In the Weeds

We're back! After a long hiatus due to professional/ life stuff, I'm happy to share with you my interview with Gary Shaw, Professor of History and Medieval Studies at Wesleyan University. Continuing our series on horses, we explore another angle of the long-standing relationship between humans and horses, looking at the role that horses played in human transportation and warfare. As we brace ourselves for the impact of A.I., I find it instructive to look back to a time when our transportation and military technologies depended on other animals. It's impossible to fully comprehend the impact of the shift from horse and buggy to car, but, as we grapple with the scope and limitations of our humanity - and, I would argue, with our animality -, thinking back to a time when other animals were more fully embedded in our lives may serve as a useful counterpart and help us in our attempts to make sense of our present moment.  In our conversation, Gary Shaw and I discuss two areas of his scholarship - the development of horse travel in twelfth-century Europe and the role that horses, such as the Duke of Wellington's horse Copenhagen, played in battle during the period of the Napoleonic wars.

The title of Lydia Millet's last novel - Dinosaurs - seems to wink at the threat of human extinction, and, yet, its explicit referent in the book is to birds, those sometimes-alien creatures who survived the impact of the asteroid that wiped out most of their kind. This kind of double meaning, something like a sign that points in multiple directions, abounds in Dinosaurs, which is at once a moving human narrative and a reflection on the ways in which our frailty puts us at the mercy of our shortcomings as a species but also, ultimately, serves as an opening to discovering how much we care about the natural world. It was, as always, a great pleasure to talk to Lydia Millet about these and other matters. I hope you too will enjoy our conversation.

A continuation of my earlier episode in which Trevien Stanger - instructor of environmental studies at St. Michael's College in Vermont - and I discuss Abram's book, which, I think it's fair to say, has had a profound effect on both of us. This time, we focus on Abram's argument about the impact of the invention of the alphabet on our relationship with the natural world. If you'd like to listen to part 1 of this discussion - https://www.buzzsprout.com/356774/11992722If you'd like to listen to my conversation with Johanna Drucker about the invention of the alphabet - https://www.buzzsprout.com/356774/11826284

There's a funny little corridor tucked away behind a park in the Village of Pleasantville, New York where I live, where bears and bobcats amble through, walking atop the Catskill Aqueduct, the 100-year-old artery that delivers water from the Catskill mountains to New York City. Fellow resident, Michael Inglis, who has been hiking this patch of semi-wilderness for the past twenty-five years, has recently written a book about it, Woods and Water: Walking New York's Nanny Hagen Brook. He calls this a “liminal space,” existing as it does at the margins of a human-dominated landscape. After reading his book, I asked him if we could take a walk along the Nanny Hagen brook together. As we explored off-trail, he pointed out the surprising number of native plants but also the corrosive effects of human influence, including the predominance of invasive plants that have escaped from suburban backyards into the wild. What ensued for me was a reflection on how human culture literally shapes the natural world, but also the ways in which nature can push back and be surprisingly resilient, when given the chance.

When we think of major innovations in human history, what comes to mind are inert technologies - from the wheel to the computer - but one of the most significant developments occurred as the result of the relationship between humans and another animal, horses. The domestication of horses brought about a major sea-change in human society, as we became much more mobile.  It affected everything from agriculture to warfare to the dissemination of language and culture. To discuss the domestication of horses and the impact of this relationship, I spoke with  William Taylor,  Assistant Professor and Curator of Archeology at the University of Colorado, Boulder.  As Taylor explains, our understanding of this history continues to evolve thanks to new scientific tools, such as new types of genomic sequencing, but also due the work of anthropologists who observe present-day horse culture in Mongolia, contemporary Ukraine and other parts of the Eurasian steppes where the domestication of horses first took place. 

Jennifer Lynch Fitzgerald tells the story of her relationship with Maddie, a mustang rescued in Habersham County, Georgia from a man who was collecting horses to sell for meat.  When Maddie was found, she'd been tied to a tree for months, was malnourished and very angry.  Jen tells how, in spite of her limited experience with horses, she learned to train or "gentle" Maddie.  She discusses what she's learned about horse language and what it's meant to her to develop a relationship with an animal who was once wild.  This is the first installment of a short series of episodes on horses.  Horses have played such a significant role in human history that they are an important part of the nature/ culture nexus.  Before we delve into the history, however, I wanted to start with a story of a relationship between one human animal and one horse animal. https://in-the-weeds.netFollow us on Twitter @intheweedspodIn the Weeds is also on Facebook where you can  join our new In the Weeds Facebook Group for on-going discussion of the culture/ nature intersection.

