From the time I was a little child, I’ve wanted to understand. Why are those beautiful poison dart frogs so dangerous? How did America become what it is today? What is the point of it all?

I dig and dig and dig until I am somewhat satisfied with the answer to such questions, while recognizing that the choice of when to stop pursuing a line of inquiry is a mere act of will. Just because I stop doesn’t mean that I fully know.

This frustrates me. I want to understand the world, and I want to understand it completely. I do not want to be a finite mind, constrained by the limits space and time set on my capacity to know all that there is to know.

Yet, that is my position as a bounded creature made by the uncircumscribable God. This being the case, what am I to do?

First, filter. Given my short period of time on Earth, I must be selective in choosing what to attend to. While I am interested in many things, they are not all of equal importance in explaining the breadth and depth of reality. What subject matter will most help me understand the entirety of all subject matters? Where is the principle from which all else flows located?

Second, dive. Once said fundamental field is identified, dig as deep as possible and use learnings from it to inform my perception of all contingent lines of inquiry. Provided that it truly contains the Truth in which all other truths participate, then I will know that I am spending my limited time on the primary intellectual pursuit.

While this approach will not satisfy my curiosity about all things, it will at least give me the satisfaction of knowing that I am seeking to understand the primary thing.

The key question is, what is this field that informs all others? How am I to know that it is indeed the one, and does not just appear to be so? Why should I trust that I have chosen correctly?

This field is theology, and I know this by faith.

The second-century Gnostic schools that St. Irenaeus of Lyon confronted in Against Heresies shared the conviction that the material creation is the defective work of an evil deity, and that salvation consists of human spirits escaping from their fallen bodies. St. Irenaeus answered this challenge with a central tenet of patristic theology: recapitulation (anakephalaiosis). In Christ’s Incarnation, God enters human history and takes up the whole of human nature in order to redeem creation from within. This paper examines St. Irenaeus’ doctrine of recapitulation as developed across Books III through V of Against Heresies, arguing that it vindicates the goodness of the body, affirms the redemption of creation, and establishes the Incarnation as the true grounding for the salvation of the flesh. The paper further contends that recapitulation constitutes a permanent theological resource against any anthropology that treats biological humanity as a deficiency to be overcome, rather than as a resource to be treasured. A concluding section identifies the structural return of Gnostic patterns in contemporary transhumanist, posthumanist, and artificial general intelligence/superintelligence eschatologies, which replicate the ancient contempt for the flesh by reimagining salvation as technologically enabled self-transcendence. St. Irenaeus’ vision, crowned in his declaration that “the glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God” (Gloria enim Dei vivens homo, vita autem hominis visio Dei), speaks directly to the present moment and offers us the true way to transcendence: theosis.

Introduction

How does Christ save the flesh? St. Irenaeus of Lyon answered with a single word that became the key principle underlying his entire systematic theology: anakephalaiosis, recapitulation, the gathering up of all things under one head in the Incarnate Word. St. Irenaeus inherited from St. Polycarp the apostolic memory of St. John, and turned that memory against the most sophisticated theological adversary the early Church faced, the Gnostics. These schools of the second century taught that the material creation is the defective product of an inferior artificer, and that salvation consists of the soul’s escape from its bodily prison.

St. Irenaeus does not state recapitulation as a single thesis. He builds it across the last three books of Against Heresies. The argument of this paper follows St. Irenaeus’ own thought. Book III sets recapitulation as a Christological claim. Book IV grounds it in the goodness of the material creation. Book V brings it to its end in the salvation of the flesh. A closing section reads Ray Kurzweil’s transhumanist eschatology as a thematic return of the same failed anthropology St. Irenaeus refuted so long ago.

The Gnostic Challenge in Brief

What are the second-century heresies that St. Irenaeus confronts? The opening of Against Heresies surveys a family of false teachers whose systems differ in detail, but converge on a single failure of theological anthropology: the denial of the salvific destiny of creation.

St. Irenaeus’ archetype is Valentinus, whose elaborate myth of the Pleroma and the fallen Sophia lay behind a school still vigorous in his own day. Valentinians divided humanity into three natures, “spiritual, material, and animal, represented by Cain, Abel, and Seth,” of which only the spiritual was capable of perfection through gnosis, while the material went, “as a matter of course, into corruption.”¹ Marcion taught that the divine Father of Jesus was wholly other than the Creator God found in Genesis, whose material handiwork was therefore alienated from the salvation offered by Christ.² Basilides taught that “salvation belongs to the soul alone, for the body is by nature subject to corruption.”³ Carpocrates, in turn, taught that “the body is ‘the prison,’” from which souls escape only after passing by transmigration through every kind of embodied action.⁴

Modern secular historical scholarship has rightly grown wary of treating “Gnosticism” as a single position. David Brakke argues that Gnosticism is not really a single position, but instead refers to a diversity of esoteric schools that share certain mythic motifs but are irreducible to a unified system.⁵ Each of these groups, however differently they conceived of the nature of the cosmos, agreed that the body was either completely alien to the divine, merely accidental to salvation, or completely hostile to the good of the spirit. How does St. Irenaeus respond to these errors?

Book III: Recapitulation as Christological Claim

Book III proposes a response grounded in a single Greek noun: anakephalaiosis. The verb anakephalaioō means “to gather under one head” or “to sum up.” St. Paul uses the term in Ephesians 1:10 to name God’s purpose in Christ “to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”⁶ This Pauline concept is the foundation of St. Irenaeus’ entire Christology—that the Word who created is the Word who became flesh, and that He became exactly what we are. The Word, he writes against the Gnostics who denied a real Incarnation, “was made what we were” in order to “recapitulat[e] in Himself His own handiwork.”⁷ John Behr has shown that recapitulation, for St. Irenaeus, is the integrating concept by which the entire economy of salvation holds together: the single thread on which Adam, Christ, the Church, and the eschaton are strung.⁸

Recapitulation requires the substantial unity of the Creator and the Redeemer. If the Father of Christ were not the Creator of this material world, then there would be no human body for the Word to gather up into Himself. Recapitulation would be impossible, because the human nature that the Word assumes would be utterly foreign to the God who saves it. Hence St. Irenaeus’ persistent return to the one Christ, the one Father, the one economy: “There is therefore, as I have pointed out, one God the Father, and one Christ Jesus, who came by means of the whole dispensational arrangements [connected with Him], and gathered together all things in Himself.”⁹ The Marcionite contrast between an evil Old Testament God against a good New Testament God collapses under this insistence, as does any other system that proposes the Incarnate Word to be of a different divine nature from the Creator of all things.

This same argument runs through the Adam-Christ, Eve-Mary pairings that St. Irenaeus so beautifully describes: “As by one man’s disobedience sin entered, and death obtained [a place] through sin; so also by the obedience of one man, righteousness having been introduced, shall cause life to fructify in those persons who in times past were dead.”¹⁰ St. Irenaeus extends the parallel through the Virgin in the same passage: as Adam was formed “from untilled and as yet virgin soil” by the Word, so the Word, “recapitulating Adam in Himself, rightly receive[d] a birth… from Mary, who was as yet a virgin.”¹¹ Recapitulation gathers up not only the first man but the very conditions of his making. The Adam who fell is the same Adam who is taken up: “Wherefore Luke points out that the pedigree which traces the generation of our Lord back to Adam contains seventy-two generations, connecting the end with the beginning, and implying that it is He who has summed up in Himself all nations dispersed from Adam downwards.”¹² God’s mercy in Eden, even His expulsion of Adam from the tree of life, was, for St. Irenaeus, the result of pity rather than of envy. Death itself was set “as a bound to his [state of] sin, by interposing death, and thus causing sin to cease… so that man, ceasing at length to live to sin, and dying to it, might begin to live to God.”¹³ In other words, the very act of dying belongs to the economy of recapitulation. Nothing in the human condition is wasted, not even the limits imposed by mortality.

Recapitulation, then, is the theological concept that encompasses God’s refusal to abandon the work of His own hands. The Father does not merely extract remnants of light from a defective cosmos. He gathers the whole of human history, including Adam himself, into the true man, Jesus Christ.

Book IV: Recapitulation and the Goodness of Creation

Book IV proves, by way of the Eucharist and the nature of the human person, that recapitulation entails the goodness of the material creation. If the Word recapitulates man, then the matter of which man is constituted, the wheat and the wine, the very dust of the earth, must itself be apt for redemption. The argument’s decisive move is liturgical, as St. Irenaeus shows that the Eucharist would be incoherent were a Gnostic anthropology true: “How can they say that the flesh, which is nourished with the body of the Lord and with His blood, goes to corruption, and does not partake of life?”¹⁴ The bread of the earth, when it is consecrated, “is no longer common bread, but the Eucharist, consisting of two realities, earthly and heavenly; so also our bodies, when they receive the Eucharist, are no longer corruptible, having the hope of the resurrection to eternity.”¹⁵ Creation and redemption hold together in the cup and the bread. The cup is “a part of the creation,” the bread “also a part of the creation,” and the same Word who established them establishes Himself in them. The economy of grace goes with the grain of the goodness of matter, not against it.

This is also exemplified by the legendary line at the climax of Book IV: Gloria enim Dei vivens homo, vita autem hominis visio Dei. “The glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God.”¹⁶ This sentence is often domesticated into the popular paraphrase “the glory of God is man fully alive,” which strips it both of its strict reference to the vivens homo, the living human person in his embodied integrity, and of the corresponding call to the visio Dei, the beatific vision in which that creature is fulfilled. St. Irenaeus is making a claim about the kind of being to whom God reveals Himself: the man of flesh and soul, capable of seeing God because he was made for that very seeing. The popular paraphrase mistakes the line for a maxim about human flourishing.

Book V: Recapitulation and the Salvation of the Flesh

Book V shows that recapitulation reaches its eschatological end in the salvation of the flesh. The book opens with the formula that Byzantine mystical theology has carried ever since: “The Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ… did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.”¹⁷ This line marks the entrance of theosis, the patristic doctrine of deification, into history. To be deified is to attain salvation through the flesh. The spirit does not displace it; the spirit animates it. Theosis identifies what recapitulation accomplishes: the human person, gathered up through the obedience of the Word, is brought up into the very life of the Trinity without ceasing to be a creature.

Against this background, St. Irenaeus mounts his most direct refutation of the Gnostic position: “Vain in every respect, are they who despise the entire dispensation of God, and disallow the salvation of the flesh, and treat with contempt its regeneration, maintaining that it is not capable of incorruption.”¹⁸ If the flesh is not saved, then the Lord did not redeem us with His body and blood; the bread and wine cannot become His transfigured self for us to consume, “for blood can only come from veins and flesh, and whatsoever else makes up the substance of man, such as the Word of God was actually made.”¹⁹ If the flesh is not saved, then we cannot become one with God.

The Trinity creates “by the hands of the Father, that is, by the Son and the Holy Spirit, man, and not [merely] a part of man, was made in the likeness of God.”²⁰ The two hands of God the Father lovingly shape the human creature into his two-fold composite of soul and flesh: “The perfect man consists in the commingling and the union of the soul receiving the spirit of the Father, and the admixture of that fleshly nature which was moulded after the image of God.”²¹ The flesh is not abolished in the eschaton. It is animated by the Holy Spirit and so inherits eternal life. The completed man is the whole creature whom the two hands have been guiding: a soul that has its flesh, a flesh that has its soul. M. C. Steenberg has argued that this is the structural shape of Irenaeus’ whole theology: to speak of God in Against Heresies is already to speak of the human creature, for the human creature is the theater in which God reveals what He is.²²

The Contemporary Recurrence

Ray Kurzweil is the most articulate contemporary heir of ancient Gnostic patterns. Kurzweil has spent four decades arguing that human cognition will, by the middle of this century, transcend its biological substrate. Transhumanism names the project of using technology to surpass the present limits of human nature. Posthumanism names the condition that follows that surpassing. AGI (artificial general intelligence) and ASI (artificial superintelligence) name the technical milestones at which engineered minds match and then exceed unaugmented human cognition.²³ Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Nearer (2024) frames history in six “epochs,” at the sixth of which “our intelligence spreads throughout the universe, turning ordinary matter into computronium.”²⁴ This is a complete eschatology. The Word does not become flesh; flesh becomes computation.

Echoes of Gnostic thought are everywhere throughout the book. Biology is a sign of our “frailty,” the body is “the enclosure of our skulls” from which the merged mind is “freed” into “a substrate millions of times faster than biological tissue.”²⁵ On Kurzweil’s account, the body is not essential to the human person: in the 2040s and 2050s, “we will rebuild our bodies and brains to go vastly beyond what our biology is capable of,” so that “we will not be dependent on the survival of any of our bodies for our selves to survive.”²⁶

The Gnostic heresies that St. Irenaeus refuted and overthrew are structurally present here. Human biology is treated as a deficiency to be overcome rather than as a substance to be redeemed. Where St. Irenaeus has transfiguration, Kurzweil has replacement. The Sixth Epoch is an eschaton without a resurrection. Jeffrey Pugh has documented this pattern in detail and given it a name: the para-Gnosticism of the transhumanist anthropology.²⁷ Kurzweil is not a Valentinian. He has no demiurge, no divine spark, no metaphysical hatred of matter, in his cosmology. The pattern is “biology as obsolete and replaceable,” not “matter as evil.” Nonetheless, the despisal of human finitude is shared.

Conclusion

Recapitulation identifies the action by which the human person is saved in Christ. Theosis describes the Trinitarian dynamic into which the human person is saved. “The glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God.”²⁸ The Word “did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.”²⁹ Together, these two sentences answer both the ancient Gnostic and the contemporary transhumanist. Theosis is true transcendence, and the flesh that is glorified is the same flesh that was made. To be saved is to receive what the two hands have been forming since the beginning of creation.

Bibliography

Behr, John. Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity. Christian Theology in Context. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Bostrom, Nick. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Brakke, David. The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity. Harvard University Press, 2010.

Irenaeus of Lyon. Against Heresies. Edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Translated by Alexander Roberts and W. H. Rambaut. Ante-Nicene Fathers 1. Christian Literature Company, 1885.

Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI. Penguin, 2024.

Pugh, Jeffrey. “The Disappearing Human: Gnostic Dreams in a Transhumanist World.” Religions 8, no. 5 (2017): 81. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8050081.

Steenberg, M. C. Of God and Man: Theology as Anthropology from Irenaeus to Athanasius. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009.

1. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, bk. I.7.5.↩︎
2. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, bk. I.27.2.↩︎
3. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, bk. I.24.5.↩︎
4. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, bk. I.25.4.↩︎
5. David Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity (Harvard University Press, 2010), 1–28.↩︎
6. Eph. 1:10 (Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition). All subsequent Scripture citations follow this version.↩︎
7. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, bk. III.22.1↩︎
8. John Behr, Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity, Christian Theology in Context (Oxford University Press, 2013), 144–62.↩︎
9. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, bk. III.16.6.↩︎
10. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, bk. III.21.10.↩︎
11. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, bk. III.21.10.↩︎
12. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, bk. III.22.3.↩︎
13. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, bk. III.23.6.↩︎
14. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, bk. IV.18.5.↩︎
15. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, bk. IV.18.5.↩︎
16. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, bk. IV.20.7.↩︎
17. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, bk. V preface.↩︎
18. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, bk. V.2.2.↩︎
19. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, bk. V.2.2.↩︎
20. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, bk. V.6.1.↩︎
21. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, bk. V.6.1.↩︎
22. M. C. Steenberg, Of God and Man: Theology as Anthropology from Irenaeus to Athanasius (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009), 16–54.↩︎
23. Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford University Press, 2014), 22–29.↩︎
24. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI (Penguin, 2024), chap. 1.↩︎
25. Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer, chap. 2.↩︎
26. Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer, chap. 6.↩︎
27. Jeffrey Pugh, “The Disappearing Human: Gnostic Dreams in a Transhumanist World,” Religions 8, no. 5 (2017): 81, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8050081.↩︎
28. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, bk. IV.20.7.↩︎
29. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, bk. V preface.↩︎

St. Justin's point that Christ is the Divine Logos in whom all that is true, good, and beautiful in natural philosophy participates is very important for us to appreciate and internalize in the modern day. Too often faith and reason are cast as being in opposition to one another by secular society, but the truth that St. Justin attests to in the second century is that the Church has always recognized that reason without faith can only grasp partial truths, whereas when it is exercised in conjunction with faith it can more fully appreciate the nature of reality. This should free us to engage the natural sciences with confidence, knowing that whatever genuine truths they uncover about created reality already hold together in the Logos, and that faith does not compete with these discoveries but illuminates their deeper significance.

That St. Irenaeus' theological vision, along with that of the entire Catholic Church, is premised on the fact that truth exists and that Christianity is the ultimate description of reality, is something that is unfortunately not as well appreciated as it should be. In the face of attacks from all sides, be they scientific, philosophical, historical, or political, Catholics can too easily forget that the Church is the pillar and foundation of the truth. Theology, as Hans Urs von Balthasar notes in the footnote accompanying this quote, is about seeing what is. Catholicism is the worldview that most fully explains the things that we see, touch, smell, taste, and feel with our own hands.

This should be something that is extremely reassuring to us. The Christian religion is not merely one set of cultural, ritual, or spiritual practices among many—it is the highest, fullest, and most accurate way of living in created reality. Not all systems of thought and practice are equal. Truth exists, and Catholics are blessed to be members of the divine institution that embodies that truth fully. Given these facts, we should strive to live, think, and act in accord with what the Church authoritatively stewards and teaches. Not merely from a sense of duty, but out of an understanding that these diverse teachings the Church proclaims are actually true.

I was quite moved when reading the Epistle to Diognetus. This quote summarizes a feeling that I've come to experience more deeply as my Catholic formation has progressed—the sense of being an alien in a culture and society that is emphatically not Christian, and even anti-Christian. The life that we are called to is so great an inversion of worldly values that it is hard to put into words the sensibility that one attains as their heart is more devoutly set on the things of heaven.

To desire humility, to seek to love all men, to go to the lowest places in search of the highest things... These are ideas that are simply unbelievable by the world's standards. Who wouldn't want to gain at all times, to satisfy the desires of the flesh, to always attempt to rise in status? What kind of person does not want those things.

As the Epistle shows us, this is the natural Christian approach to life in the created world. We are in the flesh, but not after the flesh. With eyes not looking at the desires of the flesh, but raised to the heights of the spirit. To see Christ in all things, and earnestly strive to attain to his likeness by constant struggle. What a calling we have been given, one that is as ancient as the Church herself, as this letter attests.

This is one of those deep questions that can be taken in an almost infinite number of directions, but I will propose a response grounded in the importance of history in shaping the present. Arguments between Roman Catholics and Protestants often get hung up on the nature of the early Church. Were bishops, priests, deacons, and the rest of the ecclesiastical hierarchy there from the beginning? Did they celebrate Mass and other liturgical practices in a structured, ordered way? What sacraments did they practice and what meaning did those acts hold for the persons participating in them?

Reading the Fathers helps clarify these questions, as understanding how the men who were so central in forming the early Church thought about these issues keeps us from drifting off into vain intellectualizing. The Fathers lived in the Church before she was riven by the splits between East and West, Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, that so shape modern theological discourse. In a sense, they do not hold positions in these fights given that they were not around to engage in the particulars of these debates. They show us a fundamentally different way to think about the faith, one that exists outside of recent controversies and inside the deeper mysteries of our faith that were so important for the early Church to clarify.

The Fathers are especially necessary for those of us in sacramental Churches as they were the men most responsible for guarding and handing on the teachings of Christ and his Apostles. They form the initial chain of being between those men who knew Christ in the flesh and us two thousand years later. They were so close to Christ and those who knew him that it makes utter sense for us to look to their theological orientation to help us better inhabit the mind of the Church.

In sum, the Fathers are necessary because Sacred Tradition is necessary.

Alignment comes from old French, resulting from the combination of the prefix à (to, toward) and the word ligne (line), originally from the Latin linea for the word line. Thus, the verb aligner literally means to “arrange into a line” or “bring into line.”

If the developers of AI systems are to bring their creations into line, they first need to know what line to aim for. The fundamental problem with this is that no one agrees on what the line should be. What are these supposedly well-understood “human values” that these AI systems should act in accord with?

The main human value that AI safety practitioners seek to imbue in their AI systems is a vague desire to live on the part of humans. “Do not kill humans” is a good way to sum up these instructions.

Makes sense, right?

Or does it? When should these systems not kill humans? What does it mean for a human to be alive? Do the unborn count? How about the elderly? Or the sick and suffering?

If humanity cannot agree on so basic a thing as who is worthy of living, then surely we also cannot agree on what it means to live a good life. And if we do not agree on what is good, true, and beautiful, then how can we expect our creations to do so?

They set the topics to be considered, the terms in which they are considered, and the boundaries of the conversation itself. These decisions set the initial conditions for the discourse that follows. In doing so, they constrain not only what can be said, but what can plausibly be meant.

What is most interesting about this power of the first to draft is that those who revise the artifact often forget its contingency. The substrate is treated as a given, a prior, something that is rather than something with a history.

Before the first draft, the space of possible meanings for a work is endless. After the first draft, that space is tightly constrained. This discrete act marks the transition from a state of open possibility to one of bounded interpretation. After the draft exists, disagreement tends to occur inside the draft’s assumptions, rather than about them.

Who wrote it and why? What implicit philosophy motivates it? What questions does it take as foregone conclusions? What might it have asked, but did not? What other ways of arranging it may have been considered, but were ultimately excised? How does all of this affect how, or if, I should engage with it?

Accepting the initial framing of a work is a decision, not a necessity.

I am also glad at how many books there are about safety out there. Carbon markets were pretty bare on that front, and I was glad to engage in the literature behind my day-to-day work. Otherwise my reading fell into familiar categories: the physical economy, environmental law and policy, spiritual reading, the Church and the modern world.

How Things Break

Engineering a Safer World by Nancy G. Leveson
The preeminent work laying out the complex systems-view of safety. Dr. Leveson is a pioneer in the field and her in-depth critique of simplistic views of causation when it comes to life, property, and environmentally damaging accidents strikes home, especially in my work as a safety professional. The key point that safety is an emergent phenomenon of the mysterious workings of complex socio-technical systems that can’t be simply guaranteed by following rules and procedures dictated from on high is a necessary corrective to the standard view in the field.

Trust in Numbers by Theodore M. Porter
A work that dives into the social construction of metrics in all of their forms—whether numbers, graphs, statistics, projections, etc.—and how Western society has come to so deeply rely on them as signals for whether claims should be believed or not. His chapter documenting the origin of cost-benefit analysis in the context of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers needing numbers to justify the civil infrastructure works it proposed to Congress is invaluable.

Deepwater Horizon by Earl Boebert and James Blossom
A fantastic deep-dive into the system dynamics leading up to the Macondo blowout which killed 11 people and released 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The story I had always heard about how it happened blamed the faulty blow-out preventer, but this application of the complex systems approach to safety laid bare the human, organizational, and technical factors that led to a BP operational environment in which an accident such as this one was very likely to occur. It reads like a thriller.

Safety First by Mark Aldrich
A useful history of the evolution of workplace injury liability, insurance, regulation, and practice in the United States from the late 1800s to mid 1900s. Aldrich takes factory, railroad, and mine safety as his key lines of inquiry and shows how the rapid technological advancements in each led to dramatic increases in the number and danger of hazards that workers encountered on the ground. Private and public sector actors shifted the liability for accidents from employees to employers, leading to improvements in safety outcomes across these heavy industries and America as a whole.

Energy-Based Safety by Matthew Hallowell
A new book out this year that synthesizes Dr. Hallowell’s academic work which seeks to improve safety outcomes by applying physical science principles. The central premise of this work is that incidents in which 1500 joules of energy or more is transferred to the worker, via whatever type of hazard, be it kinetic, electrical, chemical, etc., are those which result in serious injuries and fatalities. Therefore, the workplace safety community should focus its efforts on eliminating these kinds of hazards instead of lower-energy ones. This is an eminently practical book for those of us working on the ground to help keep workers safe.

The Safety Anarchist by Sidney Dekker
Dr. Dekker is well-known in the safety science community for being unrelentingly critical of the extant compliance-focused approach to workplace safety that is so dominant in industry. This book is informed by the work of James C. Scott in that it proposes that workers know best how to work safely, and that the majority of government and corporate regulations of their work are meant to protect government/employers rather than actually effect positive safety outcomes on the ground. I was inclined to like this book given my former anarchist tendencies, but I ultimately thought it went too far in advocating for total worker liberty.

What Flows

Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon
Perhaps my favorite book of the year that comprehensively documented the rise of the city of Chicago using the lens of its place as the hub of commerce for the rapidly developing Great West of old as the tying thread. He makes a compelling case that Chicago’s position as the interface between the huge demand for natural resources compelled by the industrializing East and the near unquantifiable bounty of the virgin West led to it being the great city that it is today. He digs into the process that led to nature being turned into commodities by digging into the development of markets for timber, meat, and grain as they became centralized in Chicago. This is the book to read if you want to understand how natural resource markets develop from a historical perspective.

Breakneck by Dan Wang
This book proposes that the US is dominated by lawyers while China is dominated by engineers, and that this dichotomy best explains why the US can’t build anymore while China can. I think it is a useful lens to employ, but I think it is overstated as an explanation for why these societies are on such different trajectories. The chapter about China’s one child policy and how the state enacted ~300 million forced abortions alongside mass sterilizations was one of the most horrifying things I’ve read all year. It made me feel very grateful that I live in America where the lawyers keep this sort of outrageous government tyranny at bay. I thought he made the mistake of ascribing the dysfunction of “coastal” America (NYC/SF/LA/DC etc.) to the country as a whole, while saying virtually nothing about the booming South (TX/FL/TN/NC etc.). The prose is masterful. I plan to review it in greater detail at a future date.

The Boom by Russell Gold
A remarkably even-handed exploration of the shale boom as it was taking off in real time (the book came out in 2014). The rise and fall of Aubrey McClendon was utterly gripping. I did not expect the book to be as balanced as it was, given the overall bias of the press against oil & gas, so I was glad that this book was as good as it was.

The Origins of Efficiency by Brian Potter
I enjoyed this historically-grounded approach to understanding how production processes have become more efficient over time. It cites the historical and technical factors relevant to all manner of production processes, from lightbulbs to solar panels to modular buildings, and gives the reader a framework to think about how the modern world came to have so many things. The Toyota production process is a marvel of human thought.

The World for Sale by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy
A journalistic escapade into the hidden world of the commodity traders who provide the world with its oil, coal, iron, aluminum, nickel, lithium, cobalt, grains and other natural resources. I had heard about Glencore, Trafigura, Vitol, Gunvor, Mercuria, and others before but didn’t have a good understanding of what these firms actually do before reading this book. Traders seem like wild people.

Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee
I love all of John McPhee’s work and this was excellent as expected. I particularly enjoyed his travels with Roger Ainsworth, a HAZMAT chemical tanker owner-operator who is quite the character. I was also fascinated by his exploration of coal transportation via rail from mines in Eastern Wyoming. His prose is wonderfully composed and a joy to read.

Air-Borne by Carl Zimmer
An interesting exploration of the scientific history behind our modern understanding of air-borne disease.

Wild Houston by Suzanne Simpson and John Williams
This is a wonderful coffee table book that explores nature in the Houston area. My daughter loves it.

The Rules Humans Make for Nature

Lawyers, Swamps, and Money by Royal C. Gardner
The definitive history of American wetland law as it evolved out of the Clean Water Act. The writing is substantive yet funny.

Pollution, Property and Prices by J.H. Dales
In which an economist formally proposes markets as a mechanism to effectively minimize pollution. It gave me a strong historical basis for understanding how the idea of carbon credits came about.

The Making of Environmental Law by Richard J. Lazarus
This was a useful history of American environmental law. The author’s politics came into the text too much at times, and it was a bit light on detail in some places.

The Case for Nature by Siddarth Shrikanth
Shrikanth is a nature/carbon market insider who strings together a number of vignettes of interesting initiatives going on in the space into this book. The ‘case’ itself was weak.

The Interior Life

The Intellectual Life by Antonin Sertillanges
This book has already changed my life. Father Sertillanges frames the intellectual life in the context of the Catholic vocation to union with God, and proposes many practical ways to bring the two into accord with one another. The biggest thing I took away from it is to take my intellectual work seriously, understand it in the context of the unity of truth, and to make the sacrifices necessary to be a useful servant of it.

Finding True Happiness by Robert J. Spitzer
Fr. Spitzer’s understanding of the four types of happiness, rising from the sensual to the ego-driven to the empathetic-contributive to the transcendent, is one I am applying to my life now. The priest who most thoroughly inculcated me in the mind of the Church uses this framework often, so I was glad to actually read how Fr. Spitzer proposed it himself.

The Wounded Healer by Henri J.M. Nouwen
Nouwen’s understanding that true human healing can only come from the hands of someone who has been spiritually wounded themselves, and is able to transfigure that pain into a soothing balm, is wonderful.

Discerning the Will of God by Timothy M. Gallagher
This practical book explains how the Ignatian rules for discernment can be used for day-to-day decisions in life. It was useful to read as I was transitioning from carbon markets into safety.

The Life of Moses by Gregory of Nyssa
St. Gregory’s understanding of the spiritual life being one of infinite progress, where one can never stand still and must always strive forward to better attain the likeness of God, is very compelling and matches my own experience.

The Church in the Modern World

From Christendom to Apostolic Mission and The Religion of the Day by the University of Mary
These two books make the case that the Church is faced with a strange neo-paganism today, where the vast majority of people in the West have heard the message of Christ and His Church but have rejected it. This situation demands a different approach to evangelization, and brings us closer to the experience of the earliest Christians than at any other time in history. They are beautifully written and contain a lot of practical material about how the Church can engage with this strange new world.

The Vocation of the Catholic University Professor by the University of Mary
A slim volume outlining how Catholic university professors can best serve the Church in their chosen pursuit. It was quite relevant to me given that I will be teaching my first college course this upcoming spring.

Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church
Think of this like the Catechism, but focused specifically on Catholic social teaching. It is a great summary of the principles and practicalities of how Catholics should think about engaging social, economic, and political topics.

Uniatism by Cyril Korolevsky
This volume argues that the Latinization of Eastern Catholic Churches was largely driven by the Eastern Churches themselves. While it is true that the Apostolic See released many directives telling Roman Catholic clergy to strive to have Eastern Catholics under their jurisdiction keep their tradition unmodified, the on-the-ground reality seemed to bely the orders.

Modernity and Its Discontents

Lord of the World by Robert Hugh Benson
This novel deeply affected me. It was written just before World War One, yet its vision of a world in which euthanasia, atheism, and technological accelerationism are the norm is eerily prophetic. I plan to review it in greater detail at a future date.

After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre
I read this after learning MacIntyre died earlier this year and found it to be electrifying. He compellingly makes the case that discussions of morality in the modern West are fruitless given the lack of shared vocabulary for even discussing the topic. He put into writing things that I have thought for a long time. His style is unique and rewarding to read.

The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis
I am a Lewis fan, but this book didn’t provide me with much beyond what MacIntyre said.

The Artifice of Intelligence by Noreen Herzfeld
I read this as part of my paper exploring the lessons Catholic social teaching holds for how humanity should respond to artificial intelligence, given that it is one of the few Christian book-length responses out there. It didn’t help much.

McCarthy

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy gets a category of his own as I couldn’t find a good place to slot this book in. No Country for Old Men is one of those rare books where the movie adaptation may actually be better than the book, even though the book was excellent as well. Fantastic metaphysical thriller.

Feel free to reach out if any of these sound interesting to you.

I am profoundly annoyed by secular Christmas culture. Santa, the shopping frenzy, the compulsory cheer—I can’t stand it. Secular Christmas in America is a celebration that has no reason. In a country with fewer and fewer disciples of the Lord, how could it?

I hold this seasonal annoyance in tension with the remarkable fact that on this very day two thousand and twenty-five years ago, the incomprehensible, unlimited, almighty, and ever-living God was born of a woman and became man. The Creator of the universe wrapped in swaddling clothes. How could this possibly be true?

And yet it is.

This is a deep mystery, in the original Christian sense of the word: a divine truth that is utterly beyond anything we completely grasp. Indeed, what would it even mean for finite creatures like you and me to fathom the magnitude of the One in whom we live and move and breathe and have our being taking flesh within his own creation? Such a form of intelligibility is necessarily impossible.

While we may not be able to understand this event, we can participate in it. Christmas comes from Christ’s Mass, the Divine Liturgy of the Nativity of the Lord. In celebrating the Eucharistic sacrifice of the God-man, we can enter into His Incarnation by receiving Him in Holy Communion, by bringing His earthly flesh into our own.

Let us recognize this objective reality today. Let us worship Jesus Christ, fully divine and fully human.

It clearly cannot be so. What are people doing when they are engaged in a conversation? Are they merely shooting off beads of words without any reflection at all? Is the art of listening, pondering, and responding but the gabbling of so many geese? How about those in the physical trades? Is an electrician laying conduit not exercising his intellectual faculties whatsoever? Is he only a biological machine following his animal instincts in order to bring light to a building?

The person in conversation is thinking. The electrician laying conduit is thinking. The claim that writing is thinking, taken literally, is obviously false.

When pressed on these points, the “writer as thinker” may pull back their overextended claim and assert that obviously the examples raised are forms of thinking, but what writing can exclusively provide is the fruit of crystallized thinking. Oral and physical reasoning are dynamic, ever-changing. They require the capacity to respond rapidly to changing conditions, to think on your feet. This is in contrast to writing, which once laid down needs to stand for itself. The author is given the ability to draft, review, revise, and excise until they reach a point that they are minimally confident in the artifact they have produced.

Grant all this. But notice what has happened: writing is not just thinking, it is the best thinking!

And why does this phrase circulate with such fervor now, just as machines have learned to produce paragraphs on demand? Because it justifies keeping the machines at arm’s length. If writing is thinking, then outsourcing your writing means outsourcing your mind. A convenient conclusion for those who write for a living—and an impoverished view of human intelligence for everyone else.

I am the quintessential flitterer.

My mind is teeming with things that I could, might, or even should do. By academic training, I am a geologist, oceanographer, and biogeochemist. To be an Earth scientist means to think in systems, and thinking in systems means thinking about literally everything under the sun. History, philosophy, theology, science, linguistics—I am interested by them all.

After graduating, I found myself in the world of carbon market startups through a chance class I took as I was mastering out of my PhD program. In my professional career, I have been with four employers in four years, which speaks to my base level of dissatisfaction with those in authority over me. Sales, operations, research, technical writing, safety, compliance—I’ve done them all.

I dabble, I jump, I escape. Once I’ve read enough about a set of ideas I drop them like a used kleenex and I move on to the next thing. Once I’m frustrated enough with an employer I jump to the next one without a second look back. When I fear something enough, I run immediately. I am in a constant state of flux. The me of five years ago is illegible to me. His opinions, claims, and protests mean nothing to me.

