality. We get so close, but never. quite. touch. it.

Yet in our stasis, we’ve allowed the American Dream to drift further away from our fingertips. We risk forgetting that we ever dreamt the dream at all. Too many Americans today are fearful of change because they’ve never seen change that made things better. If we want them to accept change, they have to believe, deeply, almost religiously, that the change will be good. They need a vision of the future that is so different, so good that it’s a dream.

Abundance can bring the dream back within reach. That’s what the conference and Washington, D.C. did for me. To paraphrase , I left with a vision of the “world of tomorrow that shimmered with promise” and a fervent faith in the American Dream.

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Thank you to , , , , , , Brendan Mulligan, and Kaylee Mulligan for their comments on earlier drafts.

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Editor's note: Applications for the Roots of Progress Institute 2025 Blog Building Intensive Fellowship are open. You should apply! The deadline is June 1.

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore

I’ve had three “we’re not in Kansas anymore” moments in my life. The first is when I stepped out of Grand Central Station, on the way to an admitted students event at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in 2013. My heart still pounds when I think about staring up at Manhattan for the first time. I had never traveled so far from home in Arizona. The energy and scale of the city made me dizzy, like a cartoon character knocked in the head. I was not at all convinced I belonged at an Ivy League graduate program. Only a few months prior, I was just hoping for a job with steady hours. I had spent the summer before grad school making $9/hr managing a grocery store in rural Colorado. Undergrad had taken me six years, and my resume featured far more restaurant experience than professional experience. It felt like I had arrived in NYC by accident, by some misunderstanding.

The second moment came a year later. My graduate internship was in Peru. Now I was a continent away from home for the first time and could barely speak the language. I was down to 125 pounds, having lost more than twenty pounds in the first few weeks of the trip because I was unaccustomed to the food and water. While hiking through the jungle on the way to a remote ecotourism business I was there to consult with, I lost consciousness. I remember waking up with a stranger looking down on me, unaware of where I was or how I got there. Only a year before, I had been scraping by; now I was Who Knows Where on an adventure that made me feel like I was living out a scene from one of my favorite books about Theodore Roosevelt.

I could probably describe both instances more succinctly as some exaggerated form of cultural shock. But it wasn’t just the culture that shocked me. It was my sense of self, the limitations on the life I could imagine for myself, that were crumbling. If I was there, living that moment, moments I couldn’t have dreamed of, what else was out there?

I felt the same thing, for the third time in my life, last year at the Progress Conference. This time I felt it coming. The Conference was the culmination of the Roots of Progress Fellowship I had begun about eight weeks earlier. Throughout the program, I had felt something brewing, but I couldn’t put my finger on it through the virtual sessions and interactions.

What did I feel leading up to the event? It felt like reluctance, resistance. A recognition that I seemed to be swimming through a world that was more viscous than the one the other fellows and the advisors inhabited. It wasn’t until we were all together in Berkeley that it hit me like a hammer. These are the highest agency people I’ve ever met.1

The Fellowship was my first inside look at this kind of agency, ambition, and courage. These weren’t new ideas to me. It’s not as though I’d spent the last decade since hiking out of the Peruvian jungle twiddling my thumbs on the couch. I have invested tens of millions of dollars in climate and environmental strategies as a capital allocator and helped build pioneering partnerships to deliver conservation wins on agriculture and forest lands around the world. By most measures, I was well into a successful career.

But once I joined the Fellowship, it dawned on me that I had hit an invisible threshold, an ambition asymptote without realizing it. Watching the other fellows work, seeing how Emma ran the program, hearing the advisors who came to speak with us, that invisible threshold started to reveal itself. It was as though I saw a ripple, light catching in a way I hadn’t seen before as I watched people move through a space I couldn’t. The Progress Conference is where I realized it wasn’t a wall or solid threshold at all. It’s more like a cell membrane. Permeable. Good ideas could flow through, be absorbed, an input to something greater. The experience caused a profound shift in how I think about myself, talent in general, and progress studies overall.

That’s when my sense of what Progress Studies meant shifted from a field of study or discipline to a state of mind, “a vibe.” Progress Studies is about telling ourselves that we can do things. That we can figure it out.

