KQED's Forum

For years, Solano County residents wondered who was secretly spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy up family farms in their community. The rumors swirled: was Disney planning a new theme park? Was it some sort of Chinese government land-grab? In August, the mystery was solved: the New York Times reported that a group of tech moguls including billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz, philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and were making the purchases as part of a plan to build a city from scratch, on 50,000 acres of agricultural land. They’ve now gone public, under the name California Forever, and are promising to bring benefits like good paying local jobs, solar farms, and open space. But many questions remain. In this hour of Forum, we’ll talk to the group’s CEO as well as one of the local lawmakers raising concerns about the plan.Guests:J.K. Dineen, Bay Area housing reporter, San Francisco ChronicleJan Sramek, Founder and CEO, California ForeverCatherine Moy, Mayor, Fairfield Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rental rates for homes are dropping across the Bay Area. They first fell in 2020 during the pandemic and never fully recovered. Some renters are spending less on rent, but nearly half of Bay Area residents are considered rent-burdened. That leaves housing advocates and experts doubtful the region will become more affordable in a meaningful way. We’ll talk about what lower rents could mean long term and how renters can take advantage of the current market.  Guests:Ben Metcalf, managing director, Terner Center of Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, former director of California Department of Housing and Community DevelopmentShanti Singh, communications and legislative director, Tenants TogetherChris Salviati, senior housing economist, Apartment List Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

California’s coast is vanishing, surely and no longer so slowly, writes LA Times environment reporter Rosanna Xia. By the end of the century, climate change and storm and tidal patterns could cause sea levels in California to rise by as much as seven feet, destroying coastal towns and causing billions in damages. But Xia says it’s not too late to chart a different course. We’ll talk to Xia about California communities that are managing sea level rise successfully and about strategies – like seawalls and sand replenishment – that may need to be reconsidered. And we’ll learn why Xia wants us to adopt a deeper way of thinking about our coastline, one that would reframe sea level rise as “an opportunity to mend our fractured relationship with the shore.” Xia’s new book is “California Against the Sea.”Guests:Rosanna Xia, staff writer, Los Angeles Times. Her new book is "California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What if you had a doppelganger – someone who you’re routinely mistaken for – but that double is someone whose politics and worldview are diametrically opposite of yours? That’s what happened to writer and intellectual Naomi Klein. At times in her career, Klein has been mistaken for writer Naomi Wolf, which was sometimes funny and sometimes annoying. But when Wolf evolved into a conspiracy theorist and a regular commentator on Steve Bannon’s podcast, the mix-up became more troubling to Klein, a climate activist and anti-capitalist. The quandary of having a double who stands for ideas that are the polar opposite of your own is the subject of Klein’s new book, “Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.” We talk to Klein about her work…and her double.Guests:Naomi Klein, author and columnist with The Guardian. Klein's latest book is "Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Walking instead of driving to work, school or the store is good for the environment and our physical and mental health. But being a pedestrian isn’t easy in California’s car-centric culture. Our infrastructure is built with cars in mind, and that means that walkers and wheelchair-users can confront serious safety risks in a state where an average of three pedestrians are killed every day. This hour on Forum, we’ll look at how the state is addressing pedestrian safety issues and we’ll hear from you: What do you notice when you don’t use a car?Guests:Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, UC Berkeley School of Law; host of the podcast "Climate Break"Tim Weisberg, deputy director, marketing and public affairs, California Office of Traffic Safety Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you ever seen a weird bug or plant and thought, “Oh my God. What is THAT?” Then iNaturalist, a Bay Area invention, is the social platform for you. Begun as a graduate school project at UC Berkeley, it now receives hundreds of thousands of monthly submissions from nature enthusiasts across the globe. Users post photos of what they have seen and where they found it, and fellow citizen scientists, and often actual, scientists help identify the flora, fauna and habitat. Some iNaturalist aficionados have even identified new species. Now the site is going independent with the help of a $10 million grant. We’ll survey the past and future of this remarkable Bay Area contribution to our collective understanding of the world.Guests:Ken-ichi Ueda, co-director, iNaturalistScott Loarie, co-director, iNaturalistJennifer Rycenga, professor emeritus in the Humanities Department, San Jose State University; former president of the Sequoia Audubon Society in San Mateo.Prakrit Jain, student of evolutionary biology, University of California, Berkeley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brown v Board of Education, the landmark civil rights decision banning racial segregation in public schools, was supposed to give Black children greater educational opportunities. But instead, according to Columbia Teachers College professor Bettina Love, it marked the beginning of an anti-Black educational agenda, characterized by low academic expectations, excessive suspensions, surveillance and physical violence. Love grew up in the 1980s and 90s, a period when the Reagan and Bush administrations pushed ideas of “school accountability” and “school safety” that she says were used to justify punishment of Black children and that have harmed a generation. We talk to Love about her and her peers’ experiences in school as “eighties babies” and why she thinks reparations are essential to repair public education.Guests:Bettina Love, William F. Russell professor, Teachers College, Columbia University; author, "Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s hard enough to train for a marathon. But what if you could only train in a crowded prison yard, with borrowed running shoes, on a small track with potholes and six 90-degree turns? That’s what the members of the San Quentin 1000-Mile Club running group face – on top of the harsh living conditions in California’s oldest prison – as they prepare for their annual marathon. A new documentary, 26.2 to Life, goes inside the prison to tell the story of the San Quentin Marathon, its participants, and why they run. We talk with the film’s director as well as the club’s running coach, and one of its former members.Guests:Christine Yoo, director, the new documentary "26.2 to Life" - Opens Fri (September 22) at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco, the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, Rialto Cinemas Elmwood in Berkeley and Rialto Cinemas SebastapolMarkelle Taylor, former member, San Quentin 1000-Mile ClubFrank Ruona, coach, San Quentin 1000-Mile Club Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“I’ve spent my whole life trying to belong, to show people that I’m not like ‘them,’ not a Black person living in poverty, not a Black person with an addiction.” So writes Atlantic senior editor Jenisha Watts in the magazine’s October cover story, “I Never Called Her Momma: My Childhood in a Crack House.” When Watts began her career in journalism, she hid her roots while further developing her love for words and storytelling. She’s telling her own story now for the first time. We’ll talk with Watts about her family, the transformative power of Black literature and what it means to write about — and share — the trauma we’re used to keeping private.Guests:Jenisha Watts, senior editor, The Atlantic Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Homes in California produce about 8 percent of the state’s total greenhouse gas emissions. As the Golden State looks to significantly cut down emissions, one strategy is to electrify homes by, for example, replacing a gas stove with an electric one or installing a heat pump instead of gas-powered cooling and heating systems. Congress recently approved funding for tax rebates to encourage more people to recharge their dwellings. These electrification strategies could also have a major impact nationwide given that homes produce 20 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. For our next installment of Climate Fix, Forum’s monthly collaboration with KQED’s Science team, we’ll talk about electrification as a growing strategy for addressing climate change.Guests:Laura Klivans, climate reporter, KQEDSam Calisch, chief scientist, Channing Street Copper - a Berkeley-based company that makes induction stoves. He is also a founding staffer and advisor to Rewiring America and is known as Mr. Heat Pump, a persona who educates people about heat pumpsMark Hall, CEO and founder, Revalue.io - a company that helps homeowners transition to clean energy sources for their homesAlejandra Mejia Cunningham, senior building decarbonization advocate, Natural Resources Defense Council Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices