Planet: Critical

Which papers are telling the truth? And which are giving inches to climate skeptics?In this episode, Lucy McAllister, Assistant Professor in Environmental Studies at Denison University, explains how journalism's obsession with "balance" causes bias in climate reporting. She walks us through new research which shows how climate coverage accuracy has improved since the initial findings in 2004, but that there is still a significant divide between left-leaning and right-wing papers, specifically those owned by Rupert Murdoch.She also reveals how the tactics of muddling the discourse has become more sophisticated, with column inches now being given to climate skeptics or discourses of delays. Combatting this is critical, Lucy says, pointing to solutions journalism as critical in the fight to "reframe" narratives to empower communities around the world.“We're seeing media more accurately representing the science on climate change—climate change is happening, it's caused by humans. Now we're seeing in terms of climate action that climate skeptics, deniers, or discourses of delay, are being given more space in the news article, more power than like a relevant climate expert or policymaker.“So they're getting the science right but then when they're talking about the actual solution and action moving forward, we're still seeing this problematic balance issue where one side is being favored.”Referenced Papers/Articles:* Balance as Bias: global warming and the US prestige press* Balance as bias, resolute on the retreat? Updates & analyses of newspaper coverage in the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia and Canada over the past 15 years* Positive, global, and health or environment framing bolsters public support for climate policies* Tactical framing around the Green New Deal* Discourses of Climate Delay* Media Representations of Climate Change: A Meta-Analysis of the Research Field* The International Reporting of Climate Scepticism* The 2021 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: code red for a healthy futureLucy McAllister is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Denison University. Prior to this position, she worked at the Technical University of Munich, Babson College, and Boston College. Lucy's interdisciplinary research focuses on the framing of overlapping global environmental injustices—climate change and hazardous waste—and the disproportionate impact on minorities, women, children, future generations, and other stigmatized groups. Broadly, her research explores how we communicate and perceive social harms and environmental injustices, and therefore informs work on inclusive, interdisciplinary solutions. She has published research in several outlets, such as Environmental Research Letters, The Lancet, The Lancet Planetary Health, Health and Human Rights, Science and Engineering Ethics, and the Sociology of Development. Lucy is a part of the research group at the Media and Climate Change Observatory, University of Colorado Boulder.  Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.© Rachel Donald Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

You can’t go green without going small.Our fossil-fuelled economy is destabilising the planet. But a renewable economy might not be much better. Simon Michaux and his team at the Geological Survey of Finland have been researching how much minerals and materials we have on earth to build our renewable energy. They’ve found that we simply do not have enough—and mining for those materials would bears a huge environmental cost.On this episode, Simon walks us through the research, the possible outcomes from calculated energy contraction to collapse, what policymakers are doing with this information, and how the geopolitics of the US-China proxy war could make the green transition impossible for the West.“Renewables get cheaper when it's still a small system. But if it can be shown that we don't have enough minerals in the ground to make a replacement system, we will hit an asymptote in the market where all of a sudden there's now scarcity of metal supply, and the systems you want to use are no longer available on the market…“So when I say s**t's gonna get real, it’s when the mining industry now has to run in a situation where it is on non-fossil fuel systems only; the manufacturing supply chain at the moment is only conceptual and we just haven't thought it through. Fossil fuels are a hidden subsidy for everything. Take that away and you've now got a hidden penalty.“I think a lot of mining and a lot of manufacturing will just simply stop.”Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.© Rachel Donald Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

