News and commentary for the week of April 18-24, 2007 with Mike Kaspar and Nathan Callahan.

Albert Bates, an influential figure in the intentional community and ecovillage movements discusses his new book "The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times." Over the coming years we will need to move from a global culture addicted to cheap, abundant petroleum to a culture of compelled conservation, whether through government directive or market forces. Bates takes a positive, upbeat, and optimistic view of "the Great Change," promoting the idea that it can be an opportunity to redeem our essential interconnectedness with nature and with each other. Bates is a lawyer, author and teacher. He has been director of the Institute for Appropriate Technology since 1984 and of the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm in Summertown, Tennessee since 1994.

News and commentary for the week of April 11-17, 2007 with Mike Kaspar and Nathan Callahan.

News and commentary for the week of April 4-10, 2007 with Mike Kaspar and Nathan Callahan.

Peter Navarro Associate Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine discusses his book The Coming China Wars: Where They Will Be Fought and How They Can Be Won.

China's breakneck industrialization is placing it on a collision course with the entire world. Tomorrow's China Wars will be fought over everything from decent jobs, livable wages, and leading-edge technologies to strategic resources such as oil, copper, and steel...even food, water, and air.

Navarro also reveals how China has become the world's most ruthless imperialist...how it is promoting global environmental disaster... and, perhaps most terrifying of all, how this nuclear superpower and pirate nation may be spiraling toward internal chaos.

News and commentary for the week of March 28 - April 3, 2007 with Mike Kaspar and Nathan Callahan.

Benjamin Barber discusses his new book Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole. A sequel to Barber's best-selling Jihad vs. McWorld, Consumed offers a portrait of how adult consumers are infantilized in a global economy that overproduces goods and targets children as consumers in a market where there are never enough shoppers. Driven by a frantic imperative to sell, consumer capitalism specializes today in the manufacture not of goods but of needs.

This culmination of Barber's lifelong study of and capitalism shows how the infantilist ethos deprives society of responsible citizens and displaces public goods with private commodities. Traditional liberal democratic society is colonized by an all-pervasive market imperative. Public space is privatized. Identity is branded. Our world, homogenized. Barber confronts the likely consequences for our children, our liberty, and our citizenship, and shows finally how citizens can resist and transcend the civic schizophrenia with which consumerism has infected them.

Barber is the Gershon and Carol Kekst Professor of Civil Society and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos, and Director, CivWorld.

News and commentary for the week of March 21 - 27, 2007 with Mike Kaspar and Nathan Callahan.