Best John Woodland Podcasts (2024)

1
The Vital Role of Woods in Human Civilization with John Perlin 1:01:19

16d ago1:01:19

1:01:19

Episode Topic In this episode of Timber Talks, we get into Civilization and Historical Deforestation with John Perlin, an esteemed author, lecturer, and consultant in solar energy and forest preservation. John explores the pivotal role wood has played throughout human history, highlighting how deforestation has influenced the rise and fall of civil…

1
Using Drones for Conservation and Development with Dan Staley 53:31

24d ago53:31

53:31

Episode Topic In this episode of Timber Talks, we get into the fascinating world of Urban Forestry & Drone Technology with Dan Staley, the principal of Arbor Drone LLC. The discussion centers around the integration of advanced drone technology into forestry management, highlighting its transformative impact on the industry. Dan shares his journey f…

1
Tree Care and Sustainability with Kathy Glass of Inspire Green Inc 41:25

1M ago41:25

41:25

Episode Topic: Welcome to an insightful episode of Holistic Health Habits. We get into the world of holistic nutrition and wellness with Christian Elliot, CEO of TRUE Whole Human. The discussion centers around the transformative power of a Personalized Health Approach. Christian shares his journey from struggling with his health to becoming a leade…

1
The Future of Renewable Energy with Wesley Smith 38:32

1M ago38:32

38:32

Episode Topic In this episode of Timber Talks, host Mindy welcomes Wesley Smith, the CEO of Tree Service Digital, a specialized marketing agency for tree care companies. The discussion centers around the importance of digital marketing in the forestry and tree care industry. Wesley explains how tree service companies can significantly grow their bu…

1
Innovating Tree Management with John Snow's Expertise 27:28

1M ago27:28

27:28

Episode Topic In this episode of Timber Talks, we delve into the dynamic world of arboriculture and forestry management. Hosted by Mindy, the show features a conversation with John Snow, a seasoned consulting master arborist and president-elect of the Florida Urban Forestry Council. Together, they explore the evolution of tree care practices, the r…

1
A Sustainable Future in Arboriculture with Kurt Stenberg 30:42

2M ago30:42

30:42

Episode Topic In this episode of Timber Talk, Mindy interviews Kurt Steinberg, founder of Cochrane Tree Care, to explore the intricate world of arboriculture and tree care. Kurt shares his journey from a career in firefighting and EMT to becoming a dedicated arborist. He discusses his motivations, the challenges he faced, and his passion for enhanc…

1
Climbing High with Arborist Jeff Inman of True Timber 40:59

2M ago40:59

40:59

Episode Topic In this episode of Timber Talk, we dig into the world of arboriculture with Jeff Inman, exploring his passion for trees and his journey in the forestry field. Jeff shares his story of how a childhood fascination with wood and nature, inspired by his grandfather, evolved into a fulfilling career. This episode aims to shed light on the …

1
Episode 0: Intro Music 0:29

3M ago0:29

0:29

New show coming soon!By ForestryDegree.net

1
Dinosaurs with Lydia Millet 46:04

5M ago46:04

46:04

The title of Lydia Millet’s last novel - Dinosaurs - seems to wink at the threat of human extinction, and, yet, its explicit referent in the book is to birds, those sometimes-alien creatures who survived the impact of the asteroid that wiped out most of their kind. This kind of double meaning, something like a sign that points in multiple direction…

1
David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous with Trevien Stanger, Part 2 44:18

1y ago44:18

44:18

A continuation of my earlier episode in which Trevien Stanger - instructor of environmental studies at St. Michael's College in Vermont - and I discuss Abram's book, which, I think it's fair to say, has had a profound effect on both of us. This time, we focus on Abram's argument about the impact of the invention of the alphabet on our relationship …

1
Study of a Liminal Corridor with Michael Inglis 21:26

1y ago21:26

21:26

There’s a funny little corridor tucked away behind a park in the Village of Pleasantville, New York where I live, where bears and bobcats amble through, walking atop the Catskill Aqueduct, the 100-year-old artery that delivers water from the Catskill mountains to New York City. Fellow resident, Michael Inglis, who has been hiking this patch of semi…

1
William Taylor on the Domestication of Horses 43:29

1+ y ago43:29

43:29

When we think of major innovations in human history, what comes to mind are inert technologies - from the wheel to the computer - but one of the most significant developments occurred as the result of the relationship between humans and another animal, horses. The domestication of horses brought about a major sea-change in human society, as we beca…

1
Maddie 31:54

1+ y ago31:54

31:54

Jennifer Lynch Fitzgerald tells the story of her relationship with Maddie, a mustang rescued in Habersham County, Georgia from a man who was collecting horses to sell for meat. When Maddie was found, she’d been tied to a tree for months, was malnourished and very angry. Jen tells how, in spite of her limited experience with horses, she learned to t…

1
David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous with Trevien Stanger, Part 1 1:07:42

1+ y ago1:07:42

1:07:42

I’ve mentioned this book numerous times on the pod. It’s fair to say that David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass are the two books that really kicked off the idea for In the Weeds. And it feels like time to dig into Spell. All the more so since my current episodes are exploring the question “how did we…

1
The Invention of the Alphabet with Johanna Drucker 43:04

1+ y ago43:04

43:04

“Letters have power,” Johanna Drucker tells me. But what is the nature of this power and how did it all begin? Unlike writing, the alphabet was only invented once. Somewhere in Egypt or the Sinai Peninsula, about 4,000 years ago, speakers of a Semitic language adapted Egyptian hieroglyphics to represent the basic phonetic building blocks of their l…

1
William Bryant Logan on the Ancient History of Managed Woodlands 51:29

1+ y ago51:29

51:29

William Bryant Logan’s book Sproutlands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees opens the door to a little known history, in which people all over the world, from Norway to Japan to pre-colonial California, managed trees in a way that was beneficial to trees and humans alike. Logan stumbled upon this history after taking on a job for the Metropolitan Mu…

1
John Roulac on Agroforestry 32:48

2y ago32:48

32:48

Picking up where we left off in the spring, we return to the topic of farming through a conversation with John Roulac, entrepreneur and executive producer of the movie Kiss the Ground. Roulac’s latest project, Agroforestry Regeneration Communities, supports initiatives in Central America and East Africa that teach farmers how to grow what are somet…

1
Nate Looney on Urban Farming, Jewish Ethics and Diversity Equity and Inclusion 30:27

2y ago30:27

30:27

For the second of three episodes on farming, I talk to Nate Looney about Jewish ethics, Diversity Equity and Inclusion and, yes, farming, specifically, his experience as an urban farmer using hydroponics and aquaponics to produce gourmet leafy greens and microgreens for restaurants and farmers markets in his hometown of L.A. Nate Looney has followe…

1
Filmmaker Jim Becket on The Seeds of Vandana Shiva 34:28

2y ago34:28

34:28

“When you control seed, you control life on earth,” says Indian environmental activist and scholar Vandana Shiva in the new documentary film The Seeds of Vandana Shiva. Known as “Monsanto’s worst nightmare,” Vandana Shiva has been a champion of small, organic farms, since she established seed banks, in a subversive act she likens to Gandhi’s champi…

1
Lydia Millet's Mermaids in Paradise 50:50

2y ago50:50

50:50

Mermaids are the fly in the ointment in Lydia Millet’s very funny satirical novel Mermaids in Paradise, “an absurdist entry into the mundane,” as she puts it. And, yet, her mermaids, who have bad teeth and the particular features of individuals, also draw us into the wonders of the ocean itself. Mermaid lore, Millet reminds us, recalls manatees and…

1
So You Think You Know What a Mermaid Is... 58:30

2+ y ago58:30

58:30

As co-editors of The Penguin Book of Mermaids, a compendium of stories from all over the world, Marie Alohalani Brown and Cristina Bacchilega show us that mermaids are not always white, not always beautiful and don’t even always have a fish tail (sometimes mer creatures have the tail of a whale or an anaconda). What they also teach us is that legen…

1
More Real Than Real: VR and the Metaverse with Lisa Messeri 53:40

2+ y ago53:40

53:40

According to Mark Zuckerberg and others, the metaverse - a would-be digital double of the real world - is good for the environment, because it will make us drive less, fly less. We won’t have to visit the barrier reef in person; we can experience it from our own living rooms. But will this descent into technology make us more alienated than we alre…

1
Air Travel, Climate Change and Don’t Look Up with Chris Schaberg 42:16

2+ y ago42:16

42:16

Chris Schaberg, whom you might remember from my episode on SUV commercials, has written a number of books on air travel. I wanted to talk to him about the impact of air travel on climate change but also about what air travel - and, increasingly, the fantasy that we can be tourists in space as well - reveals about the relationship between us human a…

1
Art as Climate Action with Susannah Sayler and Ed Morris 43:48

2+ y ago43:48

43:48

Susannah Sayler and Ed Morris have been working at the intersection of art and climate activism for the last fifteen years. They are co-founders of the Canary Project, started in 2006 and inspired by a series of articles that Elizabeth Kolbert published in The New Yorker that eventually became her book Field Notes from a Catastrophe. Adapting Kolbe…

1
On the Origins of Christmas Trees with Judith Flanders 29:52

2+ y ago29:52

29:52

In time for the winter solstice, we revisit our episode on the history of Christmas trees with historian Judith Flanders, author of Christmas: A Biography (2017) as well as numerous books on the Victorian period, including The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Reveled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime and The Victorian City: Eve…

1
Exploring the Forest Canopy with Meg Lowman 48:13

2+ y ago48:13

48:13

In our continuing series on climate change, I talk to Meg Lowman who knows more about trees than most people on this planet. She invented canopy ecology - the practice of studying trees in the treetops - and has worked across 46 countries and 7 continents, designing hot air balloons and walkways and other ways to explore and study this diverse bios…

1
Studying Climate Change at Black Rock Forest with Andy Reinmann 36:22

2+ y ago36:22

36:22

To find out what we know about how a warming planet will affect the forests in my home state of New York, I visit Black Rock Forest, a research station in the Hudson Highlands, and talk to Andy Reinmann, Assistant Professor in the Environmental Sciences Initiative at the Advanced Science Research Center of the Graduate Center, CUNY and in the Depar…

1
The Unnatural World with David Biello 46:40

2+ y ago46:40

46:40

In the second installment of our series on climate change, I talk to environmental journalist and science curator for TED Talks David Biello about his book, The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth's Newest Age. Biello argues that, culturally, we’re still prey to the false notion that there’s a divide between the human and the …

1
Reckoning with our Emotions About the Climate Crisis with Daniel Sherrell 58:30

3y ago58:30

58:30

In his new book, Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World, Daniel Sherrell reflects on his career as a climate activist and tries to process the emotional fallout, for himself and his generation - Millennials -, of growing up in the age of climate change. Written as a letter to his imagined future child, the book is a kind of Dantean descent i…

1
We’re Back! Intro to A New Season on the Climate Crisis 3:20

3y ago3:20

3:20

This past summer, the UN Secretary General, in connection with the UN report on climate change, spoke of a “code red for humanity,” a warning that was underscored by the fires, floods and searing temperatures we saw worldwide. Now, the Democrats in Congress (most of them, anyway) are fighting to pass the most ambitious climate bill to date and, a m…

1
Mountains and Desire with Margret Grebowicz 35:09

3y ago35:09

35:09

In 1923, when British mountaineer George Mallory was asked why he wanted to summit Mount Everest, he famously answered “Because it’s there.” These days, there are still many who want to climb Mount Everest, but the conditions of mountaineering have altered significantly: people are outraged by the trash on Mount Everest; concerned about the risks i…

1
The Rich Ecology of Oak Trees with Doug Tallamy 41:33

3y ago41:33

41:33

Entomologist Doug Tallamy and I discuss his new book, The Nature of Oaks, in which he pulls back the curtain on the fascinating world of living creatures that inhabit oak trees. From acorn weevils to spun glass caterpillars, the book introduces us to a cast of unusual characters, many of them insects. Tallamy and I discuss these characters, how to …

1
The Forests of Toni Morrison’s Beloved with Philip Weinstein 1:01:11

3y ago1:01:11

1:01:11

In our fourth episode on the forest in fiction, I speak to Philip Weinstein, Professor Emeritus of Swarthmore College and author of numerous books on fiction, including What Else But Love? The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison, about the forest and the natural world in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. In this gripping story by the Nobel-prize w…

1
The Forest of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Randall Martin 1:12:31

3+ y ago1:12:31

1:12:31

In our third episode on the forests of the Western imagination, I discuss A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Randall Martin, Professor of English at the University of New Brunswick and author of Shakespeare & Ecology. Associated with the night, with dreams, the imagination, madness, and the theater itself, the forest of A Midsummer Night’s Dream - inha…

1
The Tangled Woods of the Psyche: Ellen Handler Spitz on Sondheim and Lapine’s Into the Woods 58:08

3+ y ago58:08

58:08

In the second episode of our series on the forest in fiction, Ellen Handler Spitz - a renowned specialist of psychology and the arts and senior lecturer in the Humaninties program at Yale - and I discuss Sondheim and Lapine’s musical, Into the Woods. Into the Woods brings together characters and story lines from several well-known fairy tales, draw…

1
The Forests of Dante’s Inferno 50:25

3+ y ago50:25

50:25

If you hear a story that begins “in a dark wood,” you’re instantly transported to a place of fear, of danger and disorientation. Where does this come from? One important, early source is Dante’s Inferno. In the first of our series on fictional forests, Peter Olson and I discuss the two principal forests of the Inferno, the “dark wood” of the openin…

