How should we speak with children about climate change?  Should young children be taught about climate change, and how? During the Cold War, the existential threat of nuclear holocaust was always present but there was, at least, a chance that the missiles would not be launched.  Climate change is also an existential threat but it is already happening.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a thoughtful conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Bagley, managing director of Project Drawdown, who has written and spoken about these questions. She  holds joint Ph.D.s in environment & resources and educational psychology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she studied how video games can encourage systems thinking about complex environmental topics.

San Benito County is one of the unsung jewels of the Central California Coast.  Most people know of San Juan Bautista and the Pinnacles, but there is much, much more.  Two mountain ranges, broad valleys, rangelands, farmlands and biodiversity.  But the Highway 101 corridor, which runs through a corner of the county, provides access to Silicon Valley and the SF Bay and people are moving south in search of cheaper housing.  Malls and sprawls are not far behind.  Now, a local movement is seeking to limit development with an initiative to require a public vote if agricultural, rural or range land is rezoned to residential, commercial or industrial use, a strategy already applied in several other California counties. Join host Ronnie Lipschutz to hear from Andy Hsia-Coron of Protect San Benito County, one of the activists behind the initiative, Chris Wilmers of UCSC, who studies cougars and bobcats that want to cross the road, Seth Adams from Save Mount Diablo, a land trust active across the County, and Val Lopez, Chair of the Amah Mutsun, whose ancestral lands cover much of the County.

Students eat.  But what do they eat?  And where does that food come from?  Both the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the California Department of Food and Agriculture are trying to help small farms sell more of their organic produce to public schools, shortening the supply chain between farms and consumers and encouraging students to eat more salads and other healthy foods.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz and guests Mireya Gomez-Contreras and Alma Leonor-Sanchez from Esperanza Community Farms in Watsonville, along with Pajaro Valley High students Mark Mendoza Luengas and Julio Gonzales, to hear about Esperanza’s farm to cafeteria program and their efforts to help Latine operators of small farms on the Central Coast to earn more revenue for their crops by selling directly to customers.

Sustainability Now! August 23, 2020. Host Ronnie Lipschutz and his guest Kim Stanley Robinson engage in a wide-ranging  conversation about sustainability, politics, 2020 and after, and how we  might prepare for the future. Robinson is a science fiction author,  California futurist and environmental optimist of the will. His recent  work, such as New York 2140 (2017) has addressed environmental and climate issues. His forthcoming book, The Ministry for the Future,  which imagines a new, global organization that advocates for the  world’s future generations and protects all living creatures, present  and future.

(Photo by Stephan Martiniere, https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/arts/kim-stanley-robinson-coming-to-phoenix-art-museum-sept-20-9702004)

Sustainability Now! #25, August 9, 2020. Climate Change, Public Health & Birth Impacts, with Dr. Rupa Basu, Chief of the Air and Climate Epidemiology Section at California Office on Environmental Health Hazards in the California Environmental Protection Agency and a lecturer in the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.  She is coauthor of a recently-published review article in JAMA Open Network about the effects of air pollution and climate change on birth outcomes and conducts research on the health effects of climate change. Dr. Basu received her PhD in Environmental and Occupational Epidemiology from The Johns Hopkins University and a Masters of Public Health from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.

Sustainability Now! #24, July 26, 2020. Environmental Art in Built & Natural Landscapes, with Marisha Farnsworth. “Environmental artists seek to investigate our human relationship with the environment through embedding their artistic practice within it” (“The Art Story”). Learn about the practice of environmental art on Sustainability Now! in this conversation between host Ronnie Lipschutz and environmental artist Marisha Farnsworth. She is an Oakland-based artist, whose large-scale public space interventions explore future ecosystems, infrastructural utopias and the social and ecological implications of materiality in the built environment.  Her work has been exhibited at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Venice Biennale and is in the collection of the Nevada Museum of Art. She was the lead artist for the 2017 Temple at Burning Man. You can find out more about her work here. The Nevada Museum of Art's Center for Art + Environment has an extensive archive of ecological art projects.

