Episode 11 - Rekindling Kinship with Nature

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

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. 

John Hausdoerffer

Gavin, John, and Alice Irene’s conversation is 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.