Sustainability Now! on KSQD.org

The attack on Iran by the United States and Israel demonstrated, among other things, the necessity of a rapid transition to renewable fuels, like solar and wind.  The technologies for capturing and converting them into usable form are heavily dependent on critical minerals, such as lithium, cobalt and others. Indeed, critical minerals are driving a new wave of resource nationalism and extraction around the globe, many of them being eyed by President Trump as potential regions of intervention and conquest.  What does the gold rush for these minerals portend for world politics and economics? Are we on the brink of a new era of colonialism and imperialism or even resource wars? In two weeks, join me for a conversation about these matters with Professor Thea Riofrancos, from Providence College in Rhode Island, who recently published Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism.

Riofrancos is associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College, a Strategic Co-Director of the Climate and Community Institute, and a fellow at the Transnational Institute. Her research focuses on resource extraction, climate change, the energy transition, the global lithium sector, green technologies, social movements, and the Latin American left.

Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances—commonly known as PFASs and "forever chemicals"—have become ubiquitous in the environment and are being found almost everywhere in soil, water, plants and bodies.    The Trump Administration has lowered drinking water standards for PFASs presence but that does not mean the stuff has gotten safer. You might know PFASs in the form of Teflon which, for many years, are applied to non-stick cookware so those eggs slide off the pan.  But if you overheat that pan, the Teflon might also slide off.  PFASs slide off of many other things, as well. The environmental and health impacts of PFASs are almost totally unknown, although they are beginning to look pretty bad.

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Dr. Faith Kibuye, a Water Resources Extension Specialist in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management and the Institute of Energy and the Environment at the Pennsylvania State University. Kibuye specializes in environmental engineering, focusing on water quality, aquatic chemistry, cyanobacterial blooms, and contaminants like pharmaceuticals and PFASs, and their fate, transport and transformation.

We’ve heard a lot about the problem of microplastics pollution. Just how bad is it?  What are its causes?  What are microplastics doing to us and the world?  Is anything being done to stem the accelerating production and consumption of plastics that end up in our water, our air, in animals, and in human bodies? Liste to a conversation about microplastics with host Ronnie Lipschutz, Dr. Myra Finkelstein, Adjunct Professor in the Microbiology and Environmental Toxicology Department at UC Santa Cruz and Dr. Steven Mentor a Santa Cruz climate activist and long-time environmentalist. Finklestein has been examining the health effects of plastic ingestion on seabirds to better understand the consequences for marine wildlife and human health. Mentor will discuss campaigns in California to regulate microplastics and what can be done to turn the tide of plastic packaging and consumption.

You can learn more about the topic from Food and Water Watch, the Netflix film "The Plastic Detox" and the Interstate Technology & Regulatory Council.

Indigenous peoples around the world are under threat, especially from massive development projects engineered by governments and corporations, which promise to destroy the lands, forests and waters on which those peoples depend.    In an article that appeared in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, “We Think They'll Kill Someone” journalist Anjan Sundaram reported on one such project in the Southern Mexico Oaxacan town of San Blas Atempa, where a new factory will wipe out a communally owned forest.

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Sundaram. He is an Indian author, war reporter, academic, television presenter and founder of The Stringer Foundation. He is the author of three memoirs of journalism, Stringer, Bad News and Breakup. His forthcoming  book, Double Exposure: Two Reporters in the Climate War, is scheduled for publication this coming fall.

The State of California has created a program called “Transformative Climate Communities,” focused on making low-income, urban areas more resilient, efficient and responsive to housing, energy and climate challenges. What does this mean on the ground? Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Nancy Faulstitch, Executive Director and Eloy Ortiz, Special Projects Manager at Regeneración Pajaro Valley which, along with Monterey County, received a TCC planning grant in 2021. They have been leaders in this effort and will talk about the planning process and what happens next. Regeneración is a Pajaro Valley non-profit that builds bridges between residents and climate practitioners in local cities, counties, and at the state level.

The world’s cities are big and getting bigger.  By 2050, 80% of the world’s people will live in cities. Can cities be made sustainable?  Who is thinking about this? Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Peter Calthorpe, architect and urban designer with HDR, a global company specializing in architecture, engineering, environmental and construction services. Over the past 45 years, Calthorpe has been a primary advocate for sustainable communities, the New Urbanism and transit-oriented development. His most recent publications are "Ending Global Sprawl: Urban Standards for Sustainable and Resilient Development" for the World Bank and “Grand Boulevards and the AB2011 Revolution: Reinventing the Strip to Solve California’s Housing Crisis.”

Over the past several decades, there has been a concerted effort by biologists, economists and others to put a value on nature’s services: what would it cost, for example, to provide clean water the way nature does?  Oxygen, photosynthesis, soil?  Early estimates were around $30 trillion per year; arguably, today they are much higher, over $100 trillion.  But getting from hypothetical calculations to actual incorporation into real work policy and development projects is no easy task.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Daniel Chiu Suarez, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Middlebury College in Vermont. He has just published Biologists Unite!  The Rise and Fall of Ecosystem Services, an account of why three decades of academic, activist and policy efforts have failed to incorporate ecosystems services into global economic accounting and action.

The removal of four dams from the Klamath River in Northern California is rapidly becoming one of the great recent success stories in conservation and restoration.  The riverbank habitat is returning to its former condition and salmon have been spotted swimming upriver past the sites where the dams once blocked their passage.  Along with this comes the restoration of the indigenous peoples’ way of life, heavily dependent on those fish.  Join Host Ronnie for an update on the Klamath in a conversation with Amy Bowers Cordalis, who has just published The Water Remembers—My Indigenous Family’s Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life.  She is a mother, fisherwoman, attorney, executive director of Ridges to Riffles, and member of the Yurok Nation and its former general counsel.

(Photo by Brontë Wittpenn, San Francisco Chronicle)

Many listeners are probably familiar with the tags found in hotel bathrooms that read: “Save Our Planet,” followed by instructions about reusing and replacing towels, and concluding “Thank you for helping us converse the Earth’s vital resources.”  Reusing towels might help conserve the hotel’s financial resources but does that make any difference for the Planet?  Such “lifestyle environmentalism” is widespread, providing a sense of doing something in a world in which collective action is so difficult.  In two weeks, join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Dr. Michael Maniates, for a conversation about his new book, The Living-Green Myth: The Promise and Limits of Lifestyle Environmentalism.  Maniates dismisses the notion that individual actions can make a significant impact on the state of the planet.  But if not that, what are we to do?

Lake Tahoe is one of California’s natural jewels but it is under siege and increasingly awash in plastic wastes, as visitors carelessly dispose of bottles and packages and discarded items degrade into small pieces washed into the lake.  What happens to that stuff? As we have been learning, microplastics are everywhere, in the environment and in our bodies.  What are their impacts on people, animals and nature?  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Madison “Madio” Wallner, a UCSC PhD student in Environmental Science, who is studying microplastics and tire particles in Tahoe’s bottom sediments.