10.19.15: Recycling is Overrated, Peak Foliage, & The Ganges Problem

For decades, environmentalists have fought to keep plastic, glass, paper and other recyclables out of landfills where they’d sit for thousands of years…so, is recycling truly making a difference in the health of the planet? Today, some data that challenges recycling’s sanctified status. Then, India’s government says it will clean up the horribly polluted Ganges, the river which supports ten percent of the world’s population. The first step: working with the Hindu belief that the Ganges is holy, self-purifying and the place to be buried. 

Listen to the full show. 

In 1996, John Tierneywrote an article attacking the idea that recycling could solve America’s prolific production of garbage. Nearly two decades later, he has written another piece for the Sunday Times and concludes that recycling in America is still an unsustainable model for reducing waste and carbon emissions.

John Tierney writes the column Findings for the “Science Times” section of the New York Times, and wrote the opinion piece “The Reign of Recycling.” 

When is peak foliage? Ask four New Englanders that question and you’ll get five answers. Jeff Folger is a photographer, writer, and foliage enthusiast and he tackled the topic for Yankee Magazine’s foliage blog.

Some have argued that fresh water - not oil - will be the focus of the world’s next big resource crisis.  One man in California, a state that’s facing its own water crisis right now, is looking to the clouds for an answer.  Literally.  Leila Day brought us the story.

You can listen to this story again at PRX.org.

Cameron Conawayis a former MMA fighter, and an award winning poet and a journalist. Cameron has been reporting on the state of the Ganges river with the support of a grant from the “Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting”. We found his article “The Ganges River is Dying Under the Weight of Modern India” at Newsweek.