In episode 8, Rewilding Patagonia, we take you to the far reaches of Chilean Patagonia, where US philanthropist Kris Tompkins has overseen the largest act of wildlands philanthropy in history. We also offer a new segment in which we hear directly from frontline activists who provide us with tips and hints about effective environmental advocacy. And speaking of advice, welcome our new sustainable living advice columnist, Ms. Green—aka Jessian Choy. Doria Robinson, a resident of Richmond, California joins us to chat about living in the shadow of a giant Chevron oil refinery.

Transcript

Jason Mark: Earlier this year, I got the incredible opportunity to go on a reporting trip that took me to one of the most beautiful places on the planet, Patagonia National Park in the far south of Chile. The scenery there was almost scripted; sharp peaks almost always head-locked by clouds, the valleys were split with these aquamarine rivers, vast grasslands dotted with guanaco, which is the wild relative to the llama.

 Patagonia was the last place that humans arrived in the Americas and it's still one of the most remote places on Earth. When I was there, one of the weirdest things was discovering that there was no airplane traffic overhead, no contrails, no jet roars splitting the sky.

 Yet at least for those who live there, it's the center of the world and in recent years it's also been the center of some controversy - over how and whether that place should be preserved so that it will always remain wild and beautiful.

Kris McDivitt Tompkins: To create something beautiful is important because beauty matters.

Jason Mark: On this episode of The Overstory, we're going to head to Patagonia to meet the American philanthropist who's at the center of one of the world's most ambitious rewilding efforts to create and maintain millions of acres of parkland in the far south of Chile and we're going to get a chance to meet our new environmental advice columnist, Jessian Choy, AKA Ms. Green.

Jessian Choy: I try to make it so that people feel like they can do something what might seem like a little action every day, all the way up to making a bigger difference, whether it's changing policies or signing a petition.

Jason Mark: She spends her days advising the city of San Francisco on green policies and programs and she spends her nights serving on the board of Earth Island Institute, a grassroots environmental leadership org. Basically, she's doing green activism 24/7 and for just a few minutes an episode, she's going to help us all do the same.

Jessian Choy: People have a lot more power than they might think they do.

Jason Mark: Plus, we've got a conversation with the director of a small farming nonprofit that's got big ideas about climate adaptation.

Doria Robinson: Showing kids through the work that we were doing that you could take a blighted area and grow something beautiful.

Jason Mark: This is The Overstory. Come explore with us.

(2:20) Preserving Patagonia

 It's 8:15 on a summer morning in February and the office of Tompkins Conservation outside the Chilean hamlet of El Amarillo is high busy. The philanthropy's controller is hunched over a laptop filled with spreadsheets and there's a supervisor giving orders to groups of men in blue coveralls.

 In the middle of it all, toggling between a pair of laptops and her cell phone is the intense but always gracious California-born 69-year-old Kristine McDivitt Tompkins, the organization's president and the force behind today's important meeting.

Kris McDivitt Tompkins: Till 10:00, I think, as soon as the administer arrives.

Jason Mark: The administers show up, yeah.

Jason Mark: Chile's Minister of Public Lands is about to arrive, a television crew in tow. He's there to see some of the lands that Tompkins is set to donate to the Chilean people, an act of generosity that represents the most ambitious wild lands philanthropy in history.

Jason Mark: What are your feelings are right now on the verge of the handover.

Kris McDivitt Tompkins: I'm still in shock that we did it.

Jason Mark: Just outside the busy office stretches a postcard-perfect view of Pumalin National Park. There's unbroken temperate rainforest climbing toward the glacial top summit of a dormant volcano. It was just a year earlier when Tompkins and then Chilean President Michelle Bachelet announced a historic agreement: Tompkins Conservation would donate nearly a million acres of land and in return, the government will put 9 million acres of Southern Chile under new protection. In total, it would be an area larger than the state of Delaware and it would create five new national parks and expand three others.

So how exactly did an American philanthropists come to own almost a million acres of Patagonian wilderness and then donate it all back to the Chilean government? It was the consequence of a capitalist success, a love story, and a terrible tragedy.

Back in the 1970s, Kris started working for a little outdoor clothing and gear company called Patagonia. Over the years, she eventually rose to the post of CEO and she transformed the company into a global fashion icon.

By 1993, she had left her position as CEO and she married a guy named Doug Tompkins. He was the founder of another outdoors company you might've heard of, The North Face, as well as the co-founder of the global fashion company, Esprit.

