Generation Green: Fulfilling the Promise of Jobs and Justice | Jerome Ringo and Billy Parish

Climate change. Energy crisis. Economic collapse. We live in a time of unprecedented global crisis and opportunity. There’s a monumental amount of work to be done to make the transition to a restored world, yet young people are unemployed at astonishingly high rates. How can we unlock the green economic opportunities that will open the door to doing well by doing good for generation green and generations to come? Join Apollo Alliance president Jerome Ringo and clean energy leader Billy Parish for a hopeful glimpse into the organizations and programs that will give our children the opportunity to make a living and make a better world.

To learn more about the work the guests in this podcast are doing, visit Jerome at Zoetic Global, and Billy Parish at Mosaic.

From Bows and Arrows to Laptops: Marrying Traditional Knowledge with Web Technology

Forty years ago when a logging road was blasted deep into the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, the outside world discovered the Surui people. Contact with the Western world led to their decimation by disease, warfare and illegal logging and mining. The Surui organized to save themselves and their homeland by electing a young leader to tell their story to the world. Chief Almir Narayamoga Surui traveled from the Amazon rainforest to the Google-plex to ask for help to bring his people back from the brink of extinction and save their precious rainforest. The collaboration with Google Earth Outreach manager Rebecca Moore has helped map a next world that marries the best of tradition and conservation with the best of high technology. Translation by Vasco van Roosmalen.

To learn more about Chief Almir Narayamoga Surui and the mapping of Indigenous lands, visit his facebook page.

Where Angels Fear to Tread: Making Art that Heals the Broken Places

How do we transform a vicious circle into a virtuous circle? How do we move from environmental degradation and the deterioration of human relations to restoration? From war to peace – from hatred to compassion – from isolation to community? How can one person make a crucial difference? Painter and professor Lily Yeh‘s approach to community healing takes that which is broken and creates something whole and wholly new and beautiful through public art. From Philadelphia to Rwanda, broken places are her canvases. People’s stories are the pigments. People’s talents and creativity are the tools. At the heart of her work is the transformation of human heart.

To find out more about the work of Lily Yeh, visit her website.

Molecular Psychology: Good Chemistry with Nature’s Green Chemistry (Podcast)

Did you ever ask yourself who in their right mind would invent a convenience to keep food fresh that would one day litter the landscape, wash up on every beach around the world and release toxic substances into the web of life and your body long after its short disposable life? Master green chemists and educators John Warner and Amy Cannon say all that is changing — by necessity and by design. The radical growth of green chemistry is showing we can have good chemistry with the Earth by emulating natures green chemistry and do good business at the same time.

For more on the work of John Warner and Amy Cannon, visit the Warner Babcock website.

The Organic Revolution: From Hippie to Hip to Scale

Though still small in the big picture, organic food has come all the way — from hippie to hip to mainstream since the Sixties. But can organic food and fair food ever feed seven billion people? How can the entire food chain become sustainable? And does sustainability stack up to profitability? Visionary food entrepreneur Gary Hirshberg answers those questions with a resounding yes. As founder and CEO of Stonyfield Farm, the world’s largest organic yogurt company, Hirshberg has demonstrated that environmentally and socially responsible business can also be profitable.

All Love Begins with Seeing: Poetry and Justice for All | Shailja Patel

Shailja Patel‘s unique artistry is a provocative global mash-up of genres. Shes a slam poetry champion and star of her award-winning, one-woman play Migritude about the intricate webs of global migration and cultural identity. As an acclaimed poet of South Asian and Kenyan ancestry, through her fearless art she embodies the authentic voices of women, South Asians and Africans who are otherwise seldom heard. For her, the ultimate destination of poetry is justice — too heart-breakingly beautiful to be denied.

Bread and Roses: Time Poverty, Super-Wealth and the Politics of Happiness – Annie Leonard and John de Graaf

At the same time the Great Recession has inflicted enormous pain and suffering, it has also caused people to take a deeper look at what’s really important in our lives. Many are finding that time is not money: time is far more valuable. The acclaimed filmmakers and social entrepreneurs Annie Leonard (The Story of Stuff) and John de Graaf (Seattle Area Happiness Initiative) pop the Big Question: What’s the economy for, anyway? Is it a voracious cycle of perpetual growth and more stuff? Or can we create growth within the natural limits of the planet to produce sufficiency, a high quality of life and real happiness?!

Tears in the Eyes: Dr. Jane Goodall’s Reasons for Hope

The visionary primatologist and conservationist Dr. Jane Goodall revolutionized primatology and helped us realize how close our kinship is with the animal kin-dom. It has been 50 years since Dr. Jane, as she’s affectionately known, began her intensive solitary studies of chimp behavior In Africa’s Gombe National Forest and inspired the world to save the rapidly dwindling populations and their habitats. Today, her compelling vision in action to restore people, animals and planet is delivering real hope.

Beloved Community: Hello, My Other Self | Ilarion “Larry” Merculieff & Guadalupe Avila

In today’s radically shifting world, the name of the game is resilience – the capacity of both human and ecological systems to absorb disturbance, roll with the punches and come up standing. Resilience arises from building community – enduring relationships and networks that hold cultural memory in the same way seeds regenerate a forest after a fire. Indigenous leaders Ilarion “Larry” Merculieff and Guadalupe Avila come from old-growth cultures that have sustained community over centuries and millennia.

Education for Action: Reinventing Everything | David Orr, Anthony Cortese and Jess Rimington

Perhaps the single greatest systems error of human civilization is the illusion that people are somehow separate from nature not subject to the ground rules for the rest of the web of life. As a result, were getting an environmental education the hard way — because when you fight nature, you lose. Join ecoliteracy leaders David Orr and Dr. Anthony Cortese and young educational social entrepreneur Jess Rimington for an inspiring teach-in on how educators and students are creating a living curriculum for an engaged society that’s solving problems while studying them.

From Slavery to Stardust: What Would Healing Look Like?

What’s it like to be in someone else’s skin? What if the color of the skin is different – say, black and white? What might happen when the descendants of a white slave trader and of black people who were enslaved meet? That is the brave and wrenching journey embraced by Thomas DeWolf, whose white ancestors were once the nation’s biggest slave traders, and Belvie Rooks and Dedan Gills, descendants of African people who were enslaved. Together they depict their remarkable journey to discover what healing looks like.

Future Generations Are Screaming: The Clean Energy Climate Challenge | Susan Marshall, John Fogarty, Alec Loorz, and James Hansen

The climate crisis is a crisis of governance and leadership. Will we move rapidly enough to realign our policies, politics and economy to stabilize the climate? Creative and innovative people from all walks of life are stepping forward to address the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. Community organizers Susan Marshall and John Fogarty are taking power local. Youth advocate Alec Loorz is mobilizing young people worldwide for the defining issue of their lives. NASA’s chief climatologist James Hansen says there’s still time.