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Investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of bringing perfectly round, red tomatoes to supermarkets all year long. Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, based on his James Beard Award-winning article, "The Price of Tomatoes," traces the supermarket tomato from its birthplace in the deserts of Peru to Immokalee, Florida, and investigates the herbicides and pesticides used on crops, why tomatoes have become less nutrient-rich, and how the drive for low cost fruit has fostered a modern-day slave trade in the United States.

Former city-dweller Kurt Timmermeister describes the life and livelihood of a modern-day farmer. In Growing a Farmer: How I Learned to Live Off the Land he tells about his initial stumbles in his quest to establish a profitable farm near Seattle, and he shares the specifics of making cheese, raising cows, and slaughtering pigs, and it will entirely change the way we think about our relationship to the food we consume.

Alaskan waters remain off-limits to drilling, much to many oil companies' dismay. But Exxon has decided to hop over the Bering Strait, and make a deal with Russia to explore for oil in the Arctic Ocean in their territory. This deal may show how lucrative climate change has become to the oil business, since more oil is becoming available as Arctic ice recedes.

Gerard Lordahl, open space greening director of GrowNYC, tells us how to care for our plants—indoor and outdoor—for our final Summer Stuff segment.

Do you have a question about how to keep your garden growing? Call us at 646-829-3985 or leave a comment below.

Tom Johnson is the co-founder of NJ Spotlight, where he covers energy and the environment. As the Christie administration holds hearings on the draft of the Energy Master Plan, he looks at the plan and New Jersey's energy future.

Rock and roll legend Chuck Leavell, longtime keyboardist and musical director for the Rolling Stones, performs live and discusses the band, currently in negotiations for a world tour next year—2012 is the band’s 50th anniversary. He’s currently working on an album in tribute to the pioneering blues piano players that have inspired him--it's titled "Back to the Woods," and it's scheduled to be released in the fall. He’s the founder of the for-profit environmental website Mother Nature Network (www.mnn.com), and he’s also written a book, Growing a Better America: Smart, Strong, and Sustainable, about his environmental activism.

Investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of bringing perfectly round, red tomatoes to supermarkets all year long. Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, based on his James Beard Award-winning article, "The Price of Tomatoes," traces the supermarket tomato from its birthplace in the deserts of Peru to Immokalee, Florida, and investigates the herbicides and pesticides used on crops, why tomatoes have become less nutrient-rich, and how the drive for low cost fruit has fostered a modern-day slave trade in the United States.

Former city-dweller Kurt Timmermeister describes the life and livelihood of a modern-day farmer. In Growing a Farmer: How I Learned to Live Off the Land he tells about his initial stumbles in his quest to establish a profitable farm near Seattle, and he shares the specifics of making cheese, raising cows, and slaughtering pigs, and it will entirely change the way we think about our relationship to the food we consume.

(Courtesy of the Sierra Club)

The Sierra Club announced this morning that Mayor Bloomberg's charitable arm is donating $50 million to the environmental groups "Beyond Coal" campaign to shut down a third of America's coal fleet by 2020.

This summer wildfires have raged in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, as well as throughout the country, and so far over 5,800,000 acres have burned this year alone. Ken Frederick and Tom Romanello, Bureau of Land Management fire specialists at the National Interagency Fire Center, explain how wild fires start and spread, how they behave, and how they’re contained and extinguished. We’ll also find out why there seem to be so many this year, and what happens to an area after a fire.

Call us at 646-829-3985 to ask a question about fires, or leave a comment!

This week, a team of Japanese scientists announced that vast deposits of rare earth minerals—considered essential for the production of certain electronics—have been found under the Pacific Ocean. Cindy Lee Van Dover, Director of Duke University Marine Laboratory and Peter B. Kelemen, an Earth & Environmental Studies Professor at Columbia University, tell us about the deposits and how deep sea mining works.

Montanans living along the Yellowstone River say they are worried and angry, following the rupture of an ExxonMobile pipeline which sent up to 1,000 barrels of oil gushing into the river. The pipeline had been shut down once before, in May, after residents of the town of Laurel raised concerns over rising river levels. 

Tim Flannery, scientist, explorer, conservationist, and co-founder and Chair of the Copenhagen Climate Council, discusses the Earth’s evolution—from a galactic cloud of dust and gas to a planet teeming with life. Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet describes how the Earth’s crust and atmosphere formed, how its oceans transformed from toxic brews of metals to life-sustaining bodies of water covering 70 percent of the planet’s surface, and how our own species evolved.

Environmental writer Eugene Linden talks about how the far corners on the earth have been changed by—or have resisted being changed by—modernity. The Ragged Edge of the World: Encounters at the Frontier Where Modernity, Wildlands, and Indigenous Peoples Meet looks at this environmental frontier—Vietnam, New Guinea and Borneo, pygmy forests and Machu Picchu, the Arctic and Antarctica, Cuba and Midway Island.

Investigative journalist Christian Parenti explains how extreme weather is breeding banditry, humanitarian crisis, and failed states from Africa to Asia and Latin America. In Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence, Parenti travels along the front lines of this gathering crisis and describes how to confront the challenge of climate-driven violence with sustainable economic and development policies.

Alex Prud'homme tells the evolving story of freshwater—as the climate warms and the world population grows, demand for water has surged, but supplies of freshwater are static or dropping, and new threats to water quality appear every day. The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-first Century investigates the state of our water infrastructure, the supply and quality of water, how secure our water supply is, new sources of water, and discusses whether the wars of the 21st century will be fought over water.

Randy Newman captured a moment of national anger in "Burn On," a song about the polluted Cuyahoga River catching fire in 1969. That environmental disaster pushed Congress and the Nixon administration to create the Environmental Protection Agency and pass laws like the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act. But today's guest warns that these laws are woefully outdated, and that clean water is becoming increasingly scarce. Access to freshwater, he argues, is the most urgent problem we face in the twenty-first century.

The Souris River, which loops from Saskatchewan, Canada to North Dakota, has risen to record high levels and is spilling into the North Dakota city of Minot, causing more than 11,000 residents from there to evacuate for the second time this month. The flooding is said to have been caused by a heavy spring snow melt and heavy rains. The last major flood in the area occurred in 1969, which prompted the construction of levees. But this flood is five feet taller than the 1969 flood, and the levees are unable to contain it. 

Director Marshall Curry discusses his documentary “If a Tree Falls: The Story of the Earth Liberation Front,” which tells of the rise and fall of an anarchist environmental group, the ELF. The film focuses on the evolution of the group and the transformation and radicalization of Daniel McGowan, one of its members, and poses questions about environmentalism, activism, and the way we define terrorism. “If a Tree Falls” opens June 22 at IFC Center.

Juliet Eilperin, environmental reporter for The Washington Post, looks at the ways different people and cultures relate to sharks, the ocean’s top predator. She reminds us why sharks remain among nature’s most awe-inspiring creatures. Demon Fish: Travels through the Hidden World of Sharks takes us from Belize to South Africa to show us how sharks live and why they are at risk of extinction.