I've mentioned this book numerous times on the pod. It's fair to say that David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous and Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass are the two books that really kicked off the idea for In the Weeds. And it feels like time to dig into Spell. All the more so since my current episodes are exploring the question “how did we get here?” Not only how did we materially arrive at our current environmental crisis but how did we, in the West, develop a culture that led to this mess, a culture that separates the human sphere from the natural world?Environmentalists have been debating this question for some time and, as Abram himself acknowledges, there is not just one answer, though he does propose an intriguing one in Spell that I talked about in our last episode:  that the invention of the alphabet might have had something to do with it. To discuss The Spell of the Sensuous, I reached out to Trevien Stanger, instructor of environmental studies and science at St. Michael's College in Vermont and all around smart and thoughtful guy.We examine the two influences that support Abram's shift from a mechanistic to an animist view of the world: phenomenology, a philosophical movement started by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl in the early 20th century, and the teachings of indigenous shamans that Abram encountered during his travels as an itinerant sleight-of-hand magician in Southeast Asia. Most of all, we try to understand what it would mean to experience the world the way that Abram would want us to, as a dynamic and relationally-rich encounter with the more-than-human.There's a lot to unpack and we take our time, so we only get about a third of the way into the book. We will continue our discussion in an upcoming episode.And, yes, I have a cold :)

“Letters have power,” Johanna Drucker tells me.  But what is the nature of this power and how did it all begin? Unlike writing, the alphabet was only invented once. Somewhere in Egypt or the Sinai Peninsula, about 4,000 years ago, speakers of a Semitic language adapted Egyptian hieroglyphics to represent the basic phonetic building blocks of their language.  All modern alphabets can be traced back to this origin.Johanna Drucker, Distinguished Professor and Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, and author of numerous books, including her most recent, Inventing the Alphabet (University of Chicago Press, 2022), talks to me about this fascinating history, from what archeology has uncovered to the alphabet's central role in information technology. We also discuss a theory put forth by David Abram, in his book, The Spell of the Sensuous, that the alphabet opens “a new distance […] between human culture and the rest of nature,” as it turns our powers of perception inward and focuses our attention on human-made sounds and words. Links to some of the things we discuss: Two key archeological sites where inscriptions of the first alphabet have been found:  Serabit el-Khadim and Wadi el-Hol. Sandstone sphinx at the British Museum with Proto-Sinaitic letters. The Acrophonic principle. The Ahiram sarcophogus and shards found in Israel. Unicode. See also in-the-weeds.net.

William Bryant Logan's book Sproutlands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees opens the door to a little known history, in which people all over the world, from Norway to Japan to pre-colonial California, managed trees in a way that was beneficial to trees and humans alike.   Logan stumbled upon this history after taking on a job for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for which he was given the task of pollarding trees. Pollarding is an ancient technique for pruning trees that, along with coppicing, was used for millennia to cull woodlands without having to destroy the forest. These techniques were an integral part of managed woodlands, in which people kept livestock, harvested different kind of food and cut wood that was used for everything from energy to building ships and houses to creating floating walkways. This managed cultivation was not only productive for humans; it also allowed trees to live longer and created more biodiversity than existed in unmanaged woods. All of this, as Logan explains to us, was possible because of the remarkable regenerative property of trees, which allows many species of trees to resprout in the most unlikely situations and in the most unlikely ways. In theory, at least, Logan tell us, trees can live indefinitely and, in some unusual cases, they seem to do just that.William Bryant Logan is the author of Sproutlands, Oak, Air and Dirt, the last of which was made into an award-winning documentary. He is a long-time faculty member of the New York Botanical Garden where he teaches pruning. He is a certified arborist and the founder and president of Urban Arborists, Inc., a Brooklyn-based tree company. He has also been a regular garden writer for the New York Times and was a contributing editor to House Beautiful, House and Garden and Garden Design magazines. 

Picking up where we left off in the spring, we return to the topic of farming through a conversation with John Roulac, entrepreneur and executive producer of the movie Kiss the Ground. Roulac's latest project, Agroforestry Regeneration Communities, supports initiatives in Central America and East Africa that teach farmers how to grow what are sometimes called food forests. Food forests  mimic the structure and diversity of natural forests; they have the ability to restore ecosystems and bring diversified nutrition and economic development to rural communities.This approach to farming – new by contrast with post-World War II industrial-style farming but based on techniques that are thousands of years old – is a relatively inexpensive way to make farming sustainable and, in fact, beneficial with respect to carbon capture, climate resilience and biodiversity, among other impacts. Ironically, Roulac notes, there is little investment in this low-hanging fruit among the solutions to our environmental problems.

For the second of three episodes on farming, I talk to Nate Looney about Jewish ethics, Diversity Equity and Inclusion and, yes, farming, specifically, his experience as an urban farmer using hydroponics and aquaponics to produce gourmet leafy greens and microgreens for restaurants and farmers markets in his hometown of L.A.Nate Looney has followed an unusual career path, from the U.S. National Guard to service in New Orleans and Iraq as a military police soldier to CEO and Owner of Westside Urban Gardens, an urban agricultural start-up based in L.A., to his current job as JEDI (“Jewish Equity Diversity and Inclusion”) Director of Community Safety and Belonging for the Jewish Federations of North America. As such, his thinking often moves across disciplines, linking practical matters to questions of ethics, combining his experience of farming with his knowledge of Jewish thought.  

