Reseed

A small hummingbird flew over 1,900 kilometres, and ended up in a Saskatchewan backyard before a cold winter. The hummingbird – later called Yosemite Sam in national news stories – had performed something called reverse migration, a phenomenon where a bird migrates in the wrong direction. Sam ended up in the care of today’s guest, who protected the Californian bird through a Canadian winter, while she puzzled over how to rehabilitate the bird to the wild. Jan Shadick is a wildlife rehabilitator, and the Executive Director of Living Sky Wildlife Rehabilitation. Jan has spent decades advocating for wildlife rehabilitation, and she trains and encourages new rehabilitators. She is a founding member of a provincial organization that runs the wildlife hotline and provides rescue services for wildlife across the province. Animal rehabilitation and care are a beautiful example of how humans can resist our hubris and become more humble with our relationships with nature. As Silent Spring becomes a reality, and as birds migrate across continents, this episode looks at the heartbreaking loss of birds and animals. The conversation also explores how to refuse to accept the continued destruction of biodiversity, by recognizing that we ourselves are animals, and we can be a force for good. Listen at Reseed.ca. 

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 Régénération 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. Régénération 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. 

Imagine creating a food future where all people have access to nourishing affordable food, growing practices are regenerative, and our food systems transition from being global and fragile to regional and resilient.This conversation looks at our isolation from the Earth and food that nourishes us, and wonders about repairing our relationship with land and agriculture. We discuss the extractive systems on which we are dependent, and what happens when our systems are disrupted by climate change. We interrogate the prevailing economy which we have been serving and supporting - and look at other options, like a circular economy or a regenerative economy. Guest Barbara Swartzentruber is currently Executive Director of the Smart Cities Office at the City of Guelph, where the City and County of Wellington are collaborating with public and private sector partners to build a circular, regenerative regional food system. Building on the principles of a circular economy and leveraging the power of data, they are re-imagining a sustainable regional food system that increases access to affordable, nutritious food and finds new opportunities for waste reduction and recovery. Barbara has taught public policy, community development and advocacy at several Canadian universities, has been appointed to expert panels and as a Senior Fellow on the circular economy at esteemed institutions, and speaks internationally about reimagining resilient local food systems. Facing international problems of daunting proportions, we ask: what is the role of individuals, communities, and cities? What do we want the commons to look like? How can food not only feed and nourish people, but also connect and strengthen community?Listen at reseed.ca or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Communicating the Anthropocene is an art and a science. Multiple messages, tactics, messengers, and channels can be harnessed to convey climate change problems and solutions to citizens. Environmental communications are one of the most underutilized solutions we have for rising to meet environmental crises. Every movement, every momentous and terrible human collective shift starts not with weapons or protests - they start with words.Anthropocene problems are spiritual and cultural. Our greatest problems lie in a lack of sacredness, disconnection, isolation, rootlessness, too much stuff, too much pressure, distraction, division, and a lack of imagination of other realities. Enter storytelling and media - shapers of culture, givers of richness, enhancers of empathy, influencers of citizens and their politicians, and fertile soil for imagination. Guest Sara Lopez is a social entrepreneur, creator, artist, writer, and culture worker. Her multicultural upbringing inspired her to study, document, and work with people from different cultures all over the planet. Along with Gabriel Alvarez, she co-founded The Jungle Journal, an online platform with an annual print magazine that covers themes around global cultures, ecosystems, past and modern histories, Indigenous activism, and reflections. Together, Sara and Gabriel share stories about cultures and people that go unnoticed and unheard.How do we shift culture? How do we rebuild trust in each other, and the capacity to imagine and express? How do we dismantle what we see as truths, such as  the norms of capitalism and our role in keeping it humming along to the edge of the cliff? How do we shape stories that tell people what we are fighting for, and energize them to fight? Or love, or care, or tend? This conversation explores these questions, and looks at storytelling and the role of media in reconnecting with the Earth.Listen at Reseed.ca. 

