Justin Nobel has spent seven years investigating the way the oil and gas industry deals with the enormous amount of waste products it produces. All of it is toxic but some of it is also radioactive. Lax regulation and legal loopholes expose workers and people living near the wells to levels of radiation far in excess of legal limits. Waste from the fracking process is dumped into watershed where it will become more radioactive over time as elements like radium and radon decay into daughter elements. His book is Petroleum 238.

In her book Rooted Brea Baker looks at how land theft from black and indigenous people has shaped not only the economic landscape but also the natural environment. Baker makes a case for reparations based on documented cases where stolen land robbed not only the historical people involved but also robbed their descendants of generational wealth.

Zoe Weil has been a humane educator for decades. In her book The Solutionary Way she has developed a system for bridging divides, addressing the causes of complex and persistent problems and creating a framework for doing the most good and the least harm for people, animals and the environment.

This is part 2 of a conversation with Jem Bendell. In the first half we talked about what collapse looks like and how it might play out. The second half focuses more on how to respond.

Dr. Bendell’s early career focused on mitigating the effects of industrial civilization. He worked with the UN and NGO’s all over the world. Davos deemed him a young global leader. In 2018, after extensive research on the state of life on the planet he published the Deep Adaptation paper which said basically that a collapse of our economy, food production and energy systems is inevitable. In his new book Breaking together he goes one step further and writes that collapse has already begun. The best we can hope for is ways to make the crash less ruinous. And the only way to do that is change the how we live and how we view our relationships with each other and the rest of the natural world.

Derrick Jensen is the author of many books questioning and critiquing contemporary society and its values, including A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, and Endgame. We’ll be talking about his book “Bright Green Lies: How the environmental movement lost its way and what we can do about it”

Dr. Jem Bendell’s career centered on how to mitigate harms caused by the excesses of our consumer culture. He was a Founder of the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability which had an MBA program with over 2000 students online from around 100 countries. He gave talks all over the world to leaders in business and government on tackling critical global challenges. In 2012, the World Economic Forum appointed him a Young Global Leader.
In 2018 he published a White Paper on Deep Adaptation. The research for that paper changed his life. He came to the conclusion that tinkering around the edges of how we live won’t save us from the catastrophic effects brought about by the degradation of the natural world.
His new book Breaking Together examines the scope of the crisis and advocates for creative responses. There is so much in this book that I felt I could have built an entire series around it but I had only an hour of his time. In this first half we talk about what collapse looks like and how it might play out. The second half focuses more on how to respond.

In the decade from 2010 to 2020 a wave of popular uprisings swept over the globe. Starting with the Arab spring , social media and the internet brought images of injustices to a wide audience. The resulting indignation brought people out in droves and established political systems fell. In his book If We Burn Vincent Bevins writes "it felt like something had shifted in the nature of time itself. They had cracked open the structure of reality, and with each step, with each victory against police defenses, with every movement, it felt as if they were literally moving history forward. " But most of the gains were undone. IF WE BURN asks a single, vital question: How did so many mass protests lead to the opposite of what they asked for?

The Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade has allowed states to restrict access to abortion. Adoption has been presented by anti-abortion advocates as a way to solve the problems created by these restrictions. Gretchen Sission interviewed hundreds of women who gave up their children for adoption. The impacts of those decisions are outlined in her book Relinquished.