Felicity Barringer joins Michael Krasny to discuss bringing environmental journalism to the Lane Center
Long-time public radio host Michael Krasny has initiated a series of podcasts on the American West, produced in partnership with the Bill Lane Center. Over the course of four conversations, Krasny will interview experts on the region, from historians to journalists to artists and writers.
The Lane Center was co-founded in November of 2005 by the first guest in the series, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Kennedy. Episode one took up the real and the mythic American West, the region's water and wildfire crises, its energy and equity issues, its people, its politics, its economy, its borders, and the need for educating future leaders who can serve as stewards of the region and its magnificent natural resources. As always, David Kennedy offered a sweeping and incisive overview of the West's significance in American history, as well as the motivation for creating a hub of scholarship on the region at Stanford.
In recent years, as it became the premier place of study for Western land and life, the Center launched an environmental journalism initiative spearheaded by veteran New York Times reporter, Felicity Barringer. Along with Geoff McGhee, Barringer created '& the West,' an online magazine offering reporting, research, interviews, and analysis on the environmental future of California and western North America.
In Krasny's second episode in the series, Barringer joined him to discuss the future of water in the region, focusing on the divisions in the Colorado River, new water technologies, and the West's concentration of lithium. The conversation also covered geothermal energy alternatives, the Sustainable Groundwater Act, and the threats of sea level rise to coastal communities, as well as how the insurance industry has adapted to survive the effects of climate change. Barringer addressed the ongoing debate about the West's advancement on climate change compared to other regions, as well as the damage to salmon runs resulting from both climate change and dams. Other topics ranged from seaweed farming and dust storms to Native peoples and western land, social media's impact on national parks, and coal. The discussion concluded with Barringer's insights about what distinguishes the American West culturally, her experiences as a journalist in Russia during the Gorbachev era, and what lies ahead for & the West. Listen at the link below.
Felicity Barringer: The West Is a Tortoise on the Environment Ahead of Other Tortoises
