Episodes
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Frequent listeners to Sustainability Now! know that, from time to time, interviews focus on animals, mostly from the perspective of animal rights and whether animals are people, too. Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Sy Montgomery, adventurer, naturalist and author, who has been engaging with and writing about animals since the 1980s. She asks questions like “what do chickens know? Does an octopus have a soul? And is it really “turtles all the way down?” She is the author of 38 nonfiction books for adults and children and has garnered numerous awards for them. Her 2023 book, Of Time and Turtles was a New York Times bestseller, and her new book, What the Chicken Knows, has just been published.
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Join Host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Dr. Sunaura Taylor, Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. Taylor is also an artist, writer, activist and mother, who has just published Disable Ecologies—Lessons from a Wounded Desert. Her first book, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, which received the 2018 American Book Award. Along with academic journals, Taylor has written for a range of popular media outlets. Her artworks have been exhibited at venues such as the CUE Art Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution and is part of the Berkeley Art Museum collection. Among other awards, she has received a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant, two Wynn Newhouse Awards, and an Animals and Culture Grant.
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Episodes manquant?
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A longstanding debate in the environmental and conservation movements is whether protection of natural resources can be reconciled with their economic development? Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation about this question with Larry Selzer, President and CEO of The Conservation Fund, a Virgina-based nonprofit that buys land for conservation and promotes sustainable economic development. TCF works with public agencies to acquire land and hold it until the agencies are ready to purchase it back. And the organization focuses on protecting working forests and farms, which provide clean air, clean water, and jobs for rural communities.
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What happens to your corporeal body, if and when it is buried in the earth? According to Genesis in the Hebrew Torah, we come from dust and to dust we return. The original text, however, uses the word עָפָ֣ר ("apar"), which means “earth.” Most burials in the United States seek to protect the body from returning to the earth through containment, while cremation produces greenhouse gases and leaves behind heavy metals. Are there other ways to go? Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Katrina Spade, founder and CEO of Recompose, a Seattle-based green funeral home that composts human bodies, turning them into soil that can be spread almost everywhere. We talk about other end-of-life choices, too.
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How should we speak with children about climate change? Should young children be taught about climate change, and how? During the Cold War, the existential threat of nuclear holocaust was always present but there was, at least, a chance that the missiles would not be launched. Climate change is also an existential threat but it is already happening. Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a thoughtful conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Bagley, managing director of Project Drawdown, who has written and spoken about these questions. She holds joint Ph.D.s in environment & resources and educational psychology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she studied how video games can encourage systems thinking about complex environmental topics.
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San Benito County is one of the unsung jewels of the Central California Coast. Most people know of San Juan Bautista and the Pinnacles, but there is much, much more. Two mountain ranges, broad valleys, rangelands, farmlands and biodiversity. But the Highway 101 corridor, which runs through a corner of the county, provides access to Silicon Valley and the SF Bay and people are moving south in search of cheaper housing. Malls and sprawls are not far behind. Now, a local movement is seeking to limit development with an initiative to require a public vote if agricultural, rural or range land is rezoned to residential, commercial or industrial use, a strategy already applied in several other California counties. Join host Ronnie Lipschutz to hear from Andy Hsia-Coron of Protect San Benito County, one of the activists behind the initiative, Chris Wilmers of UCSC, who studies cougars and bobcats that want to cross the road, Seth Adams from Save Mount Diablo, a land trust active across the County, and Val Lopez, Chair of the Amah Mutsun, whose ancestral lands cover much of the County.
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As the Earth gets warmer, the world’s glaciers get smaller. Land-based glaciers in the Earth’s polar regions hold enormous quantities of water and, as they melt, the runoff is raising sea levels and disrupting ocean systems, such as the Gulf Stream. The obvious solution is for us to drastically reduce global greenhouse gas emissions but, even if we were to do that, the Earth would continue to warm and the glaciers would continue to melt. Is there anything we could do to slow the melt?
There are a growing number of proposals to intervene in Earth’s systems—called “geoengineering” as a way to moderate climate change. Join Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Research Professor John Moore, who is a glaciologist in Rovaniemi, Finland at the University of Lapland’s University of the Arctic. His solution to slowing glacier melt is the construction of barriers at glaciers’ underwater bases in order to slow or prevent flows of warmer ocean water from carving away at the ice.
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The Monterey Bay is the crown jewel of the Central California Coast. For well over a century, the Bay has been exploited for a myriad of purposes; today, it needs protection and conservation. This is especially the case with its fish and fisheries, which provide a vital source of food but are vulnerable to tastes and markets. Join Sustainability now! host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Melissa Mahoney, Executive Director of the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust, which seeks to ensure sustainable fisheries, resilient communities and a healthy Bay and ocean.
