NARRATION

Did you know that every element that makes up your body was born in the life and death of stars? Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron: These essential building blocks were born in supernovas that exploded and scattered across the universe. Ever since, those ingredients have been combining and separating and transforming into more iterations than we can count—an endless process of alchemy that we call life.

My name is Willow Defebaugh, and this is The Nature Of. Each week, we’ll look to the natural world for insights into how to navigate the experience of being human. Today, we’re exploring the nature of alchemy, a witchy word that refers to the process of transformation, creation, or combination.

When I think about alchemy in nature, I see it as a story of change: life and death forever in transition, chemicals acting and reacting, matter moving through metamorphosis. Studying the universe reminds us that transformation is not only possible, it’s inevitable. So the question becomes, what do we want that transformation to look like?

Here to answer this question with me today is adrienne maree brown, self-proclaimed witch and author of beloved books including Pleasure Activism, Emergent Strategy, and her most recent work, Loving Corrections. Adrienne and I will be exploring the role we can all play in transmuting the dominant power structures of our world, embodying the magic of transformative justice, and re-enchanting ourselves with the Earth.

Willow Defebaugh

I am so thrilled to be talking with you about a word that, for me, weaves together so many different threads of what you offer to the world, and that word is alchemy. Before we dive into some of these different threads, I’m just curious what the word brings up for you.

adrienne maree brown

Yeah, I think turning straw into gold; and I think of sitting in rooms full of people that were at odds with each other, and watching them become rooms full of people that were aligned and happy to be in each other’s presence.

Willow

Well, alchemy is something that is deeply intertwined with the subject of witchcraft, which is one that I know that is close to both of our hearts. I was wondering if you could share a little bit about the practice and what it means to you and how it shows up in your daily life.

adrienne

Yeah. I did a deep dive over this last year on—I called it witch school, because I have been kind of an organic witch. I felt myself called to practice creating more possibilities in partnership with nature, and that that nature can include the human body, it can include the elements, it can include everything that’s alive, something flying by me. Creatures come and talk to me, creatures come and visit with me, and I’m like, “Oh, I understand that you recognize something in me that is communicating with you and cares about you and respects you and is in a conversation with you and believes that together we can make something a little bit more possible or make something different, possible.” So for me, yeah, the witching is kind of like this trusting, like, “Oh, you know something about this, and so I’m going to ask you to help me with it.”

In Loving Corrections, there’s a section that’s called “From Fragility to Fortitude.” Because I think, for me, a lot of my witching is what has helped me move from a sense of being a fragile, disconnected, isolated being who has possibly no impact on the world to being an interdependent, interconnected, fortified part of a community that has always and always will take care of ourselves. And we are only fragile when we forget that and we believe the lie that we are individuals who are disconnected. For me, that’s the witchiness of it all.

Willow

 Beautifully put. There’s such a community element of witchcraft and witching. It’s so inseparable.

adrienne

Got to have a coven.

Willow

Yeah, you have to have a coven. Exactly.

adrienne

Got to have a circle. Got to have a crew.

Willow

Yeah, and we’ll definitely get into that. I love, also, you speaking to the craft itself shape-shifting and taking so many different forms. For me, for the longest time, my sort of ritual or practice was just sitting for meditation with tea. It was just drinking tea and it was about the heat of the water, the water itself, the leaves that were grown on the earth, incense, all of the things. And gradually, that kind of opened my understanding of like, OK, yes, there’s that ceremony, but also everything is ceremony and everything can become part of the craft.

And I’m thinking, throughout history, obviously so many people—particularly women—have been persecuted for witchcraft, but essentially just for having a relationship with nature. And there are so many parallels to me between that and how, in the Global North and the Western world, we have reached this place of disenchantment with nature. It leads me to think about how disenchantment creates the opportunity or the space for harm. We no longer see something with reverence and suddenly it permits the possibility for separation and for violence to occur.

So I’m curious, for you, how do you practice re-enchanting yourself with nature? How can we all practice cultivating a sense of re-enchantment with the world around us? And how is that tied in with climate work or environmentalism?

adrienne

So I will say, the first thing I think that really helps me is to understand that any disenchantment or disconnection I have from nature is intentional, and it’s about power. So that for most of human history, most humans had a direct relationship with the Earth, a direct relationship with the land, and that all of us have that in our lineages, that our peoples were finding and carving and finding a way to be in relationship with the earth that actually was sustainable.