I find this state of affairs to be frustrating. I sometimes reflect on my friend from high school who knew what he wanted to do when he grew up, and he did it. He was a devout Catholic his whole life and always wanted to be an aerospace engineer. He is now married and working as an aerospace engineer. Would that I had such a singular vision for my life at all times, and the discipline to go out and execute it!

Being a dilettante annoys me. I want to be the person who can dedicate his whole life to the study of one or two fields, to dive deep into a profession or three, and be satisfied. I am dissatisfied. I want more. More knowledge, more interesting work, more interior alignment.

I want to be the person who can put his shoulder to the plow and not even think of turning his head back. I am working on it. Marriage and fatherhood has been extremely helpful in this regard. I have duties and responsibilities to attend to at home that keep my flittering whims at bay, at least somewhat. I need a job with benefits. I need to be mentally stable. I need God.

This trope is especially grating in energy and climate discussions. People who believe that climate change is a major crisis and want “society” to take action to mitigate its catastrophic effects love to use the word “we” when discussing the future of the global energy system. As an example:

“If we are to meet our net-zero goals, we need to incentivize the rapid deployment of solar and battery storage to fully decarbonize our electric system.”

This kind of sentence appears everywhere in climate commentary. The unanswered question is who this ‘we’ is. Is it the talking heads personally? Their home state of Massachusetts? Just Democrats in that state? Every citizen of the United States? The entire world?

Most uses of the word “we” in such contexts assume that the “we” in question is the whole of humanity. The logic runs like this: since climate change is a global commons problem that could render the whole planet uninhabitable, all of humanity must make whatever sacrifices are deemed necessary to stop this future from coming into being.

But is this true? Clearly the entire human race does not agree on the magnitude and relative importance of the climate problem. But even among those who do, there is wide disagreement about how best to address it.

This rhetorical sleight of hand cuts deeper than just policy. Even within the scientific consensus that anthropogenic greenhouse gases increase the overall surface temperature of the Earth, there is genuine disagreement about the timeline and severity of its resulting impacts.

When someone says “we must act now to save the planet,” they are not merely summarizing the consensus view on the subject. They are selecting one scenario from within that consensus and speaking as though that selection were not a choice. The pronoun conscripts you into a political coalition and an empirical worldview at the same time, without asking permission to do either.

The most dramatic example of this appears in the differing priorities between the Global North and the Global South with respect to the evolution of the global energy system. The North is rich enough to have the luxury of worrying about the environmental externalities of its energy system. The South, by contrast, lives in such a state of acute energy poverty that its people simply want energy, and they want it now.

The immediate question for the Global South is not “fossil or renewable,” but how best to dramatically improve the quality of life of billions of people. For someone who has never had reliable air conditioning, “we must cut consumption” sounds less like a shared responsibility and more like the rich world pulling up the ladder behind them.

So, when Western talking heads make sweeping claims about what “we” must do to address climate change, I shake my head and ask who this “we” is supposed to be. “We” becomes a cop-out to avoid hard questions about trade-offs and conflicting interests. We are not all on the same team when it comes to climate, and there are good reasons for that. If you insist on speaking in the name of a “we,” have the honesty to say who you are speaking for and who, exactly, you are asking to pay the price.

Do you have a statistic for that? Where does “The Science™” show that what you are saying is true? How much quantitative analysis went into your claim? Show me the graphs and show me the numbers, or else.

This is a curious state of affairs, given that the average person is not all that good with numbers. I know that I’m not. Despite having been trained as an Earth scientist, I humbly admit I am not the most quantitative of people. I can pass muster with my math, but I consider myself more a rigorous qualitative thinker than a quantitative one.

However, I know enough about numbers to understand that they can be dangerous. Where did this number that I am supposed to trust come from? Why was it calculated? Why was it quantified in that particular way? How were the boundaries of the analysis defined? Why should I trust it?

I think these questions matter because what I call “the aesthetic of rigor,” the mathematical sheen surrounding a number offered as proof of a truth claim, often conceals serious structural problems in the number, analysis, or projection itself.

Here is a tangible example from my work in safety that illustrates this phenomenon. The Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) purports to represent the relative occurrence of workplace injuries within a given company for the purposes of cross-company and cross-industry comparisons. It is quantified as follows:

$$\text{TRIR}=\frac{\text{Number of recordable incidents}\times \mathrm{200,000}}{\text{Number of work hours}}$$

• The number of recordable incidents refers to injuries and illnesses deemed recordable by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) over a given period of time.

• 200,000 is a scaling factor that normalizes the rate to the number of hours that a company of 100 full-time workers should expect to work over one year.

• The number of work hours is the total number of hours worked during the time window in which a given set of recordable incidents occurred.

This metric seems reasonable enough. It makes sense to rely on the categorization scheme of the highest workplace safety regulator in the country to determine what is recordable or not. It also makes sense that you would want to figure out how to normalize this number so that the incident rate of small and large companies can be easily compared.

That being said, we need to consider the size of these variables and the constant. The number of work hours scales with the size of the employer. The larger the employer (i.e., more employees), the more work hours they log over a given period of time, and vice versa for smaller employers (i.e., fewer employees).

Consider the following: Small Company has 10 employees (20,000 worker hours) and Big Company has 100 employees (200,000 worker hours). Over the period of one year, both companies suffer one OSHA-recordable incident.

Here is the TRIR for Small Company:

$$\text{Small Company TRIR}=\frac{1\times \mathrm{200,000}}{\mathrm{20,000}}=10$$

Here is the TRIR for Big Company:

$$\text{Big Company TRIR}=\frac{1\times \mathrm{200,000}}{\mathrm{200,000}}=1$$

So, with the same number of recordables (1), Small Company’s TRIR looks much worse than Big Company’s solely because its one case is spread over far fewer hours than Big Company’s single case. This highlights how noisy TRIR is as a metric for small employers versus larger employers.

Some excellent research from Dr. Matthew Hallowell in collaboration with the Construction Safety Research Alliance indicates that for many companies, especially smaller ones, TRIR has almost zero predictive validity. It is statistically random noise masquerading as a performance metric.

Yet, despite this fragility, TRIR is treated with reverence. It is plastered on boardroom slides, used to deny or grant vendor contracts, and used to determine executive bonuses. It looks rigorous. It has a formula, a regulator’s stamp of approval, and a decimal point. It possesses the aesthetic of rigor, but lacks the fullness of truth.

This is the trap of tempting quantification. When we encounter numbers like this, we should ask the inconvenient questions. Who built this ruler, and for what reason? Is it actually measuring what we think it’s measuring? Or have we just found a sophisticated way to stop asking questions at all?

I entered the industry with an idealistic vision of carbon credits being a wonderful tool to scale ecological regeneration. I’ve unfortunately been thoroughly disabused of this notion after having worked in the field for about three and a half years.

Carbon credits are a remarkably intangible concept. They attempt to make tradable the process of invisible carbon dioxide gas from the atmosphere being turned into some stable form of carbon (or avoiding the release of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere from some stable form of carbon). How, in principle, can a flow be turned into a stock? How do you know the flow actually occurred? What does it mean to sell a process as a commodity?

Their invisible nature makes their development very easy to game. One can draw the boundaries of these projects in manipulative ways, arbitrage contract lengths, and make promises about activities that don’t actually occur in order to maximize the generation of credits. Credits produced this way are not real.

I’ve seen these practices occur too many times to count. Earth system science manipulated to make money. Nominal human development goals perverted to facilitate the creation of Mammon. Supposed positive benefits for nature not actually manifesting on the ground.

What is true? What is false? What is an illusion? What is a delusion? It’s far too hard to know in the carbon credit industry, with the most likely answer being that the project in question is fake.

I don’t have a problem with the idea of carbon credits. In principle, I think that it is a good thing that companies are willing to philanthropically support projects that mitigate climate change, support a wilder world, and benefit human communities. The problem is that in practice, the vast majority of the carbon projects out there do not achieve these aims, but their credits are still sold on the market.

There are certainly good projects that achieve these noble goals, but in my experience they are few and far between. They are so rare, that it is fair for people to write off the industry as a whole. I’m there myself, and am glad that I am now in a different line of work.

This is wrong.

Shading over Deserts

Historically, deserts were considered wastelands alongside wetlands, tundra, and mountain chains. Because they were not fit for agriculture, they were therefore not fit for man. We would have transform them into places fit for human consumption.

To the nature lover, however, deserts are a delight. Their austere face draws you in, allowing you to meditate on the grand cosmic cycle of life and death and consider how it applies to you personally. They are also havens of life, even if we cannot always see it. Saguaro cacti, greater roadrunners, biocrusts, Gila lizards, desert foxes: these unique creatures can be found in no other ecosystem on Earth and make a grand life out of what we consider the most inhospitable of places.

Yet, in the rush to rapidly transition to so-called “green” energy, deserts are once again wastes—purely useful insofar as they can be exploited. Not for minerals this time, but for surface area.

Last year, the federal government announced an ambitious plan to turn the Great Basin into a giant solar facility. Vast stretches of federal landholdings in Nevada, Utah, and California were to be paved with silicon to provide electricity for man. In practice, this looks like thousands of Joshua trees being cut down and incinerated, desert tortoises being forced from their one-square-meter territories, and desert fox kits being removed from their dens to make way for artificial shade.

How is it not obvious that addressing climate change in this context comes in direct conflict with protecting biodiversity at its most tangible, local level that you can see, touch, smell, feel, and taste?

Starving the Global South

Net-zero goals have an unstated assumption embedded in them. In these scenarios, the Global South is to be starved of oil & gas, the most abundant, energy-dense, and cost-effective energy resources ever discovered on this planet; the very same resources that enabled the extremely rapid economic growth of the Global North.

In the name of addressing the global problem of climate change, the Global South are to be guinea pigs in the grand experiment of a light-speed “energy transition,” the scale and speed of which has not previously been witnessed in human history. Somehow, these countries are expected to bring their citizens’ standard of living up to that of the developed world, but without the energy sources that enabled that blessed billion to do so in the first place.

The Global North caused the problem, now the Global South is being handicapped in their just struggle for better lives.

Does anybody really believe that the variable power provided by solar and wind, backed up by yet-to-be-invented large scale battery storage, will be able to completely eclipse the baseload power provided by the oil, natural gas, and coal in these emerging economies? Why should they take that bet? Would you, if you were in their shoes?

Wherefore the just transition?

The Point

The take away from these examples is not to bash the idea of trying to address climate change. It is happening and will have negative consequences for humanity and the natural world we are embedded in. The point is that we should be conscious of the tradeoffs we make, both socially and individually, in the way we address the issue.

The view that the problems of nature, climate, and justice are all part of the same struggle can all too easily shift into the idea that any initiative meant to address one therefore addresses the others. This is simply not true. These issues are not puzzles that have clever solutions in which everyone wins.

Taking a more realistic and pragmatic view on these tradeoffs will enable us to actually address the problems we care to solve. We must be discerning about what we’re choosing and what we’re sacrificing when we make these decisions. Otherwise we’re just lying to ourselves about what we’re actually doing.

Introduction

Artificial intelligence represents both a dramatic culmination of human technological progress and a remarkable challenge to Christian theological anthropology. As machines increasingly perform tasks once considered uniquely human, the Church faces the urgent task of articulating what remains irreducibly human. This paper argues that Catholic Social Teaching provides the necessary anthropological framework for this process of discernment. Through the examination of intelligence as the unique gift of God to man, human work as the act of co-creation with God, human relationships as imaging the Trinity, freedom as only being possible through true moral agency, and dignity as being inherent to the human person, this paper shows how the Church's understanding of man—grounded in the Incarnation and oriented toward theosis—offers both a critique of reductionist approaches to AI and positive guidance for authentic human flourishing in the digital age.

The Image of God in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence forces humanity to confront the most basic question of its existence with an increasing sense of discomfort. Gaudium et Spes lays out this eternal question brilliantly: "What is man? What is this sense of sorrow, of evil, of death, which continues to exist despite so much progress?"2 The Council Fathers could not have foreseen machines that would compose symphonies, diagnose diseases, or engage in seemingly intelligent conversation, yet their insight proves prophetic. Technological advances intensify, rather than resolve, the mystery of human existence. Each new capability demonstrated by AI, from surpassing human performance in complex games to generating convincing human-like text, compels us to examine who man truly is. The Council understood that progress paradoxically deepens our need to understand "the place and role of man in the universe, [and] the meaning of its individual and collective strivings."3 Against the dual temptations of a technocratic hubris that would "exalt [man] as the absolute measure of all things” and the draw of a nihilism that “debases [him] to the point of despair," the Church maintains that human dignity transcends mere instrumentality.4 This theological anthropology provides the necessary foundation for engaging with AI's challenge to human self-understanding.

Catholic teaching provides the essential framework for understanding what artificial intelligence cannot replicate: the human person as the only creature "God willed for itself," endowed with "an eternal seed which cannot be reduced to sheer matter."5 This principle from Gaudium et Spes directly counters any reductionist account that would equate human cognition with computational processes. The Magisterium has explicitly engaged this challenge, with Antiqua et Nova affirming that "the Christian tradition regards the gift of intelligence as an essential aspect of how humans are created 'in the image of God'."6 This means human intelligence cannot be understood apart from its source and end in God. It is fundamentally a spiritual capacity that transcends material processes. While machines process data according to programmed processes, human intelligence participates in divine wisdom, seeking not just information but meaning, not just patterns but purpose.

The technological power that artificial intelligence represents exposes a fundamental weakness in contemporary civilization, as Pope Francis, in his encyclical Laudato Si, indicates that "contemporary man has not been trained to use power well" because technological development hasn't been "accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience."7 This confusion manifests in what he calls a "constant schizophrenia" between two extremes: the technocratic mindset that sees "no intrinsic value in lesser beings" and the anti-human ideology that sees "no special value in human beings."8 Artificial intelligence intensifies this schizophrenia by appearing to bridge the gap between human and machine intelligence, suggesting that what we thought made us special can be replicated in silicon. The Church's theological anthropology becomes essential precisely because it refuses both of these reductionistic tendencies, insisting that human dignity rests neither on computational superiority nor on material equality with other beings, but on our unique calling to participate in divine life.

The Nature of Human Intelligence

The distinction between human and artificial intelligence begins with understanding intelligence itself as more than the capacity to execute logical formulas. Antiqua et Nova provides an essential clarification when it makes the distinction between "intellectus [which] refers to the intuitive grasp of the truth,” and “ratio [which] pertains to reasoning proper."9 This distinction reveals that AI fundamentally lacks the capacity for intellectual intuition that grasps truth beyond what can be derived logically. The document emphasizes that human intelligence is ultimately "God's gift fashioned for the assimilation of truth" with the ability to go "beyond what it has already achieved."10 This transcendent quality of human intelligence stands against contemporary attempts to reduce it to "the mere acquisition of facts or the ability to perform specific tasks."11 While artificial intelligence excels at ratio, the systematic processing of information according to logical rules, it lacks intellectus, the spiritual capacity to apprehend meaning, purpose, and truth that transcends empirical data. Human intelligence thus operates on two levels that cannot be separated: the rational processing that AI can simulate and the intellectual intuition that remains uniquely human.

Despite its impressive capabilities, artificial intelligence remains fundamentally limited in ways that reveal the poverty of purely computational approaches to intelligence. Antiqua et Nova states the issue plainly: “AI's advanced features give it sophisticated abilities to perform tasks, but not the ability to think."12 Most significantly, "AI cannot currently replicate moral discernment or the ability to establish authentic relationships," which are capacities that flow out of intelligence as a spiritual faculty rather than a computational process.13 The poverty of machine intelligence lies not in its limited processing power, which may exceed human capacity, but in its categorical inability to transcend the material processes that constitute it.

The Embodied Nature of Human Knowing

The Church's insistence on the embodied nature of human intelligence counters any attempt to reduce human cognition to disembodied information processing. Gaudium et Spes that "though made of body and soul, man is one" and through his body "raises voice in free praise of the Creator."14 This unity means human intelligence cannot be abstracted from "embodied experiences, including sensory input, emotional responses, social interactions."15 The temptation to see intelligence as pure computation represents a new form of the ancient Gnostic heresy that "despised the body, matter and the things of the world."16 Against this hatred for the creation, Catholic teaching maintains that human knowing is irreducibly embodied. Our intelligence develops through physical interaction with the world, is shaped by our mortality, and finds expression through our bodily presence to others. Artificial intelligence, lacking genuine embodiment, processes information without the lived, physical experience that gives human knowledge its depth and meaning.

Human intelligence acquires its distinctive character precisely through the limitations that AI cannot experience. Gaudium et Spes recognizes that "in the face of death...the riddle of human existence grows most acute" yet in this confrontation "man rebels against death because he bears in himself an eternal seed."17 This paradox, finite beings aware of the infinite, shapes human intelligence in ways that transcend computation. As Pope Leo XIII observes in his encyclical Rerum Novarum, "to suffer and to endure, therefore, is the lot of humanity" and no technology will "succeed in banishing from human life the ills and troubles which beset it."18 These limitations are not merely obstacles to be overcome, but formative experiences that shape the fruit of human wisdom. Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical Laborem Exercens, adds that "sweat and toil...present the Christian...with the possibility of sharing lovingly in the work that Christ came to do."19 Suffering and limitation thus become paths to a deeper understanding of the nature of reality, which is something that no algorithm, no matter how sophisticated, can replicate.

