re: Wild
By Boyce Upholt
re: Wild is a series of conversations with people who are pushing the boundaries of that old idea. We'll talk to people who -- instead of conceiving of the wilderness as a place apart -- live, eat, and work in a more-than-human world.
New episodes drop twice a month, on the first and third Wednesdays.
re: WildSep 07, 2022
Jessica Camille Aguirre: The View From Space
Jessica Camille Aguirre is a writer whose work focuses on climate change and extremes.
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[01:41] AFAR Magazine: “The Promise and Peril of Space Tourism”
[05:13] Frank White’s The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution
[06:34] The Space Studies Institute: Gerard K. O’Neill
[08:19] NASA: “Blue Marble”
[08:23] NASA: “Earthrise”
[08:58] Kenneth E. Boulding: “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth”
[09:14] Wikipedia: “Whole Earth Catalog”
[18:02] Harper’s Magazine: “Another Green World”
[22:25] University of Arizona: “Biosphere 2”
[31:56] Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature
[36:40] Southlands newsletter
Justin Gregg: Us Dumb Humans
Justin Gregg is a science writer and animal cognition researcher.
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[0:52] Justin Gregg's If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity
[9:39] EuroNews: “Explained: Who has nuclear weapons in Europe and where are they?”
[24:58] Arik Kirschenbaum's The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens—and Ourselves
Defending the Forest
May and Hadley identify as members of the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement.
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[0:05] Atlanta City Studio’s Our Future City report (h/t Charles Bethea at the New Yorker)
[1:18] Defend the Atlanta Forest
[12:41] Resident Advisor: “Inside the American South’s Anti-Cop Raves”
[19:23] Rolling Stone: “The Battle for ‘Cop City’”
Laura J. Martin: Designing the Wild
Laura J. Martin is a historian and ecologist who studies how people shape the habitats of other species. She is the author of Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration and an environmental studies professor at Williams College.
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[1:21] Laura J. Martin’s Wild by Design
[3:47] The Society for Ecological Restoration
[7:49] “A New Global Framework for Managing Nature Through 2030”
Wyatt Williams: Life and Death and Meat
Wyatt Williams is a writer and a former restaurant critic.
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[1:19] Springer Mountain: Meditations on Killing and Eating
[2:01] Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma
[2:04] Food Inc.
[9:45] “Will the Next Pandemic Start with Chickens?” (The New Republic)
[10:58] “When the National Bird is a Burden” (The New York Times Magazine)
[14:09] Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm
[17:16] Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals
[23:44] “What Went Wrong With Eleven Madison Park's Vegan Menu" (Bon Appetit); “Restaurant Review: Eleven Madison Park's Vegan Menu” (The New York Times)
[28:39] Emma Marris’s Wild Souls
Rien Fertel: The Pelican Holds Everything
Rien Fertel is the author of Brown Pelican and three previous books: Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera, The One True Barbecue, and Imagining the Creole City. He is currently a Visiting Professor of History at Tulane University.
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Mentioned in this episode:
[1:14] Rien Fertel’s Brown Pelican
[2:25] Fantasy Birding
[2:50] eBird
[9:20] Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
[15:19] Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
[15:58] Walter Anderson
[17:46] Jack Davis’s The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America's Bird
Julia Rosen: We Are Grass People
If you're anything like me, when you think of nature the first image that comes to mind is a tree. But, as beautiful as forests are, another ecosystem is even more important to human history: grasslands. For centuries, grasslands have been ignored by Western scientists, sometimes even denigrated as wastelands. Julia Rosen says that's due in part to a bias against grasslands that emerged in Europe and was exported overseas. In this episode of re: Wild, Boyce and Julia discuss grasslands — both their past and the key role they may play in our future.
For further reading, see Julia's July article in The Atlantic, "Trees Are Overrated."
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Julia Rosen is a freelance journalist covering science and the environment from Portland, Oregon. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Hakai, High Country News, and many other publications. Follow her on Twitter at @1juliarosen
Peter Alagona: The Nature of Cities
Cities and suburbs across the U.S. are filled with wildlife, from squirrels to hawks to coyotes and bears. Indeed, you're more likely to run into a bear outside of Newark, New Jersey, than outside of Anchorage. How did this come to be true? That's the subject of The Accidental Ecosystem by environmental historian Peter Alagona, the guest on this episode of re: Wild.
Lyndsie Bourgon: Tree Thieves
The act of carving up a tree on public land can seem like a desecration: our forests are our natural cathedrals, after all, at least according to the classic cliché. But as writer and oral historian Lyndsie Bourgon points out in her new book Tree Thieves, crime in the forest is a bit more complicated.
Marcia Bjornerud: Timefulness
Sometimes we like to seek landscapes that feel timeless, as if they've been set adrift from the tyranny of the clock. But perhaps we need to start seeing the world as timeful.
Marcia Bjornerud is a professor of geology and environmental studies at Lawrence University, and the author of two books, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World, and Geopedia: A Brief Compendium of Geological Curiosities.
In this first episode of re: Wild, I talk to Marcia about deep time, and how developing "timefulness" might be key to a better relationship with the rest of the world.