San Benito County is one of the unsung jewels of the Central California Coast.  Most people know of San Juan Bautista and the Pinnacles, but there is much, much more.  Two mountain ranges, broad valleys, rangelands, farmlands and biodiversity.  But the Highway 101 corridor, which runs through a corner of the county, provides access to Silicon Valley and the SF Bay and people are moving south in search of cheaper housing.  Malls and sprawls are not far behind.  Now, a local movement is seeking to limit development with an initiative to require a public vote if agricultu ..read more

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 “geoengineeri ..read more

 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 ..read more

Do you remember the Northern Spotted Owl, icon of the old-growth Redwood Wars of the 1990s?  Well, the Northern Spotted Owl is, once again, under threat.  This time, however, the threat comes from another species of owl, the Barred Owl, a larger and more aggressive bird native to the United States, whose range has been expanding westward as a result of development and climate change. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife has devised a plan to protect the Northern Spotted Owl: shoot Barred Owls.  Scientists, conservationists and the public are torn: should humans intervene to prevent ani ..read more

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 materi ..read more

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.  H ..read more

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 Interpr ..read more

Why do humans dominate nature and why have they done so?  Is it because of God told Adam and Eve to “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth”? Is it because capitalism sees the world in terms of scarcity and commodification and must find monetary value in everything?  Some psychologists and philosophers have proposed that we seek to overcome our fear of death by controlling that nature to which we must inevitably return when we di ..read more

The light and energy from the sun falls on us all, humans, animals and plants.  That light is what sustains life on Earth.  But that light can also be transformed into electricity by solar photovoltaics that are not cheap.  Is solar energy the common property of everyone on Earth or is it the exclusive property of those who can afford the technology to capture it?  In two weeks, on Sunday, May 12th, join me for a conversation with Anthropology Professor Kathryn Milun, from the University of Minnesota Duluth, who is head of the Solar Commons Project at the Minneapolis campus ..read more

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 Juli ..read more