By Environmental Solutions - One Planet Podcast - Creative Process Original Series
The story of our environment may well be the most important story this century. We focus on issues facing people and the planet. Leading environmentalists, organizations, activists, and conservatio
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The podcast currently has 224 episodes available.
Carl Safina’s lyrical non-fiction writing explores how humans are changing the living world, and what the changes mean for non-human beings and for us all. His work has been recognized with MacArthur, Pew, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and his writing has won Orion, Lannan, and National Academies literary awards and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. Safina is the inaugural holder of the endowed chair for nature and humanity at Stony Brook University, where he co-chairs the steering committee of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science and is founding president of the not-for-profit Safina Center. He hosted the 10-part PBS series Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina. His writing appears in The New York Times, National Geographic, Audubon, CNN.com, National Geographic News, and other publications. He is the author of ten books including the classic Song for the Blue Ocean, as well as New York Times Bestseller Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. His most recent book is Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace.
"At the Safina Center, we're trying to work on values. Values I think are the fundamental thing. If you resonate with the values we're expressing, you would feel differently about the prices of things, just, for instance, oil and coal are really very cheap. They are priced cheaply. The price, the value, and the cost of things are three really different things.
So the price of oil and coal is very cheap, but the cost of those things involves, well, let's just say coal for one example, it involves blowing the tops off of mountains throughout Appalachia, occasionally burying a few people, giving lots of workers lung disease, changing the heat balance of the entire planet, and acidifying the ocean. That's the cost of it. It's nowhere in the price."
www.safinacenter.org
www.carlsafina.org
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
Photo: Carl Safina in Uganda
"The field of synthetic biology, which is known by some as extreme genetic engineering – that's a name mostly used by people who don't like it - amounts to a set of tools that humans have developed to be able to very precisely and accurately change the genetic code, the DNA of living organisms in order to get those organisms to do things that humans want. So the applications in medicine are predominantly devoted to trying to make us healthier people, and they range from some really exciting work on tumor biology to work on the microbiome, which is all of the thousands and tens of thousands of species that live on our lips, our mouths, our guts, our skin. And in agriculture, it's primarily directed at crop genetics, trying to improve the productivity of crops, the nutritional value of crops, the ability of crops to respond to climate change, and a whole variety of other things. Some people may have heard of one of these tools called CRISPR used to very precisely alter the sequences of DNA.
This book that Bill and I wrote is about the impending intersection between synthetic biology and the field of nature conservation, not an examination of the technologies per se, but an examination of the way that we are going to end up needing to think about the intersection between our ability to change DNA, and what it means to be natural, and what it means to conserve things and whether or not we want to conserve things that we have altered."
Kent H. Redford is a conservation practitioner and Principal at Archipelago Consulting established in 2012 and based in Portland, Maine, USA. Archipelago Consulting was designed to help individuals and organizations improve their practice of conservation. Prior to Archipelago Consulting Kent spent 10 years on the faculty of University of Florida and 19 years in conservation NGOs with five years as Director of The Nature Conservancy’s Parks in Peril program and 14 years as Vice President for Conservation Science and Strategy at the Wildlife Conservation Society. For six years he was Chair of IUCN’s Task Force on Synthetic Biology and Biodiversity Conservation. In June 2021 Yale University Press published Kent’s book with W.M. Adams: Strange Natures. Conservation in the Era of Synthetic Biology.
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300230970/strange-natures/
https://archipelagoconsulting.com
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
Kent H. Redford is a conservation practitioner and Principal at Archipelago Consulting established in 2012 and based in Portland, Maine, USA. Archipelago Consulting was designed to help individuals and organizations improve their practice of conservation. Prior to Archipelago Consulting Kent spent 10 years on the faculty of University of Florida and 19 years in conservation NGOs with five years as Director of The Nature Conservancy’s Parks in Peril program and 14 years as Vice President for Conservation Science and Strategy at the Wildlife Conservation Society. For six years he was Chair of IUCN’s Task Force on Synthetic Biology and Biodiversity Conservation. In June 2021 Yale University Press published Kent’s book with W.M. Adams: Strange Natures. Conservation in the Era of Synthetic Biology.
