The southern sea otter is a keystone species in kelp forest  communities, acting to increase the species diversity and providing  ecosystem services. Despite federal protection since 1977, the southern  sea otter population has struggled to recover and there are only an  estimated 2,800 sea otters in California.

Listen to this conversation with Dr. James Estes, Emeritus Professor  of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at UCSC.  Estes is author of Serendipity: An Ecologist’s Quest to Understand Nature and appears in “The Serengeti Rules,”  a 2019 film about “five unsung heroes of modern ecology,” of which he  is one.  Of course, Jim is best known for his research on California sea  otters, once almost wiped out, then recovered and now again threatened  by marine toxins, disease, orcas and agricultural chemical runoff.

More information is available on the Tinker & Estes Lab’s  web page.

Sustainability Now! May 3, 2020, Protecting Sacred Lands, with Valentin Lopez, Chair of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band of the Costanoan/Ohlone Indians and President of the Amah Mutsun Land Trust.  The Amah Mutsun are descendants of the more than 20 politically distinct indigenous peoples of the territories ranging from Año Nuevo to the greater Monterey Bay area. We talked about the history of the Amah Mutsun, some of their research and relearning projects and plans for Juristac, a sacred tract of land near Gilroy.

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 "national security."  The second now threatens the future of life on Earth--human and nonhuman--but Great Powers (and the not-so-great) resolutely refuse to give them up in the name of "national security" and "lifestyle."  In 2022, Dalby published Rethinking Environmental Security, an analysis of firepower past, present and future.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a thought-provoking conversation with Simon Dalby about these two threats and what countries are not doing about it.

Sustainability Now! April 19, 2020, By the Beautiful Sea, with Rachel Kippen, Executive Director of O’Neill Sea Odyssey and a columnist for the Santa Cruz Sentinel. Rachel was previously Director of Programs at Save Our Shores. She has also worked as a marine science educator, a kayak guide and a whale tour naturalist. She holds two degrees in Environmental Studies. She grew up on two islands, one in the Puget Sound and the other in Hawai’i, so she spent her youth learning about the ocean by snorkeling, surfing, and paddling.  O’Neill Sea Odyssey is a Monterey Bay-based introduction to marine science for students in grades 4-6 aboard the 65-foot O’Neill Catamaran.

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 the prudent thing to do. Join Sustainability Now! hosts Brooke Wright and Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Sierra Ryan, the recently appointed Water Resources Manager for the Santa Cruz County Department of Environmental Health.  Ryan coordinates water resource management activities among the other county departments and works closely with other local, state, and federal water supply and resource management agencies in the County and the Central Coast.

You can find out more about the Santa Cruz County Water Agency at: http://scceh.com/Home/Programs/WaterResources.aspx

In the Shadow of Climate Change: What can the Children Tell Us?

with Filmmaker Eric Thiermann

Join Host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with filmmaker and media producer Eric Thiermann. During his 40-year career, Thiermann has filmed, produced and directed hundreds of media projects in over 40 countries. These include "Art and the Prison Crisis," "The Last Epidemic: Medical Consequences of Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear War," "In the Nuclear Shadow: What Can the Children Tell Us?" nominated for an Academy Award in 1984, and "Women for America," which received the Academy Award for best short documentary film in 1986. More recently, he has been involved in creating a radio show called “Kids on Climate” and “Connected Universe,” a game-like educational platform where the player is offered an island paradise which is suffering from climate change.

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation. and Environmental Innovations.

As California looks forward (!) to the beginning of a new Presidential Administration, there is growing trepidation about what it might mean for the state.  Is it time to secede and join with other West Coast states to create a new country?

Fifty years ago, Ernest Callenbach published Ecotopia, a vision of a new country dedicated to protecting people and the environment. In 2015, on the 40th anniversary of Ecotopia, UCSC held a conference called “Utopian Dreaming: 50 years of imagined futures in California and at UCSC.”  Speakers included a number of academics, critics and dreamers. None of us, of course, imagined that Donald Trump might be the next President of the United States.

Listen to three talks from the conference: a keynote by Kim Stanley Robinson, best-known today for The Ministry of the Future;  a critique by UC San Diego Professor of Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature Rosaura Sanchez; and an account of how Silicon Valley has become the generator of utopian and dystopian futures, by Fred Turner, Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University.

You can find videos of the complete conference at https://www.youtube.com/@ronnielipschutz8900.  And you can read an article on California eco-utopias at: https://ksqd.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Ecotopia-or-ecocatastrophe.pdf.

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 fruition ordinances on composting, drugs and sharps, plastic bags, polystyrene foam and e-waste. We talk about waste management, plastics, recycling and composting and especially the new state ordinances on the handling of compostable foodware and organic and food wastes.

Previous broadcasts of Sustainability Now! are archived at KSQD.org and on Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation.

 The Monterey Bay is the crown jewel of the Central California Coast. For well over a century, the Bay has been exploited for a myriad of purposes; today, it needs protection and conservation.  This is especially the case with its fish and fisheries, which provide a vital source of food but are vulnerable to tastes and markets.  Join Sustainability now! host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Melissa Mahoney, Executive Director of the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust, which seeks to ensure sustainable fisheries, resilient communities and a healthy Bay and ocean.

The world’s climate is changing and it is changing more and more rapidly.  What are we to do?  In two weeks, at the 27th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt.  This is the 30th such gathering since 1992 and there is not much to show for all that.

Join host Ronnie Schultz and his guests, Professor Sander Chan and Andrew Deneault who are in Sharm attending the conference. We’ll be talking about  the conference, its history and its goals as well as the “groundswell of climate action” by international and national organizations, states, provinces, cities and individuals. The UN has documented 29,000 of these actions. Do they make any difference?  What can you do?

If you are interested in following the conference, you can find reports from a number of sources at Earthweb.info.

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation. and Environmental Innovations.

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 females, the females feeding their large and growing pups, and listen to the odd noises they produce (although they probably think humans make strange noises).

This is a rebroadcast of a 2022 interview with Dr. Theresa Keates, who holds a UCSC PhD in Ocean Sciences and is currently a Legislative Analyst with the California Energy Commission. Keates' dissertation research centered on deploying oceanographic tags on elephant seals, which offer both a source of valuable oceanographic data from remote regions as well as a unique platform to investigate these very large marine mammals.

Sustainability Now! co-host Brooke Wright speaks with Tahra Goraya, the new President & CEO of the tri-county Monterey Bay Economic Partnership (MBEP).  MBEP works on housing, broadband access, workforce development, renewable energy and climate policy, water conservation,  regional recycling, transportation and more. We will talk with Tahra about her journey into this role and about what MBEP is and what it is getting done to address climate change and other environmental issues.

In this SN! Revisit from 2019, 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.

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 Coordinator at the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve and adjunct professor at UCSC.  Dr. Wasson conducts research on a range of topics focused on the impacts of human activities on estuarine ecosystems, such as Elkhorn Slough. She develops and tests restoration strategies to mitigate those impacts.  And she will talk about housing oysters.

