Renowned author, activist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken joins Mongabay’s podcast to discuss his new book, Carbon: The Book of Life, and argues that the jargon and fear-based terms broadly used by the climate movement alienate the broader public and fail to communicate the nuance and complexity of the larger ecological crises that humans are causing.

Instead, Hawken argues that real change begins in, and is propelled by, communities: "Community is the source of change, and what we have [are] obviously systems that are destroying community everywhere."

The title of Hawken's book, carbon, is also the fourth most abundant element in the universe, and a fundamental building block of life. He argues it is being maligned in a way that distracts from the root causes of ecological destruction in favor of technological solutions that are not viable at scale, or international agreements that prioritize carbon accounting.

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Image credit: A photograph of Paul Hawken, environmental activist and author. Image courtesy of Paul Hawken.

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Timestamps

(00:00) Language in the climate movement

(18:10) What is a ‘nounism’?

(23:45) Leadership is ‘listening to all voices’

(33:49) Community drives change

(40:24) Why does carbon get a bad rap?

(50:01) Normalizing the conversation around climate

(54:22) ‘Decentering’ the Global North

(59:19) Humans are not ‘alpha’

The Australian government recently shelved key environmental protection commitments indefinitely, including the establishment of an environmental protection agency, and a robust accounting of the nation’s ecological health via an environmental information authority. The latest suspension was announced by the Prime Minister just ahead of a federal election. Australia initially proposed these “nature positive” reforms in 2022 and hosted the first Global Nature Positive Summit in 2024 to great fanfare, but has not implemented any substantial domestic legislation to overhaul its old environmental laws.

Joining the podcast to explain this situation is Adam Morton, the environment editor at The Guardian Australia. In this podcast conversation, Morton details what the Australian government promised, what it reneged on, the potential global influence of its backtracking, and why the nation’s environment will continue to degrade without intervention.

 "I think that the message internationally from this term in parliament has been that the resources sector is winning, and environmental protection is losing out. Now, that's a very simple dichotomy, and it doesn't have to be one or the other, but on every front at the moment, that's how it feels in Australia. That applies to fossil fuel extraction. It applies to native forestry [and] logging, which still continues in a significant amount," Morton says.

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Image Credit: A koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) in Queensland, Australia. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

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Timecodes

(00:00) Australia breaks a key promise

(07:30) What does 'Nature Positive' mean?

(16:39) Koala protection sidelined

(20:53) How to 'right' the 'wrongs’

(28:30) Credits

Recent and major shifts in international environmental policies and programs have historical precedent, but the context of global environmental degradation and climate change presents a planetary risk that’s new, say Sunil Amrith. A professor of history at Yale University, he joins this week’s Mongabay Newscast to discuss the current political moment and what history can teach us about it.

" When we look at examples from the past, [societies’ ecological impacts] have tended to be confined to a particular region, to those states, and perhaps to their neighbors. Because of where we are in terms of anthropogenic warming [and] planetary boundaries, I think the scale of any risk, the scale of any potential crossing over into irreversible thresholds, is going to have impact on a scale that I'm not sure historical precedents would give us much insight into," he says.

Amrith is the author of The Burning Earth: A History, which examines the past 500 years of human history, colonization and empire, and the impact of these on ecological systems. In this conversation, he details some historical parallels, what lessons can be learned, and what periods of history resulted in the most peace and prosperity.

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Image credit: Deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon. Photo by Rhett Butler/Mongabay.

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Timecodes

(00:00) Historical parallels to the current moment

(09:43) The context of ‘planetary risk’

(20:36) Lessons from history

(26:10) Credits

A new framework for considering the needs of the “more-than-human world” when designing human-made systems is “ecological empathy,” the focus of Lauren Lambert, founder of Future Now, a sustainability consulting firm.

Her research, Ecological empathy: Relational theory and practice, was published in the journal Ecosystems and People in late 2024, when she was at Arizona State University. She joins the podcast to detail the concept and its potential for reconnecting humans with nature for mutual benefit.

