Lifeworlds

This episode is a live interview with Dr. Suzanne Simard at the MOTH Festival of Ideas in London. Suzanne is the forest ecologist whose researched popularised notions of the Wood Wide Web and the Mother Trees, and revealed the living networks that wire a forest together to share carbon, water and resources. We talk about the courage it took to call a tree "mother," the grizzly encounters and burned-down research plots behind the tidy data, and the findings from her Mother Tree Project and luminous new book, When the Forest Breathes - chief among them, that a forest, given half a chance and a few elders left standing, knows exactly how to breathe its way back to life.

Episode Website Link

Links:

• Suzanne’s main website
• The Mother Tree Project & Program
• Book: When the Forest Breathes
• Book: Finding the Mother Tree
• MOTH Festival of Ideas

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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[Republished with better quality audio] 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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What does it actually mean to translate a language that has never been written down or spoken in air, whose holders are ancient ocean denizens, and may not even carry concepts we'd recognize as our own? That's the question sitting at the center of this episode, and those answering it have formed one of the more radical partnerships in science today: Project CETI and MOTH. CETI is a collective of fifty-plus scientists attempting to listen to and translate the communication of sperm whales.

MOTH is a legal collective working to bring that science before courts, in the hope that whales might be granted something like legal standing and rights. In a barn in the English countryside, David Gruber and César Rodríguez-Garavito walk us through what it takes to listen this closely to another species, and whether this new convergence of human, animal, and machine intelligence could spark a watershed moment for conservation and consciousness.

What we'll cover:

• The sperm whale's anatomy of perception, acoustic vision, and what it's like to navigate a world of inky darkness through sound
• The deep evolutionary kinship between humans and whales, and what their convergent vowel-like sounds suggest about the origins of language
• How Project CETI uses machine learning to find phonetic structure and contextual meaning in whale codas
• The legal arguments emerging from this research, from the right not to suffer to the right to a cultural life
• A remarkable multi-whale birth event — and what it reveals about coordination, kinship, and social roles among whales
• The ethical guardrails (NACT) proposed for AI-assisted animal communication technology, and the risks of getting this wrong
• Whether this new convergence of human, animal, and machine intelligence could spark a watershed moment for conservation and consciousness 

Episode Website Link

Links:

• Project CETI
• More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program at NYU
• Nature: Description of a collaborative sperm whale birth and shifts in coda vocal styles during key events
• What if We Understood what Animals are Saying? The Legal Impact of AI-assisted Studies of Animal Communication.”
• He Whakaputanga Moana: The first Declaration recognizing whales as sentient beings with inherent rights
• From Orbit to Intimacy
• The Crimson: Are Whales Trying to Tell Us Something?
• Time: Researchers are Using AI to Understand what Animals are Saying
• Lifeworlds Episode: The Sounds of Life: Bioacoustics, A.I. and Ethics – with Karen Bakker
• Lewis Mumford: Tecnics and Civilisation
• From Orbit to Intimacy
• Listening to whales: input requested!!

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

Credits: Sperm Whale Sound (Project CETI)

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

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What if one of the most powerful tools for saving the Amazon rain-forest was a bee most people have never heard of?

Enter the stingless bee – a 65 million year old resident of Earth that produces honeys teeming with medicinal molecules and has co-evolved with indigenous Amazonian communities across millennia. Today, these bees are at the keystone species at the heart of a pioneering conservation movement spanning science, law, economics and Indigenous rights: one that recently secured the world's first legal recognition of the rights of an insect.

Dr. Rosa Vásquez Espinoza is the National Geographic Explorer and conservation scientist whose NGO Amazon Research Internacional is spearheading these initiatives. In this episode we explore the life world of the bees themselves, the pioneering science and bio-economies emerging around their extraordinary honey, the deep co-evolutionary bond between stingless bees and Amazonian communities, and how bridging indigenous and Western knowledge is proving essential for the forest, for the communities who steward the bees and the legal frameworks being built to protect them.

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

Links:

• Amazon Research International: Main Site
• Dr Rosa Vasquez Espinosa
• Book: The Spirit of the Rainforest
• Youtube: STINGLESS BEES AND THE BIODIVERSITY OF OUR AMAZON
• In Peru, a Mission to Save the Stingless Bee
• Nat Geo: Stingless bees make ‘miracle liquid.’
• Guardian: Stingless bees from the Amazon granted legal rights in world first
• 
  

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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What is life, and are we alone in the universe?

In this episode I sit down with Adam Frank, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Rochester, prolific science communicator, and author of five books including The Blind Spot and The Little Book of Aliens. Adam is one of the most compelling voices working at the intersection of astrobiology, philosophy, and the human future.

We journey from the stunning variety of exoplanets we're only beginning to map, to the deep questions on detecting life in space. Adam argues that the search for extraterrestrial life can't be separated from the question of what life means here on Earth. Astrobiology, it turns out, may be our most useful mirror for understanding our own civilisational moment.

We also get into the hard problem of consciousness, the blind spot at the heart of modern science, and how cosmology like art and myth - can be a gateway to awe. A conversation that leaves you more at home in the strangeness of the universe and probably less certain about what “alive” even means.

Episode Website Link

Links:

• Adam’s Website
• Adam’s Podcast: The Blind Spot
• Adam’s Instagram
• Noema Magazine: Why Science Hasn’t Solved Consciousness (Yet)
• The Atlantic: The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore
• 5 Sci FI Aliens article
• Beyond Center at ASU on astrobiology and SETI
• Sarah Walker’s Assembly Theory in the NYT: A Test for Life Versus Non-Life
• Nature paper on Assembly Theory
• Schrodinger: What is Life?
• Information Theory
• Book: Human Cosmos by Jo Marchant
• "Semantic information, autonomous agency and non-equilibrium statistical physics" by Artemy Kolchinsky and David Wolpert

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

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

Photo Credit: Hubble Space Telescope

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Consciousness is one of the great running threads beneath every episode of this show: a loaded term, tangled up with questions of sentience and intelligence, and carrying the most direct ethical implications for how we live on Earth.

