A new award has been created in honor of late conservation icon Jane Goodall by the board of the Starmus Festival, an international gathering of scientists and artists to be held from Oct. 17-22 in Tenerife, Spain. Christiana Figueres has been selected as the recipient of this inaugural Jane Goodall Earth Medal. Figueres is the former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and is known for her work in securing the negotiations leading to the Paris climate agreement.
She joins the podcast this week to discuss the significance of this medal and her thoughts on the future of science communication and truth — both of which are focal points of the upcoming festival.
"What an absolute giant [Goodall] was to her very last day," says Figueres. "The fact that a medal has been made in her honor, and that I will debut that is just an unbelievable honor."
Astrophysicist and co-founder of the Starmus Festival, Garik Israelian, also joins the podcast to discuss the festival theme, "The Search for Truth." He credits the idea for the medal to his advisory board, which includes Starmus co-founder Brian May, also an astrophysicist but better known as the guitarist for the rock band Queen, and fellow musician Peter Gabriel.
"Brian was very active in protecting animals, and he had a foundation called Save Me. And another member of our advisory board, Peter Gabriel, was also very active in human rights, and also he knew Jane Goodall very well," Israelian says.
Both Figueres and Israelian agree that this year's theme, "The search for truth," runs into challenges in the age of social media, which previous newscast guest Bram Büscher described as ushering in a "post-truth era," where factual information is increasingly hard to discern. The solution, this week's guests agree, may lie in regulating tech companies and their algorithms, which prioritize engagement over truth, with platforms often pushing content that may contain false information.
"We are swimming in both disinformation and misinformation all the time without even knowing it," Figueres says.
"It is time for us to make a conscious decision," she adds. "We need to surround ourselves with different kind[s] of information. We cannot continue to search for the tiger that is going to eat us up."
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Mike DiGirolamo is the host & producer for the Mongabay Newscast based in Sydney. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
Cover image: Sunrise over the Amazon Rainforest. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
Listen to our previous conversation with Christiana Figueres here.
Listen to our conversation with Bram Büscher about social media platforms here.
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Timecodes
(00:00) A legacy of hope
(10:30) The search for truth
(24:52) Legal frameworks to hold countries accountable for climate impacts
(31:25) An awakening to the importance of nature
(40:28) AI and environmental concerns
(47:30) Looking to the Starmus Festival
