Stuart Pimm · Expert in Study of Present-Day Extinctions · Founder/Dir. Saving Nature

Stuart Pimm · Expert in Study of Present-Day Extinctions · Founder/Dir. Saving Nature

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Global Leader in the Study of Present-Day Extinctions & Biodiversity
Founder & Director of Saving Nature

It's a complicated issue. I think a lot of those bird disappearances come from the fact that we have massively intensified our agriculture. Large areas of North America and Europe are now under intense agriculture. They are sprayed with a whole variety of pesticides, which I think is also responsible for the fact that many insects have disappeared, so species that depend on farmland have clearly declined dramatically, but it isn't all birds and there is a piece of this complicated story that involves water birds. Herons and egrets and ducks. Those species both in North America and Europe, are now much more common than they were 30, or 40 years ago. That comes from active conservation of protecting wetlands, making sure we don't shoot our wetland birds. So it’s not all doom and gloom. There are some success stories. There are many things we can do. I think 50 years ago, there were only something like 300 bald eagles in the lower 48 states. Bald eagles are now nesting in every state apart from Hawaii. Our conservation efforts have done a great job.

Ami Vitale · Award-winning Photographer, Filmmaker & Exec. Director of Vital Impacts

Ami Vitale · Award-winning Photographer, Filmmaker & Exec. Director of Vital Impacts

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Award-Winning Photographer & Filmmaker
Executive Director of Vital Impacts

When are we all going to start to care about one another? Because all of our individual choices do have impacts. And I just think the demands that we place on this planet, on the ecosystems, are what are driving conflict and human suffering. In some cases, it's really the scarcity of resources, just like water. In others, it's the changing climate and the loss of fertile lands to be able to grow food. But in the end, it's always the people living in these places that really suffer the most. All of my work today, it’s not really about wildlife, and it's not just about people either. It's about how deeply interconnected all of those things are. People and the human condition are the backdrop of every one of the stories on this planet.

WILLIAM McDONOUGH

WILLIAM McDONOUGH

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Leader in Sustainable Design & Development
Architect, Co-author of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

I think believing in something is also part of the responsibility of the believer to sift through these things. So there are a lot of people saying I'm green because they do something less badly. So for me, it’s not green yet, it's just less bad. It's not really good yet. It's not really fabulous, but that just means there's an opportunity to keep going to share information and help each other because in the end, I think what we're dealing with now is the recognition that the world has a very serious issue with climate, that's very clear now. So how can we help each other? The question is no longer what is wrong with the way you're doing it. The real question now is how can I help you?

DAVID SIMON

DAVID SIMON

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Editor of Rethinking Sustainable Cities · Professor of Development Geography & Director for External Engagement, School of Life Sciences & Environment, Royal Holloway, University of London

That principle, what is now called by Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, and being popularized more widely by the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Network and others as the 15 or 20 Minute City. The idea underpinning it is that a higher proportion of the goods and services, the activities, the social interactions that we need are obtainable within a 1 1/2 to 2 km radius of one's home, which means a far higher proportion of one's individual trips or multiple purpose journeys can be done on foot and by bicycle, therefore, you use your vehicle if you have one more sparingly. You use the bus or minibusses to reach slightly more distant places, and then you have transport interchanges is where you connect with the metro system or the best rapid transit or the railway to reach other parts of large cities or indeed for inner-city journeys. And that is what is now becoming the new best practice in terms of urban planning redesign.

ALICE SCHMIDT
MARYBETH GASMAN

MARYBETH GASMAN

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Author of Doing the Right Thing: How to End Systemic Racism in Faculty Hiring
Executive Director of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity, & Justice & Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions

We all have things to learn when it comes to these diversity-related issues or issues of identity. We have so much to learn. Just because, let's say, you’re a person of color, it doesn't necessarily mean that you are going to be accepting of transgender individuals. You might have some real hangups. Or you could be transgender and have some hangups around people of color, all around the spectrum. You can be a woman who doesn't support women. You can be a woman who doesn't support women trans-women. There are all of these kinds of things that I think we have to be open to, and we have to be open to learning and also open to making mistakes because sometimes people are going to make mistakes around these issues.

BILL HARE

BILL HARE

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Founder & CEO of Climate Analytics · Physicist · Climate Scientist

Net-zero is a big idea. It’s a big theme. And, unfortunately, what's going up are many ways to look like you're doing net-zero when you're not. So in the ideal world, getting to net-zero means essentially reducing your emissions, and then, where you have residual emissions left, that means you might need to have negative emissions. For example, it's relatively easy to decarbonize the power sector completely, and you can do it quickly and cheaply in most places, but you’re always going to be left with some levels of emissions from agriculture.

