17/08/2020

We're Not Here For Doom And Gloom': Meet The Hosts Of Climate Change Podcast How To Save A Planet

The Guardian - 

Alex Blumberg and Dr Ayana Elizabeth Johnson consider how ordinary people can stop the decline of the planet without feeling terrified, in their ambitious new Spotify series

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Alex Blumberg, presenters of How to Save a Planet. Photograph: PR HANDOUT

For a podcast about the climate crisis, there is a surprising amount of laughter in How to Save a Planet.

Certainly, British listeners – maybe more accustomed to the sober, mournful tone Radio 4 brings to these issues – may feel startled by the sheer quantity of hilarity that the American presenters, Alex Blumberg and Dr Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, find in the subject.

The show’s chattiness, and its decision to refer to listeners as “earthlings”, may grate a little to begin with, but it is worth persisting. Beneath the gossipy drivetime tone, this is a podcast of enormous ambition and seriousness, and one which promises to be fascinating.

The show’s determined sense of can-do optimism reflects the creators’ conviction that it is crucial not to depress listeners excessively if you want them to engage with this challenging subject. “We’re not just going to bum you out, that’s really important,” Blumberg says.

Anyone who writes or broadcasts about the climate crisis is familiar with the difficulty of conveying the urgency of the situation without triggering a profound sense of hopelessness, which prompts people to switch off – literally, in the case of a podcast.

Blumberg, an award-winning radio journalist who has worked on This American Life and co-founded his own podcast company, Gimlet, has collaborated with Johnson, a marine biologist, to try to inspire an active response in listeners.

Blumberg’s involvement comes from a sense that despite this being the greatest challenge of our time, most people seem to be defeated by the enormity of it. “It’s an existential issue that requires a broad sort of collective action,” he says, and yet “it doesn’t really seem that many people are talking about it, the way they should”. This, he thinks, is partly because so much of the conversation has been about the problem and not about possible solutions.

Most reporting, Johnson adds, concludes that the planet is “totally screwed … The ice is melting, the world’s on fire, and scientists continue to show us this in new ways, with new levels of rigour and specificity. And this is important, because it’s critical for us to know what is at stake. But that leaves us with ‘OK, now what?’ kind of feelings. There’s been a lot of great reporting on climate, especially in the last few years, but it’s been kind of hard to connect with. It’s either like doom and gloom, or it’s so fluffy that it’s not going to get us where we need to go. So we were trying to find that sweet spot in the middle.”

This is the territory the podcast wants to inhabit, Blumberg explains. “In the US there’s a very small minority – like 10%, according to polling – of people who deny climate change, but that group has a way, way outsized voice, and because they’re so loud, people think it’s a much bigger group. A lot of media is focused on trying to convince that 10% that it is real and we should really pay attention to it. And then you’ve got a broad group of people who are just terrified already, but they don’t want to read another scary article, because they’re convinced already and they want to know: what can I do that isn’t just, like, recycle more,” he says. “This podcast will take it as a given that it’s happening, but will be asking: what do we as humanity do about it?”



They hope to create an army of activists out of listeners, helping them find a way to participate in planet-saving missions, such as (in episode one) accelerating the move from coal to wind. Shaming people about their carbon footprint has not worked, Johnson says; instead she hopes to help people participate in wider change. “One of the failings of the climate movement to date is that we have been asking everyone to do the same thing. We say: ‘Right, everyone, march! Everyone, donate! Everyone, lower your carbon footprint!’ As opposed to saying: ‘What are you good at? And how can you bring that to this wide array of solutions that are available to us? By showcasing different climate solutions every week, we’re really hoping that people will see something here that they connect with,” she says.

“We already have most of the solutions we need,” says Johnson. It’s just about how we’re going to get them done. We want to create a show that’s focused on solutions and helping people figure out how they can be part of the systems-level change as opposed to individual behaviour change. We need to change our energy system and our transportation system and our manufacturing and our buildings and our agriculture – we don’t just need people to ride their bikes more. And so we’re backing away from the ‘10 quick easiest lifestyle changes’ to saying: we need to change everything. There are people doing this work; we’ll talk to them and let’s figure out how we can all help.”

Before each show concludes, they return to the scientists and energy experts they have interviewed, and ask them to spell out exactly what steps listeners can take. At the end of the first episode, they call on subscribers to look out for and attend council meetings, and support applications for wind farms (pointing out that most members of the public who attend these meetings are local residents with nimbyish concerns about where sites should be). The podcast’s perspective is initially quite US-centric, but the struggles between residents, politicians and energy firms are global.

