Seven million people live in the Bay Area, and millions more come here to work and visit every year. The ability of this region to adapt to climate change affects the world. And the ways its people respond may guide coastal communities elsewhere.

San Francisco Bay is the largest estuary on the Pacific coast of the Americas. Yet it was once much larger – 40% of its waters and wetlands were filled to create real estate. The 29-inch rise of coastal waters predicted by 2050, along with rapid river run-off and flooding due to storm surges, will reclaim some of that land. Among the areas threatened are the airports, Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Financial District.

We visit people who are responding to this oncoming disaster. Mendel Stewart of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is managing the conversion of enclosed salt ponds into open wetlands. These wetlands will serve as flood control while capturing greenhouse gases and providing wildlife habitat. Will Travis directs the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission. He is trying to coordinate a regional response to this crisis. And he created a design competition looking for solutions. One idea, contributed by architect Craig Hartman, is to place an inflatable barrier beneath the Golden Gate Bridge to keep storm surges combined with high tides from flooding the land. Brilliantly simple; but realistic?

1951 - The Rise of Levittown 

This week, Action Speaks takes a look at a birthplace of suburban utopia, Levittown. In just over 50 years, the American suburbs have physically transformed the landscape of our country, redefined the middle class and helped to both fuel and bring down our nation's economy. Is this the American dream we were looking for? Will the suburbs, built on a seemingly inexhaustible supply of oil, be able to turn 'green' and can bastions of  'white flight' and individualism reflect our nation's demographic diversity and its needs for community?

PANELISTS:

V. Elaine Gross is the president of ERASE Racism, a regional not-for-profit organization based on Long Island, New York that promotes racial equity through research, policy advocacy and education in areas such as housing, public school education and health. The Racial Equity Report Card: Fair Housing on Long Island is a revealing report published in March 2009.

Alyssa Katz is a freelance journalist who teaches at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. The former editor-in-chief of City Limits, an award-winning magazine about urban policy in New York City, she is currently an editorial consultant for the Pratt Center for Community Development and the author of Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us.

Paul Lukez is a Boston based architect and the founding principal of his own firm, Paul Lukez Architecture. His designs and competition entries have earned him numerous awards with the NE / AIA and BSA. With over 15 years of teaching experience, he has taught at MIT, Tsinghua University , TU Delft and is currently teaching at Washington University.  He is the author of Suburban Transformations, a book which proposes theories and tools for planning suburbs and edge cities.

Action Speaks!, a co-production of AS220 and the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, would like to thank The National Endowment for the Humanities who provided major funding to our program; our Media Partners: WRNI, RIPBS & the Providence Phoenix.  Thanks to The What Cheer? Brigade for our intro music.

Find out more at http://actionspeaksradio.org/ 

Contact the production crew at actionspeaksradio@as220.org with any feedback, ideas for future shows for press info or to request a personalized ID. You can also write to us at Action Speaks! c/o AS220 Main Office, 95 Mathewson St. Dreyfus #204, Providence RI 02903. If you are a radio station and wish to receive a CD of Action Speaks! please visit Creative PR's website: creativepr.org to make a request or contact them at info@creativepr.org / 1-888-233-5650.

After December 2009, please contact actionspeaksradio@as220.org with any CD requests.

Today on the show we're tackling climate change on two fronts. 

First we'll speak with architect Gordon Gill.  Gordon is responsible for the greening of Chicago's Willis Tower among other projects and he'll tell us how architects are designing mixed use buildings that are better for the environment and better fits for city living.

And we'll talk to Julia Parzen of the firm JP Consulting.  She's brought 65 international cities together to coordinate climate action planning as the director of the New Urban Sustainability Director's Network. She'll tell us about the low hanging fruit for cities that want to make a big dent in their carbon footprint.

Two 29 minute segments. Each can be run separately as half hour programs. 1 second of silence at end of each.

Cut into end music of segment 2 if you need more time for announcements.

Music: "Garbage" by Chairlift, album "Does You Inspire You"

Attics, basements, and garages are loaded with the plunder of past shopping. Some people rent storage lockers just to hold all their extra stuff. Dumps are filling up with brand new items, never used, but tossed out. There's even a TV show called "Hoarders" - a reflection of the national preoccupation. Do all these THINGS really make us happier?

