Planet: Critical

In a yearlong investigation from The New Humanitarian and Mongabay, spanning multiple countries, investigative reporters found the United Nations is not climate neutral as it claims to be.

The UN bases much of its claims on the use of carbon credits--which are already increasingly criticized by experts as having little impact on actually offsetting emissions. 

Reporters found that many projects that issue carbon credits to the U.N. were linked to environmental damage or displacement, and 2.7 million out of 6.6 million credits were linked to wind or hydropower — which experts say don’t represent true emissions reductions.

Joining the podcast to explain these findings is investigative reporter Jacob Goldberg from The New Humanitarian.

Related reading:

Revealed: Why the UN is not climate neutral

Please invite your friends to subscribe to the Mongabay Newscast wherever they get podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, or download our free app in the Apple App Store or in the Google Store to get access to our latest episodes at your fingertips.

If you enjoy the Newscast, please visit www.patreon.com/mongabay to pledge a dollar or more to keep the show growing, Mongabay is a nonprofit media outlet and all support helps!

See all our latest news from nature's frontline at Mongabay's homepage: news.mongabay.com or find and follow Mongabay on all the social media platforms.

Episode artwork: More than half of the UN carbon offsets come from high-risk projects. Image by JuergenPM via Pixabay (Public domain).

Please share your thoughts and feedback! [email protected].

“We found more undocumented meetings between senior newspaper editors—especially his real boss, as Dominic Cummings called Boris Johnson's former employer, The Telegraph,—than any other industry by far. What do they get? What does the political class get? Boris Johnson's got one million pounds per year at The Daily Mail. That's what he gets. They get cover. They get support from these papers.

What do the papers get in return? We've documented it. At least 200 million in covid subsidies through this advertising, which was only given to members of the News Media Association, which includes the Guardian and The Mirror and The Independent. The Independent takes money from Saudi, so it’s greenwashing. You ask them to comment on it, they won't touch it because their salaries are being paid by it.”

Oligarchy has infiltrated media—but the elite invited them in.

Keeping up with the revolving door between media, politics, intelligence and corporations would make anyone queasy. There is an elite class of people with access to power, wealth and influence, and they trade that power, wealth and influence between them to keep it in the family. The press would like us to think they’re the independent watchdog above it all. It’s the greatest story they’ve ever spun.

Peter Jukes is the cofounder and executive editor of Byline Times, the British media outlet created to expose corruption in media and write the stories the establishment won’t. In this episode, he explains how oligarchy took over the markets after 2008, the reality of the press ecosystem, how it’s unravelling, and how to create a forum for ideology.

© Rachel Donald

Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.

The American bison ('buffalo') was once decimated to a tiny fraction of its original population of 30 million, reaching a low point of just 77 individuals. Today, they number around 350,000 thanks to the visionary preservation efforts of Indigenous communities, individual conservationists, and others.

Joining the Mongabay Newscast to discuss this hopeful conservation effort that enabled this comeback is acclaimed, award-winning filmmaker and American documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. His latest project examines the tragic history of the American buffalo and the devastation that their population collapse wrought upon Indigenous Americans. Mongabay staff-writer Liz Kimbrough speaks with him about his process, the role of native peoples in making the film, and what the team discovered by making it.

THE AMERICAN BUFFALO is set to premiere on U.S. public television, PBS, on Oct. 16 and 17.

Read Liz's feature and see the interview transcript here:

• Ken Burns discusses heartbreak & hope of ‘The American Buffalo,’ his new documentary

Please invite your friends to subscribe to the Mongabay Newscast wherever they get podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, or download our free app in the Apple App Store or in the Google Store to get access to our latest episodes at your fingertips.

If you enjoy the Newscast, please visit www.patreon.com/mongabay to pledge a dollar or more to keep the show growing, Mongabay is a nonprofit media outlet and all support helps!

See all our latest news from nature's frontline at Mongabay's homepage: news.mongabay.com or find and follow Mongabay on all the social media platforms.

Episode artwork: The American bison, once on the very edge of extinction, is making a major comeback, including in protected areas and on tribal lands. Photo courtesy of Kelly Stoner/WCS

Please share your thoughts and feedback! [email protected].

Can regenerative farming fix our food systems?

One relatively effective action for an individual to combat climate change is going vegan. Industrial agriculture is razing the Amazon rainforest, facilitating endless suffering, and causing a health crisis. However, regenerative farmer Nikki Yoxall says whilst these things are all huge problems, going vegan doesn’t treat the root of the problem—capitalism.

