Category Archives: Radio/Podcasts

Mongabay podcast: What’s the TFFF? A forest finance tool ‘like no other’ shows potential

An Indigenous park guard on forest patrol in Suriname. A new funding mechanism aims to pay tropical countries like Suriname to keep trees standing and forests intact. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

It’s always a pleasure to join the Mongabay podcast with my colleague Mike DiGirolamo, who is now based in Australia. He was interested in discussing, in part with me, the most significant story I reported from Colombia in October 2024 from the United Nations biodiversity summit, or COP16.

The podcast is linked here.

Here’s what Mike writes: The Brazilian government in 2023 announced a novel funding mechanism to incentivize forest preservation: the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF). In an episode of Mongabay’s weekly podcast Newscast, host Mike DiGirolamo explored what experts think about the TFFF, what it can do, and what it can’t.

Mongabay contributor Justin Catanoso, who has written previously about the new fund, also known as the Tropical Forest Finance Facility, told DiGirolamo a key component that makes it different is that the money is neither a loan nor a donation. Instead, it’s an investment fund, where the “investors get paid back first, and the money that is generated by the investments above what the investors get is what will be given to the tropical countries,” Catanoso said.

Charlotte Streck, co-founder of advisory firm Climate Focus, also joined the podcast. She told Mike that the TFFF “has great potential because it is put forward and supported by tropical rainforest countries.”

The Innovator: A podcast I host for Wake Forest’s Center for Entrepreneurship with new-business leaders and innovators

In Spring semester 2020, I was asked by Dan Cohen and Greg Pool, both leaders of the Center for Entrepreneurship at Wake Forest University, if I would consider hosting a podcast in which I interview guests to campus about the companies they had founded or are in the process of building.

I said yes. And the result has been The innovator, hosted on Spotify and linked here. It is similar in focus to the popular podcast How I Built This, hosted by NPR’s Guy Raz. Like Raz, I engage a wide rage of entrepreneurs in their origin stories – both personally and business wise. Here’s why I didn’t hesitate to take on this new challenge.

Before I starting covering environmental issues in 2013 first as a freelancers and by 2015 almost exclusively for Mongabay, I was the executive editor of the Triad Business Journal from its founding in 1998 until I left for full-time teaching at Wake Forest in 2011.

During those 13 years leading coverage of the Triad economy and writing a weekly column, I learned a great deal about the entrepreneurship — the special leadership qualities, vision and risk tolerance necessary to start something from scratch, often with other people’s money. We covered new-business startups closely and the personalities behind the companies. We covered the investors, too, those willing to underwrite good ideas and risk millions in the process.

Hosting the Innovator was simply a natural extension of a knowledge base I had developed over a long period of time. When you put that together with the 15 years I was on public radio each week with WFDD-88.5 FM, shifting to a long-form podcast format was pretty seamless. Special thanks to Greg Pool for being the producer of The Innovator.

Mongabay podcast with Rachel Donald: Burning wood is not ‘renewable energy,’ so why do policymakers pretend it is?

Rachel Donald of Ireland, an environmental journalist par excellence, was recruited to Mongabay in 2023 to take over its nearly decade-old podcast called The Mongabay Newscast. With good reason. She is the heart and soul behind the popular Planet: Critical, which covers the climate crisis by podcast and newsletter with subscribers in 160 countries.

Rachel had been reporting on Drax, the United Kingdom’s largest consumer of forest biomass for energy and a leading wood-pellet producer. She wanted to do a podcast on the issue, with Drax at the center. My colleague Mike DiGirolamo, with whom I’ve recorded from COP26 in Glasgow in 2021 and who works on the podcast, recommended she set up an interview with me. After all, I had just reported on what appears to be Drax’s intention to open the first wood-pellet mills in California.

Here’s the podcast link. I record a lot of these on both sides of the mic. Rachel was easily the best host I’ve been interviewed by. She combines a deep knowledge of the subject matter with a sharp ear for listening, a real plan for the arc of the conversation and a voice that exudes a genuine passion for the subject matter.

As Mike, who edited and produced the podcast from his home in Australia, says at the outset, if you are new to the issues of forest biomass for energy, my discussion with Rachel Donald is a good place to start.

Coastline on WHQR: Justin Catanoso on the Enviva crisis, wood pellet industry, and why environmental reporting doesn’t always have two equal sides

In the spring of 2019, investigators tracked logging trucks coming from a mature hardwood forest and going to Enviva’s Northampton, NC, facility. The clear-cut, seen here, was located in the Tar-Pamlico River Basin, alongside Sandy Creek, feeding into the Pamlico Sound of North Carolina. Photo: the Dogwood Alliance

Radio journalist Rachel Lewis Hilburn, host of Coastline, a weekly program on WHQR public radio in Wilmington, North Carolina, had been following my coverage of the wood pellet industry over the past year. Of particular interest were the stories that focused on Enviva, the world’s largest producer of wood pellets, which has four manufacturing plants in eastern North Carolina.

When we spoke by phone to discuss her program, she was not only interested in my coverage, but also my reporting process, my working with a key anonymous whistleblower who once worked for Enviva, the distinction between environmental journalism and environmental advocacy, and what lessons I share with my journalism students at Wake Forest University.

