Birds, Imagination, and the Tyranny of Clocks

Each of us is deeply connected to soil, whether we see or feel soil directly. It is the source of our food, medicine, and clothing, and is critical to the liveability of our ecosystems and to our lives. Healthy soil can also help us rise to meet biodiversity loss and climate change. We can grow soil, and sequester carbon, feed ourselves, and strengthen local communities and economies in the process. 

Guest Antonious Petro is the Executive Director of Régéneration Canada and a Masters Candidate in Soil Science. His background is in biology and in community economic development, and that intersection lends itself beautifully to his role leading a national project in regenerative agriculture. Régéneration Canada started as a grassroots initiative, when a handful of Montrealers with a mutual passion for living soils met up in the fall of 2016, hoping to create a national conversation about regenerative agriculture. Since then, the group has grown to become a Canada-wide organization promoting soil regeneration in order to mitigate climate change, restore biodiversity, improve water cycles, and support a healthy food system.

In this episode, I visit Antonious in a barn at a local farm, and we also have a conversation where we get into the principles of regenerative agriculture, barriers that farmers face, and the importance of soil. We look at the hopeful ways in which we can help nature and soil heal themselves. Soil is a connector: regenerative agriculture is deeply connected to the well-being of human beings and animals, and the health of our communities and economies. We need to make sure environmental, economic, and social well-being work together, if we are to have any hope.

Listen at reseed.ca. 

We are midwives of a transformation, in a time of crises and grief. Now is a moment to find our most expansive definitions of motherhood, nature, and ancestry in order to equip us for this moment. This episode of Reseed explores mothering in these times of ours, writing through emergency, a ceasefire in Palestine, and the power of togetherness.   

Kerri ní Dochartaigh is an Irish mother, writer, and grower. Her work explores ideas of emergency, interconnectedness and ecologies of care. For her first book, Thin Places, she was awarded the Butler Literary Award 2022, and highly commended for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2021 in the UK. Cacophony of Bone was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing. Kerri is currently actively engaged with Irish Artists for Palestine, a coalition of artists focused on active solidarity and fundraising.

This conversation invites us to bear witness to the grief, atrocities, and brutalities of the genocide in Palestine and say not in our name. As we grapple with these horrors, we are called to bring our deepest reserves of tenderness and remember our deep love for each other.

Listen at reseed.ca.

We all have times of silence — when momentum slows down, we turn inwards, or we cannot rush and produce. These wintering times, as Katherine May calls them, can allow us to rest and heal, but they can also lead to big changes. Taking times of silence can be one essential tool for restoring our energy and then changing how we are directing that energy: to confront a machine of oppression and extraction; nurture our communities and projects; or rebuild how we want to live. 

Guest Steven Lovatt is a birder, writer, critic, parent, and teacher based in South Wales. He authored Birdsong in a Time of Silence, detailing the life of his young family through the beginning of the Covid pandemic, when he once again noticed the sound of birdsong. He wrote, “Finally, the earth could hear itself think, and the voice of its thought was song.” Like many of us, Steven paid more attention to nature and in his case, turned to birdwatching, rekindling a childhood love, as well as the awareness of the birds who are no longer here. 

This conversation ranges from poetry to parenting, and asks about that which is endangered in our society beyond birds. We dig deep into the roots of being human, and talk about imagination - one of those fruits that comes from times of silence.  

Listen at reseed.ca. 

In the darkness of solstice season, a slim and nourishing light begins to return, imperceptibly, like the small and steady reconnections we are making to the earth and each other. 

This conversation explores how we can reconnect with land and improve our relationship with the environment through natural dye and slow fashion.  These practices allow us to express creativity and connect with our specific homes on a miraculous and hurting planet. We discuss how no one can shoulder the weight of environmental care alone, and it is important (and joyful!) to cultivate community – we need each other. 

Malú Colorin, a Mexican natural dyer and designer living in Ireland, inherited her name and a calling for textile art from her mother and grandmother. Her work draws inspiration from the traditional garments of her native Mexico, while embracing the rich heritage of Irish textiles. Malú is the founder of Talú, a natural dye house and educational hub helping slow fashion lovers keep their clothes in play for longer and reconnect to the Land. She is also the co-founder of Fibreshed Ireland, a community-supported social enterprise building networks to craft a regenerative Irish textile system based on local fibre, local dyes and local labour. 

As we come through the darkest part of the year, this beautiful conversation looks at land, rewilding in Ireland, natural dye processes, the strength of local action, and living our lives authentically. In the slowly-receding darkness, we reflect on what to let go of  – and what we hold onto fiercely. 

Listen at reseed.ca. 

A journey to track giants - the biggest old growth trees in British Columbia - teaches us about the relationships we have with forests, and the threats our trees face, from runaway wildfire to old growth logging to climate change. This journey also sheds light on the harms of a checklist approach to life where we search for the biggest and best acquisitions at a recklessly fast pace. 

Guest Amanda Lewis is a big-tree tracker and an award-winning book editor. Born in Ireland, she now lives in a log house on a small island in the Pacific Northwest of Canada. Amanda’s first book Tracking Giants: Big Trees, Tiny Triumphs, and Misadventures in the Forest became an instant bestseller, telling the story of being an overachieving, burned-out book editor who decides to visit all of the champion trees in British Columbia.

In a conversation ranging from old growth trees to small gardens, from perfectionism and burnout to self-discovery, and from the West Coast of Canada to Ireland, we explore learning how to let go of the checklist, in favour of life.

Collective action can lead to real, tangible victories, like halting an offshore oil project proposed by Big Oil, reminding us that collectives of people have the power to challenge destructive and powerful forces. Instead of the individualistic, lonely, consumerism-heavy environmentalism that claimed centre stage in the past - telling us we are guilty for the worsening climate impact and we need to solve it all alone - the collective climate justice movement encourages us to turn towards each other. 

