A podcast series that explores how to orient your life around nature. We discover the mindsets, skills and actions that are required to partner wisely with other forms of life and engage in acts of brilliant restoration.
Join me on this intimate journey into the eyes and minds of other species; learn how our guests are living in deep relationship with ecologies; be electrified by expanding your field of reality, and let these stories spark your reconnection to nature’s multiverse.
By restoring our relationship with nature, and learning what it is to be nature, we begin to restore ourselves.
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A podcast series that explores how to orient your life around nature. We discover the mindsets, skills and actions that are required to partner wisely with other forms of life and engage in acts of brilliant restoration.
Join me on this intimate journey into the eyes and minds of other species; learn how our guests are living in deep relationship with ecologies; be electrified by expanding your field of reality, and let these stories spark your reconnection to nature’s multiverse.
By restoring our relationship with nature, and learning what it is to be nature, we begin to restore ourselves.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
What if the next shift in planetary consciousness didn’t come from looking back at Earth from space, but from listening deeply to the voices already here? In this thought piece I propose the “inworlding effect” as the overview effect of our time: one where developments in science, technology, law, and many other disciplines are revealing our entangled presence within a multispecies world.
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Today we’re joined by artist, musician and communal grief ritual facilitator Alexandra “ahlay” Blakey to speak about the cultural forgetting of communal mourning, the sacred role of professional mourners, and the re-emergence of grief ceremonies as necessary spaces of remembrance, healing and repair.
Ahlay brings her experience weaving song, body, and ritual into collective spaces where grief is given breath and movement, and we explore the history of grief practices across cultures, the political power of public mourning, and how grief can soften the heart and stitch community back together. We explore what to expect in a communal grief ceremony, and ahlay shares the story behind her 200-voice album WAILS: Songs for Grief, inspired by whales, ancestral sorrow, and Francis Weller’s work. Within the episode are woven tracks of her haunting songs, so tune up your headphones, and sink in.
Episode Website Link
Show Links:
Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.
Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd
Photo Credit: Cover image (Earth Altering)
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In this episode we’re joined by the renowned environmentalist, activist and author Paul Hawken to explore the lifeworld of carbon and its role as a vital agent in the story of life.
Paul speaks about the dysfunctions in Western language on how we speak about climate and nature, and why metaphors of war, control, and fixing actually perpetuate the very mindset that created the crises in the first place. We explore common traps we fall into, and how to recarbonize, to bring life back and restore relationality in how we think, feel, and act.
This is a wide-ranging and intimate conversation on language, grief, science, reverence, and what it means to come home to Earth and to the deeper meanings of life.
Episode Website Link
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Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.
Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd
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In this episode, we journey into the vibrational worlds of sound, ancestry, and deep listening with Whaia, a Ngāti Kahungunu woman of Māori descent and First Nations sonic weaver and multi-instrumentalist.
Raised between the salt of the Pacific and the red dust of the Australian desert, Whaia’s voice carries ancient songlines, blending traditional Māori instruments, crystalline singing bowls, and her original mother tongue, the language of Te Rā, the Sun. We explore her work singing with whales, reclaiming cultural instruments once left silent in museums, and remembering the sacred oceanic highways navigated by her Polynesian ancestors, guided by the stars and whale ancestors.
This is a conversation about song as medicine, the voice as ceremony, and reclaiming lineage through sound. We ask: what might the whales be singing to us now? What frequencies are we called to remember in order to heal ourselves and our waters?
Stay on after the episode wraps to hear a special feature from Whaia’s debut album WHAIA & WATER — the first of a twelve-part series known as her Sacred Sonic Sessions.
Episode Website Link
Show Links:
Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.
Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd
Photo of Whaia: Chanel Baran Photo
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In a remote cabin in Vancouver Island in 2019, far away, I sat by the shore. I listened. I re-read poetry. I swam with jellyfish. I ate bright salmon berries and raw samphire. I gazed around and listened to the songs of the land. This piece of writing is a result of my days there.