Sustainability Now #23, July 12, 2020, with Len Beyea, addresses sustainable community planning in Santa Cruz and cities in general. Len is a semi-retired energy engineer and commissioning agent, former land-use planner, musician, Interfaith Minister, gardener, dancer, political and cultural commentator. He is host of the Wednesday broadcast of Talk of the Bay on KSQD and shares hosting of Border-Free Radio, which airs just before this time slot.

Len writes that “The modern city has grown up during the era of the automobile, resulting in sprawling land use, paving over of up to 60% of urban space, loss of productive farm and range lands, forests, and wetlands, destruction of riparian habitats, and increased runoff and erosion; while within the urban spaces offering a lack of walkable neighborhoods and real centers of social and civic engagements, financially unsustainable infrastructure, traffic jams, and almost total dependence on private motorized transportation for shopping, school, work and basic services.”

He addresses the current state of Santa Cruz County’s urbanized spaces and their unsustainable characteristics, principles of urban design for walkable neighborhoods and “new urbanism” that can bring our cities back into balance, visualization of a transition to more sustainable and inviting spaces for various local neighborhoods where we live, work, and engage socially, and exploration of the concrete and specific changes that can help get us there. You can read about attempts during the 1960s to turn Santa Cruz into an industrial city in “The plan to make Santa Cruz into Detroit and Los Angeles,” by Ross Eric Gibson in the Santa Cruz Sentinel. Another interesting publication about sustainable planning is “Civic Commons: Reimagining Our Cities’ Public Assets,” 2016.

Sustainability Now! #22, June 28, 2020, with Kalina Browne, 2019-20 RAY Diversity Fellow at the Ocean Conservancy to learn about Climate Change and Black Lives Mattering on the California Coast.  Browne grew up on the Caribbean island of St Vincent and the Grenadines. She holds a B.S. in Environmental Geoscience from the University of Buffalo. She has worked with the Caribbean Community Climate Change Center in Belize, the Garifuna Heritage Foundation in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and the Ministry of Finance, Economic Planning, Sustainable Development and Information Technology for the Government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.  She will be entering the Coastal Science and Policy Program at UCSC this Fall. You can find her recently coauthored brief on seabed minerals mining here.

Sustainability Now! #21, June 14, 2020, with Jo Chamberlain, Executive Director of the Coastside Land Trust in Half Moon Bay. Jo is a graduate of College Eight (aka, Rachel Carson College) at UC Santa Cruz and was provost’s assistant there for several years during the past decade.  She has served on several non-profit boards, including the San Francisco Zoological Society and Friends of Westwind. The Coastside Land Trust is dedicated to the preservation, protection and enhancement of the open space environment, including the natural, scenic, recreational, cultural, historical, and agricultural resources of Half Moon Bay and the San Mateo County coast for present and future generations. You can find out more about California’s land trusts at the California Council of Land Trusts.

May 31, 2020, “The Wheels on the Bus” Getting ‘Round the City, with Rick Longinotti, a member of and spokesperson for the Campaign for Sustainable Transportation, a “group of volunteers dedicated to making Santa Cruz County a place where everyone in our diverse community can access their needs and activities in a way that is safe, affordable, convenient and sustainable for future generations.” You can learn more about transportation in Santa Cruz County at the Regional Transportation Commission website and the City of Santa Cruz Public Works website and from the work of Adam Millard-Ball, an environmental studies professor at UC Santa Cruz.

Sustainability Now!, May 17, 2020, Struggling to Survive: Binational Farmworkers on the Central Coast, with Dr. Ann Lopez, Founder and Director of the Center for Farmworker Families in Watsonville, California.  Lopez is emerita professor at San Jose City College, and holds degrees in biology and a PhD in Environmental Studies from UC Santa Cruz. The Center works with binational farmworkers and their families to promote their well being. She is author of The Farmworker’s Journey about the human side of the binational migration circuit from the subsistence and small producer farms of west central Mexico to employment in California’s corporate agribusiness. In 2019, Ann was chosen as Woman of the Year by the 29th Assembly District of California. Be sure to watch “A Migrant Farmworker’s Story,” a CFF video filmed during on of the Centers Farmworker Reality Tours.

