Susan Edwards Richmond’s new children’s book, Bird Count, follows a young citizen scientist as she participates in a Christmas Bird Count, the 120-year-old census of winter birds conducted by teams of volunteers for the Audubon Societies. Living on Earth’s Bobby Bascomb visited the author and the preschoolers she teaches at Massachusetts Audubon's Drumlin Farm for a day of birding, and a discussion on the importance of citizen science. Hijinks, and a whole lot of learning, ensued.

This week, Peter Dykstra and Host Steve Curwood discuss the impacts of climate-driven drought, from a fire that’s raging outside Sydney, Australia, to the rapid depletion of Bali’s water supply, to the reduction of Victoria Falls to a trickle, to the drying up during the ski season in parts of the Alps. They also mark the murder of two more indigenous environmental activists who protested logging in the Brazilian Amazon. And in the history calendar, they look back twenty years to Julia Butterfly Hill’s two-year tree sit protest.

Homer Spit on the southern tip of the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska is home to a colony of small shorebirds known as rock sandpipers, as well as gulls and waterfowl. One way to keep track of them is the yearly Christmas Bird Count. BirdNote's Mary McCann has more.

The U.S. has more than 1,300 Superfund sites, areas contaminated with toxic substances, and the Environmental Protection Agency is responsible for overseeing their cleanup. But a recent study conducted by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that cleanup efforts at 60 percent of Superfund sites could be compromised by climate change disasters such as flooding, fires, and hurricanes. Alfredo Gomez, the Director of Environmental Protection at the GAO, joined Host Steve Curwood to discuss this study and the recommendations the watchdog agency made to the EPA to protect Superfund sites from the impacts of climate change.

The latest UN climate talks, known as COP25, just wrapped up in Madrid, Spain. And in the wake of Republican President Trump officially beginning the process to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, a new vanguard of U.S. Democratic politicians with a climate agenda is saying “We Are Still In”. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) led a delegation of Democratic members of Congress, and Democratic Presidential candidate and former UN Special Climate Envoy Michael Bloomberg spoke about the “America’s Pledge” initiative. Living on Earth’s Aynsley O’Neill reports on the U.S. presence at the Madrid climate talks and on the debate over using carbon markets to curb global emissions.

Jane Fonda has been a Hollywood icon for a half-century, is a two-time Academy Award winner, and is currently starring in a hit Netflix show. But in 2019 she wants you talking about the climate. She’s spearheading the “Fire Drill Fridays” protests and, at 81 years old, even spent a night in jail for acts of civil disobedience in these efforts. Famous friends from Ted Danson to Sam Waterston to Diane Lane have joined her in risking arrest and using their celebrity to focus attention on the climate crisis. Jane Fonda joins Host Steve Curwood to discuss her activism and her call for more acts of civil disobedience to confront the planet’s warming.