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.

Appearances

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

She wants to let young people make their own way and find their own way of listening to the forest.

There's a passage that's actually one of my favorite passages of many great passages in the book

where she writes about taking a bunch of college students who are very much from the Bible Belt, who think quite differently, and she sets them up as people who really are far from her way of thinking, takes them into the forest, perhaps not too far from where I am, come to think of it,

And on the long walk back, they start spontaneously singing Amazing Grace in a beautiful way.

It just starts quietly and develops.

And the sense Kimura has is that she has gotten them to just sort of feel the forest and acquire a different way of looking at the plants around them.

And they're responding in their own way.

And she celebrates it.

She regards this as a great success, as a moment of teaching, which I think is completely right.

And it's really a very powerful passage.

It's one of my favorite passages in the book.

I'll read out that passage.

And it nicely conveys her response to the moment.

And also, I think we begin to see her writing style.

So here's the passage.

I turned to see the students coming down the trail behind me, a petal-strewn path in gauzy light.

One person, I don't know who, began to sing, ever so quietly, those familiar first notes, the ones that open your throat, irresistibly calling you to sing.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound.

One by one they joined in, singing in the long shadows and a drift of white petals settling on our shoulders.

That saved a wretch like me.

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