Internet of Nature Podcast

Lucy Jones is a journalist and the author of Losing Eden — an investigation into what nature does for the human psyche, written from inside her own recovery from depression — and Matrescence, a memoir-meets-neuroscience of the developmental transition into motherhood. The word was coined in the 1970s by anthropologist Dana Raphael and brought back into circulation in 2017 by reproductive psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks. Most cultures across human history have marked this transition with rites and rituals. Contemporary Western societies, broadly, do not.

In this episode, Lucy and I talk about why the word matters, and why the built environment is a maternal mental health issue — narrow pavements, dominant cars, playgrounds without benches, libraries closing under austerity. Why Bogotá's manzanas del cuidado (care blocks) might be the most underrated urban infrastructure in the world. Why nearby nature — the cemetery five minutes from the door, the pocket forest at the bottom of the walk-up — is not a consolation prize but the entire point. How a community bioblitz, iNaturalist, and the City Nature Challenge can give a beloved patch of land enough teeth to survive a planning meeting. And the question I have been quietly reorganising my whole intellectual life around: what if we stopped asking how nature heals us, and started asking how to design communities that don't require us to heal constantly?

Find Lucy at lucyfjones.com. Matrescence and Losing Eden are available wherever you buy books.

At ten, Gil Penalosa tried to convince his parents to let him quit school and turn pro. He was ranked second in tennis in Colombia. The catch: 99% of tennis in Colombia was played in private clubs — and Gil's family wasn't a member of any. He played on a public park court across from his house, and routinely beat the wealthy kids on their own courts.

You can see the rest of the life unfolding from there. Former Parks Commissioner of Bogotá, where he helped build more than 1,000 new parks and grew the Cyclovía program from 17 km to 130 km — now adopted in 350+ cities worldwide. Founder of 8 80 Cities. Two-term chair of World Urban Parks. Runner-up in the 2022 Toronto mayoral race after entering 100 days out and pulling 100,000 votes against an entrenched political establishment.

In this episode — recorded in person at the Toronto Botanical Gardens during the Urban Ravine Summit, where I'd just delivered the opening keynote — Gil and I dig into what cities already know how to do, and the courage most are missing to actually do it. We talk about why public engagement is broken in most cities, and what real listening looks like (hint: it involves pizza, juice, and a school at 3 p.m.). Why tree canopy averages mask brutal equity gaps — and the unprecedented redistribution Gil would push for if he were mayor. Why walking is the most underrated urban idea on Earth, and why "becoming a bicycle city" is the most overrated. And why elections, more than any master plan, are what actually change cities.

We also talk about the dying Cyclovía he inherited as commissioner and grew tenfold; Janette Sadik-Khan's pedestrianization of Times Square; Anne Hidalgo's car-free schoolyards in Paris (350 and counting); the Texas border towns where every public school is locked at 4 p.m. while one in three children doesn't have a park within walking distance; what Tirana, Malmö, and Rotterdam are doing that more famous cities aren't; and the simple thing Gil does mid-run when his heart rate hits 145 — which I have since tried, and which works.

Plus the line I haven't been able to stop replaying since we sat down: "Engagement shouldn't be tokenism. It should be real listening."

Find Gil at gpenalosa.ca and 880cities.org. Sign up for his free Cities for Everyone webinar series — every other Tuesday at 11 a.m. ET.

Fewer than 23% of Flemish children between 8 and 17 can identify a blackbird. Less than 5% can name a peacock butterfly. The mole scores highest — not because of nature education, but because it's a beloved character in children's stories.

Nature isn't just disappearing from our landscapes. It's disappearing from our minds.

In this episode, I sit down with Prof. Hans Van Dyck, behavioral ecologist at UCLouvain and head of the Behavioural Ecology and Conservation group, to talk about what happens to a species — and a society — when children grow up without meaningful contact with the living world.

