Living on Earth

Lush peonies, delicate hydrangeas, and vibrant roses burst into bloom in early summer, filling gardens and parks with color and fragrance. But flowers are more than their beauty. They’re some of the oldest beings on Earth, and they played a large role in shaping the natural world as we know it. Author and biologist David George Haskell joins us to discuss his 2026 book, How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries. Also, while honeybees get most of the buzz, most bees don’t produce honey, and most don’t even live in colonies. Instead, they’re solitary bees who build individual nests. A recent study details an astonishing finding of several million solitary bees in a cemetery in Ithaca, New York. And the 2026 El Niño is now officially underway, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA. Combined with the ongoing rising temperatures from the climate crisis, this possible “super” El Niño could spell major disruption of weather patterns and ocean circulation worldwide. -- Sign up for the next virtual Living on Earth Book Club event on July 14 at 5 pm PDT / 8 pm EDT! We’ll talk with Yurok activist and attorney Amy Bowers Cordalis about how multiple generations of her family have advocated for the protection of Northern California’s Klamath River, a crucial habitat for salmon and the lifeblood of the Yurok tribe. Her book is The Water Remembers: My Indigenous Family’s Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life. You can sign up for this free event at loe.org/events. Music from public domain and licensed from Blue Dot Sessions: sessions.blue

The ongoing efforts of the Trump Administration to walk back climate policy and clean energy development may be handing over the health of the US economy to our chief economic rival. China is outpacing US economic growth by supplying the world with the clean technologies vital today and in the future, including electric vehicles and critical minerals, while the Trump Administration tries to revive a dying coal industry. Also, onshore wind in the US is hitting a cliff, even in the most wind-powered state, Iowa, which generates about 2/3 of its electricity from wind. A combination of local opposition, anti-wind rhetoric and tax credit phaseouts has led to a steep decline in new wind projects. And the young hero of children’s book Daisy Rewilds not only likes nature, but she also wants to become nature. Daisy refuses to take baths and reverts the manicured lawn of her family home back into the wild, all with a bit of hilarity. Weeds and worms show her family and neighbors the true beauty in nature, chaotic as it can be. --- Save the date for the next Living on Earth Book Club event! On Thursday, Feb. 26th at 6:30 p.m. Eastern, Terry Tempest Williams will join us live on Zoom to discuss her new book The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary. Go to loe.org/events to learn more and register for this free conversation about finding glimmers of hope in the natural world.

As geothermal heating and cooling slowly spreads in the U.S., some communities and utilities are looking to grow small pilot projects into much larger networks of pipes and heat pumps that extract and store heat in the earth to warm and cool homes and businesses as needed. We hear about a large geothermal HVAC system that demonstrates the possibilities and benefits of scaling up. Also, classic science fiction tends to assume that if aliens visit Earth, they will have done so thanks to using math and science that’s like our own. But physicist Daniel Whiteson and cartoonist Andy Warner aren’t so sure. They’re the authors of the book Do Aliens Speak Physics? And Other Questions About Science and the Nature of Reality. And the current Trump administration has in its first year cut off the World Health Organization, dismantled the United States Agency for International Development or USAID, and overhauled vaccination recommendations, just to name a few decisions impacting health and claiming lives across the globe. --- Save the date for the next Living on Earth Book Club event! On Thursday, Feb. 26th at 6:30 p.m. Eastern, Terry Tempest Williams will join us live on Zoom to discuss her new book The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary. Go to loe.org/events to learn more and register for this free conversation about finding glimmers of hope in the natural world.

The Trump Administration recently announced plans to withdraw the United States from dozens of United Nations treaties and organizations including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, a treaty that was ratified by the US Senate in 1992 and is the key international forum for addressing the climate crisis. Marianne Lavelle, the Washington Bureau Chief for Inside Climate News, speaks about what this decision could mean for global climate progress. Also, the Colorado River provides water to seven western states, and there is not enough to go around. Recently the federal government ordered the states to agree on a plan on how to share what's left amid a worsening drought. Luke Runyon co-directs The Water Desk at the University of Colorado-Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism and he joins us to discuss the challenges of allocating water resources when demand continues to outstrip supply. And mycorrhizal fungi form intricate and vital partnerships with plants through enormous underground networks that could help ecosystems and agriculture withstand climate impacts. But these fungi are threatened by habitat loss, nitrogen pollution and more. 2025 MacArthur Fellow Toby Kiers is leading fungi research and conservation efforts; he shares the wonders of fungi and why they’re worth protecting. — If you’re not yet signed up for the Living on Earth newsletter, the start of the new year is a great time to join! Don’t miss out on our weekly exclusive content and notes behind the stories you hear on Living on Earth. Just go to loe.org/newsletter to get started.

As a new space race heats up, private companies and sovereign nations alike have their sights on setting up permanent human settlements in space – but huge technological, medical and legal challenges remain. Kelly and Zach Weinersmith join us to talk about their book A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? And 2025 brought some exciting extraterrestrial scientific discoveries, including new evidence about the Martian environment and the possibility of past life on Mars, the discovery of important building blocks of life in samples from the asteroid Bennu, and observations of the third interstellar object that’s been documented in our solar system. --- If you’re not yet signed up for the Living on Earth newsletter, the start of the new year is a great time to join! Don’t miss out on our weekly exclusive content and notes behind the stories you hear on Living on Earth. Just go to loe.org/newsletter to get started.