Sustainability, Climate Change, Renewable Energy, Politics, Activism, Biodiversity, Carbon Footprint, Wildlife, Regenerative Agriculture, Circular Economy, Extinction, Net-Zero · One Planet Podcast · Mia Funk

Another World Is Possible: Lessons for America From Around the Globe w/ NATASHA HAKIMI ZAPATA

·55 min·3 clips

Singapore’s Housing Development Board helped 80% of Singaporeans live in public housing and 90% become homeowners.

Natasha Hakimi Zapata speaks as an award-winning journalist, translator, and university lecturer based in Europe, and as the author of Another World is Possible, Lessons for America from Around the Globe. She opens by pointing to the danger of the moment and to the way Cold War stigma still warps the American conversation. That stigma, she suggests, has kept people from recognizing strong public policies simply because they were once branded socialist or communist. She also notes that the resistance has softened over time, especially among younger people, and treats that as part of a broader shift in political imagination. The conversation moves from political language to lived experience. She describes swimming with sea turtles and other sea creatures and feeling a deep connection to the wider natural world. From there, the talk turns to Costa Rica’s biodiversity law, which treats conservation as inseparable from the human communities living inside the ecosystem. The point is not that people stand apart from nature, but that they live within it and carry responsibilities that reach across generations. A large part of the episode is devoted to the practical case for ambitious public policy. The discussion asks how a country like the United States could green its grid, provide universal health care, and house everyone. Rather than treating those goals as fantasy, it frames them as questions of will, infrastructure, and political choice. The conversation keeps returning to the familiar objection that these things are too expensive, and answers it by asking what the country already chooses to spend on. One of the sharpest stretches looks at the imbalance between defense and domestic priorities. The episode notes that the United States spends only 3% of its national budget on education compared with 15% on defense, plus roughly 4% on veterans affairs. The point is not just arithmetic. It is a critique of a national habit that favors military power over families, young people, and long-term health. The conversation even imagines bringing soldiers home to help green the grid, redirecting tactical experience toward building rather than destroying. That argument deepens when the episode turns to global comparisons. It cites a 2022 Oxford University study suggesting the world could save $12 trillion by 2050 if fossil fuels were abandoned. The point is that climate action is not only ethically necessary but economically rational. The episode also points to Norway’s paid parental leave and subsidized childcare as examples of policy that support women in the formal labor market and help grow GDP. Again, the frame is practical rather than abstract: investment in people is presented as something a society can measure in both dignity and output. The talk keeps widening without losing its center. It connects climate policy to labor policy, family policy, health policy, and international priorities. It also returns to the scale of American military presence abroad, including the roughly 750 bases around the world. The listener is asked to notice not only what the country says it cannot afford, but what it has already chosen to fund. That contrast becomes the moral engine of the episode. Throughout, the exchange stays warm, serious, and exploratory. It gives space to large claims without reducing them to slogans. It connects ecological survival and social justice as one political problem rather than two separate ones. The closing note on solidarity lands as both a conclusion and a challenge to keep imagining more equal forms of life.

As heard by us

A clear-eyed case for climate policy as a test of national priorities.

Natasha Hakimi Zapata presents climate policy as plain civic common sense: cleaner grids, public investment, and a politics that no longer treats practical ideas as suspect.

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Why you'd press play

Hear climate policy argued as a question of priorities, not sacrifice.

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