How do we as humans get or stay connected to the real natural world
Three polls, twelve questions, 48 participants. Held May 16, 2026.
The same panel of participants was polled three times during the salon — once at the start (Before), once mid-conversation (During), and once at the close (After). Each poll asked four questions, mixing scale ratings (−5 to +5, or 0 to 5) with open-ended text answers. One question — "How do you feel about geoengineering?" — was repeated across all three polls to track movement.
Not everyone answered every poll. Numbers below reflect actual responses, not the total participant count. All text responses are reproduced verbatim, attributed by first / last name.
Same question asked three times across the evening. Scale: −5 (very negative) to +5 (very positive).
Asked at the start of the salon, before the discussion.
How do we as humans get or stay connected to the real natural world
A
Making irreparable changes
Understand more
Who gets hurt in this process
Resource coordination
What can we do?
what is geoengineering?
How do we collectively coordinate our efforts and initiatives/projects?
Who gets to decide if geoengineering strategies are deployed?
My biggest concern is the emotional vibration that people are entering the space of inquiry with - and how that can conflate the efforts of solution finding and building
How can I help people around me in the next 6 months or so?
I don’t know enough to ask anything
Are we fucked when it comes to climate?
Trust. How can we be verbs and not just nouns?
Calibrating solutions in a see of other solutions with varying degree of funding and impact
Disturbing an existing delicate ecosystem
what’s actually affective
n/a
Food security
Is it necessary?
That we won't meaningfully tackle climate change until it's too late
Where are my people, with compassion and love, who refuse to turn to hatred or ignorance about all that's happening?
Can't reach the chocolate almonds :(
Changing things in a negative or harmful way. Over engineering things.
How scalable is solar geoengineering? What are the political sentiments about it? How open are governments to adopting solar geo engineering?
B
Are we fucked
How extractive is geoengineering? What are the tradeoffs?
Soil
is there real hope? are we all going to die? 🤙
How do we actually change and how do we actually inspired change
The rise of ai
how can geoengineering action be bought into collectively
How we stop losing elections to the far right aka come up with more exciting and appealing ideas that aren’t “degrowth” lol
Exploitation & depletion of resources
what does the future consist of? what looks the same, what looks different? Where do we return to, what must we abandon
Which country is leading the desire to pursue geo-engineering at scale? Pro and cons?
The human toll of impending disruption. Moving from abundance to scarcity
Are we giving up on mitigation?
Funding small ecological projects so they can support ppl when stuff crumbles
Waste
How is cure not worse than the disease
Dangerous? Unintended consequences?
What’s the risk?
What are we doing actively? Do people have awareness of it?
Food security and biodiversity
Engineering for the physical world / geospatial application
A
Using technology to influence the climate or weather
Earth engineering
Changing our nature for pressumingly the betterment of our earth
Innovation
Unintended consequences
this is my first time hearing this term
Tell me more!
Dangerous techno quick-fix
Unnatural
A paradox. How do we control the earth?
Geotechnical engineers. Helical piles. Related?? I don’t know
Manipulating the natural. Often used as a tech solution to continue extractive industries
Community
A dice roll and Snowpiercer
Black swans
Playing god with the weather
building things with thought to the land
truly not much, renewables and other ways of using earth for energy
?
Using technology to impact weather and climate
Using elements and/or physics of nature to build things
Manipulating the earth and nature for human technological purposes
Preserving the status quo
I have no idea.
Solar, ultimate climate solution
B
Physical weathering
My first time hearing. Doing engineering that's related to the earth?
What is geoengineering?
geo = earth 🤘
Engineering re: Geography
Shaping geology to sustain a group people and an ecology. Or leveraging the natural geology for sustainable living.
public sector failure
Necessary
Large scale manipulation of the environment
Daniel Babbin ROCK DOC DANNNNNNN
Ministry for the Future
Potential and danger. Human hubris. Mistrust of how we implement things.
Its too big and Sci fi
Amplifying or manipulating earthly materials?? Not warm fuzzy
Mining rate earth, modifying weather
Daniel Babin
Architecting nature
Shooting crazy stuff in space with limited information and unknown side effects. Myopic vision from scientists who think they know what they’re doing, probably most likely conflicted
GMOs
Asked midway, during open conversation.
The importance of multilateralism, funding, and collective effort to address global issues
There are solutions if we fund them.