"Ecological empathy as I define it [is] essentially a framework of practice for how to use empathy as a guide to connect to the more-than-human world, and integrate our interdependence and relationships with the more-than-human world in everyday thinking, everyday practice, and specifically in the places where we work," she says.

Previous newscast guests like Carl Safina, argued for overhauling how humans raise and farm seafood. Ben Goldfarb discussed how road crossings can help humans move toward a less environmentally damaging road infrastructure network in his award-winning book Crossings, which documents what he calls “road ecology.”

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Image Credit: A Sulphur-crested Cockatoo (Cacatua galerita) in Indonesian New Guinea. Photo by Rhett A. Butler.

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Timecodes

(00:00) What is ‘ecological empathy’?

(10:50) The limits of feelings

(15:38) The theory of change

(21:22) How do you apply it?

(33:29) Real-world examples

(44:29) What empathy is and isn’t

(52:30) Credits

Middle and working-class citizens in nations across the globe are feeling their purchasing power diminish while billionaires hoard historically high levels of wealth. People are looking for economic solutions out of the inequity that are in line with their ecological values and planetary boundaries.

"People are really hungry for solutions [and] really hungry to find alternatives," says Alvaro Alvarez, the documentary  filmmaker of the new BBC documentary Less Is More: Can Degrowth Save the World?

Alvarez joins Mongabay's podcast to detail real-life solutions using the concepts behind “degrowth” in the city of Barcelona, which he highlights in the film and which have garnered widespread interest.

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Listen to a previous conversation on degrowth on the Mongabay Newscast here.

Image Credit: La Brugera de Púbol, a sustainable living and educational eco-estate roughly 2 hours from the city of Barcelona operated by Mike Duff. Image courtesy of Alvaro Alvarez.

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Timecodes

(00:00) Degrowth momentum in Barcelona

(06:26) Degrowth and housing cooperatives

(09:01) Growing international support

(13:06) Challenges and criticisms of degrowth

(24:51) Degrowth and global inequality

(32:42) Green gentrification

(39:03) Challenging the ‘wealth=success’ narrative

(42:24) Keeping inside the planetary boundaries

A paper in the journal Nature Climate Change concludes there is limited accountability for corporations that fail to achieve their climate change mitigation targets. The analysis shows 9% of company decarbonization plans missed their goals, while 31% “disappeared.”

However, 60% of companies met their targets. While this might initially seem like good news, it may not be leading to genuine climate action.

This week's podcast guest, Ketan Joshi, a consultant and researcher for nonprofit organizations in the climate sector, explains that many corporations are not actually decarbonizing their supply chains, but rather relying on buying renewable energy certificates and carbon credits to "offset" additional carbon emissions from their business.

While carbon offsets are often touted as a way to directly fund climate action on the ground, Joshi stresses there is no verifiable way to track how much is funding these projects. Typically, credits are purchased from a broker, and 90% of these intermediaries arranging such deals on the voluntary carbon market don't share their data.

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Image Credit: The 2015 Paris Agreement stipulates that countries must reduce carbon emissions in order to limit warming to 1.5°C, or at least well below 2°C. Image by jwvein via Pixabay (Public domain).

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Timestamps

(00:00) Are companies actually decarbonizing?

(16:06)  The rise of climate litigation

(31:00) Carbon removal tech as an offset

(42:00) What is GreenSky?

(50:38) Credits

The bobcat population has rebounded over the past century, making it North America’s most common wildcat: as of 2011, there were an estimated 3.5 million bobcats in the United States alone, a significant increase from the late 1990s.

These intelligent felids, Lynx rufus, have benefited from conservation efforts that have increased their natural habitat. The species also thrives at the edges of towns and cities, where their presence can even reduce the spread of pathogens like Lyme disease that affect people, says podcast guest Zara McDonald, founder of the Felidae Conservation Fund.

McDonald shares her thoughts on how the bobcat manages to thrive on the edge of urban areas, the state of wildcat conservation, and what she wishes more people knew about wildcats.

