Forward Radio podcasts

On this week's Truth to Power, we bring you a major highlight from the University of Louisville's 13th Annual Human Trafficking Awareness Conference: Climate Change & Migration. We hear today from Ritu Bharadwaj, Principal Researcher and Team Leader, Governance of Risk, Climate Change Group, at the International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED). On February 20, 2023, Ritu spoke on "Climate Change, Migration and Vulnerability to Trafficking."

This session covered how the impact of climate change and environmental degradation is deepening inequality, driving migration and creating vulnerability to modern slavery, human trafficking and forced labour within borders and cross borders. She explained why this connection needs be acknowledged and treated with urgency and what actions are needed at the international, regional and national levels. Listen in to learn about:

- What is modern slavery and is climate change a driver for modern slavery?

- How is vulnerability to modern slavery linked to patterns of displacement and migration?

- Understanding the drivers of modern slavery in context of climate change with case studies from South Asia and West Africa

- Why should this issue be treated with urgency and what needs to be done to address this issue?

Learn more at https://louisville.edu/womenscenter/signature-programs/human-trafficking-initiative

On Truth to Power each week, we gather people from around the community to discuss the state of the world, the nation, the state, and the city! It's a community conversation like you won't hear anywhere else!

Truth to Power airs every Friday at 9pm, Saturday at 11am, and Sunday at 4pm on Louisville's grassroots, community radio station, Forward Radio 106.5fm WFMP and live streams at http://forwardradio.org

Doctors Mike Flynn and Gene Shively continue their discussion - where's all the money going in our $4+ trillion healthcare industry that costs twice as much as other developed countries and delivers worse outcomes?

Our guest this week is St. Clair Detrick-Jules, a Brown University graduate who is a filmmaker and a new author. Her book 'My Beautiful Black Hair: 101 Natural Hair Stories from the Sisterhood' debuts on September 28 and features essays by and photographs of Black women who have come to some deeper understandings about what their hair and how they wear it means to them.

We talk to St. Clair about chemical treatments for Black hair and how they differ from the treatments white women know, how hair can play a role in mother/daughter relationships, and the important reason she wanted to create this book in the first place.When we recorded this episode, Black hair had recently made the news because of the International Swimming Federation’s ban on Soul Caps at the Tokyo Olympics which are made for Black swimmers with natural hair.

You can find St. Clair on social media at @stclairdetrickjules or at her website www.mybeautifulblackhair.com.

Books Mentioned in this Episode:

1- My Beautiful Black Hair: 101 Natural Hair Stories from the Sisterhood by St. Clair Detrick-Jules

2- The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination With the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World by Patrik Svensson

3- Litany for the Long Moment by Mary-Kim Arnold

4- Water Street by Crystal Wilkinson

5- Blackberries, Blackberries by Crystal Wilkinson

Shows/Films mentioned--

1- Only Murders in the Building (Hulu)

2- Good Hair ((2009 documentary)

ENERGY IS LIMITED.

OUR WORLD WILL CHANGE.

TRUSTED INSTITUTIONS ARE BLIND.

THE REST IS DETAILS.

My guest is Simon Michaux. Simon’s message is vital for understanding a future that is fast approaching, a future with limited energy, such that neither fossil fuels nor so-called renewable energy will be cheap or abundant as they are now.

It’s not that we won’t have any energy, but at some point it’s going to be a great deal more expensive. When it becomes more expensive, that expense is going to ripple through the economy, such that we will have no choice but to live with an economy that is much different from what we have now, and much different than anything being predicted or promoted either by the advocates of unlimited fossil fuels or the advocates of so-called renewable energy.

No one knows all the details, because the future is famously hard to predict. But half the fossil fuels we’ve ever used we’ve burnt in the last 30 years. How long can that go on?

Previously we have seen an increase in fossil fuel usage nearly every year for hundreds of years.

We are at or near the peak of fossil fuel consumption. And we are looking at a future of declining fossil fuel consumption. Our economy is not designed for declining energy consumption. It is designed for ever increasing energy consumption.

So when fossil fuel energy starts declining, it will be a very different economy, different from the economy that we’ve always lived with and taken for granted.

The party is going to be over in the foreseeable future. It’s just a question of when.

It’s time for us to start preparing for the future as it will be, and not live according to the fantasies we are fed by Madison Avenue, Wall Street, Congress and the Military Industrial Complex.

These institutions are all energy blind and they are going to be blind sided when our economy gets transformed from what it is to what it will be.

Simon Michaux is able to tell you about this inevitable future that no one is talking about.

His work is very well researched.

So please look up Simon Michaux on YouTube or Google and go from there.

CLEAN VEHICLES, DIRTY EXTRACTION

North America could be a serious producer of lithium for electric vehicles. But at what cost?

Thacker Pass in Nevada is being asked to help produce minerals for “clean” vehicles, owing to the site’s rich deposits of lithium, a.k.a., “white gold.”

According to Wikipedia: “The Thacker Pass Lithium Mine is a proposed lithium … mining development project in Humboldt County, Nevada which is the largest known lithium deposit in the US, and one of the largest in the world.[5][6][7] The project site would cover 18,000 acres At full capacity it would produce 66,000 tons annually,[2][4][6] equivalent to 25% of the current (2021) demand for lithium globally.

