Nathan Hagens is a former hedge fund manager who shifted his attention to the study of fossil energy depletion and founded the website The Oil Drum. In this episode Nate and Eric talk about the turn of events that shifted his career and attention away from the finance sector and to the study and social context of energy, people’s resistance to stories about reduced consumption, fossil fuel depletion and stocks versus flows, human beings as a superorganism, and adaptive cycles, among other things.

Trish Denton and Pamela Formica facilitated a workshop called Parallel Narratives that Eric participated in earlier this year. In this episode they talk about the roots of folk narratives among oppressed peoples, where the term Parallel Narrative came from, how storytelling helps us identify and engage with our inner critic, and the practice of storytelling as an art form and pedagogy, among other things.

Shaina Levee is a trauma-informed psychotherapist, educator, and community organizer. She is the creator of Birth Love Family, specializes in birth trauma and life transitions, and has been in private practice for over a decade. She and Eric talk about pre- and perinatal psychology, the impacts perinatal trauma can have on our psychological and even physical development, and the stigma associated with childbirth and how it impacts women’s expectations and experience, among other things.

Michelle Louise Bicking is Executive Director of Hidden Acres Farm, Inc., and is a licensed clinical social worker with over 20 years of direct service experience. She and Eric talk about what drew her to the practice of herbalism, how working the land can anchor people in their psychological healing, and how histories of migrant work or slavery can impact people’s relationship to farming and land-based work, among other things.

In this solo episode Eric reflects on the history of power elites deliberately dividing subjugated peoples into factions and pitting them against each other as a means of preserving their hold on power. He also talks about strategies that can guide social justice work towards more effectively bringing people together to subvert the divide and conquer strategy that has been used so effectively to divide people for so long.

Christian Dymond is a therapist and the founder of Nature centered Psychotherapy, a model which integrates multiple modalities of psychotherapy with an emphasis on nature, farm, and animal-based therapeutic experiences. In this episode, he and Eric talk about the challenges men face getting in touch with their empathy, giving ourselves permission to cry, finding power in vulnerability, being a non-violent parent, and how time in nature can help men relax into a reflective state of mind, among other things.

This episode is dedicated to Daniel Quinn, an author who passed away on February 17, 2018. In this solo episode Eric talks about some of the themes he found most inspiring in Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael trilogy, particularly Quinn's take on the Fall of Man as written in the Book of Genesis and how he discusses the impacts of colonialism and colonization. Eric reflects on how those same themes were explored in the recent Marvel blockbuster Black Panther as well.

Teresa Mares is a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Vermont. Her teaching and research focus on food systems, and she has written widely on the topics of food justice and food sovereignty, among others. In this episode she and Eric talk about different ways of framing access to food, the different values intrinsic in food, drawbacks in how the local and organic food movements frame food access, and the realm of deep food, among other things.

Leonore Tjia is a coach, educator and writer whose work focuses on sexuality, power and wholeness. An archer and poet, she lives in the hills of Berkeley, California. She and Eric talk about empathy, shame, the burdens we carry from our sexual socialization, and the difference between hunting as an act of empathic connection versus hunting as an act of conquest and achievement, among other things.

Aaron is an earth builder, an artist and an activist. He leads a mentoring program called Turn It Up Now! geared towards young people, and believes that practices that promote deep connection are among the most powerful tools one can use to dismantle racism. Aaron and I talk about his counseling programs and his workshops, the challenges that some white people face as they try to get closer to blackness, and the relationship between isolation, toxic masculinity and racism, among other things.