Throughout the first couple of episodes, Johnson and Blumberg are constantly laughing, trying not to take themselves too seriously. Johnson says she often “gets accused of being optimistic and hopeful”, despite being someone who has dedicated her career to marine biology and “studying an ecosystem that is almost certainly not going to make it”. “The truth is that I’m just a joyful person who understands the science. We certainly take the climate crisis seriously because we know how long the odds are. That doesn’t mean I have to be miserable on a moment-to-moment basis,” she says. Occasionally, though, the reporting for the series reduced both co-presenters to tears – so frequently in an episode about the European Green Deal that editors had to cut some of the segments. “I think I cried three times in that episode and we were like: that’s too many,” she says.

The emotive conversations seem likely to continue. One forthcoming episode asks what the climate movement can learn from Black Lives Matter. (Johnson recently wrote in Time magazine that “We can’t solve the climate crisis without people of colour, but we could probably solve it without racists.”)

The presenters say this is an open-ended series, and Johnson is keen to stick with it. “It is a weekly show – until the job is done.”

Note: How to Save a Planet from Gimlet and Spotify launches on 20 August

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Climate Change, Not Hunting, May Have Doomed The Woolly Rhinoceros

Smithsonian - 

Populations of the Ice Age icon were healthy right up until their extinction, suggesting they crashed precipitously as the planet warmed

A lifelike restoration using the remains of a baby woolly rhinoceros recovered from the Siberian permafrost. The specimen was nicknamed Sasha after the hunter who discovered it. (Albert Protopopov)

Some 30,000 years ago, the hulking woolly rhinoceros and its curved, three-foot-long horn inspired ancient humans to streak the limestone walls of Chauvet Cave in southern France with vivid charcoal portraits of the Ice Age beast. But were humans’ artistic renderings of the woolly rhino accompanied by hunting that drove the creatures extinct roughly 14,000 years ago?

The explanation for the demise of Ice Age megafauna, including the woolly mammoth, giant sloth and saber-toothed cat, has been debated for decades. Many researchers have proposed that the mammals were hunted into extinction by Homo sapiens in what’s been termed the “overkill hypothesis.” Now, in research published today in Current Biology, scientists who analyzed the animal’s DNA suggest that it may have been the planet’s swiftly changing climate that undid the species.

“Humans are well known to alter their environment and so the assumption is that if it was a large animal it would have been useful to people as food and that must have caused its demise,” says Edana Lord, a graduate student at the Centre for Palaeogentics and co-first author of the paper. “But our findings highlight the role of rapid climate change in the woolly rhino’s extinction.”

The woolly rhino was a fur-matted fortress of a creature that grazed across the dry, frigid steppe ecosystem of northern Eurasia, including modern-day France but particularly in Siberia, for hundreds of thousands of years. They were roughly the same size as the white rhinos of today, which can reach up to five tons. Scientists speculate that woolly rhinos used their horns, which are thinner and more blade-like than those of living rhinos, to sweep away snow and nibble at frost-crusted tufts of greenery.

A woolly rhinoceros skeleton. (Fedor Shidlovskiy)

But suddenly, around 14,000 years ago the woolly rhino died out. Humans are thought to have first made their way to the rhino’s Siberian stronghold around 30,000 years ago, meaning they overlapped with woolly rhinos for some 16,000 years. The animal’s last centuries of existence coincided with a sudden and severe warming event called the Bølling–Allerød interstadial, which began around 14,700 years ago. During this roughly 2,000-year period of warmth, the meltwater gushing from the planet’s immense ice sheets raised sea level by approximately 50 feet.

For the paper’s senior author Love Dalen, a paleogeneticist at Stockholm University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History, the goal was to establish when the woolly rhino’s population started to decline and what that lined up with. “Did the decline start 30,000 years ago when humans appeared,” says Dalen. “Or 14,000 years ago when we know the planet went through a period of rapid warming?”

To find out when that decline likely began, Dalen and his colleagues needed good quality samples of woolly rhino DNA. The ancient animal’s DNA would reveal how inbred or genetically diverse the woolly rhino was, which would allow researchers to infer when the population started shrinking before going extinct. Finding samples meant scientists spent years tramping around the increasingly sodden Siberian permafrost to track down pieces of bone, tissue and hair from specimens. They then screened those samples to find the ones with the most pristine genetic material.

