The newsletter formerly known as Minimum Viable Planet

A most verdant, vibrant, and vivacious new name (that lets me keep my monogrammed MVP robe and slippers).

When I started this newsletter six years back on ye old Mailchimp, I called it Minimum Viable Planet because it was about the little things we could do in a world where there wasn’t time or energy to do much else. At the time I had two young kiddos and a lot of puréed vegetables to gently fold into their brownies. I was working a full-time job, freelancing, and trying to make sense of a warming world. I was trying to figure out where to apply my very finite discretionary time to do what I could on climate, and that burning question was the impetus for this newsletter. I gave people prompts — letters to write, small actions to take…because even that was very hard (still is, really). Behavioral science teaches the value of breaking big things into manageable pieces (chunks!). And you know, Rome wasn’t cooled by 1.5 degrees in a day.

Talking about climate itself was a goal enough because so many people had trouble just doing that (still do, really). The course I helped create, Talk Climate to Me, sought to make talking climate unscary. Katharine Hayhoe started writing a newsletter called Talking Climate.

And Minimum Viable Planet was a product of those conditions. The nonsensical individual-versus-systemic change debate over those pesky 100 companies making 71% of our pollution hadn’t reared its unhelpful head and writing a letter to your local mucketymuck was done by way of a seemingly endless slew of New/Mode petitions that you could dispatch with relative ease, while doing whatever people did before we sourdoughed and Netflixed our way through Covid.

Minimum Viable Planet was a nod to the MVP ethos, too: move fast and save things…But while I still like that energy, I don’t like the gelatinous tech stew from which it emerged. Big tech is responsible for so much of our planetary warming, unprecedented democratic upheaval, the disappearance of news, and the cratering mental health of young people everywhere (never mind adults!). But more acutely, and even as the vision of a healthy planet feels further away than ever: I DON’T WANT A MINIMUM VIABLE PLANET! I want the Most Vibrant Planet.

What’s the good of a barely liveable world? One riven by conflict, run by despots, stripped of beauty, devoid of cookies? We don’t want to get to minimum viable JUST to prevent the Maldives from being washed away — we want to get to most vibrant to lift up the Maldives and all dives. To make the world better and more beautiful, for everyone.

The quest for a most vibrant planet is motivating. I’m not the synesthete my daughter is, but this new MVP nonetheless conjures a solarpunk cityscape full of greenery and life in my mind. And I’d rather that, even if the path to getting there feels steeper than ever. I want to picture the marching band at the end of the marathon. (See: painting the positive vision…)

What does a Most Vibrant Planet look like?

I am not joining team goodvibesonly. But how you brand is who you be. And in the face of the most bad, I want to envision the most good. And I want this digital firmament to be a most vibrant place for that convening. This isn’t a very brand-forward newsletter — it could just as well be called Sarah’s House of Momjokes — but it’s important to get it bright.

Getting it bright is lighting up paths forward, building community, and pointing to the markers of progress in a world that feels darker than ever. In light of so much climate and democratic backpedaling and capitulating, how do we go forward? More vigorously. More ardently, in our articulation of the things that matter: air to breathe, freedom to breathe it, sustainable systems, and some music and delight thrown in to boot. I will highlight more of that, and areas we can make inroads. I’m excited for some fun interviews I’ve got lined up. But first, some principles pulled from people and places I love in service of this eponymic evolution:

More! Vibrant! Phrases!

🟢 Be “incurably constructive”

I followed the stories about Voice of America’s untimely and ill-advised decimation, and its CEO, Michael Abramowitz, led me to his dad, Mort, a truly incredible character and peace broker, who passed away last year. I loved this from Samantha Power on Abramowitz’s relentless energy, from his WaPo obit:

He was “incurably constructive,” she told the New Yorker in 2014. “There was just nothing he encountered where his mind didn’t go to, ‘What can you do?’”

