Simon Kuper talks about AJAX, THE DUTCH, THE WAR. It’s about resistance and collaboration through the lens of soccer in the Netherlands. And Hurricane Sandy moves us to air a portion of our 2011 interview with Mark Hertsgaard about his book, HOT: Living Through the Next 50 Years on Earth. It’s about adapting to climate change. (Note: this episode of WV originally aired on stations the week of November 7, 2012.) Continue reading →
Filmmaker Susan Rockefeller discusses her film, MISSION OF MERMAIDS: A Love Letter To The Ocean. Also, children’s book author, Jason Chin, talks about his acclaimed new book, ISLAND: A Story of the Galapagos. But first, WV encores our 2011 interview with Paolo Bacigalupe about SHIPBREAKER, his dystopian sci fi novel that takes place in a world altered by climate change.
Brian Fagan talks about his book, THE ATTACKING OCEAN: The Past, Present, and Future of Rising Sea Levels, and we also air our 2011 interview with Christine Shearer about Kivalina, an Alaskan community that is already getting hammered by sea level rise.
Jason Mott talks about his terrific debut novel, The Returned. It’s about what happens when loved ones who have died return to their families unscathed.
And world leaders are once again discussing climate change, this time at the UN climate talks in Warsaw, Poland. Meanwhile, the Phillipines is struggling to recover from supertyphoon Haiyan. We put climate change and conflict into context with Christian Parenti. We re-air our 2011 interview with Parenti about his book, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence.
Ruth Thomas-Suh talks about her powerful new film, REJECT. Joining the conversation is her father, Herbert Thomas, author of THE SHAME RESPONSE TO REJECTION. And environmental journalist John Cushman talks about about what’s really in the State Department’s Environmental Impact report on the Keystone XL pipeline.
The State Department’s EIS, it turns out, “relied heavily” on studies funded by Alberta, Canada government agencies and carried out by Jacobs Consultancy, a subsidiary of a major tar sands developer, as Cushman reported several days after his interview with WV:
The Jacobs Consultancy is a subsidiary of Jacobs Engineering, a giant natural resources development company with extensive operations in Alberta’s tar sands fields. The engineering company has worked on dozens of major projects in the region over the years. Its most recent contract, with Canadian oil sands leader Suncor, was announced in January.
“The Alberta Oil Sands are a very important component of our business,” the parent company said in late 2011, announcing seven new contracts in the region. “Jacobs has a strong history in the area, and we are pleased to support our clients in these initiatives.”
A journalist in Washington since the mid 70s, Cushman covered the EPA for the New York Times and now works with Inside Climate News, the online news site that won a Pulitzer Prize last year for its report,”The Dilbit Disaster,” an investigation into the million-gallon spill of Canadian tar sands oil into the Kalamazoo River in 2010.
Boris Fishman talks about his terrific debut novel about coming of age as an immigrant in America, A REPLACEMENT LIFE.
And Obama just announced a get-tough policy on carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants. Now the question is, will he or won’t he on the Keystone XL pipeline? John Cushman of Inside Climate News tells the story leading up to Obama’s predicament on the pipeline and where he might go in the future. Cushman’s new e-book is KEYSTONE AND BEYOND.
World-renowned biologist Paul Ehrlich of The Population Bomb fame talks about his new book (with Michael Charles Tobias)Hope on Earth: A Conversation. And Ryan Mitchell discusses Tiny House Living: Ideas For Building and Living Well In Less than 400 Square Feet.
Naomi Oreskes talks about the speculative novel she co-wrote with Erik Conway, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future. Then, as the world prepares for climate talks and the People’s climate march in New York City, we hear our 2010 interview with climatologist Dr. James Hansen.