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation.

May 31, 2020, “The Wheels on the Bus” Getting ‘Round the City, with Rick Longinotti, a member of and spokesperson for the Campaign for Sustainable Transportation, a “group of volunteers dedicated to making Santa Cruz County a place where everyone in our diverse community can access their needs and activities in a way that is safe, affordable, convenient and sustainable for future generations.” You can learn more about transportation in Santa Cruz County at the Regional Transportation Commission website and the City of Santa Cruz Public Works website and from the work of Adam Millard-Ball, an environmental studies professor at UC Santa Cruz.

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 pending decision by the California Public Utilities Commission to impose “grid participation charges” on households with rooftop solar.

To get listeners prepared for Dr. Faruqui, we have assembled a show that draws on past episodes focused on solar.   We’ll be hearing from: Dr. Dustin Mulvaney, a SJSU professor and solar energy expert, to talk about PG&E; Fred Keeley, who has been deeply involved in electricity law and regulation for more than 20 years, to talk about the future of electric utilities in California; Allie Detrio, Chief strategist at Reimagine Power in San Francisco, who will run us through how solar law and regulation functions in California, and Bob Stayton, who will talk about his Solar Dividends proposal, to give every Californian a month basic income from the sale of solar electricity.

Radio Show, #29, October 4, 2020. Host Ronnie Lipschutz and guest Dina Gilio-Whitaker talk about indigenous environmental justice, environmental philosophy and the restoration of balance between humans and nature. Gilio-Whitaker is a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes in the Pacific Northwest, a lecturer in American Indian Studies at California State University, San Marcos and Policy Director and Researcher at the Center for World Indigenous Studies. She is author of As long as grass grows: The indigenous fight for environmental justice, from colonization to Standing Rock (Beacon Press, 2019) and co-author, with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, of "All the Real Indians Died Off": And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans (Beacon Press, 2016). Professor Whitaker has just received a journalism award from the Native American Journalist Association for an editorial she published in High Country News, on indigenizing the Green New Deal.

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 much more costly than predicted.  The country’s one hundred or so operating reactors have generated prodigious quantities of highly radioactive spent fuel that is being stored in so-called swimming pools and caskets adjacent to the plants that produced it.  Blame politics, if you will, but it remains waste.  And only a month ago, a federally subsidized deal to build a cluster of six SMRs in Idaho collapsed, due to cost overruns and construction delays.  So, is that renaissance real or just hope and hype?

To find out more, join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Professor Allison Macfarlane, Director of the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at The University of British Columbia.  Dr. Macfarlane was chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 2012-2014.  She holds a PhD in Geology from MIT, was a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, which addressed the 70-year old challenge of radioactive waste disposal, about which she continues to write.

What is regenerative agriculture?  Who is practicing regenerative agriculture?  And what are its prospects?  In two weeks, join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Stephanie Anderson, author of From the Ground Up: The Women Revolutionizing Regenerative Agriculture, which explores how women are leading the movement to transform the U.S. agricultural system and inspiring hope in the face of environmental and social challenges.

Students eat.  But what do they eat?  And where does that food come from?  Both the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the California Department of Food and Agriculture are trying to help small farms sell more of their organic produce to public schools, shortening the supply chain between farms and consumers and encouraging students to eat more salads and other healthy foods.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz and guests Mireya Gomez-Contreras and Alma Leonor-Sanchez from Esperanza Community Farms in Watsonville, along with Pajaro Valley High students Mark Mendoza Luengas and Julio Gonzales, to hear about Esperanza’s farm to cafeteria program and their efforts to help Latine operators of small farms on the Central Coast to earn more revenue for their crops by selling directly to customers.

You probably receive an electricity bill every month from your local utility and, after complaining about it, dutifully pay it.  But do you ever stop to read your electricity bill?  If you are a customer of PG&E and, maybe, a local community choice aggregator, you receive 6 pages of unintelligible, closely-spaced text, numbers, graphs and acronyms.  As Groucho Marx might have said, “This is so simple, a PhD could read it.  Run out and find me a PhD!”

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz and Kevin Bell on Sustainability Now! when we offer “A Talmudic Exegesis: Reading and Interpreting Your Electricity Bill--A Talmudic Exegesis:.”  You will learn why your local utility pays a wholesale price of only about 3 cents per kilowatt hour for renewable electricity while charging you 50 cents!  You’ll learn about PICA, which is not a small animal but, rather, the “Power Charge Indifference Adjustment.”  And you’ll find out why your bill seems to be rising ever upward and why the newly-announced fixed charge, due to show up on your bill next year is unlikely to make it stop rising.

You can find a handout here, to be followed along with the broadcast: A Guide to Reading your Electric Bill.

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 know of its existence.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz in a conversation with Orin Martin, who has managed the Chadwick Garden since 1977 and where he is widely admired for his skills as a master orchardist, horticulturalist, and teacher.  Tune in to hear about Orin’s role at the Chadwick Garden, as well as its origins and history since the 1970s.  You’ll be well-prepared to visit it when UCSC reopens.

You can read Orin's oral history for the UCSC library here.  A website dedicated to Alan Chadwick is here.  And oral histories of organic and sustainable farming on California's Central Coast are available here.

Previous broadcasts of Sustainability Now! are archived at KSQD.org and on Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation.

Sustainability Now! September 8, 2019. Green Architectural Design, with Thomas Rettenwender, Principal Architect at Ecologic Design Lab in Carmel, California talking about green building.

Sustainability Now! October 6, 2019, History of UC Santa Cruz, with Professor Emeritus Jim Clifford, History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, talking about the University and its history, and his book, In the Ecotone.

Join Host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Dr. Sharachchandra Lele who is coleader of an Expert Writing Group of natural scientists, social scientists and humanities scholars who have published a “Letter to Fellow Citizens of Earth,” “an urgent call to our global neighbours, to acknowledge the climate crisis, make personal and collective commitments in line with differences in privileges and responsibilities and work toward transformative changes.” Dr. Lele is  a Distinguished Fellow in Environmental Policy & Governance at the Centre for Environment & Development of the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment in Bangalore, India  and an Adjunct Faculty Member in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education & Research (IISER) Pune. His research interests include conceptual issues in sustainable development and sustainability, and analyses of institutional, economic, ecological, and technological issues in forest, energy, and water resource management.

We'll be reaching beyond California on this show, so don’t miss it!

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 field of agricultural development.  Beginning in 1983, Bunch began investigating and disseminating the use of plants that fertilize the soil, now called “green manure/cover crops.”  He has been honored for his work with nominations for the Global 500 Award, the End the Hunger Prize of the President of the United States, and the World Food Prize.

A longstanding debate in the environmental and conservation movements is whether protection of natural resources can be reconciled with their economic development?  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation about this question with Larry Selzer, President and CEO of The Conservation Fund, a Virgina-based nonprofit that buys land for conservation and promotes sustainable economic development. TCF works with public agencies to acquire land and hold it until the agencies are ready to purchase it back.  And the organization focuses on protecting working forests and farms, which provide clean air, clean water, and jobs for rural communities.