“When you control seed, you control life on earth,” says Indian environmental activist and scholar Vandana Shiva in the new documentary film The Seeds of Vandana Shiva.  Known as “Monsanto's worst nightmare,” Vandana Shiva has been a champion of small, organic farms, since she established seed banks, in a subversive act she likens to Gandhi's championing of the spinning wheel, to counter the efforts of large corporations to control agriculture in India through the selling of pesticides and trademarked GMO seeds. In this episode - the first of three on farming - I talk to filmmaker Jim Becket about making the film and about the story of Vandana Shiva's life and mission.

Mermaids are the fly in the ointment in Lydia Millet's very funny satirical novel Mermaids in Paradise, “an absurdist entry into the mundane,” as she puts it. And, yet, her mermaids, who have bad teeth and the particular features of individuals, also draw us into the wonders of the ocean itself.  Mermaid lore, Millet reminds us, recalls manatees and the order of the Sirenia, and it speaks to “the way we imprint our imaginations onto the wild.”  One of the most interesting writers working at the intersection of fiction and environmentalism, Lydia Millet has written over a dozen novels and story collections, many about ties between humans and animals and the crisis of extinction. Her story collection Fight No More received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019 and her collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. In this episode, we discuss her 2015 novel Mermaids in Paradise and the ways in which she uses these hybrid, mythical creatures to address our environmental crises.  We also talk at length about story telling, the kinds of stories we tell and how they both help and hinder our relationship with the natural world. 

As co-editors of The Penguin Book of Mermaids, a compendium of stories from all over the world, Marie Alohalani Brown and Cristina Bacchilega show us that mermaids are not always white, not always beautiful and don't even always have a fish tail (sometimes mer creatures have the tail of a whale or an anaconda). What they also teach us is that legends of merfolk and other kinds of water spirits exist pretty much everywhere that people do.What is so fundamental about these myths of hybrid creatures that bridge the human world and the water world? Why are they so often female and alluring? How to the myths change across cultures? And what do they have to tell us today about our relationship to the natural world and to oceans and water in particular? Thanks to my guests, this episode will leave you with a new understanding of what a mermaid is or, rather, can be.Cristina Bacchilega coedits Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies and is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa where she taught fairy tales and their adaptations, folklore and literature, and cultural studies. An Anglo-Indian Italian who is non-white settler in Hawaiʻi, Cristina approaches wonder tales and other traditional narratives from a transcultural perspective that privileges the juxtaposition of different cultural narratives to highlight their distinctive worldviews and ways of knowing. Her most recent book with Jennifer Orme (2021), Inviting Interruptions: Wonder Tales in the 21st Century, features Maya Kern's comic How To Be a Mermaid.Marie Alohalani Brown is an Associate Professor of Religion, specialist in Hawaiian religion, culture, and oral/literary traditions at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She is a trained translator and works primarily with Hawaiian-language resources. She is the author of Ka Poʻe Moʻo Akua: Hawaiian Reptilian Water Deities (University of Hawaiʻi Press, January 31, 2022). Her first book, Facing the Spears of Change: The Life and Legacy of John Papa ʻĪʻī (University of Hawaʻi Press, May 2016), won the biennial Ka Palapala Poʻokela award for the categories of Hawaiian language, culture, and history (2016 and 2017). She is the co-editor with Cristina Bacchilega of A Penguin Book of Mermaids (Penguin Classics, 2019). 

According to Mark Zuckerberg and others, the metaverse - a would-be digital double of the real world - is good for the environment, because it will make us drive less, fly less. We won't have to visit the barrier reef in person; we can experience it from our own living rooms. But will this descent into technology make us more alienated than we already are from the natural world? And do we really want to recreate an idea out of dystopian science fiction anyway? These are some the the issues I discuss with Lisa Messeri, Assistant Professor at Yale University in the Anthropology Department who studies science and technology and whose upcoming book, In the Land of the Unreal, explores arguments that VR - virtual reality - can be a force for good.https://www.in-the-weeds.net

Chris Schaberg, whom you might remember from my episode on SUV commercials, has written a number of books on air travel. I wanted to talk to him about the impact of air travel on climate change but also about what air travel - and, increasingly, the fantasy that we can be tourists in space as well - reveals about the relationship between us human animals and the sophisticated technology that drives globalization (and, as a fall out, climate change). I was also itching to talk about Adam McKay's film Don't Look Up, in which a comet hurtling towards the earth serves as an analogy for climate change, and Chris was kind enough to indulge me.in-the-weeds.netto contact the host - asquith.intheweeds@gmail.com

