Barbara Bernstein

From honey bees and bumbles to lesser-known diggers, miners, leafcutters and masons, bees have long been central to our harvests, our mythologies and our very existence. But for the past decade, resounding alarm about dwindling bee populations has often seemed to drown out... Read more

The Columbia River runs through the Hanford Nuclear Site, home to some of the most dangerous pollution on Earth. What will remain of the Hanford Nuclear Site’s radioactive and toxic pollution in 100 years? Are Columbia River fish too toxic to eat? Can tribal people exercise... Read more

  This program originally aired on June 25, 2018 According to Sightline Institute Tacoma, Washington is the major frontline community in the fight to stop fossil fuel development in the Northwest. After vehemently rejecting a proposal to build the world's largest methanol ... Read more

  This program was originally broadcast on June 18, 2018. It seems likely that the Canadian province of Alberta—home to a massive tar sands industry that produces some of the globe’s dirtiest and most polluting oil—has put the Pacific Northwest in its crosshairs. The provi... Read more

  This program originally aired on May 28, 2018 Every May 18, I spend time remembering the eruption of Mt. St. Helens that day in 1980. But this year I had the opportunity to commemorate the 38th anniversary of the eruption by hiking the Hummocks Trail in the blast zone o... Read more

This week on Locus Focus we feature a new radio documentary produced by our friends at WCUW in Worcester, Massachusetts. Foreclosures for Sale: Revisiting Stories of Worcester’s Mortgage Crisis is produced by Hallie Blashfield and Beatrice Misher. It tells the stories of M... Read more

This program originally aired on July 2, 2018 As this year’s fire season gets off to a roaring start we are still absorbing the impact and lessons learned from last seasons megafire in the Columbia River Gorge. On this episode of Locus Focus we look at post-fire natural re... Read more

Last May the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal, an internationally recognized Civil Society public opinion tribunal functioning independently of state authorities, held a special session in Corvallis, Oregon, on the human rights impacts of fracking and climate change On this epi... Read more

Across the planet vast landscapes are contaminated by the legacy of the nuclear age. From Hiroshima to Hanford and Chernobyl to Fukushima, the growing legacy of lethal radioactive waste has created vast exclusion zones where people have been permenantly forced from their ho... Read more

Over the past few years a flurry of LNG and methanol projects have been proposed for Northwest communities from Vancouver, BC to Coos Bay, Oregon. There is a glut of natural gas being produced and these LNG facilities and methanol refineries are the fossil fuel industry's w... Read more