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When natural disasters strike, marginalized communities are often left behind without access to essential recovery resources or digital infrastructure. In her groundbreaking book Climate and Code: Building a Digital and Connected Climate-Resilient Future, Georgetown University Law Center professor and National Geographic Explorer Monica Sanders explores how law, community wisdom, and technology can bridge this gap to build disaster equity. Monica Sanders, founder of The Undivide Project, joins us for an insightful conversation on redefining resilience from the ground up. Drawing from her personal experience surviving Hurricane Katrina to examining digital redlining and community-led initiatives in Panama and Baltimore, Monica highlights why digital access is a critical lifeline during extreme weather events. Discover how centering local knowledge and co-creating digital solutions can empower communities to withstand environmental crises and shape a more resilient future.

About Monica Sanders

Monica C. Sanders, JD, LL.M., is a law professor, author, journalist, and social entrepreneur working at the intersection of climate resilience, technology, and justice. A New Orleans native whose work was shaped by Hurricane Katrina, she founded The Undivide Project to help communities use digital infrastructure and data to strengthen disaster resilience, and Bonne Terre Labs to build decision-intelligence tools for more responsible infrastructure investment. Sanders teaches at Georgetown University Law Center, is a National Geographic Explorer and Forbes Senior Contributor, and previously held senior disaster, homeland security, and humanitarian roles in government and at the American Red Cross. Her new book, Climate and Code, explores how law and technology can help build a more resilient and equitable future.

Guest Website: https://www.monicacsanders.com

Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/monicasanders12/

Guest Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/monicadrrprof/

Guest YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@theundivideproject4007/videos

Resources Mentioned:

BOOK: Climate and Code: Building Digital Justice in a Connected World

Show Notes:

• 00:00 How Hurricane Katrina Shaped Disaster Resilience And Equity
• 07:38 Valuing Natural Systems: The Barataria Estuary As Environmental Infrastructure
• 12:14 Designing Technology With Communities, Not For Them
• 20:18 Digital Access As A Critical Component Of Climate Resilience
• 28:51 Data Centers, Hyperscale Tech, And Environmental Justice
• 38:27 Climate And Code: Leveraging AI Responsibly Without Losing Human Innovation
• 48:06 Actionable Steps To Build Equitable Community Resilience

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Climate And Code: Bridging The Digital Divide In Disaster Recovery With Monica Sanders

How Hurricane Katrina Shaped Disaster Resilience And Equity

Welcome, regenerators. Each week we explore the intersection of sustainability, justice, and regenerative thinking with a focus on building a better future for people and the planet. I’m going to be joined by Monica Sanders. She is a law professor, author, journalist, and social entrepreneur who works at the intersection of climate resilience, technology, and justice. A New Orleans native whose work was shaped by Hurricane Katrina, she founded the Undivide Project to help communities use digital infrastructure and data to strengthen disaster resilience.

She teaches at Georgetown University Law Center, is a National Geographic Explorer, and a Forbes Senior Contributor. She previously held senior disaster, homeland security, and humanitarian roles in government and at the American Red Cross. She joins me to talk about her new book, Climate and Code, which explores how law and technology can help build a more resilient and equitable future. This is a story we all need.

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Thank you so much for joining me, Monica. It’s so nice to have you here.

Thank you. I appreciate you having me spend this time with you, Corinna.

I have to say you have served in several very complex roles in your time as a business professional and academic. I wanted to start with the story of Hurricane Katrina, where it all began. How did this hurricane shape your understanding of resilience and who can often get left behind?

New Orleans is a very old and very complex place in the context of US history in the context of world history. Growing up there, I had a surface-level awareness of where we were located and what extreme weather was, and also a surface-level awareness of inequality. It was that summer of 2005. I had a previous career as a journalist. I was an adult. When Katrina hit New Orleans, we were trapped in the city under the military curfew. Some people said occupation.

For a while, the military was in control of the sea. I went to law school a month late. That was one of my first big fights for justice was to take my seat in the law class that I was supposed to be in. I watched people walk for miles, traumatized in the scorching heat, because I do not think that unless you’ve been through a hurricane of that scale and a topography like that, you realize just how much heat it leaves behind.

New Orleans is part of our energy coast, and there’s still not a true count of how many oil and chemical spills happened during the hurricane. There was all of this stuff in the water that was left behind in the city, and the heat and the smell of it. Even in that situation, I came to understand that my family could afford a generator. We’re southerners. We have something called a deep freezer. We were just taking perishables out and having cookouts with our neighbors who also had those and just like, “The power was out, still feeding each other.” We encountered people who had lost everything, had been stranded in water, and who had just barely survived, walking, looking for something.

The effects of a disaster like that can be really far-reaching. I know you’ve probably put some thought into this already when you hear a story like Mondami sharing that some of the pollution issues from the Twin Towers falling were hidden from the populace. As you’ve just said, you do not know how many chemical spills, you do not know how many oil spills were the result of this disaster hitting Couture.