Susannah Sayler and Ed Morris have been working at the intersection of art and climate activism for the last fifteen years. They are co-founders of the Canary Project, started in 2006 and inspired by a series of articles that Elizabeth Kolbert published in The New Yorker that eventually became her book Field Notes from a Catastrophe. Adapting Kolbert's investigative strategy, Ed and Susannah initially set out to photograph places around the world being impacted by climate change - in order to call out a warning, as the name Canary Project suggests.  (Though the photographs themselves or the installations that ensued were subsequently renamed History of the Future.) Since then, Susannah and Ed have worked on numerous projects, from Green Patriot Posters to the more recent Toolshed, and helped coordinate works of fellow artists tackling climate change. They also both teach in the Dept. of Film and Media Arts at Syracuse University.As a former student of the arts (more the literary kind than the visual kind, but who's quibbling), I was curious about the ability of art to engage in climate activism. What can the artist achieve that the scientist and the journalist cannot, I wondered? And, conversely, what are art's limitations?To see the photos and other images we discuss, go to in-the-weeds.netTo check out Susannah and Ed's latests project go to https://tool-shed.org

In time for the winter solstice, we revisit our episode on the history of Christmas trees with historian Judith Flanders, author of Christmas: A Biography (2017) as well as numerous books on the Victorian period, including The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Reveled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime and The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London.Flanders helps us to parse history from myth, as we discuss the origins of Christmas and the practice of bringing evergreen trees into our homes to decorate them for the holidays. Guitar rendition of “O Tannenbaum” by Dave Larzelere.

In our continuing series on climate change, I talk to Meg Lowman who knows more about trees than most people on this planet. She invented canopy ecology - the practice of studying trees in the treetops - and has worked across 46 countries and 7 continents, designing hot air balloons and walkways and other ways to explore and study this diverse biosphere. We discuss her recent book, The Arbonaut: A Life Discovering the Eighth Continent in the Trees Above Us. This riveting memoir takes us from her small-town roots in New England to her work in Australia, where she first climbed trees to study leaves and also, along the way, married an Australian sheep rancher and had her two sons, to her exploration of forests in California, India, Malaysia, Ethiopia and beyond.Lowman's prognosis for the future of our forests is grim but her message is clear: “It's not good enough to plant trees. We have to save the big trees!” One way we can do that is by supporting treefoundation.org, which is working to build ten canopy walkways in the ten most endangered forests of the world - an innovation which not only allows visitors to experience the dynamic life and biodiversity of the canopy but also brings economic and social benefits to the people living near these forests, thus helping the local communities and helping to save their forests.in-the-weeds.net

To find out what we know about how a warming planet will affect the forests in my home state of New York, I visit Black Rock Forest, a research station in the Hudson Highlands, and talk to Andy Reinmann, Assistant Professor in the Environmental Sciences Initiative at the Advanced Science Research Center of the Graduate Center, CUNY and in the Department of Geography and Environmental Science at Hunter College.We talk Phenocams, melting snow packs in New England, which tree species are likely to survive a warmer climate and how trees can help mitigate the impact of erratic weather in cities and suburbs. And glory in the beauty of a New York autumn!in-the-weeds.netto check out the Phenocam network via The University of New Hampshire: https://phenocam.sr.unh.edu/webcam/Black Rock Forest website: https://www.blackrockforest.org

In the second installment of our series on climate change, I talk to environmental journalist and science curator for TED Talks David Biello about his book, The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth's Newest Age. Biello argues that, culturally, we're still prey to the false notion that there's a divide between the human and the natural, when, in fact, we humans are dependent on the natural world for our survival and are, furthermore, affecting every corner of the world, no matter how remote. We explore this notion of the Anthropocene - the geologic term meant to define an era in which humans are having such a dramatic effect on the earth that we will leave our mark in the geologic record. Biello argues we need to take ownership of our oversized role and become better, more deliberate and thoughtful stewards of our home. Along the way, he also has lots of interesting stories to tell, from the effort to bring back the wooly mammoth to the use of garbage to generate energy in Rizhao, China. 

In his new book, Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World, Daniel Sherrell reflects on his career as a climate activist and tries to process the emotional fallout, for himself and his generation - Millennials -, of growing up in the age of climate change. Written as a letter to his imagined future child, the book is a kind of Dantean descent into the pit of emotions - from frustration, grief, rage and despair to hope - that all of us who are engaged with what is happening to our planet must grapple with. This episode inaugurates our new season on climate change and seems like a good point of departure: coming to terms with how we feel about what Dan Sherrell, referencing philosopher Timothy Morton, calls a hyperobject: a problem too big, spatially and temporally, for us to really wrap our heads around.in-the-weeds.netTo lobby Congress to include meaningful climate legislation in the Build-Back-Better bill, I encourage you to check out the Sunrise Movement - sunrisemovement.org

This past summer, the UN Secretary General, in connection with the UN report on climate change, spoke of a “code red for humanity,” a warning that was underscored by the fires, floods and searing temperatures we saw worldwide. Now, the Democrats in Congress (most of them, anyway) are fighting to pass the most ambitious climate bill to date and, a month from now, the UN Climate Change Conference, COP26, will convene in Glasgow. So, do we really have any choice but to tackle the #climatecrisis head on? That said, with all the podcasts on climate change, I'm leaving most of the discussions of the science and technology to others. Our concern, as always, is the intersection of culture and nature - in this case, a nature gone awry as a result of our cultural practices. The connection is almost too obvious, and yet, if industrial technologies and capitalist excess led us into this crisis, what can we say about our culture's ability to respond to the challenges we face?You can contact me @ asquith.intheweeds@gmail.comin-the-weeds.net