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Image: A bobcat in Kalispell, Montana. Image by Outward_bound via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

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Timecodes 

(00:00) Intro

(02:58) The resilience of bobcats

(08:13) The benefits of bobcats

(16:19) The Felidae Conservation Fund

(25:30) The state of wildcat conservation

(30:47) Wildfires and their impact on wildcats

(33:47) Thoughts on coexistence with wildlife

Nations across the world are working to expand their protected areas to include 30% of Earth's land and water by 2030. In Africa, this would encompass an additional 1 million square miles.

Mongabay's Ashoka Mukpo recently traveled to three nations to assess the current state of conservation practices in key protected areas, to get a better picture of what an expansion might look like, and how the crucial role of rangers in enforcing their protection is evolving. While there, he traveled with passionate and dedicated rangers, but also documented allegations of ranger involvement in violent incidents in Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda. 

He joins the podcast to describe the situation, which he says is commonplace in national parks across the continent.

"The amount [of] violence and aggressive enforcement that is, I think, generally associated with wildlife rangers has led to a lot of mistrust, a lot of alienation, and a real sense that 'the purpose of these people is to kind of harass and impose a system that doesn't include us, on us,'" Mukpo says.

Read more here:

‘Killed while poaching’: When wildlife enforcement blurs into violence

‘Like you, I fear the demise of the elephants’

Image Credit: Lion inside Queen Elizabeth National Park. Photo by Ashoka Mukpo for Mongabay.

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Timestamps

(00:00) Introduction

(01:27) National parks, human rights and 30x30

(04:15) Allegations of violence in Queen Elizabeth Park\

(09:48) How did we get here?

(13:26) Tension between communities and rangers

(18:05) Signs of collaboration

(21:27) The economics of Queen Elizabeth Park

(24:16) Local people cut out from revenue

(26:31) The bigger picture

(30:28) Credits

Bryan Simmons, the vice president of communications for the Arcus Foundation, joins the Mongabay Newscast this week to share the philosophy behind the 25-year-old foundation, which funds grantees that work on LGBTQ rights and great apes and gibbons conservation.

In this conversation with co-host Mike DiGirolamo, Simmons explains the link between economic development and justice for people and how this is correlated with conservation outcomes.

“When people are not able to have their economic needs met, conservation begins to pay the price right away,” says Simmons.

He encourages listeners to review recent reports regarding ape conservation and how this relates to human health, disease, and the ‘one health’ approach to planetary stewardship. Find more at stateoftheapes.com.

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Arcus is a funder of Mongabay, but it did not initiate this interview nor does it have editorial influence on Mongabay’s coverage.

Image Credit: Young lowland gorilla, Gabon. Photo by Rhett Butler for Mongabay.

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Timestamps

(00:00) Bryan’s journey to the Arcus Foundation

(13:25) How social justice enables conservation

(25:47) Threats to human rights and conservation

(30:09) Concerns in the Congo Basin

(33:26) Hope during a dark period

(37:54) Empathy in apes

This week, Anthony James, host of The RegenNarration Podcast, joins Mongabay’s podcast to share stories of community resilience and land regeneration in the Americas and Australia. James explains how donkeys (seen as invasive pests) are now being managed to benefit the land in Kachana Station in the Kimberley region of Western Australia.

In this episode, James emphasizes the importance of harnessing what’s in front of us, rather than fighting it. Across the many interviews he’s conducted, it’s become clear that this concept is something Aboriginal Traditional Owners are keenly aware of.

“If you’re there, you’re kin. There’s no sense of ‘being greater than,” James says.

Related reading:

Huge deforested areas in the tropics could regenerate naturally, study finds

Like this podcast? Please share it with a friend. You can also subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify. Listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Image Credit: Jim Jim Falls, Kakadu National Park. Image by Parks Australia. Courtesy of the Director of National Parks, Australian Government, Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water.

Timecodes

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(00:00) Why Anthony James started The RegenNarration

(05:32) The story of Kachana Station

(12:24) Turning problems into solutions

(25:26) Community resilience amidst political strife

(36:45) Where's the potential?

(41:29) Credits