"The field of synthetic biology, which is known by some as extreme genetic engineering – that's a name mostly used by people who don't like it - amounts to a set of tools that humans have developed to be able to very precisely and accurately change the genetic code, the DNA of living organisms in order to get those organisms to do things that humans want. So the applications in medicine are predominantly devoted to trying to make us healthier people, and they range from some really exciting work on tumor biology to work on the microbiome, which is all of the thousands and tens of thousands of species that live on our lips, our mouths, our guts, our skin. And in agriculture, it's primarily directed at crop genetics, trying to improve the productivity of crops, the nutritional value of crops, the ability of crops to respond to climate change, and a whole variety of other things. Some people may have heard of one of these tools called CRISPR used to very precisely alter the sequences of DNA.
This book that Bill and I wrote is about the impending intersection between synthetic biology and the field of nature conservation, not an examination of the technologies per se, but an examination of the way that we are going to end up needing to think about the intersection between our ability to change DNA, and what it means to be natural, and what it means to conserve things and whether or not we want to conserve things that we have altered."
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300230970/strange-natures/
https://archipelagoconsulting.com
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
"Many of us are now aware that bees are in trouble due to manmade changes to the environment. Large-scale industrial agriculture, of course, means that often there are no floral resources over very large areas of farmland, and bees' flexibility in locating food sources of course can cope with that to some extent because they're very good at locating patches, but this ability only goes so far. Of course, if there are literally no flowers left or very few, then their learning ability won't help them very much.
In addition, of course, there is very heavy usage of pesticides and herbicides in industrial agriculture. And these substances in many cases have been designed to be lethal or at least harmful to insects because they are meant to keep herbivores at bay. And of course often, even if insects don't eat the leaves, flower-visiting insects still get exposed to them in the contents of floral nectar or pollen. So they carry these poisons back to their hives, their nests, albeit perhaps in lower concentrations
that they're available in the leaves, but they're still present at a level that's harmful to bees so that affects their navigation, that affects the health of their young. So these manmade changes have a huge impact on bees and this is typically measured in those bees that are least affected - that is honeybees.”
Lars Chittka is professor of sensory and behavioral ecology at Queen Mary University of London, where he founded a new Research Centre for Psychology in 2008 and was its scientific director until 2012. He is the author of The Mind of a Bee and is the coeditor of Cognitive Ecology of Pollination. He studied Biology in Berlin and completed his PhD studies under the supervision of Randolf Menzel in 1993. He has carried out extensive work on the behaviour, cognition and ecology of bumble bees and honey bees, and their interactions with flowers. His discoveries have made a substantial impact on the understanding of animal intelligence and its neural-computational underpinnings. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed articles, and has been an editor of biology’s foremost open access journal PLoS Biology since 2004. He is an elected Member of the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), a Fellow of the Linnean Society and Royal Entomological Society, as well as the Royal Society of Biology.
http://chittkalab.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk/Lars.html
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691180472/the-mind-of-a-bee
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
Photo credit: Markus Scholz / Leopoldina
Lars Chittka is professor of sensory and behavioral ecology at Queen Mary University of London, where he founded a new Research Centre for Psychology in 2008 and was its scientific director until 2012. He is the author of The Mind of a Bee and is the coeditor of Cognitive Ecology of Pollination. He studied Biology in Berlin and completed his PhD studies under the supervision of Randolf Menzel in 1993. He has carried out extensive work on the behaviour, cognition and ecology of bumble bees and honey bees, and their interactions with flowers. His discoveries have made a substantial impact on the understanding of animal intelligence and its neural-computational underpinnings. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed articles, and has been an editor of biology’s foremost open access journal PLoS Biology since 2004. He is an elected Member of the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), a Fellow of the Linnean Society and Royal Entomological Society, as well as the Royal Society of Biology.
"Many of us are now aware that bees are in trouble due to manmade changes to the environment. Large-scale industrial agriculture, of course, means that often there are no floral resources over very large areas of farmland, and bees' flexibility in locating food sources of course can cope with that to some extent because they're very good at locating patches, but this ability only goes so far. Of course, if there are literally no flowers left or very few, then their learning ability won't help them very much.
