Aural Traditions

DocArchive: The Bicycle Diaries - part one

2009-01-28T16:35:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-22T10:19:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-02T09:27:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-01T11:54:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-25T17:02:00.000-08:00

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.”

2008-11-25T12:21:00.001-08:00

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

2008-11-19T10:33:00.000-08:00

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

The Witch of the Willows (Lord Dunsany) January 29, 1964

2008-11-14T08:18:00.000-08:00

http://www.kpfahistory.info/bm/bm_witch.mp3

The Witch of the Willows (Lord Dunsany) January 29, 1964

Barefoot College

2008-11-06T21:20:00.000-08:00

http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll/bunkerroy.mp3?pt=rd&sdm=web&sid=62771346&ufn=bunker

Bunker Roy Profound respect for collective wisdom and traditional skills permeate Bunker Roy’s tale of how his Barefoot College empowers local people to improve their communities by demystifying technology and recognizing the dignity of labor.

2008-11-05T09:45:00.001-08:00

http://emma2.radio4all.net/pub/archive/05.29.04/0511anarchism1.mp3

Horticultural Consciousness

2008-10-31T19:59:00.000-07:00

http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com/enclosure/2008-10-29T19_07_07-07_00.mp3

What is Thinkism? And what does it have in common with Peak Oil Doomerism? Was agriculture a good idea? What are the prosepects for giving it up? KMO discusses these and other burning questions with Toby Hemenway and Eric Boyd in this week's installment of the C-Realm Podcast. Show notes: http://kmo.livejournal.com/378511.html

2008-10-26T20:11:00.000-07:00

http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/current/audioonly/aim_20081025.mp3

We can´t survive without them -- and we´ve long underestimated their prowess. Controversially, bacteria could even have cognitive talents that rival our own. Predatory behaviour, cooperation, memory -- Jules Verne eat your heart out -- Natasha Mitchell takes you on a strange adventure into the secret world of microbial mentality.

Ecotopia Revisited

2008-10-22T09:16:00.000-07:00

http://media.podcastingmanager.com/5/4/3/9/2/138389-129345/Media/CALLENBACH%20ECOTOPIA%20Hi%20Qual.mp3

Ernest Callenbach, Author and Visionary "Ecotopia Revisted" Saturday, June 14, 2008 Alameda Free Library, Conference Rooms A&B 1550 Oak Street, Alameda, CA Today everyone knows that the future of human society is threatened by global warming and other environmental disasters. Imagine a society where community consciously makes ecological choices over profit! Bay Area author Ernest Callenbach's seminal novel, Ecotopia (1975), does imagine such a world. Ecotopia, the portrait of an ecologically sustainable society in a future ages, was initially rejected by virtually every publisher in New York. Callenbach then self-published the book. It went on to become an underground classic, was ultimately issued in mass-market paperback by Bantam, and is still used in classrooms all over the country. It has sold over a million copies, has been translated into nine languages, including Japanese, and was influential in Germany at the time their Green Party emerged. In 1981, Callenbach published a prequel, Ecotopia Emerging, which tells how 'Ecotopia' comes into being.

2008-10-16T15:36:00.000-07:00

http://www.anu.edu.au/mac/podcasts/Audio/woods0307.mp3

It’s Every Monkey for Themselves 07 March 2007 Vanessa Woods Writer, researcher, freelance journalist Taking off to mend a broken heart, Vanessa Woods left safe, suburban Canberra and headed for the remote, wild and distinctly unsafe jungles of Costa Rica. She was stung so often by killer bees she developed a lethal allergy, and the monkeys she was to study were evasive, mean and aggressive. The only difference between them and her housemates was that at least she could tell her housemates apart. In this talk, science writer Vanessa Woods will explain how to survive a year in the jungle: a world of love, loss, bitter rivalry and vicious battles – and that’s just the monkeys.

Living On Earth: Nuclear Power Politics

2008-10-14T20:36:00.000-07:00

http://stream.loe.org/audio/081010/081010nuclear.mp3

Nuclear Power Politics John McCain says the best way to battle global warming is to build more nuclear reactors. But his proposal raises questions about safety, waste storage, and cost.

