Reseed

From the wonder of watching tiny, wild critters to the grand, complex world of international environmental research, this conversation spans worlds. It navigates the often-separate disciplines of science and stories, threading them together. Guest Kai Chan and host Alice Irene Whittaker discuss our responsibilities on Earth, heroic action, the value of nature, the connection between culture and conservation, what it is really like to work on those massive international climate reports, and rewilding a beautiful planet. 

Kai Chan is a scientist, professor, and cofounder of CoSphere, a Community of Small-Planet Heroes. He is the Canada Research Chair in Rewilding and Social-Ecological Transformation at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia. He is an interdisciplinary, problem-oriented sustainability scientist, trained in ecology, policy, and ethics from Princeton and Stanford Universities. Kai led the pathways and solutions chapter of the recent ‘UN biodiversity report’ and has published over 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals. As an interdisciplinary sustainability scientist, Kai leads CHANS lab (Connecting Human and Natural Systems) and is a Lead Editor of the new British Ecological Society journal People and Nature. Kai strives to understand how social-ecological systems can be transformed to be both better and wilder.

Weaving threads between worlds, this episode of Reseed examines how the stories we tell can turn science into action, and takes a peek at the great lengths to which we will go for our one wild and wondrous home.  

Listen at reseed.ca. 

How do we balance joy with sorrow in the midst of ongoing crises? Seeking freedom is not frivolous but rather essential, so that we are able to care for ourselves as we protect wild places, and so we can be resilient in the face of environmental and social breakdown. This conversation explores the importance of strengthening our relationships to our ancestors, protecting the places where we live, and reconnecting with our own inner child in this search for joy.

Guest Danielle Daniel is an award-winning author and illustrator of settler and Indigenous ancestry, who has written two novels. Forever Birchwood is a middle grade novel set in her northern hometown of Sudbury, following Wolf, on the crest of adolescence, as she fights to protect a beloved forest. Danielle’s bestseller adult novel Daughters of the Deer is an historical fiction novel inspired by the lives of her ancestors— an Algonquin woman and a soldier/settler from France, and their first born daughter who was murdered by French settlers. Danielle joins Reseed to talk about her novels, and to delve into environmental protection, polarization, finding common ground, the power of stories, and reconnecting with joy. 

In the words of Mary Oliver, joy may be life’s “way of fighting back, that sometimes something happened better than all the riches or power in the world”. Joy and childhood wonder need not be an escape from everything we collectively face, but rather they can coexist with the sorrow, give life meaning, and support us in being the caretakers that we need to be. 

Listen at reseed.ca. 

We live as part of a wondrous planet, an intricate web of interconnections and relationships. We have been taught, though, to think not in wholes and connections, but rather to break everything into simple, easy-to-digest pieces. What is often lost is our knowledge that we are whole, and that we belong here. Fortunately, systems thinking helps us to see interconnections and complexities, and learn from whole systems, like a body, ecosystem, economy, community, or planet.  Drawing on this way of thinking, multisolving helps us solve complex problems by taking actions that result in many interconnected benefits. This conversation looks at systems thinking and multisolving - starting with a decades-long experience of cultivating an intentional community. 

Reseed guest Dr. Elizabeth Sawin brings decades of experience as a systems thinker who leans into complexity to help small seeds grow into big changes. She is a wise systems thinking expert, and she is leading the forefront of multisolving. as the Founder of the Multisolving Institute. A biologist with a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Beth co-founded Climate Interactive in 2010 and served as Co-Director from 2010 until 2021. While at Climate Interactive, she led the scientific team that offered the first assessment of the sufficiency of country pledges to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2008. 

Elizabeth helped create Cobb Hill, an intentional community of people who want to explore the challenge of living in ways that are materially sufficient and socially and ecologically responsible, with 23 households managing 270 acres in Vermont. She raised her family in this community that is now home to community-supported agriculture, beekeepers, and more, built on the three pillars of community, sustainability, and land and farm. Elizabeth digs into the experience of cultivating an intentional community in this conversation.

A systems view encourages us all to look beyond the false boundaries and lines that have been drawn, and calls on us instead to see how many parts interconnect as a whole. This is a conversation about changing how we see the Earth - and our place within her.

Listen at reseed.ca. 

There is a strange and haunting beauty to the discarded massive objects like ships, planes, cars, and phone booths that sit in waste graveyards around the planet. These relics of the past and symbols of our disposable culture are spotlighted in Scrap, a new documentary by filmmaker Stacey Tenenbaum, who tells the stories of the human beings who live with and have relationships with these objects at the end of their useful life. Scrap draws on poetic, cinematic storytelling to allow us to witness what happens to the mammoth waste that we create and discard, and delves into the lost arts of repair, reuse, and restoration that people are reclaiming.

