Today we’re speaking Faith Gemmill, a Pit River/ Wintu and Neets’ aii Gwich’in Athabascan earth defender from Arctic Village, Alaska. She is a campaign organizer for REDOIL (Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands). Faith has worked on behalf of the Gwich’in Nation for over ten years as a representative, public spokesperson and Gwich’in Steering Committee staff to address the potential human health and cultural impacts of proposed oil development in the birthplace and nursery of the Porcupine Caribou Herd in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Faith continues as a public spokesperson, press and tribal liaison and human rights advocate. Faith is a current field representative of the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) and has represented the Gwich’in Nation at United Nations. Faith also serves on the advisory board of Honor the Earth and and National Wildlife Federation. Also joining us is Princess Lucaj. She is the former Executive Director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee and Alaska Director at the Indigenous Leadership Institute. She was a Production Manager with Native Voices at the Autry National Center, a member of the Board of Dancing with the Spirit, and she is an actor, director and activist.

http://www.wearethearctic.org/action/tell-president-and-congress-protect-arctic-refuge

Today, the conversation with Radical Mycology’s Peter McCoy probes onward, as we invoke the powers of fungi in Earth healing and the integration of human societies into our delicate and compromised biosphere. We begin with cutting-edge uses of fungi for personalized medicine, which promises sweeping advances in healthcare and natural healing. We surmise the potentials and the limitations of myco-remediation in confronting industrial agriculture, logging, oceanic plastics, and other major pollution. We’ll also discuss the imperative to preserve fungal diversity and the methods of creating local spore and culture banks. Despite being sidelined by academia and the social mainstream, understanding mycology and fungal ecology—and the universal patterns therein—is an essential tool for reigning in the ecological crisis.

Website: radicalmycology.com
US Book Tour: radicalmycology.com/2016-tour/
The Book: chthaeus.com/product-p/b-rmp.htm
2016 Convergence: radicalmycologyconvergence.wordpress.com/

Today we welcome back Peter McCoy, who speaks on behalf of the fungi, the most overlooked and misrepresented organisms in the web of life. Peter leads us through the earliest evidence of the fungal “queendom” in the development of culture and human intelligence, and shows how understanding fungal biology and mycelial webs can steer our social experiments. Peter is an original founder of Radical Mycology, a grassroots organization and movement that teaches the skills needed to work with mushrooms and other fungi for personal, societal, and ecological resilience. Peter is the lead cultivation expert for the Amazon Mycorenewal Project and Open Source Ecology and the primary author behind Radical Mycology, a nearly 700-page book on accessible mycology and mushroom cultivation. Apart from his work with fungi, he is also a community organizer, street medic, zinester, artist, musician, lecturer, and teacher.

Today we will look deep into the challenges faced by frontline indigenous activists in one of America’s most vibrant, and imperiled, regions, the Mississippi Delta. Monique Michelle Verdin is a native daughter of southeast Louisiana and the creator of the film My Louisiana Love. Her intimate documentation of the Deltas’ indigenous Houma nation exposes the complex interconnectedness of environment, economics, culture, climate and change. Cherri Foytlin is a Cherokee and Dine journalist, and mother of six who lives in south Louisiana. She is the author of "Spill It! The Truth About the Deep Water Horizon Oil Rig Explosion," and she has been a constant voice speaking out for the health and ecosystems of Gulf Coast communities, across many forms of media.

Dr. Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, writer, member of the Citizen Band Potawatomi, Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, NY, and the founding Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. The Center’s mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability. Her research interests include the role of traditional ecological knowledge in ecological restoration and building resilience for climate change. In collaboration with tribal partners, she and her students have an active research program in the ecology and restoration of plants of cultural significance to Native people. She is active in efforts to broaden access to environmental science training for Native students, and to introduce the benefits of traditional ecological knowledge to the scientific community, in a way that respects and protects indigenous knowledge. Dr. Kimmerer has authored numerous literary essays and scientific papers on restoration and plant ecology, as well as the award-winning books Gathering Moss, and Braiding Sweetgrass, which interweave indigenous knowledge and scientific perspectives. She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild.

