On this episode of the Newscast we take a look at Natalie Kyriacou’s widely praised new book, Nature’s Last Dance: Tales of Wonder in an Age of Extinction, whose high-profile fans, like Paris climate agreement architect Christiana Figueres, call it a “lyrical call to awaken our love for the wild before the music stops.”
Kyriacou, the founder of the environmental organization My Green World, shares her aim of the book, her thoughts on real solutions to our ecological problems, what she wishes more people understood about nature, and why they need to fall in love with it.
“If there’s one simple thing that we can do, it is to just step outside and feel that wonder and look up and appreciate it … if we are going to protect nature, to protect something, you need to fall in love with it.”
Always honest and often humorous, this deeply researched volume clearly outlines the economic, political and cultural drivers of our most significant ecological problems, and what the reader can do to effect meaningful change.
Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.
Image Credit: Natalie Kyriacou. Photo by Chloe Paul.
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Timecodes
(00:00) Making nature mainstream
(04:28) Challenging bias about nature
(12:38) Stories of recovery
(16:23) How we all depend on nature
(21:55) Porches and peacocks
(27:03) Your actions are a vote
(35:18) Inspiration from Costa Rica
(38:55) Lessons from the Montreal Protocol
(45:08) To protect it, you have to love it
Rewilding advocate, financier and host of the popular podcast Rewilding the World, Ben Goldsmith, joins Mongabay’s podcast to discuss nature restoration in his home country of England, where a significant cultural change is taking hold toward reviving biodiversity, such as beavers. Once seen as a nuisance there, many farmers and planners now embrace the rebound of the huge rodent, thanks to its impressive ability to mitigate flooding events that the island nation now experiences with regularity, due to climate change.
“If you stop a random person on the street now, in the city or in the countryside, they know that beavers are back, that [they] are native species, that they play a vital role in managing our rivers,” he says.
However, he argues that while there has been some rewilding momentum in England, it’s not happening fast enough, particularly for larger carnivores like wolves.
“The idea of reintroducing them is considered madness. Even though there are news reports of swelling populations of deer and growing incidents of Lyme disease and road traffic collisions and a disequilibrium in our forests,” Goldsmith says.
Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.
Please send questions, feedback or comments to podcast[at]mongabay[dot]com.
Image Credit: Chrome Hill in Yorkshire, England. Image by Tim Hill via Pixabay (Pixabay free content license).
Timecodes
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(00:00) “We don’t have wildlife here”
(11:46) England’s rewilding comeback
(15:05) Cultural and economic shifts
(25:24) Changing environment policy
(30:52) Nitrogen and pollinators
(37:43) Getting along with ‘difficult’ wildlife
(47:51) Rewilding the World
On this week’s episode of Mongabay’s podcast, best-selling author Alan Weisman details the people and places he visited in reporting his new book, Hope Dies Last, a chronicle of miraculous accomplishments and resilience of the book’s protagonists, many of whom are working to solve humanity’s most intractable ecological problems.
The book’s impetus was an accumulation of despair at the state of the world and how humanity treats it. “I started this book because I was really, really, really depressed about how I saw systems breaking down,” Weisman says.
But as he uncovered each story, Weisman’s tune changed. He explains the ingenuity and bravery of the people and projects he visited that altered his perspective on what is possible.
“By the end of this book, I was so uplifted by all these people — and by the variety of people — that I found, in the most extraordinarily different circumstances, each of them daring to hope and oftentimes succeeding, that I'm there with them. This ain't over.”
Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.
Please send questions, feedback or comments to podcast[at]mongabay[dot]com.
Image Credit: Kicker Rock in the Galápagos, Ecuador. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
Timecodes
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(00:00) The Mesopotamian Revitalization Project
(07:56) Why does Hope struggle against itself?
(13:27) Creating food from thin air
(24:06) Suing the government to protect species
(31:03) The most dangerous country Alan visited, the U.S.
(35:54) New forms of energy
(45:39) Power is the most addictive drug
(51:53) This ain’t over