Wild Talk

Green-Wood Cemetery, in the middle of Brooklyn, feels unexpectedly wild. The 478 acres are alive with big old trees, flowers, bees, fungus, birds, wild and feral animals. Yes, it's also full of dead people — the “permanent residents” of Green-Wood, as they refer to them, comprise a Who’s Who of 19th century New York: famous actresses and Civil War generals, industrialists, businessmen, developers. There's Boss Tweed, there's Samuel Morris, inventor of the Morse code. But a visit to Green-Wood makes it clear that this cemetery is for the living. It's not just a burial ground. It's a breeding ground. A place of birth and renewal and life and excitement.

Join Wild Talk producer Matt Dellinger as he strolls among the graves with Joseph Charap, Green-Wood’s Director of Horticulture, and Sara Evans, the Manager of Horticulture Operations and Projects. The interviews were recorded last Spring, in April 2021, as vaccinations were first made widely available, the first time it seemed possible to imagine the worst of the coronavirus pandemic was behind us. 

“I don't think it's hokey to think of the cemetery as a place where you can think about life. And I think that the whole point. It was conceived that way, to have these large living organisms be in a place in which the dead were buried, it's showing, like, not in a subtle way, the continuity of life.” -Joseph Charap, Director of Horticulture

Jainey Bavishi is the director of the New York City Mayor's Office of ​Climate Resiliency — overseeing more than $20 billion worth of investments to prepare New York City for the impacts of climate change. This includes bolstering the city’s coastline ​against coastal storms and high-tide flooding, preparing for intense rainstorms, and protecting New Yorkers against deadly heat waves. 

We met with Jainey the spring of 2021, well before the current hurricane season provided a dramatic demonstration for why these efforts are so critical to the city’s future. She brought us to the newly rebuilt boardwalk of Edgemere, an oceanfront community on the Rockaway peninsula, not far from JFK airport, in Queens. The Rockaways were hit hard by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and Edgemere, whose very name means “at the sea’s edge,” is among the communities still grappling with the hard choices, presented by changing weather and rising sea levels.

Jainey got her start working on equitable disaster recovery efforts after Hurricane Katrina, and went on to lead climate preparedness efforts for the Obama administration’s Climate Action Plan. In 2017, she joined the de Blasio Administration to lead a team of urban planners, architects, engineers, lawyers, and policy experts who to develop ​science-based programs and policies that address impacts of climate change.

From heatwaves to hurricanes, flooding to FEMA grants, our conversation ranged through the myriad ways our communities will need to think differently about how we build for an ever-changing future. Jainey’s insights humanized and made tangible the profound social justice and economic impacts of climate change, and the complexity in designing an equitable recovery plan. Jainey was recently nominated by President Biden to a top leadership position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), and is awaiting Senate confirmation.

The pandemic has created a tremendous amount of isolation and distance between people. While digital tools and ways of gathering have helped us stay somewhat connected, they lack the capacity to help us relax, have fun, build trust and rapport and get to know each other in our more full selves. 

Organizations are struggling to find ways to gather that feel safe and meet this moment which is leading us to a new normal. It can be important to gather, at least occasionally, in person and what better way to do that than safely outdoors in the container of nature and the wild. 

We are social animals. We crave belonging - to each other, to family, to tribe, to team, to community. So when we have moments of connectivity, especially after being in isolation for so long, it rings a bell deep within us.  

Join Wild Talk host Jay Erickson and some of his colleagues at Modus, a digital agency, as they paddle on the Hudson River to Bannerman Island and visit a castle with an explosive history. They are meeting in person for the first time since the pandemic, lock downs and working from home. We can hear the excitement to be together in person and to be setting sail on a new chapter and adventure together. 

“We've been missing dimension. Everything's been very flat not just because the screen is flat and people are flat -we all just got there like very one dimensional. A lot of the beauty and  the messiness and the connections that all happen that you don't realize they're happening. The ones you can feel but not see.” - Abi Stock 

Transcript & photos: https://www.wildtalkpodcast.com/episodes/episode-09-rivers-castles-kayaks

As the country continues to grapple with the impact of racism in our communities, we wanted to understand how an institution like healthcare - which prides itself on scientific objectivity - was coming to terms with the impact racism has on doctors and patients alike. We reached out to Dr. Omolara Uwemedimo, a leading voice in advocating for black women physicians, to talk about her experiences as a doctor, as a patient and as a community builder seeking to heal with more than just medicine. 

We sat with Dr. Uwemedimo on a canal separating her Long Island town of Baldwin, from neighboring Oceanside, New York. It was one of the first warm days of spring, and it seemed like everyone in the neighborhood was out with a leaf-blower or lawnmower, and every bird had a lot to say, especially the ducks and geese and laughing gulls that Omolara’s kids consider their pets. 

Luckily, Omolara is practiced at staying serene amidst chaos. She was a practicing pediatrician for many years in the United States as well as in several countries across Latin America, Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, while also teaching at Columbia University Medical Center, and founding the organizations Melanin and Medicine — to support black women doctors — and the Coalition To Advance Antiracism in Medicine.