Stacey Tenenbaum is an award-winning producer and director. In 2014 she founded H2L Productions, a boutique documentary film production company. Scrap, a love letter to the things we use in our daily lives, is her third feature documentary and premieres at Hot Docs in May 2022. Stacey is fascinated by things that are old, and she is nostalgic for a time when life was slower, and things were made by hand and built to last.

This conversation with Stacey and Reseed host Alice Irene Whittaker looks at Scrap as a window into not just the worlds of waste that exist around our planet, but also the evolving circular economy where we reduce what we use in the first place, and have a clear plan for everything we make and buy so that our world is waste-free and marked by a balanced relationship with nature and one other. Reuse, restoration, the right to repair movement, and the reevaluation of value are explored in this discussion, as is the vital role that storytelling and art play in the revolution to create a circular, just, and regenerative future. 

Read the transcript and show notes at reseed.ca. Follow @aliceirenewhittaker on Instagram for a chance to win a pair of tickets to the premiere of Scrap at Hot Docs.

Growing our own food and supporting local farmers has multiple, interconnected benefits, and farms in the cities can play a powerful role in regional food systems. Soil is regenerated, human bodies and minds are nourished, emissions are reduced, local economies based on fair labour are supported, beauty flourishes in city environments, and communities are strengthened. All of this is possible - and in places like Sundance Harvest, abundant dreams like this have already taken root. 

Guest Cheyenne Sundance is a self-taught farmer. She is the Farm Director of Sundance Harvest, an ecological farm in Toronto which she founded in 2019. This 1.5 acre farm in the city grows mushrooms, herbs, vegetables and fruit, and is centered on fair labour, soil health, knowledge sharing, and community building. Sundance Harvest is flourishing and focussing on scaling their model to provide more fair waged careers, especially for young Black and Indigenous people who would like to start a life in agriculture. Cheyenne runs a free urban agriculture program called Growing in the Margins, which nurtures and grows the farm projects of  BIPOC youth from seed to harvest. She sits on the executive board of the National Farmers Union, and she started the first BIPOC Farmers Caucus across Canada. 

To reroot is to root again, or in a new place in a better way. Cheyenne is showing how cultivating small-scale, sovereign farms like Sundance Harvest can root traditional ecological agricultural practices in a better way that is designed for new places, like our cities. In today’s conversation, we explore city farming, burnout, imperfection, soil, seeds, self-sufficiency, food sovereignty, and connected communities.

Listen at reseed.ca. 

What does wildness mean to us - and what should it mean? What can wildness mean when it is defined not by a few people, but rewritten for all of us?

This episode of Reseed revisits the history of conservation to explore its dark corners, going beyond nipping off the buds and leaves to dig at its roots, unearthing information about those who are credited with founding Western conservation. Deconstructing nice and lovely platitudes can unearth real truths, to first feel the despair of unlearning and then create a better way. A new conservation can be inclusive and accessible to all people while also protecting ecosystems and animals, like birds. 

Guest J. Drew Lanham is an ornithologist, wildlife ecologist, poet, professor, author, and lover of birds. He is the author of Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts and The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, which received the Reed Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Southern Book Prize, and was a finalist for the John Burroughs Medal. He has published essays and poetry in publications including Orion and Audubon, as well as in several anthologies. An Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University, he and his family live in the Upstate of South Carolina.

Poetry, birds, soil, conservation, and deep questions braid together in this thoughtful and lyrical conversation, which looks at how care for humans, nature, and animals are all connected and embedded into our humanity.  

Listen at reseed.ca. 

How do we courageously face our eco anxiety and grief, and find the resources we need to cope with the climate crisis? How do we cultivate the emotional resilience that we need to weather ecological crises? How do we take care of our own mental health, so we can take care of each other and our Earth?

Britt Wray joins Reseed for a conversation about climate change, emotions, and mental health. Britt is an acclaimed researcher, science communicator, author and TED speaker. Her Gen Dread newsletter, TED Talk with 2.4 million views, and writing in outlets like TIME and the New York Times all share wide-ranging ideas for supporting emotional health and psychological resilience in ecological crises. Her forthcoming second book Generation Dread merges scientific knowledge with emotional insight to show how these intense feelings are a healthy response to the troubled state of the world. 

Experiences of anxiety and grief can cause us to give up. They can interrupt our ability to cope with the breakdown of the natural world, and limit our ability to protect and save all that we can. Learning to feel, acknowledge, understand, and express our climate emotions will allow us to be more whole as human beings, and more able to be the stewards of this planet that we need to be. This conversation invites emotion into science, climate activism, and the halls of power. 

