Media around the globe reported the death of Ted Turner on May 6, 2026, at the age of 87. Phillip Evans, a spokesman for the family, confirmed the death. He announced in 2018 that he had Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder. Turner’s Montana properties included the flagship 113,000-acre Flying D Ranch south of Bozeman.
So, we thought it would be good to rebroadcast our interview with Bozeman author, Todd Wilkinson, from 2013 when his book, LAST STAND: TED TURNER’S QUEST TO SAVE A TROUBLED PLANET, was published.
She is a pioneer scientist on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; who conveys complex, technical ideas in ways that are inspiring and profound. Her work has influenced filmmakers such as James Cameron’s “Tree of Souls” in Avatar. She has demonstrated that trees interact and communicate using below ground fungal networks, and that forests have elder trees, that she calls Mother Trees, which are large, highly connected trees, who play an important role in the flow of information and resources in a forest.
Her current research investigates how these complex relationships contribute to forest resilience, adaptability and recovery and has far-reaching implications for how to manage and heal forests from human impacts, including climate change.
She writes about this in her latest book, WHEN THE FOREST BREATHES: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World, published by Knopf.
We spoke with Suzanne Simard on April 3, 2026 via Zoom.
Elaine Ingham, Who Taught That Soil Is Alive, Dies at 73 A scientist and leader in the organic farming movement, she popularized the “soil food web,” and understanding that soil is a complex realm of microorganisms. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/science/earth/elaine-ingham-dead.html
Dr. Charles G. Curtin is the director of Regenerative Conservation Design.
He is the author of The Science of Open Spaces: Theory and Practice for Conserving Large, Complex Systems and the coeditor of Complex Ecology: Foundational Perspectives on Dynamic Approaches to Ecology and Conservation. His latest book is PLACE-BASED SOLUTIONS: THE POWER OF REGENERATIVE THINKING IN THE FACE OF CRISIS, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. His books explore the intersection of ecology and culture and focus on how the word’s messiness leads to uncertainty and unexpected outcomes, and what to do about it.
Not merely a world renowned ecologist with conservation collaborations including cross-cultural conservation exchanges from the Middle East and Africa to the fisheries of Maine. His Two-Cowboys Project involves cross-continent learning networks between Maasai pastoralists in Kenya and US ranchers in the New Mexico/Arizona and Mexico borderlands, as well as Montana’s Blackfoot Challenge. The Crown of the Continent Partnership is a collaboration project on the borders of Montana, Alberta, British Columbia and the Salish and Kootnai Confederation. You can find out more about this ecosystem here: https://www.crownmanagers.org/about-the-crown
We spoke to him via Zoom from his home in Ranchos de Taos, NM on March 23, 2026.
Dr. Christine Webb is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at New York University, where she is part of the Animal Studies program. Her research is driven by growing awareness that the ecological crisis demands a profound shift in how we understand other animals and our place among them.
Her work seeks to elucidate the complex dynamics of animal social life, and to apply this knowledge to foundational questions in animal ethics and conservation. She investigates how animals manage and mitigate social disruptions, the emotional and motivational states that underlie those processes, and the cultural influences shaping them, with a focus on nonhuman primates.
She also studies how prevailing societal norms, values, and institutions shape contemporary scientific knowledge of other animals. As you will hear, her work examines the pervasiveness of the belief in human exceptionalism, and how this ideology—oftentimes hidden—biases scientific exploration of the more-than-human world.
She asks: How are cutting edge scientific insights revealing striking interdependencies among different species? How has anthropocentrism fueled an essentially competitive, hierarchical view of Nature? How does this in turn obscure our understanding of evolution, and of ourselves, in ways that perpetuate notions of human exceptionalism?How has this emphasis on competition led people to misinterpret and misuse evolutionary theory to explain the current anthropogenic crisis of life on earth? And How can a less anthropocentric understanding help us re-imagine it?
She explores these questions and more in her book, THE ARROGANT APE: THE MYTH OF HUMAN EXCEPTIONALISM AND WHY IT MATTERS, published by Avery. We spoke with Professor Webb on February 24, 2026 via Zoom as she, and many others were snowbound in New York.
Our guest on this edition of Forthright Radio is the Fred Harvey Harrington Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Alfred McCoy.
For well over five decades he has specialized in the foreign policy of the United States, European colonization of Southeast Asia, and CIA covert operations and illegal international drug trade. In June of 1972, he testified before the US Senate Committee on Appropriations’ Foreign Operations Subcommittee, testifying that American officials were condoning and even cooperating with corrupt officials at the highest levels in Southeast Asia’s illegal drug trade out of political and military considerations. He testified that the CIA chartered Air America aircraft and helicopters in northern Laos to transport opium harvested by their “tribal mercenaries”.
His multiple awards winning books include, THE POLITICS OF HEROIN IN SOUTHEAST ASIA: CIA COMPLICITY IN THE GLOBAL DRUG TRADE; A QUESTION OF TORTURE: CIA INTERROGATION, FROM THE COLD WAR TO THE WAR ON TERROR; IN THE SHADOWS OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY: THE RISE AND DECLINE OF US GLOBAL POWER; and TO GOVERN THE GLOBE: WORLD ORDERS AND CATASTROPHIC CHANGE. He was our guest when those last two were published. His latest book is COLD WAR ON FIVE CONTINENTS: A GLOBAL HISTORY OF EMPIRE AND ESPIONAGE, published by Haymarket Books.
As in his earlier books, he reiterates the importance of maintaining dominance over the heartland of the “World Island,” comprised of Eurasia and Africa, which was articulated in Halford John Mackinder’s 1904 article, “The Geographical Pivot of History.”
