Our Leadership

Andrew Revkin is one of America’s most honored, experienced and innovative journalists focused on environmental and human sustainability. In 2019, he became the founding director of the Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at Columbia University’s Earth Institute (now the Climate School). There he is building programs, tools and collaborations aimed at bridging gaps between science and society to cut climate risk and spread social and ecological resilience. He runs a popular online webcast through Columbia called Sustain What and writes a related newsletter with thousands of subscribers. Before moving to Columbia, he was the strategic adviser for environmental journalism at the Society, where he helped expand the Society’s grants and programs fostering effective conservation communication where it’s needed most. From 2016 through early 2018, he was the senior reporter for climate change at the nonprofit investigative newsroom ProPublica. From 2010 through 2016 he wrote his award-winning Dot Earth blog for The Times Opinion section while serving as Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding at Pace University. There, he developed and taught a graduate course called “Blogging a Better Planet” and co-created an award-winning field course on environmental filmmaking. He was a staff reporter at The Times from 1995 through 2009, covering issues ranging from threats to New York City’s water supply to the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami and, of course, climate science and policy. He made three Arctic reporting trips and was the first Times reporter to file stories, video and photos from the sea ice around the North Pole. Revkin began reporting on climate change in the 1980s in magazines and never stopped. He has won the top awards in science journalism multiple times, along with a Guggenheim Fellowship and Investigative Reporters & Editors Award. He has written acclaimed and award-winning books on the Anthropocene era (with National Geographic photographer George Steinmetz), the history of humanity’s relationship with weather, the changing Arctic, global warming and the assault on the Amazon rain forest, as well as three book chapters on science communication.

Revkin has crossed over into scientific scholarship. He played an early role in the evolution of the hypothesis that humans have triggered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. In his 1992 global warming book, he wrote: “Perhaps earth scientists of the future will name this new post-Holocene period for its causative element – for us. We are entering an age that might someday be referred to as, say, the Anthrocene [sic]. After all, it is a geological age of our own making.” That future arrived just eight years later, in 2000, when scientists formally proposed such an epoch. Revkin was invited to join the Working Group on the Anthropocene advising the International Commission on Stratigraphy and served from 2011 through 2016.

A lifelong musician, he was a frequent accompanist of folk legend Pete Seeger and Revkin’s 2013 album of original songs was called a “tasty mix of roots goulash” by a reviewer for the music site Jambands.

He lives on the coast of Maine near Acadia National Park with his wife, the sustainability educator Lisa Mechaley.