Smashed and battered by the record-breaking Hurricane Irma, many small Caribbean island nations and territories now face the monumental task of rebuilding much of their infrastructure. For insight on how islands can rebuild, and how every nation can embrace mitigation measures that reduce the threats of extreme weather, Host Steve Curwood spoke with former Grenada UN Ambassador and former Special Advisor for the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Dessima Williams. She says the Caribbean people remain resilient and self-reliant, but global action on climate change is more urgent than ever.

Patience Gray’s pioneering European cookbook brought foreign tastes to the British home cook and her remarkable Honey From a Weed is still a key source of inspiration for popular food writers, yet she’s largely unknown today. A new biography, Fasting and Feasting, introduces her iconoclastic and meandering life, with artists, architects, and radicals in postwar London, and finally to the simplicity of living and cooking off the land at the remote heel of Italy’s boot. In conversation with Living on Earth’s Helen Palmer, author Adam Federman shares Patience Gray’s story of lifelong artistic and culinary searching – and whets the appetite too.

As well as devastating Florida communities, Hurricane Irma blasted an estimated three to ten feet of storm surge into the Everglades. This “River of Grass” extends from Lake Okeechobee in central Florida down to its southern tip at the Gulf of Mexico, and much of it is a National Park. Host Steve Curwood asked University of Maryland hydrologist Fernando Miralles-Wilhelm how the hurricane’s storm surge and severe downpours, added to the steady rising of the seas, could affect this threatened ecosystem. Professor Miralles-Wilhelm says draining and channelizing the wetlands through decades of development weakened the Everglades’ resilience and ability to buffer storms.

Living on Earth gives voice to Orion magazine’s longtime feature where readers celebrate their favorite places. In this week’s edition, writer Andrea Lynn paints a lyrical image of Gold Beach, Oregon, once a destination for prospectors, and now for tourists and fishermen.

Northern Right whales are endangered, with only about 500 left, so scientists became alarmed this year when 13 carcasses were spotted. Most deaths were in Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence, an area far north of the whale’s usual summer range in the Gulf of Maine. Erin Meyer-Gutbod, a postdoctoral scholar at UC Santa Barbara, tells host Steve Curwood that warmer waters may be driving the favorite food of these whales further north, where the lack of regulation puts the cetaceans at risk of ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear.