EnvironMental with Dandelion

This is the second week we're talking about the book, Black Food Matters. A collection of interdisciplinary articles written or compiled by Ashanté M. Reese and Hanna Garth We decided to split this up and talk about it over two episodes because this book is an important set of voices sharing the tangible intersection of systemic racism, power, and food culture. This week Court thoughtfully covers...

This is the first of 2 episodes dedicated to the book, Black Food Matters. A collection of interdisciplinary articles written or compiled by Ashanté M. Reese and Hanna Garth   We decided to split this up and talk about it over two episodes because this book is an important set of voices sharing the tangible intersection of systemic racism, power, and food culture.   For this first week, aub shares...

This week on EnvironMental, aub did a deep dive into food deserts. More than 10% of people in the US live in a food desert, which is a geographic area where access to affordable, healthy food options are limited. Our ability to create and grow food from a centralized place also allowed for things like urban city sprawl and a decrease in rural farms - and with both of these came food deserts. There...

This week on EnvironMental, Courtney did a deep dive into food insecurity.   The long and short is that food insecurity is a trap - it's a cycle that is generationally difficult to escape from.   It is highly correlated with high rates of violence and poverty and while there are solutions like using our food waste more wisely, the only real solution for food insecurity is providing a living wage....

This week on EnvironMental we spoke with Anne Terhorst, Junior Business Developer for Food Tech Brainport, a company that is dedicated to improving food tech to make food production more sustainable.   We talk about the human condition and how even though we can solve a lot of issues with technological advances, we can't make global change without people accepting those advances into their everyda...

This week on EnvironMental we talk about Farming for the Long Haul by Michael Foley! This book offers a fantastic look at the history of traditional farming and gives actionable advice for how we can transition to growing food within our communities. Would we recommend it? Yes! To anyone who felt like they might want to farm or have a garden that grows food. After reading this, we feel inspired to...

This week on the EnvironMental Podcast, we start talking about food and agriculture. You can tell by the tone of the episode that we’re a little overwhelmed by how big this topic is and how many directions it CAN go in! Here’s the good news: there’s a lot of room for improvement. But the reality we’re living is a little dire. Here are some facts that we want to dive deeper into this month: Food ac...

This week's episode of EnvironMental is a short wrap up of the conversation we have been having around the transition to renewable energy. The long and short of it is that there are so many solutions out there! And the good news is that there are a lot of people are working on them, but the not-so-great truth is that there's no big global plan for the necessary transition to renewable energy. Whil...

This week we're talking with Tom Vocke (THE Tom!) with Lightyear!  He's an electrical engineer who has been part of the transition to solar energy, especially in cars, since 2011.  We spent time asking about the reality of transitioning to renewable energy - he's optimistic about what is possible!  He told us about the limits of solar energy, what a solar cell is made out of, and why solar is gett...

This week we read the Carbon Boycott by Samuel Avery Do we think it's possible to boycott carbon? Yes. Do we think it's going to be easy? No. In his book, Sam gives several examples of times throughout human history that we've made huge societal changes for the betterment of our society - from the  Boston tea party to the civil rights movement to the end of apartheid. We ARE capable of the type of...

This week we're leaving the topic of dirty energy and fossil fuels behind to start talking about the necessary transition to renewables. We split up and independently answered some questions, and then shared it with each other on this week's podcast. Aub went first and talked about where we are in the transition and what kind of plan we have in place. There's a lot of information out there about t...

This week on EnvironMental, we decided to let sleeping dogs lie. We spent the past month talking about fossil fuels and the fossil fuel industry, and to be honest, we needed a break. The more we dig into this industry, the more we find ourselves wading through human rights violations, environmental catastrophes, tax breaks, politics, and corruption. (hey, there's a reason investigative journalists...

After last week's run in with propaganda left us with a ton of questions, we decided to split up and research independently, then come back together and share what we learned. Courtney looked into the injustices, and potential issues with mining for renewable energy and found that we might just be swapping one issue for another one. And she updated us on the currently accepted research on climate...

