Planet: Critical

Extinction Rebellion drew attention to the climate crisis like no other group before them. Founded in just 2018, they’ve forced the climate conversation into the mainstream, and their organisation is an inspiring reminder of what citizens can achieve when mobilized.

But what happens after the alarm has been raised? How do activist groups evolve their messaging and their mission to identify a new goal: solutions.

That’s what Dr Gail Bradbrook joins me to discuss. Gail is one of the original members who set up Extinction Rebellion and has now transitioned to Being The Change which empowers both activist groups and members of the public to connect with one another around the world and do something. Gail also gives insight into where activism is going wrong in the West, from white saviour complex beliefs to inadequately connecting with the public.

This is a fascinating discussion from someone who really knows these movements about where they’re going and what to do about it. Listen to the full interview here, catch it on on Apple or Spotify or watch on Youtube. You’ll find the bonus episode on Youtube over the weekend, and paid subscribers have access to the interview transcript on Planet: Critical.

© Rachel Donald

Planet: Critical is a resource for a world in crisis, supported by people like you. Join the community by becoming a subscriber today.

By 2025, the edible nut industry will be worth an estimated $2 billion globally. In Papua New Guinea (PNG), a traditional and plentiful staple, the galip nut (Canarium indicum), holds the promise of tapping into that demand.

Its familiarity and the ease with which it can be grown together with coffee and cocoa is adding up to a new source of income for thousands of small scale farmers across PNG while preserving forest cover. 

On this episode of Mongabay Explores, we speak with Dorothy Devine Luana, an entrepreneur from the province of East New Britain, whose company grows galip nuts using agroforestry, a farming technique rooted in traditional knowledge that grows multiple cash crops alongside woody perennials.

We also speak with Nora Devoe, research program manager for a special project focused on the galip nut at the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR). This project has been funding more than a decade of research seeking to understand the viability and potential of the galip nut to drive the canarium industry in PNG and foster new markets for entrepreneurs and locals like Dorothy to sell the crop.

If you missed the first six episodes of Mongabay Explores New Guinea, you can find them via the podcast provider of your choice, or locate all episodes of the Mongabay Explores podcast on our podcast homepage here. 

Episode Artwork: Tinganagalip Women Cooperative Group Chairwoman Caroline Misiel holds a handful of galip nuts. Image by Conor Ashleigh.

Sounds heard during the intro and outro include the following: rusty mouse-warbler, growling riflebird, raggiana/lesser bird-of-paradise, superb fruit-dove, long-billed honeyeater, little shrike-thrush, brown cuckoo-dove, black-capped lory. Special thanks to Tim Boucher and Bruce Beehler for identifying them.

Please invite your friends to subscribe to Mongabay Explores wherever they get podcasts.  If you enjoy our podcast content, 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 us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok by searching for @mongabay.

Feedback is always welcome: [email protected].

What happens when a small percentage of the population amass resources and power? Oligarchy. And polymath Sally Goerner says oligarchy is the final stage of most human civilizations—and a symptom of dysfunctional human systems.

She joins me to explain why the future is integral and collaborative, why empowering people with vision and hope is key to creating systemic changes, why citizenship is the foundation of any human system, and how to measure the health of those systems.

This is a far-reaching and impressive conversation covering neurobiology, history, sociology, political theory and systems thinking. I found Sally and her research utterly fascinating and hope you all get as much out of it as I did.

Sally’s email: [email protected]

Listen to the full interview here, catch it on on Apple or Spotify or watch on Youtube. You’ll find the bonus episode on Youtube over the weekend, and paid subscribers have access to the interview transcript on Planet: Critical.

© Rachel Donald

Planet: Critical is a resource for a world in crisis, supported by people like you. Join the community by becoming a subscriber today.

Because the roles and rights of Indigenous communities are widely agreed to be key to its success, we also speak with Jennifer Tauli Corpuz, a member of the Indigenous Caucus at the Convention on Biological Diversity and senior global policy and advocacy lead for Nia Tero.

Jennifer provides the Indigenous perspective on what’s currently in the draft biodiversity framework, what changes are needed to better support Indigenous land rights, and the overall importance of Indigenous leadership toward preserving Earth’s biodiversity.

Related reading:

• Reaching the Paris Agreement without protecting Indigenous lands is ‘impossible’, says report
• Indigenous land rights take center stage in a new global framework for biodiversity conservation
• Climate efforts won’t succeed without secure community rights, says Nonette Royo
• Momentum is building for a ‘robust’ biodiversity framework: Q&A with Elizabeth Mrema

If you enjoy the Mongabay 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 us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram by searching for @mongabay.

Episode artwork: Red-eyed tree frog. Photo Credit: Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

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

What’s a resilient biosystem? Healthy soil, healthy water, healthy cycles. They’re so key that even defence departments around the world are starting to invest in creating them, as research shows we have just 60 harvests left if we stick to our industrialised system of agriculture.

There’s hope for us yet, and it lies in the soil. Microbiologist and regenerative agriculture expert, Walter Jehne, joins me to explain how soil can capture carbon, promote global cooling, and feed billions on very little space. He explains how politics got in the way of progress in the 70s, and why governments are scrambling to speak to him and his team.

This is an utterly fascinating discussion (please bear with the lower quality recording). Walter was suggested by listeners so, please, if there is anyone you would like me to get on the show, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Listen to the full interview here, catch it on on Apple or Spotify, or watch on Youtube. You’ll find the bonus episode on Youtube over the weekend, and paid subscribers have access to the interview transcript on Planet: Critical.

© Rachel Donald

Mongabay Explores is an episodic podcast series that highlights unique places and species from around the globe.

