Susan Wagner: Stop sending our horses to the slaughterhouse.

"50% of clothing that gets created ends up in a landfill in the first year. When we're using way too much resource in the first place, the fact that half of that is going directly to landfill in the first year is insane. And then, what actually makes it into our closets, we wear about 20% of on a trailing 12 month basis. So if you think about just the actual amount of utility that we get out of this massive system is insane. And that's just the waste part of it." – Vanessa Barboni Hallik Vanessa Barboni Hallik is the founder and CEO of Another Tomorrow, a luxury brand that is doing fashion better. Much much better. They're a B Corp Certified end-to-end sustainable design company with a mission to model a new future for fashion with a fully digitized product eco-system delivering technology-enabled transparency and authenticated recommerce. If other brands would follow Another Tomorrow's lead, humans, the planet and billions of animals would benefit enormously. Vanessa is also an investor in early-stage companies positioned to catalyze systemic change. And she serves on the Advisory Board for Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, where current work focuses on the ethics of AI. Prior to founding Another Tomorrow, Vanessa was a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley, where she held several leadership roles in the emerging markets institutional securities business. Throughout her career she has worked across global markets and managed culturally diverse and cross-border teams. Vanessa is an active speaker on innovation, digitalization and new business models built for resilience. She has been featured in The New York Times, Fast Company, Bloomberg, Forbes and Vogue for her work, and is one of Wallpaper* Magazine's USA300 and Worth Magazine's Worthy100. Please listen and share. In gratitude, Elizabeth Novogratz

10 Juli 202435min

"I think one of the reasons dignity matters to animals is that they are objectified. They are stripped of their agency very often, and they're also caught up in power relations with human beings that do not go in their favor in, in the overwhelming number of cases. But it's also grounds why they have a right to be subjects of justice, doesn't it? So, it is the fact that they are subjects, that they are agents, that they their voices matter in a political sense." – Melanie Challenger Melanie Challenger wears a lot of hats— she's an artist, philosopher, poet and writer, deputy co-chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and a Vice President of the RSPCA UK. She is the author of On Extinction: How we became estranged from nature (2011), How to Be Animal: What it means to be human (2021), and anthology editor of Animal Dignity: Philosophical Reflections on Non-human Existence (2023). Melanie is bringing her decades of experience in both science and the arts to come up with a solution to a big question: how can non-human animals be represented in the process of making crucial decisions that affect their lives? This project is called Animals in the Room. It began during the pandemic and is an international collaboration of philosophers, scientists and animal welfare specialists who are working together to devise and test models for representing non-human. Links: Melanie Challenger: https://www.melaniechallenger.com/about/ Animals in the Room: https://animalsintheroom.org/

25 Juni 202441min

"Anybody with half a heart could understand that this is a very bad deal for these feeling beings. Waking up every day at the same place where these horrible things happened, it's not right." – Gene Grant It's been almost a decade since the National Institutes of Health ended the use of chimpanzees for biomedical research. But today we still have scores of chimpanzees sitting in labs. They're not being tested on, but they are still waiting to be moved into a sanctuary. This is happening even though there is a law in place that established a federal sanctuary system to provide lifetime care for chimpanzees retired from medical research. 26 of these former research chimpanzees live in the Alamogordo Primate Facility on Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. I asked Gene Grant, the chief program and policy officer for Animal Protection New Mexico, to come on the show and talk about why all these years later, these chimps have still not been moved to a sanctuary. And how that changes. LINKS Animal Protection New Mexico https://apnm.org/ Chimp Haven https://chimphaven.org/donate/ https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/23/science/chimpanzees-research-retirement.html

12 Juni 202437min

"There was a farmer who I met. He had the craziest [story], but not crazy because it's happening everywhere. A hog horn rammed into him and he got a disease. No one had any idea what it was. He went septic. He almost died. And he figured out that his herd had gotten an antibiotic resistant bug because of the way he was farming." – Chloe Sorvino Chloe Sorvino leads coverage of food and agriculture as a staff writer at Forbes. She writes the newsletter, Mind Feeder, and founded the Forbes newsletter Fresh Take. Chloe is also the author of Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed and the Fight for the Future of Meat, an exposé into the power and corruption of America's meat industry. Nearly a decade of reporting at Forbes has brought her to In-N-Out Burger's secret test kitchen, drought-ridden farms in California's Central Valley, burnt-out national forests logged by a timber billionaire, and Costco's rotisserie chicken slaughterhouse in Nebraska. Sorvino serves as a steward on the Forbes Union unit council. Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, NPR, Fast Company, the Financial Times, the New York Times, New York Magazine, Civil Eats, Modern Farmer, Salon and many more. Chloe Sorvino: https://www.chloesorvino.com/