Full poem on Lifeworlds Website
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Where does your body end and the Earth begin? In this episode, we explore the real and poetic parallels between human health and planetary health, and how nature’s language moves in our bodies.
Joining me is Dr. Mackenzie Hall, a doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Functional Medicine, who helps us trace the Earth’s vital systems through the lens of humans as ecological systems.
We ask:
This brings up a profound point: if we are to ensure the Earth’s aliveness, we have to feel it as our own body. And, if we can sense the Earth’s rhythms as our own, can we also become its white blood cells, human agents of healing embracing and embodying its circulatory wildness?
Episode Website Link: https://www.lifeworld.earth/episodes-blog/theecologyofhealth
Show Links:
Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock, Ellie Kidd & The Rising by Tryad CCPL.
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David McConville is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher who explores how technology shapes our perspectives of Earth—from local places to our cosmic context. Our conversation examines how worldviews influence infrastructure, using Los Angeles as a case study. We explore the paradigm of "living infrastructure," discussing how David's studio Spherical collaborates with communities and organizations to develop mapping and co-design tools. Even if you’re not in LA, this episode offers valuable insights into how communities can work together to create resilient infrastructure systems that honor their unique cultural needs and local environments.
Links:
Bio:
David McConville is co-founder and lead cosmographer of Spherical, a strategic design and integrative research studio based in xučyun / Oakland, CA. His PhD in Art and Media from Plymouth University examined how cosmological perspectives shape cultural imaginaries and ecological practices.
Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.
Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd
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In this episode, I share some reflections on Season 2, before diving into our first listener-guided Q&A!
You’ll be hearing from fellow listeners who enquired on topics like:
Thank you to everyone who sent in these thought-provoking questions.
Episode Website
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What if you could inhabit the future? In this episode, we dive into the work of Superflux, the visionary design studio turning imagination into tangible worlds. From multispecies banquets and rewilded ecological sanctuaries to mythic friezes that re-enchant cityscapes, co-founder Anab Jain shares how embodied experiences can transform how we see — and shape — the world.
Join us as we explore speculative design, active hope, and the power of imagination to move us beyond ecological breakdown and into interspecies thriving. A celebration of wonder, possibility, and the art of asking: "What if?"
Episode Website Link
Show Links:
Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.
Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd
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This is my take on ancient and intuitive sensory experience that taps into the innate intelligence of the human body, a blend of body compass, Zen Beginner's Mind, a shamanic medicine walk and Goethean science.
The practice asks you to find a place in the natural landscape where you could walk undisturbed for some time, and have an encounter with an element of nature. A true act of lifeworld-ing!
I guide you through a short introduction and the instructions. Attached on the website page is a link to the full instructions in PDF, and listed here in much briefer bullets below.
I recommend listening in full, then using either of the instructions when you choose to do the practice itself.
Abbreviated instructions
· Before entering into the natural landscape, you’ll walk to a threshold place, and stop.
· Here you will physically draw a threshold that you will walk across.
· Once you’ve done that, pause, connect with the land, speak your intention, ask for permission.
· Cross the threshold, and start walking towards where you feel a tug. Be conscious of the way your body can intuitively lead the way. Use the senses.
· At some point, you may come across a being in the land that catches your attention. It could be a spiders web, a stone, a patch of moss, a dead bough of a tree, a stream, a blade of grass, truly anything. Approach, introduce yourself.
· Spend a moment in presence with them, in beginners mind.
· Use Goethe’s Exact Sense Perception instructions –then imagine it transforming. Then release to receive. Let it communicate back to you.
· Stay here as long as feels right.
· When it comes to the time to go, thank this natural being and start walking back to your threshold place.
· When you cross the threshold, thank the land and when you’re ready, step across back into the other world.
· Gently wipe out the threshold door and take some time upon returning to digest anything that may have arisen for you.
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Throughout history, many cultures have observed and interpreted animal behavior to predict events and read the landscapes around them. The multispecies lives of our planet weave an astonishing network of information across the face of the globe, a web of knowledge compromised of thousands of creatures communicating with each other, across species, and with their environments.
