Amid this summer’s blistering heat waves, historic floods, and devastating wildfires, it’s impossible to ignore the signs of climate change all around us. These extreme weather events can be catastrophic, both for human life and for property. And when it comes to the property side of things, the insurance industry is taking note: Over the past few months, several private insurers have limited coverage in higher risk states like California and Florida. Sean Hecht, managing attorney of Earthjustic...
Aug 11, 2023•30 min
Redwood stave pipes were fundamental to the industrialization of American society This episode of Terra Verde features an interview with Greg King, the author of the recently published book The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals and Real Estate in the California Redwoods. The book explores the economic and ideological webs of control over our industrialized society — and how the raw resource of the ancient redwoods provided fundamental industrial products dedicated to the establishment of economic ...
Aug 04, 2023•30 min
A weekly public affairs show that delivers news and views about the most important environmental issues in California and globally. The post Terra Verde – July 28, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.
Jul 28, 2023•30 min
A weekly public affairs show that delivers news and views about the most important environmental issues in California and globally. The post Terra Verde – July 21, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.
Jul 21, 2023•30 min
File photo of a wildfire in Alberta, Canada. Photo by Chris Schwarz/Government of Alberta. Journalist and author John Vaillant’s new book Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World — which chronicles a massive wildfire in the tar sands oil boomtown of Fort McMurray, Alberta in 2016 that forced the entire city of 88,000 people to evacuate— is a gripping disaster tale that comes with an urgent message: Climate change has no baseline, it’s going to keep upping the ante. And, he says, as the hun...
Jul 14, 2023•30 min
E. Tendayi Achiume, currently a professor of law at University of California, Los Angeles, was appointed as the United Nation’s Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in 2017, becoming the first woman and the first person from southern Africa to fill the role. Her last interventions before leaving the role late last year highlighted how ‘green’ solutions that require vast tracts of land and energy are being implemented at the...
Jul 07, 2023•30 min
Climate activists, including Khrizia Velacruz (center) of Oil & Gas Action Network, disrupt a June event in San Francisco featuring Jody Freeman, a board member of ConocoPhillips, the company behind the massive Willow Project oil drilling venture in Alaska. Photo by Erick Parker, courtesy of Climate Defiance. Over the past year, there have been a growing number of non-violent disruptive actions by climate activists across the US and beyond against politicians, business leaders, lawyers, etc ...
Jun 30, 2023•30 min
This month, the EPA issued regulatory revisions to the National Contingency Plan after a years-long lawsuit filed by environmental and public health advocates, calling to limit the use of toxic chemical dispersants in oil spill response. The EPA’s final rule is an improvement to the outdated regulations that were previously in place, but additional, local action is needed to ensure community health and safety. On this episode, Terra Verde host Fiona McLeod speaks with Dr. Riki Ott, a marine toxi...
Jun 23, 2023•30 min
Could methane from manure become so lucrative that big dairies will end up farming for cow poop rather than milk? Photo by Daniel Farrell. One of California’s primary emissions reduction strategies — manure digester projects that capture methane from dairy and hog farms and refine it into “renewable natural gas.” — could not only be prolonging the state’s dependence on natural gas, tying it with the state’s Low Carbon Fuel Standards and offsets programs could also be promoting the expansion of C...
Jun 16, 2023•30 min
Photo by Jim Maurer California’s public transportation system is on the edge of what has been described as a “fiscal cliff.” Due to lower post-pandemic ridership and inflation, among other factors, transportation agencies just don’t have enough funding to meet their needs. The funding deficit is particularly acute in the San Francisco Bay Area, where it could mean steep cuts in crucial BART and MUNI services. Transportation advocates are asking Governor Gavin Newsom to step in and make up the di...
Jun 09, 2023•30 min
Mount Shasta in winter. Photo credit: Gary Hughes Terra Verde is joined this week by guests from the Mount Shasta Bioregional Ecology Center who describe how the organization works to protect the forests and source waters of the most northern reaches of California from emerging threats such as the massive Golden State Natural Resources wood pellet manufacture and export scheme. The post Shasta At Risk appeared first on KPFA.
Jun 02, 2023•30 min
A weekly public affairs show that delivers news and views about the most important environmental issues in California and globally. The post Terra Verde – May 26, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.
May 26, 2023•30 min
A weekly public affairs show that delivers news and views about the most important environmental issues in California and globally. The post Terra Verde – May 19, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.
May 19, 2023•30 min
A weekly public affairs show that delivers news and views about the most important environmental issues in California and globally. The post Terra Verde – May 12, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.
May 12, 2023•30 min
Ochres, iron oxides, and earth pigments are humankind’s oldest art material. For ochre researcher and artist Heidi Gustafson, they are also an invitation to challenge how we interact with the inanimate world, and to deepen our respect, reciprocity, creativity, and connection with the lands we live on. In this week’s episode of Terra Verde, Heidi joins host Fiona McLeod to share about her rare working collection of more than six hundred ochers from around the world, and to discuss her new book, B...
May 05, 2023•30 min
The Berkeley law is intended to reduce carbon emissions from buildings and health concerns related to gas stoves. Photo courtesy of PLE BORA/Wikimedia commons. On April 17, a federal court in San Francisco struck down the City of Berkeley’s first-of-its-kind law banning natural gas infrastructure from new buildings. The ruling can have implications beyond Berkeley, especially since more than seventy local and state jurisdictions around the country have followed Berkeley’s lead in requiring or st...
Apr 28, 2023•30 min
Last Thanksgiving, the Martinez, CA oil refinery released somewhere between 20 and 24 tons of spent catalyst, a byproduct of the oil refining process. That spent catalyst wafted over Martinez neighborhoods and settled on cars, houses, and gardens. It contained toxic heavy metals, including vanadium, aluminum, barium, chromium, nickel, and zinc. When local residents woke up the next morning, they were puzzled by the ash. They didn’t know what it was. That’s because Martinez Refining didn’t alert ...
Apr 21, 2023•30 min
A weekly public affairs show that delivers news and views about the most important environmental issues in California and globally. The post Terra Verde – April 14, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.
Apr 14, 2023•30 min
The Earth Island Journal has published the reporting from on the ground in Wallmapu (Photo Credit Denali DeGraf). This episode of Terra Verde features an interview with Denali DeGraf, a writer based in the Argentine Patagonia. Denali’s reporting has been featured in the Earth Island Journal and in Mongabay. Recently he has written about expanding monoculture exotic species tree plantations, increasing wildfire risk, and the efforts of indigenous Mapuche communities in the Southern Andes of Argen...
Apr 07, 2023•30 min
Forested mountains on Pooley Island, British Columbia. Photo by Laurie MacBride/Wikimedia Commons The Pacific Coastal Temperate Rainforest is the largest swath of temperate rainforest on the planet. Stretching from Alaska to California, this carbon dense forest is an important habitat for the region’s distinctive biodiversity and has long been a source of sustenance and cultural significance for coastal Indigenous communities. In this week’s episode of Terra Verde, host Gary Graham Hughes talks ...
Mar 31, 2023•30 min
File photo of a open-air burn pit in Kansas. Photo by FEMA/Crystal Payton. After a train derailed near East Palestine, Ohio and spilled hundreds of thousands of pounds of hazardous chemicals recently, part of the “cleanup” response was to burn the chemicals that spilled — which further emits toxins into the air, soil, and water. Communities across the country are impacted by the environmental and health impacts caused by open burning, including in rural Appalachia, where a US Army Ammunition Pla...
Mar 24, 2023•30 min
File photo of farmworkers at work at strawberry fields in Pajaro Valley, Monterey County. Photo By Lance Cheung/USDA. Last Friday, the Pajaro River breached an old levee and flooded the small agricultural town of Pajaro in Monterey County, which is home to a large population of migrant farmworker families. The rising waters displaced about 2,000 people and destroyed the area’s strawberry fields, the key source of income for these families. While news of the levee breach has been making headlines...
Mar 17, 2023•30 min
The post Terra Verde – March 10, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.
Mar 10, 2023•30 min
The post Terra Verde – March 3, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.
Mar 03, 2023•30 min
A weekly public affairs show that delivers news and views about the most important environmental issues in California and globally. The post Terra Verde – February 24, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.
Feb 24, 2023•30 min
30×30 is an international movement to conserve 30% of natural areas, lands, and waters by 2030, in an effort to protect and restore biodiversity and mitigate and build resilience to climate change. On this week’s episode, Terra Verde host Fiona McLeod is joined by Jennifer Norris, Deputy Secretary for Biodiversity and Habitat at the California Natural Resources Agency, who leads the state’s 30×30 initiative, and Blanca Begert, Reporting Fellow at Grist who has written extensively about 30×30 and...
Feb 17, 2023•30 min
In the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains and just a few miles outside of Gilroy, California, sits land that is sacred to the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band. Known as Juristac, the Amah Mutsun lived on this land for millennia until they were forcibly removed. Today, a private investor group wants to develop a massive gravel and sand mining complex on the site, despite its cultural significance to the Amah Mutsun, as well as the role it serves as a wildlife corridor and refuge for vulnerable species....
Feb 10, 2023•30 min
A weekly public affairs show that delivers news and views about the most important environmental issues in California and globally. The post Terra Verde – February 3, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.
Feb 03, 2023•30 min
This episode of Terra Verde features an interview with a researcher from the organization Food and Water Watch describing their recent report on Direct Air Capture (DAC) technology titled The Dire Climate Consequences of Capturing Carbon from the Atmosphere. The episode exposes the highly celebrated but unproven climate geoengineering approach as being absurdly expensive, energy and emissions intensive and, ultimately, worse than doing nothing. The post The Seductive Lure of Direct Air Capture T...
Jan 27, 2023•30 min
The Naval Shipyard in Hunters Point, San Francisco. Photo by Todd Lappin/Flickr. The residents of Bayview Hunters Point, a low-income, working class community of color in southeast San Francisco, have been embroiled in a decades-long struggle to get a full clean up of the many sources of pollution in their neighborhood, including radioactive and toxic contamination at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard Superfund site and dozens of other contaminated sites along the waterfront and throughout the co...
Jan 20, 2023•30 min
