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

Dr. Linda Birnbaum is a scientist emeritus and former director of the National institute of Environmental Health Sciences and of the National Toxicology Program. She is also a Scholar in Residence at the Nicholas School of the Environment of Duke University, and an adjunct full professor at Duke, University of North Carolina, and Yale University School of Public Health. She is the author...

“So, if we study transportation, then we need to study urban development and infrastructure. Suddenly, we need to think about housing. We need to think about the co-location of jobs and shops, and you realize it's all connected. That might be one of the challenges of urban sustainability. It's all connected. So the way we move around is connected to the way we built the city. And I think the intri...

Roland Geyer is a Professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California at Santa Barbara, and the author of The Business of Less. Since 2000 he has worked with a wide range of governmental organizations, trade associations, and companies on environmental sustainability issues. His overarching goal is to help develop the knowledge, tools, and methods necessa...

“In Edo Japan, basically life was pretty good, and they recycled everything. Everything was reused, upcycled. Waste was considered taboo. A person who was wasting was considered an ugly person. So there is a lot that we could talk about: design, the layout, scale. Buildings were rarely taller than two stories. Very good use of environmental features, microclimates, use of wind for cooling, passive...

Azby Brown is a leading authority on Japanese architecture, design, and environmentalism and the author of several groundbreaking books, including Just Enough, Small Spaces, The Japanese Dream House , The Very Small Home, and The Genius of Japanese Carpentry . He is lead researcher for Safecast, a global citizen-science organization that pioneered crowdsourced environmental monitoring. Azby Brown...

“I mentioned before that one of the reasons why we haven't been able to overcome many of the climate crisis factors is because people don't understand what it means. What is it about? What can I do? Usually, when we hear these experts speak about the climate crisis, at least me, I don't understand 9/10ths of the speech or the document. Simplifying the message, allowing that difficult scientific kn...

Yolanda Kakabadse’s work with the environmental conservation movement officially began in 1979, when she was appointed Executive Director of Fundación Natura in Quito, where she worked until 1990. In 1993, she created Fundacion Futuro Latinoamericano , an organization dedicated to promote the sustainable development of Latin America through conflict prevention and management. She was the Executive...

“This is a very important question because cities are really living labs of everything that we're doing in terms of energy policy, and it’s extremely important that whatever we are putting forward in terms of policy, if it is not embraced by the citizens in cities on the local level, the best policies will not serve any purpose if they not really taken up by citizens. 
Of all of the Sustainable De...

Paula Pinho is Director of Just Transition at the European Commission Directorate-General for Energy. She was responsible for Energy Strategy and Policy coordination and then for Renewables and Energy System Integration Policy and Decarbonisation and Sustainability of Energy Sources. She was Acting Director for Energy Policy where she has overseen notably the work of international energy relations...

“To explore different worlds, essentially. That’s what literature has taught me. Reading has taught me how difficult it is to write well, to do you something other than the mundane or the expected, so all those things point to a kind of human creativity and a human capacity to both create and also to learn. To learn about life in different ways and to pass on those lessons to other people. One thi...

David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor, and Professor of Comparative Literature, at Stanford University. He has written widely on culture, literature, human rights, and politics, both in his books and also in venues such as Truthout, The Guardian, Jacobin, The Nation, Al Jazeera, and others. · www.palumbo-liu.com Twitter: @palumboliu · www.oneplanetpodcast.org · www.creativeproces...

“The political struggle is really hard today and I feel like we haven't been winning, but I think it's important not to think of this as either we win it, or there's catastrophe and that's the end. We win or lose, and there’s this big tidal wave that kills us all. That's not the way the climate crisis is going to play out. It’s going to be a long, slow, attritional crisis punctuated by forms of na...

Ashley Dawson is currently Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the English Department at the Graduate Center , City University of New York (CUNY), and at the College of Staten Island/CUNY . He currently works in the fields of environmental humanities and postcolonial ecocriticism. He is the author of three recent books relating to these fields:  People’s Power  (O/R, 2020),  Extrem...

Jeffrey D. Sachs is University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Chair of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission, Co-Chair of the UN Council of Engineers for the Energy Transition, Commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development, academician of the Pontifical Academy of S...

“If we’re badly educated, we’re not going to make it on this planet. If I had to put my finger on one Sustainable Development Goal above all else, it is let’s empower young people so that they know the future. They know the world that they’re going to be leading soon. They can do something about it…Specifically, target 4.7 which says that everybody should learn about sustainable development. Every...

"This poem was written when I was having a real moment of reckoning, not that I hadn't had it earlier, but where I was doing some deep reading about the climate crisis and really reckoning with myself, with where we were and what was happening, what the truth was. And I felt like it was so easy to slip down into a darkness, into a sort of numbness, and I didn't think that that numbness and darknes...

Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying , which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has been supported most recently by a Guggenheim Fellowship. She grew up in Sonoma, California and now lives...

“Thinking about the future of the environments more broadly and the challenges of global development, we need to remember that freedom from infectious disease is not a privilege that is universally shared. And so in order to continue to improve global public health, it's vitally important that people in poor countries have access to opportunities for economic growth Human well-being is both a ques...

Kyle Harper is the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty, Professor of Classics and Letters, Senior Advisor to the President, and Provost Emeritus at the University of Oklahoma.  Harper’s fourth book, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History , is a global history of infectious disease spanning from human origins to COVID-19. It tells the story of hu...

“Nature is my home because. It doesn't matter where I am. It’s available and it's there and it's always giving me the same sort of nourishment. All of us have had to develop a sense of home elsewhere. With me in particular, I've been traveling and living in different countries for the last 20 years since I was 22, so it's not even that I've had a geographical place that is my new home because I've...

Claudia Bueno is an internationally recognized Venezuela born artist renowned for creating immersive technological wonders using light, sculpture, painting and sound. Claudia creates large scale, multi-sensory experiences that communicate a profound sense of wonderment and awe. Lights, motors, wind, and video power her creations with pulsations and movements. Detailed drawings, meticulous cutouts...

“How do you get people to have a sense of urgency to actually take action and do something different? What we're finding is the learnings from business very much do apply to other spheres and also more generally to challenges like climate change. We’re facing the question of how do you get more people to actually be willing to take real meaningful action.” Gaurav Gupta is Director of Kotter I...

Gaurav Gupta is Director of Kotter International · Change Management & Strategy Execution and co-author of Change: How Organizations Achieve Hard to Imagine Results in Uncertain & Volatile Times. He translates strategy into implementation and develops learning-focused teams. Gaurav has worked with clients in industries as diverse as food and beverage, oil and energy, healthcare, chemicals, an...

“You can criticize many things in the United States, but there are taboos and the number one taboo is that you cannot criticize Capitalism. That is equated with disloyalty…This story about Capitalism being wonderful. This story is fading. You can’t do that anymore. The Right Wing cannot rally its troops around Capitalism. That’s why it doesn’t do it anymore. It rallies the troops around being hate...

Richard D. Wolff is Founder of Democracy at Work and host of the show  Economic Update . Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. Earlier he taught economics at Yale University (1967-1969) a...