Peter Godfrey-Smith

speaker

184 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 24 Aug

Peter Godfrey-Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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Close Readings · Nature in Crisis: ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer · 28 Jun 2026 podcast

Yeah, it's nice also to see Carson mentioned yet again.

She's a recurring figure all the way through this series.

Let's start talking about the book, and I want to say up front that I will criticize quite a few or some ideas in the book, but I do admire it, and I admire Kimura a lot.

I think that if more people thought like her, we'd be living in a considerably better world.

Okay, let's look at some of the main themes.

I guess the theme that's most important is

is the advocacy of some sort of interaction, some sort of beneficial interaction between indigenous belief systems and scientific methods and mainstream scientific frameworks.

Kimra herself exemplifies this kind of interaction because she's a botanist trained within the mainstream scientific tradition.

She uses botanical terms.

She talks about mitochondria and draws on other details of a scientific view of plants.

But she thinks that we also have a lot to learn from a different perspective, an indigenous perspective.

Now, that way of talking, I think, immediately raises a question, you know, talking about the Indigenous perspective.

I think there's a question mark there is, you know, can there really be one or is there really much commonality there?

And we'll come back to that in a moment.

I just want to sort of mention that up front as something we will cover later.

A bit more about just how the book and Kimra operate perhaps before that.

She's not just concerned about the bringing together of scientific approaches and indigenous belief systems.

She's also very concerned about teaching, about teaching young people, getting young people into the forest to listen and learn from it.

and doing so without, I think, her pressing her particular spiritual framing on the experience.

When she talks about how she handles teaching and students, she comes across as not at all heavy-handed.

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