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

The planet’s well-being unites us all, from ecosystems to societies, global systems to individual health. How is planetary health linked to mental health?Charlie Hertzog Young is a researcher, writer and award-winning activist. He identifies as a “proudly mad bipolar double amputee” and has worked for the New Economics Foundation, the Royal Society of Arts, the Good Law Project, the Four Day Week Campaign and the Centre for Progressive Change, as well as the UK Labour Party under three consecutive leaders. Charlie has spoken at the LSE, the UN and the World Economic Forum. He studied at Harvard, SOAS and Schumacher College and has written for The Ecologist, The Independent, Novara Media, Open Democracy and The Guardian. He is the author of Spinning Out: Climate Change, Mental Health and Fighting for a Better Future.“There's that old saying, ‘blessed are the cracked for they shall let in the light.’ For a lot of people like myself, I think it's true that losing your mind can be a proportionate response to the climate crisis. Those of us with mental health issues are often branded as being in our own world. But paradoxically, being in our own world can actually be a result of being more connected to the outside world rather than less. And in the context of climate change, it may be fairer to describe people who fail to develop psychological symptoms as being in their own separate anthropocentric world, inattentive to the experiences of the billions of other human and nonhuman beings on the planet, unaffected by looming existential catastrophe. There are layers and layers of insulation made up of civilizational narratives that dislocate many people from climate chaos and those whose psyches buckle upon contact with this reality are the ones deemed mad. But this pathologizing is a defense mechanism employed by the civilized or by the dominant culture, which ends up subjugating those of us whose minds stray from accepted norms. There are lots of studies that show that certain forms of psychosis are actually a form of meaning-making for communities that feel like they have no sense of purpose. We've had generations and generations of trauma visited upon the human species by picking apart communities and our intimate relationships with nature. Especially since the 80s, picking apart our inability to even consider ourselves as part of society in a meaningful sense. That kind of pulling apart means that we're locked in quite individual and atomized spaces, where when something as massive as climate change starts to happen, people feel both responsible for it, and completely unable to do anything about it. That's not me saying that being depressed is the only objective kind of indicator for reality, but it's quite easy for the human species to underestimate or discount quite how significantly dangerous our situation is and people with depression are more able to see that with eyes unclouded by biases.”https://charliehertzogyoung.mehttps://footnotepress.com/books/spinning-out/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“When I broke it down for every inhabitant of planet Earth, I was staggered at how much money it is. So, if you take things like subsidies, and they could be consumption or production subsidies, it's less than a trillion. But then if you add in the costs of climate change and other damages done by using the fossil fuels, we come up to this figure of five trillion. And actually, in the last few years, it's been more than that. It's been up six and seven trillion, as well. For example, if we compare it with the amount that the governments of the West are supposed to supply each year in climate finance, which is a hundred billion, it's approximately one fiftieth of the amount that we're actually subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, which is the major cause of the problem.”The Five-pronged Clean Energy Future“I thought about it, and I was wondering, what do we actually need in the world? Because we don't need petrol and we don't need coal. We need energy to power various things. So, we need these energy services. So, what's the simplest way of providing all of the energy services? And it really seems to me that we can basically do it all with about five different types of goods. So the system of the future I put out in the book is first of all, you have the generation of electricity, which is mainly going to be with renewables, mainly with wind and solar because they are the cheapest and they're getting cheaper thanks to Wright's Law. Then you need energy storage and other means of sharing matching demand to supply. So, storage is the one that people will be most familiar with, which can be batteries, for example. And again, the price of batteries has also plummeted about 85 percent price reduction in a decade. And it continues because, again, we have mounting volumes. In a competitive market, there's lots of innovation going on in terms of battery design, in terms of construction, and all of this stuff, new materials coming into batteries. So, that's your first two, that's your renewable generation and your battery storage. Electric vehicles will be the main method of transportation. Already, they dominate sales in the two-wheeler market in China and India. They're