By Julia Rosenberg

The existential paradox of the Climate Crisis is summarized by the cliché that we’re the first generation to feel its sting and the last that can do something about it. 

As the world simultaneously drowns and burns and hundred-year disasters populate the daily headlines, marshaling the collective will to recognize and confront the catastrophe has proved even more insurmountable than flouting the gathering storm. 

The gulf between what scientists say needs to be done and the political reality of what is possible seems to widen every day. Even as the Alaskan village of Kivalina slipped into the sea in 2019, the White House worked to dismiss official recognition of the gathering disaster by striking the phrase “climate change” from the government’s lexicon.   

In the face of this irreconcilable incongruity, a panel of nationally recognized groundbreakers will discuss our path forward on this season’s 10^th episode of Common Ground with Jane Whitney. It will be a wide-ranging discussion of the toxic mix of science, economics, politics, technology and human nature that now threatens to upend life as we know it. The panel will examine what could break the political logjam, how the issues play in national, state and local elections, what state and local communities are doing to mitigate the congressional stasis, and the role of private citizens and companies.

Our lead panelist is the first-ever Presidential Envoy on Climate, Secretary John Kerry, who has owned so many senior government titles that his biography reads like a personal bibliography.

He has been a central player in almost every major national issue since the Vietnam war, and his accomplishments provide the structure of much of America’s post ‘60s history.

He has served in so many positions that former seems like his Christian name: Secretary of State, Massachusetts senator, Democratic presidential candidate, Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor, lawyer, prosecutor, naval officer, international aid worker, decorated combat veteran and controversial anti-war activist.

He initiated the 2013-14 Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and was a key architect of the agreements restricting Iran’s nuclear program. As Secretary of State, he signed the Paris Agreement on Climate Change on behalf of the United States and, as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, helped expose “the Iran Contra Affair,” the Reagan Administration’s illegal financing of the Nicaraguan rebels and their connections to international drug smuggling.

Our second panelist is the Paul Revere of The Climate Crisis, Bill McKibben.

An internationally renowned environmentalist, author, journalist and expert on climate change, he is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and has written 12 books on the impact of global warming, including The End of Nature. Considered a global clarion call when published in 1989, it is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change and was enormously influential. 

McKibben is a founder and leader of 350.org, an international movement of ordinary people dedicated to ending the fossil fuel era and building a world of community-led renewable energy. Recognized as one of the most essential climate change movements globally, it in 2009 organized 5,200 simultaneous demonstrations in 181 different countries, pushing the climate crisis to the top of the world agenda. 

In 2011 and 2012, McKibben led a successful campaign against the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline, which some Native American tribes considered sacrilege as it crossed sacred land and which environmentalists considered a hazard to vital watershed and diverse species and habitats throughout the United States and Canada. 

McKibben was awarded the Gandhi Peace Prize in 2013 and the Right Livelihood Award in 2014, being lauded for "mobilizing growing popular support in the USA and around the world for strong action to counter the threat of global climate change."  Foreign Policy magazine included McKibben on the list of the world's 100 most important global thinkers.

Our third panelist is Katharine Hayhoe, the personification of a Vulcan mind-meld.

An internationally renowned climate scientist, she also is an evangelical Christian and passionate about demonstrating why faith doesn’t conflict with the science of global warming.

The daughter of missionaries, Hayhoe is married to Andrew Farley, a radio evangelist and the pastor of an evangelical church in Lubbock, TX. She is chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy and a distinguished professor with an endowed chair in public policy at Texas Tech University, where she also is an associate in the Public Health program of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences.

An atmospheric scientist, Hayhoe’s research focuses on providing a scientific way to assess how the climate crisis affects people’s daily lives. She has published more than 125 peer-reviewed papers and abstracts and many vital reports, including the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s Second and Third National Climate Assessments, as well as a key paper for the National Academy of Science. In addition, she has led climate impact assessments for a broad cross-section of cities and regions, from Chicago to California and the Northeast. Many have been presented before Congress, highlighted in briefings to state and federal agencies, and used for planning by communities, states and regions across the country.

The winner of a plethora of awards from both lifestyle and policy groups, Hayhoe was honored in 2017 as one of Fortune’s “World’s Greatest Leaders” and one of Working Mother’s “50 Most Influential Moms.” In 2019 she was named to Foreign Policy’s list of “100 Global Thinkers” for the second time, Apolitical’s “100 Most Influential People in Climate Policy” and Elle Magazine’s “27 Women Leading the Charge.” 

Hayhoe’s TED talk has racked up almost 4 million views and her new book, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, will be published this month.

Our fourth panelist is Andrew Zimmern, an Emmy and four-time James Beard Award winner.

A multimedia chef with a missionary’s zeal, Zimmern is a television personality, writer, teacher, and innovator who inherited his passion for the culinary arts from his parents, especially his father who was renowned as a "legendary eater and traveler." 

A climate change champion, Zimmern began his career in New York City, helping to manage restaurants while simultaneously struggling with substance abuse. After a stint in a Minneapolis rehab, he landed a job there washing dishes at a café, Un Deux Trois. Promoted to executive chef, he transformed the restaurant into an award-winner, making him a media sensation. He soon became a columnist for Minneapolis/St. Paul Magazine, host of his own radio show and the creator of several food-based television series, including the smash hit, What’s Eating America. In each episode of the series, Zimmern uses the “lens of food” to investigate how universal issues, such as climate change, affect Americans’ daily lives.

Our final panelist is Xiye Bastida, a Mexican-Chilean teenager born into the Climate Crisis who, despite her disdain for the label, is often called America’s Greta Thunberg.

A member of the Otomi-Toltec indigenous nation, she was raised in San Pedro Tultepec, outside of Mexico City, but moved to New York City in 2015 as a 13-year-old when her hometown was inundated after heavy rains ended three years of drought.

A sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, she has launched a Youth Activism Training Program, sits on the Administration Committee of Peoples Climate Movement, is a member of Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion, was invited to speak about Indigenous Cosmology at the 9th UN World Urban Forum, and three years ago awarded the “Spirit of the UN” award.

While calling for urgent activism, especially among young people, Bastida emphasizes the disproportionate suffering imposed by the crisis on poor communities of color and argues indigenous values need to be a key component of the world’s response.

“We don’t call water a resource; we call it a sacred element,” she says. “The relationship we have with everything that Earth offers, it’s about reciprocity. That’s the only way we are going to learn how to shift our culture from an extraction culture to a balanced and harmonious culture with the land.”