Ambition

Before the Fellowship, I thought of ambition as a desire for things like money and prestige; traditional markers of success. Ambition up to that point had felt like craving, yearning, maybe even envy. As the Fellowship rolled on, I started to see ambition as something akin to vision, a vision of what the world could look like. Ambition started to feel less covetous and consumptive, it became creative and generative. Agentic rather than memetic.

I began to notice my perspective shifting as advisor after advisor spoke about the need for vision. Some spoke about vision related to progress studies writ large, some entrepreneurship, others writing. But the visions had similar shapes and characteristics.

They all had a certain boldness, often the bolder the better. As one of the advisors put it, “hard problems are easier to solve than easy problems” because hard problems attract great people. But they were bold for reasons other than difficulty. They were unbounded by prior experience or knowledge. As an advisor put it, “You have to learn 99% of what you’ll need to know on the job as an entrepreneur anyway, so why limit your ambition to the 1% you already know?” Who cares if you’ve been a writer before or not? Or an engineer. Or a researcher. Why can’t you learn?2

I’ve worked as a wildlife biologist, a conservationist at the largest environmental NGO in the world, and a capital allocator at a wealth management firm. I’m no stranger to picking up new skills or trying to conquer new frontiers. But I’ve never been part of a group that believed in doing so as fervently as the progress community.

Existing know-how is not a prerequisite. What matters is what you’d be happiest to see become reality. Because when things get hard, and they will, the purpose and joy in your vision is what gets you through.3

Courage

It’s one thing to have a vision. It’s another to chase it. To paraphrase Scott Alexander on The Dwarkesh Podcast, “most people writing on the internet are within 1% of not having the courage to do so.” I had no idea how true this is until I went through the Roots of Progress Institute Fellowship.

The necessity for courage often shows up in mundane ways. I’d written plenty and been on podcasts for work, but I’d never written anything under my own name for public consumption when I applied to the Fellowship. I was Grant Mulligan of Insert Organization Here. The ideas may have been mine, but I was speaking on behalf of an organization. I never really had to declare myself. I had no clue how difficult that transition would be.

Now before I can be legible to others, I have to be legible to myself. What do I want to declare? Which of my ideas are worth sharing? What do I really believe? Sharing my vision for environmentalism was hard enough, but through the program I was encouraged to share more personal anecdotes (like this post). Inserting myself into the story requires getting over a significant cringe factor. Hyperlegibility may be our new reality, but it requires courage.

The sheer difficulty of writing requires courage in its own right. Writing is hard.4 In weekly Draft Gyms, the fellows would edit each others’ work. We’d watch each other struggle and fumble over our pieces. We’d start in on an idea, write thousands of words, and still couldn’t get it right. But then, more often than not, something would click, the fellow would find their voice, and the piece would come together. Getting to see a brilliant article before it’s brilliant was the coolest part of being a fellow.

Before the Fellowship, I’d read an article on Substack or Works in Progress and thought it must be the product of genius or divine inspiration. Far more common is smart people with the courage to keep grinding. They believe they’ll figure it out. Again, this is not a novel idea. I was no stranger to hard work before the Fellowship. But there’s something uncommonly relentless about the Progress community.

Talent

Each time my ambition and courage have taken a major leap, it's been in response to a catalyst. I needed a professor to believe in me and bring me to Yale. I needed my girlfriend, now wife, to tell me I should apply for an internship in Peru, that traveling there didn’t need to be relegated to fantasy; it’s a place I could really go. I needed the Roots of Progress Fellowship to reveal the invisible and arbitrary thresholds holding me back.

I’m sure not all talent requires a catalyst, that’s probably part of what makes the most talented people special. But there’s bound to be others like me who need a little push, a little encouragement to have a bigger vision for themselves and the world. Many people don’t realize how talented they are, or at the very least, could be. That there is vast, latent talent waiting for a catalyst has become one of my most fundamental and strongly held beliefs.5

That belief is at the core of my fascination with progress studies. My hope is that Progress Studies is the catalyst, a meta-discipline for raising human ambition and unlocking untapped talent. What vision could activate all that talent? What would happen if we activated all that talent? How much better could the world be?

Let’s find out.

The Fellows

For all I learned from the Fellowship, like most things in life, it all comes back to the relationships and people you meet along the way. The advisors were great; I got to meet many of my personal heroes.6 But the real magic of the program was without a doubt the other fellows. Thank you to each fellow for, well, the fellowship.

