Yesterday, the Bay Area Open Space Council held its always-fantastic annual conference, this time around the theme “Conservation in a Time of Change.” More than 500 attendees gathered in Richmond’s Craneway Pavilion to hear from land managers, environmentalists, academics, and politicians about such topics as the aftermath of the 2017 North Bay wildfires, carbon sequestration on agricultural lands, and the forthcoming California state budget.
These important topics were all quite familiar Monitor territory (see our past coverage of the wildfires, soil carbon capture, and budget wrangling, and look for standout conference speaker Nina Roberts in our forthcoming June edition). However, one that really struck close to home came via the afternoon panel “Notes from the Fourth Estate: Hot Topics on the Environmental Beat,” featuring the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education‘s Odette Alcazaren-Keeley in conversation with San Jose Mercury News environmental reporter Paul Rogers and Felicity Barringer, editor of the “… & the West” environmental blog at Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West.
We’ve been seriously preoccupied with the challenges and opportunities addressed by these speakers, and we think these issues deserve a little more attention than they might be receiving. So, we’re offering the audio from that panel discussion here, in the player below. The recording runs just under half an hour, and the quality is not high — the acoustics of the cavernous space may force you to turn up your speaker volume, or even listen through headphones. Nonetheless, we found this conversation to be highly compelling, and we think you will, too.