Podcast · Tech & Science

Small Planet Heroes

Do you worry about our world in crisis? Social inequity, polarization, shifting climates, and disappearing nature can feel like too much for any one person to take on. We’ve been there, and we found hope. On Small-Planet Heroes, we invite change-makers to share their stories of trial and triumph in

New episodes: Every two weeks
Typical length: 1 hr
Latest: 14 Jul 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

14 Jul 2026 · 1 min

Trailer: Season 2

A sneak peak from Dr. Kai Chan and occasional co-host Clare Price.

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Earlier episodes 16 most recent

S2 · E9 · 28 Nov 2025 · 1 hr 10 min
David Suzuki: David's Community Party
An Invitation from David Suzuki to Connect, Commit, Compete, and Correct Our Way to Sustainability Within and Beyond Our Generation David Suzuki has spent a lifetime translating the living world for the rest of us, first as a young geneticist, then as a groundbreaking broadcaster, and later as a public advocate for ecological responsibility. In this rich and personal conversation, he looks back with the perspective of someone who has watched societies, institutions, and ecosystems evolve over more than 80 years. Suzuki speaks candidly with co-hosts Kai Chan and Sam Blackwell about the…
26 Nov 2025 · 1 hr
Bob Watson: The Risks of Doing Nothing
Bob Watson Discusses Large-Scale Systems Transformation, His Life in Science Assessment, and the Need for Trust in an Anti-Science Era Global science assessment goes far beyond crunching numbers and tallying up abstract human impacts: it is about convincing the world to act. Recalling his life in leadership with co-hosts Kai Chan (professor and Canada Research Chair at UBC) and Maia O’Donnell (UBC graduate in soil science and producer of the Small Planet Heroes podcast), Robert (Bob) Watson narrates his path from early training in atmospheric chemistry to high-stakes positions at NASA, the…
17 Nov 2025 · 1 hr 6 min
Terre Satterfield: Culture is a Co-Production
Terre Satterfield Explores Queasy Questions, the Quest for Environmental Justice, and the Narrative Imperative in Ecosystems Services Research Queasy questions shake us. It’s that nervous strangeness of surveying the very limits of what we know. For Dr. Terre Satterfield, anthropologist and environmental social scientist, that queasiness has fueled a career bridging critical and constructive perspectives. In this conversation with UBC colleagues and co-hosts Kai Chan (professor and Canada Research Chair) and David R. Boyd (professor and legal expert on human rights and the environment),…
7 Nov 2025 · 1 hr 9 min
David Boyd: Nature’s Rights are Human Fights
David R. Boyd on Levering Transformative Change for a Healthy Environment from a Global Legal Perspective In the coastal Wild West, when laws and justice do not align, the town can summon an environmental cowboy, someone able to negotiate a way out of the hair-trigger standoff to turn towards the sun. Leaving the Alberta Rockies behind in the rearview mirror of a Greyhound bus, lawyer, academic, and frontier spirit David R. Boyd has gone on to sheriff local, national, and international courts. While fulfilling mandates for governments and non-profits alike, he has also published several…
31 Oct 2025 · 1 hr 9 min
Ingrid Waldron: Our Bodies, Our Land, Our Laws
Ingrid Waldron’s Road to Racial and Environmental Justice Through Community, Law, and Collective Action Growing up in Montreal, young Ingrid Waldron never imagined drafting what would become this country’s first environmental justice legislation. Bill C-226 acknowledged the historical roots and lived realities of environmental racism. Deeply committed to health equity, Ingrid’s research led to her 2018 book and the award-winning documentary There’s Something in the Water . Both stressed the need for everybody to have a voice in environmental decision-making, especially when the places we…
24 Oct 2025 · 1 hr 10 min
Eli Enns: We are All Treaty People
Eli Enns On Indigenous Conservation and Bringing Balance Back Conservationist Eli Enns’ voice exudes warmth, irony, and a nuanced historical awareness of what it is to live in Canada (from kanata, the Haudenosaunee word for “village”) and be Canadian today. This lively conversation, accented by personal stories from his West Coast Indigenous heritage, tackles the fine balance between rights, laws, and responsibilities when undertaking ethical stewardship of traditional lands and waters everywhere. By viewing all inhabitants of present-day Canada as treaty people, Eli highlights the eternal…
17 Oct 2025 · 1 hr 3 min
Teika Newton: No Place Is Isolated, No One a Stranger
From a relatively isolated, “tech-less” childhood in small-town Ontario to the unglamorous frontlines of community-based environmental organizing, Teika Newton shows us the undeniable value of showing up. Whether bridging the work of researchers and activists, catalyzing multi-dimensional partnerships across disparate cultures and worldviews, or simply talking to strangers as a revolutionary act of love and trust, Teika proves how authentic relationships drive successful collaborations. Understanding that lasting change often happens slowly and behind the scenes, she discusses with co-hosts…
10 Oct 2025 · 1 hr 3 min
Suzanne Simard: Speaking for the Trees, Calling for Change
Suzanne Simard revolutionized how we understand forests with her discovery of the “wood wide web,” the vast underground network that allows trees to communicate and cooperate. Her research showed the world that forests are not just collections of individuals but living communities bound together through resilience, resource sharing, and reciprocity. In this conversation with co-hosts Kai Chan (professor and Canada Research Chair at UBC) and Nancy Kang (professor and Canada Research Chair at the U of Manitoba), Suzanne shares stories from her scientific journey, the challenges of pushing…
