In the Weeds

The title of Lydia Millet’s last novel - Dinosaurs - seems to wink at the threat of human extinction, and, yet, its explicit referent in the book is to birds, those sometimes-alien creatures who survived the impact of the asteroid that wiped out most of their kind. This kind of double meaning, something like a sign that points in multiple directions, abounds in Dinosaurs, which i

A continuation of my earlier episode in which Trevien Stanger - instructor of environmental studies at St. Michael's College in Vermont - and I discuss Abram's book, which, I think it's fair to say, has had a profound effect on both of us. This time, we focus on Abram's argument about the impact of the invention of the alphabet on our relationship with the natural w

There’s a funny little corridor tucked away behind a park in the Village of Pleasantville, New York where I live, where bears and bobcats amble through, walking atop the Catskill Aqueduct, the 100-year-old artery that delivers water from the Catskill mountains to New York City. Fellow resident, Michael Inglis, who has been hiking this patch of semi-wilderness for the past twenty-

When we think of major innovations in human history, what comes to mind are inert technologies - from the wheel to the computer - but one of the most significant developments occurred as the result of the relationship between humans and another animal, horses. The domestication of horses brought about a major sea-change in human society, as we became much more mobile. It affected e

Jennifer Lynch Fitzgerald tells the story of her relationship with Maddie, a mustang rescued in Habersham County, Georgia from a man who was collecting horses to sell for meat. When Maddie was found, she’d been tied to a tree for months, was malnourished and very angry. Jen tells how, in spite of her limited experience with horses, she learned to train or "gentle" Maddi

I’ve mentioned this book numerous times on the pod. It’s fair to say that David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass are the two books that really kicked off the idea for In the Weeds. And it feels like time to dig into Spell. All the more so since my current episodes are exploring the question “how did we get here?” Not only h

“Letters have power,” Johanna Drucker tells me. But what is the nature of this power and how did it all begin? Unlike writing, the alphabet was only invented once. Somewhere in Egypt or the Sinai Peninsula, about 4,000 years ago, speakers of a Semitic language adapted Egyptian hieroglyphics to represent the basic phonetic building blocks of their language. All modern alphabets

William Bryant Logan’s book Sproutlands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees opens the door to a little known history, in which people all over the world, from Norway to Japan to pre-colonial California, managed trees in a way that was beneficial to trees and humans alike. Logan stumbled upon this history after taking on a job for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for whic

Picking up where we left off in the spring, we return to the topic of farming through a conversation with John Roulac, entrepreneur and executive producer of the movie Kiss the Ground. Roulac’s latest project, Agroforestry Regeneration Communities, supports initiatives in Central America and East Africa that teach farmers how to grow what are sometimes called food forests. Food f

For the second of three episodes on farming, I talk to Nate Looney about Jewish ethics, Diversity Equity and Inclusion and, yes, farming, specifically, his experience as an urban farmer using hydroponics and aquaponics to produce gourmet leafy greens and microgreens for restaurants and farmers markets in his hometown of L.A.Nate Looney has followed an unusual career path, from the