Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As America marks its 250th birthday, Nate takes a moment to step outside of the celebrations to seek out a wider boundary perspective on this milestone holiday. He poses the question of whether the United States has truly matured as a nation over two and a half centuries, particularly through the lenses of energy, ecology, history, and culture.
For decades, climate professionals and the informed public have been living with the disturbing knowledge of what is coming. Now, as the impacts of climate predictions begin to come true, we live with the devastating reality of what is happening, and we feel it deeply. This sorrow deserves a name.
Poet and author Sophie Strand joins Human Nature Odyssey for a wide-ranging conversation about stories, illness, ecology, and transformation. Drawing from her own experience living with chronic illness, Sophie explores how the stories we inherit shape our relationship to the living world.
Elon Musk becoming the planet’s first trillionaire should alarm anyone worried about democracy. At that level of wealth, you’re no longer just buying another mansion or private jet; the dangerous power of concentrated wealth is to distort markets, politics, and society.
One city’s success in stopping a data center grew into a regional movement that’s notching wins across the San Gabriel Valley.
This moment demands more than opposition. What is needed is not just resistance against corrupt centralized systems, but to create new, local systems that restructure power so it is dispersed throughout society. Because the problem is not only that those in power abuse it. The problem is that power is concentrated in the first place.
We have been told capitalism is the only economy that works. But if “working” means climate chaos, fractured communities, loneliness, and nature sacrificed for private gain, we need something better — one rooted in cooperation, not competition.
Nate poses questions about our shared future, using headlines regarding a potential ceasefire deal between the U.S. and Iran to confront a subject that has re-entered public discourse with a quiet but startling force: nuclear warfare.
War has become a fever that world leaders cannot seem to break. As militarism spreads, its costs extend far beyond the battlefield, accelerating climate change while consuming the resources needed to confront it.
As concern over falling birth rates spreads across the political spectrum, pronatalist ideas are finding new audiences. But protecting reproductive freedom and respecting planetary limits require rejecting the politics of population growth.
While the U.S. celebrates its 250th anniversary, political attention is drifting away from climate change just as warming accelerates and Earth’s life-support systems approach collapse. From disappearing federal climate data to record-breaking heat, denial is giving way to something more dangerous: collective delusion.
From “natural resources” to “natural disaster” and “sustainability,” the language used in environmental and development discourse doesn’t just describe the world, it shapes what is seen and prioritized.
