Planet: Critical

Mark Lee Hunter is an investigative journalist, a founding member of the Global Investigative Journalism Network and the principle author of Story-Based Inquiry: A Manual for Investigative Journalists. I asked Mark to join me to explain a little-known story of how a group of left-wing media outlets became instrumental in the gutting of USAID. This consortium of left-wing publications released an investigation accusing one of the world's most influential investigative journalism outlets, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), of being in bed with the US government—an accusation that originated in Russia after Putin's offshore finances were exposed by the OCCRP.
Their report made its way into the hands of the MAGA crowd, who then used it as justification to gut government funding for investigative journalism around the world—and act which is has enormous repercussions for us all. 
This conversations details exactly what happened, and Mark's published rebuttal of their investigation which shows how the journalists extrapolated conclusions from publicly available data. We then have a fascinating discussion about the importance of morality and strategy in journalism, with Mark warning that a fringe trend of finding facts to fit one's own bias is rapidly becoming more and more common in journalism today.
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FROM THE ARCHIVES:
Reverend Billy is the world-famous secular preacher singing out against climate change, corporate greed and consumerism. Billy has been pounding the streets of New York for decades, preaching against Disney, against mindless consumption, and against the corporations putting our planet in danger. Together with his choir, The Church of Stop Shopping, Reverend Billy uses song and arrest as a form of protest, trespassing into banks, labs and private land to sing about the dangers of the sixth extinction event—and what we can do to stop it.
Billy joins me to discuss his journey to secular preaching and the faith in humanity that drives the particular and beautiful protests of The Church of Stop Shopping.
This is preaching like you’ve never heard it before.
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What does it mean to be alive? Where does intelligence originate?  What do we share with other living creatures? Where does the individual begin, and how do each of us fit into the living world?
These are the questions I pose researcher and writer, Melanie Challenger, author of Alive: The Hidden Intelligence of the Living World (UK version, US version). In this brilliant episode, we explore the definition of aliveness and intelligence, with Melanie revealing the ancient histories which have dominated our cultural understanding of intelligence. She offers a new definition, one grounded in our sensory bodies—a physical intelligence that comes from being here, being present, and being finite. We also discuss the supposed binary between individualism and collectivism, with Melanie challenging both the neoliberal hegemony and the environmental mantra of unlimited entanglement, offering a nuanced perspective which reconciles these two oppositional positions into something profoundly meaningful. 
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This week I’m joined by James Dyke, a senior lecturer in Global Systems at the University of Exeter. James reveals why net-zero targets for carbon emissions do nothing but provide an excuse to continue business as usual, posing an existential threat to humanity. He goes into great detail about the interplay of politics, economies, culture and the industrialisation connecting us all, explaining that while there is no one quick fix to the climate crisis, decarbonisation is possible—if we get rid of fossil fuels.
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We need to live differently. Part of that means learning how to live together differently, both with each other, and with the wider environment around us. 
 James Bullen is the founder of the Land-Based Living Collective, a UK initiative aiming to create accessible, land-based communities that provide economic opportunities for the residents, nurture the land back to health, foster a sense of community and tackle some of our biggest modern problems such as food insecurity, energy insecurity and financial precarity. James has spent much of his adult life living in alternative land-based collectives like this, and is honest about the challenges of such a life—and also the great wonders it offers. His vision is grounded in meeting material needs, interweaving existing solutions to create an ecosystem of resilience that can both support its residents and facilitate them supporting one another.
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FROM THE ARCHIVES:
So much of the hope we put in solutions for climate change falls away under a microscope. Did you know wind turbines aren’t recyclable, for example? Guess where they’re buried. Are enough people thinking about what happens when globalisation fails and post-industrial states like Europe and the US are left to mine their own materials? How can we mitigate climate change, truly, without plunging billions into poverty?
Simon Michaux is working to find solutions to all these questions. As an associate professor in the circular economy solution unit at the Geological Survey of Finland, Simon models the mining and energy industries to figure out what we can do sustainably—and what is nothing more than greenwashing. He drops more than a few bombshells throughout this episode concerning energy use and politics, but also reveals a new energy paradigm he’s working on that could provide genuine zero emission energy.
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Climate Vanguard is a youth-led organisation providing political education to the public and activists across the Majority World. I'm joined by Inea Lehner, one of their core team members, to discuss their outreach, strategies and principles in supporting the climate movement, and Leftist movements more broadly.
Wonderfully, this conversation explores how Inea's own life has been changed through political education, particularly through her adoption of a materialist lens. She explains how Marxism helped her make sense of the world, and what it has to offer the youth of today in their quest to dismantle the inequities of capitalism and create a new vision for a better future. This vision is centred on political decentralisation, social infrastructure and, of course, the regeneration of Earth's body—which is all possible, she says, if we learn to build power from the ground up.
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FROM THE ARCHIVES:
Professor Steve Keen was one of the few economists to realise that a serious economic crisis was imminent in 2005. He publicly warned the world, and helped his native Australia navigate the 2008 crash without the major repercussions that crippled markets everywhere else.
He is now working on a new model of economics for a post-crash world. He joined me today to discuss why and how capitalism needs to be constrained, the economics of climate change and what mainstream economists and academics are getting wrong—to the detriment of us all.
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Non-native species management has very little to do with ecology and everything to do with economics. That's what activist and writer, Clare Follmann, uncovered in her book Scapegoat: What the Invasive Species Story Gets Wrong (UK version, US version). She joins me to explain how "invasive" species have been blamed for creating the conditions of environmental degradation — conditions that have actually been caused by capitalism, extraction and colonialism.
In this fascinating episode, she reveals the linguistic tricks at play which colour the doctrine of invasive species management, and the insidious links between these protocols and racism and xenophobia. She gives illuminating examples of how extractive industries have blamed species for the problems caused by their pillaging of Earth, and emphasises that the very idea of non-native species forgets the diverse history of the planet which has seen species spread out all across the globe for millions of years. 
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Can violence be cured?
According to physician and epidemiologist, Gary Slutkin, it can. Gary worked for decades treating some of the most virulent disease outbreaks around the world. Then he took that model and applied it to his hometown of Chicago to treat what he believed was an outbreak of violence. His results were shocking: by implementing similar strategies to disease containment and treatment, violent crime could be dramatically reduced.
He joins me to discuss exactly that, explaining the research revealed in his book, The End of Violence (UK version, US version), which argues that violence is a pathogen, a contagion, which we can eradicate through tried and tested methods. Gary walks us through the exact methods he and his team at Cure Violence Global has used around the world to inhibit violence, and we discuss the particularities of sexual violence, state violence, and the absolute necessity of understanding that the epidemic is truly a crisis of male violence. 
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