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A Cemetery Buzzing with Bees
While honeybees get most of the buzz, most bees don’t produce honey, and most don’t even live in colonies. Instead, they’re solitary bees who build individual nests. A study details an astonishing finding of several million solitary bees in a cemetery in Ithaca, New York.
Bluetooth Butterfly Tracking
Monarch butterflies can travel thousands of miles each year between Mexico and North America in an epic relay race of multiple generations. And thanks to new technology, our phones and other Bluetooth devices can now tell us what paths these brave little insects take on this journey.
How Flowers Made Our World
Summer flowers like black-eyed Susans, hibiscus, sunflowers and coneflowers fill gardens and parks with color and fragrance, but flowers are more than their beauty. They’re some of the oldest beings on Earth, and they played a large role in shaping the natural world as we know it. Author and biologist David George Haskell joins us to discuss his 2026 book, How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries.
Hints of Life on Mars
On Mars, our planet’s rocky twin, NASA’s Perseverance Rover is seeking signs of past life in Jezero Crater. Now, scientists say they may have uncovered some of the most compelling evidence yet, in the form of complex carbon molecules in Martian mudstones. Planetary scientist Dr. Kevin Hand of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains the buzz about these “potential biosignatures.”
Trump Attempts to Shrink Bears Ears -- Again
On July 13, 2026, President Trump issued a proclamation reducing the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in southern Utah by about 90 percent, to remove almost 3 million acres from monument status. We discuss the significance of these places to several local tribes who co-manage them, and why in their view the President lacks the authority to slash monuments.
Saving the Klamath, Salmon, and Yurok Culture
The Yurok tribe has inhabited the lower stretches of the Klamath River in Northern California since time immemorial, and their culture is deeply intertwined with the river’s salmon. So, when toxic conditions caused by the dams on the river resulted in a massive fish kill, the Yurok people sprang into action and secured the historic removal of four dams, a story captured in The Water Remembers: My Indigenous Family’s Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life.
Climate Change Speeding Up
Current climate change has been well underway for decades, but the rate of that change is now going up so fast that people are noticing things like tornados and extreme heat waves are occurring in places where they have rarely been seen before. How greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, the loss of reflective ice and snow, and other changes are increasingly causing the Earth to retain extra heat energy from the Sun.
Celebrating 30 years of Living on Earth!
Host Steve Curwood in the Living on Earth studio
Join the Living on Earth Book Club on October 13th!
Bestselling science journalist Ed Yong joins us to talk about his new book. Click here to learn more and register!
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A Cemetery Buzzing with Bees
While honeybees get most of the buzz, most bees don’t produce honey, and most don’t even live in colonies. Instead, they’re solitary bees who build individual nests. A study details an astonishing finding of several million solitary bees in a cemetery in Ithaca, New York.
Bluetooth Butterfly Tracking
Monarch butterflies can travel thousands of miles each year between Mexico and North America in an epic relay race of multiple generations. And thanks to new technology, our phones and other Bluetooth devices can now tell us what paths these brave little insects take on this journey.
How Flowers Made Our World
Summer flowers like black-eyed Susans, hibiscus, sunflowers and coneflowers fill gardens and parks with color and fragrance, but flowers are more than their beauty. They’re some of the oldest beings on Earth, and they played a large role in shaping the natural world as we know it. Author and biologist David George Haskell joins us to discuss his 2026 book, How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries.
This Week’s Show
August 7, 2026
listen / download
A Cemetery Buzzing with Bees
listen / download
While honeybees get most of the buzz, most bees don’t produce honey, and most don’t even live in colonies. Instead, they’re solitary bees who build individual nests. A study details an astonishing finding of several million solitary bees in a cemetery in Ithaca, New York.
BirdNote®: Bee Hummingbird
listen / download
The smallest bird in the world is a hummingbird found only in Cuba that lays eggs the size of a coffee bean. And as BirdNote®’s Mary McCann explains, they’re so small they’re often mistaken for bees.
Bluetooth Butterfly Tracking
listen / download
Monarch butterflies can travel thousands of miles each year between Mexico and North America in an epic relay race of multiple generations. And thanks to new technology, our phones and other Bluetooth devices can now tell us what paths these brave little insects take on this journey.
How Flowers Made Our World
listen / download
Summer flowers like black-eyed Susans, hibiscus, sunflowers and coneflowers fill gardens and parks with color and fragrance, but flowers are more than their beauty. They’re some of the oldest beings on Earth, and they played a large role in shaping the natural world as we know it. Author and biologist David George Haskell joins us to discuss his 2026 book, How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries.
"Anthropocene Pastoral"
listen / download
In her poems, Catherine Pierce grapples with unfolding climate disaster and reflects on finding beauty amidst the ecological disarray of the Anthropocene. Here she reads her poem “Anthropocene Pastoral” from her 2020 collection Danger Days.
Special Features
Field Note: "After the Storm"
Living on Earth's Explorer-in-Residence, Mark Seth Lender, ruminates on the storm as it meets the shore.
Blog Series: Mark Seth Lender Field Notes
Field Note: "Countermeasures"
Living on Earth's Explorer-in-Residence, Mark Seth Lender, shares observations about shorebirds in flight.
Blog Series: Mark Seth Lender Field Notes
...Ultimately, if we are going prevent large parts of this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we are going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them...
-- President Barack Obama, November 6, 2015 on why he declined to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline.
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