This is an overlapping continuation of episode 31, including the part about Silver Bay. Greg Laden and Mike Haubrich spoke a bit more, about our travels and experiences along the North Shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota. We also talked about the Iron Range in some greater detail, we talked about the gas fires in a flooded Grand Forks in 1997, how Hibbing had to move for the mines in the 1920’s and how even the mountains in Minnesota are almost flat.
This is how our conversations go when we get together. You should join us sometime.
Episode 30 - Protecting the Watershed with Megan Bond
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Guest Megan Bond
Megan Bond has a BS in Public Administration with a Minor in Health Care Adminstration, a J.D. and an M.A. in Public Policy and Leadership from the University of St. Thomas. She began working in water conservation as a teenager in Las Vegas and has found her way into the environmental movement wherever she’s lived, and made environmental policy a major focus of her studies at all levels, even earning the Dean’s Award in Environmental Law in law school. She is an attorney and a solo practitioner at Bond Law Office, in International Falls, MN, concentrating in public interest defense work, including defending 37 water protectors protesting the Line 3 project in 2020 and 2021. She lives on the shores of Rainy Lake near Voyageurs National Park, in the heart of the Rainy River Watershed. Outside of her career, she chairs theDFL Environmental Caucus, chairs the Science and Policy Committee for Voyageurs Conservancy, serves on the Board of Directors of her local Food Shelf, and spends as much time camping in the summers and hiking in the autumns as she can.
Canoes at Boundary Waters
In this interview, Megan talks extensively with Greg Laden about the importance of the watershed to Minnesota’s Boundary Waters and Voyageurs National Park as well as the Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario; but more importantly, the watershed flows out from a contintal “trivide” to Hudson’s Bay, The Atlantic Ocean’s East Coast through the St. Lawrence Seaway and to the Gulf Of Mexico through the Mississippi River.
We do need to have copper for solenoids in windmills, and it’s a nearly perfect conductor for electrical wires for power transmission. So, we aren’t saying to not mine copper, but the mines being fought over are not necessary in an environmentally sensitive area.
There is an additional segment with Mike Haubrich talking to Greg about the EPA suit that forced the Reserve Mining Company to stop dumping taconite tailings into Lake Superior.
Episode 29: Agro Ecology and Smart Farmers with Laurent Penet
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Our Guest
In this wide-ranging episode, we explored ideas in agriculture on how to make it both more productive and ecologically friendly. Our guest is Laurent Penet, PhD, a researcher with the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment. While we strayed from the initial question, we did cover a lot of ground on maintaining our ability to continue to produce food in the tropics and the temperate zones, how to encourage biodiversity by not killing all the weeds, why we need pollinators, and reiterated that farmers are great resources because they know the land they are working.
Laurent had warned us that the frogs may be loud, but they ended up being quiet. So I made up for it by adding some to the beginning through an audio courtesy of ZapSplat. “Happy Dance” by Mr. Smith is extracted for the intro, and the close is “A Song for Peace” by Siddhartha Corsus. Legal notifications under the Creative Commons License.
We started with a list of twenty questions, but that turned out to be bigger than a breadbox (figuratively, meaning we ran out of time.) And so we have fourteen questions related to phsyics and the universe in general.
Ethan Siegel is a primo science communicator, with a blog at Starts With a Bang, a podcast of his own of the same name, and articles that he has published in a diverse array of magazines. He’s an enthusiastic interpreter of science, and we assure you there is no math required to listen to this podcast.
We are using new bumper music. “Happy Dance” by Mr. Smith is extracted for the intro, and the close is “A Song for Peace” by Siddhartha Corsus. Legal notifications under the Creative Commons License.
Episode 27 - The Science Says I'm Right and You're Wrong
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Especially since Covid-19, everyone you argue with either in person or on the internet about masks or vaccines, or climate change, or evolution, or whether the earth is flat or round*, or whatever people fight about, there’s going to be a demand to produce the science to support your argument. That’s not always as easy as you might think.
In this episode, Mike interviews Greg, to ask about how science works, what peer-review means, whether correlation implies causation and if that means that correlation has no value. It helps to have a good understanding of what science does, and how it works. We’re here to help. For example, are you familiar with “The Scientific Method?” You likely earned an “A” on your 8th Grade (2nd form) science quiz by reciting this set of steps:
Just a basic idea of how science works.
There’s much more to science than that. Science is woven into the culture, and yet many misconceptions remain. Greg and Mike only covered a quantum mass of misconceptions, but we never fail to inform. There are many resources, and we reference this one during the show:
We are using new bumper music. “Happy Dance” by Mr. Smith is extracted for the intro, and the close is “A Song for Peace” by Siddhartha Corsus. Legal notifications under the Creative Commons License.
*The earth is neither flat nor round, is it? It’s an oblate spheroid, meaning it is ball-shaped with bulges around the belly, or the tropics. Pizzas are flat and round, the earth is not pizza.
Episode 26 - Seven Simple Rules for Saving the Planet
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A yurt
One person alone doesn’t make much of a difference, really. But that’s no reason to throw your hands in the air, say “what does it matter,” and take a hot shower with water heated by a gas-burning tank. There are simple actions that you can take in your life, that don’t require turning into a scoldy, crunchy, hippie living in a yurt on a commune in Vermont. (Although there’s nothing wrong with that.)
In this episode, Mike and Greg are each other’s guests, and we go over things you can do both at home and in talking to your local and national government representatives to help restore carbon balance to nature.
Engineers are working the problems, too.
We are using new bumper music, “Happy Dance” by Mr. Smith. Legal notifications under the Creative Commons License.
Episode 25 - Pump: A Natural History of the Heart, Part 2
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The wait is over!
Bill Schutt, auther of Pump: A Natural History of the Heart
This is the second part of Greg Laden’s interview with Bill Schutt, whose book Pump: A Natural History of the Heart, is available on Amazon in multiple formats. If you haven’t listened to the first part of this interview yet, catch up on that one first.
Episode 24 - Pump: A Natural History of the Heart, Part 1
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We are back!
Bill Schutt, auther of Pump: A Natural History of the Heart
Join us with part one of an interview with zoologist and author Bill Schutt, as we discuss his latest book, Pump: A Natural History of the Heart, a delightful and informative exploration of the heart, in all its (anatomical) forms.
We have changed our format a little, and hope you enjoy it. Feedback is welcome as long as you are nice about it.
Dr. Karen Stollznow is a linguist who earned her PhD at the University of New England, in Australia. She hosts the skeptical podcast Monster Talk with Blake Smith (subscribe, you’ll thank us!) She is also a prolific author, having published academic works, non-fiction as well as fiction.
Dr. Karen Stollznow
In this episode, we open with the ways in which we judge and stereotype each other based on the dialect and language that we use and move on to the meanings of words and how the change in time and space. Not only does the cafe lose the accent after a time, but bad words turn good and good words turn bad. It’s hysterical, how that works.
We marked this episode “explicit” because we discuss some of the words that are not used in polite language and how the relative offense of using some words varies based on where the speaker is as well as how the audience may be.
Check out her Amazon Author’s Page Here and also check out Monster Talk.
