Well, this is it. Yer last ever Babble. Thank you - seriously, thank you - if you've lent us your attention over the years. It's been a pleasure.Herewith a valedictory episode in which we reveal the real reason we're binning the babble, Ol serenades Dave with an original tune, and we humbly compare ourselves to one of the finest sitcoms this or any country has ever produced.Mostly though we consume far too much of the Christmas spirit and get bitter about the British Podcast Award...
Dec 24, 2022•1 hr 13 min
For our final interview, we're joined for a second time by the majestic Chris Packham, our first 'proper' guest all the way back in 2015.We discuss all that has changed in those seven and a half years, not least some pretty hardcore stuff for Chris personally, and we chew over what the world of activism and protest might look like seven years hence, given things continue to go so spectacularly to shit.Talking of shit, we discover that Chris Packham is full of it - so much so that ...
Dec 19, 2022•1 hr 2 min
If there wasn't twitter, would we have solved climate change by now? Might we at least have got round to thinking about solving climate change? Would Ol have had more sleep?Sure, loads of important eco connections and organising and other useful stuff have happened via the site, but so too has a prodigious amount of titting about (trust us, we know of what we speak) let alone all the hate and bile and BS and conspiracy that sustains it.Do climate-y people need to 'win' twitter to ...
Dec 11, 2022•1 hr 3 min
Bat-chomping bird-slicing eco-crucifixes* are making a comeback! A mere eight years after some Tories effectively banned anyone from erecting wind turbines in England, some other Tories now look poised to overturn that ban. Which sort of tells you everything you need to know about Westminster politics.So this week we transport ourselves to a time when David Cameron was both a thing and someone who professed to like the planet, to understand why it is that these obviously useful, relentlessly pop...
Dec 05, 2022•47 min
Look, we're quitting, so if there ever was a leash we are now firmly off it. Problem is, while unleashed Dave might follow his nose into the bushes of podcasting misadventure, unleashed Ol... well, he's not that interesting is he? So having cast aside any editorial imperative to stay vaguely relevant or entertaining, herewith 45 minutes of a sad old man wanging on about hot water cylinders and heat pumps.Don't say you weren't warned.Sustainababble is your friendly environment...
Nov 28, 2022•53 min
Now then, we have Some News about the babble. Listen to the show to find out precisely what (don't worry, we haven't been bad), but suffice to say this year's Sustainabauble will be particularly valedictory.But before we get too festive and emotional, there's work to be done. Like trying to gather our thoughts on there being 8 billion humans alive.Or indeed what we make of the increasingly ballsy climate protests sweeping the land. Are Just Stop Oil really "damaging thei...
Nov 20, 2022•55 min
Chances are you’ll have read David Roberts’ superlative writing on climate – at Vox or more recently Volts – and thought ‘coo, that’s sensible and right and interesting’. We certainly have, so we’re delighted to finally have him on the show.David natters with us about US politics (are things potentially *not* totally naused?), progressives’ inability to be happy, the usefulness of COPs and the role of protest. We also goad him to adopt pointlessly binary positions on various controversial topics...
Nov 14, 2022•1 hr 13 min
If we said "name the weirdest, most mystical & inexplicable creature on earth" you would rightly say "80s English footballer Peter Beardsley". But pause for a moment to consider instead the 'umble eel, a fish(ish) so unknown and unknowable that no human has observed one shagging in the wild. In fact no-one's totally sure that they even DO shag in the wild. A bit like Peter Beardsley.It's an astonishing tale, the eel's, at the heart of which is a simple...
Nov 06, 2022•51 min
Loathe though we are to be scatological, it's time to face faecal facts: the astonishing amount of human excrement on the planet presents a honking environmental challenge.When you think about it, with nearly eight billion of us crimping one out most days, the fact that humans aren't all swimming in the stuff is an impressive log-istical achievement, especially when flush toilets have only existed for 150 years.And despite it being the most normal thing in the world, poos and pooing re...
Oct 31, 2022•50 min
Britain has lost a lot of things lately: international standing; economic credibility; its collective shit. But we've also mislaid something more fragile, dank and extraordinary than even Liz Truss's premiership: our precious and hitherto largely unknown temperate rainforests.In his new book, The Lost Rainforests of Britain, author and campaigner Guy Shrubsole sets out to right that wrong. He's mapped every last rainforesty remnant, uncovered centuries old cultural ties to them, a...
