One Planet Podcast · Climate Change, Politics, Sustainability, Environmental Solutions, Renewable Energy, Activism, Biodiversity, Carbon Footprint, Wildlife, Regenerative Agriculture, Circular Economy, Extinction, Net-Zero

"There's no question, we are in a state of conservation emergency. And we have a real situation on our hands and it's so fragile that if we take a step back, we could say goodbye to two types of chimpanzee species and the forest is also on the brink of disappearing forever. And when I started as a conservation researcher, there was kidnapping and insecurity throughout the Nile Delta region, and it was immersed in a lot of oil politics and civil conflicts. Kidnapping and insecurity ran throughout that region. Let's not forget that Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation now. We are over 200 million people in the country, and it's a growing population of young people who are looking for means of livelihood and on the lookout to find space to live. So parts of the forest within one year would suddenly become a new village."Rachel Ashegbofeh Ikemeh is a Whitley Award-winning conservationist and Founder/Director at the Southwest Niger Delta Forest Project, a grassroots-focused conservation initiative that has been dedicated to the  protection of fragile wildlife populations and habitat across her project sites in Africa’s most populous nation. Rachel won the award in 2020 for her work on chimpanzee populations in Nigeria and is aiming to secure 20% of chimpanzee habitat in Southwest Nigeria. She is also the winner of the National Geographic Society Buffet Awards for Conservaton Leadership in Africa, a Tusk Conservation Awards Finalist.She works to protect some of the most highly threatened forest habitats and primate populations in southern Nigeria. For example, Rachel’s determined efforts has helped to bring back a species from the brink of extinction – the rare and critically endangered Niger Delta red colobus monkey, also, considered one of 25 most endangered primates in the world. She has helped to establish two protected areas and have also taken on the management of these PAs to restore habitats in these very highly threatened ecosystems which are also areas of high-security risks in the country.Rachel is the Co-Vice Chair for the IUCN/SSC Primate Specialist Group African Section and Member of the International Primatological Society (IPS) education committee. Through her strategic positions in these networks, Rachel has been committed to championing the need to increase conservation leadership amongst Africans as she co-founded the African Primatological society in 2017. She’s trained the 55 persons that make up her team from local institutions and local communities. https://swnigerdeltaforestproject.org.ngwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Rachel Ashegbofeh Ikemeh is a Whitley Award-winning conservationist and Founder/Director at the Southwest Niger Delta Forest Project, a grassroots-focused conservation initiative that has been dedicated to the  protection of fragile wildlife populations and habitat across her project sites in Africa’s most populous nation. Rachel won the award in 2020 for her work on chimpanzee populations in Nigeria and is aiming to secure 20% of chimpanzee habitat in Southwest Nigeria. She is also the winner of the National Geographic Society Buffet Awards for Conservaton Leadership in Africa, a Tusk Conservation Awards Finalist.She works to protect some of the most highly threatened forest habitats and primate populations in southern Nigeria. For example, Rachel’s determined efforts has helped to bring back a species from the brink of extinction – the rare and critically endangered Niger Delta red colobus monkey, also, considered one of 25 most endangered primates in the world. She has helped to establish two protected areas and have also taken on the management of these PAs to restore habitats in these very highly threatened ecosystems which are also areas of high-security risks in the country.Rachel is the Co-Vice Chair for the IUCN/SSC Primate Specialist Group African Section and Member of the International Primatological Society (IPS) education committee. Through her strategic positions in these networks, Rachel has been committed to championing the need to increase conservation leadership amongst Africans as she co-founded the African Primatological society in 2017. She’s trained the 55 persons that make up her team from local institutions and local communities. "There's no question, we are in a state of conservation emergency. And we have a real situation on our hands and it's so fragile that if we take a step back, we could say goodbye to two types of chimpanzee species and the forest is also on the brink of disappearing forever. And when I started as a conservation researcher, there was kidnapping and insecurity throughout the Nile Delta region, and it was immersed in a lot of oil politics and civil conflicts. Kidnapping and insecurity ran throughout that region. Let's not forget that Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation now. We are over 200 million people in the country, and it's a growing population of young people who are looking for means of livelihood and on the lookout to find space to live. So parts of the forest within one year would suddenly become a new village."https://swnigerdeltaforestproject.org.ngwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