The first season of this program has explored our ecological predicament from the vantage of activism, science, indigenous knowledge, and eco-psychology, and we have brainstormed and dreamed about how to move towards a regenerative future as an Earth community. The window we must pass through to escape a total unraveling of the climate and biodiversity is so small that we must focus all our creative powers on hitting that target, no matter how radical the changes we must make in our societies and ourselves. The other part of the message is that we can’t do it alone, and we must partner with the plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria, those ancient survivors and healers who give so freely of their gifts. In separation, all creatures perish, but together we comprise a complete intelligence, a beating heart. Our inquiries have often been conceptual, as we dig down to the roots of our collective confusions and shadows. We have set aside the fine-toothed political and economic discussions, because they often conclude that what’s necessary is impossible, and thus produce no meaningful solutions that change our destructive course. Today marks a new direction. Our guest today is a rare breed: a politician who not only can admit our political system is broken and our home planet cries for radical change, but who is absolutely dedicated to building a movement around making it through that diminishing window of opportunity. Jill Stein is the Green Party’s 2016 candidate for President of the United States.

A delightful meander into the deep knowledge of the forest! How do trees communicate with one another and act for the common good? Why are oceans utterly dependent on healthy forests? How would a regenerative society meet its resource needs? What do children know that their parents have forgotten? Diana Beresford-Kroeger is a one-woman force of regeneration of the biosphere. A botanist, medical biochemist and self-defined "renegade scientist," she brings together ethnobotany, horticulture, spirituality and alternative medicine to reveal a path toward better stewardship of the natural world. Orphaned in Ireland in her youth, Diana was educated by elders who instructed her in the Brehon knowledge of plants and nature. Told she was the last child of ancient Ireland and told to one day bring this knowledge to a troubled future, Diana has done exactly that. Her Bioplan is an ambitious plan encouraging ordinary people to develop a new relationship with nature, to join together to replant the global forest. Her books include “The Sweetness of a Simple Life,” “The Global Forest,” “Arboretum Borealis,” “Arboretum America,” and “A Garden for Life.” Diana Beresford-Kroeger was inducted as a Wings WorldQuest fellow in 2010 and named one of Utne reader’s World Visionaries for 2011.

Diana Beresford-Kroeger is a one-woman force of regeneration of the biosphere! A botanist, medical biochemist and self-defined "renegade scientist," she brings together ethnobotany, horticulture, spirituality and alternative medicine to reveal a path toward better stewardship of the natural world. Orphaned in Ireland in her youth, Diana was educated by elders who instructed her in the Brehon knowledge of plants and nature. Told she was the last child of ancient Ireland and told to one day bring this knowledge to a troubled future, Diana has done exactly that. Her Bioplan is an ambitious plan encouraging ordinary people to develop a new relationship with nature, to join together to replant the global forest. Her books include “The Sweetness of a Simple Life,” “The Global Forest,” “Arboretum Borealis,” “Arboretum America,” and “A Garden for Life.” Diana Beresford-Kroeger was inducted as a Wings Worldquest fellow in 2010 and named one of Utne reader’s World Visionaries for 2011.

Upcoming event///March 19:
Call of the Forest: Climate, Water, and Spirit, in Point Reyes, CA.
http://ptreyesbooks.com/goh/call-of-the-forest

Come fall in love with plants, not just as teachers and healers, but as powerful partners in land stewardship and renewal. Rosemary Gladstar joins us to discuss her activism in protecting and restoring medicinal plants and their habitats. She is a pioneer in the herbal movement and has been called the 'godmother of American Herbalism'. She began over 35 years ago developing herbal formulas in her shop, Rosemary's Garden in Sonoma County, California. She is the founder of the California School of Herbal Studies, the oldest running herb school in the United States, and is the organizer of the International Herb Symposium and The annual New England Women's Herbal Conference. She is the author of numerous books and has taught extensively throughout the United States and worldwide at venues as varied as backyard gardens, native villages, garden clubs, universities and hospitals. She is also the co-founder of the Traditional Medicinals tea company. Rosemary’s greatest passion has been the work of United Plant Savers, a non profit organization that Rosemary founded in 1994 and is currently president. UpS is dedicated to the conservation and cultivation of at risk North American medicinal plants and to preserving botanical sanctuaries across the U.S. to help preserve the land that these precious native species thrive on. Rosemary lives and works from her home, Sage Mountain Herbal Retreat Center, a 500 acre botanical preserve in central Vermont.

https://www.unitedplantsavers.org/

As we stand in awe before biotic and societal collapse, Andrew Harvey gives us a map of mystical teachings to help us navigate the dark night of the soul and to emerge as empowered Earth defenders. Andrew Harvey is Founder Director of the Institute of Sacred Activism, an international organization focused on inviting concerned people to take up the challenge of our contemporary global crises by becoming inspired, effective, and practical agents of institutional and systemic change, in order to create peace and sustainability. Sacred Activism is a transforming force of compassion-in-action that is born of a fusion of spiritual knowledge, courage, love, and passion, with wise radical action to preserve and heal the planet and its inhabitants. Andrew was born in south India in 1952, and went to school in England. He studied history at Oxford, receiving England’s highest academic honors. Over the last forty years he has plunged into different mystical traditions to learn their secrets and practices, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Sufism. He has synthesized these mystical explorations with a deep environmental and humanitarian ethic in the practice of Sacred Activism. He is the author of over 30 books.