The fellows in my cohort are brilliant thinkers and writers. You should subscribe to their blogs (mine too, button below)! To learn more about each fellow and subscribe to their blog, go here. See my thread on X or Substack Notes for my favorite articles from each fellow.

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Thank you to Brendan Mulligan, , , , Simonelli, and Kaylee Mulligan for their comments on earlier drafts.

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It is not so simple a thing to feed the world. Yet most of us eat three meals a day and think little of it. If you do give the calories you consume much thought, I’m guessing you spend far more time worrying about how to avoid eating too many than you do worrying about whether you’ll get enough.

The last sentence should awe you. Do not skim past it. The fact that many of our bellies are overfull is one of humanity’s greatest achievements.

Consider this graph:

If you allow yourself the time to sit with this graph and all that it means, what do you feel? I feel an appreciation for all the nights, and I mean all, that I’ve gone to bed without hunger pangs. I feel grateful that my children were born into a world where they can push away fresh vegetables in the winter without a second thought. In all of human history, how many ages could even make sense of that sentence? Full enough to be picky, discarding nutritious food, fresh in winter?! I rejoice in lives made healthier, taller — possible. I see previously unimaginable wealth.

If that graph doesn’t make you feel as fortunate as I do, consider this one:

I find this graph astonishing for two reasons. First, each red bar represents the wretchedness and death of millions; it represents misery on an spectacular scale.1 Second, it shows how drastically, quickly, and recently our human condition has changed. In 1945, it was estimated that roughly half of the global population didn’t have access to enough calories. Today, the number of people without enough calories to eat is down to nearly 1 in 10. That’s an incredible improvement in less than 100 years. Poverty and hunger were, for almost all of human history, the default. No longer. We escaped this trap when we learned how to grow more food from less land. Our ability to raise agricultural yields, and all it enabled, is the quintessential example of what I mean when I say progress.2

Where Progress Comes From

In his excellent essay, Breakfast for Eight Billion,3 Charles C. Mann highlights three major breakthroughs that led to the massive increase in crop yields that characterize modern agriculture: fertilization, irrigation, and genetics. I’ll add two more: mechanization and energy.

Fertilization

Nitrogen is the limiting factor to plant growth. Historically, farmers used fire, manure, and crop rotations as ways to increase nitrogen in soils, but these techniques weren’t sufficient to overcome nitrogen as a constraint on yields. Then, in the early 1900s, came the discovery of how to make synthetic nitrogen at an industrial scale via the Haber-Bosch process. In Thomas Hager’s book about the discovery of Haber-Bosch, Alchemy of Air, he estimates that roughly 50% of the nitrogen found in our bodies comes from nitrogen made available by the process. That is to say, if we are what we eat, roughly half of what we consume was grown with the assistance of synthetic fertilizer made possible by Haber-Bosch. What does this mean, practically? Billions of us alive today owe our very existence to this technology.

Irrigation

As anyone with a house plant knows, plants are thirsty. Less than 1% of the water on earth is freshwater accessible and usable by humans, and we use around 70% of that limited freshwater supply to support agriculture. Harvests used to depend on the whims of nature to supply water in sufficient quantities, at the right time. Heavy spring rains didn’t help a farmer that needed water in the late, sweltering days of summer. Limited or poorly timed water availability, limited or no harvest. Now, with dams and pumps, farmers have much more access and control over when water can be applied to a field. This ability to irrigate is a major driver of yields; roughly 40% of global production depends on irrigation.

Genetics

The potential yield of any individual plant is a function of its genetic makeup. Plant genes are like human genes, they impact traits like height and health. In short, better genes equal a higher potential yield. Norman Borlaug figured out how to breed wheat that was not only disease resistant (plants struck by pests and disease don’t produce as much), but could also produce far more grain if fertilized and irrigated. This variety of wheat, called dwarf wheat, allowed crop yields to quadruple in some places. Billions of people are alive because Borlaug figured out how to feed them.

When we combine the power of fertilizer, irrigation, and genetics we get amazing outcomes like this one described by Mann:

Between 1961 and 2003, Asian irrigation more than doubled, from 182 million acres to 417 million acres, and fertilizer use went up by a factor of more than twenty, from 4 to 87 million tons. Combined with the new rice strains, the consequence was a near-tripling of Asian rice production.