"The Inland Sea came out in 2020. And in that period as I was writing it, I would keep noticing each year would be 'the worst on record.' Like the hottest day on record, the most fires on record. And there was a sort of strangeness to having written the book in a period of Black Summer fires that burned for nearly six months and just decimated huge sways of land. In 2020, I had gone back to the Sydney Writers Festival and spent some time with family, and then just got stuck for months in the COVID lockdown. And I would go on runs into these stretches of bushland that had been burned, and I would make my way through these skeleton forests. The trees were black. The soil was black. There was no color at all. No bird song. No insects. And it was March. There should have been so much wildlife. It was deeply eerie."Madeleine Watts is an Australian writer based in New York. Her first novel The Inland Sea was published in 2020 and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. Her essays and stories have been published in Harper’s Magazine, The Believer, The Guardian, The White Review, and The Paris Review Daily, among others. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University in New York. Her second novel, Elegy, Southwest, is forthcoming.www.madeleinewatts.comwww.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/667704/the-inland-sea-by-madeleine-wattswww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Madeleine Watts is an Australian writer based in New York. Her first novel The Inland Sea was published in 2020 and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. Her essays and stories have been published in Harper’s Magazine, The Believer, The Guardian, The White Review, and The Paris Review Daily, among others. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University in New York. Her second novel, Elegy, Southwest, is forthcoming."The Inland Sea came out in 2020. And in that period as I was writing it, I would keep noticing each year would be 'the worst on record.' Like the hottest day on record, the most fires on record. And there was a sort of strangeness to having written the book in a period of Black Summer fires that burned for nearly six months and just decimated huge sways of land. In 2020, I had gone back to the Sydney Writers Festival and spent some time with family, and then just got stuck for months in the COVID lockdown. And I would go on runs into these stretches of bushland that had been burned, and I would make my way through these skeleton forests. The trees were black. The soil was black. There was no color at all. No bird song. No insects. And it was March. There should have been so much wildlife. It was deeply eerie."www.madeleinewatts.comwww.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/667704/the-inland-sea-by-madeleine-wattswww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Adam Aron is a Professor in the Psychology Dept at UC San Diego. His research and teaching focus on the social science of collective action on the climate crisis. His climate activism has been through the Green New Deal at UC San Diego where he has worked on several campaigns such as fossil fuel divestment and also campus decarbonization via ElectrifyUC and he has also produced the documentary Coming Clean. Before switching to the climate crisis, Adam had a successful career in cognitive neuroscience. He earned his PhD from the University of Cambridge, and was a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA.“Psychology has something to tell us about why so few people are really engaged in the climate struggle. There are different components to this. First of all, there is what I call epistemic skepticism in the book, which is to say, skepticism about the facts of climate change. The second thing is threat perception, that threat levels are not as high as they should be. And the third is that people are skeptical about the response. They don't think that they can do anything, or they don't believe that groups or even countries can make a difference. Epistemic skepticism: psychologically this means that quite a lot of people, for example, the United States, don't believe in the human cause of heating. And the reason for that is very much to do in fact, with the systematic campaign of misinformation that's been fostered by the fossils industry, systematically set out to confuse people about the scientific consensus. We should be very threatened by this. In fact, the youth, generally speaking, are anxious to some extent about it. In effect, Mother Earth is saying, "I can't deal with what you're doing to me, people. I'm putting up my temperature." And if you're not feeling anxious, then you're not paying attention. That's the right way to feel on Planet Earth.”https://aronlab.org/climate-psychology-and-action-labhttps://ucsdgreennewdeal.nethttps://electrifyuc.org/www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N_dq9J7mDYJudith Butler on “Speaking Out of Place”: “In this work we see how every critical analysis of homelessness, displacement, internment, violence, and exploitation is countered by emergent and intensifying social movements that move beyond national borders to the ideal of a planetary alliance. As an activist and a scholar, Palumbo-Liu shows us what vigilance means in these times.  