27 Maj 202437min

"We want to know that we're not separate from all beings - because most of our grief, our fear, our anger comes from feeling separate, not feeling connected, we're constantly finding ways to connect." – Nina Rao Nina Rao runs an organization called Saving Wild Tigers, a project that raises funds and supports conservation efforts for tigers throughout India. Three of the eight tiger subspecies that roamed Asia only 50 years ago are gone. And the remaining population is under severe threats from habitat loss, hunting of its prey and poaching. The future is uncertain for tigers. Saving Wild Tiger's supports the immediate needs of the wild tigers: protecting the tiger, its habitat, its prey and its protectors; supporting the surrounding villages (community-based conservation), scientific studies to understand the needs of the tigers and control of poaching and international trade of tiger parts. Nina also is a chantress. She learned traditional chants (bhajans) from her grandfather in a village in south India when she was nine years old. The chants quietly stayed with her until she rediscovered chanting with Krishna Das, in New York in 1996. Krishna Das is a singer/chanter known globally or his performances of Hindu devotional music called kirtan. Nina is Krishna Das' business manager and accompanist as well as a chant leader on her own. Nina is also a podcast host on the widely-heard Be Here Now Network, exploring spirituality, practice, and conservation of wilderness and Nature. Links: https://www.savingwildtigers.org/ https://www.ninaraochant.com/

8 Maj 202446min

"I think that's often the solution when feeling sort of bogged down in the issues of our day is when you zoom out and you look at sort of the whole arc of change, you can sort of get inspired that, yeah, we've come a long way." - Monica Murphy Bill Wasik is the editorial director of The New York Times Magazine and Monica Murphy is a veterinarian and writer. Their latest book, Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals, comes out today, April 23rd. It's a book about moral change and a moral revolution, one that took place from the 1860s to the 1890s in the United States. Over those three decades, the way we treated animals completely changed. It was the time of the birth of the ASPCA, of many SPCAs, of the anti-vivisection movement, and of the first animal shelters. It was a time of massive change. Even though I think most people who listen to this podcast know that we need a much larger moral revolution in terms of how we treat animals, this book gave me so much hope that it can actually be done. Please listen, share and read Our Kindred Creatures. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634494/our-kindred-creatures-by-bill-wasik-and-monica-murphy/

24 Apr 202437min

"Wouldn't it be amazing if you went into Nike Town and the same pair of shoes or the same style [but]each pair was different because it had been grown and was not the result of a plastic, you know, a plastic polymer or an animal that had been so heavily finished that they all look the same. That, or me, would be mind blowing, where you and I could have the same handbag, but they're from the same brand, in the same shape, it's the exact same model, but the material is slightly different on every single one, like the leaves on a tree." – Suzanne Lee Suzanne Lee is the Founder & CEO of BIOFABRICATE, a global network that serves the needs of bio innovators, which are material makers, consumer brands and investors. BIOFABRICATE is where design meets biology. Suzanne is a pioneer in this space. She started growing materials from microbes for the fashion industry in 2022, coining the term 'Biocouture™'. She is also the author of Fashioning the Future: Tomorrow's Wardrobe. She is a special advisor to Parley For The Oceans, The Mills Fabrica and Fashion for Good on biomaterials, a TED Senior Fellow, and a Launch Material Innovator - an initiative of NASA, Nike, USAID and the US State Department. Formerly Suzanne was the Chief Creative Officer of Modern Meadow, a biomaterials start-up in New York (2014-2019).

10 Apr 202442min

"He called me into his office and he said, 'you see that picture above my desk?' I said, 'yes.' It kind of looked like an animal that reminded me of a squirrel. He said, 'that is a lemur that we think is extinct in the wild. If you can, please go to Madagascar and find out if it's extinct or not.'" – Patricia Wright Dr. Patricia Wright is an anthropologist, a conservationist, and a professor at Stony Brook University in New York, and she's probably the world's leading expert on lemurs. There are over 100 species of lemurs, which are prosimians - a type of primate and they only exist on the island of Madagascar. Patricia spends half her time, six months a year in Madagascar studying lemurs, and has done so since the 80s, when she discovered a new species of lemur, the Golden Bamboo Lemur, and she also established Ranomafana National Park. It is almost an understatement to say that Patricia is a trailblazer— she has done the impossible again and again. Her story is will astound you.

4 Apr 202455min