Category Archives: Environment

Archive, Environment, Radio, Transformations

GREEN GROWTH: a guide to post-pandemic economic sustainability

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Can we achieve healthy growth, the kind that is more regenerative than wasteful, more equitable than unjust? 

Recorded 3/16/2021
GBH Forum Network VIDEO LINK

PER ESPEN STOKNES and L. HUNTER LOVINS believe they have the answers.  Both are experts in the field, having written books that offer blueprints for an inspiring regenerative economy that avoids collapse and works for people and the planet. 

A new Cambridge Forum series looks at the ramifications of COVID as an agent of change: How has the pandemic affected your life and what are its effects going forward?

In her new book, A Finer Future, author L. Hunter Lovins asks: is the future one of global warming, 65 million migrants fleeing failed states, soaring inequality, and grid-locked politics? Or one of empowered entrepreneurs and innovators working towards social change, leveling the playing field, and building a world that works for everyone?

Her answer is that humanity has a chance – just barely – to thread the needle of sustainability and build a regenerative economy through a powerful combination of enlightened entrepreneurialism, regenerative economy, technology, and innovative policy. 

Norwegian psychologist and economist Per Espen Stoknes, author of Tomorrow’s Economy, joins the conversation with recommendations for creating healthy, sustainable green growth.

Green Growth 1
Green Growth 2

L. Hunter Lovins is President of Natural Capitalism Solutions, which helps companies, communities and countries implement more regenerative practices profitably. 

Hunter has just written A Finer Future: Creating an Economy in Service to Life. which won a Nautilus Award. Time Magazine recognized her as a Millennium Hero for the Planet, and Newsweek called her the Green Business Icon. 

Per Espen Stoknes is a psychologist who now serves as director of the Centre for Sustainability and Energy at the Norwegian Business School in Oslo. In addition he has founded companies such as clean-tech GasPlas, and he is author Money & Soul (2009) and What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming (2015).

Archive, Environment, Events

The War Against Science

A conversation with environmental scientists Joel Clement, H. Curtis Spalding, Brown University and Andrew Rosenberg, Director for Science and Democracy at Union of Concerned Scientists  on the War Against Science.

Recorded November 15, 2017

Joel Clement recently resigned his post as a senior Department of Interior official over the suppression of facts about implications of climate change on human populations. He cited the department’s  “poor leadership, waste, and failures on climate change.”

“I am a scientist, a policy expert, a civil servant and a worried citizen. Reluctantly, as of today, I am also a whistleblower on an administration that chooses silence over science.”

Archive, Environment, Radio

Dispatches From The Front Lines of Climate Justice

Journalist and author Wen Stephenson discusses his new book What We’re Fighting For Now Is Each Other.

Stephenson provides a candid look at some of the “new American radicals” who are risking everything to build a stronger climate justice movement. What motivates them? How can individual, local actions really affect a larger global movement?

Wen Stephenson,  an independent journalist and climate activist, is a contributing writer for the Nation.  Formerly an editor at the Atlantic and the Boston Globe, he’s also written about climate, culture, and politics for Slate, the New York Times, and Grist.
Recorded October 7, 2015     Watch this forum on the WGBH Forum Network
Archive, Environment, Events, Podcasts

The Ecological Imagination

In this Cambridge Forum Classic, best-selling writer David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous, tells a story that reveals the  subtle dependence of human cognition on the natural environment.What lessons can we learn from our relationship with the natural world?

[audio:https://www.cambridgeforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/CF-EcoImaginationAbram.mp3|titles= Cambridge Forum The Ecological Imagination]

Environment

CLIMATE CHANGE: Is Green Consumption a Solution?

Heather Rogers, author of Green Gone Wrong, kicks off Climate Change Week in Cambridge, eight days of events about facing and reducing the escalating threats of a changing climate. Solutions for climate change aren’t known, but science tells us that our consumption, what we eat, the products and services we buy, contribute to the problem.

What can be done about the products that contribute most? Heather Rogers has investigated whether earth-friendly products are a solution.  Tim Weiskel moderates the discussion.

Friday, May 13 @ 7:30pm Meetinghouse

Co-sponsored by Cambridge Climate Emergency Action Group and the First Parish Climate Justice Task Force.

Archive, Environment

Empires of Food

Author Andrew Rimas discusses his latest book Empires of Food:  Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations.  What does this sweeping look at the relationships among food, food availability, new foods, and developing human civilizations tell us about food security in our own warming world?

Wednesday, April 13th @ 7:00 pm

Co-sponsored by Food for Free

Archive, Environment

World On The Edge

Internationally renowned environmentalist Lester Brown has been assessing the health of the earth’s ecosystems for more than two decades.  Over that time he has seen increasing signs of breakdown until we are now facing issues of near overwhelming complexity and unprecedented urgency. Can we change direction before we go over the edge? In his new book World On The Edge,  Brown attempts to illuminate a path toward preventing environmental and economic collapse.

Recorded February 9th, 2011


WORLD ON THE EDGE: Preventing Environmental and Economic Collapse

Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, a D.C. research organization, discusses his new book, World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse.

For two decades, Lester Brown has been assessing the state of planet’s well being. How does he analyze the current status of the Earth’s ecosystems? Dramatic events have already altered the status quo for populations across the globe. Given the loss of wheat, due to the 2010 record summer heat wave in Russia, will future generations of farmers be able to feed 8 billion people? What solutions does Brown propose to restore the Earth’s health?

Author of 20 major books alerting the public to possible environmental problems, Lester Brown is widely perceived as the nation’s leading environmental writer. E.O. Wilson, in his supporting note on the book cover writes: “If the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize has been extended to a third recipient, the logical candidate would have been Lester Brown.” Brown has received numerous prizes, including a MacArthur Fellowship, the U.N. Environment Prize, Japan’s Blue Planet Prize and twenty-five honorary degrees.