climate disruption

To round out Season 3, Melissa and Wythe talk about the concept of the “urban forest” in NYC with scientist Mike Treglia of The Nature Conservancy. Mike was trained as a herpetologist (reptile scientist), but he now focuses on the total ecological systems of cities, especially trees. The Nature Conservancy itself works to study and protect land in many different ways, including in New York City. Mike also works with Forest For All NYC, supporting policy that can create and realize a comprehensive plan for NYC’s treescape. Mike also co-organizes the Green Roof Researchers Alliance (GRRA), with NYC Audubon. The GRRA coordinates research on green roofs in the city, including the mapping of these roofs and helping us know what animals live across these heterogeneous spaces. Mike tells us all about the types of work that different research groups are up to, and how these individual scientific efforts connect with a larger social movement to create green roofs and steward them successfully. We also talk a lot about policy, especially given extreme temperatures and the roles green roofs can play in keeping buildings cooler. (Plus, lightning round: pizza in Staten Island!)

Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support Fields by becoming a member!

Fields is Powered by Simplecast.

Dr. Tushar Mehta practices Emergency Medicine in the Toronto area and is the co-founder of Towards Ahimsa and Plant Based Data, a free database which organizes academic and institutional literature regarding plant-based diet health, environment, food security, and zoonotic pandemic risk. Tushar will be speaking at Compassionate Living’s upcoming Ahimsa Vegan Conference. 

Tushar joins us to discuss the environmental impact of animal agriculture and thoroughly debunks “regenerative” grazing. He also addresses common arguments for eating local and other “sustainable” meat, dairy, and eggs. He warns of animal farming’s resource intensive use of land and water and offers solutions that we so desperately need as we swelter in the new normal of extreme summer heat, floods, and fires. This is a rebroadcast of an interview with Tushar in 2021. 

Resources:

Ahimsa Vegan Conference

Another Industry Attempt to Greenwash Beef

Plant-Based Data

Learn More and Support this Podcast:

Compassionate Living

Hope for the Animals Podcast

Melissa and Wythe catch up with their friend and former co-host, artist and scholar of food agriculture, Allie Wist. Allie is currently completing an interdisciplinary arts Ph.D. at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a focus on the senses, the Anthropocene, and environmental archives. We talk about her work studying how plants’ odors are changing due to climate disruption, the future of sustainable pest management, how rising temperatures affect different plants, the future of coffee production, and much more. Overall, we discuss how changes in agriculture due to climate disruption will affect cuisine in different ways—creating more and more “matter out of place” (and out of time) in food and agriculture. What types of smells and tastes will future consumers accept as delicious, or understand as “real,” given massive shifts in agriculture due to climate?

Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support Fields by becoming a member!

Fields is Powered by Simplecast.

Melissa and Wythe catch up with their friend and collaborator Jeffrey Landau, Director of Business Development at Agritecture Consulting. Jeffrey is an expert in controlled environment agriculture (CEA, or indoor farming), urban agriculture, and urban agriculture policy. He’s spent the last year traveling to farms and gardens across the U.S., working much of that time with different stakeholders in the city of Dallas to craft an urban agriculture plan, and he shares with us some of his reflections on urban agriculture policy around the country. We talk about current trends in urban agriculture, differences between UA sectors in different cities, the importance of land trusts, and what the future may hold, especially as climate disruption intensifies. It’s an edifying conversation, as always. For more of Jeffrey’s travel writing and work on urban agriculture, subscribe to his Substack feed.

Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support Fields by becoming a member!

Fields is Powered by Simplecast.

Seasoned podcaster (and longtime friend) Patrick Farnsworth joins Elle for a frank discussion on caring in the age of ecological crisis. After 300 episodes of his podcast, Patrick muses on holding multiple truths at once: the realistic urgency of the present times, and the human need for slowness, connection, care, and hope? 

Subscribe to Hoorf! Radical Care in a Late Capitalist Heckscape wherever you listen to your favorite podcast:

Apple
Spotify
Google

Become a Patron: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/hoorfpodcast/membership 

Connect with Elle Billing:  

• Website: www.hoorfpodcast.com / www.elleandwink.com 
• Instagram: instagram.com/hoorfpodcast 

The Fields team speaks with Greg Peterson, founder of The Urban Farm in Phoenix, AZ, about his decades of working in urban agriculture. He’s developed an “urban to the max” old-growth food forest in the middle of a dry region. (At the same time, Greg is also the host of The Urban Farm Podcast, which has an archive of over 650 episodes!) We talk about trust in nature, the human condition, abundance, why growing grass makes much less sense than growing fruit trees, and how Greg has taught urban agriculture online during a pandemic. In fact, The Urban Farm offers free urban agriculture classes online. Recorded at the end of COP26 summit, this episode also focuses on climate disruption’s effects on agriculture as well as the politics of agriculture. Check it out, and happy planting!

Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support Fields by becoming a member!

Fields is Powered by Simplecast.

Emily Broad Leib, Faculty Director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, offers policy solutions to managing food waste on consumer and corporate platforms.

Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!

What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Jeremy Lent’s new book, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe offers a coherent worldview of deep interconnectedness by integrating ancient Taoist and Buddhist views of humanness and awakening, with a modern scientific, conceptually-oriented view of human capacity. Jeremy makes the case for reigniting lost ethical values that can shift the disconnection that has led humanity to the brink of ecological and societal destruction. We discuss deep intelligence, wise action, how to expand collective concern to include all humans, our animal and plant brothers and sisters, and our planet. Our practical and philosophical dialogue moved me at the core of my being. May it be an inspiration for shift in all who hear it! 

The US edition is available mid-July but you can get the UK edition now. 
Visit the book website. Visit Jeremy's website 

Jeremy Lent received a BA in English Literature from Cambridge University, an MBA from the University of Chicago, and was a former internet company CEO. His award-winning book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning, explores the way humans have made meaning from the cosmos from hunter-gatherer times to the present day. He is founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicated to fostering an integrated worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the Earth. 

Professor Corey Bradshaw is the Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology at Flinders University, where he leads the Global Ecology Laboratory and heads the Flinders Modelling Node of the Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage.

Corey was lead author of a recent perspective article titled ‘Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future’. This paper discusses the major environmental issues that have regrettably received little attention but require urgent action. Anyone with a passing interest in the environment knows things aren’t great, but just how bad are they really? Professor Bradshaw is not here to appease the masses with a watered-down message, but rather gives us a well-needed reality check and urges us not to look away from the mess we have created. An overview of this research was published in The Conversation.

We are living on borrowed time by taking more from the planet than it can take. Scientists are no longer talking about avoiding environmental problems, but rather how to best deal with them. Irrespective of what we do now, the future is going to be ghastly – but just how ghastly depends on the path we take moving forward.

In this episode we discuss:
• How Corey’s childhood shaped his relationship with the environment and inspired his journey to academia
• The subject matter of Corey’s previous books Killing the Koala and Poisoning the Prairie and The Effective Scientist
• The silos in academia, lack of connectivity and why this model won’t deliver adequate solutions for the wicked problems we face
• The catastrophic loss of biodiversity and the detrimental impact this is having on ecosystem resilience
• How humanity is driving the sixth mass extinction
• Why the rise of the right-wing populist movement, the weaponisation of environmentalism and ongoing political donations have led to political impotence on climate change
• The ignorance of wanting unlimited economic growth in a finite world
• The potential solutions we can all consider, individually and collectively
• Corey’s must-subscribe blog Conservation Bytes
• And a WHOLE lot more - there’s a lot of knowledge dropped in this one folks!

We hope you enjoy this important conversation and would love to hear your feedback! Be sure to tag @TheLentilIntervention and help us reach more people by liking, reviewing, subscribing and sharing this episode with your friends and family.

Please support our work and enable us to deliver more content by buying us a coffee.

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

In this episode, I interview Dahr Jamail, author of The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption. We talk about Dahr’s life as an investigative journalist, his introduction to the climate crisis through his reporting, climate as the biggest story of all time, his book The End of Ice, coming to grips with our bleak climate reality, how quickly the climate is changing, having difficult conversations about climate disruption, personal rights versus obligations to the planet and future generations, transitioning from an industrial civilization to something new and creating a life of meaning through service to others and all species on Earth.