Sustainability, Climate Change, Renewable Energy, Politics, Activism, Biodiversity, Carbon Footprint, Wildlife, Regenerative Agriculture, Circular Economy, Extinction, Net-Zero · One Planet Podcast

Geochemist Lex van Geen is a research professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and is member of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. His research focuses on ways to reduce the impact of the environment on human health. For two decades, he coordinated earth-science on the origin and health effects of elevated levels of arsenic in groundwater. His other projects focus on fluoride in grou...

“When you dig into the medical literature, 7 out of 10 of the leading causes of death in the United States are diet-related chronic diseases. And so one of the hopeful messages that I think comes out of The Hidden Half of Nature, Growing a Revolution, and What Your Food Ate is that what we do to the land, essentially we do to us. And what's good for the land is good for us. So if we think about fa...

David R. Montgomery teaches at the University of Washington where he studies the evolution of topography and how geological processes shape landscapes and influence ecological systems. He loved maps as a kid and now writes about the relationship of people to their environment, and regenerative agriculture. In 2008 he was named a MacArthur Fellow. He is the author of award-winning popular-science b...

"The dinosaur extinction - dinosaurs didn't really have much to say about it. A meteor crashed into the earth and wiped them out. We, on the other hand, are creating quite an extinction right now. And we actually could do something about it, but we're not going to do anything about it because we're just greedy. We always just slough it off to the next generation. ‘They can fix it,’ we say. I'm a w...

Jack Horner is a severely dyslexic, dinosaur paleontologist. He attended the University of Montana for 14 semesters without receiving a degree. He has since received two honorary doctorates of science and a plethora of awards including a MacArthur Fellowship. Jack was Curator and Regent’s Professor of Paleontology at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana for 34 years. He has more than 300 p...

"When we were working in Panama with E.O. Wilson on the Panama Museum of Biodiversity for the world's first museum of biodiversity, we went into the jungle with E.O. Wilson, and he explained that there's only one thing on the planet and that's life. And life has an experiment going in form. We are one of those forms, and over 99% of all the experiments have gone extinct. So less than 1% of all the...

Designer, author, educator and artist Bruce Mau is a brilliantly creative optimist whose love of thorny problems led him to create a methodology for life-centered design. Across thirty years of design innovation, he’s collaborated with global brands and companies, leading organizations, heads of state, renowned artists and fellow optimists. Mau became an international figure with the publication o...

Chris Coulter is CEO of GlobeScan, an insights and advisory consultancy helping companies, NGOs, and governmental organizations know their world and create strategies that lead to a sustainable and equitable future. He is a co-author of All In: The Future of Business Leadership, and The Sustainable Business Handbook. He is Chair of Canadian Business for Social Responsibility, a member of B Lab’s M...

"I think we have to recognize that we're having other impacts on biodiversity, not just eliminating it but also altering it - what it looks like, what constitutes it. I think recognizing that is vital, really. We've created a human planet, a planet that is increasingly organized to serve one particular species. And the rest of life has to work around that, but I feel that there are lessons to be l...

David Farrier's books include Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils (2020) and Anthropocene Poetics (2019). Footprints won the Royal Society of Literature’s Giles St. Aubyn award and has been translated into nine languages. He is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh.  "I think we have to recognize that we're having other impacts...

"A lot of my story in the Seychelles was about the environmental impact that developed countries have on a place like that, which is in the middle of the ocean that could disappear through rising seas. And it is really important that they have a voice and their voice is being heard. I mean, little Seychelles, population 100,000, is depending on the industrialized countries to do their part. But, s...

Marcia DeSanctis is a journalist, essayist, and author of A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life, 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go, a New York Times travel bestseller. A contributor writer at Travel + Leisure, she also writes for Air Mail, Vogue, BBC Travel and many other publications. She has won five Lowell Thomas Awards from the Society of American Travel Writers and is t...