The Theology of Human Labor

Human work possesses theological significance that no machine automation can replicate. Pope John Paul II establishes the foundation for this insight when he states that "man is the image of God partly through the mandate received from his Creator to subdue, to dominate, the earth."20 Through labor, "a man ordinarily supports himself and his family, is joined to his fellow men and serves them."21 Work thus serves multiple purposes simultaneously: material sustenance, social connection, and spiritual participation in divine activity. Pope Paul VI, in his encyclical Populorum Progressio, emphasizes that "every worker is, to some extent, a creator—be he artist, craftsman, executive, laborer or farmer."22 This creative dimension of work flows from the human person being made in the image and likeness of God the Creator, making work an expression of human dignity rather than merely a means to economic ends.

The Church's social teaching consistently maintains that work exists for the person, not the person for work. Pope John Paul II articulates this principle clearly: "The primary basis of the value of work is man himself, who is its subject" and therefore work is "for man," not man "for work."23 This subjective dimension of work, that it proceeds from and shapes the human person, cannot be a feature of machine production. Gaudium et Spes reinforces this personalist understanding of work: "Human labor...is superior to the other elements of economic life, for the latter have only the nature of tools."24 When work is properly understood, it serves human development rather than reducing workers to "mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons."25 This principle becomes crucial when evaluating AI's role in the workplace. Technology must enhance rather than replace the subjective dimension of human work.

AI and the Crisis of Human Purpose

The increasing ability of AI to outperform humans in a variety of tasks creates a crisis of meaning for human work. Pope John Paul II addresses this conundrum when he states that "while it may seem that in the industrial process it is the machine that 'works'...the proper subject of work continues to be man."26 Yet when machines surpass human performance, this distinction becomes harder to maintain. The encyclical warns that "technology can cease to be man's ally and become almost his enemy...when it deprives many workers of their previous employment."27 This enmity manifests not just in unemployment but in the degradation of human dignity. As Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, observed about industrial labor: "Bodily labor...is in many instances changed into an instrument of perversion; for from the factory dead matter goes out improved, whereas men there are corrupted and degraded."28

The prospect of widespread technological unemployment through AI automation threatens not just economic stability, but human dignity itself. Pope Francis notes that "the goal should not be that technological progress increasingly replace human work, for this would be detrimental to humanity."29 Pope Pius XI emphasizes that "the opportunity to work be provided to those who are able and willing to work" because unemployment causes workers to be "plunged into misery and temptations."30 Man is made for work, and meaningful work should be provided for him as his natural right. Antiqua et Nova specifically addresses AI's impact on human labor: "If AI is used to replace human workers rather than complement them, there is a 'substantial risk of disproportionate benefit for the few.'"31 The concentration of wealth and power that results from automation, without consideration for displaced workers, violates the principle of the common good that underlies Catholic social teaching.

As AI assumes more economically productive tasks, the Church's teaching on human dignity becomes increasingly more important. Gaudium et Spes declares: "A man is more precious for what he is than for what he has."32 This principle challenges the productivity-obsessed metrics by which modern society measures the worth of man. Pope John XXIII, in his encyclical Mater et Magistra, extends this reasoning to the act of work itself: "Work, which is the immediate expression of a human personality, must always be rated higher than the possession of external goods."33 This personalist value of human work resists reducing labor to more economic output. He further clarifies that "scientific and technical progress...are essentially instrumental in character. They are not supreme values in themselves."34 In an age where AI may surpass human persons in productive output, these teachings remind us that human worth rests on being rather than doing, and on dignity rather than output.

The Trinitarian Foundation of Human Relationality

Human relationships reflect the Trinitarian nature of God in ways that no artificial system can replicate. Communio et Progressio establishes the foundation for this teaching when it states that "communication is more than the expression of ideas...at its most profound level it is the giving of self in love."35 Antiqua et Nova reinforces this theological understanding of the human person: "Human beings are 'ordered by their very nature to interpersonal communion.'"36 This ordering toward communion reflects our creation in the image and likeness of the Trinity, where three persons exist in perfect, unitary relationship. Human relationships thus possess an ontological depth that transcends functional interactions.

Authentic human encounter requires capacities that remain beyond artificial intelligence's reach. Antiqua et Nova specifies that “true empathy requires the ability to listen, recognize another's irreducible uniqueness."37 This recognition of the other as unique and irreplaceable, not solely as a set of data or pattern of behaviors, defines genuine human relationships. Communio et Progressio raises a prescient question in this age of rapidly advancing technology: "How can one avoid allowing communications made indirectly and through machinery to weaken direct human contact?"38 This concern, voiced in 1971, proves prescient in the age of AI-mediated interactions. Antiqua et Nova highlights that "no AI application can genuinely experience empathy" because emotions "reflect the way a person, as a whole, relates to the world."39 Empathy requires not just processing emotional cues but participating in the full range of human experiences—joy, suffering, hope, and fear—in an embodied way.

The Promises and Perils of Digital Relationship

The proliferation of digital connections through AI-mediated platforms creates an illusion of relationship while often deepening isolation. Laudato Si observes that "when media and the digital world become omnipresent...the great sages of the past run the risk of going unheard amid the noise."40 This noise not only crowds out silence, but replaces meaningful connections with endless superficial interactions. Pope Paul VI, in his encyclical Octogesima Adveniens, diagnosed this technologically-induced paradox early on: "Man is experiencing a new loneliness...in an anonymous crowd which surrounds him and in which he feels himself a stranger."41 AI amplifies this loneliness by creating echo chambers, what communication scholars call "narrowcasting," leading to "separation and isolation in society."42

The development of AI companions, from chatbots to social robots, presents a fundamental challenge to human relationality. Antiqua et Nova warns that "while human beings are meant to experience authentic relationships, AI can only simulate them."43 The document continues with a stark warning: "If we replace relationships with God and with others with interactions with technology, we risk replacing authentic relationality with a lifeless image."44 This replacement is particularly dangerous because AI's increasing sophistication makes the simulation more convincing. Yet, no matter how sophisticated the programming, an AI companion cannot offer genuine love, authentic presence, or mutual vulnerability—all of which are elements that make human relationships truly valuable.

The Nature of Human Freedom

Catholic teaching understands freedom not as the mere absence of constraints, but as the capacity for willing and doing the good. Gaudium et Spes states that "only in freedom can man direct himself toward goodness."45 This positive conception of freedom establishes human persons as moral agents. Pope Francis warns against a degraded understanding of human freedom when he says that "our freedom fades when it is handed over to the blind forces of the unconscious."46 When we surrender our decision-making to AI, we risk exchanging authentic freedom for the delusion of convenience. This is particularly dangerous given that the capacity for moral judgment distinguishes humans absolutely from artificial intelligence. Antiqua et Nova states this categorically: "Between a machine and a human being, only the latter is truly a moral agent."47 This agency flows from our nature as "a conscious and free subject, that is to say a subject that decides about himself."48 Moral agency requires not just choosing between options but understanding the moral significance of choices, which is a capacity that requires consciousness, intentionality, and responsibility.

AI and the Threat to Human Agency

Algorithmic decision-making systems increasingly shape human choices in ways that threaten authentic freedom. Antiqua et Nova warns that "the concentration of power over mainstream AI applications...creates the risk that AI could be manipulated" creating "mechanisms for the manipulation of consciences."49 Pope Francis recognizes that "technological products are not neutral" but "create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles."50 When algorithms determine what information we see, what products we're offered, and even what relationships we form, they shape our choices before we make them. This algorithmic mediation of choice represents a new form of soft determinism that preserves the appearance of freedom while undermining its reality.51 This dependence develops gradually as we delegate first simple choices, then increasingly complex ones, to algorithmic systems. Yet Antiqua et Nova insists that "ultimate responsibility for decisions made using AI rests with the human decision-makers."52 We cannot escape moral responsibility by claiming the AI made the choice. To do so would be to surrender our fundamental dignity as moral agents.

The Foundation of Human Dignity

Human dignity precedes and transcends any material capacity or achievement, resting solely on our creation in God's image and likeness. Antiqua et Nova emphasizes that "a person's worth does not depend on possessing specific skills...but on the person's inherent dignity, grounded in being created in the image of God."53 Gaudium et Spes establishes the practical implication of this principle, that "the social order and its development must invariably work to the benefit of the human person."54 Society exists to serve persons, not persons to serve the efficiency of the economy. Pope John Paul II indicates that "even prior to the logic of a fair exchange...there exists something which is due to man because he is man."55 This "something" is the justice that each human person is owed by his very nature.

The Church's insistence on the unconditional, infinite value of human life stands as a scandal to utilitarian logic. Gaudium et Spes condemns "whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions...where men are treated as mere tools for profit."56 This condemnation extends to any system—technological or economic—that reduces persons to their functional value. Pope Francis emphasizes that "we should be particularly indignant at the enormous inequalities in our midst" when some are considered "more worthy than others."57 Yet this is precisely what functionalist approaches to AI imply, that those who remain economically productive deserve more consideration than those whom machines can replace.

AI's Challenge to Human Dignity

Artificial intelligence systems necessarily reduce persons to quantifiable data points, threatening the recognition of human dignity. Antiqua et Nova warns that "drawing an overly close equivalence between human intelligence and AI risks succumbing to a functionalist perspective."58 Pope John Paul II’s critique of socialism applies equally to algorithmic reductionism: "Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism."59 When AI systems make decisions about employment, healthcare, or criminal justice based on statistical profiles, they treat persons as interchangeable units rather than unique beings.

The suggestion that AI makes certain humans obsolete represents a fundamental assault on human dignity. Pope John Paul II warns that when "the mechanization of work 'supplants' him...through exalting the machine, it reduces man to the status of its slave."60 This reduction occurs not just through physical replacement, but through the narrative that some humans no longer have value in an AI-driven economy. Antiqua et Nova counters this narrative directly when it states that "human lives are intrinsically valuable, independent of their economic output."61 The Church consistently rejects any view that "man [be] treated as an instrument of production" rather than as an end in himself.62 The obsolescence narrative reveals the spiritual poverty of purely economic valuations of human worth.

Conclusion

The question "What is man?" posed by Gaudium et Spes resonates with greater urgency in the age of artificial intelligence. Through examining intelligence, work, human relationships, freedom, and dignity, we discover that human distinctiveness lies not in functional capacities but in our fundamental orientation toward and end in God. The Council's answer remains definitive: "Whoever follows after Christ, the perfect man, becomes himself more of a man."63 This Christological key unlocks the mystery of human nature. We understand ourselves only in relation to the God-man who reveals both divine love and the heights of human potential. As Pope John Paul II affirms, the Church receives 'the meaning of man' from Divine Revelation."64 This revealed anthropology provides the only adequate response to the challenge of AI, grounding human worth in its calling to divine union rather than physical or intellectual output.

Faced with the transformation of human society by AI technologies, the Church's prophetic mission becomes increasingly vital to the fate of the world. As Pope Benedict XVI, in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate, declares: "The Church must above all protect mankind from self-destruction."65 This protection requires not just warning about future dangers, but proposing a positive vision of authentic human flourishing. Pope John Paul II declares the fundamental truth about any such approach when he says that "Christian anthropology therefore is really a chapter of theology," which makes clear that questions about human nature cannot be answered without reference to God.66

The Church's theological anthropology yields concrete guidance for humanity's relationship with artificial intelligence. Antiqua et Nova provides the fundamental principle for using AI well: "AI should be used only as a tool to complement human intelligence rather than replace its richness."67 This complementarity respects both the legitimate benefits of AI and the irreplaceable nature of human faculties. The document further specifies that "how we incorporate AI 'to include the least of our brothers and sisters...will be the true measure of our humanity.'"68 Our treatment of those whom AI might render economically redundant reveals whether we truly believe in human dignity, or merely pay it lip service. Finally, we must "cultivate those aspects of human life that transcend computation"—prayer, contemplation, genuine relationship, moral discernment, and creative expression—to preserve authentic humanity against digital reductionism.69

The Incarnation stands as God's definitive statement about human worth. Gaudium et Spes declares that "by His incarnation the Father's Word assumed, and sanctified...the whole of man, body and soul."70 This assumption of human nature by Jesus Christ, the Son of God, forever proclaims that humanity possesses a unique dignity among the creatures of the material creation. No artificial intelligence, no matter how sophisticated, can claim this divine affirmation. The human person remains, as Pope John Paul II insists, "the primary route that the Church must travel in fulfilling her mission."71 Technology must serve this mission rather than subvert it. Ultimately, the answer to "What is man?" in the age of AI is found where it has always been found—in Christ who "reveals man to man himself."72 In Him we discover that we are not biological machines to be replaced by silicon ones, but beloved children called to eternal communion with the most Holy Trinity.

In this episode I speak with Candice Ammori, founder and CEO of Climate Vine, a professional networking organization for climate tech professionals. Candice brings a unique perspective as an Iraqi-American from the Chaldean Catholic community who has navigated data science, international development, and now climate tech community building. We discuss:

• How her upbringing in a close-knit Chaldean Catholic community of 60+ first cousins in Metro Detroit shaped her approach to building communities in climate tech.
• The parallels between AI and climate change as systemic disruptions that capitalism in its current form may not survive.
• Why 80% of successful community building is about filtering and selecting the right people, while only 20% is programming and events.
• Her journey from studying AI ethics and biostatistics to focusing on climate after the 2018 IPCC report.
• The importance of breaking down silos between technologists, activists, policy makers, and Global South perspectives in addressing climate change.
• How accepting reality rather than fighting it has become central to her spiritual practice and approach to climate work.

David Valerio: How would you describe your spirituality and the way it impacts how you engage with your work?

Candice Ammori: I would describe my spirituality as both ever-changing and intentionally at the core of my life. Well, aspirationally at the core of my life. I don't think it's quite there yet.

I was raised Catholic in a Catholic Iraqi family, so being Catholic was pretty core to our identity. I went to Catholic middle school. I've always thought that Jesus seemed like a really good person. I wouldn't say that I totally resonated with the larger Catholic Church, but I always held onto that. I think that experience formed a bit of the spirituality that's emerged from there.

David Valerio: I would love for you to expand on the community you came from. I'm personally a Ruthenian Greek Catholic which is in the Slavic tradition, but your particular church is very interesting. Could you expand on your family history and background?

Candice Ammori: I'll try to be as historically accurate as I can. My family comes from a small village called Tel Keppe in Northern Iraq, which is a bit north of Mosul. It's not too far Kurdistan. We were a religious minority in Iraq for a very long time. Ethnically, I believe we're Assyrian.

From my understanding, a couple hundred years ago, there was a group of these Assyrians who decided enter into communion with the Roman Catholic Church. We then became called Chaldean Catholics by the Roman Catholic Church. My brother has his DNA tested and and we're 99.98% Middle Eastern and 0.02% Asian. So we really have come from that land and stayed in that land for a long time.

In the '60s and '70s, some Chaldeans migrated to Detroit which was booming at the time. Some went to San Diego. There was a bit of chain migration where one person would come over, often start their own small business because they didn't have an American education, and then be able to bring over a sibling or parent. They had to vouch for them in the American immigration system, saying "We will take responsibility for this person for the first two to ten years."

That allowed a lot of people in the community to come over. Migration sped up during the Gulf War and after ISIS took over. At this point, Tel Keppe itself is pretty devastated. That happened in my 20s, so I'm really bummed that I wasn't able to see it before then. But there are some people in my community who go back to see parts of Iraq now that it's a little more stable.

David Valerio: How did that community shape you growing up?

Candice Ammori: Both of my parents are one of ten, and most of their siblings had on average three to five kids. I'm one of five, the youngest. I have over 60 first cousins who all lived within 20 miles of each other in Metro Detroit. Most of those cousins have had kids. The extended family keeps extending, and it's really awesome. We've actually held a lot of those family ties together

I don't live in Michigan right now, and I'm one of maybe 5% of this large extended family that lives outside of Michigan. Once you're there, it's a center of gravity that's really comforting. It's really nice to have so much community, especially in the American context where it's not super common to have giant families or built-in communities the way we do.

It definitely was central to my upbringing. Sometimes people who've met my parents have been like, "Oh, I didn't realize that they're so foreign." Because I'm in some ways very American. I look pretty Anglo-Saxon. When I lived in Cambodia, they were like, "But you're not American-American. Where are you from?" They could tell I wasn't European-American. But pretty often, people just assume I'm a white American with a white American experience. That's how I get treated and that's very much part of my identity too.

At the same time, growing up was different in terms of the food I ate, the language we were spoke at home. We spoke Chaldean, which is modern-day Aramaic. All these things were pretty different compared to the people around me.

David Valerio: Tell me about your journey to where you are now. You have a diverse background: data science, startups, sustainability. Now you're working on climate.

Candice Ammori: When I was younger, I loved the environment and animals. My mom was like, "You're gonna be a doctor, because you're smart and you like science." And I was like, "I don't know about that." She was like, "Oh, you like animals. Be an animal doctor." I was like, "I still don't know if that's quite it."

In undergrad, I viscerally remember my sister Lavonne being like, "You should be an engineer. You like science and math." And I was like, "It's on North Campus." So I didn't do engineering because it was too far away. I wanted to play rugby and hang out on central campus, so I studied environmental science.

Then I got involved in a business school because I thought social impact businesses were really interesting. I ended up graduating with a policy undergrad, because I was thinking about multiple pathways to having an impact.

I ended up going to Singapore after that as part of Princeton in Asia, where I taught business communications. I went to Cambodia and worked in microfinance, to test out this social impact business question. Can this make an impact? Can this be what I really focus in? For community reasons, really, I went back to Michigan. Got involved in tech, but also thought I might be a business professor and did some case studies with a business professor for a bit.