Radio Show #34:  Sunday, December 13th, 5-6 PM  Join Host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Darryl Molina Sarmiento, Executive Director for Communities for a Better Environment,  a 40-year-old environmental justice organization with offices in both  Southern and Northern California. The mission of CBE is to build  people’s power in California’s communities of color and low-income  communities to achieve environmental health and justice by preventing  and reducing pollution and building green, healthy and sustainable  communities and environments.  CBE provides residents in heavily  polluted urban communities in California with organizing skills,  leadership training and legal, scientific and technical assistance, so that they can successfully confront threats to their health and well-being.

Sustainability Now! August 23, 2020. Host Ronnie Lipschutz and his guest Kim Stanley Robinson engage in a wide-ranging  conversation about sustainability, politics, 2020 and after, and how we  might prepare for the future. Robinson is a science fiction author,  California futurist and environmental optimist of the will. His recent  work, such as New York 2140 (2017) has addressed environmental and climate issues. His forthcoming book, The Ministry for the Future,  which imagines a new, global organization that advocates for the  world’s future generations and protects all living creatures, present  and future.

(Photo by Stephan Martiniere, https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/arts/kim-stanley-robinson-coming-to-phoenix-art-museum-sept-20-9702004)

Have you procrastinated on planting a garden or been too busy?  Do you think it’s too late and you’ll have to wait until next year?  Not on the Central Coast!  Join Host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Renee Shepherd, founder of Renee’s Garden and seed entrepreneur extraordinaire.  Not only do we talk about what can be sown now to be ripe and ready late summer and fall harvesting, we’ll also cover topics such as heirloom, heritage and hybrid seeds and discuss where the seeds for your garden come from.

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation and Environmental Innovations.

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 Open Space Authority works to protect and steward the region’s natural capital, open spaces, water resources, natural areas, and working lands to support healthy lands, resilient communities, and strong economies.

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation.

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 in an incredibly dense, complex network of roots and chemical signals. ... “In a single forest, a mother tree may be connected to hundreds of other trees.”

Here is what Bookshop Santa Cruz wrote about Simard: “Suzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; she’s been compared to Rachel Carson, hailed as a scientist who conveys complex, technical ideas in a way that is dazzling and profound…. Simard writes—in inspiring, illuminating, and accessible ways—how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved, how they perceive one another, learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, and remember the past; how they have agency about the future; elicit warnings and mount defenses, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication, characteristics ascribed to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies—and at the center of it all, the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them.”

You can learn more about Simard's work in "The Social Life of Forests," New York Times Magazine, Dec. 2, 2020, and at The Mother Tree Project.  If you search for "Suzanne Simard" on You Tube, you will turn up a dozen videos, including a TED talk, about her work.

The articles referred to in the show are:

Lincoln Taiz, et al, "Plants Neither Possess nor Require Consciousness," Trends in Plant Science 24, #8 (August 2019): 677-87

Michael Pollan, "The Intelligent Plant," The New Yorker, December 23, 2013.

Food insecurity and food apartheid are a common challenge in many low-income and minority neighborhoods across the United States.  Big supermarket companies avoid those areas because stores are unprofitable and small stores find that they make the most money on junk foods, sodas and liquor.  Saba Grocers is an Oakland-based organization, founded in 2019, that works with those small stores to enable them to sell fresh produce sourced from minority farmers across the region.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Lina Ghanem, director and co-founder of the Saba Grocers Initiative in Oakland.

Episode #36, Sunday, January 10th: Hear Jeffrey Downing, Professor of Art at San Francisco State University and Artist-in-Residence at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art talk about how his work connects culture and nature. Downing was featured in the San Francisco Chronicle a few weeks ago for his environmental sculpture in Richardson Bay, designed to mark today’s king tides, which will be swamped by rising sea levels in the future.

According to a website describing his work: “Jeff Downing’s sculpture is informed by the humor and pop sensibility of the California artist Robert Arneson; by the stripped-down economy of Alberto Giacometti’s figures; and by the spontaneity and energy characteristic of the work of Pablo Picasso. Downing’s work with dog imagery depends on chance discovery of form but seeks to invoke feelings concerning the human condition and our varied relationship with the natural world. In Jeff Downing’s world view, studying the dog – with all of its expressiveness, intelligence and sensitivity - leads us to a better understanding of the connection between culture and nature.”

You can hear previous broadcasts of Sustainability Now! at KSQD.org and on Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.  Check out Marisha Farnsworth, an Oakland-based environmental artist, who appeared on the show on July 27, 2020.

(* with apologies to Connie Willis, author of the eponymous book).

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 back memories and fears for some of us, reminiscent of the darkest days of the Cold War.  What would be the climatic consequences of nuclear war?  Our guest are Dr. Alan Robock, Distinguished Professor in the Environmental Sciences Department at Rutgers University and Dr. Joshua Coupe, a postdoctoral researcher at Louisiana State University.  They and their colleagues are modeling the climatic consequences of a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States, aka, “Nuclear Winter,” a notion popularized by Carl Sagan in the 1980s (some of us are old enough to remember both).

That’s our explosive show broadcast on Sunday, March 20th, 2022.

Previous broadcasts of Sustainability Now! are archived at KSQD.org and on Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation and Environmental Innovations.

Here are some resources:

Coupe, J., Bardeen, C. G., Robock, A., & Toon, O. B. (2019). "Nuclear winter responses to nuclear war between the United States and Russia in the Whole Atmosphere," Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 124, 8522–43.

Jeannie Peterson, ed. The Aftermath--The Human and Ecological Consequences of Nuclear War (New York: Pantheon/Ambio, 1983).

Kjølv Egeland (2021) "The Ideology of Nuclear Order," New Political Science, 43:2, 208-230.

Rutgers U. Research Archive: http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/nuclear/

Sustainability Now! #21, June 14, 2020, with Jo Chamberlain, Executive Director of the Coastside Land Trust in Half Moon Bay. Jo is a graduate of College Eight (aka, Rachel Carson College) at UC Santa Cruz and was provost’s assistant there for several years during the past decade.  She has served on several non-profit boards, including the San Francisco Zoological Society and Friends of Westwind. The Coastside Land Trust is dedicated to the preservation, protection and enhancement of the open space environment, including the natural, scenic, recreational, cultural, historical, and agricultural resources of Half Moon Bay and the San Mateo County coast for present and future generations. You can find out more about California’s land trusts at the California Council of Land Trusts.

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 Klein Show podcast and a UC Santa Cruz alum.

You can watch the video of the entire event at: https://tinyurl.com/57czndz4.

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 their composting site on the Westside of Santa Cruz, next to the Homeless Garden Project. We’ll be touring their site, talking about organic waste management in Santa Cruz and what is Hard Core’s role in composting food scraps locally, especially as the city’s composting program gets going.

