Reseed: Recent Episodes
Alice Irene Whittaker
Thoughtful conversations about repairing our relationship with nature. The guests of Reseed are the RE generation: people who are embracing redesign, reduction, repair, reuse, and regeneration, and cultivating a world rooted in care, justice, and well-being. Join farmers, builders, designers, artists, and makers to delve into our collective journey from takers - to caretakers.
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.
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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.
The human animal lives at a fragile moment on Earth. But, even as the world we know erodes, many people leave the comfort of denial and inaction to rise and face a changing world with generosity and brave, active hope.
In season three of Reseed, host Alice Irene Whittaker sits down with an animal rehabilitator, a conservation biologist, a birder and author, a beekeeper and grower, a natural-dyer, a climate justice activist, a giant tree tracker, and others who are renewing, repairing, redesigning, reconnecting, and reimagining.
Attheir heart, these conversations are about (re)connecting with our animal selves and creaturely kin while evolving the uniquely human part of ourselves that can repair our relationships with an out-of-balance Earth.
Listen to Reseed's third season - "The Human Animal" - at reseed.ca.
Why do we grow in our gardens? Are we searching for closeness to the mystery and magic of the natural world, or perhaps working towards self-sufficiency by feeding ourselves? Do we grow to create habitat for pollinators or enrich precious soil? Do we grow to foster a knowledge of growing in our children, and to foster community? Do we grow to grasp control in a scary world? Do we grow because we love beauty?
Wise and curious guest Alice Vincent delves into her new book, Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival. Alice is a writer, broadcaster, career-journalist, and multi-platform storyteller, and her book Rootbound: Rewilding a Life was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize. Now a columnist for Gardens Illustrated, Alice has written for The Telegraph, The New Statesman, Vogue, The Financial Times, The Sunday Times and The Observer. Beyond the page, Alice is the host of the Why Women Grow podcast, which unearths stories of the land with inspiring women.
This beautiful and rich conversation roots into our relationships with nature and gardening in cities. We discuss perfectionism, being drawn to the soil, and motherhood. We refurl stories of women in their gardens, and pay homage to the gardens who raised us.
Listen at reseed.ca. Support Reseed at buymeacoffee.com/reseedpodcast.
This mini-documentary chronicles the journey of host Alice Irene Whittaker in 2019, when she traveled pregnant with her third child to Colorado to interview acclaimed environmental economist and regenerative rancher Hunter Lovins. Around a kitchen table in her regenerative ranch, Hunter answers curiosities about a circular economy that is modelled on nature’s cycles, and envisions the large-scale transition to renewable energy and ecologically-responsible business. The role of cities and local food systems in caring for our environment are explored. Hunter reflects on her lived and professional experience in transforming landscapes and soil through regenerative agriculture.
L. Hunter Lovins has been a leading pioneer in environmental economics for decades. An award-winning author, she has co‐authored over a dozen books and hundreds of articles. She has consulted for scores of industries and governments worldwide, from Patagonia to the United Nations. She has won dozens of awards, and has been decorated with such honours as receiving The Audubon Society’s Rachel Carson Award to being named a Hero for the Planet by TIME Magazine. Hunter Lovin’s book A Finer Future is a blueprint for an inspiring regenerative economy that avoids collapse and works for people and planet - and it was this book that host Alice Irene Whittaker had in her bag when she was on that airplane to meet Hunter in Colorado.
A moment in time between two women is captured in this thought-provoking conversation that unfolds surrounded by horses, the homes of herons, and wide open sky. This episode challenges economic growth as a concept, dreams of the demise of the fossil fuel industry, and encourages designing an economy that fosters happiness and well-being.
Listen at reseed.ca and follow on Instagram at aliceirenewhittaker.
How do we feed everyone, how do we feed cities? How do we tackle food deserts and food injustice? And what if there is not one answer to these questions - but many?
This experiment of how humanity tackles environmental breakdown requires all of us. People will find their niches. For Eddy Badrina, that niche is the intersection of economics, technology - and lettuce.
