Small Planet Heroes CoSphere

In today’s economy, people are being guided to move back home or take on roommates to make housing affordable. This may seem strange and unwelcome after decades of it being normal to live apart. But some people argue that living with others can be deeply rewarding, if we approach it right.

All this has deep connections to the climate and ecological crisis. As nuclear families and single-occupant homes became normal, consumption was boosted by the proliferation of households. For the same number of people, more households means more stuff and more energy, which means more pollution, climate change, and habitat destruction.

This episode we speak with Dr. Tanya Gee on the importance of love and empathy. These traits are not only important if you’re hoping to live with others; they’re also key to being a small-planet hero. Overcoming the division and polarization that surrounds environmental and social issues will take a hippo’s dose of love and empathy.

On today’s episode, we’ll be speaking to Kai Chan, our future host and an interdisciplinary professor and Canada Research Chair at UBC. He is a sustainability scientist whose work straddles social and natural systems with a focus on values, rewilding, and transformative change. Kai takes us on a journey through his academic career, what inspired him to create Cosphere, and how it led to launching this podcast.

Our vision of a sustainable future embraces a diversity of people as equals, whether they’re unlike us in their gender, sexuality, or in their understanding of these topics.

On Small Planet Heroes, we seek to understand how people are bringing about the social and system change that enables a benign climate and healthy biosphere. As a parallel, one area that has seen rapid progress is diversity and inclusion about gender and sexuality.

In recent years, gender has also been a battleground, inciting backlash from the conservative right, and a deep polarization across political divides. Much like climate change.

So, today we embrace gender and sexuality diversity and inclusion, as topics of intrinsic interest, and for what we can learn about the path to a planet both better and wilder.

A key theme is overcoming polarization by accepting apparently contradictory truths. Along the way, understandably, we will hit some dark spots, including discussions of alcoholism, which may be triggering or traumatizing for some listeners.