Is climate news stressing you out? Same. We're experiencing funding cuts to environmental agencies, while climate disasters like heatwaves and storms persist, and wildlife and environmental protections are at risk. It's a tough time to be an environmentalist, and all this stress and sadness can lead to climate anxiety (aka eco-anxiety).

If you've felt anxious about the state of our climate, you're not alone. We thought it was a perfect time to bring back this episode from last season, where we hear from you our listeners, to hear various ways to cope with climate anxiety through nature, community, and gratitude.

If you're looking for more resources to help with climate anxiety, we highly recommend this list from the team at All We Can Save.

🌎 For photos of our contributors and further reading, check the full show notes.

📞 We'd love to hear from you! Submit to the show.

📱 To join the Commons community, download the app.

📷 Follow Second Nature on Instagram.

Episode Credits

• Listener contributions: Adyasha, Artie Sadahiro, Camille, Liv, Natalie Pullen, Nick Blocha, Savannah Vize
• Editing and engineer: Evan Goodchild‍
• Hosting and production: Katelan Cunningham

-> Stop State AI Regulation Ban in the "One Big Beautiful Bill" Act

When you ask ChatGPT to write a cover letter, make your grocery list, or edit an image, what's actually happening in the real world? As AI gets bigger by the day, it's requiring more and more energy, water, and land in communities around the world.

Tech companies are investing billions of dollars in data centers and technologies to power AI, but are they also investing in sustainable and equitable resources to keep it going?

Today, we’re going to take a step back from the chatbots to understand the true impact of AI, how we’re tracking and regulating that impact, and we’ll find out what it will take to build a sustainable future for AI.

🌎 See photos of our contributors and find further reading in the full show notes.

📱 To join the Commons community, download the app.

📷 Follow Second Nature on Instagram.

Episode Credits

• Listener contributions: Kylie Kovatch, Artie Sadahiro, Nicole Collins, Parisa Golchoubian, Brian Stancheski
• Editing and engineer: Evan Goodchild‍
• Hosting and production: Katelan Cunningham

Farmers market season is upon us! As we've started seeing spring crops here at markets in the Northern Hemisphere, we're thinking about the power of locally grown food. As our food supply chains have gone global — we’ve gained more access to nutritious foods in areas where they may be hard to grow — but we’ve lost touch with seasonality and the source of our food. And we’ve lost touch with plenty of foods altogether.

Locally grown food not only gives us more nutrients, but done right, it can bring biodiversity to local land, build climate resilience, and even offer diversity and economic resilience in our communities.

Today we're reconnecting to local food through our global community, connecting the dots between food justice and equity,
and learning more about how our food system favors big agriculture.

🌎 See photos of our contributors and find further reading in the full show notes.

📱 To join the Commons community, download the app.

📷 Follow Second Nature on Instagram.

Episode Credits

• Listener contributions: Elizabeth, Stella, Joao Vilca Soto, Lin Diaz Maceo, Airlea Rasul, Jessika
• Editing and engineer: Evan Goodchild‍
• Hosting and production: Katelan Cunningham

Microplastics are seemingly everywhere, even our clothes. From production through wash days, synthetic fabrics are shedding microplastics into the air and water. It's a big issue that's going to take shifts from manufacturing to our own homes, and we wanted to start tackling this big discussion with the help of our friends at the podcast, Conscious Chatter.

Earlier this year, host Kestrel Jenkins spoke with Dana Zhaxylykova. Dana is an environmental scientist and microplastics researcher, who's originally from Kazakhstan and currently based in Germany. She uses Instagram to share practical and actionable tips about microplastics through a scientific lens.

👖 Hear more from Kestrel and Conscious Chatter here.
📷 Follow Conscious Chatter on Instagram.

📱 To join the Commons community, download the app.

📷 Follow Second Nature on Instagram.

• (00:00) - Tempo: 120.0

The climate crisis has a way of making hard things even harder — and that includes gender disparities. From their professional lives to their personal lives, climate change has left many women vastly under-resourced and at risk, all while taking on the heavy toll of caring for their families and communities through climate mitigation and resilience.

In this episode, we hear how the climate gender gap is affecting our community, talk to WOCAN founder Jeannette Gurung about how women continue to work through vast climate inequities around the world, and we hear from Commons' founder and CEO Sanchali Seth Pal about how health disparities women face as a result of climate disaster.

🌎 See photos of our contributors and find further reading in the full show notes.

📱 To join the Commons community, download the app.

📷 Follow Second Nature on Instagram.

Episode Credits

• Listener contributions: Aliya Hirji, Lin Diaz Maceo, Nicole Collins, Sobia Zaidi
• Editing and engineer: Evan Goodchild‍
• Hosting and production: Katelan Cunningham

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (01:57) - How gender perceptions affect sustainable behavior
• (04:50) - How our community experiences the climate gender gap
• (10:50) - Interview with WOCAN founder, Jeannette Gurung
• (25:21) - How climate change is disproportionately affecting women's health
• (31:52) - Outro

Planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence have us in a disposable consumption cycle. But it hasn't always been this way. When and why did we stop thinking things were worth fixing?

In this episode, we get a history lesson in planned obsolescence, visit Adrienne Ferre, who is helping run a Makers Hub in LA, complete with a tool library and repair cafes. And we catch up on Right to Repair legislation with Commons' founder and CEO Sanchali Seth Pal.

🌎 See photos of our contributors and find further reading in the full show notes.

📞 We'd love to hear from you! Season 3 submissions coming soon!

📱 To join the Commons community, download the app.

📷 Follow Second Nature on Instagram.

Episode Credits

• Listener contributions: Holly Kane, Katrina Rodabaugh, Maya Roman, Sare, Taylor Barkley, Verity
• Editing and engineer: Evan Goodchild‍
• Hosting and production: Katelan Cunningham

• (00:00) - Tempo: 120.0

This episode originally aired on June 12, 2024.

Becoming more conscious consumers is a pivotal step in building a more sustainable economy, but how do we deconsume in a consumerist world? When we buy less, we save money, cut down on clutter, and lower our emissions. This collective shift has another big impact — helping us to steer the economy away from disposable products, unsustainable resource use, and dangerous supply chains.

On this episode of Second Nature, we hear listeners' take on overconsumption and their tips for deconsumption. We also chat with climate activist and educator Lauren Bash about Buy Nothing groups, Repair Cafes, and her own deconsumption journey. Plus, we find out who's doing all this overconsuming and the impact it's having on the rest of the world.

🌎 To see photos of our contributors as well as citations, and further reading, check the full show notes.

📞 We'd love to hear from you! Submit to the show.

📱 To join the Commons community, download the app.

📷 Follow Second Nature on Instagram.

A great way to cut down on overconsumption is to get a handle on what you’re consuming. If you want a sustainable spending buddy to help you track the emissions of every purchase and gives you personalized tips, try the Commons app.

Episode credits

• Listener contributions: Alyssa Barber, Amea Wadsworth, Andrea Reno, Caitlyn Luitjens, Daria Panova, Jonas Schäfer, Mac Hansen, Madeline Streilein, Nicole Collins, Rachel Orenstein, Timmin Vooijs, Willa Stoutenbeek‍
• Featuring: Lauren Bash and Sanchali Seth Pal‍
• Editing and engineer: Evan Goodchild‍
• Hosting and production: Katelan Cunningha

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (04:06) - Overconsumption is everywhere
• (06:47) - Why does stuff make us so happy? We ask our community
• (10:05) - How do we overcome overconsumption? We ask Lauren Bash.
• (22:33) - What is the big-picture impact of all this stuff we’re buying? And what are we doing with it?
• (28:16) - Outro

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Often on urban lots, behind chain link fences, adorned with hand-painted signs, plots burgeoning with fruits, vegetables, and flowers, flanked by compost piles — the humble community garden feels like a salve for so much that ails us.

On this Community Voices episode, we're going from Los Angeles to Brazil to hear how community gardens have brought people much more than fresh fruits and vegetables. With food prices on the rise and so many of us losing touch with the abundance of our communities, we thought it’d be nice to hear how community gardens have helped you, our community.

🌎 See photos of our contributors and find further reading in the full show notes.

📞 We'd love to hear from you! Season 3 submissions coming soon!

📱 To join the Commons community, download the app.

📷 Follow Second Nature on Instagram.

Episode Credits

• Listener contributions: Dr. Sheridan Ross, Alexa Rivera, Clara, Nick Blocha, Camille
• Editing and engineer: Evan Goodchild‍
• Hosting and production: Katelan Cunningham

• (00:00) - Introduction and the origin of community gardens
• (03:49) - Dr. Sheridan Ross in Compton Community Garden
• (06:54) - Nick in Illinois
• (09:05) - Camille in San Diego, California
• (10:29) - Alexa in Los Angeles, California
• (13:10) - Clara in Floripa, Brazil