Sustainability Now! on KSQD.org

All of us—well, many of us—are backyard gardeners. And it’s planting season. Backyard gardens are not immune from the impacts of violent and unpredictable weather or the longer-term effects of climate change.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Kim Stoddar t, editor of Amateur Gardening and author of The Climate Change Resilient Vegetable Garden—How to Grow Food in a Changing Clima...

We live in a Consumer Society.  Rising consumption is good, since it makes the economy grow.  At the same time, we face a Climate Crisis.  Rising consumption is bad, since it makes carbon emissions grow.  People across the Global North believe we must reduce emissions but they are reluctant to reduce their consumption. What can we do?  Some advocate ecological modernization by making our goods and...

The elephant seals are back! The elephant seals have made their annual trip back to the California Coast!  During the winter months, Elephant Seals turn to love...and fighting... and feeding... and laying around in the sun and rain. This is the prime viewing season at Año Nuevo State Park and Point Reyes National Seashore, where you can watch the two-ton male seals fight bloody battles over the fe...

Climate change is transforming what scientists call the land-sea interface, with crumbling cliffs, falling structures, tidal and storm flooding and loud homeowners demanding government action.  Should that interface be buttressed and built up to prevent further coastal erosion or is managed retreat a better strategy? Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Rosanna Xia (“Shaw”), an envir...

Energy has been with us for a long time and, over the past 100 years, fossil fuels have been cheap and plentiful.  Now we are going to have to pay the piper if we want to limit the future impacts of climate change.  How could that happen.  Tune in to hear Amory Lovins , cofounder of the Rocky Mountain Institute a nd long time energy policy analyst and advisor to many utilities, regulators and busi...

Monterey Waterkeeper is part of a coalition of organizations seeking to reduce nitrate pollution in the region’s groundwater. Nitrate contamination, the result of over-application of fertilizers, can cause the “blue baby syndrome” and various cancers in adults.  The State Water Board recently issued rules that allow growers to continue over-application of nitrogen fertilizers without any deadlines...

According to Simon Dalby, Professor emeritus in the Balsillie School of International Affairs at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, global politics over the past 70 years has been driven by an overabundance of "firepower," both nuclear and carbon-based.  The first was used by Great Power to threaten incineration of the world, by intention or accident, in the name of "nat...

Nuclear power is being touted as a way of providing clean energy, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and paving the way to a zero-emission future. There is talk of a “nuclear renaissance,” with small modular reactors (SMRs) replacing the gigawatt nuclear behemoths of the past, quickly and at much lower cost.  But the United States’ experience with nuclear, now going back 70 years, turned out to be...

Long-time listeners to Sustainability Now! know that we periodically turn to a focus on plastic, whose production is predicted to skyrocket over the next few decades, as fossil fuel companies look for ways to sell their product.  Plastics are not forever, although they last a long time in the environment and are piling up across the world’s lands and oceans.  Even notionally “compostable” plastics...

Sequoias are among the oldest living things on Earth, and most of the world’s sequoias are in Sequoia and King’s Canyon National Parks. Since 2020, according to the National Park Service, almost 20% of that iconic species have been destroyed by wildfires.  The parks’ management is planning to repopulate the burned-over areas with thousands of sequoia seedings, in an effort to rebuild six groves. ...

When you go out into the world and walk on the Earth, have you ever wondered what was beneath your feet ?  Animals and plants, of course, but mostly soil.  Soil is a wonderful substance, an essential element in the riot of life that covers the planet’s continents.  But soil is not without life of its own: a handful of fertile soil is home to more organisms in a than there are people on Earth.  And...

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for this Blast from the Past with Dr. Helen Caldicott .  According to Dr. Caldicott, the nuclear doomsday clock of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is set at 100 seconds to Midnight, but 20 seconds is closer to the mark. Dr. Caldicott has devoted the last forty-two years to an international campaign to educate the public about the medical hazards of the nuclear age...

