For The Wild

What does it mean to practice hope in a changing world? In the final episode based on A State of Change: California’s Forgotten Landscapes, newly revised and expanded by Heyday Books, Ayana Young and artist-naturalist Laura Cunningham explore how we might stay present to what can still be protected, restored, and cared for. Laura reflects on the role of art and imagination in reconstructing California’s ecological past, describing her paintings as “visual hypotheses” shaped by science, hist...

Ayana Young and Laura Cunningham return to A State of Change: California’s Forgotten Landscapes, newly revised and expanded by Heyday Books. Laura shares how decades of research became a story-driven exploration of ecological memory, resilience, and recovery, offering a glimpse into what California has held and what may still return. California has always been a landscape in motion. Water shifts across floodplains, rivers change course, fire renews forests and grasslands, and species like Ch...

What becomes possible when we learn to see a place through the layers of its memory? Host Ayana Young speaks with artist-naturalist Laura Cunningham about her newly revised and expanded book, A State of Change: California’s Forgotten Landscapes (Heyday Books, 2026). Through field sketching, careful observation, and imagination rooted in research, Cunningham invites us to slow down and look closely at the birds, plants, waterways, and landscapes that shape a place. Together, they explore how...

“I’d like to propose a toast to the garden, to this beautiful planet, and to the gardener. You know, some people have gardens, some people don't. But, they need to have a garden because Grandfather used to say, “We are all a garden in the world." So, I give thanks to the garden and the gardener.” —Carlo Montesanti And so, we have gathered to the final course in this banquet, Dolce. Dessert. Here at this table, we reflect on inheritance. Returning once more to conversations with Ca...

“Mother Earth is really asking us to touch the soil… it’s not just enough to pray. We need to put our hands in the soil.” —Carlo Montesanti Contorni. The side dishes, or the surroundings. In this fourth episode of our series Fat of The Land, we turn towards the question of taste: how it is cultivated and remembered. Through conversations with Carlo Montesanti and Arianna Gelpke, the episode traces the shifting contours of Italian food culture amid tourism, commercialisation, supermarket...