And so there’s a power that any community has when they’re directly in relationship with the land, that they’re receiving guidance and they know the cycles of that land. They know the abundance of that land and how to care for it and be cared for by it. So, then, the effort to disconnect us from the land, which I see as the combination of colonization, organized religion, militarism and capitalism coming together to say, everything will be done through us, everything will be done through white men, everything will be done through—there’s someone else who has a direct relationship with God, and they have to study the way you do that, and you don’t know what it is. So you can’t just go out there and think you’re talking to a tree. I’m the one who talks to God. So you can tell me everything bad you’ve done. I’ll tell you what you need to do, and we’ll go from there.

And then colonization, it’s like, We’re going to disconnect you from the land. The only relationship you can have with it will be one that serves us. Capitalism says the land has to be marketable. It has to be of a value that we can capitalize on. And so you, as a being of this land, also have to become a commodity. And you can be a commodity that works on this land or you can be a commodity that works for us in some other way, but it will be labor. And then militarism, which is constantly saying, we will use violence to remove everyone from the land to which they belong.

Maya Angelou said that you have to keep a place in yourself that is—there’s a place that can’t be touched by all of that colonization, and all of that harm, and all of that dishonesty about the truth of our connection to nature. There’s something in me that even though I was raised not to trust it, I still know that what happens between my bare feet and the dirt is sacred. And I still know that when I’m overwhelmed by what I’m carrying, if I go lay down in my yard, I will recover some of myself. I will leave something that I can’t hold. It enchants me. It really does.

Now I’ve got my backyard set up with a couple of bird feeders, and there’s a squirrel that has established a nest in the tree, and I’ve been doing ceremony around this tree. And I’ve really been building a sacred ecosystem. And what’s been beautiful to watch is all the creatures coming back to my yard.

When I first moved in, almost nobody was visiting, where the heron would look over and be like, “Girl, get it together. I don’t need to fly over there.” Now, heron, squirrels, a little, I think, muskrat, maybe beaver, something went by the other day, and I was like, “What are you? You’re so cute.” These ducks will come waddle. The birds are fighting in the tree and having their whole discussion around who gets what access to the feeder. It’s magnificent.

It’s like the combination of me giving some small investment, some small care, some small attention relative to what I give the rest of my life, an abundance of life and love and care and interaction comes back. And that always astounds me, that I’m like, if I take my mind off of the massive crisis and bring it down to the small thing that I can care about, there’s magic, and it’s available right now.

Willow

I mean, that’s the emergence, too. That’s the magic of nature, right? It’s like, from this seed emerges so much possibility. And what is magic, if not that?

I always think about how people love these fantastical stories. I want to be like, Look around. Look at this world we’re living in. Look at how everything emerges from the tiniest, tiniest ingredients.

adrienne

Even the things that disgust me. I’ll look and I’ll be like, “Oh my God. There’s mold growing in my compost. What the heck?” And then I’m like, “Oh my gosh. There’s life sprouting in this compost of waste and material that I considered no longer necessary. And if I place that in the ground right now, things will grow because that’s what wants to happen.” That’s pretty fricking magical to me.

Willow

Yes. And I was thinking there’s kind of an aspect of witchcraft that really involves pulling back the veil, but making the unconscious conscious, being willing to venture into the dark in order to bring truth to light and the fear of doing so, the desire to know less, to not witness ecological breakdown, to not witness genocide, the desire to turn away from these things is, in some ways, it feels like what we’re really up against in a lot of different arenas.

When I turn back to nature and I think about some of the phenomena that have emerged, I think about bioluminescence and glowing fireflies and foxfire fungi and what it looks like to kind of be the little lights in the dark that say, there’s beauty out here, too. And how can we shine a light on the grief and the pain alongside everything else?

adrienne

I think any witch worth her salt has to be someone who’s pulling the veil back within themselves at all times. I think that’s the part of being a witch that is hard and unseen, is the very private part where you have to be like, I have to be willing to look. I have to be willing to witness. I have to be willing to understand what I’m looking at, be honest about my part in it, and be willing to shift something.

NARRATION

Few species know the internal work needed for true transformation, quite like those that undergo complete metamorphosis. Butterflies, along with 80% of insects, and therefore 60% of life on Earth, undergo this process, a life cycle of distinct stages including egg, larva, pupa, and adult.

