Tag Archives: sustainability

For our episode this month, we spoke with Ken Asmus, the founder of Oikos Nursery.  From 1982 till earlier this year, Oikos was one of the most important sources of rare fruit trees and other non-commercial perennial food plants.  Ken recently retired from the nursery business in order to better pursue his research into food-bearing plants for an era of …

The pawpaw is an incredible, temperate, semi-forgotten fruit.  It’s existence is a real exception on many levels: it is the only member of a tropical genus to survive this far north in most of the continent; it is nutrient and protein rich beyond most fruit; and pawpaws are exceptionally fragile, pushing them outside of economic distribution.  Their skin and flesh …

Welcome to our Environmental Justice episode of Hearabouts: Asian American Midwest Radio with Meloddy Gao and Cindy Nguyen! Hearabouts is produced by WFHB and Indiana University’s Asian Culture Center. We ask critical questions about identity, culture, community and shared assumptions.  In this episode we talk with Cindy Nguyen about environmental justice and her experiences with environmental education. Her background is …

For our second episode, we visited the small city of Carbondale, Illinois. Carbondale is a shrinking college town at the southern edge of the state, with a long history of racist segregation.  Since winter 2019, though, a broad range of residents has made a wager on a different future.  Grasping climate change and white supremacy by the horns, they’ve laid …

Welcome to the debut episode of Partisan Gardens. For our first episode, we wanted to take you on a tour through radically different ends of the food system.  We will begin by speaking with two farmers growing vegetables for CSAs and schools, with an eye towards building autonomy and power. After that, however, we speak with someone working in a …

The City of Bloomington has held a Hospital Reuse Committee since 2015. Over the years this group has worked with the city on the redevelopment of the current IU Health Bloomington Hospital. This group is made up of about 30 community members who have been recently joined by the architecture and urban planning firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, or SOM, …

Since the 1970’s, environmentalists have framed our epoch as the “Anthropocene,” a period defined by man’s — and often specifically men’s — unidirectional impact on a quickly heating planet Earth. The so-called Anthropocene continues to be caused by only a small portion of the people on the planet, following hierarchies of race, gender, class, and the artificial division of Man …

The 2019 National Solar Tour kicks off this weekend. Local residents are participating in this national tour, opening their homes to show how solar power works, and make themselves available to answer questions. To learn about solar open house events in our area, go to nationalsolartour.org/map. And, the City of Bloomington is launching its fourth Solarize Bloomington initiative. The project …

In this week’s episode of Eco Report, WFHB’s Julie Thomas and Julianna Daily report on human overpopulation is threatening iconic animals in the Masai Mara and Serengeti and the Bloomington city council’s  update on the Unified Development Ordinance during their meeting, last week. Also in this week’s news a federal judge in Alaska ruled on Friday that President Trump exceeded …

Bloomington Mayor John Hamilton gave his state of the city address on Thursday, February 21. Hamilton is a first-term incumbent Democrat, running for re-election this May, against Monroe County Commissioner Amanda Barge. Hamilton gave his third state of the city address, live from the Buskirk-Chumley Theater. On tonight’s Standing Room Only, Hamilton discusses his administration’s achievements and future challenges.