I moved to New York and really got into tech because it was there. Everything was tech. That wasn't as thoughtful of a reason, honestly, but it worked out well and allowed me to be in New York. I learned a lot about AI during that time. There are actually a lot of similarities between my understanding of AI and my understanding of climate. What I noticed back in 2015 was that AI was rapidly getting better, and it was only going to keep doing so, exponentially.

I got really interested in the ethics of AI. I wasn’t necessarily thinking that it was gonna take over and kill us all, but there was definitely an obvious issue in that it takes observational data, which is as sexist, homophobic, and racist as the general population, and puts it through a feedback loop that can sometimes make it more of negative qualities. There are many case studies of judges saying, "Well, we're gonna use AI to make objective decisions on someone's sentence."

That term "objective" isn't necessarily correct when you're using observational data that's not objective; it's subjective. Then it might even be more biased than the original data given the algorithms. I got really fascinated by that. I ended up deciding I was going to go back to school for a statistics PhD to understand the math and algorithms side of AI so I could understand what to do about the ethical questions surrounding AI.

But then the 2018 IPCC report came out and indicated the world was going to hit multiple tipping points if incredibly quick changes weren’t made before 2030. That report really shook me because, going back to my childhood, I was always interested in the environment and was very conscious of it. It was mind-blowing to think about these tipping points and how now is the time to do as much as we can to avoid them so we don't get to a place that we can't turn back from. I've been in the climate space squarely since that time.

David Valerio: That's such an amazing and interesting background. A tying thread here is positive impact for people and planet. Where do you think that grounding comes from?

Candice Ammori: I think it has always been there. My dad passed away, but my mom is still alive. They were both really good-hearted people. I think that was probably a really big grounding. My four older siblings also are really good, solid humans, which I think does so much as the youngest child. Our community really took care of each other. I think that was a core thing I took away from my community.

But I would also think in these ways of "How do we help the poor? How do we make everyone around us happier and better, and have the core needs that they need?" I grew up in metro Detroit, and by the time I was around, my parents had some stability in their professional and financial lives, which was great. My older siblings didn't have as much, but I was like, "Well, great, what about everyone else?"

When I was young, I remember my parents would say things like, "Yes, but you also have to worry about yourself. You also have to take care of yourself," which I think is still a lesson that I'm learning these days.

I don't know if that's the best or healthiest way to live. I don't know if always wondering how we can "change the world" and thinking in these larger systems that are so complex and that one person can't shift is the healthiest way to live. I think small groups of people can actually shift it, but I don't want to come across as sounding like I think that's actually the healthiest or best way to live.

I'm working on a transition myself where I'm thinking through local impacts I can make where I live right now, instead of these really large change-the-world, change-these-larger-systems ways. I’m wondering if focusing on the local can actually do a little bit more and push a little bit more, maybe make that bigger ripple effect than constant focusing on the larger picture.

David Valerio: That makes sense that your family and community would shape you that way. I've been going through a similar transformation, re-evaluating my values and approach. I've also always felt like I wanted to have an impact, make the world a better place. But likewise, I've had those grandiose visions of "if I can do X, Y or Z, then the whole system changes."

I think partially from being married and having two kids now, I've become more grounded in the real day-to-day, everyday things that I do. I've come to realize that system-level change for the good has to include the local bottom-scale effort as well. You can't force good from on high. Improvement come from our daily interactions with the people around us: with my wife, with my kids, with my community, with my church. Then like you said, there's that ripple effect that spreads outwards

I'm not saying higher-level problem-solving isn't useful. But maybe there's a synthesis here, a balance where in your overall career arc you're striving to solve larger-scale problems, but also recognizing you have a lot of work to do at your very local, smaller scale.

Candice Ammori: Yeah, I think so. I think the smaller scale potentially scales up better than some of the larger scale.

David Valerio: Tell me more about getting involved with On Deck, starting their climate tech fellowship, and now founding Climate Vine.

Candice Ammori: In 2018, I read the report. I had just started grad school, and I ended up doing a two-year master's instead of finishing with a PhD, mostly because I was like, "I need to get into climate now." There's no time to waste. I learned some great skills in the grad program.

In 2020, I had no idea what I was going to do, but I knew it was going to be in climate. Everything was an option. Activism was an option. Policy work was an option. Starting a company, maybe a local business or something was an option.

I had known On Deck's founder, Eric Torenberg, from Michigan. We met each other in our first class. It was called Global Change, actually, which is funny. It's a class about environmental change. They were starting to grow. He just texted one day and was like, "Hey, I know that you're focused on climate now. Do you want to start our climate fellowship? We're gonna expand into different areas. Climate could be one of our first verticals. What do you think?"

I chatted with him and was like, "Why not?" It just landed in my lap. I was intrigued by the idea of being able to build something from the ground up. When I joined, I think I was number 10. On Deck grew to like 350 to 400, some huge number during the year and a half that I was there.

I got to spend the first couple of months setting up the playbook for how On Deck would grow different fellowships and what they would look like. Then I got to create the playbook for what vertical fellowships would look like. What was really important for me in the climate one was that it was a place to break down silos.

What I knew about climate so far was that it was incredibly complex. It's a complex system. It touches everything, and we're not gonna solve it through tech alone. On Deck was a very technical fellowship. It's a tech startup. The grounding of it was in helping tech people find co-founders.

For the climate fellowship, it was incredibly important to me that we had policy, activism, entrepreneurship, investment, Global South, frontline workforce people. All these different people in climate talking to each other, and sure, talking about solutions, but also diagnosing the problem in really smart ways that any one of those types of folks wouldn't be able to do alone. The policy folks wouldn't be able to totally diagnose a problem in the same way that they would if they have the input of the investors, the tech people, the Global South folks.

In that first iteration, it was also 2020 when the pandemic had hit and a ton of people were trying to get into climate, reevaluating their own impact, their own life, their own professional trajectory. Climate was hot. Chris Sacca, who's a big-time tech investor, started Lowercarbon Capital, and I think that was one of the major signals to the tech community that climate is a real vertical. It's a real space that has real money and real interest and real potential

We ended up, over the two years of the climate tech fellowship, having over 650 members. We had dozens of companies start, hundreds of millions of dollars raised. The thing that was really important to me was that we had people in the room who were climate experts of all kinds alongside people who could bring in expertise from outside climate that would be helpful. We had billion-dollar founders who had exited companies and knew how to scale. We had really impressive hardware and software engineers. People who knew what they were doing and could scale up companies in important ways that I thought would be helpful in the climate space. But also activists to ground some of those things in what's actually happening in communities.

That was On Deck Climate Tech. Climate Vine is, in some ways, a continuation of the work we did there in the sense that it's really focused on individuals who are climate professionals who are probably in some sort of career transition. It might be that they're working on their company and trying to grow it or get investment. It might be that they're looking to change roles or areas.

It's still got this community, de-siloing, having really raw conversations about climate and going really deep in it. Those are all still core to Climate Vine today.

David Valerio: You mentioned bridging silos a lot. How do you go about doing that, and what have been your key learnings doing this work for almost five years now?

Candice Ammori: At the highest level, it is about resonating with the right people. Not everyone is siloed, actually. Some people totally work across the ecosystem, have all the diverse voices they need. Those are great people, andoften they'll join Climate Vine as well because they're just interested in continuing to grow it out.

The type of person who isn't interested in getting different diverse viewpoints or expanding beyond the network they have right now won't totally resonate with Climate Vine. Step one is just saying, "Hey, this is what we do. This is what we're about. Here are our values." We think about long-term thinking. We think about systems change. We think about how we can actually be helpful to each other. How can you give two times more than you hope to receive?

Step one is really that messaging, but step two is attracting the right people and a big part of that is the application process. Our general acceptance rate has always been about 20%. A lot of that process comes down to, first, experience. We want them to be an expert in something. Once we've hit that level of yes, you're an expert in something, personally I like people who are experts in things that are not super mainstream climate tech. I like the experts in water and experts in biodiversity, because that's not, at least today, core to the climate tech space.

Step three is: are you a giver? Are you open to being in this community and giving back and collaborating? Do you have a really collaborative mindset?

I honestly think 80% of the success of something like Climate Vine or On Deck Climate Tech is really focusing on the expertise of the people that come in, their values, and whether or not they resonate with what we're building and who we are. Then it's about getting the right diversity of people in the group.

When I started On Deck Climate Tech, I was very clear that I only wanted half of the people in each cohort, maximum, to be new to climate. 50% had to have a deep expertise in climate. Then I needed 10% activists, 10% policy, etc. I would go through and search LinkedIn or search MCJ and be like, "Who's a PhD here? Can I reach out to them and tell them more about this?"

I think 80% is getting the right people in the room. It's so rare to have a smallish group of people who are all really engaged, who have such diverse backgrounds, but who are all working on the same thing and all have the same values.

Then I would say the 20% is what do we do from there? We have expert speakers who come in. We've had Jigar Shah, Sarah Carney, Dawn Lippert, and others come and speak to our cohorts. We've had amazing activists come and speak.

We do a lot of community connections. We do these mastermind groups where I try to match people who have slightly different backgrounds but who can help each other move forward. That's another way we bridge the silos.

We also have member-led events, which I think are one of the more important aspects of Climate Vine. Because everyone is an expert and they're all working on really cool things, they can come in and say, "Hey, here's what I'm working on. Here's what I've learned," or "Here's what I'm working on. How can you help?" Usually it's a mix of both.

When you get a small group of people that are really diverse, all working on the same things with the same values, I think there is some sort of magic that can happen that is pretty rare in other spaces. It takes so much intentionality to get that amount of diversity in the same room.

David Valerio: That's an interesting answer. I wouldn't have thought it's 80% filtering and selection for the right people in the first place, and then 20% of the work is all the programming you facilitate after they join. What are the key things you're looking for? How do you judge that in a person through the application process?

Candice Ammori: The day one community that we brought in were really important in shaping the day five community that we have today. I was really intentional about that first group and about who would be in it. I actually remember having conversations with someone who I thought would be a speaker, and I was like, "Hey, do you wanna be a speaker?" And he was like, "No, I actually wanna be a part of this." And I was like, "Great, let's do it." He ended up being an amazing member.

Then I spoke to someone else who I thought would make a great member, and she was like, "No, I should be a speaker." And I was like, "Okay, let's figure this out and bring you into the room." Part of my filtering was for humility. Are you willing to be a member with everyone else and know that everyone is in this together and we're doing this together? It's some of those subtle things that I would watch out for and look for in different members.

I have a very unique perspective on the types of people and the types of work and the types of personalities that mix well with something like Climate Vine, and I can't outsource that. I've tried so many times to just write down on a piece of paper "What are we looking for so that someone else can do it?" We've had great people on the team and they've done great work, but because I've been in climate so long, I can see things that they've done where I'm like, "Oh, that's unique, that's interesting, that points to some depth there and some expertise that someone else might miss."

I don't know if that helps, because it's hard for me to articulate it even though I've tried to do so for so long.

David Valerio: No, I think that it does help. One key thing it sounds like is humility, willingness to give, and being charitable, but then the second part of the answer is even more interesting where it's about tacit knowledge. It's your curation skills. It's the embodied experiences you've had interacting with all these people and seeing what's worked and what hasn't worked that can't really be formally turned into a set of rules that someone else can apply.

Candice Ammori: Good. I'm glad. It's haunted me at times. A lot of this work, I think, I end up having to do, and that makes it in some ways more special. Not because I'm special, but because it's all through one lens and it's all cohesive, and I have a certain vision. If someone else had a different vision, that would work really well for their project.

It haunts me a bit how involved I have to be and how unscalable some of this is, but I think that's actually part of the magic of what we're doing.

David Valerio: It doesn't seem scalable and I think that's a good thing. Obviously from a tech startup mindset, everybody's thinking about exponential growth. But there are plenty of businesses out there that are not scalable in the tech sense but they're still very good businesses bringing value to the world. I find it more interesting that you can't scale it.

Candice Ammori: No, I think it's totally right. This is one of those businesses that loses the magic when it's scaled inappropriately. There are probably some ways to scale it appropriately, but inappropriately it really loses its magic. I come from a community of mostly small businesses, so I think there's something there that makes sense too.

David Valerio: I would love for you to lay out the parallels between how you think about AI and climate that you alluded to earlier.

Candice Ammori: Fundamentally, I think my grand theory is, and I shy away from saying this because it's a pretty big statement that I've felt since probably 2015: Capitalism in its current form will not survive both AI and climate change. It might not have survived either one alone, but the confluence of both of them makes it seem like systems will have to shift because people need to survive.

I sort of pause in saying that because it's such a big statement. Who knows when it will happen, but my sense of it was that things were going to start moving more quickly than is comfortable. We often talk about these things impacting our kids. I just had a sense that once they hit some sort of tipping points, whether it's the technological advances in AI or the very physical tipping points in climate, things would start moving really quickly. That would require changes at a systems level that might be really uncomfortable for everyone.

David Valerio: I like that. I'm a guy who likes big ideas and hot takes. I likewise am noticing some sort of system change and sensed it for a while.

From my own perspective, it seems like we’re just gonna ride this tiger until it dies. The only way out is through. I've come around to hesitant eco-modernist view on the subject, even though I used to be more attracted to degrowth as an option.

Candice Ammori: What does eco-modernist mean?

David Valerio: It's associated with this organization called The Breakthrough Institute. Essentially, they think we need to innovate our way out of resource constraints.

I'm less progress for progress's sake, because what is progress? That's a value question, and plenty of people have different values about what constitutes progress. But I don't see humans or society deciding to stop consuming things anytime soon. If that's true, what does that mean we need to do?

Candice Ammori: I would consider myself to be attempting to bridge the gap myself also. I contain a lot of contradictions. Being Catholic, Iraqi, and queer, that's a contradiction in my community. Being a biostatistician who runs a community. Being very white American, but also having this not super white American experience growing up.

I can get along and agree with both the most radical activists and the most radical technologists. I’m not onboard with Elon Musk’s go to Mars push, as I don’t think that’s going to work. But for the most part, I can really understand both sides of this and empathize. I think there's truth on both sides.

One side, the activist side, says we need degrowth, we need to break apart capitalism. The tech side says we live in capitalism, so let's continue doing it and we need to innovate our way out of this. Both sides are like, things are so bad that we need to move quickly, but they pproach it in different ways. Breaking the system versus working within the system.

Where I've landed, coming from 2008 when I started in environmental science and the professors were pretty clear that we've had the climate science around for decades and no one is doing anything about it... They were really pessimistic. It just got really negative. I was like, "Cool, but what can we do?" Business, policy, engineering, where can we go?

Today, I look at the charts and our progress to date. Even just from 2020 to today, we're using more fossil fuels than ever. We're more entrenched in the systems that climate people are trying to get out of than ever. Trends are not looking good, even in the last four years when climate tech has been everywhere. We've had more climate disasters.

I think I've probably had a similar shift to you, which is that we have to go through, and some breaks are going to occur. Until then, we have to do what we can. Build community, focus on local action. Continue to talk about the big ideas, but understand that we're set up for some tough times.

It feels similar to AI actually. We're not gonna stop building it. We're in a race to keep building it, and maybe there will be a breaking point. Maybe some of that breaking point will be that enough people's jobs have been taken away that they can't support themselves, then the economic paradigm will have to shift.That's how I see those things coming together.

David Valerio: What's your vision for AI going forward? Are you a doomer? What's your P(doom)? Or are you an optimist?

Candice Ammori: I think some of the super doomerism actually plays into tech's hand. Whether or not it's true, it can be helpful as the CEO of OpenAI or any of these AI companies to say, "This is so powerful, they might just destroy us all." So don't pay attention to the fact that there are no laws today on how to use AI. Let's focus on the doomerism.

I think there are compelling arguments that AI might do that. But I also think that climate change is coming for us in a way that might make it impossible for AI, unless we have fusion or something, to get all the energy that it needs.

The core fear is that AI will need so much energy that, in the same way that we have made so many animals extinct or endangered because we just want the land... It's not like we hate these animals and want to kill them all. It's actually just we need all these resources and unfortunately we're taking it from these other animals. A byproduct is that they become endangered or extinct. For the most part, it's not malicious.

In this case, there's an argument that maybe AI will end up doing that because they need so much energy and there are eight billion people that have energy in them. We're like their dinosaur fossil fuel source.

I think that's really interesting. Because I'm so focused on climate change, that's where I land. What I'm trying to parse through is where does AI intersect with climate? We understand the climate impacts of one ChatGPT prompt. Maybe DeepSeek makes that a little less, but it might not. There are all these nuances of actually how much energy and water use it requires. That's obviously one big downside.

Then there's the other big upside of how AI could help us make the grid more resilient, speed through the interconnection queue, and help get a bunch of off-grid microgrids that actually could connect to the grid? Can it help us think through these complex systems that are really hard for one individual to think through, but maybe a bunch of LLMs can?

My take is I'm waiting to see, but I think when it comes to the human side, things are going to change so quickly. They already are changing so quickly. Whether AI is going to kill us all or not, it's still going to dramatically shift our social structures, same with climate change. I don't think either of them will kill us all.

David Valerio: That's basically my view as well. I think of AI as another general-purpose technology that humans have created, similar to agriculture, metallurgy, whatever. But the closest analog to it I think about is the printing press and the newfound ability for humans to transfer the written word to a lot more people.

That was really cool and does tons of great things. I'm glad the printing press exists. I like to read, I like learning. But then you also recognize that after the printing press, there were the wars of religion in Europe, and those were brutal. One might say the printing press allowed the Protestant Reformation to really take off because Luther's ideas and others were able to spread so much faster than they would've in the pre-printing press era.

