A Wild and Beautiful World

"Cultural understandings can be very rapid, they can also be sometimes very resistant to change, which is part of the problem, but the evolution of culture is something we can and should think about in a very different way from biological evolution, which takes a long time--and the fact that cultural evolution can turn on a dime can be very encouraging, because it means that it could be that in the next ten years (in a fantasy) everybody's out in the streets, saying 'leave it in the ground'--the fossil fuel, that is."

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Ursula W. Goodenough is a Professor of Biology Emerita at Washington University in St. Louis where she engaged in research on eukaryotic algae. She authored the textbook Genetics and the best-selling book The Sacred Depths of Nature and speaks regularly about religious naturalism and evolution. She contributed to the NPR blog, 13.7: Cosmos & Culture, from 2009 to 2011.She currently serves as president of the Religious Naturalist Association and in 2023, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

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Other links:

Religious Naturalist Association

This week I have something a little different. I was asked to take part in the Collective Climate Action lecture series for the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University. These are the same folks who asked me to do a keynote five years ago, which turned into the essay that's in the wonderful book All We Can Save. I struggled with this one, as I struggled with that one, trying to honestly describe and also find power in the very complicated feelings that climate change instills in me as in many others. I'm going to keep working on this one too, because I think it will serve as the keystone in a book of essays. Meanwhile, I hope you find it useful, or at least interesting.

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Links: Spring Creek Project: https://prax.oregonstate.edu/initiatives/spring-creek-project

Spring Creek Lecture Collective Climate Action series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T1WjHGofKk

Loving a Vanishing World (the lecture I gave for Spring Creek in 2019): https://medium.com/@enjohnston/loving-a-vanishing-world-ace33c11fe0

"If we had a climate leader like Anne Hidalgo, the Pike/Pine network itself, going from Capitol Hill, which is dense enough to support its own pedestrian zone and car-free streets, could be car-free or mostly car-free down to the water, there'd be this wonderful green interchange between Capitol Hill and downtown and there's really wonderful opportunities for a sustainable connectivity that we can't really conceive because every square inch of this city has to be handed over to the private vehicle."

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Mike Eliason is the founder and principal of Larch Lab. He is a researcher, writer, urbanist, and architect based in Seattle. He has dedicated his career to advancing innovation and broadening the discourse on passivhaus, community-oriented housing, ecodistricts, prefabrication, and circularity. He is an activist for dense, livable, affordable, and sustainable cities, and he currently sits on the board of Seattle's new Passivhaus Social Housing Development PDA. He has just finished a book on climate adaptive ecodistricts for Island Press.

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Links: Larch lab

Building for People: Designing Livable, Affordable, Low-Carbon Communities

Seattle Mayor's Comp Plan response to HB 1110

Paris

Mass Timber

PNW Forests

EcoCocon

"Because the one thing they will never have that we have is numbers, and moral high ground. Most of us are doing this because we care, it's coming from a place of love, often we're doing it in our volunteer time--and the government and corporations will never match that."

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Lauren Regan is the legendary founder, executive director, and staff attorney at the Civil Liberties Defense Center. She and the CLDC have defended "green scare" activists, climate activists, water protectors, and many more. The CLDC was a founding member of the Water Protector Legal Collective, active at Standing Rock and Line 3, and has also worked to defend activists at Cop City in Atlanta. Lauren has also coordinated the defense of large groups of activists in the Pacific Northwest, and run countless Know Your Rights briefings, security workshops, and information sessions about the dangers of SLAPP suits. She represents activists affiliated with Extinction Rebellion, immigrant rights, indigenous rights, Black Lives Matter, and other environmental and social justice movements. I've personally experienced her fierce and focused legal advocacy, and can attest to the fact that you definitely want her on your side if you're challenging the system.

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Links:

Civil Liberties Defense Center

"The clear-cuts were littered with these big old logs, they were just lying there rotting in the sun, and we asked Dominick DellaSalla, the scientist who was our tour guide, what's that all about, and he said 'they're really picky about which logs they bring back to market, so if they see flaws in the wood they'll just leave it behind...70% of the logs, of the old growth yellow cedar trees that are cut down, are left behind.'"

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Today's episode is with Paul Koberstein and Jessica Applegate, the co-authors of Canopy of Titans (currently a finalist for the Oregon Book Award), which focuses on Pacific Northwest forests and their importance to our global climate. Paul is editor and co-founder of Cascadia Times, and has won awards for investigative journalism. He's an Oregon native who currently resides in Portland. Jessica Applegate is managing editor and photographer for Cascadia Times and works with young children with special needs. As a lifelong environmental activist and public servant, she also owns an organic vineyard in Douglas County, Oregon. Jessica resides in Portland.

