Tag Archives: Justin Catanoso

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.

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.

YouTube: RF100 Greensboro Community Mapping Project on Climate Change

In the Peruvian Andes, June 2018. Photo by Nathan Allen, Wake Forest University student.

In early November, just after the midterm elections where the Democrats took back the House of Representatives, with many new members calling for a Green New Deal (action on climate change), a group of students in Greensboro, N.C., from UNC-Greensboro, Guilford College and N.C. A&T State, fanned out across the community to gather the thoughts and insights of a variety of people involved in some way in environmental protection, renewable energy and climate change. Kathe Latham, a local environmental activist asked if I would be interviewed on camera by two Guilford students — Christina Gaviria and Ian Gordan. I agreed; we talked on a rainy Friday in my den.

The result is here with this well shot and edited YouTube video. It’s part of RF100, a community mapping project to chronicle local leaders speaking out on this important issue. The following week, a big crowd filled every seat at Scuppernong Books in downtown Greensboro to view the various videos and talk about how they can urge local leaders to do more when it comes to sustainability efforts. The quick answer: local leaders can and should do more. A lot more.

Mongabay: Naomi Oreskes on climate change: “We’ve blown it… but pessimism is not acceptable”

Naomi Oreskes. Photo by Harvard University photographer Claudio Cambon

Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard professor of the history of science, and an outspoken champion of the climate science surrounding global warming, spoke at Wake Forest on Feb. 16, 2016, in a high-energy panel discussion moderated by MSNBC’s Melissa Harris Perry. When i told my Mongabay editor Glenn Scherer about the event, he recommended I interview Oreskes for an online Q&A. I did. With so many similar interests (tobacco industry malfeasance to climate change science), we had a long, intense discussion. The result is a very readable and insightful Q&A, linked here.

Excerpt regarding climate denial: It’s a cliché to say that knowledge is power. It’s not true actually. Knowledge is knowledge. In our society, knowledge resides in one place, and for the most part, power resides somewhere else. And that disconnect is really the crux of the challenge we face right now.

Mongabay: The Paris climate talks ended in elation — now the real work begins, say Faith leaders

Statue at the entrance to Le Bourget Airport near Paris, honoring Charles Lindbergh, the first to solo the Atlantic, and Frenchmen Charles Nungesser and François Coli, who attempted the crossing two weeks earlier and disappeared without a trace. Each day during the Paris climate change conference, participants passed by the statue — a tribute to the Lindbergh Moment, which resonated with many COP21 attendees. [Cutline by Glenn Scherer]

Glenn Scherer, my exemplary editor at mongabay.com sums up my “faith community’s moment” story this way: The story link is here.

Catholic Pope Francis, with his climate change encyclical, and Islamic leaders with their Declaration on Climate Change, both helped to rally their billions of followers to set the stage for a successful Paris climate agreement.
Now, the world over, Faith leaders are discussing and debating the best strategies and tactics for avoiding climate chaos, adapting to global warming, and protecting the world’s poorest and must vulnerable from continuing environmental degradation.
“This is the moment the spirit is trying to work. We need to be there, in all corners of the world, to carry out the message as best we can. We believe in it. We believe in it!” — Sister Sheila Kinsey

Mongabay.com: Papal encyclical draws harsh critique from Peru’s private sector

Elena Conterno, who heads Peru’s fisheries group, is a fierce critic of the papal encyclical. Photo by Emilia Catano

He may be beloved in his home region of Latin America. He may enjoy 82 percent approval ratings in Peru, where three out of four people are Catholic. But Pope Francis has some fierce critics. And Elena Conterno is one of them. As Glenn Scherer summed up at mongabay.com:

Peru’s commercial fishing industry is sustainable, productive and well regulated, says Elena Conterno, but the illegal “artisanal” fleet of the poor is “growing too fast and unsustainable.”
“Why blame business?” Conterno asks of the Pope’s encyclical, when “the public sector is really lagging,” failing to regulate the environment and the climate, and provide for the poor.
“Who are the ones doing the most illegal activities? It’s the poor. Not the big companies,” she says. The Pope’s encyclical “is more than naïve. It lacks institutional analysis.”

A tense, compelling interview, start to finish with a the head of the Peru’s fishing industry,

Mongabay.com: Pope’s encyclical draws support from Peru’s #1 environmental official

Manuel Pulgar-Vidal is Peru’s minister of the environment, and among the most most influential climate change policy makers. Photo by Emilia Catanoso

I remember Manuel Pulgar-Vidal well from the UN Climate Summit in Lima in December 2014. He was seemingly everywhere, certainly at every press conference. He was friendly and accessible. I was offered to interview him the day COP20 opened, but declined; I could not get to Lima so soon.

In mid-July, 2015, through the high-level connections of Enrique Ortiz, my fixer and interpreter for two weeks in Puru, I got an hour with the minister. He had studied he encyclical and had a lot to say about it. He was less keen on discussing the Tia Maria copper mine in southern Peru. It was a great interview, linked here, and I’m glad mangabay.com chose to run this and two others.

Mongabay Edior Glenn Scherer’s summary:

1, Peruvian Environmental Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal hosted COP20 in Lima, and will play a leading role at Paris COP 21 in December.

2. He praises the Pope’s controversial encyclical written in “the language of a poet, with the precision of an engineer, and by a leader with the moral authority to have influence.”

3. “We [will] have an agreement in Paris,” says the minister. Obama, China, France, Peru, many nations want it. “The political moment is key, and this papal document is very helpful.”

More photos by Emilia Catanoso from the interview and just before:

Hanging out with an Indian tribe outside his office. Photo by Emilia Catanoso

During the interview. Photo by Emilia Catanoso

Not too happy in the direction change of the interview. Photo by Emilia Catanoso

Mongabay.com: Pope and Peru’s top mining CEO agree and at odds on environment

Roque Benavides, CEO of BuenaVentura, Peru’s largest precious metals mining company. Photo by Emilia Catanoso

Through the good fortune of meeting TV producer Luis Moray in Lima, I was able to spend the last morning of my reporting during my first of two trips to Peru last summer interviewing one of the country’s most influential businessmen — Roque Benavides, CEO of BueanaVentura Mining. He read the encyclical before our interview so he would be prepared. Mongabay.com, with expert editing by Glenn Scherer, published a series of three of my Q&A stories during the week of Pope Francis’ history visit to the United States in late September 2015. My first Q&A is here.

Glenn Scherer wrote as an intro to my interview:

Roque Benavides makes no apologies for Peru’s extraction industry, noting that it employs tens of thousands, and gives much back to the communities in which it works.
The CEO fears that the Pope’s encyclical is overly simplistic, putting too much of the blame for the environmental crisis on industry and business.
He argues forcefully that government has failed in its role as environmental protector, and that the poor are more destructive to the environment than industry.

Emilia Catanoso took a series of amazing photographs. Her best of the entire two-week experience.