Ferris Jabr, author of Becoming Earth, claims that it is: that Earth is a vast interconnected living system and we humans (and all other living things) don’t just live...

Dr. Adrienne Brown reads cities the way professors read novels: carefully, and with lots of attention to what’s written between the lines...

Daniel Holz studies black holes, gravitational waves, and cosmology, all while also running the Existential Risk Laboratory...

Biologist Sara Lewis doesn’t just study fireflies—for her, fireflies are a living reminder that the world is pure magic. In this episode, the author of Silent Sparks: The Wondrous World of Fireflies unpacks the science of fireflies.

Biologist Dr. Seth Magle wants to rethink what a city is – and who it’s for. As part of an alliance with 50 cities around the globe, Seth and other wildlife researchers have discovered an overlooked truth: that our large cities teem with interesting native wildlife.

Artist Laurie Palmer believes they can. In her book, The Lichen Museum, Laurie explores what
we can gain from learning to see life the way a lichen does.

Season SIX Will Launch This Friday, May 9th

New episodes, new guests, and new insights about nature and our built environments coming soon with season 6 of Shape of the World. And more on how we can live together–with nature, with cities, and with one another. Listen on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite platform.

The organization Nick Wesley co-founded, Urban Rivers, is creating The Wild Mile, the first-ever floating eco-park of its scale in the world. It's a mile-long floating park located on the North Branch Canal of the Chicago River, a manmade channel along the east side of Goose Island between Chicago Avenue and North Avenue.

The organization Nick Wesley co-founded, Urban Rivers, is creating The Wild Mile, the first-ever floating eco-park of its scale in the world. It's a mile-long floating park located on the North Branch Canal of the Chicago River, a manmade channel along the east side of Goose Island between Chicago Avenue and North Avenue.

The organization Nick Wesley co-founded, Urban Rivers, is creating The Wild Mile, the first-ever floating eco-park of its scale in the world. It's a mile-long floating park located on the North Branch Canal of the Chicago River, a manmade channel along the east side of Goose Island between Chicago Avenue and North Avenue.

Guest Jenn Smith says that human concepts of intergenerational wealth and inequality occur also in the behaviors of animals.

When Jane Watson encountered a ruined meadow of seagrass in the ocean, instead of getting furious, she grew curious.

Season Five Will Launch July 2022

New episodes, new guests, new insights about nature and our built environments are coming soon. And more on how we can live together--with nature, with cities and with one another. Subscribe in your favorite podcast app or check back here.

Sarah Cowles encourages radically rethinking the synthetic landscapes found in cities. When welcoming nature to our human cities, do we aim for an...

Dr. Caitlin Rankin’s research shows that a long-held theory about why an ancient civilization passed out of existence was wrong. Cahokia Mounds in...

Dr. Scarlett Howard’s research on cognition of honeybees got a lot of media attention when in 2018, she published a paper that showed bees can...

Tony Hiss’s new book, “Rescuing the Planet: Protecting Half the Land to Heal the Earth,” lays out both the urgency for and possibility of protecting...

Jeanne Gang has an explicit intention to make the human built environment as kind as possible for birds, nature, wildlife and the Earth’s atmosphere...

Climate change is scary. The magnitude of the problem makes it hard for people to commit to direct action to solve it, hoping instead (reasonably but perhaps impractically!) that government will do the work...

Akiko Busch is well-known for her writing on design, culture and the natural world. Her essays continue to touch on those subjects although increasingly, it incorporates—or directly addresses—the natural world...