Small Planet Heroes

An Invitation from David Suzuki to Connect, Commit, Compete, and Correct Our Way to Sustainability Within and Beyond Our Generation David Suzuki has spent a lifetime translating the living world for the rest of us, first as a young geneticist, then as a groundbreaking broadcaster, and later as a public advocate for ecological responsibility. In this rich and personal conversation, he looks back wi...

Bob Watson Discusses Large-Scale Systems Transformation, His Life in Science Assessment, and the Need for Trust in an Anti-Science Era Global science assessment goes far beyond crunching numbers and tallying up abstract human impacts: it is about convincing the world to act. Recalling his life in leadership with co-hosts Kai Chan (professor and Canada Research Chair at UBC) and Maia O’Donnell (UBC...

Terre Satterfield Explores Queasy Questions, the Quest for Environmental Justice, and the Narrative Imperative in Ecosystems Services Research Queasy questions shake us. It’s that nervous strangeness of surveying the very limits of what we know. For Dr. Terre Satterfield, anthropologist and environmental social scientist, that queasiness has fueled a career bridging critical and constructive persp...

David R. Boyd on Levering Transformative Change for a Healthy Environment from a Global Legal Perspective In the coastal Wild West, when laws and justice do not align, the town can summon an environmental cowboy, someone able to negotiate a way out of the hair-trigger standoff to turn towards the sun. Leaving the Alberta Rockies behind in the rearview mirror of a Greyhound bus, lawyer, academic, a...

Ingrid Waldron’s Road to Racial and Environmental Justice Through Community, Law, and Collective Action Growing up in Montreal, young Ingrid Waldron never imagined drafting what would become this country’s first environmental justice legislation. Bill C-226 acknowledged the historical roots and lived realities of environmental racism. Deeply committed to health equity, Ingrid’s research led to her...

Eli Enns On Indigenous Conservation and Bringing Balance Back Conservationist Eli Enns’ voice exudes warmth, irony, and a nuanced historical awareness of what it is to live in Canada (from kanata, the Haudenosaunee word for “village”) and be Canadian today. This lively conversation, accented by personal stories from his West Coast Indigenous heritage, tackles the fine balance between rights, laws,...

From a relatively isolated, “tech-less” childhood in small-town Ontario to the unglamorous frontlines of community-based environmental organizing, Teika Newton shows us the undeniable value of showing up. Whether bridging the work of researchers and activists, catalyzing multi-dimensional partnerships across disparate cultures and worldviews, or simply talking to strangers as a revolutionary act o...

Suzanne Simard revolutionized how we understand forests with her discovery of the “wood wide web,” the vast underground network that allows trees to communicate and cooperate. Her research showed the world that forests are not just collections of individuals but living communities bound together through resilience, resource sharing, and reciprocity. In this conversation with co-hosts Kai Chan (pro...

Alex Morton on Impossible Resilience, the Call to Kindness, and Building Activist Legacies for The Big Team Alexandra (Alex) Morton has been called a mix of Jane Goodall and Erin Brockovich, but her decades-long fight for wild salmon and orcas is entirely her own. A scientist, activist, and author, Alex shares how she was pulled from whale research into one of BC’s most high-stakes environmental b...

What does it mean to be a Small Planet Hero? In this pilot, co-hosts Kai Chan (professor and Canada Research Chair at UBC) and Clare Price (UBC graduate student in soundscapes and urban transformation) pull back the curtain on the vision behind the podcast. They dive into the origins of the show’s name, the idea of our “small planet,” and why being a hero isn’t about capes or perfection- it’s abou...

Climate change is poised to worsen the refugee crisis badly as people flee floods and fires, as life becomes untenable in places with prolonged droughts, and rising seas swallow low-lying islands. The suffering of vulnerable people has not always received much attention from the environmental community.  Instead, there’s a disturbing history of people being displaced in creating parks and protecte...

The path to sustainable futures is one that overcomes polarization, not just about the climate crisis and solutions to it, but all manner of things. We can’t change systems to work for people and the planet if we’re deeply divided and fighting about the most basic issues. Our guest believes, and shows, that art and effective communication are key to overcoming divides, that they offer a path to em...

Self-sacrifice: We tend to celebrate it. But when celebrating self-sacrifice becomes a culture of overworking for the sake of one’s employer and one’s own career, as if that’s heroic, the economy seems to grow, but people suffer. Families suffer. And the planet suffers. When we overwork, we often lose sight of what really matters. We’re too busy for key relationships or being good citizens. We ove...

In today’s economy, people are being guided to move back home or take on roommates to make housing affordable. This may seem strange and unwelcome after decades of it being normal to live apart. But some people argue that living with others can be deeply rewarding, if we approach it right. All this has deep connections to the climate and ecological crisis. As nuclear families and single-occupant h...

On today’s episode, we’ll be speaking to Kai Chan, our future host and an interdisciplinary professor and Canada Research Chair at UBC. He is a sustainability scientist whose work straddles social and natural systems with a focus on values, rewilding, and transformative change. Kai takes us on a journey through his academic career, what inspired him to create Cosphere, and how it led to launching...

Our vision of a sustainable future embraces a diversity of people as equals, whether they’re unlike us in their gender, sexuality, or in their understanding of these topics. On Small Planet Heroes, we seek to understand how people are bringing about the social and system change that enables a benign climate and healthy biosphere. As a parallel, one area that has seen rapid progress is diversity an...