Changes to the Endangered Species Act

Guest: Robert Keiter, Director and Professor, Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment, University of Utah, SJ Quinney College of Law

Environmental groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club and Humane Society, filed a lawsuit this week against major changes the Trump Administration is making to the Endangered Species Act. Ever since the Act became law in 1973, it’s been the subject of lawsuits and heated political debate –all the while both sides contend they are committed to “conserving and recovering species.”

Tracking Ticks Across the Country

Guest: Jean Tsao, Associate Professor, Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, Large Animal Clinical Sciences, Michigan State University

Globally, mosquitoes area major killer. But in the United States, ticks are the bigger problem. They’re to blame for the vast majority of insect-borne illnesses reported every year –Lyme Disease being chief among them. And the really bad news is that in the last decade, ticks have been on the move –their populations growing and expanding into new areas that never used to have a tick problem.

America’s Newest Sport Is High-Speed Drone Racing, and Yes, It Is as Cool as It Sounds

Guest: Nicholas Horbaczewski, Founder and CEO, The Drone Racing League

When the drone racing competition live-streamed on Twitter a few weeks ago people who stumbled on it lost their minds. It looks like a video game: Little drones lit in fluorescent colors zooming through dark hallways at 90 miles per hour, squeezing through gates, trying to not to crash. And there’s play-by-play from excited commentators. But it’s not a video game. It’s happening live in a dark stadium. A bunch of guys with gamer nicknames are controlling the drones from cockpits wearing virtual reality goggles. The Drone Racing League is suddenly a huge phenomenon. Six million people watched that three-and-a-half-hour broadcast on Twitter, plus it was also on NBC. 

Reporting on the Moon Launch as Teenager

Guest: David Chudwin, Author, “I Was a Teenage Space Reporter: From Apollo 11 to Our Future in Space”

The Apollo 11 moon launch 50 years ago was the story of the summer. More than three-thousand reporters from all over the world showed up at Cape Canaveral in Florida to cover it. David Chudwin was among them –the only college reporter NASA gave press credentials to for the launch. He was 19. A rising sophomore at the University of Michigan who’d grown up with the space program, dreaming of being an astronaut. So, the summer of 1969, Chudwin and his buddy Marv hatch a plan to go Florida to watch the Apollo 11 crew launch for the moon. He’d spent his freshman year at the University of Michigan writing for the independent campus paper–The Daily -where he was the only person on staff with an interest in the space program. Chudwin decides he’ll just shoot the moon, so to speak, and see if he could see the moon launch as a reporter, instead of just a civilian fan. He just released a memoir of that amazing experience. It’s called “I Was a Teenage Space Reporter.”

Plastic Bag Bans Are Spreading Across the Country, Plus Bans on Those Bans

Guest: Matt Seaholm, Executive Director, American Progressive Bag Alliance

Eight states have banned the carry-out plastic bags you get at the grocery store –California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New York, Oregon and Vermont–and dozens of cities done so, too. They cite the problem of flimsy plastic bags ending up in rivers, lakes and the ocean. Wildlife eat them or get tangled in them. Plus, many coastal cities just get tired of cleaning up the bags from beaches and parks. But at least a dozen states have passed laws preventing cities from banning plastic bags. Those states have bag ban bans.