371 episodes

For The Wild Podcast is an anthology of the Anthropocene; focused on land-based protection, co-liberation and intersectional storytelling rooted in a paradigm shift away from human supremacy, endless growth and consumerism.

For The Wild For The Wild

    • Society & Culture
    • 4.8 • 80 Ratings

For The Wild Podcast is an anthology of the Anthropocene; focused on land-based protection, co-liberation and intersectional storytelling rooted in a paradigm shift away from human supremacy, endless growth and consumerism.

    JAROD K. ANDERSON on Reclaiming Limits [ENCORE]

    JAROD K. ANDERSON on Reclaiming Limits [ENCORE]

    This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Jarod K Anderson, originally aired in January 2023. 

    Bringing us into his world of nature, awe, and magical poetry, guest Jarod K. Anderson reminds us that our human journey is worthy of just as much love and affection as the natural world around us. When we come to nature with intention, how might it guide us towards love and inspiration? In a time where so many of us are feeling lost, confused, and not connected to a purpose, we often abdicate our power to make meaning in favor of buying prepackaged narratives about who we are based on what we consume. Tapping into the beauty of telling our own stories and making our own meaning, Jarod and Ayana counter what we have been taught about worth. This episode highlights the power of the humble in the face of the grandiose and attention seeking. We are people of a place, Jarod reminds us, and the intimate, internal, and local work we do matters, just as our small bodies in this vast universe matter infinitely. 


    Writer, Poet, and podcaster Jarod K. Anderson (creator of The CryptoNaturalist Podcast) has built a large audience of readers and listeners with his strange, vibrant appreciations of nature. Ranging from optimistic contemplations of mortality to appreciations of single-celled organisms, Jarod is forever writing love letters to the natural world. 


    Music is “Pine Chant” by Sara Fraker and Lachlan Skipworth. “Inspired by tree-ring growth data from the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, Pine Chant is a sonic embodiment of twelve Arizona trees and an emotional response to climate crisis.” Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.



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    • 58 min
    THREE BLACK MEN on the World as Ritual /368

    THREE BLACK MEN on the World as Ritual /368

    This week we are thrilled to bring you a special conversation from a dear friend of the podcast, Bayo Akomolafe. Recorded while in Ghana for the Three Black Men Tour, this conversation features the voices of Bayo Akomolafe, Resmaa Menakem, Orland Bishop, Victoria Santos and Okhiogbe Omonblanks Omonhinmin, all of whom were involved with the conversation and presentation of the Three Black Men tour. 


    In 2023, Resmaa, Bayo and Orland shared space as they visited three cities across three continents, tracing a diasporic route in reverse from Los Angeles in The United States, to Salvador in Brazil, and finally to Accra in Ghana. 


    Through the tour, these three visionary Black men, sharing their leading edges, are inviting us into a radical re/imagination of how we respond to our time. They sense into emergent possibilities, triangulating toward a synthesis of new forms, new magic, and new directions.


    This conversation touches on the community of care that Bayo, Resmaa, Orland, Victoria, and Omon contributed to and experienced across the tour, the lessons they learned from this undertaking, and visions for what is to come. As each conversation partner emphasizes, “Blackness” is about far more than pigmentation. It is a call to re-story the world, to reimagine possibilities. Together they discuss the cracks, callings and visions that invite us into a paradigm shift that none of us could imagine alone.


    Learn more about the tour at https://www.threeblackmen.com and https://www.centerforhealingandliberation.com


    The music that opens and closes this episode is by 808 X Ri. And with courtesy of the Leaving Records record label, the music breaks you heard today are  by The Growth Eternal. Artwork by Jon Marro. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.

    For an extended version of this episode join us at patreon.com/forthewild.
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    • 58 min
    ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN on Pleasure as Birthright [ENCORE] /367

    ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN on Pleasure as Birthright [ENCORE] /367

    This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with adrienne maree brown which originally aired in April 2019.
    adrienne maree brown begins this week’s episode by asking, “If we were not ashamed of our pleasure, what would become possible? If we started to understand that pleasure is something that everyone should have access to, what would become possible?”
    This week on For The Wild, we are exploring how to embody pleasure in its many forms with adrienne maree brown. Drawing upon Audre Lorde’s seminal publication, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, adrienne maree brown’s latest book, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, reiterates how once we truly know the pleasure of being alive, suffering becomes unimaginable. Above all, pleasure resides in our body, but many of us seem to forget this through lifetimes of social conditioning, performative identities, and the multitude of ways in which capitalism and patriarchy have filtered love and desire through the lens of ownership. Yet, whether we are cognizant of this or not, our pleasure and our liberation remain inextricably bound together.
    adrienne maree brown grows healing ideas in public through her multi-genre writing, her music and her podcasts. Informed by 25 years of movement facilitation, somatics, Octavia E Butler scholarship and her work as a doula, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination and Transformative Justice as ideas and practices for transformation. She is the author/editor of several published texts, cogenerator of a tarot deck and a developing musical ritual.
     Music by The Boom Booms, JB the First Lady, and Small Town.