In this Radio Ecoshock program, we examine the two extremes of consumption: the Americans who use up more of the world's resources than any other people; and the slum dwellers who use practically nothing.

The World Watch Institute has released it's annual report. "State of the World 2010, Transforming Cultures: From Consumerism to Sustainability" is 262 pages of solutions from around the world.

I interview the project director, Erik Assadourian. We start by noting the total disconnect between governments and economists encouraging consumers to get out and buy to save the economy - versus the plain facts that resources are getting harder to find, the forests and land are being devastated, and the atmosphere is damaged by all the useless spending.

Then, in Part 2, we look at the other part of the world, the 3 billion people who create hardly any carbon emissions. Most of them live in "illegal settlements", with no government services, no police, no fire, no hospitals, no schools, and little hope.

Except, as our next guest David Satterthwaite tells us, the so-called "slum dwellers" are self-organizing to improve their lot, in many parts of the world.

Dr David Satterthwaite is a senior urban planner for the International Institute for Environment and Development, a non-profit based in the UK. He's traveled to the poorest parts of cities all over the world. He's the editor of the Earthscan Reader in Sustainable Cities, and co-author of many other books, including "Adapting Cities to Climate Change: Understanding and Addressing the Development Challenges."

Satterthwaite has also researched the role of consumerism, in the developed versus developing world. If you were wondering, when it comes to climate change is it "them" (increasing population in the "Third World") or is it "us" (Western-style consumers) - the verdict is in: it is us! 

In this half-hour we'll visit three communities – a Montana town where coal has been both a blessing and a curse, an Indian reservation looking to coal for salvation, even as some say it's already poisoned their way of life, and a town on the plains of North Dakota that's still hesitant to open its doors to coal development after years of the industry's knocking.

Along the way, we'll hear about the future of coal and coal power, including a concept you may have heard about – something called 'carbon sequestration'; technology that promises we can have our coal and climate, too. But who really pays the price? And who's liable when things go wrong? Those answers and more on this High Plains News special – “We Shall Remain – Life with and after coal.”

Just a few years ago, I accompanied a group of some of the finest entomologists and foresters into the heart of grizzly country for a first-hand look at the beetle damange to Yellowstone's whitebark pine trees. Trudging up the sides of mountains and, later, flying over ridge after ridge in a small plane, the extent of that damage became clear. More than two-thirds of the species, which ranges throughout the Rockies, has been destroyed. Mountainsides once evergreen have turned a rusty brown.

Now, whitebark pine trees are being considered for endangered species protection, primarly because of the continued threat of global warming to their survival. But without any intervention, their demise could tip the scales for an entire community of species that rely on the trees for surviving the winter.

More:

Yellowstone's grizzly bears rely on a single food more than any other to pack on the pounds before winter: whitebark pine tree nuts. They find them stockpiled in squirrel middens - storehouses for another species dependent on the nut in winter. The tree survives by being indispensible to one more species - a bird called the Clark's nutcracker, which survives the winter on buried nuts. Unlike other pines, whose seeds spread by fire, the whitebark pine needs a forgetful nutcracker.

But this tightly woven community of animals and trees faces a serious threat, made worse by global warming. Pine beetles that once focused on other species of trees have taken advantage of warmer temperatures and shorter winters to continue their attack at the higher altitudes where whitebark pine trees grow. The trouble is that whitebark pines haven't evolved the right defenses against this particular bug. So it's killing trees faster than they can bounce back--leaving few, if any, options for foresters.

Fewer whitebark pines means fewer whitebark pine nuts. And fewer nuts means bears, squirrels, and the nutcracker must scramble to find another source of calories - or starve.

It's the kind of story unfolding in ecosystems across the globe: warmer temperatures set off or speed up a chain of events with consequences nearly impossible to reverse.

Dioxin pollution has been present in a watershed in central Michigan for more than thirty years.  People around the country might think it's just a local issue, but there was a time when this very same pollution problem made national news.  Shawn Allee met the man who took the issue to Congress and who feels it should make news again.