Here’s the result, a wide-ranging, live-to-tape 50-minute discussion in three segments in which Rachel’s innate curiosity and enthusiastic interviewing style directed me through all of those issues and a few more. I really appreciated the opportunity to talk with her and her listeners. Thanks also to producer George Newman at WFDD on the Wake Forest campus for preparing the studio in which I spoke remotely with Rachel.

WFAE-Charlotte/Charlotte Talks: Inside North Carolina’s wood pellet industry

*Enviva’s smallest wood-pellet mill of four in North Carolina, this one in Ahoskie near the coast. Photo courtesy the Dogwood Alliance.*

David Boraks, a talented environmental reporter for WFAE-Charlotte, the second-largest public radio station in North Carolina (reaching lots of South Carolina), contacted me in December after my Mongabay story regarding the Enviva whistleblower. He, too, has covered Enviva and its impact on communities and the environment in the poor counties where it operates, four out of 10 of which are in North Carolina.

David invited me to join him in a detailed discussion on the popular noontime news program Charlotte Talks. We discussed the wood pellet industry, its impact on the Southeastern US and the policies overseas that enable this controversial energy source to keep proliferating.

As Derb Carter, a lawyer with the Southern Environmental Law Center, told Boraks: “What’s happening in North Carolina is the forests are being cut and exported to Europe. None of that is used to produce anything benefiting North Carolina in any way. And you’re losing that carbon storage in the forest.”

Sea Change Radio: Wood Pellets – The New Coal

My December stories on the wood pellets industry, from the Enviva whistleblower to the policy changes in The Netherlands and Australia, have attracted attention from other journalists, including those working in Denmark, Germany, and the U.S. My colleague Erik Hoffner knows radio host Alex Wise, with Sea Change Radio in the Bay Area of California. Wise was eager to talk with me about my December coverage on his program, which focuses on issues related to climate change and sustainability.

Here’s our interview. Included midway is a fabulous Hank Williams song Settin’ the Wood s on Fire, which adds a little levity to an otherwise serious set of issues. Sea Change Radio is carried weekly on more than 80 radio stations coast to coast in the U.S. and up into Alaska.

Storytelling: The Monti Video Series “Games People Play” edition

Journalism aside, I’ve always enjoyed public speaking, and especially public storytelling. When my family memoir, My Cousin the Saint, was published in 2008, I was invited to make scores of presentations to a variety of groups, ranging from churches to civic clubs to book clubs to college campuses. I gave more than 100 public talks in the four years after my book was published, from Maine to Florida.

The Monti is a storytelling event founded and operated by Jeff Polish of Durham, N.C. It is modeled after the famous storytelling event in New York City called The Moth. In both, non-professional storytellers — usually five an evening — are invited to tell a personal story (without notes) before a live audience on a particular theme. My first story at a Monti held in a restaurant in Chapel Hill was a favorite story from my book regarding my Uncle Tony’s fabulous, miraculous tale from World War II in southern Italy.

In all, Jeff invited me to the Monti on five different occasions — three in the Triangle, two in Greensboro. I enjoyed each one. On January 30, 2016, I shared with an audience of 200+ at the Carrboro Arts Center a story I started telling immediately after it happened in the summer of 1972. A little league championship game played in Wildwood Crest, New Jersey, a motley group of teammates and an improbable throw from centerfield. That night was the first time Jeff videotaped the performances. I’m glad he did.

Here’s the video.

KCRW Los Angeles: Microsoft wants to go carbon negative. What does that mean?

Building 92 at Microsoft Corporation headquarters in Redmond, Washington, 2016.Credit: Coolcaesar (CC BY-SA 4.0).

I am fortunate to have a good friend working as a producer in Los Angeles on the popular noon public radio program called Press Play with Madeleine Brand on KCRW. I had worked with this talented producer previously when covering the last two UN climate summits in Poland and Spain. Recently, my friend accepted first pitch based on my story for Mongabay about Pachama, the Silicon Valley startup that will monitor the carbon offsets Microsoft to preserve forests in forests in North and South America.

The eight-minute interview is linked here. Press Play reaches much of Southern California. I hope it’s not my last time on the program.

WUNC/The State of Things: A Closer Look At The Wood Pellet Industry

Wood pellet production. Photo credit:
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE

The producers of The State of Things, the hour-long radio program of WUNC, invited me on the program on Jan. 14, 2020, to discuss the wood pellet series I co-authored with Saul Elbein and Richard Stradling for the News & Observer of Raleigh. Here is the link to my 10-minute discussion with host Frank Stasio. The program was broadcast from Triad Stage in Greensboro before an audience of about 50 people.

The series has drawn a lot of attention — positive and critical. Saul and I have also come under what appears to be a coordinated attack on our reporting and professional integrity by the pellet industry, including the CEO of Enviva in a commentary he wrote for the N&O. It is all validation of the accuracy and importance of our reporting on an issue central to climate change and climate mitigation. We are both proud of how the N&O editors and Pulitzer Center have stood behind us, our reporting and the fairness and accuracy of the wood pellets project. Funding from the Pulitzer Center made our reporting possible.

WUNC/The State of Things: Trump Administration Pushes Fossil Fuel At UN Climate Summit

Leaders of the 24th UN Climate Summit. Photo courtesy UNFCCC

For the fifth time in five years, The State of Things, the noon program on WUNC out of Durham, which reaches half of North Carolina, had me on live to talk with host Frank Stasio about the UN climate summit. The location this year, 2018? Katowice, Poland.

The link to the radio conversation is here.