Writers, Philosophers & Thought Leaders Speak Out
How can we be more engaged global citizens? How do we fight for truth and protect democracy in a post-truth world? What influence do billionaires have on politics, journalism, and the technology that shapes our lives? Deborah Cahn, Daniel Susskind, Carlos Moreno, Lee McIntyre, Julian Lennon, Darryl Cunningham, and Arash Abizadeh on the future of democracy.
Senior Reporter at ProPublica · Filmmaker · Author
On The Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America
Living in California, I've just come to accept the unsettledness of this era we're moving into. And I think that's really how I see the future. You know, we're living in an era of disruption, and there are others I talk to and write about in the book who also muse about the possibility of a more nomadic future. That maybe home isn't a permanent place with deep roots but is a transient place with shallow roots or two places that you alternate between. In addition to a lot of other dramatic changes that the book is about, a change in our sense of home and our sense of place is a part of this story.
Political Economist · Provost of SciencesPo
Co-author of Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century
In Russia, I ran a university, a new economic school. And as an economist and a public intellectual, I was engaged in interactions with the government, including with Vladimir Putin. And there, of course, the situation was that Russia was already a nondemocratic country, meaning that it was a country where elections were not free and fair and partial censorship was already in place. Yet in those years, we could express ourselves openly, not on national TV, but at least in newspapers and on radio. And that eventually brought me into trouble with Vladimir Putin, who at some point suggested that I talked too much and I should not be in the same country. I was also interrogated. My office was searched. And at some point, common friends told me, 'Look, you shouldn't be here.' And I bought a one-way ticket for the next day and just left Russia. The dictators in the 20th century used military or paramilitary uniforms to project brute force and fear. Today, the situation is different. Successful dictators pretend to be democrats.
CEO of Legacy Agripartners
It's interesting, as I've gotten older, I've really started to reflect back on that early time growing up on a farm. And I'm fiercely, fiercely proud of where my roots are. And Weldon, Saskatchewan, it's a town of 160 people there today. And just being in a spot where every day you have cattle to feed, you've got a grain crop you're trying to grow, right? The things are subject to weather. The sort of ups and downs of farm life are so dependent on the 6 pm news and the weather forecast each night. It's at times very stressful, but most times incredibly rewarding, right? There's nothing like sitting in a combine at harvest time with all the fruits of your labors all coming in at the same time. It's a great experience. We had cattle, which is just a never-ending thing, right? You know, our vacations were tied around going to cattle shows, cattle sales, bull sales, cow sales, anything that revolved around the farm. And we had a ton of fun on our vacations going to these events and seeing sites in those areas where we went to. But at the end of the day, you know, your life revolves around the cattle on the farm. It revolves around the farm. There's no sort of, we'll take four months off and not worry about it, right? Those cows have to be fed twice a day and looked after. So it's a lot of responsibility, and it's a great way to get yourself ready for life as an adult.
Stanford Professor of Law · Expert on Civil Rights & Antidiscrimination Law
Author of Dress Codes · Rights Gone Wrong · The Race Card
One of the things that I've tried to do in my work is demonstrate the way that laws that don't seem to be directly related to social equality, to equality of opportunity, to racial justice in fact are and that it's only through also reforming these kind of systemic and institutionalized forms of discrimination that we could truly achieve an egalitarian society. So what I've really wanted to argue against is the idea that civil rights are kind of a magic bullet and that those kinds of laws alone would be sufficient to achieve.
Member of Web Collective degrowth.info
Master of Environmental Studies candidate, University of Pennsylvania
Degrowth as an idea has intellectual roots in the environmental critiques of the sixties and seventies found in landmark works like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth report, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, which was a seminal piece of economic theory that applied the laws of thermodynamics to the economy and was very influential for ecological economics, which is intertwined with degrowth. Degrowth was first formulated in 1972 by French philosopher André Gorz in a public debate where he used the term décroissance to question whether planetary stability was compatible with capitalism.
Human & Girls’ Rights Activist
Founder & Executive Director of Foundation for Girls Leadership
One thing that we should remember as young people is that everything allowed us is political by nature. We shouldn't be really scared of getting ourselves into different political aspects of issues around us. Be bold enough to speak out on the biggest challenges that are around you. And at the same time, it's in us to understand what kind of environment I am in? What is it that I can contribute to the problems that I am facing? That young people or people in general facing? So just go on. Be a part of that, and you'll be surprised that you will be the biggest game-changer.
