Sustainability Now! on KSQD.org

 The Trump Administration has declared war on California and is hell-bent on eliminating any and all of the state’s environmental protections. As part of its “drill baby, drill” strategy, it is moving to open the California Coast to oil drilling and to increase exploration and extraction on BLM lands across the state.  And not wanting to stay out of the action, the Supreme Court recently ruled that the makers of the herbicide Roundup do not have to warn users of cancer risks associated with its use. But wait, there’s more! The bad news just keeps on coming! Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for conversations on these issues with Jason Rylander and Hollin Kretzmann from the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity.

The Santa Cruz Mountains cover more than 1,000 square miles of the Central California Coast, running from just south of San Francisco all the way down to the Salinas Valley.  The region has been actively stewarded for thousands of years by indigenous people and is a place of significant cultural, biological, and environmental diversity which supports many native plant and animal species found nowhere else on Earth.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation about the mountains and the network with Dylan Skybrook, Manager of the Santa Cruz Mountains Stewardship Network, a collaboration of twenty-six organizations engaged in land stewardship in the Santa Cruz Mountains, whose mission is to help cultivate a resilient, vibrant region where human and natural systems can thrive for generations to come.

Over the past four centuries, the transformation of the Greater San Francisco Bay Region has been extraordinary.  What was once a near paradise for a few hundred thousand indigenous First Peoples is now home to nearly 8 million whose accumulated activities since the arrival of Europeans have created an industrialized landscape interspersed with large areas of open space where nature is in recovery. How did this happen? Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with David D. Schmidt, who spent two decades writing San Francisco Bay Area—An Environmental History, published by Back Country Press in 2025, and which is this year's winner of the California Book Awards Gold Medal for Contributions to Publishing. The book is a magisterial tome addressing virtually every aspect of SF Bay and its environmental transformation over the past 400 years.  And learn how Alfred Hitchcock got the idea for his classic film “The Birds.”

Everyone talks about climate but no one does anything about it.  In recent months, parts of Maui were nearly washed away by Kona Lows that dropped 60 inches of rain.  An unusual trio of Pacific cyclones on both sides of the equator drove warm oceanic water to the east, adding to climate turbulence.  And the world is being warned of an “off-the-charts” El Niño this coming fall and winter. And there’s more!  Are you having trouble keeping track of all of these phenomena?  Relief is at hand! Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a tutorial about climate with Dr. Daniel Swain, a weather and climate scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources division and a research partner at the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research. He engages extensively with journalists and other media partners, serving as a climate and weather science liaison to print, television, radio, and web-based outlets and is the go-to guy when on latest climate research and findings. Watch Swain's latest "Weather and Climate Office Hour" (May 13). Read his "Weather West" blog.

The attack on Iran by the United States and Israel demonstrated, among other things, the necessity of a rapid transition to renewable fuels, like solar and wind.  The technologies for capturing and converting them into usable form are heavily dependent on critical minerals, such as lithium, cobalt and others. Indeed, critical minerals are driving a new wave of resource nationalism and extraction around the globe, many of them being eyed by President Trump as potential regions of intervention and conquest.  What does the gold rush for these minerals portend for world politics and economics? Are we on the brink of a new era of colonialism and imperialism or even resource wars? In two weeks, join me for a conversation about these matters with Professor Thea Riofrancos, from Providence College in Rhode Island, who recently published Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism. Riofrancos is associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College, a Strategic Co-Director of the Climate and Community Institute, and a fellow at the Transnational Institute. Her research focuses on resource extraction, climate change, the energy transition, the global lithium sector, green technologies, social movements, and the Latin American left.

Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances—commonly known as PFASs and "forever chemicals"—have become ubiquitous in the environment and are being found almost everywhere in soil, water, plants and bodies.    The Trump Administration has lowered drinking water standards for PFASs presence but that does not mean the stuff has gotten safer. You might know PFASs in the form of Teflon which, for many years, are applied to non-stick cookware so those eggs slide off the pan.  But if you overheat that pan, the Teflon might also slide off.  PFASs slide off of many other things, as well. The environmental and health impacts of PFASs are almost totally unknown, although they are beginning to look pretty bad. Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Dr. Faith Kibuye, a Water Resources Extension Specialist in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management and the Institute of Energy and the Environment at the Pennsylvania State University. Kibuye specializes in environmental engineering, focusing on water quality, aquatic chemistry, cyanobacterial blooms, and contaminants like pharmaceuticals and PFASs, and their fate, transport and transformation.