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Links:

Canopy of Titans: https://orbooks.com/catalog/canopy-of-titans/

Do Young Trees Suck Up More Carbon? https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08022022/do-young-trees-suck-up-more-carbon/

350 Seattle forestry FAQ: https://350seattle.org/forestry-faq/

"Our ignorance of the soil really impedes our efforts to reach what I see as the holy grail here, which is low-impact, high-yield farming. There's plenty of high-impact, high-yield farming, and plenty of low-impact, low-yield farming, but neither of those are the answers that we need to find. We have this enormously challenging thing that we face, that we have to feed 8, and one day 9 or 10 billion people, while trying to bring that system back within planetary boundaries."

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George Monbiot is a columnist for the Guardian, and an investigative environmental reporter. He's in some cases barely lived to tell the tale while writing about forced migration in Indonesia, peasant movements in Brazil, assaults on nomadic people in Kenya and Tanzania, and the illegal traffic in mahogany, including to Buckingham Palace.

He's the author most recently of Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea, and Human Life, and Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet.

He received a UN Global 500 Award from Nelson Mandela.

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Links:

The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People: https://www.monbiot.com/2023/10/04/the-cruel-fantasies-of-well-fed-people/

Grazed and Confused: https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/reports/fcrn_gnc_report.pdf

"The climate crisis that we have now, the environmental justice crises that we have now, are because there was not an investment or concern about the communities that are feeling the brunt of these illnesses when these facilities were being created, when these plans were being made. If we had cared about climate change, if we had cared about the environment, 40/50 years ago, when Valero Energy Corporation was planning to build in SW Memphis, we probably wouldn't have the cancer rates that we have now. If people had cared about all of these toxic release inventory facilities that surround our community, we wouldn't be dealing with the consequences of environmental degradation and environmental racism that we have now. The reality is that to show that we care, it does require us to show up differently, and that means consistently, persistently rejecting the status quo. "

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Justin J. Pearson is a state representative in Tennessee's General Assembly, a powerful pipeline fighter who helped to defeat the Byhalia Pipeline through his work with Memphis Community against Pollution, and an activist who has also stood up for educational equity, racial justice, and gun control. Along with Justin Jones, he was one of the two state representatives who were expelled after taking part in a gun control protest at the state capitol. He was reappointed six days later.

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"We need regulation, we need policy, we need community pressure, we need expectations, we need movies, we need poetry...we need all these things that drive us to a certain behavior, because we have got a lot of good sides, and they're not brought out by our current society and our current economic model, they are repressed and destructed by it. There's a great academic story about a guy who went to look for evidence that we behave badly under pressure--the whole dog eat dog market view of the world, when things go bad we're going to be fighting for the food, fighting for shelter, and...all the apocalyptic movies, The Road, etc...and there's a side of us that can behave that way, but his view was that the academic evidence was not just not supportive, it was the opposite--that when we have a wildfire, when we have a flood, when we have a really intense threat to a community, the community comes together, and it comes together because it needs to in order to protect itself, and that's a natural tendency of humanity, not something that we need to be forced into."

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Paul Gilding is the author of The Great Disruption, and has been an activist for over 50 years: a student activist against Apartheid and for Aboriginal land rights, a union organizer, a disarmament organizer, a climate organizer, the Executive Director of Greenpeace International, and much more. In consulting and speeches, he's also worked to persuade companies and corporate executives to respond appropriately to the climate crisis, and he's a teacher and researcher at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership.

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Links:

The Great Disruption

The Great Disruption Has Begun

"Standing Rock was like the beginning and the end of various parts of my life. I feel like I was asleep before Standing Rock. When I took my children out there it became more about recognizing our place on Earth as human beings and realizing that if we don't have our children in those spaces, how are we going to pass that knowledge on, or how do we expect them to stand...as much as I would love to say that our youth didn't have to stand on the frontlines, but they're inheriting what's been created already, and so unfortunately we are left to create warriors to continue this work that we're doing."

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Today I have the pleasure of talking with someone a little closer to home than most of my guests. Rachel Heaton is a Muckleshoot tribal member, a founder of the Indigenous-led divestment group Mazaska Talks, a mountain climber, a cultural educator, a naturalist, and mother to 3 beautiful children, Mercedes, Nylah, and Dahnahhi. I've been lucky enough to work with her on and off over the last several years, and I can honestly say there are few people I've appreciated more. Her kindness, intelligence, and dedication shine through in all she does.

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Links:

Mazaska Talks

"Start by just learning the names of the bumblebees in your garden and the butterflies that fly past your room, of the birds, and it's not hard...and once you open that door, once you start, it's this neverending unfolding field of wonders, as crazy and naive as that sounds, and I wouldn't be able to live my life without it."

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Adam Welz is a South African journalist, nature conservation consultant, photographer and filmmaker. Most recently, he's the author of The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown, which Bill McKibben has called "A book that goes deeper than any before into the meaning of the climate breakdown for all the rest of creation."

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Links:

The End of Eden

The Merlin App

iNaturalist