People Places Planet Podcast

Since 2010, ELI has been supporting Gulf communities as they navigate the Deepwater Horizon restoration process. In this episode, Taylor Lilley, Public Interest Law Fellow, and Christina Libre, a Research Associate, speak with residents of coastal Mississippi to hear about the challenges and successes they have encountered engaging with the recovery process in the nine years since the spill, as well as their hopes for the future.

Last March, ELI Press released Legal Pathways to Deep Decarbonization in the United States, a "legal playbook" for reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% from 1990 levels by 2050. With 35 peer-reviewed chapters and over 50 contributing authors, the book offers more than 1,000 legal pathways involving federal, state, and local law, as well as private governance. In this episode, we talk to the lead editors of the project, Professors Michael B. Gerrard and John C. Dernbach, and to some of the book's contributing authors, to get an inside look.

In this episode, Dave Rejeski, Director of ELI’s Technology, Innovation, and the Environment Program, talks with Jay Keasling, UC Berkeley professor and synthetic biologist, about his game-changing innovation. Keasling and his teams engineered yeast – yes, the same yeast used to brew beer – to produce high-quality, low-cost THC and CBD at a much lower environmental impact.

On average, Americans waste about 40% of their food. In this episode, we sit down with Linda Breggin, Director of ELI’s Center for State, Tribal, and Local Environmental Programs and Project Coordinator for the Nashville Food Waste Initiative (NFWI), and Sam Koenig, a research assistant at ELI. A project of the Natural Resources Defense Council, NFWI seeks to develop high-impact policies, strategies, and practical tools to serve as models for cities around the country. Linda and Sam discuss the scale and impact of food waste and the actions that are being taken to address it.

From sensor devices and LED lighting to automated systems and monitoring software, technology plays a vital role in cultivating sustainability in the cannabis industry. In this episode, we talk to Jesse Peters, the co-founder of Eco Firma Farms, a not-so-ordinary growing facility located just outside Portland, Oregon. A seasoned cultivator, Jesse explains how the capital investment in technology has ultimately translated into financial and environmental sustainability.

The cannabis industry is transforming rapidly. But what does this mean for the environment? From air, water, and nutrients, to packaging, waste, and pesticides, the cannabis sector is fraught with sustainability challenges. In this episode Kaitlin Urso (cannabis environmental consultant at Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment) and Azi Akpan (science and policy analyst at ELI Innovation Lab) digs into some big sustainability questions, exploring the priorities, challenges, and obstacles to driving sustainability in cannabis.

How do you wash a car without water? Join us in our second “Environmental Disruptors” episode where we talk to DJ Patterson, owner of EcoGreen, Oklahoma’s first and only “waterless” car detailing service, about how he built a business promoting sustainability and water conservation in a landlocked Midwestern state.

An estimated 25 million tons of fish is used in animal feed per year. Is there an alternative to feeding livestock from limited marine resources? In this inaugural episode of Environmental Disruptors, Kasantha Moodley, ELI’s Manager of Innovation and Governance, interviews the co-founders of Grubbly Farms, Patrick Pittaluga and Sean Warner. They discuss the beginnings of Grubby Farms, a fly farming operation, an idea that if scaled, could avoid exploiting the ocean’s limited resources, to feed livestock.

There have been a number of changes – or attempted changes – to the environmental legal landscape since President Trump took office on January 20, 2017. In this podcast, Ethan Shenkman, former Deputy General Counsel of EPA and current partner of Arnold & Porter, and Stacey Sublett, a shareholder with Beveridge & Diamond, discuss environmental law and policy in the Trump era and, more specifically, the limits of executive branch authority. The episode was brought to you in partnership with the American Bar Association Section on Civil Rights and Social Justice.

An increasingly fast-paced technological world requires a restructuring in environmental protection strategy. In our first episode, ELI President Scott Fulton and Dave Rejeski, Director of ELI's Technology, Innovation and Environment Project, discuss how environmental protection could be organized and implemented in the future.