One disaster came from a terrorist attack. The other disaster came from the climate. The aftereffects were immense in both cases. How we handle these things and how we connect with the people who are experiencing those issues were so vastly different from a government perspective. You saw people rushing to the aid of New York City, and really slow responses to what happened with Hurricane Katrina for many people.

It was very stark, because remember they’re only four years apart. People from Louisiana, firefighters, electricians, and search and rescue people went to New York to support the 9/11 search and rescue and recovery. To their credit, people, not the government from New York, actually drove across the country to come and help us. FDNY people came. It was what felt like weeks of silence being in the city. You, watching from the inside, were watching all kinds of things. It was a sharp contrast between the way that we view East Coast metropolitan cities in the United States and the way that we view the South.

It was a stark contrast between the way we view people who ostensibly were middle-class, upper-class Americans living in Manhattan, working in Manhattan, and the way we see poor people, working people. New Orleans is an extremely diverse, extremely black, and brown city. It was then. It still is now. First is something that is perceived as being Americana, as diverse as New York City is, there was still a strong depiction of whiteness in the way that 9/11 was covered. As we’re recording this, we are just ahead of the annual 9/11 memorial. Every year, we read every single one of those names as we should.

There is no memorial to the people who perished in Hurricane Katrina. There’s only a makeshift wall that survivors put up themselves. I was talking about being a survivor of the storm and going to law school late. It was four years afterwards. I graduated from law school and was working in Congress as a Homeland Security Committee counselor. I went there with the sole purpose of seeing that the recovery funding was spent correctly for my hometown and for my city. It was January of 2009, before the reconstruction of New Orleans in Southern Mississippi was properly funded by Congress, and recovery again. It was October of 2009 before the infamous FEMA trailers started getting hauled off of my street. I alluded to the privilege that I lived in a more affluent part of New Orleans.

Parts of the Lower Ninth Ward and Irish Channel still have not recovered to this day, 21 years later. The EPA has never done a full review of exactly what happened with all those chemical and oil spills. Mayor Mamdani released some of the findings from what happened that were kept from the public after 9/11 and just what was known about how it was impacting people’s health, which is kudos to him. He’s doing a lot. There’s never even been a study. You have multiple generations of people now who probably will never really find out what they were exposed to in those years after the storm.

I feel like taking a big breath there. Obviously, this is just one of the ways in which we do not get equality in this country.

Valuing Natural Systems: The Barataria Estuary As Environmental Infrastructure

The other side of it is in my role as a National Geographic Explorer. All roads lead back to New Orleans and that experience. After the story I told you, you can see how it left an indelible mark on me and the way I engage with communities and advocate for communities like mine, particularly the American South. It’s that I did a project just surfacing the beautiful spaces, places, and cultures. I do not think people realize that the Bear Terrier Estuary, which is 60 million acres of wetlands, is the lungs of the South. It’s similar to the Amazon and what it does as an ecosystem.

The way it cools us, holds certain kinds of moisture, and stabilizes the climate in that part of the country. We talk about what the Amazon does for the world. The Barataria estuary does something similar for the United States. I spent time taking pictures. When you contextualize a place in all of that trauma. Sometimes we forget how beautiful and important they are, and that for every one of those dramatic and horrible experiences, there’s an alternative pathway.

I did a photography mission where I went through the estuary and showed the unique topography where the swamp and the cypress tumble into white sand and into the ocean. There are Cypress trees that are hundreds of years old, and it’s like the earth has endured us and will continue to endure us. We can choose to be good stewards of it or not. Also, the recovery of some of the mangroves there and the recovery of many of the oyster beds.

The earth has endured us and will continue to endure us. We can choose to be good stewards of it or not.

One of my colleagues does valuations of natural systems and says that if the estuary was protected and the coastline was restored, it would be worth about $52 billion a year, versus what the oil and gas industry is on the decline, no matter. At some point, you’re not going to be able to do it anymore because of land loss and subsidence. There are beautiful sustainable choices that we can make just on the other side of these inequitable and unjust choices. I feel like we’re in a place where we need to start thinking about which door we want to walk through.

You’re reminding me of an earlier guest I have on this show, Paula DiPerna. She wrote a book about pricing the priceless, which really talks about how you price the value of a natural ecosystem and how you price something like the mangrove forest that’s on the edge of your bayous, essentially protecting the coastline and ensuring that there is a healthy space for fish to grow, these things that we do not necessarily consider because if there’s nowhere for young fish to breed and grow, then your fishing stocks are reduced too. It’s food sources, it’s oxygen, it’s the stability of the coastline. It’s everything.

It’s everything. It’s also tied to our public health and our mental health, because now there are so many studies about the reduction of anxiety and other diagnosable clinical ailments that are not necessarily cured. The symptoms are reduced just by exposure to nature.

Just by touching grass, being outside next to the river, by the ocean, whatever, yes, totally.