Previous broadcasts of Sustainability Now! are archived at KSQD.org and on Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation and Environmental Innovations.

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz in welcoming Dr. Helen Caldicott to Sustainability Now!, live from Australia, to talk about the looming threat of nuclear war. 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 and the necessary changes in human behavior to stop environmental destruction and nuclear catastrophe. She calls this “Global Preventive Medicine.” Caldicott is also the subject of “If You Love This Planet,” which won an Academy Award in 1982 for best documentary.

As the Earth gets warmer, the world’s glaciers get smaller.  Land-based glaciers in the Earth’s polar regions hold enormous quantities of water and, as they melt, the runoff is raising sea levels and disrupting ocean systems, such as the Gulf Stream.  The obvious solution is for us to drastically reduce global greenhouse gas emissions but, even if we were to do that, the Earth would continue to warm and the glaciers would continue to melt.  Is there anything we could do to slow the melt?

There are a growing number of proposals to intervene in Earth’s systems—called “geoengineering” as a way to moderate climate change.  Join Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Research Professor John Moore, who is a glaciologist in Rovaniemi, Finland at the University of Lapland’s University of the Arctic.  His solution to slowing glacier melt is the construction of barriers at glaciers’ underwater bases in order to slow or prevent flows of warmer ocean water from carving away at the ice.

How should we speak with children about climate change?  Should young children be taught about climate change, and how? During the Cold War, the existential threat of nuclear holocaust was always present but there was, at least, a chance that the missiles would not be launched.  Climate change is also an existential threat but it is already happening.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a thoughtful conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Bagley, managing director of Project Drawdown, who has written and spoken about these questions. She  holds joint Ph.D.s in environment & resources and educational psychology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she studied how video games can encourage systems thinking about complex environmental topics.

Radio Show #32. In September 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order requiring that by 2035 all new cars and passenger trucks sold in the state will have to be zero-emission vehicles, producing no greenhouse gases.  While there are various types of zero-emission power plants in existence and on design boards, most of these will probably be electric vehicles, or EVs. This goes along with a parallel push to electrify the state by 2045. Getting from here to there will be no easy task.

Host Ronnie Lipschutz speaks with Beverly DesChaux, President of the Electric Auto Association of CA Central Coast about Newsom's mandate and related topics.  We’ll talk about electric vehicles, past, present and future, and how they could become an electricity storage solution to the ups and downs of the California electrical grid.  We’ll also discuss “virtual power plants,” which are based on the aggregation and remote control of rooftop solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles as part of the electricity grid.

You can find out more about EVs at: Plug-in America, the Sierra Club, and the Monterey Bay Electric Vehicle Incentive Program.

And you can contact Beverly at bdchaux@gmail.com.

You can hear previous broadcasts of Sustainability Now! at KSQD.org and on Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation.

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 released two albums, “Do What You Otter” and “One for the Sun.” Peter sings some of his songs and we’ll play others from the albums.

Sustainability Now! December 1, 2019, What Do You Do About a Problem Like PG&E?, with Professor Dustin Mulvaney, Environmental Studies at San Jose State University. His research focuses on the social and environmental dimensions of food and energy systems, innovation, emerging technologies and environmental change.  He is author of Solar Power: Innovation, Sustainability, and Environmental Justice and the forthcoming Sustainable Energy Strategies: Socio-Ecological Dimensions of Decarbonization.

Sustainability Now! August 25, 2019, Climate Action Now!, with Dr. Tiffany Wise-West, Sustainability & Climate Action Manager for the City of Santa Cruz. For more information, see the City’s Climate Action Program web site.

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 of The Last Plastic Straw and Advocacy Manager of the Plastic Pollution Coalition.  The Last Plastic Straw is a project of the Plastic Pollution Coalition, a global alliance of more than 1,200 organizations, businesses, and thought leaders in 75 countries that seeks to shift the way individuals and businesses think about plastic pollution - and about our society’s disposable culture on a larger scale.

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation.

Radio Show #33: Host Ronnie Lipschutz and Dave Blume of Blume Distillation do a walking interview and tour of Whiskey Hill Farm,  its permaculture and regenerative agriculture practices and  technological innovations connecting alcohol distillation and organic  agriculture.  Whiskey Hill Farm is a 14-acre organic farm on Calabasas  Road near Watsonville that employs poly-cropping, permaculture  techniques in six large greenhouses to create “food forests” of  multi-layered polyculture. Dave is CEO and Director of Research and  Development at Blume Distillation and Whiskey Hill Farm.  He is author  of the critically acclaimed book Alcohol Can be a Gas! and  has been engaged in one sort of farming or another for more than 40  years.  This is an edited version of the full 70 minute tour, which you  can hear at: https://sustainablesystemsfoundation.org/201124_0004-mp3/

There is now a video of this tour available on You Tube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AymRxdkyAf8&feature=youtu.be

Electrify California! with Benjamin Eichert

On Sustainability Now! Sunday, April 3rd, 5-6 PM

on KSQD 90.7 FM and KSQD.org

Hosts Brooke Wright and Ronnie Lipschutz speak with Benjamin Eichert, Director of  Let’s Green California—an initiative launched by the Romero Institute in Santa Cruz to create a California Green New Deal and get the core legislation passed into law by September 30, 2022.

Let’s Green California has also created “Electrify CA!” based on a simple idea: make the switch from fossil fuel-based technologies to electric alternatives powered by clean energy, and ensure that low-income communities and working families both lead and benefit from this transition.

Previous broadcasts of Sustainability Now! are archived at KSQD.org and on Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation. and Environmental Innovations.

According to those who know, we are in the midst of the Sixth Great Extinction, this one brought on by the activities of human civilization that are resulting in a species extinction rate that is estimated to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than natural extinction rates.  So far, efforts to protect endangered plants, animals and insects have proven inadequate to the challenge.  What are we to do?

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Professor Douglas Tallamy, who teaches in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware.  He is the author of Nature’s Best Hope—a New Approach to conservation that Starts in Your Yard, published in 2019, and a just-published companion version for children, subtitled How You Can Save the World in Your Own Yard.  Both books propose what some might consider a radical approach to protecting species through transformation of front and back yards into conservation zones.

Sustainability Now! January 12, 2020, Is Bioethanol the Answer? with David Blume, CEO & Director of Research and Development at Blume Distillation, and author of Alcohol Can be a Gas, to talk about his distillation & permaculture operation just outside of Watsonville.

Have you ever wondered about the history of the landscapes around you, how they were shaped and by whom?  UCSC Associate Professor of Anthropology Andrew Mathews has and he has studied landscape histories and their transformations in Italy.  Now he has published his research in Trees are Shape Shifters--How Cultivation, Climate Change and Disaster Create Landscapes, a closely-documented study of trees and people in central Italy and "how they make sense of social and environmental change" around them.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a widely-ranging conversation with Mathews about landscape histories, human action and ecological change in Italy, California and the rest of the world.