Creator, Executive Producer & Showrunner of Minx
starring Ophelia Lovibond & Jake Johnson
What drew me to the time period of the 70s was the real story of these magazines Playgirl, Viva, Foxy Lady, all the magazines that existed in this period. So it was a natural outgrowth of trying to tell a story that was inspired by, to some extent, real-life events. When I started developing Minx, what struck me about the 70s, in particular, is just how similar it was to our time. It seems like the magazines were covering all the same issues that we're now talking about. Obviously, we all saw with the leaked decision in Roe vs. Wade just how close we are to that time period and how far we haven't come.
NYTimes Best-selling Author of the books Take My Hand · Balm, & Wench
Chair of the Board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation
My dad graduated from Tuskegee, and he often told me about the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. He really wanted me to understand the history, not only of medical experimentation but more specifically, medical experimentation in the state of Alabama. So my feeling about medical experimentation is that there's a long history in this country of medical experimentation on black bodies, particularly based behind this racist notion that black people don't feel pain in the same way. And so I've always sort of known that, but once I started to research this book, I began to really understand more specifically what it has meant for black women.
Award-Winning Photographer & Filmmaker
Executive Director of Vital Impacts
When are we all going to start to care about one another? Because all of our individual choices do have impacts. And I just think the demands that we place on this planet, on the ecosystems, are what are driving conflict and human suffering. In some cases, it's really the scarcity of resources, just like water. In others, it's the changing climate and the loss of fertile lands to be able to grow food. But in the end, it's always the people living in these places that really suffer the most. All of my work today, it’s not really about wildlife, and it's not just about people either. It's about how deeply interconnected all of those things are. People and the human condition are the backdrop of every one of the stories on this planet.
Black Feminist Historian · Founder of the Transformative Black Feminisms Initiative at Ohio State University
Author of America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women & The Struggle for Justice
We have to be unwavering in our commitment to principles of justice and freedom and be harbingers of hope. So for me, this is a lifelong thing, and I think of it as ancestor work that I one day will be somebody's ancestor, and I want them to be proud of the work that we did to give them a world that’s a little better of an inheritance than the world that I was born into. And I think that is how we mark progress in more nuanced ways, in more honest ways. It doesn't need to be a straight line towards freedom, more of a journey with wins and losses, setbacks and victories.
Lambda Literary Award Winning Author of In the Dream House & Her Body and Other Parties
I would say that I write liminal fantasy. I write surrealist work and literary fiction. I write horror. Horror is probably the genre that speaks to me the most. I feel horror is the genre that I feel the most affinity towards. For me, that is the sweet spot where the beautiful and the grotesque meet each other. It's very interesting to me, and I think encouraging people to look at certain ideas that are horrifying, making them beautiful and interesting, that intersection of beauty and pain, humor and darkness, it’s the most interesting place.
Global Sustainability Advisor · Co-Author of The Sustainability Puzzle: How Systems Thinking, Climate Action, Circularity and Social Transformation Can Improve Health, Wealth and Wellbeing for All
What is societal progress? I think the last 70 years, clearly, in the post World War II period, we have been thinking of economic growth and have been equating that with societal progress. To an extent of course that's right. To an extent, we need this economic growth to lift people out of poverty. We’ve kind of lost the reasoning. We have been following only this economic growth paradigm measured by the GDP, the Gross domestic product and we have forgotten that it measures many things, but it doesn't actually measure progress. It doesn't measure how healthy people are, how educated they are, how clean the environment is, how safe it is, how secure it is. It’s something where we really need to do a lot to transform those mindsets and in the end to understand that sustainability is about making their lives better and not worse.
Author of Doing the Right Thing: How to End Systemic Racism in Faculty Hiring
Executive Director of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity, & Justice & Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions
We all have things to learn when it comes to these diversity-related issues or issues of identity. We have so much to learn. Just because, let's say, you’re a person of color, it doesn't necessarily mean that you are going to be accepting of transgender individuals. You might have some real hangups. Or you could be transgender and have some hangups around people of color, all around the spectrum. You can be a woman who doesn't support women. You can be a woman who doesn't support women trans-women. There are all of these kinds of things that I think we have to be open to, and we have to be open to learning and also open to making mistakes because sometimes people are going to make mistakes around these issues.