The larva, or caterpillar, spends most of its time feeding and shedding its skin until a hormone release triggers it to grow a hard outer cuticle, which we know as a chrysalis. It then enters a period of stillness during which most of the creature liquefies, save for a few of its vital organs, including its heart and previously dormant clusters of cells called imaginal discs. Those cells, at the instruction of the hormones, begin to take new shapes and become its wings and other body parts. Eventually, it emerges as the creature we know and love: the butterfly.

And so the process of transformation is, more than anything, one of decay. Like the butterfly and its chrysalis, it’s the internal work of undoing systems of harm within us so that we can embody ourselves more freely and authentically in the world. And that level of embodiment has a ripple effect—a butterfly effect on those around us, too.

As a trans woman, I relate to the butterfly’s experience. I remember there was this period where I felt if only I could just convince people to accept me or if only I could educate them. That was me trying to pull the veil back for others. The real work I had to do was in accepting myself and coming into myself more authentically. And I’ve since found that being able to just embody who I am has a far more transformative effect than me trying to tell people that I deserve the same rights and respect as everyone else.

adrienne

Our friend Alok talks about this so beautifully, that it’s like, when we are being our freest self, it evokes in people the distance that they are from freedom inside themselves. And so much of that punitive response that, I’m going to tear you apart. I’m going to get you back to the shape that I’m comfortable with, is because they have already conformed to that shape. And that has really been helping me so much when I’m like, “My job is not to shrink or conform any part of myself. It’s just to be.”

Just by being, if you’re in my presence, you’ll be like, “Oh, she’s a thinker, and she’s a visionary, and she’s curious, and she’s childlike, and she’s queer, and she’s Black, and she’s a witch, and she’s disabled, and she’s a woman, but there’s something else going on there too, and there’s…” You’re just going to pick up on the things.

I think the thing that I was really trying to pull off with this book was how to be course-correcting to get myself constantly more and more in alignment with being alive on Earth rather than punitive correction, which is the system that we all are swimming in right now. Which is, like, if you don’t conform and you don’t fit in, then we will punish you until you either do or die; and choosing a different pathway altogether and just saying, “Actually, there’s something else.”

I know you know this, but we’re not even in right relationship to time. So everything we’re doing right now is urgently trying to be normal and the same. There’s this other thing that is the divergence of all being, that is the healthy ecosystem path, that is the world in which many worlds fit. We’re trying to actually align ourselves. That’s reality. The reality of our Earth is a fecund, multitudinal ecosystem on ecosystem on ecosystem. There’s life constantly moving towards life. That’s true. I didn’t make it up. I’m just noticing that the Earth is the way it is, right? So once you stop trying to conquer the Earth, it’s actually quite easy to start to correct your path and correct your course into relationship with the Earth.

Willow

And I love, also, that you said that it’s about getting into right relationship with life here on Earth. Just to bring in something that you shared earlier in talking about organized religion, I mean, of course there’s so many beautiful things about religion. This is not me hating on religion in any way.

adrienne

We love it.

Willow

We love it.

adrienne

We love it.

Willow

But it makes me think about the fact that so much of our punitive culture has ties in organized religion, and that’s connected to the idea of an elsewhere, an unplace, right? The idea of heaven not on Earth, and how can you correct your behavior in order to be accepted in some place that isn’t Earth? And so I love the idea of transformative justice and loving corrections as being about, well, how do we shift our behavior to be in relationship with where we are here and root us on the ground?

adrienne

It always feels like the saddest part to me about organized religion spaces, because I deeply see myself as a person of faith. I deeply see myself as a person of spirit. And what spirit is always showing and telling me and letting me experience and feel is that I am already alive and I am already in a place that has all the qualities of heaven. All the qualities of heaven are here on Earth, and they, I think, always have been. And that my nakedness is a part of that, and my mistakes are a part of that, and my seductions are a part of that. My beauty is a part of that. All of it is a part of my aliveness.

And I think that one of the things that’s happening with organized religion right now is, I see so much of it doubling down on control, on misinformation, and on like—we are creating a population of people that have faith without God, if that makes sense. So they’ve got faith that they should have power. That’s the thing that they’re tithing to. That’s the thing that they’re investing in. That’s the thing that they’re practicing, is, I deserve to be in power, I deserve to be over somebody, and I’m going to put my faith in whoever affirms that for me. And I think that’s all shaking apart because it actually doesn’t work that way. We just have to humble ourselves. I think the main work of humanity and of spirit should actually be humbling ourselves and not being humbled by others.