We get into the winners and losers of human-altered landscapes, and where Homo sapiens really sits on that spectrum. We talk about niche construction and its hidden cost — how we built a world for ourselves, and what we quietly subtracted in the process. Hans walks me through Robert Pyle's devastating 1978 concept of the "extinction of experience," and why disconnection compounds across generations. We get into shifting baselines — why each generation inherits a smaller idea of what "normal" nature looks like, without knowing it. And we talk about the move from nature blindness to biophobia: the teacher who brought tissues for children to clean their hands after touching plants, the teenagers who fled a butterfly on a café terrace, the children in hazmat suits at a tree-planting (a story Adrian Wong from SUGi first told me in S6E7).

Hans also makes a compelling case for school yards as one of the highest-leverage interventions available to us — for biodiversity, for reduced bullying, and as an equalizer for children whose families can't drive to the countryside on weekends. And he reminds us that you don't need to know the name of a single species to do this work. Curious children are already doing it for us.

Hans's December 2025 op-ed in De Standaard — "Children can no longer tell a blackbird from a sparrow" — is a wonderful companion to this conversation. He's also the author of Het orakel van de bosnimf. Van vlinders en mensen (Lannoo), and his scientific work is available on Google Scholar and ResearchGate.

Ya-Ting Liu became New York City's first-ever Chief Public Realm Officer in 2023 — a role created from scratch to focus City Hall's attention on the parks, plazas, streets, and sidewalks that make a dense city livable.

Recorded inside NYC City Hall in November 2025, just after Zohran Mamdani's election as New York's next mayor but before his inauguration, this conversation traces how the job came to exist, why the Fifth Avenue redesign won't break ground until 2028 ("utility spaghetti" is the answer), and how 26 blocks of Jackson Heights became Paseo Park — one of the most ambitious community-led open streets anywhere in the world.

We also talk about finding the "public realm Avengers" inside government, why "1% for Parks" isn't a rallying cry most New Yorkers can picture, and Ya-Ting's three favorite public spaces in the city (spoiler: one is under the Brooklyn Bridge).

Since this recording, Ya-Ting has joined NYU Tandon as Chief of Staff and Director of Strategy in the Office of the Dean.

What does a nine-month Amazon expedition have to do with a public school playground in São Paulo? More than you'd think.

This week, Nadina speaks with Laís Fleury — original story architect behind the Netflix documentary The Beginning of Life 2: Outside and children-and-nature lead at the Alana Foundation — about why urban children may be the planet’s most underestimated conservation strategy.

They cover: nature deficit in megacities, why Rio schools aren’t using the national park in their backyard, how one teacher with no extra budget built a natural playground that became municipal policy, and the single most clarifying argument for why this work matters — for children and for the planet.

No national park required.

There's a statistic I keep coming back to: the average child can name more than 1,000 corporate logos, but fewer than 10 native plant species in their own neighborhood. Christina Delfico has been fighting that number for 13 years — one toddler, one oak tree, one planting day at a time.

In this episode, I talk with Christina — Emmy-nominated TV producer turned urban greening practitioner, and founder of I Dig to Learn on Roosevelt Island — about what actually happened when 400 New Yorkers gathered to plant New York State's first-ever Miyawaki method pocket forest. We get into the wood wide web, why a 20-year career at Sesame Workshop turned out to be perfect training for ecosystem restoration, and what Christina did not expect when she handed 1,500 baby trees to 400 strangers on a Sunday in April.

We also talk about the woman who came back every week to water the specific tree she and her son had planted. About beach plums, the Lenape Center, and what Henry Hudson's journals tell us about what Manhattan used to look like. And about why a pocket forest might be the best gateway drug urban forestry has ever had.

Visit the Manhattan Healing Forest at South Point Park on Roosevelt Island — public, free, and on Google Maps. Learn more about the forest at sugiproject.com. Find Christina and iDig2Learn on Instagram at @idig2learn.

A free-range chicken has more space than a child on a Dutch school playground. Ian Mostert has spent 12 years doing something about that.

In this episode, I talk with Ian Mostert — youth health worker turned urban greening practitioner, and Project Manager for Child and Nature at IVN Nature Education — about what actually changes when you transform a paved, fenced schoolyard into a green community space. We get into why the hardest part of greening a schoolyard has nothing to do with plants, why he starts every stakeholder conversation with childhood memories instead of data, and what happens to bullying, concentration, and teacher burnout when children finally get the outdoor environment they're built for.

