Bestselling author Patrick Carman joins Betsy to talk about the magical world depicted in his new novel for young adults "Atherton: the House of Power", and its not coincidental resemblance to the magical Earth we all live on: "This particular book takes place about a hundred years in the future…"
LISTEN (8 min)
Oregon Teacher of the Year Award Recipient John Borowski tells Betsy about the pressure he’s faced from school administrators to stop teaching his students how science can be practically applied to the largest challenge that they will inherit from us, climate change. Mr. Borowski points to corporate pressure on science teachers nationwide not to tell our kids too much about their future, but he teaches undeterred, determined to respect his students’ education and teach them to think critically about the world: "I ask kids to take a newspaper article on the environment and analyze it. I always told them that I’ll grade the paper based on two things: you presentation of facts, and how well you analyze those facts. But I’m not going to grade them on their opinion." LISTEN (11 min)
SustainLane Chief Strategy Officer Warren Karlenzig joins Betsy to talk about how SustainLane has ranked the 50 greenest cities in the nation in their attractive and handy new book How Green is Your City? The top three cities are on the West Coast, but cities from Boston to Honolulu have green habits and new efforts, from Farmer’s Markets to Tap Water to Public Transportation, that they should be proud of and build upon: "Cities can learn from one other. They’re using these rankings to compare their metrics, how they’re performing in different areas on everything from green building to sustainability management." LISTEN (7 min)
Fortune Magazine Assistant Managing Director Cait Murphy offers a broad view of how mainstream corporate businesses have warmed to the environment just in time to help us address climate change with ingenuity and capital investments. Their cover model? Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard. Nice choice!
LISTEN (12 min)
Marty Essen tells Betsy about the adventures to be found on our precious, joyous, and yes, hair-raising planet, chronicled in his new book Cool Creatures, Hot Planet : "There are a lot of creatures out there that aren’t warm and cuddly, that you might want to wipe off the map, but when you do that, you lose things for humans. For example…" LISTEN (8 min)
Two months ago major headlines were made when a coalition of environmental groups, financiers, citizen activists and energy giant TXU cut a deal to stop the construction of a number of archaic coal-fired power plants in the state of Texas. At the time the deal stuggested to us a blueprint for the way businesses and activists can work together: citizens and Rainforest Action Network worked the streets and the internet, NRDC and Environmental Defense sought common ground with TXU in the boardroom, and the banks did the numbers. The future looked bright indeed.
A little too bright, apparently. This week TXU announced that it was partnering with Mitsubishi to build some of the largest nuclear plants in our nation’s history in Texas, and….nobody’s talking about it. Aside from the Wall Street Journal, newspapers aren’t following up. The environmental groups have been quiet. Friends of the Earth Executive Director Norman Dean fills the void: "It looks to me like TXU and its partners did not put all their cards on the table at the time the deal was cut. The irony is that Texas is the number one producer of wind power, and is perfectly situated to meet its growing energy needs through wind power and other renewable energy sources. If we were putting the subsidies that we’re putting into nuclear power into wind power, we’d have a lot more supply at this point." LISTEN (11 min)
Treehugger Correspondent Simran Sethi
interviews Martha Marks, President and co-founder of Republicans for Environmental Protection: "Conservation is one of the most fundamentally conservative acts that you can imagine." Listen here for the next wave in conservatism, same as the old wave.
LISTEN (9 min)
EcoTalk gives major props to the bevy of magazines that are doing entire issues dedicated to one of the only issues that really matters, but when one single page in Newsweek seeks to debunk the other 80 or so pages of the magazine, EcoTalk must take out its scalpel and dissect that malignant piece of paper.
Oh, What a surprise! Noted climate change skeptic Dr. Richard Lindzen! Climate Institute Chief Scientist Dr. Michael MacCracken says that while Dr. Lindzen holds his scientific colleagues to incredibly high standards, he lowers the bar a bit for his own statements: "As I read that piece, and it’s only about 7 or 8 paragraphs, I noted down a dozen things that were quite misleading or deceptive." LISTEN (11 min)
"A genuine American hero," according to RFK Jr., Chad Pregracke, the young man who has cleaned up our Mississippi River, returns to EcoTalk to relate his colorful, inspiring story as it is told in his new book From the Bottom Up: One Man’s Crusade to Clean America’s Rivers. Nobody dedicates their life to such humble stewardship of the planet if they are not optimistic and in posession of an archetypal Midwestern work ethic. LISTEN (12 min)
Eco-Activist, Permaculture proponent, and publisher of Primal Instincts Magazine, Michael Sunanda tells Betsy what he’s pieced together about the mysterious disappearance of bee colonies in 25 states and three countries in Europe. With Bees pollinating flowers and fruit trees, the highly visible role they play in our ecosystem is undoubted. Are pesticides to blame for these ghost hives? Are organic bee farms similarly effected? LISTEN (8 min)