In 1923, when British mountaineer George Mallory was asked why he wanted to summit Mount Everest, he famously answered “Because it's there.” These days, there are still many who want to climb Mount Everest, but the conditions of mountaineering have altered significantly:  people are outraged by the trash on Mount Everest; concerned about the risks incurred by the Sherpa; worried about environmental degradation and indigenous rights, as in the case of Uluru in Australia, which is now closed to climbers; and, last year, the Himalaya were closed to climbers due to Covid 19. All of this complicates the age-old question, “Why do it?” My guest, the environmental philosopher Margret Grebowicz, argues in her latest book, Mountains and Desire, that mountaineering is a kind of test case for the challenge of knowing what desire really is in our late-capitalist era when the things we love to do are so often appropriated by everything from advertising to popular culture and social media.For a list of suggested documentaries on climbing see in-the-weeds.netTo contact us with suggestions, questions, etc. write to asquith.intheweeds@gmail.com

Entomologist Doug Tallamy and I discuss his new book, The Nature of Oaks, in which he pulls back the curtain on the fascinating world of living creatures that inhabit oak trees. From acorn weevils to spun glass caterpillars, the book introduces us to a cast of unusual characters, many of them insects. Tallamy and I discuss these characters, how to best plant oaks (pssst! plant acorns) as well as other engaging and useful oak facts. To listen to my earlier interviews with Doug Tallamy, you can click here for my interview on Bringing Nature Home and here for my episode on Nature's Best Hope.For images and links that supplement this episode see http://in-the-weeds.net/oaks-with-doug-tallamy/To reach out to me with ideas, suggestions, pitches, etc. email me at asquith.intheweeds@gmail.com.

In our fourth episode on the forest in fiction, I speak to Philip Weinstein, Professor Emeritus of Swarthmore College and author of numerous books on fiction, including What Else But Love? The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison, about the forest and the natural world in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. In this gripping story by the Nobel-prize winning author, the forest plays numerous roles, including that of a place of refuge - notably during Sethe’s escape from slavery -, a place exempt from institutional pressures, and a place that remembers a pre-European past and connects former slaves to an America future.To learn more about the history of American slavery, listen to Slate's podcast with Jamelle Bouie and Rebecca Onion.For more about In the Weeds, go to our website in-the-weeds.net.

In our third episode on the forests of the Western imagination, I discuss A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Randall Martin, Professor of English at the University of New Brunswick and author of Shakespeare & Ecology. Associated with the night, with dreams, the imagination, madness, and the theater itself, the forest of A Midsummer Night’s Dream - inhabited by fairies who delight in playing pranks on the Athenians who enter it - is not merely a passive backdrop but, rather, a potent realm that challenges many of the traditional categories of Western culture, including the distinction between humans and other living beings. Randall Martin tells us about the actual forests of Shakespeare’s time and the emerging ecological problems of Early Modern England, which sound surprisingly familiar. Shakespeare, he tells us, has a “fantastic ability to mirror back to us our most recent ideas and concerns and emotions,” and, indeed, A Midsummer Night’s Dream turns up a whole host of environmental concerns that haunt us today, from climate change to worries about genetic engineering to invasive species.For links and further information see http://in-the-weeds.net/the-forest-of-shakespeares-a-midsummer-nights-dream-with-randall-martin/

In the second episode of our series on the forest in fiction, Ellen Handler Spitz - a renowned specialist of psychology and the arts and senior lecturer in the Humaninties program at Yale - and I discuss Sondheim and Lapine’s musical, Into the Woods. Into the Woods brings together characters and story lines from several well-known fairy tales, drawing particularly on the Brothers Grimm’s versions, and explores the moral repercussions of the characters’ actions in a second act that begins “Once upon a time… later.” In his 1976 book The Uses of Enchantment, psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim likens the woods of fairy tales to the unconscious. Spitz gives us a new version of this analogy, arguing that in Into the Woods, the woods function as “the province of and” where the choices we have to make in real life are suspended; where you “can meet a wolf, or a witch, a giant, a spell or a prince,” which may cause you to change or to learn something new. But there is no easy resolution in Sondheim and Lapine’s musical. As Red Riding Hood reflects, after having survived her encounter with the wolf, “isn’t it nice to know a lot!…. and a little bit not.”If you’ve never seen Into the Woods, I encourage you to watch the stage production before you listen to this episode. A big thank you to Stephanie Kovacs Cohen and Adam David Cohen from Arc Stages who allowed me to use audio excerpts from their wonderful 2104 production of Into the Woods in this episode. You can watch their production in its entirety here.For more information on the In the Weeds podcast,  go to in-the-weeds.netFollow us on Twitter @intheweedspod

If you hear a story that begins “in a dark wood,” you’re instantly transported to a place of fear, of danger and disorientation. Where does this come from? One important, early source is Dante’s Inferno. In the first of our series on fictional forests, Peter Olson and I discuss the two principal forests of the Inferno, the “dark wood” of the opening, where the pilgrim is lost, and the “brooding wood” of Canto XIII, in which those who committed suicide have been transformed into bushes and trees which can speak and bleed. Peter Olson, the Provost of North Central Michigan College, has a Ph.D. in Comparative from the University of Michigan and is the former chair of the Department of English at Hillsdale College where he frequently taught Dante. He guides me in a close reading of these two sections of Dante’s famous descent into hell.For related links see http://in-the-weeds.net/the-forests-of-dantes-inferno/

Whenever we enter a fictional forest - whether in a film, a novel or a fairy tale - we know we’re bound for a story of adventure, possibly of danger, magic or transformation. In the next few episodes of In the Weeds, we’ll be exploring works of fiction in which the forest plays a key role. Underlying our discussions will be some broader questions: why is the forest such an evocative place in our stories? What does it stand for? And what does the imagined forest tell us about our relationship with actual forests, past and present? In this brief introduction to the series, I tell you about some of the works we’ll be discussing - in case you would like to read along - and briefly discuss the two words at the heart of this inquiry, “forest” and “wood.”

Two friends - Margaret Ables, co-host of the podcast What Fresh Hell: Laughing in the Face of Motherhood, and Sonia Fujimori, educator and former coordinator of the edible garden at our children’s elementary school - join me in conversation with educator and anthropologist of education Lorie Hammond to discuss her new book, Growing Whole Children in the Garden.For more information see http://in-the-weeds.net/growing-whole-children-in-the-garden/

Geologist Marcia Bjornerud gives us primer in “reading rocks.” We start by discussing where the “stuff” of our solar system comes from - you’ll be amazed by the origins of water on Earth, for example - and then delve into the different rock types, igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic. Bjornerud explains the “grammar” of these different rock types and gives us tips for what to look for as well as reading recommendations. Though it clearly takes practice and experience, learning to read the rocks in our local landscapes can help us see the places where we live in a whole new way: unlocking the past lives of our dyanmic planet.For photos, links and the complete, unedited interview with Marcia Bjornerud see http://in-the-weeds.net/reading-rocks-with-marcia-bjornerud/

There are two things about Christmas that you can count on, says historian and author Judith Flanders: most of the origin stories you’ve heard are false and people have always thought ‘Christmas was better in the old days.’ Though it may not be true that Santa’s red suit came from Coca Cola, nor that Prince Albert brought the Christmas tree to Britain, the history of Christmas that Flanders relates in her 2017 book, Christmas: A Biography, is just as compelling. In this episode, I talk to her about the history of the Christmas tree, a subject I first looked into a couple of years ago when dwelling on a simple question: what does it mean to bring a tree into our homes in the dead of winter? Flanders, who has written numerous books on the Victorian period - including The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime and The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London - as well as her own crime fiction, is more reluctant to speculate on the larger meanings of certain historical connections - for instance, that the tree of knowledge was probably the earliest inspiration for the Christmas tree - than I might be, but she helps us set the record straight, telling us, for instance, about the impact of Goethe’s novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, which was all the rage at the end of the eighteenth century and introduced many to the German tradition of the Christmas tree. Revisiting this history of Christmas and of the Christmas tree in particular puts current customs and our own personal histories - for those of us who celebrate Christmas - into a broader perspective and reminds us that this celebration was originally - and still is - a chance to take a break and have a good time in what (for those of us in the Northern hemisphere) is the darkest time of the year. Thanks to Dave Larzelere for his rendition of O Tannenbaum, to Sonia Fujimori for her recording of her family expedition to cut down their Christmas tree and to my Mom and Dad for all the great memories of Christmas trees past.

Since the 1990s, we’ve been seeing the same kind of commercials: sweeping vistas of the American wilderness, forests and clear streams, rocky ledges, perhaps a dusting of snow. And, cutting through the landscape, a jeep or an SUV. No other cars in sight. Such a vision would seem to be fraught with contractions. For starters, this is not how most of us experience driving. Where we experience roads and traffic, SUV ads give us off-roading in beautiful country, using nature to sell technology. And, yet, these ads are clearly effective.I discuss these fantasies of wilderness used to sell us cars with Christopher Schaberg, Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, who has written several books on airports and air travel and who wrote a Master’s thesis relating SUV ads to American nature writing.We look at the history of car advertising in the U.S. and the evolving role of nature (or, rather, Nature) in relation to the car. What do these commercials tell us about the enduring role of wilderness as a symbol of American history and patriotism? What do they tell us about how we feel about cars these days and how the car manufacturers want us to feel about cars?A few notes. The Baobab Car is actually by Arnauld Laval and Jaqueline Held, not to be confused with Timothy's Dream Book by Pierre Le-Tan.Here's the Joe Biden commercial we talk about; the "tiger under the hood" commercial from 1965; the Toyota Rav 4 commercial, "Chase the Unknown"; Ford Bronco's "Built Wild"; Lincoln Aviator's "Warm Escape" commercial with Matthew McConaughey; and the Jeep Wrangler 4xe commercial, "Pale Blue Dot."

When my daughter was eight years old, she came home one day and announced that she "knew what the B word was." But she was confused: why was a word for a female dog - the most awesome of creatures, in her mind - also an insult for girls and women? Interesting, I thought. What did this insult say about our relationship to animals, to dogs specifically, and about the gendering of that relationship? What did it say about how our culture connects animals and women?These questions sparked a series of conversations - with linguist Eric Russell, feminist Josephine Donovan, comedian Adam Oliensis, my high school BFF, Jennifer Lynch, and, finally, with dog trainer Jamie Ianello. Following the path of these conversations, this episode explores how language works and what it says about our relationship to other animals, as we examine the shifting uses and meanings of the B word.Thank you also to Stephanie Kovacs Cohen and Stacey Bone-Gleason from Arc Stages who read the Shakespeare parts and to Adam Bernier who recorded my interview with Adam Oliensis. in-the-weeds.net for more information on the podcast

How fragile is our economy? Can it rebound from the impact of the shutdown and - similarly - from stresses climate change might inflict in the future? These are some of the questions I’ve found myself asking during the Covid pandemic. Looming over all of these was a broader and more troubling question: were the success of our economy and the future health of our planet somehow at odds? Following the logic of capitalism, would we only thrive if we produced and consumed at a rate that would eventually put our own species, as well as many others, at peril? To help me make sense of this, I turned to Environmental Economist Marc Conte, an Associate Professor at Fordham University. He challenged my assumptions and introduced me to the Environmental Economist’s tool kit, from cap and trade to taxes on emissions.

After a long hiatus, In the Weeds picks up where we left off with a third installment of our series on the apocalyptic!From parasitic wasps to zombie ants and the hive mind, Joe Wallace’s novel Invasive Species takes strange natural phenomena and spins them into an apocalyptic yarn, in which a new, emergent predator threatens the human species. This is an unusual take on the apocalyptic genre I explored previously in interviews with theologian Bernard McGinn (episode #18) and novelist Brian Francis Slattery (episode #21). In this case, the end-of-days is not the end for everyone, just potentially for humans. Wallace, who had a long career as a science writer, which included a book on dinosaurs for the American Museum of Natural History, finds the idea of a future in which humans are “taken down a peg” refreshing and likes the idea that life will continue, even if we don’t.

In the fourth and last of my "socially distanced with" episodes, I touch base with Amy Hall, VP of Social Consciousness for the clothing brand Eileen Fisher with whom I discussed "the hidden cost of clothes" in episode 14.The clothing industry is among those being hit hard by the pandemic. Amy and I speculate about the long-term effects this may have and the ways in which it may alter our buying habits. We also chat about what she's up to, including her new blog (http://www.amyjhall.com) and a consultancy business she's started to help other businesses that want to address their environmental and social impact (http://www.impactorum.com).

In the third of my “socially distanced” episodes - shorter episodes in which I touch base with former guests to see what they are up to during the quarantine - I talk to violin maker Brian Skarstad. He tells me about some of the advantages of socially distancing for him, such as taking on projects he normally doesn’t have the time for, as well as the challenges. Together, we reflect on the way this unusual time is changing our relationship to music.A few links you might find useful. In our chat, Brian mentions The Jacob Burns Film Center. I reference a YouTube video featuring actress Ali Ewoldt filmed in our town of Pleasantville, New York. I also share a song my husband Dave Larzelere recently recorded at home, "Snap Back Mama." I've been needing to thank him for letting me use a piece of "Sweet Long Odds," from his album, Sweet Science, in my intro and outro. Thank you, darling.

In the second episode of my series on the apocalyptic, I talk to Brian Francis Slattery about his novel Lost Everything, which won the 2012 Philip K. Dick award. The novel follows two friends on a mission up the Susquehanna River, in an apocalyptic not-too-distant future, in which climate change and civil war have transformed the Northeast of the United States into a tropical wasteland, replete with monkeys climbing over post-industrial ruins.Slattery and I discuss the canoe trip he took along the Susquehanna with two biologist friends to research the book; his discussions with a religious friend that helped shape the novel, which he says he wrote so that it could yield both secular and religious readings; and his work as a journalist, which provided insight into the human and material costs of war. We also compare notes on the apocalyptic in popular culture - why some people like it; what Slattery thinks is good (and isn’t) and the kind of mental and emotional work it faciliates.

In the second of my “socially distanced” episodes, I talk to geologist Marcia Bjornerud at her home in Wisconsin, who says that the coronavirus pandemic is a reminder that, throughout all of geologic time, microbes have been in charge. We talk about viruses, what odd entities they are, the curious role they have played in evolution, and we muse over the possible long-term effects of the dramatic changes to our lives and culture this virus has wrought.

