Lifeworlds

The roads on which we drive are unlikely to strike us as an exciting source of design innovation or interspecies dialogue. And yet, some of the most fascinating experiments and living laboratories are taking place around the world in how humans can build structures of hope and creativity for other species to flourish, despite having their habitats sliced in half by concrete veins. 

Earth is a fluid organism and needs connected landscapes like a canvas upon which to paint its life. Roads, on the other hand, are the single most destructive element in the process of habitat fragmentation (not to mention the millions of deaths due to collisions and the massive economic cost of these accidents). Over the coming 30 years, an additional 25 million km of roads will be built across the planet’s surface. So today in the show, we speak to pioneers in the world of wildlife crossings and design competition leaders who have spurred the process of globally rethinking and redesigning human structures to grapple with the concept of “wilderness” and the radical interconnectedness of nature and culture.

Jeremy Guth is a trustee of the Woodcock Foundation, and an ARC founding sponsor. Nina-Marie is the Graduate Director of the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Toronto Metropolitan University where she leads the Ecological Design Lab, and has created a series of courses at the Harvard Graduate School of Design called Wild Ways.

Episode Website Link:  https://www.lifeworld.earth/episodes-blog/reweavinglandscapes 

Show Links:

• ARC website
• Crossings for Wildlife website
• Biophilic Cities Network
• Ecological Design Lab.ca
• Wild Ways Harvard Course
• Wild Ways publication
• Interactive map of wildlife crossings in the US
• Aeon article: Reweaving the Wild
• (Re)Connecting Wild film
• NYT wildlife crossing article

Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock, Ellie Kidd & The Rising by Tryad CCPL

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A clarinet plugged into an underwater hydrophone, playing with liquid humpback whale songs below the surface. A huddled group of musicians under a night-time forest in Berlin, singing with nightingales. A 17-year swarm of cicadas alighting upon a sole jazz musician. These are the scenographies that David Rothenberg provokes with his interspecies music compilations, asking us, why should we only play music with other humans and not improvise along with the original musicians of the planet herself? 

For human music and song emerged from a world that sings, hums, beats, chirps, and human translations of these sounds have captured our imaginations from our tribal origins through to the first recordings of humpback whales that spurred anti-whaling conventions in the 70s and electronic synthesizers. 

Today’s episode brings us into this creative engagement with the planet, exploring how we are transformed when we open up to a world of music, beauty and art created by nature every day. So my friends, listen wider, expand your sense of music, and have David Rothenberg, interspecies musician, writer, and philosopher, show us how to become not just passive listeners but active participants in the symphony.  

Episode Website Link

Show Links:

• David’s website
• David Rothenberg music on Spotify
• all David Rothenberg books on Amazon
• NYT making music with cicadas
• If Nietzche were an animal book
• Tim D recording wind
• Slowing down nightingale song into whale song
• On making music with whales
• Sounding Soils
• Bernie Krause
• David’s workshop in Costa Rica

Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd

Songs: Nightingale sounds are from David, and the Monkey Chant is from Kecak from Bali (Bridge Records)

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The world around us is constantly vibrating with sounds we cannot hear. This magical soundscape evades our senses, tempts us by its elusive presence and beckons us to look deeper.

Our ability to listen in is rapidly evolving. Over the last decades, scientists have begun installing digital listening devices in nearly every ecosystem. This process of deciphering what nature is saying is called “bioacoustics” and “ecoacoustics”. Massive advances in both hardware and artificial intelligence are permitting us to go where no artificial ear has gone before.

Recent breakthroughs unveil that many more species are speaking in ways we didn’t know were possible, with far richer behaviors than were previously known.

Karen Bakker - Canadian scientist, author, Professor at UBC and Rhodes Scholar - tells us how bioacoustics is poised to alter humanity’s relationship with our planet by expanding our sense of sound. 

We can develop mobile protected areas for animal climate refugees. Simply by singing, a whale can turn aside a container ship. Acoustic enrichment can help corals regenerate.

