On October 27th, as part of the Easton Book Festival, Nurture Nature Center was honored to welcome Andrew Revkin, one of America’s most respected and experienced journalists focused on environmental and human sustainability. Andrew spoke about his new book, co-authored with Lisa Mechaley, Weather: An Illustrated History: From Cloud Atlases to Climate Change and his experience working as a reporter for ProPublica and The New York Times, where he started the popular Dot Earth blog, as a senior fellow for environmental understanding at Pace University, and in his current position as founding director of the Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at Columbia University’s Earth Institute.

Andrew also reflected on his connection to NNC and to our founder, Ted Kheel, saying that Mr. Kheel’s approach to labor mediation and fostering discourse has informed his own work moving from telling the stories of environmental issues, in a one way communication, to shaping a better conversation with his audience. He increasingly integrated interactive elements into his journalistic work, using social media or live question and answers, for example. As he explained the acceleration of human impacts on the planet, he emphasized the importance of exploring new strategies in media to convey the variegated issues – politics, behavior, climate science, etc. – that we must consider as we pursue a healthy and sustainable future. Weather: An Illustrated History, is a wonderful jumping off point for having conversations about how humans have understood weather and climate through time, as it explores moments in history such as one of the first written hypotheses that the climate could change, historic wildfires and storms, and the development of instruments like the barometer. How might these insights about weather and climate from our past impact how we think about current events?