Sustainability Now! from KSQD Radio

A Spectre is Haunting Europe: Nuclear Winter with Dr. Alan Robock & Dr. Joshua Coupe   On Sustainability Now! Sunday, March 20th, 5-6 PM on KSQD 90.7 FM and KSQD.org   “A spectre is haunting Europe,” but this time it is not communism. Vladimir Putin has put Russia’s nuclear forces on “special combat readiness,” bringing […]

What are Seabed Mineral Nodules and Who Wants Them? with Emily Jeffers, Center for Biological Diversity On Sustainability Now! Sunday, March 6th, 5-6 PM   California Assembly Member Luz Rivas recently introduced a bill to ban mining of seabed nodules on 2,500 square miles of sea floor off the coast of California.  According to the […]

Sustainability Now! Sunday, February 20th: From Food Waste to Soil at Hard Core Compost   Join Ronnie Lipschutz for a trip to Hard Core Compost. My guests will be Kumi Maxson and Zav Hershfield, two members of the Hard Core Compost collective. Hard Core uses cargo bicycles to haul food scraps from home kitchens to […]

Solar Panels and Solar Panics, with Dr. Ahmad Faruqui January 2022 is Solar Energy Month on Sustainability Now!  On Sunday, January 23rd, hosts Ronnie Lipschutz and Brooke Wright welcome Dr. Ahmad Faruqui, an energy economist who has been deeply involved in solar electricity issues in California. We talk about the pending decision by the California […]

Here Comes the Sun!  on Sustainability Now!  Sunday, January 9th, 5-6 PM on KSQD   January 2022 is Solar Energy Month on Sustainability Now!  On Sunday, January 23rd, we will be welcoming Dr. Ahmad Faruqui, an energy economist who has been deeply involved in solar electricity issues in California.  We will be talking about the […]

Oil and Oceans Don’t Mix with Fred Keeley  on Sustainability Now!  Sunday, December 26th, 5-6 PM on KSQD Join hosts Ronnie Lipschutz and Brooke Wright for a conversation with Fred Keeley, a well-known political person about town and across the Monterey Bay Region.  He has a long and distinguished career in community service. In the […]

Join hosts Brooke Wright and Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Tim Goncharoff, who knows everything there is to know about waste management.  He has had a long and distinguished career in community service, locally and statewide, most recently as a Zero Waste Programs Manager at the County of Santa Cruz. He helped bring to […]

W(h)ither Water? with Sierra Ryan, County Water Resources Manager  on Sustainability Now!  Sunday, November 14th, 5-6 PM on KSQD Central California just experienced one of the three most intense storms since the 1950s, but was that prelude to feast or famine this coming water year?  No one knows, but planning for the worst-case scenario is […]

Join hosts Ronnie Lipschutz and Brooke Wright for a conversation with Fred Keeley, a well-known political person about town and across the Monterey Bay Region.  He has a long and distinguished career in community service. In the 1980s and 1990s, Keeley served two terms as County Supervisor and three in the State Assembly. Following that, […]

Have you ever wondered what is going on upstream when you cross the Highway 1 bridge over Elkhorn Slough?  Or why there are marshes on both sides of the highway?  Or where all the birds and kayakers come from? Join SN! hosts Ronnie Lipschutz and Brooke Wright for a conversation with Dr. Kerstin Wasson, Research […]

Join hosts Ronnie Lipschutz and Brooke Wright for a conversation with Maya Elson, Executive Director of CoREnewal (formerly known as the Amazon MycoRenewal Project).  She is a founding member of the Radical Mycology network, she’s worked on various fungal cultivation and educational projects in Olympia, WA and the San Francisco Bay area. Maya is a […]

The Sustainable Systems Research Foundation: Who are those guys? On Sustainability Now! Sunday, September 19th, 5-6 pm Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation.  But what is SSRF?  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz and new co-host Brooke Wright in a discussion of two SSRF projects in development.  The Watsonville Basic Income Pilot Project […]

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Shaina Nanavati, a research organizer for the Reclaim Our Power Utility Justice Campaign and staff member of the Local Clean Energy Alliance. Reclaim Our Power is an statewide initiative mobilizing a broad coalition of utility ratepayers, social justice advocates, and allies to develop an equitable, sustainable, decentralized […]

Planetary heating and climate change are in the news more and more, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just issued a very pessimistic report on humanity’s and the world’s prospects. In a revisit of a show from 2020, Host Ronnie Lipschutz and Guest Dr. Rupa Basu talk about about climate change and public […]

Host Ronnie Lipschutz welcomes Robert Stayton, physicist and author of Solar Dividends: How Solar Energy Can Generate a Basic Income for Everyone on Earth.  We’ll discuss the math, physics, economics and politics of his idea and proposal, and whether his utopian vision can be made real by the end of the 21st century. Previous broadcasts […]

Plastic is ubiquitous: it rains down on us, it fouls land, streams and oceans, it even turns up in our bodies. And the big oil companies are looking to plastic to keep up profits when fossil fuels are finally banned. What are we to do? SN! host Ronnie Lipschutz speaks with guest Jackie Nuñez, founder […]

Host Ronnie Lipschutz speaks with Andrea Mackenzie, General Manager of the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority. For more than 25 years, Ms. Mackenzie has worked in the fields of land use planning, conservation planning, public policy, and finance for open space and agricultural land preservation agencies at county, regional, state, and national levels. The […]

California is dry, dry, dry and that probably means we are in for a wild wildfire season. Since the beginning of January, there have been more than 10,000 wildfires across the state.  So, what are we to do? Hear from Dr. Sasha Berleman, Wildland Fire Scientist. She is director of Fire Forward at Audubon Canyon […]

There is an old saying attributed to the 19th century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck: “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.”  This show is about law and sausages in California. If you ever took a civics or government class in high school or college, you […]

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz as he speaks with Dr. Suzanne Simard, Professor of Forestry and Conservation Sciences about the social life of trees.   Her new book, Finding the Mother Tree–Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, has just been published.  According to Simard, communication between trees happens not in the air but deep below our feet […]

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz and Dr. Esther Leslie, Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck University in London.  “Political Aesthetics highlights the complex and ambiguous connections of aesthetics with social, cultural and political experiences in contemporary societies.”  This past January, Leslie published an entry in “The Stone,” a New York Times column on philosophy.  There, she [&#8230...

“Gosh, I never realized there was a social ecology in my backyard!” Tune in to Sustainability Now! find out just what those bugs are up to in your garden, as host Ronnie Lipschutz welcomes Azucena Lucatero, a third-year PhD student in Dr. Stacy Philpott’s lab at UC Santa Cruz. Lucatero studies the socio-ecology of urban […]

Sustainability Now! Sunday, April 18th, 2021, from 5-6 PM UCSC’s Agroecology Farm is known around the world for innovation, training and inspiration.  But before there was a Farm, there was a Garden: the Alan Chadwick Garden, launched in 1967 on a steep, rocky clay hill side. It is still there today, although very few people […]

These days, we are hearing a lot about plans to transform the country’s energy infrastructure from one based on fossil fuels to one based on renewable energy resources.  President Biden appears to be making this transformation one of his signature initiatives.  Certainly, the technology exists, the money is (probably) there but there is one elephant […]

It’s beginning to look as though California is headed into another multi-year drought. The snowpack is meager and contracted water supplies through the state’s delivery systems are likely to be much less than requested.  Farmers and cities are looking to groundwater to make up the difference, but even groundwater is heavily depleted. Hear Dr. Ruth […]