This session, produced by SSF and sponsored by Post Carbon Institute, opens with Katharine’s acknowledgment that fossil fuels replaced animal labor, human labor, and slavery — and that without them, modern medicine, refrigeration, and transportation would not exist. She uses that honest recognition of fossil fuels’ social benefits to build common ground with audiences who depend on them, before leading them to the climate science and the case for transition.

From that shared ground she argues that climate communication works not by leading with facts and fear, but by finding genuine common values first. The invitation to speak to the board of a Texas oil and gas company becomes her test case — and her model for how to reach anyone.

She traces the emotional landscape of the transition: gratitude for what fossil fuels have given us, guilt about what they are costing us, and fear of a change that has to happen faster than any in human history. The barriers to climate action, she says, are scientific, technical, and emotional — and we will not move people past any of them until we are willing to name all three.

This session brings together the economist who spent decades being told she was dangerous for challenging GDP, and the economist who gave that challenge its most actionable form. Kate walks through how Amsterdam adopted the doughnut as its city compass in the height of COVID — committing to 50% circular procurement by 2030 and putting legal stress on business to transform. Hazel traces her Beyond GDP polling across 12 countries, repeated four times over 15 years, each time finding 70 to 80 percent of ordinary citizens already understanding what economists refused to acknowledge.

The conversation turns on a shared insight: neither of them spends much time talking to economists. Both go where the energy is. Hazel — pulled from library shelves by economics departments that called her the most dangerous woman in America — did not expect to see her work land in her lifetime. In this session, recorded before her death in 2022, she is watching it accelerate. Kate, who built on foundations Hazel laid in the last century, gives her that confirmation. This recording is the handoff between generations.

This session was recorded in 2017, just after the publication of Drawdown, produced by SSF and moderated by Chip Comins, CEO of the American Renewable Energy Institute. It captures Paul before Drawdown became a movement, when he was still having to explain why solutions, not fear, was the right frame.

He opens with a line that reorients everything: we are the only species without full employment, and never has there been so much good work to be done. Ninety-eight of the 100 Drawdown solutions are regenerative development — healing the future and selling it in the present as GDP. What we are doing now, he says, is the opposite: stealing the future, selling the present, and calling it GDP.

The Q&A that follows is equally direct. On climate psychology, he dismisses the strategy of trying to change people’s minds — when was the last time you wanted someone to change yours? — and argues instead for meeting people where they are, with what they actually need: jobs, security, food, dignity, the sense that they have value. When people are marginalized, he says, they act that value out — and vote for tyrants. The climate movement, done right, is the biggest and best agenda we could imagine.

This session was recorded in October 2017 — one year after the 2016 election — and it captures something rare: two thinkers willing to say plainly what went wrong. Recorded without cameras, audio only, and moderated by Elisabeth Graffy of Arizona State University and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, it has the quality of a frank internal conversation rather than a public performance.

David opens with a historical accounting. From the first climate warning to a US president in 1965 through the environmental legislation of the 1970s, the movement built real intellectual capital — and then diverged. While environmentalists were writing books and holding conferences, the other side was taking over school boards, city councils, state legislatures, and courts. By 2017 they controlled virtually every branch of government, and the apparatus of environmental protection was being dismantled day by day. The mistake, David argues, was assuming people were rational. We are better rationalizers than rational thinkers, and the movement built its strategy on a foundation that neuroscience and psychology had already called into question.

Erik picks up the thread from the education side. His Earth Education framework — built around earth dependence, interdependence, creativity, deep learning, life skills, and earth-centric leadership — is a direct response to the same failure: a generation of students taught the three Rs of recycling rather than how to think critically about the systems they live inside. Both men land in the same place: the technological apparatus that was supposed to democratize information — Facebook, Twitter, the attention economy — is instead reinforcing the irrationality it was supposed to overcome. Recorded in 2017, this conversation reads today as a precise diagnosis of what has since become undeniable.

This session was recorded in November 2021, shortly after the publication of Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival, moderated by SSF’s Edward Saltzberg and Daniel Lerch of the Post Carbon Institute. It captures Richard at his most philosophical.

He opens with the central argument of the book: we have to grow up, or grow out of the illusion that there are no limits. Industrial civilization, as we know it, is up for grabs. The only scenario in which it survives this century is one in which we learn to limit resource extraction, waste dumping, energy usage, and land use — substantially. Not incrementally. The decoupling that economists count on to solve climate change while maintaining growth, he says, is largely an accounting trick: the US didn’t decouple from carbon, it shifted that carbon to China.

The Q&A turns on a question Edward puts directly to him: can human nature change? Richard’s answer draws on history and anthropology. The range of human collective behavior across cultures and time is vast — and the most ecologically sustainable societies are those that stayed in one place long enough to learn limits through trial and error. Indigenous peoples are not a romantic ideal; they are the caretakers of natural systems they understand better than modern science does. He closes with Lao Tzu: mastering others is strength, but mastering yourself is true power. It is the best possible closing line for a book called Power.

This session, drawn from the Hazel Henderson Series, captures Vicki at the core of her argument. Where Hazel works at the level of systems and indicators, Vicki works at the level of the individual — and this clip is the bridge between the two. The golden calf, she says, is GDP: a world where something else doles out wellbeing, where money is more important than life, where we define ourselves by our economic role. The golden rule is the alternative: I create wellbeing through my choices and integrity. Life is more important than money.

Her framework from Your Money or Your Life becomes a practical path out. The first shift is realizing you are not earning money — you are selling your time. Once people grasp that their time is sovereign and money is secondary, they start saving massively, buying back their lives. The second shift is from more is better to enough is enough — that Goldilocks place where you have everything you need and nothing in excess. The third is from disempowerment to asking the questions nobody asks: are the things I am buying actually serving me? Am I trying to fill non-material needs with material stuff?

The clip ends with the question she calls most powerful: who are you outside of the economy? What would your life be like if you didn’t need to make a living? Most people have never been asked. Most people have no answer. That, she says, is the problem — and the opening.