3 Oct 2025 · 1 hr 13 min
Alex Morton: Walk Beside Me, Not Behind Me
Alex Morton on Impossible Resilience, the Call to Kindness, and Building Activist Legacies for The Big Team Alexandra (Alex) Morton has been called a mix of Jane Goodall and Erin Brockovich, but her decades-long fight for wild salmon and orcas is entirely her own. A scientist, activist, and author, Alex shares how she was pulled from whale research into one of BC’s most high-stakes environmental battles: challenging salmon farming and the systems that enable it. In this episode, Alex joins co-hosts Kai Chan (professor and Canada Research Chair at UBC) and Clare Price (UBC graduate student in…
S2 · 26 Sep 2025 · 14 min
What Even is a Small Planet Hero?
What does it mean to be a Small Planet Hero? In this pilot, co-hosts Kai Chan (professor and Canada Research Chair at UBC) and Clare Price (UBC graduate student in soundscapes and urban transformation) pull back the curtain on the vision behind the podcast. They dive into the origins of the show’s name, the idea of our “small planet,” and why being a hero isn’t about capes or perfection- it’s about purpose, power, and finding our unique place in driving systems change. This season, you’ll hear from a range of impactful figures, some of whom are household names and others whose work tends to…
S1 · E5 · 7 Jun 2024 · 48 min
Community, Growing up, and Refugee Status with Muhaddisa Sarwari
Climate change is poised to worsen the refugee crisis badly as people flee floods and fires, as life becomes untenable in places with prolonged droughts, and rising seas swallow low-lying islands. The suffering of vulnerable people has not always received much attention from the environmental community. Instead, there’s a disturbing history of people being displaced in creating parks and protected areas. As we seek a future in which people and nature coexist harmoniously, today we’ll delve into the refugee crisis and the systems we have in place to resettle refugees from someone who has…
S1 · E4 · 17 May 2024 · 42 min
The Art of Listening with Johnny Trinh
The path to sustainable futures is one that overcomes polarization, not just about the climate crisis and solutions to it, but all manner of things. We can’t change systems to work for people and the planet if we’re deeply divided and fighting about the most basic issues. Our guest believes, and shows, that art and effective communication are key to overcoming divides, that they offer a path to empathy, and that if we can laugh together and cry together, we can work together. But neither art nor communication is intrinsically powerful. They are only powerful in the context of our audience,…
S1 · E3 · 3 May 2024 · 36 min
Hero Culture, Overworking, and Materialism with Derek Strokon
Self-sacrifice: We tend to celebrate it. But when celebrating self-sacrifice becomes a culture of overworking for the sake of one’s employer and one’s own career, as if that’s heroic, the economy seems to grow, but people suffer. Families suffer. And the planet suffers. When we overwork, we often lose sight of what really matters. We’re too busy for key relationships or being good citizens. We overspend, and that fuels a cycle of resource extraction and production that pollutes the planet, warms the climate, and degrades nature. Join Dr. Chan in talking with Derek Strokon!
S1 · E2 · 19 Apr 2024 · 40 min
Tradition, Co-generational Living, and Unconditional Love with Dr. Tanya Gee
In today’s economy, people are being guided to move back home or take on roommates to make housing affordable. This may seem strange and unwelcome after decades of it being normal to live apart. But some people argue that living with others can be deeply rewarding, if we approach it right. All this has deep connections to the climate and ecological crisis. As nuclear families and single-occupant homes became normal, consumption was boosted by the proliferation of households. For the same number of people, more households means more stuff and more energy, which means more pollution, climate…
S1 · E1 · 5 Apr 2024 · 37 min
Gender and Sexuality, Jein, and Productive Dialogues with Kai Scott
Our vision of a sustainable future embraces a diversity of people as equals, whether they’re unlike us in their gender, sexuality, or in their understanding of these topics. On Small Planet Heroes, we seek to understand how people are bringing about the social and system change that enables a benign climate and healthy biosphere. As a parallel, one area that has seen rapid progress is diversity and inclusion about gender and sexuality. In recent years, gender has also been a battleground, inciting backlash from the conservative right, and a deep polarization across political divides. Much…
5 Apr 2024 · 36 min
Pilot: Social Signaling, Defending Ants, and Introducing Kai!
On today’s episode, we’ll be speaking to Kai Chan, our future host and an interdisciplinary professor and Canada Research Chair at UBC. He is a sustainability scientist whose work straddles social and natural systems with a focus on values, rewilding, and transformative change. Kai takes us on a journey through his academic career, what inspired him to create Cosphere, and how it led to launching this podcast.

About Small Planet Heroes

Small Planet Heroes is a English tech & science podcast from CoSphere. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: CoSphere
Language: English
Category: Tech & Science
New episodes: Every two weeks
Typical length: 1 hr
Latest episode: 14 Jul 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1739848823
Rights: CoSphere

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