What is Audacious Water (and why should you subscribe)?
Audacious Water is about pushing boundaries. Here, you will read about unlikely partnerships, unconventional ideas and disruptive technologies to reinforce the reality that water must be front-and-center in climate adaptation. While my work is focused in America’s heartland because that region is ground-zero for water issues that have local and global import, I’ll also share examples and topics from around the world.
About me
I’m a dad, a teacher, a traveler. A New Orleans transplant, but a quick adopter of the seize- the-day attitude of my neighbors. I work with students, talk with experts, collaborate with corporate and policy leaders, and regular people around the world who are thinking about how to provide water for us all. Their resourcefulness, commitment and spirit fuel my optimism.
It all comes together for me at the ByWater Institute at Tulane University, where I serve as director. I’m also a professor in Tulane’s Department of Coastal & River Science and Engineering in the School of Science and Engineering. In those roles, previous academic posts and through Future H2O-B, the private sector benefit corporation I founded, I’ve worked in the Mississippi, Colorado and other major rivers of North America, the Mekong in Asia, the Amazon in South America and many other waterways that connect the people of the world.
Why you should subscribe to Audacious Water
Because the solutions of the past are not up to the challenges facing water (and those who use it—i.e., everyone) in the era of climate change. We have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, and that means mitigating emissions as fast as possible while also developing comprehensive adaptation strategies. So far, we are under-investing in adaptation, and water is not getting enough attention.
It’s time to take risks. To loosen the parameters of research. To rapidly take ideas from one place or discipline and apply them elsewhere—and learn from what happens. To use nature in new ways, and to make new nature. This is the newsletter to talk about and helo make all that happen.
My goal for Audacious Water is to incite greater action for centering water in climate adaptation among academics and environmentalists, economists and skeptics, government representatives and corporate and community leaders. I aim to spur and move the conversation so that the link between the way we think about water and grocery prices, insurance rates and human health is more present. And I hope to demonstrate the need for science—both traditional and what I call a “clinical trials for a healthy planet” approach—are absolutely essential to a prosperous future in the era of climate change.
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