The team selected and sequenced the mitochondrial genomes of 14 samples that included a baby woolly rhino found mummified in the permafrost with much of its hide intact and from a scrap of rhino meat recovered from the stomach of an Ice Age puppy found with its internal organs intact.

Animal cells contain both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA. While most of the cell’s DNA is contained in the nucleus, the mitochondria also has its own DNA. These short, maternally inherited lengths of genetic code are easier to sequence but provide less information about ancestry than the much larger nuclear genome. Still, the multiple samples of mitochondrial DNA would allow the researchers to expand and corroborate results gleaned from a nuclear genome, which is considered more reliable because it contains fewer mutations.

To sequence the woolly rhino’s nuclear genome, Dalen needed a sample that carried relatively intact and unfragmented strings of genetic code and low levels of contamination from the bacterial DNA that often dominates ancient cells. The researchers finally settled on an 18,500-year-old humerus found in the Arctic Chukotka region of Russia.

Study co-lead author Edana Lord, a paleogeneticist at the Centre for Palaeogenetics, extracting a DNA sample from woolly rhino tissue in the lab. (Marianne Dehasque)

But to know how to piece together the disordered fragments of the woolly rhino’s ancient nuclear genome the researchers needed what’s called a reference genome, a genome from a modern relative of the extinct species being sequenced. The scientists sequenced the woolly rhino’s closest living relative, the endangered Sumatran rhino. Dalen estimates the two species share nearly 99 percent of the same DNA, and, because they’re so genetically similar, the team was able to use the properly arranged Sumatran rhino genome to figure out how to arrange the recovered fragments of woolly rhino DNA.

The 18,500-year-old bone showed strong genetic diversity, indicating that the species’ population was relatively stable and was missing the duplicate sections of genetic code that result from inbreeding. “This was a healthy individual in terms of genetic diversity, which leads us to believe that the decline in population leading up to the woolly rhino’s extinction must have happened rapidly sometime between 18,500 years ago and 14,000 years ago,” says Lord.

“This paper shows that woolly rhino coexisted with people for millennia without any significant impact on their population,” says Grant Zazula, a paleontologist for Canada’s Yukon territory and Simon Fraser University who was not involved in the research. “Then all of a sudden the climate changed and they went extinct.”

This doesn’t prove that human hunting didn’t help extinguish the woolly rhino, cautions Dalen. It’s possible that either human populations or human hunting capabilities reached some crucial tipping point in the 4,500 years his team’s data doesn’t cover.

But the more likely explanation, says Dalen, is that the massive change in climate during the Bølling–Allerød interstadial drove the rhino into oblivion. “I personally don’t think that the increase in temperature in itself was a big problem for the rhinos, but what that warming does is increase precipitation,” says Dalen.

An increase in precipitation would have resulted in more snow. If the snow was many feet deep, it may have put the grasses out of reach of the rhinos, placing them in danger of starvation. Eventually, the warmer, wetter climate would have transformed the steppe ecosystem the woolly rhino depended on from grasslands to shrubs to more forests.

Kay Behrensmeyer, the curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, isn’t totally convinced that climate change alone slayed the woolly rhino. Extinction doesn't usually have a single cause, she says, but instead occurs “when a range of factors critical to a species' existence reach a tipping point.” She says that even with a scant 4,500-year window, human hunting and climate change may have each played a role in the rhino’s doom.

Lord and Dalen say they hope to find more recent samples with high quality DNA so they can probe the millennia just prior to the loss of the woolly rhino. Zazula says even if the final word on the woolly rhinoceros adds human hunting to the mix, the massive changes wrought by Earth’s fickle climate not so long ago should be a lesson for our species to tread more carefully in the present. “It only takes a short period of warming to drive cold adapted species extinct,” he says. “That rapid warming at the end of the Ice Age is similar to what we’re seeing now and it could have similarly devastating consequences for Arctic species today.”

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What Does Islam Say About Climate Change And Climate Action?

Al Jazeera - 

Muslims already have an environmentalist framework to follow. It is set in Islam.

