Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
To find satisfaction you have to have an encounter with the real world and absorb its great subtleties. It’s difficult to make the deep connections about food without meeting the people that grow the plants or bake the bread, or doing those things yourself.
We follow Herman from the lecture halls of Louisiana to the forests of Brazil – and through a period of global upheaval and personal transformation. It’s the late 1960s: war, civil rights, and the first whispers of ecological collapse are reshaping the world.
Every myth matters. Each one reveals how people once understood their place in the cosmos. Most have been lost, their meanings erased. The story of Marduk and Tiamat survives—and that alone makes it worth examining.
New York Times bestselling author Christopher Ryan joins the odyssey to discuss human nature. What’s universal, what’s cultural, and what’s personal? Can we really change the culture we live in? And are some societies better suited to human well-being than others?
The developments of the organic certification system is today driven by the actors who have a vested interest in it, such as the standard-setters, certification bodies, government bureaucrats and consultants; not by the farmers, food producers, consumers and the trade they are supposed to serve.
In an unprecedented move Rob Morgan, the CEO of the Alberta Energy Regulator, has bowed to intense bullying from an Australian-based coal company and cancelled a planned public hearing on a large underground project near the town of Grande Cache.
Ecologists, this is a call to emerge from your niche occasionally, enough to acknowledge the root cause of the issues you study. You don’t need to start a new movement. There’s an existing movement of academics and activists establishing the need for degrowth to a steady state economy and raising awareness of this need.
On this episode, Nate is joined by environmental journalist, Oliver Milman, to discuss the alarming decline in insect populations in the past few decades and the far-reaching consequences this has for ecosystem stability, human well-being, and the overall health of the biosphere.
In this episode we travel in time to the year 2125, to visit the Crazy Town museum, which showcases today’s world of wanton consumption and profligate waste. How will humans in 2125 – if there are any of us left – judge the things everyone sees as normal today?
Humanity soon will be returning to low-power ways of organizing itself. And in our new age of tariff wars, the tide is already turning from global to regional in trade, investment, and politics. What has seemed impossible may soon become obviously necessary to larger numbers of people.
From here I can return to my old country, neither prodigal nor victorious, but someone unexpected, without history, without illusion, appearing beside a silvery bush whose bitterness frees the spirits of this haunted earth and colours everything green.
Some of the littlest organisms in the ocean wield incredible influence, both on their ecosystems and on the planet. Like plants do on land, phytoplankton absorb sunlight and carbon dioxide and expel oxygen.
