If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you know we’ve been working on a series about kinship with the “more-than-human world.” We began this project before anyone had even heard of Covid, and now, we’ve finally completed the kinship series. What you may not realize is that we have a separate podcast feed that includes four extended interviews that won’t air on the radio. Each of these conversations runs 35-40 minutes and is simply too long to fit into our weekly radio show.
So why these long interviews? Partly, it was an experiment to see if they hold up at this length. (They do, in case you’re wondering.) But mostly, it scratched my itch to go really deep into these conversations, with the luxury of time to pursue tangents and also delve into the personal histories of some remarkable people. With anthropologist Enrique Salmon, we hear how his native Raramuri culture showed that everything around him - plants, animals, rocks, wind - is his direct relative; Suzanne Simard describes how a childhood playing in the dirt and dodging grizzlies in Canada’s wild forests shaped her pioneering research in forest ecology; mycologist Merlin Sheldrake ranges from the networked intelligence of fungi to the strange properties of magic mushrooms; and ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan reflects on “desert wisdom.”
Every so often, all of us at TTBOOK will push against the edges of our format - to find out what sounds good and also what nourishes our creative drive. I hope you’ll come along for the ride and tell us what you think about the kinship series.
—Steve