Our lives are so rushed, so busy. Always on the clock. Counting the hours, minutes, seconds. Have you ever stopped to wonder: what are you counting? What is this thing, that’s all around us, invisible, inescapable, always running out? What is time? Original Air Date: November 18, 2023 Interviews In This Hour: Time, loss and the Big Bang — Finding solace in the vastness of space — Carlo Rovelli's white holes, where time dissolves Guests: Marcelo Gleiser, Marjolijn van Heemstra, Carlo...

Are you ready to think in centuries instead of seconds? Eons instead of hours? It’s time to make thousand-year plans and appreciate how Earth keeps time. For more from this series, visit ttbook.org/deeptime. Original Air Date: August 19, 2023 Interviews In This Hour: Shifting your mind to 'geologic' time — Discovering the wonders of ancient cave art — Making art inspired by the ancestors Guests: Marcia Bjornerud, Stephen Alvarez, Dustin Illetewahke Mater Never want to miss an...

When you’re on the clock, you’re always running out of time – because in our culture, time is money. The relentless countdown is making us and the planet sick. But clock time isn’t the only kind. There are older, deeper rhythms of time that sustain life. What would it be like to live more in tune with nature’s clocks? **Deep Time is a series all about the natural ecologies of time from To The Best Of Our Knowledge and the Center for Humans and Nature. We'll explore life beyond the clock,...

Time rules our lives. We wake, eat, work, and sleep on the clock. Our days unfold in a standardized symphony of alarm clocks, school buzzers, and meeting timers. Meanwhile, global positioning satellites measure time in millionths of seconds, and financial trades circle the planet at the speed of light. Time-keeping is among the greatest accomplishments of the human species – but somewhere along the way, we made a fundamental miscalculation: we began to mistake our clocks for time...

Ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan has been called the “father of the local food movement.” For decades he’s campaigned for seed diversity and sustainable food production. Some of his insights come from the farming practices of Indigenous people living near the U.S.-Mexico border, who’ve grown food in arid habitats for centuries. Originally from the Midwest, Nabhan moved to the Arizona desert several decades ago. He reflects on “the wisdom of the desert,” and also talks about his work to foster a...

The fungal world is mind-bending. Mushrooms may look like plants, but taxonomically, fungi are more closely related to animals. They go inside their food to eat it and “play games with individuality,” says biologist Merlin Sheldrake, author of “Entangled Life.” One underground fungal network in Oregon spreads over four square miles, but genetically, it’s a single organism. As Sheldrake says, “they are everywhere at once and nowhere in particular.” He talks with Steve Paulson about his...

Thirty years ago, forest ecologist Suzanne Simard was a lone voice in the wilderness, arguing that commercial logging practices were destroying the symbiotic relationships between different tree species. She showed how mycorrhizal networks fused with tree roots to create complex systems of communication and cooperation. Today, Simard is a celebrated scientist. Her concept of “mother trees” helped inspire James Cameron’s blockbuster movie "Avatar," and she was a model for one character in...

Anthropologist Enrique Salmon formulated the concept of “kincentricity,” a worldview that sees everything around us — plants, animals, rocks, wind — as our direct relative. As Salmon says, “the rain is us, and we are the rain.” In his native Raramuri culture, culture and language are embedded in the mountain landscape of Chihauhau, Mexico. Salmon teaches a class called “American Indian Science,” in which he asks his students to incorporate their personal experiences into their observations...

There are old folktales and legends of people who can become animals. Animals who can become people. And there’s a lesson for our own time in those shapeshifting stories — a recognition that the membrane between what's human and more-than-human is razor thin. Human identity cannot be separated from our nonhuman kin. From forest ecology to the human microbiome, emerging research suggests that being human is a complicated journey made possible only by the good graces of our many companions. In...

If you look at a mountain, you might see a skiing destination, a climbing challenge, or even a source of timber to be logged or ore to be mined. But there was a time when mountains were sacred. In some places, they still are. What changes when you think of a mountain not as a giant accumulation of natural resources, but as a living being? Human identity cannot be separated from our nonhuman kin. From forest ecology to the human microbiome, emerging research suggests that being human is a...

Over the past decade, plant scientists have quietly transformed the way we think of trees, forests and plants. They discovered that trees communicate through vast underground networks, that plants learn and remember. If plants are intelligent beings, how should we relate to them? Do they have a place in our moral universe? Should they have rights? Human identity cannot be separated from our nonhuman kin. From forest ecology to the human microbiome, emerging research suggests that being human...

There's a certain a kind of visual encounter that can be life changing: A cross-species gaze. The experience of looking directly into the eyes of an animal in the wild, and seeing it look back. It happens more often than you’d think and it can be so profound, there’s a name for it: eye-to-eye epiphany. So what happens when someone with feathers or fur and claws looks back? How does it change people, and what can it teach us? Human identity cannot be separated from our nonhuman kin. From...

When you think about your neighbors, your friends and family, do you consider the nonhuman relationships in your life? With the birds and trees, the rivers and hills around you? This idea of "kinship" with our plant and animal neighbors — and the broader ecosystem around us — is the focus of "Kinship With The More Than Human World," an eight-part podcast and radio series produced by TTBOOK in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature and with support from the Kalliopeia...