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For The Wild

DIANA FRIEDRICH on the Beauty and Promise of Rewilding /339

Embracing the mountains, desert steppe, and islands of Patagonia, this week’s guest Diana Friedrich grounds listeners in an expansive and profound landscape. As she describes her work to protect swaths of land through Rewilding Argentina’s Patagonia Azul project, Diana and Ayana share in a love for landscapes that offer both challenge and refuge.

For Diana, conservation work is a calling to enter into deep community and to build trust over a shared love for the land. This means reimagining economic systems, challenging industrial greed, and countering our current culture of consumption and exploitation. Focusing on the resilience of biodiverse landscapes, and the hope of what we can still conserve, Diana stresses the importance of finding loving conservation strategies that amplify joy and community while pushing for more funding, focus, and effort for conservation measures.

Diana brings expert insight as she talks listeners through the complexity of international biodiversity goals and declarations. Though this, Diana emphasizes the importance of creating truly protected local areas rather than just relying on regulations and declarations. The deep commitment and intentional work of rewilding is vital as we work to support and to be a part of a world teeming with biodiversity.

ABENA OFFEH-GYIMAH on Sacred Seed and Soil /337

Engaging crucially with food as a cultural, spiritual, and generational experience, this week’s guest Abena Offeh-Gyimah highlights the connections between ancestral foods, and the soil, seeds, and people who play a part in sustaining ancestral foodways. Focusing on the ancestral foods of Africa, and specifically her home-country of Ghana, Abena shares stories of connection, trust, and community fostered by food.

Capitalism and colonialism have had drastic effects on the landscape of food within Africa, from the introduction of particular cash crops, to the devaluation of traditional African foods, to the marketing narrative that agrochemical solutions are “best.” Yet, as Abena points out, farmers are the archivists of the land, and farmers and communities have continued to preserve local foodways—saving seeds for future generations. If we recognized the true value of local foods, what capitalistic practices might we be able to evade?

Abena calls listeners to pay attention to the technical and spiritual aspects of seeds that connect them to past, present, and future landscapes. Through this deep connection, Abena points out the absurdity that certain companies claim to own seeds as if they could own life itself. Seeds carry with them the miracle of life and abundance, how might we shape our food and agricultural systems to honor this sacred reality?

How are the crises of our times crises of being, crises of becoming? In this week’s conversation, Ayana is joined by returning guest Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé. Ayana and Báyò dance together through questions of crisis, identity, and rupture. As we attempt to break from the monoculture that cements us as citizen subjects of empire, Báyò suggests that we need an ontological mutiny.

Pointing out the possibilities of a more generous and spacious politics, Báyò calls listeners’ attention to the duplicity of safety. Perhaps the things from which we recoil contain promise. As we try to stabilize, cracks will emerge, and Báyò invites us to nurture each other through the ruptures. How might we descend to the crises of our times, and embrace the decay and compost that modernity has come to detest?

Considering the practices that may bring us to ask new questions and to come into new ways of being, Báyò highlights that which pulls at the threads of stability. As the empire of whiteness fades, we must experiment with a new nature-culture and with new forms of embodiment. While cracks and ruptures emerge, we may need something more than healing, we may need sanctuaries.

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