already eating into global oil demand. They're taking about 1.5 percent of global oil demand already, and the sales are increasing exponentially in China and other countries as well. They are cost-competitive. It's just on the purchase price in some markets with some models now. And it's going to get cheaper again because battery costs will fall. Heating and cooling, which is a big demand for energy. We can use heat pumps, which are super efficient running on electricity…Hydrogen, that will probably be the fifth prong, but a smaller prong, rather like the little finger on your hand.”Richard Black spent 15 years as a science and environment correspondent for the BBC World Service and BBC News, before setting up the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit. He now lives in Berlin and is the Director of Policy and Strategy at the global clean energy think tank Ember, which aims to accelerate the clean energy transition with data and policy. He is the author of The Future of Energy; Denied:The Rise and Fall of Climate Contrarianism, and is an Honorary Research Fellow at Imperial College London.https://mhpbooks.com/books/the-future-of-energyhttps://ember-climate.org/about/people/richard-blackhttps://ember-climate.orgwww.therealpress.co.uk/?s=Richard+blackwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

How and when will we transition to a clean energy future? How will the transition empower individuals and transform global power dynamics? How did China become the world’s first electrostate, leading the drive for renewable energy, and what can we learn from this?Richard Black spent 15 years as a science and environment correspondent for the BBC World Service and BBC News, before setting up the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit. He now lives in Berlin and is the Director of Policy and Strategy at the global clean energy think tank Ember, which aims to accelerate the clean energy transition with data and policy.He is the author of The Future of Energy; Denied:The Rise and Fall of Climate Contrarianism, and is an Honorary Research Fellow at Imperial College London.“When I broke it down for every inhabitant of planet Earth, I was staggered at how much money it is. So, if you take things like subsidies, and they could be consumption or production subsidies, it's less than a trillion. But then if you add in the costs of climate change and other damages done by using the fossil fuels, we come up to this figure of five trillion. And actually, in the last few years, it's been more than that. It's been up six and seven trillion, as well. For example, if we compare it with the amount that the governments of the West are supposed to supply each year in climate finance, which is a hundred billion, it's approximately one fiftieth of the amount that we're actually subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, which is the major cause of the problem.”The Five-pronged Clean Energy Future“I thought about it, and I was wondering, what do we actually need in the world? Because we don't need petrol and we don't need coal. We need energy to power various things. So, we need these energy services. So, what's the simplest way of providing all of the energy services? And it really seems to me that we can basically do it all with about five different types of goods. So the system of the future I put out in the book is first of all, you have the generation of electricity, which is mainly going to be with renewables, mainly with wind and solar because they are the cheapest and they're getting cheaper thanks to Wright's Law. Then you need energy storage and other means of sharing matching demand to supply. So, storage is the one that people will be most familiar with, which can be batteries, for example. And again, the price of batteries has also plummeted about 85 percent price reduction in a decade. And it continues because, again, we have mounting volumes. In a competitive market, there's lots of innovation going on in terms of battery design, in terms of construction, and all of this stuff, new materials coming into batteries. So, that's your first two, that's your renewable generation and your battery storage. Electric vehicles will be the main method of transportation. Already, they dominate sales in the two-wheeler market in China and India. They're already eating into global oil demand. They're taking about 1.5 percent of global oil demand already, and the sales are increasing exponentially in China and other countries as well. They are cost-competitive. It's just on the purchase price in some markets with some models now. And it's going to get cheaper again because battery costs will fall. Heating and cooling, which is a big demand for energy. We can use heat pumps, which are super efficient running on electricity…Hydrogen, that will probably be the fifth prong, but a smaller prong, rather like the little finger on your hand.”https://mhpbooks.com/books/the-future-of-energyhttps://ember-climate.org/about/people/richard-blackhttps://ember-climate.orgwww.therealpress.co.uk/?s=Richard+blackwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“My production company SOC Films, which works out of Pakistan, has created more than 15 short films about climate change in the region, and created a book for children to talk about climate change heroes. Pakistan is one of the top 10 countries in the world most affected by climate change. And so at the heart of everything that I do, climate change matters greatly to me because I have a personal connection to it.I love to hike and I seek out mountains and quiet places where one can be in solitude with nature. I think that in the desire to expand and consume, we have really shaken the core of that connection that we have with Mother Earth — and I think that it's important. It's incumbent upon us to make sure that our children's generation and their children's generation have that same connection, where they can be in parts of the world where Mother Nature has been left to be in the state that it's meant to be in.”Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is an Oscar and Emmy award-winning Canadian-Pakistani filmmaker whose work highlights extraordinary women and their stories. She earned her first Academy Award in 2012 for her documentary Saving Face, about the Pakistani women targeted by brutal acid attacks. Today, Obaid-Chinoy is the first female film director to have won two Oscars by the age of 37. In 2023, it was announced that Obaid-Chinoy will direct the next Star Wars film starring Daisy Ridley. Her most recent project, co-directed alongside Trish Dalton, is the new documentary Diane von Fürstenberg: Woman in Charge, about the trailblazing Belgian fashion designer who invented the wrap dress 50 years ago. The film had its world premiere as the opening night selection at the 2024 Tribeca Festival on June 5th and premiered on June 25th on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ internationally. A product of Obaid-Chinoy's incredibly talented female filmmaking team, Woman in Charge provides an intimate look into Diane von Fürstenberg’s life and accomplishments and chronicles the trajectory of her signature dress from an innovative fashion statement to a powerful symbol of feminism.www.hulu.com/movie/diane-von-furstenberg-woman-in-charge-95fb421e-b7b1-4bfc-9bbf-ea666dba0b02https://www.disneyplus.com/movies/diane-von-furstenberg-woman-in-charge/1jrpX9AhsaJ6https://socfilms.comwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with acclaimed author and activist, and San Francisco legend, Chris Carlsson about his new novel, When Shells Crumble. It begins in December 2024, when the US Supreme Court nullifies the popular vote in the Presidential election and awards the presidency to an authoritarian Republican, who proceeds to demolish democracy and install a fascistic state that hastens ecological havoc. The novel is much more than your usual dystopian tale—it focuses on how to resist political cynicism and defeatism, and rebuild on planetary wreckage. It is a world-building project filled with wisdom, sadness, and joy. We specifically put this fictional text in conservation with his brilliant non-fiction work, Nowtopia, which offers a radical redefinition of “work” that restores dignity and value to their proper places.Chris Carlsson, co-director of the “history from below” project Shaping San Francisco, is a writer, publisher, editor, photographer, public speaker, and occasional professor. He was one of the founders in 1981 of the seminal and infamous underground San Francisco magazine Processed World. In 1992 Carlsson co-founded Critical Mass in San Francisco, which both led to a local bicycling boom and helped to incubate transformative urban movements in hundreds of cities, large and small, worldwide. In 1995 work began on “Shaping San Francisco;” since then the project has morphed into an incomparable archive of San Francisco history at Foundsf.org, award-winning bicycle and walking tours, and almost two decades of Public Talks covering history, politics, ecology, art, and more (see shapingsf.org). Beginning in Spring 2020, Carlsson has hosted Bay Cruises along the San Francisco shoreline.His latest novel, When Shells Crumble was published by Spuyten Duyvil in Brooklyn, NY at the end of 2023. At the dawn of the pandemic, he published a detailed historical guidebook of the city, Hidden San Francisco: A Guide to Lost Landscapes, Unsung Heroes, and Radical Histories (Pluto Press: 2020). His full-length nonfiction work Nowtopia(AK Press: 2008), offers a groundbreaking look at class and work while uniquely examining how hard and pleasantly we work when we’re not at our official jobs. He published his first novel, After The Deluge, in 2004, a story of post-economic utopian San Francisco in the year 2157. He has edited six books, including three “Reclaiming San Francisco” collections with the venerable City Lights Books. He redesigned and co-authored an expanded Vanished Waters: A History of San Francisco’s Mission Bay after which he joined the board of the Mission Creek Conservancy. He has given hundreds of public presentations based on Shaping San Francisco, Critical Mass, Nowtopia, Vanished Waters, and his “Reclaiming San Francisco” history anthologies since the late 1990s, and has appeared dozens of times in radio, television and on the internet.www.palumbo-liu.comhttps://speakingoutofplace.comhttps://twitter.com/palumboliu?s=20www.instagram.com/speaking_out_of_place