Guest Eddy Badrina is the Chief Executive Officer of Eden Green, a part vertical farm, part technology company that produces year-round harvests of locally grown leafy greens. Eddy is on the board of directors of Seed Effect, an economic development non-profit, and he is a dad.
In this conversation, we get curious about vertical hydroponic farming, reducing water and energy, and how to feed cities with locally-grown food. We explore how, when facing environmental breakdown - that most complex of problems - technology and innovation can be a part of a complex mix of solutions.
Listen at reseed.ca.
In these dark winter days at the beginning of a new unknown year, this reflective episode invites us to be quietly awake: awake to our true selves, awake to who we are in relationship with, awake to how we honour our responsibilities, and awake to justice. How can we be awake to beauty as well as the darkness of the world and the fragility of ecosystems and species? How can we be awake to the brokenhearted but resilient and courageous millions who refuse to abandon a planet that needs our care?
Guest Larissa Crawford is an acclaimed published Indigenous, anti-racism, and climate justice researcher, policy advisor and speaker. Larissa Crawford proudly passes on Métis and Jamaican ancestry to her daughter, Zyra. Larissa is the Founder of Future Ancestors Services, a youth-led professional services social enterprise that operates at the intersection of climate and racial justice. Since the launch of Future Ancestors Services in April 2020, the organization has mobilized +$95K in donations and gifted services for anti-racist and climate justice initiatives.
We talk about climate justice, reconciliation, motherhood, and a groundswell of activism. Larissa delves into her expertise in restorative circle keeping. We discuss the direct connection between anger and joy - and how that anger can fuel meaningful environmental action that is rooted in justice.
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 documentaryby 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.
Growing our own food and supporting local farmers has multiple, interconnected benefits, and farms in the cities can play a powerful role in regional food systems. Soil is regenerated, human bodies and minds are nourished, emissions are reduced, local economies based on fair labour are supported, beauty flourishes in city environments, and communities are strengthened. All of this is possible - and in places like Sundance Harvest, abundant dreams like this have already taken root.
Guest Cheyenne Sundance is a self-taught farmer. She is the Farm Director of Sundance Harvest, an ecological farm in Toronto which she founded in 2019. This 1.5 acre farm in the city grows mushrooms, herbs, vegetables and fruit, and is centered on fair labour, soil health, knowledge sharing, and community building. Sundance Harvest is flourishing and focussing on scaling their model to provide more fair waged careers, especially for young Black and Indigenous people who would like to start a life in agriculture. Cheyenne runs a free urban agriculture program called Growing in the Margins, which nurtures and grows the farm projects of BIPOC youth from seed to harvest. She sits on the executive board of the National Farmers Union, and she started the first BIPOC Farmers Caucus across Canada.
To reroot is to root again, or in a new place in a better way. Cheyenne is showing how cultivating small-scale, sovereign farms like Sundance Harvest can root traditional ecological agricultural practices in a better way that is designed for new places, like our cities. In today’s conversation, we explore city farming, burnout, imperfection, soil, seeds, self-sufficiency, food sovereignty, and connected communities.
Listen at reseed.ca.
What does wildness mean to us - and what should it mean? What can wildness mean when it is defined not by a few people, but rewritten for all of us?
This episode of Reseed revisits the history of conservation to explore its dark corners, going beyond nipping off the buds and leaves to dig at its roots, unearthing information about those who are credited with founding Western conservation. Deconstructing nice and lovely platitudes can unearth real truths, to first feel the despair of unlearning and then create a better way. A new conservation can be inclusive and accessible to all people while also protecting ecosystems and animals, like birds.
Guest J. Drew Lanham is an ornithologist, wildlife ecologist, poet, professor, author, and lover of birds. He is the author of Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts and The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, which received the Reed Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Southern Book Prize, and was a finalist for the John Burroughs Medal. He has published essays and poetry in publications including Orion and Audubon, as well as in several anthologies. An Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University, he and his family live in the Upstate of South Carolina.
Poetry, birds, soil, conservation, and deep questions braid together in this thoughtful and lyrical conversation, which looks at how care for humans, nature, and animals are all connected and embedded into our humanity.
Listen at reseed.ca.
How do we courageously face our eco anxiety and grief, and find the resources we need to cope with the climate crisis? How do we cultivate the emotional resilience that we need to weather ecological crises? How do we take care of our own mental health, so we can take care of each other and our Earth?
Britt Wray joins Reseed for a conversation about climate change, emotions, and mental health. Britt is an acclaimed researcher, science communicator, author and TED speaker. Her Gen Dread newsletter, TED Talk with 2.4 million views, and writing in outlets like TIME and the New York Times all share wide-ranging ideas for supporting emotional health and psychological resilience in ecological crises. Her forthcoming second book Generation Dread merges scientific knowledge with emotional insight to show how these intense feelings are a healthy response to the troubled state of the world.
Experiences of anxiety and grief can cause us to give up. They can interrupt our ability to cope with the breakdown of the natural world, and limit our ability to protect and save all that we can. Learning to feel, acknowledge, understand, and express our climate emotions will allow us to be more whole as human beings, and more able to be the stewards of this planet that we need to be. This conversation invites emotion into science, climate activism, and the halls of power.
Embracing our climate emotions - in all of their messy, human complexity - can free us to move out of an anthropocentric frame, navigate the vast uncertainty of it all, and rediscover enchantment with the interconnected web of life that is our home.
Listen at reseed.ca.
The journey to consuming less and reclaiming our collective power is an imperfect, emotional, and challenging one. Consuming stuff is embedded into our identities and our culture. We are told that we deserve to buy things, and that ownership defines our worth. For the sake of our planet’s health and our own freedom, it is well worth the hard work of dismantling our addiction to stuff and asking ourselves questions about who we want to be.
Aja Barber joins Reseed for a fascinating and frank conversation that delves into intersections between fashion, justice, and climate, wildest dreams for remaking the fashion ecosystem, and how to balance individual and collective action. She digs into her book Consumed - The Need for Collective Change: Colonialism, Climate Change, and Consumerism. Ajais a highly respected writer, stylist and consultant whose work deals with the intersections of sustainability and the fashion landscape. She writes for outlets like The Guardian and CNN, and for her thriving online community. Her work builds heavily on ideas behind privilege, wealth inequality, racism, feminism, colonialism and how to fix the fashion industry with all these things in mind.
Consuming less is not easy, and sometimes our stuff threatens to consume us. Our rites of passage, rituals, celebrations, hard times, boredom, and life changes are marked often by the accumulation of more things. Consumption is deeply intertwined with colonialism, is built on unjust labour conditions that keep people in poverty, and fuels climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution. Even when we know that, in the context of consumption being so wedded to our identities and society, buying less can be really frustrating, emotional, and - ultimately - it can be liberating.
Expansive ideas and abundant dreams abound: rewriting environmental storytelling, rethinking climate activism, reorienting economic growth, climate reparations, rethinking conservation, resisting the co-opting of progressive movements, reclaiming green for the people, and repairing place-based relationships are all explored in this thought-provoking conversation. As we pass over that lovely threshold into spring - and as the Earth requires our creativity and dreams more than ever - we are presented with an ideal moment at which to plant the seeds for a more regenerative relationship with the Earth and with one another.
Guest Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host and producer of the Green Dreamer Podcast. With over 300 episodes, her podcast explores our paths to collective healing, biocultural revitalization, and true abundance and wellness for all. Her sustainability newsletter UPROOTED is rooted in deep ecology and is a decolonial thought-in-progress. She brings critical thought to her writing and her vibrant community of tens of thousands of people. With her guests and in her writing, Kamea delves with grace and courage into complex topics and encourages people to seed dreams of a regenerative world.
Amidst the cacophony of doom and hopelessness, Kamea invites us to dream and imagine the possibilities, recalibrate how we measure abundance, and rejoice in the celebration of our renewed paths forward. Marking the bright beginning of spring, this is a conversation about thinking critically, planting seeds for regenerative futures, and dreaming of the green possibilities that could be tomorrow’s beautiful reality in each of our respective places on this wondrous planet.
Learn more and listen at reseed.ca.
Parents have the formidable task of providing care for their own children while also caring for a planet in crisis - all while questioning how to raise the next generation to be caretakers. This episode of Reseed looks at the unique role that parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and other guardians can play, with specific actions that we can take as people who are raising children at an exhausting and intensive stage of life. We explore how to guide children to be active stewards and activists, without imposing too heavy an emotional burden that lessens their resilience or their ability to be active cultivators of a healthier planet.
This conversation is not just for parents, but rather is for all of us who are contemplating what role we want to play as stewards and ancestors at this moment in time. This conversation is for people who want to explore how systems of care can dismantle the systems of dominance and extraction that have brought us to this convergence of climate change, war, and inequality. If we take a birds’ eye view of this era that is fraught with crisis and sorrow, how do we want to show up? What can we do with our own hands and hearts - with love, conviction, and courage - regardless of how everything turns out?
Reseed is joined by Elizabeth Bechard, a climate activist, mother, and author of Parenting in a Changing Climate: Tools for Cultivating Resilience, Taking Action, and Practicing Hope in the Face of Climate Change. Elizabeth is a coach, former research coordinator, and graduate student in public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. After becoming a mother, she became passionate about the intersection between climate change and family resilience. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband and young twins.
At its heart, Remaking Parenthood for the Anthropocene is a deeply spiritual conversation. It examines awakening as a critical part of being a human right now, and how we all awaken to climate change in different ways. This episode looks at how environmental action is a spiritual calling for each of us, and how the Earth is rising up and speaking through us in our actions, in mysterious and wondrous ways.
Learn more at reseed.ca.
In difficult times, people are often drawn to make and create with their hands. Throughout the pandemic, activities like baking bread, gardening, and sewing have resurfaced as small acts of resistance to a culture that celebrates overabundance and digital distraction, and as joyful acts that help to restore our mental health. Mending has been widely embraced as a practice that subverts throwaway culture while allowing people to slow down and repair clothing with their own hands. Mending and repair are also important parts of a thriving, circular fashion system that reduces consumption and waste, redesigns the whole textile industry to be waste-free and inclusive, and regenerates the natural world.
Arounna Khounnoraj joins Reseed to discuss Visible Mending: Repair, Renew, Reuse the Clothes You Love, her book that guides readers how to mend, based on her experience as a fibre artist and force in the vibrant mending movement. Arounna is a Canadian artist and maker working in Toronto where she immigrated with her family from Laos at the age of four. She has a master’s degree in fine arts in sculpture and ceramics, and in 2002 she started bookhou, a multi-disciplinary studio with her husband John Booth, where Arounna explores screen printing and a variety of textile techniques such as embroidery and punch needle. In addition to being a sought-after mentor and educator, Arounna is the author of two books, with her third book on embroidery being released in spring 2022.
Against a backdrop of pandemic, climate change, inequality, and war, mending can seem inconsequential and insufficient, and of course it cannot solve the many pressing crises we face. Mending, however, can be a powerful personal act that helps us to slow down, reduce consumption, and take care of our mental health so that we are more resilient and able to rise to looming problems. This conversation looks at reclaiming the joy of simple and slow homemade creativity in complex times.
Read more at reseed.ca.
Our relationships with animals and land, and our decisions around food, vary vastly from person to person. Most of us have grappled with these relationships, as well as how we want to live in right relationship to land, food, and animals. With curiosity, this conversation delves into complexities and nuances of veganism, going beyond easy answers to explore intersections of animal rights, social justice, cultural respect, and environmental care.
