Jean Ponzi, Gateway Center for Resource Efficiency

Jean Ponzi promotes environmental education for kids, business people, and the general public as program manager for the Gateway Center for Resource Efficiency, a division of the Missouri Botanical Garden.

Happy Earth Day! I feel really privileged to be writing for Grist this week, prime time for the human attention-span to focus on environmental issues.

Today is an anniversary for me, as well. Earth Day marks (approximately) the start of my longest-running job, as producer and host of "Earthworms," an environmental radio show. I started it 15 years ago, and I do it on a volunteer basis. "Earthworms" is a weekly, hour-long, interview-format talk show, an original feature of the public-affairs programming on KDHX-FM, St. Louis Community Radio.

KDHX is one of about 30 independent community radio stations remaining in this country; when I first got involved there were more than 100. With 47,000 watts and an 80-mile broadcast radius, we are a powerful station in a major media market. We are primarily a music station with about 150 volunteer programmers bringing their passions and expertise to the airwaves.

We reach urban, suburban, and rural listeners in 25 Missouri and 15 Illinois counties with commercial-free, totally unfettered creativity. This is an incredible resource for the St. Louis region, especially considering almost all the broadcast media in the world is now owned by about a dozen companies. KDHX is rare, but it is not an endangered species! Listener memberships generate about 65 percent of our operating revenue, and the contributions keep increasing. We just had our spring pledge drive, which started the same day as the war; it was precarious, unsettling timing but the calls and pledges never faltered.

"Earthworms" is a solo project. It's easiest and most satisfying to coordinate the logistics of booking guests, researching topics and running the show on my own. I did have a regular contributor for a couple of years -- a woodworker, artist, and musician who was active in the Sierra Club. He wrote and read wonderful short prose pieces called "The Wild Skies Weather Report." Aside from that, it's the worms and me.

The show's name was a fortunate accident. The early editions had no topical focus until a friend suggested I cover environmental issues. I polled the audience about this change and solicited their ideas for a title. Callers were overwhelmingly positive about the idea, but the names they proposed were universally dorky. ("Wisdom of the Mother," for example, and "Gaia Triumphs.") Then a guy suggested "Earth Words" -- but I thought he said worms. Years later, at a party, I met the man who conferred upon me an annelid-ical totemic identity, and I got to thank him.

"Earthworms" is not officially a part of my job, although Gateway Center's director generously supports my work on it, and the business often benefits from my interview contacts. The show keeps me abreast of a broad range of complex environmental issues that I wouldn't otherwise be ambitious enough to track, and this diversity in turn balances the focus on recycling and resource-efficiency I need to maintain for Gateway Center.

Many of my interviews now come to "Earthworms" through the Mainstream Media Project, based in northern California. MMP assembles rosters of experts to address broadly defined topics, pitches these subjects mainly to commercial radio stations, and books the guests with fabulous email efficiency. Halimah Collingwood, my contact at MMP, has become a true friend, although we've never met.

"Earthworms" serves a local audience, including many guests and topics from the St. Louis region, but Mainstream Media has linked KDHX listeners and me to the world. For example, this spring through MMP I interviewed Frances Moore Lappe about her new book Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet; Scott Cassel, founder of the Product Stewardship Initiative; and Robert Gould, president of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Tonight's show wraps up a series of interviews promoting the wealth of Earth Day events around St. Louis. I try to include a lot of local Earth Day spokespeople on my April shows, and I have to crank up my coordinating efforts to get in as many as four or five guests and segments in an hour show. This year, Earth Day overlaps with an international conference on Biodevastation being sponsored locally by the Greens, and a personal desire to focus some airtime on peace issues.

The pace will ease up a little in May, and I'm already getting requests for interviews in July and August. I'm glad to be of service. Hosting a talk show is a great job. My guests bring the information, and all I have to do is ask good questions and carry on the conversation. Because the environment essentially includes everything, I can deal with almost any issue that matters to me. I mostly stick to classical environmental topics, but when worms take the microphone on a Tuesday night, any subject can turn green.