Cascade PBS Ideas Festival

Manipulating Nature to Save It with Elizabeth Kolbert

The New Yorker staff writer says human ingenuity may offer some solutions to the planet's biggest problems.

The relationship between humanity and nature is complicated. People are a part of nature, but at the same time they are a force that acts upon nature … and usually to the detriment of the rest of nature. 

Climate change is the most high-profile example of this interaction, but there are many other ways that human beings degrade the living world, from ocean acidification to the proliferation of plastics to the role that modern civilization plays in spreading pathogens.

The extent of the destruction wrought by humanity has been amplified by human ingenuity to what could be called an unnatural degree. But what if humanity could use that ingenuity to do the reverse, to mend the damage done. 

That is the topic of this episode of Crosscut Talks, featuring author Elizabeth Kolbert and Grist staff writer Lizzy O’Leary discussing the intriguing technologies that may help heal nature and the likelihood that they will protect the planet from the worst ravages of climate change.

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Credits

Host: Mark Baumgarten

Producer: Sara Bernard

Event producers: Jake Newman, Andrea O'Meara

Engineers: Resti Bagcal, Viktoria Ralph

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If you would like to support Crosscut, go to crosscut.com/membership. In addition to funding our events and our daily journalism, members receive complete access to the on-demand programming of Seattle’s PBS station, KCTS 9.

The Fight to Save Snake River Salmon with Dr. Helen Neville and Alyssa Macy

Salmon in the Pacific Northwest have been on the decline. Two advocates tell how breaching the dams along the river could restore the population. 

Salmon are integral to Pacific Northwest culture and have been for a very long time. Many generations before images of salmon filled Seattle gift shops, Native tribes relied on the fish for sustenance, and they still do today.

But the salmon populations that return to the rivers here during their spawning runs are a fraction of what they used to be, and they appear to be sliding toward extinction. 

In recent years, a movement to reverse that depopulation has gained steam. It has  focused on the dams along the Snake River, which stand as a major obstruction to the salmon. But the dams have also served as sources of hydroelectric power, which is something else that has more recently become woven into the culture of the Pacific Northwest. So removing those dams is no easy task. 

For this episode of the Crosscut Talks podcast, retired environmental journalist Rocky Barker sits down with two people who would like to see those dams breached — Dr. Helen Neville and Washington Environmental Council CEO Alyssa Macy — to talk about what is at stake and where the movement stands now.

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Credits

Host: Mark Baumgarten

Producer: Sara Bernard

Event producers: Jake Newman, Andrea O'Meara

Engineers: Resti Bagcal, Viktoria Ralph

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If you would like to support Crosscut, go to crosscut.com/membership. In addition to funding our events and our daily journalism, members receive complete access to the on-demand programming of Seattle’s PBS station, KCTS 9.

The Politics of Your Dinner Plate with Eddie Hill and Robert Paarlberg

The food that Americans eat says a lot about the political culture they live in. An expert panel discusses what the country's diet is telling us now. 

Food is something that human beings think about every single day. It is the most intimate way we engage with the outside world – by ingesting parts of it – and the need to eat requires us to make choices. What makes it onto our dinner plates, then, says a lot about who we are and what we value, in a nutritional sense as well as a social sense.  

To a certain extent, this perspective has become widely accepted. The rise of organic foods in the grocery aisle and farm-to-table on restaurant menus speaks to this kind of understanding. But the system that’s delivering that food to our plates is so much more complex than a label. And that’s what this episode of the Crosscut Talks podcast is about. 

We invited two people who think a lot about food to share what they see when they look at our food systems. Eddie Hill is a co-founder of the Black Food Sovereignty Coalition and director of the Black Farm Bureau. Robert Paarlberg is the author of Resetting the Table: Straight Talk About the Food We Grow and Eat.

In conversation with Grist staff writer Kate Yoder, they tangle with the food system’s  biggest problems, discuss whether a focus on local and organic foods are actually solving some of those problems and share what they see as the best course toward a healthier future for everyone.

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Credits

Host: Mark Baumgarten

Producer: Sara Bernard

Event producers: Jake Newman, Andrea O'Meara

Engineers: Resti Bagcal, Viktoria Ralph

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If you would like to support Crosscut, go to crosscut.com/membership. In addition to supporting our events and our daily journalism, members receive complete access to the on-demand programming of Seattle’s PBS station, KCTS 9.

