Earthbound

A Conversation with Jason Dove Mark Have you ever stood in a place you love and sensed something missing, without being able to say what? Author and journalist Jason Dove Mark has a name for why that happens: the great getting used to. Scientists call it shifting baseline syndrome. Each generation accepts the world it first noticed as normal, so the losses that came before never register as losses...

Who pays when the price on the shelf doesn't cover the cost of growing the food? Brenda Huerta, Senior Advisor for Climate and Environment at Fairtrade International, joins Earthbound to talk about what a label on a banana can promise, what it can never promise, and why the farmers who contributed least to the climate crisis stand on the most exposed ground. Brenda grew up in Mexico, where farming...

In the 1960s, schoolchildren practiced for the end of the world by hiding under their desks. Sixty years later, the desks are virtual, and the apocalypse has company. In this solo episode, host Thomas Schueneman reads a short essay from Thinking Out Loud, his column in the Global Warming Is Real newsletter. After nearly twenty years of warning about climate change, he watches artificial intelligen...

What if human thought isn’t separate from nature, but Earth’s newest ecosystem? Anne Riley spent more than 30 years in accounting, high tech, and banking before walking away from a system built on one goal: maximize profit at all costs. Her book, The Human Idea: Earth’s Newest Ecosystem , starts inside a single cell and builds outward to us. Life runs in nested layers, DNA to cell to body to colon...

Maya Lilly builds documentaries around one question: what makes a story move somebody to act? She trained at Juilliard, ran an environmental club there called the Juilliard Greens, then took an environmental studies degree and moved to Hollywood on purpose. The plan was to learn what the industry does well and either get climate storytelling inside it or carry the techniques back to organizers. Sh...

The harbor master in Monterey once told me the ocean is confused. Scientists have a name for part of it: shifting baseline syndrome, where each generation inherits a diminished ocean and calls it normal. The loss happens underwater, unwitnessed. Andrew Lewin has built a career on making it visible. A marine biologist who started in marine protected areas, he now hosts How to Protect the Ocean and...

Bridging the Gap and Finding Agency in a Complex World What can one person actually do about problems as vast as climate change, racism, or inequality? For most of us, the honest answer feels like: not much. That sense of powerlessness is exactly what philosophers Michael Brownstein and Alex Madva set out to dismantle. In this episode, Tom talks with the co-authors of Somebody Should Do Something...

More Than Enough Light What is more addictive than fentanyl, cocaine, or heroin? Evan Jaqua’s answer is power. And once people have it, they will do almost anything to keep it. This is a solo episode, a short essay built around the ideas of Evan Jaqua and the Solutions Party, the political reform organization he founded. The interview tape didn’t meet the bar for broadcast, so I took his thinking...

Your Brain is the Algorithm A conversation with David Beckemeyer We are a storytelling species. Long before we had data, we had narrative. But in a media environment engineered to trigger our most primitive threat responses, even the most compelling story struggles to find its audience. The amygdala doesn’t care about nuance. It cares about survival. So how do we talk about climate change to peopl...

What if the problem isn’t that the people with the most power don’t care? What if it’s that they’ve lost the capacity to? That’s the question at the center of Diana Colleen’s debut novel, They Could Be Saviors . A group of the world’s wealthiest men is kidnapped and brought to a facility where they’re offered a choice: undergo psychedelic-assisted therapy, or stay put indefinitely. It sounds far-f...

Novelist Lee Schneider completes the Utopia Engine Trilogy with a story of climate collapse, AI dominance, and the stubborn possibility of liberation. What if the Earth pushed back? That’s the question at the heart of Liberation, the final book in Lee Schneider’s Utopia Engine Trilogy . Schneider is a novelist, screenwriter, futurist, and podcast producer, and in this episode, he sits down with me...

A Shift in Perception What if the climate crisis isn’t just about what we’re doing to the planet, but how we see it? What if it is our flawed perception of the world and our place within it that separates us from nature and drives our destructive actions? In this contemplative conversation, writer and wilderness guide Bridget Lyons explores how perspective shapes our relationship with the living w...