For uncounted millennia, the creatures of the world’s ocean have been hunted, captured and killed by human beings.  For most of that history, however, this was done for subsistence purposes.  Only over the last few centuries, was the slaughter of whales, seals, otters, turtles, sharks and other marine species justified in the name of capitalism and industry.  Beginning in the late 1960s, exposing...

What do you know about CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act, passed in 1970 and signed into law by then-Governor Ronald Reagan? For more than 50 years, CEQA has been used to inform decisionmakers and the public about the potential environmental impacts of proposed projects but, in recent years, it has been applied in situations for which it was not designed, especially new housing develo...

The Rights of Nature is one way to rethink the relationships between humans and Nature, but are there other ways to think about those connections? Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Dr. Rosalind Warner, professor of political science at Okanagan College in British Columbia and Research Fellow with the Earth System Governance Project.  Warner is studying the role of kinship metaphor...

More than 50 years ago, Christopher Stone, a UCLA law professor, wrote a groundbreaking book  Should Trees Have Standing? in which he argued for the right of trees to be represented in courts of law.  Since then, the Rights of Nature movement has taken the world by storm; some countries have encoded such rights into their constitutions.  But what does it mean to say that trees, rivers and animals...

When is the safety, health and well-being of people a concern for homeland security? Jackie McCloud, Watsonville’s Environmental Sustainability Manager in Public Works, has been accepted into the Naval Postgraduate School’s MA program in Security Studies at their Center for Homeland Defense and Security in Monterey.  According to McCloud, “People might see the words ‘Homeland Security’ and think t...

Join Host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Roland Bunch, who has worked in agricultural development for more than half a century in more than 50 nations of Latin America, Africa and Asia. In 1982, he published the book, "Two Ears of Corn, A Guide to People-Centered Agricultural Improvement", which has since been published in ten languages and is an all-time best-seller in the fie...

We hear a lot these days about innovation, entrepreneurship and disruption of the status quo in pursuit of a better world.  It sounds good but what does it really mean? And can it contribute to sustainability? Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with KSQD programmer Nada Miljkovic , Program Manager of UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development . We’ll be talkin...

Listen to a conversation between Elizabeth Kolbert and Ezra Klein on May 21st, part of UC Santa Cruz’s annual Deep Read , about  Kolbert's 2021 book, Under a White Sky . Kolbert is a writer, observer and commentator on the environment for The New Yorker and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Ezra Klein is a New York Times columnist, host of The Ezra...

In the face of climate change, jurisdictions across the country and the world have set ambitious electrification goals that will rely heavily on solar, wind and other zero-carbon energy sources.  California is no exception.  Increasingly, the state’s power providers are buying low-cost electricity from vast solar farms across the seemingly uninhabited deserts of the American Southwest.  But those...

Rivers have long been the object of poems, songs, novels, studies, fishers, swimmers, sewage, engineers, farmers and salmon.  In California, rivers and the water in them are the focus of near-eternal political struggle.  And, there is that old saying, attributed to Heraclitus, “one never steps into the same river twice.”  Every river is different, yet there is some human drive to make every river...

Many KSQD listeners may know that the UC Regents recently approved UCSC’s Student Housing West proposal, which includes relocation of Family Student Housing to the iconic East Meadow, on the east side.  Join Sustainability Now! host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Nadia Peralta and Bob Majzler of Protect East Meadow, which has been active at UCSC in opposing the Family Student Housing pro...

Join SN! host Ronnie Lipschutz and Dr. Peter Weiss, the Singing Scientist, in honor of Earth Day. Weiss is well-known in Santa Cruz as “The Singing Scientist” and he is leader of the Earth Rangers, which plays music that educates and uplifts people, especially children. Weiss and his colleagues started performing a decade ago to combat environmental illiteracy and connect with kids. They have rele...

SN! Host Ronnie Lipschutz welcomes Marisa Gomez, Community Education and Collaboration Manager at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History .  In that role, Marisa leads the Museum’s onsite school programs, coordinates group visits, orchestrates public programs, and specializes in immersing visitors in the culture and stewardship practices of the native people of Santa Cruz, the Amah Mutsun.  She a...