When institutions fail—communities take back control.Community organising has never been more important in a world where people are increasingly isolated from one another, competing in a deliberately precarious market, dislocated from their culture, their land, their history. We experienced the power of community resilience during the pandemic, and the deep desire to help and rebuild. Humankind has a long history of doggedly overcoming the odds when facing a crisis. But we don’t have to rely on a crisis to push us over the edge—and the coming crisis will be much worse than anything we’ve ever experienced.CIVIC SQUARE in Birmingham is infrastructure for the public good, embedded in the local community’s needs, dreams and desires. Launched by the team who ran Impact Hub for five years, CIVIC SQUARE is reimagining the public space as a neighbourhood that fosters the convening of ideas in a participatory ecosystem.Immy Kaur is the co-founder of CIVIC SQUARE. She explains the history of community organising which led to this immense project, detailing how to leverage systemic change and nurture imagination. She explains the history between public good, government and industry, the importance of knowledge, and the role communities will face in the upcoming crisis.See also WeCanMake in Bristol.“You get to a stage where those systems are crumbling. You start to see a resilience, an organising, a healing, a coming together, that cannot be organised by the conglomerates, that cannot be manipulated by the mainstream media.”Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.© Rachel Donald Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

How can we change an economic system that has a life of its own?10,000 years ago, homo sapiens began farming a grain surplus. This surplus led to the creation of societal and cultural hierarchies which divorced our species from our long relationship with the natural world.This week’s guest, Lisi Krall, argues that our current economic system of fossil-fuelled capitalism is an interpretation of that same system—and we must repair our relationship to the more-than-human world if we are to change the system. But it is a momentous challenge. One, she argues, we must not think culture alone can overcome.Lisi Krall is a Professor of Economics at the State University of New York Cortland where she researches political economy, human ecology, and the evolution of economic systems. She's also the author of Bitter Harvest: An Inquiry into the War Between Economy and Earth.“Agriculture severs the ties of humans to the more-than-human world. We're no longer embedded in the rhythm and dynamic of the more-than-human world.“But the development of capitalism is a particular institutional and energetic interpretation of what began with agriculture. You get this expansive, dynamic, interdependent system, growth system that functions unto itself as if it isn't connected to its biophysical roots.”Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.© Rachel Donald Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

Our scientific model of the universe is changing.From the mechanistic, rational ideas of the 20th century, physics is now understanding that the universe itself is conscious—that we are all expressions of consciousness. Looks like those indigenous teachers were right.On this episode, Jude Currivan, cosmologist and author of The Story of Gaia, walks us through all of the evidence we have to suggest that the universe is conscious, from the latest Nobel Prize Award in physics to thousands of years of spiritual wisdom. Jude then explains the necessity of a new worldview of unity and wholeness to help mitigate the crises that we are seeing, whether these are human crises or the climate crisis, and become the next stage in this evolution of universal consciousness.“Our universe, we're now discovering, is innately intelligent, and its innate intelligence is meaningfully informed in a way through the laws of physics and through their relationships to enable it to not just exist, but to evolve from that first moment 13.8 billion years ago—from its initial simplicity to ever greater levels of complexity and diversity.”Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.© Rachel Donald Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

What if we educated young people in how to change the world?Black Mountains College is the world’s first college dedicated to the climate crisis. The inaugural Bachelors, Sustainability: Arts, Ecology and Systems Change launches this September, aiming to educate young people in how to navigate the polycrisis, and how to steer us to safety. Set in the heart of the Brecon Beacons National Park in Wales, BMC focuses on the challenge of our times: how to build a fair and just society within safe planetary boundaries.Owen Sheers, the college co-founder joins me to discuss the college and its aims. Owen is a writer and professor in creative practice at Swansea University. Along with his co-founder, Ben Rawlence, they’ve put creativity and systems thinking at the heart of this educational experiment, firmly believing that unlocking the imagination of young people—along with teaching them the connectivity and complexity of the natural world—will give our future leaders the knowledge and ideas we need to implement to build a better world.“The climate crisis, the ecological crisis, is a wicked problem. You can't address it by following a single discipline, it's entirely interrelated, and our learning in the face of it has to be as well. This isn't going to work if we stay within our silos.”Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.© Rachel Donald Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