As I was writing this work, I was really thinking about this. I’m like, “Well, what is it?” If I’m telling people, like “You don’t want to go sit and listen to someone tell you how wrong you are, but I want to sit and hold your hand and tell you about a way that, together, we could turn and face something.” That’s my hope for one of the ways that it gets used, is being like, “I want to invite you back into community with me,” which I think is a spiritual invitation. “I want to invite you into my field, into my ether. You get to still be a part of what influences my life, and I want to be a part of what influences yours.”

Willow

 And that is the turning the straw into gold. That’s the alchemy. That’s the not turning away from each other. And I think that’s something that’s so beautiful at the heart of Loving Corrections, is how do you say, “Hey, let’s look at this together.” And I love that you brought in the value of humbling ourselves, because I think part of humbling ourselves is also recognizing that we actually don’t know another person’s capacity to grow and to evolve and to change. And when we do turn away—

adrienne

Or their desire.

Willow

Yeah, their desire to change. I’m thinking about a few years ago, I went to see my grandmother who just passed a few days ago and—

adrienne

Oh, Love.

Willow

Yeah.

adrienne

Send you condolences.

Willow

Thank you. I really feel her with me in this conversation. And I saw her for the first time after four years. We were separated because of the pandemic and health issues. And I was going to see her, and it was the first time I was seeing her as myself. This was like my 93-year-old Arab grandmother. I had no idea how she was going to react. And I walked in the front door, and she just put her hands on my face and she just said, “My granddaughter.” And she told me about how much she loved willow trees, and we had this—

And I think so much, especially now that she’s not here physically, what would’ve been lost if I hadn’t gone, if I had made assumptions about how she would react or—and I had this healing moment with this woman who helped raise me. And there’s so much to be gained, so much to be alchemized from not turning away.

adrienne

That’s right. What I hear inside of your story, and I recognize, is letting time pass. After I came out to my grandparents, it took time. It took time for the alchemy within them, right? I was like, “I’ve already made this change enough that I can tell you this is my truth. And I know the system that you grew up in doesn’t allow you to see me at all, but here I am.”

And I had a similar moment sitting with my grandfather before he passed after a long absence, and just having him look at me and feeling recognized and feeling seen as myself. And I’m so glad that you got that moment. I’m so glad that you got that because there is something in the intergenerational cycle, I wish everyone got to experience this, where you get to really say like, “Oh my gosh. Look how far my grandparent came in their lifetime; from a world in which I was unimaginable into a world in which they love me as me.”

What is the amount of change that has to happen between generations to allow for these big breakthroughs to happen where, if I come from people who owned slaves and people who were enslaved, and what had to happen in each of the generations from those who owned slaves to those who are now so excited every time myself and my dad and all the Black members of our family roll up to the house? And for them to start asking questions and being curious about our humanity? And so I’m like, “Oh, something happened four generations ago. Something happened three generations ago. Something happened two generations ago.”

And by the time my mom married my dad, the rebellion was far along, even though it didn’t look like it. Small shifts had happened in each generation that allowed her to become the rebel that she was. And those are the intergenerational corrections. To me, that’s the intergenerational place where it’s like, “Well, love is allowing me to do something I thought was not possible.”

NARRATION

What adrienne and I are talking about here relates to a concept we’re both passionate about: fractal theory. Now, a fractal is a pattern that repeats at various scales in nature. Think of crystals and leaves, blood vessels and rivers, or the golden spiral which we see in the eye of hurricanes and the unfurling of ferns.

Fractal theory invites us to look at the whole world as a series of patterns. And so to reweave some of the harmful patterns that underlie human society, we have to start by doing so in our individual relationships. If you want to change the world, start by changing yourself. As adrienne points out, over time and generations, those shifts can lead to large-scale evolutionary changes.

Willow

Evolution is something we talk about; but how it happens in practice, it’s individual anomalies that come up within a given population over time that allow for adaptation, that allow for thriving within an environment that presents challenges and obstacles. And it’s over time that piece becoming more and more of the standard for a given species.

