

Sustainability, Climate Change, Renewable Energy, Politics, Activism, Biodiversity, Carbon Footprint, Wildlife, Regenerative Agriculture, Circular Economy, Extinction, Net-Zero · One Planet Podcast
Mia Funk
The story of our environment may well be the most important story this century. We focus on issues facing people and the planet. Leading environmentalists, organizations, activists, and conservationists discuss meaningful ways to create a better and more sustainable future.
Participants include EARTHDAY.ORG, Greenpeace, UNESCO World Heritage Centre, PETA, European Environment Agency, Peter Singer, 350.org, UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development, Citizens’ Climate Lobby, Earth System Governance Project, Forest Stewardship Council, Global Witness, National Council for Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Public Leadership, Marine Stewardship Council, One Tree Planted, Polar Bears International, EarthLife Africa, Shimon Schwarzschild, and GAIA Centre, among others.
Interviews conducted by artist, activist, and educator Mia Funk with the participation of students and universities around the world. One Planet Podcast Is part of The Creative Process’ environmental initiative.
www.oneplanetpodcast.orgwww.creativeprocess.info
INSTAGRAM @creativeprocesspodcast
Participants include EARTHDAY.ORG, Greenpeace, UNESCO World Heritage Centre, PETA, European Environment Agency, Peter Singer, 350.org, UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development, Citizens’ Climate Lobby, Earth System Governance Project, Forest Stewardship Council, Global Witness, National Council for Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Public Leadership, Marine Stewardship Council, One Tree Planted, Polar Bears International, EarthLife Africa, Shimon Schwarzschild, and GAIA Centre, among others.
Interviews conducted by artist, activist, and educator Mia Funk with the participation of students and universities around the world. One Planet Podcast Is part of The Creative Process’ environmental initiative.
www.oneplanetpodcast.orgwww.creativeprocess.info
INSTAGRAM @creativeprocesspodcast
Episodes
Mentioned books

Jun 22, 2022 • 43min
KC Legacion on Degrowth, Technology and Social Media
KC Legacion is a Master of Environmental Studies candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. His research presents a reimagined understanding of social media through the lens of degrowth—this project will culminate in a short film set to premiere in September of this year. Outside of their research, KC is a team member of the web collective degrowth.info and a member of a nascent housing cooperative in West Philadelphia.“What does degrowth mean for the Global South? There are some thoughts that degrowth in the Global North would facilitate self-determination in the Global South because the Global North would no longer have this extractive relationship. There's also a critique to that, saying that degrowth in the Global North can and will have repercussions on the Global South just given the interconnected nature of our globalized realities.Degrowth was first formulated in 1972 by French philosopher André Gorz in a public debate where he used the term décroissance to question whether planetary stability was compatible with capitalism.”www.degrowth.infowww.kclegacion.comwww.decidim.orgwww.joinmastodon.orgwww.iNaturalist.orgwww.oneplanetpodcast.orgwww.creativeprocess.info

Jun 17, 2022 • 12min
Highlights - Chris Funk - Dir., Climate Hazards Center - Author of “Drought, Flood, Fire…”
“I guess the work that we're doing here at the Climate Hazards Center is trying to build out the science to cope with a two-degree world. And I think that we can do that. It's not going to be easy, but I think that's definitely within our capabilities, and it is already making human beings be smarter together in very empowering ways. And these are examples of people in Boulder, Colorado getting ready for the next big flood event and having conversations between the National Weather Service and local communities, or me on a zoom call at seven in the morning with my friends in East Africa as they're getting ready to cope with the next extreme. There are great examples of radio clubs in Niger who are working with their meteorological agencies and local farming communities that are pulling data that we're producing here in Santa Barbara, precipitation estimates, but then using them to decide whether they should fertilize their millet crops or not. And so there are ways that we can counter climate hazards and weather hazards by being smarter.”Chris Funk is the Director of the Climate Hazards Center (CHC) at UC Santa Barbara. He works with an international team of Earth scientists to inform weather and famine-related disaster responses. Chris studies climate and climate change while also developing improved data sets and monitoring/prediction systems. He’s the author of Drought, Flood, Fire: How Climate Change Contributes to Recent Catastrophes and co-author with Shrad Shukla of Drought Early Warning and Forecasting. While his research interests are quite diverse, a central theme uniting Chris’ work is developing both the technical/scientific resources and the conceptual frameworks that will help us cope with increasingly dangerous climate and weather extremes.www.chc.ucsb.eduwww.chc.ucsb.edu/people/chris-funkDrought, Flood, Fire: How Climate Change Contributes to Recent Catastropheswww.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.info