We’re in planetary overshoot. So why are governments coercing women into having children?Nandita Bajaj is the Executive Director of Population Balance, an organisation offering education and solutions to address the intersectional impacts of human overpopulation and over consumption on the planet, people and animals. Nandita also co-hosts The Overpopulation Podcast, and teaches at the Institute for humane education at Antioch university, where she researches prenatal ism and human supremacy and their impacts on reproductive ecological and intergenerational justice.This episode is about the dangers of pronatalism. Nandita reveals how the coercive pronatalist policies around the world coupled with cultural mechanisms are causing a devastating impact on the planet. She also explains how existing power structures benefit from a growing population, illustrating how our economic obsession with growth demands exponential population growth. Nandita also explores the elevation of rights—human, species and natural—as a cornerstone climate policy to tackle population and create a sustainable world for everyone, and everything.“Who benefits from shaming people who do not have children, or glorifying large families? Pushing marriage, pushing children, keeps corporations, the baby industry, the car industry, the housing industry, the property development industry, in business.“All lines, for the most part, lead to growth: Growth in your own kind, growth in GDP, growth in consumerism, growth of religion, growth of a certain ethnic tribe. And all of those things undermine not just reproductive autonomy, they undermine the rights of the children that are simply seen as commodities to continue on that growth.”Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.© Rachel Donald Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

People all around the world wonder what makes human beings so special. One scientist flipped the question on its head: What got in the way of other species developing a similar consciousness?Ajit Varki met Danny Bower, the man behind the theory, by chance at a conference. They spoke for two hours and never met again. Bower died before having published his theory, but Varki received the manuscript from Danny’s widow. Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind proposes a new theory of the origins of the human species. Bower and Varki suggest that human beings became aware of their own mortality and simultaneously, to deal with the terror of that knowledge, developed a profound capacity for reality denial.Ajit Varki is a physician-scientist and distinguished professor of medicine and cellular and molecular medicine, co-director of the Glycobiology Research and Training Center at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and co-director of the UCSD/Salk Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA).“Everywhere you look, humans are ignoring reality – earthquakes happen and people go back and build in the same space again: “It's not gonna happen to me.”“What is optimism? Denial of reality. What is extreme optimism? Extreme denial of reality. If you didn't have optimism, humans couldn't move forward. We just ignore everything. We corrupt reality at our will look. Just look around the world today and see what's going on. What person on the people on the planet today is not ignoring reality?”Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.© Rachel Donald Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

What if a nation built policies for the future, not the election cycle?Sophie Howe was the world’s first “commissioner for the unborn”, appointed to steer Welsh politics away from short-term electoral goals to long-term policies that protect the population and planet. During her seven year term she achieved incredible successes—including stopping all new road planning projects in the nation.Sophie joins me to discuss the Future Generations Act, the progressive piece of legislation that led to her appointment and makes it statutory that the Welsh government keep seven long-term goals in mind: prosperity, resilience, health, equality, community, culture and global responsibility. She explains how the Act has transformed education, culture and political thinking in the modest nation in a short time—and why other governments around the world are putting their own Acts through parliament as we speak.“You wouldn't think it was revolutionary for a country to have a set of long-term goals but it's completely revolutionary. There's no other country in the world that has that. It's all just short-term electoral cycles, so nobody really knows where we are, and therein lies the problem with the ageing population, with addressing issues around automation and AI, with addressing issues around climate.“These things span way beyond, and so the political system doesn't account for them. So having these seven long-term goals, it means, for Wales, we know where we're going.”Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.© Rachel Donald Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

If politics is broken—what's the alternative?Indra Adnan is an author, political entrepreneur and psychosocial therapist. She's also the founder of The Alternative UK political platform and a global consultant on soft power. For over twenty years, Indra has been writing, consulting, network-building and event-organising on the themes of future politics, conflict transformation, the role of the arts and integral thinking.She joins me to discuss the problem with narratives peddled by mainstream media, the power of story, and how to reimagine the story of now in order to get people excited about building a new future together. This episode covers so much, exploring conflict, creativity, education, the economy, disconnection, and gives a vision of a new politics centred around relationships.“Conflict can be the very thing that shows you what's wrong: there's something amiss with our relationships in this society, we need to flush this out. If you're doing it well, it can lead to the transformation of that society.“But if you're simply buying into the conflict as an opportunity to gain power over the other side, that it's a zero sum game, then it's going to lead to violence.”Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it.© Rachel Donald Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe