In this episode, Aruni talks to Patrick Holden, CBE  a UK organic dairy farmer, campaigner for sustainable food and farming, and co-founder with Anthony Rodale of U.K. The Sustainable Food Trust and U.S. Sustainable Food Alliance. 

They discuss how Patricks  interest in farming were sown during his London childhood. Holden kept a variety of animals, ranging from mice and rabbits to budgerigars and myna birds, and would spend hours in his back garden studying the amphibians that migrated to the ponds he had dug as a boy. 

And about in n 1971, aged 20, Holden when he spent a year in the San Francisco Bay Area and how he was strongly influenced by the green movement that was gathering momentum at the time. As a result, Holden returned to the UK and worked for a year on an intensive dairy fam in Hampshire before studying biodynamic agriculture at Emerson College (UK).

Holden then joined the back-to-the-land movement in 1973 and, using the knowledge gained from his childhood, studies and experiences in California, formed a community farm in Bwlchwernen, Wales. After the community dispersed, Holden continued to run the farm now known as Holden Farm Dairy - now the longest established organic dairy farm in Wales. Enterprises have included an 80 cow Ayrshire herd, the milk from which goes to produce Hafod, a cheddar style cheese; oats and peas; wheat for flour milling; and carrots which he grew for supermarkets for 25 years.

Alongside farming, Holden’s other work has included the development of organic standards and the market for organic foods, founding British Organic Farmers, trustee of the Soil Association, and director of the Soil Association (1995-2010). He is also a patron of the UK Biodynamic Agricultural Association and The Living Land Trust, as well as an advisor and participant in the Prince of Wales Terra Carta initiative. 

In 2010, Holden founded the Sustainable Food Trust, an organisation based in Bristol, UK that works internationally to accelerate the transition towards more sustainable food systems. Key activities of the organisation include influencing government policy on sustainable agriculture; advocacy for true cost accounting; development of an internationally harmonised framework and metric for measuring on-farm sustainability; campaigning for the re-localisation of supply chains, including small abattoirs; and linking healthy diets to sustainable food production.

Sharon Friel is an ARC Laureate Fellow and Professor of Health Equity. She is Director of the Planetary Health Equity Hothouse, and the Menzies Centre for Health Governance at the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet), Australian National University. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences Australia and the Academy of Health and Medical Sciences. Previously, she was Director of RegNet from 2014-2019, and Head of the Scientific Secretariat (University College London) of the World Health Organisation Commission on the Social Determinants of Health between 2005 and 2008. In 2014, her international peers voted her one of the world’s most influential female leaders in global health. Her interests are in the political economy of health equity; governance of the social, commercial and planetary determinants of health inequities; climate change, food systems, trade and investment. Her 2019 book “Climate Change and the People’s Health” highlights the importance of addressing the global consumptogenic system.

Alison Kenner is an associate professor in the Department of Politics, with a joint appointment in the Center for Science, Technology and Society. Professor Kenner's research is concerned with human-environment relations in late industrialism, particularly how people inhabit their homes, think about and experience environments, and work to create change in the world. Working in the traditions of experimental and collaborative ethnography, Kenner’s research tacks between political economy, everyday life, and the infrastructures that underpin both. Her first book, Breathtaking: Asthma Care in a Time of Climate Change (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), documents how care is materialized at different scales — from medication use to mobile phone apps and environmental policy – to address the U.S. asthma epidemic.

In this episode we will talk about the effects of climate change on human health. We all know that global climate is changing progressively, that global temperatures are rising, the levels of greenhouse gases are increasing and glaciers are melting at an unprecedented rate, but what is less well known are the effects of climate change on health, how extreme weather events and rising temperatures affecting human health and wellbeing. What are the effects of climate change on the most vulnerable populations and the most susceptible individuals to address some of these issues? We are joined today by a distinguished guest, Dr. Jay Lemery. Dr. Lemery is a Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the Chief of the Section of Wilderness and Environmental medicine. He is the past president of the Wilderness Medical Society. And in 2017 he co-authored the book "Environmedics", the impact of climate change on human health. He has been a consultant for the Climate and Health program at the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. And he's currently the Medical Director of the National Science Foundation's polar research program, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. 

Today on the podcast, we will be talking with Molly Peterson. Ms. Peterson a science news writer, who reports on issues relating to climate change, catastrophe and risk for KQED, a Public Broadcasting Service member television station in San Francisco.  In the past, she has was environmental correspondent at Southern California Public Radio.  Her work has appeared at the New York Times, The Guardian, as well as NPR and other national outlets.  She has recently reported on a range of issues such as floods, forest fires and others. 

Today we will talk about Earth - the key elements of nature that support all life.  Tucked away in an obscure corner of the milky way, this blue planet is home to us all and the only known planet that supports organic life. Throughout its course of evolution, the planet has undergone radical transformations – from a hot fiery ball of fire to a frigid snowball earth that remained frozen for 300 million years.  As the earth warmed, life flourished on the planet in exuberant profusion. After maintaining a relatively stable atmosphere for the last 11,000 years, global temperatures are beginning to rise again. Many believe that this runaway global warming is to due to human activity, which has increased the atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases.  Few people know more about how this climate change is affecting or will continue to affect the health of the planet and its inhabitants, or that there is deep bond between human health and the health of the planet than our guest today – Dr. Jennifer Cole. 

Dr. Cole is a biological anthropologist interested in how humans influence and adapt to changing environments.  She is a lecturer in Global and Planetary Health at Royal Holloway University of London.  From 2017-2019, she was Public Health Policy Advisor to the Rockefeller Foundation Economic Council on Planetary Health at Oxford University and co-authored the influential book – Planetary Health: Human Health in the Era of Global Environmental Change. 

In this episode, Dr. Aruni speaks with Professor Glenn Albrecht about solastalgia and how it is affecting people today worldwide. Solastalgia is a new concept developed to give greater meaning and clarity to environmentally induced distress. As opposed to nostalgia--the melancholia or homesickness experienced by individuals when separated from a loved home--solastalgia is the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment.