Who do we have to become, in order to preserve the chance of a wild and beautiful world that includes humans?

Just a bit of stage-setting for how I came to this podcast, and what I hope to offer in it....

"We need to start to imagine what would it look like if we actually built a civilization that was designed from the outset to set the conditions for all people to flourish on a regenerated, living earth.”

Jeremy Lent is a former tech entrepreneur, and the author of The Patterning Instinct, which George Monbiot called "perhaps the most profound and far-reaching" book he'd ever read. Following that, Jeremy wrote The Web of Meaning, and he’s currently at work on the third book in the series, Future Flourishing: Towards an Ecological Civilization. Together, the three books do no less than describe how human civilization has found itself in its current state, and work to identify how we might extricate ourselves from that state and rebuild in a way that allows for the widespread flourishing of both the human and the natural worlds.

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If you enjoy these conversations, please make sure to subscribe, and leave a review if you can! I’m committed to making this free and ad-free, but will happily accept donations; if you can easily support it, please do, at glow.fm/awabw.

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Many thanks to Hank Lentfer for the use of his gorgeous nature sounds!

“We have an economic system that is very profitable for the winners, and they’re not that interested in the level of change that IPCC report after IPCC report is telling us we need: fundamental transformation of virtually every aspect of society….So how do we build the political power that wants that transformation?”

Naomi Klein needs no introduction. The author of This Changes Everything as well as No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, among other books, she’s a professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia, and one of the very few folks to whom I’d consider outsourcing my thinking. She has been a super-power for multiple movements, and has offered her sharp analysis, warmth, energy, and commitment in myriad ways to the fight for a humane and thriving planet.

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If you enjoy these conversations, please make sure to subscribe, and leave a review if you can! I’m committed to making this free and ad-free, but will happily accept donations; if you can easily support it, please do, at glow.fm/awabw.

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Many thanks to Hank Lentfer for the use of his gorgeous nature sounds!

“I do think it's very important to be connected to your place, even if those places change, you have to be a student of that place. So this is what we've tried to teach our kids, is that wherever you end up, that you become a steward of that place, you become a student of that place, and you look after that place because you are part of it. When you go into that new place, you are now part of it. The animals are going to know you, they’re going to be affected by what you do, the water is going to be affected by what you do, the air is going to be affected by what you do, so you need to understand your role in that ecological fabric and be a good citizen in that ecosystem. And that just goes for wherever you end up.”

Sonia Shah is an investigative journalist and the author of critically acclaimed and prize-winning books on science, human-animal relations, and international politics. Her 2020 book, The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, was selected as a best nonfiction book of 2020 by Publishers Weekly, and a best science and technology book by Library Journal. She also wrote Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years, and the prize-winning 2006 drug industry exposé, The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World’s Poorest Patients. Her work has been called “bracingly intelligent”, a “tour-de-force”, “brilliant”, “important”, and “powerful”. 

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If you enjoy these conversations, please make sure to subscribe, and leave a review if you can! I’m committed to making this free and ad-free, but will happily accept donations; if you can easily support it, please do, at glow.fm/awabw.

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Many thanks to Hank Lentfer for the use of his gorgeous nature sounds!

"Sometimes [kindness] means waking people up, and that's what movements do...when we build movements, one of the reasons we do it is to bring people back to attention."

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Bill McKibben needs no introduction. He’s the author of The End of Nature, which was the first layperson’s book about climate change, and a book that had a profound influence on me and many others. He’s also the author of many other thought-provoking books, including Falter and The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon, which the New Yorker called one of the best books of 2022. He founded the global climate group 350.org with some of his students from Middlebury College, and founded a more recent group, Third Act, primarily with retirees across the country. No matter your age, in other words, Bill may urge you, too, to get involved. Astonishingly insightful, articulate, strategic, and generous, Bill’s commitment to and impact on this world would be hard to overstate; the fact that the world isn’t in better shape is simply a profound nudge to the rest of us to level up.

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If you enjoy these conversations, please make sure to subscribe, and leave a review if you can! I’m committed to making this free and ad-free, but will happily accept donations; if you can easily support it, please do, at glow.fm/awabw.

________

Many thanks to Hank Lentfer for the use of his gorgeous nature sounds!

"The ability to imagine what it's like to be inside another person's mind or another person's life is the beginning of compassion...and it seems to me too that moral imagination is a necessary condition for hope. When you set out to think of something new, then you have a reason to think it might be possible. If you can't imagine anything better then you'll never be able to act towards achieving it. I believe you can imagine a better future into existence."

Professor Emerita of Environmental Philosophy at the Oregon State University, Kathleen Dean Moore was the co-editor of Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, and the award-winning author of many other books, including Riverwalking, Great Tide Rising, and the illustrated Take Heart: Encouragement for Earth’s Weary Lovers. She retired early from academia to focus on the climate crisis, and she’s a senior fellow at the Spring Creek Project. She’s one of the fiercest and wisest people I know.

What can YOU do about Climate Change?  https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/10/what-can-you-do-about-climate-change-take-this-quiz-to-find-out/

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If you enjoy these conversations, please make sure to subscribe, and leave a review if you can! I’m committed to making this free and ad-free, but will happily accept donations; if you can easily support it, please do, at glow.fm/awabw.

________

Many thanks to Hank Lentfer for the use of his gorgeous nature sounds!

I had some scheduling issues with folks, so I took this opportunity to do a short episode that attempts to begin to tease out some of the overlaps and intersections of my guests so far, and where those might lead. 

Coming next week will be a great interview with David Abram, followed by (in some order, perhaps not this one) Jerome Foster II, Craig Santos Perez, Lhadon Tethong and Tenzin Dorjee, and Lise Van Susteren. 

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If you enjoy these conversations, please make sure to subscribe, and leave a review if you can! I’m committed to making this free and ad-free, but will happily accept donations; if you can easily support it, please do, at glow.fm/awabw.

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Many thanks to Hank Lentfer for the use of his gorgeous nature sounds, and to Lindsay Jaeger for the cover art.