Test
There are many possible solutions
It might be worth doing research on this to inform multilateral policy making- but we need to tread very very very carefully
We may need to revise upward our climate projections.
That geo engineering must be in our toolbelt
The range of explored solutions beyond shooting particles in the atmosphere
a little more about SO2, and reasons it’s not happening yet
Geoengineering is underfunded
That governments are not funding climate stabilization efforts despite knowing for a da that this is a major threat to society and our natural systems
I already had an idea how far behind we were in meeting climate goals and how much worse the reality probably was. But I really appreciated the way that information was shared with grounded hope and realistic optimism
Iceberg stabilization
All of it. So that people know what’s really happening and possibilities for action
How much the IPCC data has issues
The options for stabikization
That geo-engineering -- using technology to modify earth systems -- is happening in so many dirty, unethical ways. And we have a chance to stabilize the climate if we could take time to understand our options.
Hope in the next 30 years
that we are doing geoengineering anyway in the least thoughtful way possible. We might as well align with reality and figure out a way to do it better
How underestimated the climate models are.
clarifying that mitigation/emissions reductions are insufficient to address major climate tipping points
a lot of science holy shit
It’s amazing to me that 60+ ppl listened to a subject I deal with day to day. Just her presentation alone :)
We can do some changes to change climate trajectory
Our models are flawed and we are mapping to them spending so much money for obsolete solutions
W
Iceberg heatpumps
How bad the situation already is; how the predictive modeling is so far behind reality
Complex
Messing with the earth.
Test
Stressed!
Spectrum of interventions from practical to last resort
All the unintentional geoengineering we've done over the last hundred years (oil & gas, mineral extraction, deforestation)
Hope! Also a bit scary, but hopeful
Several dice rolls
buildings things that affect our planet on a large way
Manipulation of earth’s systems
Less playful this time around.. when I hear geoengineering it makes me think of human created solutions to the issues we created, how we destroyed so many of the earth’s natural ability to self-correct (symbiosis) or pushed the issues past the earth’s natural ability to balance out
Learning the hard way and/or exploitation class to blame
Desperation
Possibility that could be harmful or helpful depending
Still solar
Change the planet in a smart way back to baseline.
Something that's happening, not in the best of ways, and also an opportunity to make a real difference to stabilize the climate
bandaids
making global scale moves to change the course of the global climate impact
I think of modifying the environment by intentional design
Climate stabilization!
meep
Jevons paradox. Jevons Paradox. Jevons Paradox. Carl Sagan’s The Demon Haunted world. Science as a Candle in the Dark
More human meddling
Weather manipulation
W
Hope.
Methods to change the worlds climate and reverse the current trend toward global warming
Asked at the end of the salon.
More science
Opportunity
Need for more research and honest dialogue within climate movement
Shifting the window past mitigation and adaptation
I think it’s interesting and I want to learn more about it. I’m always curious about things that no one wants to talk about
something we can get right, once profit has been dethroned as superior
I feel curious and open but also cautious. I think it’s important that we have more funding and communications with information.
Biased: excellent solution for a big impact in a short amount of time
Optimism
I'm feeling curious, interested, more informed, and (not blindly) hopeful.
A good feeling about the future
a branding challenge
Land and lines
Call to action by governments
Need
A chance to change our trajectory.
Climate stability
Climate stability! Let’s do this!
A lot of the science and data shared around climate stabilization
Urgency
Geoengineering reframe to “climate stabilization”
We need global communication at all levels.
There are things we could be doing that we are not and part of that is ideologically driven
such an amazing experience. the talk plus that song circle?? i can't wait for the next salon
Hope, curiosity, and an opening to both the complexity and possibility of geo engineering.
Love the reframe of geoengineering as climate stabilization
More understanding
People are 'geo-engineering' already -- there are better options for us to explore.
The need to geoengineer our way out of this
There’s still hope for climate action!
Kelly is SUCH an incredible speaker !!!!! wowowowwwwwww. She speaks so well and so kindly and so intelligently and has so much energy. absolutely mind-blowing
It m8ght be worth a try because it might buy us a few more years
Hope!
The opportunity to educate
A reminder that community interconnection is key to our ability to sit with these tough topics and to figure out what we can do. The vibe that Jacob created in our collective experience was a great example of this.