Podcast

Imagine a world where the mountains and glaciers, trees and waterways and animals—everything comprising our living, breathing planet—had as much a right to exist, legally, as humans. In this narrated essay, author Boyce Upholt travels to meet with the O’odham peoples of the Sonoran Desert, who have long revered the Saguaro cactus as a being with personhood. As Saguaro are bulldozed to make way for a segment of the US-Mexico border wall through Organ Pipe Cactus National Park, existing legal protections for the cactus come up against humancentric and extractive attitudes towards the Earth. Talking with elders from the Tohono O’odham Nation who are acting on behalf of the rooted beings of the desert, Boyce wonders how our Earth might transform if we recognized the dignity of all life.

Photo by Bear Guerra

Visiting West Bengal during monsoon season, writer and photographer Arati Kumar-Rao bears witness to all that is formed and all that is destroyed in the swell and retreat of the Ganga. Struck by the immense power of the ancient river—a deity alive and accessible, benevolent and merciless—she wonders how human activity will continue to both affect and be determined by the will of its waters. As the Ganga transforms the lay of the land, shifting modern-day political boundaries, agricultural settlements, and historical constraints on its movement, Arati considers the confluence of the sacred and the profane.

Photo by Arati Kumar-Rao

Soil has been described as the skin of the living world—vital, reactive, fragile and thin. Like our own skin, soil contains and protects a living, interdependent ecosystem that breathes, digests, and is finite in its ability to revitalize itself when harmed. In this rich, compendious story from our archive, author Jay Griffiths offers a love letter and a prayer to soil, marveling at the creativity and capacity of earthworms, fungi, and the pioneering water bear, soil-dwelling creatures who enable all other life. Jay looks frankly at how heavily we tread upon the land, describing the myriad threats to the health of the Earth’s soil and inviting us to commune with soil from a place of reverence and gratitude. After all, she reminds us, soil is what turns the Earth’s barren rock into the riotous life we know.

Photo by Studio Airport

With native ecosystems and Indigenous lifeways perpetually under threat, acclaimed Australian Aboriginal author Alexis Wright considers how her enduring culture has responded to ongoing destruction. She turns inward to the dwelling place of ancestral story, to a space where the sovereignty of mind and imagination carry forward systems of knowledge that ensure the survival of her people. Understanding the intrinsic link between resilience and stories that regenerate the world we live in, Alexis looks towards the future and calls upon storytellers to help usher in the creation of a new world.

Art by Gloria Petyarre © Aboriginal Artists Agency Ltd

How we experience time is, ultimately, how we experience our lives. In this conversation with Jenny Odell, artist and author of Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, she describes the social and cultural ideas that underpin our sense of standardized, mechanized time, which has laid an abstract grid over the living world. What choices, what futures, might become possible, she asks, if we allowed ourselves to slip free of the grip of linear, predictable chronos time and be swept into dynamic, interruptive kairos time?

Photo by Chani Bockwinkel

To mark the beginning of England’s nightingale season, we revisit our conversation with acclaimed folk singer, conservationist, and song collector Sam Lee, who steps into the forest each spring to sing with these beloved birds. In this interview, Sam reflects on the ancient musical kinship between humans and nightingales—melodies shared and silences exchanged—and the parallels between folk music and birdsong that embody deep connection to place. Finding a re-enchantment with the Earth through his practice, Sam speaks of the great importance of listening, and, as Britain’s nightingale population declines, a hope that music might offer the bird a path back into cultural consciousness.

Photo by Dominick Tyler

In this week’s podcast, Tribal Chairman and award-winning author Greg Sarris introduces us to the Crow Sisters, who tell of a young woman drawn on a mysterious journey to the lost village of Kobe·cha, near Sonoma Mountain in Northern California. Weaving traditional Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo creation tales with other histories of life in Northern California, Greg shows us the ways in which all stories—like all life—are deeply interconnected.

Artwork by Studio Airport

In this narrated essay from our archive, ecological historian Bathsheba Demuth explores the allure of the apocalyptic arc—the ending of an “old” world and the promise of a new, “perfect” one. As she crosses the easternmost edge of northern Russia, Bathsheba traces the rise and the ruin of the Soviet ideology that imposed its utopian vision of a tamed and commodified tundra upon the Native Chukchi people and their herds of reindeer. Finding uneasy parallels between such aims and today’s capitalist ideals, she considers survival against systems of power, and wonders how we might re-imagine the apocalyptic arc as the world as we know it ends.

Photo courtesy of Kunstkamera

For thousands of years, the southern Mississippi River has been shaping the land it traverses—and the structures humans have built along it. Over vast stretches of time, Indigenous societies were building hundred-foot pyramids, fifty-acre plazas, and intricate clusters of hillocks along this wild waterway. In this narrated essay, Boyce Upholt charts the shifting course of the river and the civilizations that have emerged alongside it. Beholding the 2,200-mile levee system that now curbs the river’s torrent, he wonders: what do our monuments say about who we are—and the crises we face?

Photo by Jenny Ellerbe

This week’s episode is an audio adaptation of our multimedia experience “Valemon the Bear: Myth in the Age of the Anthropocene,” featuring mythologist Martin Shaw. Martin’s vivid telling summons the ancient tale of a wild daughter falling in love with a bear, inviting us into a deep encounter with a living myth that has the potential to remind us of the parts of ourselves we’ve forgotten, if we let it.

Illustration by Martin Shaw

In this narrated essay, author Lacy M. Johnson reflects on what can be rebuilt and what must be mourned as our environments shift, fracture, and sometimes disappear. Walking through a wetlands that was once an upscale neighborhood in Houston, Lacy comes into contact with a landscape transformed by oil extraction and subsidence—one haunted by cycles of destruction. Feeling for the edge of change, she examines the value of restoration in the aftermath of disaster, and considers what futures could emerge, what places would survive, if we didn’t simply repair what is broken but adapted to what lies ahead.

Photo by Linda Murdock

In this narrated essay from our archive, Nigerian writer Bayo Akomolafe deconstructs old stories of colorism and puts forward “monstrosity”—that which upends the familiar, that which challenges and resists the order of things—as a site to truly meet ourselves. He presents race as emergent and dynamic, and identity as unwieldy, deeply composite, and intertwined with the living world. As the Anthropocene lays bare the interconnectedness and interdependence of all life, and dispels boundaries between human and nonhuman, Bayo invites us to disturb, rethink, and remake how we construct identity and race.

Illustration by Jia Sung