This book takes us through the wretched landscape of our world to the ideals of social transformation, calling for a place, the planet, where collective passions can bring about a true and radical democracy.”David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He has written widely on issues of literary criticism and theory, culture and society, race, ethnicity and indigeneity, human rights, and environmental justice. His books include The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age, and Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Al Jazeera, Jacobin, Truthout, and other venues.www.palumbo-liu.com https://twitter.com/palumboliu?s=20

Sagarika Sriram is currently a student at Jumeirah College in Dubai. She founded the organization Kids4abetterworld when she was 10 years old with a mission to educate and encourage young children to lead a more sustainable life and reduce their carbon footprint. Children are the worst affected by the effects of climate change,  yet most children do not participate in climate change discussions or take actions to live more sustainably because they do not have the awareness and capability to do so. Kids4abetterworld conducts awareness workshops on sustainability aiming to Educate, Motivate and Activate young children to  conserve natural resources, protect biodiversity, and positively  impact climate change. As a UN Climate Advisor, she has participated in the global consultations that will ensure children are made aware of their environmental rights and that UN member states protect and uphold these. Kids4abetterworld is a platform for young children  to connect  across the globe as they adopt sustainable lifestyles and drive systemic solutions to the climate crisis.www.k4bworld.comwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Listen to Part 4 of this Special Series with music courtesy of composer Max Richter. All voices on this episode are from our interviews for The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast:INGRID NEWKIRK, Founder & President of PETA - People for the Ethical Treatment of AnimalsJEFFREY D. SACHS, President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Director of Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University, Economist, AuthorJENNIFER MORGAN, Fmr. Executive Director of Greenpeace International, Special Envoy for International Climate Action, German Foreign MinistryMERLIN SHELDRAKE, Biologist & Bestselling Author of “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures”, Winner of the Wainwright Prize 2021WALTER STAHEL, Architect, Economist, Founding Father of Circular Economy, Founder-Director, Product-Life InstituteARMOND COHEN, Executive Director of Clean Air Task ForcePIA MANCINI, Co-founder/CEO of Open Collective - Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation, YGL World Economic ForumRON GONEN, Founder & CEO of Closed Loop Partners, Former Deputy Commissioner of Sanitation, Recycling & Sustainability, NYCAIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL, Poet & Author of “World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks and Other Astonishments”ANA CASTILLO, Award-Winning Xicana Activist, Editor, Poet, Novelist & Artistwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcastwww.maxrichtermusic.comhttps://studiorichtermahr.comMax Richter’s music featured in this episode are “On the Nature of Daylight” from The Blue Notebooks, “Path 19: Yet Frailest” from Sleep.Music is courtesy of Max Richter, Universal Music Enterprises, and Mute Song.Artwork: Saudade, Mia Funk

Ashley Dawson is Professor of English at the Graduate Center / City University of New York and the College of Staten Island. Recently published books of his focus on key topics in the Environmental Humanities, and include People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons (O/R, 2020), Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (Verso, 2017), and Extinction: A Radical History (O/R, 2016). Dawson is the author of a forthcoming book entitled Environmentalism from Below (Haymarket) and the co-editor of Decolonize Conservation! (Common Notions, 2023). “The message is that indigenous sovereignty is connected to the preservation of biodiversity. And right now the statistics are really shocking on so-called protected areas, which currently constitute 17% of the planet. And the goal coming out of that Montreal conference for the biodiversity crisis last autumn is to roughly double that amount of protected areas, right? So the slogan was 30 by 30. 30% of the planet in protected area status by 2030. So we're really talking about massive expansion of protected areas. But within protected areas themselves, according to recent reports, only about 1% of the land actually has indigenous sovereignty. There are other arrangements like co-management, for instance, or indigenous people who are kind of encouraged to see their claims to conservation organizations with the guarantee that it will be protected and they'll have access of some kind. But, you know, as some of the indigenous activists who appeared at this conference and who are in the Decolonize Conservation! book said, they don't like the idea of co-management because it's essentially colonialism. They want control of their land.”https://ashleydawson.info www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2101-environmentalism-from-below#:~:text=Environmentalism%20from%20Below%20takes%20readers,fight%20to%20protect%20imperiled%20worlds https://viacampesina.org/en/ www.shackdwellersnamibia.comwww.palumbo-liu.com  https://twitter.com/palumboliu?s=20

