The City Nature Challenge is an international contest known as a bioblitz: a brief, intensive survey of biological diversity over a set area and time. With a handy smartphone app, anyone can participate between April 26 and 29 by cataloguing the nature in their neighborhoods. Living on Earth's Aynsley O'Neill met up with the Boston BioBlitz Initiative for Girls during a trip to Thompson Island in Boston Harbor, where a group of teens practiced their observational skills for the competition.

Every spring and fall, a journey of thousands of miles begins, as migrating birds find their way between breeding and overwintering grounds. It’s an amazing phenomenon that naturalist Kenn Kaufman brings to life in his new book, A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration. Kaufman is the author of the Kaufman Field Guide series and is also a contributing field editor with the Audubon Society. He joined Host Steve Curwood to talk about his latest book and what our species can do to avoid harming birds on their remarkable journeys.

Peter Dykstra and Host Steve Curwood discussed a recent rash of beehive theft, which may be happening in part because of the continued decline in bee populations. Also, the upgrades to New Orleans levees in the wake of Hurricane Katrina at a cost of $14 billion for taxpayers may not be up to the task in just four more years. And in the history vault, the two look back 44 years to the publishing of an infamous Newsweek story on global cooling, still used to this day by climate deniers seeking to sow confusion about the science.

Minnesota Democratic Senator and Presidential hopeful Amy Klobuchar is campaigning for action on climate change. At a recent “youth-focused” CNN Town Hall, Senator Klobuchar explained she can engage rural America as climate change is taking a huge toll on the middle of the country as well as the coasts, and why she supports the Green New Deal.

Microbeads are tiny plastic spheres found in facial scrubs and other cosmetics, but sewage treatment doesn't remove them from the water, so they end up in lakes and streams. As Kara Holsopple of the Allegheny Front reported in 2104, they are a hazard to fish and to anyone who might eat lake-caught fish.

Updating Kara Holsopple’s 2014 report in 2019, microbeads in cosmetics are now illegal in the US but overall, microplastic pollution is a growing threat to freshwater and saltwater ecosystems. Andrea Thompson, an associate editor of sustainability with the Scientific American, joined Living on Earth’s Bobby Bascomb to discuss how the microplastics crisis is harming people and nature, and possible solutions.