About 75% of the world’s flowering plants and about 30% of crops rely on pollinators. Things like habitat loss, pesticide use, climate change, and invasive species are all threats to pollinator populations, which are truly essential for both ecological balance and food security. On August 22-23 Floridians can do their part as citizen scientists to help researchers keep tabs on the health of pollinator populations by participating in the Great Southeast Pollinator Census. To participate, during those two days you simply pick one or more plants in your yard that attract pollinators and watch them closely for 15 minutes and count each time an insect lands on the plant, and then upload that information into a database.

The Midwest Food Bank was founded on a farm in Illinois in 2003 and has grown ever since, adding branches around the country including one that covers Florida. The Midwest Food Bank Florida branch opened in Fort Myers in 2014 and has been providing food to its more than 200 partner agencies ever since. These days they’re providing tens of thousands of meals every month. They pretty much runs on volunteers — they had about 2000 last year — and they only have six paid employees so they’re able to turn every dollar donated into 34 meals. We meet their new Executive Director to get to know him and better understand what they do.

If you’ve ever called 211 here in Southwest Florida to find assistance with things like housing, food, healthcare, mental health — the list goes on — the United Way of Lee, Hendry, and Glades is who is supporting the 211 service, and is helping to fund the many agencies and nonprofits around the region who are there to help. Each year their fundraising campaign is designed to raise the money they need to help fund more than 90 partner agencies who help around a half-million people each year. Put simply, the United Way of Lee, Hendry, and Glades provides an essential backbone for social services in southwest Florida. We learn about a breakfast on Monday, Aug. 4 that will help set the tone for this year's campaign.

Lightning comes in different varieties, the most common kinds don't reach the ground, called intra-cloud and cloud-to-cloud. Cloud to ground lightning actually only makes up about 10-20% of strikes. About 1% is ground to cloud. Then one of the outlier forms of lightning stretches for miles (sometimes dozens of miles) horizontally and can resemble a spider web, and that’s why it’s called spider lightning. We learn about ongoing research at Florida Gulf Coast University into this form of lightning with the instructor who is leading it and a student who helped her work with the data.

The concept of birthright citizenship dates to English Common Law, and it was codified in 1868 by the ratification of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and was upheld in 1898 in a Supreme Court ruling called United States v. Wong Kim Ark, and it was further strengthened in 1940 when Congress passed the Nationality Act. President Trump signed an Executive Order that claim “The 14th Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States,” and says that only children born of at least one citizen parent will be a U.S. citizen. We get some clarity and context with two immigration attorneys, one with the ACLU and the other who has worked on immigration law for nearly 50 years.

On Saturday, July 19 there will be a daylong gathering in Fort Myers to begin a conversation about moving the City of Palms toward openly becoming a Compassionate City. One that holds empathy, dignity, and care at the core. The organizers are calling for educators, civic leaders, healthcare workers, artists, entrepreneurs, faith voices, and anyone really, who want to join the conversation about the importance of compassion and empathy and how to find ways to build them into the community. We talk with three of the people involved with Saturday’s event to get a preview and to talk about compassion.

When it comes to the ways global climate change impacts the world’s oceans things like melting ice caps and glaciers, and what’s called thermal expansion — that’s when water takes up more volume as its temperature goes up — are probably what first come to mind. Or how increased water temperatures impact sea life, like recent, widespread coral bleaching events off Florida’s coast and around the world. Or even how changes in temperature and salinity can alter ocean currents, which are crucial for regulating global climate and weather patterns. But, an overlooked aspect of this story is how increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases the acidity — or the pH level — of the world’s oceans.

Right now our public debt is about 97% of our GDP. The last time we had a ratio that high was around World War II. A key number that economists are focused on right now is how much interest the U.S. Government is paying to manage the national debt. Right now, we’re paying almost $1 trillion dollars per year in interest. That is more than we spend on the military budget and almost as much as we spend on healthcare, including Medicare and Medicaid, every year. So, in order to get an overview of how the U.S. national debt works, how the government borrows money to service the debt or even pay it back, how we’ve found ourselves in a place with such a high debt to GDPT ratio, and how concerned we all should be, we talk with the author of a recent piece in The Journalist’s Resource titled “The national debt: How and why the US government borrows money.”

The world filled with portable devices and electric cars that we’ve come to rely upon is mostly powered with lithium-ion batteries. Most of the lithium-ion batteries we use require cobalt. Most of the cobalt that’s being used in these batteries is extracted from the ground in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and much of it is sent to China to be processed for the global market. The Blood Diamond initiative in the 1990s sought to raise awareness about, and eventually create systems to mitigate the use here in the U.S. of, so-called ‘blood’ or ‘conflict’ diamonds that were being mined in places like Sierra Leone and the DRC where workers were being mistreated and profits were fueling war. Our guest was instrumental in the Blood Diamonds initiative, and is now leading the new Blood Battery Campaign that’s modelled after it.

Thunderstorm Aversion or storm anxiety is when dogs experience significant fear or anxiety during storms. Loud noises are the most obvious trigger, but dogs can react to other storm-related cues like lightning flashes, the sounds of wind or rain hitting the home, changes in barometric pressure, and even static electricity in the air. We learn about Thunderstorm Aversion and ways veterinarians try to help dogs and their owners. And we learn about a three-year, double-blind, placebo-controlled study of a new treatment that’s hoping to become a medical solution.