Sustainability Now! on KSQD.org

Join Host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Dr. Sunaura Taylor, Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley.  Taylor is also an artist, writer, activist and mother, who has just published Disable Ecologies—Lessons from a Wounded Desert.  Her first book, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, which received the 2018 American Book Award. Along with academic journals, Taylor has written for a range of popular media outlets. Her artworks have been exhibited at venues such as the CUE Art Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution and is part of the Berkeley Art Museum collection. Among other awards, she has received a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant, two Wynn Newhouse Awards, and an Animals and Culture Grant.

A longstanding debate in the environmental and conservation movements is whether protection of natural resources can be reconciled with their economic development?  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation about this question with Larry Selzer, President and CEO of The Conservation Fund, a Virgina-based nonprofit that buys land for conservation and promotes sustainable economic development. TCF works with public agencies to acquire land and hold it until the agencies are ready to purchase it back.  And the organization focuses on protecting working forests and farms, which provide clean air, clean water, and jobs for rural communities.

What happens to your corporeal body, if and when it is buried in the earth?  According to Genesis in the Hebrew Torah, we come from dust and to dust we return.  The original text, however, uses the word עָפָ֣ר ("apar"), which means “earth.”  Most burials in the United States seek to protect the body from returning to the earth through containment, while cremation produces greenhouse gases and leaves behind heavy metals.  Are there other ways to go?  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Katrina Spade, founder and CEO of Recompose, a Seattle-based green funeral home that composts human bodies, turning them into soil that can be spread almost everywhere.  We talk about other end-of-life choices, too.

How should we speak with children about climate change?  Should young children be taught about climate change, and how? During the Cold War, the existential threat of nuclear holocaust was always present but there was, at least, a chance that the missiles would not be launched.  Climate change is also an existential threat but it is already

San Benito County is one of the unsung jewels of the Central California Coast.  Most people know of San Juan Bautista and the Pinnacles, but there is much, much more.  Two mountain ranges, broad valleys, rangelands, farmlands and biodiversity.  But the Highway 101 corridor, which runs through a corner of the county, provides access to Silicon Valley and the SF Bay and people are moving south in search of cheaper housing.  Malls and sprawls are not far behind.  Now, a local movement is seeking to limit development with an initiative to require a public vote if agricultural, rural or range land is rezoned to residential, commercial or industrial use, a strategy already applied in several other California counties. Join host Ronnie Lipschutz to hear from Andy Hsia-Coron of Protect San Benito County, one of the activists behind the initiative, Chris Wilmers of UCSC, who studies cougars and bobcats that want to cross the road, Seth Adams from Save Mount Diablo, a land trust active across the County, and Val Lopez, Chair of the Amah Mutsun, whose ancestral lands cover much of the County.

As the Earth gets warmer, the world’s glaciers get smaller.  Land-based glaciers in the Earth’s polar regions hold enormous quantities of water and, as they melt, the runoff is raising sea levels and disrupting ocean systems, such as the Gulf Stream.  The obvious solution is for us to drastically reduce global greenhouse gas emissions but, even if we were to do that, the Earth would continue to warm and the glaciers would continue to melt.  Is there anything we could do to slow the melt?

There are a growing number of proposals to intervene in Earth’s systems—called “geoengineering” as a way to moderate climate change.  Join Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Research Professor John Moore, who is a glaciologist in Rovaniemi, Finland at the University of Lapland’s University of the Arctic.  His solution to slowing glacier melt is the construction of barriers at glaciers’ underwater bases in order to slow or prevent flows of warmer ocean water from carving away at the ice.

 The Monterey Bay is the crown jewel of the Central California Coast. For well over a century, the Bay has been exploited for a myriad of purposes; today, it needs protection and conservation.  This is especially the case with its fish and fisheries, which provide a vital source of food but are vulnerable to tastes and markets.  Join Sustainability now! host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Melissa Mahoney, Executive Director of the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust, which seeks to ensure sustainable fisheries, resilient communities and a healthy Bay and ocean.

According to those who know, we are in the midst of the Sixth Great Extinction, this one brought on by the activities of human civilization that are resulting in a species extinction rate that is estimated to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than natural extinction rates.  So far, efforts to protect endangered plants, animals and insects have proven inadequate to the challenge.  What are we to do?

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Professor Douglas Tallamy, who teaches in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware.  He is the author of Nature’s Best Hope—a New Approach to conservation that Starts in Your Yard, published in 2019, and a just-published companion version for children, subtitled How You Can Save the World in Your Own Yard.  Both books propose what some might consider a radical approach to protecting species through transformation of front and back yards into conservation zones.

You probably receive an electricity bill every month from your local utility and, after complaining about it, dutifully pay it.  But do you ever stop to read your electricity bill?  If you are a customer of PG&E and, maybe, a local community choice aggregator, you receive 6 pages of unintelligible, closely-spaced text, numbers, graphs and acronyms.  As Groucho Marx might have said, “This is so simple, a PhD could read it.  Run out and find me a PhD!”

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz and Kevin Bell on Sustainability Now! when we offer “A Talmudic Exegesis: Reading and Interpreting Your Electricity Bill--A Talmudic Exegesis:.”  You will learn why your local utility pays a wholesale price of only about 3 cents per kilowatt hour for renewable electricity while charging you 50 cents!  You’ll learn about PICA, which is not a small animal but, rather, the “Power Charge Indifference Adjustment.”  And you’ll find out why your bill seems to be rising ever upward and why the newly-announced fixed charge, due to show up on your bill next year is unlikely to make it stop rising.

You can find a handout here, to be followed along with the broadcast: A Guide to Reading your Electric Bill.

Why do humans dominate nature and why have they done so?  Is it because of God told Adam and Eve to “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth”? Is it because capitalism sees the world in terms of scarcity and commodification and must find monetary value in everything?  Some psychologists and philosophers have proposed that we seek to overcome our fear of death by controlling that nature to which we must inevitably return when we die? Join Host Ronnie Lipschutz for a thought-provoking conversation with James Rowe, Associate Professor of Political Ecology and Cultural, Social, and Political Thought at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island, who has just published Radical Mindfulness—Why Transforming Fear of Death is Politically Vital.