Originally aired April 2005
Environmental damage, climate change, rapid population growth and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of these societies, but other societies found solutions and persisted. The subtitle claims “societies choose to fail or succeed.”

Jared Diamond website

I recently broke my two-year hiatus with a show of reflections on the election and the path forward. I couldn’t resist again this week, following the inauguration of Donald Trump and the millions around the US and the globe who marched yesterday. in protest. I discuss recent events and the meaning of the marches with: • Richard (RJ) Eskow (www.patreon.com/thezerohour), host of the syndicated radio show The Zero Hour, was a writer for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. • Drew Dellinger, Ph.D. (drewdellinger.org), founder of Planetize the Movement, is the author of the award-winning poetry collection, Love Letter to the Milky Way, and the upcoming book, Martin Luther King—Ecological Thinker: Toward a Cosmology of Connection. • Mark Hertsgaard (markhertsgaard.com), Veteran journalist, Investigative Editor of The Nation, and the author of seven books including HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth and On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency.

After hosting and producing this show for 17 years, I stepped away from recording new live interviews nearly two years ago, but I couldn’t resist commenting about Trump’s election and our path forward confronting his administration. The Courage Campaign is spearheading resistance in California with a mix of online and ground organizing and action. Colby Devitt shares her experience at Standing Rock and her work in the campaign to divest from banks funding the pipeline.

 

 

Originally aired October 2011

As the two countries play a high stakes game of chicken, it’s a good time to see what Greece and Germany looked like in the aftermath of the global crash. Who better to be our tour guide than best-selling author MICHAEL LEWIS?

Lewis’s book, BOOMERANG: Travels in the New Third World is made up of articles originally published in Vanity Fair and picks up where 2010’s THE BIG SHORT left off. Governments are the focus of this book. Mostly because they have taken on the bad debts of the too-big-to-fail banks, so now they are themselves at risk. Now politics and culture become much more important as to how they will deal with that risk. The book also profiles Ireland, Iceland, and California.
Both Ira Glass and Malcolm Gladwell say today’s guest is their favorite storyteller. In his books and magazine articles, Lewis writes about sports, business, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, political campaigns, fatherhood. Stuff that matters to a lot of people. He’s smart and he has a sense of humor. Once a trader at Salomon Brothers, he wrote his first best-seller, LIAR’S POKER about the excesses of Wall Street during the 1980s. He continues to write about that world with his last two books, a column for Bloomberg, and articles in Vanity Fair. We also talk about the twisted path taken to get MONEYBALL into movie theatres.

 

 

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