Sustainability Now! on KSQD.org – Détails, épisodes et analyse

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.