Navigating Climate Anxiety with Leslie Davenport
treehugger podcast
Come for the shifting climate stay for the complicated feelings. Climate psychologist Leslie Davenport returns to treehugger to talk about her new book, . We get into climate grief, joy, anger, helplessness, nervous systems, burnout, justice, and getting better at understanding those feelings and channeling them into solidarity and restorative action. We also talk about Leslie's new podcast, meeting people where they are, “healthy feelings are ones that flow,” breathing the sky, hospicing systems that need to go while midwifing better ones, and the possibility that someday Tacoma...
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New Restoration Standards Reveal
treehugger podcast
The Society for Ecological Restoration has released the Third Edition of the International Principles and Standards for the Practice of Ecological Restoration, and this episode is less of a book review than a reflection on what these new Standards reveal about our profession. I explore how ecological restoration has evolved over the past two decades through the lenses of justice, human health and livelihoods, climate readiness, accountability, and communities of practice. I also share why I think the first four principles form the philosophical heart of the new edition, where I'm still...
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Ecosystems of The Mandalorian and Grogu
treehugger podcast
*Spoilers throughout. You've been warned. Michael went to see The Mandalorian and Grogu as a lifelong Star Wars nerd and Pedro Pascal fan. He left thinking about wetland tipping points, cryosphere feedbacks, and sacrifice zones - which, for this show, tracks. This episode tours four planets as ecological field sites: a remote ice world doing load-bearing planetary work, a deliberately degraded Hutt swamp holding medicine in its margins, a neon urban underworld where ecology persists in the cracks, and a volcanic home in slow, hopeful succession. Along the way we meet characters, like Gatori,...
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Default Prescriptions with Timothy Pape & Sam Woodrich
treehugger podcast
A couple years after our first conversation on artificial intelligence and ecological restoration, I sat back down with Timothy Pape and Sam Woodrich to ask: what’s actually happening now? Their new research looks at how mainstream AI chatbots generate restoration plans across North American ecosystems. The results are familiar; almost too familiar. Plant native species. Remove invasive plants. Repeat. A longer show title might be - Default Prescriptions: AI, Ecology, and the Stories We Repeat. In this follow-up conversation, I reconnect with Timothy Pape and Sam Woodrich to explore...
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Scapegoat with Clare Follmann
treehugger podcast
In this episode, Michael talks with environmental writer Clare Follmann about her new book Scapegoat: What the Invasive Species Story Gets Wrong (AK Press) - and yes, we are talking about invasive species again, but this time with sharper teeth. Together they question the fantasy of eradication, unpack “plastic words” like management and health, and examine how invasive species rhetoric can distract from capitalism, climate disruption, and the systems actually reshaping our landscapes. From novel ecosystems to the ethics of killing in conservation, this conversation asks restoration...
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grove & grit restoration brief on foraging & food sovereignty
treehugger podcast
Let's explore foraging as a living, contested relationship between ecology, culture, law, and survival. Beginning with za’atar - a resilient wild thyme central to Palestinian foodways - we examine how conservation policy can criminalize cultural harvest. From there, we move briefly through international access models (UK personal-use law, Nordic everyman’s rights, regulated European mushroom harvest), and closer to home: US National Parks, Washington State Parks, Seattle, and Tacoma. We unpack how language like management, stewardship, and resource protection can obscure power, and...
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grove & grit restoration brief January 18, 2026
treehugger podcast
grove & grit launches with local restoration in Hilltop, Dublin Bay oyster recovery, UN World Restoration Flagships, and an ecological reckoning on war, climate, and accountability — plus two essential upcoming reads from Emma Marris and Clare Follmann. This episode is released during the week of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday, grounding restoration work in a shared ethic of collective liberation. Local Action (Tacoma) Tacoma Tree Foundation - Green Blocks: Hilltop A neighborhood-based urban forestry program supporting residents with tree selection, permits, delivery, and...
