We have a soft spot for food systems that challenge the modern convention: food systems like forest gardens or sea gardens that don’t at all look like vast rows of monocultures, but instead blend into the landscape — to the point of being invisible… at least until you’ve learned how to see them.

It just so happens that, not far from us (in the Cowichan Estuary), there’s another kind of ancient food system being revived, and we were looking forward to visiting it as part of our upcoming season 7. But when one of the all time greatest shows on Canadian radio beat us to the scoop, we thought we may as well save ourselves the effort and bring you the story that much sooner.

From Ideas and producer Pauline Holdsworth, this is “What the River Wants to Be”

This is just Part 1 of a 2-part series. Listen to Part 2 (or find CBC Ideas wherever you get podcasts)

Spring is here, and (not to brag, but) around these parts, the smell of flowers is in the air, and everything seems to be buzzing with life. Times like these, it’s hard not to have plants on the brain, and we fully endorse you getting out to meet your green neighbours. While you do that, we thought you’d like to hear from two of our favourite plant enthusiasts: Chelsey Armstrong and Leigh Joseph.

You might remember Chelsey from our season 4 classic: FOREST / GARDEN, where we explored the roots of permaculture through the lens of Indigenous food systems which have been overlooked all too often. Today, Chelsey is sitting down with Leigh Joseph: Skwxwú7mesh ethnobotanist, author, and botanical entrepreneur.

Both Leigh and Chelsey do incredible work, in academia and in community. Their conversation today will take us into some of the thornier parts of the field (and deliver us to fruitful gifts).

Enjoy!

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This podcast is supported by our incredible community.

Join our Patreon (PWYC) for early episode releases, a back catalogue of bonus content, discord chatroom access (including our book club), stickers, patches, toques, and more!

So you want to put good fire on the ground, but how?? We're taking you to Yurok territory (at the mouth of the Klamath River) to join the Cultural Fire Management Council for 3 days of burning — not just for fuel management, but for all sorts of cultural and ecological values: food, wildlife, materials, and more. We're finally moving from theory to practice, as we learn what it really means to be on the fire line.

This is our 6th return to the subject of fire. Call us obsessed, but we can't think of a better symbol for what this podcast is all about: demonstrating how people can (and need to) be active stewards of their ecologies, rather than passive victims of collapse. In fire-evolved ecosystems all over the world, prescribed fire has been an ecological management tool since time immemorial.

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🔥 Learn more about the CFMC at culturalfire.org

📸 Find photos, citations, and a transcript of this episode at futureecologies.net

🌱 Support this indie podcast, made with love for the world. Join our community on Patreon for as little as $1 each month to get

• Exclusive early access to new episodes
• Access to our discord (and bookclub)
• A back catalogue of bonus content
• Stickers, patches, hats (and a 50% discount on all merch at any membership level), and
• Your name listed at futureecologies.net/join — forever

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This episode features the voices of (just some of) the CFMC crew. In order of appearance: Elizabeth Azzuz, Dylan Stevens, Rick O’Rourke, Margo Robbins, Robert McConnell, Annelia Norris, Isabel Guerra, Amanaka Yancey, Jordan Spannaus, Claire Brown, Max Brotman, and Will Bruce.

Plus music by C. Diab, Thumbug, Adrian Avandaño, G̱a̱mksimoon, and Sunfish Moon Light

With special thanks to the Confluence Lab's inaugural Artists-in-Fire Residency (Sasha White especially). Thanks as well to Fern Purdy, and Anita & Micah Williams. If you're interested in another version of this story, Adam wrote a blog post for the Confluence Lab about his experiences at the CFMC.

Cover art by Ale Silva

Catch up on all our other episodes On Fire:

• FE1.5 - Camas, Cores, and Spores
• FE1.6 - Combustible Communities
• FE2.2 - In the Wobble
• FE5.4 - Under Water
• FE5.5 - Walking on Two Legs

Plus three related episodes:

• FE4.7 - Phase Change
• Earthkin's Trial by Fire
• Disintegration Loops (by The Wind)

😅 We accidentally released an unfinished draft of our upcoming episode!

If you auto-downloaded it, please don't listen to it (or don't be surprised that it's undercooked).

It's going be a great one, and we want you to hear it when it's done — which will be very soon.

