Environment Podcast

Grist columnist, author: POWER TRIP

Sun, 9 May 2010 18:11:36 -0700

I’m deeply worried about the ultimate effects of the Gulf oil spill – just the latest tragedy our society has brought on itself because we seem unable to wisely assess the risks of our actions. Think of the war in Iraq and the Wall Street crash.

With regard to oil, AMANDA LITTLE has written a book, POWER TRIP: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells, Our Ride to the Renewable Future, in which she looks at the past, present and future of energy -- and she ends up optimistic. I’m going to ask her to share what she’s learned and how she can possibly feel that way.

AMANDA LITTLE has published widely on energy, technology, and the environment. Her columns on green politics and innovation have appeared on Grist.org, Salon.com, and in the magazine, Outside. Her articles have been published in the New York Times magazine, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Wired, New York Magazine, In Style, Men's Journal, and the Washington Post. POWER TRIP is her first book.

DALE BELL and HARRY WILAND

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 22:29:26 -0700

The documentary GROWING GREENER SCHOOLS shows that across the country education is being transformed by educators who are committed to a green school based curriculum. It traces the impact of green initiatives from elite neighborhood schools to inner city schools and finds increased test scores and more proficient learning. Students benefit from a wide range of factors -- from more exposure to natural day lighting, fresh lunches or an eco-friendly school campus. The results, where the transformation has taken place, are profound, especially in the face of a national consensus that our public schools are failing.

DALE BELL and HARRY WILAND co-founders of the Media & Policy Center, are veteran film makers who, between them, have won an Academy Award (for Woodstock), five Emmys, one Peabody, two Christophers and two Cine Golden Eagles. They are both Ashoka Fellows, recognized as social entrepreneurs who use media effectively and creatively to inspire citizen action.

Interview: MARK HERTSGAARD, Author

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 08:17:57 -0800

A fellow of The Open Society Institute and The Nation's environment correspondent, MARK HERTSGAARD also covers climate change for Vanity Fair, TIME and Die Zeit and has written for many of the world's leading newspapers and magazines. He is the author of the highly acclaimed study of the media during the Reagan years, On Bended Knee, as well as Earth Odyssey; A Day in the Life: The Music and Artistry of the Beatles; The Eagle's Shadow; and the forthcoming Generation Hot: Living Through the Storm of Climate Change.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100104/hertsgaard

Interview: STEWART BRAND, Author and Editor

Sun, 8 Nov 2009 19:47:58 -0800

STEWART BRAND's Whole Earth Catalog introduced millions to new ways of thinking and doing and probably contributed to the birth of environmentalism in the US. Confronting today's challenges to global civilization in his new book, Brand questions environmental positions against GMO foods, Geo-engineering, and nuclear power.
In 1968 a totally original cultural item appeared. It owed something to old time catalogs perhaps akin to the Farmers almanac. Its style was funkily low-fi while its content had one foot in a simpler past and the other in a high tech sci-fi future. It was called the Whole Earth Catalog and subtitled "Access to Tools."
STEWART BRAND was its founder, editor and publisher, and Brand has been at the founding of several other cultural entities, events, and movements. Today, in his '70s, STEWART BRAND is no less curious, no less purposeful, and no less forward looking. His new book, WHOLE EARTH DISCIPLINE: An EcoPragmatist Manifesto, confronts the challenges we face as a global civilization - population, urbanization, resource depletion, peak oil, and most profoundly climate change, by issuing challenges of his own to what has passed for years as environmental orthodoxy. Brand characterizes many in a movement he helped to create and inspire as being anti-science, and anti-intellectual in their opposition to GMO foods, Geo-engineering, and nuclear power.
Forty years ago, Brand could say in the Whole Earth Catalog, "We are as gods, we might as well get good at it". Today in WHOLE EARTH DISCIPLINE, he says, "We are as gods and have to get good at it."
http://current.com/items/90416515_stewart-brand-proclaims-4-environmental-heresies.htm
http://web.me.com/stewartbrand/DISCIPLINE_footnotes/Recommended_Reading.html

Interview: LESTER BROWN, Founder of Worldwatch and Earth Policy Institute

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:41:00 -0700

In Lester Brown's new book, PLAN B 4.0: MOBILIZING TO SAVE CIVILIZATION, Brown lays out the symptoms, the diagnosis, and the cure. He estimates that we could solve all the world's greatest problems for $200 billion a year - less than half the US defense budget.

PLAN B 4.0 is a comprehensive plan for reversing the trends that are undermining our future. Its four overriding goals are to stabilize climate, stabilize population, eradicate poverty, and restore the earth's damaged ecosystems. Failure to reach any one of these goals will likely mean failure to reach the others as well.