A friend of mine from the Homa Nation always points out that the estuary is home to two things. One thing we like, one thing we need. One thing we like is sassafras, which is a thickener for soups and the famous gumbo and all these things. It’s sort of like when the estuary dies, you’re all going to have runny soup, which is the tongue-in-cheek way. Also, several plants that we use in antiviral medications grow in that estuary. It’s just like, would you like a nice thick bowl of gumbo, and would you like a flu shot if you would like one of these things?

Yes, I’d like both, please.

You should be a champion for this and other spaces because every one of those where it’s difficult to put a value on it, like there’s an economic value, there’s a public health value, there is an infrastructure value to it too, because when you lose those systems, you also lose the opportunity to sustain certain kinds of public structures.

Designing Technology With Communities, Not For Them

Now I want to talk about designing with communities, not for them. This is a concept that is often covered in the world of sustainability education, a space where I’ve just earned my PhD. What does community-centered technology actually look like in practice?

It’s a process of one accepting that communities are your peers and not your subjects, which academic researchers and clinical researchers sometimes struggle with, even when they’re trying to do community-centered work. The next one is taking an expansive definition of the word technology, because we may have some fixed ideas of what technology is. To a community, technology may look like using their written language to track changes in their natural environment.

We wish to get them get to know them enough to realize that the language is mathematical. Their technology is our technology. We just do not know how to acknowledge it because we’re so caught up in this hierarchical view of things. The other piece of it is just recognizing that when we come from places where we have certain kinds of resources, we may be able to see a place, but we cannot understand or know a place or a community. Right? Like, I do a lot of GIS work. I can stare at where you live through near-Earth orbit satellites and look at it. I can study it. I can do all kinds of projections about the weather and the climate.

I can team up with a sociologist or an anthropologist and read books upon books about your culture. I will not know what it means to live there and what your priorities and challenges are. I will not know it. The community will always know better than you because it can take in millions of data points. You will never know what it’s like to be in a place on a Tuesday afternoon until you go to that place and be there on a Tuesday afternoon and know what people are concerned about. Community-centered work is getting there in the afternoon. Understanding that their technology is just a different kind of technology.

Also, in this world, when we talk about technology, we often mean digital. We mean computers, when really creating a new way to create a soup spoon is a technology too.

Creating a new way. Also, sometimes we do not recognize that the two can live side by side. One of the places that I got to visit for the book was in Panama, where they were doing a managed retreat, which, for your audience who may not be familiar with that term, is when the impacts of climate change or extreme weather are such that a community has to move away from the danger.

There’s no more mitigation, adaptation, or building differently. The community actually has to move. Some of the barrier islands in Panama are sinking and heating up so quickly that it is no longer safe for parts of their indigenous community to live there. The government worked with them to choose the next place where they were going to move. There were drones, there was mapping, and all of these things. What we realized is that the various leaders of the community have this extensive oral history.

As I sit here as a lady of a certain age with brain fog, I cannot even imagine remembering my group’s entire history of my lived experience and the prior chief’s lived experience. It’s passed down through oral history. Once we realise what was being passed down, we’re like, it’s mathematical because this person was chief from this date until that date. We can match it up with climate data points from then and understand more deeply. Now we can understand. We can get a better estimate of the rate of change just by understanding that the oil history is a form of technology.

They used that to know how soon people needed to move. It was better data than what we could get from various government agencies making estimates. The political boundaries had changed. Their understanding of where things were and where resources were never changed over millennia. They were able to pinpoint and optimize the best location, both for cultural and religious reasons. Also, real climate data came from the community to choose where they wanted to go next. That’s so cool.

You’re talking about interdisciplinary work that involves people from the community at the same time. You can use geographical society information, satellite data, historical data, weather trends, things like that, all at once. The reality that you’re also expressing is that this may not be the first displacement that these people have experienced from generations past. It could have been, perhaps, a dam, a flood area. They had to move. How their culture handled that through story, and is handling that now when we’re facing something that’s more climate-oriented at the same time.

I cannot help but think of the fact that Southern California is being pummeled right now and that there are very wealthy people with oceanfront property whose homes are being destroyed, and it may be really hard to rebuild there. They may not get the right to rebuild. It’s one thing when you have this coming from a place of privilege. These people have the resources they need to get up and move easily. When you’re talking about people who may not have that same level of privilege, then even the stories that they create about how they handled these challenges in the past, there’s a value there that is, it’s hard to put a dollar sign on. You cannot really do that.

There’s also the resilience that we should aspire to move away from, which is the resilience built from being put in that situation repeatedly, of having to deal with moves and migration and being overexposed to different kinds of risks, whether they’re climate or political or so forth and so on, and having to develop internal mechanisms to mitigate them. This is different from a wealthy Californian who has lots of financial resources, insurance, and access to different kinds of abilities to rebuild a home.

What we learned from them, which is something that I do not think we know how to do, as I said here in Virginia, is ancestral knowledge about how to recreate food very quickly, too, in terms of what they learned prior to the growth of these countries around their territory. Being a migratory people, how to quickly reestablish foodways, collaborate around construction, and bring work back to the community.

