Earthbound

Who pays when the price on the shelf doesn't cover the cost of growing the food? Brenda Huerta, Senior Advisor for Climate and Environment at Fairtrade International, joins Earthbound to talk about what a label on a banana can promise, what it can never promise, and why the farmers who contributed least to the climate crisis stand on the most exposed ground.

Brenda grew up in Mexico, where farming has long meant more than food production. From the milpa to cocoa agroforests in Ghana, she brings that view to her work translating between smallholder farmers and the companies that buy from them. She is also refreshingly honest about what a certification scheme can and can’t do.

In this episode:

• Milpa, the Green Revolution, and criticizing the system that feeds us
• How fair trade began, and why it treats poverty as a product of unfair trade
• Cooperatives, the Fairtrade Minimum Price, and the premium farmers spend as they choose
• Label fatigue, and why certification can’t fix a system-wide problem
• The adaptation finance gap facing smallholder farmers
• Europe’s deforestation and green claims rules, and who pays to comply
• Living income reference prices and the true cost of food
• Why the COP “year of implementation" never quite arrives
• Sankofa, dynamic agroforestry, and the future of cocoa

Ask Brenda what she loves most about her work, and she doesn’t cite a statistic. She says she knows, by first and last name, the farmers the work reaches. Somebody pays for that cheap banana. Knowing who is a start.

• Fairtrade International: https://www.fairtrade.net
• Meet Brenda Huerta (Fairtrade International): https://www.fairtrade.net/en/get-involved/news/meet-brenda-huerta.html
• Fairtrade Risk Map: https://riskmap.fairtrade.net
• Fairtrade Living Income Reference Prices: https://www.fairtrade.net/en/why-fairtrade/why-we-do-it/decent-livelihoods/living-income/living-income-reference-prices.html
• Sankofa: dynamic agroforestry for cocoa in Ghana: https://www.fairtrade.net/en/get-involved/news/sankofa--improving-incomes-and-building-climate-resilience-throu.html
• FLOCERT, Fairtrade’s independent auditor: https://www.flocert.net
• NDC Partnership: https://ndcpartnership.org
• Climate Policy Initiative, Global Landscape of Climate Finance 2025: https://www.climatepolicyinitiative.org/publication/global-landscape-of-climate-finance-2025/
• Related Earthbound: Somebody Should Do Something (individual action vs. systemic change): https://www.earthboundpodcast.com/individual-action-vs-systemic-change/
• Earthbound: https://www.earthboundpodcast.com
• Global Warming Is Real: https://globalwarmingisreal.com

In the 1960s, schoolchildren practiced for the end of the world by hiding under their desks. Sixty years later, the desks are virtual, and the apocalypse has company.

In this solo episode, host Thomas Schueneman reads a short essay from Thinking Out Loud, his column in the Global Warming Is Real newsletter. After nearly twenty years of warning about climate change, he watches artificial intelligence arrive to steal climate’s existential thunder. Then he takes the joke seriously enough to follow it somewhere useful, to the question beneath both crises: is our wisdom keeping pace with the complexity we keep building?

In this episode

• Duck and cover, mutually assured destruction, and a magazine that asked: "What, me worry?"
• The virtual desks we hide under today, or mutually assured distraction
• AGI and AGW: two acronyms, two threats of our own making
• The irony of AI as both a burden on the climate and a hoped-for fix
• Finding the humor in hilarious times, and why it helps
• Why complexity does not imply resilience or wisdom
• The question that matters more than any forecast: what kind of world do we want?

Hope, Tom suggests, begins when we stop fooling ourselves, and that cuts both ways. The danger is real. So is our capacity to answer it. The way out isn't a better hiding place. It's climbing out from under the desk, long enough to imagine something better.

Links

• Read the original essay and subscribe to the Global Warming Is Real newsletter: globalwarmingisreal.com https://globalwarmingisreal.com/2026/10/01/why-worry-climate-change-and-ai/
• Earthbound: https://www.earthboundpodcast.com
• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1801556711
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1oTiYPa10UY9pqWgSwwEnF
• Earthbound on Substack: https://planetwatch.substack.com
• Further reading: Energy and AI, International Energy Agency, 2025: https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai
• Related: Breaking the Chains: The Lust for Power vs. the Light of Energy: https://www.earthboundpodcast.com/breaking-the-chains-the-lust-for-power-vs-the-light-of-energy/
• Related solo essay: Climate and Peace | Lessons of Minneapolis: https://www.earthboundpodcast.com/climate-and-peace-lessons-of-minneapolis/
• Related solo essay: The Fourth Turning Meets the Ways of the Duck: https://www.earthboundpodcast.com/the-fourth-turning-meets-the-ways-of-the-duck-responding-with-calm-in-a-chaotic-world/
• Support the show: https://www.earthboundpodcast.com/support/

What if human thought isn’t separate from nature, but Earth’s newest ecosystem?

Anne Riley spent more than 30 years in accounting, high tech, and banking before walking away from a system built on one goal: maximize profit at all costs. Her book, The Human Idea: Earth’s Newest Ecosystem, starts inside a single cell and builds outward to us. Life runs in nested layers, DNA to cell to body to colony, all bound by one rule. Do what you need, but don’t harm your neighbor. Humans run the same design one layer up, built from ideas. The difference is choice. Our rules are whatever we decide, and a bad idea spreads as easily as a good one.

In this conversation

• Why Riley left accounting, and the goal that crowds out every other goal
• The ideasphere: idea, mind, body, institution, society
• “Amazing and dangerous”: how the takers outspread the live-and-let-livers
• Government as the body’s nervous system, and what money does to it
• Nature’s one hundred percent tax system
• Schools that compete for students, and healthcare split into wellness and catastrophe
• Measuring pollution the way a body reports a cut finger
• AI as a possible form of life without life’s constraints
• Why a quiet person with a big idea keeps talking anyway

Riley calls herself a super introvert and the wrong person to spread her own theory. Some people tell her it will never work. Others ask when we start.

Links

• The Human Idea: Earth’s Newest Ecosystem by Anne Riley, 2nd ed., Ideasphere World Publishing, 2024: thehumanidea.com
• Anne Riley’s books, including DINA and Aerie: thehumanidea.com/books
• Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem, Michael Rothschild, 1990: https://books.google.com/books/about/Bionomics.html
• Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari, 2024, on AI as “alien intelligence”: https://www.ynharari.com/book/nexus/
• Earthbound: Bill McKibben, Here Comes the Sun: earthboundpodcast.com/bill-mckibben-here-comes-the-sun-and-how-renewables-can-power-the-future
• Earthbound: Diana Colleen, They Could Be Saviors | Curing Billionaire-ism: earthboundpodcast.com/they-could-be-saviors
• Earthbound: earthboundpodcast.com
• Earthbound Listener Survey: https://www.earthboundpodcast.com/survey/2026/
• Global Warming Is Real: globalwarmingisreal.com

Maya Lilly builds documentaries around one question: what makes a story move somebody to act?

She trained at Juilliard, ran an environmental club there called the Juilliard Greens, then took an environmental studies degree and moved to Hollywood on purpose. The plan was to learn what the industry does well and either get climate storytelling inside it or carry the techniques back to organizers. She did both. She is now a lead producer for The Years Project.

Her definition of a story is narrow and very old. Somebody has a problem, confronts it, and overcomes it. What the arc does, she says, is lift the veil on a run of events that would otherwise feel unconnected.

That reorders the work. Instead of finishing a film and attaching an impact campaign to the end, she goes to communities that already have a campaign and builds the film in service of it. In East Palestine, Ohio, her first question to residents was what do you need. In Cancer Alley, she points to Sharon Lavigne, who confronted the petrochemical industry with one simple sentence.

