Canadian author Mike Nickerson talks with Daryn Caister about his most recent book, “Life, Money and Illusion: Living on earth as if we want to stay” as well as some of his thoughts on environmental thinking, policy and ideas of growth within Canada.

Tim Jackson is an economist and his recent book titled “Prosperity Without Growth – The Transition to a Sustainable Economy” reminds us that we live in a world with finite resources, that we are burning up those resources at an unsustainable rate and that the survival of the planet requires that something change. Mark Brooks reviewed Prosperity without Growth for Alternatives Journal and speaks about the book with Peter Stock.

Correspondent Danny Leskiw is joined by Ben Parfitt from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives to discuss their new report: “Fracture Lines: Will Canada’s water be protected in the rush to develop shale gas.” They speak about Canada’s natural gas aspirations and what that might mean for the water supply based on the most recent scientific evidence.

Bill C-311, also known as Canada’s “Climate Change Accountability Act” was assassinated this week in what has been called a sneaky Senate vote in which many non-conservative appointed senators were not in attendance. This seems to spell the end for a bill which would have required Canada to base its climate change policy on the best international science available rather than the whim of the day in Ottawa. Executive Director of the Sierra Club of Canada John Bennett joins host Daryn Caister to discuss what happened and what this means for Canada’s environmental future on the eve of COP16 in Cancun Mexico.

Kris Stevens the executive director of OSEA, the Ontario Sustainable Energy Association joins Daryn Caister by phone to discuss who and what is OSEA. Community power is a popular concept these days in environmental circles, as well as being a big focus of OSEA’s message. We find out what exactly community power is and could be, as well as how this well this strategy is working in the real world.

Joanna Dafoe is joined by Professor Scott Barrett who is the Lenfest-Earth Institute Professor of Natural Resource Economics at Columbia University and researches the policy response to transnational challenges like climate change. He has been an adviser to the European Commission, the OECD, the World Bank, and the United Nations. Joanna talks to him about his most recent book is called “Why Cooperate? The Incentive to Supply Global Public Goods”.

British Columbia’s sockeye salmon gradually vanished from the province’s rivers. The population was so perilously low in 2009 that the federal government struck an official inquiry to find out what happened … only to see the sockeye population reverse all trends and roar back in record numbers this year. Chris Hannay speaks with Dr. David Levy, the federal inquiry’s scientific director, to find out what’s going on.

He’s been called a climate hero about as many times as he’s been called a climate change extremist. Dr. James Hansen has been an outspoken researcher on climate change as well as the head of NASA’s Goddard Space Institute for Space Studies. Dr. Hansen speaks to Daryn Caister about the state of the climate change debate.