After a hurricane, everyone wants the same thing: to put the town back exactly as it was, as fast as possible. Gavin Smith has spent three decades arguing that this instinct is how the next disaster gets built.

Gavin is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at North Carolina State University, and four of America's most destructive storms have shaped his career. Three weeks into his first government job, Hurricane Fran hit North Carolina, and he found himself running a $120 million programme to buy out flood-prone homes and return the land to open space. After Hurricane Floyd, thousands more homes followed. After Katrina, he led Mississippi's Office of Recovery and Renewal and helped replace trailers with cottages built in the coastal vernacular. After Matthew, he led a team helping Princeville, a town founded by formerly enslaved people, plan a partial move to higher ground.

In this conversation with host Peter Marcus Bach, Gavin explains why climate adaptation still has so much to learn from natural hazards planning, why he prefers "community-led relocation" to "managed retreat", and what the United States and New Zealand could each borrow from the other's buyout programmes. He also talks about bureaucratic inertia, disaster gentrification, who suffers most in a heatwave, and the bipartisan leadership that once made recovery work.

Underneath it all is a story about place. People are deeply tied to the land they live on, and Gavin's work is about helping them make one of the hardest decisions of their lives with dignity.

Show notes and resources: https://tgcpodcast.show/073

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro & the Bundesliga
4:36 The rare disaster scholar for climate adaptation
9:16 Gavin's start in land development
13:35 Overview of the challenge of risk reduction and mitigation
18:45 Learnings from Fran, Floyd, Katrina and Matthew
26:43 Gavin's experience with Hurricane Katrina's Recovery
35:16 Community-led relocation over Managed Retreat
47:15 Leadership and governance in a crisis
53:44 The international perspective
1:01:27 Learning and relearning in climate adaptation
1:11:08 Exciting things Gavin is working on
1:12:44 Q&A Start
1:13:11 What does innovation mean to you?
1:15:28 Key moment, event, person
1:17:14 Time Management
1:19:09 Favourite childhood memory
1:21:54 Greatest challenge to date
1:24:06 Advice for young professionals
1:25:24 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:26:10 Where can people find you?
1:27:32 Final Message
1:29:13 Outro

Detailed shownotes over at: https://tgcpodcast.show for more in-depth information about each episode.
Join the community over at: linkedin.com/company/tgcpodcast and let's connect across the world!

Subscribe and listen to the podcast (and do please leave a review/rating) on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts from.
Your subscription/follow will greatly help the show grow and reach a wider audience.

Hosted by Peter Marcus Bach (www.petermbach.com), follow me on:

• X (fomerly Twitter): @petermbach
• Instagram: @petermbach87
• Subscribe to my channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/PeterMarcusBach/

We have known how to fix most of our environmental problems for decades. So why do we keep not doing it?

Joshua Harrison calls it the action-inaction dilemma. As Director of the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure at UC Santa Cruz and co-founder of the New York green infrastructure company Leaf Island, he works where art, ecology and systems strategy meet. His argument is that the gap is no longer science or technology. It is what we value. We talk about why insurers spend so little on prevention, why "sustainability" may be the wrong goal for a broken system, and why green roofs, gardens and oyster reefs gain value with age while concrete loses it. We follow fire through California's history, from Indigenous cultural burning to a century of suppression and the cost of ignoring what was predicted.

Underneath it all is a story. Josh grew up in a family of ecological artists, building fish tanks as a child and, at fourteen, using a garden hose to create an artificial monsoon that finally got crabs breeding in captivity. From the political movements of 1960s New York to set design for film, his path has never run in a straight line, which is exactly why he sees connections others miss.