She argues the other side has won by hammering simple narratives, while her own side has often explained complex issues poorly. Her team’s working question is how to keep the film from going wonky, how, in doing so, they might swap “anthropocentric” or “greenhouse gas emissions” for something much simpler: pollution. She pushes funders too. One told her proudly that its overhead is only ten percent. Some of that, she said, needs to be for better communications.

We also get into Ishmael, deep ecology, and the consequences of an economy built with little consideration for the ecology that underpins it. And we end in the water, with a twenty-minute swim to a platform in Jamaica and hundreds of jellyfish that let her pass. She looked them up later. There were so many because the ocean is warming.

“Storytelling for me is like looking through a little peephole into a wider room. So often what I’m trying to do is find the smaller story that shows the bigger story within it.” · Maya Lilly

Resources

• Maya Lilly and The Years Project
• Hop Hopkins, “Racism Is Killing the Planet” Sierra, 8 June 2020:
• Sharon Lavigne, 2021 Goldman Environmental Prize, North America:
• RISE St. James, founded by Sharon Lavigne in 2018
• Beyond Plastics
• Rare, and its Center for Behavior and the Environment
• Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
• Earthbound Podcast
• Global Warming Is Real
• Full raw interview audio

The harbor master in Monterey once told me the ocean is confused. Scientists have a name for part of it: shifting baseline syndrome, where each generation inherits a diminished ocean and calls it normal. The loss happens underwater, unwitnessed.

Andrew Lewin has built a career on making it visible. A marine biologist who started in marine protected areas, he now hosts How to Protect the Ocean and runs the Speak Up for Blue podcast network. His guiding lesson, borrowed from Randy Olson: scientists speak to the brain, but people are moved through the gut. Tell someone we have passed 1.5 degrees and they nod. Tell them about the basement that flooded twice and the insurance that will not cover it, and you have their attention.

We talk about the state of the ocean and the state of the argument. The UN plastics treaty, still unfinished, still shadowed by industry lobbyists. The High Seas Treaty, now in force, and the distance between coming into force and being enforced. Deep-sea mining, and what a vacuum three thousand meters down would mean for animals that navigate by sound.

And we talk about apathy. Lewin traces the industry's argument from denial, to reassurance, to something stranger: yes it is real, no there is nothing to be done, so carry on. They are banking on apathy, he says. Which makes exhaustion not a side effect of the crisis but a product of it.

He finds his optimism in the long game, and in what the late Wallace J. Nichols called blue mind, the ocean's effect on our own. Worry less about the degrees, he suggests, and get people back to the water. You do not defend what you never loved.

Resources

• Andrew Lewin, Speak Up for Blue podcast network: speakupforblue.com
• How to Protect the Ocean podcast: speakupforblue.com/show/speak-up-for-the-ocean-blue
• Beyond Jaws, co-hosted with Dr. David Ebert: speakupforblue.com/show/beyond-jaws
• Randy Olson, Don’t Be Such a Scientist (Island Press, 2009; second edition 2018)
• (Little, Brown and Company, 2014)
• Wallace J. Nichols, Blue Mind (Little, Brown and Company, 2014)
• The BBNJ Agreement, or High Seas Treaty, entered into force 17 January 2026: High Seas Alliance
• UN plastics treaty negotiations (INC): unep.org/inc-plastic-pollution
• International Seabed Authority: isa.org.jm
• Deep Sea News: deepseanews.com · Southern Fried Science: southernfriedscience.com
• Earthbound: earthboundpodcast.com · Global Warming Is Real: globalwarmingisreal.com
• Earthbound Listener Survey

Takeaways

• The oceans are facing a crisis, with shifting baselines creating confusion about their health and future.
• As the ocean absorbs more pollution and climate impacts, it's vital to recognize our role in safeguarding marine ecosystems.
• Andrew Lewin’s work emphasizes the importance of storytelling in ocean conservation and the need for innovative approaches to engage the public.
• Deep-sea mining poses significant risks to marine biodiversity, and international agreements must be enforced to protect these vulnerable areas.
• Effective communication in science is crucial; we need to connect emotionally with audiences to inspire action for ocean conservation.
• The High Seas Treaty offers hope for better management of international waters, but enforcement remains a challenge that requires global cooperation.