We read The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein this week because we're not here just to tow the democratic- climate crisis - anti-fossil fuels line, we're here to investigate the fossil fuel industry and climate change issue deeper. This wasn't the book that we had hoped it would be. It was more of a thirsty love letter to the fossil fuel industry than anything remotely resembling an unbi...

This week we jump into the topic that we will spend the next two months talking about - Energy. We're starting with fossil fuels because the industry has its sticky fingers in every pie. To jump into the topic, we started this with a quote from the epilogue of The Crisis, a new podcast from Vice News, which perfectly describes the issue we want to talk about this month. "...From our reporting, it'...

This week on EnvironMental, we talk about our main takeaways from the past month that we’ve spent diving into sustainable sourcing. We asked a few questions like what global certifications should we trust? What questions should we ask? What resources are out there, and what does it take to create a sustainable supply chain? And we have to say - our questions were answered PLUS SOME. We talked to T...

This week on EnvironMental, we're talking about what we learned from reading the first hand accounts of building Fair Trade value supply chains around the world! In Honor Thy Label: Dr. Bronner's Unconventional Journey to a Clean, Green, and Ethical Supply Chain, Gero Leson lays out exactly how (and why) Dr. Bronner's builds their supply chain so that they can have the best sources available for t...

This week on EnvironMental, we talk to Trish Flaster - a sourcing aficionado with decades of work under her belt dedicated to ethical ingredient sourcing. She shares her story about being a pioneer in service of understanding different cultures of native people and reciprocating the gift of their plant knowledge in a way that helps them to preserve and sustain their culture. She gave really great...

This week we're introducing the new topic for the month: Sourcing. What we know is that small, sustainable businesses have to navigate through a sourcing nightmare in order to find products and ingredients that are suitable for their own standards and the standards of their customers. Quality is hard to come by. It's more expensive for the business owner and that cost has to be passed along to the...

This week we're wrapping up our discussion around deforestation. Throughout this month, we answered our biggest questions from part one and we learned the right way to ask questions about this topic. This topic feels like something that we could spend years learning about and join in the fight against the destruction of the world's forests - because there isn't a clear solution to this problem. As...

In this episode of EnvironMental, we're continuing our conversation around deforestation with a SECOND changemaker chat this month! We're jumping in with Catalina Von Hildebrand to talk about an industry that is partly responsible for deforestation - the cocoa industry. Do you know where your chocolate is coming from? (Hint: no, you probably don't. Not specifically at least.)  The true source of c...

In this episode of EnvironMental, we're diving into one needed solution for deforestation with the CEO of Cambium Carbon, Ben Christensen. Cambium Carbon is dedicated to urban reforestation! (So cool!) We learned that more trees fall in cities around the US than in the forests and that most of those trees go to the landfill - what the actual fuh?!?! Cambium Carbon has taken on the problem - and ev...

This week we continue our conversation around #deforestation by listening to Save the Planet by Almir Narayamoga Surui. Almir is chief of the Surui native tribe in the State of Rondonia in Brazil. In this book, he shares his life and his tribe's story of the conservation of their land. Would we recommend this book? Yes. It is a wonderful, touching, and enlightening look through the eyes of a nativ...

In today's episode of EnvironMental we share what we already know about the topic of Deforestation and what questions we want to answer this month. We have so many questions about this large topic and we're really looking forward to researching it and understanding more about the complexities. These are some of our main questions: - What is the biggest contributor to deforestation? - What areas of...

It's the overview week for this month's podcast topic: Sustainable Packaging! In this week's episode, we talk about what we've learned over the past month. Starting at 49:30 you will find our 10 suggestions for helping you choose your brand's packaging. This month: - We talked about sustainable packaging as an issue and what questions we have around it - Read and gave our book review: "The Future...