Sustainability Now! on KSQD.org

What is seabed mining and what are those mineral nodules that seem to promise a future full of green devices?  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Emily Jeffers, a Berkeley-based staff lawyer for the Center for Biological Diversity.  We’ll explore why mineral companies are so gung ho about getting out there and scooping up those nodules.

Here are a few articles about the topic:

Elizabeth Kolbert, "Mining the Bottom of the Sea," The New Yorker, December 26, 2021.

Jessica Aldred, "The Future of Deep Seabed Mining," China Dialogue Ocean, February 25, 2019.

Kathryn A. Miller, Kirsten F. Thompson, Paul Johnston and David Santillo, "An Overview of Seabed Mining Including the Current State of Development, Environmental Impacts, and Knowledge Gaps," Frontiers of Marine Science 4 (2018): article 418.

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

Join Ronnie Lipschutz for a trip to Hard Core Compost. My guests will be Kumi Maxson and Zav Hershfield, two members of the Hard Core Compost collective. Hard Core uses cargo bicycles to haul food scraps from home kitchens to their composting site on the Westside of Santa Cruz, next to the Homeless Garden Project. We’ll be touring their site, talking about organic waste management in Santa Cruz and what is Hard Core’s role in composting food scraps locally, especially as the city’s composting program gets going.

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.

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz in a conversation with Josefina Lara Chavez, Farm-to-Market specialist and Senior Manager, Latinx Farmer Program for the Community Alliance for Family Farmers in Davis. Our focus will be on Latinx farmers in the Monterey Bay Region and their struggle to survive and thrive in the face of an agricultural system that takes little account of them.  Lara Chavez a fourth generation family farmer and is currently working at getting her farm and food hub in Hollister, Lara Organics, off the ground.

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.

North Bay Jobs with Justice has launched a campaign to support farmworkers in Sonoma County. For more information, see https://northbayjobswithjustice.org/

January 2022 is Solar Energy Month on Sustainability Now!  On Sunday, January 23rd, hosts Ronnie Lipschutz and Brooke Wright welcome Dr. Ahmad Faruqui, an energy economist who has been deeply involved in solar electricity issues in California. We talk about the pending decision by the California Public Utilities Commission to reduce compensation for rooftop solar electricity and to charge households for access to the state’s electricity grid.

You can learn about the proposed decision at: https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/nemrevisit

Dr. Faruqui's comments on the proposed decision are at: http://ahmadfaruqui.blogspot.com/2022/01/my-comments-on-cpucs-proposed-decision.html

Dr. Severin Borenstein of the UC Berkeley Haas School and Dr. Faruqui debated the choices before the State of California on Wednesday, January 26th. You can watch the debate at: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/live-debate-how-to-fix-rooftop-solar-policy-in-california?utm_id=canary&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=202127337&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--K_uhTUcmpl88UhS4iCADMc_gKWQWrB2ziu5wcLOqakZayxzHba7UwZXOB4xjYk6bZ1-TYV6J4NWWCzsT3x64XRPLsMQ&utm_source=nem

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.

Join hosts Brooke Wright and Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Tim Goncharoff, who knows everything there is to know about waste management.  He has had a long and distinguished career in community service, locally and statewide, most recently as a Zero Waste Programs Manager at the County of Santa Cruz. He helped bring to fruition ordinances on composting, drugs and sharps, plastic bags, polystyrene foam and e-waste. We talk about waste management, plastics, recycling and composting and especially the new state ordinances on the handling of compostable foodware and organic and food wastes.

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.

Bees are in danger; what can we do? Tune into Sustainability Now! to hear a conversation with Eve Bratman, an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Franklin & Marshall College, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  Bratman is author of Governing the Rainforest: Sustainable Development Politics in the Amazon. She is currently writing a book entitled Pollen Nation: A journey into the politics of saving the bees and the ethics of a sustainable future, which uses bees as a prism for seeing broader social and ecological phenomena and is premised upon revealing the ways that human society fumblingly strives to protect and preserve their roles in our lives.  You can find out more about Professor Bratman’s research and writing at http://www.evebratman.com/

Central California just experienced one of the three most intense storms since the 1950s, but was that prelude to feast or famine this coming water year?  No one knows, but planning for the worst-case scenario is the prudent thing to do. Join Sustainability Now! hosts Brooke Wright and Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Sierra Ryan, the recently appointed Water Resources Manager for the Santa Cruz County Department of Environmental Health.  Ryan coordinates water resource management activities among the other county departments and works closely with other local, state, and federal water supply and resource management agencies in the County and the Central Coast.

You can find out more about the Santa Cruz County Water Agency at: http://scceh.com/Home/Programs/WaterResources.aspx

Join hosts Ronnie Lipschutz and Brooke Wright for a conversation with Fred Keeley, a well-known political person about town and across the Monterey Bay Region.  He has a long and distinguished career in community service. In the 1980s and 1990s, Keeley served two terms as County Supervisor and three in the State Assembly. Following that, he was Santa Cruz County treasurer for 10 years. Currently he is working with the County of Santa Cruz to assess park, recreation and cultural services needs and is leading an effort to establish a county open space district. Keeley also teaches undergraduate political science and in the graduate program of public administration at San Jose State University.  Our topic will be “Oil and Oceans Don’t Mix.”

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

Have you ever wondered what is going on upstream when you cross the Highway 1 bridge over Elkhorn Slough?  Or why there are marshes on both sides of the highway?  Or where all the birds and kayakers come from?

Join SN! hosts Ronnie Lipschutz and Brooke Wright for a conversation with Dr. Kerstin Wasson, Research Coordinator at the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve and adjunct professor at UCSC.  Dr. Wasson conducts research on a range of topics focused on the impacts of human activities on estuarine ecosystems, such as Elkhorn Slough. She develops and tests restoration strategies to mitigate those impacts.  And she will talk about housing oysters.

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

Join hosts Ronnie Lipschutz and Brooke Wright for a conversation with Maya Elson, Executive Director of CoREnewal (formerly known as the Amazon MycoRenewal Project).  She is a founding member of the Radical Mycology network, she’s worked on various fungal cultivation and educational projects in Olympia, WA and the San Francisco Bay area. Maya is a teacher, naturalist, mycologist, organizer and lover of the wild, dedicated to enacting effective and just solutions to environmental and social crises by working in collaboration with fungi. CoRenewal is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing education and research in ecosystem restoration, health and healing, and sustainable community dynamics through community development and bioremediation, the nature-based solutions to human caused pollution.

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

For further reading:  Zoë Schlanger, "Our Silent Partners," New York Review of Books, October 7, 2021: Review of Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (Random House, 2021).

For viewing: "Fantastic Fungi," https://fantasticfungi.com/