Arts & Ecology Unknown Road

Arts & Ecology is a new podcast all about the vital role art and culture play in creating a regenerative future. Each season we ask artists, authors, and curators one question. This season we ask, How can we tell better stories? 
 
In this episode, Natasha is in conversation with author, environmentalist, and financier Ben Goldsmith. 
 
Ben is a British environmentalist and financier. He is a leading light in the rewilding movement in Britain and Europe, as well as a pioneer of green investment. Ben and his wife, Jemima, are rewilding their farm in Somerset, and Ben has helped to establish a number of environmental initiatives, including the Environmental Funders’ Network, the Conservative Environment Network, Rewilding Britain, Beaver Trust, and the Conservation Collective, a global network of locally focused environmental foundations. Ben was a Director at DEFRA for five years, successfully advocating for a series of ground-breaking environmental restoration policies during his tenure, including the new Environmental Land Management scheme, the Nature for Climate Fund and the Species Reintroductions task force. The Iris Project was established by Ben Goldsmith and Kate Rothschild in partnership with the Global Greengrants Fund in loving memory of their daughter, Iris Goldsmith, a young environmentalist who loved the natural world. @bengoldsmith

Arts & Ecology is a new podcast all about the vital role art and culture play in creating a regenerative future. Each season we ask artists, authors, and curators one question. This season we ask, How can we tell better stories? 
 
In this episode, Natasha speaks with author, mythologist, and pyschologist Sharon Blackie.
 
Dr. Sharon Blackie is an award-winning writer, psychologist and mythologist. Her highly acclaimed books, courses, lectures and workshops are focused on the development of the mythic imagination, and on the relevance of myths, fairy tales and folk traditions to the personal, cultural and environmental problems we face today.
As well as writing five books of fiction and nonfiction, including the bestselling If Women Rose Rooted and her latest, Hagitude, her writing has appeared in anthologies, collections and in several international media outlets – among them the Guardian, the Irish Times, and the Scotsman. Her books have been translated into several languages, and she has been interviewed by the BBC, US public radio and other broadcasters on her areas of expertise. Her awards include the Roger Deakin Award, and a Creative Scotland Writer’s Award. Her next book, Wise Women: Myths and folklore in celebration of older women will be published by Virago in 2024.
Sharon is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and has taught and lectured at several academic institutions, Jungian organisations, retreat centres and cultural festivals around the world. Find out more at www.sharonblackie.net.

 
 
 

Arts and Ecology is a brand new podcast about the vital role art and culture plays in creating a regenerative future. This season we ask authors, artists, and curators one question: How can we tell better stories?
 
James Bridle is a writer, artist and technologist. Their artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide and on the internet. Their writing has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Wired, the Atlantic, the New Statesman, the Guardian, and the Financial Times. They are the author of 'New Dark Age' (2018) and 'Ways of Being' (2022), and they wrote and presented "New Ways of Seeing" for BBC Radio 4 in 2019. Their work can be found at http://jamesbridle.com.  
 

Arts & Ecology is a new podcast all about the vital role art and culture play in creating a regenerative future. This season we ask artists, authors, anc curators one question: How can we tell better stories?
 
Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey (b. 1959/1959 England) are internationally acclaimed for creating works that intersect art, activism, architecture, biology, ecology and history.  Referencing memory and time, nature and culture, urban political ecologies, the climate emergency and degradation of the living planet, their time-based practice reveals an intrinsic bias towards process and event.  Processes of germination, growth and decay (organic and inorganic) feature in artworks that often evolve through extended research in response to people and place, interfacing their profound interest in local ecologies and global planetary concerns.
They give high profile keynotes and public presentations and contribute writings and photographs to books and journals.  In 2019, the artists co-founded Culture Declares Emergency in response to the climate and ecological emergency.
In 2021, one hundred Beuys’ Acorns trees were exhibited at Tate Modern to commemorate Beuys’s centennial and Tate’s declaration of climate emergency.
Currently Beuys’ Acorns is residing in London on Global Generation’s Paper Garden and Story Garden.  Each tree is contained in a specialist Air-pot that has enabled both portability of the trees and ensured their on-going welfare through healthy root development.
Public exchanges, keynotes, conversations and live open-ended research are integral to their approach and practice, and Ackroyd & Harvey give many high-profile keynote lectures and presentations, notably Declaring Emergency: Museums and the Climate Crisis, Courtauld Institute of Art, London; Big Botany, Spencer Museum, Kansas; How to be a COPtomist, Kings College, London; On Energy, Banff Centre, Canada; Environmental Funders Network, Cambridge, UK; COCE/Conference on Communication and Environment,University of Colorada, Boulder; ‘Nobel Laureate Symposium’ on Creativity, Leadership and Climate Change at London’s Science Museum; ‘Art + Alchemy’Trinity College, Cambridge; EARTH: Art of  a Changing World, Royal Academy of Arts, London; Smith School, Oxford; London School of Economics, UK; the Royal Society, London; Royal Institute of British Architects, London; Tate Britain, London; Royal National Theatre, London; Manchester International Festival, UK; Courtauld Institute, London; Harvard University, Boston, USA; San Francisco Institute of Arts, USA; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, USA.
 

Arts & Ecology is a new podcast all about the vital role art and culture play in creating a regenerative future. This season we ask authors, artists and curators one question, “How can we tell better stories?” Not just about the many crises we face but about the regenerative future so many of us are working hard to build.
 
This week, we speak with author Katherine May. Katherine is an internationally bestselling author and podcaster living in Whitstable, UK. Her most recent book, Enchantment became an instant New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller. Her internationally bestselling hybrid memoir Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times was adapted as BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week, and was shortlisted for the Porchlight and Barnes and Noble Book of the Year. The Electricity of Every Living Thing, her memoir of a midlife autism diagnosis, was adapted as an audio drama by Audible. Other titles include novels such as The Whitstable High Tide Swimming Club, and The Best, Most Awful Job, an anthology of essays about motherhood which she edited. Her journalism and essays have appeared in a range of publications including The New York Times, The Observer and Aeon.
Katherine’s podcast, How We Live Now, ranks in the top 1% worldwide, and she has been a guest presenter for On Being’s The Future of Hope series. Her next book, Enchantment, will be published in 2023. Katherine lives with her husband, son, two cats and a dog. She loves walking, sea-swimming and pickling slightly unappealing things.

 
Arts and Ecology is a podcast about the vital role art and culture play in creating a regenerative future. This season we ask one question, “How can we tell better stories?” And not just about the many crises we face but about the regenerative future so many of us are working hard to build. Join your host, Natasha Rivett-Carnac, for these in-depth conversations with artists, curators, and authors across a range of subjects and discover how you might bring a fresh perspective on story telling into your own practice