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.
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.
Josh Galperin, outgoing Associate Director for the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy, interviews incoming Associate Director Lisa Dale about her background and new role. Dr. Dale discusses her passion for the outdoors and how it has been channeled into environmental policy work.
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 precarious positions that human communities have in relationship to it.
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 solutions.
In this episode, Matthew Hoffmann, 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 frame for climate change.
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’s lives.
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.