Embracing our climate emotions - in all of their messy, human complexity - can free us to move out of an anthropocentric frame, navigate the vast uncertainty of it all, and rediscover enchantment with the interconnected web of life that is our home. 

Listen at reseed.ca. 

The journey to consuming less and reclaiming our collective power is an imperfect, emotional, and challenging one. Consuming stuff is embedded into our identities and our culture. We are told that we deserve to buy things, and that ownership defines our worth. For the sake of our planet’s health and our own freedom, it is well worth the hard work of dismantling our addiction to stuff and asking ourselves questions about who we want to be. 

Aja Barber joins Reseed for a fascinating and frank conversation that delves into intersections between fashion, justice, and climate, wildest dreams for remaking the fashion ecosystem, and how to balance individual and collective action. She digs into her book Consumed - The Need for Collective Change: Colonialism, Climate Change, and Consumerism. Aja is a highly respected writer, stylist and consultant whose work deals with the intersections of sustainability and the fashion landscape. She writes for outlets like The Guardian and CNN, and for her thriving online community. Her work builds heavily on ideas behind privilege, wealth inequality, racism, feminism, colonialism and how to fix the fashion industry with all these things in mind.

Consuming less is not easy, and sometimes our stuff threatens to consume us. Our rites of passage, rituals, celebrations, hard times, boredom, and life changes are marked often by the accumulation of more things. Consumption is deeply intertwined with colonialism, is built on unjust labour conditions that keep people in poverty, and fuels climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution. Even when we know that, in the context of consumption being so wedded to our identities and society, buying less can be really frustrating, emotional, and - ultimately - it can be liberating. 

Expansive ideas and abundant dreams abound: rewriting environmental storytelling, rethinking climate activism, reorienting economic growth, climate reparations, rethinking conservation, resisting the co-opting of progressive movements, reclaiming green for the people, and repairing place-based relationships are all explored in this thought-provoking conversation. As we pass over that lovely threshold into spring - and as the Earth requires our creativity and dreams more than ever - we are presented with an ideal moment at which to plant the seeds for a more regenerative relationship with the Earth and with one another.

Guest Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host and producer of the Green Dreamer Podcast. With over 300 episodes, her podcast explores our paths to collective healing, biocultural revitalization, and true abundance and wellness for all. Her sustainability newsletter UPROOTED is rooted in deep ecology and is a decolonial thought-in-progress. She brings critical thought to her writing and her vibrant community of tens of thousands of people. With her guests and in her writing, Kamea delves with grace and courage into complex topics and encourages people to seed dreams of a regenerative world. 

Amidst the cacophony of doom and hopelessness, Kamea invites us to dream and imagine the possibilities, recalibrate how we measure abundance, and rejoice in the celebration of our renewed paths forward. Marking the bright beginning of spring, this is a conversation about thinking critically, planting seeds for regenerative futures, and dreaming of the green possibilities that could be tomorrow’s beautiful reality in each of our respective places on this wondrous planet. 

Learn more and listen at reseed.ca.

Parents have the formidable task of providing care for their own children while also caring for a planet in crisis - all while questioning how to raise the next generation to be caretakers. This episode of Reseed looks at the unique role that parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and other guardians can play, with specific actions that we can take as people who are raising children at an exhausting and intensive stage of life. We explore how to guide children to be active stewards and activists, without imposing too heavy an emotional burden that lessens their resilience or their ability to be active cultivators of a healthier planet. 

This conversation is not just for parents, but rather is for all of us who are contemplating what role we want to play as stewards and ancestors at this moment in time. This conversation is for people who want to explore how systems of care can dismantle the systems of dominance and extraction that have brought us to this convergence of climate change, war, and inequality. If we take a birds’ eye view of this era that is fraught with crisis and sorrow, how do we want to show up? What can we do with our own hands and hearts - with love, conviction, and courage - regardless of how everything turns out? 

Reseed is joined by Elizabeth Bechard, a climate activist, mother, and author of Parenting in a Changing Climate: Tools for Cultivating Resilience, Taking Action, and Practicing Hope in the Face of Climate Change. Elizabeth is a coach, former research coordinator, and graduate student in public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. After becoming a mother, she became passionate about the intersection between climate change and family resilience. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband and young twins.

At its heart, Remaking Parenthood for the Anthropocene is a deeply spiritual conversation. It examines awakening as a critical part of being a human right now, and how we all awaken to climate change in different ways. This episode looks at how environmental action is a spiritual calling for each of us, and how the Earth is rising up and speaking through us in our actions, in mysterious and wondrous ways. 

Learn more at reseed.ca.