Doug MacGregor has been an editorial cartoonist for more than 40 years. He got his professional start at the Norwich Bulletin in eastern Connecticut in 1980. He moved to Florida in 1988 and drew cartoons for the News Press in Fort Myers until 2011. Doug created five cartoons every week, year in and year out, for nearly a quarter century. He has donated a large collection of his original drawings (mostly pertaining to the local environment) to Florida Gulf Coast University’s “Archives & Special Collections” at the school’s Wilson G. Bradshaw Library and students have completed the process of digitizing them and the team at the Archives helps students use Doug’s work in their studies.

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.”

Back in the 1990s, as the southwest Florida population grew, it became apparent that local water bodies and waterways were being impacted — and impaired — by nutrient pollution. So, in the late 2000s several local governments began implementing ordinances that prohibited the application of lawn fertilizer during the rainy season, which generally speaking runs from June first through September or so. We learn about Lee County’s ordinance, and the importance of complying with these rules to benefit our waters and ecosystems.

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.

When author and educator Carole Burns’ father Frank passed away earlier this year she found a small, simple notebook amongst his things that he’d carried with him during his time as a volunteer at the slough, where he’d led tours since 2001. She wrote an essay about finding that notebook and sent it our way, so we thought it would be a good reason to have a conversation about what the slough meant to her father, and what finding that notebook meant to her — and what the Six Mile Cypress Slough Preserve has meant, and means, to so many of the people who’ve visited it over the past nearly half-century.

Dr. Jerry Jackson is known to WGCU listeners as the creator and host of With the Wild Things, heard weekday mornings at 7:19 and weekday afternoons at 5:18. He’s a professor emeritus of Ecological Sciences at Florida Gulf Coast University, and a professor emeritus at Mississippi State University. Nick Penniman is a retired newspaper publisher, and he is chair emeritus of the Conservancy of Southwest Florida and a Florida Master Naturalist. He and Dr. Jackson gave a talk together at Florida Gulf Coast University in April as part of the school’s Provost’s Seminar Series titled Getting to Know the World Around You: an Illustrated Conversation” so we had them come by the studio to chat.

On April 10 WGCU hosted an event at Florida Gulf Coast University’s Water School that featured NOVA Executive Producer Chris Schmidt. That day we screened parts of the NOVA episode Weathering the Future for an audience of about 200 people. Between the segments we chatted with him, as well as two FGCU professors about issues raised in the film and the challenges we face in Southwest Florida when it comes to adapting to our changing climate. Chris talked about the challenges NOVA faces in communicating science to a broad audience, and Dr. Win Everham and Dr. Molly Nation helped tie it all together.