Looking at species in a landscape, we can see the stories of each creature and what role it plays in that ecosystem. So, what is our role in our landscapes? Are we an invasive species? Too often we hear that we are doomed to be takers, who damage the planet with our very presence. However, it is possible to see ourselves as creative stewards of the Earth while meeting our own needs. Most of us have not seen a reciprocal reality brought to life, but this Reseed conversation about permaculture, agroecology, land rights, and ecosystem restoration illustrates how we can remember how to be a part of a natural world that we never left. Guest Tao Orion is a permaculture designer, teacher, homesteader, and mother living in Oregon. She is the author of the book Beyond the War on Invasive Species: A Permaculture Approach to Ecosystem Restoration, and an expert and practitioner of permaculture and ecosystem restoration.Tao takes listeners on her journey from growing up on a commune to her role as a mother and grower of food and steward of the land. She brings to life the restoration of creeks and ways to manage invasive species by looking at ecosystems as a whole, resulting in the hopeful return of biodiversity and flourishing webs of life. We discuss how to find balance, cultivate food, tend to land,  grow community networks, and mother future generations to see us through times of disasters and abundance. Listen at reseed.ca. 

The ocean - which has always held mystery for us human beings - also holds powerful solutions to climate change and biodiversity loss. By rewilding our oceans and protecting the forests of the sea, we can bring back essential biodiversity, reduce the worst of climate change, and provide a sustainable source of food for humans and many ocean species. In a world of discouraging environmental news, stories of the proven successes and future potential of rewilding the ocean are a beacon of hope. Charles Clover is the Executive Director of the Blue Marine Foundation, and author of Rewilding the Sea: How to Save our Oceans. Charles has dedicated decades to conserving land and ocean, and made his name as an author and environmental journalist and editor. His book The End of The Line and the award-winning major documentary film of the same name highlighted overfishing as a global problem.Delve into this conversation about rewilding the ocean, the mystery of seahorses, and witnessing one patch of land on Earth change over decades. Learn about the role of policy in protecting and restoring the health of our oceans, and how the sea connects to us all, no matter what ecology we call home. Listen at reseed.ca or wherever you find podcasts. 

Food justice is interwoven with conversations about our women ancestors and motherhood in this episode of Reseed. Food is interconnected with human health, planetary health, water, soil, animals, culture, and care. At its worst, the production of food is one of the most damaging sources of climate change and biodiversity loss, and it can be cruel to animals and exploitative to people. At its best, growing food roots us into this beautiful Earth, creating a reciprocal relationship with the land, connections with community - and the reclamation of rights. Guest Leticia Ama Deawuo has been a leading activist for food sovereignty and food justice for the past 15 years. She is the Executive Director of SeedChange, and spent four years as the Executive Director of Black Creek Community Farm, where she worked towards greater food justice with the Toronto community of Jane-Finch. She brings a unique perspective and expertise on food sovereignty, agroecology and food justice, thanks to her childhood spent on a small-scale farm in Ghana. She is also a filmmaker, currently working on a film on Women Indigenous Farmers in Africa that explores gender, racial equality, and indigeneity in African farming communities. Ama sheds light on food sovereignty, a grassroots worldwide movement to reclaim food systems, with a particular focus on farmers’ rights. It focuses on the right to food, and grapples with questions of land ownership, distribution of resources, workers’ rights, environmental justice, and historical injustices. Could anything be more prescient to our precarious moment when workers are rising up and the Earth cries for our radical care? Listen at reseed.ca or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Fossil fuel narratives seep into our culture, media, politics, and minds like pesticides through soil, water, and food. It can be hard to know where these pervasive and damaging narratives started, or how to extricate them from our lives. Fortunately, we can create our own hopeful narratives of possible climate futures that run like fast-moving rivers from person to person. Guest Grace Nosek is a climate justice scholar, community organizer, and storyteller. Grace has spent years studying and deconstructing the narratives and tactics of the fossil fuel industry - as well as creating her own hopeful climate narratives like the Ava of the Gaia trilogy and the Rootbound project. Her research on climate litigation and storytelling was cited in a critical international report and she contributed to the Good Energy Playbook on climate storytelling for Hollywood screenwriters.We do not need to push for a more hopeful climate future alone. We do not need to dwell in a place of crisis, fear, and scarcity all the time. We can find the veins and rivulets of care that already exist in the growing climate movement, and together rewrite the future to be one - not of uncertain doom - but one of collective care, no matter what we may face.