🟢 Possibility > positivity

I loved this BEworks report when it came out a while back. The incredible Solitaire Townsend reups it in her newsletter this week. She pulls out the idea of being a possibility thinker, and I love that, because possibility is the antidote to paralysis (h/t Saul Griffith):

Creative minds are naturally good at future-oriented thinking, perseverance, and spotting opportunities. These are all essential for climate solutions. If you’re a creative thinker who hasn’t applied your imagination to climate change: we need your magic!

🟢 Fundamentals, inevitability, and the smartest gals in the room

It’s worth listening to this whole episode of Open Circuit on the lessons of the pandemic, but it’s the back half of it that really unpacks the fundamentals of the inevitability of the transition, and the durable power of industrial policy, globally. Loved this bit from Jigar Shah:

Go figure the smartest people in the entire world were working in renewable energy. And when all of these things went haywire, the people that were able to figure it out and actually get things deployed, even though folks were betting against them, was the renewable energy industry…

And then the other thing that’s turning out to be really interesting is that this whole concept of we just need the cheapest renewable energy and the cheapest stuff has also been one of the biggest losers. Folks want resilient stuff, local stuff. And you’re starting to see a lot of folks decide that they’re going to pay a premium if they have to, but they’re going to manufacture some of it locally.

Adjacent to that is this interesting piece on the rise of the new joule order, as highlighted by CTVC yesterday. It’s a report by the Carlyle Group that says energy is being driven by security.

The report argues that amid all this global disorder, there’s a new energy world order emerging — an ongoing shift from the Oil Age to a Joule Order, driven by countries reordering their priorities to security, affordability and then climate.

🟢 Less work, more meaning

This is a fantastic post from Lloyd Alter, who advances sufficiency not degrowth. It’s not the most vibrant phrase, but it is just what we need. He wrote the post in response to the implications of tariffs on our hewers-of-wood economy here in Canada, but it’s really about so much more. Writes Lloyd: J.B. MacKinnon, author of The Day the World Stops Shopping, thought we would end up in a nicer place:

“The evidence suggests that life in a lower-consuming society really can be better, with less stress, less work or more meaningful work, and more time for the people and things that matter most. The objects that surround us can be well made or beautiful or both, and stay with us long enough to become vessels for our memories and stories. Perhaps best of all, we can savour the experience of watching our exhausted planet surge back to life: more clear water, more blue skies, more forests, more nightingales, more whales.”

🟢 Conscious consumerism, but make it dope?

I don’t write about consumerism as much as I used to…but I still try to buy as little as possible, while not boring my friends with talk of Poshmark. I love this from Blackbird Spyplane, who call themselves “earth’s No. 1 most anti-consumerist dope-clothes celebrators.”

Is buying things bad?

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Most Valuable Planetry 📗🌱💚

a few more vibrant shoots

• The left will not be able to compete until we have a media ecosystem, something that takes time, patient capital, and smart people giving creators the space to develop their voice without meddlesome strictures. Efforts to date have failed because they missed the boat on at least two out of three of these necessities. But more and more wise minds are articulating this, forcefully, in all the thought leadershipy places, and I’m hopeful it’s finally sinking in. I like this further drilling down on what this means from Ashwath Narayan of Social Current:
  Issue/Advocacy/Impact focused organizations have to invest in infrastructure that a) supports existing progressive & political creators and gives them resources, money and tools to grow their audience b) brings new voices into our space and helps them activate around issue based messaging when they want c) creates culture first spaces for audiences that are based around key values instead of only talking points.
  

• Rule of threes! This is great and simple from the last Open circuit podcast: The three reasons that major investors are still investing in the clean energy/climate transition (in order of importance):
  1. Diversification
  2. Profit
  3. Sustainability
  

• Kelly Mark. She was such a clever, meticulous artist. I was so sad to learn of her passing last week. (Lovely/sad CBC obit)

Housekeeping and thanks

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I hope you are doing ok in these wild times,
Sarah

People dancing

Some Doechii by my fave trio:

norah_yarah_rosa

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