What can one person actually do about problems as vast as climate change, racism, or inequality? For most of us, the honest answer feels like: not much. That sense of powerlessness is exactly what philosophers Michael Brownstein and Alex Madva set out to dismantle.

In this episode, Tom talks with the co-authors of Somebody Should Do Something (written with Daniel Kelly) about the trap of either/or thinking, the false choice between fixing ourselves and fixing the system. The truth, they argue, is both/and. Our personal choices and our collective structures are woven together, and the most powerful thing any of us can do is act in ways that draw others in.

Along the way: why the personal carbon footprint was a fossil-fuel PR invention, how the “Crying Indian” ad shifted blame from industry to individuals, what the NRA and the temperance movement understood about identity, and the startling fact that most Americans badly underestimate how many of their neighbors want climate action. It’s a conversation about social influence, honest hope, and the roles each of us already plays.

If you’ve ever thought somebody should do something, this one is for you. It turns out that somebody is us.

Links & Resources

• Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change (MIT Press, 2025), by Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and Daniel Kelly, mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049788/somebody-should-do-something
• Michael Brownstein, John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate Center
• Alex Madva, Cal Poly Pomona, California Center for Ethics and Policy
• Daniel Kelly, Purdue University
• Mary Annaïse Heglar, “I Work in the Environmental Movement. I Don’t Care if You Recycle,” Vox (2019)
• Pluralist Ignorance
• Ian Haney Lopez
• Related Earthbound episodes: Dana Fisher on the polycrisis; Bill McKibben; Travis Rieder on Catastrophe Ethics
• Earthbound: earthboundpodcast.com · Global Warming Is Real: globalwarmingisreal.com

What is more addictive than fentanyl, cocaine, or heroin? Evan Jaqua’s answer is power. And once people have it, they will do almost anything to keep it.

This is a solo episode, a short essay built around the ideas of Evan Jaqua and the Solutions Party, the political reform organization he founded. The interview tape didn’t meet the bar for broadcast, so I took his thinking and ran it through my own. I hope to have Evan back for a clean recording. For now, it’s just you and me.

The throughline is power, and the strange double life the word leads. In physics, power is the flow of energy, the capacity to do work. In politics, it is the capacity to influence, coerce, and control. Jaqua’s argument is that nearly all of our social dysfunction, from energy policy to corruption, runs downstream of one addiction: the lust for that second kind of power.

Energy is where the two meanings meet. Fossil fuels are scarce, contested, and easy to hoard, which is exactly why they translate so cleanly into political control. Sunlight asks no one’s permission. As Bill McKibben puts it, none of the ninety-three million miles light travels to reach us passes through the Strait of Hormuz.

The Solutions Party’s first move is disarmingly simple: eliminate re-election, and sever the link between holding power and seeking more of it. Abundant, decentralized energy severs that link everywhere else.

We have the means. We are standing in them. What we lack is the will to stop guarding the old fire.

Links and Resources

• The Solutions Party: https://www.solutionsparty.org/
• Bill McKibben, Third Act / writing on renewable energy: https://billmckibben.com/
• Listener survey: earthboundpodcast.com/survey
• Rate and review Earthbound: https://www.earthboundpodcast.com/rate/
• Support the show: https://www.earthboundpodcast.com/support/

Thanks to these sonic contributors

Environment War 4 by mensageirocs -- https://freesound.org/s/232644/ -- License: Attribution NonCommercial 3.0

winter forest 125 PM 240125_0644 by klankbeeld -- https://freesound.org/s/726466/ -- License: Attribution 4.0

A conversation with David Beckemeyer

We are a storytelling species. Long before we had data, we had narrative. But in a media environment engineered to trigger our most primitive threat responses, even the most compelling story struggles to find its audience. The amygdala doesn’t care about nuance. It cares about survival.