In addition, of course, there is very heavy usage of pesticides and herbicides in industrial agriculture. And these substances in many cases have been designed to be lethal or at least harmful to insects because they are meant to keep herbivores at bay. And of course often, even if insects don't eat the leaves, flower-visiting insects still get exposed to them in the contents of floral nectar or pollen. So they carry these poisons back to their hives, their nests, albeit perhaps in lower concentrations
that they're available in the leaves, but they're still present at a level that's harmful to bees so that affects their navigation, that affects the health of their young. So these manmade changes have a huge impact on bees and this is typically measured in those bees that are least affected - that is honeybees.”
http://chittkalab.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk/Lars.html
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691180472/the-mind-of-a-bee
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
Photo credit: Markus Scholz / Leopoldina
"I think maybe the critical issue here is the governance aspect which I think is one of the core sources of many of the greatest threats to human civilization on the planet. The difficulties we have in effectively tackling these global governance challenges. So global warming, I think, at its core is really a problem of the global commons. So we all share the same atmosphere and the same global climate, ultimately. And we have a certain reservoir, the environment can absorb a certain amount of carbon dioxide without damage, but if we put out too much, then we together face a negative consequence."
Nick Bostrom is a Swedish-born philosopher with a background in theoretical physics, computational neuroscience, logic, and artificial intelligence, as well as philosophy. He is the most-cited professional philosopher in the world under the age of 50.
He is a Professor at Oxford University, where he heads the Future of Humanity Institute as its founding director. He is the author of some 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias, Global Catastrophic Risks, Human Enhancement, and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, a New York Times bestseller which helped spark a global conversation about the future of AI. He has also published a series of influential papers, including ones that introduced the simulation argument and the concept of existential risk.
Bostrom’s academic work has been translated into more than 30 languages. He is a repeat main TED speaker and has been on Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers list twice and was included in Prospect’s World Thinkers list, the youngest person in the top 15. As a graduate student he dabbled in stand-up comedy on the London circuit, but he has since reconnected with the heavy gloom of his Swedish roots.
https://nickbostrom.com
https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
Nick Bostrom is a Swedish-born philosopher with a background in theoretical physics, computational neuroscience, logic, and artificial intelligence, as well as philosophy. He is the most-cited professional philosopher in the world under the age of 50.
He is a Professor at Oxford University, where he heads the Future of Humanity Institute as its founding director. He is the author of some 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias, Global Catastrophic Risks, Human Enhancement, and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, a New York Times bestseller which helped spark a global conversation about the future of AI. He has also published a series of influential papers, including ones that introduced the simulation argument and the concept of existential risk.
Bostrom’s academic work has been translated into more than 30 languages. He is a repeat main TED speaker and has been on Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers list twice and was included in Prospect’s World Thinkers list, the youngest person in the top 15. As a graduate student he dabbled in stand-up comedy on the London circuit, but he has since reconnected with the heavy gloom of his Swedish roots.
"I think maybe the critical issue here is the governance aspect which I think is one of the core sources of many of the greatest threats to human civilization on the planet. The difficulties we have in effectively tackling these global governance challenges. So global warming, I think, at its core is really a problem of the global commons. So we all share the same atmosphere and the same global climate, ultimately. And we have a certain reservoir, the environment can absorb a certain amount of carbon dioxide without damage, but if we put out too much, then we together face a negative consequence."
https://nickbostrom.com
https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
“Humanity needs to do three things if it wants to continue to flourish, and it will. The three things that humanity needs to do are decarbonize the global economy, drawdown, capture, harvest much of that heat-trapping pollution that we've already pumped into the atmosphere over the past hundred years because as long as it's up in our atmosphere, we're going to have continued warming. And the third thing that humanity needs to do is become more resilient to the impacts of climate change, which unfortunately will continue for the next several generations at least, even as we succeed in decarbonizing the global economy and harvesting that heat-trapping pollution from the atmosphere.
So these are the three things that have to happen. These three things will happen. The open question is how rapidly will they happen? Any business that can play a vital role in making any one or two or all three of those things happen, those are businesses that are going to flourish going forward. And any business that's sitting on the side and not contributing to one of those three areas, I really think they will become increasingly irrelevant, if not completely antiquated and increasingly understood to be harmful.”