You can read about Mathew's work on his web site.

 On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as President of the United States for his second term.  There is considerable trepidation in the environmental policy and activism sectors across the country and, indeed, the world.  Trump’s appointees are committed to deregulation across the board, especially where the environment is concerned, to gutting funding for renewable energy and rescinding the Inflation Reduction Act and increasing fossil fuel production and consumption.

What his Administration might want to do and what it will be able to do are two very different questions. Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a discussion on these matters with Dr. Andrew Rosenberg who, most recently, was director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists and has had considerable experience in how policies are made and how they are implemented.  That’s not as easy as many people believe.

For more information on this topic, you can also watch "Navigating the Trump 2.0 Deregulatory Agenda webinar" from the Security & Sustainability Forum at: https://tinyurl.com/4e6ck2mn

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 services greener.  Others argue that only shrinking the economy--"degrowth"--will do the trick.  Maybe both are more mythic than technologically or politically feasible. Can we square the circle (or, maybe, circle the square?) and find a path to sustainability?

Join SN! host Ronnie Lipschutz for a thought-provoking conversation with Dr. Jean Boucher, about the promises and myths of sustainable consumption.  Boucher is a senior Research Scientist and Macaulay Development Trust Fellow in Land Use and Societal Metabolism at the James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland.  His research ranges from people's attitudes about climate change and their carbon-intensive lifestyles to the demographic distribution of clean energy technologies, the socio-technical factors that influence cultural and institutional behavior, and macro-scale societal metabolics analyzing materials and energy flows through households and economic sectors.

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz in this Blast from the Past (originally broadcast on May 23, 2021) as he speaks with Dr. Suzanne Simard, Professor of Forestry and Conservation Sciences about the social life of trees.   Her 2021 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 in an incredibly dense, complex network of roots and chemical signals. ... “In a single forest, a mother tree may be connected to hundreds of other trees.”

Here is what Bookshop Santa Cruz wrote about Simard: “Suzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; she’s been compared to Rachel Carson, hailed as a scientist who conveys complex, technical ideas in a way that is dazzling and profound…. Simard writes—in inspiring, illuminating, and accessible ways—how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved, how they perceive one another, learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, and remember the past; how they have agency about the future; elicit warnings and mount defenses, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication, characteristics ascribed to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies—and at the center of it all, the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them.”

You can learn more about Simard's work in "The Social Life of Forests," New York Times Magazine, Dec. 2, 2020, and at The Mother Tree Project.  If you search for "Suzanne Simard" on You Tube, you will turn up a dozen videos, including a TED talk, about her work.

The articles referred to in the show are:

Lincoln Taiz, et al, "Plants Neither Possess nor Require Consciousness," Trends in Plant Science 24, #8 (August 2019): 677-87

Michael Pollan, "The Intelligent Plant," The New Yorker, December 23, 2013.

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation and Environmental Innovations.

Sustainability Now! #25, August 9, 2020. Climate Change, Public Health & Birth Impacts, with Dr. Rupa Basu, Chief of the Air and Climate Epidemiology Section at California Office on Environmental Health Hazards in the California Environmental Protection Agency and a lecturer in the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.  She is coauthor of a recently-published review article in JAMA Open Network about the effects of air pollution and climate change on birth outcomes and conducts research on the health effects of climate change. Dr. Basu received her PhD in Environmental and Occupational Epidemiology from The Johns Hopkins University and a Masters of Public Health from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.

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 talking about these topics and Crown College’s innovation and entrepreneurship courses, which Nada has helped develop along with Crown Provost Manel Camps and others.  What do students learn?  What have they achieved?

Sustainability Now! February 23, 2020, Climate Justice in the Pajaro Valley, with Nancy Faulstich, Director of Regeneración, a non-profit focused on climate and social justice in Watsonville, California and the Pajaro Valley, Tamela Harkins, Pajaro Valley High School English Teacher, and three members– Itzel Sanchez, Luke Zamora and Reuben Garcia–of La Vida Verde, a student environmental club at the high school.

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.  But not everyone supports this project: some ecologists argue that there are enough seedlings growing in those groves to provide the next generation of trees.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz to hear about the pros and cons from Dr. Christy Brigham, Chief of resources management and science at the two national parks and one of the architects of the plan, and from Dr. Chad Hanson, cofounder of the John Muir Project, who is a critic of the plan.

Photo credit: Gary Coronado, LA Times

Sustainability Now! #22, June 28, 2020, with Kalina Browne, 2019-20 RAY Diversity Fellow at the Ocean Conservancy to learn about Climate Change and Black Lives Mattering on the California Coast.  Browne grew up on the Caribbean island of St Vincent and the Grenadines. She holds a B.S. in Environmental Geoscience from the University of Buffalo. She has worked with the Caribbean Community Climate Change Center in Belize, the Garifuna Heritage Foundation in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and the Ministry of Finance, Economic Planning, Sustainable Development and Information Technology for the Government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.  She will be entering the Coastal Science and Policy Program at UCSC this Fall. You can find her recently coauthored brief on seabed minerals mining here.

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 Stoddart, editor of Amateur Gardening and author of The Climate Change Resilient Vegetable Garden—How to Grow Food in a Changing Climate.  She lives and gardens in West Wales, where weather conditions are not always optimal.  Kind of like California.

Sustainability Now! October 20, 2019, Where the Mountain Lions Are, with Professor Chris Wilmers, Department of Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz, talking about mountain lions, talking about their habits, lairs and ecology.

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 and long time energy policy analyst and advisor to many utilities, regulators and businesses.  Almost 50 years ago, Lovins published a groundbreaking article in the journal, Foreign Affairs, entitled “Energy Strategy: The Road not Taken,” which recommended a renewable-based strategy over one based on oil, coal and nuclear power.  Surely, but slowly, that vision is being realized, albeit in a much more complicated and conflicted fashion.  Amory will talk about efficient energy use, integrative design, renewable supply (including grid integration), and long-term energy needs and paths to getting to an electrified future.

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 Ranch in Stinson Beach. She is a CA State Certified Burn Boss, a Prescribed  Fire Training Exchange (TREX) coach and leader, and a wildland  firefighter with Fire Effects Monitoring, Squad Boss, Crew Boss, Firing  Boss, and Incident Commander qualifications.  Find out what we can do to  reduce the threat and risks of wildfires.

Watch these videos online:

Why These Californians Are Starting Fires On Purpose 

Community-Based Burning: Caring for our Land Together

Andrew Selsky, “Amid clamor to increase prescribed burns, obstacles await,” AP News, June 22, 2021.

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 Public Utilities Commission to reduce compensation for rooftop solar electricity and to charge households for access to the state’s electricity grid.

You can learn about the proposed decision at: https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/nemrevisit

Dr. Faruqui's comments on the proposed decision are at: http://ahmadfaruqui.blogspot.com/2022/01/my-comments-on-cpucs-proposed-decision.html

Dr. Severin Borenstein of the UC Berkeley Haas School and Dr. Faruqui debated the choices before the State of California on Wednesday, January 26th. You can watch the debate at: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/live-debate-how-to-fix-rooftop-solar-policy-in-california?utm_id=canary&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=202127337&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--K_uhTUcmpl88UhS4iCADMc_gKWQWrB2ziu5wcLOqakZayxzHba7UwZXOB4xjYk6bZ1-TYV6J4NWWCzsT3x64XRPLsMQ&utm_source=nem

Previous broadcasts of Sustainability Now! are archived at KSQD.org and on Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation and Environmental Innovations.

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 spaces are not empty. Join Sustainability Now! host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Professor Dustin Mulvaney, of the Environmental Studies Department at San Jose State University. He has been studying the social and ecological impacts of large solar farms on the deserts and whether they can contribute to a “just energy transition.”

Listen to the "Battle for a Solar-Powered Future," with Professors Hilary Angelo and Dustin Mulvaney, on Alec Baldwin's "Here's the Thing."

Read Dustin's article, "The Battle Over Solar Power in California," in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 3, 2022.

What happens to your corporeal body, if and when it is buried in the earth?  According to Genesis in the Hebrew Torah, we come from dust and to dust we return.  The original text, however, uses the word עָפָ֣ר ("apar"), which means “earth.”  Most burials in the United States seek to protect the body from returning to the earth through containment, while cremation produces greenhouse gases and leaves behind heavy metals.  Are there other ways to go?  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Katrina Spade, founder and CEO of Recompose, a Seattle-based green funeral home that composts human bodies, turning them into soil that can be spread almost everywhere.  We talk about other end-of-life choices, too.

What if humanity could take a giant step forward towards a climate transformation? We are rebroadcasting Christine Barrington's October 12, interview with Dr. Delton Chen, Founder of the Global Carbon Reward along with Renegade Economist, Della Duncan, who together will headline at a November 2 event at the Resource Center for Non-Violence called Funding for the Future: New Ways to Value Life on our Planet.

The Global Carbon Reward is a bold policy proposal that seeks to leverage the power of the world’s central banks to institute a global monetary policy that rewards the mitigation of carbon. This policy would create a parallel economy powered by a Carbon Currency whose value is derived through increasing the health of the biosphere. Dr. Chen’s ideas were featured in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, and he is on a bi-coastal tour to raise awareness and engage interest in the policy. He will be presenting, along with Kim Stanley Robinson, at the Verge 22 Climate Tech Summit in San Jose at the end of October.

Della Duncan is a Co-Founder of the California Doughnut Economics Coalition and a Public Banking advocate. She works alongside others to shift the mindset around economics in order to tackle the 21st century’s grand challenge of meeting the needs of all people within the means of the planet.  Della dynamically pursues this vision through teaching, organizing, and mentoring. She is a Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics International Inequalities Institute and since 2016 has produced and hosted the Upstream Podcast, which invites listeners to unlearn everything they thought they knew about economics and imagine what a better world could look like.  She will address ideas around De-growth and the questioning of “Green Capitalism” as applied to the Global Carbon Reward.

Della’s 2-Part audio documentary is powerful journalism and full of provocative ideas well worth considering. Part 1:  The Problem with Green Captitalism;  Part 2: A Green Deal for the People

You can also listen to Christine's Talk of the Bay broadcast "Pricing Nature through the Global Carbon Reward: A Conversation with Dr. Delton Chen, Author Kim Stanley Robinson and Renegade Economist Kate Raworth."

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation. and Environmental Innovations.

Well, Well, Well! Clean Water for Everyone!

with Chelsea Tu of Monterey Waterkeeper

On Sustainability Now! Sunday, August 21st, 5-6 PM, on KSQD 90.7 FM and KSQD.org

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Chelsea Tu, the new executive director of a new local non-profit, Monterey Waterkeeper, which combines education, science-based policy advocacy and legal action to ensure that all communities, including low-income communities of color, have safe, affordable drinking water and enjoy clean, swimmable and fishable waters. According to Tu, Monterey waterkeeper will be working to limit levels of contaminants in drinking water, mostly in well water that does not receive water treatment. Drink up!

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation. and Environmental Innovations.

Sustainability Now! December 15, 2019, Can Solar Energy Provide a Basic Income for Everyone in the World? with  Robert Stayton, author of Power Shift: From Fossil Energy to Dynamic Solar Power and Solar Dividends: How Solar Energy Can Generate a Basic Income for Everyone on Earth discusses his proposal to give everyone on Earth 10 kilowatts of solar PV panels. You can request a free e-book of Solar Dividends at: http://solardividends.org/free-ebook-by-request/ 

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 restructuring of California’s energy system.  Tune in to learn about this transformative project and what it will require to succeed.

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation.

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 the same: the ideal river.

Join SN! host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation about rivers with Dr. Joanne Yao, Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. Yao is the author of The Ideal River: How control of nature shaped the international order. Her book is about the Rhine, Danube and Congo Rivers. How they were reshaped and managed (or not) and the role they played in the imaginaries and emergence of the European imperialist order of the 19th century and in the shaping of nature around the world, before and since.  Yao’s book has special relevance for California, where the struggle to make virtually all of our rivers ideal ones has been going on since the middle of the 1800s.

Radio Show #37, January 24, 2021: Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with newly-elected  California State Senator John Laird, to talk about energy, resources,  environment and politics, in the state and the country, and his hopes  and dreams for the State Senate.  Laird’s political career began in  1981, on the Santa Cruz City Council, and included stints in the State  Assembly and Jerry Brown’s second administration as Secretary of Natural  Resources. He has just begun his term in office and represents Senate  District 17, which includes Santa Cruz and San Luis Obispo Counties in  their entirety, as well as portions of Monterey and Santa Clara  Counties.

Are elephants people, too?  Do they have rights?  A recent ruling by a New York state court said that “elephants may be intelligent and deserving of compassion” but that Happy, an elephant confined in the Bronx Zoo, is not a person.  A growing number of human people around the world disagree and argue that both animals and nature have rights. Listen to a Sustainability Now! conversation about the rights of animals and nature with Host Ronnie Lipschutz and  Professor Matthew Liebman, Associate Professor and Chair of the Justice for Animals Program at the Law School at University of San Francisco University.  We will talk about the history of “rights,” how they have been extended over time, and why animals and nature are deserving of the same consideration.

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation. and Environmental Innovations.

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with anthropologist Dr. Michelle Merrill, whose teaching and counseling experience led her to establish Novasutras, an egalitarian spiritual movement with scientific sensibilities. Novasutras responds to the need for spiritual community centered on the biggest challenge humanity currently faces: how do we help people through the transition from an “Industrial Growth Society” to an “environmentally sustainable, socially just and spiritually fulfilling human presence on the planet“?

You can hear previous broadcasts of Sustainability Now! here on Anchor, at KSQD.org and on Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation.

