St. Louis on the Air

The director of the St. Louis Zoo Institute for Conservation Medicine, Dr. Sharon Deem, wants people to understand just how much human health is dependent on the health of other animals and the environment. The interconnection between people, animals, plants and their shared environment is the main focus of the CDC’s “One Health” movement, in which the St. Louis Zoo is a leader. In this interview, Deem talks about emerging public health issues, everyday solutions to global threats and the St. Louis Zoo’s role within the One Health movement.

Growing up in north St. Louis County, where she was leading choirs by the time she was 12 years old, Maria Ellis remembers thinking about St. Louis Children’s Choirs as “the ultimate vocal group.” But as her alma mater, the University of Missouri-St. Louis, notes in a recent UMSL Daily story about Ellis’ journey, Ellis couldn’t afford to join the SLCC program as a child. She did participate in one of the organization’s community honors choirs, and now she’s come full circle, having landed a position as SLCC’s community engagement manager several years ago. But shortly after starting that job, she realized the north St. Louis County honors choir she’d so enjoyed as a child was no more. Now, in 2020, it’s coming back thanks to Ellis.

On the heels of Bi-State Development's meeting where committee members declined to move forward a proposal that the regional transit agency take over trolley operations, St. Louis Public Radio's Kae Petrin joins host Sarah Fenske in studio to talk about it.

In the popular imagination, Cahokia seems to represent a cautionary tale. What today remains only as a series of mounds outside Collinsville, Illinois, used to be a thriving city — bigger than London in the mid-13th century. There may have been as many as 40,000 people living there. Yet in the years that followed, the population faced rapid decline. By 1400, what was a city had become a wasteland. Yet a new paper suggests that narrative is at best incomplete. Published yesterday in “American Antiquity,” the study uses fecal deposits to show that the exodus from the site was short-lived. A fresh wave of native people settled in Cahokia and repopulated the area from 1500 to 1700. In this segment, A.J. White discusses the paper and how the longer timeline of his study destroys “the myth of Cahokia’s Native American lost civilization.” A doctoral student in anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, White is the study’s lead author.

Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner is suing the St. Louis Police, a former undergrad is suing Washington University, and across the country, there are thousands of lawsuits against Bayer-Monsanto. Locally, a trial kicks off in St. Louis this week involving Bayer-Monsanto’s weed killer Roundup, as well as one in Cape Girardeau involving Dicamba. In this episode, a panel of legal analysts joins host Sarah Fenske to discuss these cases and more.

George Herbert Walker III, better known as Bert, was a St. Louis businessman, philanthropist and former U.S. Ambassador to Hungary. He died Saturday at the age of 88. In this remembrance, we listen back to when Walker came on the show in March 2007.

Host Sarah Fenske learns more about Downtown STL’s process of upgrading the street lights throughout downtown's 360 square blocks. Once completed, St. Louis will become one of the largest smart cities in the U.S., second only to San Diego. Joining the discussion is Downtown STL CEO Missy Kelley and the father-and-son team that helped develop the smart technology: Ted Stegeman, CEO of Labyrinth Technologies, and his 23-year-old son John, the company’s chief technology officer.

In an age of crumbling infrastructure across the U.S., sidewalks have been no exception to the pattern of decay. The city of St. Louis alone is home to roughly 2,000 miles worth of sidewalks, and both the physical condition and suitability of those streetside pathways vary widely. David Newburger, St. Louis' commissioner on the disabled, is constantly working with colleagues to update sidewalks and maintain ADA compliance, and they’re also thinking about sidewalks within the context of streets as a whole. Meanwhile, local municipalities including both St. Louis and Kirkwood are participating in the National Complete Streets Coalition, which is focused on making roads better for all types of users rather than prioritizing drivers. U.S. Department of Transportation statistics on pedestrian deaths show there’s still much work to be done. For Kirkwood City Councilwoman Kara Wurtz, the fact that Missouri ranks among the more dangerous states for pedestrians is a problem. She’s made addressing it within her municipality’s borders a focus. In this episode of the talk show, Wurtz and Newburger join host Sarah Fenske for a discussion about the state of the region’s sidewalks and what needs to happen to improve pedestrian comfort and safety. Also participating in the conversation is Cindy Mense, CEO of Trailnet. The discussion also includes listeners during the show who call in and post messages on social media with their thoughts on sidewalks.

When news breaks about a dangerous situation, it’s natural to wonder what one might have done in a similar scenario: Tried to help? Been courageous? Perhaps made things worse? Running into burning buildings and shielding others from active shooters may be the sort of dramatic situations that come to mind. But far subtler opportunities to intervene on behalf of fellow humans come up more regularly than one may recognize — right in the grocery checkout aisle, for example, when witnessing a tense parent-child interaction. That’s the sort of scene Nancy Weaver and her colleagues at St. Louis University’s College of Public Health and Social Justice have been helping others around the region visualize and then learn to respond to in positive, practical ways.

There are roughly 2.8 million people living in Greater St. Louis, many of whom would be surprised to know that they share the space with a good variety of wildlife. The St. Louis Wildlife Project now has four seasons of data that they hope will give insight into how wildlife occupy and utilize the region’s urban spaces. For the past year, they’ve collected images from 34 motion-activated cameras planted in parks and green spaces across St. Louis. They’ve spotted foxes, turkeys, river otters, and even a couple bobcats. In this interview, Sarah Fenske talks with the researchers involved to learn about their observations from the past year.