⁠In the 1970s, much of South and East Asia were plagued by hunger. By the twenty-first century, Asians had an average of 30 percent more calories in their diet. Millions upon millions of families had more food, and with that came so much else. Seoul and Shanghai, Jaipur and Jakarta; shining skyscrapers, pricey hotels, traffic-choked streets blazing with neon: all are built atop a foundation of laboratory-bred rice.⁠

Mechanization

Mechanization dramatically reduces the amount of labor required on a farm and allows that labor to be applied elsewhere; this is one of the reasons the industrial revolution was possible in the first place. Adam Smith saw it happening: “By means of the plough two men, with the assistance of three horses, will cultivate more ground than twenty could do with the spade.”

What Smith didn’t envision is how far tractors and other machinery would take this trend. The decreasing need for labor is what allowed Borlaug to leave his family farm and pursue the education that would lead to his wheat breakthrough. Mechanization not only improved yields directly, but it allowed for the processing, transport, and storage of bumper yields that characterize modern agriculture supply chains.

Energy

It’s hard to overstate the importance of energy. Modern agriculture requires copious amounts of energy (coal, oil, gas, renewables) to produce fertilizer, make cement for dams, and fuel tractors, to name only a few uses. Remember how I said that roughly half of what we consume was grown with the assistance of synthetic fertilizer made possible by Haber-Bosch? Making that fertilizer consumes around 2% of global energy. It is no coincidence that as energy consumption grew, agricultural land use per person fell. Abundant, cheap energy very directly translates into more food. Without that energy, billions would starve.

Why we still need more progress

For all the progress we’ve made, so much more is necessary. That graph of agricultural land use per person that gave me all the warm and fuzzies? It also adds a tremendous urgency to push further. There are three primary reasons why more agricultural progress is needed: progress has not reached everyone, agriculture’s environmental impact, and population growth.

Progress is not evenly distributed

We can now grow enough food, on a per calorie basis, to feed the world. Yet billions of people are still plagued by low agricultural productivity and hunger, regardless of what the global average has to say. There are still roughly three billion people on this earth who don’t have to imagine the tragedies that people like me in the developed world have largely left behind. They’re still living in it. Progress has undeniably reduced suffering, but it clearly hasn’t eliminated it.

It should be no surprise that low agricultural productivity leads not only to hunger, but poverty. In Sub-Saharan Africa where agricultural productivity significantly lags the rest of the world, 40% of people live below the international poverty line. The poorest of the poor are farmers. 76% of working adults in extreme poverty are employed in agriculture. These numbers were very similar in France, Italy, and the UK — in the early 1800s. Today, 4% or less of the workforce in these countries is employed in agriculture, agricultural yield per worker is at least 30% higher, and those living in extreme poverty have plummeted.

The adoption of the same breakthrough technologies that define modern agriculture would be a great place to start. Africa uses more than 5x less fertilizer than the global average. In many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, less than 1% of cropland is irrigated. Use of high yield crop varieties, mechanization, and energy are all among the lowest in the world. Extending the means and benefits of modern agriculture would pay enormous dividends.

The challenge is that the spread of modern agriculture has been handicapped by the lack of fundamental economic modernization — things like roads and land tenure, let alone basic security from war. Sub-Saharan Africa needs agriculture focused reforms, infrastructure, and technologies tailored to the region’s context. It’s not enough to wait on general economic development that trickles into agriculture when people are going hungry today. Creating the enabling conditions for increasing yields must be a priority. There is no route to progress, no route to relieving the ongoing suffering associated with hunger and poverty, that doesn’t include increasing agriculture yields.

Environmental Impact

There is no human activity that has more impact on the environment than agriculture. Consider only two of the many concerns. First, nearly half of the earth’s surface is used to grow food (or food for our food), at a direct cost to forests and grasslands. Second, agriculture accounts for roughly 25% of global emissions. Each challenge, land use and emissions, benefits from increased efficiency. The more food we can grow with fewer inputs, agricultural productivity in a nutshell, the better we address local and global environmental problems.