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Do you remember the Northern Spotted Owl, icon of the old-growth Redwood Wars of the 1990s? Well, the Northern Spotted Owl is, once again, under threat. This time, however, the threat comes from another species of owl, the Barred Owl, a larger and more aggressive bird native to the United States, whose range has been expanding westward as a result of development and climate change.
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife has devised a plan to protect the Northern Spotted Owl: shoot Barred Owls. Scientists, conservationists and the public are torn: should humans intervene to prevent animal extinctions by competitors and invasive species if they threaten the survival of endemic ones, or should we let nature take its course? And since humans have intervened in nature for thousands of years, everyday and everywhere, what is the right thing to do? How can we decide?
Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Hugh Warwick, spokesperson for the British Hedgehog Preservation Society, who has been looking into this dilemma around the world. He has just published Cull of the Wild: Killing in the Name of Conservation. Warwick is a frequent speaker on wildlife conservation in public talks and on British radio and TV. He also runs courses on hedgehog conservation.
Warwick with hedgehog photo © Zoe Broughton
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The world is awash in plastic. According to a study published in 2020, total production of plastics since 1950 is now over 10 billion tons, with more than half of that simply discarded. And the production of plastics will only increase in the future. There is a lot of oil and natural gas in the world and, if and when we wean ourselves from fossil fuels, oil and chemical companies will be looking for other places to use their stocks.
So far, only about one billion tons of plastic have been recycled—that is, put into the recycling chain. What exactly has happened to that material is less clear. Different types of plastic require different post-consumer processing to turn them back into pellets of raw material. Most factories are set up to use only particular types of plastic and it is still cheaper to buy virgin pellets than recycled ones. Are compostable plastics the solution? What is a compostable plastic? What is it made from? How is it broken down? Are there plastics that will simply decompose into constituent molecules by weathering and micro-organisms? Questions, questions. Are there answers?
Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a chemistry and economics lesson from Dr. Susannah Scott, Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and occupant of the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Chair in Sustainable Catalytic Processing at the University of California Santa Barbara. Here I quote from a UCSB website: "Her research interests include the design of heterogeneous catalysts with well-defined active sites for the efficient conversion of conventional and new feedstocks, as well as environmental catalysts to promote air and water quality."
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According to those who know, we are in the midst of the Sixth Great Extinction, this one brought on by the activities of human civilization that are resulting in a species extinction rate that is estimated to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than natural extinction rates. So far, efforts to protect endangered plants, animals and insects have proven inadequate to the challenge. What are we to do?
Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Professor Douglas Tallamy, who teaches in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Nature’s Best Hope—a New Approach to conservation that Starts in Your Yard, published in 2019, and a just-published companion version for children, subtitled How You Can Save the World in Your Own Yard. Both books propose what some might consider a radical approach to protecting species through transformation of front and back yards into conservation zones.
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You probably receive an electricity bill every month from your local utility and, after complaining about it, dutifully pay it. But do you ever stop to read your electricity bill? If you are a customer of PG&E and, maybe, a local community choice aggregator, you receive 6 pages of unintelligible, closely-spaced text, numbers, graphs and acronyms. As Groucho Marx might have said, “This is so simple, a PhD could read it. Run out and find me a PhD!”
Join host Ronnie Lipschutz and Kevin Bell on Sustainability Now! when we offer “A Talmudic Exegesis: Reading and Interpreting Your Electricity Bill--A Talmudic Exegesis:.” You will learn why your local utility pays a wholesale price of only about 3 cents per kilowatt hour for renewable electricity while charging you 50 cents! You’ll learn about PICA, which is not a small animal but, rather, the “Power Charge Indifference Adjustment.” And you’ll find out why your bill seems to be rising ever upward and why the newly-announced fixed charge, due to show up on your bill next year is unlikely to make it stop rising.
You can find a handout here, to be followed along with the broadcast: A Guide to Reading your Electric Bill.
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Why do humans dominate nature and why have they done so? Is it because of God told Adam and Eve to “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth”? Is it because capitalism sees the world in terms of scarcity and commodification and must find monetary value in everything? Some psychologists and philosophers have proposed that we seek to overcome our fear of death by controlling that nature to which we must inevitably return when we die? Join Host Ronnie Lipschutz for a thought-provoking conversation with James Rowe, Associate Professor of Political Ecology and Cultural, Social, and Political Thought at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island, who has just published Radical Mindfulness—Why Transforming Fear of Death is Politically Vital.
