Interviews

Patrick Marcus and other motivated citizens sprouted a community garden on city land slated to be a park in Ashland, Oregon. When the garden was threatened by plans to develop the park, they got active. Their research and advocacy led to official policy supporting community gardens in city parks. As the volunteer garden manager, Patrick affirms gardening isn't just for leisure -- it helps build community. It creates bonds among people from diverse social spheres -- through shared work, classes, potlucks and, most of all, shared passion. Episode 106.

Though born and raised elsewhere, Jerry Becker is now a de facto indigenous member of Oregon's Elk River watershed. The credo he lives by is Respect. He and his family have lived lightly "long before it was cool." An ecoforester, Jerry manages the woods sensitively with an eye to its wholeness. For the past thirty years he has worked with Friends of Elk River to protect wilderness regions in the watershed. In the last decade he formed the Elk River Land Trust, working with private landowners to protect agricultural and forest lands from development. Ripples of his gentle respectfulness permeate an entire watershed. (www.foer.org, www.erlt.org.) Episode 105.

From an early start producing biodiesel from used cooking oil in his garage, Ian Hill was instrumental in creating a market for biofuels in the state of Oregon. Now Managing Partner of SeQuential Biofuels in Eugene, he has gone on to build the first retail biofuels station in the state -- and it's not an ordinary fueling station: A solar panel canopy provides 50% of the needed electricity. The convenience store is a passive solar design to help with heating and cooling, and stocks as much locally produced food as possible. Its "living roof", of mostly native plants, helps cool the building in summer, and slow and filter stormwater runoff. This optimistic enteprenuer says he and his family have found that consuming less can bring greater happiness. Episode 104.

Wanting to live a "reasonable, comfortable life" in tune with nature, Ann and Gord Baird are building a "net zero energy" home on rural Vancouver Island. Their plans: a thick-walled cob house with passive solar heating. Wind and solar panels to provide electricity. Solar thermal hot water for domestic use and radiant heating. Composting toilets to enrich the earth for orchard, gardens and chickens. Rainwater catchment and a well for domestic and irrigation water. Episode 103.

Renowned political analyst Kevin Phillips argues successive administrations have imperiled the US economy by a combination of shortsighted policies and a trend against regulation. These include unparalleled credit card debts, the expansion of financial industries such as hedge funds, ballooning national debts, and deliberately altering statistics like inflation and unemployment to mask the accurate picture.

Spurred by a viewer's question about gas prices, Michael Moore talks about the breadth of the problem of peak oil: petroleum is not just a fuel, but a feedstock for most of the material bases for our life.

Host Jon Steinman speaks with Rebecca Kneen of Crannóg Ales - Canada's only Certified Organic farmhouse microbrewery. Kneen published a manual on small-scale organic hop growing and she is extremely excited at the attention the manual has received since the global hops shortage hit home. We also learn more on the philosophies of biodynamic agriculture and the important presence of microorganisms in a post-carbon world.

Chinese cities are experiencing explosive growth - much in the form of "superblocks" -- roughly 1km² residential developments that can have anything from 2,000 to 10,000 units of housing in them --which are being built at a rate of 10-15 per day. This film is a case study of a proposed "ecoblock", which would be self-sufficient in water and energy.

The Reality Report's Jason Bradford speaks with University of Oregon law professor Mary Wood, who explains how the government, acting as trustee of the atmospheric commons, is obligated to deal realistically with climate change science.

Is raising children in suburbia a form of child abuse? What happens to developing people when public space is the berm between the Wal-Mart and the K-Mart? When school looks like a maximum security "facility"? When parents are chauffeurs? James Howard Kunstler addresses these topics and speaks of his own experiences growing up in the suburbs of Long Island and in Manhattan.