Susan Moran has a telephone interview with Cynthia Barnett. Cynthia is a journalist and author of Blue Revolution: Unmaking America’s Water Crisis.” She calls the U.S. one of the most “water-wasting places on the planet.” But in her book she also draws from positive examples of water conservation in the country to propose a new “water ethic.” (start – 4:20).
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Jeff Branson of the SparkFun Electronics Department of Education joins Tom McKinnon in the Boulder studio to discuss the so-called Maker Movement. In particular, he describes how it is revolutionizing K-12 education. (start 13:20).
Producer: Beth Bartel and Tom McKinnon
Co-Hosts: Susan Moran and Beth Bartel
Engineer: Ted Burnham
Executive Producer: Tom McKinnon
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:38 — 20.7MB)
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Feature #1 (time mark 5:30) When people think of Colorado, they usually don’t think about “oceans”. After all, Colorado doesn’t have much of a coastline these days, though it was definitely had oceanfront property a few hundred million years ago. However, being in a landlocked state doesn’t mean that there isn’t any thing we can do to impact the health and ecology of the ocean and marine biology. Co-host Joel Parker talks with Vicki Goldstein, founder and president of the 
Feature #2 (time mark 14:10) Nitrogen – we can’t live without it, but you can have too much of a good thing. In its gaseous form nitrogen is harmless and makes up nearly 80 percent of the atmosphere. The worldwide population never would have reached 7 billion people without nitrogen, in the form of chemical fertilizer. But excess nitrogen –from fertilizer runoff, manure, human sewage and other sources is wreaking havoc on the environment. Co-host Susan Moran talks with John Mischler, a PhD student at CU Boulder, who is researching worms and snails in Colorado and Africa. He talks about how excess nutrients in ponds, lakes and elsewhere can lead to the spread of parasitic disease from trematodes to snails to us.
Nature means something different to everyone. It’s a towering old-growth redwood forest to some. Deep silent canyons to others. And urban community gardens to others. Defining what is “pristine nature” is even more dicey. Just ask conservation biologists trying to figure out the best ways to preserve ecosystems and their flora and fauna.
Tom McKinnon interviews Jeff Bisberg of 
![Pluto and its moons [click to enlarge] (credit: NASA, ESA, M. Showalter, Z. Levay)](http://howonearthradio.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/hs-2011-23-d-web_print.jpg "hs-2011-23-d-web_print")
