In this episode of Berkeley Voices, Bree Rosenblum, a professor of global change biology at UC Berkeley, talks about why we need to stop blaming each other for the environmental crisis that we’re in, and instead confront its root causes and expand our ideas of what it means to be human on our planet. "We are in such an individual and collective squeeze point," she said. "Do we want humanity to mean what it has meant in the past, or do we want to create a new meaning for our species and our purpose?"

Listen to the episode, read the transcript and see photos on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/04/01/roots-of-climate-despair

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Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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Today, we are sharing an episode from The Edge, a podcast by California magazine and the Cal Alumni Association: "Should we bring back woolly mammoths?" Hosts Laura Smith and Leah Worthington sat down with a genetic engineer and an ecologist to understand how de-extinction works and to explore its unintended consequences. This episode was originally released in June 2021.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/03/18/berkeley-voices-should-we-bring-back-woolly-mammoths

Photo by Timothy Neesam via Flickr.

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Berkeley Law professor and anthropologist Khiara Bridges discusses the history of reproductive rights in the U.S., what’s at stake when Roe v. Wade is overturned and why we should expand our fight for reproductive justice. "Roe v. Wade didn't fall out of the sky," says Bridges. "In 1973, the justices weren’t like, 'You know what we should make up? A right to an abortion.' Roe v. Wade was actually part of a long line of cases dating back to the 1920s." And it likely won’t stop at abortion rights, says Bridges. By saying that Roe v. Wade isn’t good law, it suggests that these court decisions that led to Roe v. Wade were also improper interpretations of the Constitution.

Listen to the episode, read the transcript and see photos on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/03/04/podcast-khiara-bridges-reproductive-justice

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UC Berkeley illustration by Neil Freese.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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As a kid growing up in New York City, Roqua Montez was interested in everything — comics, dinosaurs, science, music and dance, martial arts — and his calendar filled up fast. Now, as the executive director of communications and media relations in UC Berkeley's Office of Communications and Public Affairs, he still has a lot to keep track of. To manage his activities and responsibilities, Roqua has relied on something that we all rely on: the seven-day week.

The week has been used as a timekeeping unit and calendar device to organize society for about 2,000 years, says David Henkin, a professor of history at Berkeley and author of the 2021 book, The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms that Made Us Who We Are. But it's only for the past 200 years in America that the week has had a grip on our daily lives.

Listen to the episode, read the transcript and see photos on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/02/18/the-week/

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UC Berkeley illustration by Neil Freese.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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Between 1910 and 1970, about 6 million Black Americans moved from the rural South to cities in the North, the West and other parts of the United States. It’s known as the Great Migration. Musicians who moved to these cities became ambassadors, says UC Berkeley history professor Waldo Martin, “not only for the music of the South, but for the culture from which the music emerged. And the music was made and remade, and continues to be today. On Feb. 17, mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran and jazz pianist Jason Moran — and an all-star roster of jazz collaborators — will perform their remaking of the music in Two Wings: The music of Black America in Migration for UC Berkeley’s Cal Performances.

Listen to the episode, read the transcript and see photos on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/02/04/music-of-the-great-migration/

If you haven't already, follow Berkeley Voices and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!

UC Berkeley illustration by Neil Freese.

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As drought and the effects of climate change continue to threaten the water supply that Californians rely on, experts at UC Berkeley are looking for new ways to generate an ongoing, stable water supply in its cities that is not as reliant on the weather. "Californians are leaders worldwide in the recycling of water," says David Sedlak, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and director of the Berkeley Water Center. There's just one problem that needs to be solved — and if it is, it could open up water recycling opportunities in many parts of the world.

Listen to the episode, read the transcript and see photos on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/01/21/water-recycling

If you haven't already, follow Berkeley Voices and review us on Apple Podcasts!

UC Berkeley illustration by Neil Freese; Music by Blue Dot Sessions

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When Joshua Kyan Aalampour was 16, he taught himself to play the piano using a cheap 61-key keyboard and videos on YouTube. Four years later, Joshua is a music student at UC Berkeley. He has performed his work at Lincoln Center, written a symphony and composed a score for a feature-length film. He teaches music to students around the world. He performs a new piece for TikTok every day. All while taking at least 26 credits each semester so that he can graduate this May — two years early.

Listen to the episode, read the transcript and see photos on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/12/10/berkeley-voices-podcast-student-musician-joshua-kyan-aalampour

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Today, we share an episode of The Science of Happiness, a podcast produced by our colleagues at the Greater Good Science Center. Host and UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner talks with Berkeley Journalism professor and bestselling author Michael Pollan about what it was like for Pollan to give up Twitter — something that he found was becoming a somewhat unproductive compulsion.

Next week, we'll be back with our final Berkeley Voices episode of the season. 

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/11/26/science-of-happiness-michael-pollan

Artwork by Whitney Anderson.

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Ehren Tool is the ceramics studio manager in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley and a veteran of the 1991 Gulf War. In his off-time, he makes brutal-looking clay cups to start conversations about war. Since 2001, he has made and given away more than 21,000 of them. Here he is — in his own words — talking about his cups.

Listen to the episode, read the transcript and see photos on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/11/10/cups-for-conversations-about-war/

This audio is from a video about Tool that was published with a feature story on UC Berkeley News in February 2020.

Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small

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In 2018, China enacted a policy that effectively banned the import of most plastics and other materials. "That really, I think, was the Chinese government drawing a line in the sand and saying, 'Look, we don’t want to be seen as the world’s garbage dump anymore,'" said Kate O'Neill, a professor in UC Berkeley's Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management and author of the 2019 book Waste. The United States, which had been shipping some 700,000 tons of recyclable waste to China each year, faced a crisis. Since then, communities across the U.S. have curtailed collections or put an end to their recycling programs altogether. Waste has been piling up, leaving many wondering: What now? At UC Berkeley, the Cal Zero Waste team has been hard at work answering this question. "We’re really talking about not just recycling, but reducing, reusing and composting," said Lin King, manager of Cal Zero Waste. "Really, it comes down to what you purchase and that mentality of how you get to zero waste."

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/10/29/waste/

NurPhoto photo by Mamunur Rashid via AP

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