Sustainability Now! May 3, 2020, Protecting Sacred Lands, with Valentin Lopez, Chair of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band of the Costanoan/Ohlone Indians and President of the Amah Mutsun Land Trust.  The Amah Mutsun are descendants of the more than 20 politically distinct indigenous peoples of the territories ranging from Año Nuevo to the greater Monterey Bay area. We talked about the history of the Amah Mutsun, some of their research and relearning projects and plans for Juristac, a sacred tract of land near Gilroy.

Sustainability Now! April 19, 2020, By the Beautiful Sea, with Rachel Kippen, Executive Director of O’Neill Sea Odyssey and a columnist for the Santa Cruz Sentinel. Rachel was previously Director of Programs at Save Our Shores. She has also worked as a marine science educator, a kayak guide and a whale tour naturalist. She holds two degrees in Environmental Studies. She grew up on two islands, one in the Puget Sound and the other in Hawai’i, so she spent her youth learning about the ocean by snorkeling, surfing, and paddling.  O’Neill Sea Odyssey is a Monterey Bay-based introduction to marine science for students in grades 4-6 aboard the 65-foot O’Neill Catamaran.

Bees are in danger; what can we do? Tune into a Sustainability Now! rebroadcast from 2021 to hear a conversation with Eve Bratman, an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Franklin & Marshall College, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  Bratman is a political ecologist with interdisciplinary training utilizing social science to explore conservation and land use issues relating to sustainable development politics and policies.  She is author of Governing the Rainforest: Sustainable Development Politics in the Amazon, and is finishing her book, called Bee Politics: Protecting Pollinators and the Local-to-Global Challenge of Sustainability, which uses bees as a prism for seeing broader social and ecological phenomena and is premised upon revealing the ways that human society fumblingly strives to protect and preserve their roles in our lives.

Sustainability Now!, April 5, 2020, Urchins in the Storm, with KSQD engineer Emily Donham, a 5th-year PhD candidate in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at UCSC.  Emily’s research focuses on how sea urchins, which graze on kelp forests, may be vulnerable to ocean acidication and global warming.  Emily is the producer of “Santa Cruz Naturalist,” which airs on Tuesdays at 7:54 AM, Wednesdays at 3:55 PM and Saturdays at 11:54 AM. at Her favorite crustacean is the horseshoe crab.

Sustainability Now! March 22, 2020, No Place Like Home, with UCSC Sociology Professor Steve McKay, director of the UCSC Center for Labor Studies and codirector, with Professor Miriam Greenberg, of “No Place Like Home,” a community-initiated, student-engaged research project on the affordable housing crisis in Santa Cruz County.

Sustainability Now! March 8, 2020, Auto-Free Living in Hayward? with Dr. Sherman Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Cal State East Bay, to talk about a proposal for Bayview Village, a car-free development in a disused quarry in Hayward and urban sustainability more generally.

Sustainability Now! February 23, 2020, Climate Justice in the Pajaro Valley, with Nancy Faulstich, Director of Regeneración, a non-profit focused on climate and social justice in Watsonville, California and the Pajaro Valley, Tamela Harkins, Pajaro Valley High School English Teacher, and three members– Itzel Sanchez, Luke Zamora and Reuben Garcia–of La Vida Verde, a student environmental club at the high school.

Sustainability Now! February 9, 2020, Caring for the Prairie, with Professor Jenny Reardon of the UCSC Sociology Department talks about  “Caring for the Prairie,” a “project involving biking through the prairies and small towns of Kansas, designed to develop embodied knowledge of the land and to find out more about attitudes towards contemporary US politics from the denizens of the prairies.” You can hear a podcast about her experiences in Kansas here.

Sustainability Now!, January 26, 2020, A Conversation with Extinction Rebellion, with members of Extinction Rebellion in Monterey and Santa Cruz: Vanessa Mekarski, Dwight Mitchell, Jennifer Brugman and Magali Morales. Extinction Rebellion is a leaderless, decentralised, international and apolitical network using non-violent direct action and civil disobedience to persuade governments to act justly on the Climate and Ecological Emergency.

Sustainability Now! January 12, 2020, Is Bioethanol the Answer? with David Blume, CEO & Director of Research and Development at Blume Distillation, and author of Alcohol Can be a Gas, to talk about his distillation & permaculture operation just outside of Watsonville.