Bill McKibben on the Future of the Climate Fight

The iconic environmentalist discusses the history of climate change and climate denial, as well as the challenges and opportunities the future holds.

It’s been more than 30 years since Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature, an essential text in the fight against climate change. And in many ways the world has changed dramatically in that time. But while the possibilities of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change have decreased, the audience for work like McKibben’s has grown. 

When McKibben was first writing about the effects of humanity on the natural world, climate change was still something of a niche category of news. It is only in the past couple decades, as its impacts have become devastatingly apparent, that the story of our rapidly changing planet has become central to everyday life. 

For this episode of the Crosscut Talks podcast, which was recorded as part of the 2022 Crosscut Festival, Bill McKibben shares his perspective on this current state of the climate fight with Grist climate reporter Shannon Osaka. 

McKibben discusses the history of climate change and climate denial that have led to this point, as well his outlook for the future that may be more dire than it was 30 years ago, but remains unwritten.

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Credits

Host: Mark Baumgarten

Producer: Sara Bernard

Event producers: Jake Newman, Andrea O'Meara

Engineers: Resti Bagcal, Viktoria Ralph

How the Reversal of ‘Roe v. Wade’ Impacts Washington State

At a live Civic Cocktail event, Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson and an expert panel discuss the Supreme Court’s decision to end federal protection for abortion.

Roe v. Wade established the right to a safe and legal abortion nationwide. Its reversal means that each state in this extraordinarily divided country of ours will need to decide for itself whether to keep abortion legal, ban it or severely limit it. 

Washington state decided decades ago that abortion access would remain in the state even if Roe fell. But the impact of this decision extends far beyond access. 

What changes lie ahead for clinics and service providers as demand grows from other states? Will legislators reinforce Washington’s laws as other states rewrite theirs? And what should Washingtonians know about the broader implications to their rights going forward? 

For this episode of the Civic Cocktail podcast, Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, Planned Parenthood regional CEO Rebecca Gibron and State Senator Manka Dhingra attempt to answer those questions.

This conversation was recorded on June 22, 2022.

Civic Cocktail is a production of Seattle City Club and Crosscut.

To receive future conversations like this one in your podcast feed earlier, subscribe to the Civic Cocktail podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon, Podbean, or wherever you listen.

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Credits

Host: Mónica Guzmán

Podcast production: Mark Baumgarten

Event production: Jake Newman, Andrea O'Meara

Audio support: Sara Bernard

Safe Water for Everyone with Matt Damon and Gary White

The actor and the engineer discuss solutions to the water crisis.

Access to clean water is a major issue across the globe. According to a 2020 report from the World Health Organization and UNICEF, 771 million people lack access to safe drinking water. 

This issue has also brought together two unlikely partners, engineer Gary White and actor Matt Damon, in the creation of the nonprofit water.org. Their goal is to help bring an end to this global need in their lifetimes. 

For this episode of the Crosscut Talks podcast, White and Damon describe what drew them to this work while laying out the problem as they understand it. 

In this conversation with Dr. Leah Stokes from the 2022 Crosscut Festival, they also detail how their efforts to facilitate the financing of solutions has made clean water available to more than 40 million people and tell the story of how their work has impacted those who previously spent hours each day securing clean water.

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Credits

Host: Mark Baumgarten

Producer: Sara Bernard

Event producers: Jake Newman, Andrea O'Meara

Engineers: Resti Bagcal, Viktoria Ralph

Ijeoma Oluo on the State of America’s Racial Reckoning

The author of So You Want to Talk About Race discusses how the conversation around race has evolved since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.

The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in the spring of 2020 fueled a nationwide conversation about race. It drew hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets, elicited commitments from businesses to do better when it comes to equity and sent books that tangled with systemic racism, white supremacy and the experience being Black in America up the bestseller lists. 

But two years on, where has all that conversation and commitment led us? And where do we go from here? That is the topic of this episode of the Crosscut Talks podcast, which features a conversation with author Ijeoma Oluo, whose book So You Want to Talk About Race was central to many of the conversations happening in 2020.

In this talk with Seattle Times journalist Naomi Ishisaka, which took place in early May as part of the Crosscut Festival, Oluo offers a clear-eyed appraisal of the state of race in the country right now. 

