Sustainability Now! on KSQD.org

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Chelsea Tu, the new executive director of a new local non-profit, Monterey Waterkeeper, which combines education, science-based policy advocacy and legal action to ensure that all communities, including low-income communities of color, have safe, affordable drinking water and enjoy clean, swimmable and fishable waters. According to Tu, Monterey waterkeeper will be working to limit levels of contaminants in drinking water, mostly in well water that does not receive water treatment. Drink up!

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

These days, one’s political affiliation is often a clue to one’s position on abortion (and vice versa).  That was not always the case.  During the 1950s and into the 1970s, Republicans were often supporters of abortion as a form of family planning—especially in developing countries, but in the United States, too. And they were allies of many environmentalists, who were worried about the so-called population explosion.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Dr. Caroline Tracey (PhD in geography from UC Berkeley), whose June 18th essay in the San Francisco Chronicle recounted the historical relationship between Republicans, environmentalism and abortion. We’ll also talk about the Reverend Malthus, his essay on population and how it continues to infuse political discourse today, 225 years later.

You can find more of Tracey's writing at her website (https://cetracey.com/), SFMOMA's "Open Space" (https://openspace.sfmoma.org/author/carolinetracey/), and "Civil Eats" (https://civileats.com/2022/06/08/californias-sheepherders-center-overtime-battle/).

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

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz in this Blast from the Past (originally broadcast on May 23, 2021) as he speaks with Dr. Suzanne Simard, Professor of Forestry and Conservation Sciences about the social life of trees.   Her 2021 book, Finding the Mother Tree--Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, has just been published.  According to Simard, communication between trees happens not in the air but deep below our feet in an incredibly dense, complex network of roots and chemical signals. ... “In a single forest, a mother tree may be connected to hundreds of other trees.”

Here is what Bookshop Santa Cruz wrote about Simard: “Suzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; she’s been compared to Rachel Carson, hailed as a scientist who conveys complex, technical ideas in a way that is dazzling and profound…. Simard writes—in inspiring, illuminating, and accessible ways—how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved, how they perceive one another, learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, and remember the past; how they have agency about the future; elicit warnings and mount defenses, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication, characteristics ascribed to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies—and at the center of it all, the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them.”

You can learn more about Simard's work in "The Social Life of Forests," New York Times Magazine, Dec. 2, 2020, and at The Mother Tree Project.  If you search for "Suzanne Simard" on You Tube, you will turn up a dozen videos, including a TED talk, about her work.

The articles referred to in the show are:

Lincoln Taiz, et al, "Plants Neither Possess nor Require Consciousness," Trends in Plant Science 24, #8 (August 2019): 677-87

Michael Pollan, "The Intelligent Plant," The New Yorker, December 23, 2013.

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

Have you procrastinated on planting a garden or been too busy?  Do you think it’s too late and you’ll have to wait until next year?  Not on the Central Coast!  Join Host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Renee Shepherd, founder of Renee’s Garden and seed entrepreneur extraordinaire.  Not only do we talk about what can be sown now to be ripe and ready late summer and fall harvesting, we’ll also cover topics such as heirloom, heritage and hybrid seeds and discuss where the seeds for your garden come from.

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

Are elephants people, too?  Do they have rights?  A recent ruling by a New York state court said that “elephants may be intelligent and deserving of compassion” but that Happy, an elephant confined in the Bronx Zoo, is not a person.  A growing number of human people around the world disagree and argue that both animals and nature have rights. Listen to a Sustainability Now! conversation about the rights of animals and nature with Host Ronnie Lipschutz and  Professor Matthew Liebman, Associate Professor and Chair of the Justice for Animals Program at the Law School at University of San Francisco University.  We will talk about the history of “rights,” how they have been extended over time, and why animals and nature are deserving of the same consideration.

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

Sustainability Now! co-host Brooke Wright speaks with Tahra Goraya, the new President & CEO of the tri-county Monterey Bay Economic Partnership (MBEP).  MBEP works on housing, broadband access, workforce development, renewable energy and climate policy, water conservation,  regional recycling, transportation and more. We will talk with Tahra about her journey into this role and about what MBEP is and what it is getting done to address climate change and other environmental issues.

Join Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Rebecca Johnson and Alison Young, Co-Directors of the Center for Biodiversity and Community Science at the California Academy of Sciences. Community science is a global movement through which scientists and non-scientists alike make observations, collect data, and help answer some of our planet's most pressing questions. It is research- and monitoring-driven and controlled by local communities, and characterized by place-based knowledge, social learning, collective action, and empowerment.

In the Spring, Elephant Seals turn to love...and fighting... and feeding... and  laying around in the sun. We are just past the prime viewing season at Año Nuevo State Park, during which the two-ton male seals fight bloody battles, the females give birth to young conceived the prior year, the adults mate, and the weaner pups look cute.

Join Sustainability Now! hosts Ronnie Lipschutz and Brooke Wright on Sunday, April 17th, for a discussion with Theresa Keates, a UCSC PhD student in Ocean Sciences, who studies elephant seals.  Her research is centered around deploying oceanographic tags on elephant seals, which offers both a source of valuable oceanographic data from remote regions as well as a unique platform to investigate these very large marine mammals.

Previous broadcasts of Sustainability Now! are archived at KSQD.org and on Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.

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

Hosts Brooke Wright and Ronnie Lipschutz speak with Benjamin Eichert, Director of  Let’s Green California—an initiative launched by the Romero Institute in Santa Cruz to create a California Green New Deal and get the core legislation passed into law by September 30, 2022.

Let’s Green California has also created “Electrify CA!” based on a simple idea: make the switch from fossil fuel-based technologies to electric alternatives powered by clean energy, and ensure that low-income communities and working families both lead and benefit from this transition.

Previous broadcasts of Sustainability Now! are archived at KSQD.org and on Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.

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

“A spectre is haunting Europe,” but this time it is not communism. Vladimir Putin has put Russia’s nuclear forces on “special combat readiness,” bringing back memories and fears for some of us, reminiscent of the darkest days of the Cold War.  What would be the climatic consequences of nuclear war?  Our guest are Dr. Alan Robock, Distinguished Professor in the Environmental Sciences Department at Rutgers University and Dr. Joshua Coupe, a postdoctoral researcher at Louisiana State University.  They and their colleagues are modeling the climatic consequences of a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States, aka, “Nuclear Winter,” a notion popularized by Carl Sagan in the 1980s (some of us are old enough to remember both).

That’s our explosive show broadcast on Sunday, March 20th, 2022.

Previous broadcasts of Sustainability Now! are archived at KSQD.org and on Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.

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

Here are some resources:

Coupe, J., Bardeen, C. G., Robock, A., & Toon, O. B. (2019). "Nuclear winter responses to nuclear war between the United States and Russia in the Whole Atmosphere," Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 124, 8522–43.

Jeannie Peterson, ed. The Aftermath--The Human and Ecological Consequences of Nuclear War (New York: Pantheon/Ambio, 1983).

Kjølv Egeland (2021) "The Ideology of Nuclear Order," New Political Science, 43:2, 208-230.

Rutgers U. Research Archive: http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/nuclear/