Listen to Part 3 of this Special Series with music courtesy of composer Max Richter.All voices on this episode are from our interviews for The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast:PAULA PINHO, Director of Just Transition at the European Commission Directorate-General for EnergyPIA MANCINI, Co-founder/CEO of Open Collective - Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation, YGL World Economic ForumJENNIFER MORGAN, Fmr. Executive Director of Greenpeace International, Special Envoy for International Climate Action, German Foreign MinistryWALTER STAHEL, Architect, Economist, Founding Father of Circular Economy, Founder-Director, Product-Life InstituteMERLIN SHELDRAKE, Biologist & Bestselling Author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, Winner of the Wainwright Prize 2021RON GONEN, Founder & CEO of Closed Loop Partners, Former Deputy Commissioner of Sanitation, Recycling & Sustainability, NYCMANUELA LUCÁ-DAZIO, Executive Director, Pritzker Architecture Prize, Fmr. Exec. Director of Venice Biennale, Visual Arts & Architecture Dept.NICHOLAS ROYLE, Co-author of "An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory”, Author of “Mother: A Memoir”MARK BURGMAN, Director, Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, Editor-in-Chief, Conservation BiologyMIKE DAVIS, CEO of Global WitnessJAY FAMIGLIETTI, Fmr. Senior Water Scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Exec. Director, Global Institute for Water Security, Host of "What About Water?" PodcastBRITT WRAY, Author of “Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis”, Researcher Working on Climate Change & Mental Health, Stanford UniversityRICHARD VEVERS, Founder & CEO of The Ocean AgencyARMOND COHEN, Executive Director of Clean Air Task ForceBILL HARE, Founder & CEO of Climate Analytics, Physicist, Climate ScientistDAVID PALUMBO-LIU, Activist, Professor & Author of “Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back”, Host of Speaking out of Place PodcastIBRAHIM ALHUSSEINI, Founder & CEO of FullCycle Fund GAIA VINCE, Science Writer, Broadcaster & Author of “Transcendence” & “Adventures in the Anthropocene”INGRID NEWKIRK, Founder & President of PETA - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animalswww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcastwww.maxrichtermusic.comhttps://studiorichtermahr.comMax Richter’s music featured in this episode are “On the Nature of Daylight” from The Blue Notebooks, “Path 19: Yet Frailest” from Sleep.Music is courtesy of Max Richter, Universal Music Enterprises, and Mute Song.Artwork: Beneath the Ice, Mia Funk

Naomi Oreskes is Henry Charles Lea professor of the History of Science and affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. She is a world-renowned earth scientist, historian, and public speaker. Oreskes is a leading voice in the role of science in society, the reality of anthropogenic climate change, and the role of disinformation in blocking climate action.In 2010, she and her co-author Erik Conway published Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, where they identified something called the tobacco strategy that became paradigmatic in terms of corporate efforts to debunk science.This discovery led them to explore more deeply and more broadly the attack on science. They found that as science was demoted, the idea of market fundamentalism or the “magic of the market” became a mantra that covered up corporate malfeasance. In today's program, we discuss Oreskes’ and Conway's new book, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.https://histsci.fas.harvard.edu/people/naomi-oreskeswww.bloomsbury.com/us/big-myth-9781635573572/Judith Butler on “Speaking Out of Place”: “In this work we see how every critical analysis of homelessness, displacement, internment, violence, and exploitation is countered by emergent and intensifying social movements that move beyond national borders to the ideal of a planetary alliance. As an activist and a scholar, Palumbo-Liu shows us what vigilance means in these times.  This book takes us through the wretched landscape of our world to the ideals of social transformation, calling for a place, the planet, where collective passions can bring about a true and radical democracy.”David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He has written widely on issues of literary criticism and theory, culture and society, race, ethnicity and indigeneity, human rights, and environmental justice. His books include The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age, and Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Al Jazeera, Jacobin, Truthout, and other venues.www.palumbo-liu.com https://twitter.com/palumboliu?s=20https://speakingoutofplace.comPhoto credit: Kayana Szymczak