Clik here to view.
Two Grains of Sand
Nature and Humanity are running off the rails and governments stand seemingly helpless before the juggernaut. Into the breach are stepping new players, inventing strategies to transform the way we do...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Of Pigs and People
The indiscriminate use of antimicrobials in large-scale industrial meat production is building bacterial resistance to the most effective antibiotics on which our national and global health systems...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Game-Changing Innovation
The U.S. designs nifty iPhones and deadly weapons, but in measures that really matter, like education and green tech, we're being upstaged by other nations. In recent years, we have been systematically...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Wasting Away
On both land and sea, human activities are inflicting damage on a scale that may well be irreversible. Our future is imperiled by the heedless pursuit of energy and development to feed a civilization...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bad Medicine: Overusing Antibiotics in Meat Production
What part do we consumers play in driving the priorities of an industrial meat production system that puts cheap meat on our plates, but at rising costs to human health, animal welfare, and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bombs Away
The cold war's been over for nearly twenty years, but the U.S. and Russia still aim thousands of nuclear tipped missiles at each other, ready to fire at a moments notice. Meanwhile, economies collapse,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Nuturing Creativity
It's often said that to be employable in a 21st century economy we'll all need to be wired to our computers and one another. Maybe so, but we'd still be missing the qualities of mind and heart that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Detox! The Movement to Reform Chemicals Policy
It's not a very comfortable thought: We live, eat, and breathe in a complex brew of industrial chemicals, some eighty thousand of them. And all but a handful have never been tested to find out it...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Starting Out Right: Upgrading Early Childhood Education
We're just now finding out that the first few years of life do much to determine how the rest of it unfolds. That's a scary thought. For those who enjoy the good fortune of being born into affluence,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tightrope in Teheran: Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Option
A disputed election, street demonstrations, open dissent from founding fathers of the Islamic Republic, brutal repression, revelations of a nuclear enrichment plant. Events that would have seemed...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Riding the Tiger: Asia Ascending
China, India, Southeast Asia: Asia's high-octane economies, though impacted by the global recession, are on a long-term trajectory to expand their influence. Their energy and determination are...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Poultry: Pure and Simple
Today on A World of Possibilities, "Poultry Pure and Simple." We'll hear from turkeys, chickens and the farmers who raise them --as their grandparents did-- free-range and free of antibiotics, growth...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Designing With Nature
Fasten your seatbelts. Now put on your thinking caps; you'll need them. And while you're at it, tie on those wings of unfettered imagination. We're about to enter a different kind of twilight zone....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Beauty In Broken Places: The Healing Arts of Lily Yeh
Lily Yeh is a remarkable woman who has found a way to love life that is both ingenious and inspirational. As an artist, she has taken her work altogether out of the studio and into the streets. Not...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Victims No More: Seeking the Middle Way in the Middle East
The Middle East is the ground zero of human conflict. Here the competing claims of three of the world's great religions - Christianity, Judaism and Islam - collide in an unforgiving landscape, a triple...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Climate Collision: What Comes After Copenhagen?
The Copenhagen climate summit saw fierce jockeying for advantage among the great powers but few tangible results. Smaller nations and indigenous peoples were left out in the cold. Yet for them it's not...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Forgiving the Unforgivable: Community Reconciliation in Sierra Leone
Civil wars in Africa, Asia, and Southern Europe have left long-festering wounds in communities where victims and perpetrators continue to live side by side with little acknowledgment of crimes...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Winning The Peace: From West Point to War Zones
For years, lieutenants in the U.S. armed forces have been leading tasks with strategic influence in some of the most challenging environments imaginable. Assisted by a multitude of organizations and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Heavy Weather
In this special edition of A World of Possibilities, we present a documentary by Portland independent radio producer Barbara Bernstein. Heavy Weather explores the connections between increasing extreme...
View ArticleClik here to view.
From Victims to Victors: Transcending Tragedy
Why is it that while many of us are discouraged and some devastated by life's losses, a rare few not only survive but thrive in their wake - transcending tragedy, growing not despite but through it....
View ArticleClik here to view.
