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On the latest edition of Politically Speaking, St. Louis Public Radio’s Jason Rosenbaum and Jo Mannies welcome back state Rep. Joshua Peters.

Franklin County Presiding Commissioner John Griesheimer joined St. Louis Public Radio’s Jason Rosenbaum and Jo Mannies on the latest edition of the Politically Speaking podcast. Griesheimer has served as Franklin County’s top elected official since 2011. Beforethat, the Republican served for 18 years in the Missouri General Assembly. Born in St. Clair, Grieshimer was a car salesman. Along the way, he was elected to the Washington City Council and to the Franklin County Commission before winning a seat in the Missouri House in 1992.

We too often hear how out society is checked-out, apathetic, overwhelmed. There is a LOT of keep track of and cope with in the news today - in no small part because there's so much news coming at us constantly. But keeping engaged as citizens is IMPORTANT. The Missouri Coalition for the Environment has a new tool to help us be active, responsive, inquiring. It puts efficient, effective potentials in our pockets.

                 
Caitlin Zera, Community Engagement Manager for MCE, leads the team developing The People's Pocket Guide to Environmental Action. A pdf version is available now. MCE staff and volunteers are distributing (pocket sized!) print copies at community outreach events, and will be offering citizen action trainings starting this fall. An interactive online Pocket Guide is in the works, giving MCE and many partner organizations the capacity to illustrate the basic action measures with community issue examples. 

As Caitlin talks through the action process with Earthworms host Jean Ponzi, we are confident you'll get the goal this guide's subtitle energizes: How YOU Can Make a Difference in Your Community NOW.

Music: Magic 9 performed live at KDHX by Infamous Stringdusters

THANKS to Cody Pees, Earthworms engineer

Related Earthworms Conversations: From the Pipeline with Filmmaker Caitlin Zera (January 2016)

New Food Policy Coalition Grows Health & Environment Resources (December 2015)

They stand around us, enrich our lives in countless ways - that are increasingly well-documented with compelling data. They embody cooperation in many ways that humans could emulate. And they give us shade. When we tune to their frequencies, what's on the Great Tree Playlist for us? Plenty!

             

Biologist David George Haskell has been listening to trees in very different Earth locales. His new book The Songs of Trees - Stories from Nature's Great Connectors (Penguin 2017) features trees in an Ecuadoran rain forest, on Broadway in Manhattan, in a middle-eastern olive grove, and other unique spots. His observations and perceptions combine scientific precision with a philosopher's expansive take on life, told in a troubadour's voice. Trees have MUCH to teach our kind, about dancing between competition and cooperation, toward the vision (Haskell says it's an attainable goal!) of regenerating and benefiting all we touch.

David Haskell will speak on July 25 in St. Louis, for the Wild Ideas Worth Sharing biodiversity speaker series - FREE - at the Missouri Botanical Garden. He will also present to area teachers as keynote speaker for the "Visualizing Biodiversity Symposium." He teaches biology at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. His work integrates scientific, literary, and contemplative studies of the natural world.

Music: For Michael, performed live at KDHX by Brian Curran
THANKS to Cody Pees, Earthworms engineer

Related Earthworms Conversations: Urban Forests: Seeing the Benefits FROM the Trees (October 2016)

Backyard Woodland: How to Tend Your Forests and Your Trees (August 2016)

Missouri Democratic Party Chairman Stephen Webber joins St. Louis Public Radio’s Jason Rosenbaum and Jo Mannies for a candid episode of the Politically Speaking podcast.

St. Louis Public Radio’s Politically Speaking podcast team of Jason Rosenbaum and Jo Mannies were on the road again Wednesday, this time to Picasso’s coffeehouse in the historic downtown of St. Charles. The two welcomed state Sens. Bob Onder and Bill Eigel, Republicans who represent much of St. Charles County.

Our human culture shapes our human values, which in turn makes us more (or less) of how we see ourselves and who we "really" are, as individuals and as the societies we form. Writer and thinker Jeremy Lent has explored the connecting, shaping forces in the context of human history - to help us see and hopefully direct ourselves.

                                

This conversation lights on topics from Agriculture - and how it cultivated Hierarchies - to Truth, with and w/o the capital emphasis, to Love being our realization of connectedness, at the heart of human-kind-ness. We think you'll dig these deep thoughts, seasoned with Earthworms' sense o' humus about what it means to be Human - in the past, now and in possible futures. 

