Ralph Bloemers has been working on forest fire and climate issues for about 25 years. His work focuses on communities in Oregon, Washington, and California. He has spent thousands of hours in burned landscapes, documenting wildlife and forest regeneration. He’s a documentary filmmaker, environmental lawyer, and advocate for living with fire on the land.

Tony Povilitis is a wildlife biologist, conservation activist, and founder of Life Net Nature, a "mom and pop" nonprofit devoted to wildlife research, voluntarism, and advocacy. For more than a half century, Tony has witnessed ongoing destruction of wildlife and nature in numerous countries. His conclusion: Efforts to mitigate human impacts have fundamentally failed. The only sane way forward is to vastly scale down humanity's exploitation of nature, consumption, and population. His book "Slipping through our hands, imperiled wildlife of the Greater San Juans" appeared in 2000. You'll hear more about his background as he explains how that book came about.

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein are evolutionary biologists who have been invited to address the US Congress, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Education, and have spoken before audiences across the globe. They both earned PhDs in Biology from the University of Michigan, where their research on evolution and adaptation earned awards for its quality and innovation. They have been visiting fellows at Princeton University, and before that were professors at the Evergreen State College for fifteen years. They resigned from Evergreen in the wake of 2017 campus riots that focused in part on their opposition to a day of racial segregation and other college “equity” proposals. They cohost weekly livestreams of the DarkHorse podcast. And you are the co-authors of a new book:  A HUNTER-GATHERER’S GUIDE TO THE 21ST CENTURY: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

Alice Friedemann, the granddaughter of two scientists, is genetically predisposed to do extensive research and exhaustive reading. Much of this was accomplished as she read while walking 10 miles round-trip between home and office.  She was a systems architect and engineer for over 25 years.  She retired from Dilbert Land to devote more time to science writing on energy, ecology, climate change, whole grains, agriculture, infrastructure, pollution, and too many other topics to list (see her website www.energyskeptic.com). The past few years she has come to see that fossil-fueled western civilization will likely collapse from dozens of factors. Especially oil, the master resource that makes all others possible. Especially in transportation since heavy-duty trucks, locomotives, and ships depend on diesel fuel.  Manufacturing is also completely dependent on the high heat fossil fuels can generate to make cement, steel, microchips, glass, ceramics, bricks and other essential products. Today we talk about her new book Life After Fossil Fuels.