This week I'm joined by Kensy Cooperrider, cognitive scientist and host of Many Minds podcast, circling the questions of what mind, intelligence, and experience might be beyond the human. Kensy has had hundreds of conversations with scientists working at the edges of what we know about minds, and also the most creative, concrete apertures into other lifeworlds: names, goosebumps, dreams, fire, taboos, medicine. We also discuss whether, if we're willing to stretch words like sentience across the animal kingdom, what happens when we begin to explore AI - the mineral, the silica, the metallic? Unanswerable questions, maybe, but what fun to explore.

Links:

• Episode website link
• Many Minds podcast
• Kensy’s personal website
• Many Minds with Michael Levin
• Book: Robert Bringhurst Tree of Meaning
• Many Minds: Mutualisms all the Way Down
• Diverse Intelligences Summer 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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today’s episode explores a simple but urgent question: is our education system still fit for the world we’re entering? Climate disruption, AI, and uncertainty demand new forms of education fit for complexity and change.

A rich lineage of alternative and experimental education has been evolving for decades, seeking to make learning more holistic, place-based, creative, and ecologically grounded. The focus of today’s conversation is one of those institutions: Black Mountains College in Wales. BMC is building a university model explicitly designed for a warming world, where nature is often the classroom and curriculum blends ecology and climate science with the arts, systems thinking, and community-rooted practice.

I’m joined by its co-founder and CEO, Ben Rawlence, award-winning writer and former human rights researcher, to explore:

• The historicity of Western educational systems
• What the role of a university should be in society
• Black Mountains College as model of the future of education 
• The role of ecological imagination
• Youth, eco anxiety and the challenges of parenting in today’s planetary moment

Episode Website

Links:

• Black Mountains College
• Think Like a Forest by Ben Rawlence
• Guardian: ‘We create changemakers’: the new UK college dedicated to climate crisis
• BMC and ecological imagination by Joseph Rowntree Foundation
• List of alternative schools and earth centered curriculum centers
• The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies of Ecological Revolution from Below
• Britt Wray on Climate Grief
• Future Council
• Re-imagining education conference

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

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This Lifeworlds episode is a devotional journey into the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, the lyrical German poet of thresholds and embracing transformations.

Through readings of his most luminous poems and writings, we explore how Rilke guides us deliciously in reconciling suffering and turmoil with tremendous beauty. It’s an offering for anyone standing in the in-between, for those moving through sublimation, and longing for those secret, dazzling encounters with primal life forces.

Rilke’s words are an invitation in. To move towards. His poems are prayers…. “to go out into our hearts as onto a vast plain, so that life can feel us as it reaches for us.”

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In this episode, we explore the role of theatre and empathy in transforming worldviews. Dr. Dylan McGarry is one of the founders of Empatheatre, a South African theatre-making company and methodology that turns research and storytelling into living social sculpture. Their plays create what they call amphitheatres for empathy - spaces where art, ritual, and dialogue help people listen across difference, from mining conflicts to ocean governance to human-wildlife coexistence.

Empatheatre’s productions have brought together communities, policymakers, and activists that rarely meet, showing how imagination can transform civic life. The process of creating the plays generates profound potentials for restorative justice. As Dylan says, empathy is not about agreement, but about creating a vessel strong enough to hold our differences while keeping us in relation.

We will cover:

• Empathy as a creative act
• Theatre and storytelling as Trojan horses that open conversations that traditional politics often can’t
• How to design spaces that allow lifeworlds to touch and the practices that help us shift into another’s perspective
• How empathy, when practiced collectively, becomes a form of governance: a new infrastructure for democracy and care

Episode website

Links:

• Share your input for the whale production
• Empatheatre
• Dylan’s PHD
• 5min Empatheatre doc
• Indlela Yokuphila: The Soul's Journey (ZULU) film & the radio play used in the court case
• Lalela Ulwandle Trailer
• Umkhosi Wenala doc about Zulu musical on indigenous traditions & animist relationships
• Steiner’s 12 senses
• MOTH
• Project CETI
• Karen Bakker
• Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals
• One Ocean Hub
• dylanmcgarry.org
• Instagram: @dylan_mcgarry

Photo Credit: Casey Pratt. It captures a significant moment in a collaborative theatre-making & storytelling project titled "Umkhosi Wenala"

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In this episode, I sit down with Bill Plotkin, founder of Animas Valley Institute. Over the past 40 years, Bill has developed intricate, nature-based models of human development and education that challenge dominant psychological frameworks and invite us into a maturation process rooted in wholeness, wildness, and the more-than-human world.

We explore their three major maps of a person’s “soul-centric journey” and cover topics including:

• Why most modern humans remain developmentally stuck in early adolescence
• The 8-stage Soulcentric Developmental Wheel and how it mirrors nature’s rhythms
• The four cardinal facets of the psyche, and the inner protectors that distort them
• Whether other species undergo their own versions of soul initiation
• Why the path to a mature culture will not come from the strategic mind, but from descent, mystery, and imagination
• This is a deep-dive into a body of work that’s revolutionizing the lives of thousands of people, and how to think about adulthood, education, and healthy human cultures.

Episode Website Link

Links:

• Animas Valley Institute
• Animas Valley Offerings
• Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche
• Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World
• Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche
• The Journey of Soul Initiation: A Field Guide for Visionaries, Evolutionaries, and Revolutionaries
• Parable of the Tribes

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

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

Photo Credit: Midjourney

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.