How can we show more kindness, respect, and love to the animals we share this planet with? What lessons can we learn from non-human animals about living in greater harmony with nature?Ingrid Newkirk is the Founder and President of PETA, actively leading the organization and advocating for animal rights. PETA is the largest animal rights organization in the world with more than 9 million members and supporters globally. Under her leadership, PETA has achieved significant victories, such as ending car-crash tests on animals, pushing major fashion brands to go fur-free, influencing Ringling Bros. to become an animal-free circus, and helping pass a law that allows the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to approve new medications without conducting cruel tests on animals. Ingrid has written 14 books and has been featured in major publications like The New Yorker and The Guardian, and was the subject of HBO's documentary I Am an Animal and was named one of Forbes’ “100 Most Powerful Women.” She joined One Planet Podcast to reflect on her 75 years as animal rights advocate.“I think things do change because of agitation. So agitation is vital. I mean, nobody who is in a cause should be there to win a popularity contest, whether you're working for children or the elderly or working for peace animals, it's all against nonviolence, aggression, domination, and needless cruelty and suffering. It's all for respect. So you have to be vigorous. You have to use your voice. You can use it politely, but if people don't listen, at PETA, we escalate. So we always start off with a polite letter, a polite entreaty. We always try to, as I say, do the homework. So we have the options that we put out on the table to say, look, instead of doing this, you could do that, and we will help you transition to that.They’re not human traits. They’re all shared traits because, of course, we all love. We all love our families, or not. We all grieve if somebody we love disappears or dies. A family dog, perhaps. A grandfather. We all feel loneliness, we all feel joy. We all really value our freedom. And so I think, if anything, looking into the eyes of the animal, even online, you see a person in there. There’s a someone in whatever the shape or the physical properties of that individual are. And that lesson is that I am you. You are me, only different. We are all the same in all the ways that count…Any living being teaches you– Look into my eyes. And there you are, the reflection of yourself. So we need to learn from the animals how to live more gently and consume less and be more thoughtful and look out for each other in this great circle of life.”www.peta.orgwww.ingridnewkirk.comwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“Getting people to care is the most important thing. I went all the way to the Maldives for research for my book How to Talk to a Science Denier because I wanted to see coral death. I wanted to see the Maldives. I wanted to see the country most under threat from climate change. One of my teachers was a 17 or 18-year-old kid who was the captain of a fishing boat. He said, "Oh, sir, outside the Maldives, no one cares." And that was when I realized that climate denial was not just about belief, it was about caring. He was right. Could you get people to care? How do you get people to care about what happens to the Maldives? They have to go there and meet people and/or know someone in order to care. I've been really fortunate in my life to have had so many teachers in that way, sometimes through short interactions.”Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science at the Aspen Institute. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. He has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean’s Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His books include On Disinformation and How to Talk to a Science Denier and the novels The Art of Good and Evil and The Sin Eater.https://leemcintyrebooks.comwww.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730833/on-disinformation-by-lee-mcintyrehttps://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545051/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-art-of-good-and-evil/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-sin-eater/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

How to talk to a science denier? How do we fight for truth and protect democracy in a post-truth world? How does bias affect our understanding of facts?Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science at the Aspen Institute. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. He has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean’s Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His books include On Disinformation and How to Talk to a Science Denier and the novels The Art of Good and Evil and The Sin Eater.“Getting people to care is the most important thing. I went all the way to the Maldives for research for my book How to Talk to a Science Denier because I wanted to see coral death. I wanted to see the Maldives. I wanted to see the country most under threat from climate change. One of my teachers was a 17 or 18-year-old kid who was the captain of a fishing boat. He said, "Oh, sir, outside the Maldives, no one cares." And that was when I realized that climate denial was not just about belief, it was about caring. He was right. Could you get people to care? How do you get people to care about what happens to the Maldives? They have to go there and meet people and/or know someone in order to care. I've been really fortunate in my life to have had so many teachers in that way, sometimes through short interactions.”https://leemcintyrebooks.comwww.