Join Sustainability Now! hosts Brooke Wright and Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Ecology Action's Matt Miller about bicycles, Bike Month, e-bike rebates and local transportation policies and practices, more generally.  Matt is a Senior Program Specialist at Ecology Action in Santa Cruz, where he focuses on urban transportation working collaboratively with local government, businesses, and NGOs, to help build physical and social infrastructure to move away from car centric planning and behavior.  If you don't already bike but are thinking about getting out of your car, be sure to tune in!

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation. and Environmental Innovations.

Sustainability Now! March 22, 2020, No Place Like Home, with UCSC Sociology Professor Steve McKay, director of the UCSC Center for Labor Studies and codirector, with Professor Miriam Greenberg, of “No Place Like Home,” a community-initiated, student-engaged research project on the affordable housing crisis in Santa Cruz County.

In the Spring, Elephant Seals turn to love...and fighting... and feeding... and  laying around in the sun. We are just past the prime viewing season at Año Nuevo State Park, during which the two-ton male seals fight bloody battles, the females give birth to young conceived the prior year, the adults mate, and the weaner pups look cute.

Join Sustainability Now! hosts Ronnie Lipschutz and Brooke Wright on Sunday, April 17th, for a discussion with Theresa Keates, a UCSC PhD student in Ocean Sciences, who studies elephant seals.  Her research is centered around deploying oceanographic tags on elephant seals, which offers both a source of valuable oceanographic data from remote regions as well as a unique platform to investigate these very large marine mammals.

Previous broadcasts of Sustainability Now! are archived at KSQD.org and on Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation and Environmental Innovations.

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 will take revenues from sale of solar electricity to a local business and distribute to selected farmworker households as basic income stipends.  The Sustainable Urban Food Initiative will bring the benefits of agricultural technology and farm management techniques to small farms and gardens in the Monterey Bay Region.  Both projects are examples of the kinds of local development pursued by SSRF.

Sustainability Now!, May 17, 2020, Struggling to Survive: Binational Farmworkers on the Central Coast, with Dr. Ann Lopez, Founder and Director of the Center for Farmworker Families in Watsonville, California.  Lopez is emerita professor at San Jose City College, and holds degrees in biology and a PhD in Environmental Studies from UC Santa Cruz. The Center works with binational farmworkers and their families to promote their well being. She is author of The Farmworker’s Journey about the human side of the binational migration circuit from the subsistence and small producer farms of west central Mexico to employment in California’s corporate agribusiness. In 2019, Ann was chosen as Woman of the Year by the 29th Assembly District of California. Be sure to watch “A Migrant Farmworker’s Story,” a CFF video filmed during on of the Centers Farmworker Reality Tours.

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 for cleaning up contaminated water.  In October 2023, rural Latino community and farmworker groups, environmental organizations, including Monterey Waterkeeper, and commercial and recreational fishing organizations filed suit to overturn the decision.  Tune in to hear Chelsea Tu, Executive Director of Monterey Waterkeeper, talk about the problem, the situation and the solution

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 and the necessary changes in human behavior to stop environmental destruction and nuclear catastrophe. She calls this “Global Preventive Medicine.” Caldicott is also the subject of “If You Love This Planet,” which won an Academy Award in 1982 for best documentary.

Sustainability Now! November 17, 2019, Down on the Farm in Santa Cruz, with Nina Vukecevic, Farm Manager at Common Roots Farm in Santa Cruz, which provides disabled adults with access to agriculture. You can find out more about urban agriculture here.

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 teacher, naturalist, mycologist, organizer and lover of the wild, dedicated to enacting effective and just solutions to environmental and social crises by working in collaboration with fungi. CoRenewal is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing education and research in ecosystem restoration, health and healing, and sustainable community dynamics through community development and bioremediation, the nature-based solutions to human caused pollution.

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation.

For further reading:  Zoë Schlanger, "Our Silent Partners," New York Review of Books, October 7, 2021: Review of Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (Random House, 2021).

For viewing: "Fantastic Fungi," https://fantasticfungi.com/

Solar electricity is the fuel of the future.  But can we go solar without damaging the environment?  Solar farms in distant places need transmission lines to get their product to the market.  Storage batteries, and especially electric vehicles, require lithium and the stuff must be mined somewhere.  And all the while, its seems that the solar enterprise is being undermined by the struggle to control where solar panels can go and who can decide how little wholesale power will cost and how much you, the consumer, will pay.

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz as he welcomes back SJSU Environmental Studies Professor Dustin Mulvaney, who has been looking into the environmental consequences of solar farms, transmission lines and mining in California’s “Lithium Valley.”

Sustainability Now! February 9, 2020, Caring for the Prairie, with Professor Jenny Reardon of the UCSC Sociology Department talks about  “Caring for the Prairie,” a “project involving biking through the prairies and small towns of Kansas, designed to develop embodied knowledge of the land and to find out more about attitudes towards contemporary US politics from the denizens of the prairies.” You can hear a podcast about her experiences in Kansas here.

Farming is tough enough as it is, but when farmers face the loss of organic certification due to climate-related disasters and wildfires, what can they do? Join Host Ronnie Lipschutz in a discussion with Amber Schat and David Obermiller speak about their experience with such challenges and programs that address them. Amber Schat is a Wildfire Resilience Specialist with the Community Alliance with Family Farmers, a statewide non-profit that focuses on serving small family farms with ecological farming information and support. David Obermiller is a farmer with Unearthed Farm and Harvest Field Organic Farm in Fresno County which was impacted by wildfire on July 1st in 2022.

For more information about fire retardants, see "After Wildfires, What Happens to Crops Soaked in Fire Retardant?"

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation. and Environmental Innovations.

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Rachel Kippen about city and county “climate action plans.”  A CAP lays out a community’s roadmap for reducing greenhouse gas emissions over the coming decade, with input and review by community members and various “stakeholders.” How does a city or county go about developing a CAP, and is it an aspirational document or a plan for concrete action? And how effective are these plans in driving concrete emission reductions?  Do CAPS matter?

Rachel is a coastal environmental advocate, writer, nonprofit professional, and artist with over 15 years’ experience in educational programming, communications, and advocacy. She writes “Our Ocean Backyard,” a twice monthly column in the Santa Cruz Sentinel and is advisor and consultant to a number of city and county municipal CAPs.  We’ll be talking about how CAPS are developed and implemented, giving listeners insights into how government works and the roles that citizens can play, especially in the face of the climate change challenge.

The world is awash in plastic. According to a study published in 2020, total production of plastics since 1950 is now over 10 billion tons, with more than half of that simply discarded.  And the production of plastics will only increase in the future.  There is a lot of oil and natural gas in the world and, if and when we wean ourselves from fossil fuels, oil and chemical companies will be looking for other places to use their stocks.