Thankfully, we have met or are approaching the point where we can grow enough food per acre to feed the world and take land out of production to be returned to nature. The challenge will be increasing yields quickly enough, especially where they’re lagging, to avoid massive habitat loss. There is no greater opportunity for environmental protection and restoration than enhancing agriculture yields.

Population growth

The global population is expected to peak at a little over 10 billion in 2084. That means that in less than sixty years we need to be able to feed an additional 2 billion people every day. The challenge is only exacerbated by the fact that many of these people will likely be born in areas with currently low agricultural productivity. Whether we advance one of our greatest achievements will determine whether or not future souls will know literal feast or famine.

Agricultural progress deserves more attention

All of this is to say, agricultural progress matters. But I fear that a general lack of appreciation for the achievement that is modern agriculture, the want of understanding of what makes the achievement possible, has resulted in a stalling of the agricultural progress humanity still desperately needs. We cannot lose sight of all that progress has made possible and all that progress can still make possible.

With that in mind, I’m envisioning this as the first post in a series on agriculture and progress. To start, the next posts will cover the interplay of agriculture and the environment, barriers to progress, and how to fund agricultural progress. More to come!

Thank you to Brendan Mulligan, , , , and Kaylee Mulligan for their comments on earlier drafts.

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Before you read any further, first answer this question: who had (or will have) a higher carbon footprint at age 40, you or your grandparents?

If you live in the US and are roughly 40, like I am, the answer is your grandparents, and it’s not particularly close.1 My carbon footprint is about 15% lower than my grandparents’ when they were my age. In the UK, where the country’s last coal plant recently closed, the decline in per capita emissions is even greater - they’ve seen a 50% reduction in per-capita emissions since their emissions peaked in the 1960s. UK per capita emissions haven’t been this low since the 1850s! 

Crucially, these massive reductions have not come at the cost of economic progress; many developed countries have achieved significant GDP growth while reducing per-capita emissions. 

Source: Our World in Data

Do these numbers surprise you? If so, you’re not alone.

Hannah Ritchie’s book, Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet, is full of such counterintuitive data. Not the End of the World is where I first encountered the idea that my grandparents’ generation had higher per-capita emissions than mine. I knew emissions had been falling, but despite years working in the environmental and climate space, I hadn’t internalized how far we’ve come. This is where Ritchie excels. She is a brilliant science communicator able to translate data into compelling stories that enlighten and inspire. Her book, like her writing at Our World In Data and Sustainability by numbers, is the perfect antidote to gloom and doom. 

From air pollution to overfishing, she uses data to show that we’ve been far more successful addressing environmental challenges than typically reported. Ritchie’s goal is to inspire action by arming us with the data to be optimistic about what our efforts can achieve. 

If we want to get serious about tackling the world’s environmental problems, we need to be more optimistic. We need to believe that it is possible to tackle them. As we’ll see in the chapters that follow, this is not a pipe dream: things are changing, and we should be impatient about changing them faster.

Importantly, and often missing from most discussions on sustainability, Ritchie makes clear that sustainability can’t be limited to environmental measures. Human well-being must be a core metric, too. Ritchie’s book is the first I’ve read in the progress studies canon that puts the interplay between environmental and human progress in proper context.

A world in which half of all children die is not meeting ‘the needs of the present generations’ and is therefore not a sustainable one.

There is no shortage of data to support the claim that things are changing for the better on both human and environmental dimensions. Here are a few of my favorite highlights from the book:

In rich countries carbon emissions, energy use, deforestation, fertilizer use, overfishing, plastic pollution, air pollution and water pollution are all falling, while these countries continue to get richer.

As recently as 1800, about 43% of the world’s children died before reaching their fifth birthday. Today that figure is 4% – still woefully high, but more than 10-fold lower.

Every day, 300,000 people get access to electricity and a similar number get clean water, for the first time. This has been the case every day for a decade.

In 1820, more than three-quarters of the world lived below the equivalent of this poverty line. Today that figure is less than 10%.

In 1990, 2 billion people lived on less than $2.15 per day. By 2019, this had more than halved to 648 million. To put this development in perspective, every day for the last 25 years there could have been a newspaper headline reading, ‘The number of people in extreme poverty has fallen by 128,000 since yesterday’.

Between 2013 and 2020, Beijing’s pollution levels fell by 55%. Across China as a whole, they fell by 40%.