We also talk about the boy who couldn't function inside a classroom but lay on his stomach for half an hour watching ants — and became calm. About the teenagers who had been dealing drugs on a schoolyard and agreed to clean it up every morning because someone finally included them in the community. About why Ian insists every greened schoolyard must be open to the neighborhood 365 days a year, and why that single condition transforms a school amenity into a third space that struggling families desperately need.

The conversation ends where I think the whole urban greening movement needs to go: the bureaucratic silo problem that makes holistic investment nearly impossible, why storytelling will get us further than data ever has, and Ian's dream of one million green schoolyards worldwide.

Find Ian and IVN Nature Education at ivn.nl.

Just because someone lives in an apartment doesn't mean they don't want to go outside and be in nature.

In this episode, I sit down with Lauren Zullo, Managing Director of Impact at Jonathan Rose Companies, at their Midtown Manhattan headquarters to talk about what happens when you design affordable housing around health — and how nature fits into that equation. Lauren's work sits at the intersection of housing, sustainability, and the social determinants of health, and she makes the case that housing touches every single one of them: air quality, food access, social connection, financial stress, and the immediate environment in which people live.

We talk about how Jonathan Rose Companies brings nature into 19,000 units of affordable housing across the US — from trees for shade in the Bronx to green roofs that make rooftop solar more efficient in DC — and why the business case for green space isn't about ecosystem services but about building places people actually want to stay. Lauren also shares the story behind Sendero Verde in East Harlem, one of the largest affordable Passive House buildings in the world, where the courtyard follows a Lenape walking trail and the plantings were chosen based on the indigenous species that once grew on the site.

Find Lauren Zullo and Jonathan Rose Companies at rosecompanies.com.

There's a reason people write poetry about trees and not speed bumps.

In this episode, I talk with Dr. Geoffrey Donovan — forest economist, 23-year USDA Forest Service researcher, and founder of Ash and Elm Consulting — about why the health benefits of urban trees dwarf every other benefit we talk about, and why most people still don't believe it. We get into the emerald ash borer study that produced the headline "when trees die, people die," the Portland research showing the inverse — tree planting linked to decreased cardiovascular mortality — and why the strongest evidence sits at both ends of life: babies born heavier when mothers live near tree canopy, and people living longer in greener neighborhoods.

We also talk about biodiversity and immune development, including Geof's studies linking genus-level plant diversity to lower rates of childhood asthma and leukemia, why peak exposure to grayness may be a risk factor for ADHD, and what a pregnant woman can actually do with all of this research. The conversation ends where I think the field needs to go: science-based storytelling, why Geof reads Seamus Heaney to audiences after the graphs, and why trees don't make cities more livable — they make them survivable.

Find Geof and Ash and Elm Consulting at ashelmconsulting.com.

Most people walk through their city every day and never notice the nature around them.

In this episode — the Season 7 premiere — I talk with Nuno Curado, founder of Wild Eindhoven, from a bench along the river Dommel in the center of Eindhoven. We walked from the High Tech Campus into the city along the river, barely touching a road, talking about beavers, birdsong, mushrooms, and what happens when people start paying attention to the wildlife that's been around them all along.

We discuss how Nuno, a newcomer from Portugal, turned his own process of discovering Eindhoven's nature into guided walks that help residents connect with the living city beneath the asphalt. We talk about the beaver that appeared five meters from a walking group and why he calls it "a very marking moment," and why finding your first mushroom changes the way you see everything after it.

The conversation also explores Nuno's work at Trefpunt Groen Eindhoven, a 25-year-old organization that acts as the voice of nature in Eindhoven's urban development — and a model I think more cities need.

This episode will resonate with urban ecologists, nature educators, municipal planners, and anyone who's ever jogged through a park without once looking up.

Find Nuno on his website, Wild Eindhoven, and on LinkedIn.