Living On Earth: The Clean Tech Challenge

2008-10-10T17:29:00.000-07:00

http://stream.loe.org/audio/081003/081003greentech.mp3

The Clean Tech Challenge

As Wall Street tumbles, is it taking nascent clean industries with it? Matthew Nordan of Lux Research Inc. says it depends on the industry. Nordan talks with host Bruce Gellerman about green winners and losers and the future of clean technology. (6:00)

Cloud Dragon Skies

2008-10-03T18:22:00.000-07:00

http://media.rawvoice.com/escapepod/media.libsyn.com/media/escapepod/EP114_CloudDragonSkies.mp3

EP114: Cloud Dragon Skies Published by SFEley on 12 Jul 2007 at 12:30 pm. 13 Comments. Filed under Podcasts, Rated PG. By N.K. Jemisin. Read by Máia Whitaker (of Knitwitch’s Scifi/Fantasy Zone). First appeared in Strange Horizons, August 2005. Closing music: “The Fall,” by Red Hunter. I was a child when the sky changed. I can still remember days when it was endlessly blue, the clouds passive and gentle. The change occurred without warning: one morning we awoke and the sky was a pale, blushing rose. We began to see intention in the slow, ceaseless movements of the clouds. Instead of floating, they swam spirals in the sky. They gathered in knots, trailing wisps like feet and tails. We felt them watching us. We adapted. We had never taken more than we needed from the land, and we always kept our animals far from water. Now we moistened wild cotton and stretched this across our smoke holes as filters. Sometimes the clouds would gather over fires that were out in the open. A tendril would stretch down, weaving like a snake’s head, opening delicate mist jaws to nip the plume of smoke. Even the bravest warriors would quickly put such fires out. Rated PG. Contains passing nudity and apocalyptic themes

James Lovelock

2008-10-01T08:13:00.000-07:00

http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/thinkaboutscience_20080103_4325.mp3

Forty years ago, British scientist James Lovelock put forward the first elements of what he would come to call the Gaia theory. At first many biologists scoffed. Today, Lovelock’s ideas are more widely accepted, even in circles where he was initially scorned. Last year, he published "The Revenge of Gaia", and in this week's podcast, we present a profile of James Lovelock.

Science Friday: Energy and the Economy

2008-09-27T19:00:00.000-07:00

Between environmental concerns and rising gasoline prices, energy use has never seemed more entwined with the economy. Guests discuss how oil prices are tied to economic growth, and give a roundup of the latest energy news.

http://podcastdownload.npr.org/anon.npr-podcasts/podcast/510221/95116550/npr_95116550.mp3

The Suspect Society Part 2

2008-09-23T08:13:00.000-07:00

The Surveillance Society. The Age of Paranoid Politics. These terms, and many others, have been used to describe how the political ground has been shifting under us, particularly since 9/11. Terrorism and national security have become obsessive anxieties. A world-wide initiative has developed that combines a growing machinery of surveillance, assaults on civil liberties and increasing censorship. We are living in what IDEAS producer Mary O’Connell calls “the suspect society.”

http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/ideas_20080922_7574.mp3

The Long Descent

2008-09-22T05:27:00.000-07:00

KMO welcomes author and Archdruid, John Michael Greer, to the program to discuss his new book The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age and explore the possibility that Peak Oil may play out more like a fall down the stairs than like a plunge from a third floor balcony. Do the worldviews of Peak Oil aficionados, Singularitarians, and Trekkies all spring from the book of Revelations, and are modern visions concerning progress and the human future really just ancient religious myths in secular drag?

http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com/enclosure/2008-09-17T16_54_27-07_00.mp3

The Risk Society

2008-09-21T05:40:00.000-07:00

Ulrich Beck & Bruno Latour Ulrich Beck talks about the place of science in a risk society. You’ll also hear from another equally influential European thinker, Bruno Latour, the author of "We Have Never Been Modern." He will argue that our very future depends on overcoming a false dichotomy between nature and culture.

http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/thinkaboutscience_20071227_4292.mp3

Suspect Society

2008-09-20T15:21:00.000-07:00

The Surveillance Society. The New Authoritarianism. The Age of Paranoid Politics. These terms, and many others, have been used to describe how the political ground has been shifting under us, particularly since 9/11. Terrorism and national security have become obsessive anxieties. Fear and suspicion have become the order of the day. We are living in what IDEAS producer Mary O’Connell calls “the suspect society.”

http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/ideas_20080915_6828.mp3

Urban Farming

2006-09-16T15:02:00.000-07:00

Here's a very interesting podcast from "Deconstructing Dinner" on

Urban Farming. I'm very interested in this because I think it's

important that urban dwellers develop a closer relationship with the

people who grow their food. What better way to do it than to rent

your backyard to a local farmer?

As practical and environmentally friendly as growing food within a city can be, the art of gardening has seemingly disappeared in many urban settings. As current farming practices are proving to be unsustainable in the long-term, urban agriculture is looked upon by many as being a critical shift that needs to take place if we are to ensure a level of food security in the near and distant future.