Really having the answers to questions that we struggle with, that California will struggle with in some of these places, probably not some of the communities that we’re talking about. In other communities, say, how will we restore services, get people back to work, and get things rebuilt? They were very clear, generations-old practices that informed us we were going to go to this new place. The first thing we’re going to do is this and then that, and then that.

That’s really amazing.

Digital Access As A Critical Component Of Climate Resilience

That is what happens when you do community center, community-led work is the willingness to sit with people as peers and recognize that you cannot know the place as they do. Also, they know a lot of things that you didn’t even know you needed to understand. They have definitely more context as well because they understand the space.

Place-based work. I want to also talk about this whole concept of digital access as climate resilience. Why should digital access be considered part of climate and disaster resilience, not a separate issue?

People do not realize where the data comes from when we’re speaking about our definition of technology. Actually, there are some colleagues in California who came up with this term, digital redlining. There are parts of the area that are in the eye of that hurricane where there’s no reliable internet access. There are no fiber cables. There’s no wifi. Researchers like me need to put up sensor networks. A lot of times, they are meshed, and you know what they need? A good wifi signal is needed to be able to send data back. If you’re measuring air quality, even in your house, or your carbon monoxide monitor, if it’s connected to your Nest in your home, you need a wifi signal.

Internet of things.

After the event is over, whether it’s the state government or the federal government, most of the forms that we fill out, not only to get funding or resources, but also to document what took place, are online because we went through this whole statutorily required digitization initiative back in 2019 and 2020.

If scientists cannot measure, we do not get an accurate estimate of the real risk, which is why we did have four weeks of forecasting for the severity of what was about to take place in California, because there are dead zones where we couldn’t estimate. On the other side of it, when we get ready to do recovery work or even learn from this, we have another data collection problem. Of course, if you’re not online, you cannot do something as basic as go and read about what’s happening in your community.

In cases like this, when a natural disaster hits and your internet goes out for any number of reasons, you could also not have access to the data that you need to know where to go. It’s that simple.

If you’re the person who’s surviving it. If you do not have a smartphone, it can be difficult to get some of the digital alerts to give you real-time awareness of danger. Just because of that, not to get into the weeds about community, like where the system is. Fortunately, we’ve been doing more low-frequency messaging. Also, you cannot for the days after the event, you cannot go online and see where people are or know if it’s safe to come back. We can say it’s not wise to rebuild there. For some places, we will not know how quickly the California coastline is degrading or how much that hurricane impacted it. They’re literally just going to roll the dice and rebuild and see what happens next time.

I’m in Northern California, pretty close to where the CZU fire complex hit a few years back. I have friends who are rebuilding now. One of them looks like their build is going to be completed relatively quickly now. It’s been years of working to do this. One of the things that is being managed from the perspective of just building codes and who gets a permit to rebuild is that you had to rebuild with the same or even a smaller footprint, and that you had certain things that you had to do to ensure that you were creating a situation where the same issue would not erupt.

A lot of people chose not to rebuild because the permitting was so hard. The second piece of that is that you could not sell the land to be built upon later. That means a loss of resources. It’s like the value of the land is gone. You might have got the money to rebuild a home and then chose to take that money instead nd just put it down on a home somewhere else, just because there’s even PTSD related to the fire because you had to get out so quickly and then you lost everything.

We’re going to see more of this. The fact is that we have what is proposed to be one of the most intense El Niño seasons coming ahead. We’re already seeing some of the early signs of that, as I mentioned in Southern California. How do we all prepare for these types of disasters? We need to build a stronger community. If what you’re talking about is also designing with communities, not for them, then we, as individuals, coming together and working to build more communities will help us when the natural disasters do hit, because they’re not likely to stay away.

We’re waiting with bated breath. Many scientists thought that the first hurricane in this El Niño season was going to happen on the East Coast. There are layers to what’s happening in California. Going back to Katrina, that was how we survived as a community. It was once the danger passed, and going out and seeing where your neighbors were. Moving debris out of the street, because we did a lot of that ourselves.

We also were not going anywhere. It just became a week-long cookout. When all the perishables were gone, all the canned stuff came out and went to another cookout. It was pooling resources. What we learned from that in that community, and this was a Broadmoor case study that Harvard Business School looked at. In addition to what I wrote about, the lessons learned from that turned into a large community garden that provides fresh produce for the community during what we call blue skies.

It produces enough to feed the community for three days in the event of a disaster without having to worry about external resources coming again. It’s not a nice thing to have to say as a citizen. We learned from the government not coming to help us. We learned its strength in the community. There’s a tool lending library to help people reinforce their homes.

We learned from the government not coming to help us that there’s strength in the community.

Also, when something happens and you need to very quickly repair something or make something safe, those resources are there, and the people to help you are also there because of this framework that has been put in place, like local policy, if you will. It’s like, we’re going to maintain the tool lending library, the community garden. There’s a pantry that we have for unhoused or low income or working poor people. There’s also a surplus in there for hurricane season. We know we can do it because we did it before. Now we formalize the process, and it’s a template that other places could use.

