Worth Repeating: Save the Seas
New Thinking for a New World - a Tallberg Foundation Podcast
07/14/22
•43m
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Do you care about the future of the oceans? Are you worried that pollution, acidification and warming of the seas could transform the planet as much as, maybe more than, what’s happening to the rainforests?
Seventy percent of the earth is covered by water. If we want a livable planet, we need livable oceans. Can we save the oceans? If failure is not an option—and it should not be—who needs to do what?
In a Tällberg webinar, oceanographers Sylvia Earle from the United States and Asha de Vos from Sri Lanka talked about water, the oceans, threats, and solutions. Both are explorers, educators, and activists and both are winners of the Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize.
Previous Episode
Should We Be Celebrating Erdogan’s Leadership?
July 7, 2022
•38m
At the recent NATO summit in Madrid, US President Joe Biden made a joint appearance with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Speaking of Erdogan’s supposed agreement to accept Sweden and Finland in NATO and to find a solution to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Biden said, “I want to particularly thank you for what you did putting together the situation with regard to Finland and Sweden, and all the incredible work you’re doing to try to get the grain out of Ukraine and Russia. I mean, you’re doing a great job....it’s in large part because of your leadership. Thank you. I really mean it.”
Leadership? Really?
Just a few months ago, Erdogan was isolated and largely ignored. He was on Biden's no-call list. He had almost hostile relations with most of his neighbors, was being denied new western weapons systems, seemed close to armed conflict with Greece, and had unilaterally sent troops into Libya and Syria. Moreover, his economic mismanagement has produced domestic inflation of 75%, a currency in free fall, and an economy in tatters. **Along the way, Erdogan has abused his political opposition, suppressed domestic liberties, squeezed migrants, and attacked Kurds in Turkey and elsewhere. **
What Biden calls leadership, Michael Sahlin, former Swedish diplomat with deep experience in Turkey, thinks is more like a cat landing on its feet after falling out a window. What do you think? Listen as Sahlin discusses Erdogan’s amazing resilience—but without resorting to the “L word."
Next Episode
Worth Repeating: Welcome to the End of Democracy
July 21, 2022
•32m
"We may remain, as we are now, nominally democratic, but be ruled by a technocratic class empowered by greater powers of surveillance than those enjoyed by even the noisiest of dictatorships.”
Those words were written by Joel Kotkin in a recently published essay on democracy’s demise. Donald Trump is not the villain of the piece, as most pundits want us to believe, nor other populists outside the United States. Rather, Kotkin argues that the withering of democratic process and institutions reflects the deeper transformation of American and European societies: the emergence of a ruling technocracy; the use of the pandemic and the environmental crisis to constrain individual rights; the new concentration of power in governments, and the growing distance between the governing and the governed. All of it made worse by the mind-boggling concentration of economic wealth, which is as much an issue in China as it is in the United States.
Kotkin’s analysis deserves our attention. What do you think—not about Trump, but about democracy? Who can do what to bend the arc away from the dystopian end game that he and others describe? Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in California and Executive Director of the Urban Reform Institute, as well as the author of the Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class.
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