Ready your cups and saucers and set your kettles to boil! We’re talking tea with Sarah Besky!
Sarah is a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Michigan Society of Fellows and Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan. In her book, The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-trade Tea Plantations in India (U of California Press, 2013), Sarah narrates the lives of tea workers in Darjeeling in engaging and evocative prose to, “explore how notions of fairness, value, and justice shifted with the rise of fair-trade practices and postcolonial separatist politics in the region.” The Darjeeling Distinction is the first book of its kind, charting a new field for examining how fair-trade operates in the context of large-scale plantation-based production.
In November of 2013, SNRE students Jenny Cooper, Rachel Jacobson, and Chris Wolff joined the throngs of international delegates at the COP19 UN climate talks in Warsaw, Poland. In this episode of IHIH, they share some of their most memorable experiences. Listen in and let their stories transport you to the hectic, yet hopeful, scenes in Warsaw’s National Stadium, where over 10,000 participants from 89 countries came together to negotiate how to best safeguard present and future generations from climate change.
Following recent announcements from Unilever and Ferraro stating they would switch to sustainable palm oil sources by 2014, Forest Heroes, a Michigan advocacy group for the protection of Indonesian rainforest, decided it was time to apply extra pressure on Kellogg’s to join their pledge.
Eva Resnick-Day (Forest Heroes organizer, GreenCorps trainee, and two time guest of IHIH) helped organize and lead the rally, and later sat down with Andrea to talk her through the events, Kellogg’s reaction, the subsequent media storm, and what’s up next.
If you’re interested in getting involved in the campaign, or just want to thank Eva for her hard work, please contact her at (eva at greencorps dot org).
On November 6, 2013, Jennifer sat down with Mark Binelli to chat about his latest book: Detroit City is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis.One of Publishers Weekly‘s Top 10 Best Books of 2012. While we’ll soon play the audio on an upcoming show, you’re welcome to listen to Mark’s articulate, energetic, and at times enthusiastic, take on the history and future of Detroit here first! (Apologies for the minor interruption around min 11:45, this is college radio afterall!) And, thank you to our good friends and colleagues in the University of Michigan’s Program in the Environment for bringing Mark to campus, and inviting us for this interview!
Born and raised in the Detroit area (but now living in New York), Mark is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and Men’s Journal, and has previously published a novel entitled: Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! You can read more on Detroit City is the Place to Be below – or by visiting the book’s (and Mark’s) page at MacMillian Publishers.
Once America’s capitalist dream town, Detroit is our country’s greatest urban failure, having fallen the longest and the farthest—and, finally, into the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. But the city’s worst crisis yet (and that’s saying something) has managed to do the unthinkable: turn the end of days into a laboratory for the future. Urban planners, land speculators, neopastoral agriculturalists, and utopian environmentalists—all have been drawn to Detroit’s baroquely decaying, nothing-left-to-lose frontier. With an eye for both the darkly absurd and the radically new, Detroit-area native Mark Binelli has chronicled this convergence. Sharp and impassioned, Detroit City Is the Place to Be is alive with the sense of possibility that comes when a city hits rock bottom. Binelli does not shy away from exploring the violence, economic devastation, political corruption, and physical ruin that have ravaged his hometown, but he also offers a glimpse of a long-shot future Detroit that is smaller, less segregated, greener, economically diverse, and better functioning—what could be the boldest reimagining of a postindustrial city in our new century.
Nov. 15, 2013: Learn all about the power of storytelling and how it affects the environmental field.
– Lianne Lefsrud (PhD), post-doctoral fellow at the Erb Institute, studies the power of rhetoric and explains to us how storytelling may hold the key to addressing climate change.
– Brittany Anstead (Sustainable Systems, MS ‘15) hails from the Haliwa-Saponi tribe in North Carolina and shares her own story about helping lead her community towards energy independence.
– What’s in season? Beans, beans, magical beans! Rachel Chadderdon (Fair Food Network) talks to us about one of Michigan’s finest exports: delicious dried legumes!
Nov. 1, 2013: Two passionate activists join us and talk about their work curbing rainforest deforestation in Southeast Asia.
– Eva Resnick-Day, Forest Heroes campaign organizer and Greencorps trainee, returns to the show to update us on the campaign against the massive palm oil farms that are destroying Indonesia’s rainforest.
– Brihannala Morgan, director of the Borneo Project, talks about working with indigenous communities to protect rainforest and land rights. Currently, they’re taking on dam expansion in Malaysian Borneo.
Oct. 4, 2013: This week we bring you recycling in the Big House, SNRE’s Career Week, and a deforestation campaign gaining traction on campus.
University of Michigan student, Ian Makowske (MS Behavior, Education, and Communication 2015), talks about fusing two of his passions—athletics and sustainability—in an exciting new recycling initiative at the Big House football stadium. Continue reading Homecoming→
We hosted this conversation with Shannon Brines, Jason Frenzel, and Lucas DiGia, organizers of theApril 2012 Local Food Summit. How did the summit go? What were the major themes and outcomes this year? Listen in to find out! (Don’t miss some of Lucas’ awesome Rap for Food toward the middle of the show!)
(+ bonus conversation with Matt Grocoff, organizer of the Mission Zero Fest coming up June 9–10, 2012. If you are a green building junkie, be sure to listen to the last 10 minutes of the audio to hear a preview of the fest…)