Sustainability Now! December 15, 2019, Can Solar Energy Provide a Basic Income for Everyone in the World? with  Robert Stayton, author of Power Shift: From Fossil Energy to Dynamic Solar Power and Solar Dividends: How Solar Energy Can Generate a Basic Income for Everyone on Earth discusses his proposal to give everyone on Earth 10 kilowatts of solar PV panels. You can request a free e-book of Solar Dividends at: http://solardividends.org/free-ebook-by-request/ 

Sustainability Now! December 1, 2019, What Do You Do About a Problem Like PG&E?, with Professor Dustin Mulvaney, Environmental Studies at San Jose State University. His research focuses on the social and environmental dimensions of food and energy systems, innovation, emerging technologies and environmental change.  He is author of Solar Power: Innovation, Sustainability, and Environmental Justice and the forthcoming Sustainable Energy Strategies: Socio-Ecological Dimensions of Decarbonization.

Sustainability Now! November 17, 2019, Down on the Farm in Santa Cruz, with Nina Vukecevic, Farm Manager at Common Roots Farm in Santa Cruz, which provides disabled adults with access to agriculture. You can find out more about urban agriculture here.

Solar electricity is the fuel of the future.  But can we go solar without damaging the environment?  Solar farms in distant places need transmission lines to get their product to the market.  Storage batteries, and especially electric vehicles, require lithium and the stuff must be mined somewhere.  And all the while, its seems that the solar enterprise is being undermined by the struggle to control where solar panels can go and who can decide how little wholesale power will cost and how much you, the consumer, will pay.

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz as he welcomes back SJSU Environmental Studies Professor Dustin Mulvaney, who has been looking into the environmental consequences of solar farms, transmission lines and mining in California’s “Lithium Valley.”

Sustainability Now! November 3, 2019, Zero Waste Living? with Liz McDade, who runs the “No Trace Shop,” an online business dedicated to providing customers with a “sustainable lifestyle.”

Sustainability Now! October 20, 2019, Where the Mountain Lions Are, with Professor Chris Wilmers, Department of Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz, talking about mountain lions, talking about their habits, lairs and ecology.

Sustainability Now! October 6, 2019, History of UC Santa Cruz, with Professor Emeritus Jim Clifford, History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, talking about the University and its history, and his book, In the Ecotone.

Sustainability Now! September 22, 2019, Where Does Your Bottle Go?, with Tim Goncharoff, Zero Waste Programs Manager for Santa Cruz County discussing garbage, recycling and all that.

Sustainability Now! September 8, 2019. Green Architectural Design, with Thomas Rettenwender, Principal Architect at Ecologic Design Lab in Carmel, California talking about green building.

Sustainability Now! August 25, 2019, Climate Action Now!, with Dr. Tiffany Wise-West, Sustainability & Climate Action Manager for the City of Santa Cruz. For more information, see the City’s Climate Action Program web site.

All of us—well, many of us—are backyard gardeners. And it’s planting season. Backyard gardens are not immune from the impacts of violent and unpredictable weather or the longer-term effects of climate change.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Kim Stoddart, editor of Amateur Gardening and author of The Climate Change Resilient Vegetable Garden—How to Grow Food in a Changing Climate.  She lives and gardens in West Wales, where weather conditions are not always optimal.  Kind of like California.

We live in a Consumer Society.  Rising consumption is good, since it makes the economy grow.  At the same time, we face a Climate Crisis.  Rising consumption is bad, since it makes carbon emissions grow.  People across the Global North believe we must reduce emissions but they are reluctant to reduce their consumption. What can we do?  Some advocate ecological modernization by making our goods and services greener.  Others argue that only shrinking the economy--"degrowth"--will do the trick.  Maybe both are more mythic than technologically or politically feasible. Can we square the circle (or, maybe, circle the square?) and find a path to sustainability?