By the time they married, Doug was already fabulously wealthy and just the other side of a midlife crisis. He had divorced his first wife and thought his stake in Esprit, which they had founded together. He made an estimated 150 million bucks on the sale.

 Then he up and he moved to Chile to live in a ramshackle sheepherders' cottage on an isolated fjord in the middle of the Valdivian Rainforest.

Douglas Tomkins: Sometimes, as we all know, life takes turns that you don't expect, and I bought a farm in Southern Chile because they have very beautiful farms there, some of the most beautiful you'll find anywhere.

Jason Mark: It was there in the wilds of Patagonia that Doug Tompkins became enamored with the ideas of Arne Naess, the Norwegian mountain climber and philosopher who had developed a system of environmental ethics called "deep ecology." This led to a significant awakening and a shift in Tompkins' worldview. He decided that he needed to atone for his capitalist past and that he would do so by buying up millions of acres of Patagonian wilderness in both Chile and Argentina.

Here's Tompkins, his old friend and business partner, Peter Buckley, talking about those early days.

Peter Buckley: And we took off in his little plane like we always do and we were flying around, and he was like some sort of demented real estate guy. He's like, "Look at that, look at this, isn't that beautiful?" I'm like, "Yeah, that's stunning." He's like, "That's for sale. We could buy that. We could buy this. We could buy that."

Jason Mark: Kris joined Doug in Chile, and together, they continue these massive land acquisitions.

Kris McDivitt Tompkins: He became his greatest self as he began to realize that modernity, or the Industrial Revolution, was creating a dystopia.

Jason Mark: Doug always said he was buying these lands for nature, not for himself.

Douglas Tomkins: They're social responsibilities. Everybody is ethically bound by that and it comes back to that paying your rent for living on the planet.

Jason Mark: But Kris says that not all Chileans saw it that way.

Kris McDivitt Tompkins: Here's a foreign couple who come down and become "the couple who cut Chile in half," and we didn't cut the trees, so we were amassing very large sections of forest and not cutting anything, so that's highly suspicious.

Jason Mark: To Chileans accustomed to international investors who could come to the country only to extract its resources, it didn't make any sense.

Then the suspicions became conspiracy theories. Wild rumors started to circulate in the Chilean media, things like the Tompkinses were going to remove cattle from the land and introduce American bison or really crazy stuff like the land was going to be used as a nuclear waste dump or a secret US nuclear base or, some said, a Zionist colony.

The long-time superintendent of Patagonia National Park, a guy named Dago Guzman remembers hearing some rumors back in the 1990s.

Dago Guzman: [Speaks Spanish in bits woven through Jason's comments below].

Jason Mark: He told me that there were all these crazy stories about a mysterious project that was going to take over Chile's lands and waters.

But when he got to Pumalín, Guzman found himself fascinated by the project and he ended up working with the Tompkins Conservation for the next 16 years.

But buying up land was just the first step in a bigger conservationist plan. Next, the Tompkinses set about trying to enlarge the wildlife populations through an ambitious rewilding program.

Douglas Tomkins: Well, national parks, like I like to say, are the gold standard of conservation. They enjoy, in most countries around the world, the best legal protection for the landscapes and the wildlife there. If you can, as a conservationist, can get land put into national parks, you've really reached the peak of the pyramid in terms of conservation.

Daniel Velasquez Romero: [Speaks Spanish in bits woven through Jason's comments below].

Jason Mark: I got to meet a onetime sheepherder named Daniel Velasquez Romero worked there in the area when it was a big cattle and sheep farm. At the time, he said the whole place was just dirt and earth due to overgrazing.

Eventually, the Tompkinses won over many Chileans with their vision. According to what Romero told me, the park is the best thing that could have happened to the wildlife there.

Not surprisingly, I guess, such radical ideas had their critics. One of those critics is Carlos Olivares. He's the president of a local campesino advocacy group.

Carlos Olivares: [Speaks Spanish in bits woven through Jason's comments below].

Jason Mark: He disliked the North Americans telling Chileans how to use their land. Olivares told me that the project wasn't done with the agreement of the local citizens, that the Tompkinses ignore the local culture and the history of work and the economy.

One could, I guess, see the Tompkins’ mission as a kind of paternalism, the belief that they knew what was best for the citizens of the region, but that would eventually change.

In 2015, Doug Tompkins died in a tragic kayaking accident. He was out on a Patagonian Lake with some pals when his boat capsized and he succumbed to hypothermia. After Doug's death, Kris turned her intense into action. She decided to fulfill their shared vision of donating the properties they had amassed during their marriage of giving the land back to Chile as publicly managed wild lands.