And what it makes me think of is something else that really emerges in Loving Corrections, which is that mistakes will be part of it. There will be regression, there will be setbacks, there will be challenges in all of it. And also, that is not exempt from evolution. That is not exempt from the process of transformation. So I was wondering if you can just speak a little to our culture of shame around mistakes.

adrienne

I have really examined this in my own life, that I grew up in a world of love and punishment. And if someone really loves you, they punish you when you mess up and tell you not to do it again and also, “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.” I really grew up—and I think many of us did—in my generation, I feel like it was you were being suspended or put into detention or expelled from school, and you were put in time out in the corner. You were punished physically, corporal punishment, et cetera, and then that turns into juvenile jail, that turns into jail, that turns into prison, that turns into the death penalty. From the womb to the tomb almost, we have a punitive culture. Trying to suggest that another way is possible, there’s so many points of intervention, actually, along that journey. And the one that I’m choosing to focus in on is the place that we can bring transformative justice and an abolitionist spirit into our interpersonal relationships.

So for me, the first place I have to be in loving correction when I’m like, I make mistakes because I’m human. I make mistakes because that’s how humans learn. If you watch a baby trying to learn to walk, it’s not like they watch a video on here’s how you walk, and then they stand up and it’s just like one step after another perfectly done as the instructions said. Could be a way—maybe that’s how robots and cyborgs will do it.

But Earth-born little babies are like, I’m going to rock myself back and forth until I develop the musculature to push myself up into a crawl. I’m going to pull myself up. You know what I’m saying? We’re struggling, but we’re taking ourselves very seriously. We’re like, I’m going to learn to move like the people around me are moving. I’m going to watch them, and I’m going to make mistakes as I mimic them until, oh, that’s a step, and here’s another one, and here’s another one. And the same with learning to ride a bike. And the same with learning your alphabet. And the same with learning to dance or to sing or to play the piano or to run track or anything else that we learn. Everything we learn we do by making a million mistakes until we’re like, Oh, that’s how it feels in my body to do that.

So what if the same thing is true for our relationships? I’m not trying to give up making mistakes. I’m trying to get really good at learning from the mistakes and expecting the mistakes as part of the process. So much of transformative justice is just saying, “I don’t think you’re done learning yet. Even if you have done great harm, I believe that that was hopefully a low point that you can learn from. And if you can understand how you got there, you can understand a way through and beyond it.”

Willow

What I feel humbled by whenever I look to the natural world is just everywhere you look, regeneration is possible: from geckos and starfish and earthworms that grow new limbs to trees and plants that sprout branches from the wound. We have that model all around us.

We’ve been talking about coming into right relationship with life. And also, I think there’s another aspect of your work that you’ve spoken to that’s also coming into right relationship with death. Because as a culture, particularly talking about here in the United States, we have a very warped relationship with death.

I’d love to talk about death as alchemy, and you’ve spoken about how we need to get better at dying. And what is the wisdom that death holds for us? In Loving Corrections, you point to fungi as teachers. You say, “Mycelia see the potential life in everything. Everything dead and alive goes into the soil and gets processed into life. When we understand that our pain and grief are part of our aliveness, part of how we can learn to be, part of how we contribute to the life of our planet, we can learn to eat everything and make it fuel. We can recycle and upcycle everything because it is all material, data, content, source. We can make death into life.” I had to read that because it’s too beautiful.

adrienne

Thank you. Yeah. I mean, this has been the big teacher of my adulthood, recognizing that I wasn’t really prepared for death. I had spent my life learning to be really good at living and ambitious about it and competitive with it, and in some ways very disconnected, in most ways very disconnected. When you’re just focused on living as if it’s an infinite thing that you’re doing and you’re getting over on everything, it’s so lonely. I was such a high achiever.

Lately, the thought I’ve been having is that death brings us back into the total interdependence of all things. And that coming into a body to get to experience life, stepping into being an individual, part of it is we’re supposed to be like, OK, what am I as a cell inside of this larger collective whole? And that the relief is like, OK, I’ve learned about this, and now I’m returning to the collective whole.

I really like to think that no matter how our actual deaths are, some of our deaths are violent, some are unexpected, some are long and drawn out, but no matter how the deaths are, that when we are in the energy of being dead, it’s all good, that it’s peace, that it’s just like, OK, cool. How do we make getting from here to there as easeful as possible? How do we accept that it is a part of what life is? How do we become really good at grief? And that feels like being good at dying, right? Is that it’s my turn to grieve and someday someone will grieve me. And then what I have brought into this world will disperse into the many, and I’ll get to rest.

And I don’t know. For me, that feels peaceful and it feels helpful because then it’s like, “OK, you work hard while you’re here, you do your best while you’re here, but don’t let your ego take over the ship. You’re going to die. No matter how much you do at life, you’re going to die. And even if you just sit in your garden for the rest of your time, you’re going to die.” It’s the guaranteed reward at the end of the journey, is it’ll end.