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730833/on-disinformation-by-lee-mcintyrehttps://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545051/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-art-of-good-and-evil/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-sin-eater/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Stephen Wolfram is a computer scientist, mathematician, and theoretical physicist. He is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Language. He received his PhD in theoretical physics at Caltech by the age of 20 and in 1981, became the youngest recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Wolfram authored A New Kind of Science and launched the Wolfram Physics Project. He has pioneered computational thinking and has been responsible for many discoveries, inventions and innovations in science, technology and business.“It’s interesting to me that there are things that people have an intuitive sense of and have for a long, long time had an intuitive sense of that sometimes in science, there's been a tendency to say, "Oh, no, no, no. We have a particular way of thinking about things in science and that doesn't fit with it. So let's lock it out," so to speak. So an example of that, well, for example, animism; you mentioned this question of where are their minds? Is it reasonable to think of the weather as having a mind of its own? Is it reasonable to think of the forest as having a mind, so to speak? Well, in these kind of computational terms, yes, it does become reasonable to think about those things. Now if you say then, one comes to that idea from a place of formalized science, but nevertheless, it relates to sort of intuitions that people have had for a long time about that come from that didn't come from that particular kind of branch formalized thinking.”www.stephenwolfram.comwww.wolfram.comwww.wolframalpha.comwww.wolframscience.com/nks/www.amazon.com/dp/1579550088/ref=nosim?tag=turingmachi08-20www.wolframphysics.orgwww.wolfram-media.com/products/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“One thing I love about living in Crete is that the sense of the presence of nature is always here. I walk out the door and I can see the mountains around the city. I can see the White Mountains (Lefka Ori), which for half the year are covered in snow. I can see the sea. If you walk out in the summer, you're immediately aware of your physicality. You become dehydrated very quickly. It's not necessarily a kind environment for humans. It's not if you engage in any vigorous activity, but it's one that makes you feel vividly alive."Keith Frankish is an Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, a Visiting Research Fellow with The Open University, and an Adjunct Professor with the Brain and Mind Programme in Neurosciences at the University of Crete. Frankish mainly works in the philosophy of mind and has published widely about topics such as human consciousness and cognition. Profoundly inspired by Daniel Dennett, Frankish is best known for defending an “illusionist” view of consciousness. He is also editor of the journal Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness and co-edits, in addition to others, The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science."The area where I grew up, which is a very low-lying area, in a river valley, it was a landscape where nature felt very dormant. The skies would be gray. The landscape would be flat. There was also a lot of human activity in it. Canals, railway lines, coal mines. It was a land that felt as if it had been depressed, as if it had not been allowed to express itself somehow. And it's been carved up into fields and so on by humans.And so now here, it's the opposite. Although there is a lot of building in the particularly tourist areas, drive five minutes out of the city, and you're in a land of rugged land with almost desert in places. A land where you couldn't survive very long without proper water, in particular. It's a land where you feel the presence. And, also, another thing you feel here is periods of frequent earthquakes, and that again, is quite a salutary thing. When the Earth shakes like that, and you suddenly realize that this building, which seems wonderfully strong and well-equipped, is suddenly moving from side to side under Poseidon's influence. It makes you see how people could animate this landscape. It's a landscape that feels animated with presences, with gods, with non-human entities. There's a way of living, which involves engaging more deeply with the meaning of things, engaging not just living life on the surface, but trying to look for the deeper, for the real patterns, and living with that, not without pleasure, not without relishing life, but with relishing it for its complexity.”www.keithfrankish.comwww.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-handbook-of-cognitive-science/F9996E61AF5E8C0B096EBFED57596B42www.imprint.co.uk/product/illusionismwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast