Full Program

Part 1

We begin with a victim of a previous mass shooting at a house of worship who just attended the memorial service at the AME church in Charleston where he found comfort from the latest victims on Father’s Day in remembrance of his father who in 2012 was gunned down in his Wisconsin Sikh temple by a white racist. Amardeep Kaleka, an Emmy Award winning film director, who since his father’s murder has been an advocate for gun control and hate crime legislation, joins us to discuss his article at The Huffington Post “American Dream Disturbed” and the governor of South Carolina’s call to take down the Confederate flag that was the only flag not lowered to half-mast at the state capitol.

Part 2

Then we speak with Naomi Oreskes, a Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University and the co-author of the new book “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future”. We discuss how her work helped inform Pope Francis in the preparation of his encyclical on the environment and how her new book, grounded in science, portrays our planet in the not-too-distant future as the “pile of filth” the Pope warns against.

Part 3

Then finally, with the release of a new study in the journal Science Advances by Stanford, Princeton and Berkeley scientists, we examine the sixth mass extinction phase that the earth has now entered following the fifth 65 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs. An expert on mass extinctions, Peter Ward, a paleontologist who teaches biology and earth and space sciences at the University of Washington joins us. He is the author of “Under a Green Sky”, a book that points out that all but one of the major extinction events in history have been brought on by climate change.

Full Program

Part 1

We  be begin with the massacre in the historic AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina perpetrated by a young white racist who murdered the pastor and eight parishioners with a handgun recently given to him by his father as a birthday present. John Hale, a professor of Civil Rights History at the College of Charleston and author of the forthcoming book “The Freedom Schools: A History of Student Activists During the Civil Rights Movement” joins us to discuss the historical significance of the church where this flagrant hate crime took place and the overlooked threat from right wing terrorists that the country faces.

Part 2

Then we examine the disastrous breakdown of emergency talks in Luxembourg between European Finance Ministers and the Greek government that ended in acrimony and recriminations. With a run underway on Greek banks as depositors grab up Euros before the last-minute talks resume on Monday when Greek banks are not likely to be open, we are joined by Andre Gerolymatos, the Chair of Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. He focuses on the Political and Social History of Modern Greece and we will discuss what can be done to pull Greece back from the brink.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with J.J. Messner, the Executive Director of The Fund for Peace where he just co-authored their latest report “Fragile States Index 2015” which is published by both The Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy. He joins us to discuss the ranking of the world’s countries that are moving towards stability or closer to collapse with some bright spots like Cuba, Georgia and Portugal and a lot of sad cases like South Sudan, the worst ranked, and Syria, which is going from bad to worse.