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    • 1 hr
    ERIK ASSADOURIAN on Dreams of the Long Future /366

    ERIK ASSADOURIAN on Dreams of the Long Future /366

    Introducing listeners to his way of worship and connection to the Earth, this week’s guest Erik Assadourian offers insight into the religious framing and practical applications of the Gaian way. Erik shares his spiritual path of recognizing interdependence with the Earth and shares how he dreams towards a future where we exist in a mutualistic relationship to the Earth. Ranging from topics of degrowth to tangible spiritual practices for connection to the Earth and its seasons, Erik’s wisdom and groundedness is a balm for those tired by the rhetoric of our overculture. 


    Together, Erik and Ayana consider the value of spirituality and theology while also reckoning with the complicated and often harmful ways such ideologies have been applied throughout human history. Taking this into mind, the conversation delves into our culture of consumerism and extraction while also considering the philosophies and paradigm shifts that may guide us out of it. Using religion and connection to the sustaining force of the Earth as a guide, how might we build communities of care not just for humanity, but for the Earth itself? In a time when so many of our environmental fights feel urgent, Erik calls listeners to consider how we might build a culture and framework of environmentalism meant to propel us through to a long future. 


    Erik Assadourian is the director of the Gaian Way, a spiritual philosophy and practicing religious community. He is also a sustainability researcher and writer. Erik was a researcher with Worldwatch Institute from 2001 until its end in 2017. At Worldwatch, he directed or codirected seven books, focusing on consumerism, eco-education, global security, sustainable communities, and economic degrowth.


    Music by Algorhythm.Code. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.



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    • 58 min
    MERLIN SHELDRAKE on Embodied Entanglements / 365

    MERLIN SHELDRAKE on Embodied Entanglements / 365

    Winding through questions of philosophy, science, and meaning making, this week’s episode brings together vital thoughts on what it means to live an embodied life in an entangled world. Guest Merlin Sheldrake shares the motivations that drew him to study fungi and the complex ways this study has shaped his life and thought. 


    As Merlin shares, “an account of life that doesn't include fungi is an account of a living world  that doesn’t exist.” Our relationship with fungi is non-negotiable. Merlin invites listeners to pay attention to what this relationship means and how it shapes not only our lives, but the entanglement of life across the world. With this, Merlin also shares the ways fungal life offers a diversity of expressions and possibilities – offering up the perspective that the diversity and complexity of relationship and expression is what makes life fertile. 


    Across the episode, Merlin and Ayana contemplate the history and meaning of science, and come to see life as a process and a relationship. The meaning we make does not come out of a vacuum, but rather out of relationship. Life itself, in its many forms, is improvisational. Understanding this, we are left with the provocation: How might we speak to the world, rather than about it?   


    Merlin is a biologist and author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, and winner of the Royal Society Book Prize and the Wainwright Prize. Merlin is a research associate of the Vrije University Amsterdam, and works with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks and the Fungi Foundation. A keen brewer and fermenter, he is fascinated by the relationships that arise between humans and more-than-human organisms. (merlinsheldrake.com)


    Music by Matthewdavid. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.




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    • 56 min
    SKY HOPINKA on What We Pass On /364

    SKY HOPINKA on What We Pass On /364

    This week, Ayana is joined by Sky Hopinka in a conversation that dives deep into the meaning of art and film and the stories and emotions we share between generations. Sky grounds the conversation in his incredible expertise and thoughtful approach to media. Touching on the very questions of who we are and how we make meaning, the questions in this conversation cut to the core of what it means to be human.  
    The conversation is a beautiful exploration of art, Indigeneity, intergenerational pain, and the way we make meaning in times like these. Weaving together the ephemeral worlds of emotion and identity with the grounding power of shared values and reciprocity, Sky reminds us that art is meant to provoke, inspire, and make the space needed for feeling to emerge. 
    Sky Hopinka was born and raised in Northern Washington State and Southern California. He's a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non fiction forms of media. His work has played at various festivals including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival. 
    Music by Arushi Jain. The artwork for this episode is Sky Hopinka; Breathings (2020). Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
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    • 56 min

Customer Reviews

4.8 out of 5
80 Ratings

80 Ratings

Dangerous Dazza ,

Survival

Really enjoying your show and guests
As some who sees very little to be optimistic about in the coming future of EARTH.
Your show is a wonderful place to hear some positive talk and awareness of the work others are doing. Let’s see what we can do and how far we can take this global movement. Keep up the great work and having great guests and activists. I have the upmost respects to all and everyone who takes to the streets in theses strange times.

allegra111nogi111 ,

My favourite podcast!

My absolute favourite podcast of all time. Such informative, deep dive conversations into our connection to the earth and the systemic ways in which humanity is hindering it.

This podcast offers is such a potent teaching tool that brings to light SUCH important topics.

Thank you so much to Ayana + the whole For the Wild team for being my most consistent teachers in ecology + for educating me each week in more reasons why we should love, care for + stand up for our planet!

artemisia vulgaris ,

:)

One of the best podcasts out there! Ayana Young approaches conversations with such intelligence and sensitivity, and gives a voice to such a rich range of perspectives. My best 2020 lockdown discovery, hands down. Very grateful that it exists.

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