Join ecologist Stewart Brand as he presents a bold and creative set of solutions for producing a more sustainable society.
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Tagged with “environment”
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Whole Earth Discipline
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Noam Chomsky: Philosophies of Language and Politics
Noam Chomsky, Professor, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT
Larry Bensky, Former National Affairs Correspondent, Pacifica Radio; Host, "Sunday Salon" KPFA; Professor at Stanford, California State University East Bay and Berkeley City College - Moderator
World-renowned intellectual Chomsky has been pushing change in language, politics and culture for decades.
This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California on October 6th, 2009.
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Dr. Seuss’s Copenhagen by Marcus Brigstocke
The debacle of the Copenhagen summit told as a Dr. Seuss story on BBC’s The Now Show.
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Stewart Brand: Rethinking Green — The Long Now
This talk was given at Cowell Theatre in Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, California on Friday October 9, 02009.
Brand built his case for rethinking environmental goals and methods on two major changes going on in the world. The one that most people still don’t take into consideration is that power is shifting to the developing world, where 5 out of 6 people live, where the bulk of humanity is getting out of poverty by moving to cities and creating their own jobs and communities (slums, for now).
The second dominant global fact is climate change. Brand emphasized that climate is a severely nonlinear system packed with tipping points and positive feedbacks such as the unpredicted rapid melting of Arctic ice.
Global warming has to be slowed by reducing the emission of greenhouse gases from combustion, but cities require dependable baseload electricity, and so far the only carbon-free sources are hydroelectric dams and nuclear power. Brand contrasted nuclear with coal-burning by comparing what happens with their waste products.
Moving to genetically engineered food crops, Brand noted that they are a tremendous success story in agriculture, with Green benefits such as no-till farming, lowered pesticide use, and more land freed up to be wild. The developing world is taking the lead with the technology, designing crops to deal with the specialized problems of tropical agriculture. Meanwhile the new field of synthetic biology is bringing a generation of Green biotech hackers into existence.
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Stephen J. Dubner | SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance
Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner spent more than two years on the New York Times Best Sellers list and sold more than 4 million copies worldwide. The book offered surprising insights into hot-button issues like cheating, crime, parenting, and class consciousness, in a compelling and readable style. Now, with SuperFreakonomics, the "rogue economist” and the award-winning journalist delve into the hidden agendas of all kinds of individuals, and the incentives that drive them. Featuring: Stephen J. Dubner is an author and journalist, formerly a writer and editor for The New York Times Magazine. The author’s Freakonomics blog on the New York Times website receives more than 1 million unique hits each month.
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Stewart Brand’s ‘Ecopragmatism’
In the 1960s, Stewart Brand became one of the country’s first and most famous champions of a new ecological awareness. His Whole Earth Catalog spoke to a generation of hippies and back-to-nature commune dwellers.
Now, at 70, Stewart Brand is calling on environmentalists to reframe their understanding of the problem — and solutions. It’s too late for back-to-nature, he says. Global warming is beyond that.
To survive now, Brand says, we need nuclear power, genetic engineering, giant cities. We must manage nature or lose civilization.
This hour, On Point: In the face of global warming, Stewart Brand redefines green.
http://www.onpointradio.org/2009/10/stewart-brands-ecopragmatism
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KQED’s Forum: Margaret Atwood
In Margaret Atwood’s new novel, a natural disaster has altered the earth and wiped out most human life. Two women survive, and "The Year of the Flood" is their story. We speak with the author about her career, the new book and what she thinks the future holds for our fragile planet.
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The Human Factor
In this issue of the magazine, Elizabeth Kolbert writes about the history of mass extinctions. Here Kolbert talks about the often indirect ways that human settlement has led to the demise of other species, and describes her visits to a frog preserve in Central America and a bat cave in the Northeast.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/2009/05/25/090525on_audio_kolbert
Tagged with biology extinction environment ecology
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Science Times: Concrete and Mars
A product relatively unchanged for two centuries is being tweaked to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.
A crew of six people in Moscow will be isolated for 105 days on a simulated flight to another world.
From the New York Times science section. http://www.nytimes.com/pages/science/
Tagged with science mars concrete space environment new york times nytimes
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