Sustainability Now! on KSQD.org

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation.  But what is SSRF?  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz and new co-host Brooke Wright in a discussion of two SSRF projects in development.  The Watsonville Basic Income Pilot Project will take revenues from sale of solar electricity to a local business and distribute to selected farmworker households as basic income stipends.  The Sustainable Urban Food Initiative will bring the benefits of agricultural technology and farm management techniques to small farms and gardens in the Monterey Bay Region.  Both projects are examples of the kinds of local development pursued by SSRF.

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Shaina Nanavati, a research organizer for the Reclaim Our Power Utility Justice Campaign and staff member of the Local Clean Energy Alliance. Reclaim Our Power is an statewide initiative mobilizing a broad coalition of utility ratepayers, social justice advocates, and allies to develop an equitable, sustainable, decentralized restructuring of California’s energy system.  Tune in to learn about this transformative project and what it will require to succeed.

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

In this SN! Revisit from 2019, host Ronnie Lipschutz welcomes Robert Stayton, physicist and author of Solar Dividends: How Solar Energy Can Generate a Basic Income for Everyone on Earth.  We’ll discuss the math, physics, economics and politics of his idea and proposal, and whether his utopian vision can be made real by the end of the 21st century.

Plastic is ubiquitous: it rains down on us, it fouls land, streams and oceans, it even turns up in our bodies. And the big oil companies are looking to plastic to keep up profits when fossil fuels are finally banned. What are we to do?

SN! host Ronnie Lipschutz speaks with guest Jackie Nuñez, founder of The Last Plastic Straw and Advocacy Manager of the Plastic Pollution Coalition.  The Last Plastic Straw is a project of the Plastic Pollution Coalition, a global alliance of more than 1,200 organizations, businesses, and thought leaders in 75 countries that seeks to shift the way individuals and businesses think about plastic pollution - and about our society’s disposable culture on a larger scale.

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

There is an old saying attributed to the 19th century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck: “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.”  This show is about law and sausages in California.

If you ever took a civics or government class in high school or college, you probably learned about how a bill becomes law through a clean and straightforward process.  You might have learned about lobbyists and interests, too, but probably never traced legislation from its origins to its implementation.  The actual process is a good deal more sleazy and arcane than we are taught, and is more like a game of Calvinball, in which the rules are made up as you go along.

My guest on this show is Allie Detrio, Founder and Chief Strategist of Reimagine Power, which she founded. At Reimagine Power, Allie focuses on policy and market strategy for microgrids, distributed energy resources, cleantech, and sustainability in the west coast. She works with clean energy developers, cleantech startups, nonprofits, serves as the representative for the microgrid industry, intervenes in regulatory proceedings, lobbies for bills, writes papers, organizes grassroots support for policy, and serves as a liaison for  many  trade associations. So she is thick in the middle of California law and sausages.

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

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz as he speaks with Dr. Suzanne Simard, Professor of Forestry and Conservation Sciences about the social life of trees.   Her new 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.

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz and Dr. Esther Leslie, Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck University in London.  “Political Aesthetics highlights the complex and ambiguous connections of aesthetics with social, cultural and political experiences in contemporary societies.”  This past January, Leslie published an entry in “The Stone,” a New York Times column on philosophy.  There, she asked “Are we the cows of the future?” to be manipulated and managed like livestock. Among other topics, we talk about contemporary utopian visions of nature, digital surveillance and the relationship of humans to nature.

You can find links to Dr. Leslie's publications here: https://www.bbk.ac.uk/our-staff/profile/8008438/esther-leslie#publications

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Gosh, I never realized there was a social ecology in my backyard!”

Find out just what those bugs are up to in your garden, as host Ronnie Lipschutz welcomes Azucena Lucatero, a third-year PhD student in Dr. Stacy Philpott's lab at UC Santa Cruz. Lucatero studies the socio-ecology of urban gardens in the California central coast with special interests in biological pest control, community and population ecology, landscape ecology, and food justice.  The ladybugs are already home!

You can find information & publications about "BUGS" (Biodiversity in Urban Gardens) at https://www.urbangardenecology.com/.  This includes the BUGS Garden Report 2019 and lots more!

These days, we are hearing a lot about plans to transform the country’s energy infrastructure from one based on fossil fuels to one based on renewable energy resources.  President Biden appears to be making this transformation one of his signature initiatives.  Certainly, the technology exists, the money is (probably) there but there is one elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about: getting the American public to go along.

Central to going along will be greening the economy and central to the greening of the economy will be the greening of businesses and companies, large and small.  Hear Green Business expert Brooke Wright talk about the network.  She manages the Monterey Bay Green Business Program, which is part of the California Green Business Network.  The CGBN is a network of local programs, funded by grass-roots contributions from local government and utility partners to allow small to medium-sized businesses implement specific practices to reduce pollution, save water, conserve energy, and protect human health.

You can read James O'Connor's on "The Second Contradiction of Capitalism" at http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/second_contradiction.htm.

It’s beginning to look as though California is headed into another  multi-year drought. The snowpack is meager and contracted water supplies  through the state’s delivery systems are likely to be much less than  requested.  Farmers and cities are looking to groundwater to make up the  difference, but even groundwater is heavily depleted.  Hear Dr. Ruth  Langridge, UCSC Researcher and instructor in Legal Studies, who has  studied California groundwater and climate change since 2009, the  current state of underground resources and ways to conserve and restore  groundwater. You can find information about her work here.