Kris McDivitt Tompkins: Certainly, his death focused me on this, probably saved my life doing this, funneling that black hole in something that we both wanted so badly.

Jason Mark: According to his friends and family, there's a line that Doug Tompkins used to say all the time: "If anything can save the world-

Kris McDivitt Tompkins: ... save the world, I'll place my bet on beauty."

Jason Mark: In the end, he did, his entire fortune. He even wagered his life on it and left his bones in the most beautiful places money could buy.

Kris McDivitt Tompkins: To create something beautiful, just beautiful is important and maintaining things beautifully is important because beauty matters.

Jason Mark: What Kris and Doug wanted wasn't just a return to beauty or a return to wild landscapes, it's something much greater, a kind of peace.

Kris McDivitt Tompkins: National parks are not an end in themselves. We're after national parks as one of our strategies to slow down the species' extinction, to make peace.

Jason Mark: For The Overstory, I'm Jason Mark. If you want to read the full article, just go to sierramagazine.org.

(12:08) Youth Keep Pressure on Leaders for Climate Change

Jason Mark: On our last episode, we heard from some young people who were at the historic climate strike in New York City and we felt so inspired by them that we wanted to experiment with a new segment on The Overstory, where we can hear from young people who are taking action on climate change. We're asking them to record a memo from the field with a tip about how to get out, get inspired, and get involved.

We're going to start with someone that we met last episode. Daphne Frias. Daphne was an organizer at the New York climate strike on September 20th and we got to hear how that strike day went for her. In the week since, Daphne and her fellow organizers have kept the pressure on local, national, and global leaders to take action on climate change.

A lot of less experienced activists sometimes ask Daphne what actions they can take to make an impact, so we asked her to share her point of view with us. Here's a short voice memo from Daphne with something that any climate activist, a beginner or a pro, can do right now.

Daphne Frias: Something that I got a lot of feedback on was people wanting to continue actions and not just waiting for the next big protest, so today I'm here to talk to you about something that I did to create climate action in New York City.

I knew a thing that I really wanted to tackle was having New York City declare a climate emergency, so I went ahead and looked at my local city council representative and I sat down and I began to write him a letter. In my letter, I spoke to him about the buses in my neighborhood because we have a huge bus depot there. I also talked to him about the water treatment plant that was in my neighborhood because it exhausts fumes that pollute our air and it makes it really hard for people like me with asthma and respiratory issues to breathe safely and comfortably in their environments.

The first couple of times, I got sort of a generic response where they have their secretary say, "I acknowledged the receipt of your letter. Thank you so much for writing to us."

I kept on pushing. I kept on sending the letters and I got creative with the letters. I made stickers and I drew pictures and drawings. I made it as unique as possible. I would put sticky notes on my letter and I would say, "Hi, you should read this letter because if you live on planet Earth, you're affected by the climate crisis." I sent my letter 63 times and I finally got, not only a letter response, but a phone call from my representative and he spoke to me and said, "How can we help you? How can we do something about this and how can we work together to declare a climate emergency?"

Find your local representative. Our elected officials really do work for us and the way that we can make them do their job effectively is by having open and honest communication with them.

My biggest tip is to write from the heart. Talk about your personal experiences with climate change and then ask them directly what you want them to do about it. I hope to hear how you, too, are changing the world.

Jason Mark: That was Daphne Frias. You can find her at frias_daphne, that's F-R-I-A-S underscore D-A-P-H-N-E on social media. If you've got a climate action tip or trick to share, contact us. Just send us an email at overstory.podcast@sierraclub.org for a chance to be featured on this segment. We'd love to hear from you.

(15:43) Living with a Refinery in Your Backyard

Jason Mark: As a lifelong resident of Richmond, California, Doria Robinson grew up with a Chevron refinery looming over her city. Now, in the oil refinery's shadow, she runs a farming nonprofit called Urban Tilth. At first, the nonprofit set out to teach young people how to grow food at the urban farm. That is, until a fire broke out at the refinery in 2012, forcing the nonprofit to change course.

Sierra magazine's Senior Story Editor, Wendy Becktold, talked with Doria about how the nonprofit has grown increasingly involved in working against climate change.

Wendy Becktold: Can you tell us what it was like growing up with the presence of this refinery so close by?

Doria Robinson: I mean, it's funny because when I was growing up, I grew up on 5th Street, on 5th and Nevin in Richmond, and literally out of my window, the view out of my window from my childhood bedroom was the refinery. It was just monolithic.

