Does our society have an addiction to short term thinking and planning? Is our failure to mitigate climate change a result of this?

Vincent Ialenti spent three years doing fieldwork in Finland, interviewing experts working on Posiva's Safety Case for the world's first long term nuclear repository, Onkalo.

His book about that fieldwork, Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now, explores the idea of "shallow" and "deep" time thinking. Dr. Ialenti uses Onkalo as a case study for how policy can involve ongoing work over decades, and look ahead towards potential impacts hundreds of thousands of years into the future - if expertise is as trusted and depoliticised as it is in Finland.

Bertie spoke to Vincent about the book, and how policymakers and the climate sector can think beyond the next generation or electoral cycle.

Dr. Vincent Ialenti is a Research Associate at California State Polytechnic University Humboldt’s Department of Environmental Studies. Audio engineering by Vasko Kostovski.

Further reading:

• Buy Deep Time Reckoning from MIT Press here.
• 'The Art of Pondering Earth’s Distant Future', Scientific American, 2021
• 'The benefits of 'deep time thinking'', BBC Future, 2023
• 'Temporality, fiction and climate – reading Mark Bould’s Anthropocene Unconscious', Land and Climate Review, 2022

Click here to visit The Future Unrefined, our curated collection of articles and podcasts on raw materials and extraction.

Find more podcasts and articles at www.landclimate.org

Bertie speaks to Austin Frerick about his new book Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry.

Austin Frerick is an agricultural and antitrust policy fellow at Yale University, and has advised on policy for senior US politicians including Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and Joe Biden during his presidential campaign.

Bertie and Austin discuss lobbying and state capture in the US, the history of farming deregulation, and the environmental impact of food monopolies.

Barons was published last week and is available to buy from Island Press here.

Further reading:

• Book excerpt: ‘Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry’, Minnesota Reformer
• ‘Hidden costs, public burden: The real toll of Walmart's "always low prices"’, Salon
• ‘Do You Know Where Your Strawberries Come From?’, The New Republic
• ‘Why Austin Frerick Is Taking On The Grocery Barons’, Forbes

Click here to visit The Future Unrefined, our curated collection of articles and podcasts on raw materials and extraction.

Find more podcasts and articles at www.landclimate.org

Last month an investigation by Transport and Environment (T&E) exposed a number of challenges facing Eni's African biofuel projects.

The Italian oil giant's "second generation" biofuel crops have not met production targets in Kenya and Republic of the Congo. The investigation found that key promises have not been met around intercropping, and collected testimonies of alleged expropriation driven by Eni's business partners. T&E say farmers are now giving up on the projects.

To hear more details, Alasdair welcomed Agathe Bounfour back to the podcast, Oil Investigations Lead at T&E.

Audio engineering by Vasko Kostovski.

Further reading:

• Read Agathe's op-ed about the investigation on Land and Climate Review.
• Read T&E's full investigation.
• Read The Continent's front page cover story about the investigation.

Click here to visit The Future Unrefined, our curated collection of articles and podcasts on raw materials and extraction.

Find more podcasts and articles at www.landclimate.org