Our goal is wellness and health, which seem ever elusive amid a pandemic, the challenges of racial injustices, and the toxicity of our politics. We yearn to move on and past these strains. In this episode, we’ll instead lean into them. You’ll hear unique perspectives, explore uncomfortable topics and experience the power of truthful dialogue. We’ll move ahead together in a conversation with Dr. Jeff Gardere, psychologist and professor, and Dr. Andra Gillespie, political science professor and public scholar.
Ep. 15 – Gay Bradshaw on Charlie Russell, grizzly bears, and the search for truth
Bears, like other carnivores, are typically cast as unthinking, emotionless killers. But the late naturalist Charlie Russell believed this tragic misperception hides the truth about who bears really are. Charlie’s life story changed how humans perceive grizzly bears. While other scientists and naturalists were studying bears from a distance, tranquilizing them and tagging them with trackers, Charlie chose to live, intimately and without harm, among bears for decades in far east Russia and in North America. His objectives were as different as his methods. “Biologists know a lot—how many calories a bear needs every day, their numbers, and so on. This is good information, but it doesn’t really tell you anything about who a bear is,” he told our guest. “I’ve never wanted to know about bears, I’ve only wanted to understand them.” In her much anticipated new book, “Talking with Bears” (Rocky Mountain Books, fall 2019), Dr. Gay Bradshaw tells Russell’s story, built on a decade of conversations about and two lifetimes devoted to searching for the truth of who animals really are. An internationally renowned expert on animal trauma and a Pulitzer Prize-nominated author, Dr. Bradshaw has spent her life exploring the minds, emotions and lives of animals, and pushing and inspiring science and society to better understand them.
Ep. 8 – Charles Siebert on translating nature’s symphony
During his travels in South America at the close of the 18th century, the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt came upon a parrot speaking the words of a lost Indian tribe. The encounter inspired our guest, acclaimed author and New York Times Magazine writer Charles Siebert, to imagine the echoes of human language that might persist, in nonhuman voices, once we are gone. We speak with Siebert about his reporting on humans’ wonder for and wounding of animals, the reach of metaphor, and what he discovered in the gaze of a chimpanzee named Roger.