Her assessment may not come as a surprise to anyone who has been tracking the faltering efforts to rethink policing in America, the continued inequities in our health care system or the backlash against educators who acknowledge the role that white supremacy plays in our history and culture. But, in addition to seeing things as they are, Oluo also shares what she believes it would take for them to truly change in a meaningful way.

Credits

Host: Mark Baumgarten

Producer: Sara Bernard

Event producers: Jake Newman, Andrea O'Meara

Engineers: Resti Bagcal, Viktoria Ralph

Work Isn’t Working with Sarah Jaffe and Eyal Press

Two labor journalists discuss what the Great Resignation, union organization and hybrid models mean for the future of work.

 

Work is a huge part of American life. For most people, it takes up more than a third of their days, at least. And it provides the paychecks that meet their everyday needs. And in America it also provides health insurance. Then, of course, there is the fact that a person’s identity is tightly aligned to what they do when they are on the clock.

So when the pandemic came and upended work, it really disrupted so much more. The reverberations have been significant and include the so-called Great Resignation and newly energized movement toward organized labor. Management, meanwhile, is trying to figure out how to return to some form of normalcy, or whether that is even possible. 

All of these issues are of high interest to the journalists appearing on his episode of the Crosscut Talks podcast, Eyal Press and Sarah Jaffe. Both have been studying labor in America since before the pandemic and have recently authored books on different aspects of work in America. 

In this conversation with This Changes Everything host Sara Bernard they explore what the recent disruption has revealed about work in America and whether our current moment is a transformational one.

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Credits

Host: Mark Baumgarten

Producer: Sara Bernard

Event producers: Jake Newman, Andrea O'Meara

Engineers: Resti Bagcal, Viktoria Ralph

Chasing COVID with Trevor Bedford

The Fred Hutch scientist was one of the first people to explain COVID-19 to the public. Thousands of Twitter followers and a MacArthur grant later, he reflects on what he learned.

In many ways, the world is swimming in information about the pandemic. Two-plus years after the virus was first detected in the United States, the COVID-19 dashboard has become, and remains, a fixture in many Americans' lives. There is still room for more information that would help the public in its battle against the virus, but the need is nothing compared with the early days of the pandemic. 

Those early days are where Trevor Bedford found a new role for himself as a science communicator. A professor in the vaccine and infectious disease division of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Bedford was busy at the start of the pandemic. In addition to his day job, he used Twitter to deliver a steady stream of information on the new threat to a public desperate for it.

Bedford continues to inform the public, now with more than 400,000 Twitter followers and a MacArthur “genius” grant to his name. 

For this episode of the Crosscut Talks podcast, reporter Hannah Weinberger speaks with Bedford about how his particular experience with this difficult period has impacted the way he thinks about his work, communication and the pandemic.

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Credits

Host: Mark Baumgarten

Producer: Sara Bernard

Event producers: Jake Newman, Andrea O'Meara

Engineers: Resti Bagcal, Viktoria Ralph

Our Healthcare System Is Sick with Vin Gupta and Cassie Sauer

The pandemic presented new challenges to U.S. health care. Two experts discuss where the system failed, as well as the advancements spurred by the virus.

For more than two years now, talking about health care in the United States has really meant talking about COVID-19. And yet, health care is so much more than a single virus. And while much of the country watched the dashboards showing the peaks and valleys of COVID infections, hospitalizations and deaths, there were many other statistics that shifted into the background, as stress and delay warped the health care system. 

It wasn’t as if that health care system was perfect in the first place. The pandemic has both exposed and intensified existing problems in our hospitals, including access for some Americans and deep inequities when it comes to race. The pandemic also created new problems, including shortages of supplies and equipment early on, and now, as the country presses through a fourth virus surge, shortages of hospital staff. 

While much of the country attempts to move past the pandemic, the health care industry has no such luxury as health care professionals face continued challenges posed by the virus.

For this episode of the Crosscut Talks podcast, recorded in early May during this year’s Crosscut Festival, journalist Will Stone interviews two of those professionals, Amazon Chief Medical Officer Vin Gupta and Washington Hospital Association CEO Cassie Sauer, about the past two years of sustained stress on the health care system, examining the cracks it has exposed, as well as some silver linings.  

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Credits

Host: Mark Baumgarten

Producer: Sara Bernard

Event producers: Jake Newman, Andrea O'Meara

Engineers: Resti Bagcal, Viktoria Ralph