This week, Host Steve Curwood takes a trip Beyond the Headlines with Peter Dykstra to celebrate Germany’s achievement of 35% renewable power, and note how both nuclear power and clean coal are stumbling in Georgia. Also, thought it didn’t derail the project, it’s been 40 years since nearly fifteen hundred people were arrested protesting plans to build Seabrook Nuclear power plant.

A new, interdisciplinary effort analyzed vast amounts of climate and economic data to forecast certain regions of the United States will be hit harder than others by global warming. Economist and lead author Solomon Hsiang of the University of California, Berkeley, told Living on Earth Host Steve Curwood the study estimates southern counties of the US, many of which are poor, could face a 20% decline in economic activity if carbon emissions continue unabated through the 21st century.

Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau famously ‘lived deliberately’ in a small hand-built cabin is popular, and Thoreau walked, thought, and observed in the surrounding woods. To protect them from development, conservationists, Thoreau scholars and even a rock star founded the Walden Woods Project. 200 years after Thoreau’s birth, Walden Woods now helps students and teachers learn about Thoreau, his philosophy and nature itself. Living on Earth’s Jenni Doering went to the woods to find out how and why Thoreau’s legacy lives on

Host Steve Curwood notes that three Republican Senators voted with Democrats to oppose the use of the Congressional Review Act to overturn Obama’s rule to control venting and flaring of the powerful greenhouse gas methane from public lands.

Is Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, says Randall Fuller, Professor of English at the University of Tulsa. Darwin’s book arrived in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts in 1860, as the slavery debate raged and civil war loomed, and its ideas were instantly fodder for those discussions. Randall Fuller explains the influence of Darwin’s new theories on Thoreau and his contemporaries with Living on Earth’s Helen Palmer.

The U.S Court of Appeals for the D.C Circuit ruled the Environmental Protection Agency cannot suspend a regulation that makes new oil and gas wells reduce methane leaks. The powerful greenhouse gas methane contributes to air pollution and damages public health. David Doniger, Director of the Climate and Clean Air program at the Natural Resources Defense Council who helped bring the suit and Host Steve Curwood discussed the significance of this ruling.