Episodes

Liz Barratt-Brown, Senior Advisor to NRDC & Executive Committee member of the Yale Law School, and Advisory Board Member of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy joins Catherine Martini for a conversation about Barratt-Brown's career working on the Toxic Release Inventory, the Keystone XL Pipeline, international climate negotiations, and organic olive oil farming in Mallorca, Spain (www.pedruxella.com).

Deborah Goldberg, the managing attorney for the Northeast office of Earthjustice sits down with Melissa Legge to discuss environmental litigation, climate change, environmental justice, and the unusual twists and turns of her own career from academic to litigator.

Dr. Patty Limerick, Faculty Director and Chair of the Board of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado Boulder and professor of environmental studies and history, joins Stephanie Ratte, a student at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, for a conversation about the importance of history for understanding environmental issues today, challenges and opportunities in the American West, and why we should care more about bureaucrats.

Eugene Rusyn, YLS '17, sits down in the studio with Professor Jim Grijalva to discuss environmental law on Indian lands. Professor Grijalva is an expert in federal Indian law, environmental law, and environmental justice and is the director of the Tribal Environmental Law Project at the University of North Dakota School of Law.

Jennifer McIvor, Vice President of Environmental at MidAmerican Energy speaks with Becky Gallagher about the various environmental issues that energy companies face. While climate change dominates the conversation, companies like MidAmerican are also working to clean up water, protect endangered species, and otherwise coordinate energy production with environmental protection.

Edan Rotenberg, a partner at the Super Law Group, joins Joya Sonnenfeldt a dual degree student at Yale Law School and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies for a conversation about protecting the environment through private environmental law practice. Edan tells Joya about the type of work he does, what drives him, and how lawyers in private practice can protect the public interest.

Abbie Dillen, Vice President of Litigation for Climate and Energy at Earthjustice joins Melissa Legge in the studio to discuss public interest environmental litigation as a tool to make broader changes in environmental governance in the public and private sectors.

Frances Beinecke joins Melissa Legge of Yale Law School and Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies for a conversation about the past, present, and future of the environmental movement. Frances has been involved in environmentalism for 40 years, all of that with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). This past year she retired from her position as President of NRDC and is now a fellow at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Melissa and Frances discuss the role ...

Francesca Koe, a communications specialist, joins Josh Galperin in the studio to talk about strategic environmental communications. Francesca is the former Director of Campaigns and Strategic Initiatives at the Natural Resources Defense Council where she continues to consult for NRDC's Climate Center and Center for Policy Advocacy. Francesca is also on the steering committee and is a coalition advisor for the Climate Advocacy Lab, is an environmental consultant to the AdCouncil, is President of ...

Hans Bruyninckx, the Executive Director of the European Environment Agency, discusses his work toward a low carbon economy in Europe. He explores the upcoming UNFCCC meeting in Paris, and considers the role of Europe in climate change policy.

Lisa Dale, the new associate director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy talks to Josh Galperin, the outgoing associate director, about her new role, experience, and vision for the Center.

Dr. Per Espen Stoknes discusses the misunderstood science of climate psychology and overcoming psychological barriers so we can act meaningfully together to build bottom-up support for climate policy. His new book is What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming: Toward a New Psychology of Climate Action. Dr. Stoknes is a psychologist and economist who teaches at the Norwegian Business School in Oslo.

Christine Klein, the Chesterfield Smith Professor of at the University of Florida Levin College of Law and Sandra Zellmer, the Robert Daugherty Professor at the University of Nebraska Law College, discuss the environmental and social implications of decades of American engineering along the Mississippi River. In 2014, they wrote the book Mississippi River Tragedies: A Century of Unnatural Disaster. The book focuses on the dramatic transformation of the river over the last century and the precari...

Kate Gordon leads the Energy & Climate team at Next Generation. In this episode, she talks about the promising signs of change in US climate and energy policy, with a special focus on the innovations emerging from California. There’s increasing public and private investment in transforming California’s economy, which is now the world’s eighth largest, and Gordon explains its significant impact on the scale of clean energy solutions across the state and what this could mean for national policy so...

In this episode, Matt Hoffman, a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, talks about potential routes toward decarbonization, the process of weaning societies from fossil fuels. His work suggests that the role of international climate negotiations in the future may be different than what we’ve come to expect—they may provide less in the way of binding agreements and more of a source of global goal setting. In this interview, Hoffman offers an entirely new f...

In this episode Glenn Hurowitz speaks on his pathbreaking work in eliminating both environmental and social injustices that pervade the world’s biggest, most entrenched agricultural supply chains. Glenn is the managing director of Climate Advisors where he has taken the international lead on ending deforestation for commodity agriculture. In the last year, Glenn has played a major role in getting the world’s biggest agribusinesses, like Cargill, Wilmar International, and Kellogg, to adopt polici...

In this episode Oriana Persico and Salvatore Iaconesi, both teachers of digital design at La Sapienza University of Rome, discuss what the near future is, how they study it, and what implications of designing the near future has for natural resource companies such as Shell. They help listeners envision the possibilities of a collaborative and ubiquitous learning environment. Much of the conversation centers on their recent Human Ecosystems project in New Haven, Connecticut where they "mapped the...

In this podcast Mathias Risse, professor of philosophy and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, discusses his recent paper, "The Human Right to Water and Common Ownership of the Earth" which posits that humanity's shared possession of our planet provides a philosophical foundation for a right to water and sanitation.

In this podcast, Christopher Sawyer -- a partner with Alston & Bird, a law firm specializing in corporate governance, real estate and conservation law -- discusses the body of skills necessary to transform ideas into a lasting positive community reality.

In this episode, Rafay Alam, an environmental lawyer and activist in Lahore, Pakistan, speaks about the social and economic challenges the government faces in addressing endemic environmental issues. Much of the conversation revolves around problems with poverty and access to natural resources, and how Pakistan's national identity is defined by the Indus River. Rafay also tells the story of starting Critical Mass Lahore, a bicycling advocacy group and how, person by person, it is changing people...

In this podcast Peter Lehner, executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), discusses agriculture -- both NRDC's work on the issue and his own experiences as a coffee and sugar cane grower in Costa Rica -- high-impact climate litigation, and career planning.

In this podcast WWF's Dekila Chungyalpa, discusses the organization's Sacred Earth program, which engages religious leaders and faith communities as stakeholders in the organization's work. Religious leaders, Chungyalpa says, have long been the missing piece of conservation. Scientists often want to distance themselves from religion, or from addressing the moral and ethical questions inherent in many of our most critical environmental dilemmas. This idea that religion threatens science has been ...

The start date for what scientists call the Anthropocene - the era in which human activities begin to have a significant global impact on Earth's ecosystems - varies widely. Some researchers point to the industrial revolution, others look much further back. In this podcast Jed Kaplan, of the Institute of Earth Surface Dynamics, University of Lausanne, Switzerland, discusses his research, focused on the role of the Earth's land surface in the climate system -- and what it reveals about how humans...

In this podcast, Whendee Silver, Yale F&ES '97 (PhD) and professor of ecosystem ecology at U.C. Berkeley, outlines how the use of composted organic material (agricultural and green waste) on rangeland soils can increase carbon storage and decrease greenhouse gas emissions.