"We can harvest a huge amount of food from a very small space. And just to contrast or explain more about what we're doing, we grow our vegetables on just about a half-acre, essentially. So we can pack 50 boxes of vegetables every week for 16 weeks on a half-acre and generate 50 percent of our income for our household on a half an acre." John and Emily Beaton have created a multi-enterprise farmin...

John and Emily Beaton have created a multi-enterprise farming business in Northeastern Minnesota near Duluth and the shores of Lake Superior. They founded Fairhaven Farm with a spirit of community building, a focus on soil health, and a desire to see a thriving local food system.  They sell starter plants each spring for home gardeners, grow food for over 50 families through their CSA program...

“One of our chiefs was a Chief Crazy Horse. When they rode into battle to meet the US soldiers, his war cry was "Only the Earth lives forever!" And to me, that's really powerful because it shows what we were fighting for, and that they were willing to die for Mother Earth to protect it from this really nasty mining. They almost massacred the buffalo to extinction. They almost made the buffalo go e...

Victor A. Lopez-Carmen is a Dakota and Yaqui writer, health advocate, and student at Harvard Medical School. He is cofounder of the Ohiyesa Premedical Program at the Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), which supports Indigenous community and tribal college students to pursue healthcare education. He also founded Translations for our Nations, a grant funded initiation that translated accurate COVID...

"In some sense, kids don't have words early on. So they're just seeing without a filter of words. And I even have memories myself as a young child of just the wonder. I remember walking to kindergarten and seeing this bush with all sorts of flowers on it, and all these monarch butterflies on it. And I was completely transfixed. Here I was, five years old, I was looking at magic, and I knew I was l...

Donald D. Hoffman is a Professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of The case against reality: Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes. His research on perception, evolution, and consciousness received the Troland Award of the US National Academy of Sciences, the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution of the American Psychologi...

"I think certainly we're going to go through 1.5 degrees Celsius. I think the best estimate is probably somewhere around 2032 or thereabouts, the early 2030s. And at the current rate we're going, we'll go through 2 degrees Celsius in the mid to late 2050s. Now there's certainly time to slow that rate of increase down, and we could easily push the 2 degrees Celsius threshold out to 2070 or 2080. An...

Kevin Trenberth is a Distinguished Scholar at the National Center of Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder and an Honorary Academic in the Department of Physics, Auckland University in Auckland, New Zealand. From New Zealand, he obtained his Sc. D. in meteorology in 1972 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a lead author of the 1995, 2001 and 2007 Scientific Assessment of Climate Ch...

“All the holders of solutions, all the innovators could be a startup or a big company, can submit their solution to us, and the solution will be analyzed by our group of experts. We have external and independent experts, about 370 of them, and they will observe three criteria: Is it a solution that exists today and is credible today? Because we don't want to have vague ideas for the future. We wan...

Psychiatrist, aviator and explorer, Bertrand Piccard made history in 1999 by accomplishing the first ever non-stop round-the-world balloon flight, and a number of years later the first round-the-world solar-powered flight. Piccard has dedicated his life to demonstrating sustainable development opportunities. He is Founder and Chairman of the Solar Impulse Foundation, which has assembled a verified...

"The biggest challenge we have for the first half of this century is how do we reduce our CO2 emissions and get them as close to zero as possible. And the challenge for the second half of the century is how do we remove CO2 from the atmosphere at scale and start to restore the climate system to some semblance of what it had been like before." Dr. Charles D. Koven is an Earth System Scientist, work...

Dr. Charles D. Koven is an Earth System Scientist, working in the Climate Sciences Department at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He investigates feedbacks between climate and the carbon cycle. Dr. Koven’s primary research focus is on high-latitude feedbacks to climate change, and in particular the role of soil carbon in permafrost soils, and its response to changing climate. Dr. Koven i...

"If we reduce population growth by 1% in the world economy, we can have growth in income per capita at a level of about 7% and still hold carbon emissions unchanged. Namely, by reducing population growth, we can permit growth in income per capita without polluting planet earth more than otherwise. So this is very important because it suggests to us that policies that target gender equality, the di...