Human Impact

Human Impact

Top of Mind with Julie Rose - Radio Archive, Episode 546 , Segment 3

Episode: Race Data, Men Without Work, Execution in America

  • May 4, 2017 11:00 pm
  • 19:24 mins

(originally aired July 13, 2016) Guest: Melinda Zeder, PhD, Curator  Think about all the laws aimed at trying to fix the damage humans have done to the landscape – the Clean Air Act, the Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Underlying them is the notion that, in a perfect world, we could roll back the clock and restore the ecosystem to its pristine state. But, pristine is impossible – and maybe never really existed – according to a provocative research paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. An international team including archaeologists, geneticists, ecologists and anthropologists concluded in the article that humans have been leaving their mark on the planet for millennia: way before the industrial revolution or the colonization of the world’s islands and even before they invented the wheel, humans were changing their environment. And not all for the worse, either.

Other Segments

Data on Race and Police Shootings

19 MINS

Guest: Ben Montgomery, Reporter, Tampa Bay Times In the past three years, fatal encounters between police and unarmed black men sparked protests across the country. Were these just a handful of tragic but isolated incidents, as law enforcement officials claimed? Or were the shooting deaths of Michael Brown, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, and Walter Scott evidence of a larger pattern of racial discrimination by police?  When Tampa Bay Times investigative reporter Ben Montgomery set out to answer that question in Florida, he quickly realized it wouldn’t be easy; no one—not even the FBI—was keeping track of police shootings in the country’s third-largest state. This is also true in most states around the country. So Montgomery and a team at the Tampa Bay Times decided they would. It took more than two years, but now they’re done and he shares his findings with us.

Guest: Ben Montgomery, Reporter, Tampa Bay Times In the past three years, fatal encounters between police and unarmed black men sparked protests across the country. Were these just a handful of tragic but isolated incidents, as law enforcement officials claimed? Or were the shooting deaths of Michael Brown, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, and Walter Scott evidence of a larger pattern of racial discrimination by police?  When Tampa Bay Times investigative reporter Ben Montgomery set out to answer that question in Florida, he quickly realized it wouldn’t be easy; no one—not even the FBI—was keeping track of police shootings in the country’s third-largest state. This is also true in most states around the country. So Montgomery and a team at the Tampa Bay Times decided they would. It took more than two years, but now they’re done and he shares his findings with us.