Join SN! host Ronnie Lipschutz for a thought-provoking conversation with Dr. Jean Boucher, about the promises and myths of sustainable consumption.  Boucher is a senior Research Scientist and Macaulay Development Trust Fellow in Land Use and Societal Metabolism at the James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland.  His research ranges from people's attitudes about climate change and their carbon-intensive lifestyles to the demographic distribution of clean energy technologies, the socio-technical factors that influence cultural and institutional behavior, and macro-scale societal metabolics analyzing materials and energy flows through households and economic sectors.

The elephant seals are back!

The elephant seals have made their annual trip back to the California Coast!  During the winter months, Elephant Seals turn to love...and fighting... and feeding... and laying around in the sun and rain. This is the prime viewing season at Año Nuevo State Park and Point Reyes National Seashore, where you can watch the two-ton male seals fight bloody battles over the females, the females feeding their large and growing pups, and listen to the odd noises they produce (although they probably think humans make strange noises).

This is a rebroadcast of a 2022 interview with Dr. Theresa Keates, who holds a UCSC PhD in Ocean Sciences and is currently a Legislative Analyst with the California Energy Commission. Keates' dissertation research centered on deploying oceanographic tags on elephant seals, which offer both a source of valuable oceanographic data from remote regions as well as a unique platform to investigate these very large marine mammals.

Climate change is transforming what scientists call the land-sea interface, with crumbling cliffs, falling structures, tidal and storm flooding and loud homeowners demanding government action.  Should that interface be buttressed and built up to prevent further coastal erosion or is managed retreat a better strategy? Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Rosanna Xia (“Shaw”), an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times and a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020.  Xia has just published California Against the Sea—Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline.  She has traveled the state’s 1,200-mile coastline and talked to experts, politicians and the public to see what is happening, what communities are doing and what we can expect for our coastal future.

Energy has been with us for a long time and, over the past 100 years, fossil fuels have been cheap and plentiful.  Now we are going to have to pay the piper if we want to limit the future impacts of climate change.  How could that happen.  Tune in to hear Amory Lovins, cofounder of the Rocky Mountain Institute and long time energy policy analyst and advisor to many utilities, regulators and businesses.  Almost 50 years ago, Lovins published a groundbreaking article in the journal, Foreign Affairs, entitled “Energy Strategy: The Road not Taken,” which recommended a renewable-based strategy over one based on oil, coal and nuclear power.  Surely, but slowly, that vision is being realized, albeit in a much more complicated and conflicted fashion.  Amory will talk about efficient energy use, integrative design, renewable supply (including grid integration), and long-term energy needs and paths to getting to an electrified future.

Monterey Waterkeeper is part of a coalition of organizations seeking to reduce nitrate pollution in the region’s groundwater. Nitrate contamination, the result of over-application of fertilizers, can cause the “blue baby syndrome” and various cancers in adults.  The State Water Board recently issued rules that allow growers to continue over-application of nitrogen fertilizers without any deadlines for cleaning up contaminated water.  In October 2023, rural Latino community and farmworker groups, environmental organizations, including Monterey Waterkeeper, and commercial and recreational fishing organizations filed suit to overturn the decision.  Tune in to hear Chelsea Tu, Executive Director of Monterey Waterkeeper, talk about the problem, the situation and the solution

According to Simon Dalby, Professor emeritus in the Balsillie School of International Affairs at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, global politics over the past 70 years has been driven by an overabundance of "firepower," both nuclear and carbon-based.  The first was used by Great Power to threaten incineration of the world, by intention or accident, in the name of "national security."  The second now threatens the future of life on Earth--human and nonhuman--but Great Powers (and the not-so-great) resolutely refuse to give them up in the name of "national security" and "lifestyle."  In 2022, Dalby published Rethinking Environmental Security, an analysis of firepower past, present and future.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a thought-provoking conversation with Simon Dalby about these two threats and what countries are not doing about it.

As the Earth gets warmer, the world’s glaciers get smaller.  Land-based glaciers in the Earth’s polar regions hold enormous quantities of water and, as they melt, the runoff is raising sea levels and disrupting ocean systems, such as the Gulf Stream.  The obvious solution is for us to drastically reduce global greenhouse gas emissions but, even if we were to do that, the Earth would continue to warm and the glaciers would continue to melt.  Is there anything we could do to slow the melt?

There are a growing number of proposals to intervene in Earth’s systems—called “geoengineering” as a way to moderate climate change.  Join Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Research Professor John Moore, who is a glaciologist in Rovaniemi, Finland at the University of Lapland’s University of the Arctic.  His solution to slowing glacier melt is the construction of barriers at glaciers’ underwater bases in order to slow or prevent flows of warmer ocean water from carving away at the ice.

Nuclear power is being touted as a way of providing clean energy, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and paving the way to a zero-emission future. There is talk of a “nuclear renaissance,” with small modular reactors (SMRs) replacing the gigawatt nuclear behemoths of the past, quickly and at much lower cost.  But the United States’ experience with nuclear, now going back 70 years, turned out to be much more costly than predicted.  The country’s one hundred or so operating reactors have generated prodigious quantities of highly radioactive spent fuel that is being stored in so-called swimming pools and caskets adjacent to the plants that produced it.  Blame politics, if you will, but it remains waste.  And only a month ago, a federally subsidized deal to build a cluster of six SMRs in Idaho collapsed, due to cost overruns and construction delays.  So, is that renaissance real or just hope and hype?

To find out more, join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Professor Allison Macfarlane, Director of the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at The University of British Columbia.  Dr. Macfarlane was chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 2012-2014.  She holds a PhD in Geology from MIT, was a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, which addressed the 70-year old challenge of radioactive waste disposal, about which she continues to write.

Long-time listeners to Sustainability Now! know that we periodically turn to a focus on plastic, whose production is predicted to skyrocket over the next few decades, as fossil fuel companies look for ways to sell their product.  Plastics are not forever, although they last a long time in the environment and are piling up across the world’s lands and oceans.  Even notionally “compostable” plastics require special handling if they are to be returned to their constituent components, and most of these plastics are not handled specially.

If you could make a better plastic—one that would decompose into biological carbon in your backyard compost pile—wouldn’t the world beat a path to your door?  Maybe not. Join SN! host Ronnie Lipschutz and Raegan Kelly, Head of Product and Sustainability Lead at Better for All, for a conversation about composting plastics.  Better for all is trying to widen use of PHBH, a biologically based plastic that breaks down with minimal treatment in your back yard.  We are going to talk about why it is so difficult to get the manufacturers of plastic and plastic products to use PHBH and what Better for All is trying to do about that.

Sequoias are among the oldest living things on Earth, and most of the world’s sequoias are in Sequoia and King’s Canyon National Parks. Since 2020, according to the National Park Service, almost 20% of that iconic species have been destroyed by wildfires.  The parks’ management is planning to repopulate the burned-over areas with thousands of sequoia seedings, in an effort to rebuild six groves.  But not everyone supports this project: some ecologists argue that there are enough seedlings growing in those groves to provide the next generation of trees.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz to hear about the pros and cons from Dr. Christy Brigham, Chief of resources management and science at the two national parks and one of the architects of the plan, and from Dr. Chad Hanson, cofounder of the John Muir Project, who is a critic of the plan.

Photo credit: Gary Coronado, LA Times

When you go out into the world and walk on the Earth, have you ever wondered what was beneath your feet?  Animals and plants, of course, but mostly soil.  Soil is a wonderful substance, an essential element in the riot of life that covers the planet’s continents.  But soil is not without life of its own: a handful of fertile soil is home to more organisms in a than there are people on Earth.  And these organisms are vital to plant and animal nutrition and growth.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz and Dr. Chelsea Carey, Director of Soil Research and Conservation at Point Blue Conservation Science  for a fascinating conversation about the life beneath our feet.

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for this Blast from the Past with Dr. Helen Caldicott.  According to Dr. Caldicott, the nuclear doomsday clock of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is set at 100 seconds to Midnight, but 20 seconds is closer to the mark. Dr. Caldicott has devoted the last forty-two years to an international campaign to educate the public about the medical hazards of the nuclear age and the necessary changes in human behavior to stop environmental destruction and nuclear catastrophe. She calls this “Global Preventive Medicine.” Caldicott is also the subject of “If You Love This Planet,” which won an Academy Award in 1982 for best documentary.