Make no mistake. Ritchie is not arguing that problems don’t exist or that we can rest on our laurels. She is pushing back against a cultural pessimism that has led people to forget the progress we’ve made and give up on the progress we can yet achieve.

She addresses this pessimism directly at the beginning of several chapters by debunking popular doomsday prophecies. She is neither belittling nor dismissive - she takes the central concerns of each prophecy seriously. For instance, in the chapter on plastics, she examines the claim that by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean. The claim is wrong, but people are rightly worried about the effects of plastics on wildlife. However, the material itself is not the problem. The problem is plastic pollution. 

Time for another poll:

Globally, somewhere around 0.5% of plastic waste ends up in the ocean. The vast majority of that plastic pollution, quite small compared to overall plastic consumption, comes from middle income countries where waste management systems haven’t kept pace with economic growth and plastic use. Modest waste management investments in these countries could dramatically reduce the flow of plastic to the ocean. Yet, several US states have plastic bag bans and plastic straw bans have become a silly political litmus test even though abolishing all consumer plastic use in the US would hardly make a dent in the ocean plastics problem.2 In other words, encouragements to reduce, reuse, and recycle plastics don’t do much good.

“We complain that it has become so ubiquitous in our lives, but this is a testament to the fact that it is such a useful material.”

Plastics are amazing. Plastics are much lighter to transport than other materials (saving fuel and carbon emissions). They keep food fresher, longer (reducing food waste and emissions). They are used to make lifesaving medical devices. The list could go on. We don’t want to eliminate plastics. We want waste management systems that eliminate plastic pollution.

Like in many environmental stories, the real problem is misidentified or misrepresented, resulting in proposed solutions that are inadequate and require unnecessary human sacrifice. They seem to be more designed to satisfy a narrative than to solve the problem. 

Ritchie is persuasive because she avoids these traps. She has an obvious commitment to environmental causes combined with a willingness to go where the data leads. As she references several times in the book, she believed in the classic, apocalyptic environmental narrative as a student. But after looking closely at the data, she realized that humans, and the environment, are doing much better than she knew.

When I zoomed out and saw these trends, I felt stupid. I also felt cheated. I had been duped by an education system that was supposed to teach me about the world. I was a diligent student. I won medals for coming top for everything from earth materials to sedimentology, atmospheric science to oceanography. I could create complex diagrams of seismic faults, I could recite the chemical formulas of pages of minerals from memory, but if you’d asked me to draw a graph of what was happening to deaths from disasters, I’d have sketched it upside down.

This sets Ritchie, and the book, apart from the typical antagonism of partisan environmentalism - where opponents argue an issue is either existential or doesn’t exist. She paints a beautiful portrait of what progress has been achieved while still being a call to action to address the blemishes that remain. 

Not the End of the World is an important book, and one I hope quickly becomes required reading in environmental curriculums. It is a vision for the future, grounded in the progress of the past, that is desperately needed. Ritchie urges us to get to work and reminds us that solutions exist or can be found. Instead of a world where people question whether to have kids lest they live through or contribute to a climate catastrophe, we should recall that in many ways we’re better off than our grandparents. We should expect that our grandchildren will look back and say the same.

Thank you to Julius Simonelli, Rob Tracinski, Steve Newman, Kevin Kohler, Quade MacDonald, and Brendan Mulligan for their edits and suggestions.

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From my earliest grade school memories, lessons on the environment were uniformly focused on how humans were destroying the planet. We were driving species to extinction and creating holes in the ozone. 

The environmental stories being taught from grade schools to graduate programs largely haven’t changed in more than sixty years. A student in 1970 would have cited many of the same authors and arguments as a student today. Silent Spring is still taught as a clarion call to address pollution. John Muir’s defeat at Hetch Hetchy remains the classic example of how wilderness and beauty are destroyed in the name of economic advancement. And despite years of empirical evidence disproving their theories, Malthus’ and Erhlich’s warnings that human consumption will outstrip the earth’s ability to provide remain pillars of environmental 101 courses. A student today might learn about the BP oil spill instead of Exxon Valdez and climate change instead of acid rain, but the core message hasn’t changed - humanity’s relationship with nature is fundamentally broken and in our pursuit of progress we have left the natural world a husk of its former self. 