May this podcast prompt you to pick up Jeremy Lent's new book, The Patterning Instinct - A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning (Prometheus, 2017), and check his work through the non-profit Liology Institute, where connection is appreciated as a universal organizing principle. 

Music: Beneath the Brine, performed live at KDHX by The Family Crest

THANKS to Cody Pees, Earthworms engineer and hub of Sedentism Awareness

 

   
      
   

St. Louis Alderman Megan Ellyia Green joins St. Louis Public Radio’s Jason Rosenbaum and Jo Mannies for a second time on the  Politically Speaking podcast.

Consider money: abstract medium of exchange representing all human and natural creativity and productivity. Could money evolve through human ingenuity - motivated by human love - to restore, protect and cultivate the human and natural resources it stands for?

Investment expert Joel Solomon says, emphatically, YES! and expounds on how in his new book The Clean Money Revolution - Reinventing Power, Purpose and Capitalism (New Society, 2017; written with Tyee Bridge).

                            

This revolution means that we who have monetary privilege can and will use the energy of money for the good of the whole, for the long term. Visionary - and practical, advocating from 30+ years investment experience that proves doing well can do good, in major ways. 

This Earthworms conversation explores the options, as it affirms the urgent necessity of transforming how money works, and how to realize changing it.

Music: Giant Steps, performed live at KDHX by the Dave Stone Trio

THANKS to Cody Pees, Earthworms engineer, and to Carney & Associates P.R.

Check out Joel Solomon's Ted Talk - Joel, chair of Renewal Funds, a $98 million mission venture capital firm in Vancouver, BC, was instrumental in bringing TEDx to Vancouver. 

The bug us. They bite us. Some of them carry a dread disease. Mosquitoes are a fact of summer life that WE can and must actively control.

                       

Jim Sawyer, Vector Control Supervisor for St. Louis County Department of Public Health, covers the details about mosquito biology, disease concerns, and County mosquito control protocols. Earthworms host Jean Ponzi gets the facts to help us all work together with public health officials to minimize mosquito breeding (dump and prevent standing water!) and to identify sites where mosquito species of concern may be proliferating.

Hear how Integrated Pest Management by a local government uses surveillance, conservative and strategic applications of adulticide and larvaecide chemicals, and plenty of public education to protect human health while also protecting beneficial insects. If you are gardening for bees or butterflies, learn how you can opt out of street spraying.

                       

For specific information about mosquito controls where you live, call you municipality or county government Vector Control office. Resources from St. Louis County, MO, include the basics of citizen-municipal collaboration toward good health for all.

Music: Hunters Permit, performed live at KDHX by Mr. Sun

THANKS to Andy Heaslet, Earthworms engineer, assisted by Cody Pees.

Related Earthworms Conversations:
Fight the Bite!  City of St. Louis Mosquito Team (July 2016)

On the latest edition of the Politically Speaking podcast, St. Louis Public Radio’s Jason Rosenbaum and Jo Mannies welcome back Gregg Keller for the second time.

On the latest edition of the Politically Speaking podcast, St. Louis Public Radio’s Jason Rosenbaum and Jo Mannies shook things up, recording the show with state Rep. Bruce Franks on Wednesday in front of a live audience at Yaquis on Cherokee in St. Louis.

Across the tribal lands of Oklahoma, indigenous people are supporting Monarch butterflies and other pollinators by learning about and restoring the area's indigenous plant communities.

           

Jane Breckinridge - herself a Butterfly farmer! - co-directs this initiative, Tribal Environmental Action for Monarchs (TEAM), a collaboration of seven sovereign native nations. TEAM is growing a living stream of plants and butterflies, the Monarch Migration Trail, in partnership with the international initiative Monarch Watch.  Jane also founded the project Natives Raising Natives (2013), which is teaching rural tribal members to cultivate butterflies with goals to (1) reduce unemployment, (2) promote STEM education for Native youth and (3) promote conservation of native butterflies and the ecosystems that support them. 

Evolving on the wings of cultural and environmental purpose, this is a new model for conservation as community action. that is working in accord with the partners' diverse tribal values. Healthier humans of all ages are thriving with bugs and plants, in interactions that restore the land all depend upon.

Jane Breckinridge will be guest speaker at The Pollinator Dinner, June 20, at the Saint Louis Zoo. Tickets for this delectable, inspiring event go fast. 

