Internet of Nature Podcast

Dr. Nadina Galle
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How can we make our communities wilder, greener, healthier, and happier—and which technologies can help us along the way? Ecological engineer and National Geographic Explorer Dr. Nadina Galle—best-selling author of THE NATURE OF OUR CITIES and pioneer of the Internet of Nature®—shares stories of people using tech to bring the wild back into streets, schools, and homes. This is where the wild meets the wired.

  1. S7E10: "How's Your Matrescence Going?" — The Word for the Metamorphosis of Motherhood — and Why Our Built Environment Is Failing It, with Lucy Jones

    May 17

    S7E10: "How's Your Matrescence Going?" — The Word for the Metamorphosis of Motherhood — and Why Our Built Environment Is Failing It, with Lucy Jones

    Lucy Jones is a journalist and the author of Losing Eden — an investigation into what nature does for the human psyche, written from inside her own recovery from depression — and Matrescence, a memoir-meets-neuroscience of the developmental transition into motherhood. The word was coined in the 1970s by anthropologist Dana Raphael and brought back into circulation in 2017 by reproductive psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks. Most cultures across human history have marked this transition with rites and rituals. Contemporary Western societies, broadly, do not. In this episode, Lucy and I talk about why the word matters, and why the built environment is a maternal mental health issue — narrow pavements, dominant cars, playgrounds without benches, libraries closing under austerity. Why Bogotá's manzanas del cuidado (care blocks) might be the most underrated urban infrastructure in the world. Why nearby nature — the cemetery five minutes from the door, the pocket forest at the bottom of the walk-up — is not a consolation prize but the entire point. How a community bioblitz, iNaturalist, and the City Nature Challenge can give a beloved patch of land enough teeth to survive a planning meeting. And the question I have been quietly reorganising my whole intellectual life around: what if we stopped asking how nature heals us, and started asking how to design communities that don't require us to heal constantly? Find Lucy at lucyfjones.com. Matrescence and Losing Eden are available wherever you buy books.

    1h 17m
  2. S7E9: "If You Want to Hear From 14-Year-Olds, Bring Pizza" — How Real Public Engagement Actually Works, with Gil Penalosa of 8 80 Cities

    May 10

    S7E9: "If You Want to Hear From 14-Year-Olds, Bring Pizza" — How Real Public Engagement Actually Works, with Gil Penalosa of 8 80 Cities

    At ten, Gil Penalosa tried to convince his parents to let him quit school and turn pro. He was ranked second in tennis in Colombia. The catch: 99% of tennis in Colombia was played in private clubs — and Gil's family wasn't a member of any. He played on a public park court across from his house, and routinely beat the wealthy kids on their own courts. You can see the rest of the life unfolding from there. Former Parks Commissioner of Bogotá, where he helped build more than 1,000 new parks and grew the Cyclovía program from 17 km to 130 km — now adopted in 350+ cities worldwide. Founder of 8 80 Cities. Two-term chair of World Urban Parks. Runner-up in the 2022 Toronto mayoral race after entering 100 days out and pulling 100,000 votes against an entrenched political establishment. In this episode — recorded in person at the Toronto Botanical Gardens during the Urban Ravine Summit, where I'd just delivered the opening keynote — Gil and I dig into what cities already know how to do, and the courage most are missing to actually do it. We talk about why public engagement is broken in most cities, and what real listening looks like (hint: it involves pizza, juice, and a school at 3 p.m.). Why tree canopy averages mask brutal equity gaps — and the unprecedented redistribution Gil would push for if he were mayor. Why walking is the most underrated urban idea on Earth, and why "becoming a bicycle city" is the most overrated. And why elections, more than any master plan, are what actually change cities. We also talk about the dying Cyclovía he inherited as commissioner and grew tenfold; Janette Sadik-Khan's pedestrianization of Times Square; Anne Hidalgo's car-free schoolyards in Paris (350 and counting); the Texas border towns where every public school is locked at 4 p.m. while one in three children doesn't have a park within walking distance; what Tirana, Malmö, and Rotterdam are doing that more famous cities aren't; and the simple thing Gil does mid-run when his heart rate hits 145 — which I have since tried, and which works. Plus the line I haven't been able to stop replaying since we sat down: "Engagement shouldn't be tokenism. It should be real listening." Find Gil at gpenalosa.ca and 880cities.org. Sign up for his free Cities for Everyone webinar series — every other Tuesday at 11 a.m. ET.

    53 min
  3. S7E8: “A Nature-Blind Society Is a Sick Society” — On Ecological Illiteracy, Biophobia, and the Children We’re Raising Without Nature, with Prof. Hans Van Dyck of UCLouvain

    May 3

    S7E8: “A Nature-Blind Society Is a Sick Society” — On Ecological Illiteracy, Biophobia, and the Children We’re Raising Without Nature, with Prof. Hans Van Dyck of UCLouvain

    Fewer than 23% of Flemish children between 8 and 17 can identify a blackbird. Less than 5% can name a peacock butterfly. The mole scores highest — not because of nature education, but because it's a beloved character in children's stories. Nature isn't just disappearing from our landscapes. It's disappearing from our minds. In this episode, I sit down with Prof. Hans Van Dyck, behavioral ecologist at UCLouvain and head of the Behavioural Ecology and Conservation group, to talk about what happens to a species — and a society — when children grow up without meaningful contact with the living world. We get into the winners and losers of human-altered landscapes, and where Homo sapiens really sits on that spectrum. We talk about niche construction and its hidden cost — how we built a world for ourselves, and what we quietly subtracted in the process. Hans walks me through Robert Pyle's devastating 1978 concept of the "extinction of experience," and why disconnection compounds across generations. We get into shifting baselines — why each generation inherits a smaller idea of what "normal" nature looks like, without knowing it. And we talk about the move from nature blindness to biophobia: the teacher who brought tissues for children to clean their hands after touching plants, the teenagers who fled a butterfly on a café terrace, the children in hazmat suits at a tree-planting (a story Adrian Wong from SUGi first told me in S6E7). Hans also makes a compelling case for school yards as one of the highest-leverage interventions available to us — for biodiversity, for reduced bullying, and as an equalizer for children whose families can't drive to the countryside on weekends. And he reminds us that you don't need to know the name of a single species to do this work. Curious children are already doing it for us. Hans's December 2025 op-ed in De Standaard — "Children can no longer tell a blackbird from a sparrow" — is a wonderful companion to this conversation. He's also the author of Het orakel van de bosnimf. Van vlinders en mensen (Lannoo), and his scientific work is available on Google Scholar and ResearchGate.

    1h 16m
  4. S7E7: “Public Space is the Secret Sauce” — Reimagining Fifth Avenue, 26 Blocks in Jackson Heights, and the Fight for a Culture of Yes with Ya-Ting Liu, New York City’s First Chief Public Realm Officer

    Apr 26

    S7E7: “Public Space is the Secret Sauce” — Reimagining Fifth Avenue, 26 Blocks in Jackson Heights, and the Fight for a Culture of Yes with Ya-Ting Liu, New York City’s First Chief Public Realm Officer

    Ya-Ting Liu became New York City's first-ever Chief Public Realm Officer in 2023 — a role created from scratch to focus City Hall's attention on the parks, plazas, streets, and sidewalks that make a dense city livable. Recorded inside NYC City Hall in November 2025, just after Zohran Mamdani's election as New York's next mayor but before his inauguration, this conversation traces how the job came to exist, why the Fifth Avenue redesign won't break ground until 2028 ("utility spaghetti" is the answer), and how 26 blocks of Jackson Heights became Paseo Park — one of the most ambitious community-led open streets anywhere in the world. We also talk about finding the "public realm Avengers" inside government, why "1% for Parks" isn't a rallying cry most New Yorkers can picture, and Ya-Ting's three favorite public spaces in the city (spoiler: one is under the Brooklyn Bridge). Since this recording, Ya-Ting has joined NYU Tandon as Chief of Staff and Director of Strategy in the Office of the Dean.

    43 min
  5. S7E6: "The Child Who Never Goes Outside Won't Fight to Save It." — On Children, Nature & the Long Game with Laís Fleury of the Alana Foundation

    Apr 19

    S7E6: "The Child Who Never Goes Outside Won't Fight to Save It." — On Children, Nature & the Long Game with Laís Fleury of the Alana Foundation

    What does a nine-month Amazon expedition have to do with a public school playground in São Paulo? More than you'd think. This week, Nadina speaks with Laís Fleury — original story architect behind the Netflix documentary The Beginning of Life 2: Outside and children-and-nature lead at the Alana Foundation — about why urban children may be the planet’s most underestimated conservation strategy. They cover: nature deficit in megacities, why Rio schools aren’t using the national park in their backyard, how one teacher with no extra budget built a natural playground that became municipal policy, and the single most clarifying argument for why this work matters — for children and for the planet. No national park required.

    56 min
  6. S7E5: New York City's First Pocket Forest — 400 Strangers, 1,500 Trees, and the Japanese Method That Compresses a Century into a Decade, with Christina Delfico of iDig2Learn

    Apr 12

    S7E5: New York City's First Pocket Forest — 400 Strangers, 1,500 Trees, and the Japanese Method That Compresses a Century into a Decade, with Christina Delfico of iDig2Learn

    There's a statistic I keep coming back to: the average child can name more than 1,000 corporate logos, but fewer than 10 native plant species in their own neighborhood. Christina Delfico has been fighting that number for 13 years — one toddler, one oak tree, one planting day at a time. In this episode, I talk with Christina — Emmy-nominated TV producer turned urban greening practitioner, and founder of I Dig to Learn on Roosevelt Island — about what actually happened when 400 New Yorkers gathered to plant New York State's first-ever Miyawaki method pocket forest. We get into the wood wide web, why a 20-year career at Sesame Workshop turned out to be perfect training for ecosystem restoration, and what Christina did not expect when she handed 1,500 baby trees to 400 strangers on a Sunday in April. We also talk about the woman who came back every week to water the specific tree she and her son had planted. About beach plums, the Lenape Center, and what Henry Hudson's journals tell us about what Manhattan used to look like. And about why a pocket forest might be the best gateway drug urban forestry has ever had. Visit the Manhattan Healing Forest at South Point Park on Roosevelt Island — public, free, and on Google Maps. Learn more about the forest at sugiproject.com. Find Christina and iDig2Learn on Instagram at @idig2learn.

    37 min
  7. S7E4: "Does the Child Have a Problem, or is it the Environment?" — Green Schoolyards, Urban Childhood, and 12 Years of Turning Asphalt into Oases with Ian Mostert of IVN Nature Education

    Apr 5

    S7E4: "Does the Child Have a Problem, or is it the Environment?" — Green Schoolyards, Urban Childhood, and 12 Years of Turning Asphalt into Oases with Ian Mostert of IVN Nature Education

    A free-range chicken has more space than a child on a Dutch school playground. Ian Mostert has spent 12 years doing something about that. In this episode, I talk with Ian Mostert — youth health worker turned urban greening practitioner, and Project Manager for Child and Nature at IVN Nature Education — about what actually changes when you transform a paved, fenced schoolyard into a green community space. We get into why the hardest part of greening a schoolyard has nothing to do with plants, why he starts every stakeholder conversation with childhood memories instead of data, and what happens to bullying, concentration, and teacher burnout when children finally get the outdoor environment they're built for. We also talk about the boy who couldn't function inside a classroom but lay on his stomach for half an hour watching ants — and became calm. About the teenagers who had been dealing drugs on a schoolyard and agreed to clean it up every morning because someone finally included them in the community. About why Ian insists every greened schoolyard must be open to the neighborhood 365 days a year, and why that single condition transforms a school amenity into a third space that struggling families desperately need. The conversation ends where I think the whole urban greening movement needs to go: the bureaucratic silo problem that makes holistic investment nearly impossible, why storytelling will get us further than data ever has, and Ian's dream of one million green schoolyards worldwide. Find Ian and IVN Nature Education at ivn.nl.

    1h 5m
  8. S7E3: “Housing Is Setting the Environment in Which People Live” — How Affordable Housing Becomes Health Infrastructure with Lauren Zullo of Jonathan Rose Companies

    Mar 29

    S7E3: “Housing Is Setting the Environment in Which People Live” — How Affordable Housing Becomes Health Infrastructure with Lauren Zullo of Jonathan Rose Companies

    Just because someone lives in an apartment doesn't mean they don't want to go outside and be in nature. In this episode, I sit down with Lauren Zullo, Managing Director of Impact at Jonathan Rose Companies, at their Midtown Manhattan headquarters to talk about what happens when you design affordable housing around health — and how nature fits into that equation. Lauren's work sits at the intersection of housing, sustainability, and the social determinants of health, and she makes the case that housing touches every single one of them: air quality, food access, social connection, financial stress, and the immediate environment in which people live. We talk about how Jonathan Rose Companies brings nature into 19,000 units of affordable housing across the US — from trees for shade in the Bronx to green roofs that make rooftop solar more efficient in DC — and why the business case for green space isn't about ecosystem services but about building places people actually want to stay. Lauren also shares the story behind Sendero Verde in East Harlem, one of the largest affordable Passive House buildings in the world, where the courtyard follows a Lenape walking trail and the plantings were chosen based on the indigenous species that once grew on the site. Find Lauren Zullo and Jonathan Rose Companies at rosecompanies.com.

    54 min
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How can we make our communities wilder, greener, healthier, and happier—and which technologies can help us along the way? Ecological engineer and National Geographic Explorer Dr. Nadina Galle—best-selling author of THE NATURE OF OUR CITIES and pioneer of the Internet of Nature®—shares stories of people using tech to bring the wild back into streets, schools, and homes. This is where the wild meets the wired.

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