Thirty years ago, forest ecologist Suzanne Simard was a lone voice in the wilderness, arguing that commercial logging practices were destroying the symbiotic relationships between different tree species. She showed how mycorrhizal networks fused with tree roots to create complex systems of communication and cooperation. Today, Simard is a celebrated scientist. Her concept of “mother trees” helped inspire James Cameron’s blockbuster movie "Avatar," and she was a model for one character in Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Overstory.” In this interview, she reflects on her childhood growing up in a Canadian logging family, her pioneering insights about “forest intelligence,” and why she talks to trees.

Human identity cannot be separated from our nonhuman kin. From forest ecology to the human microbiome, emerging research suggests that being human is a complicated journey made possible only by the good graces of our many companions. In partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature and with support from the Kalliopeia Foundation, To The Best Of Our Knowledge is exploring this theme of "kinship" in a special radio series.

To learn more about the Kinship series, head to ttbook.org/kinship.

Original Air Date: April 01, 2022

Anthropologist Enrique Salmon formulated the concept of “kincentricity,” a worldview that sees everything around us — plants, animals, rocks, wind — as our direct relative. As Salmon says, “the rain is us, and we are the rain.” In his native Raramuri culture, culture and language are embedded in the mountain landscape of Chihauhau, Mexico. Salmon teaches a class called “American Indian Science,” in which he asks his students to incorporate their personal experiences into their observations about the world. He tells Steve Paulson that any theory of reality must account for lived experience, which pushes against the scientific paradigm that seeks an “objective” understanding of reality.

Human identity cannot be separated from our nonhuman kin. From forest ecology to the human microbiome, emerging research suggests that being human is a complicated journey made possible only by the good graces of our many companions. In partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature and with support from the Kalliopeia Foundation, To The Best Of Our Knowledge is exploring this theme of "kinship" in a special radio series.

To learn more about the Kinship series, head to ttbook.org/kinship.

Original Air Date: March 25, 2022

Guests:

Enrique Salmon

Further Reading:

CHN: "I Want the Earth to Know Me as a Friend"

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There are old folktales and legends of people who can become animals. Animals who can become people. And there’s a lesson for our own time in those shapeshifting stories — a recognition that the membrane between what's human and more-than-human is razor thin.

Human identity cannot be separated from our nonhuman kin. From forest ecology to the human microbiome, emerging research suggests that being human is a complicated journey made possible only by the good graces of our many companions. In partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature and with support from the Kalliopeia Foundation, To The Best Of Our Knowledge is exploring this theme of "kinship" in a special radio series.

To learn more about the Kinship series, head to ttbook.org/kinship.

Original Air Date: November 20, 2021

Guests:

Sharon Blackie — David Abram — Chris Gosden — Stephen Graham Jones

Interviews In This Hour:

Reclaiming the fierce women who are shapeshifters — How a man turned into a raven — Shapeshifters, shamans and the 'New Animism' — Horror author Stephen Graham Jones on what our monsters say about us

If you look at a mountain, you might see a skiing destination, a climbing challenge, or even a source of timber to be logged or ore to be mined. But there was a time when mountains were sacred. In some places, they still are. What changes when you think of a mountain not as a giant accumulation of natural resources, but as a living being?

Human identity cannot be separated from our nonhuman kin. From forest ecology to the human microbiome, emerging research suggests that being human is a complicated journey made possible only by the good graces of our many companions. In partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature and with support from the Kalliopeia Foundation, To The Best Of Our Knowledge is exploring this theme of "kinship" in a special radio series.

To learn more about the Kinship series, head to ttbook.org/kinship.

Original Air Date: July 24, 2021

Guests: 

John Hausdoerffer — Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk — David Hinton — Lisa Maria Madera

Interviews In This Hour: 

What Do You Owe The Mountains Around You? — 'These Are Live, Active Places': A Ute Activist Fights To Save The Bears Ears National Monument — A Poet Finds Life Lessons on Hunger Mountain — 'I Was Born To Volcanoes'

Over the past decade, plant scientists have quietly transformed the way we think of trees, forests and plants. They discovered that trees communicate through vast underground networks, that plants learn and remember. If plants are intelligent beings, how should we relate to them? Do they have a place in our moral universe? Should they have rights?

Human identity cannot be separated from our nonhuman kin. From forest ecology to the human microbiome, emerging research suggests that being human is a complicated journey made possible only by the good graces of our many companions. In partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature and with support from the Kalliopeia Foundation, To The Best Of Our Knowledge is exploring this theme of "kinship" in a special radio series.

To learn more about the Kinship series, head to ttbook.org/kinship.

Original Air Date: December 19, 2020

Guests:

Robin Wall Kimmerer — Matt Hall — Monica Gagliano — Brooke Hecht

Interviews In This Hour:

We've Forgotten How To Listen To Plants — We Share This World With Plants. What Do We Owe Them? — Guided by Plant Voices — The Botanical Medicine Cabinet

There's a certain a kind of visual encounter that can be life changing: A cross-species gaze. The experience of looking directly into the eyes of an animal in the wild, and seeing it look back. It happens more often than you’d think and it can be so profound, there’s a name for it: eye-to-eye epiphany. So what happens when someone with feathers or fur and claws looks back? How does it change people, and what can it teach us?

Human identity cannot be separated from our nonhuman kin. From forest ecology to the human microbiome, emerging research suggests that being human is a complicated journey made possible only by the good graces of our many companions. In partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature and with support from the Kalliopeia Foundation, To The Best Of Our Knowledge is exploring this theme of "kinship" in a special radio series.

To learn more about the Kinship series, head to ttbook.org/kinship.

Original Air Date: February 08, 2020

Guests: 

Gavin Van Horn — Jenny Kendler — Ivan Schwab — Jane Goodall — Alan Lightman

Interviews In This Hour: 

In The Eye Of The Osprey: A Physicist's Wild Epiphany — 100 Bird Eyes Are Watching You — The Look That Changed Primatology — Watching the Fierce Green Fire Die: Animal Gazes That Shaped Conservation Movements — The 600 Million Year History Of The Eye — 'We Are The Feast' — A Feminist Philosopher's Life-Changing Encounter With A Crocodile — How Do You Practice Kinship? A Brief Meditation — Sharing Eye-To-Eye Epiphanies With The Animal World 

Further Reading:

"The Disruptive Eye" by Gavin Van Horn—"6 a.m. on LaSalle Street" by Katherine Cummings—"Salmon Speak ~ Why Not Earth?" by Bron Taylor—"The Eyes of an Owl" by Greg Ripley—"From Bestiary" by Elise Paschen

When you think about your neighbors, your friends and family, do you consider the nonhuman relationships in your life? With the birds and trees, the rivers and hills around you?

This idea of "kinship" with our plant and animal neighbors — and the broader ecosystem around us — is the focus of "Kinship With The More Than Human World," an eight-part podcast and radio series produced by TTBOOK in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature and with support from the Kalliopeia Foundation.

In this series, leading scientists, philosophers and writers illuminate ways in which “personhood” transcends the human species and shows how kinship practices can deepen our care and respect for the more-than-human world.

You can learn more about the series at TTBOOK.org/kinship