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The light and energy from the sun falls on us all, humans, animals and plants. That light is what sustains life on Earth. But that light can also be transformed into electricity by solar photovoltaics that are not cheap. Is solar energy the common property of everyone on Earth or is it the exclusive property of those who can afford the technology to capture it? In two weeks, on Sunday, May 12th, join me for a conversation with Anthropology Professor Kathryn Milun, from the University of Minnesota Duluth, who is head of the Solar Commons Project at the Minneapolis campus of the University of Minnesota, a project that seeks to create wealth from solar electricity for low-income communities and households.
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Students eat. But what do they eat? And where does that food come from? Both the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the California Department of Food and Agriculture are trying to help small farms sell more of their organic produce to public schools, shortening the supply chain between farms and consumers and encouraging students to eat more salads and other healthy foods. Join host Ronnie Lipschutz and guests Mireya Gomez-Contreras and Alma Leonor-Sanchez from Esperanza Community Farms in Watsonville, along with Pajaro Valley High students Mark Mendoza Luengas and Julio Gonzales, to hear about Esperanza’s farm to cafeteria program and their efforts to help Latine operators of small farms on the Central Coast to earn more revenue for their crops by selling directly to customers.
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Bees are in danger; what can we do? Tune into a Sustainability Now! rebroadcast from 2021 to hear a conversation with Eve Bratman, an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Franklin & Marshall College, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Bratman is a political ecologist with interdisciplinary training utilizing social science to explore conservation and land use issues relating to sustainable development politics and policies. She is author of Governing the Rainforest: Sustainable Development Politics in the Amazon, and is finishing her book, called Bee Politics: Protecting Pollinators and the Local-to-Global Challenge of Sustainability, which uses bees as a prism for seeing broader social and ecological phenomena and is premised upon revealing the ways that human society fumblingly strives to protect and preserve their roles in our lives.
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Solar electricity is the fuel of the future. But can we go solar without damaging the environment? Solar farms in distant places need transmission lines to get their product to the market. Storage batteries, and especially electric vehicles, require lithium and the stuff must be mined somewhere. And all the while, its seems that the solar enterprise is being undermined by the struggle to control where solar panels can go and who can decide how little wholesale power will cost and how much you, the consumer, will pay.
Join host Ronnie Lipschutz as he welcomes back SJSU Environmental Studies Professor Dustin Mulvaney, who has been looking into the environmental consequences of solar farms, transmission lines and mining in California’s “Lithium Valley.”
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All of us—well, many of us—are backyard gardeners. And it’s planting season. Backyard gardens are not immune from the impacts of violent and unpredictable weather or the longer-term effects of climate change. Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Kim Stoddart, editor of Amateur Gardening and author of The Climate Change Resilient Vegetable Garden—How to Grow Food in a Changing Climate. She lives and gardens in West Wales, where weather conditions are not always optimal. Kind of like California.
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We live in a Consumer Society. Rising consumption is good, since it makes the economy grow. At the same time, we face a Climate Crisis. Rising consumption is bad, since it makes carbon emissions grow. People across the Global North believe we must reduce emissions but they are reluctant to reduce their consumption. What can we do? Some advocate ecological modernization by making our goods and services greener. Others argue that only shrinking the economy--"degrowth"--will do the trick. Maybe both are more mythic than technologically or politically feasible. Can we square the circle (or, maybe, circle the square?) and find a path to sustainability?
Join SN! host Ronnie Lipschutz for a thought-provoking conversation with Dr. Jean Boucher, about the promises and myths of sustainable consumption. Boucher is a senior Research Scientist and Macaulay Development Trust Fellow in Land Use and Societal Metabolism at the James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland. His research ranges from people's attitudes about climate change and their carbon-intensive lifestyles to the demographic distribution of clean energy technologies, the socio-technical factors that influence cultural and institutional behavior, and macro-scale societal metabolics analyzing materials and energy flows through households and economic sectors.
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The elephant seals are back!
The elephant seals have made their annual trip back to the California Coast! During the winter months, Elephant Seals turn to love...and fighting... and feeding... and laying around in the sun and rain. This is the prime viewing season at Año Nuevo State Park and Point Reyes National Seashore, where you can watch the two-ton male seals fight bloody battles over the females, the females feeding their large and growing pups, and listen to the odd noises they produce (although they probably think humans make strange noises).
This is a rebroadcast of a 2022 interview with Dr. Theresa Keates, who holds a UCSC PhD in Ocean Sciences and is currently a Legislative Analyst with the California Energy Commission. Keates' dissertation research centered on deploying oceanographic tags on elephant seals, which offer both a source of valuable oceanographic data from remote regions as well as a unique platform to investigate these very large marine mammals.
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