The fires in the Amazon rainforest are illuminating the alarming speed of deforestation in one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. Deforestation in the Brazilian part of the Amazon is on the rise again as Brazil’s President, Jair Bolsonaro, allows farmers and corporations bent on turning old growth forest into soy fields and cattle ranches. Now a “tipping point” could be near, putting the rainforest at risk of gradually turning into dry savannah. Living on Earth’s Bobby Bascomb spoke with Carlos Nobre, senior researcher at the University of Sao Paulo, about what the continued loss of the Amazon rainforest could mean for nature and the global climate.

In this week's trip beyond the headlines, Peter Dykstra joins Host Steve Curwood to take a look at the declining health of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Then, the two discuss how the United States became the world’s number one oil producer over the past year. Finally, with a look back into the history vaults, Peter tells the story of a bull shark found hundreds of miles from the ocean in the Mississippi River back in 1937.

On the evening of September 4th, CNN hosted a town hall event with seven hours of discussion surrounding the climate crisis. In back-to-back sessions, ten Democratic presidential hopefuls fielded questions from moderators and audience members alike on how they plan to address rising seas, environmental racism, and the fast-approaching deadline to curb global carbon emissions. We recount highlights from five of these ten candidates in the first part of our recap of the town hall.

Host Steve Curwood sits down with Joe Aldy, economist and Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, to take a look at carbon pricing, a just transition for fossil fuel workers, and other key topics from the climate crisis town hall.

Many nature writers turn our eyes skyward, towards majestic mountains, open valleys, and wild rivers. But there’s a whole other world beneath our feet, in the dark and hidden places below the Earth’s surface—a place that the British author Robert Macfarlane calls the "Underland.” For nearly a decade, Macfarlane has been venturing into ice caves, exploring underwater rivers, and crawling through catacombs to discover this underworld, and he captures these travels in his latest book, Underland: A Deep Time Journey. Robert Macfarlane tells Living on Earth's Jenni Doering what drives him to explore the “deep time” that runs down below.