Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In this episode, Nate is joined by educator and indigenous researcher Vanessa Andreotti to discuss what she calls “hospicing modernity” in order to move beyond the world we’ve come to know and the failed promises that “modernity” has made to our current culture.
As population bombs, perhaps there’s no explosion, but a whimper of modernity as the larger living world finds its voice again, accented by human song.
A just resolution to the Israel/Palestine conflict requires acknowledging and honoring truths that are seemingly contradictory. Examples from other domains show how this can be accomplished and offer a potential pathway to an enduring, long-term peace.
The myth of human dominion and exceptionalism is as old as the Bible and as unquestioned as gravity, at least in “modern” society. Rob, Asher, and Jason explore the ways that humanocentrism has come to dominate the planet and our minds, while pointing to ancient and newly emerging ways that the more-than-human world is respected and protected, even the dung beetle.
There’s a bridge between people’s experiences with these more-than-human “living cultures” and the work of regrowing our ways of being human together. They offer images that reflect, backwards and forwards, helping us give words to the work that is called for.
The value of the arts is as a natural, communal expression of meaning that is inseparable from our everyday lives, impulses and needs, existing in spite of the desires of capitalism and the hegemonic structures that enforce it.
Humans can slow and, perhaps, reverse the ecological harms that they have caused, but Earth will never return to some past pristine state. Nonetheless, I believe that history can help humans save Earth’s remaining wild, natural places that, along with cultural icons like Notre Dame, tell the stories of who we are.
An advantage of the transition to agrarian localism is that it depends very little on new technologies, and almost entirely on politics – hence my subtitle for this post.
It is a matter of summoning our collective will to build a future based on the common good, and the people with whom we can best do it are our neighbors in our communities and bioregions. We can change the world by beginning the work in our own places.
Journalist and podcaster Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) interviews Dr. Omnia El Omrani, a medical doctor and Climate and Health Policy Fellow at Imperial College London. Omnia shares reflections on Connecting Climate Minds—a landmark project looking at climate and mental health across the globe, with a specific focus on the lived experiences of youth, Indigenous communities, small farmers and fisher people.
If transportation departments and urban planning staff do not include the voices of nondrivers, they are unlikely to develop policies and infrastructure that will reflect the needs of their whole communities.
Biospheric cognition, when brightly lit, always places the biosphere first and central. Always. Biospheric cognition is a context in which understanding and meaning take place as the very biosphere itself (Herself) cognizing with and through us, awake or awakening to itself/Herself as us.