In a series of short episodes, I check in with previous guests to see what they are up to under stay-at-home orders and to find out what they have to say about the pandemic. In the first of these "socially distanced" chats, I talk to entomologist Doug Tallamy who tells us that the biologists saw this coming due to the problems of overpopulation and crowding in cities. Look at what happens when you have too many caterpillars in a container, he tells me.We also talk about the possible benefits of more time at home, including, in Tallamy's case, catching up on gardening and tuning into the natural world. He also recommends the use of apps such as iNaturalist and Bug Guide which can help you identify creatures you find on walks or in your own garden.

The word “apocalyptic” pops up in conversation a lot these days, at a time when fiction and reality seem to be blurring. In the first episode of a series on the apocalyptic and what it reveals about how we feel about what’s happening to the natural world, I talk to the world-renowned theologian Bernard McGinn about the origins of the “apocalyptic imagination” and how fundamental it is both to Christianity and to narrative in Western culture.

Gardening and observing the natural world may offer us solace during this time of worry and confinement. So I bring you my latest interview with entomologist Doug Tallamy, who has been teaching many of us about the need to garden with native plants in order to feed insects, especially pollinators, and preserve all of the "ecosystem services" that we humans, along with other animals, need to survive. Tallamy's latest book, Nature's Best Hope, introduces the idea of a Homegrown National Park comprised of all of our gardens and private spaces stitched together to form corridors of wilderness all across the United States. It's a bold vision and a call to action in which all of us can take a part. He also offers new tips and insights about how to make parks and gardens wilderness-friendly that may give you ideas of projects to take on while we keep a safe distance from other humans but are free to tune in to the lives of other creatures.

Nick Kaplinsky, Chair of Biology at Swarthmore College, and I discuss Nina Fedoroff's book Mendel in the Kitchen, on the genetic modification of food, going back the earliest domestication of crops such as wheat and corn, to foods currently labeled as “GMOs.” Kaplinsky surprises me with the statement that opposition to GMOs on the left ressembles climate change denial on the right. What is at the heart of this claim? To better understand genetically-modified foods, you have to delve into the science, which, Kaplinsky points out, very few of us have the education to properly understand, and you have to look at the complex picture of agriculture today and what is at stake both in the U.S. and in countries such as India and Bangladesh, where a genetically-modified form of rice known as “golden rice” could alleviate the devastating effects of vitamin A deficiency for those who subsist primarily on rice.

How do baby birds learn their songs? Why does a female bird want a mate who knows his neighborhood songs? What impact does bird migration have on the 9/11 memorial “Tribute in Light”? These are some of the many fascinating issues that come up in my discussion with Alan Clark of Fordham University, a biologist and expert in bird vocalizations, whose career was inspired by the experience of falling in love at-first-sight with penguins he met during a research fellowship in New Zealand.

We go down the rabbit hole of how clothes are made and contemplate the hidden social and environmental costs of fashion with Amy Hall, VP of Social Consciousness for the fashion brand Eileen Fisher, as our guide. When you return to the surface, you're likely to look at your clothes in a whole new way!More more info go to in-the-weeds.net

Listen to some giggly girls tell about the camp where they took old clothes, cut, patched and sewed them into new ones, flippy, sparkly....OMG. A little morsel of podcast to tide you over while I'm busy tending to our new puppy Coco and juggling kids and the general slobber of family life. Coming up... my interview with Amy Hall, VP of Social Consciousness for Eileen Fisher on fashion and the social and environmental cost of our clothes.More more info go to in-the-weeds.net

In “Laudato si,” known as the Encyclical on the Environment, Pope Francis presents an “urgent challenge” to protect our “common home,” the Earth. I discuss this letter addressed not just to Catholics but to all people, with Christiana Zenner, Associate Professor of Theology, Science and Ethics in the Department of Theology at Fordham University. We talk about Pope Francis’ folding together of his concern for the environment and for the lives of the poor; his framing of the issues in a language of ethics and spirituality and much more. For a link to the full text of the Encyclical and other episode notes, go to in-the-weeds.net.

Using heat-sensitive cameras and radio collars, Gotham Coyote Project tracks coyotes, as they make a life for themselves in the Bronx, in parks and a golf course and, occasionally, show up in Central Park or trotting along the West Side Highway. This amazingly resilient animal challenges our understanding where “nature” resides and gives us a blueprint for how we might welcome wilderness into our suburbs and our cities.

Predators are a two-faced god for humans, according to Dan Flores, historian and author of Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History. After all, we were once both predators and prey.With this episode, we continue to explore this complex relationship of humans and predators by looking to the song dogs of the prairie. Coyotes inspired several Aztec dieties, served as the model for the protagonist of the earliest American stories, and, in defiance of a concerted effort by federal and state agencies to wipe them off the face of the earth, thrive throughout the lower 48 states today. As such, they have much to teach us about the natural and cultural history of America and, more broadly, about our own species.Thank you to David Larzelere for playing the guitar on the "Coyote National Anthem."For more see in-the-weeds.net