Guest Tori Tsui is a Bristol-based climate justice activist, organiser, writer and speaker from Hong Kong. You might have seen her on the cover of Vogue with a host of young environmental leaders and Billie Eilish, on panels like one hosted by Emma Watson at the New York Times Climate Hub, or in Instagram posts with inspiring activist friends like Mya-Rose Craig, Greta Thunberg, Daphne Frias, and Dominique Palmer. Tori is one of the wise, outspoken, and youthful leaders of a collective climate justice movement that is expanding environmentalism, intellectually, philosophically, equitably, and emotionally. Her recent debut book, It’s Not Just You, explores the intersections between climate change and mental health from a climate justice perspective.

The climate justice movement shows us how activism does not have to mean the demise of our mental health, requiring non-stop urgent action and burnout. Instead, activists like Tori remind us that climate action is lifelong work, requiring rest, mutual care, and joy. This conversation reveals concrete steps for creating welcoming, nuanced, and flexible spaces that allow for imperfection and conviction. It provides wise reflections on successful movement building and sustaining, and shows how recent wins have been accomplished by collective-minded organizing that is required for these dark times.

Listen at reseed.ca. 

Our lives interconnect closely with the lives of animals. From the raven to the honey badger to the snake to the fox, we live in relationship with the animals, our neighbours and creaturely kin. When the convenience of our modern life causes animals great violence and harm, many of us are deeply affected, even heartbroken, and many of us privately seek ways to grapple with and grieve the cycle of life and death in a society that largely disregards animal life.      

Guest Dr. Amanda Stronza discusses her poetic animal memorials that resonate with tens of thousands of people, because they bring beauty to the deaths of the animals who live among us. Amanda is an environmental anthropologist who studies human relationships with animals, with 30 years’ of field research, conservation, advocacy, writing, teaching, photography, and documentary film. Her experience is mostly in the Amazon regions of Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and in the Okavango Delta of Botswana, though it is closer to home in Austin, Texas, that she creates and shares her powerful animal memorials.

From the deaths of the animals closest to us to the miraculous appearances of living herons and snapping turtles, this conversation invites us to pay attention and bear witness to animals, and to see their deaths in a way that honours animal life while also redeeming us – the human animal.

Listen at reseed.ca. 

The human animal lives at a fragile moment on Earth. But, even as the world we know erodes, many people leave the comfort of denial and inaction to rise and face a changing world with generosity and brave, active hope.

In season three of Reseed, host Alice Irene Whittaker sits down with an animal rehabilitator, a conservation biologist, a birder and author, a beekeeper and grower, a natural-dyer, a climate justice activist, a giant tree tracker, and others who are renewing, repairing, redesigning, reconnecting, and reimagining.

At their heart, these conversations are about (re)connecting with our animal selves and creaturely kin while evolving the uniquely human part of ourselves that can repair our relationships with an out-of-balance Earth.

Listen to Reseed's third season - "The Human Animal" - at reseed.ca. 

Why do we grow in our gardens? Are we searching for closeness to the mystery and magic of the natural world, or perhaps working towards self-sufficiency by feeding ourselves? Do we grow to create habitat for pollinators or enrich precious soil? Do we grow to foster a knowledge of growing in our children, and to foster community? Do we grow to grasp control in a scary world? Do we grow because we love beauty?

Wise and curious guest Alice Vincent delves into her new book, Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival. Alice is a writer, broadcaster, career-journalist, and multi-platform storyteller, and her book Rootbound: Rewilding a Life was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize. Now a columnist for Gardens Illustrated, Alice has written for The Telegraph, The New Statesman, Vogue, The Financial Times, The Sunday Times and The Observer. Beyond the page, Alice is the host of the Why Women Grow podcast, which unearths stories of the land with inspiring women.

This beautiful and rich conversation roots into our relationships with nature and gardening in cities. We discuss perfectionism, being drawn to the soil, and motherhood. We refurl stories of women in their gardens, and pay homage to the gardens who raised us.

Listen at reseed.ca. Support Reseed at buymeacoffee.com/reseedpodcast.

This mini-documentary chronicles the journey of host Alice Irene Whittaker in 2019, when she traveled pregnant with her third child to Colorado to interview acclaimed environmental economist and regenerative rancher Hunter Lovins. Around a kitchen table in her regenerative ranch, Hunter answers curiosities about a circular economy that is modelled on nature’s cycles, and envisions the large-scale transition to renewable energy and ecologically-responsible business. The role of cities and local food systems in caring for our environment are explored. Hunter reflects on her lived and professional experience in transforming landscapes and soil through regenerative agriculture.

L. Hunter Lovins has been a leading pioneer in environmental economics for decades. An award-winning author, she has co‐authored over a dozen books and hundreds of articles. She has consulted for scores of industries and governments worldwide, from Patagonia to the United Nations. She has won dozens of awards, and has been decorated with such honours as receiving The Audubon Society’s Rachel Carson Award to being named a Hero for the Planet by TIME Magazine. Hunter Lovin’s book A Finer Future is a blueprint for an inspiring regenerative economy that avoids collapse and works for people and planet - and it was this book that host Alice Irene Whittaker had in her bag when she was on that airplane to meet Hunter in Colorado.

A moment in time between two women is captured in this thought-provoking conversation that unfolds surrounded by horses, the homes of herons, and wide open sky. This episode challenges economic growth as a concept, dreams of the demise of the fossil fuel industry, and encourages designing an economy that fosters happiness and well-being.

Listen at reseed.ca and follow on Instagram at aliceirenewhittaker.