ENVR 203 Podcast: Recent Episodes
Julia Freeman
In this, the final episode of our course podcast, I bring your questions to Dr. David Boyd and we talk about his experience writing "The Rights of Nature", how a river performs its responsibility, and how Environment students might find inspiration while working to critique and transform the consequences of the "three damaging ideas". I hope the conversation allows you to reflect on the last weekly guiding question for the term: what have we learned about how cultural knowledge, environmental ethics, and legal innovation can bring about a more just and flourishing world?
For this week's episode we consider chapter 11 and "A Voice for the Great Barrier Reef" in the Boyd book, and Plumwood's chapter "The Logic of Colonisation" in order to help us think through the question: how can our relationships be transformed to better support just and flourishing communities?
This week we try to imagine alternatives to the monoliths of Western development and capitalism through our readings of Eduardo Gudynas and David Schweickart. We look to their papers to help us answer the question: How can the economy be transformed to better support just and flourishing communities?
This week we draw from the work of Mulrennan, Mark and Scott to help us address the question: how can academic research be transformed to better support just and flourishing communities?
This week marks the start of the final unit for the course, "Decolonizing Nature and Society" and features an interview with activist-scholar Dr. Jen Gobby. She draws from her research with climate activists and Indigenous land defenders to help us answer the question: who is resisting harm to ecological communities?
This week features an interview with Dr. Ingrid Waldron about her work leading the ENRICH Project and her book "There's Something in the Water" in order to help us reflect on the question: how and why is environmental harm systematically and unequally distributed?
As a special bonus episode to further help us consider the question "how do we engage the interests of plants and their communities" Ivan Vargas Roncancio speaks to us about his ground breaking doctoral research. We learn how plants can be teachers and legal systems might transform to accommodate our interrelationships with plant persons.
This week we consider the question: what are some of the historical roots of contemporary anti-nature systems? Dawson, Whyte and Boyd's readings will help us address the tangled problems of extinction, colonialism and capitalism.
This week we grapple with extending moral consideration beyond animal life to include individual plants, plant species and even entire ecosystems.
We look to Boyd's chapter 5, Wohlleben's excerpts from The Hidden Life of Trees, and the ECNH report on the Dignity of Living Beings with regards to Plants to help us consider the question: How do we engage the interests of plants and their communities?
This week's episode features an interview with Marika Hadzipetros, a Humanities teacher and curriculum developer at Vanier College with a background in Philosophy. Our discussion centers around how to write a great paper for this course.
This week we read Boyd and Robinson to help us answer the question: what is animal personhood?
This week we consider the Boyd, Singer and Wallace readings and try to figure out what it really means to "consider the lobster", all as part of our reflection on the question: how do we approach animal suffering?
This week we consider the Plumwood, Bekoff and Boyd readings, and consider the question: how do we understand animal experience?
In this week's episode we consider the Boyd and Orr readings and reflect on the questions: how can we listen to others in our ecological community and why does this matter?