Full Frame: Climate Action

Full Frame

Full Frame host Mike Walter traveled to Miami, Florida, to attend the Aspen Ideas: Climate festival and speak with some of the innovators finding solutions to our climate crisis. 

Solutions in the Soil

Peter Byck is a professor at Arizona State University, in both the School of Sustainability and the Cronkite School of Journalism. His first documentary, Garbage, won the South by Southwest Film Festival His second documentary, Carbon Nation,  has screened all over the world and won the Clarion Award.

He is currently producing Carbon Nation 2.0, an ongoing series of short films created in collaboration with ASU. Additionally, he’s also working with scientists and ranchers on soil health and soil carbon storage research via regenerative grazing.

“The science that our science team has done is showing that, yes, you can draw down enormous amounts of carbon while getting yourself out of debt, getting the water cycle much more improved,” Byck said.

An App to Take Action

BrightAction is a company that creates software tools with the mission of empowering people on climate solutions. Founder and CEO Lisa Altieri says addressing the climate crisis requires an “all hands on deck” approach.

“Reducing 50% of our missions by 2030 is not something that’s going to happen if we wait for one person or one government to fix it,” she said. “All of us, as individuals in our daily lives, in our household activities, we also have such an opportunity to make a difference.”

 

Climate education and advocacy

Florida-cased CLEO Institute has a mission to make sure the public is “informed, engaged and prepared” when it comes to climate change. 

“We’re definitely seeing the disparities that have been settling in our communities for so many years become exacerbated by a warming climate,” said executive director Yoca Arditi-Rocha. “Whether it’s gender inequality, whether it’s racial inequality, whether it’s social economic inequality, those injustices are really making the issue a lot worse.”


Traditional farming guides sustainable food production

Thelonoius Cook’s farm in eastern Virginia carries on traditions from Africa. He uses sustainable farming practices he learned while working in Tanzania and Mozambique, techniques like using cover crops to restore the soil and planting certain crops to detract pests. His farm uses only non-toxic methods to grow food, avoiding all fertilizers and pesticides.

Doing regenerative type practices also allows you to work yourself out of a job because the soil is starting to improve,” Cook said. “So it eventually clicks and it starts to respond, and then your plants start to respond, and then you start to get better tasting food.”