You have to think too, if a hurricane is really bad and hits an area, the grocery stores may not be getting the same food coming in, roadways could be closed, and grocery stores might not be open. You have to have a network essentially there to support you through this.

If you try to go to the store, the army or the National Guard may be there, and some people do not feel safe trying to access stores and public spaces when you have that presence there. You get accused of looting and it turns into a law enforcement situation, which was also something that took place then, still takes place quite a lot is that people end up having encounters with, because for some reason that never goes down during a natural disaster.

People end up having encounters with law enforcement or the carceral system when they’re trying to resource or recover from a disaster. There are just ways to build sustainable and resilient community-level structures. We can learn from these different events. To your point, communities can work together to achieve some of these things without waiting for the best policy to come from larger, more complicated systems.

Data Centers, Hyperscale Tech, And Environmental Justice

I want to talk about this concept of not shifting the costs. A lot of what you’re talking about, these digital infrastructures. There is a cost to them. How do we build digital and physical infrastructures without shifting the environmental, financial, and social costs onto communities that are already vulnerable? In particular, I’m thinking here of the growth of AI and data centers entering areas and the impacts of that at the same time that we might acknowledge that we really need better digital infrastructure.

It’s a word that no one in business likes to hear if you need to wait. You need to wait a little bit, and you need to do some research and let go of this concept of being first and “winning,” because, specific to data centers, my heart goes out to people in Memphis and in Mississippi who already had environmental justice and water stress issues and now are being added to it by these hyperscaled infrastructures. The wild thing is, there’s science out there that says they do not have to be built that way. They do not have to be built there.

Particularly in the Platte, Memphis, and this place in Mississippi, I cannot remember. It’s in Northern Mississippi. They get a tremendous amount of sunshine. There was an opportunity to not even have those facilities be on, and they could have sped up the implementation of a farm, something like that. Some of those communities were starting to transition to solar but lost the funding for it and the changeover administration.

There was an opportunity to support the community’s efforts to transition and build the thing so that it was not drawing on the grid. There are so many scientists who have come up with waterless or closed-loop systems that could be implemented so you do not have to put so much water stress on a community. There are companies that do creative things like transition other infrastructure into data centers. I’ve seen some cool stuff like using rail cars and abandoned warehouses.

There were already blighted post-industrial cities like Baltimore and Detroit being changed over into smaller data centers. My third point is that a little bit of truth-telling is that we need these tools. They do. There is an opportunity to improve our lives and build new economies. The demand is so inflated. Some of us may remember the browser wars when there were like ten different ones. At some point, we decided, like, we only need this one. That’s always on my phone, and this one is always on my laptop.

I hear you.

The rest of that went away. That’s my take on it’s like, it does not have to be that way. The estimates vary, but we’re talking about taking anywhere from 6 to 18 months longer to build than just racing to get the cheapest land and the cheapest source of water and energy that you can get your hands on in the name of being first. It’s not even about shifting costs. It’s about finding what sustainability professionals like to call double materiality, or a win-win in the common song of working with communities to come up with a win. It’s like, we could have had Claude without stripping these people of their dignity or further polluting the space. We actually could have done both. We could have cured some of that and powered these new tools that we want. We just didn’t want to stop, wait, and think about it.

The thing I’ve also heard, I do not have a specific point to point to right now. I have heard this and watched some coverage of citizens going up against the city councils and things along those lines, admonishing them for approving plans. I cannot recall the exact specifics of what I had heard and watched in one of these, which seemed to be well researched, which I didn’t have the time to verify, was that a company came in and essentially had a closed-loop data center approved. When it came time to build, they said they didn’t have enough funding to do so.

They got the approval and shoved it in. They didn’t do the closed-loop system. Now the environmental impacts are going to be much higher. The city council has already approved it and is just shoving it down the throat of the people who are there. It makes sense to me that this happens because I’ve seen similar efforts come underway when it’s even just building a little apartment complex in the area. They get a plan approved, and then there’s a change. That change is more impactful on the environment than the original plan had been.

The fix for it is longer than the election cycle of the elected officials who approved it. We find ourselves keeping it because that’s where the law should be helping us, often failing communities. It’s not even the highest level of jurisprudence. It’s a breach of contract. It should be a lawsuit. If it does harm, it’s a tort. It’s willful negligence. It should be in court. It means that they can be built. The tax credits go away. The person loses the election and the talking point about bringing economic development and housing into the community.

That’s where the law, the policy, and the political will fail us. I’m sure if that was a startup, there’s probably, not knowing exactly which one I was like, if it was a startup and they didn’t raise enough money, or if they were working with the economic development commission or office in that. Municipality, there’s probably some SEC and IRS regulations at play too about saying we didn’t have enough money to do it the right way. We’re going to breach is not a sufficient explanation. People will accept it because they feel like they do not have other options.

The 200 jobs that the data center brings in somehow override the will of the people, which does not make any sense to me.

