By Kate Kavanaugh
4.9
142142 ratings
The podcast currently has 95 episodes available.
In this episode, I sit down with Katy Bowman. First, a long on-ramp to the episode where I talk about where some of Katy’s work dovetails with explorations of how we move resources to our bodies (when we used to move our bodies to resources) that we’ve been exploring on the podcast. Katy and I then dive into the ecology of movement, movement diets, finding your movement why, and how you might consider stacking community into movement.
Find Katy Bowman:
My Perfect Movement Plan: The Move Your DNA All Day WorkbookMovement Matters: Essays on Movement Science, Movement Ecology, and the Nature of MovementInstagram: @nutritiousmovement
Website
Sponsored By:
REDMOND REAL SALT
SUNDRIES FARM GARLIC
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Instagram: @kate_kavanaugh
In this episode of the podcast I sit down with John Perlin, whose book A Forest Journey: The Role of Trees in the Fate of Civilization explores the history of, well, of us. As you’ll hear in this episode the history of humans is inextricably intertwined, or made possible, with the history of trees and of wood. Wood is our materia prima, the foundational material of both our ecology on earth and the civilizations we have built. We explore the cycles of humanity and their relationship with wood throughout the last million years, touching on the Stone Age (which is really the wood age), Rome and Greece, the American revolution, the Industrial revolution, containerization and the green revolution, and the present. John’s book offers us a mirror to see our activities and how the stories we tell ourselves are ones we’ve been telling ourselves over and over again.
Find John Perlin:
A Forest Journey: The Role of Trees in the Fate of Civilization
Let It Shine: The 6,000-Year Story of Solar Energy
Website
Sponsored By:
REDMOND REAL SALT
SUNDRIES FARM GARLIC
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Instagram: @kate_kavanaugh
In this episode, I sit down with anthropologist Alyshia Gálvez to talk about her book Eating NAFTA. The conversation is from two people who came to economic policy through unlikely means, but as Alyshia explains, economic policy in general, and NAFTA in particular - on its 30 year anniversary, has become a part of all of our bodies whether we’re aware of it or not. Alyshia’s work is incredible at connecting dots that aren’t often seen in economics - its about people, landscapes, and cultures and how they are affected by policy that favors corporations. We explore ideas of efficiency, and how the standard definition is anything but, of consumption, and the paradoxes that arise when looking at people, food, and policy. We look at corn as a material that drives our world through corn products and how landrace corn varietals have been lost to the people that first cultivated them. We also look at the health effects of policy, both here in the US, and in Mexico. Alyshia comes with a big message: if you, like us, feel like you’re a stranger to economic policy or that you can’t change it, perhaps you can and it matters now more than ever.
Find Alyshia Gálvez:
Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies and the Destruction of Mexico
Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers
X: @alyshiagalvez
Website
Sponsored By:
SUNDRIES FARM GARLIC
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Instagram: @kate_kavanaugh
In this week’s episode, I sit down with geologist Marcia Bjornerud to talk about her new book Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks and to explore how we can gain a sense of feeling embedded in the time and space of Earth, as earthlings. We explore the mentorship rocks have to offer us and putting the story of Earth as a dynamic planet front and center. We talk about how learning about process, not just end product, through the lens of geology, can give us a sense of empathy and story that mirrors our own inner experiences on Earth. It’s also about the paradoxical qualities of geology, the vetoing of the term ‘Anthropocene’ in the geologic community and why it matters, and what it means to look at the future through the lens of the past. This episode is about putting Earth in the foreground, not as a backdrop for our human endeavors, but as a living and active system. Marcia is excellent at being a translator for the Earth and her books and way of speaking both illuminate Earth in an intriguing and dynamic way.
Find Marcia Bjornerud:
Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks
Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World
Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of Earth
Geopedia: A Brief Compendium of Geologic Curiosities
Resources Mentioned:
In the Weeds Interview with Marcia (Part 1 and Part 2)
Sponsored By:
REDMOND REAL SALT
SUNDRIES FARM GARLIC
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Connect with Kate:
Instagram: @kate_kavanaugh
Rose George is the author of four fantastic books (Nine Pints, Ninety Percent of Everything, the Big Necessity, and a Life Removed) that share a common theme: much of her work is about seeing the unseen. It’s about those things that are ubiquitous and unnoticed, or more likely, obfuscated from us. In this episode, we focus on human waste, the shipping industry, and blood. Much of our conversation is about how we begin to see the waters we swim in, stop sanitizing our language to further obscure things, and use our awareness to create changes large and small. It’s about breaking down taboos and letting individual stories of tragedy and triumph bring us into issues that matter. It’s also a little bit about the shipping industry and how 90% of our goods get to us, how toilets can transform lives, and how period products can dramatically improve the lives of girls.
Find Rose George:
Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood
Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate
The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters
A Life Removed
Rose’s Subtack
On X
Resources Mentioned:
Surfer’s Against Sewage
Monterrey Bay Fish Guide
Sponsored By:
REDMOND REAL SALT
SUNDRIES FARM GARLIC
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Connect with Kate:
Instagram: @kate_kavanaugh
Mariele Ivy is an artist. Known for her work in making jewelry and in lapidary, she is also a ceramicist, a maker of talismans and sacraments. In this episode, Kate sits down with Mariele Ivy from Young In the Mountains to talk about what it means to be an artist and to work with things of the earth. We talk about Mariele’s dedication to her supply chain - to fair trade gold, American mined inlay stones, American mined sapphires, and recycled diamonds and we talk about how she extends that care to every aspect of her business. This episode is about earth’s processes and artistic processes both - about how we can make our inner feelings tangible. It’s also about what distraction, inspiration, and contentment mean in the creative process, about how working with your hands can change your mind, and about those things in us that are most ancient. Mariele is a delight and you’ll love her work and words both.
Sponsored By:
REDMOND REAL SALT
SUNDRIES FARM GARLIC
Find Mariele:
Young In the Mountains
Instagram: @younginthemountains
Resources Mentioned:
The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
Eat Like a Human by Dr. Bill Schindler
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Connect with Kate:
Instagram: @kate_kavanaugh
email: [email protected]
Steven Kurutz grew up in a town of 1500 people in the mountains of Pennsylvania. It was a formative rural experience. He set pins at a local bowling alley. He frequented the town library. It’s where he learned to love books, writing, and the characters of small town America - including the towns themselves. He puts all of that to practice in his new book ‘American Flannel: How a Band of Entrepreneurs are Bringing the Art and Business of Making Clothes Back Home'. Steven and Kate sit down to talk about the tension between urban and rural environments. To talk about how the last 50 years of economic policy has changed small towns, fashion, and what quality means. We talk about the clothing brands American Giant and Zkano socks and what they’re doing to bring manufacturing back to America while making beautiful and quality goods that are as economically accessible as possible and the grit and determination (and relationships) it takes to do just that.
Find Steven:
American Flannel: How A Band of Entrepreneurs are Bringing the Art and Business of Making Clothes Back Home by Steven Kurutz
X: @skurutz
NYT Work
Selected Other Pieces:
On Small Town Libraries
On Being a Pin Boy
Resources Mentioned:
American Giant
Zkano Socks
Sponsored By:
REDMOND REAL SALT
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In this episode, Kate sits down with author Ferris Jabr, whose book Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life comes out on June 25th. Ferris’ love of other animals and plants started at an early age and that fascination has grown into an incredible career as a journalist, exploring the perspective of ecosystems, animals, and the earth itself. Beginning with his garden in Portland, Kate and Ferris span out into the garden of earth itself and the way life creates the conditions for its own existence. From the young ages of the earth and the reciprocal processes between bacteria and our atmosphere, they explore some of the salient cycles that bend chronological time and minds alike. Plankton, and their jaw-dropping role in earth, become a vehicle for talking about how Saharan Africa fertilizes the Amazon which causes rain in the midwest. They discuss how throughout earth’s timescale, complexity grows and with it, the complexity of the relationships between life and environment and earth. They also explore the human animal’s role on earth and its cycles and what it might mean to tell ourselves a new story. An excellent episode to explore complexity, cooperation, mutuality, and beauty.
Sponsored By:
REDMOND REAL SALT
SUNDRIES FARM GARLIC
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Find Ferris:
Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life
X: @ferrisjabr
Instagram: @ferrisjabr
Ferris’ Articles
The Story of Storytelling
How Beauty is Making Scientists Rethink Evolution
Resources Mentioned:
An Immense World by Ed Yong
The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen
How to Be Animal by Melanie Challenger
Systems View of Life by Fritjof Capra
Connect with Kate:
Instagram: @kate_kavanaugh
email: [email protected]
In this episode, Kate sits down with author and co-host of the Gastropod Podcast, Nicola Twilley, to talk about her new book Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. Nicola has written an absolute page-turner exploring the massive and far-reaching impacts of refrigeration on just about every aspect of our lives, not since the dawn of agriculture has something changed our world so radically. In this episode, her and Kate explore the domestication of cold - which, very much unlike fire - is a recent phenomenon. The cold chain is new - not even 150 years old - and its impacts on our health and the environment, on biodiversity and flavor, are big. It’s a technology that can slow time, delay death, and shift our geography. It has led to the marketing of an apple by an astronaut, the reinvention of the tomato many times over, and so much more. We talk about biodiversity loss, death, and also how we might re-imagine the cold chain in light of the global cold rush. This is an episode not to be missed and a book you won’t be able to put down!
Sponsored By:
REDMOND REAL SALT
SUNDRIES FARM GARLIC
Support the Podcast:
Substack
Leave a one-time Tip
Find Nicola:
Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves (out June 25th)
Gastropod
Instagram: @nicolatwilley
X: @nicolatwilley
Connect with Kate:
email: [email protected]
In this episode of the Ground Work podcast, Kate sits down with author John Vaillant to begin to tease out some of the themes of his 4 incredible books, 3 works of non-fiction, and one work of fiction. At the recording, John had just been awarded as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World. John and Kate talk about what it means to consume, how we as human animals interact with our environments and resources, and about how we reconcile the cognitive dissonance we experience born into the Petrocene age. It’s about the multi-dimensional reckoning we’re in right now, as human and geologic time scales merge, and we are thrust into an acceleration of everything we know. A lot of this interview comes down to a sense of urgency many of us are feeling and this one fact: what happens next is not inevitable. John also shares some about his process as a writer and what it means to tell stories at this moment in time.
REDMOND REAL SALT
SUNDRIES FARM GARLIC
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Resources Mentioned:
Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins
Find John:
X: @JohnVaillant
Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World
The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed
The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival
The Jaguar’s Children: A Novel
Connect with Kate:
email: [email protected]
The podcast currently has 95 episodes available.
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