Lauren Markham is a writer and reporter based in Northern California. Her book The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life was named a 2017 Critic's Pick by the New York Times, among other honors. She and Eric talk about what prompted her to write a book that focused on undocumented immigration, forces that push people out of their home countries, and why discourse on immigration has become so polarized here in the United States, among other things.

Katherine Elmer is a clinical herbalist at the Burlington Herb Clinic, founder of Spoonful Herbals, and educates people on the value of plant-based healing. In this episode Katherine and Eric talk about the idea of place-based healing, what role plants can play in that and particularly what role local plants can play in that, and we talk about deriving plant foods from our landscapes in a deeply connected way, among other things.

Dr. Brian Ricca is the superintendent of the Montpelier Public School System, in Montpelier, Vermont. He joins Eric to talk about Montpelier High School’s recent decision to fly a Black Lives Matter flag for the month of February to honor Black History Month. We talk about the history behind Montpelier High School’s decision to fly the flag, about seeing privilege and prejudice, and about moving forward in the face of criticism.

In this solo episode Eric talks about how the prejudices people harbor serve as the foundations of the discriminatory behavior that causes so much harm in our modern world. He explores how the atrophy of people’s capacity for empathy creates space for these prejudices to take root, and offers strategies to strengthen our empathic capacity so we can let go of our prejudices. He also talks about the broader evolutionary context in which empathy emerged as a vital survival skill for the human species.

Heather Retberg operates Quill’s End Farm with her husband in Penobscot, Maine, and advocates for local food sovereignty. Our conversation touches on what food sovereignty is, the relationship between food sovereignty and water sovereignty, how large corporations gain control of resources in rural areas of the United States, and some of the lessons Heather has learned in her years of food sovereignty activism, among other things.

Charlotte Biltekoff is faculty at the University of California at Davis, where her research strives to build bridges between scientific and cultural approaches to questions about food and health. She is the author of the book Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health, and her work is the subject of a short film called Imperfection Salad. She and Eric talk about the interplay between culture, politics and how we build our identities by moralizing our eating practices.

Tim DeChristopher is best known for disrupting a Bureau of Land Management oil and gas auction in December of 2008 where he outbid oil companies for parcels around Arches and Canyonlands National Parks in Utah with no intention of paying for the parcels. He and Eric talk about using civil disobedience as a tool in climate change activism, the need for activists to prioritize healing their personal trauma within their activist work, and the source of civil disobedience’s power, among other things.

Eleanor Hancock is the director of White Awake, a project that brings mindfulness and contemplative spiritual practice to white affinity work. She and Eric talk about how white privilege is a cheap buy off used to coax white American society to support the existing economic hierarchy, how a lack of empathy is implicated in colonialism and the spread of empire, and Eleanor’s upcoming online workshop Before We Were White, which explores these topics in greater detail.

Salvatore Gencarelle is the founder and director of the Helpers Mentoring Society. Sal and Eric talk about how he met his Lakota mentor Benjamin Godfrey Chipps and how their relationship changed over the years, the types of ceremonies he learned about, cultural appropriation, and the need for traditional ceremonial practices to fill the spiritual voids left by lack of strong connective relationships to other people and to the landscapes in which we live.

Darcy Ottey helped to found Youth Passageways, a diverse network of folks helping to regenerate healthy rites of passages into adulthood. She and Eric talk about rites of passage, the consequences to individuals and communities when folks don’t receive them, how a lack of transition skills contributes to suicide, and about an online workshop she’ll be co-facilitating at the end of January, in 2018, among other things.