We close with The Key Questions, innovation as rediscovery, and an old Greek proverb about planting trees.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro & Speculative Fiction
04:29 Action vs. Inaction on Climate
13:12 Josh's eclectic background and childhood
16:57 The movement of Ecological Art
21:53 The drivers in Josh's multi-disciplinary journey
30:06 Having difficult conversations and conversational drift
45:18 Are we just reinventing the wheel over and over again?
52:04 Ecology, Fires & Indigenous Knowledge
58:37 Learning to plan and adapt with fire
1:06:35 Public debate for action inaction - Asian examples
1:10:33 The lost past - circularity did exist before...
1:17:27 Oysters, Moss and an appreciating asset
1:25:19 Coming full circle in a diverse conversation?
1:27:32 What gives Josh hope for the future?
1:32:30 Q&A Start 01:32:42 What does innovation mean to you?
1:34:13 Key Event, Book, Person
1:37:01 Time Management
1:39:12 Biggest Challenge to date
1:42:45 Advice for young professionals
1:43:38 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:44:21 Where can people find you?
1:45:12 Final Message
1:45:40 Outro

Detailed shownotes over at: petermbach.com/podcast for more in-depth information about each episode.
Join the community over at: linkedin.com/company/tgcpodcast and let's connect across the world!

Subscribe and listen to the podcast (and do please leave a review/rating) on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts from.
Your subscription/follow will greatly help the show grow and reach a wider audience.

Hosted by Peter Marcus Bach (www.petermbach.com), follow me on:

• X (fomerly Twitter): @petermbach
• Instagram: @petermbach87
• Subscribe to my channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/PeterMarcusBach/

What if the most important infrastructure in any building is the people inside it?

Jennifer Koster has spent more than 25 years building companies across tech, construction and regenerative development. Along the way she reached a conclusion most engineers never get to: humans are a system too, and we need our own infrastructure to function properly. In this episode we explore both sides of that coin, the built infrastructure and the human one.

For practitioners, Jennifer explains why circularity is still what the built environment gets most wrong. Moving a light fixture into another building is not circularity. Designing a building so that none of it ends up in landfill is. She describes how WerkWell grew from an independent construction management firm (on her figures, projects run 30% over budget and schedule on average) into a building performance consultancy and an innovations group that brings market-proven European solutions into US projects. We cover low-carbon concrete, a particle board made from seaweed, power purchase agreements, aquifer recharge credits, and the (re)Building with Resilience symposium she co-organised after the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, where resilience started to look like the new definition of luxury.

Underneath runs a very human story. A dot-com crash that wiped out everything overnight and sent her back to her teenage bedroom in Calgary. A chance conversation with contractors that became a construction career in Los Angeles. A growing unease at building enormous homes nobody lived in. And a family road trip through Europe that ended in a move to the Netherlands. Jennifer shares LivWell, her plan for regenerative communities inspired by blue zones, and her forthcoming book The Truth About Baggage, a journey from awareness to agency.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro & the predictable unpredictability of life's journey
5:36 How would Jennifer describe herself?
13:46 Jennifer's journey into construction
23:37 Decarbonization in construction
26:36 WerkWell - A new path in construction and the pivot
42:44 Resilience, a new definition of luxury
54:03 Human Infrastructure
1:09:59 The "Truth about Baggage”
1:22:28 Jennifer's Future Plans
1:23:55 What does the built environment miss?
1:25:41 Q&A Start
1:26:03 What does innovation mean to you?
1:27:38 Key moment, book, event, person
1:33:55 Time Management
1:36:44 Favourite childhood memory
1:37:30 Advice for young professioanls
1:37:56 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:38:11 Where can people find you?
1:39:09 Final Message
1:40:15 Outro

Detailed shownotes over at: petermbach.com/podcast for more in-depth information about each episode.
Join the community over at: linkedin.com/company/tgcpodcast and let's connect across the world!

Subscribe and listen to the podcast (and do please leave a review/rating) on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts from.
Your subscription/follow will greatly help the show grow and reach a wider audience.

Hosted by Peter Marcus Bach (www.petermbach.com), follow me on:

• X (fomerly Twitter): @petermbach
• Instagram: @petermbach87
• Subscribe to my channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/PeterMarcusBach/