THANKS! to Andy Heaslet, Earthworms Engineer

MUSIC: Jamie, performed live at KDHX by Yankee Racers

Related Earthworms Conversations: Dr. Chip Taylor, founder of Monarch Watch (March 1, 2017)

On the latest edition of the Politically Speaking podcast, St. Louis Public Radio’s Jason Rosenbaum and Jo Mannies welcome back state Rep. Tracy McCreery.

The operation's name affirms its goal: Living Lands and Waters, and it's founder is a powerhouse of encouraging experience for humans along many shores. As Chad Pregracke proudly reports, LLW has worked on 23 Rivers in 20 States, mobilizing 98,000 Volunteers to pull more than 9.2 million pounds of Trash OUT of U.S. waterways. Right livelihood, on a barge. Since this guy was 17.

               

Chad is a Green Giant - and his LLW crew and circles of helpers and supporters are doing some of the most amazing, effective and necessary work around. Including connecting people of all political persuasions to our land's big rivers, in ways that enable us all to experience being good citizens of our nation and our Earth.

This Earthworms is a rockin' good listen!

Music: Extremist Stomp - performed live at KDHX by Pokey laFarge and Ryan Spearman

THANKS to Andy Heaslet, Earthworms' Engineer

Related Earthworms Conversations: Missouri River Relief (March 2017)

Mississippi Watershed Mayors take Infrastructure Plan to Washington (March 2017)

 

Now five issues old, The New Territory celebrates culture and views of the Lower Midwest in a quarterly anthology of writing, art and photography.

                   

Founder, publisher, Ed-in-Chief Tina Casagrand took her vocational step into magazine-making to amplify voices of the region she unhesitatingly calls a Center of the Universe. She talks with Earthworms host Jean Ponzi about the spirit and workings of her literary venture, and the region it portrays.

Visit online at NewTerritoryMag.com   Let us know how you experience it!

THANKS to Andy Heaslet, Earthworms engineer.

Earth's atmosphere can safely sustain a concentration of 350 parts per million carbon dioxide (or less). That number, 350, now stands for the world-wide work of climate protection activists (350.org), who also advocate for human stuff like a livable minimum wage - and for office-holders in accord with 350 goals.

       

350STL launched in November, 2016, on a wave of local affiliates to 350.org. 350STL organizers John Shepherd, Stephanie Sturm-Smith and Elizabeth Ward talk with Earthworms host Jean Ponzi about this group's purpose and activities - most recently coordinating the April 29 Peoples Climate March in St. Louis - and about their personal motivations and experience doing this work. 

You'll hear a climate of thoughtful purpose, working toward local and global change.

Music: Butter, performed live at KDHX by Ian Ethan Case

THANKS to Andy Heaslet, Earthworms engineer

Related Earthworms Conversations: Citizens Climate Lobby - Dec 2016 Indigenous Peoples and Climate Change - Nov 2016                                       An Ethnobotanical Perspective on Climate Change - December 2015               David and the Giant Mailbox: A 1,000 Mile Walking Climate Conversation (Nov 2015)

On the latest edition of the Politically Speaking podcast, St. Louis Public Radio’s Jason Rosenbaum and Jo Mannies welcome back state Rep. Deb Lavender to the program.

On the latest edition of the Politically Speaking podcast, St. Louis Public Radio’s Jason Rosenbaum chats with House Budget Committee Chairman Scott Fitzpatrick.

Digging into food values - while exploring her own - author Marissa Landrigan journeyed from her Italian family roots to vegetarian and PETA activism - and on into the realm of modern food production, especially Meat. Her new book, A Vegetarian's Guide to Eating Meat (Greystone Books, 2017), chronicles her quest for dietary and personal identity.

Even if you can expound on Food Issues in your sleep, you'll be nourished by Ms. Landrigan's  perspective on the importance of eating local, voting for instead of protesting with your fork, becoming aware of your food connections - plus participating at a steer slaughter and in an elk hunt.

This Earthworms conversation with Marissa Landrigan serves a menu of food consciousness, most eloquently. 

MUSIC: Deep Gap - recorded live at KDHX by Marisa Anderson

THANKS to Andy Heaslet, Earthworms engineer, and to Kathlene Carney Public Relations.

RELATED Earthworms Conversations:

Farmer Girl Meats: Pasture to Porch, Sustainably (June 2016)

Grow - Create - Inspire with Crystal Moore Stevens (October 2016)

St. Louis Food Policy Coalition (December 2015)