International Trade: Free, Fixed, or Fair
In the view of its proponents, free trade as promoted by the United States and other leading industrial powers is the swiftest and surest route to global economic development. But in from the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Building Cathedrals: The Slow Work of Social Transformation
When Barack Obama was elected president in November 2008, both supporters and critics saw it as a watershed in political and social transformation. But a year later, a seemingly unstoppable tide...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Hearts Broken Open
Most of us take life for granted. But what happens when we're forced to think hard about whether we want to live? Suicide and the impulse to attempt it are a great unacknowledged epidemic in public...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Blowin' the Blues Away: The Healing Power of Music
Today we explore the remarkable power of soulful music to transform sorrow into solace and sadness into joy, not just for the singer but for the listener as well. We'll hear from two remarkable...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Saving Sacred Lands
Our failure to protect and respect innately sacred natural places is a direct reflection of our loss of connection to the land and water that sustain us - and a harbinger of self-destruction. These...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Growing Pains: Organics Come of Age
Organic agriculture has grown up. A once-marginal movement of plucky and slightly eccentric home gardeners has bloomed into mega-farms that ship around the world selling at premium prices. In this...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Life in Slo Mo
In a global culture dominated by the impatience of youth, counted in nanoseconds and fueled by "just-in-time" supply chains, everything needs to be done "yesterday" since today is no longer soon...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Back to the Garden: Cacao's Role in Reviving Biodiversity
Species of both plants and animals are dying out at unprecedented rates. Overpopulation, industrialization, and mono-cropping are stressing the world's food supply. Now radical shifts in climate change...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Toxic Legacy: Healing from Agent Orange
Thirty-five years ago the war in Vietnam came to an abrupt end, yet for millions of Vietnamese soldiers and citizens and for thousands of American veterans and their descendants, a legacy of diseases,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Transforming Misfortune
It's clear now that the economic collapse of 2008, the second "September shock" after 2001, will have a more enduring impact than most of us once supposed. Today we'll meet two individuals who've...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Food and Forests: Reviving Diversity
As we seek ways to make both our economies and food supplies more sustainable, we would do well to look at what worked for hundreds of years before modern technology gave us both greater productivity...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Fractured Bedrock, Fractured Communities
Nine thousand feet beneath the surface of several Northeastern states lie vast deposits of shale impregnated with natural gas. The Marcellus Shale play, as it is called, is being touted by energy...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Gross National Happiness: From Private Wealth to Public Well-Being
"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This most famous phrase from the U.S. Declaration of Independence places happiness at the front and center of the role of government. Today we'll hear...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Slow Money: Reducing Velocity, Increasing Value
Each day, billions of shares flash through stock markets worldwide. Fortunes are made and lost at the flick of a keystroke, wreaking havoc on millions of people far from the trading floor. Meanwhile,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Gas Rush
Host Mark Sommer continues his journey across the communities lying above the Marcellus Shale Play, a gigantic natural gas deposit stretching under the Northeast United States. In this program we hear...
View ArticleClik here to view.
China's Great Green Wager
China today is the most polluted nation on earth. But it's also on its way to becoming the most environmentally advanced. And it's no coincidence. Long seen as the Great Replicator, China is now...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Better Together? Chinese Innovators on Green Tech Partnerships
Like "Made in Japan" a generation ago, the "Made in China" label has long been viewed by Americans as a low-cost, low quality knock-off of a costly original designed and manufactured in more advanced...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Take Me For A Ride In Your E-Car!
These days we think of electric vehicles as futuristic inventions, coming our way just a little before commercial flights to the moon. But actually, they preceded the infernal combustion engine by more...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Full Circle Innovation
In its breakneck pursuit of modernization, China has given nature a back seat to its turbo-charged industrial development. Now, with drought, desertification, and extreme pollution, China's leaders are...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Hong Kong, China's Green Gateway?
Hong Kong has always been a world unto itself. But today it's a city uncertain of its identity. As mainland China surges to the front rank of the global economy, its vast industrial base has upstaged...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Vanishing and Re-emerging: Reviving Biological and Cultural Diversity
Around the world, languages, cultures and ecosystems are disappearing at an alarming rate, erasing richness vital to our survival. Based on interviews conducted at a major international conference on...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Crosswinds: A Community Wind Farm Divides an Island
When residents of an isolated island off the coast of Maine found their utility bills rising to three times what mainlanders paid, their local energy cooperative turned to wind as a clean and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bot, will you be my friend?
Is your best friend a bot or a Facebook pal? How much time do you spend in online interaction with digital beings and how much face-to-face with real ones? MIT professor Sherry Turkle, author of Alone...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Cooling Our Jets: Reversing the Climate Meltdown
The science of man-made global climate change is irrefutable. New heat records, drought worse than the Dust Bowl, epic floods, hurricanes and tsunamis: the signs of ecological collapse are...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Healing Arts, Healing Hearts: Lily Yeh in China
At a time of increasing turmoil and despair, artist Lily Yeh takes her work out of the white-walled galleries of high culture and into the streets and hearts of those most traumatized and marginalized...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Conversations With the Earth
Global climate change is here. And only now, as our nation is ravaged by hurricanes, floods and droughts, is this new reality becoming all too obvious. But indigenous people in isolated communities...
View ArticleClik here to view.
911 + Ten: From Unity to Enmity
Journalist Laurie Garrett was there, in the streets with her notepad and her camera just minutes after the World Trade Center came under attack on September 11th, 2001. She’s written a new book -- a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ruin and Resilience in Northern Uganda
War has shaped the lives of people in northern Uganda for the past two decades. Impunity for widespread crimes and grave violations committed during the war is pervasive, and there has been very...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Fractivists: Slowing the Gas Rush
In the past few years, natural gas fracking has become a near-household word as landowners in the path of drilling have mounted efforts to slow its rapid pace of development in the U.S. and worldwide....
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Promise and Perils of Nanotechnology
Today, nano particles are in our food, cosmetics, and hundreds of other items. And this is just the beginning of what is projected to be a $1 trillion nanotech industry within a decade. Yet its...
View Article