But the world has changed, and environmentalism needs to change with it. In contrast to the traditional narrative, we have actually been remarkably successful at solving environmental challenges. This environmental progress has occurred without requiring a step backwards in human prosperity. In fact, growing wealth and technological advancement are fundamental conditions for environmental progress. We’ve proved it’s possible to decouple emissions and GDP growth in the highest income countries. As Hannah Ritchie says in Not the End of the World, “in rich countries carbon emissions, energy use, deforestation, air pollution and water pollution are falling while these countries continue to get richer.”1 This is largely because rich countries can afford to care, invest in new, expensive technologies, and bring them down the cost curve. For all the urgency and challenges that remain, there’s good evidence that things are getting better, dramatically better, and we should be much more optimistic about humanity’s relationship with nature.2 

Consider climate change. While we still have a long way to go, considerable headway is being made. In only ten years, the projection for global temperature increase by 2100 has dropped by a full degree. 

Source: Cipher

This rapid improvement in our expected fortunes doesn’t fully account for the exponential growth in clean energy generation and storage. Solar is being installed at a clip that has wildly exceeded expectations. Battery storage is doubling every year. 

Source: The Economist

Improvements aren’t just energy and carbon related. Deforestation peaked in the 1980s, several places around the world have seen reforestation, and there’s been a major bounceback in European mammal populations. As technology allows for increasing crop yields, we need less land for agriculture and can return it to nature.3 Even the switch from horses to cars was a boon for New England forests. 

Yet, no matter how much the evidence suggests otherwise, mainstream environmentalism has been unable to ditch the negative vibes.4 It’s time to update our priors. Human and environmental progress are not competing in a zero-sum game. Instead of considering consumption as the fundamental sin responsible for the extraction of earth’s finite resources, environmentalism should focus on progress - and creating a world where both humans and the environment can thrive together. We need a positive-sum environmentalism.5 

In a zero-sum game, players compete over a fixed pool of resources. What one player wins, the other loses. Positive-sum is the opposite. Instead of fighting over a limited pie, in a positive-sum game the pie can grow - each player can end better off. 

It is not an idle distinction. It matters because zero-sum environmentalism has artificially excluded potential solutions. A pernicious example of zero-sum environmental thinking is the pushback against electric vehicles because they will require a significant increase in lithium mining. Classic environmentalism sees limited known reserves, supply constraints, and dirty refining technology and instinctively responds with calls to halt. But as we’ve seen time and time again, economic incentives and technological breakthroughs can address these problems. We’ve already seen this with lithium. Known reserves are up as people are incentivized to find it, investment led to supply exceeding demand by over 10% in 2023, and new technologies are making it cheaper and cleaner to mine. All of these factors have lowered battery prices by 99% over the last thirty years and accelerated the clean energy transition. 

Crucially, zero-sum thinking tends to evaluate solutions on a hyperlocal rather than global scale, overlooking base rates and tradeoffs. Fossil fuels require significantly more mining than critical minerals needed for the energy transition and air pollution from burning fossil fuels kills more than 3 million people per year. Even if lithium isn’t perfect, it’s a heck of a lot better than the alternatives. We can’t let perfect be the enemy of good. 

Positive-sum environmentalism on the other hand offers us expanded possibilities for progress. We could expand the use of genetically modified crops to not only reduce malnutrition and improve subsistence farmer livelihoods, but also return agricultural land to forests or grasslands to benefit biodiversity. We could streamline permitting to build new transmission lines that could connect gigawatts of renewable energy to the grid. That clean, abundant, and cheap energy could be used to desalinate water that pumped up to a river head would eliminate water scarcity as it journeys back down towards the ocean. The list of ways for nature and humanity to thrive together could go on and on, and they aren’t pie in the sky hypotheticals. We don’t need major technological breakthroughs to make them possible. We need an environmentalism that values dynamism over stasis and presents a compelling vision of abundance that people can get behind. 

The next generation of environmentalists can’t be zero-sum thinkers - it leads to a solution set of one. In a word, degrowth. What we need now is an optimistic, positive-sum environmentalism.

Thank you to Rob Tracinski, Steve Newman, Lauren Gilbert, and Brendan Mulligan for their edits and suggestions.

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