Sustainability Now! on KSQD.org

Many listeners are probably familiar with the tags found in hotel bathrooms that read: “Save Our Planet,” followed by instructions about reusing and replacing towels, and concluding “Thank you for helping us converse the Earth's vital resources.”  Reusing towels might help conserve the hotel's financial resources but does that make any difference for the Planet?  Such “lifestyle environmentalism” is widespread, providing a sense of doing something in a world in which collective action is so difficult.  In two weeks, join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Dr. Michael Maniates, for a conversation about his forthcoming book, The Living-Green Myth: The Promise and Limits of Lifestyle Environmentalism, which will be published in August.  Maniates dismisses the notion that individual actions can make a significant impact on the state of the planet.  But if not that, what are we to do?

Tariffs are in the air and on the news. Tariffs are up and down.  Tariffs are in and out. Who knows where they might go and what they might do. But what do tariffs mean for sustainability and the environment?  Will they help or hurt?  Do they matter either way?  Tune into Sustainability Now! to hear Christine Barrington and Ronnie Lipschutz discuss tariffs and what they might mean for the environment and the planet. Lipschutz is neither an economist or an expert on the design or history of tariffs but has had many opportunities to study and write about taxes and the environment.  He's promised to keep economic jargon to the minimum and intelligibility to the maximum.

Big agriculture is Big!  And it appears to be getting Bigger, as the leading companies in four critical sectors—equipment, seeds, fertilizers and chemicals—consolidate in order to dominate their markets and the farmers who buy their products.  Join Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Dr. Jennifer Clapp, who has just published Titans of Industrial Agriculture—How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why It Matters.  Clapp is Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems.

Until very recently, salmon and other fish attempting to spawn in Northern California's Klamath River found a number of dams in their way. Over the past several years, in the largest project of its kind to date, those dams have been removed. Now, the watershed is being restored to let the salmon swim upriver and allow other plants and animals to return.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Brook Thompson, a member of the Yurok tribe, restoration engineer, PhD candidate in Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz, and author of I Love Salmon and Lampreys, an illustrated book for children.  Her doctoral work is focused connecting water rights and Native American knowledge through engineering, public policy, and social action.

On January 16th, 2025, a fire broke out at the Vistra plant in Moss Landing, California burning for two days and scattering heavy metals and other toxic materials across the plant's surroundings, including Elkhorn Slough.  What happened there and why did the batteries burn?  What are the impacts of the fire and on the future of renewable energy?Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for three conversations about the batteries and the fire, with Ric O'Connell, executive director of GridLab, who will explain what the batteries are doing there, Dr. Ivano Aiello, Professor of Geological Oceanography at San Jose State's Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, who will discuss the results of his research into contamination of Elkhorn Slough, and Dr. Megan Thiele Strong, Professor of Environmental Sociology at San Jose State, who will talk about the health and social effects of the fire on people living around the site.Here are some resources:Fire Protection Association, UK "Why do lithium-ion batteries catch fire?"Never Again Moss LandingHunterbrook, "After Vistra Fire, Residents Report Illness, Scientists Confirm Contaminated Soil," Jan. 27, 2025.Never Again Moss Landing (NAML), "Community Organization Conducts Surface Sampling for Heavy Metals Following Moss Landing Battery Storage Facility Fire," feb. 6, 2025.Hunterbrook, "New Data Indicates Elevated Heavy Metal after Vistra Fire," Feb. 11, 2025.Julian Spector, "Why we don't need to worry about the latest grid battery fire," Canary Media.com, Jan. 27, 2025.(Moss Fire photo @picklerich831 via REUTERS)

Food insecurity and food apartheid are a common challenge in many low-income and minority neighborhoods across the United States.  Big supermarket companies avoid those areas because stores are unprofitable and small stores find that they make the most money on junk foods, sodas and liquor.  Saba Grocers is an Oakland-based organization, founded in 2019, that works with those small stores to enable them to sell fresh produce sourced from minority farmers across the region.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Lina Ghanem, director and co-founder of the Saba Grocers Initiative in Oakland.