You were just at its mercy and you'd just be generally upset with it, but there's not anything you could really do. It's just this deep cynicism in my mom or in my aunties or in my grandparents, just deeply cynical knowing that every time there'd be a fire or every time there'd be something that happened, the flaring, the constant flaring of this, just the dirty air, the soot that's on all your things and your house and your windows and your car if you leave it for a day. Just generally upset, generally just angry, like, "Why do they get to do this and I can't really do anything about it?"

Throughout my lifetime, I think I consciously remember three big incidents. One, when I was a child, I remember the sky's going kind of red and sirens going off. It was this whole shelter in place thing and we're like, "Mom, what's up?"

After a while, we came out to find that the paint had been eaten off of our car. We went through the whole... What happens usually when there's an accident in Richmond is that they'll, they'll open up these offices that you can put in a claim, right? Everyone's like, "I'm about to get my money after something like that happens."

Again, it's like this very cynical thing and then everyone goes stand in line or whatever. My mom did the same thing. She's going to get her car repaid, they owe her type of thing.

Months and months later, after this thing happened, this check comes in the mail for some tiny amount, like $500 or something like that, barely get the car painted again. I remember her opening up the check and just again just saying in this snide voice, like, "Yeah, this'll pay for the car, but what are they going to pay me for my lungs?" It just really made a huge impression on me, this underlying threat, this underlying damage that's constantly being done.

For the first seven years of our existence as Urban Tilth, we're hyper-focused on health and food and nutrition and eating habits and obesity and heart disease and things like that and not so much involved with air and water and our environmental justice issues.

But this particular summer, we had one of the biggest classes ever in the summer apprentice program. The kids had grown a ton of food, we were growing new things, we were growing at eight different sites. It was just a big year and literally the day before graduation, the fire happened at Chevron. Just this feeling of being there, being in one of the gardens and looking up.

We spent the whole summer convincing kids, showing kids through the work that we were doing that you could take a blighted area in Richmond and grow something beautiful, something healthy, that they could do it, that they could transform their own situation, that they weren't locked into this negative, nasty future.

Then the refinery blows up and spews this cloud of, at that time, we were like, "We have no idea what's in that cloud. No idea. It's most likely toxic." The kids were like, "All of our work is ruined." We can do whatever we want to do to try to change our lives, but ultimately, corporations like Chevron and these bigger entities have so much more control over us and we're really at their mercy.

They got pissed. They were really angry. They were like, "This isn't right." They're like, "Who owns the sky? Why do they get to own the sky?" They decided that they were going to rip out all of the produce because they felt like it was unsafe to eat and they were like, "We're going to pull it all out and we're going to go to the Chevron community meeting and we're going to dump it on their stage and we're going to say, 'You're responsible for this,' and basically hold our own protest." That's what they did and it created a really strong commitment to environmental justice and environmental work within Urban Tilth, that fire.

Wendy Becktold: It sounds like it really changed the conversation for you at Urban Tilth.

Doria Robinson: Right. Before the fire, we were really just a community garden organization interested in teaching kids how to plant and how to grow and how to water.

After the fire, the gardening really became a metaphor for the much deeper work that we are doing and opened up a whole other area that we now are completely committed to around climate and around just environmental justice, just the having the right to be in relationship with land, having the right to say that even in Richmond, that that land, those people, our people, us deserve to be protected.

What I hope is that through our work at Urban Tilth, we can demonstrate how you could create a regionally local food system, one that shortens those supply chains, that reconnects urban centers to their rural counterparts.

Our little urban farm is, we hope, a beacon or a magnet for this interest in energy. We grow food here, but we also connect with farmers in East Contra Costa County who want desperately to keep their farming lifestyles to pass it down to their kids, so we connect with them, we bring food into our farm, we distribute it to people who are most in need at prices that they can afford. This is not free. We're actually wanting to actually develop an economic system around this new regional food distribution that employs people at fair wages and passes along that retail price to farmers through this direct distribution.

That's what we're trying to do is we're actually trying to remake these smaller regional growing distributing systems that connect people back to the land, connect people back to farmers, connect people back to their economies, and try to make a life that's really worth living.

Jason Mark: That was Doria Robinson speaking with Sierra's own Wendy Becktold. For more information on Urban Tilth, visit urbantilth.com. That's urban T-I-L-T-H dot com.

Editor note: Urban Tilth's website is actually urbantilth.org, not .com. Link above takes you to the correct website.

(23:20) Introducting Ms. Green!

 I'm really excited to be able to introduce Sierra magazine's and The Overstory's new Environmental Living Advice Columnist, Ms. Green, and that's Jessian Choy.

Jessian Choy: Hi, Jason.

Jason Mark: Jessian, I'm so glad you're here. You're going to be, as our long-time advice columnist Mr. Green was doing, offering people tips and hints about how to tread a little bit lighter on the Earth, but I learned about you I think first because you had this really cool blog called Fun and Draconian.

Jessian Choy: That's where I post tricks on how to create an equitable green world, also have tips on how to be happy and vegan and still have friends.

Jason Mark: Is it hard to be vegan and have friends?

Jessian Choy: I actually find it makes me a much more generous person. I'm always bringing food and I just love to see the looks on people's faces when they do like what I bring, so it's made me a better person.

Jason Mark: Fun and Draconian, I guess this sort of take is that you want it to be easy and I guess not to feel like you're, as it were, eating your vegetables to live a more environmentally conscientious lifestyle.

Jessian Choy: I tried to make it so that people feel like they can do something, what might seem like a little action, every day, all the way up to making a bigger difference, whether it's changing policies or signing a petition, trying to make people feel like they have a lot more power than they might think they do and trying to make them laugh at the same time.

Jason Mark: You also have this really deep background as a real environmental policy wonk, right?

Jessian Choy: By day, I work at San Francisco Department of Environments where I help co-create laws, some of the strictest laws in the nation. We also do a lot of research on less toxic green products.

Jason Mark: I guess you're bringing those research skills to us here at Sierra magazine and The Overstory to really help people suss things out because a lot of these questions are not as straightforward as they might seem.

Jessian Choy: Right, and a lot of times the answers are not on the Internet. I don't always just trust what manufacturers say because I've been around too long.

(25:34) Eco-Friendly Sanitary Products

Jason Mark: So, let's go to one of our ask Ms. Green questioners. This is Julie from Washington, DC.

Jessian Choy: Hi, Julie.

Julie: Hello.

Jessian Choy: What's your question?

Julie: The issue of environmentally friendly sanitary products; there's definitely a lot of eco-friendly options out there, which I'm aware of, but perhaps you could give us a little bit more info about those and then also, especially the reusable product, is that actually more eco-friendly by the time you throw them through the washer, run a separate load for them, does that actually amount to a significant gain for the environment? Is it really worth it?

Jessian Choy: Well, surprise, surprise, my answer will not be single-use items. I don't know if you know, but in 2015, the Ocean Conservancy collected almost 35,000 used tampons and applicators on beaches in a single day, and I'm that person that actually took photos of ones I've seen on beaches.

What I find to be the greenest and also the most comfortable is period underwear. I don't know if you are familiar with that kind of product?

Julie: I'm not.

Jessian Choy: Oh. Well, it's just like regular underwear and it doesn't give you what I call the "everyone knows I'm wearing a diaper" look and feel, it's just like regular underwear except it's leak-proof.

What I do is I wash mine with cold water that I collect in water dispensers that I have in my bathroom while I wait for my shower to get warm, so that's how I work around that.

Julie: Oh, cool.

Jessian Choy: It looks like I have drinking water dispensers in my bathroom, but they're actually not for drinking.

Julie: That's a fantastic idea.

Jessian Choy: Yeah. There's some pretty ones out there online. You can get fancy, fancy wedding-looking water dispensers if you want.

Julie: You wash them in the sink by hand, then?

Jessian Choy: Yeah, or sometimes I watch them in the shower. It's definitely very meditative, I guess.

Julie: Yeah, because I was picturing running a whole washing machine load for a few reusable products and that just seemed like a crazy business there. But of course, hand washing had, for some reason, never occurred to me.

Jessian Choy: Mm-hmm. When I say "hand wash," it doesn't take a lot of time. Really, I'm just rinsing. Sometimes I use soap, but really, after you rinse it, all you have to do is you can throw it in your regular laundry.

Julie: That sounds actually almost more convenient than the non-usable ones because it saves you having to go out and restock and saves you all of the extra worry. You've convinced me.

Jessian Choy: Well, thank you so much for your question and for calling in.

Julie: Thank you so much for answering it.

Jessian Choy: Thank you. Bye.

Julie: Bye.

Jason Mark: Well, Jessian, thanks again for this segment. Looking forward to having you on the next episode of The Overstory.

Jessian Choy: Thank you so much, Jason.

Jason Mark: That was Jessian Choy, A.K.A. Ms. Green, she's our new advice columnist at Sierra magazine and here on The Overstory. You can talk nerdy to her at sierramagazine.org. Just go to the top of the page, click on Green [music brea]

Lifestyle, and scroll down to Ask Ms. Green. You can also follow her on Twitter: @realmsgreen.

(29:17) Tribute to April Pierson-Keating

Jason Mark: On our last episode, we featured the voice and story of April Pierson-Keating, a clean water activist in her community of West Virginia and the daughter of Iris Bell, who wrote the state song ‘This is My West Virginia,’ which April happily sang for us.

Right after we released the episode, we were saddened to learn that April Pierson-Keating has recently passed away. Ms. Pierson-Keating spent her life as a tireless advocate for clean water in her community, which has suffered from the health effects of mountaintop removal coal mining. West Virginia and Kentucky lead the nation in deaths per capita from cancer and recent studies have shown a direct link between cancer and the air and water pollution due to toxins from strip mining.

In response to this epidemic, April founded the Mountain Lakes Preservation Alliance and the Buckhannon Riverfest. She was also a founding member of POWHR: Preserve Our Water, Heritage, and Rights. She was a board member of the Buckhannon River Water Association and a board member of ICare, a cancer research group, a board member of the West Virginia Environmental Council, the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, and the Ohio Valley Environmental Council.

April died of breast cancer on Saturday, September 28th at just 52 years old. She is survived by her husband, her two sons, and her daughter. Thank you, April, for all of your work to make your community and this planet a better place.

(30:40) Rise in Asthma and Developmental Disabilities

Jason Mark: Lynn Ringenberg had been a pediatrician in Florida for over 20 years when she started seeing some troubling patterns and the kids coming into her office.

Lynn Ringenberg: I realized in my private practice, so many kids younger and younger and younger with asthma. I didn't see that back 20 years ago.

Jason Mark: It wasn't just asthma. There were also behavioral issues, even some showing up as early as just a year old.

Lynn Ringenberg: I see more kids with developmental disabilities than I ever saw in the first 20 years of my practice and I saw more kids coming in for the well-baby checkups that actually had mild hearing loss, other kinds of behavioral issues, and I said, "This can't be genetics."

Jason Mark: It was an alarming trend and it caused Lynn to found the Florida chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, a nationwide physician-led organization that's working to protect people from the health effects of climate change.

We sat down with Lynn and PSR Florida board member Maria Sgambati to learn more about their work, the challenges, and the promises of hope.

Lynn Ringenberg: It's hard to make a "This definitely causes this." That's very, very hard. There aren't that many things.

Maria Sgambati: The process by which those causal connections are made are very complex and very difficult to do, but necessary work because I think to some extent, science and policy are interrelated with each other, so it's critical that we study the epidemiology of exposures to certain chemicals, whether that's particulate matter in the air or understanding what fracturing might put into our drinking water and then understanding the human health impacts of that. That's why I got involved with PSR, but the truth is that I love the planet.

Lynn Ringenberg: Our only reason to do this is our love of the planet, yes, but our love of our children and grandchildren, when you get in front of a group, I start off telling them that "I'm a doctor and I take care of kids like you and I also take care of the Earth and the Earth is really sick."

Then we went through about 30 minutes or so and at the end, I gave them all a little globe, a little earth ball, and I said, "Okay, now you're all doctors. Now you all have to be doctors of our planet so you and your families can grow up in and live in this beautiful place that we have." This was middle school kids, really cute kids and they would walk around saying, "I'm a doctor of the Earth." It was so cute.

Maria Sgambati: The thing that gives me the greatest hope is when I see young people engaged, is because then I know, "Okay, so there are a lot of the next generation. The next generation is engaged in this."

Jason Mark: That was Maria Sgambati and Lynn Ringenberg from Florida's Physicians for Social Responsibility. You can learn more about their work at psrflorida.org.

Notes and Thank Yous

The Overstory is produced by Josephine Holtzman and Isaac Kestenbaum of Future Projects Media with help from Danielle Roth, additional reporting by Riva Goldberg. Special thanks to Kelly McCarthy. Our theme music is by Jeff Brodsky. This episode was mixed by Dara Hirsch. I'm Jason Mark and you've been listening to The Overstory.

 It doesn't matter if you're a regular subscriber or a first-time listener. I hope you'll take a minute, go to Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast from and rate us. It'll really help.

What's Next?

Check out Episdoe 9: Birding for Change in which we go birding in Atlanta Georgia, hear from climate activist Partic Houston, and talk with youth poet laureate of Nashville.