Oceans, cities, farming, media, storytelling, seeds,  soil, and activism are being reimagined and revolutionized by the captivating guests who join season 2 of Reseed. Host Alice Irene Whittaker delves into thought-provoking, in-depth conversations with people who are repairing our relationships with nature. Seeds of change are being planted by these guests - and also by millions of us. Individually, these seeds seem small, but together, they transform our ecology and our selves.We can repair, heal, cultivate, and steward when it is needed the most. This is our calling. Reseed conversations make space for the very real heartbreak of our moment, and they are also filled with joy, love, and care.Listen at reseed.ca or wherever you listen to podcasts. The first episode of season 2 will be published November 1, 2022. 

We protect our gentle hearts and our fearful brains by saying things cannot change, telling ourselves it isn’t as bad as it is, or just ignoring environmental and social breakdown all together. Our disillusionment can be a slow erosion of imagination and hope, day by weary day, with global tragedies playing out behind our personal triumphs and pains. As an antidote to disconnection and despair, artists have a powerful role to play: making space to feel grief, sparking imagination, knitting people together in solidarity and shared experience, and rekindling a belief in what is possible. Guest Rebeka Ryvola de Kremer is an artist and illustrator who is creating a more just and caring world, as well as a learning advisor for the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre. From guerilla protest art to art galleries to scientific reports to international UN conferences, Rebeka’s art brings creativity and human responses to creativity into many spaces and places. She sees art as a powerful medium to communicate climate messages and build community. Rebeka brings her faith in the power of curiosity, wonder, and connection to the work she does in service to people and the planet. She currently works primarily with illustration, visualization of data and information, live visual communication like scribing & cartoons, group facilitation, and public art installation. Her clients and collaborators include Black Lives Matter DC, the World Bank, the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement, The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, Yale University, Columbia University, and community organizations in Los Angeles, Washington DC, Mexico City, and Beirut.Rebeka is the type of person who reignites your belief in magic and makes you want to reconnect with your creative self. She is also the artist who created the cover art for Reseed, and she was a part of the project before it ever reached listeners. This conversation examines being an artist in “serious” spaces, human migration across places, and disconnecting from social media and information overload for the sake of sanity and creativity. Art can be informed by science and evidence, and can responsibly connect humans with information and steward action. Art has often been disregarded or sidelined in climate and justice conversations, but creativity is essential for the revolution towards a regenerative and caring reality.Listen at reseed.ca. 

From the wonder of watching tiny, wild critters to the grand, complex world of international environmental research, this conversation spans worlds. It navigates the often-separate disciplines of science and stories, threading them together. Guest Kai Chan and host Alice Irene Whittaker discuss our responsibilities on Earth, heroic action, the value of nature, the connection between culture and conservation, what it is really like to work on those massive international climate reports, and rewilding a beautiful planet. Kai Chan is a scientist, professor, and cofounder of CoSphere, a Community of Small-Planet Heroes. He is the Canada Research Chair in Rewilding and Social-Ecological Transformation at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia. He is an interdisciplinary, problem-oriented sustainability scientist, trained in ecology, policy, and ethics from Princeton and Stanford Universities. Kai led the pathways and solutions chapter of the recent ‘UN biodiversity report’ and has published over 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals. As an interdisciplinary sustainability scientist, Kai leads CHANS lab (Connecting Human and Natural Systems) and is a Lead Editor of the new British Ecological Society journal People and Nature. Kai strives to understand how social-ecological systems can be transformed to be both better and wilder.Weaving threads between worlds, this episode of Reseed examines how the stories we tell can turn science into action, and takes a peek at the great lengths to which we will go for our one wild and wondrous home.  Listen at reseed.ca. 

How do we balance joy with sorrow in the midst of ongoing crises? Seeking freedom is not frivolous but rather essential, so that we are able to care for ourselves as we protect wild places, and so we can be resilient in the face of environmental and social breakdown. This conversation explores the importance of strengthening our relationships to our ancestors, protecting the places where we live, and reconnecting with our own inner child in this search for joy.Guest Danielle Daniel is an award-winning author and illustrator of settler and Indigenous ancestry, who has written two novels. Forever Birchwood is a middle grade novel set in her northern hometown of Sudbury, following Wolf, on the crest of adolescence, as she fights to protect a beloved forest. Danielle’s bestseller adult novel Daughters of the Deer is an historical fiction novel inspired by the lives of her ancestors— an Algonquin woman and a soldier/settler from France, and their first born daughter who was murdered by French settlers. Danielle joins Reseed to talk about her novels, and to delve into environmental protection, polarization, finding common ground, the power of stories, and reconnecting with joy. In the words of Mary Oliver, joy may be life’s “way of fighting back, that sometimes something happened better than all the riches or power in the world”. Joy and childhood wonder need not be an escape from everything we collectively face, but rather they can coexist with the sorrow, give life meaning, and support us in being the caretakers that we need to be. Listen at reseed.ca. 

We live as part of a wondrous planet, an intricate web of interconnections and relationships. We have been taught, though, to think not in wholes and connections, but rather to break everything into simple, easy-to-digest pieces. What is often lost is our knowledge that we are whole, and that we belong here. Fortunately, systems thinking helps us to see interconnections and complexities, and learn from whole systems, like a body, ecosystem, economy, community, or planet.  Drawing on this way of thinking, multisolving helps us solve complex problems by taking actions that result in many interconnected benefits. This conversation looks at systems thinking and multisolving - starting with a decades-long experience of cultivating an intentional community. Reseed guest Dr. Elizabeth Sawin brings decades of experience as a systems thinker who leans into complexity to help small seeds grow into big changes. She is a wise systems thinking expert, and she is leading the forefront of multisolving. as the Founder of the Multisolving Institute. A biologist with a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Beth co-founded Climate Interactive in 2010 and served as Co-Director from 2010 until 2021. While at Climate Interactive, she led the scientific team that offered the first assessment of the sufficiency of country pledges to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2008. Elizabeth helped create Cobb Hill, an intentional community of people who want to explore the challenge of living in ways that are materially sufficient and socially and ecologically responsible, with 23 households managing 270 acres in Vermont. She raised her family in this community that is now home to community-supported agriculture, beekeepers, and more, built on the three pillars of community, sustainability, and land and farm. Elizabeth digs into the experience of cultivating an intentional community in this conversation.A systems view encourages us all to look beyond the false boundaries and lines that have been drawn, and calls on us instead to see how many parts interconnect as a whole. This is a conversation about changing how we see the Earth - and our place within her.Listen at reseed.ca. 

There is a strange and haunting beauty to the discarded massive objects like ships, planes, cars, and phone booths that sit in waste graveyards around the planet. These relics of the past and symbols of our disposable culture are spotlighted in Scrap, a new documentary by filmmaker Stacey Tenenbaum, who tells the stories of the human beings who live with and have relationships with these objects at the end of their useful life. Scrap draws on poetic, cinematic storytelling to allow us to witness what happens to the mammoth waste that we create and discard, and delves into the lost arts of repair, reuse, and restoration that people are reclaiming.Stacey Tenenbaum is an award-winning producer and director. In 2014 she founded H2L Productions, a boutique documentary film production company. Scrap, a love letter to the things we use in our daily lives, is her third feature documentary and premieres at Hot Docs in May 2022. Stacey is fascinated by things that are old, and she is nostalgic for a time when life was slower, and things were made by hand and built to last.This conversation with Stacey and Reseed host Alice Irene Whittaker looks at Scrap as a window into not just the worlds of waste that exist around our planet, but also the evolving circular economy where we reduce what we use in the first place, and have a clear plan for everything we make and buy so that our world is waste-free and marked by a balanced relationship with nature and one other. Reuse, restoration, the right to repair movement, and the reevaluation of value are explored in this discussion, as is the vital role that storytelling and art play in the revolution to create a circular, just, and regenerative future. Read the transcript and show notes at reseed.ca. Follow @aliceirenewhittaker on Instagram for a chance to win a pair of tickets to the premiere of Scrap at Hot Docs.