DocArchive: The Bicycle Diaries - part one

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/docarchive/docarchive_20090116-0830a.mp3

DocArchive: The Bicycle Diaries - part one This series features three portraits of the use of the bicycle around the world. The first programme looks at a new bicycle system in Paris, France called the Velib. Duration: 23mins | File Size: 11MB

Climate Wars - Part One

http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/ideas_20090119_10989.mp3

Climate Wars - Part One from The Best of Ideas: CBC Radio Global warming is moving much more quickly than scientists thought it would. Even if the biggest current and prospective emitters - the United States, China and India - were to slam on the brakes today, the earth would continue to heat up for decades. At best, we may be able to slow things down and deal with the consequences, without social and political breakdown. Gwynne Dyer examines several radical short- and medium-term measures now being considered—all of them controversial.

Pond Scum Power

http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/media/2008-2009/mp3/qq-2008-10-04_01.mp3

Pond scum may not be pretty to look at, but some scientists think it may be a beautiful solution to our energy needs. Over the past few years, we've devoted a lot of effort to developing biofuels from plant crops like corn and soy. But these crops take up lots of land and use a lot of water - resources we need for food production. It also takes a lot of fossil fuels to farm biofuels, so they're not nearly as green as we once supposed. Now the challenge is to find plants that don't need prime agricultural land and heavy irrigation to thrive.  Not a lot of plants are up to the challenge -- except perhaps for humble algae, better known as pond scum. Despite their diminutive size, some species of algae can turn sunlight and carbon dioxide into oil, which they store as fat reserves in their tiny bodies. This oil, in turn, can be processed into a biodeisel we can use in our cars. It sounds like a great idea and some scientists are convinced we can replace the fossil fuel we use with algal biofuel. But there are plenty of challenges before we start running on pond power. Researchers have only just begun to identify which species produce high amounts of oil and, then, getting them to do it reliably turns out to be kind of tricky. As well, designing large-scale algal farms turns out to be harder than it might sound. So, producing algal biofuel in the kind of volume that can satisfy our unquenchable thirst for fuel may still be a long way off.  Dr. Kirsten Heimann is the Director of the North Queensland Algal Identification and Culturing Facility at James Cook University in Australia. She and her colleagues are sifting through innumerable algal species in order to find which ones pump out the most oil. Dr. Heimann is particularly encouraged by one species she's found that produces 30 percent of its body weight in oil. Dr. Al Darzins oversees the U.S. Department of Energy's National Bioenergy Center in Golden, Colorado. Dr. Darzins and his colleagues have recently re-started a U.S. government research program identifying oil-producing algae and trying to grow it on a large-scale. Dr. Andres Clarens is an an Assistant Professor and an Environmental Engineer at the University of Virginia. He's interested in using waste CO2 from coal factories as a way of super-charging algal growth. As hopeful as he is that we'll be able to develop algal bio-fuel, he thinks, in the short term, large-scale algae farms will be best suited for sequestering carbon dioxide. Dr. John Benemann is an independent consultant and research scientist who is somewhat skeptical that we'll ever produce algal biofuels in significant enough quantities that it will ever be a viable fuel alternative. However, like Dr. Clarens, he feels it has tremendous potential to act as an environmental sponge, not just for cleaning up the air, but as an efficient filtering system for sewage and waste water.

Crop To Cuisine: Mushrooms

http://media.globalpublicmedia.com/RM/2008/12/C2C_Mushrooms12.1.08.mp3

Crop To Cuisine 01 Dec 2008 — Renowned mycologist Paul Stamets and other guests discuss the importance of mushrooms and other fungi to the health of the planet, from a medicinal, environmental, and culinary perspective.

Jerry Mander

http://mbanna.radio4all.net/pub/archive4/mp3_2/1021manderander.mp3

Fred Turner of Stanford University on “From Counterculture to Cyberculture: the Rise of Digital Utopianism.”

http://media-cyber.law.harvard.edu/AudioBerkman/fred_turner_2006-12-01.mp3

mediaberkman - December 1, 2006 @ 3:33 pm · Berkman Center, Digital Identity, Education, Fred Turner, Governance, Imaginify, Internet, Politics, Science, Software, audio  Fred Turner of Stanford University on “From Counterculture to Cyberculture: the Rise of Digital Utopianism.” (time: 1:28:32). In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers represented a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place. Fred Turner explores this extraordinary and ironic transformation by tracing the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs who made the connections between San Francisco “flower power” and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers.

Humanure Composting

Title: Humanure Composting Producer: Stephanie Potter Length: 26:39 minutes (24.41 MB) Format: MP3 Stereo 44kHz 128Kbps (CBR) On the Recovery Zone, June 7th, Stephanie Potter featured Ole & Maitri Ersson who use humanure compost on their garden plants--including their fruits and vegetables. All they need is a bucket, wood chips and a compost bin. They have safely been doing this for 15 years.

http://kboo.fm/audio/download/3348/0607+humanure+narration+final.mp3