More than 15 years in the making, the United Nations has finally reached an agreement on a landmark, legally binding treaty to protect international waters, where a myriad of wildlife big and small live.
Why did it take so long, and what happens next?
Hear all about it by listening to this audio reading of the popular article by Elizabeth Fitt:
As U.N. members clinch historic high seas biodiversity treaty, what’s in it?
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Image caption: A humpback whale in Antarctica. Image by Christopher Michel via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
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The American approach to food production is negatively impacting the environment and depleting natural resources like topsoil and groundwater at an alarming rate. Top agriculture author, journalist, and Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future research associate Tom Philpott highlights these problems on this episode first by discussing two regions where such impacts are acutely felt, the Central Valley of California and the Great Plains, and then explains how these problems are spreading to the rest of the globe.
But the author of Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It, Philpott also says there's hope via sustainable practices like agroecology and agroforestry, new land tenure models, and more.
A former food reporter and editor for Mother Jones and Grist, he discusses steps that can be taken to reform our food systems for a healthier and more sustainable future at this moment as a new growing season is about to begin in the Northern Hemisphere.
“We don’t have to have an agriculture that consumes the very ecologies that make it possible, and leads to this catastrophic loss of species that we’re in the middle of right now,” our guest says.
Related reading:
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Image caption: Corn is a common food and fodder crop of the Great Plains, and has also long been used to make ethanol. But its most common cultivation methods lead to massive soil erosion, pollution of waterways, and heavy use of chemical herbicides and pesticides. Image courtesy of Tyler Lark.
In 2022, the population of western monarch butterflies reached its highest number in decades, 335,000, according to the annual Western Monarch Count in California and Arizona, marking the second year in a row for a positive tally of the species numbers.
While that count is celebrated by conservationists, they also point to the need to protect monarchs' overwintering sites in North America, which continue to suffer degradation and destruction each year.
Read the popular article by Liz Kimbrough here: Western monarch populations reach highest number in decades
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Image caption: A monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus). Image by John Banks via Pexels (Public domain).
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This podcast episode won a 2024 Indigenous Media Award.
National Geographic photographer Kiliii Yuyan joins the show to discuss his visits to five Indigenous communities and the value of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) for protecting the world’s biodiversity, which is the subject of his new project, "The Guardians of Life: Indigenous Stewards of Living Earth."
An effort in collaboration with previous guest Gleb Raygorodetsky and with support from the National Geographic Society and the Amazon Climate Pledge, the project takes Yuyan to five different Indigenous communities across the world.
Yuyan shares insights on the TEK of the Indigenous communities he’s visited and his own reflections as a person with Indigenous ancestry doing this work, plus what he wishes more journalists would do when sharing the stories and unique knowledge of Indigenous communities.
Related reading:
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Image Caption: Larry Lucas Kaleak listens to the sounds of passing whales and bearded seals through a skinboat paddle in the water. Image (c) Kiliii Yuyan.