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. 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.
“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.
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
Our guests today on this edition of Forthright Radio are co-authors of a new book, SOMEBODY SHOULD DO SOMETHING: HOW ANYONE CAN HELP CREATE SOCIAL CHANGE, published by MIT Press.
Michael Brownstein is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at John Jay College, as well as Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York. He is the author of THE IMPLICIT MIND: Cognitive Architecture, the Self, and Ethics.
Alex Madva is Professor of Philosophy , Director of the California Center for Ethics and Policy, as well as Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Consortium at Cal Poly Pomona. He is a co-editor of An Introduction on Implicit Bias: Knowledge, justice, and the social mind.; and THE MOVEMENT FOR BLACK LIVES: Philosophical Perspectives.
Not joining us, but also co-author of SOMEBODY SHOULD DO SOMETHING is Daniel Kelly, Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University and author of YUCK! THE NATURE AND MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF DISGUST.
They explore the question “Climate Change, racial injustice, systemic inequality – it’s all so huge – What difference can one person make?” They write, “We’re not wonks. We’re three philosophers frustrated by the wrong lessons we were taught about these problems.”
We spoke with them via Zoom on September 22, 2025.
On this edition of Forthright Radio our guest is journalist, author, activist and critic, Malcolm Harris.
After being arrested in the October 2011 Occupy Wall Street protest on the Brooklyn Bridge, his court case became “a significant focus of attention for its involvement of posts to social networking sites and legal arguments over who controls that material” as the prosecution sought to undermine his defense using his own Twitter posts which he had deleted.
His books include Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials; Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World; and most recently What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis, published in Spring, 2025 by Little, Brown.
We spoke with Malcolm Harris about his latest book, which includes a reference to Judi Bari, on July 21, 2025 via Zoom. He was very patient and kind, re-connecting after a couple of disruptive technical problems.
Anand Pandian is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, with a joint appointment in Earth & Planetary Sciences.
His books include A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times, and Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life and How to Take Them Down, published in May, 2025 by Stanford University Press.
He has written that he sees these books as chapters in an ongoing anthropology of the open mind, a mind open to the differences and uncertainties of a wider world, committed to the significance of transformative encounters and relations. Openness of mind, he believes, is a necessary foundation for environmental ethics, the cultivation of ecological sensibility, the pursuit of livable relations with the natural world, a critical resource for the ecological trials of our time. He serves as a curator of the Ecological Design Collective, a community for radical ecological imagination and collaboration.
We spoke with Anand Pandian on July 7, 2025 via FaceTime from his home in Baltimore, MD.
Natasha Hakimi Zapata is an award-winning journalist, university lecturer, and literary translator based in London, U.K. She was born in Chicago to a Mexican mother and Iranian father and raised in Mexico City and Los Angeles.
In 2014 she collaborated on The Transborder Immigrant Tool Book published by the University of Michigan Press.
Her book, ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE: Lessons for America From Around the Globe, is published by The New Press. In it she travels to countries and investigates ways they have created governments and cultures that support the wellbeing of their citizens and environments.
Her work appears regularly in The Nation, The L A Review of Books, In These Times, Truthdig, and elsewhere.
We spoke with Natasha Hakimi Zapata on June 24, 2025 via FaceTime while she was traveling in Europe.
Lately I have been thinking a lot about ecologist and one time presidential candidate, Barry Commoner, and his Four Laws of Ecology, which he enumerated in his 1971 book, THE CLOSING CIRCLE. They are:
Everything is connected to everything else. There is only one Ecosphere for all living organisms, and what affects one affects all.
Everything must go somewhere. There is no “waste” in Nature, and there is no “away” to which things can be thrown.
Nature knows best. Humankind has fashioned technology to improve upon Nature, but such change in a natural system is likely to be detrimental to that system.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Exploitation of Nature will inevitably involve the conversion of resources from useful to useless forms.
Our guest on this edition of Forthright Radio, award winning author and journalist, Vince Beiser, begins his latest book, POWER METAL: THE RACE FOR THE RESOURCES THAT WILL SHAPE THE FUTURE, with the statement, “There is no such thing as clean energy,” so I thought it would be good to find out more about his reporting from “over 100 countries, states, provinces, kingdoms, occupied territories, no man’s lands and disaster zones. He has exposed conditions in California’s harshest prisons, trained with US Army soldiers, ridden with the first responders to natural disasters, and hunted down other stories from around the world.”
His earlier book, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization, was a finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. As well as A California Book Award. He has written for the Oakland Tribune, The LA Times, Village Voice, The Nation and Rolling Stone, as well as being the former senior editor of Mother Jones. We spoke with Vince Beiser from his home in Vancouver, British Columbia, via Skype.
POWER METAL: THE RACE FOR THE RESOURCES THAT WILL SHAPE THE FUTURE is published by Riverhead Books. Vince Beiser also writes on Substack, which you can access here: https://powermetal.substack.com
Due to time limitations, we were not able to discuss his chapter, “New Lives for Old Things,” on the Right to Repair movement. In it he writes about a couple of Cal Poly Tech students, who became so incensed at products designed to preclude owners from repairing them that they created a website iFixit, which hosts a free online repository of more than 103,000 do it yourself repair manuals for some 54,000 separate products. Here is a link: https://www.ifixit.com/
During the broadcast, I referred to the recent 5-2 Montana Supreme Court opinion, which upheld a permit the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation issued to Tintina Montana Incorporated (now Sandfire Resources) to manipulate approximately 250 millions gallons of groundwater in pursuit of a 14 million-ton copper deposit in Meagher County, and which environmentalists fear will endanger the pristine Smith River. I misspoke, mentioning the transnational Rio Tinto mining company instead of Tintina Montana Incorporated.
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