This broadcast marks the first of an ongoing series that will explore urban agriculture in British Columbia, Canada, and around the world.

Guests

Wally Satzewich - Farmer , Wally's Urban Market Garden / SPIN Farming (Saskatoon) - Gail Vandersteen and Wally Satzewich are both long-time residents of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. They operate an urban market garden . One unique feature of the market garden is that it is located within the confines of a city. Their produce is grown on a number of residential garden plots scattered throughout the city. This allows them to practice an eco-friendly form of agriculture, one that puts less pressure on rural habitats, and fosters self-reliance in an urban setting. This form of agriculture makes it more feasible to utilise organic household kitchen wastes because much of this material can be composted and used for growing crops. Gail and Wally are also the co-creators of SPIN Farming - a business that assists others wishing to adopt a similar business model based on small-plot intensive farming.

Beth Sobieszczyk - Program and Social Enterprise Coordinator, Fruit Tree Project , LifeCycles Project Society (Victoria) - The Victoria Fruit Tree Project of the LifeCycles Project Society sees volunteers and a couple a ladders turning backyard fruit trees into a valuable source of food for the community. The project harvests fruit from private trees that would otherwise go to waste. The fruit is then distributed among homeowners, volunteers, food banks and community organisations within Victoria.

Jac Smit - President and CEO , The Urban Agriculture Network (TUAN) (Washington D.C.) - This information and consulting organization was founded in 1992. It has visited over 30 countries in its advocacy. The urban agriculture book they wrote for the United Nations is the 2nd best selling book ever published by the UNDP. TUAN operates in all media. It is engaged frequently in workshops and conferences. Jac is a regular contributor to the Vancouver based City Farmer web site - an extensive Canadian resource for urban agriculture information.

SOF: Religious Passion, Pluralism, and the Young (August 31, 2006)

2006-09-03T07:56:00.000-07:00

Todays podcast comes form American Public Radio's "Speaking of Faith" program.

"Al-Qaeda appeals powerfully, if destructively, to the need of young people to be important and make a difference in the world, says our guest Eboo Patel; he believes it is the most effective "youth program" in the world today. Eboo Patel is a 30-year-old American Muslim, a former Rhodes Scholar, who is out to change that.

{This is an encore presentation of a program last broadcast in November 2005.}

"Building Mutual Loyalty Among Different Religious People"

So much of the news of recent years has a religious component, for good or ill, and often involving the young. Since I interviewed Eboo Patel, I watch this unfold with a Gwendolyn Brooks poem ringing in my ears — a poem that he has taken as his rallying cry. It is called "Boy Breaking Glass":

"I shall create! If not a note, a hole.

If not an overture, a desecration."

I spoke with Eboo Patel a year ago, just before Muslim youth in suburban Paris began to set their neighborhoods on fire, and weeks after four young Muslim men walked into three subway stations and boarded one bus in London with bombs strapped to their bodies. More recently, 24 young men were arrested in Britain in the midst of plotting another devastating attack. In light of such events, Eboo Patel is puzzled by people who patronizingly describe his own projects as "sweet." He sees the work of honoring the vast spiritual longings and religious energies of the young of every faith as work of extreme urgency for us all. At 23, he founded the Interfaith Youth Core, now at work across America and in several countries.

Patel himself is 30. He is ambitious, and his own energy is vast. He reminds me that heroic religious and social icons of the past century — such as Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi — were in their 20's when they began to change the world. Moreover, as they transformed cultures less pluralistic than our own, these extraordinary reformers knew each other and worked together across traditions.

Eboo Patel draws sustenance from "interfaith" images many of us have forgotten: Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching with Martin Luther King in Selma, saying that he felt as though his legs were praying; the Baptist minister King consulting with the Hindu Gandhi; and Gandhi sitting alongside the Pashtun Abdul Ghaffar Khan in Indian villages where Hindu-Muslim tensions threatened, reciting alternately from the Qur'an and the Bhagavad Gita, insisting that "the word of God" be heard.

Yet of all the differences between Eboo Patel and his Catholic, Mormon, Hindu, and Jewish friends growing up in suburban Chicago, he says, personal religious beliefs were the most difficult to talk about. He believes there is a salutary and practical power in giving young people fluency in the depths of their own religious traditions and those of others. He does so by first engaging adolescents and young adults in ground-level interactions based on service to others. He calls this work "track two diplomacy." In many cultures, he has found, religious elders and leaders can be reluctant to engage openly with differing beliefs. But their children are open to meaningful interaction and the possibility of change.