Acknowledging these forms of communication requires us to confront our entrenched ideas of sentience and intelligence. This seeks to understand non-human communication on its own terms and brings up new ethical and moral dilemmas. Who grants us consent to listen in to the conversation of bats? And as we inhabit such different lifeworlds, might we have enough shared concepts that would enable any kind of translation? 

Episode Website Link

• Smart Earth Project
• Sounds of Life
• Yale article
• Project CETI
• Interspecies Internet
• Earth Species Project
• Sonification
• Elephant listening project
• Wild Dolphin Project
• Sounds of Reef
• Marine mammal communication & cognition
• Biologgers

Photo: Karen’s Book

Music: Electric Ethnicity

Coral sounds Tim Lamont

Bat sound Tomáš Bartonička

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This is a meditation I wrote and recorded to plunge us through epochs of cosmic time, through the tremendous evolutionary processes that preceded us, became us, and are us. It grants us invaluable context on the great tales of life whose memories are held in our bones.

This is our origin and lineage. I hope you find yourself nourished and moved by the experience.

This script is inspired by and takes language from the deep time practices of Joanna Macy and the Deep Time Walk of Stephan Harding and colleagues, along with some of the evolutionary notions explored in Otherlands by John Halliday – to them I am deeply grateful. My script here. Please credit if used or shared.

Music attribution: Take Off and Shoot a Zero. Stunt Island Album. Written, produced, and performed by Chris Zabriskie. Published by You've Been a Wonderful Laugh Track (ASCAP). © 2011 Chris Zabriskie.

Art made with… You guessed it. Midjourney.

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This episode weaves live narrative, interview and descriptions on Romanian bison, wild forest adventures, and the lost ancient art and science of tracking.

Tracking is an ancient sensorial and survival strategy that our nomadic ancestors cultivated as state of profound observation. It led to the development of many innate abilities of the human mind and indeed, tracking is so ingrained in our very cells that it is synonymous with being human.

There is a movement today to revitalise tracking into a new modern profession, into a science that can help to monitor the impact of climate change and biodiversity loss and nature conservation. More on this in the show… 

Here I bring you into my own story of tracking animals and wild bison in the mountains of Romania with We Wilder, a social enterprise and cooperative founded by WWF Romania and local community members. We were engaging in a 4 day experience led by Toni Romani, a certified Cyber Tracker facilitator, and organised as part of building a local circular economy and connecting more people to the practicalities and experience of rewilding.  

Episode Website Link

Show Links:

• How the return of the Bison will transform Europe (by Mossy Earth)
• Cyber Tracker 
• The Art of Tracking resources
• We Wilder Romania 
• Toni Romani: Research Gate & CyberTracker Italy
• Movebank technology approach to animal tracking (Max Planck institute)

Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd

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Carl Safina is an ecologist, author, conservationist, and animal translator whose body of work probes how free-living animals experience life. His books Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel and Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace have won numerous awards. Audubon named Carl Safina among its “100 Notable Conservationists of the 20th Century.” 

Carl uncovers the rich truth that many species and animals have entire cultures, traditions, familial stories, and individual quests, that all are part of this symbiotic tapestry of tales that we call “nature”. He travels alongside the sweeping wingspans of albatrosses, the elephants of East Africa, the wolves of Yellowstone, the Orcas of the Pacific Northwest, sperm whales, seals, turtles, deciphering the role of matriarchs and elders, describing how individual personalities affect all kinds of behaviors, and how these creatures too experience mourning, loss, and grief. 

Here we speak about all these interlocking animal worlds and lives, their highly evolved and complex cultural systems, how the world is awash in waves of communication, the imperfect evolutionary work in progress known as human empathy, and how knowledge of their existence should drastically influence strategies of conservation and regeneration. We end on a profound note speaking to the role of beauty across species and minds.

(Tip: Listen to the end of this episode, the closing is particularly special...)

“Culture is Life itself adjusting and responding and expressing to the corner of this galaxy in which it finds itself” - Carl Safina

Episode Website Link.

