‘Envisioning a Sustainable Planet’.

After the 1979 nuclear meltdown on Three Mile Island, a fledgling technology magazine published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers sent an aspiring novelist named Ellis Rubinstein to find out what had happened.

Rubinstein was the first journalist to get to the bottom of the accident, and the small magazine put out a complete, minute-by-minute explanation before the US government report.

It was around this time that Rubinstein says he put aside his novel: “I just got entranced by the excitement of writing about science and technology as a career.”

That career has included a decade as the editor of Science, stints as the editor of The Scientist and a senior editor at Newsweek, launching the daily news service ScienceNow, and winning three National Magazine Awards.

For the last 15 years, Rubinstein has led the 200-year-old New York Academy of Sciences. The academy has partnered with the United Nations Secretary General and UN agency heads on sustainability, as well as advising heads of state, ministers, and mayors on science, technology, and innovation policy, and partnering with more than 1,000 corporations, universities, and non-governmental organizations in areas ranging from Alzheimer’s disease and malnutrition to STEM education and early childhood development.

At a Public Health Forum titled “Science for a Sustainable Planet: The Critical Role of Science and Technology in Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030” on September 5, Rubinstein will share his insights on new solutions to some of the biggest challenges the world is currently facing.

Ahead of the event, Rubinstein discussed the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and the Millennium Development Goals that came before them, why he worries about silos and “boutique” solutions, and the importance of social networks and integrated solutions. 

What is the overarching message you want to get across with your upcoming talk?

I’m going to focus on what has made it possible to even envision a sustainable planet with all of the enormous challenges that we face, how we’re going to address the billions of people who right now don’t see a future, either because of the potential of health problems or education problems, not to mention climate and so on.

We have many issues of enormous concern before us, and I think the answer is that science and technology—particularly information technology and social networking—are creating some opportunities that we’ve never had before, particularly the power and potential of collective action. Collective action wasn’t really understood 20 years, ago but it’s now something we see we can count on to make us do our job, working together to address these challenges.

What do you see as the biggest challenge to sustainable development?

The main challenge is scalability of solutions. The single biggest worry I have is that we still are living in a world where those people who are trying to work on the grand challenges tend to get siloed, even if they’re in public–private partnerships, and they tend to create what I might call “boutique” solutions that can’t get scaled because they themselves are too isolated. There isn’t an easy way of getting everyone working together.

The best example, in my mind, of a sea change in addressing this was the Millennium Development Goals initiative, how it began and grew, and how even in areas where it didn’t succeed, other people were able to capitalize on the lessons learned and make major progress.

What makes you hopeful about the world’s ability to make progress on the Sustainable Development Goals?

The single biggest surprise for me was the ability for a global initiative like the Millennium Development Goals to actually work. I was fortunate to have a window seat, because my wife was the chief of staff on that initiative with [senior United Nations advisor] Jeffrey Sachs.

I saw what worked and what didn’t work, and what worked was really astonishing to me and gives me a lot of hope, because you can see you are integrating these challenges. It isn’t just, say, you’re very proud because you’ve delivered antiretrovirals and reduced the HIV burden, but people are dying from waterborne diseases, or they’re not able to work, or they’re starving.

This was the challenge that the Millennium Development Goals overcame, and the Sustainable Development Goals are now overcoming, by integrating health across all sectors, and then by costing it out and creating these proofs of concepts. With that, governments, even those in developing countries, can say, “Oh, we can scale these initiatives up, by using donor money or reallocating money that we’re spending on other areas—that we maybe shouldn’t be spending so much money on, like the military—because if we can do it in this village then we can do it in the entire province, and if we can do it in this province then why not do it across the entire country?”

I’ve also seen some collective action progress here in our own country, not as much in health but in education for sure, that have had astonishing successes because all of the elements of a community or a whole city have come together.

As a longtime science writer and editor, what do you see as the state of media coverage of these goals and this progress?

I certainly don’t think that there’s enough coverage of the size of the challenges and the progress that we’re making, and properly informing the public about both what can be done and what their role could be.

On the other hand, I do see big changes in the willingness of entities like CNN to cover global challenges and do success stories and make heroes of people who have done good things, which I think would have been ignored in the past. I think of when MTV—many years ago now—made a documentary with Angelina Jolie driving around Africa with Jeffrey Sachs, visiting some of the millennium villages. It gave young people a chance to realize that this is something that is engaging on a personal level, even to an iconic movie star, and so maybe it should be to them as well.

—Michelle Samuels