Sustainability Now! on KSQD.org

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Rachel Kippen about city and county “climate action plans.”  A CAP lays out a community’s roadmap for reducing greenhouse gas emissions over the coming decade, with input and review by community members and various “stakeholders.” How does a city or county go about developing a CAP, and is it an aspirational document or a plan for concrete action? And how effective are these plans in driving concrete emission reductions?  Do CAPS matter?

Rachel is a coastal environmental advocate, writer, nonprofit professional, and artist with over 15 years’ experience in educational programming, communications, and advocacy. She writes “Our Ocean Backyard,” a twice monthly column in the Santa Cruz Sentinel and is advisor and consultant to a number of city and county municipal CAPs.  We’ll be talking about how CAPS are developed and implemented, giving listeners insights into how government works and the roles that citizens can play, especially in the face of the climate change challenge.

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz in welcoming Dr. Helen Caldicott to Sustainability Now!, live from Australia, to talk about the looming threat of nuclear war. According to Dr. Caldicott, the nuclear doomsday clock of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is set at 100 seconds to Midnight, but 20 seconds is closer to the mark. Dr. Caldicott has devoted the last forty-two years to an international campaign to educate the public about the medical hazards of the nuclear age and the necessary changes in human behavior to stop environmental destruction and nuclear catastrophe. She calls this “Global Preventive Medicine.” Caldicott is also the subject of “If You Love This Planet,” which won an Academy Award in 1982 for best documentary.

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Lani Faulkner, Founder and Director of Equity Transit of Santa Cruz County and Michael Wool, a transit activist and senior at UCSC.  We’ll be talking about Transit Equity Week 2023, which will run from January 30-February 4th, 2023. Transit Equity Day is a National Coalition movement event celebrated on Feb 4th, in honor of Rosa Parks’ Birthday and her pivotal role in combating racial segregation on public buses, trains, and trolleys.  Transit Equity Week will bring awareness to the need for robust public transportation and safe streets in Santa Cruz County. Transit Equity advocates for a robust and affordable public transportation system, a clean environment, affordable housing, safe walkable streets, and opportunity access for work, school, and everyday life.

Have you ever wondered about the history of the landscapes around you, how they were shaped and by whom?  UCSC Associate Professor of Anthropology Andrew Mathews has and he has studied landscape histories and their transformations in Italy.  Now he has published his research in Trees are Shape Shifters--How Cultivation, Climate Change and Disaster Create Landscapes, a closely-documented study of trees and people in central Italy and "how they make sense of social and environmental change" around them.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a widely-ranging conversation with Mathews about landscape histories, human action and ecological change in Italy, California and the rest of the world.

You can read about Mathew's work on his web site.

The world’s climate is changing and it is changing more and more rapidly.  What are we to do?  In two weeks, at the 27th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt.  This is the 30th such gathering since 1992 and there is not much to show for all that.

Join host Ronnie Schultz and his guests, Professor Sander Chan and Andrew Deneault who are in Sharm attending the conference. We’ll be talking about  the conference, its history and its goals as well as the “groundswell of climate action” by international and national organizations, states, provinces, cities and individuals. The UN has documented 29,000 of these actions. Do they make any difference?  What can you do?

If you are interested in following the conference, you can find reports from a number of sources at Earthweb.info.

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation. and Environmental Innovations.

What if humanity could take a giant step forward towards a climate transformation? We are rebroadcasting Christine Barrington's October 12, interview with Dr. Delton Chen, Founder of the Global Carbon Reward along with Renegade Economist, Della Duncan, who together will headline at a November 2 event at the Resource Center for Non-Violence called Funding for the Future: New Ways to Value Life on our Planet.

The Global Carbon Reward is a bold policy proposal that seeks to leverage the power of the world’s central banks to institute a global monetary policy that rewards the mitigation of carbon. This policy would create a parallel economy powered by a Carbon Currency whose value is derived through increasing the health of the biosphere. Dr. Chen’s ideas were featured in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, and he is on a bi-coastal tour to raise awareness and engage interest in the policy. He will be presenting, along with Kim Stanley Robinson, at the Verge 22 Climate Tech Summit in San Jose at the end of October.

Della Duncan is a Co-Founder of the California Doughnut Economics Coalition and a Public Banking advocate. She works alongside others to shift the mindset around economics in order to tackle the 21st century’s grand challenge of meeting the needs of all people within the means of the planet.  Della dynamically pursues this vision through teaching, organizing, and mentoring. She is a Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics International Inequalities Institute and since 2016 has produced and hosted the Upstream Podcast, which invites listeners to unlearn everything they thought they knew about economics and imagine what a better world could look like.  She will address ideas around De-growth and the questioning of “Green Capitalism” as applied to the Global Carbon Reward.

Della’s 2-Part audio documentary is powerful journalism and full of provocative ideas well worth considering. Part 1:  The Problem with Green Captitalism;  Part 2: A Green Deal for the People

You can also listen to Christine's Talk of the Bay broadcast "Pricing Nature through the Global Carbon Reward: A Conversation with Dr. Delton Chen, Author Kim Stanley Robinson and Renegade Economist Kate Raworth."

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation. and Environmental Innovations.

Farming is tough enough as it is, but when farmers face the loss of organic certification due to climate-related disasters and wildfires, what can they do? Join Host Ronnie Lipschutz in a discussion with Amber Schat and David Obermiller speak about their experience with such challenges and programs that address them. Amber Schat is a Wildfire Resilience Specialist with the Community Alliance with Family Farmers, a statewide non-profit that focuses on serving small family farms with ecological farming information and support. David Obermiller is a farmer with Unearthed Farm and Harvest Field Organic Farm in Fresno County which was impacted by wildfire on July 1st in 2022.

For more information about fire retardants, see "After Wildfires, What Happens to Crops Soaked in Fire Retardant?"

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation. and Environmental Innovations.

Open Farm Tours is back and happening October 8th and 9th! Fifteen south county farms are participating and all are family owned, organic and sustainable. Join host Ronnie Lipschutz and his guests, Penny Ellis, Paul Towers and David Blume. They will talk about the current state of farming in Santa Cruz County and Open Farm Tours. Ellis is the founder and coordinator of Open Farms Tour and organizes tours of Santa Cruz County farms and artisanal food purveyors. Towers is Executive Director of the Community Alliance with Family Farmers which advocates for state and national policies that create more resilient family farms, communities and ecosystems. Blume is CEO of Whiskey Hill Farms.  You can find out more about Open Farms Tour at https://www.openfarmtours.com/.

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation. and Environmental Innovations.

Join Host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Dr. Sharachchandra Lele who is coleader of an Expert Writing Group of natural scientists, social scientists and humanities scholars who have published a “Letter to Fellow Citizens of Earth,” “an urgent call to our global neighbours, to acknowledge the climate crisis, make personal and collective commitments in line with differences in privileges and responsibilities and work toward transformative changes.” Dr. Lele is  a Distinguished Fellow in Environmental Policy & Governance at the Centre for Environment & Development of the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment in Bangalore, India  and an Adjunct Faculty Member in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education & Research (IISER) Pune. His research interests include conceptual issues in sustainable development and sustainability, and analyses of institutional, economic, ecological, and technological issues in forest, energy, and water resource management.

We'll be reaching beyond California on this show, so don’t miss it!

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation. and Environmental Innovations.