Mind, Body, and Soil Kate Kavanaugh

In this episode, Kate sits down with author Jay Owens to talk about her book Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles. Together, they unravel the paradoxes and challenges posed by dust - a small particle that makes a big impact throughout history. Discover how dust connects the Sahara to the Amazon, influences snowmelt, and carries historical significance, embodying both awe and horror. Dust underpins everything - it is, as Jay says, “a boundary crosser, a transgressor” and makes itself known in ice cores, the aftermath of the atomic bomb, in the drying up of bodies of water, and the pollution from our highways. It is the mark of the modern world and our incalculable impact on it. It underlines our interconnectedness and highlights the uncertainty about what happens next. This is also a call to salvage, to look at the externalities, and embrace hope at a local level.
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Find Jay:
Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles
Instagram: @hautepop
X: @hautepop
Other Writing

Resources Mentioned:
Ways of Being by James Bridle
How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra 
The Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks

Also Check Out These Episodes:
Infrastructure with Deb Chachra
Water with Heather Hansman

Current Discounts for MBS listeners:
15% off Farm True ghee and body care products using code: KATEKAV1510% off Home of Wool using code KATEKAVANAUGH

In this episode, Kate sits down with author and journalist Rachel Slade to discuss her books Making It In America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the USA (and How It Got That Way) and Into the Raging Sea: Thirty-Three Mariners, One Megastore, and the Sinking of El Faro. Rachel’s books are incredible explorations of humanity and she deftly weaves together complex threads. We focus on Making It In America in the episode. The book is so much about where trade, manufacturing, farming, immigration, the textile industry, unions, and the history of the hoodie itself meet. We start by exploring how manufacturing made America and touching on the complex series of events that led to the offshoring of the majority of American manufacturing after NAFTA. This episode is about grit and determination and a commitment to vision by American Roots, the hoodie company featured in the book, and what entrepreneurship means and what it might mean to manufacture in America once again. It’s a wide-ranging conversation about history, geopolotics, economics and the externalities of focusing solely on the bottom line. It’s about building and re-building community and networks of support and it’s about what it means for us, as humans, to make things by hand. 
We also talk about;
Men’s mental health
Supply chains
Find Rachel:
Making It in America
Into the Raging Sea
Articles + Essays
Instagram: @rachelmslade
Made in USA Brands
Resources Mentioned:
Fields of Gold by Madeleine Fairbairn: 
90% of Everything by Rose George
Eating Nafta 
Rachel on the Julian Dorey Podcast: 
Melanie Challenger’s On Extinction

Also Check Out Episodes
-Kate’s Solo on Resources
-Melanie Challenger

In this week’s episode Kate sits down with the lovely, the ineffable, the effervescent May Lindstrom. Together they explore themes of grace, slowness, and the intricate dance between our inner and outer worlds. May shares many of her incredible stories and laces throughout them a call to live a life full of compassion and love and a cherishing of the everyday. She invites us to think about how we connect to ourselves and to nature, about what it might mean to grow old while integrating the perspectives of ourselves when we were younger, and to follow a north star of love. Throughout is a conversation about what it means to have a body that is bodying - whether that’s your body, a worm body, or to imagine all the other bodies that surround us. She also dives into frontloading pleasure, making a mess, and building something you really believe in. May’s words and wisdom shine in this episode that is really about coming home to yourself. 
Find May:
May Lindstrom Skin
Instagram: @maylindstromskin
If you loved this episode:
With Caroline Nelson 
With Lacey Jean 
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Connect with Kate:
Instagram
email: kate@groundworkcollective.com
Current Discounts for MBS listeners:
15% off Farm True ghee and body care products using code: KATEKAV1510% off Home of Wool using code KATEKAVANAUGHKateK20 for 20% off Herbal Face Food

In this episode, materials scientist and engineering professor Deb Chachra shares about infrastructure. Her book ‘How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems that Shape Our World’ is a multi-layered dive into infrastructure. In this episode, Deb and Kate explore ideas of how we move resources to bodies and waste away from bodies. It is a brief exploration of the rise of globalization and our telecommunications, physical infrastructure, and roads, but it is also an exploration of how access to energy is also access to agency. In it, the concept of ‘away’ is explored - whether it’s the away that we send our waste or the away from which we extract resources using human labor and the complexities of infrastructure’s harms and benefits. It’s also a re-imagining of what the future could look like, which Deb reminds us “is not inevitable” and how we can ask ourselves questions about our values and how we might shape the our care for people now and in the future. Infrastructure is a big and complex subject and Deb’s book deftly explores it. This episode is a small peek into her work. 
Find Deb:
How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World by Deb Chachra
Metafoundry Newsletter
X: @debcha
Instagram: @debcha

Books Mentioned:
Crossings by Ben Goldfarb
Do Artifacts Have Politics? By Langdon Winner
The Power Broker by Robert Moses 
Golden Gulag by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Other Episodes of Interest:
With Ben Goldfarb
Solo on Infrastructure

Support the Podcast:
Substack
Leave a one-time Tip
Connect with Kate:
Instagram
email: kate@groundworkcollective.com
Current Discounts for MBS listeners:
15% off Farm True ghee and body care products using code: KATEKAV1510% off Home of Wool using code KATEKAVANAUGH
KateK20 for 20% off Herbal Face Food

Sand. It’s everywhere and it’s foundational to the built and digital worlds, yet we rarely see or think about it. Vince Beiser’s the World in a Grain tells the story of sand as it makes its way into the materials that make up our world: concrete, glass, silicon chips, and beyond. In this episode of the podcast, we explore some of the broader implications of sand - what it means to build worlds, how to grapple with the largesse of sand’s impact as we run out of this critical resource, and what, if anything, we can change in our relationship to sand. It’s about infrastructure, but it’s also about our relationship to infrastructure and how often the use of more resources begets the use of… more resources. We dive a little into the magic of sand, not just to house and transport us, but also the creation of the lens and how sand allows us to see things really small, really far away, and also really everyday - through glasses. We also talk about time, which sand is a measurement for and also a manifestation of, with the average grain of sand created over 200 million years. This is a conversation that will change the way you see and relate to your world.
Find Vince:
World in a Grain: the Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization
Power Metal Newsletter
X: @VinceBeiser
Website

Books Mentioned:
Crossings and Eager by Ben Goldfarb
Ninety Percent of Everything with Rose George

Other Episodes of Interest:
With Ben Goldfarb
Solo on Infrastructure

Support the Podcast:
Substack
Leave a one-time Tip
Connect with Kate:
Instagram
email: kate@groundworkcollective.com
Current Discounts for MBS listeners:
15% off Farm True ghee and body care products using code: KATEKAV1510% off Home of Wool using code KATEKAVANAUGHKateK20 for 20% off Herbal Face Food

Our relationship to resources shapes the world. Our food, our clothing, our devices, our building materials and the infrastructure that underpins moving them from place to place. On this podcast, we've explored a lot around food as a resource - its impact on land and human health and some of the inputs and externalities of our food system. Now, I'd like to take a turn to explore some other resources and the ubiquitous, yet unseen, infrastructure that moves them to us and our waste products away from us. Coming episodes will be filled with this exploration and so I want to give us a little primer on why this became so interesting to me and why it matters.
Support the Podcast:
Substack
Leave a one-time Tip
Connect with Kate:
Instagram
email: kate@groundworkcollective.com
Current Discounts for MBS listeners:
15% off Farm True ghee and body care products using code: KATEKAV1510% off Home of Wool using code KATEKAVANAUGHKateK20 for 20% off Herbal Face Food