amitav ghosh

My guest this episode is artist and activist Katie Holten. Katie has just released a book called The Language of Trees, a collection of literary and scientific works by people like Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ursula le Guin, and Ross Gay. Using her Alphabet of Trees, the book is underpinned by the Katie’s art and asks us to examine our relationship with trees by pulling together wide-reaching strands and demonstrating in one place, just how connected we are to them.

Dr Ian Bedford’s Bug of the Week: Asian Hornets

What We Talk About 

The idea behind the Language of Trees

The Tree Alphabet

Themes behind the essays

Inspiring Tree People

About The Language of Trees

In this beautifully illustrated collection, artist Katie Holten gifts readers her visual Tree Alphabet and uses it to masterfully translate and illuminate pieces from some of the world’s most exciting writers and artists, activists and ecologists.

Holten guides us on a journey from prehistoric cave paintings and creation myths to the death of a 3,500 year-old cypress tree, from Tree Clocks in Mongolia and forest fragments in the Amazon to the language of fossil poetry. In doing so, she unearths a new way of seeing the natural beauty that surrounds us and creates an urgent reminder of what could happen if we allow it to slip away.

Links

The Language of Trees by Katie Holten - Elliott & Thompson, June 2023 

www.katieholten.com

Starcroft Farm Cabins

Other episodes if you liked this one:

Plants and People

The Botanical Mind

Patreon

To mark World Environment Day on June 5, team Banega Swasth India speaks with Author, Jnanpith Award Winner, Amitav Ghosh about his new book - The Living Mountain and how through most of his work he is highlighting the climate crisis that are taking place around the world. Mr Ghosh tags climate change as "slow violence" and adds, "it is like a war with another name." He says that the cycle of production and consumption are really the drivers of climate change and we all have grown used to the climate crisis.

Natalie Zemon Davis and Amitav Ghosh: Storytelling and the Global Past John-Paul Ghobrial (History, Churchill College) This public lecture will bring together the prize-winning historian Natalie Zemon Davis and the celebrated novelist Amitav Ghosh to reflect on prevailing approaches to writing about the global past. Masterful storytellers in their own right, both speakers have experimented in novel, poignant, and bold ways with several of the key questions facing global historians today. In doing so, they have also embraced the productive tension at the boundaries of history and fiction. The event, therefore, is intended as much as a reflection on global history as an opportunity to consider wider issues of narrative, plausibility, and authenticity in historical writing in its myriad forms. In doing so, it will encourage the audience and participants to think together about the limits and opportunities facing historians and novelists, respectively, in their attempts to depict the global past.

Opening of exhibition by Amitav Ghosh and a reading from his In an Antique Land. Introduced by Anshuman Mondal (Brunel).