The 209-to-18-month temporary contract jobs. The data center only takes 5 or 10 guys tops to run. As they’re increasingly automated, not even that. The long-term STEM jobs are much fewer than the short-term construction jobs that are often pitched to communities.

Sorry. I just couldn’t let that slide. It was like, “No, I’m here for it. Thank you.” It’s also a number that does not seem too high, even if it took 500 people to build it really quickly. They often are only referencing 200 because it’s not a number that seems so high that it might negatively impact things like the school system or housing. It’s also not too low, so it sounds like jobs are being brought in.

Some of the fully integrated companies, like Google, already have contractors to do it. A lot of times, it’s not even new hires. It’s the teams that are brought in.

There are some cases not called a data center. They call it something else, come up with a creative term, so it does not sound as onerous or challenging.

There are NDAs at play. There are all kinds of things. Which is sad because there are also, and I will not name them out of fairness, 10 or 12 development developers that adhere to sustainability principles and do community outreach. We do not hear about them because it’s taken them more time to build, but they’re invested in the longer term. Their bet is on. The market is overinflated. These things are going to blow up in some of the hyper-gaiety faces, but we’re still going to need somewhere to send this workload that we’re creating as we begin to create new tools. We’re in it for the long haul.

We can afford to build sustainably and do things with communities, with schools, with young people and workforce development, and with environmental work, and those kinds of things. That also, as a sad state of affairs, is that the news cycle is hijacked by the worst-case scenario. We do not even get to know. It reminds me of Spotify. You’ll never meet your favorite artists because the algorithm pushes so many independent, emerging, and new voices out of the marketplace. I feel like that’s what the data center conversation is you will not get to know the ones who develop in a way that might actually appreciate, because there’s so much noise coming from all the wrong ways it happens.

There’s so much bad news. It’s like the fire hose effect, right? You only have so much time to absorb the other things. Honestly, news coverage, it might be more complicated. It’s a complex story, and it does not make for good sound bites. Therefore, they do not focus on it.

Also, for some of those same companies, it’s a different inequality. They cannot afford the biggest, most expensive PR firms to ensure that they stay in the news cycle. They may not have a communications team at all. We do not get to know them unless you are researching or at a data center conference and you end up meeting them.

Climate And Code: Leveraging AI Responsibly Without Losing Human Innovation

The pay-to-play nature of the media at this time is really disturbing.

It really is.

You did write an incredible book here, Climate and Code. What’s the central idea behind it, and what do you want readers to walk away understanding?

The central idea is that the two are intertwined, whether we realize it or not, as you so kindly asked me at the beginning of this, but also that the two are our way forward. We cannot strip away this digital economy, this digital global economy that we’re building, and not expect catastrophic and inequitable effects in the name of saving the planet. At the same time, we can also find the white-hat uses, the community-centered uses of these technologies to actually help us better prepare for a rapidly changing Earth.

We should be doing both. I want people to read it because there’s a lot of good insights from communities. There’s a lot of legal research that challenges how we could use laws, global laws, to create a different social contract where instead of accelerating harms, we’re accelerating cures. We may not all get to be trillionaires, but we can develop healthy economies where we all have a dignified way of living. Maybe some of us get to be millionaires or even billionaires along the way. That’s why I think that people should read the book just to understand that it does not have to be this way.

We’ve gotten to a space where, you know, people are picking sides with technology, almost the way they do with politics. Some are saying no to AI in all forms. Others are saying, embrace AI, use it as this incredible tool, make everything better. I have school-aged children. I hear about all sides of that story too, because there’s also worry over kids not ever using their own sentences to create an essay. To have Claude or ChatGPT do it for you. There’s worry about how you even teach people, or how we encourage people to learn, or what the responsible use of AI and technology truly entails. I wonder if you have thoughts on that perspective overall, given your experience in law, technology, and policy.

I have this conversation every semester because I’m still teaching. I said, “If you rely on Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, whichever one of these things to do the work for you.” I said, “You and it are going to get consistently dumber. There’s a point of saturation where it cannot help you anymore because all it does is scrape ideas from the wide-open internet.” It’s heavily reliant on human innovation. If we stop innovating, at some point it becomes an idiot, and we’re idiots alongside it. I said, but what you should use it for is to research and challenge your own ideas, and force you to think innovatively.

I said, “It’s never the way you feel. It’s never going to be able to live, no matter how smart or intelligent we make it. It cannot live. It cannot have pain. It cannot have all the things that inspire people to write and create.” I said, “Use it as a partner.” I tell them, “I have no problem with you using it to edit because we’re in an international school. Some of us speak English as a secondary or tertiary language. I had no problem with you using it to pull English from all the best English speakers on the planet and help you edit your essay. It’s never going to be able to outthink you.

Do not create a dynamic where you become so reliant on it that you have, you’re in this constant state of writer’s block, or you lose the synapses in your brain, the chemistry to do so.” There’s a middle ground for things, and also not overconsuming this the way that we overconsume many things. I’m speaking specifically about United States society or global society, where we have to do everything to the maximum. You do not have to use that all day. No one asks for the weird robot to do all of your housework. You do not have to have it write everything for you or teach you everything.

I said, “It is a great way to have it do some of the automated or more tedious work or to supplement some gaps and things like that.” That’s where I come down on it is just realizing that, like, this is just the intellectual equivalent of Doritos. You do not have to eat those things. It’s something we’re talking about banning them or changing the recipe as they are. You could just not eat so much of it. You could just not use it so much for so many things. We forget that there’s moderation in everything, in particular when we’re using these tools.

Thank you for that. Personally, I look at Claude as my research assistant, kind of. One of the things I like to use Claude for is, “I need to find five research studies and peer-reviewed journals on this topic. I want one of them, at minimum, to surprise me. Here’s the context.” See what Claude can come up with. What I do find in cases like this is that my efficiency of time versus going to the stacks at my library is dramatically different. It can be an incredible time saver, but I’m not asking it to do the thinking for me.

That’s in my mind, a responsible use being directed to the articles that are going to help me expand my understanding of a particular subject. That’s important. Even just learning how to prompt Claude, if you’re writing an essay about something in your history or literature class, maybe it can direct you to some recent scholarship that’s interesting and that can help you broaden your horizons as opposed to limiting them or creating a thought for you because it cannot create that thought.

Even help you engage with libraries differently. At one point, there was some concern about the careers of the law librarians. I said, “No, because what happens is that students are taught how to do legal research, but it’s just one class and a three-year journey. They forget it. I said, “They should be using Claude and all of the other things. It is to ask how to ask questions of you and how to frame a research question. Again, it’ll pull ideas from all the best researchers. The students should not stop coming to the library.

They should come to the library with much better questions that help you locate things faster. We become clearer and more efficient. I said, “I should not be coming up with theories of litigation or writing law review articles.” With some intentionality, that’s what happened. The students go to the law librarians. I do not know if we can measure by what percentage they’re less annoying, but they go to the librarians with better questions.

That’s good. Now I have heard, I think it was the University of Chicago that had an outright ban on the use of AI, or was it the University of Illinois? It was out of the Midwest. Are you familiar?

Yes. A couple of universities have gone that route and just decided to ban AI. That concerns me when we say to pick and choose these binaries, because when the students get into the workplace, it’s going to be there. You lose an opportunity to not just teach them to be better prompt engineers, but also the social skills of interacting with it, and when to use it and when not to use it, and how to use it, and what it’s fit for purpose for and what it is not.

There’s a lost opportunity in having them do that. Also, I’m not sure about both of them. I can’t remember if it was the University of Illinois or the University of Chicago, but both of those have engineering schools. How are they training engineers to develop AI and ML, which is where a lot of the jobs are? There’s just common sense that we’re here to teach students skills so that they can be employed and take care of themselves. Why are you excluding an entire section of the economy from your curriculum?

That makes sense to me.

I understand the band. I just questioned the short-term thinking that probably went into that.

Is there a more nuanced way to approach this, essentially?

Yes. Again, are you willing to wait and struggle a little bit? I know a few universities on the East Coast that have been wrestling with this for a year and admit that it’s a work in progress. The guidelines might change from semester to semester. They’re willing to wrestle with it and understand that you cannot come to a conclusion about something this complicated over the summer.

I appreciate that. Now, for an ordinary person, a business, a nonprofit, or a policymaker that might be listening to this right now, do you have a specific suggestion for what they can actually do to make resilience more equitable in their lives?

Actionable Steps To Build Equitable Community Resilience

I would say, for you or me, ask what I can do in my community. Resilience is such a large word. I think the UN has thirteen different definitions for it. It’s maybe as simple as making sure you have a defensible space around the house. It’s contributing to your community food bank. It’s if you have resources to provide support to emergency response organizations, do it locally because you contribute. It does not have to be these big, overwhelming things. If you’re a business or a nonprofit that does grants, think outside of your usual partnerships because there are many mutual aid and community-based organizations.

Some of the ones that I referenced are doing extraordinary resilience work. Some of them are even doing infrastructure work. I know there are some organizations that are restoring oyster beds, both for fisheries and because they help cool down the ocean. Think outside of your usual partnerships and make sure that some of this new non-traditional work is getting resourced. If you’re a business, track your funding. I say this with extreme bias, but I did some research work with colleagues when we were in the pandemic, and the George Floyd situation happened.

There were a lot of pledges, just like after a disaster, and there’s going to be all kinds of money pledged to help a variety of issues in California, but we never really know what happens to that funding. All of us hear some anecdote about it not ending up where it ought to be. Trace your funding. Require transparency. Again, have the medium-term thinking to follow it all the way to its impact. You do not end up with a lot of funding for Minneapolis organizations as in New York, Atlanta, and other places by virtue of the way that subcontractors interact with large corporations and corporate donations.

