WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Today’s show “The Disaster of Development: On Biodiversity and Species Extinction” with guest Eduardo Brodizio will forgo our usual format of segments and music breaks in favor of bringing you as much conversation as possible in the time allotted to us.
Our single musical selection today is McCoy Tyner’s “Utopia” off of the 1968 album Tender Moments, featuring Tyner on piano, Lee Morgan on Trumpet, and Bernie Maupin on tenor saxophone. To me, Jazz makes a difference. To me, Utopia is that pastoral golden age that likely has no there to it, but seems far more plausible as a future we might construct than the techno-sterility of the cyborg optimists as we face climate disruption and species extinction.
Eduardo Brondizio sat down with me in the WFHB studios to discuss his work as the co-chair of the IPBES – that’s the Inter-governmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. What caught my attention, and what made me want to talk to Brondizio, is the glaring fact of impending extinctions that a huge number of species face and how climate disruption is but one driver of our dystopian future.
Our conversation was very broad and we only found our way back to species extinction in the final minutes of the program, instead focusing on the unequal suffering brought on by the development ethics of capitalist economies. But the IPBES is very broad and it looks at so many ways we are entangled in these systems of nature and life that it proves a narrow focus is to our terminal detriment.
In what follows we don’t speak with real specificity about what can be done but one thing seems clear to me: if you live in a city or town where there is a major institution, be it economic, poltical, governmental or educational, then you, citizen, have a focus of activist attention. You CAN be heard and these institutions can be made to act for the greater good. Let’s get utopian while we can.
And let’s keep in mind the words of French Symbolist poet and novelist Remy de Gourmont, “Man is not at the pinnacle of nature; he is in nature, one of the units of life, and nothing more.”
GUEST
Eduardo Brondizio is the Co-Chair (with Sandra Diaz and Josef Settele) of the Global Assessment of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the Inter-governmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University in Bloomington.
RELATED
Welcome to IPBES
The End of Normal: The All-Encompassing Threat of Climate Change
Don’t Pull No Punches: Dahr Jamail on the End of Ice
MUSIC
“Utopia” by McCoy Tyner (Tender Moments)
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kyrie Greenberg
