Podcast

In the tradition of telling the bees, beekeepers relay the news of a death in the family to each of their hives, oftentimes draping them in black mourning cloth. As bee colonies in the US perish in record numbers, Emily Polk wonders if bees not only witness human grief, but also feel loss themselves. Meeting with a famous Yemeni beekeeper in downtown Oakland, California, and scientists from around the world studying bee behavior and cognition, she learns of the enduring generosity and spirit of survival of these tiny creatures, and glimpses the greater circles of loss that connect us with the more-than-human world.

On a field trip to Los Cedros cloud forest in Ecuador in 2022, mycologist Giuliana Furci, author Robert Macfarlane, legal scholar and More Than Human (MOTH) Life Collective founder César Rodríguez-Garavito, and musician Cosmo Sheldrake wrote and recorded “Song of the Cedars”—a composition made not just in the forest, but in conscious collaboration with it. Rich with field recordings of the ecosystem and the track’s entwined human and more-than-human melodies, this conversation between the foursome explores their ongoing effort to gain legal recognition of Los Cedros as co-creator of the song, which if successful, will be a world first.

In this experiential essay, Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta breaks the constructs of linear time and storytelling with love magic—a connective substance that transcends time and space—and explores how we might slip between the cracks of the linear and maintain connection across time. Drawing on the knowledge encoded in a traditional boomerang he carved from silky oak, Tyson urges us to flow with love magic; to “swim in its currents” to offset the greed and extraction that is consuming the world.

From the archive, this week’s episode is a conversation with author and artist Jenny Odell. Speaking about her book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, she challenges the social and cultural ideas that underpin standardized, mechanized time, and imagines how we might instead attune to the rhythms of the Earth and embrace interruptions that allow us to glimpse the inherent unpredictability and creativity of every moment. What choices, what futures, might become possible, she asks, if we stepped out of chronos time and towards a kairos time?

What does a place, a community, look like when it welcomes home Indigenous presence? Recorded in January 2025, this new fourth episode of “Coming Home to the Cove” explores the impact of Theresa Harlan’s work to protect, restore, and rematriate Felix Cove over the last three years—from widening community awareness of Coast Miwok history; to opening hearts to allyship between Indigenous and settler families; and running traditional ecological knowledge workshops. Amid ongoing vandalism of her ancestral home, rancher evictions, and new land management, Theresa continues to fight for a larger vision of healing, and asks, are we willing to come together to honor the entire story of a land?

This audio series is the multigenerational story of a Coast Miwok family’s eviction from their home and one woman’s determination to bring the living history of her family back to the land. Episode Three examines the role Spanish missions, boarding schools, and ranching empires played in driving many Coast Miwok people from their ancestral lands; and follows Theresa Harlan and her relatives on a boat trip to Felix Cove to experience their mothers’ perspective of arriving at their home from the water. Next episode, we’ll be sharing a new fourth installment to the series, tracing the impact of Theresa’s vision to restore and protect Felix Cove over the last three years, and the ongoing challenges of creating space for Indigenous history.

This series tells the multigenerational story of a Coast Miwok family’s eviction from their ancestral home on a cove in Tomales Bay in Northern California, and one woman’s effort to bring the living history of her family back to the land. Episode Two traces the Coast Miwok’s ten-plus-millennia-long presence in this landscape. Rich with interviews with a local historian and members of Theresa Harlan’s family, this episode asks: How is it that ten thousand years of continuous human civilization is seemingly invisible today? And who gets to define history?

This series tells the multigenerational story of a Coast Miwok family’s eviction from their ancestral home in Northern California, and one woman’s grassroots mission to restore their living history to the land. As we reshare this series over the coming weeks, we’re adding a new fourth episode tracing recent developments in Theresa Harlan’s work, its impact on the community, and the ongoing challenge of creating space for Indigenous history. In Episode One, Theresa Harlan shares the story of her family’s uprooting from Tomales Bay, which ended their time there but did not sever their connection to the ancestral lands and waters of Tamal-liwa.

In this interview from the archive, Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta invites us into an Indigenous understanding of time as inseparable from place. He shares the ways Lore and knowledge are kept within lands and tribes over centuries, and how deep time thinking can help us feel our obligation to beings, landscapes, and future generations. With candor and humor, Tyson emphasizes the importance of story, data, and technology emerging from a place of “right relationship” if we are to usher in new systems of order amid the chaos of the current moment.

In this archive conversation, forest ecologist Suzanne Simard speaks about her life’s work exploring tree intelligence and relationships, and her most recent research on Mother Trees—the oldest trees in the forest—and their astounding ability to recognize and nourish their own kin. Stepping outside of scientific precepts towards a vernacular that acknowledges connection—“mother,” “children,” “grandfather”—she delves further into the intricate web of relationships that Western systems of knowledge are only beginning to understand, and wonders what lessons these trees can teach us about healing our separation from the Earth.

David Farrier examines how “wild clocks”—the biological and ecological rhythms that living beings use to coordinate their lives with the greater cycles of the Earth—are falling out of synch with each other in our age of ecological crisis. Traversing the Future Library in Norway, Sami reindeer herds in Scandinavia, and oyster colonies in Scotland’s Firth of Forth, David considers the different ways time is made between people, more-than-human beings, and place—and wonders if the disordering of our wild clocks offers an opportunity to understand anew how time can be an expression of kinship.

Given at St. Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in London in November 2024, this final talk in a series by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee explores how an embodied practice of spiritual ecology is a radical act amid a culture that has forgotten the sacred nature of our relationship with the Earth. He shares how a remembrance of this intimate connection is the spiritual responsibility of our time, and that when our hearts recognize and hold this reality, we can keep alive an essential connection and offer a practice of love to the suffering Earth.

This week, we return to our interview with journalist Paul Salopek, who, for the last decade, has been on an epic journey retracing the migration pathway of some of the earliest humans out of Africa’s Rift Valley. Moving through the world as our ancestors did, Paul shares how he’s become attuned to the way time passes through us and around us: from the ancient pulse of the Earth underfoot, to the fury of mechanized time that rampages through our urban centers. Throughout, he shares profound experiences of timelessness, which he dubs “sacramental time,” that bring together mind, body, and landscape in conversation.

In this expansive conversation from our archive, writer, artist, and technologist James Bridle looks at how the glorification of our own intelligence has shaped the history of technology, and anticipates in our future an “ecological turn” in the way we view and create it. James draws on principles of decentralized knowledge systems, a redistribution of agency among all beings, and an embrace of what is unknowable to envision how our technology could move away from the reductionism of ones and zeros and towards reflecting other kinds of intelligence and the ways we are intimately connected to the world.