Oct 23, 2022•48 min
Who knew climate conferences had corporate sponsors? 183,295 people, that's who, for they have signed a petition telling the UN suits to ditch the sponsor of this year's jamboree in Egypt which is... Coca-Cola.That's Coca "oh hi! we're the biggest plastic polluter in the world!" Cola. Producers of 200,000 plastic bottles EVERY MINUTE coca-cola. Corporate lobbyists supreme, Coca-Cola. Everyone's favourite pilferer of scarce fresh water supplies and flogger of br...
Oct 17, 2022•40 min
Mistakes have been made, lessons learned. Yet again, us being away for a few weeks coincided with the ass falling out of everything that is good.In fact Blighty's new "Government" has done so many dastardly things that even usually mild-mannered bird watchers are losing their shit. Worse still, Dave & Ol's reputation is in tatters after we (*cough* Dave *cough*) said the Trussticular era probably wouldn't be much worse than what came before. Whoops.So this episode is...
Oct 09, 2022•50 min
What, or who, is a Liz Truss and why does anyone care? Well buckle up because approximately 17 old white men from the rich bits of England have just made her boss of Blighty and there are, we fear, going to be some changes around here.Or, er, are there? Because while Liz Truss is an MP with as many environmentalist bones in her body as a jellyfish, and as much as it's very, VERY tempting to get all shouty about her un-banning fracking etc., might we be getting too obsessed with individual p...
Sep 11, 2022•45 min
'Intersectional environmentalism' is a) a lot of syllables, b) a brilliant concept explained simply and powerfully by writer and environmentalist Leah Thomas, and c) coincidentally also the title of Leah's new book.Part activist toolkit, part theory, and part history of environmental (in)justice, The Intersectional Environmentalist acknowledges and explores the overlap between systemic harm against Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC) communities and the Earth.It also d...
Aug 28, 2022•54 min
Rupert Read is an author, philosopher, and activist, perhaps best known for his prominent role in Extinction Rebellion. He's written more than a dozen books and his most recent - Why Climate Breakdown Matters - is, well, full on. Full on in that it argues that unless we confront the full horror of the situation we're in, and the very high likelihood that that situation will unravel towards some sort of societal collapse, then we can't possibly hope to plot a course towards a livea...
Aug 21, 2022•45 min
If you ever encounter a Sloane's Viperfish, you're in for a treat. The charming creature has a bite so ferocious that its first vertebra has to act as a shock absorber. When it chomps, it unhinges its skull, opens its jaw 90 degrees, and expands its stomach to eat things up to 50% bigger than itself. Its absurd fangs act as a cage, trapping anything trying to escape.Luckily for us, Viperfish are found in the high seas, which is a very good reason to never go there. But unfortunately lo...
Aug 15, 2022•44 min
"WHY HAVEN'T YOU BABBLED ABOUT EVIL EVIL POO-BUM ROADS?!?!" yells twitter. Well, your bellowed word is our grudging command.But while we're delighted to go truffling for babble in tarmac territory, there is no way on god's earth we are picking sides in the internecine war that is anti-roads campaigners vs anti-HS2 campaigners.But still. It is true, is it not, that comparatively little fuss is made about comparatively bollocks-loads of big new roads planned or under const...
Aug 07, 2022•55 min
Fans of our feathered friends, look away now...If you've been to the coast recently there's every chance you'll have seen, how can we put this delicately, an exceptionally dead bird washed up on the shore. Or, more likely, dozens of the bastards.Bird flu has been around for ever, but evidently got the hump while Covid hogged the viral limelight. Now it's back with a vengeance, ensuring everyone and H5N-y-1 knows its name.Predictably enough, concern is largely reserved for the...
Aug 01, 2022•49 min
Famously soggy, predictably chilly. Well, not any more, cos Blighty has joined the global combustability club after turning in a world-beating and very much oven-ready 40.3 degrees C of scorchiosity in its latest heatwave.So how freaked out should we feel? Cos like, this was always going to happen wasn't it? And, as sure as tropical night follows sweltering day, it's only going to get hotter from here.But does extreme weather's inevitability in anyway dent its horror? Will the fac...
Jul 26, 2022•38 min
How much, precisely, is one whale worth? Half an elephant? Three dozen gibbons?"Don't be silly, Ol and Dave, you can't put a price on nature" we hear you cry. Well tell it to the IMF, because they say our blubbery friends retail for $2m, a big figure which, in the world of excel spreadsheets and cost benefit analyses, means whales are worth saving. Unlike, say, earwigs, who aren't priced up and therefore can extinctify themselves without wider consequences.Bonkers, no? W...
Jul 18, 2022•49 min
Epping Forest, or "Effing Forest" as it's known to the locals, is at the heart of Luke Turner's wonderful 2019 book about sexuality, trauma, god and personal recovery.The forest, Luke says, hums with an energy of people both enjoying the place but also getting up to things they can't do, and being people they can't be, in their normal lives. It's a human landscape, and kinda always has been - in contrast to the hippified, somewhat problematic idea of 'unto...
Jul 11, 2022•53 min
The babble, it must be said, has a problem with authority. Probably cos of our upbringing or something. But this week, The Authority – specifically the Advertising Standards Authority – shot up in our estimation after it said NO, PURVEYORS OF SH*T LAWNS, YOU CANNOT CALL SH*T LAWNS ECO-FRIENDLY.Huzzah!BUT, they simultaneously stamped on vegan ads, so The Authority is firmly back in the bastards column again. We think.Also this week, Joe ‘Hey! I’m still alive!’ Biden gets all militaristic about he...
Jun 12, 2022•53 min
If you were until recently, say, sustainability overlord at IKEA, should you be viewed as a suit who slapped green respectability onto a company that flooded living rooms with unnecessary tat? Or, perhaps, as a radical, transforming one of the word's biggest businesses into among the greenest while bringing veggie balls to the masses?Well, Steve Howard is said person - currently boss of sustainability at Singaporean investment fund Temasek - and as luck would have it he agreed to come on th...
Jun 05, 2022•49 min
Bring out the bunting, close the streets, give everyone an extra holiday! No, not for the Queen's platinum wotsit, for the fact that the Aussies have voted out another massive inhofe!Yep, believe it or not, this week we say cheery bye-bye to former PM Scott Morrison, purveyor of weapons grade bullshit and world-leading climate inaction. And, it must be said, Olympic standard inhofery towards anyone who isn't Scott Morrison. To understand how and why ScoMo got the heave-ho, and to avoid...
May 29, 2022•43 min
The night sky, it seems, is getting brighter. At least according to some not-science we got sent by some not-scientists. But whether it's true or not (it almost certainly isn't) the question of light pollution got us thinking. So this week we rattle off all the ways in which the simple act of making sure we can see where we're all going is in fact abysmally bad for life on earth.Here's to another 250 episodes eh.Sustainababble is your friendly environment podcast, out weekly....
May 22, 2022•59 min
We live in a desperately cynical world - christ, the Babble should know - but a few public figures remain untarnished, standing tall as beacons of trustworthiness while our shared consensus collapses around us. The O.G. Big Dave is perhaps the most trusted of them all, the mere idea of him lying too horrible to comprehend. Which is perhaps why, when *he* tells us the planet is on fire and it's all our fault - unlike, say, every climate activist - the message is heard, listened to, and belie...
May 16, 2022•48 min
You might think being dead is when you can finally stop worrying about your impact on the planet. You'd be wrong.Be it burrying, burning, or buggering off to space, there are myriad options for dealing with one's remains, and not all of them particularly courteous to the living organisms you leave behind.So, inspired by an email from the intriguing sounding www.earthfuneral.com, this week Dave quizes Ol on the different ways people (or at least, Americans) have come up with to dispose ...
May 08, 2022•52 min
In a rare bit of good news for the nation's youth, a new natural history GCSE means 16 year olds might one day appreciate fauna as much as they do Fortnite.Author & conservation goddess Mary Colwell is the driving force behind the 10 yr + campaign to persuade the UK government to introduce this new qualification, no mean feat given the introductions they prefer to make are between plutocrat A and party fundraiser B. ALLEGEDLY.We natter to Mary about how on earth she got this campaign ov...
May 02, 2022•58 min
Kelp. That's what's gonna save the world. Not trees, kelp. Or seagrass. Or some other form of wibbly algae that lives in the sea and isn't a plant.Bingeing carbon; hoovering up chemical nasties in the water; being home for the ickle fishies; being turned into non-plastic plastic - seaweed does myriad very important jobs without so much as a sniff of inhofery.And, lest we forget, it can be damn tasty, especially if you're the Welsh.So why don't western countries pay atten...
Apr 24, 2022•55 min
Keep Out. Two little words that carry such unquestioned authority. But why are we so well behaved when what we're kept out of is often the thing we're all lacking - green space, the beguiling attraction of the natural world, things that aren't manicured and sanitised? How did England's green and pleasant lands come to be so hostile to most of us plebs? We quiz author and illustrator Nick Hayes, who has literally written the book on trespass. Two in fact - the latest, The Tres...
Apr 18, 2022•56 min
