Steve Curwood's "Living on Earth"

I love the radio show Living on Earth. It runs stories on pollution, global warming, environmental policies, species extinctions and their impact on the all-important human race, etc. Never fear, though, moderator Steve Curwood keeps a peaceful, heartening tone in his voice even when the topic is depressing. I like that he can do that.

I could make a snarky comment about how these issues are not important enough for other shows to cover, but my weariness with stupidity has overcome me and I'll spare you.

However, it's no doubt due to the unimportance of these issues that Living on Earth is marginalized - around here it's on just once a week, at 6 am on Sunday morning!

It's got a good website, with archives (both audio and transcripted) of shows I didn't manage to listen to because I wasn't awake at 6 am.

There is also a podcast feed of the current show.

Yesterday, an interview with Eric Brende, who with his wife went to an Amish community to try living without most technology. Then, of course, he wrote a book: this one is called Better OFF: Flipping the Switch on Technology.

I'll try to get a copy of the book and let you know what it's like. (I wrote about the Amish here and here and reviewed a book by an earlier visitor to the Amish world, Randy Michael-Testa, here.)

Here's Brende's response when asked "How can you say machines create more labor?"

What sense does it make to provide laborsaving machinery when we need physical exercise to be healthy? Yes, some onerous tasks should be lightened, but if you get rid of all of them, we simply have to go back and get the exercise anyway. So we've created two jobs out of one. Hence the ridiculous spectacle of people driving to the gym to recapture the exercise they miss by driving. Our gravest health problems today follow directly from sedentary lifestyles. We all pay for and work to pay the cost of that third task, paying for outrageous health insurance bills.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Conservation, Podcast, Technology, Amish