How we listen in on this collective intelligence? Today’s guest Martin Wikelski is director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space (ICARUS) - a project which has been dubbed as ‘the internet of animals’. Their team has created a global ecological monitoring system, attaching remote sensing chips to thousands of animals in the wild, in effect uncovering and translating, as Martin says, ‘the collective intelligence of life on earth’.
By tuning in to the communication and culture of animals, the project his project reveals the planet's hidden workings with enormous implications for conservation, global finance, and human infrastructure.
We explore many of these forward-thinking ideas in this episode, adding another layer to Lifeworlds’ ongoing question: How do we sense the planetary and see through the perspectives of other life?
Episode Website Link
Show Links:
Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.
Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd
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Could the destruction of nature become considered as serious a crime as that of genocide? How does the structure of law shape a civilisation’s norms, behaviors and overarching story?
Today we’ll be discussing international Ecocide law, a massively growing movement that wants to embed the notion of ‘ecocide’ crime at the highest levels of law - at the International Criminal Court in The Hague - and create a powerful deterrent for the further damage to ecosystems and people globally.
Our guest is Pella Thiel, a maverick ecologist, farmer, author and who has co-founded the Swedish hubs of international networks like Transition Sweden, End Ecocide Sweden and is an associate of the Centre for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala University. Pella was awarded the Swedish Martin Luther King Award in 2023 and the Environmental Hero of the year 2019.
We discuss:
Episode Website Link
Show Links:
Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.
Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd
Photo credit: Law Statue
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Have you ever wondered what it would be like to breathe yourself into your own body? To flow with the out-breath of trees into your own fractaling lungs, to dance ribbonlike into an ancient ceiba’s vasculature, to stitch an ecosystem together as a mycelium highways sparkling with energy? In this episode we explore the transformational potential of virtual reality through the work of Marshmallow Laser Feast, an artist collective that has emerged as a leading VR creators in the last decade.
They exhibited internationally from London to New York, Melbourne to Seoul, their work included in major exhibitions at institutions including the Barbican Centre, Saatchi Gallery, Sundance Film Festival, and SXSW. 'In The Eyes Of The Animal' was nominated for the Design of the Year by Design Museum Beazley Awards and won the Wired Innovation Award (2016). Most recently, the team at MLF won the Tribeca Film Festival Storyscapes Award for Innovation in Storytelling and Best VR Film at VR Arles Festival for ‘TreeHugger, Wawona’.
Ersin Han Ersin is the director of MLF and describes to us how they use dazzlingly aesthetic real-time VR experiences to explore the invisible perspectives of nature’s lifeworlds – and how they are constantly pushing the bounds of what technology makes possible in expanding our ecological sensitivities. I enquire into:
Episode Website Link.
Show Links:
Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.
Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd
Photo credit: MLF exhibition at AMCI in Australia (photo from their website)
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Today’s episode brings us into the heart and philosophy of Zen Buddhism, as practiced by the Plum Village monastic community that was founded in 1982 by the Vietnamese peace activist, monk, poet, and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. Today it has grown into Europe’s largest Buddhist monastery, with over 200 resident monks and nuns, and known as one of the most actively engaged Buddhist communities offering insight on the modern world, and on the climate and ecological crises.
We’ve spoken on the show about fragmented consciousness, a mind that sees parts and not the whole. Meditation and other Buddhist practices are one of the core ways of how we can heal minds and views. And so we will hear from two Plum Village monks: Sister True Dedication and Brother Spirit. Before entering the monastery, Sister True Dedication studied History & Political Thought at Cambridge University and worked as a journalist for BBC News. In the early years of her monastic training, she assisted Thich Nhat Hanh in their engaged Buddhist actions for human rights, religious freedom, applied ethics, and ecology. Brother Spirit began his monastic training in Plum Village in 2008, and before ordaining he studied mathematics at Cambridge and worked professionally as a composer, and as such has since composed many of the community’s beloved chants. They both helped to found the international Wake Up Movement, a community of young meditators finding new ways to combine mindfulness and engaged Buddhism.