Dr. Mona Sarfaty is the Executive Director and Founder of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health, comprised of societies representing 70% of all U.S. physicians. She founded the Consortium in 2016 in conjunction with the George Mason University Center for Climate Change. Under her leadership, the Consortium has grown into a nationwide coalition of societies, organizations, and advocates mobilizing support for equitable policies that address the health impacts of climate change.
Edward Maibach is Director of the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, a distinguished University Professor and communication scientist who is expert in the uses of strategic communication and social marketing to address climate change and related public health challenges. His research – funded by NSF, NASA, and private foundations – focuses on public understanding of climate change and clean energy; and the psychology underlying public engagement. In 2021, Ed was identified by Thompson Reuters as one of the world’s 10 most influential scientists working on climate change.
https://medsocietiesforclimatehealth.org
https://twitter.com/docsforclimate
www.climatechangecommunication.org/all/climate-change-american-mind-april-2022/
www.climatechangecommunication.org/all/politics-global-warming-april-2022/
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
Dr. Mona Sarfaty is the Executive Director and Founder of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health, comprised of societies representing 70% of all U.S. physicians. She founded the Consortium in 2016 in conjunction with the George Mason University Center for Climate Change. Under her leadership, the Consortium has grown into a nationwide coalition of societies, organizations, and advocates mobilizing support for equitable policies that address the health impacts of climate change.
Edward Maibach is Director of the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, a distinguished University Professor and communication scientist who is expert in the uses of strategic communication and social marketing to address climate change and related public health challenges. His research – funded by NSF, NASA, and private foundations – focuses on public understanding of climate change and clean energy; and the psychology underlying public engagement. In 2021, Ed was identified by Thompson Reuters as one of the world’s 10 most influential scientists working on climate change.
“Humanity needs to do three things if it wants to continue to flourish, and it will. The three things that humanity needs to do are decarbonize the global economy, drawdown, capture, harvest much of that heat-trapping pollution that we've already pumped into the atmosphere over the past hundred years because as long as it's up in our atmosphere, we're going to have continued warming. And the third thing that humanity needs to do is become more resilient to the impacts of climate change, which unfortunately will continue for the next several generations at least, even as we succeed in decarbonizing the global economy and harvesting that heat-trapping pollution from the atmosphere.
So these are the three things that have to happen. These three things will happen. The open question is how rapidly will they happen? Any business that can play a vital role in making any one or two or all three of those things happen, those are businesses that are going to flourish going forward. And any business that's sitting on the side and not contributing to one of those three areas, I really think they will become increasingly irrelevant, if not completely antiquated and increasingly understood to be harmful.”
https://medsocietiesforclimatehealth.org
https://twitter.com/docsforclimate
www.climatechangecommunication.org/all/climate-change-american-mind-april-2022/
www.climatechangecommunication.org/all/politics-global-warming-april-2022/
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
"So this was maybe nine months after the fire in Notre Dame, and I had been struck visually by the fire, the yellow smoke, which is a telltale indicator of lead. The fact that 400 tons of lead constituted the covering of the roof of the cathedral. And a lot of that had volatilized, presumably, but no one really knew how much. So that got me thinking, and I happened to be in Paris at the time, so I thought if it's so much lead, could it be that it affected the population living within say a kilometer of the cathedral? I thought there wasn't really a lot of clear information about what had happened, and what had been measured. I thought some more openness and transparency was needed."
Geochemist Lex van Geen is a research professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and is member of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. His research focuses on ways to reduce the impact of the environment on human health. For two decades, he coordinated earth-science on the origin and health effects of elevated levels of arsenic in groundwater. His other projects focus on fluoride in groundwater in India, bauxite dust in Guinea, or soil contaminated with lead from mine-tailings in Peru, and fallout of lead over Paris following the fire in Notre Dame. Dr. Van Geen is a firm believer in the more widespread use of field kits by non-specialists to reduce exposure to environmental toxicants.
www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~avangeen
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
www.creativeprocess.info
The podcast currently has 224 episodes available.