Summary Pending

Eric Higgs (of FE3.1, FE3.2, FE3.3, and FE4.9) sits down with Laura Govers, who has been working on bringing eel grass back to the Netherlands' Wadden Sea — on an island that moves, no less!

This conversation covers the low-tech solutions that they concocted to plant hectares of eel grass, the social invisibility of the marine domain, and the semantics of "restoration" in a rapidly changing world.

Catch some videos of Laura's team over at the Zeegrasherstel NL YouTube channel. And don’t miss our own visit to Oostvaardersplassen, in FE4.3 “A Tiny Wilderness”

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🪼💖 Everything we do is brought to you ad-free by our wonderful supporting listeners.

Join us on Patreon to get Hyphaedelity and all Future Ecologies episodes early, as well as exclusive bonus content, discord server access (where you can also find our book club), stickers, patches, cozy hats, and more.

Bogs are our absolute favourite places to be. They’re not only tremendously important ecosystems, rich in exquisite biodiversity and massive stores of carbon, they’re also uniquely beautiful. These serene, colourful spaces jumble land and water into something at once both alien and familiar.

In this episode, we explore the wonders and the mysteries of peatlands, through the story of one very special (and threatened) bog just outside of the city of Vancouver. We meet the scientists who fought for its protection, and some of the folks who are studying it and working on restoring it to this day.

Plus, we answer a tricky question: should we still be extracting peat to help grow plants?

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Visit futureecologies.net/listen/fe-6-8-for-peats-sake for photos from some of our boggy adventures, full credits, citations, and a transcript of this episode

🪼💖 This episode is sponsored by our amazing community of supporting listeners. If you appreciate it, you can become one yourself! Get the scoop at futureecologies.net/support

Mendel has another show to share with you: Waterbodies

It's a video podcast dedicated to a particular body of water we have here in Vancouver, called False Creek, but more generally it’s about how we can transform our urban spaces into thriving, biodiverse, celebrations of living nature — for everyone’s benefit.

If you live in a city on a coast, and you dream of swimming in clean waters, tidepooling along the shore, and seeing all kinds of sea life, right next to downtown, this show is for you.

So far on Waterbodies, we’ve discussed the interplay of environmental and human health, frameworks for Indigenous protected and conserved areas, environmental rights and personhood, marine biodiversity and citizen science, and urban planning in the face of rising sea levels, and there’s lots more to come.

Find Waterbodies on the False Creek Friends YouTube channel and wherever you get podcasts

PS. This is more than a podcast. It's a project in civic reimagination. If you'd like to get involved with grassroots environmental democracy, and take part in shaping the future of Vancouver, we'd love to have your help. Visit falsecreekfriends.org to learn more and get involved.

We had the opportunity to hang out with two of our favourite podcasters: Amy Martin of Threshold, and Amy Westervelt of Drilled.

We've previously featured both of their work on the Future Ecologies feed, and we couldn't pass up the chance to talk shop about the latest (fantastic) seasons of their respective shows, and get to know more about their personal journey. That's this episode: Part 1

In the supporter-exclusive Part 2, we get into more of a roundtable on the practice of environmental journalism and podcasting in these especially scary and chaotic times. For the two of us, unschooled and unqualified in anything resembling journalism, it was a blast to have the privilege of what ended up being a private consulting session with two of our heroes. Interested? You can find it on our Patreon

What do you call it when a population of podcasts mysteriously drop episodes on the same topic at the same time? It's Critical Mast!

We're so proud to present this nutty experiment in community podcasting, with its roots going back to the very beginning of our show (and the beginning of our dedication to silly puns).

Thanks to help from our pals at Jumpstart Nature, Golden State Naturalist, Learning from Nature: The Biomimicry Podcast, Nature’s Archive, and Outside/In, it's time for a bumper crop of podcasts about (or inspired by) the perplexing phenomenon known as masting: where plants somehow synchronize their seed production across staggering distances.

Give all these pods all a follow, & check out this Spotify playlist (to which episodes will be added as they drop).

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🌱 💖 Thanks to all our supporters for making this show possible (and keeping it ad-free and independent)

Join our community for as little as $1/month for access to early episode releases, a bonus podcast feed, merch, our discord server, book club, and more!