She holds a bachelors degree in biomedical sciences from the City University of New York, she received her medical degree from New York University School of Medicine and completed her residency training in pediatrics at the Boston Medical Center / Children’s Hospital Boston. She completed a research fellowship in health services research while completing a master’s degree in population and family health at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

Chloe Cockburn is a lawyer, an activist, and an organizer. She currently leads strategy on criminal justice reform for Open Philanthropy, a research and grant-making foundation that identifies giving opportunities, makes grants, and publishes its findings publicly. Prior to joining Open Philanthropy, Chloe oversaw state policy reform efforts at the ACLU’s Campaign to End Mass Incarceration, and before that she worked with the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Sandy movements, which led her to better appreciate her role as a connector between funders and activists.

We spoke to Chloe last summer, when those connected worlds were in overdrive. Prison populations were among those hardest hit by the Coronavirus, and weeks of intense protests had followed the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police, sparking new awareness and focus on systemic racism and the need for criminal justice reform. Chloe took a break from her work and family to walk us through the woods near her home in the Catskills. Her dog Logan came along.

What can the wild world teach us about how to push through in tough times? And how can we use those lessons to help ourselves, and our kids, look towards a future none of us can yet define? In this episode, host Emily Kagan-Trenchard goes on a deeply personal journey to craft a new ritual for finding ways to keep going.

Starting from the Jewish tradition of eating apples dipped in honey, Emily explores the strange and beautiful ways that bees and apple orchards survive from generation to generation. Emily calls upon her family, co-host Jay Erickson, Field Maloney of West Country Cider and Josh Viertel of Harlem Valley Homestead to talk about the things that help all creatures get by. From snuggle puddles and booze to intergenerational trauma and legacy, we head into the dark places to help bring all of us some sweetness and light.

Dr. Sandeep Kapoor is a physician, a teacher, and healthcare innovator. As the Associate Vice President of Addiction Services for Northwell Health, he is on the frontlines of the fight against opioid addiction — at a time where substance use and abuse is on the rise. 

Dr. Kapoor has taken a different approach to this fight than many others — he’s starting with words. He trains clinicians on the power of language, how the terms we use around addiction can reinforce the shame and silence that keep people from seeking care, or can open up new conversations that destigmatize substance use. Dr. Kapoor and his team have helped clinicians broach the subject of substance use with over 1.5 million patients to date. This approach has proven so successful, Dr. Kapoor was recently awarded a major grant from the National Institute of Health to study gun violence prevention and establish and implement a first-of-its-kind protocol to universally screen among those at risk of firearm injury. 

We were also pretty excited to venture outside with Dr. Kapoor, because, in the stir craziness of Coronavirus, he and his family got a modest motorboat as a way of escaping the claustrophobia of quarantine. We got to spend the day on the water with Dr. Kapoor, traveling from Hempstead Harbor out into the Long Island sound, talking about how to approach public health issues from alcoholism to gun violence with more science, less fear, and a healthy dose of shared humanity. 

In this short episode, co-host Jay Erickson explores the value of embracing winter. He explores how winters can show up for us as individuals, organizations and social movements through three separate conversations in the wild with Josh Viertel, co-founder of Harlem Valley Homestead; Chloe Cockburn, lead for social justice at Open Philanthropy; and Zainab Salbi, renowned humanitarian and founder of Women for Women International.   

This winter, in the middle of the cultural winter we have been plunged into by the pandemic, how might we learn to slow down and cultivate the healing, repair and contemplation that winter can offer? How can we use this time to plan and see our lives and endeavors more clearly? What can be cleared to make space for the growth in the springtime? 

In her 2020 New York Times Bestseller, “Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat In Difficult Times,” author Katherine May points out:

“It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order. Doing those deeply unfashionable things — slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting — is a radical act now, but it is essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin. If you do, you’ll expose all those painful nerve endings and feel so raw that you’ll need to take care of yourself for a while. If you don’t, then that skin will harden around you.”

So grab a cup of your favorite hot drink and join us for a little meander into what it means to winter well.  

Humanitarian, activist, writer and TV host Zainab Salbi has become a leading voice for women’s rights. A survivor of struggles both geopolitical and personal, Zainab has taken her hard-won insights about conflict and healing, and used that empathy to organize and inspire. Along the way, she’s developed a deep connection to the natural world, where she finds rich metaphors that inform her work.  

Zainab grew up in Iraq, in the shadow of Saddam Hussein’s regime, before fleeing to the United States at the age of 19. In 1993, she founded Women for Women, a global humanitarian effort that has helped half a million women affected by conflict.

Her awards and accolades include inclusion in Foreign Policy Magazine's “100 Leading Global Thinkers” and People Magazine's “25 Women Changing The World.” She is the author of several books, including her most recent, Freedom Is An Inside Job: Owning Our Darkness and Our Light to Heal Ourselves and the World. 

We met Zainab for a crisp, socially-distanced, leaf-crunching walk at a nature preserve in Pawling, New York, 75 miles north of New York City. It was November, 2020, just days after the Presidential election, and though the votes were still being counted, it was already clear that America remained divided.

Impressed by her experience working with survivors of global conflicts, we wanted to ask Zainab about what comes next. In the wake of #metoo and #blacklivesmatter, and as we confront the growing threat of violent extremism in the US… Now what?  How can societies and souls overcome our greatest failings?

Magic is sometimes said to be the only honest profession - the magician promises to deceive you, and then they do. But we love these slights of hand and fantastic illusions, even when we know we’re being fooled, because there is a joy in having our minds set off balance. They shake up our expectations of the way the world works and think differently about what’s possible. In this episode, Emily Kagan-Trenchard pulls apart a magic trick to show us how it’s done.