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Forest History with Jennifer Ott
treehugger podcast
What happens when we trace the history of our forests? Not just through trees, but through people, policy, and place? In this episode, I talk with Jennifer Ott, Executive Director of , Washington’s free online encyclopedia of history. Jennifer is an environmental historian, author of Olmsted in Seattle: Creating a Park System for a Modern City, and co-author of Waterway: The Story of Seattle’s Locks and Ship Canal. She brings a deep knowledge of Seattle’s reshaped landscapes; it's filled tidelands, leveled hills, and rechanneled rivers, and a lifelong commitment to accessible public...
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Urban Evolution with Liz Carlen
treehugger podcast
In this episode, Michael talks with evolutionary biologist and urban ecologist Dr. Elizabeth Carlen about how cities - shaped by war, politics, religion, and everything in between - are evolving alongside the wildlife that calls them home. Liz is an urban evolutionary biologist whose research explores how human social structures, from redlining to sacred groves, shape the genetics, behavior, and survival of city-dwelling creatures like squirrels and pigeons. We dive into the often-overlooked ways that social histories leave their mark not just on human communities, but on the DNA of the...
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My Head for a Tree with Martin Goodman
treehugger podcast
In this special episode, we welcome author and storyteller Martin Goodman to explore the extraordinary living story of the Bishnoi people—a community in the Western Thar Desert of India who have made protecting life, in all its forms, their deepest devotion. Three centuries ago, 363 Bishnoi villagers led by Amrita Devi gave their lives to defend the sacred khejri trees from destruction, speaking the words still taught to Bishnoi children today: “My head for a tree is a cheap price to pay.” But the Bishnoi are not just a story of sacrifice from the past—they are still here, still...
info_outlineDisrupted by enclosure of the commons and colonialism, people have had a relationship with trees via coppice and pollard for eons. This is the show where we discuss the role moditional “modern” + “traditional” methods play in ecological restoration. The methods we talk about on this episode are known as live staking, coppicing and pollarding.
My guest on this episode is Alex Slakie who is a restoration ecologist, botanist, and herbalist. He currently resides on the shared lands of the Cascades, Clackamas, Wasco, Multnomah, and Chinook peoples in Corbett, Oregon. Alex is the head of Flora Northwest LLC, a business that supplies willow live stakes and seeds for salmon habitat projects, sustainably harvested wild medicinal plants for herbal companies, and interesting nursery plants for home gardeners. He grows and wild-tends willow coppices and stands of medicinal plants in the western Columbia River Gorge.
Find Flora NW online at www.floranw.com and on Instagram @floranorthwest
Alex studied ecology and sustainable agriculture at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. He became deeply interested in botany and restoration ecology while doing a work-study program at the Sound Native Plants nursery and has been following that pathway ever since. 15 years later, Alex is still wild-tending willow coppices for live stake production and is passionate about this almost lost art of forest management.
On a book recommendation from Alex, I picked up William Bryant Logan’s Sproutlands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees. Logan explains it by saying “From ten millennia to about two hundred years ago, every person in every forested part of the world would have known exactly what we mean by “coppice and pollard.” The idea is simple: when you break, burn or cut low the trunks of almost any leafy tree or shrub, it will sprout again. New branches will emerge from behind the bases, either from buds that were dormant, waiting for their cue to grow, or from twigs newly formed by the cambium.”
Enclosure has a role to play in this story too. Over the course of several centuries, much of Europe’s land was privatized. That is to say taken out of some form of collective ownership and management known as the “commons” and handed over to individuals = turned into capital. Grippingly, William Bryant Logan holds space for this in his Sproutlands book. He depicts how much of the English commons was in coppice and pollard when the crown and wealthy landowners began to enclose lands as early as the 14th century. Of course, this system was exported around the world in a variety of forms of colonialism. With it, we have lost some of art, culture and political ecology of coppice and pollard as well as the relationship we had with the land.
A Short History of Enclosure in Britain in The Land: An Occasional Magazine about Land Rights. Summer 2009
The Tragedy of the Tragedy of the Commons by Matto Mildenberger in Scientific American April 23, 2019
Editing for this episode provided by the wonderful Katie Dunn
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