“WHO CONTROLS THE PAST CONTROLS THE FUTURE, WHO CONTROLS THE PRESENT CONTROLS THE PAST.” George Orwell, 1984.
We first interviewed Harvard University’s Laird Bell Professor of History, Sven Beckert, when his tremendously informative Bancroft Prize winning book, EMPIRE OF COTTON: A GLOBAL HISTORY, was published in 2015. It weighed in at a respectable 640 pages.
His most recent tome, CAPITALISM: A GLOBAL HISTORY, dwarfs that earlier work at over 1,320 pages. In it he traces over the past thousand years, what he calls “the most impactful revolution the world has ever seen.” His exhaustive research took him to the archives on 6 continents, however it is anything but a dry disquisition. Rather it is people focused – examining their agency, resistance, ruthless coercion and innovations. From the merchants of 12th Century Aden, Yemen circulating goods from Asia, Africa and Europe to the workers in this decade’s sweat shops in Cambodia, he chronicles the ever adapting transformations of Capitalism. We spoke with Sven Beckert, who was somewhere in Europe on January 13, 2026 via Zoom.
This edition of Forthright Radio is dedicated to the memory of Renee Nicole Good and the thousands of Iranians who have been killed demanding freedom and justice in their homelands, as well as the thousands more spurred on by the same imperatives and their courageous examples, who continue to brave dangerously cold weather and disproportionately armed agents of the state .
The Fourth Amendment The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
In our first segment we speak with Stanford University Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies, Michael McFaul. He served for five years in the Obama administration, first as special assistant to the president and senior director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014).
His latest book is AUTOCRATS VS. DEMOCRATS: CHINA, RUSSIA, AMERICA, AND THE NEW GLOBAL DISORDER, published by Harper Collins. His earlier books include Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin and the NYT bestseller, From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia.
Jeff Mangan
In our second segment, we speak with Montana’s former Commissioner for Political Practices, Jeff Mangan, about a proposed amendment to the Montana State Constitution, titled The Transparent Election Initiative. It has garnered tremendous interest and excitement nationally, and is being dubbed The Montana Plan. If enacted, it would effectively kill Citizens United in Montana, and would serve as a model for other states. Instead of being cut off at the pass by the Supreme Court’s first amendment ruling that money is free speech, it instead asserts a 10th amendment states’ right to govern and control corporate charters to determine what they can and cannot do.
Articles, etc. that are pertinent to these interviews:
Today’s show is in two parts. First, longtime friend of Forthright Radio, scholar, public intellectual, McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest, and The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy, Henry Giroux, joins us again to discuss many issues facing our nation and the world – from the increasing militarization of America at home and on the seas, to the young people he teaches who are rising to the challenges of becoming effective cultural producers in this era unlike any in human history.
In the last part of the show Nate Bellinger, Our Children’s Trust’s Supervising Senior Staff Attorney, shares with us about the latest in the recent federal district court decision that Federal District Dourt Judge Dana Christenson rendered on October 16, 2025, in the Lighthiser v Trump case, and their on-going legal efforts representing their youth plaintiffs suing for a livable climate.
In the KZYX pledge drive show, we read this poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko:
Talk
You’re a brave man they tell me. I’m not. Courage has never been my quality. Only I thought it disproportionate so to degrade myself as others did. No foundations trembled. My voice no more than laughed at pompous falsity; I did no more than write, never denounced, I left out nothing I had thought about, defended who deserved it, put a brand on the untalented, the ersatz writers (doing what anyhow had to be done). And now they press to tell me that I’m brave. How sharply our children will be ashamed taking at last their vengeance for these horrors remembering how in so strange a time common integrity could look like courage.
by Yevgeny Yevtushenko Translated by Robin Milner-Galland and Peter Levi
Joining us once again is journalist, author and professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Howard French. He has been a decades long New York Times reporter, serving as its bureau chief for the Caribbean and Central America from 1990 to 1994, covering Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and other countries. He was one of the Times’ first black foreign correspondents, and from 1994 to 1998 he covered West and Central Africa, reporting on wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Central Africa, with particular attention to the fall of the longtime dictator of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko. From 1998 to 2008 he served as the Times bureau chief for Japan, Korea and Shanghai, from which experiences he wrote Everything Under the Heavens: How China’s Past Helps Shape its Push for Global Power; and China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa.
His latest book, THE SECOND EMANCIPATION: NKRUMAH, PAN-AFRICANISM, AND GLOBAL BLACKNESS AT HIGH TIDE, is being released on August 26, 2025 by Liveright. The link to our earlier interview when his book, BORN IN BLACKNESS: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, was published is below.
His very well documented books are packed full of information and insights rarely seen outside the academic world. Best of all, his writing style is lucid, fluid and a pleasure to read.
We spoke with Howard French via FaceTime on August 19, 2025.
Links to articles, etc. pertinent to this interview:
When Governor Greg Abbot called The Texas Legislature into special session ostensibly to deal with the aftermath of the devastating flooding of the Guadalupe River, but instead listed first on the agenda a highly unusual mid-decade redistricting to re-gerrymander the already gerrymandered redistricting after the 2020 Census, with the stated intention of providing 5 more Republican seats in Congress ahead of the 2026 midterm election; and After enough Democratic members fled Texas to deprive the Republican majority of the necessary quorum to do this, we invited Dave Daley back to help us understand what the heck is going on.
We had him on in September, 2024 when his book, Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections, came out; and in 2022 right after the midterms; and in 2020 when his book, Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy, was published.
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