A transparency trail, and make sure the people you’re actually trying to support and resource are doing that. Notice I stay away from larger issues like the supply chain. It was like, so much paper has been spilled on that, and people still are not doing it. I was like, let me just do some really low-hanging fruit that will be a force multiplier. That is supporting local infrastructure. I’ll leave it to the United Nations and much larger institutions to wrestle with those bigger things. I was like, there are day-to-day things that you can do to really support resilience work.

That’s such an important caution point. This is the reason, in particular, that when I see a natural disaster or, like in the case of George Floyd, this tragedy hits really hard in a number of ways. Participating in and supporting mutual aid programs that are on the ground there. This all gets back to this conversation we had earlier just about community and community-led or place-based type of work. If we’re able to donate resources, whether it be food, money, water, whatever it is, to those organizations that are doing the work on the ground in that community, the dollars that you invest actually go to do the work, I think, a little bit more efficiently.

More efficiently. Just to overuse the word in this show, it’s more sustainable. I’ll leave you with another community that we do a lot of work in, Baltimore. We supported some local organizations. I’m being careful not to say we built with. No, we supported some local organizations in finding resources. They built their own six-point Wi-Fi in their own community. Once they developed the skill set, they trained young people in how to do it. They went and did installations in other communities.

They covered areas of West Baltimore faster and more efficiently. If we had spent some time wrestling with a cable company that I will not name to do the work. It also had all of these cascading benefits because some of the participants were returning citizens who could not get employment because of laws barring people with felony convictions from doing certain kinds of work. They were able to have a local economy develop because they knew how to do it.

The physical work, like welding and stuff like that, came from being incarcerated. They developed those skills while they were incarcerated. The irony of not being able to use them. All of that happened when this one community decided that they wanted the internet and then turned themselves into subject matter experts and became consultants, if you will, to other communities to build it. There’s no way you can predict that from a sustainability office in New York City. You have to trust the community.

Doing the work in the community makes more sense across the world.

In the community, the city just came and made sure that they had access to fiber backhaul so that it would be a better and more consistent signal. The work, actually solving the problem and all of the symptoms that you could relate back to, was all done there. Now there’s a template. They’ve even gone to one group of them, forgot the name of the island off the coast of Sierra Leone, and taught some other people how to do it. They’ve really leaned into this community-to-community integration of how to do this particular thing. There’s no better efficiency study for funding locally.

It just makes so much sense. Monica, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to enter this complicated discussion with me and for sharing the knowledge that you built over decades, right? From what Katrina has taught you into a body of work that insists that resilience has to include everyone and that place-based, community-based solutions can really be leaned into to get a better effect overall. I am going to, of course, include links where people can find you and connect with your work, as well as the book, Climate and Code. Do you have any other closing words that you’d like to offer?

If you’re tuning in to this, just get on your computer or walk out of your house and find one other person that you can support in doing something easy. That’s it. Go out, find somebody else, do something easy. We do not have to wrap our arms around all of the world’s problems. We can do one easy thing.

We do not have to wrap our arms around all of the world’s problems. We can do one easy thing. Go out, find somebody else, and do something easy.

One foot in front of the other, start with your community. I love that. Thank you so much for joining me, Monica. I really appreciate you.

Thank you. This was a pleasure. I appreciate you having me and giving me the opportunity to share some of these experiences and the stories of the people who gave me their time these past decades.

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I feel like I could have continued talking with Monica for hours about all of these things because these are really complex issues that we’re interfacing with in a variety of capacities each day. We hear bad news. We’re not hearing enough of the good news. We start to really position technology as either good or bad, but really, that’s how we approach technology that will change things. It’s how we wrap our arms around it and work through community to integrate technology in a way that makes sense to support communities, as opposed to being something that will be a blight on that specific area.

Doing so with intentionality collaborating, I think it all makes sense. It all comes together. If we can think a little bit more intricately, if we can confront the issues that are difficult and spend time with them, then I think that the solutions we’ll come up with are going to be better, have a longer sight, a longer vision, and potentially can even be part of the solution to climate change that is really affecting communities as opposed to just adding to the problem.

These are the sorts of thoughts that we need to come together and really kind of behold, hold space for, and really converse around. Now, before we go, a word about the show’s cause partner, which is Prescott College. I’ve just completed the requirements for my PhD in sustainability education. For 60 years, they have trained leaders in a co-learning experiential environment to think systemically.

They’re exactly the type of learning institution that helps you confront complex issues, ones like those that Monica raises every day. I’m proud to support Prescott with a monthly gift in honor of their 60th anniversary. You can find details at CareMoreBeBetter.com/Support, or just visit Prescott.edu. Thank you, audience, now and always, for being a part of this pod and this community, because together we really can do so much more. We can be resilient. We can create solutions that may be outside the box, and we can create stronger communities together. Let’s build that. Thank you.

Important Links

• Monica Sanders
• Monica Sanders on LinkedIn
• Monica Sanders on Instagram
• The Undivide Project on YouTube
• The True Price Of Saving The Planet With Paula DiPerna – Previous Episode
• Climate and Code
• Prescott College
• Care More Be Better Support