We talk about:
Episode Website Link
Show Links:
Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.
Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd
Photo credit: Plum Village website
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Woven together loosely by my narrative, this special episode traces through a selection of five dazzling poems from the Pulitzer-prize winning poet Mary Oliver; bringing us into giddy relationship with the natural world -- with geese and grasshoppers and miracles and scars and existential queries on what makes life worth living. Mary's sharp and gentle perception of nature, her ability to communicate its messages with such simple and profound language, is at once both balm and flame for the soul.
“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.” – Mary Oliver
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Are plants conscious? Do they experience forms of cognition and intelligence that go beyond patterned and hard-wired evolutionary behaviors? Do intelligence and consciousness really require a brain and central nervous system? Or should we consider intelligence on Earth to be less brain-bound, perhaps not even residing in the individual self, but rather in an enmeshment within an ecosystem? A swarm intelligence, a networked mind, distributed, adaptive, like a murmuration of starlings in the setting sun. And how would we even begin to start answering these questions empirically?
Today it is my explicit intention to change the way that you think about the kingdom of plants and the intelligence that resides within it. This is a controversial topic with scientists on all sides of the spectrum vehemently advocating for or against concepts.
It was Darwin who first introduced to the Western world the concept of the "root brain" hypothesis, where the tips of plant roots act in some ways like a brain, a distributed intelligence network. They challenge our very notions of an individual. Plants exhibit qualities that are adaptive, flexible, and goal directed – all hallmarks of an intelligence that goes beyond hard wired impulsive responses. They make decisions, perform predictive modeling, share nutrients and recognize kin. Electrical and chemical signalling systems have been identified in plants very similar to those found in the nervous systems of animals, including neurotransmitters like dopamine and melatonin.
Our guest today is Paco Calvo, a professor at the University of Murcia in Spain, where he leads the Minimal Intelligence Lab focusing on the study of minimal cognition in plants. He combines insights from biology, philosophy, and cognitive science to explore plant behavior, decision-making, and problem-solving, challenging conventional perspectives of his field. Paco has said that ‘to ‘know thyself’, one has to think well beyond oneself, or even one’s species. We are only one small part of a kaleidoscopic variety of ways of being alive.
Episode Website Link
Show Links:
Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.
Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd
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Soulfire Sessions have come to Lifeworlds! These occasional special episodes will be our take on the good old concept of a fireside chat. Intimate, philosophical, challenging, sometimes zany, always insightful, these are discussions with visionaries who don’t often get the airtime to speak about their deeper ways of being and feeling – and what lights their souls on fire.
In this first session I speak with my dear friend Daniel Schmachtenberger, a social philosopher and founding director of the Civilisation Research Institute. Daniel has a particular interest in the topics of catastrophic and existential risk, artificial intelligence, civilization and institutional decay and collapse as well as progress, collective action problems, social organization theories, and the relevant domains in philosophy and science.
With the fire roaring, we delve into the psychological and metaphysical underpinnings of the metacrisis, traversing topics such as fragmented consciousness, Daoism, wholeness, feeling in service to thinking, dharma enquiries, conflict theory, and what it might mean to live a meaningful life.
Links:
Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd
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Seeds. Memory keepers. Speckled time travellers. Capsules of deep, earth wisdom. To control seeds is to control life. To be a seed is to hold the genetic code of turning starlight into matter, of morphing your body into soft green tips that tremble in the wind and drink fire. There is a deep co-evolutionary relationship that exists in your bones, between humans, land, ecology, and seeds.
And we are losing them. An absence of flourishing seed systems directly correlates with a loss of cultural identity for thousands of communities around the world. Life for rural communities fractures. We’re losing our seed keepers. The freedom of seeds therefore becomes a political act of justice, on food sovereignty, indigenous rights, and restoring power back into the hands of farmers. So how does this rich history weave into the story of today’s guest?