Large areas in the Middle East are expected to become uninhabitable due to frequent heatwaves in the next few decades. File photo, September 2015, Mecca, Saudi Arabia [Mosa'ab Elshamy/AP Photo]

Author
Professor Ibrahim Ozdemir is  is a renowned environmentalist and professor of philosophy at Uskudar University, Turkey.
He is former Director General at Turkey’s Ministry of Education, and the Founding Vice-Chancellor of Hasan Kalyoncu University.
Many Muslim majority countries bear the brunt of climate change, but their cultural awareness of it and climate action are often staggeringly limited.

A movement of "Islamic environmentalism" based on Islamic tradition - rather than imported "white saviour" environmentalism based on first-world political campaigns - can address both. And the post-COVID-19 lull in emissions is an opportunity to fast-track this.

It is a movement we sorely need. My home country Turkey, for example, is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, as temperatures are rising and rainfall is decreasing year on year, causing serious problems with water availability. In Bangladesh, it is estimated that by 2050 one in seven will be displaced by climate change, creating millions of climate refugees. In the Middle East, large areas are likely to become uninhabitable due to heatwaves likely to sweep over the region in the next few decades.

However, despite their vulnerability, many Muslim countries are contributing to the problem. Indonesia, the most populous Muslim-majority country in the world, is the world's fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and is doing little to curb emissions. Bangladesh and Pakistan are the two most polluted countries in the world, but have taken no serious measures to address pollution. Inaction in the Muslim world persists despite a declaration by Muslim countries in 2015 to play an active role in combatting climate change.

You would think that those most affected by climate change would be the most eager to stop it. This is not always the case. Many Muslim countries are reluctant to impose Western concepts of environmentalism, or to bow to pressure from countries which have already gone through industrialisation without having to address pollution or curb emissions. Environmental colonialism is not the answer.

What would work, and has been proven to work, is using the principles of Islam to encourage conservation in Muslims.

Islam teaches its followers to take care of the earth. Muslims believe that humans should act as guardians, or khalifah, of the planet, and that they will be held accountable by God for their actions. This concept of stewardship is a powerful one, and was used in the Islamic Declaration on Climate Change to propel change in environmental policy in Muslim countries.

In fact, Muslims need to look no further than the Quran for guidance, where there are approximately 200 verses concerning the environment. Muslims are taught that "greater indeed than the creation of man is the creation of the heavens and the earth". The reality is that nothing could be more Islamic than protecting God's most precious creation: the earth.

It is this approach that can reach the hearts and minds of the 1.8 billion Muslims around the world, and it must be integrated with, rather than neglected by, the climate movement.

The Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) also demonstrated kindness, care and general good principles for the treatment of animals, which form a benchmark for Muslims. He outlawed killing animals for sport, told people not to overload their camels and donkeys, commanded that slaughtering an animal for food be done with kindness and consideration for the animal’s feelings and respect for Allah who gave it life, he even allowed his camel to choose the place where he built his first mosque in the city of Medina.

A 2013 study in Indonesia showed that including environmentalist messages in Islamic sermons led to increased public awareness and concern for the environment. In 2014, Indonesia issued a fatwa (or Islamic legal opinion) to require the country's Muslims to protect endangered species.

There are also organisations dedicated to using religion to pass on the message of conservation, such as the Alliance for Religions and Conservation (ARC). One of its most successful projects used Islamic scholars to convince Tanzanian fishermen that dynamite, dragnet and spear fishing goes against the Quran - and they listened.

This case also tells us that remote, top-down moralising is unlikely to be effective. The fishermen had previously resisted bans from the government, but were persuaded once they were told that they were acting un-Islamically. One fisherman said: "This side of conservation isn't from the mzungu ["white man" in Swahili], it's from the Quran."

Clearly, we need to speak the language of those whose behaviour we are seeking to change, particularly if that language is naturally averse to unsustainable policies.

Some Muslim thought leaders are aware of this and are eager to develop a "homegrown" environmental movement to emerge as thought leaders in their own right. For example, the Dhaka Forum this month ran a panel on post-COVID-19 environmental issues with the majority of speakers coming from the Muslim world.

Muslim countries have a head start in the climate race. They have a framework and a belief system which mandates protection of the earth and its natural resources. As Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a prominent proponent of the religion and environmentalism movement, argues, the desacralisation of the West has resulted in an ideology that humans have dominion over the earth, rather than stewardship of it, which is the Islamic view.

Muslims must become guardians of the earth once more, for the sake of their environments and for the sake of God.

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