There’s a push to remove the moratorium in Minnesota against developing nuclear power as s ource of energy. We are hearing claims that it is a renewable energy source, and that it doesn’t produce carbon emissions. When this podcast was actually being recorded (there was snow on the ground,) the Minnesota Legislature was in session. So, yes, that’s a while ago. But this is still relevant, and will be for the future. There’s no guest on this show, because I am interviewing Greg Laden, who is the co-host and has been working on the issue so he has some expertise.
We didn’t ask what she had for breakfast, nor what she suggests that we have for breakfast, because that isn’t the point of the book. Zuk wrote about the complexity of evolutionary development and that it’s not necessarily so that modern people can look to the past to build our menus, our patterns of relationships, nor what we do for exercise. We don’t need to be stuck in the past, since evolution doesn’t teach that we should. Evolution doesn’t stop, so why should we?
As usual, the conversation touched on concepts that both Greg and Marlene developed during their field research. Even the Bing Chat AI made a contribution. Not a great one, but then it’s just a bot.
It’s been a few months since our most recent podcast, but we are happy to see that our listeners are still tuning in. Greg Laden and Mike Haubrich welcome the return of Laurent Penet to the show. Listen in for some great info on his study of fruit trees, fungi and the spores from Ivory Coast, and folk medicine.
Here are some links that he shared for more information:
Phil Adam is an engineer who has quite likely affected your life directly. If you ever go to buildings — school buildings, government buildings, commercial or industrial buildings — during the summer, and the air conditioner is on, there is a chance Phil designed the AC system for that structure.
Phil works in several areas of environmental and political activism. Phil is one of the key people responsible for assembling the thoughts and wishes of Minnesota Democrats across the state into a coherent platform of issues. He is also on the board of directors of the DFL (democrats in MN) Environmental Caucus.
Brian Anderson grew up near the banks of the Wisconsin River, in Portage, Wisconsin, and earned a degree in electrical and computer engineering from the highly prestigious UW Madison. He now lives in Minnesota where he enjoyed a storied career designing technologies used in automobile diagnostic and medical devices.
Both Phil and Brian have chosen to spend a huge amount of their free time spreading the word on electric vehicles. As engineers, they have an understanding of the technology. Both Brian and Phil have an excellent sense of how to drag important concepts kicking and screaming out of the weedy rabbit holes they inhabit, into the open, to re-explain them and make them accessible to regular people.
For more information on NIO cards, check out this link to their manufacturer. This is not an endorsement of a particular carmaker, but an example of how engineering continues to evolve to solve some of the perceived problems with commercial acceptance of electric vehicles.
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.