Isaias Hernandez joins Reseed to bring his experience as an environmental justice educator and activist from Los Angeles. Growing up, Isaias lived in a community that faced environmental injustice and it shaped the way he saw the world, spurring him to advocate for social justice in the environmental movement. His experiences led him to create @QueerBrownVegan, an environmental education platform that exists to make environmental education accessible to everyone.
In this conversation, we explore everything from food sovereignty to white veganism to the rebuilding of local food systems, as well as Isaias’ journey of seeking liberation as a queer person in outdoor spaces. We look at human imperfection, and how to avoid burnout and care for ourselves in environmental and justice movements. This episode is an in-depth exploration of liberation for all people, animals, and Earth herself.
Learn more at reseed.ca.
How can we deepen our care and respect for our family of creatures on this wondrous planet? How can we truly feel a sense of belonging here? How can we be better kin?
Gavin Van Horn and John Hausdoerffer join Reseed for a conversation about kinship. Along with Robin Wall Kimmerer, they co-edited Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, a beautiful collection of five books that looks at the ways we can deepen our care and respect for the family of plants, rivers, mountains, animals, and others who live with us in this exuberant, life-generating, planetary tangle of relations. Gavin is the Executive Editor of the Center for Humans and Nature Press, and a writer whose writing is an entangled, ongoing conversation between humans, our nonhuman kin, and the animate landscape. John is a social and ecological philosopher, who is the Dean of the School of Environment & Sustainability at Western Colorado University. His work imagines how environmental health must come from and result in the healing of social injustice and cultural trauma, and he calls for a new ethic of human care for the world.
Gavin, John, and Alice Irene’s conversation is really about a love story: it is a love story about an astounding world of relations, from the bacterium swimming in our bellies to the trees exhaling the breath we breathe. It is a love story for every person with whom we share this planet - including the human beings, the birds, the fireflies, all of the nonhuman animals, the rivers, the rocks. This is a love story of all of our kin, as well as a love story for us, the human beings who are a part of this beautiful, intricate world of relations. We belong here, surrounded by an interconnected community of kin.
Read the transcript and show notes at reseed.ca.
Imagine if our clothing was grown, designed, dyed, created, worn, passed on, and eventually composted in our own region, similar to farm-to-table food? This is the idea behind a fibershed, a regenerative, restorative, and resilient fashion system in one bioregion. In a fibershed, the way we make our clothing is carbon beneficial, regenerates soil, is healthy for our bodies, and restores livelihoods to rural communities.
Rebecca Burgess is an indigo farmer, weaver, dyer, and community organizer who spent a year wearing clothing that was grown, designed, dyed, and created in her bioregion. That experience helped inspire her to write Fibershed: Growing a Movement of Farmers, Fashion Activists, and Makers for a New Textile Economy, and to become the Executive Director of Fibershed, a grassroots organization that builds on her work to decentralize natural fiber and dye processes to strengthen economic opportunities. Rebecca has cultivatedan internationally recognized network of farmers and artisans in the Northern California Fibershed to pilot this dream of a regenerative textile economy. Rebecca is working to create a fashion system that, from soil-to-skin, is good for people and for nature.
Rebecca joins Reseed host Alice Irene Whittaker to discuss how we topple outdated, extractive systems of the old economy, and in its place, rebuild the connections that knit together farmers, weavers, dyers, artisans, and wearers in resilient and regenerative communities. This conversation spans in-depth looks at specific fibres like cotton and wool, the role of policy in replacing fast fashion, dismantling white supremacy, and coming together by building a broad and holistic movement.
Visit reseed.ca for more information. Follow the host of Reseed on Instagram @AliceIreneWhittaker.
Fashion is a connector of land, labour, culture, and personal expression. Through a decades-long project of fast fashion, we have forgotten and become disconnected from regional, regenerative fashion systems that can exist. There have been beneficial fashion systems embraced by many cultures throughout history and today, where clothing is an expression of place. Natural dyes come from the landscape, dressing the wearer in the colours from their home. Natural textiles connect regenerative farmers with makers, and give back to the soil both in their farming at the beginning of their life, and decomposition at the end of their life, as part of a circular fashion system.
We can dream of, imagine, and create this relationship to clothing again.
Aditi Mayer joins Reseed host Alice Irene Whittaker to help reimagine such a fashion system, while also advocating for the reclamation of culture. Aditi is a sustainable fashion blogger, photojournalist, and labour rights activist. A storyteller and creator, she looks at fashion and culture through a lens of intersectionality and decolonization. She approaches her work from multiple domains: from grassroots organizing in Downtown LA’s garment district to educating folks on the importance of diverse perspectives. She is on the council of Intersectional Environmentalist and State of Fashion. Aditi will be spending this year as a National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellow, spending one year documenting the social and environmental impacts of fashion in India.
This conversation explores the questions: How do we create an expressive fashion system that fosters well-being for land and people? How do we decolonize fashion, while reclaiming culture?
Visit reseed.ca for show notes and a transcript of this conversation. Follow the host of Reseed on Instagram @AliceIreneWhittaker.
Music can help us make sense of, and deeply feel, our climate grief. Tamara Lindeman’s acclaimed album Ignorance about climate grief struck a chord with citizens and critics. Performing as The Weather Station, Lindeman’s 2021 poetic, thoughtful, and highly danceable album was named album of the year by The New Yorker and Uncut. Tamara joins Alice Irene Whittaker, the host of Reseed, for a conversation that starts with climate grief before spanning to art, selfhood, rootlessness, connection, and the heartbreaking beauty of birds.
Tamara Lindeman emerged from Toronto’s vibrant folk scene, and as The Weather Station, she has released five albums and toured extensively across Europe, the US, Canada, and Australia. She has been nominated for a Juno, a Socan Award, and shortlisted for the Polaris Prize, and garnered extensive praise from Pitchfork, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Rolling Stone and The New York Times.
Our climate change narratives are often overfull of information and despair. Our human souls also require art and stories, and our climate movement needs storytellers, artists, and musicians. Art, stories and music don’t need to have the answers to the climate breakdown we are facing - there are other mediums for that, and we need to push for those answers and solutions - but art, stories, and music do have this role to play in helping us process, dream, imagine, feel, connect, release, and grieve. In a time of climate chaos, art can help us to dream of a different world while connecting with each other.
Enter a giveaway for a vinyl copy of Ignorance on Instagram at @AliceIreneWhittaker. Learn more about Reseed at reseed.ca.
Originator of Land Back and Labrador Land Protector Bryanna Brown joins Reseed host Alice Irene Whittaker to explore reinforcing Indigenous leadership in the climate movement. This conversation examines how Indigenous climate leadership is inherently interconnected to the Land Back movement, and Indigenous sovereignty. Bryanna and Alice Irene explore reconnecting with our own voices while also amplifying the voices of others.
Bryanna Brown is Inuk and Mi’kmaq from Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Labrador. She is a Labrador Land Protector. She originated Land Back to advocate for sovereignty in Indigenous peoples, as well as Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) communities, and she is focussed on land ownership as a means of environmental protection. Bryanna is a member of the Steering Committee of Indigenous Climate Action, an organization that reinforces the place of Indigenous Peoples as leaders in climate change discourse. She is an advocate for the rights of women, Indigenous peoples issues, environmental justice, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls + (MMIWG+), persons living with disabilities, food security among Indigenous communities, anti-human trafficking, and people in the Child Welfare System. Through effective advocacy, her mission is to make spaces for Indigenous peoples to feel safe in society, and to provide insights regarding social justice issues, intergenerational trauma affecting indigenous communities, climate injustice, systemic racism, and cultural revitalization.
Reclaiming Land Back is an insightful exploration of reclaiming land - and reclaiming voice.
Read the transcript and show notes at reseed.ca.
How do we find freedom from the relentless demands of capitalism? How do we cultivate rest as a radical act of resistance and revolution? How do we learn from, centre, and support Indigenous sovereignty? How do we learn from Black organizing and resistance, and see Indigenous and Black liberation as coexisting side-by-side? How do we avoid the co-opting of grassroots movements, and stay clear headed about who we are in solidarity with?
Poet, scholar, and community organizer Erica Violet Lee joins Reseed host Alice Irene Whittaker for a powerful conversation about freedom, resistance, and belonging. Erica is a two-spirit nehiyaw writer from inner-city Saskatoon and Thunderchild Cree Nation. She is a Steering Committee member of Indigenous Climate Action, and she has worked with Idle No More, the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition, and the David Suzuki Foundation among others in the pursuit of Indigenous feminist freedoms. She has spoken around the world for people in universities and community organizations alike. She has been published in outlets like The Guardian and the CBC. Erica’s work relates to Indigenous freedom, governance, law, sovereignty, feminism, love, and joy.
At its heart, this conversation is about the pursuit of freedom. It is about relationships to land, and to each other. It is about safeguarding the integrity and authenticity of grassroots movements, instead of branding and absorbing them into the dominant order by celebrating only their most palatable and non-threatening aspects. This is a conversation about the power of words and poetry to change the world, and feeling the rage and love of this moment at which we are alive - and remembering that our rage is a form of love.
Read the transcript and show notes at reseed.ca.
This is a story of children’s clothing, textiles, time passing, and the valiant confrontation of overconsumption. While it would be easier to buy cheap and new - and for those cute disposable clothes to end up in relentlessly growing landfills that our planet cannot sustain - there is a quiet, under-recognized network of women who care for and re-cycle children’s clothes. They lovingly organize, clean, fold, box, label, and share children’s clothes with their sisters and friends at the vulnerable time of new motherhood, while asking big questions about consumption and systems. This is a story of circular kids fashion.
Reseed host Alice Irene Whittaker is joined by Jad Robitaille, the Founder and Owner of Mini-Cycle, and the mother of two daughters. She has decided to centre her life on combating fast fashion while also cultivating balance in her own life. Jad discusses how she is rescuing and re-cycling clothing as many times as possible, lowering the impact on the environment while working to make circular kids fashion more affordable and accessible.
Jad and Alice Irene tackle several questions. What language resonates more with citizens - circular economy or zero waste? How can we carefully avoid the pitfalls of greenwashing? How can motherhood shape life, career, and the choices we make? What are the demands and freedoms of owning your own business and entrepreneurship, and what are the innovative business models that can make the big shifts we require? How can we avoid perfectionism and unrealistic expectations in the zero waste movement?
Cycling our garments over and over is a powerful way to reduce impact on the natural world, in so many ways. This interconnects with greenhouse gas emissions, materials, water, biodiversity, and human hands involved in unethical labour. Natural fibres connect with reducing emissions, the end of the life of pieces, and human health. Wearing clothing often, caring for garments carefully, mending, swapping, and fostering secondhand purchasing are ways in which we can be better stewards of the materials and labour that go into creating our textiles. Through our choices about clothing, and by disrupting the fashion industry, we are caring not just for children of today but also future generations.
Read more at reseed.ca.
Delicious, usable foods are being thrown out every day, with food waste soaring at the same time that people go hungry. Our preference for pretty produce contributes to that food waste - but instead of going to the garbage, imperfect fruits and vegetables can be transformed into new foods, cutting down on food waste while nourishing people. With the work and love that goes into growing, nurturing, and harvesting food, it is important that we recognize and hold its value.
Reseed host Alice Irene Whittaker discusses food rescue with David Côté, the co-founder of LOOP Mission. LOOP is a Montreal-based company that rescues fruits and veggies, day-old bread, potato cuttings, and upcycled oil, and then transforms them into juices, smoothies, beer, gin, and probiotic drinks. David is a serial entrepreneur and author of several cookbooks, and it was recently announced that he will be a dragon on Dragon’s Den in Québec in 2022.
In this conversation, David and Alice Irene discuss food waste, the circular economy, how to make food systems more equitable, the commodification of food, and what our relationship to food tells us about our society. They talk about how we can steward our food system to enrich soil, improve air and water quality, nurture biodiversity, and create more abundant human health.
The food system is fertile ground for living in a more circular and regenerative way. To create such a system, we need both regenerative food growing, and eliminating food waste - like rescuing fruits and vegetables, through not just individual action but more importantly through deep-rooted change.
Read more at reseed.ca.
How do we remake fashion so that it is regenerative, fossil-free, inclusive, and equitable?
Fashion and textiles are where climate change, waste, labour rights, and social justice all come together. Every single one of us interacts with clothing in our everyday lives, and fashion is currently one of Earth’s most polluting industries. We have an opportunity to remake our fashion system, so that it becomes the fertile ground for thriving local economies, creative expression, and circular loops that keep us in balance within nature’s boundaries.
Sophia Yang, Founder and Executive Director of Threading Change, joins Reseed host Alice Irene Whittaker for a conversation about fashion, justice, gender, circular economy, and climate - and how they all weave together.
Read the transcript and show notes at reseed.ca.
How do we redefine environmentalism so that it includes everyone? How do we embed justice and belonging into our relationship to the natural world? How can we include cities and modernity in our definitions of nature? What is the role of our ancestors in environmentalism and activism?
These questions are explored in a conversation between Chúk Odenigbo, a Founding Director of Future Ancestors, and Reseed host Alice Irene Whittaker. Chúk is an expert in climate justice, oceans, anti-racism, public health, and decolonization.
This beautiful conversation about big ideas and complex intersections delves into using our power and influence to dismantle oppressive systems, while planting seeds that grow a vibrant and just world.
Read the transcript and show notes at reseed.ca.
Meet the woman who digs through and documents Manhattan’s waste, to divert from landfill, raise consciousness, and create systemic change. Anna Sacks, aka the Trash Walker, creates viral TikTok and Instagram videos that shed light on the brand new merchandise that luxury brands deliberately destroy, as part of their continued efforts to fuel the relentless pace of a fashion system that is wasteful, unjust, and unsustainable.
Anna focuses on more than just fashion or brand waste, too - she rifles through city garbage to salvage good, quality stuff that ends up in the garbage. She has found canned food and fresh food, hundreds of dollars of fresh-pressed juice, toys, dishes, typewriters, clothing, candy, brand-new school supplies, and the list goes on. The amount of stuff that she finds is staggering - as is how perfectly usable it is.
This conversation explores not just our society’s waste problems - but also solutions, from legislation to personal action to being less polite in our dissent. It looks at how we are increasingly finding excessive waste as unacceptable, and are voicing our discontent, resisting this wasteful status quo, and searching for ways of living that prioritize sharing over ownership.
Read the transcript and show notes at reseed.ca.
Reseed is about repairing our relationship to nature. It is the guide in a journey from taking - to caretaking. The podcast explores stories of uprooting extractive systems and rooting the future in community and care.
Reseed offers in-depth, thoughtful conversations with citizens of the RE generation: people embracing redesign, reduction, repair, reuse, rewilding, resistance, and regeneration. Guests are farmers, builders, designers, artists, makers, writers, repair café leaders, and activists. Conversations explore how they meet the grief, fear, and despair of our moment with heartfelt, handmade solutions that are growing a world rooted in care.
Reseed tells the stories of a movement. People of all ages and backgrounds are undertaking the journey of transforming from takers in an extractive system to caretakers in a reciprocal system. The podcast welcomes listeners into a community where host, guests and audience are connected in this shared, imperfect journey.
The host of Reseed is Alice Irene Whittaker, a writer, mother of three, and environmental communications leader. The podcast launches December 2021. Read more at reseed.ca.