Rebecca Renner's book Gator Country takes readers into an undercover operation in the Florida Everglades. Alligator hides worth millions of dollars are harvested every year. Most of them come from alligator farms but alligators don't breed in captivity so eggs must taken from wild nests. Conservation efforts have brought alligators back from the brink of extinction but enforcing rules and regulations with people who face down angry alligator mamas has hazards of its own.

Do children need to be protected from their parent’s on-line activity? That’s the question at the heart of Erin Qiuinn-Kong’s debut novel Hate Follow. The story is fiction but the issues about child privacy and modern parenting are very real.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist who is not ready to give up on the future. Her book What if we got it right? Visions for the Future is filled with conversations, poetry and essays about the kind of world we could create. A world where we can all flourish.

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”