Pending and proposed mergers involving the world’s biggest agricultural chemical companies, such as Monsanto, Bayer, Dow, DuPont, Syngenta, and ChemChina could further consolidate the industry. Financial analyst Lou Whiteman of The Street tells host Steve Curwood what’s driving these deals and what they could mean for companies, shareholders, and farmers.

In this week’s trip beyond the headlines, Peter Dykstra and Host Steve Curwood take a look at the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, which damaged coal ash ponds and forced a nuclear plant shutdown but left solar power largely unscathed. And they note how time and time again along the North Carolina coast, homes in harms’ way have flooded and been rebuilt, at great cost to taxpayers. For the history lesson, they recall October of 1970, when President Nixon created the EPA and NOAA in just two days.

Pharmaceutical and chemical giant Bayer has shed some $20 Billion in market value in the weeks after a California court ordered it to pay $289 million in damages to plaintiff Dewayne Lee Johnson related to the herbicide Roundup made by Bayer-owned Monsanto. Jurors found that Monsanto had acted with malice and negligence in failing to warn Johnson, who is now suffering from late-stage non-Hodgkins lymphoma, about the cancer risks associated with Roundup and its key ingredient glyphosate. Journalist Carey Gillam tells Host Steve Curwood that with thousands of similar cases in the pipeline, Bayer may be on the hook for billions more, even though it merged with Monsanto just three months ago.

A “must-see” bird for anyone traveling in the West Indies, the Cuban Tody is a tiny bird with a lot of personality. In this week’s BirdNote, Michael Stein introduces us to these striking Cuban natives.

Despite being a lush tropical island, Puerto Rico imports nearly all of its food. Hurricane Maria brought road closures and shuttered grocery stores, leaving many Puerto Ricans with no choice but to skip meals and live on shelf stable and canned food for weeks and months. But as Living on Earth’s Bobby Bascomb reports, volunteers and farmers are working together to rebuild Puerto Rico’s small and devastated farming sector.

The tree of life proposed by Charles Darwin in the 19th century, depicts different forms of life diverging from one another as they evolve down through successive generations. But discoveries of new life forms and the phenomenon of horizontal gene transfer indicate life can also evolve through convergence. Author David Quammen discusses these discoveries in his new book, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life. He spoke with host Steve Curwood.