As California looks forward (!) to the beginning of a new Presidential Administration, there is growing trepidation about what it might mean for the state. Is it time to secede and join with other West Coast states to create a new country?

Fifty years ago, Ernest Callenbach published Ecotopia, a vision of a new country dedicated to protecting people and the environment. In 2015, on the 40th anniversary of Ecotopia, UCSC held a conference called “Utopian Dreaming: 50 years of imagined futures in California and at UCSC.” Speakers included a number of academics, critics and dreamers. None of us, of course, imagined that Donald Trump might be the next President of the United States.

Listen to three talks from the conference: a keynote by Kim Stanley Robinson, best-known today for The Ministry of the Future; a critique by UC San Diego Professor of Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature Rosaura Sanchez; and an account of how Silicon Valley has become the generator of utopian and dystopian futures, by Fred Turner, Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University.

Robinson Sanchez Turner

You can find videos of the complete conference at https://www.youtube.com/@ronnielipschutz8900. And you can read an article on California eco-utopias at: https://ksqd.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Ecotopia-or-ecocatastrophe.pdf.

You probably receive an electricity bill every month from your local utility and, after complaining about it, dutifully pay it. But do you ever stop to read your electricity bill? If you are a customer of PG&E and, maybe, a local community choice aggregator, you receive 6 pages of unintelligible, closely-spaced text, numbers, graphs and acronyms. As Groucho Marx might have said, “This is so simple, a PhD could read it. Run out and find me a PhD!”

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz and Kevin Bell on Sustainability Now! when we offer “A Talmudic Exegesis: Reading and Interpreting Your Electricity Bill--A Talmudic Exegesis:.” You will learn why your local utility pays a wholesale price of only about 3 cents per kilowatt hour for renewable electricity while charging you 50 cents! You’ll learn about PICA, which is not a small animal but, rather, the “Power Charge Indifference Adjustment.” And you’ll find out why your bill seems to be rising ever upward and why the newly-announced fixed charge, due to show up on your bill next year is unlikely to make it stop rising.

You can find a handout here, to be followed along with the broadcast: A Guide to Reading your Electric Bill.

To avert the worst impacts of climate change, a transition away from fossil fuels is necessary. However, what this transition looks like and what would make a transition “just,” remain open questions. What workers are missing from “green” economy discussions? What role do workers play in the fight for a future without fossil fuels? How can workers and communities ensure the transition is “just”?

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with UCSC Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies J. Mijin Cha, whose new book, A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future, will be published by MIT Press in December. Her research examines the intersection of inequality and the climate crisis in which the energy transition is leveraged to advance a more just future.

Frequent listeners to Sustainability Now! know that, from time to time, interviews focus on animals, mostly from the perspective of animal rights and whether animals are people, too. Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Sy Montgomery, adventurer, naturalist and author, who has been engaging with and writing about animals since the 1980s. She asks questions like “what do chickens know? Does an octopus have a soul? And is it really “turtles all the way down?” She is the author of 38 nonfiction books for adults and children and has garnered numerous awards for them. Her 2023 book, Of Time and Turtles was a New York Times bestseller, and her new book, What the Chicken Knows, has just been published.

Join Host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Dr. Sunaura Taylor, Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. Taylor is also an artist, writer, activist and mother, who has just published Disable Ecologies—Lessons from a Wounded Desert. Her first book, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, which received the 2018 American Book Award. Along with academic journals, Taylor has written for a range of popular media outlets. Her artworks have been exhibited at venues such as the CUE Art Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution and is part of the Berkeley Art Museum collection. Among other awards, she has received a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant, two Wynn Newhouse Awards, and an Animals and Culture Grant.

A longstanding debate in the environmental and conservation movements is whether protection of natural resources can be reconciled with their economic development? Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation about this question with Larry Selzer, President and CEO of The Conservation Fund, a Virgina-based nonprofit that buys land for conservation and promotes sustainable economic development. TCF works with public agencies to acquire land and hold it until the agencies are ready to purchase it back. And the organization focuses on protecting working forests and farms, which provide clean air, clean water, and jobs for rural communities.

What happens to your corporeal body, if and when it is buried in the earth? According to Genesis in the Hebrew Torah, we come from dust and to dust we return. The original text, however, uses the word עָפָ֣ר ("apar"), which means “earth.” Most burials in the United States seek to protect the body from returning to the earth through containment, while cremation produces greenhouse gases and leaves behind heavy metals. Are there other ways to go? Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Katrina Spade, founder and CEO of Recompose, a Seattle-based green funeral home that composts human bodies, turning them into soil that can be spread almost everywhere. We talk about other end-of-life choices, too.

How should we speak with children about climate change? Should young children be taught about climate change, and how? During the Cold War, the existential threat of nuclear holocaust was always present but there was, at least, a chance that the missiles would not be launched. Climate change is also an existential threat but it is already happening. Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a thoughtful conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Bagley, managing director of Project Drawdown, who has written and spoken about these questions. She holds joint Ph.D.s in environment & resources and educational psychology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she studied how video games can encourage systems thinking about complex environmental topics.