The Tanah Merah project sits in the heart of New Guinea covering 2,800 square kilometers (1,100 square miles). Roughly twice the size of Greater London, it threatens not only dense, primary, tropical rainforest and Indigenous land, but also could release as much carbon as the U.S. state of Virginia emits by burning fossil fuels for an entire year.

However, the true owners of the project have been hidden by a web of corporate secrecy for more than a decade. We speak with Philip Jacobson, senior editor at Mongabay, and Bonnie Sumner, investigative reporter at the Aotearoa New Zealand news outlet Newsroom, to discuss the project from inception to present day, the involvement of a New Zealand businessman, and where the project could go next.

Related Reading:

• The Secret Deal to Destroy Paradise
• New Zealand developer denies key role in giant palm oil project in Indonesia

If you missed the first five episodes of Mongabay Explores New Guinea, you can find them via the podcast provider of your choice, or locate all episodes of the Mongabay Explores podcast on our podcast homepage here. 

Episode Artwork: Rainforest in Boven Digoel. Image by Ulet Ifansasti for Greenpeace.

Sounds heard during the intro and outro include the following: rusty mouse-warbler, growling riflebird, raggiana/lesser bird-of-paradise, superb fruit-dove, long-billed honeyeater, little shrike-thrush, brown cuckoo-dove, black-capped lory. Special thanks to Tim Boucher and Bruce Beehler for identifying them.

Please invite your friends to subscribe to Mongabay Explores wherever they get podcasts.  If you enjoy our podcast content, 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 us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok by searching for @mongabay.

Feedback is always welcome: [email protected].

Why, when armed with so much knowledge, are we failing to tackle the climate crisis? There must be some piece of the puzzle we haven’t grasped to continue overshooting the planetary boundaries at an alarming rate. Even this week’s IPCC report—the big piece of literature that’s meant to tell us what’s going on and what to do about it—came under fire from some climate scientists for continuing to propagate the endless growth maxim.

But even our valuing growth as either good or bad reveals how little we understand the complexity of natural systems—and that’s what this week’s guest joined me to discuss.

Jessie Henshaw is a physicist, architect and natural systems designer who worked with the UN to reframe their sustainability goals. She believes our misunderstanding of natural systems as a whole is what’s gotten us into this mess, and why we may not get out. We discuss how and when growth is necessary, collectivism in systems, and why science’s atomisation of systems in a bid to understand them is impeding the urgent progress we need to make. 

Listen to the full interview here, catch it on on Apple or Spotify, or watch on Youtube. You’ll find the bonus episode on Youtube over the weekend, and paid subscribers have access to the interview transcript on Planet: Critical.

© Rachel Donald

It's the start of field research season in many regions--and some scientists haven't gotten afield since the pandemic started--so we're checking in with a couple researchers to hear what they’re planning to work on, out there in the bush.

Our first guest is Meredith Palmer, a post-doctoral researcher at Princeton University whose field work this season is testing new conservation technologies like the BoomBox, an open‐source device that attaches to commercially available camera traps and turns them into an automated behavioral response systems.

Also on the show is Ummat Somjee, a researcher based out of the Smithsonian Tropical Institute in Panama. He uses insects as models to understand the evolution of extreme structures in animals, like the tusks of elephants or the horns of antelopes.

Here are their studies mentioned in this episode:

• Palmer, M. S., Wang, C., Plucinski, J., & Pringle, R. M. (2022). BoomBox: An Automated Behavioural Response (ABR) camera trap module for wildlife playback experiments. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 13(3), 611-618. doi:10.1111/2041-210X.13789

• Somjee, U., Powell, E. C., Hickey, A. J., Harrison, J. F., & Painting, C. J. (2021). Exaggerated sexually selected weapons maintained with disproportionately low metabolic costs in a single species with extreme size variation. Functional Ecology, 35(10), 2282-2293. doi:10.1111/1365-2435.13888

If you enjoy the Mongabay 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 us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram by searching for @mongabay.

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

There are no easy solutions to the climate crisis—most governments admit their hope lies in technology which doesn’t even exist yet. Science and “visionaries” propose increasingly mad ideas, like refreezing the Arctic, or sending humans to live in Space. But given the urgency of the situation, would we be mad not to consider these mad ideas?

Joseph Merz thinks we’ve run out of time to ask questions. He founded the Merz Institute to combat the climate crisis, gathering some of the world’s best scientists to establish what is going wrong and how to fix it. He says the answer is behavioural change—and they’re developing a programme that would manipulate mass behaviour on a subconscious level.

How? Well, using the same techniques as the advertising industry.

Joseph explains how his team came to this conclusion and how they plan to effect these change, giving examples of which kinds of changes would be most beneficial. We dive deep into the ethics of such a program, the dangers of these technologies, and whether or not we even have time to be discussing ethics.

Listen to the full interview here, catch it on on Apple or Spotify, or watch on Youtube. You’ll find the bonus episode on Youtube over the weekend, and paid subscribers have access to the interview transcript.

© Rachel Donald

A recent study conducted in Malaysian Borneo shows that degraded forests can still provide immense value. The study details five key ecological services provided by degraded forests to Indigenous communities. 

Yet a government effort aims to convert degraded forests in Malaysian Borneo into timber plantations, despite the fact that researchers say these ecological services cannot be replaced with plantations. 

This episode features the popular article, "Even degraded forests are more ecologically valuable than none, study shows," by Sheryl Lee Tian Tong:

https://news.mongabay.com/2022/02/even-degraded-forests-are-more-ecologically-valuable-than-none-study-shows/

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

If you enjoy this series, 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 us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram by searching for @mongabay.

Photo Credit: Rainforest rainbow in Sabah. Photo credit: Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay