In the 1970s and ’80s, it was the quintessential environmentalist cause, the one that anyone who cared about the earth could unequivocally rally behind. It was the topic of international negotiations and treaties, and endless campaigns from environmental groups. (“Uh-oh, that guy down the street with the long hair has a clipboard, and is that a Greenpeace T-shirt he’s wearing? Quick, act busy!”)

These days, we’ve got bigger things to worry about — climate change, mass extinction that could wipe out half of the species on the planet by mid-century, and a human population rocketing toward 9 billion.

So what happened to the whales, and all the rah-rah activist efforts to save them? Turns out: Not a whole lot. Sure, some whale species are doing much better, but overall, whaling regulation is still in the same place that it has been since 1982. Environmental groups like Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd are still fighting, and most countries have banned whaling, but a few maverick nations, including Japan and Norway, continue to kill them.

Leah Gerber thinks she has a solution. Gerber, a population ecologist at Arizona State University, was commissioned by the International Whaling Commission to review whether their current Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary is working to keep whale populations up. After concluding that it isn’t, she borrowed concepts from cap-and-trade emissions trading to propose a new system for saving the blubbery beasts.

Her proposal would set a quota based on how many whales scientists believe could be killed without pushing the animals back to the brink of extinction. Countries could then either kill their ration of the quota or let their shares be traded in the global market where they could be grabbed up by whalers — or by the likes of Greenpeace.

“Instead of the conservation groups going out and tying themselves to whale ships and doing radical, extreme actions that possibly have negligible impact on the reduction of whaling,” she says, “if you want to save a whale, you could buy it.”

But when Gerber published the idea in the science journal Nature in January, not everyone was pleased. The fact that this strategy would in essence “legalize” whaling was unacceptable to many activists, including some who equate putting a price on a whale to human slavery.

In this interview, I talk with Gerber about the health of whale populations, why whaling regulation is gridlocked, and options for whaling’s future. Because, even if “save the whales” has gone stale, there may still be time to learn from the mistakes of our past.

Free MP3. (Right click, select “Save Link As.”)

This interview is part of the Generation Anthropocene project, in which Stanford students partake in an inter-generational dialogue with scholars about living in an age when humans have become a major force shaping our world.

“It’s amazing to me to think that only in the last 40 years have we explored the tops of trees,” says Lowman, the director of North Carolina’s Nature Research Center. Walking down a rainforest trail, it may seem like there’s a lot going on, but that’s really only a small slice of the whole picture, she says. “It’s almost like going to the doctor and if he checked your big toe and said ‘Oh, you’re perfectly healthy.’ It’s just such a small part of the whole body of the forest.”

Unfortunately a lot of what she’s found up there isn’t nearly as fun as the process she uses to discover it. “I’m going to level with you that I get pretty depressed about what’s going on with deforestation,” Lowman says — and it’s not just the critters that are suffering. “We’re seeing enormous quality of life disappearing for many cultures because of our greed and our lack of understanding.”

I spoke with “Canopy Meg” about her tree-climbing exploits, the power of Google Earth, and the importance of spirituality in rainforest conservation.

Free MP3. (Right click, select “Save Link As.”)

This interview is part of the Generation Anthropocene project, in which Stanford students partake in an inter-generational dialogue with scholars about living in an age when humans have become a major force shaping our world.

A lone rider spurs his horse as he gallops across the desolate plains. An explorer heads into the Sierras, the cathedrals of the wild. These are the classic images of the frontier and the romantic heroes who pushed into the wilderness to build the American West.

They are also relics of a time when we could imagine that the human and natural worlds were separate. “It’s as if the idea of the frontier kept open the illusion that there was more nature out there that was as yet unaffected by human beings,” says environmental historian Jon Christensen, executive director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. “That really never did exist.”

“We now see, in the Anthropocene, that even the wilderness is a product of human forces and is very much shaped by human ideas,” Christensen says. “The city is also full of nature.”

Photo by Peter576.

These insights will be crucial as Earth’s population continues to grow to the 9 billion people we expect in 40 to 50 years, and as we continue to cluster in urban areas. In this brave new world, the frontiers will be urban ones, where humanity and nature mix and interact.

The ways in which we allow these cities to grow and absorb the population, thus affecting the natural environment within and around them, is “going to determine so much about the future of life on Earth for people and the way we live,” Christensen says.

Can we design cities in a way that fosters both human and ecological health? “That,” Christensen says, “is the 9 billion-person question.”

I sat down with Christensen recently to talk about the mythos of the frontier, “ecological urbanism,” and the questions that remain for Generation Anthropocene.

This interview is part of the Generation Anthropocene project, in which Stanford students partake in an inter-generational dialogue with scholars about living in an age when humans have become a major force shaping our world.