Special Earth Day Stories
/Environmentalists, Artists, Students & Teachers share their Love for the Planet
Today we’re streaming voices of environmentalists, artists, students, and teachers with music courtesy of composer Max Richter.
Parkinson's Community & Artpark Bridges
/Happy World Environment Day!
For this special episode we celebrate the natural world with Artpark Bridges, the Parkinson's Community, independent living adults with Parkinson's disease, and People Inc, the Arts Experience, a day habilitation program for adults with developmental disabilities.
Artpark Bridges is a year-round community engagement program led by interdisciplinary artist Cynthia Pegado, dedicated to empowering adults of diverse abilities and backgrounds through expressive arts workshops and performance opportunities. Serving the Buffalo-Niagara Falls region of New York State, Artpark Bridges connects citizens with a sense of inclusion and purpose, healing and creative expression.
HENRIK FEXEUS
/Mentalist, Internationally Bestselling Author & TV Host
The Art of Reading Minds · Mind Storm · Cult · BOX
A mentalist is a kind of magician, an illusionist. And a mentalist uses whatever techniques are at that person's disposal to create the illusion of being able to read minds or being able to contact a supernatural presence…The only rule is that that part is fake, but then you can use techniques for magic or from stagecraft or from psychology. A mentalist is really someone who creates this illusion of having an almost supernatural ability. Having said that, today a mentalist sort of has come to mean something else, mainly due to popular culture TV series like The Mentalist and so on. And now there's this understanding of a mentalist as someone being able to read body language and influence behavior. It sort of ties into it all. And I've had a lifelong passion for magic, and it started when I was seven. Because I was always interested in the question: what if there's a color in the sky that we can't see? What if a handkerchief actually can vanish? What does that mean in terms of how the world works?
PAULA PINHO
/Director of Just Transition at the European Commission Directorate-General for Energy
She is responsible for Just Transition, Consumers, Energy Efficiency, Innovation and Energy security. She has been previously Head of Unit at the Directorate-General Energy in the European Commission. She was responsible for Energy Strategy and Policy coordination and then for Renewables and Energy System Integration Policy and Decarbonisation and Sustainability of Energy Sources. She was Acting Director for Energy Policy where she has overseen notably the work of international energy relations, financial instruments and inter-institutional relations.
YOLANDA KAKABADSE
/Fmr. Minister of Environment, Ecuador
Fmr. President: WWF Int’l, World Conservation Union, Founder Fundacion Futuro Latinoamericano
One of the reasons why we haven't been able to overcome many of the climate crisis factors is because people don't understand what it means. What is it about? What can I do? Usually, when we hear these experts speak about the climate crisis, at least me, I don't understand 9/10ths of the speech or the document. Simplifying the message, allowing that difficult scientific knowledge to become popular language that I can use when explaining to a child, to a rural person, to someone who has a different type of education, that knows much more about the planet but not necessarily about university, explaining those difficult issues will make a difference. And we have to invest much more in that. Speaking difficult scientific language is not helpful to the majority of society.
DR. FARHANA SULTANA
/Co-author: Water Politics: Governance, Justice & the Right to Water
Fmr. UNDP Programme Officer, United Nations Development Programme
We are always students. We are students of the earth. We need to do better and we can do better because the capacity of the human spirit is quite expansive and we owe it to future generations to do the best we can do while we can…It’s about who is at the table or rather what is the table, meaning what are the terms of the debate. Setting the terms of the debate, but how do we even know what the terms of the debate are, who is being included, who is being heeded, and part of that is, therefore, a decolonizing of knowledge and power structures because it’s centrally or fundamentally a justice issue.