Climate>Duluth: Bruce Jennings of Vanderbilt University

Excellent, thought provoking interview! As a species we're on track to witness changes in the biosphere beyond current imagination. The challenges are and will be huge but the possibilities are also vast. Individual liberty and the values of collectivism can co-exist and they can even reinforce one another. Finding a working balance between individualism and collectivism will be crucial for creating and maintaining lives worth living.

"Collectivism", also knows as communism or socialism, has resulted in at least 100 million deaths by state and state-corporate parties in the last one hundred years. It's thought that up to 70 percent of those deaths are due to state-enforced poverty.

Pushes for "collectivism" have always been draped in addressing some menace, such as "climate change."

It's a story as old as the hills, and requires endless vigilance. The notion that "individual liberty" and "collectivism" can co-exist or somehow complement each other is a fool's trope, a sheister's beckon.

@Chester Knob 
State authoritarianism and authoritarianism in general have killed many people and continue to threaten human life and liberty. Please be aware that forms of collectivism can and do exist voluntarily and independently from state or authoritarian structures. Of course you don't have to use the term collectivism if you don't want to. How do you feel about the term cooperation?

Emma - maybe "cooperation" would be less triggering to some than "collectivism." Aldo Leopold said, "An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of the same thing." I'm guessing Chester Knob dropped his old user name when his pandemic denialism didn't age well.

Dave, that's such an apt Leopold quote. I loved A Sand County Almanac as a kid and that was definitely a factor in wanting to live in this part of the world.