According to The Guardian: “Across the global lithium frontier, from Chile to the western United States and Portugal, environmental activists, indigenous communities and residents concerned about the threats to agricultural livelihoods are protesting over what they see as the greenwashing of destructive mining. Indeed, natural resource sectors, which include extractive activities like mining, are responsible for 90% of biodiversity loss and more than half of carbon emissions. One report estimates that the mining sector produces 100bn tons of waste every year. Extraction and processing are typically water- and energy-intensive, and contaminate waterways and soil.”

(“The rush to ‘go electric’ comes with a hidden cost: destructive lithium mining” 6/14/21)

According to InsideClimate News: “The opponents view lithium extraction as the latest gold rush, and fear that the desperation to abate the climate crisis is driving a race into avoidable environmental degradation. The flawed assumption behind the “clean energy transition,” they argue, is that it can maintain levels of consumption that are inherently unsustainable.”

(“Plans To Dig the Biggest Lithium Mine in the US Face Mounting Opposition” 11-7-21)

In this episode, I explore this story.

This week on Sustainability Now!, your host, Justin Mog, sits down for a chat with Brent Fryrear, a long-time champion of sustainability who wears many hats in Louisville. He has served as the Director of the Partnership for a Green City (http://partnershipforagreencity.org) since its founding in 2004. The Partnership is a sustainability collaboration between the four largest public institutions in Louisville: Metro Government, University of Louisville, Jefferson County Public Schools, and Jefferson Community & Technical College. Listen in and learn about what it is like to wrangle so many cats.

We’ll also hear Brent’s thoughts on the new leadership in both Metro Government and the University of Louisville, where Brent chairs the university-wide Sustainability Council’s Planning & Administration Committee. We also discuss Brent’s experience teaching Sustainability courses at UofL, working with his new TA, Robin Frederick (Forward Radio’s former station manager!), and developing a SUST 101 Dual Credit program with JCPS.

As always, our feature is followed by your community action calendar for the week, so get your calendars out and get ready to take action for sustainability NOW!

Sustainability Now! is hosted by Dr. Justin Mog and airs on Forward Radio, 106.5fm, WFMP-LP Louisville, every Monday at 6pm and repeats Tuesdays at 12am and 10am. Find us at http://forwardradio.org

The music in this podcast is courtesy of the local band Appalatin and is used by permission. Explore their delightful music at http://appalatin.com

This week we welcome special guest Rachel Harper to Perks. Rachel is on the faculty at Spalding University’s Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing in Lousiville, KY and is the author of three novels. Her most recent, The Other Mother, was published in 2022 and has racked up the accolades. It was named one of Amazon’s best books of 2022, was a Good Morning America buzz pick, and has been awarded the American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award for Excellence in LGBTQIA fiction.

We chat with Rachel about how her book is like an onion, with many layers to peel back and explore. While it deals with motherhood, it also deals with father-child relationships, identity, race, and how our past affects our present.

You can find Rachel on Instagram @harpsincali and her website www.rachelmharper.com

For show notes for any episode, go to our website at www.perksofbeingabooklover.com. We are also on Instagram @perksofbeingabookloverpod and on FB Perks of Being a Book Lover.

Books Mentioned In This Episode:

1- The Other Mother by Rachel Harper

2- This Side of Providence by Rachel Harper

3- Brass Ankle Blues by Rachel Harper

4- Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

5- As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

6- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

7- The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

8- The Secret History by Donna Tartt

9- Long ass books by Jonathan Franzen

10- Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

11- The Case of the Missing Moonstone (The Wollstonecraft Detective Agency) by Jordan Stratford

12- Enola Holmes series by Nancy Springer

13- Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo edited by Rebecca Walker

14- Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor

15- The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elizabeth Tove Bailey

16- Shutter by Ramona Emerson

DEFENDING BEEF, WITH NICOLETTE HAHN NIMAN

For time immemorial, we have been taught that beef is bad for you and that cattle are bad for the land, the water and the climate. Nicolette Hahn Niman bought into that thinking and became a vegetarian as a college biology major active in environmental issues. As an environmental lawyer working for Waterkeeper Alliance, she explored the impact of concentrated animal feeding operations on water quality, while also getting to know “good” ranchers, one of whom, Bill Niman, she married. While still a vegetarian, she wrote the first edition of “Defending Beef: The Case for Sustainable Meat Production.”

In this episode, we talk about the ecological and health reasons why beef can be good for you and cattle can be good for our environment, positively impacting water quality, as well as habitat for pollinators and birds.

GREENWASHING THE EXPLOITATION OF AFRICA

On December 13, 2022, US corporate leaders and representatives of the State Department met for three days with African leaders at the “US Africa Leaders Summit.”

All of the rhetoric about clean energy, inclusion, equality, economic growth and meeting the challenges of the 21st century conceals a disturbing underlying reality … that the people of Africa will not benefit ecologically or economically from this massive exercise in “green” exploitation.

On this episode, I draw from sources such as the New York Times, the Department of Defense, the Department of State, investigative reporters at The Grayzone and the website of a Bill Gates founded company that seeks to dig up $12 trillion in minerals, for the good of the planet and the climate, they say.

Don Henderson is a former healthcare administrative officer. He shares his perspective from an administrator's chair with Mike Flynn and Gene Shively