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Every Monday at 6:00pmAbout the Show
EcoRadio KC
EcoRadio KC is a magazine show, including live segments, prerecorded stories, and interviews. The weekly explores our interdependence with the rest of the world, showing the connections between the ways we choose to live and the health of the whole community of life.
Wiki is an Hawaiian word meaning quick.
Ward Cunningham heard the word in Hawaii and used it to refer to the efficient and open collaborative projects that he was working on in the early 1990s that went on to inspire many projects like Wikipedia. The wiki provides a way for different people to share their knowledge, to educate one another and to solve problems. Ward Cunningham also first used a term, “technical debt” to refer to a failure to fully plan for how computer programs would work over time. Technical debt is the result of “quick and dirty” methods that are incomplete, leaving a debt to be paid in labor in the future. Ward has given us words to describe both vital problem-solving techniques and a phenomenon that has plagued the tech world as well as American society for many decades. For our environment today, we all know we must collaborate to address those old debts and find the most sustainable solutions … quick.
We can see our technical debt wreaking havoc globally through business, government and all kinds of organizations. In light of this, we feature an interview with a tech author named Quinn Norton who has begun using technical debt to describe our climate crisis and other socio-ecological problems. Norton identifies this as a central cause of so many of our historic environmental errors in her article at Emptywheel.net titled “A World We Built to Burn.” Describing the recent rise in wildfires, she recounts “a story of disrespect and exploitation of the land, of failures in capitalism, regulation, and political will, of people who don’t want to live with the consequences of their decisions, and people who have to live with the consequences of other people’s decisions.” To solve our global problems we need to begin with the challenge of shifting towards environmental investment rather than debt.
We’ll then follow up on the latest that Kansas City, Missouri’s municipal government is doing to address these same problems of our population’s impact on the ecosystems which keep us alive. Speaking with Andy Savastino, Chief of the city’s Office of Environmental Quality, we hear about progress on their Renewable Direct program to achieve net zero emissions for all municipal KC electric usage by the end of 2020. We also discuss the city’s Climate Protection Plan and much more!
