Just Me: The Spring Creek Project lecture
A Wild and Beautiful World
This week I have something a little different. I was asked to take part in the Collective Climate Action lecture series for the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University. These are the same folks who asked me to do a keynote five years ago, which turned into the essay that’s in the wonderful book All We Can Save. I struggled with this one, as I struggled with that one, trying to honestly describe and also find power in the very complicated feelings that climate change instills in me as in many others. I’m going to keep working on this one too, because I think it will serve as the...
info_outline
Michael Eliason: What Our Cities Could Look Like
A Wild and Beautiful World
"If we had a climate leader like Anne Hidalgo, the Pike/Pine network itself, going from Capitol Hill, which is dense enough to support its own pedestrian zone and car-free streets, could be car-free or mostly car-free down to the water, there'd be this wonderful green interchange between Capitol Hill and downtown and there's really wonderful opportunities for a sustainable connectivity that we can't really conceive because every square inch of this city has to be handed over to the private vehicle." ____ Mike Eliason is the founder and principal of Larch Lab. He is a researcher, writer,...
info_outline
Lauren Regan: They're Doing This Because We're Winning
A Wild and Beautiful World
"Because the one thing they will never have that we have is numbers, and moral high ground. Most of us are doing this because we care, it's coming from a place of love, often we're doing it in our volunteer time--and the government and corporations will never match that." ____ Lauren Regan is the legendary founder, executive director, and staff attorney at the Civil Liberties Defense Center. She and the CLDC have defended “green scare” activists, climate activists, water protectors, and many more. The CLDC was a founding member of the Water Protector Legal Collective, active at Standing...
info_outline
Paul Koberstein & Jessica Applegate: Canopy of Titans
A Wild and Beautiful World
"The clear-cuts were littered with these big old logs, they were just lying there rotting in the sun, and we asked Dominick DellaSalla, the scientist who was our tour guide, what's that all about, and he said 'they're really picky about which logs they bring back to market, so if they see flaws in the wood they'll just leave it behind...70% of the logs, of the old growth yellow cedar trees that are cut down, are left behind.'" ______ Today’s episode is with Paul Koberstein and Jessica Applegate, the co-authors of Canopy of Titans (currently a finalist for the Oregon Book Award), which...
info_outline
George Monbiot: Nourishing Ourselves and the Wild
A Wild and Beautiful World
"Our ignorance of the soil really impedes our efforts to reach what I see as the holy grail here, which is low-impact, high-yield farming. There's plenty of high-impact, high-yield farming, and plenty of low-impact, low-yield farming, but neither of those are the answers that we need to find. We have this enormously challenging thing that we face, that we have to feed 8, and one day 9 or 10 billion people, while trying to bring that system back within planetary boundaries." ______ George Monbiot is a columnist for the Guardian, and an investigative environmental reporter. He’s in some cases...
info_outline
Justin J. Pearson: Doing Nothing Was Not an Option
A Wild and Beautiful World
"The climate crisis that we have now, the environmental justice crises that we have now, are because there was not an investment or concern about the communities that are feeling the brunt of these illnesses when these facilities were being created, when these plans were being made. If we had cared about climate change, if we had cared about the environment, 40/50 years ago, when Valero Energy Corporation was planning to build in SW Memphis, we probably wouldn't have the cancer rates that we have now. If people had cared about all of these toxic release inventory facilities that surround our...
info_outline
Paul Gilding: Disruption and (Positive) Change
A Wild and Beautiful World
"We need regulation, we need policy, we need community pressure, we need expectations, we need movies, we need poetry...we need all these things that drive us to a certain behavior, because we have got a lot of good sides, and they're not brought out by our current society and our current economic model, they are repressed and destructed by it. There's a great academic story about a guy who went to look for evidence that we behave badly under pressure--the whole dog eat dog market view of the world, when things go bad we're going to be fighting for the food, fighting for shelter,...
info_outline
Rachel Heaton: Recognizing Our Place
A Wild and Beautiful World
"Standing Rock was like the beginning and the end of various parts of my life. I feel like I was asleep before Standing Rock. When I took my children out there it became more about recognizing our place on Earth as human beings and realizing that if we don't have our children in those spaces, how are we going to pass that knowledge on, or how do we expect them to stand...as much as I would love to say that our youth didn't have to stand on the frontlines, but they're inheriting what's been created already, and so unfortunately we are left to create warriors to continue this work that we're...
info_outline
Adam Welz: Field of Wonders (at Risk)
A Wild and Beautiful World
"Start by just learning the names of the bumblebees in your garden and the butterflies that fly past your room, of the birds, and it's not hard...and once you open that door, once you start, it's this neverending unfolding field of wonders, as crazy and naive as that sounds, and I wouldn't be able to live my life without it." ________ Adam Welz is a South African journalist, nature conservation consultant, photographer and filmmaker. Most recently, he's the author of The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown, which Bill McKibben has called “A book that goes deeper than any...
info_outline
Season 2 Introduction
A Wild and Beautiful World
Just a quick hello to note that the second season is coming soon! My guests will include cultural educator and mountaineer Rachel Heaton, lawyer Lauren Regan, Tennessee State Rep. Justin Pearson, and writers Adam Welz, Paul Gilding, Ursula Goodenough, George Monbiot, Paul Koberstein, and Jessica Applegate. Stay tuned!
info_outline"We need regulation, we need policy, we need community pressure, we need expectations, we need movies, we need poetry...we need all these things that drive us to a certain behavior, because we have got a lot of good sides, and they're not brought out by our current society and our current economic model, they are repressed and destructed by it. There's a great academic story about a guy who went to look for evidence that we behave badly under pressure--the whole dog eat dog market view of the world, when things go bad we're going to be fighting for the food, fighting for shelter, and...all the apocalyptic movies, The Road, etc...and there's a side of us that can behave that way, but his view was that the academic evidence was not just not supportive, it was the opposite--that when we have a wildfire, when we have a flood, when we have a really intense threat to a community, the community comes together, and it comes together because it needs to in order to protect itself, and that's a natural tendency of humanity, not something that we need to be forced into."
______
Paul Gilding is the author of The Great Disruption, and has been an activist for over 50 years: a student activist against Apartheid and for Aboriginal land rights, a union organizer, a disarmament organizer, a climate organizer, the Executive Director of Greenpeace International, and much more. In consulting and speeches, he’s also worked to persuade companies and corporate executives to respond appropriately to the climate crisis, and he’s a teacher and researcher at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership.
______
Links: