The organization Nick Wesley co-founded, Urban Rivers, is creating The Wild Mile, the first-ever floating eco-park of its scale in the world. It's a mile-long floating park located on the North Branch Canal of the Chicago River, a manmade channel along the east side of Goose Island between Chicago Avenue and North Avenue.

The organization Nick Wesley co-founded, Urban Rivers, is creating The Wild Mile, the first-ever floating eco-park of its scale in the world. It's a mile-long floating park located on the North Branch Canal of the Chicago River, a manmade channel along the east side of Goose Island between Chicago Avenue and North Avenue.

The organization Nick Wesley co-founded, Urban Rivers, is creating The Wild Mile, the first-ever floating eco-park of its scale in the world. It's a mile-long floating park located on the North Branch Canal of the Chicago River, a manmade channel along the east side of Goose Island between Chicago Avenue and North Avenue.

Guest Jenn Smith says that human concepts of intergenerational wealth and inequality occur also in the behaviors of animals.

When Jane Watson encountered a ruined meadow of seagrass in the ocean, instead of getting furious, she grew curious.

Season Five Will Launch July 2022

New episodes, new guests, new insights about nature and our built environments are coming soon. And more on how we can live together--with nature, with cities and with one another. Subscribe in your favorite podcast app or check back here.

Sarah Cowles encourages radically rethinking the synthetic landscapes found in cities. When welcoming nature to our human cities, do we aim for an...

Dr. Caitlin Rankin’s research shows that a long-held theory about why an ancient civilization passed out of existence was wrong. Cahokia Mounds in...

Dr. Scarlett Howard’s research on cognition of honeybees got a lot of media attention when in 2018, she published a paper that showed bees can...

Tony Hiss’s new book, “Rescuing the Planet: Protecting Half the Land to Heal the Earth,” lays out both the urgency for and possibility of protecting...

Jeanne Gang has an explicit intention to make the human built environment as kind as possible for birds, nature, wildlife and the Earth’s atmosphere...

Climate change is scary. The magnitude of the problem makes it hard for people to commit to direct action to solve it, hoping instead (reasonably but perhaps impractically!) that government will do the work...

Akiko Busch is well-known for her writing on design, culture and the natural world. Her essays continue to touch on those subjects although increasingly, it incorporates—or directly addresses—the natural world...

Andrew Robichaud explores the peculiar coexistence of people and farm animals in America’s cities. In the 1800s, it wasn’t unusual for men wearing top hats and formal attire to stride down tony Manhattan avenues right next to goats and cows...

Dr. Katy Greenwald has a longstanding interest in puzzling out the success and persistence of North America's "gene thieves," the unisexual (all female) Ambystoma salamanders...

David Sibley started drawing birds at age five and never stopped. Having an ornithologist father and being around his father’s friends, all of whom were also interested in birds, made birdwatching seem an ordinary thing all grown men did...

Structural geologist Marcia Bjornerud was raised by free-thinking parents who instilled in her a love of books and nature. She’s published many professional papers (read mainly by experts in the field) and two popular books that, in the opinion of this podcast, ought to be read by every inhabitant of our planet...

Even though the coronavirus pandemic is keeping 226 million Americans sheltering in place, stepping out for fresh air is still allowed. But what’s safe?

In Openlands, Jerry Adelmann joined an organization whose interests aligned perfectly with his own: nature, culture, historic preservation, social equity. Since then, Jerry has been a ninja nature practitioner who’s…

Janet Voight grew up in Iowa, far from the ocean. Yet as a young adult, she found her way to the study of marine organisms, especially the cephalopods: that strange and wonderful system that includes snails, clams, squids, nautilus, and octopuses...