Do We Need to Colonize Mars to Survive? A Book Review of Dr. Peter Solomon's 100 Years to Extinction In 2017, Stephen Hawking warned that humanity had just 100 years to move beyond Earth or face extinction. That bold prediction frames my Earthbound podcast conversation with Dr. Peter Solomon, physicist, serial entrepreneur, and author of 100 Years to Extinction . We dig into the triggers threateni...

Climate, Energy, Morality, and How We Thrive as a Species on a Finite Planet We tell ourselves stories to help us cope with existence, but too often we bend our stories to fit a misguided, destructive, and utterly unsustainable worldview. In this revised audio version of a 2019 article I published in Medium, we begin with a tight shot on Venezuela and the Trump administration’s recent military act...

This bonus episode features a short reading from my Thinking Out Loud section of my newsletter. Is empathy a strength or a weakness? How do we respond to forces that hide behind masks and seek to coerce, intimidate, and terrorize? In the midst of the chaos, how do we make sense of living in a warming world? There are lessons we can learn from the citizens of Minneapolis as they resist the masked m...

What if the sun, the same star that’s powered life on Earth for billions of years, could finally free us from the fossil fuel stranglehold that’s choking our future? That’s the question at the heart of this episode’s conversation with legendary climate activist and author Bill McKibben. In his latest book, Here Comes the Sun , McKibben delivers a message that's equal parts urgent and unexpectedly...

In a world of either-or thinking, where you’re expected to choose between hugging trees or hugging flags, Katherine Lacefield offers a refreshing alternative. The founder of Just Be Cause Consulting and host of the Just Be Cause Podcast joins us to dismantle the false binaries that plague environmental and animal rights movements. With candor and hard-won wisdom, she shares her journey from "crazy...

With this bonus holiday episode, I revisit a short article I originally wrote for a now-defunct website and republished on Medium back in 2022. Blood and Cigarettes takes us back to Christmas Eve and the trenches of World War I, and how redemption can be found in the unlikeliest of places. Ever since I heard the story of the Christmas Truce of 1914 , it has intrigued me. The poignant tale of the 1...

What Would The Ocean Say If You Could Ask It A Question? Exploring the intersection of art, science, and environmental activism, this episode features thought provoking conversation with Joshua Harrison , director of the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure based at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  The art-science environmental research collaborative challenges us to rethink ou...

How I Felt Ridiculous When I Ordered Same-Day Delivery In this short bonus episode, I briefly examine the complexities of modern consumerism and the often-overlooked hidden costs of our convenience-driven shopping habits. As we rush into another holiday shopping season, I revisit a 2018 article that explored the darker side of online shopping convenience, particularly during events like Cyber Mond...

The 1970s “Crying Indian” campaign, as it came to be known, with its poignant imagery and simple message about littering, has left an indelible mark on American culture. Yet, as we unpack the history and implications of this campaign, we discover that not all was as it appeared. It served as a brilliant marketing tactic by corporations to shift the onus of pollution onto individuals, effectively m...

Feed the inner duck Not with human news Or greedy things that suck, But give it quiet views; Comments from the moon. Opinions from the sky. The insights of a tune. The wisdom of a sigh. -Michael Leunig History Doesn’t Repeat, But It Rymes In a world hurtling toward what feels like an inevitable cliff, our daily algorithmically fed news cycles have evolved from continuous to relentless, reaching a...

Here Comes the Apocalypse! Panicked or Prepared? The art of preparation in today's polycrisis, conspiracy-driven world is far from straightforward. In all cases, it is an art that encompasses, among other things, science-based common sense and community-oriented planning. Just as important is a sense of humor. With preparation, we can laugh in the face of the Apocalypse! As we navigate the eerie a...

The Golden Toad If you’re like me, by the time you first heard about the Golden Toad, it was already gone. A flash of gold high in the damp cloud forest of Costa Rica. This mysterious and elusive species, native to a tiny habitat in the misty clouds of Costa Rica, serves as a poignant reminder of the fragility of our ecosystems and the impacts of climate change.  In this episode, I chat with...

The Mountain Valley Pipeline and Stories of Resistance in Appalachia Amidst the Appalachian dawn, our exploration of community resilience and environmental justice unfolds through the lens of Denali Sai Nalamalapu, author of ‘ Holler: A Graphic Memoir of Rural Resistance .’ The Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) stands as a stark reminder of the battles waged by local communities against encroaching c...