(Highlights) AZBY BROWN

(Highlights) AZBY BROWN

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Author of Just Enough · Small Spaces · Lead Researcher for Safecast
Authority on Japanese Architecture, Design & Environmentalism

In Edo Japan, basically life was pretty good, and they recycled everything. Everything was reused, upcycled. Waste was considered taboo. A person who was wasting was considered an ugly person. So there’s a lot that we could talk about design, the layout, scale. Buildings were rarely taller than two storeys. Very good use of environmental features, microclimates, use of wind for cooling, passive solar heating. Good use of planting, gardens, etc. But regarding cities of the future, I think the main thing is it needs to be a place where people feel like they belong and want to take responsibility.


IAN BURUMA

IAN BURUMA

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Ian Buruma is the author of many books, including A Tokyo Romance, The Churchill Complex,Their Promised Land, Year Zero, The China Lover, Murder in Amsterdam, Occidentalism and God’s Dust. He teaches at Bard College and is a columnist for Project Syndicate and contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other publications. He was awarded the 2008 Erasmus Prize for making "an especially important contribution to European culture" and was voted one of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals
by the Foreign Policy magazine.

Ian Buruma · Public Intellectual & Erasmus Prize-Winning Author of A Tokyo Romance, The Churchill...
The Creative Process Podcast · Arts, Culture & Society

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Lexi Kayser with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Digital Media Coordinator is Phoebe Brous.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).

RICHARD D. WOLFF

RICHARD D. WOLFF

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Founder of Democracy at Work · Host of Economic Update
Author of The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself

You can criticize many things in the United States, but there are taboos and the number one taboo is that you cannot criticize Capitalism. That is equated with disloyalty…This story about Capitalism being wonderful. This story is fading. You can’t do that anymore. The Right Wing cannot rally its troops around Capitalism. That’s why it doesn’t do it anymore. It rallies the troops around being hateful towards immigrants. It rallies the troops around “fake elections”, around the right to buy a gun, around White Supremacists. Those issues can get some support, but “Let’s get together for Capitalism!” That is bad. They can’t do anything with that. They have to sneak the Capitalism in behind those other issues because otherwise, they have no mass political support.

GAIA VINCE

GAIA VINCE

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Science Writer, Broadcaster & Author
Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty & Time · Adventures in the Anthropocene

The good thing about our species is that we create our own environment. What we’ve been doing so far is creating an environment where we’re much more successful. We live a lot longer, we’re much healthier than we have been in the past. There are many, many more of us, so we’re very successful as a species and that’s been at the expense of other ecosystems, but what’s happened is we are now dominating the planet to a dangerous degree, but we are also self-aware. We’re capable of understanding that.

MARY EDNA FRASER & ORRIN H. PILKEY (Copy)
DR. JOERI ROGELJ

DR. JOERI ROGELJ

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Director of Research at Grantham Institute, Imperial College
Author on UN Environment Programme & Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

A key part of how I go about doing my research is being involved in policy discussions, policy conversations, and also by following the international climate negotiations very closely. Actually, I started my research career as a part of the Presidency of the International Climate Negotiations in 2009. After that I remained an advisor to country delegations in the international negotiations, particularly small island development states or least developed countries. That really helped me to get a sense of what the real questions are that they are struggling with.

MERLIN SHELDRAKE

MERLIN SHELDRAKE

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Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and bestselling author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures. Merlin received a Ph.D. in tropical ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Entangled Life won the Wainwright Prize 2021, and has been nominated for a number of other prizes. Merlin is a research associate of the Vrije University Amsterdam, Head of Science and Communications Strategy for the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, and sits on the advisory board of the Fungi Foundation.

Merlin Sheldrake · Biologist & Bestselling Author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds(Highl
Climate Change & Environmental Solutions · Creative Process Original Series

MERLIN SHELDRAKE

Humans have been partnering with fungi for an unknowably long time, no doubt for longer than we’ve been humans. Whether as foods, eating mushrooms, as medicines, dosing ourselves with moulds and other mushrooms that might help, parasites or others helpers with infection, mushrooms as tinder or ways to carry a spark, this very important thing that humans needed to do for a very long time, and as agents of fermentation, as in yeasts creating alcohol. So humans have partnered with fungi to solve all sorts of problems and so fungi have found themselves enveloped within human societies and cultures for a long time.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Cooper Berkoff with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Cooper Berkoff. Digital Media Coordinator is Phoebe Brous.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).