Jun 17, 2022 • 38min
Chris Funk - Director, Climate Hazards Center - Author of “Drought, Flood, Fire…”
Chris Funk is the Director of the Climate Hazards Center (CHC) at UC Santa Barbara. He works with an international team of Earth scientists to inform weather and famine-related disaster responses. Chris studies climate and climate change while also developing improved data sets and monitoring/prediction systems. He’s the author of Drought, Flood, Fire: How Climate Change Contributes to Recent Catastrophes and co-author with Shrad Shukla of Drought Early Warning and Forecasting. While his research interests are quite diverse, a central theme uniting Chris’ work is developing both the technical/scientific resources and the conceptual frameworks that will help us cope with increasingly dangerous climate and weather extremes.“I guess the work that we're doing here at the Climate Hazards Center is trying to build out the science to cope with a two-degree world. And I think that we can do that. It's not going to be easy, but I think that's definitely within our capabilities, and it is already making human beings be smarter together in very empowering ways. And these are examples of people in Boulder, Colorado getting ready for the next big flood event and having conversations between the National Weather Service and local communities, or me on a zoom call at seven in the morning with my friends in East Africa as they're getting ready to cope with the next extreme. There are great examples of radio clubs in Niger who are working with their meteorological agencies and local farming communities that are pulling data that we're producing here in Santa Barbara, precipitation estimates, but then using them to decide whether they should fertilize their millet crops or not. And so there are ways that we can counter climate hazards and weather hazards by being smarter.”www.chc.ucsb.eduwww.chc.ucsb.edu/people/chris-funkDrought, Flood, Fire: How Climate Change Contributes to Recent Catastropheswww.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.info

Jun 9, 2022 • 10min
Highlights - Yee Lee - Chief of Growth at Terraformation
“We're trying to help the world's forestry organizations collectively plant a trillion trees in the next decade and cover 3 billion acres of net new forest. That's a very, very large number. Some of the very largest tree-planting organizations in the world collectively plant something like half a billion to three-quarters of a billion trees per year. And even that number sounds large, too, but then you realize that's actually three full orders of magnitude smaller than the actual number we need to hit in the next decade. So we actually need to take all of the world's largest forestry organizations as a group and multiply by a thousand their efforts. So that's a very large undertaking, and I just can't underscore enough the scale at which we as a human species seeks to operate when we talk about tree-planting and forestry operations.”Terraformation builds and deploys tools to tackle the largest bottlenecks to mass-scale reforestation. Its technology includes off-grid seed banks that process and store millions of seeds, tracking and monitoring platforms to enable project transparency, solar-powered desalination and more. Its current partner network spans five continents, including in South America, East Africa and Central Asia, and includes public- and private-sector landowners and organizations. Terraformation’s goal in 2022 is to establish the world’s largest decentralized native seed banking network.www.terraformation.orgPhoto credit @pkworldwidewww.oneplanetpodcast.orgwww.creativeprocess.info

Jun 9, 2022 • 40min
Yee Lee - Chief of Growth at Terraformation - Silicon Valley Entrepreneur
Yee Lee was the first employee at Terraformation, dedicated to restoring the planet’s forests to solve climate change. He is a serial technology entrepreneur and angel investor from Silicon Valley, having invested in over 100 technology startups. Prior to Terraformation, Yee was an early team member at PayPal and Slide. He founded four venture-backed ecommerce and financial technology startups with M&A exits to Google and TaskRabbit (now part of IKEA). In his capacity as Chief of Growth at Terraformation, Yee supports Business Development, Sales, Capital Markets, and Terraformation Foundation teams.Terraformation builds and deploys tools to tackle the largest bottlenecks to mass-scale reforestation. Its technology includes off-grid seed banks that process and store millions of seeds, tracking and monitoring platforms to enable project transparency, solar-powered desalination and more. Its current partner network spans five continents, including in South America, East Africa and Central Asia, and includes public- and private-sector landowners and organizations. Terraformation’s goal in 2022 is to establish the world’s largest decentralized native seed banking network.www.terraformation.orgwww.oneplanetpodcast.orgwww.creativeprocess.info

Jun 5, 2022 • 12min
Highlights-Sir Geoff Mulgan, Author of “Another World is Possible”
"What I think we need is many more people thinking through what would this whole circular economy look like? Let's picture 20, 30 years into the future. Imagine we really did become circular. How would tax be organized in that world? Would we be taxing new stuff much more heavily relative to reused or maintained or recycled stuff? How would we be embedding this into children's upbringing? How would we be changing almost our moral view of different kinds of waste?"Sir Geoff Mulgan is Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London. Formerly he was chief executive of Nesta, and held government roles (1997–2004), including as the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit director and as Downing Street’s head of policy. He is the founder or co-founder of many organisations, from Demos to Action for Happiness, and the author of Another World is Possible, Social Innovation: how societies find the power to change, Big Mind: how collective intelligence can change our world, and other books. geoffmulgan.comhurstpublishers.com/book/another-world-is-possiblewww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.org

Jun 5, 2022 • 49min
Sir Geoff Mulgan, Author of “Another World is Possible”, Prof. UCL
Sir Geoff Mulgan is Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London. Formerly he was chief executive of Nesta, and held government roles (1997–2004), including as the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit director and as Downing Street’s head of policy. He is the founder or co-founder of many organisations, from Demos to Action for Happiness, and the author of Another World is Possible, Social Innovation: how societies find the power to change, Big Mind: how collective intelligence can change our world, and other books. “What I think we need is many more people thinking through what would this whole circular economy look like? Let's picture 20, 30 years into the future. Imagine we really did become circular. How would tax be organized in that world? Would we be taxing new stuff much more heavily relative to reused or maintained or recycled stuff? How would we be embedding this into children's upbringing? How would we be changing almost our moral view of different kinds of waste? “geoffmulgan.comhurstpublishers.com/book/another-world-is-possiblewww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.org

May 31, 2022 • 10min
Highlights–Nicholas A. Christakis, Director, Human Nature Lab, Yale
“We're not attempting to invent super smart AI to replace human cognition. We are inventing dumb AI to supplement human interaction. Are there simple forms of artificial intelligence, simple programming of bots, such that when they are added to groups of humans – because those humans are smart or otherwise positively inclined - that help the humans to help themselves? Can we get groups of people to work better together, for instance, to confront climate change, or to reduce racism online, or to foster innovation within firms?Can we have simple forms of AI that are added into our midst that make us work better together? And the work we're doing in that part of my lab shows that abundantly that's the case. And we published a stream of papers showing that we can do that.” Nicholas Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is a social scientist and physician who conducts research in the areas of biosocial science, network science and behavioral genetics. He directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale University and is the co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. Dr. Christakis has authored numerous books, including Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society published in 2019 and Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live published in 2020. In 2009, Christakis was named by TIME magazine to their annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.Nicholas Christakis Human Nature Lab humannaturelab.netYale Institute for Network Science yins.yale.eduTRELLIS - Suite of software tools for developing, administering, and collecting survey and social network data trellis.yale.eduThe Atlantic: “How AI Will Rewire Us: For better and for worse, robots will alter humans’ capacity for altruism, love, and friendship”www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.org

May 31, 2022 • 1h 6min
Nicholas A. Christakis, Director, Human Nature Lab, Yale
Nicholas Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is a social scientist and physician who conducts research in the areas of biosocial science, network science and behavioral genetics. He directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale University and is the co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. Dr. Christakis has authored numerous books, including Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society published in 2019 and Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live published in 2020. In 2009, Christakis was named by TIME magazine to their annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. “When we look around the world, we see endless and timeless fear, ignorance, hatred, and violence. From our position, we could also boundlessly catalogue the minute details of human groups, highlighting and emphasizing the differences among them. But this pessimistic gaze that separates humans from one another by highlighting evil and by emphasizing difference misses an important underlying unity and overlooks our common humanity. Humans everywhere are also pre-wired to make a particular kind of society — one full of love, friendship, cooperation, and learning. Humans have always had both competitive and cooperative impulses, both violent and beneficent tendencies. Like the two strands of the double helix of our DNA, these conflicting impulses are intertwined. We are primed for conflict and hatred but also for love, friendship, and cooperation. If anything, modern societies are just a patina of civilization on top of this evolutionary blueprint. The good things we see around us are part of what makes us human in the first place. We should be humble in the face of temptations to engineer society in opposition to our instincts. Fortunately, we do not need to exercise any such authority in order to have a good life. The arc of our evolutionary history is long. But it bends toward goodness.”Excerpted from BLUEPRINT: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society Copyright 2020 by Nicholas A. ChristakisNicholas ChristakisHuman Nature Lab humannaturelab.netYale Institute for Network Science yins.yale.eduTRELLIS - Suite of software tools for developing, administering, and collecting survey and social network data trellis.yale.eduThe Atlantic: “How AI Will Rewire Us: For better and for worse, robots will alter humans’ capacity for altruism, love, and friendship”www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.org

May 27, 2022 • 10min
(Highlights) Derrick Emsley · Co-founder & CEO of veritree - Data-driven Restorative Platform & tentree Apparel Co.
"I think what's powerful about a tree is it's tangible and it's symbolic in a lot of ways. We as humans naturally have this emotional connection, I think, to trees, and so particularly when you think of our ability to take action within the climate crisis conversation, a tree is this really powerful symbol and vehicle because it's a lot easier to understand a tree than it is to understand a pound or two of CO2 that's floating in the air.So for us, tree planting is just the start of the communication, just the start of the impact. Really if all it was was to get a stick in the ground that wouldn't have the long-term impact, whether that be carbon, whether that be socioeconomic impact, and things like that. So really for us, veritree helps us collect all that data and create the operating system to pull in the data on everything from planting forms and field updates that are coming in, survivability analysis, and different updates on things like biodiversity. We're partnering with some groups to test underwater sensors in some of these planting sites. We're collecting socioeconomic surveys and things like that to try to attach the impact to the community and back to the planting that's happening.”From a young age, Saskatchewan born Derrick Emsley has been actively connecting people with environmental stewardship. At 16, he and his brother Kalen founded a tree planting company that sold carbon offsets to businesses, a venture that saw over $1 million dollars in contracts and 150,000 trees planted. Derrick founded tentree, the apparel company that plants trees for purchases, soon after graduating from Richard Ivey School of Business in 2012. In just under a decade, tentree has set new standards for apparel brands with environmentally progressive values. Based on its success creating a model for engagement between the brand and its consumers, Derrick co-founded veritree last year, as a platform for regeneration that other brands can use to create similar impact. Named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 for 2020, Derrick has become a voice for a modern generation—one who recognizes the necessity of a brand that's earth-first, transparent, and community-focused.· www.veritree.com· veritree Launches Community of 30 Brand Partners to Plant 10 Million Verified Treesveritree Partners with Samsung to Plant Millions of Trees in 2022Mogo announces its partnership with veritreeveritree and Cardano Foundation Complete Global Impact Challenge as "Cardano Forest" Reaches Funding Target for Planting 1M Treeswww.oneplanetpodcast.org· www.creativeprocess.info


