Dr. Jem Bendell’s career centered on how to mitigate harms caused by the excesses of our consumer culture. He was a Founder of the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability which had an MBA program with over 2000 students online from around 100 countries. He gave talks all over the world to leaders in business and government on tackling critical global challenges. In 2012, the World Economic Forum appointed him a Young Global Leader.
In 2018 he published a White Paper on Deep Adaptation. The research for that paper changed his life. He came to the conclusion that tinkering around the edges of how we live won’t save us from the catastrophic effects brought about by the degradation of the natural world.
His new book Breaking Together examines the scope the crisis and advocates for creative responses. There is so much in this book that I felt I could have built an entire series around it but I had only an hour of his time. In this first half we talk about what collapse looks like and how it might play out. The second half focuses more on how to respond.

In the decade from 2010 to 2020 a wave of popular uprisings swept over the globe. Starting with the Arab spring , social media and the internet brought images of injustices to a wide audience. The resulting indignation brought people out in droves and established political systems fell. In his book If We Burn Vincent Bevins writes "it felt like something had shifted in the nature of time itself. They had cracked open the structure of reality, and with each step, with each victory against police defenses, with every movement, it felt as if they were literally moving history forward. " But most of the gains were undone. IF WE BURN asks a single, vital question: How did so many mass protests lead to the opposite of what they asked for?

The Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade has allowed states to restrict access to abortion. Adoption has been presented by anti-abortion advocates as a way to solve the problems created by these restrictions. Gretchen Sission interviewed hundreds of women who gave up their children for adoption. The impacts of those decisions are outlined in her book Relinquished.

Tensions have been growing between Mainland China and Taiwan. Like a lot of current political situations it’s difficult to understand without historical context. My guest today is Eve J. Chung. Her book, Daughters of Shandong, is fiction but it’s based on her grandmother’s flight from Communist China to the Island of Taiwan.

SADI MUKTADIR was born and raised in Toronto, a second-generation immigrant. His debut novel is Land of No Regrets which follows a group of four boys living in an Islamic boarding school. Their parents hope they’ll become religious leaders.

Laura Schmidt and Aimee Lewis Reau founded the Good Grief Network to help people rediscover meaning, joy, and connection as the tumult around us increases. In this episode of the Progressive Page Turner we talk about their book How to live in a Chaotic Climate which unpacks the social, political, and spiritual nuances of the climate emergency, step by step. It’s based on the Good Grief Network’s 10 Steps to Resilience and Empowerment in a Chaotic Climate.

In February there was an NBC poll that found 40% of registered voters said Trump’s presidency was better than expected and in light of that I thought it would be important to remind people of how he handled the pandemic. Nina Burleigh is a journalist, best selling author, documentary producer and publisher of substack on politics called American freak show. Her book is Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC and the Hijacking of America’s response to the pandemic

Every year since 1993 Project Censored has published a yearbook highlighting stories ignored or obscured by the news establishment. The yearbook also promotes the best independent journalism, research, and activism. In this podcast I’m talking with Mickey Huff who along with Andy Lee Roth co-edited Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2024.