Mark Dowie describes himself as “Cowhand, guitarist, investigative historian, poet” and journalist.  He's probably best known as cofounder, editor and staff writer forMother Jones, but during his more than 50-year career, over his he's also written for many other magazines, newspapers and publications, written eight books and received no less than 19 journalism awards. In 1995, Dowie publishedLosing ground: American environmentalism at the close of the twentieth century.  Thirty years later—and 70-odd years since the beginning of that movement, join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Dowie about the U.S. environmental movement, then and now.

Over the past few years, we've heard a lot about artificial intelligence and the algorithms that support public policy, decision making and resource allocations.  By processing reams of presumably neutral data, the algorithms are supposed to produce unbiased results.  But we've also heard concerns about the algorithms themselves: what unrecognized assumptions go into their construction and how they can produce different outcomes depending on programmer choices about the data that goes into them. Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Professor David Rehkopf of the Department of Epidemiology & Population Health at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and Derek Ouyang, Executive Director of City Systems and Senior Research Manager in Stanford University's Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab.  We'll be taking about what algorithms are, how they are used to promote environmental justice and guide public funding for disadvantaged communities, and why they can produce different results depending on what goes into them and what comes out. 

What is regenerative agriculture?  Who is practicing regenerative agriculture?  And what are its prospects?  In two weeks, join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Stephanie Anderson, author of From the Ground Up: The Women Revolutionizing Regenerative Agriculture, which explores how women are leading the movement to transform the U.S. agricultural system and inspiring hope in the face of environmental and social challenges.

 On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as President of the United States for his second term.  There is considerable trepidation in the environmental policy and activism sectors across the country and, indeed, the world.  Trump's appointees are committed to deregulation across the board, especially where the environment is concerned, to gutting funding for renewable energy and rescinding the Inflation Reduction Act and increasing fossil fuel production and consumption. What his Administration might want to do and what it will be able to do are two very different questions. Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a discussion on these matters with Dr. Andrew Rosenberg who, most recently, was director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists and has had considerable experience in how policies are made and how they are implemented.  That's not as easy as many people believe. For more information on this topic, you can also watch "Navigating the Trump 2.0 Deregulatory Agenda webinar" from the Security & Sustainability Forum at: https://tinyurl.com/4e6ck2mn

As California looks forward (!) to the beginning of a new Presidential Administration, there is growing trepidation about what it might mean for the state.  Is it time to secede and join with other West Coast states to create a new country? Fifty years ago, Ernest Callenbach published Ecotopia, a vision of a new country dedicated to protecting people and the environment. In 2015, on the 40th anniversary of Ecotopia, UCSC held a conference called “Utopian Dreaming: 50 years of imagined futures in California and at UCSC.”  Speakers included a number of academics, critics and dreamers. None of us, of course, imagined that Donald Trump might be the next President of the United States. Listen to three talks from the conference: a keynote by Kim Stanley Robinson, best-known today for The Ministry of the Future;  a critique by UC San Diego Professor of Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature Rosaura Sanchez; and an account of how Silicon Valley has become the generator of utopian and dystopian futures, by Fred Turner, Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. You can find videos of the complete conference at https://www.youtube.com/@ronnielipschutz8900.  And you can read an article on California eco-utopias at: https://ksqd.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Ecotopia-or-ecocatastrophe.pdf.

To avert the worst impacts of climate change, a transition away from fossil fuels is necessary. However, what this transition looks like and what would make a transition “just,” remain open questions. What workers are missing from “green” economy discussions? What role do workers play in the fight for a future without fossil fuels? How can workers and communities ensure the transition is “just”? Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with UCSC Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies J. Mijin Cha, whose new book, A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future, will be published by MIT Press in December. Her research examines the intersection of inequality and the climate crisis in which the energy transition is leveraged to advance a more just future.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 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.

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

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Climate change is transforming what scientists call the land-sea interface, with crumbling cliffs, falling structures, tidal and storm flooding and loud homeowners demanding government action.  Should that interface be buttressed and built up to prevent further coastal erosion or is managed retreat a better strategy? Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Rosanna Xia (“Shaw”), an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times and a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020.  Xia has just published California Against the Sea—Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline.  She has traveled the state's 1,200-mile coastline and talked to experts, politicians and the public to see what is happening, what communities are doing and what we can expect for our coastal future.