I think we're in for something analogous to that. The specific shape of it will be different. But I don't think it's predictable a priori. There's this version of "Oh, this thing is smarter than us. If it's so much more brilliant than us, then somehow that leads to everything ending." I've never seen a rigorous argument or clear chain of logic showing how that actually works in the real world.

I think that might be because I grew up in Houston around the energy industry. I see how complicated moving atoms around is and how big that industry is. That's embodied work. You have to have a human driving machinery. That's all stuff that has to be moved around the physical world. I don't see how a smarter LLM magically eliminates all those jobs and kills all those people in the physical world by somehow manifesting itself outside the computer.

I do think it's gonna be super interesting and I personally find the tools really valuable. But I view them as just another tool in humanity's tool belt. We're gonna find interesting use cases for it to address climate and other big issues.

But I don't fundamentally see the position of the human person changing. I think this also comes back to my faith. Catholics have a very high view of the human person as being made in the image and likeness of God. There's something special about us, and part of that specialness is our embodied nature. We're not just disembodied intellects.

All that being said, I think we're on the same page in terms of the humility of recognizing that we don't know what's gonna happen in the future, but it certainly seems like there's gonna be some interesting times ahead.

Candice Ammori: Yeah. Going back to the spirituality thing, something I have tried to lean into a little bit more is to just accept reality. Accepting that things are changing really quickly, and that's just the truth. There's no good or bad to it We can prepare and plan and do those things, but ultimately, we definitely can't predict what is going to happen. There's a place for fighting back, of course, there's a place for activism and changing things, but I think it comes after actually fundamentally understanding and accepting whatever reality we're in, instead of consistently fighting against it.

David Valerio: Absolutely. Or envisioning different realities that aren't the true one and then trying to do stuff based off that mistaken assumption.

Final question as we wrap up: What does a good life look like for you and how will you attempt to live that good life going forward?

Candice Ammori: I spent a lot of my 20s and a little bit of my 30s internationally. It started in undergrad when I would get these scholarships to go abroad, because my parents were pretty traditional and wouldn't easily say yes. But I'd be like, "Well, it was paid for, it was a scholarship," and they'd be like, "Okay, you can go."

This one was to Mexico as part of a class about food and global sovereignty. We went to Mexico and hung out with Zapatistas. There was this guy, Marco, who was their commander that had died He was well known in the Zapatista community for fighting against the government so they could have some sort of sovereignty for their indigenous community.

We hung out, without really realizing it until the end, with his driver. At the end, he said something like, "I know that I'm the next target." We ended this 10-day trip with this guy who we all came to love, recognizing that he might be killed not too long after that. I wish I knew what happened. This was more than a dozen years ago.

One thing that he said that stuck with me was, "We care about the good life, and that's not the better life. A lot of you in America or around the world think about the better life, but we just want the good life. What that means is we have enough and we're happy. We do enough and we play enough. It's about enoughness."

I think about that less often than I wish, but often enough to ground myself in the fact that even though I have this pretty negative view of what's to come... I think I'm pretty grounded in the science, the math, the predictions that scientists have made that have been pretty spot on so far and they just continue to probably be pretty spot on. They're not looking good. I'm grounded in that future vision that, at least in the short term, things will get bad. I'm working on that longer term vision of what do we do when things break down or how do we take advantage of those opportunities.

But in that short to medium term, I don't have the best perspective. What I do try to ground myself in is: I have enough for right now, I'm happy enough. I have great community, great relationships, and a great family. To me that is the good life.

One thing I've dug deeply into over last year is this guy named Michael Singer. He wrote this book called The Surrender Experiment. He essentially decided that he was gonna surrender to the flow of life, this life force. I think that life force is God.

Being able to follow where life leads us, and saying yes to that thing that's in front of us, knowing that it's in front of us for some reason.=We all have such different experiences and life paths. To say yes to what's in front of us. To accept reality and serve the moment as well as we can. Serve the people in front of us as well as we can. Let that just be it. If I could lean more into that, which I try to, then I think I'd be really living the good life.

In this episode I speak with Grant Mulligan, a wildlife biologist by training who has worked across conservation finance, impact investing, and environmental progress. He currently writes the newsletter Progress Accumulation and is fellow at The Roots of Progress Institute. Grant brings a unique perspective as an atheist deeply committed to environmental stewardship, drawing on Camus's absurdism to find meaning in conservation work. We discuss:

• How his atheist worldview, grounded in Camus's absurdism, shapes his joyful approach to environmental work and finding meaning through action rather than belief.
• His journey from counting endangered species in the Arizona desert to working on conservation finance at The Nature Conservancy.
• Why the shift from zero-sum to positive-sum thinking is essential for effective environmentalism that includes human flourishing.
• How spending summers watching birds with his grandparents in Wisconsin led to discovering Aldo Leopold and a career in wildlife biology.
• The critical role of economic thinking in conservation, from groundwater banking to renewable energy siting.
• Why courage and incremental action, not grand ideas, are the limiting factors in environmental progress.

David Valerio: How would you describe your spirituality and the way it shapes your work?

Grant Mulligan: In a religious context, I'd be considered as an atheist bu most. I don't believe in God. When I think about spirituality, I often start with religion. But if we zoom out a little bit, if spirituality is the answer to the question of how do I live, I think The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus is probably the closest depiction of reality for me. "One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

Visakan has a great meme on Twitter of a sailor sailing between two extremes: on the left side, "life is devastatingly meaningless," and on the right side, "life is excruciatingly meaningful." We're sailing through the absurdity of life, where we're so trivial but everything matters so much. We only get this one life. Finding things and people to be passionate about and work on—sailing through it joyfully.

When I think about spirituality, that's a huge part of it: living and creating joyfully is at its core. My personal philosophy is grounded in an article by Max Roser, who founded Our World in Data, called "The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better." It had a massive influence on me. We've made the world so much better than it used to be. Our lives have so much more joy and so much less suffering in really substantial ways, but there's still so much we can do.

I wear this necklace of Sisyphus pushing a little pearl that my brother gave me as a reminder. We live great lives and should really be happy, but we still need to enjoy pushing the boulder up the hill every day.

David Valerio: It seems that you think there is no inherent meaning in the world, and that you lean toward an absurdist worldview. But instead of taking the nihilist approach to the situation, you take the optimistic one. If there's no meaning, I need to make my own meaning. Is that how you would describe it?

Grant Mulligan: That's exactly right. I think you do have to create your own meaning, and it can happen in really small interactions day by day. I have a two-year-old and a four-year-old. I find meaning in them everyday. I find tremendous meaning in my work.

A lot of my spirituality, and how it connects to my work, comes from time I spent in nature and lessons I learned moving through nature. The closest I've ever gotten to peace, transcendence, or equanimity came from when I'm in nature. I find meaning in those landscapes and places. I don't ascribe to them religious meaning or divinity, but I think a lot of the feelings are very similar. We can create value and meaning in our day-to-day lives through our actions and relationships.

David Valerio: Where do you think those feelings of beauty and transcendence in nature come? Is it evolutionary?

Grant Mulligan: Richard Prum, an ornithologist at Yale, has some great research on beauty and how it came to be in nature. I've always thought of it as evolutionary. When I go to a beautiful landscape, I get this sense of "we can make a life here, we can survive here."

But there's also awe and grandeur. I grew up in Arizona, and even in the desert, which is a harsh environment where you wouldn't necessarily say we're going to have an easy life, there's something awe-inspiring about it.

People are drawn to beauty. Look back through history at the level of intricacy in lace-making, painting, architecture. People are drawn to making beautiful things, seeing what they can create. There's something in nature, this conversation you have with the world around you, that is really uplifting. A lot of the language in nature writing mirrors writing in the Bible, the Quran, or the Dhammapada. There's overlap because these feelings of us being small in this grand world, and the beauty that elevates us, are very much interrelated.

David Valerio: Tell me about your personal background with spirituality. You classify yourself as an atheist now, but what was your journey like?

Grant Mulligan: I grew up around religion. My mother was raised Catholic. I grew up going to church and was confirmed in a Methodist church. I had really great experiences with religion, honestly. But like a lot of college students, I became a bit of a hardcore atheist when I got to college. It's easy to point at religion and all the bad things and say, "Religion makes people do silly things." The classic black-and-white thinking of a teenager.

I was studying biology at the time and thought, "How both the Bible and evolution be true?" I thought there was much more evidence on the side of evolution, so I adopted a strongly atheistic viewpoint a la Richard Dawkins.

But that changed because while I was studying biology and becoming a wildlife biologist, I was also reading a lot of religious texts. I was having trouble figuring out how to live. I felt lost and lonely and didn't feel good at things yet. Religion seemed like this playbook for living.

My best friend since kindergarten was Mormon. He was my roommate during my first semester of college, and then he went on a Mormon mission. I thought, "This guy has conviction. He has this book and ways of living that are guiding him." So I went deep on religion. I read the Bible, the Quran, the Analects, the Tao Te Ching. I was trying to understand what they knew that I didn't, whether there was a belief system that could help me function.

Ultimately, it came back to truth for me. I thought there was a lot of truth in these texts about the human condition and how we live. But I couldn't get on board with there being a God. I would pray and couldn't feel anything.

At the same time, I was going out more into nature. Nature had been a huge part of my childhood, spending summers in Wisconsin with my grandparents. These two things fused together. As I was picking up ideas from these texts I started thinking, "That's how I feel when I'm in nature."

Nature became this thing I got deeper into. I was studying it, getting good at it, liked the rewards of knowing more about the world I was moving in. They fused together into this philosophy of how I want to live my life, what I want to study, what I want to work on forever. It was transformative in my late teens and early 20s, and has continued to now being almost 40.

David Valerio: How did you originally fall in love with nature and decide to study wildlife biology?

Grant Mulligan: This is one where my grandmother would tell you it's divine intervention. It certainly feels that way in the story.

I grew up spending summers with my grandparents in Wisconsin countryside. My favorite activity was filling up their bird feeders. They had feeders all around the house. There was a thistle feeder where goldfinches would show up in this amazing color I'd never seen before. A seed feeder out in the yard where cardinals and blue jays would come. I could sit for hours watching these birds, the robins running around in big green fields.

I really came to love spending time outdoors. It was always where I felt most at peace: outside listening to birds, walking through the forest, running around. That was something I was naturally attracted to.

In college, I was studying biochemistry. I was struggling and not having fun. I went to buy books for my second semester and A Sand County Almanac was on the shelf as required reading. My grandfather had given me it during my last summer in Wisconsin with an inscription inside: "To remind you of your summers in Wisconsin and how nature is a part of us."

I'd read the book when he gave it to me. It was beautifully written and I felt so connected to it. But I thought it was just some book about where my grandpa lived. I had no idea it was this seminal work in conservation.

I immediately signed up for the class. It was a renewable natural resources class about how you could get a career in wildlife management and conservation, work for the Forest Service… Things I'd never been aware of. I was so awestruck that you could do this for a career. I immediately marched to my counselor's office and changed my major. It was pure luck finding that book on the shelf that day. It set the course for the rest of my career and life.

David Valerio: It's amazing how much serendipity plays a role in every human life. What would your life have looked like if your grandfather hadn't given you that book?

Grant Mulligan: That serendipity has extended to so many places for me. In that major, I met a professor who saw something in me even though I was a struggling student. He encouraged me, gave me confidence, and ultimately he is the reason I went to graduate school. I met my wife during my first week of graduate school.

It's all these random little moments that you open yourself up to. If it wasn't for finding that book and that professor, there's a good chance I'd have become a high school science teacher or an accountant like my parents. Nothing wrong with that, but all the opportunities I've had since then came from finding something I could love and be passionate about and share with others. When you have that type of passion, the serendipity finds you.

David Valerio: Tell me about your early career in wildlife biology.

Grant Mulligan: I graduated from Arizona State in 2011. It was an incredibly difficult job market right after the financial recession. There were state hiring freezes and not a lot going on economically.

I was fortunate to land an internship at the Phoenix Zoo working on breeding and releasing endangered species back to the wild. Not the part where people come to see giraffes, but the back part of the show where we bred black-footed ferrets, Chiricahua leopard frogs, and narrow-headed garter snakes for reintroduction. Species native to Arizona that were threatened or endangered. We'd go out in the field, collect animals or their eggs, raise them at the zoo through periods where mortality is really high, and release them back to the wild in high numbers to reestablish populations.

That was seminal for me getting started, but I quickly realized I didn't want to just keep the last of something alive. I wanted to know why they were going extinct in the first place. I didn't feel like there was enough agency in solving these problems. It felt like Band-Aids everywhere.

I moved on to a wildlife technician role with the Arizona Game and Fish Department doing surveys for endangered species. To comply with the Endangered Species Act, you have to survey. We surveyed a lot at military establishments. I was basically a glorified counter of things, hiking 15-plus miles a day in summer in the Arizona desert. In those harsh conditions, you get a lot of time to think. I started mapping my course: what would it look like to try to solve these problems at a bigger scale?

It was a great job. I got paid to hike around in nature and play with critters, which was exactly what I wanted. But ultimately I wanted to move upstream and focus more on problem-solving.

David Valerio: Often the roles most available in environmental science are about minimizing losses. Mitigation after the fact. How did you shift from that line of work to trying to positively impact the natural world?

Grant Mulligan: I came to believe that ecology and economics are deeply intertwined. The consequences we were seeing for nature were downstream of human economic decisions. You had to put people more firmly into the picture.

For all the talk about sustainability and solving climate change in my initial education, it was very focused on what was happening to the natural system and negative stories. Not a positive vision, not talking about ways that we had solved problems, not talking about how countries getting richer means they have more to invest in conservation.

I went back to grad school and focused on business and the environment. How could you create businesses or opportunities where the more good you do, the more money you make? The best example is renewable energy. The more clean energy you create, the more money you make. The more money you make, the more clean energy you can deploy. A virtuous circle.

I was fortunate to have professor named Eli Fenichel, who saw how I was with people and my ability to create positive visions of the future. He helped me get into the Yale School of Forestry, which now the Yale School of the Environment. There I met people who were deeply passionate, incredibly ambitious, and really smart.

That journey led me to The Nature Conservancy, where I worked on cutting-edge projects blending finance and conservation. I've kept moving upstream piece by piece to sell and build this more positive vision for environmentalism.

David Valerio: Why do you think environmentalists often don't think about how humans are integrated into the natural world? We like to focus on "nature" as being different from humanity, but the two are obviously interconnected.

Grant Mulligan: I think it's hard. It's like the Fitzgerald quote about genius being able to keep two competing ideas in your mind at the same time and still function. It's hard to believe we're part of nature when you leave the city to spend Saturday on a hike and get solitude. It's hard not to feel like they're two separate things, the human environment and the natural environment. You get very different feelings in each one.

Also, when you walk through nature repeatedly as a biologist, you start to be more observant. You're trained to observe what's happening around you. Most people are born into the world as it is. They don't question where things come from. Where the food on their table comes from, and the full supply chain involved in making that happen.

There's a John Collison quote that goes “Everything you see around you is someone's passion project." Someone got into asphalt and figured out how to make materials for roads. Some engineer laid out where roads would go. Most people don't see those things.

Nature has had the biggest impact on my life by making me observe more. Everywhere I go, I notice birds. This morning taking out the trash, I heard a flicker, chickadee, and nuthatch. There are great horned owls nesting down the street that I hear calling. They're marking territory and looking for each other, as spring is almost here.

Nature is real to me. I have names for things, sounds call me into it. My neighbors taking out the trash probably had no idea birds were chirping. The patience to observe and understand connections, like where materials come from, just isn't in most people's day-to-day purview.

David Valerio: Tell me about your work at The Nature Conservancy on conservation finance. What were your key learnings?

Grant Mulligan: I started at The Nature Conservancy as executive assistant to the executive director in California, which was probably the best job I've ever had for learning how to be a professional and conservation. I got to spend time with the leadership team and see how they approached problems.

One project was creating a first-of-its-kind partnership with private equity firms. The Nature Conservancy would be embedded in their funds as an impact advisor, helping set conservation targets and rules before investments to ensure that at least no harm was done.

I raised my hand when the idea was being brought to the board and said, "This is what I'd really like to do." I got that opportunity and spent close to four years in absolutely insane learning.

What became clear was my strong conviction that conservation and environmental good can be very compatible with economic returns. But historically, people were framing them as absolute opposites in a way that was holding the field back.

Two examples of what the Nature Conservancy did brilliantly:

First, their team’s work on permitting and siting for renewable energy in California used science and data to say, "Here are places with endangered species where we don't want to plow up land for solar or wind. But here are marginal agricultural lands that aren't as important." Certainly there would be impacts, but by prioritizing land they identified those that weren’t as critical to biodiversity. "If you site renewables in those places, you can speed up permitting, get them built faster, avoid getting bogged down in courts."

That's exactly what conservation should do. Speed up economic development, get more clean energy on the grid, but do so in a green way. You stop saying no to everything and start looking for ways to grow and say yes.

Second, on my project specifically, we worked on groundwater banking. You take marginal ag land out of commission, take the water rights being used to grow something uneconomic like alfalfa and capture that water in ponds that sink through sandy soils into an aquifer. Then you can sell that water to other farmers who can use it elsewhere.

You've created a market and rationalized water use. But for conservation, you could build those groundwater banks to the right depth for migratory birds to use while migrating from Alaska to Chile on the Pacific Flyway. The San Joaquin Valley had 90-plus percent of its wetlands converted to agriculture. All the lakes and ponds birds would stop at were destroyed.