Show Links:

• Carl Safina Website with links to books, articles, podcasts
• The Safina Center Non Profit
• Zebra Fish and empathy/oxytocin response
• The Mind of a Bee book
• Guardian: Australian Songbird forgetting love songs

Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Photo Credit: Whales, Clark Miller 

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd

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My 2023 Reflections and Resolutions from Season One!

I created this podcast to explore how people can learn to inhabit the world from multiple perspectives, with the ultimate goal of being able to feel the Earth’s body as our own body. 

In this episode, I start the year and tie the bow on the closing of Season One, by looking back over our twenty or so conversations and harvesting the rich learnings and patterns that emerged across the show. There are three consistent topics I unearthed:

• The challenge of how we integrate others into our models of the world
• That tending to the lifeworlds of the earth begins to heal ourselves
• A collection of insights from our guests on how to re-sensitise and re-animate ourselves to the aliveness of the world

It’s just me today with you in this episode, so lie back and I hope this harvest brings you inspiration and breadcrumbs to follow into the new year… 

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock, Ellie Kidd The Rising by Tryad CCPL

Photo Source: Imgur

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Ever since I watched Naima Penniman (from the duet Climbing Poetree) recount her poem in this bewitching video, I’ve returned time and time again to these words, to the simplicity, playfulness, and sheer beauty of her message.

For me this poem is medicine. It reminds me of all the silly and wondrous things we human get caught inside of, and then we can wonder, how do other beings on Earth live their experiences of doubt, fear, joys, sorrows… What can we learn from them? Does it really have to be all so complicated after all?

Read full poem here: https://www.lifeworld.earth/episodes-blog/poembeinghuman

(Photo source)

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Jon Young brings us into the ancient practice of nature connection mentoring. He describes how mentoring is a virtually extinct craft, and yet occupies critical importance in building the sensory awareness and neurology of young children. We delve into his rich tales of living among the San bushmen of Southern Africa, the role of wildlife tracking and bird language, insights on building ropes with the universe, and a turkey called Pete.

For over 40 years, Jon young has been a deep nature connection mentor, wildlife tracker, peacemaker, author, workshop leader, and storyteller. A pioneer in the Western field of nature-based education, he co-founded the Wilderness Awareness School in Washington and the 8 Shields Institute in California. Jon has authored the seminal books What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World (2013), and Coyote's Guide to Connecting to Nature (2007). In 2016, he received the Champion of Environmental Education Award for his life’s work and for fostering the growth of the nature connection movement on a global level.

Episode Website Link

Show Links

• Tom Browne Tracker School
• Fascinating biography of Jon’s life
• Jon’s website
• Coyote’s Guide to connecting with Nature
• What The Robin Knows: Bird Language, Revealing the Secrets of Nature
• Description of 8 Shields
• San bushmen
• Animas Valley Institute
• School of Lost Borders

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock, Ellie Kidd

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You may not yet know what a “vision quest” or a rite of passage is. But these traditions are as ancient as our bones. No matter whom your ancestors were, I would wager that if you travel the family branchings back far enough, you would discover that they too engaged in these ritual processes that tethered them into deeper connection with the earth’s forces.

Darren Silver is a rite of passage guide, nature-connected coach, ceremonialist, and educator. For two decades he has been working with ritual, wilderness living skills and guiding transformational experiences into land. A gifted storyteller and apprentice to the old myths, Darren weaves the power of the natural world, vision, and community in devotion to the remembrance of all that we are.

We ask:

Why does human culture need rites of passage and initiatory ceremonies?

What is the role of myth in society?

How does the Earth communicate to us, and how can we respond?

What is the role of courage in all this? How can we test our limits?

Episode Website Link

Show Links:

• Darren Silver
• Sibling Society by Robert Bly
• Arnold Van Gennup - Three Stages
• Myth of the Handless Maiden
• Tom Brown Tracker School
• Fox Walking
• Core Routine - Sit Spot
• Animas Valley Institute
• School of Lost Borders

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock, Ellie Kidd

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