Energy has been with us for a long time and, over the past 100 years, fossil fuels have been cheap and plentiful.  Now we are going to have to pay the piper if we want to limit the future impacts of climate change.  How could that happen.  Tune in to hear Amory Lovins, cofounder of the Rocky Mountain Institute and long time energy policy analyst and advisor to many utilities, regulators and businesses.  Almost 50 years ago, Lovins published a groundbreaking article in the journal, Foreign Affairs, entitled “Energy Strategy: The Road not Taken,” which recommended a renewable-based strategy over one based on oil, coal and nuclear power.  Surely, but slowly, that vision is being realized, albeit in a much more complicated and conflicted fashion.  Amory will talk about efficient energy use, integrative design, renewable supply (including grid integration), and long-term energy needs and paths to getting to an electrified future.

Monterey Waterkeeper is part of a coalition of organizations seeking to reduce nitrate pollution in the region's groundwater. Nitrate contamination, the result of over-application of fertilizers, can cause the “blue baby syndrome” and various cancers in adults.  The State Water Board recently issued rules that allow growers to continue over-application of nitrogen fertilizers without any deadlines for cleaning up contaminated water.  In October 2023, rural Latino community and farmworker groups, environmental organizations, including Monterey Waterkeeper, and commercial and recreational fishing organizations filed suit to overturn the decision.  Tune in to hear Chelsea Tu, Executive Director of Monterey Waterkeeper, talk about the problem, the situation and the solution

According to Simon Dalby, Professor emeritus in the Balsillie School of International Affairs at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, global politics over the past 70 years has been driven by an overabundance of "firepower," both nuclear and carbon-based.  The first was used by Great Power to threaten incineration of the world, by intention or accident, in the name of "national security."  The second now threatens the future of life on Earth--human and nonhuman--but Great Powers (and the not-so-great) resolutely refuse to give them up in the name of "national security" and "lifestyle."  In 2022, Dalby published Rethinking Environmental Security, an analysis of firepower past, present and future.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a thought-provoking conversation with Simon Dalby about these two threats and what countries are not doing about it.

Nuclear power is being touted as a way of providing clean energy, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and paving the way to a zero-emission future. There is talk of a “nuclear renaissance,” with small modular reactors (SMRs) replacing the gigawatt nuclear behemoths of the past, quickly and at much lower cost.  But the United States' experience with nuclear, now going back 70 years, turned out to be much more costly than predicted.  The country's one hundred or so operating reactors have generated prodigious quantities of highly radioactive spent fuel that is being stored in so-called swimming pools and caskets adjacent to the plants that produced it.  Blame politics, if you will, but it remains waste.  And only a month ago, a federally subsidized deal to build a cluster of six SMRs in Idaho collapsed, due to cost overruns and construction delays.  So, is that renaissance real or just hope and hype? To find out more, join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Professor Allison Macfarlane, Director of the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at The University of British Columbia.  Dr. Macfarlane was chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 2012-2014.  She holds a PhD in Geology from MIT, was a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, which addressed the 70-year old challenge of radioactive waste disposal, about which she continues to write.

Long-time listeners to Sustainability Now! know that we periodically turn to a focus on plastic, whose production is predicted to skyrocket over the next few decades, as fossil fuel companies look for ways to sell their product.  Plastics are not forever, although they last a long time in the environment and are piling up across the world's lands and oceans.  Even notionally “compostable” plastics require special handling if they are to be returned to their constituent components, and most of these plastics are not handled specially. If you could make a better plastic—one that would decompose into biological carbon in your backyard compost pile—wouldn't the world beat a path to your door?  Maybe not. Join SN! host Ronnie Lipschutz and Raegan Kelly, Head of Product and Sustainability Lead at Better for All, for a conversation about composting plastics.  Better for all is trying to widen use of PHBH, a biologically based plastic that breaks down with minimal treatment in your back yard.  We are going to talk about why it is so difficult to get the manufacturers of plastic and plastic products to use PHBH and what Better for All is trying to do about that.