Instead of conservation having to buy lands and operate them as wetlands 100% of the year, which incredibly expensive and entails high opportunity costs, you can create groundwater banks with high economic use that also create pop-up habitats when flooded in spring and fall.

I started seeing more of these solutions from really smart people with great understandings of science, economics, and food systems. It gave me hope that if we could get more money to these types of things and deploy more ideas like this, we could accelerate human and environmental progress side by side.

David Valerio: The renewable energy example is particularly interesting. The traditional conservationist view to just say "no,” those projects will kill birds and desert tortoises. But that's not pragmatic. We need energy. How did that shift your mindset?

Grant Mulligan: You hit on something really overlooked in environmentalism: the need for positive-sum environmentalism as opposed to zero-sum thinking.

Zero-sum thinking says if we let anything get built, we've lost nature for good. If you take a positive-sum approach, you see different solutions. Zero-sum shrinks your solution set to be very small. Positive-sum thinking lets human ingenuity and nature's resilience work together in innovative ways.

There's a bit of cutting off your nose to spite your face in zero-sum thinking. You can stop renewable energy projects, make it hell to connect to the grid or build transmission lines across sensitive areas, but all you're doing is perpetuating climate change and fossil fuel use. People only have the existing infrastructure available, so they continue relying on current methods, which is ostensibly the problem you're trying to solve.

With positive-sum thinking, you think in net terms. Yes, you may have some negatives, but the positives outweigh it. You can think about local and global trade-offs. Your level and quality of thinking and solutions grow exponentially.

This is the core challenge for environmentalism. Not to overstretch the analogy, but it's like what we discussed about religion. What turns people off is the "you're a sinner, everything is bad, wrathful God" rhetoric. I see the same in classic environmentalism about humanity's role.

What Jesus, the New Testament, and positive-sum environmentalism can do is say, "Actually, there's a greater vision for the world. If we think differently, we can create a positive vision people can be excited about." There's a sort of salvation available to us. You have to give people not just apocalyptic doom and gloom, but something to aspire to. Otherwise you're paralyzed, not thinking through possible solutions. It's not actually a guide to how you live or behave.

I see more signs we're getting to a place with a much more positive vision, but there's still work to make that real and sell it to people.

David Valerio: If you view these problems dogmatically, it's more about rule-following than actual outcomes. Nothing actually happens. Whereas if we accept the world as it is and are pragmatic about how humans can facilitate the economy while growing natural ecologies, it completely shifts the conversation.

Grant Mulligan: Part of that is telling people how much better it's gotten. Malcolm Cochran wrote this brilliant piece about New England forests. The move from horses to cars allowed millions of acres to go back into forest in New England.

If you've hiked there, you walk through what feels like old, dense forest and find stone walls. They're from farmers who plowed up land for pasture because you needed hay and grain to feed horses, which were your transportation, workforce, and how you moved things. Once you switched to cars with more concentrated energy in gasoline, all that land could go back to nature.

Europe has seen major comebacks in mammal populations for similar reasons, there's actually reforestation happening. When you see more countries growing GDP while reducing carbon emissions per capita, you see a world where we can provision for people and give them options.

If you know people must be provisioned, you can be realistic. What's the best way? How do we invest in those technologies? As opposed to just saying "no."

We're on the cusp of potentially rewilding much of the world and bringing nature back to where it hasn't been in millennia, because we can lower human impact even with growing population. That's what gets me out of bed every morning.

David Valerio: Tell me about your journey from The Nature Conservancy to writing Progress Accumulation and becoming a Roots of Progress fellow.

Grant Mulligan: From The Nature Conservancy, I moved to AlTi Tiedemann Global, which is a wealth management firm. It was an unusual jump from nonprofit conservation to for-profit wealth management, but I had the opportunity to contribute to research and conduct due diligence for clients wanting to invest in climate technologies and nature through impact investing.

I'd seen these things working at The Nature Conservancy, but I didn't feel fully fluent in why capital did or didn't go to those strategies. I didn't understand the financial side of things, which was a real gap in my knowledge. So I went to capital allocation to understand: How would we allocate capital to this? What are the barriers?

One big lesson was that people's overly pessimistic approach wasn't just impacting what happened on the ground, it was affecting where dollars went. For instance, people wanting to invest in agriculture and food systems might see "organic" in a pitch and think, "That's impact, that must be good for the world." They were against GMOs or intensification on certain lands.

I thought this was a real miss. Some of the best philanthropic interventions and impact investments came from groups like the Rockefeller Foundation funding Norman Borlaug's research on dwarf wheat that enabled the Green Revolution. I was seeing pessimism creep into where money was going, and knew that pessimism impacts what reaches the ground level. You had to tell the story better.

I became obsessed with progress. Where it comes from, and why we've had environmental progress. I applied to be a Roots of Progress fellow for their blog-building intensive, which was one of the most amazing experiences of my entire life and inspired me to launch my blog.

The idea is to tell positive stories and present data. Not overly optimistic philosophy, but grounded in data, like how Hannah Ritchie does brilliantly in Not the End of the World. She's a hero of mine for showing people the progress we've made, getting them focused on the right problems, and inspiring more people to build.

It's been a way to learn from people, meet you, have these conversations, and explore what my next big work project will be, either in a startup or something else pushing the envelope of these ideas to make them real.

David Valerio: How did environmental pessimism get into the impact investment space? You'd think investment types would be hard on numbers.

Grant Mulligan: There are some key definitions to understand. The impact investor might be the person raising capital and actively making investments in renewable energy or nature-based solutions. But someone has to give them that capital: pension funds, wealth management clients, foundations, endowments, ultra-high-net-worth individuals etc.

Those people don't necessarily have investment backgrounds. Some started companies and became wealthy, and are now figuring out what to do with their money to have a positive impact. Or they inherited money and are trying to figure out what to do. There's a certain level of education that's really important.

Part of it is we've demonized wealth to an incredible extent. We love to tear down people who built amazing technologies and companies that supplied goods and wellbeing worldwide, vilifying them for having money. I think a big part of impact investing is almost investing as recompense. "I'm sorry I have this money, I need to give it away." That's the negative version.

The positive version is: "I see things that are bad in the world, I have this resource, I want to use it positively and align with my values." Almost every single person I came across in impact investing is coming from a positive place. They're good people really trying. We make it very hard on them in some ways.

But then things like “organic” become difficult. There's a price premium, so we think it must be better. Someone talks about using fewer inputs and it's all great. In many cases, organic really is great. But the challenge is if you lower crop yields, you need more land to grow the same crop. For a farmer to make their living, instead of 100 acres, maybe they need 150. They don't realize the driver of emissions from land is land conversion. Actually, we might want to intensify production in certain areas.

That starts to clash with moral judgments, values, things they've been taught and care about. It's a really complicated space. There are layers and layers of complexity when it comes to where that marginal dollar flows next.

David Valerio: We're talking about the power of ideas influencing capital allocations and real-world issues. How do you think about getting into the world of ideas and shifting the conversation?

Grant Mulligan: It took me years to get to this question. Part of why I went into capital allocation was thinking money was the problem: if we just had more money for these things, we'd be better off. Environmental philanthropy gets something like 5-6% of all philanthropic dollars in the US. It's a really small portion of impact investing.

What I came to believe is it's actually about ideas. It's about good businesses and what you can actually do. Not pie in the sky, but people concretely thinking about day-to-day challenges, how to build a market, execute well, and think about financial sustainability alongside ecological sustainability.

I started to view ideas as much more meaningful in a David Deutsch Beginning of Infinity way: good ideas replace bad ideas. If you can show something works in these memetic environments of how capital flows, people get interested.

Everyone has a different way to contribute. The Institute for Progress thinks about permitting reform and how NEPA limits clean energy. People at The Nature Conservancy do critical work in local communities identifying important areas for conversation. These ideas start linking up. One person solves one part, hits a constraint, solves it there. Someone else hits another constraint.

The limiting factor is courage. It's ideas, willingness to start a new business, find a compelling idea even if not perfect, build it out, and let this ecosystem spread the idea.

Writing makes these ideas more legible to myself first. Twenty-plus years of experience… I'm trying to figure out how to say it succinctly, understand it, tease out true lessons. But I'm also writing for actual people working in these fields to subtly change their perception, add nuance, get them thinking more positively, maybe think about a new idea in their sphere. The hope is that snowballs over time.

People get caught up in the one big idea. “If I spread this one big idea or start this one company, I'll be successful.” But there are so many smaller ways. You just have to start. Action changes everything. Any little piece you do to spread an idea, help one client allocate capital differently, get one person who reads your blog to think about managing a forest differently—all those things compound over time.

I'm trying to play the compounding game. That's what Progress Accumulation comes from. Hhow do you slowly accumulate all these to the point where over 200 years, you see massive change?

David Valerio: The end state is only reached by doing small, individual day-to-day things. Becoming a better person, seeing a better world, these abstract questions can only be addressed by becoming better yourself, interacting better with others. It's the holistic interconnections between individual actions that leads to that large graph of progress.

People like going after the big idea because they don't actually have to do anything in their day-to-day life. But real change requires changing your way of being and how you interact with people.

Grant Mulligan: I know you're a parent too. Parenting is hard. My four-year-old daughter had a massive tantrum this morning. I realized, "I'm probably escalating the situation. How do I handle this differently?" Parenting is where you look at the world, see yourself, and realize, "I have a lot to change myself." I have a lot of ways I need to change how I show up.

Your inadequacies and failings as a person are immediately reflected in the thing you care most about. That's very eye-opening in terms of how you live.

Visakan has this line: "Focus on what you want to see more of." If day-to-day you focus on being a better person, doing those things, stop worrying about the shitposts—I never respond to people trying to tear down positive visions of environmentalism. I don't want to focus on that. I want to focus on telling the positive story. If I do that well, I'll get more people in that direction.

It's a powerful way to live. What am I doing today to show up, educate myself? I've been reading more fiction to round myself out and become more compassionate. This is really hard work that most people frankly don't want to do. I don't blame them, it's easy to be comfortable. It's not for the faint of heart. But focus on more of what you want to see in the world, be that incrementally day-by-day, and trust the compounding. Trust that will lead somewhere.

David Valerio: What does a good life look like for you, and how will you attempt to live that good life going forward?

Grant Mulligan: Two influential things beyond what we discussed: Sisyphus and Stewart Brand's line "We are as gods." When I think about that, I think about concrete environmental behavior we could do, but also agency—trying to have more agency and realize we can create this world, we can shape it.

Frankly, I'm terrified of not reaching my potential, of being too comfortable and settling in. I'm trying to marry "we are as gods" with the myth of Sisyphus. There is real change in rolling that boulder up the mountain.

There's Charles C. Mann's book The Wizard and the Prophet about two competing environmental worldviews. The wizard idea is that we are as gods. We can change things, we have agency. The way I'm trying to live is to act every day as though I have more agency than I feel. Force myself to raise my ambition and try something bigger and grander than I can envision. How do I take it one step further?

That's how I got into the Roots of Progress fellowship. I didn't think I was a good candidate, but I wanted to be the type of person who applies to these things. Look what happened, I got in and it changed my life.

I'm trying to embody pushing the boulder up, doing it joyfully, believing that pushing the boulder isn't just limited to the boulder itself but creates change in the world every time I move it an inch. Really importantly: recruiting other people to push with me. It's so much more fun when you're doing it together, struggling together in the joy.

I'm out to find my passion projects, things that make me feel like I'm contributing to human progress overall, increasing joy or reducing suffering. Carrying that motivating philosophy through every day and finding more people who want to do it with me.

In this episode I speak with Silas Mähner, founder of ErthTech Talent, a recruiting firm focused on placing talent in early-stage climate tech companies. He's also the co-host of the Clean Techies Podcast. Silas brings a unique perspective as a devout Catholic working in climate tech, combining his faith-driven values with entrepreneurial ambition. We discuss:

• How his Catholic upbringing in rural Wisconsin shaped his worldview and approach to work as service to others.
• His journey from insurance sales to founding his own climate tech recruiting firm, driven by a search for meaningful work beyond financial success.
• The challenge of being openly Catholic in a climate tech space often associated with progressive politics and secular worldviews.
• Why climate tech founders often fail to learn from history, repeatedly attempting solutions that failed in Clean Tech 1.0.
• How to balance human flourishing with environmental stewardship from a Catholic perspective that rejects both unchecked capitalism and anti-human degrowth ideology.
• The importance of finding God in nature while avoiding making an idol of environmentalism itself.

David Valerio: How would you describe your spirituality and how it impacts how you engage with your work?

Silas Mähner: Broadly speaking, I am deeply spiritual. My spirituality is core to who I am and everything that I do. I was raised Catholic, and it wasn't just like, "Oh, I went to Catholic school." It was part of everything that we did as a family. I was really a big fan of catechism classes. I don't know if everybody else says the same thing, but I really enjoyed it. I loved the intellectual stimulation, just learning and understanding something that I didn't get a lot of outside of the faith. I come from a rural background in the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin, where the topics of discussion weren't usually of that caliber.

I probably went deeper with my spirituality once I moved out of Wisconsin to New York. It was tested by fire when you finally have the allurement of the world. That was when I really went even deeper, doubled down on my faith and understood that I have to make a commitment to it. Not just do it because I was raised in it.

In terms of how it affects my work, I would say that I don't actually often think about my faith per se with respect to climate. I generally try to do a good job for people. I believe that we're given certain skills for ourselves, but the things we do are meant to give back to others and bring them to God. I have a side project called Catholic Founders that casts a more spiritual lens to my work. But broadly speaking with the recruitment side of things, it's just helping people get a good job that can provide for their family and ideally do some good while they're doing that.

David Valerio: Tell me more about your family upbringing. You mentioned coming from a devout Catholic family. What did that look like day to day growing up in rural Wisconsin?

Silas Mähner: I don't know how many people can relate to this. Imagine you go to the north woods of Wisconsin, where there's not a lot of people. We grew up in the middle of the woods. We could technically see our neighbors in the winter when the leaves were off the trees, but really, we were very secluded out there.

There was no town nearby. The closest town was like a 15 minute drive away to get groceries. I was actually homeschooled and I'm the oldest of eight kids. That gives you an idea of the type of chaos I might have been around growing up. As part of my upbringing, I spent a lot of time working with my dad in his cabinetry shop, so I learned woodworking skills and how to deal with customers.

On the faith side of things, we began attending the Latin Mass when I was six years old. We would drive an hour to the church every Sunday. As I got older, I would also go to catechism classes every Wednesday during the school year, and eventually ended up joining the choir so we were there on Thursdays too. We spent a lot of time driving to religious activities.

You could bucket my life into two things: the church community we had, which was very strong in Wausau, Wisconsin, and my family community. My dad comes from a big family. I have 44 first cousins, and most of them were within about two or three miles of where we grew up. I didn't necessarily have friends outside of those circles because I didn't go to public school.

David Valerio: How did you get into climate tech recruiting? Tell me about that path from that rural, family and church-oriented life to New York and climate tech.

Silas Mähner: Admittedly, it wasn't something I dreamed about doing growing up. I started my career in sales. After graduating, I worked in insurance sales for the Knights of Columbus. I enjoyed it. I was like, "Hey, I want to make money. This is gonna make me happy. Once I can make money, it's gonna be awesome."

After about a year of doing that—I was 18 turning 19—I was quite good, but I realized there had to be more to life. I had made more money than 19-year-old me ever imagined I could make, and there was still something missing about the fulfillment of the work. That really set me off on a journey to understand what I wanted out of my career and life, because I knew money wasn't going to be the answer.

Through a series of events, I ended up doing this alternative education program called Discover Praxis. It's like a career boot camp that teaches you basic skills and how to pitch yourself to startups. I saw it as a way to meet a new network of people that was quite different than the two groups I grew up around. I expected it would take me out of Wisconsin, which was my end goal. I wanted to see the world, learn about how other places do things. It was more of a rejection of what I had rather than a pursuit of something else.

Long story short, I did that program starting in August 2019. Later that year, I bumped into somebody who said, "You sound like a sales guy. Do you want a job in recruitment in New York?" I knew nothing about recruitment, but ended up getting an offer and moved to New York on March 2nd, 2020, right before the pandemic struck.

It was in renewables. I didn't have any particular interest in the space. Growing up in rural Wisconsin, people would say things like "wind turbines kill birds" and "solar doesn't work without subsidies." The standard things you hear from more conservative people with data that's out of date. But I thought, "I don't know how I feel about renewables per se, but it doesn't seem to be a bad space to go into." I wanted to get out of Wisconsin and move to New York, so I took the opportunity.

Shortly after getting into the role, my boss told me, "You seem more interested in the tech side of things. I think you should look at this thing called clean tech." That was in the summer of 2020. That's when I started to go deep into it and started planning to build a podcast in the space.

To me, seeing the wide open ocean of opportunity in climate tech—it was called clean tech at the time—really excited me. Up until that point, I had been in search of some type of entrepreneurship vector I could pursue, but I didn't know what it would be. I often had this feeling that everything cool had already been invented. I would look at the era of the Rockefellers and say, "All this cool stuff is done. There's no more opportunity."

But when I understood that you can make materials that capture carbon, that are stronger than regular cement and are the same price to make, I extrapolated what that would mean for everything. If we fundamentally question the science of everything and see how we could make it more sustainable and build it in a better way, I thought, "This is gonna be huge, and I want to be part of it." That's when I made my real commitment to being in climate tech for the foreseeable future.

David Valerio: It sounds you were inspired by the entrepreneurial potential within climate, and not so much the climate problem per se. Tell me about how that shift in consciousness happened.