Milka Chepkorir Kuto is an anthropologist and climate and human rights activist. She is a member of the Sengwer indigenous community of Kenya’s Rift Valley, and she has become a representative for her people in defending their land rights after violent evictions from their traditional lands. Milka is also a Coordinator of Defending Territories of Life at ICCA Consortium, and has worked the UN Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Her community is now working to revitalize people-land relationships through indigenous knowledge, and Milka works with the women to save and protect their ancestral ways and seed systems. As Milka speaks, you can feel in her spirit this visceral connection to place, story, food, culture, a weaving of seed, hand, heart, human, forest. Milka herself is a seed, a story keeper, a culture holder, an inspirational tie between ancestral knowing and the modern world.
Episode Website Link
Show Links:
Milka’s Crowdfunding Site for Lifeworlds listeners: “Help the Indigenous Sengwer Peoples of Kenya”
Revitalizing Sengwer People-Land Relationships
Global Alliance for Future of Food
Earthed course: Saving Seeds for a Better Future
Will Bonsall, Scatterseed Project
Gaia Foundation Seed Sovereignty
Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd
Cover Photo by AI
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This musical journey has been produced for Lifeworlds by the vocal artist Moncaya. It is a sonic ode to the waters of the Earth and the rivers that flow, and a deep and loving conversation between two dear friends.
Moncaya is a singer-songwriter and composer whose namesake derives from the mountain that rises in a vast dry plain in Northern Spain, her homeland; a mecca for the Iberian Celts and generations of healers, witches, and spiritual practioners. In this musical journey, she has woven our words with the sounds of the Rio Magdalena, a powerful estuary that flows through the state of Mexico bringing water to the entire city, and stitched it all together with her hauntingly beautiful voice and utterances. Listen to the end, where you can catch the track in its full splendor.
This song is part of a wider movement – an open call for musicians around the world to create music, using water samples mainly gathered by Splice, a global library of musical resources for artists and creators. The movement is founded with the intent to give voice to water through different sonic universes made available to any musical artist, anywhere.
I ask Moncaya at one point in this conversation how she as an artist can translate with integrity the experience of a whole other lifeworld – that of water itself. She chuckles, and with her characteristic clarity and warmth, responds, “You don't give voice to the waters…. You just explore with a pure heart, and whatever comes is good enough”.
Moncaya was trained as an engineer and worked developing technology for conflict resolution and peace-building in countries at war, including Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Syria and Tunisia. Currently based in Mexico City, her expression flows through her creations which blend the timeless essence of folk and world music with the freshness of electronic elements, creating a powerful bridge between tradition and innovation.
So my friends, my invitation is to listen to this episode quietly, with a spacious heart, and let it wash over you.
Links
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Audacious, spunky, courageous, defiant, sensitive, compassionate, fierce… These are just some of the words that I feel radiating from the formidable spirit and woman that is Cristina “Mitty” Mittermeier. Hailed as one of the most influential conservation photographers of our time, this Mexican national has dedicated her entire life to protecting the world's oceans - and through her work, has inspired millions of people to do the same.
Cristina was one of the first pioneers in the concept and field of conservation photography. Once told to sit down and be quiet early on in her career when she asked how photography could be used as advocacy for the world’s last wild places, Cristina now has millions of followers, who are drawn to the stunning and strategic communications of her non-profit organisation Sea Legacy (which she founded with her husband Paul Niklen). It serves as a platform for many storytellers and local communities doing critical conservation work - in that way, they are amplifiers of the world’s most far flung voices and the ocean’s precious inhabitants. With that photography, should we be pushing out pictures showing the majesty of nature? Or should conservation photography also run a whole gamut of realistic but potentially emotionally distressing content? As we discuss today, it's a fine line and a delicate balance to tread in telling it as it is, whilst infusing hope in others, AND not wearing oneself down in anger or despair as we do so.
We also speak about common myths or misconceptions that exist about the ocean as well as speculate on the creation of blue economies, what justice looks like for coastal communities, and how the world might change the immense value of these blue natural capital ecosystem would be entered into the PNL of a country.
Episode Website Link
Show Links:
Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.
Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd
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