Sequoias are among the oldest living things on Earth, and most of the world's sequoias are in Sequoia and King's Canyon National Parks. Since 2020, according to the National Park Service, almost 20% of that iconic species have been destroyed by wildfires.  The parks' management is planning to repopulate the burned-over areas with thousands of sequoia seedings, in an effort to rebuild six groves.  But not everyone supports this project: some ecologists argue that there are enough seedlings growing in those groves to provide the next generation of trees.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz to hear about the pros and cons from Dr. Christy Brigham, Chief of resources management and science at the two national parks and one of the architects of the plan, and from Dr. Chad Hanson, cofounder of the John Muir Project, who is a critic of the plan. Photo credit: Gary Coronado, LA Times

When you go out into the world and walk on the Earth, have you ever wondered what was beneath your feet?  Animals and plants, of course, but mostly soil.  Soil is a wonderful substance, an essential element in the riot of life that covers the planet's continents.  But soil is not without life of its own: a handful of fertile soil is home to more organisms in a than there are people on Earth.  And these organisms are vital to plant and animal nutrition and growth.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz and Dr. Chelsea Carey, Director of Soil Research and Conservation at Point Blue Conservation Science  for a fascinating conversation about the life beneath our feet.

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for this Blast from the Past with Dr. Helen Caldicott.  According to Dr. Caldicott, the nuclear doomsday clock of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is set at 100 seconds to Midnight, but 20 seconds is closer to the mark. Dr. Caldicott has devoted the last forty-two years to an international campaign to educate the public about the medical hazards of the nuclear age and the necessary changes in human behavior to stop environmental destruction and nuclear catastrophe. She calls this “Global Preventive Medicine.” Caldicott is also the subject of “If You Love This Planet,” which won an Academy Award in 1982 for best documentary.

For uncounted millennia, the creatures of the world's ocean have been hunted, captured and killed by human beings.  For most of that history, however, this was done for subsistence purposes.  Only over the last few centuries, was the slaughter of whales, seals, otters, turtles, sharks and other marine species justified in the name of capitalism and industry.  Beginning in the late 1960s, exposing and preventing this continued decimation became the mission of individuals and groups dedicated to direct action meant to disrupt those who continue to hunt, capture and kill. Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with one of the best-known of these activists, Captain Paul Watson, who recently published his memoir Hitman for the Kindness Club—High Seas Escapades and Heroic Adventures of an Eco-Activist.  Watson was a cofounder of Greenpeace, founder of Sea Shepherds and most recently established the eponymous Captain Paul Watson Foundation which “aims to educate and raise awareness about the illegal exploitation of oceanic ecosystems and marine species, while also establishing an international anti-poaching entity to enforce conservation laws and treaties.” Watson has commissioned and skippered numerous ships and campaigns, fought against the murder of marine species for more than half a century, has been on the forefront and frontline of direct action to protect the biodiversity of Earth's marine environments.

What do you know about CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act, passed in 1970 and signed into law by then-Governor Ronald Reagan? For more than 50 years, CEQA has been used to inform decisionmakers and the public about the potential environmental impacts of proposed projects but, in recent years, it has been applied in situations for which it was not designed, especially new housing development.  In response, both Governor Newsom and the State Legislature are seeking to amend the law to prevent various activists and opponents from obstructing new housing.  Not so fast, say the law's supporters.  They point to a recent report by the Rose Foundations that CEQA has had little, if any, impact on housing projects across the state. So, who is correct? Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Professor Deborah Sivas of the Stanford Law School. She teaches environmental law, directs the environmental law clinic and has represented various environmental organizations in the courts.  We will talk about CEQA and whether it is really standing in the way of more housing in California.

The Rights of Nature is one way to rethink the relationships between humans and Nature, but are there other ways to think about those connections? Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Dr. Rosalind Warner, professor of political science at Okanagan College in British Columbia and Research Fellow with the Earth System Governance Project.  Warner is studying the role of kinship metaphors in Earth System Law, with kinship connoting more ethical relationships among humans, Nature and earth's non-human inhabitants. Earth System Law is an emerging body of legal precepts, principles and practices that bring together ethics and law with the planet's dynamic physical and biological cycles. Tune in to hear a new take on human-nature relations.

