June 22 - A Victim of a Previous Mass Shooting in a House of Worship; "The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future"; A Sixth Mass Extinction Underway

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with a victim of a previous mass shooting at a house of worship who just attended the memorial service at the AME church in Charleston where he found comfort from the latest victims on Father’s Day in remembrance of his father who in 2012 was gunned down in his Wisconsin Sikh temple by a white racist. Amardeep Kaleka, an Emmy Award winning film director, who since his father’s murder has been an advocate for gun control and hate crime legislation, joins us to discuss his article at The Huffington Post “American Dream Disturbed” and the governor of South Carolina’s call to take down the Confederate flag that was the only flag not lowered to half-mast at the state capitol.

Part 2

Then we speak with Naomi Oreskes, a Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University and the co-author of the new book “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future”. We discuss how her work helped inform Pope Francis in the preparation of his encyclical on the environment and how her new book, grounded in science, portrays our planet in the not-too-distant future as the “pile of filth” the Pope warns against.

Part 3

Then finally, with the release of a new study in the journal Science Advances by Stanford, Princeton and Berkeley scientists, we examine the sixth mass extinction phase that the earth has now entered following the fifth 65 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs. An expert on mass extinctions, Peter Ward, a paleontologist who teaches biology and earth and space sciences at the University of Washington joins us. He is the author of “Under a Green Sky”, a book that points out that all but one of the major extinction events in history have been brought on by climate change.