Founder of Regenerative Women On The Land, Nikki joins me to discuss the patriarchal thinking embedded in our economic systems which trickle down to our food systems; the importance of accepting and celebrating death; the disconnection between humanity and nature; and the necessity to understand that animals—including farm animals—are a critical in healthy and functioning ecosystems. We discuss agroecology, the homogenisation of food, the disaggregation of food from our land supply, and Nikki ends by imploring us to invite farmers in to understand the complexity of the challenges we face rather than ignoring the generational wealth of knowledge, concern and connection held by the industry, many of whom are working to regenerate a healthy society from the ground up.

Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.

Human beings have a storied and complicated history with bears. The iconic mammals have long been an important symbol for thousands of years in cultures across the globe. Yet, almost all of the eight bear species left in the wild remain threatened.

Some iconic bear species, such as the giant panda, have benefitted from conservation gains, but other species continue to face urgent and increasing threats to their survival.

Award-winning environmental journalist Gloria Dickie joins the Mongabay Newscast to discuss the state of the world’s eight remaining bear species which she documents in a compelling new book, “Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future.”

Related reading:

‘We will decide their future’: Q&A with “pro-bear” environmental journalist Gloria Dickie

Please invite your friends to subscribe to the Mongabay Newscast wherever they get podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, or download our free app in the Apple App Store or in the Google Store to get access to our latest episodes at your fingertips.

If you enjoy the Newscast, please visit www.patreon.com/mongabay to pledge a dollar or more to keep the show growing, Mongabay is a nonprofit media outlet and all support helps!

See all our latest news from nature's frontline at Mongabay's homepage: news.mongabay.com or find and follow Mongabay on all the social media platforms.

Episode artwork: A portrait of a wild grizzly bear, a subspecies of brown bear (Ursus arctos). Photo by Jean Beaufort via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain (CC0). 

Please share your thoughts and feedback! [email protected].

“You can't go off and get growth. That's not the foundations of a pension, especially a public pension as a public good. It is about quality curating, stewarding a future for these people. And the reason why I get jazzed about this is because the money, the scale of mone—30 to 50 trillion dollars globally—if we started to move that money for just the beneficiaries, we fix it for everyone. Because that is a lot of money to move.”

What if we bought the fossil fuel industry?

The value of pension funds in the world is a staggering amount. Unlike other funds, pensions have a fiduciary duty to their beneficiaries, a guarantee to act in the best interest of those who depend on these funds for their retirement. Ian Edwards, Founder of the Bank of Nature, says fiduciary duty encompasses guaranteeing a healthy planet—without a world under 1.5 degrees, there’s no retirement fund to pull from.

He joins me to explain the history of fiduciary duty, the role of pensions, and the difference in returns necessary for pensions funds compared to other investments. This lower return means we could use pensions to start leveraging the market and force a green transition. One way, he says, is buying up the fossil fuel industry to retire it. This is about the 99% recognising their combined wealth and power, and shutting down the very system which threatens us all.

Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.

Nearly a million animals are killed on roads every day. That's just in the U.S., and this sobering statistic is very likely an underestimate.

“If anything, the number is probably quite a bit higher,” says Ben Goldfarb, environmental journalist and author of the new book "Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of our Planet."

The world is projected to build 25 million more miles of roads by 2050, so wildlife ecologists and engineers are searching for ways to integrate the needs of wildlife into their design. Goldfarb’s book offers a deep examination of some of the most fascinating, inspiring, but also tragic ways human societies develop infrastructure alongside nature.

He joins the Mongabay Newscast to explain the concept of ‘road ecology’ and how wildlife-friendly designs are becoming part of landscapes globally.

Related reading:

• Wildlife crossings built with tribal knowledge drastically reduce collisions
  
  
• For wildlife on Brazil’s highways, roadkill is just the tip of the iceberg

Hear Goldfarb's previous visit with this podcast, where he discussed his award-winning book "Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter," by looking up episode #49 via your favorite podcast player or click play here:

• Podcast: Beavers matter more than you think

Please invite your friends to subscribe to the Mongabay Newscast wherever they get podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, or download our free app in the Apple App Store or in the Google Store to get access to our latest episodes at your fingertips.

If you enjoy the Newscast, please visit www.patreon.com/mongabay to pledge a dollar or more to keep the show growing, Mongabay is a nonprofit media outlet and all support helps!

See all our latest news from nature's frontline at Mongabay's homepage: news.mongabay.com or find and follow Mongabay on all the social media platforms.

Episode artwork: A bison crosses a road in British Columbia, Canada. Image courtesy of Ben Goldfarb.

Please share your thoughts and feedback! [email protected].

“If the internet was based on a kind of commons, an almost scholarly freedom, then we need to pressure the people who are regulating the virtuality of our digital lives and say we need an early internet-like space and zone in this, where people can, for example, test out realities, test out new kinds of economy, prototype things, take those prototypes into reality, see if they work, take them into the virtual world again.”

“I think the destruction of the biosphere is baked in and therefore the social disruption is baked in as well. So we need some kind of continuity of civic space on the virtual realm that is potentially before us. We need a civic stake in the specific continuity between being in the streets and protesting and literally having to quarantine because of the next biospheric disruption.”

Imagine is a world beyond our wildest dreams...

“A life beyond your wildest dreams” is promised to those entering Narcotics Anonymous, a decentralised, collectively-run program for sobriety in which fellow addicts help one another get and stay clean. The promise doesn’t make sense when you first hear it—it’s only after months, even years, of becoming someone different that you realise how limited your imagination was made by addiction.

I think of our global relationship to capitalism very similarly. It’s difficult to imagine life without it, and thus a better world, but that doesn’t mean such a world isn’t possible. So how do we unleash our imaginations and creativity to create a culture and a world beyond our wildest dreams, one in which we look after one another and the more-than-human world? How do we code for care?

This is what Pat Kane joins me to discuss. Pat is a writer and musician, an activist, and a futurist. He writes a column for The National in Scotland and is also the co-founder of The Alternative, a media organisation embedded into community resilience and imagining alternative ways of organising. Pat to join me to discuss culture—how to understand it, how to code it, how to change it. We explore the possibility of the internet as emergent collective consciousness and a tool for creativity, resilience and connection. We discuss the importance of play: the psychology of play, the impact of play, and how play as resistance reveals the absurdity of the human systems that we are forced to interact with. We meander through this and more on love, truth, cosmology, resilience, difficulty and imagination.

© Rachel Donald

Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.

“From the 1963 up until today, they can't kill our ideology. They can't kill our philosophy. They can’t kill our fight. Because we believe what we fight for. We fight for our right, freedom, dignity, and truth. So, you can come with any number, you can come with any intelligence equipment, you can come with any kind of technology, you can come. I will fight you.”

What can be justified in the name of self-defence?

Ranging across the vast territory of West Papua, 34,000 guerilla soldiers fight the 700,000 strong Indonesian military controlling their sovereign land. In February, these rebels took a New Zealand pilot hostage, threatening to kill him if the Indonesian government ignored their demands for independence. But in this exclusive interview, Jeffrey Bomanak, Chairman of the Free Papua Movement, promises Philip Mehrtens will make it home alive.

After negotiating their freedom with their Dutch colonists, West Papuans discovered the United States had used their land to bribe Indonesia into joining the capitalist economic order in 1963. The Free West Papua Movement (OPM, Organisasi Papua Merdeka) sprung up in resistance and has been fighting ever since. Jeffrey explains how their land was used as a pawn in a battle between world orders, the “genocide” of Papuans at the hands of the Indonesian government, and why organisations like the UN ignore the desperate plea of the Papuan people to maintain their colonial oversight.

© Rachel Donald

Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.

Traditional capitalism is not working for the planet or the public, and needs an overhaul, says Beth Thoren, environmental action and initiatives director at Patagonia. Where governments are failing to regulate, Thoren argues, corporations should be making the change anyway. “If we continue to live in a world where shareholder value is the only thing that is valued, we will burn up and die,” she says.

She joins the Mongabay Newscast to detail Patagonia's business model—which gives its profit to environmental organizations—and shares how the company is making a push for other corporations to follow, while taking stands against boondoggles like the space race via their #NotMars campaign.

In founder and CEO Yvon Chouinard's words, Patagonia exists to "force government and corporations to take action in solving our environmental problems." These are words the company backs up with its environmental marketing campaigns, its business model, its films and books.

The company details its philosophy and the lessons learned from 50 years in business in the book, The Future of the Responsible Company, published this month.

Please invite your friends to subscribe to the Mongabay Newscast wherever they get podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, or download our free app in the Apple App Store or in the Google Store to get access to our latest episodes at your fingertips.

If you enjoy the Newscast, please visit www.patreon.com/mongabay to pledge a dollar or more to keep the show growing, Mongabay is a nonprofit media outlet and all support helps!

See all our latest news from nature's frontline at Mongabay's homepage: news.mongabay.com or find and follow Mongabay on all the social media platforms.

Image caption: Beth Thoren, Environment Director, Patagonia. London, U.K.Friday, Nov. 13, 2020. Photographer: Jason Alden for Patagonia

Please share your thoughts and feedback! [email protected].