Willow

And there’s this great irony, too, that I’m always thinking about, which is, in the West, we think of death as being so annihilating, right? It’s isolating. We have this idea of, we all die alone. And the reality is, from a biochemical perspective, it is actually us becoming part of everything else.

adrienne

Everything else. Breath to breath. Dirt to dirt. Flesh to flesh. Whether you’re cremated or whether you’re buried in the dirt, whether you try to slow the process down or not, you unbecome, and every single part of you goes back into something else. I love that idea. And it also freaks me out a little, the idea of like, “Oh my gosh, some little maggots or some little ant’s going to carry out a little part of me or whatever,” but there’s something really cool about it. I really hope that I can remember that all the way until the moment, even as fear comes, and even as other things come.

I mean, I am at that age now where I’ve lost enough people that I’ve had to really contend with my own death, and I’ve had to really sort of turn and face it. And I’ve had to really also sit with unjust death, that part of what happens when we’re not good at dying and we don’t respect death. Because I think that’s the other piece, is death has its own timing. When we try to take over, when we force death or try to control it or put it onto others, I think we really upend the sacred contracts of the world, and I think we have to sit with that.

I know that I carry Sudanese and Congolese and Palestinian death in me and Iraqi death and Afghani death. I carry all this death. That is what it has meant to be a U.S.-born person in my lifetime, is that I’m in a country that is responsible for an immeasurable amount of death. That’s also part of being good at death, is being like, I have to help stop unjust death from happening so that more people have the privilege of a long life and a natural death surrounded by loved ones and welcomed by loved ones on the other side. I think that that’s good work to be in.

Willow

And so much, I think, of what we conceptualize, like this work or the work of becoming, becoming better, becoming more just, and also it’s the work of unbecoming. That is what we are seeing in this country.

adrienne

I feel like from the time I was about 18, it’s just been unwinding, unfolding, and unbecoming, spiraling out of the control mechanisms that I was socialized into and then rooting and spiraling back into this whole other system of beliefs, one that welcomes me alive and one that will welcome me as a body in my death, and one that will welcome my spirit in death. I’m never disconnected from that other spiral.

Even now, I’ll feel depressed, I’ll feel painful, but, oh my gosh. Then it’ll cycle through, and I’m like, “Oh, I have my dignity, and I’m in relationship, and I’m in connection, and I’m a creator, and that’s exactly what I was supposed to become. And I had to unbecome all these other parts of capitalism and colonialism and militarism and letting someone else control my relationship to God so that I could let God hold me all the time. So I think I’m on the right path.”

Willow

And that is that mycelial transmutation, right?

adrienne

It is.

Willow

I always think it’s so interesting. Fungi have just been sprouting in the collective consciousness, and I think there’s a reason there. I mean, what could be a more potent teacher or symbol for us right now?

adrienne

I do see us in this as a lifelong conversation, Willow. Your book is out on my coffee table, or what I call my coffee table, and people are flipping it open and looking through it and just living in the beauty of your mind and your world, and I’m so grateful you exist. And I’m so grateful for how you see the world and how beautiful it is. We’ll keep talking, yeah?

Willow

Likewise. Lifelong conversation.

NARRATION

Thank you for listening. At the end of each episode, I offer three prompts for guided self-reflection to help internalize and investigate how this week’s theme shows up in our daily lives and how we can apply the principles discussed. For this week, I’d like you to reflect on the following three questions: 

1. What might my own version of witching look like?

2. What is my typical response to change when it happens?

3. What areas or relationships in my life could use some loving corrections?

Follow the links in show notes for additional resources related to the episode.

The Nature Of is an Atmos podcast produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Nuzum of Magnificent Noise. Our production staff includes Julia Natt, Eleanor Kagan, and Daniel Hartman. Our sound designer is Kristen Mueller. 

The Executive Producers of The Nature Of are me: Willow Defebaugh, Theresa Perez, Jake Sargent, and Eric Nuzum.

Atmos is a nonprofit media organization focused on the cross pollination of climate and culture. In addition to our podcast, we deliver award-winning journalism and creative storytelling through a biannual print magazine, daily digital features, original newsletters, and more. To support our work or this podcast, see our show notes or visit atmos.earth/biome

I’m your host Willow Defebaugh and this is The Nature Of.