As sensible as that may sound, Eboo Patel's approach cuts somewhat against the grain of Western civic instincts and the enduring ideal of secular society. He has a great respect for evangelical Christians who want to convert him. He says educated Americans often wrongly suppose that in order to show respect for the beliefs of others, they must be discreet — even silent — about their own.

In extreme measure, the French have attempted to prevent religious tensions by forbidding public expressions of religious identity. After the Paris riots began last summer, a school headmaster was quoted by the BBC as saying, "I did not want to know what their religion was — any more than I wanted them to know what mine was." Such an attitude, Patel believes, will fail us increasingly as our societies grow more pluralistic. And there is compelling global evidence that an alternative approach can yield dramatic benefit. In India, the political economist Ashutosh Varshney has studied why some cities remain relatively calm when Hindu-Muslim tensions rise and why others explode in violence. He found that the existence of civic associations to engage religious diversity could make that difference.

Like other recent guests on Speaking of Faith, this young Muslim is dismayed by dismissive — even derisive — attitudes towards religious people often expressed in our most influential newspapers and journals. Eboo Patel's perspective and experience is as global as anyone I've interviewed, and he is supremely articulate on the futility of imagining that religion will somehow disappear. On the contrary, he says it will continue to play a robust role in every aspect of human endeavor.

I like the language he uses to describe the world he is working for: one in which the next generation of the world's faithful are steeped in the best of their traditions and attentive to the best in others. He is committed to building not just cooperation, but "mutual loyalty," among different religious peoples. Eboo Patel convinces me that his is not an idealistic vision. It is a pragmatic and genuinely enlightened response to the world we now inhabit."

Boundaries and Borders

2006-07-08T14:59:00.000-07:00

In todays world, boundaries and borders seem to simultaneously mean both less and more. In this show from the CBC's "Best Of Ideas" several philosophers gather together to consider these questions. Who knew that philosophers were such exciting dinner guests?

====================

BORDERS AND BOUNDARIES Often arbitrary and always consequential: philosophers Michael Blake, Arthur Ripstein, Seana Shiffrin and IDEAS host Paul Kennedy map out the perplexing and inescapable boundaries of political life.

Michael Dukakis on Trains as a Sutainable Transportation System

2006-05-23T05:54:00.000-07:00

Why is it that Democratic presidential candidates always get so much gutsier after they've lost the election? Here's Michael Dukakis talking about why we need to build a decent train system instead of continuing to subsidize cars and just how cheap it would be to do it. This comes from "The Long View" on WUML.

Audio:

Michael Dukakis

on The Long View,

Oct 27, 2005

Michael Dukakis: A Public Figure Who "Walks the Walk"

Reasoning the case for NE railway system development

The words of our former MA Governor, and presidential candidate are passionate (a.k.a. "Professor Dukakis" at Northeastern University) . His understanding of the advantages of public transportation is personal. On the day he joined us at UMass Lowell, Mr Dukakis insisted on returning to Boston via the train that leaves from Lowell, though there were students willing to return him by car.

Our speaker reasons the expansion and modernization of our rail system in concrete and practical terms. But, we learn that the majority of transportation development funding is used toward venues that are more expensive and polluting [I believe that I will have spent nearly $3000. in gas for my car this year alone. I haven't even tallied the other car expenses. And you??]. Why does this cheaper and greener mode of transportation receive such minimal support by the current State and Federal Governments?

Figuring out the politics of this discrepancy may be an impossible feat (as it normally is when we review politics) however, we can tip the scales with some minimal effort.

If the $30-$40 dollars to fill our gas tanks is an inspiration to consider a change, there are ways to become part of the solution too.

Hummer more efficient than Prius?

2006-05-06T13:44:00.000-07:00

Interview About Dust-to-Dust Study of Vehicle Energy Use

There's a study done by a research outfit called CNW Marketing Research which attempts to determine the total energy used by a vehicle from mining the metals to final disposal. Interestingly the Hummer H2 comes out ahead of a number of more fuel efficient vehicles including the Honda Civic and the Toyota Prius. (Let it be said that the Focus and the Scion XP come out far ahead of the Hummer). There's an interesting discussion of the results here and an audio interview with the researcher here. The primary reason's why the Hummer does so well seems to be low research costs, simple design resulting in lower tooling costs, and the fact that many of the Hummers parts are also used in many other GM vehicles resulting in economies of scale. These could be important lessons in attempting to reduce our society's overall energy usage. Of course better still is riding a bicycle.

This comes from TheWatt podcast.