So how do we talk about climate change to people who aren’t already in the room?

David Beckemeyer has spent years studying that question, not from a climate angle, but from within the outrage machine itself. As host of Outrage Overload and a researcher with the Connors Institute, David brings together scientists, psychologists, and civic thinkers to examine why we get so worked up, and what we can actually do about it.

In this conversation, we get into the psychology behind why facts so often fail to move people, even when the stakes couldn’t be higher. We talk about naive realism, the quiet assumption that because you’ve looked at the evidence and reached a conclusion, everyone else should too. We talk about solution aversion, how people unconsciously shift their position on a problem based on whether the proposed solutions feel ideologically threatening. And we talk about the movable middle, the people who aren’t loud, aren’t on your feed, but are out there, and listening.

The conversation also moves into territory that surprised me. Deliberation versus debate, and why one almost never works. The role of storytelling in reaching people across tribal lines. And a genuinely hopeful data point from Texas, of all places, about what’s possible when people engage with trade-offs honestly rather than defensively.

This is not a climate episode in the conventional sense. It’s a conversation about the human wiring that shapes every climate conversation we try to have. And if you’ve ever felt like you were talking and not being heard, I think you’ll find something useful here.

In this episode:

• Naive realism and why clarity isn’t enough
• Solution aversion and the tribal brain
• The movable middle: who they are and how to reach them
• Deliberation versus debate
• Storytelling as the path past the amygdala
• Finding agency in an algorithmic media landscape
• The Texas wind power story

Links:

• Outrage Overload: outrageoverload.net
• Earthbound listener survey
• Earthbound on the web: earthboundpodcast.com
• GlobalWarmingisReal.com

What if the problem isn’t that the people with the most power don’t care? What if it’s that they’ve lost the capacity to?

That’s the question at the center of Diana Colleen’s debut novel, They Could Be Saviors. A group of the world’s wealthiest men is kidnapped and brought to a facility where they’re offered a choice: undergo psychedelic-assisted therapy, or stay put indefinitely. It sounds far-fetched. Spend a few minutes with the headlines, and it starts to feel less like science fiction and more like a thought experiment we should have started a long time ago.

Diana is an author, a trained psychedelic therapy facilitator, and a self-described democratic socialist. In 2018, she hit rock bottom and found her way to an underground facilitator who, she says, saved her life. That experience is the bedrock of her novel.

The book frames the billionaire class not as villainy but as pathology. A taker mentality writ large, scaled across centuries and obscene accumulations of capital. But it’s also an argument for reconnection. These men are still human beings. They’ve had trauma. They can change, if something happens to shake them loose from the story they’ve been telling themselves. That’s where the psychedelics come in.

We talked about the carbon footprint myth, the corrosive design of social media addiction, the feminist architecture of the story, and what any of us can actually do right now. Your voice, Diana says, is your power.

And then she told a story about a barista having a bad day, and how one small act of kindness ripples outward in ways we can’t always see. It sounds small. But it’s also how the world turns.

Takeaways:

• Billionairism is a pathology, not just a policy problem. Extreme wealth concentration isn't simply an economic issue. Diana frames it as a mental illness, a hoarding disorder scaled to planetary consequence, that severs its hosts from the shared reality the rest of us navigate every day.
• The carbon footprint narrative is a diversion. The idea that individual consumer choices are the primary lever for addressing climate change was largely engineered by fossil fuel interests to shift blame downward. Changing the behavior of a few thousand people at the top would do more than changing the habits of eight billion at the bottom.
• Psychedelic therapy is not recreational drug use. Set and setting make all the difference. Therapeutic use is built on intention, preparation, and a held, safe environment. That distinction matters, and the suppression of legitimate research since the Nixon era has cost us decades of potential progress.
• Hope is the consequence of action, not its prerequisite. Waiting to feel hopeful before doing something has it backward. Engagement, however modest, is what generates the sense that change is possible. Disengaging entirely may protect your mental health in the short term, but it removes you from the work.
• Small acts of kindness are not trivial. They ripple. The barista story isn't a consolation prize for people who can't do bigger things. It’s a genuine theory of change, grounded in how human beings actually affect one another.