So far, only about one billion tons of plastic have been recycled—that is, put into the recycling chain.  What exactly has happened to that material is less clear.  Different types of plastic require different post-consumer processing to turn them back into pellets of raw material.  Most factories are set up to use only particular types of plastic and it is still cheaper to buy virgin pellets than recycled ones.  Are compostable plastics the solution?  What is a compostable plastic?  What is it made from?  How is it broken down?  Are there plastics that will simply decompose into constituent molecules by weathering and micro-organisms?  Questions, questions.  Are there answers?

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a chemistry and economics lesson from Dr. Susannah Scott, Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and occupant of the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Chair in Sustainable Catalytic Processing at the University of California Santa Barbara. Here I quote from a UCSB website: "Her research interests include the design of heterogeneous catalysts with well-defined active sites for the efficient conversion of conventional and new feedstocks, as well as environmental catalysts to promote air and water quality."

To avert the worst impacts of climate change, a transition away from fossil fuels is necessary. However, what this transition looks like and what would make a transition “just,” remain open questions. What workers are missing from “green” economy discussions? What role do workers play in the fight for a future without fossil fuels? How can workers and communities ensure the transition is “just”?

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with UCSC Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies J. Mijin Cha, whose new book, A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future, will be published by MIT Press in December. Her research examines the intersection of inequality and the climate crisis in which the energy transition is leveraged to advance a more just future.

Mark Dowie describes himself as “Cowhand, guitarist, investigative historian, poet” and journalist.  He’s probably best known as cofounder, editor and staff writer forMother Jones, but during his more than 50-year career, over his he’s also written for many other magazines, newspapers and publications, written eight books and received no less than 19 journalism awards. 

In 1995, Dowie publishedLosing ground: American environmentalism at the close of the twentieth century.  Thirty years later—and 70-odd years since the beginning of that movement, join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Dowie about the U.S. environmental movement, then and now.

Sustainability Now!, April 5, 2020, Urchins in the Storm, with KSQD engineer Emily Donham, a 5th-year PhD candidate in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at UCSC.  Emily’s research focuses on how sea urchins, which graze on kelp forests, may be vulnerable to ocean acidication and global warming.  Emily is the producer of “Santa Cruz Naturalist,” which airs on Tuesdays at 7:54 AM, Wednesdays at 3:55 PM and Saturdays at 11:54 AM. at Her favorite crustacean is the horseshoe crab.

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz in a conversation with Josefina Lara Chavez, Farm-to-Market specialist and Senior Manager, Latinx Farmer Program for the Community Alliance for Family Farmers in Davis. Our focus will be on Latinx farmers in the Monterey Bay Region and their struggle to survive and thrive in the face of an agricultural system that takes little account of them.  Lara Chavez a fourth generation family farmer and is currently working at getting her farm and food hub in Hollister, Lara Organics, off the ground.

Previous broadcasts of Sustainability Now! are archived at KSQD.org and on Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation. and Environmental Innovations.

North Bay Jobs with Justice has launched a campaign to support farmworkers in Sonoma County. For more information, see https://northbayjobswithjustice.org/

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 that it doesn’t match with Public Works and climate change, but Public Works is homeland security adjacent in that we provide domestic security to residents. One of the greatest threats to our residents is climate change.”  Join Sustainability Now! host Ronnie Lipschutz and Jackie McCloud to hear a whole new take on “Homeland Security.”

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 these organisms are vital to plant and animal nutrition and growth.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz and Dr. Chelsea Carey, Director of Soil Research and Conservation at Point Blue Conservation Science  for a fascinating conversation about the life beneath our feet.

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 development.  In response, both Governor Newsom and the State Legislature are seeking to amend the law to prevent various activists and opponents from obstructing new housing.  Not so fast, say the law’s supporters.  They point to a recent report by the Rose Foundations that CEQA has had little, if any, impact on housing projects across the state. So, who is correct?

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Professor Deborah Sivas of the Stanford Law School. She teaches environmental law, directs the environmental law clinic and has represented various environmental organizations in the courts.  We will talk about CEQA and whether it is really standing in the way of more housing in California.

Bees are in danger; what can we do? Tune into Sustainability Now! to hear a conversation with Eve Bratman, an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Franklin & Marshall College, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  Bratman is author of Governing the Rainforest: Sustainable Development Politics in the Amazon. She is currently writing a book entitled Pollen Nation: A journey into the politics of saving the bees and the ethics of a sustainable future, which uses bees as a prism for seeing broader social and ecological phenomena and is premised upon revealing the ways that human society fumblingly strives to protect and preserve their roles in our lives.  You can find out more about Professor Bratman’s research and writing at http://www.evebratman.com/

Sustainability Now! November 3, 2019, Zero Waste Living? with Liz McDade, who runs the “No Trace Shop,” an online business dedicated to providing customers with a “sustainable lifestyle.”

Sustainability Now! Show #27, September 6, 2020, Accessory Dwelling Units in Our Backyards: Host Ronnie Lipschutz and his guest, Santa Cruz architect Mark Primack, talk about how we might address the California housing crisis through construction of accessory dwelling units.  Primack has lived and worked in Santa Cruz since the late 1970s, served on the City Council, written Divisible Cities: Acting Local in a Transient World and writes a regular column on local matters for The Santa Cruz Sentinel (for example, here and here). Additional resources on ADUs are available at SSRF's "ADU Resources" page.

Radio Show #35, December 27, 2020: As you may have read in a number of places, not only is the ocean  full of plastic, we are literally living in an ocean of plastic  microparticles falling from the sky.  Before you know it, we will all be  “Plastic People of the Universe.”

On this show, Sustainability Now! addresses this and related topics.  Ronnie Lipschutz and Kevin Bell, co-founder and co-director of the  Sustainable Systems Research Foundation in Santa Cruz, discuss the  biodegradability of plastics and which ones don’t really break down.  Along with a raft of SSRF volunteers and interns, Bell has been  conducting research into the plastics recycling dilemma and the  diffusion of plastic through the environment and also looking for ways  to make sure that take-out containers and utensils are truly  biodegradable and compostable.

If you'd like to read more about the plastics problem, here are three recent publications of interest:

"Choked, Strangled, Drowned: The Plastics Crisis Unfolding in Our Oceans," Kimberley Warner, et al., Oceana, November 2020.

"The Mixed Message of Earth-Friendly Design--Does buying more elegant objects help heal the planet?" Blake Gopnik, New York Times, December 11, 2020.

"Biodegradable, Hygenic, and Compostable: Tableware from Hybrid Sugarcane and Bamboo Fibers as Plastic Alternative," Chao Liu, et al., Matter 3, 1–14, December 2, 2020.

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 "national security."  The second now threatens the future of life on Earth--human and nonhuman--but Great Powers (and the not-so-great) resolutely refuse to give them up in the name of "national security" and "lifestyle."  In 2022, Dalby published Rethinking Environmental Security, an analysis of firepower past, present and future.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a thought-provoking conversation with Simon Dalby about these two threats and what countries are not doing about it.

Previous shows are available at https://ksqd.org/sustainabilitynow/

Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation.