Lifeworlds – Details, episodes & analysis

Could the destruction of nature become considered as serious a crime as that of genocide? How does the structure of law shape a civilisation’s norms, behaviors and overarching story?

Today we’ll be discussing international Ecocide law, a massively growing movement that wants to embed the notion of ‘ecocide’ crime at the highest levels of law - at the International Criminal Court in The Hague - and create a powerful deterrent for the further damage to ecosystems and people globally.

Our guest is Pella Thiel, a maverick ecologist, farmer, author and who has co-founded the Swedish hubs of international networks like Transition Sweden, End Ecocide Sweden and is an associate of the Centre for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala University. Pella was awarded the Swedish Martin Luther King Award in 2023 and the Environmental Hero of the year 2019.

We discuss: 

• Why ecocide law is different & a game changer as compared with other environmental laws
• How it can help create a new moral baseline, shifting global values and mindsets
• Where the tensions or synergies might lie between the Rights of Nature and Ecocide law
• The notion of positive tipping points
• And how an Embassy of the Baltic Sea might play out as a practice center for ecological community building

Episode Website Link

Show Links:

• Stop Ecocide International : Breaking News page
• End Ecocide Sweden
• Pella Thiel personal website
• Nate Hagens interview with Pella Thiel
• Lifeworlds Resource Page: Ecocentric Law
• Lifeworlds Episode on Rights of Nature
• MA Earth Interview with Jojo Mehta (Director of Stop Ecocide)
• Positive Tipping Points
• Embassy of the North Sea
• The Ecopsychology Initiative

Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd

Photo credit: Law Statue 

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Have you ever wondered what it would be like to breathe yourself into your own body? To flow with the out-breath of trees into your own fractaling lungs, to dance ribbonlike into an ancient ceiba’s vasculature, to stitch an ecosystem together as a mycelium highways sparkling with energy? In this episode we explore the transformational potential of virtual reality through the work of Marshmallow Laser Feast, an artist collective that has emerged as a leading VR creators in the last decade. 

They exhibited internationally from London to New York, Melbourne to Seoul, their work included in major exhibitions at institutions including the Barbican Centre, Saatchi Gallery, Sundance Film Festival, and SXSW. 'In The Eyes Of The Animal' was nominated for the Design of the Year by Design Museum Beazley Awards and won the Wired Innovation Award (2016). Most recently, the team at MLF won the Tribeca Film Festival Storyscapes Award for Innovation in Storytelling and Best VR Film at VR Arles Festival for ‘TreeHugger, Wawona’. 

Ersin Han Ersin is the director of MLF and describes to us how they use dazzlingly aesthetic real-time VR experiences to explore the invisible perspectives of nature’s lifeworlds – and how they are constantly pushing the bounds of what technology makes possible in expanding our ecological sensitivities. I enquire into:

• Who they need to speak to in order to create their masterpieces and translate the umwelts of other species? What other scientists, poets, musicians, make this possible?
• What is it that virtual reality can create that no other medium can?
• What is the building block of a multisensory story?
• What are some of the astounding ways that other beings experience the world that are divergent from the human?
• How could global education be redesigned based on kinesthetic educative tools like VR?

Episode Website Link.

Show Links:

• Marshmallow Laser Feast
• TED talk
• Vimeo of MLF
• Soulful connection with trees: Dartington
• Lifeworlds Episode with Karen Bakker
• Observations on Being by MLF
• AI piece from Berggruen Institute
• Abandon Normal Devices Festival

Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd

Photo credit: MLF exhibition at AMCI in Australia (photo from their website)

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A guided meditation to bring you into a state of communion and intimacy with the Earth through the daily, sacred act of eating. 

Many ancient traditions have their ways of giving thanks to our connection with food and the planet’s bounteous harvest. Here, I have been inspired by the Zen Buddhist lineage of Plum Village, and the tenderness and beauty of bringing in all of life through every bite.

I recommend you do it as you are about to enjoy a special meal…

(Audio: New Earth - Beautiful Koshi Wind Chimes Healing Spring Meditation 432hz; Image: grapevinedesigns.in)

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A special three part episode recorded onboard a Climate and Oceans expedition in the Norwegian Arctic. We’ll hear about the dark mysteries of the deepest realms of the ocean from “Her Deepness” herself, Dr. Sylvia Earle (possibly the most admired and loved oceanographer of the last century). Followed by the latest Planetary Boundaries Earth science from Johan Rockstrom, and the role of ocean storytelling and immersive art installations from Taylor Griffith.

Together, their voices weave a tale of the predicament and possibility of the Arctic and high seas; how to sense the lifeworlds of all the creatures who glow and sparkle and live in the dark within the greatest unexplored part of Earth's biosphere; we learn about ocean exploration in the 21st century, the dangers of deep sea mining, and the role of discovery and art in bringing us into the pulsing heart of the planet’s watery body. I love this episode so much, and I hope you will too. 

Episode Website Link

Show Links:

• Sylvia Earle biography
• Mission Blue and Hope Spots
• Deep Ocean Exploration and Research (DOER Submarine vessels)
• Johan Rockstrom
• Planetary Boundaries
• Mission Blue Documentary
• Deep Sea Mining Challenges - Oxygen Project
• Taylor Griffith artist page
• Campaign Against Deep Sea Mining
• Anna Atkins Ocean cyanotypes
• Pope’s new Laudato Deum

Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock, Ellie Kidd & The Rising by Tryad CCPL

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A necessary and beautiful episode on the emotional terrain of climate grief, loss, sadness, anxiety, and all the ways we can cope either maladaptively or adaptively to this challenging moment in time.

This is an intimate conversation that makes the case for allowing ourselves to ‘feel it all’. Because from the depth of feeling comes the power of action, hope, resilience and community. If we ignore the reality of this mental health crisis, we are turning our backs on the potential that can emerge on the other side of initiation. We discuss different frameworks for processing climate anxiety - practical resources, approaches and philosophical underpinnings of a phenomenon that is sweeping the world, especially among youth populations.

Dr Britt Wray is one of the world’s most esteemed and loved researchers on this topic, having published the viral newsletter and book Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis. She is Director Special Initiative of the Chair on Climate Change & Mental Health in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences of Stanford Medicine, advancing research and approaches in the field with communities facing the reality of ecological and social breakdown.

Show Links:

• Lifeworlds Resources Page
• Britt’s website
• Britt’s books: Generation Dread & Rise of the Necrofauna
• Joanna Macey: World as Lover, World as Self
• Edwards & Buzzel: The Waking Up Syndrome
• Blanche Verlie: Learning to Live with Climate Change
• Good Grief Network
• Elizabeth Bechard: Parenting in a Changing Climate
• Jo McAndrews: Supporting children in the face of climate change
• Martin Shaw: We Are In The Underworld And We Haven’t Figured It Out Yet
• Climate Psychiatry Alliance
• Roy Scranton: Learning to Die in the Anthropocene

Music: Electric Ethnicity

Photo: Midsummer Eve Celebration

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An essential part of living into different lifeworlds resides in the mythic realm – the currents of poetry, mysticism and story that stream in the archetypal world below the world. Today I bring you a myth, from Darren Silver, rite of passage and vision quest guide; it is a myth that has laid dormant for many years and is finally here to be told.  

On the surface it’s a story of twins, of a brother and a sister, and of their initiation. There is magical surrealism here, and mythic beings, ancient and enduring laws of reciprocity, of the ways of the forest, of how to barter in ancient exchanges of the soul. There are riddles and agreements and creatures that speak and weave wisdom through grit and pain and love. 

The enduring message that this myth leaves me with is that initiation does not come bundled in cozy sound baths and sipping cacao on a beach — initiation is painful and tears us to our bones, and yet it is a sublime liberation, because through initiation, we manifest our gifts into the world. And as Darren says, for our gift to manifest, we have to wager our own skin. 

So sit back and listen to this one closely. Be present, receptive, and dignify the messages that are coming through as medicine for you, because something will strike you close. Allow yourself to be carried away by the myth. And so we begin.

Credit: Photo of Stag (Flickr)

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The roads on which we drive are unlikely to strike us as an exciting source of design innovation or interspecies dialogue. And yet, some of the most fascinating experiments and living laboratories are taking place around the world in how humans can build structures of hope and creativity for other species to flourish, despite having their habitats sliced in half by concrete veins. 

Earth is a fluid organism and needs connected landscapes like a canvas upon which to paint its life. Roads, on the other hand, are the single most destructive element in the process of habitat fragmentation (not to mention the millions of deaths due to collisions and the massive economic cost of these accidents). Over the coming 30 years, an additional 25 million km of roads will be built across the planet’s surface. So today in the show, we speak to pioneers in the world of wildlife crossings and design competition leaders who have spurred the process of globally rethinking and redesigning human structures to grapple with the concept of “wilderness” and the radical interconnectedness of nature and culture.

Jeremy Guth is a trustee of the Woodcock Foundation, and an ARC founding sponsor. Nina-Marie is the Graduate Director of the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Toronto Metropolitan University where she leads the Ecological Design Lab, and has created a series of courses at the Harvard Graduate School of Design called Wild Ways.

Episode Website Link:  https://www.lifeworld.earth/episodes-blog/reweavinglandscapes 

Show Links:

• ARC website
• Crossings for Wildlife website
• Biophilic Cities Network
• Ecological Design Lab.ca
• Wild Ways Harvard Course
• Wild Ways publication
• Interactive map of wildlife crossings in the US
• Aeon article: Reweaving the Wild
• (Re)Connecting Wild film
• NYT wildlife crossing article

Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock, Ellie Kidd & The Rising by Tryad CCPL

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A clarinet plugged into an underwater hydrophone, playing with liquid humpback whale songs below the surface. A huddled group of musicians under a night-time forest in Berlin, singing with nightingales. A 17-year swarm of cicadas alighting upon a sole jazz musician. These are the scenographies that David Rothenberg provokes with his interspecies music compilations, asking us, why should we only play music with other humans and not improvise along with the original musicians of the planet herself? 

For human music and song emerged from a world that sings, hums, beats, chirps, and human translations of these sounds have captured our imaginations from our tribal origins through to the first recordings of humpback whales that spurred anti-whaling conventions in the 70s and electronic synthesizers. 

Today’s episode brings us into this creative engagement with the planet, exploring how we are transformed when we open up to a world of music, beauty and art created by nature every day. So my friends, listen wider, expand your sense of music, and have David Rothenberg, interspecies musician, writer, and philosopher, show us how to become not just passive listeners but active participants in the symphony.  

Episode Website Link

Show Links:

• David’s website
• David Rothenberg music on Spotify
• all David Rothenberg books on Amazon
• NYT making music with cicadas
• If Nietzche were an animal book
• Tim D recording wind
• Slowing down nightingale song into whale song
• On making music with whales
• Sounding Soils
• Bernie Krause
• David’s workshop in Costa Rica

Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd

Songs: Nightingale sounds are from David, and the Monkey Chant is from Kecak from Bali (Bridge Records)

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The world around us is constantly vibrating with sounds we cannot hear. This magical soundscape evades our senses, tempts us by its elusive presence and beckons us to look deeper.

Our ability to listen in is rapidly evolving. Over the last decades, scientists have begun installing digital listening devices in nearly every ecosystem. This process of deciphering what nature is saying is called “bioacoustics” and “ecoacoustics”. Massive advances in both hardware and artificial intelligence are permitting us to go where no artificial ear has gone before.

Recent breakthroughs unveil that many more species are speaking in ways we didn’t know were possible, with far richer behaviors than were previously known.

Karen Bakker - Canadian scientist, author, Professor at UBC and Rhodes Scholar - tells us how bioacoustics is poised to alter humanity’s relationship with our planet by expanding our sense of sound. 

We can develop mobile protected areas for animal climate refugees. Simply by singing, a whale can turn aside a container ship. Acoustic enrichment can help corals regenerate.

Acknowledging these forms of communication requires us to confront our entrenched ideas of sentience and intelligence. This seeks to understand non-human communication on its own terms and brings up new ethical and moral dilemmas. Who grants us consent to listen in to the conversation of bats? And as we inhabit such different lifeworlds, might we have enough shared concepts that would enable any kind of translation? 

Episode Website Link

• Smart Earth Project
• Sounds of Life
• Yale article
• Project CETI
• Interspecies Internet
• Earth Species Project
• Sonification
• Elephant listening project
• Wild Dolphin Project
• Sounds of Reef
• Marine mammal communication & cognition
• Biologgers

Photo: Karen’s Book

Music: Electric Ethnicity

Coral sounds Tim Lamont

Bat sound Tomáš Bartonička

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This is a meditation I wrote and recorded to plunge us through epochs of cosmic time, through the tremendous evolutionary processes that preceded us, became us, and are us. It grants us invaluable context on the great tales of life whose memories are held in our bones.

This is our origin and lineage. I hope you find yourself nourished and moved by the experience.

This script is inspired by and takes language from the deep time practices of Joanna Macy and the Deep Time Walk of Stephan Harding and colleagues, along with some of the evolutionary notions explored in Otherlands by John Halliday – to them I am deeply grateful. My script here. Please credit if used or shared.

Music attribution: Take Off and Shoot a Zero. Stunt Island Album. Written, produced, and performed by Chris Zabriskie. Published by You've Been a Wonderful Laugh Track (ASCAP). © 2011 Chris Zabriskie.

Art made with… You guessed it. Midjourney.

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