Executive Director of Youth Endowment Fund
Author of Fractured: How We Learn to Live Together
I think humans really need to feel valued and loved. The question is where do you get your value from? And I try to get my value from–faith plays a big part of my life, but not everyone has that way of thinking about the world, so I'm not going to major on that, but that's only part of it, the sense that I believe there's a God who thinks I'm of worth, but it's more than that. I believe that my closest friends and my family think I'm of worth. And so I think that's probably made me more comfortable in saying if I start a charity and it fails, and I have started things that fell apart, it's not the end of the world.
Founder & CEO of Climate Analytics · Physicist · Climate Scientist
Net-zero is a big idea. It’s a big theme. And, unfortunately, what's going up are many ways to look like you're doing net-zero when you're not. So in the ideal world, getting to net-zero means essentially reducing your emissions, and then, where you have residual emissions left, that means you might need to have negative emissions. For example, it's relatively easy to decarbonize the power sector completely, and you can do it quickly and cheaply in most places, but you’re always going to be left with some levels of emissions from agriculture.
Author of Just Enough · Small Spaces · Lead Researcher for Safecast
Authority on Japanese Architecture, Design & Environmentalism
In Edo Japan, basically life was pretty good, and they recycled everything. Everything was reused, upcycled. Waste was considered taboo. A person who was wasting was considered an ugly person. So there’s a lot that we could talk about design, the layout, scale. Buildings were rarely taller than two storeys. Very good use of environmental features, microclimates, use of wind for cooling, passive solar heating. Good use of planting, gardens, etc. But regarding cities of the future, I think the main thing is it needs to be a place where people feel like they belong and want to take responsibility.
Fmr. Minister of Environment, Ecuador
Fmr. President: WWF Int’l, World Conservation Union, Founder Fundacion Futuro Latinoamericano
One of the reasons why we haven't been able to overcome many of the climate crisis factors is because people don't understand what it means. What is it about? What can I do? Usually, when we hear these experts speak about the climate crisis, at least me, I don't understand 9/10ths of the speech or the document. Simplifying the message, allowing that difficult scientific knowledge to become popular language that I can use when explaining to a child, to a rural person, to someone who has a different type of education, that knows much more about the planet but not necessarily about university, explaining those difficult issues will make a difference. And we have to invest much more in that. Speaking difficult scientific language is not helpful to the majority of society.
Director of Just Transition at the European Commission Directorate-General for Energy
She is responsible for Just Transition, Consumers, Energy Efficiency, Innovation and Energy security. She has been previously Head of Unit at the Directorate-General Energy in the European Commission. She was responsible for Energy Strategy and Policy coordination and then for Renewables and Energy System Integration Policy and Decarbonisation and Sustainability of Energy Sources. She was Acting Director for Energy Policy where she has overseen notably the work of international energy relations, financial instruments and inter-institutional relations.
Ian Buruma is the author of many books, including A Tokyo Romance, The Churchill Complex,Their Promised Land, Year Zero, The China Lover, Murder in Amsterdam, Occidentalism and God’s Dust. He teaches at Bard College and is a columnist for Project Syndicate and contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other publications. He was awarded the 2008 Erasmus Prize for making "an especially important contribution to European culture" and was voted one of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals
by the Foreign Policy magazine.
This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Lexi Kayser with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Digital Media Coordinator is Phoebe Brous.
Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).
The Creative Process: Podcast Interviews & Portraits of the World’s Leading Authors & Creative Thinkers
Inspiring Students – Encouraging Reading - Connecting through Stories
The Creative Process exhibition is traveling to universities and museums. The Creative Process exhibition consists of interviews with over 100 esteemed writers, including Joyce Carol Oates, Hilary Mantel, Neil Gaiman, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, Junot Díaz, Marie Darrieussecq, Michel Faber, T.C. Boyle, Jay McInerney, George Saunders, Geoff Dyer, Etgar Keret, Douglas Kennedy, Sam Lipsyte, and Yiyun Li, among others. Artist and interviewer: Mia Funk.