Resources:

• Diana Colleen: They Could Be Saviors
• The Parado Principle (80/20)
• Daniel Quinn: Ishmael
• Earthbound Podcast
• GlobalWarmingIsReal
• Eartbound Listener Survey

Novelist Lee Schneider completes the Utopia Engine Trilogy with a story of climate collapse, AI dominance, and the stubborn possibility of liberation.

That’s the question at the heart of Liberation, the final book in Lee Schneider’s Utopia Engine Trilogy. Schneider is a novelist, screenwriter, futurist, and podcast producer, and in this episode, he sits down with me to talk about a near-future world battered by climate breakdown, controlled by an authoritarian artificial intelligence called MIND, and populated by imperfect people doing their best to find their way through.

The trilogy began for Schneider in a very personal way. California wildfires brought smoke into his neighborhood, forced him to run his air filters constantly, and eventually forced him and his family to evacuate their home. That experience crystallized something he’d long cared about into an urgent creative need. The result: three novels that use speculative fiction as a rehearsal space for the challenges we’re already living.

Liberation brings the trilogy’s story arc to its conclusion. Protagonist Kat Keeper, a reluctant revolutionary, is trying to build a communications network free from MIND’s control, while grappling with grief and the relentless propaganda machine targeting her credibility. And out in the ocean, orca whales, having endured centuries of human noise, pollution, and indifference, have had enough.

We dig into a lot of territory in this conversation. How does misinformation amplify ecological collapse? What does it mean that AI power is concentrated in so few hands? What would a world of brain-modded humans and fake press conferences actually feel like to live in? And what can the behavior of orcas off the coast of Spain teach us about the intelligence we share this planet with?

Schneider is, perhaps unexpectedly, an optimist. Not naively so, but deliberately. He invokes Churchill: there’s no point in being anything else. And that optimism finds its way onto a wall of a building in the world of Liberation: “Utopia will always be far off. But it's always worth walking toward.”

Climate fiction, as Schneider sees it, isn’t propaganda. It’s behavior modeling. We watch imperfect characters navigate an imperfect world, and we learn something. About ourselves, and about what it means to ask “what if?”

We are a storytelling species. This episode is a good example of why that matters.

In This Episode:

• What drove Lee Schneider to write climate fiction after years in Hollywood
• How the Utopia Engine Trilogy depicts AI-controlled climate manipulation and surveillance
• The real science behind orca intelligence and what it means for how we treat other species
• The role of misinformation in ecological collapse, and how close we already are to the world in his books
• What comes next: Schneider's new forest-world trilogy for younger readers
• His podcast production company, Red Cup Agency, and his show The Future Lab with Lee Schneider

Links and Resources:

• Lee Schneider's books: leeschneiderbooks.com
• The Future Lab with Lee Schneider podcast: Future Lab
• Liberation (Book 3, Utopia Engine Trilogy), also Surrender and Resist
• Listener survey: earthboundpodcast.com/survey
• Support Earthbound: earthboundpodcast.com
• Carl Jung: Personality Archetypes

About Earthbound:

Earthbound is stories from the Anthropocene, life on a warming planet. If this episode moved you or made you think, please take a moment to leave a rating and review wherever you listen. And subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Audio Attribution:

whale song by muri_kuri -- https://freesound.org/s/684188/ -- License: Creative Commons 0

humpback_whales_and_orcas_ambient_underwater_recording by raiden04 -- https://freesound.org/s/797762/ -- License: Attribution 4.0

freewilly.mp3 by mjudo12 -- https://freesound.org/s/74908/ -- License: Attribution 3.0

Sea and seabirds by FonotecadeCanarias -- https://freesound.org/s/210954/ -- License: Attribution NonCommercial 3.0