Free Forum Q&A – RICHARD HEINBERG, Author of SNAKE OIL: Fracking’s Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future
Written on December 3rd, 2013 |
Aired: 12/1/13
What do you know about hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” of natural gas?Probably depends on who you’re listening to. The fossil fuel industry tells you it’s the biggest energy development of the century, which promises America energy independence for the US and a huge boost to our economy with benefits to local economies. Many of the communities themselves tell a different story – of pollution on the one hand and social disruption on the other.
For the spoils of success, I recommend an article in March 2013 Harpers, Where Broken Hearts Stand, Grief and Recovery on the Badlands of North Dakota by Richard Manning.
RICHARD HEINBERG has a new book, SNAKE OIL: How Fracking’s Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future, looks at fracking from both economic and environmental perspectives, informed by the most thorough analysis of shale gas and oil drilling data ever undertaken.
Join us as I try to find out, Is fracking the miracle cure-all to our energy ills, or a costly distraction from the necessary work of reducing our fossil fuel dependence?
Free Forum Q&A – JAY HARMON, Author of THE SHARK’S PAINTBRUSH: How Nature is Inspiring Innovation
Written on November 5th, 2013 |
Aired: 11/3/13
Nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling 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.
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. So why not learn as much as
we can from what works?
This week’s guest, JAY HARMON is doing just that, translating nature’s lessons and models into technologies that solve problems and perform tasks more elegantly, efficiently, and economically. He’s the author of THE SHARK’S PAINTBRUSH: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation. I believe biomimicry – a way of looking and working and designing – has enormous potential to save us from ourselves. I find this one of the most exciting developments in the world at this time.
Free Forum Q&A – GEORGE WOLFE of L.A. River Expeditions & THEA MERCOUFFER, filmmaker of ROCK THE BOAT
Written on July 18th, 2013 |
Aired: 07/14/13
How many of you know where the LA River is…where it starts, where it runs, where it ends? Okay, how many believe anyone could kayak down the entire river – all 51 miles of it – beginning in Canoga Park in the San Fernando Valley and finally passing the Queen Mary to enter the Pacific in the Port of Long Beach? My next guests believed it was possible, and proved it in 2008, changing the course, if you will, of the river for us all. For the first time in decades, kayaking and fishing are now legal along the waterway, and The L.A. River: used, abused and forgotten, is now at the center of a major vision to transform this concrete metropolis into a more sustainable model city for the 21st century.
My guests will be GEORGE WOLFE of LA River Expeditions and THEA MERCOUFFER producer-director of the film ROCK THE BOAT that documents the successful campaign by Wolfe and others to have the LA River declared a navigable river and open sections of it to boats and kayaks.
Free Forum Q&A – LOUIE SCHWARTZBERG, filmmaker of WINGS OF LIFE; CHIP TAYLOR, monarchwatch.org
Written on July 16th, 2013 |
Aired: 07/14/13
Our life on earth depends on a most unlikely love affair – one between flowers and the bees, butterflies, birds and bats which enable plants to reproduce. The brilliant colors and exotic perfumes of flowers are designed to lure their pollinators into an intricate dance of seduction, a dance on which more than one third of our food crops depend, a dance without which we could not survive.
If you’re lucky and observant, you’ve witnessed the visits of bees and those marvels of engineering, hummingbirds, to the plants around you. But now, for the first time, you have a chance to watch that magnificent dance of pollinators and plants in the far corners of the globe and in the darkness of night. WINGS OF LIFE, the latest documentary from remarkable cinematographer and director, LOUIE SCHWARTZBERG, is now available on DVD. More than beautiful – which it is – the film carries an important message about the threats to pollinators and in turn, the threat to life itself.
I’ll be joined by LOUIS and CHIP TAYLOR a Monarch butterfly expert.
Q&A: Howard Bloom, Author – THE GOD PROBLEM: How a Godless Cosmos Creates
Written on January 22nd, 2013 |
Aired: 01/20/13
HOWARD BLOOM has been called “next in a lineage of seminal thinkers that includes Newton, Darwin, Einstein,[and] Freud,” by Britain’s Channel4 TV , and “the next Stephen Hawking” by Gear Magazine. His books include The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History; Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century; The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism; and his latest, THE GOD PROBLEM: How a Godless Cosmos Creates.
Heavy stuff, sure, but his biography is a lot quirkier than that list might suggest. From 1968 to 1988, Bloom made his mark in the music business, founding and running its biggest PR firm, working with Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Marley, Bette Midler, Queen, Simon & Garfunkel, Peter Gabriel, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, among many others. He helped launch Farm Aid and Amnesty International’s American presence, and put together the first public service radio campaign for solar power.
Bloom launched a successful kickstarter campaign to raise money for PR for THE GOD PROBLEM because changing a paradigm doesn’t just happen. A lot of people have given glowing blurbs to this book, but let me quote one by Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, “If Howard Bloom is only 10 percent right, we’ll have to drastically revise our notions of the universe. There’s no mysticism in The God Problem—no God, no religion, no incommunicable spiritual insights – just the contagious joy of a great mind set loose on the biggest intellectual puzzles humans have ever faced. Whether you’re a scientist or a hyper-curious layperson, Bloom’s argument will rock your world.”
www.howardbloom.net