Silas Mähner: Initially, I was still very skeptical about climate science. I went through my own personal transformation coming from rural Wisconsin to being in a very progressive city in New York. Initially it was mostly the entrepreneurship opportunity.

But over time I started to realize, "Okay, this is real." I started to believe in the science and say climate change is real and has negative implications for people around the world. The way I really got bought into why we should do something about it for its own sake was my faith. Why would we not want to take care of the environment? If Jesus were here, would he be telling us, "Hey, just drill as much as you want and don't worry about the environment"? No, that's not what He would say at all. We don't know exactly what He would say, but He wouldn't encourage us to be bad stewards of the Earth. That's what really hooked me into saying we have to fix things by being good stewards.

David Valerio: When we first met, I was blown away. I thought, “Oh, there's another Catholic in climate!” How have you found being a Catholic in climate overall, and having the faith inform the way you engage with this work?

Silas Mähner: It's a little complicated. Climate is generally considered to be a Democratic issue, a progressive, liberal issue. So I would associate the people in climate as more on the Democratic, liberal side of things. In many cases, my values personally and my spiritual life do not align with that. So I always felt like I had to be quiet about who I was. I thought, "I can't talk about this stuff too much. I won't be pushy about the things I believe from a Catholic perspective. I'm just gonna do the work and try to do my best."

But over time—and part of it might be because I gained confidence in who I am and my capabilities with work, and then started my own business in recruitment—I gained more of a feeling of agency. Also, meeting people like you gave me a feeling that I don't have to agree with everything else that other people say in this space to still be motivated to solve the climate issue.

It's still developing, but with the vibe shift that has happened, it's made me feel like I can be more open about being conservative in some values, but still being like, "Hey, we really gotta do things about fixing the climate."

One thing I would add about being a Catholic in climate is that there's a segment of people in climate who say things we would disagree with as Catholics, such as decelerationism, this idea that we're going backwards in prosperity. I think that fixing the climate problem can never be at the expense of humans. We still need to make sure that people are employed, because I think it's very important that man has work. That's a fundamental through line I have with my involvement in this space.

David Valerio: How has being more open about your faith been received by people in the climate space?

Silas Mähner: I haven't exactly shared it more broadly—I would correct that premise—but I have been more open about it. For the most part, it’s been fine. I've gotten into a few spats on LinkedIn and Twitter here and there about it. But mostly people are like, "Hey, sure, do your thing." I can tell sometimes they're thinking, "Oh, well, clearly we don't agree on these things, so we're not gonna be friends outside of this." But overall it's been a lot better than I thought, and I've met more people who are religiously oriented in the space than I expected.

David Valerio: Tell me about starting your own business. You recently started ErthTech Talent after working for somebody for a few years. What brought you to doing that?

Silas Mähner: I'll try to keep this story short. I knew I wanted to build a business at some point. For the last two years working at my last company, NextWave, I was constantly thinking, "What could I do? What could I start?" I was in the process of getting married, so I was more risk-averse and didn't want to do something really exciting but that didn’t have legs.

I knew that I wanted to do something interesting, but I had to be responsible to my family first. So I decided that I would start a business that I know I can do and make money in which was recruitment. I wasn't going to reinvent the wheel.

It accelerated faster than anticipated. After I moved back to Wisconsin in February 2024, about a month later, things changed with my job. They wanted me to go back to doing renewables, and I was like, "I've built a brand in my podcast and on LinkedIn being super active and interested in this space. I don't want to go backwards." It's nothing against renewables, I just don't find it as interesting as the innovation happening in climate.

I crunched the numbers, and a few of my mentors said, "What are you waiting for? You've got enough money to fund your family even if you make no money for at least nine months, so give it a shot. Put it in God's hands and see how it goes."

That's what I did, and it worked out really well. There was a lot of learning throughout the process. At the beginning it seemed like I'd have deals coming out of my ears, that I would be making so much money. Then there was a doldrum where I thought, "Okay, I've got to work harder. I can't be lazy about it."

This was the key part: when I went on this journey, I related to my past experiences of negative things happening in my life, but God after a while revealed why He gave me those things. I always held the opinion that even if the business did not succeed, I knew it would be a good thing. I knew I'm gonna work hard, put my faith where it belongs, and go to Mass frequently. For a while I was going to daily mass. If I failed, I knew it wasn’t going to be because I didn't work hard enough, it was going to be because God wants me to do something else.

Keep in mind, I actually started the business knowing that my wife was expecting, so there was another added piece to the puzzle. But broadly speaking, it's been great. I really enjoy being able to help people, but being able to do it in a way where I’m not hyper-focused on hitting a particular revenue target. I'm focused on trying to do a really good job for my clients. I work at a heavily discounted rate, so in some ways it’s altruistic.

I've enjoyed it. It's been really awesome learning how to trust in God at every turn, and also being able to have time to spend with my family when they need me.

David Valerio: Tell me about being a father and how that shifted your orientation and view of life.

Silas Mähner: Becoming a father is the best thing ever, as anybody who has become a parent knows. There's a lot I could say. The most impactful thing to me has been a recognition that no matter what we want to achieve in life, God is always there for us, always waiting for us to talk to Him.

This came to me probably three weeks after our daughter was born. We're sitting there with her—she's got a diaper change, she's been fed, she's been burped, and she's still inconsolable late at night when you wish she could be sleeping. She's got everything she needs, but she's still upset. It's the same way we act with God. We've got everything we need. We're constantly upset, constantly asking for more and being discontent with what we have.

It makes me think about the fact that, especially within the US, a lot of Catholics tend to fall into this Americanism heresy of "America's great no matter what." They almost view it as a virtue to be wasteful and do things that aren't exactly green because it's a sign of America. But as Catholics, we have to remember and ground ourselves in the fact that we don't have to consume all of these things. We should focus on our faith first, before our country. Obviously we have a certain duty to our country, but we can never put our country above our faith.

This is similar to the climate topic. Do we really need to consume this much? Why can't we work towards building things in a more sustainable way, recycling things, building a circular economy? There are political arguments to be made, but just from a human perspective and understanding why God has us here—we're not just here to use the Earth like a napkin and throw it away. We're here to nurture it, take care of it, and be more connected to it.

David Valerio: You host the Clean Techies podcast and have put out more than 200 episodes now. Tell me about what inspired you to start it, and what that experience has been like.

Silas Mähner: I'm pretty bullish on podcasting broadly. The origin goes really far back. I preferred podcasting to writing blogs because I struggle to condense my thoughts.

Once I got into recruitment in renewables and understood what was going on in climate, I had the objective of one day building a venture studio in climate. I thought, "How am I gonna do this? I'm just some country bumpkin from nowhere working in recruitment. How am I going to convince people to invest their money with me?" I figured building the podcast would be a way to develop authority in the space over time.

We launched in February 2021. It was just me at the time. Now I've got a co-host, Somil Aggarwal, who really pushes me. We've done a lot better since he joined. I've really enjoyed doing it because as a recruiter, a lot of people don't like you unless they’re looking for a job. They view you as a bit of a parasite. But having a podcast, there are lots of reasons they're willing to talk to you. It's been able to get me into rooms I usually wouldn't have.

I'm a fan of having slightly less polished discussions because it forces people to realize that the person on the other end of the microphone is a real person. There's a willingness among most podcasters to correct things if they get called out on something incorrect. You can have a discussion and really get to the bottom of things.

More broadly, I think there's so much opportunity in podcasts to build niche markets and audiences, then use that audience to build services that could be sold to them. Using media as lead-gen is very underrated.

David Valerio: What have been your key learnings from producing all of those conversations?

Silas Mähner: Probably number one is related to the production of the podcast. Once Somil and I became partners in this venture, it was life-changing because there was another person there to push me. Having somebody who's there to bounce ideas off or say "Hey, that idea sucks" is very helpful. We've grown so much since he joined. When you have a partner, you have somebody you're accountable to, and they push you to improve. How to make better headlines, thumbnails, ask better questions, use fewer filler words.

The second one relates to the content of what I've learned through interviewing people. People do not frequently ask questions of those who have gone before them. I'm a huge fan of the Founders podcast with David Senra and the overall idea of looking at history to understand who has done similar things to what I'm doing so I can avoid their mistakes and focus on what they did well.

I find that in climate, there's a huge lack of this kind of thinking. There are a lot of founders who want to make an impact, but they often forget to ask people who have gone before them by assuming that nobody else has done it before because it's a new area. In reality, there are plenty of people who have gone before you. Even if it's not purely in climate, if you spend just a small percentage of your time identifying that information, you could save yourself a lot of headache.

There are so many companies that have shut down in climate. I'm pretty proud that the majority of our guests are still operating, probably only seven to ten have shut down since being on the show. I really wish people would look to those around them and ask more questions, be willing to be vulnerable. There's a tendency for climate founders to have somewhat of a God complex. "I'm saving the environment." There's so much focus on the pressure they have on their shoulders. They're too proud to ask for help from other people. That's a really big dilemma I didn't realize most people suffer from.

David Valerio: The importance of history is something I'm very attuned to. You can't understand the world without knowing what came before you. Even the evolution of the term climate tech is interesting, you mentioned how when you got into the industry it was clean tech. There was a whole wave of VC-backed startups in the space before this latest wave. Surely talking to those people and learning about their companies' trajectories is super important.

In my field of nature-based carbon markets, the industry has been around for 20 years but most people now have no idea what went on back then. We're spinning our wheels, trying to solve the same problems with the same solutions people have already tried.

Silas Mähner: One hundred percent. I think it's such a shame we don't have a way to solve this issue broadly. Eric Torenberg from Turpentine Media had this point about how can we have a system for knowing where the bodies are buried in any particular industry. This is so relevant to climate because I guarantee you, there were people from Clean Tech 1.0 who know where the bodies are buried. They're actually willing to talk to you about it. People in this space are relatively collaborative.

So many founders are working on the exact same problems that people tried and failed at 10 or 12 years ago. Of course, in some cases the timing is better now. An example is Fortera, they have a greener cement production. They tried to do this years ago under a different company name and the timing wasn't right. Fast forward 14 years with a couple things playing out differently and now they're able to make it work.

The unwillingness to listen to the sages that have gone before us… I find it frustrating because if people really care about climate, they should be willing to be humble and ask for help.

David Valerio: What do you ascribe that to? Is it coming from the software startup philosophy of "move fast and break things" where history doesn't matter? Or is it just a fundamentally human failing?

Silas Mähner: I think it's broadly just a human ignorance thing. When you're young and ambitious, you're often an action-oriented person rather than a thinking person. I can't tell you the times I've decided to share an idea with a friend and I'd never even Googled it to see if somebody else was already doing it. That's the lack of due diligence I've done at times.

I think there's another problem on the hard tech side of things. Most genuine innovation comes from technical people who are working on PhDs in material science. They're passionate about the environment and think, "I'm gonna take this and make it into a real product and be a founder." Depending on the disposition, if you're a technical person who "invented" something, it takes a lot of effort to be willing to say just because I have this thing doesn't mean we can't pivot to another technology.

Recently we had Owen Cadwalader from Travertine on. He talked about how Laura Lammers, their CEO and founder, wasn't wedded to her idea. She had the basic science down, but was willing to adjust as required to solve the problem. Aside from pure ignorance, it's the attachment to one's own invention or ideas.

David Valerio: I want to pivot to another topic. How do you think about the Catholic approach to climate and environmentalism? How do we balance the need to power the global south with the desire to reduce emissions? It's the obvious elephant in the room that people don't really want to address.

Silas Mähner: Fundamentally, we understand as Catholics that God created humans specifically, separate from the animals. Some environmentalists may not like that statement, but we believe we have a special place in all of creation. We don't believe that life on Earth is all there is. We do have to be good stewards of it. As Genesis states, we must subdue the Earth.

Progress is naturally built into us. The reason we want to create things is because when Genesis says we're created in the image and likeness of God, it's not about how we look, it's about our nature. We want to create things. We can create within the sandbox God has given us. Human fallen nature ends up leading to distortions of this drive.

Along with the degrowth mentality, people put out this issue of capitalism. They believe capitalism is the primary issue. Similar to how very hardcore climate people make fixing climate change their religion, I think many conservative people have made capitalism their religion. It's funny being a Catholic in these discussions because people assume you're one way, then you start talking about what you really believe and they're surprised.

Catholics aren't necessarily... Some people say, "I don't understand why the Church is basically socialist" because we want to give our things away to help the poor. We don't mandate it from on high, but we recognize that any capitalistic pursuit that harms mankind is not good. This is the balance we have to strike.

Conservatives, because they see what capitalism has been able to do around the world over the past 150-200 years, make it their religion. They say there can be no restrictions on capitalism. As we know, power and money ends up corrupting people, which is what you get when oil and gas companies are willing to destroy entire villages in Africa just to pump out oil.

The Catholic perspective, similar to how Aristotle would approach things, is that there's always somewhere in the middle. It's never one extreme or the other. We should pursue the good of man. We can aim to eliminate suffering but it shouldn't be the end-all be-all because we accept there's some good in suffering. We should pursue work, since we can't just sit around because we know it's good for man to work and be employed. At the same time, we should not exploit the Earth in a bad way.

It's very challenging because in many ways, the domination of the Earth—having electricity and making an industrial society—has led to the extreme desire to exploit the Earth, to have too much pollution. That's a dilemma. But we should pursue it in a way that treats this as something we were given to steward, not something we own, while recognizing this is not all there is to life. We have to focus on our eternity, but how we live this life is part of that.

David Valerio: The position of Catholics is always interesting when it comes to politics. The Church is not political. We have views, beliefs, our understanding of the world, but it doesn't fall neatly onto the traditional political spectrum. People get confused when you're like, "We love social justice, we believe in supporting and serving the poor"—just look at the Sermon on the Mount. We're called to things that would look "radically Left." But we also have strong views on the family and what we're meant to do here.

It's both/and, as opposed to either/or. That's a paradox for most people. Both the capitalist "keep building material abundance" view and the degrowth "we can't do anything or the world will end" view are utopian visions that don't recognize we are fallen human beings and some amount of suffering is baked in. Even if we enter either of those "utopias," the illness at the heart of being human is still there without God.

Silas Mähner: The last thing I would say is you have to keep in mind the perspective of people who have developed a very deep trust in God that everything will work out. If you genuinely trust that everything's gonna be all right, it's all in God's hands. Yes, there might be suffering, but we have many examples of good things coming out of bad situations.

There's probably a large portion of Catholics who may be concerned about climate change but say, "At the end of the day, I don't believe I can do anything about it, so I'm gonna try to be a good steward. I'm not gonna become an executive of an oil company and destroy villages. But I'm not gonna be too worried about it."

Part of it comes back to the Old Testament. God destroyed the Earth and various peoples for being sinful many times. Maybe some people think the Earth deserves it. I personally don't take that perspective. I think God gives us the opportunity to be good stewards.

There's another thing we didn't talk about. Companies like Cemvita using biology to create things, finding processes in nature that God intentionally created and using that to produce goods. Pursuing a cleaner, more circular economy would actually lead to us understanding or appreciating the beauty of God's creation and His fingerprint on everything.

David Valerio: The vision I'm most inspired by is improving agricultural productivity globally with new technologies and practices that allow us to produce more food on less land, allowing the rest to be rewilded. To bring more of God's creation back to places we've deforested and degraded. Through our subsidiary creation and leveraging of God's gifts, we can steward and regenerate the world and bring creation to transfiguration. That's what we're supposed to do.

That's a positive vision that's not either keeping consuming to make some machine God, or minimizing the human footprint to let creation do its own thing. There's a positive vision for man and nature in harmony that can only fundamentally come through worship of the Trinity, through belief but also action. We're not operating purely by belief alone. We have works to do.

A lot of these problems we're facing are spiritual problems that can only be solved through the change of individual human hearts. That's something each of us is called to do in our day-to-day life. It's much harder work than railing against global capitalism or whatever industry you don't like. It starts from you. You have to change yourself, become holier, share that light with your family. It comes from the microscale interactions you have—you with your wife, me with my wife, our kids, families, communities. If everybody takes that seriously, that's how things are transformed.

Silas Mähner: I can't agree more. The catechism says to pray as if it all relies on God, and work as if it all relies on you. Work hard and pray hard, and let the rest be in God's hands. This laziness of saying "I can't do anything about it" or "I'm too busy"—there's a lot of laziness we have. We need to recognize our agency and the fact that God gives us skills for the benefit of His kingdom, not for our own benefit.

David Valerio: As we wrap up, what does a good life look like for you and how will you attempt to live that life going forward?

Silas Mähner: Ever since hearing Simon Sinek's “Start With Why” speech and when I realized there was more to life than money, I decided it had to be about the journey. I had to understand the things I cared about on a daily or weekly basis and work towards those things. Whatever really mattered to me, I would put time into them every single week so that no matter how life is going, no matter how rich or poor I am or what my employment situation is, I will be happy because I'm pursuing those things.

A good life for me is being able to go to daily Mass with my family, being able to spend time with my family and not having to work all the time, although I do quite enjoy work. Having that balance and being able to come closer to God, making the time every day to spend time with Him in Scripture and trying to be an action-oriented person.

It's doing the things that I know are maybe not extraordinary on the surface, but accepting whatever God has for me and trying to achieve the things He's calling me to, listening to His voice as much as possible. Developing that life of constant unity with God. It's something that feels so elusive to me. I hear how the saints were able to be in unity with God throughout the day and never get mad in traffic. That's what I pursue, and it's really hard, but that's what I want to work towards.