Originally Aired October 2009

We are in a race between tipping points in natural and political systems.
Which will come first? Can we mobilize the political will to phase out coal-fired power plants before the melting of the Greenland ice sheet becomes irreversible? Can we halt deforestation in the Amazon basin before the forest becomes vulnerable to fire and is destroyed? Can we cut carbon emissions fast enough to save the Himalayan glaciers that feed the major rivers of Asia? Can we win this race?
LESTER BROWN thinks we can…

In his 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 $200B 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.It’s time for Plan B: an all-out response at wartime speed proportionate to the magnitude of the threats facing civilization.
http://www.earth-policy.org/about_epi/C32

 

Originally Aired November 2012
RANDY HAYES, described in the Wall Street Journal as “an environmental pit bull,” is a veteran of many high-visibility corporate accountability campaigns and has advocated for the rights of Indigenous peoples. These days the primary work of the founder of RAINFOREST ACTION NETWORK and current Executive Director of FOUNDATION EARTH is rethinking and “ecologizing” the economy.

According to Hayes, “The most important environmental or human rights policy is economic policy. That means changing the very basis of the failed system that created the problem. We need a deep green economy – not a green-washing economy. We must ecologize the economy…To start, we must help under-consumers (the malnourished and wanting) move up to a sustainable level of consumption while we assist over-consumers (the wasteful and indifferent) down. We must protect the remnants of wild nature and allow for damaged land, water, and sky to heal.”

 

http://www.fdnearth.org/staff-2/

 

 

Originally Aired August 2010

President Obama’s recent decision to add an additional 450 American soldiers to our 3,000 strong train-and-equip mission in Iraq made me reach for a dose of ANDREW BACEVICH, a voice of sanity on issues of war and peace. Bacevich wrote of Obama’s move in an op-ed, Washington in Wonderland: Down the Iraq Rabbit Hole (Again).
In WASHINGTON RULES, the 2010 book we talk about in this interview, Bacevich (in his own words) “..aims to take stock of conventional wisdom in its most influential and enduring form, namely the package of assumptions, habits, and precepts that have defined the tradition of statecraft to which the United States has adhered since the end of World War II — the era of global dominance now drawing to a close. This postwar tradition combines two components, each one so deeply embedded in the American collective consciousness as to have all but disappeared from view.

The first component specifies norms according to which the international order ought to work and charges the United States with responsibility for enforcing those norms. Call this the American Credo — …to lead, save, liberate, and ultimately transform the world.

…With regard to means, that tradition has emphasized activism over example, hard power over soft, and coercion (often styled ‘negotiating from a position of strength”) over suasion. Above all, the exercise of global leadership as prescribed by the credo obliges the United States to maintain military capabilities staggeringly in excess of those required by self-defense.”

 

 

Originally Aired December 2013

In the mid-60’s a mom in NYC organized other moms as Citizens for Clean Air to fight pollution and wrote articles calling for industry and business schools to take quality of life into consideration in planning and decision-making. Though she never attended college, HAZEL HENDERSON, has gone on to a four decade career as a globally respected economist, futurist, and author. In this remarkable hour, she tells the story of her improbable and impactful life and work.

http://hazelhenderson.com/

 

 

 

Originally aired June 2011

After 3.8 billion years of R&D on this planet, failures are fossils. What surrounds us in the natural world is what has succeeded and survived. Nature has already solved many of the problems we grapple still with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most important, what lasts here on Earth. So why not learn as much as we can from what works? JANINE BENYUS coined a term and invented a field called biomimicry – which basically means imitating nature.
In order to make things, humans usually beat, heat or treat. We either use intense pressure, intense heat or powerful solvents to produce the chemical and physical reactions in our manufacturing processes – and it’s usually that pressure, heat or chemicals that generate pollution. What if we could produce ceramics the way an abalone does, cables the way a spider spins webs, or filter water the ways so many creatures do?

Her creative brainstorm has grown into a way of looking, working and designing that has enormous potential to save us from ourselves. According to Janine, we are now learning how to grow food like a prairie, create color like a peacock, self-medicate like a chimp, compute like a cell, and run a business like a hickory forest. And she says, “The more our world functions like the natural world, the more likely we are to endure on this home that is ours, but not ours alone.”

http://biomimicry.org/janine-benyus/