Economic models can operate in support of life on earth, rather than at the expense of the living world. Listeners of this episode can dip their toes into a variety of economic approaches that are available to us, from doughnut economics to the circular economy to the well-being economy to the regenerative economy to degrowth.

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.

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.

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. 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 Régéneration Canada, a national organization promoting soil regeneration in order to mitigate climate change, restore biodiversity, improve water cycles, and support a healthy food system.

In this episode, 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. We explore how we need to make sure environmental, economic, and social well-being work together, if we are to have any hope.

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, 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. Her award-winning books include Thin Places and Cacophony of Bone. 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.

We all have times of silence — when momentum slows down, we turn inwards, or we cannot rush and produce. 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 rekindled a childhood love for birds, 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.

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 – 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. She is the founder of Talú, a natural dye house and educational hub, and 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.

In the slowly-receding darkness, we reflect on what to let go of – and what we hold onto fiercely.

A journey to track giants - the biggest 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 individualistic, lonely, consumerism-heavy environmentalism of the past, 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, on international panels, or in Instagram posts with inspiring activist friends like Mya-Rose Craig, Greta Thunberg, Daphne Frias, and Dominique Palmer. Tori’s recent debut book, It’s Not Just You, explores climate change and mental health from a climate justice perspective.

This conversation 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.

We live in relationship with the animals, our neighbours and creaturely kin, and when the convenience of our modern life causes animals great violence, we seek ways to grapple with and grieve their deaths.

Guest Amanda Stronza is an environmental anthropologist who creates powerful and poetic animal memorials that bring beauty to the deaths of the animals who live among us.

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.

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.

Season three of Reseed, called The Human Animal, is 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.

Why do we grow in our gardens? Are we searching for closeness to the mystery and magic of the natural world, or working to feed ourselves? Do we grow to create habitat for pollinators or enrich precious soil? Do we grow to foster community, or 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. 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.

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, award-winning 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. Hunter reflects on her lived and professional experience in transforming landscapes and soil through regenerative agriculture.

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.

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.

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.

This conversation explores 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.

In these dark winter days at the beginning of a new unknown year, this reflective episode invites us to be quietly awake: to our true selves, our relationships, our responsibilities. How can we be awake to beauty as well as the darkness of the world? 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.

Climate justice, reconciliation, motherhood, and a groundswell of activism are explored in this conversation. We discuss the direct connection between anger and joy - and how that anger can fuel meaningful environmental action that is rooted in justice.

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.

An expert in reimagining resilient local food systems, 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.

Facing international problems of daunting proportions, we interrogate: what are the roles of individuals, communities, and cities? Can we stomach the current economic model, and what are the alternatives? How can food connect and strengthen community?

Communicating the Anthropocene is an art and a science. Environmental communications are one of the most underutilized solutions we have for rising to meet the spiritual and cultural nature of our environmental crises.

Sara Lopez is a social entrepreneur, creator, artist, writer, and culture worker. Along with Gabriel Alvarez, she co-founded The Jungle Journal, an online platform with an annual print magazine, and together they 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 shape stories that energize them to fight, love, or care? This conversation explores storytelling and the role of media in reconnecting with the Earth.

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?

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.

This conversation about permaculture, agroecology, land rights, and ecosystem restoration illustrates that we can remember how to be a part of a natural world that we never left. We can tend to the hopeful return of biodiversity and flourishing webs of life.

The ocean - which has always held mystery for us human beings - also holds powerful solutions to climate change and biodiversity loss.

Charles Clover is the Executive Director of the Blue Marine Foundation, and author of Rewilding the Sea: How to Save our Oceans. Charles made his name as an author and environmental journalist and editor, and has dedicated decades to conserving land and ocean.

Delve into this conversation about the mysteries of the ocean and how the sea connects to us all, no matter what ecology we call home.

Food justice is interwoven with conversations about our women ancestors and motherhood in this episode of Reseed.

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, as well as a filmmaker, currently working on a film on Women Indigenous Farmers in Africa.

Ama sheds light on food sovereignty, a grassroots worldwide movement to reclaim food systems, with a particular focus on farmers’ rights. Could anything be more prescient to our precarious moment when workers are rising up and the Earth cries for our radical care?

Fossil fuel narratives seep into our culture, media, politics, and minds, and it can be hard 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.

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.

We can find the veins and rivulets of care that already exist in the growing climate movement, and together rewrite the future.