Today we are speaking with the legendary artist, educator and political activist Buffy Sainte-Marie. Buffy was born to Cree parents on the Piapot Cree Reservation in Saskatchewan, Canada. She was orphaned as an infant and moved to Massachusetts, where she would later get her degree in Eastern Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts. In the early Sixties, Buffy played the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village, where her music was so well received that her career skyrocketed to international fame soon thereafter. Almost 50 years after the release of her first album,* It’s My Way, Buffy’s new album, *Power in the Blood, is filled with the same fierce messages, eclecticism and passion unique to this unstoppable woman. We explore creativity in an age of commodification, being indigenous in a global village, demythologizing the power elites, and more!

http://buffysainte-marie.com/

New Album: Power in the Blood

In the race to name this new bizarre geologic era, "Anthropocene" seems to have stuck the most. Some people are cautious to embrace a name meaning the age of humans, as it can be latched onto by industry and used as a justification for the murder of the planet. More descriptive, cautionary names have been suggested, too. Michael Soule suggested the Catastrophozoic Era. Other contenders include Homogenocene, the Age of Homogeneity, Mixocene, the Age of Slime, and the most resonant to me, coined by EO Wilson, Eremocene, the Age of Loneliness. With the human population in explosive expansion, it is easy to forget, the Earth is going through the most rapid extinction crisis the world has ever seen. Joining us today to help us digest the great amount of information being amassed around the globe about this major juncture in Earth’s history, is Elizabeth Kolbert. Elizabeth is a staff writer for The New Yorker, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change, and most recently The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, which has just won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction.

There are virtually no places left that have not been logged, mined, tilled, paved, overfished, overhunted, irradiated, drilled, bombed, or built to the sky. As public discourse swirls around how to meet our material needs as we approach the limits of growth, there is another conversation going on about how to give back and make offerings of beauty amid the plunder. As Albert Einstein said, we can’t solve our problems with the same thinking that created them. Hyper-rational linear thinking alone cannot impassion us to defend the sacred places that are buried beneath the sprawl of infrastructure. Our guest today, Trebbe Johnson, helps people break through the walls that isolate them from the pain and healing of the Earth. She has been leading vision quests, workshops, and ceremonies worldwide since 1994. She is the founder of Radical Joy for Hard Times, a non-profit organization devoted to finding and making beauty in wounded places, and the author of The World Is a Waiting Lover. A passionate explorer of outer as well as inner frontiers, Trebbe has camped alone in the Arctic, traveled in the Sahara Desert, and is an award-winning multimedia producer.

Recent article in Orion Magazine: https://orionmagazine.org/article/uncommon-gratitude/

Radical Joy For Hard Times: http://www.radicaljoyforhardtimes.org/

Does wild nature have a place in the future of farms and human society? How close to the edge of genetic unraveling will we come before stopping biotech pollution and safeguarding seed diversity? Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental thinker and activist. A leader in the International Forum on Globalization, Shiva won the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize (the Right Livelihood Award) in 1993. Director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy, she is the author of many books, including Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply *and Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge*. Before becoming an activist, she was one of India’s leading Physicists.

An expansive discussion on the climate, past and future: the weight of humanity on natural systems, repercussions of temperature and sea level rise, the future of the amazon, the history of salmon and northwest forests, and more. Curt Stager is an ecologist, paleoclimatologist, and science journalist with a Ph.D. in biology and geology from Duke University. Stager blends the long-term perspective of a climate historian and multidisciplinary outlook of a biologist-geologist with the communication skills of a lifelong teacher and writer. He has published over three dozen peer-reviewed articles in major journals and has written extensively for general audiences in periodicals such as National Geographic, New York Times, Fast Company, and Adirondack Life.  Since 1990, he has also co-hosted Natural Selections, a weekly science program on North Country Public Radio. He currently teaches at Paul Smith's College in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, and holds a research associate post at the University of Maine's Climate Change Institute, where he continues to investigate the long-term history of climate in Africa, South America, and the northeastern United States.

Just as returning wolves to their former territories benefits all other creatures, humans—also apex predators—have an ecological role to play. Our very survival in the face of the inevitable collapse of modern civilization, Peter suggests, depends on us remembering ancestral skills and strengthening the native plant populations that sustain us. Peter is the founder and Executive Director of Rewild Portland, a local non-profit that creates cultural and environmental resilience through the education of earth-based arts, traditions, and technologies.

Leila Darwish is a community organizer, author, permaculture designer, educator, urban gardener, and grassroots herbalist with a deep commitment to environmental justice, decolonization, food sovereignty, and to providing accessible and transformative tools for communities dealing with toxic contamination of their land and drinking water. Over the last decade, she has worked as a grassroots bioremediation instructor for different environmental organizations and community groups in Alberta, BC and the USA on campaigns such as tar sands, fracking, nuclear energy, coal, climate justice, water protection, and more. We will be discussing her book from New Society Publishers entitled “Earth Repair: A Grassroots Guide to Healing Toxic and Damaged Landscapes.”

A master of eloquence and innovative language, Martín Prechtel is a leading thinker, writer and teacher whose work, both written and oral, hopes to promote the subtlety, irony and pre-modern vitality hidden in any living language. With a Pueblo upbringing, life took him from New Mexico to the village of Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala. There becoming a full village member of the Tzutujil Mayan population, he eventually served as a principal in that body of village leaders responsible for instructing the young people in the meanings of their ancient stories through the rituals of adult rights of passage. Once again residing in his native New Mexico, Martín teaches at his international school Bolad’s Kitchen. Through story, music, ritual and writing, Martín helps people in many lands to retain their diversity while remembering their own sense of place in the daily sacred. For more information visit: www.floweringmountain.com

Civilization took millennia to congeal, and in the last few hundred it has really accelerated its world takeover. The health of the world’s plant and animal communities have inversely plummeted, where now species extinctions are in the hundreds per day, and the wounded remnants of ecosystems are finally succumbing to desertification, which is evident across over two-thirds of the planet. Joining us today to help us interpret these patterns of history, and how to break them, is author Derrick Jensen. Philosopher, teacher, and radical activist Derrick Jensen has authored over twenty books and is the best-known voice of the growing deep ecology movement.

Today, we are talking with the eloquent young visionary Miles Olson, who is living an ongoing experiment in rewilding. Miles has spent the past decade deeply immersed in learning and practicing Earth Skills, while foraging, hunting, gardening and gathering for his livelihood. His experiences have given him a unique perspective on rewilding, radical self-reliance, and the impact of civilization on the natural world. Miles offers a candid discussion into the social and technological drivers of our separation from nature. We muse about collapse scenarios, and revel in thoughts of the beautiful mess of the ensuing wildness.

Today we will take an in depth look at the Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska, which has been called the “crown jewel” of Americas forests. The largest of US national forests, it consists of one third of the world’s coastal temperate rainforest ecosystem, which only occurs in three percent of Earths landmass. The Tongass has already had nearly half of its very large old growth trees cut down due to a process known as high-grading—where loggers remove the oldest and largest trees from the forest. These trees are often essential to the ecosystem, simply because they are so large and provide vital habitats for woodland creatures. Last month, an Alaska court approved further logging of this rare heritage old-growth that has just begun and will continue for ten years unless we organize a strong push-back. Joining us today to fill us in about this top-priority conservation issue is Tom Waldo, senior staff attorney with Earth Justice in Alaska, who has dedicated the last 25 years to defending Alaska’s ancient forests and other urgent causes.

Today we explore an epic nature conservation project that encompasses the great North American Rockies, and we examine the infinite delicate relationships between the species that inhabit them. Mary Ellen Hannibal is a Bay Area writer and editor focusing on science and culture. Hannibal’s book The Spine of the Continent is about a social, geographical, and scientific effort to save nature along the Rocky Mountains. A “thoroughly satisfying gem,” The Spine of the Continent chronicles landscapes, people, critters, and issues along the Spine. A former book review and travel editor, Hannibal is Chair of the California Book Awards. She was a 2011 Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellow.  She is a recipient of the National Society of Science Writer’s Science and Society Award 2012 and Stanford University’s Knight-Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism.

Carbon has become synonymous with “the problem,” but all terrestrial life is based on carbon, and figuring out the carbon cycle is a prerequisite to taking effective climate action. As a continuation of our exploration of restoration agriculture with Mark Shepard, we discuss grassland ecosystems and their capacity to pull massive amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere and back into the ground—representing a real, promising solution to our planetary crisis. Globally, 99% of grasslands are drought-stricken, overgrazed, and weakened by exotic species invasions. With some subtle adjustments to cattle management and some basic awareness of the carbon cycle, we can make a large dent in greenhouse emissions. Imagine what we can do with some more radical changes! Courtney White, formerly a frontline environmental activist and author of Grass, Soil, Hope, is tapping this extraordinary potential by bringing “carbon ranching” to the American Southwest through his work with the Quivira Coalition.

Climbing Poetree is the combined force of two boundary-breaking soul-sisters who have sharpened their art as a tool for popular education, community organizing, and personal transformation. Poets, performance artists, print makers, video and graphic designers, muralists, and new media architects, Alixa and Naima create compelling works at the service of their vision for a more just and livable world. They just published a breathtaking poetry anthology, available at climbingpoetree.com. They tells us about their valient projects and experiences in art-activism, and then get into the juiciness of vision-work, the future of human society, and their advice to budding "solutionaries."

Many of the topics we cover on this program either deal with the complex and difficult situation humanity has awoken to find itself in, or the growing pool of solutions being proposed. Few authors are able to span both areas as deftly as our guest today. We’re taking a journey into the deep wells of knowledge of restoration agriculture pioneer Mark Shepard, who has created a forest where there once was just degraded Wisconsin farmland, not just any forest, but a mega-permaculture, a 106-acre food production environment. He has just written a phenomenal book entitled Restoration Agriculture: Real-World Permaculture for Farmers, which is a handbook on large scale perennial polyculture, padded with generous servings of philosophy and big-picture analysis on how to move forward through the impasse humanity faces and confront it square-on.

The conversation from last week continues. What has the role of psychedelics been in human and plant evolution? What is the ecological function of art? How is science changing as it moves out of reductionism? What do the heart, the brain, and the gut have in common? Stephen Harrod Buhner is the senior researcher for the Foundation for Gaian studies, described as a bardic naturalist, he is the award-winning author of 19 books, including The Lost Language of Plants, The Secret Teachings of Plants, and Sacred Plant Medicine. His most recent book is Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm. Before retiring from the road in 2013, he taught for more than 30 years throughout North America and Europe. He lives in Silver City New Mexico.

This week’s interview is a mosaic of mind-shattering insights from Earth-poet-philosopher Stephen Harrod Buhner. Stephen is the senior researcher for the Foundation for Gaian studies, described as a bardic naturalist, he is the award-winning author of 19 books, including The lost Language of Plants, The Secret Teachings of Plants, and Sacred Plant Medicine. His most recent book is Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm. Before retiring from the road in 2013, he taught for more than 30 years throughout North America and Europe. He lives in Silver City New Mexico.

Eco-philosopher Joanna Macy PhD, is a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology. A respected voice in the movements for peace, justice, and ecology, she interweaves her scholarship with five decades of activism. Her group methods, known as the Work That Reconnects, helps people transform despair and apathy, in the face of overwhelming social and ecological crises, into constructive, collaborative action. It brings a new way of seeing the world, as our larger living body, freeing us from the assumptions and attitudes that now threaten the continuity of life on Earth. She offers her wisdom for remaining sane and grounded as life-long activists in the uphill battle of ecological crisis.

We are in the company of Matthew Wood, author and herbalist of thirty years speaking to us on age-old plant medicine usages, the crucial task of upholding the habitat of plant communities, and much more. In a period when many authors and lecturers are merely "arm chair herbalists" who offer theories and opinions based on book learning, and others have turned to the exotic traditions of India or China, he has been an active practitioner of traditional Western herbalism. He has helped tens of thousands of clients over the years, with many difficult health problems. While Matthew believes in the virtue of many other healing modalities, he has always been inspired to learn, preserve, and practice the tradition of herbal medicine descending to us from our European, Anglo-American, and Native American heritage. He is a member of the American Herbalists Guild (registered herbalist) and has earned his Masters of Science degree from the Scottish School of Herbal Medicine.

Albert Bates has been the director of the Global Village Institute for Appropriate Technology since 1984 and the Ecovillage Training Center at the Farm in Tennessee since 1994 where he has taught sustainable design, natural building, permaculture and restoration ecology to students from more that fifty nations. Albert regales us with his charisma, discussing the miracle of biochar, which can trap carbon while building soil and reversing desertification. We tie carbon farming into the wider climate movement and talk about breaking the cycle of climate denial. Albert goes everywhere from the nuclear reality to the importance of celebration amid the madness.

Become a better steward of your inner environment! Naturopath Xandria Williams demystifies the spectre of cancer, the most insidious "disease of civilization," and recommends a menu and lifestyle for its treatment and prevention, with lots of juicy details. Xandria began her career as a geochemist, but turned to biochemistry and the study of nutrition, naturopathy, homeopathy, and herbal medicine. She has written hundreds of articles, 15 books, and appears frequently on television and radio. Xandria lectures extensively at natural therapy colleges and conferences. She practices in London.

Peter McCoy is the main author of the new book Radical Mycology. What began as a self-guided passion in his younger years has since developed into a life-long devotion to the fungal kingdom and educating the world about its ability to heal the bodies, minds, and ecosystems of the planet. In 2006, Peter co-founded the Radical Mycology project with a focus on teaching the simplest and most effective methods of mushroom cultivation for the purposes of food sovereignty, medicine production, community-scale remediation, and resilient living.

Today we will have a rare glimpse into one of the last remaining wild places in the Eastern United States, Cumberland Island, a 18 mile long island just off the coast of Southern Georgia, a semi-tropical eden of endangered wildlife and pristine ancient forests that has been protected as a wilderness area since 1982. In addition to loggerhead turtles and wild horses, it is home to Carol Ruckdeschel, subject of the new biography Untamed: the wildest woman in America and the fight for Cumberland Island. Today we are speaking with the author of that book, Will Harlan, the editor in chief of Blue Ridge Outdoors Magazine and award-winning journalist. Will was a park ranger on Cumberland Island for nearly twenty years. He initially dreaded crossing paths with this legendary witch of the wilderness, but the real Carol Ruckdeschel turned out to be a distinguished biologist, tireless steward of Cumberland island, and one of the most wildly fascinating people in America.

Matthew Fox might well be the most creative, the most comprehensive, surely the most challenging religious-spiritual teacher in America. He has been renewing the ancient mystical tradition of Creation Spirituality, founding the University of Creation Spirituality in Oakland, which incorporates Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Sufi, Native American, goddess, Hindu traditions as well as ecology, social justice, feminist theory and art. Fox’s effort to reawaken the West to its own mystical tradition has included revivifying awareness of Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas and the Cosmic Christ tradition, as well as interacting with contemporary scientists who are also mystics. He has authored two books with British biologist Rupert Sheldrake, and has worked closely with Native American leaders such as Buck Ghosthorse. We discuss deep ecology as a spiritual practice that must be put in action.

Our guest today, Dr. Caroline Fraser, has written the first definitive account of a visionary campaign to confront ecological crises, entitled Rewilding the World, Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution. Breathtaking in scope and ambition, rewilding aims to save species by restoring habitats, reviving migration corridors, and brokering peace between people and predators. Traveling with wildlife biologists and conservationists, Caroline reports on the vast projects that are turning Europe's former Iron Curtain into a greenbelt, creating transfrontier Peace Parks to renew elephant routes throughout Africa, and linking protected areas from the Yukon to Mexico and beyond.

Toby Hemenway is the author of Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, which for the last eight years has been the best-selling permaculture book in the world. Toby has been an adjunct professor at Portland State University, Scholar-in-Residence at Pacific University, and has taught over sixty permaculture design courses. He has presented lectures and workshops at major sustainability conferences such as Bioneers, SolFest, and EcoFarm, and at Duke University, Tufts University, University of Minnesota, University of Delaware and many other educational venues. We discuss the broader social context of food, the ecological problems of civilization, the joys of nomadism, and permaculture’s place in restoration.

Charles Eisenstein is a teacher, speaker, and writer focusing on themes of civilization, consciousness, money, and human cultural evolution. His viral short films and essays online have established him as a genre-defying social philosopher and countercultural intellectual. He is one of the leading voices of the progressive movement and according to Publishers Weekly, he ”will be noted in antiquity as one of the seminal and pioneering storytellers of this new world." Eisenstein graduated from Yale University in 1989 with a degree in Mathematics and Philosophy. He is the author of Sacred Economics, The Ascent of Humanity, and most recently, A More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible. We ask him some of the unabashedly philosophical questions that keep Earth activists up at night.