More than 50 years ago, Christopher Stone, a UCLA law professor, wrote a groundbreaking book Should Trees Have Standing? in which he argued for the right of trees to be represented in courts of law.  Since then, the Rights of Nature movement has taken the world by storm; some countries have encoded such rights into their constitutions.  But what does it mean to say that trees, rivers and animals have rights? Does the “rights of nature” make any practical sense? And who is pushing for such rights? Join Sustainability Now! host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Katie Surma, a reporter at Inside Climate News. She has been covering the “rights of nature” beat at ICN since 2021 and has written extensively on the topic.  Find out whether the trees and critters in your back yard and all around us are people, too.

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.

When is the safety, health and well-being of people a concern for homeland security? Jackie McCloud, Watsonville's Environmental Sustainability Manager in Public Works, has been accepted into the Naval Postgraduate School's MA program in Security Studies at their Center for Homeland Defense and Security in Monterey.  According to McCloud, “People might see the words ‘Homeland Security' and think that it doesn't match with Public Works and climate change, but Public Works is homeland security adjacent in that we provide domestic security to residents. One of the greatest threats to our residents is climate change.”  Join Sustainability Now! host Ronnie Lipschutz and Jackie McCloud to hear a whole new take on “Homeland Security.”

Join Host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Roland Bunch, who has worked in agricultural development for more than half a century in more than 50 nations of Latin America, Africa and Asia. In 1982, he published the book, "Two Ears of Corn, A Guide to People-Centered Agricultural Improvement", which has since been published in ten languages and is an all-time best-seller in the field of agricultural development.  Beginning in 1983, Bunch began investigating and disseminating the use of plants that fertilize the soil, now called “green manure/cover crops.”  He has been honored for his work with nominations for the Global 500 Award, the End the Hunger Prize of the President of the United States, and the World Food Prize.

We hear a lot these days about innovation, entrepreneurship and disruption of the status quo in pursuit of a better world.  It sounds good but what does it really mean? And can it contribute to sustainability? Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with KSQD programmer Nada Miljkovic, Program Manager of UC Santa Cruz's Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development. We'll be talking about these topics and Crown College's innovation and entrepreneurship courses, which Nada has helped develop along with Crown Provost Manel Camps and others.  What do students learn?  What have they achieved?

Listen to a conversation between Elizabeth Kolbert and Ezra Klein on May 21st, part of UC Santa Cruz's annual Deep Read, about  Kolbert's 2021 book, Under a White Sky. Kolbert is a writer, observer and commentator on the environment for The New Yorker and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Ezra Klein is a New York Times columnist, host of The Ezra Klein Show podcast and a UC Santa Cruz alum. You can watch the video of the entire event at: https://tinyurl.com/57czndz4.  

In the face of climate change, jurisdictions across the country and the world have set ambitious electrification goals that will rely heavily on solar, wind and other zero-carbon energy sources.  California is no exception.  Increasingly, the state's power providers are buying low-cost electricity from vast solar farms across the seemingly uninhabited deserts of the American Southwest.  But those spaces are not empty. Join Sustainability Now! host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Professor Dustin Mulvaney, of the Environmental Studies Department at San Jose State University. He has been studying the social and ecological impacts of large solar farms on the deserts and whether they can contribute to a “just energy transition.” Listen to the "Battle for a Solar-Powered Future," with Professors Hilary Angelo and Dustin Mulvaney, on Alec Baldwin's "Here's the Thing." Read Dustin's article, "The Battle Over Solar Power in California," in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 3, 2022.

Rivers have long been the object of poems, songs, novels, studies, fishers, swimmers, sewage, engineers, farmers and salmon.  In California, rivers and the water in them are the focus of near-eternal political struggle.  And, there is that old saying, attributed to Heraclitus, “one never steps into the same river twice.”  Every river is different, yet there is some human drive to make every river the same: the ideal river. Join SN! host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation about rivers with Dr. Joanne Yao, Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. Yao is the author of The Ideal River: How control of nature shaped the international order. Her book is about the Rhine, Danube and Congo Rivers. How they were reshaped and managed (or not) and the role they played in the imaginaries and emergence of the European imperialist order of the 19th century and in the shaping of nature around the world, before and since.  Yao's book has special relevance for California, where the struggle to make virtually all of our rivers ideal ones has been going on since the middle of the 1800s.