“We shouldn’t try to save nature, we should try to co-exist with it.”

That’s professor Kata Beilin. She joins Friday host Esty Dinur for the first half of today’s special Earth Day show to talk about her new documentary film, Maya Land: Listening to the Bees, which “tells the story of the conflict that erupted between Mayan beekeepers and the Mexican government in 2011, fomented by the planting of genetically modified soy in the Yucatan peninsula.”

Then, cultural historian Jenny Price talks about her new book, Stop Saving the Planet!

“Ninety-eight percent of the popular solutions refuse to challenge how our economy works,” she says—and until they do, we will continue to fail both the planet and the people who call it home.

Kata Beilin is a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and faculty director of Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of In Search of Alternative Biopolitics in Contemporary Spain: Anti-Bullfighting, Animality, and the Environment in Contemporary Spain (Ohio State University Press, 2015) and co-editor of Ethics of Life: Contemporary Iberian Debates (Vanderbilt University Press, 2016). She recently directed and produced the documentary film Maya Land: Listening to the Bees (2022).

Jenny Price is a public writer, artist, and historian and a research fellow at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Stop Saving the Planet!: An Environmentalist Manifesto (W.W. Norton, 2021).

Cover photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash

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