For uncounted millennia, the creatures of the world’s ocean have been hunted, captured and killed by human beings.  For most of that history, however, this was done for subsistence purposes.  Only over the last few centuries, was the slaughter of whales, seals, otters, turtles, sharks and other marine species justified in the name of capitalism and industry.  Beginning in the late 1960s, exposing and preventing this continued decimation became the mission of individuals and groups dedicated to direct action meant to disrupt those who continue to hunt, capture and kill.

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with one of the best-known of these activists, Captain Paul Watson, who recently published his memoir Hitman for the Kindness Club—High Seas Escapades and Heroic Adventures of an Eco-Activist.  Watson was a cofounder of Greenpeace, founder of Sea Shepherds and most recently established the eponymous Captain Paul Watson Foundation which “aims to educate and raise awareness about the illegal exploitation of oceanic ecosystems and marine species, while also establishing an international anti-poaching entity to enforce conservation laws and treaties.” Watson has commissioned and skippered numerous ships and campaigns, fought against the murder of marine species for more than half a century, has been on the forefront and frontline of direct action to protect the biodiversity of Earth’s marine environments.

What do you know about CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act, passed in 1970 and signed into law by then-Governor Ronald Reagan? For more than 50 years, CEQA has been used to inform decisionmakers and the public about the potential environmental impacts of proposed projects but, in recent years, it has been applied in situations for which it was not designed, especially new housing development.  In response, both Governor Newsom and the State Legislature are seeking to amend the law to prevent various activists and opponents from obstructing new housing.  Not so fast, say the law’s supporters.  They point to a recent report by the Rose Foundations that CEQA has had little, if any, impact on housing projects across the state. So, who is correct?

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Professor Deborah Sivas of the Stanford Law School. She teaches environmental law, directs the environmental law clinic and has represented various environmental organizations in the courts.  We will talk about CEQA and whether it is really standing in the way of more housing in California.

The Rights of Nature is one way to rethink the relationships between humans and Nature, but are there other ways to think about those connections? Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Dr. Rosalind Warner, professor of political science at Okanagan College in British Columbia and Research Fellow with the Earth System Governance Project.  Warner is studying the role of kinship metaphors in Earth System Law, with kinship connoting more ethical relationships among humans, Nature and earth’s non-human inhabitants. Earth System Law is an emerging body of legal precepts, principles and practices that bring together ethics and law with the planet’s dynamic physical and biological cycles. Tune in to hear a new take on human-nature relations.

More than 50 years ago, Christopher Stone, a UCLA law professor, wrote a groundbreaking book Should Trees Have Standing? in which he argued for the right of trees to be represented in courts of law.  Since then, the Rights of Nature movement has taken the world by storm; some countries have encoded such rights into their constitutions.  But what does it mean to say that trees, rivers and animals have rights? Does the “rights of nature” make any practical sense? And who is pushing for such rights?

Join Sustainability Now! host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Katie Surma, a reporter at Inside Climate News. She has been covering the “rights of nature” beat at ICN since 2021 and has written extensively on the topic.  Find out whether the trees and critters in your back yard and all around us are people, too.

When is the safety, health and well-being of people a concern for homeland security? Jackie McCloud, Watsonville’s Environmental Sustainability Manager in Public Works, has been accepted into the Naval Postgraduate School’s MA program in Security Studies at their Center for Homeland Defense and Security in Monterey.  According to McCloud, “People might see the words ‘Homeland Security’ and think that it doesn’t match with Public Works and climate change, but Public Works is homeland security adjacent in that we provide domestic security to residents. One of the greatest threats to our residents is climate change.”  Join Sustainability Now! host Ronnie Lipschutz and Jackie McCloud to hear a whole new take on “Homeland Security.”

 The Monterey Bay is the crown jewel of the Central California Coast. For well over a century, the Bay has been exploited for a myriad of purposes; today, it needs protection and conservation.  This is especially the case with its fish and fisheries, which provide a vital source of food but are vulnerable to tastes and markets.  Join Sustainability now! host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Melissa Mahoney, Executive Director of the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust, which seeks to ensure sustainable fisheries, resilient communities and a healthy Bay and ocean.