Whenever an earthquake strikes Japan, the myth of the giant catfish Ōnamazu reminds people that the living world is full of complex meaning. In the face of repeated natural disasters, Marie Mutsuki Mockett looks to her mother’s homeland to recall stories that could change our relationship with what we call “nature.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
29min 7sec
In pursuit of a contemplative inner life amid a world in upheaval, Fred Bahnson looks to the early desert monks for guidance on how to direct our gaze and maintain an attentive heart. As he ponders th ...
24min 0sec
What if Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rachel Carson had met? Imagining an exchange in the year 1964, as the civil rights and environmental movements were forging parallel and increasingly urgent path ...
40min 59sec
As the world falters, threatening native ecosystems and Indigenous lifeways, acclaimed Australian Aboriginal author Alexis Wright turns inward to the dwelling place of ancestral story. From here, she ...
47min 25sec
Born in Battambang, Cambodia, during the Khmer Rouge regime, Kalyanee Mam immigrated to the United States in 1981 with her family. In this narrated essay, Kalyanee traces her father’s struggle for age ...
45min 18sec
Even as the pandemic has isolated us from one another, it has also revealed new paths into deeper communion with and connection to the living world. From her home in the UK during lockdown, Lucy Jones ...
34min 15sec
In this narrated essay, Tristan McConnell ventures into the shrinking mountain forests that surround Mount Kenya, home to medicinal plants, ancient trees, rivers, and rainfall. In the wake of the lega ...
29min 10sec
Just as modern science is catching up to the ancient understanding of our deep emotional and physiological relationship to the living world, the twin forces of urbanization and technological advanceme ...
47min 4sec
As Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. While the free market system we embrace in the Un ...
39min 10sec
In this in-depth interview, Reverend angel Kyodo williams reflects on our widespread crisis of story, the failure of institutional religions to offer a new way forward, and her philosophy of Radical D ...
26min 14sec
As a chemical plant in St. James Parish, Louisiana, threatens a majority Black community with toxic emissions, Boyce Upholt looks deeply at the nature of air and considers how it can challenge the oft ...
30min 55sec
In this narrated essay, poet Jake Skeets enters into the memories he shares through touch and, in doing so, conjures a deep reverence for the spaces we remember. From a stubbled chin and stucco wall t ...
48min 30sec
Rowen White is a Seedkeeper from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne and an activist for Indigenous seed sovereignty. In this in-depth interview originally published in our Food Issue, Rowen shares what ...
22min 35sec
In this narrated essay, CMarie Fuhrman encounters a coyote whose leg is caught in a trap in the southern Montana prairie. As she decides what to do, she navigates the two legacies of her identity—Nati ...
30min 21sec
In this narrated essay, ecological historian Bathsheba Demuth travels across the easternmost edge of northern Russia—home to the Native Chukchi people and their herds of reindeer. As she uncovers the ...
45min 48sec
In this interview, Sandor Katz discusses his new book, Fermentation as Metaphor. A world-renowned expert in fermented foods, Sandor considers the liberating experience offered through engagement with ...
57min 32sec
From the Yangtze Valley, to Neolithic Mesopotamia, to the orchards of Oxford, Roger Deakin sought to understand the origins of the domesticated apple. His essay East of Eden—an excerpted chapter from ...
14min 47sec
Gathering wild foods was once a practice of deep observation, carried out by women who knew the ways of wild medicine. In this narrated essay, Gina Rae La Cerva considers the widespread loss of this t ...
18min 39sec
The coronavirus has shrunk the scale of our individual worlds, setting us on an uncertain and increasingly narrow path. While in lockdown, David Farrier finds inspiration in the meandering imprints le ...
34min 37sec
To conclude our six-part “Language Keepers” podcast series, we explore the rapid rate of language loss occurring around the world and hear from speakers of endangered languages who are increasingly re ...
28min 44sec
For many Indigenous communities, the effort to document and learn from as many last speakers as possible is a race against time. In Episode Five of our “Language Keepers” podcast series we meet Julie ...
26min 54sec
Episode Four of our “Language Keepers” podcast series brings us to the home of Marie Wilcox—the last fluent speaker of the Wukchumni language and the creator of the only Wukchumni dictionary. Younger ...
33min 5sec
Episode Three of our “Language Keepers” podcast series explores efforts to revitalize the Karuk language, which is deeply tied to the Klamath River in Northern California. Just as a river is dependent ...
57min 5sec
Episode Two of our “Language Keepers” podcast series brings you to the redwood forests of Northern California, home to Loren Bommelyn, the sole remaining fluent speaker of the Tolowa Dee-ni’ language. ...
59min 52sec
Adapted from our award-winning multimedia story, “Language Keepers,” this six-part podcast series explores the struggle for Indigenous language survival in California. Two centuries ago, as many as ni ...
17min 0sec
Lia Purpura is the author of nine collections of essays, poems, and translations, including It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful and All the Fierce Tethers. In this narrated essay, Lia bears witness to th ...
31min 8sec
Daisy Hildyard examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has drawn our attention toward the space between things. She notes that these “negative spaces” reveal relationships that normally lie beyond our perc ...
58min 5sec
We commissioned four authors to approach the theme of apocalypse through fiction, from the perspectives of past, present, and future. Our fourth and final installment is a short story by Ben Okri, ent ...
42min 51sec
We commissioned four authors to approach the theme of apocalypse through fiction, from the perspectives of past, present, and future. Our third installment, The Basilisk, is from Paul Kingsnorth, a wr ...
49min 5sec
In this interview, cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram discusses the animism, power, and potency of the living world. In our current moment of ecological and societal instability—rich with ...
39min 11sec
We commissioned four authors to approach the theme of apocalypse through fiction, from the perspectives of past, present, and future. Our second installment, Ink, is a story by Sjón, an Icelandic poet ...