There are a million legitimate reasons why standing up to bullies may require a pseudonym (and a cowl), or even anonymity.

As has been clear for centuries, and even more so in this moment of inescapable mass surveillance, some of us — by nature of our birth nation, skin color, ethnicity, sex, gender, religious beliefs, and/or who we love — are in far more clear and present danger than someone like me.

And yet — millions of people over decades and centuries have stood in broad daylight and put their names and their bodies, their finite time and resources to the test, on the line, to fight for a better future for themselves and the generations to come.

• Donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation to defend digital privacy.
• Volunteer with organizing initiatives through Tech Shift, to help build a fairer, more just technological future.
• 🌍️ Get educated about where your data is going online by using the Markup’s Blacklight tool.
• 🌍️ Be heard about unlocking global energy data so that researchers worldwide have access to it.
• Invest in tech for good and use your capital to scale climate tech with Carbon Equity.

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63% of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and yet here we are. So what can we do to make the language around abortion more positive?

My guest today is Sophie Nir.

Sophie is the CEO of the Abortion Positivity Project. The Abortion Positivity Project seeks to destigmatize abortion by more or less overhauling the framework by which we currently understand and discuss it.

They've developed a training curriculum on embracing abortion positive messaging in partnership with other nonprofit orgs and mission-aligned companies. Their goal is simple: educate everyone about abortion, expand the lens through which we all view abortion and ignite peer-to-peer conversations about reframing abortion discourse.

Sophie is the former executive director of Eleanor's Legacy, as well as the former finance director for New York State Attorney General Leticia James. She's the founder of Vaccine Vigilantes, which is a fucking incredible name, and a veteran of the campaigns of many prominent women elected officials.

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INI Book Club:

• In Memoriam by Alice Winn
• Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use To Win by Jessica Valenti
• Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club

Links:

• Learn more about the Abortion Positivity Project: https://www.abortionpositivity.com/
• Follow the Abortion Positivity Project on Instagram and Tik Tok
• Get some abortion positive merch https://www.social-goods.com/collections/abortion-positivity-project

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Sometimes you buy organic, sometimes you hit a restaurant that's plant-based, or at least you choose the veggie option.

Maybe the fish option at the market or the restaurant is marketed as being sustainable. Maybe you compost. It's all useful. But we've been doing it for a while and it's not moving the needle for climate, for restaurants, for farmers, for our health.

So anyone who gives a shit wants to know, what can I actually do to scale regenerative agriculture to benefit everyone?

My guest today is Anthony Myint.

Anthony is the executive director of Zero Foodprint, where he and his colleagues work to mobilize the restaurant industry and allies in the public and private sectors to support healthy soil as a solution to the climate crisis. Anthony's also a chef who won the 2019 Basque Culinary World Prize for his work with Zero Foodprint. He is known in the restaurant industry as the co-founder of Mission Street Food. The San Francisco Chronicle called it the most influential restaurant of the past decade, Mission Chinese Food, which the New York Times named the Restaurant of the Year in 2012. And The Perennial, which was Bon Appetit's most sustainable restaurant in the country.

Anthony is currently on the board of trustees for the James Beard Foundation, and I am so excited to share this conversation with you because food is such a huge part of everything and we're doing it wrong and we can do it so much better.

And sometimes, like Anthony and his crew have, you've gotta fail a bunch of times and then take an end around before you can really start to make a difference.

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INI Book Club:

• Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club

Links:

• Take action with Zero Foodprint https://www.zerofoodprint.org/take-action
• Read Zero Foodprint's position paper on Collective Regeneration to Accelerate the Shift in Agriculture

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We've spent the last few years learning up close how a crisis like a global pandemic reveals and deepens all of our faults, inequalities, biases, and outright failures of empathy.

But here's the kicker: it's not the first time. Plagues and epidemics have always shown us who we really are. And they've left footprints, good and bad, on our institutions and the stories we tell ourselves.

So why do we keep missing the lessons?

My guest today is Edna Bonhomme, a historian, author, and public health expert who looks at disease in captivity through her own story of near-death illness, Haitian migration, and a lifetime of asking: Why does our world blame instead of heal?

Edna is the author of the new book, A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class and Captivity Shaped Us From Cholera to COVID-19.

If you've ever wondered how pandemics warp our social fabric and what it would take to heal old wounds and stop repeating the same mistakes, stick around.

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INI Book Club:

• The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş
• Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club

Links:

• Read Edna's book A History of the World In Six Plagues
• Keep up with Edna's other work
• Support global and public health with Partners in Health and Doctors Without Borders
• Support independent journalism at places like Democracy Now, The Intercept, and Jacobin Magazine (US), or Novara Media and the Guardian (UK)

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• Find more ways to take action at whatcanido.earth
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The United States has long been the largest aid donor in the world, accounting for about 40 percent of humanitarian assistance globally last year, according to the United Nations. But that is quickly changing.

Most U.S. foreign aid is currently on hold. Thousands of projects are at risk of elimination. And nearly all staff from the U.S. Agency for International Development are on administrative leave.

How did we get to this moment? And what has been the impact of the foreign aid freeze so far, including on women and girls?

In this episode from The Hidden Economics of Remarkable Women, hear a conversation taped at Foreign Policy magazine’s Emerging Threats Forum, an official side event of the Munich Security Conference, about the economic and security implications of halting overseas development assistance.

Foreign Policy editor in chief Ravi Agrawal spoke with Ndidi Okonkwo Nwuneli, the president and CEO of the One Campaign, and Umulkher (Umi) Harun Mohamed, a member of Kenya’s National Assembly.

The Hidden Economics of Remarkable Women is a podcast from Foreign Policy, supported in part by the Gates Foundation and Northwestern University’s Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs.

Follow and listen to more episodes:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-hidden-economics-of-remarkable-women-hero/id1572532247

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You’ve never had a better opportunity to improve one person’s life than you do right now.

I would argue, in fact, that there’s never been a better time to improve one person’s life than there is today.

Sounds crazy, right, considering all the destructive nonsense?

• Donate to Matriarch to help progressive working women run for office and win.
• Volunteer with your local Surfrider chapter to protect your waterways and reduce plastic pollution.
• Get educated about how you can start working on climate solutions by finding a climate job with Climate People.
• 🌎️ Be heard about building climate resilience in your community and have your city council join the Global Covenant for Mayors for Climate and Energy pledge.
• Invest in the health of our soil, forests, and oceans by investing with ReGen.

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• Get more news, analysis, and Action Steps at importantnotimportant.com
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One of the ways this Trump administration is different from the last is, relatively at least, how much more unconstitutional, how much more organized and comprehensive the attacks on our institutions, particularly the scaffolding we built for ourselves the most precious parts of of our societies: immigration, agriculture, the VA, NIH, the CDC, the NSF and humanitarian work around the globe.

Do some of these need reform? Of course, they do. Is this the way to do it? No, it is not.

These institutions, the ones we built over the last century that, again, however imperfect, baseline keep us fed and safe and on the other hand, help advance remarkable scientific progress.

They're at more risk than ever. Every single day. To combat this onslaught, we need groups who are actually prepared to fight back.

My guest today is Dr. Gretchen Goldman.

Dr. Goldman is the President of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Previously, she served almost two years in the Biden-Harris White House as the Assistant Director for Environmental Science, Engineering, Policy, and Justice in the Climate and Environment Division of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and later as the Climate Change Research and Technology Director at the U.S. Department of Transportation.

She is a prolific writer and speaker on science policy and her words and her voice have appeared in Science, Nature, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NPR, and the BBC, among others.

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Take Action at www.whatcanido.earth

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INI Book Club:

• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club

Links:

• Donate, volunteer and be heard at ucs.org
• Protect yourself and stand up for science using these Resources for Federal Sciences
• Follow more of Gretchen's work

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We didn't always call our work science for people who give a shit.

But ever since we did, we've welcomed at least two types of people to our flock. The first is people who are deeply invested in science, but are unsure how to tie it into measurable action on the human level. And the second is people already fighting for a healthier, more equitable society, but who are curious about the evolving science behind our complex systems.

They all want to know a version of the most important question, what can I do?

It's a big question right now. And today, after almost 200 conversations and on this, our newly rebranded show, we're going to confront that question as some of our most vital human and humane systems are being put in the shredder.

My guest today is Dr. Ticora Jones. Dr. Jones has spent the last two years leading the efforts to expand the vision for science in the science office at the NRDC, to support the scientific and evidence based nucleus for organizational strategy and advocacy.

Before joining the NRDC, Dr. Jones served nearly 15 years at USAID, a little agency you may have heard about recently, in a number of roles, including most recently as Agency Chief Scientist, Executive Director for Innovation, Technology, and Research, and Managing Director for Research.

As the Agency Chief Scientist, which is really a hell of a title, Jones chaired the Research and Development Council, which was responsible for revising and instituting science policy.

She advocated for process changes to better support scientific integrity and research generation and use. And she led efforts to expand USAID's interagency role with international science and technology cooperation for deeper strategic partnerships with the U.S. government.

As of this month, that is all in serious trouble.

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INI Book Club:

• Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford
• The Wild Robot by Peter Brown
• The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by NK Jemisin
• Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez
• Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club

Links:

• Support the NRDC's work
• Follow Dr Jones
• Find out more about what you can do at WhatCanIDo.Earth

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• Subscribe to our newsletter at