1
The Forests of Our Imagination - Intro to a new series 4:29

3+ y ago4:29

4:29

Whenever we enter a fictional forest - whether in a film, a novel or a fairy tale - we know we’re bound for a story of adventure, possibly of danger, magic or transformation. In the next few episodes of In the Weeds, we’ll be exploring works of fiction in which the forest plays a key role. Underlying our discussions will be some broader questions: …

1
Growing Whole Children in the Garden 1:13:07

3+ y ago1:13:07

1:13:07

Two friends - Margaret Ables, co-host of the podcast What Fresh Hell: Laughing in the Face of Motherhood, and Sonia Fujimori, educator and former coordinator of the edible garden at our children’s elementary school - join me in conversation with educator and anthropologist of education Lorie Hammond to discuss her new book, Growing Whole Children i…

1
Reading Rocks with Marcia Bjornerud 54:20

3+ y ago54:20

54:20

Geologist Marcia Bjornerud gives us primer in “reading rocks.” We start by discussing where the “stuff” of our solar system comes from - you’ll be amazed by the origins of water on Earth, for example - and then delve into the different rock types, igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic. Bjornerud explains the “grammar” of these different rock types a…

1
A History of the Christmas Tree with Judith Flanders 30:08

3+ y ago30:08

30:08

There are two things about Christmas that you can count on, says historian and author Judith Flanders: most of the origin stories you’ve heard are false and people have always thought ‘Christmas was better in the old days.’ Though it may not be true that Santa’s red suit came from Coca Cola, nor that Prince Albert brought the Christmas tree to Brit…

1
Using Wilderness to Sell Cars 46:22

3+ y ago46:22

46:22

Since the 1990s, we’ve been seeing the same kind of commercials: sweeping vistas of the American wilderness, forests and clear streams, rocky ledges, perhaps a dusting of snow. And, cutting through the landscape, a jeep or an SUV. No other cars in sight. Such a vision would seem to be fraught with contractions. For starters, this is not how most of…

1
The B Word 38:16

3+ y ago38:16

38:16

When my daughter was eight years old, she came home one day and announced that she "knew what the B word was." But she was confused: why was a word for a female dog - the most awesome of creatures, in her mind - also an insult for girls and women? Interesting, I thought. What did this insult say about our relationship to animals, to dogs specifical…

1
Covid, Economics and the Environment: A Chat with Marc Conte 53:15

4y ago53:15

53:15

How fragile is our economy? Can it rebound from the impact of the shutdown and - similarly - from stresses climate change might inflict in the future? These are some of the questions I’ve found myself asking during the Covid pandemic. Looming over all of these was a broader and more troubling question: were the success of our economy and the future…

1
The Apocalyptic #3: Invasive Species by Joe Wallace 43:01

4y ago43:01

43:01

After a long hiatus, In the Weeds picks up where we left off with a third installment of our series on the apocalyptic! From parasitic wasps to zombie ants and the hive mind, Joe Wallace’s novel Invasive Species takes strange natural phenomena and spins them into an apocalyptic yarn, in which a new, emergent predator threatens the human species. Th…

1
David, Part 3 45:28

4y ago45:28

45:28

David, Part 3 by Bayside WoodlandBy Bayside Woodland

1
Socially Distanced with Amy Hall 18:15

4y ago18:15

18:15

In the fourth and last of my "socially distanced with" episodes, I touch base with Amy Hall, VP of Social Consciousness for the clothing brand Eileen Fisher with whom I discussed "the hidden cost of clothes" in episode 14. The clothing industry is among those being hit hard by the pandemic. Amy and I speculate about the long-term effects this may h…

1
David, Part 2 44:45

4y ago44:45

44:45

David, Part 2 by Bayside WoodlandBy Bayside Woodland

1
David, Part 1 39:28

4y ago39:28

39:28

David, Part 1 by Bayside WoodlandBy Bayside Woodland

1
Why Worry? Part 3 46:09

4y ago46:09

46:09

Why Worry? Part 3 by Bayside WoodlandBy Bayside Woodland

1
Socially Distanced with Brian Skarstad 18:34

4y ago18:34

18:34

In the third of my “socially distanced” episodes - shorter episodes in which I touch base with former guests to see what they are up to during the quarantine - I talk to violin maker Brian Skarstad. He tells me about some of the advantages of socially distancing for him, such as taking on projects he normally doesn’t have the time for, as well as t…

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John Woodland Podcasts

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