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

I once was lost, but now I'm found.

I was humbled.

Their singing said everything that my well-intentioned lectures did not.

On and on they went, adding harmonies as they walked.

They understood harmony in a way that I did not.

I heard in their raised voices the same outpouring of love and gratitude for the creation that Sky Woman, who's a central figure in Kimra's worldview, first sang on the back of Turtle Island.

Close Readings · Nature in Crisis: ‘Is a River Alive?’ by Robert Macfarlane · 3 Jun 2026 podcast

And me, Peter Godfrey-Smith.

I would have said no.

And I've always thought of rivers as among the least good candidates for unexpected cases of living systems.

They look alive because they move.

They certainly give us that impression.

But whereas in the case of a forest, I think, you know, there's a case to be made perhaps that the forest itself as an object over and above the individual organisms that make it up might have some kind of living status in its own right.

I've always thought it's very hard to argue that for a river, because although they give us this impression of animacy, they have much less of the kind of self-maintaining, self-regulating, thermodynamically unusual features that living systems in general have, and that a forest might be a sort of special, partial, interesting, difficult case of.

So I would have said no.

Absolutely.

But first, I want to pick up something in that Le Guin quote, which I think is important and which I'll probably want to come back to this a bunch of times.

A lot of people, when they write about this, they do use this dichotomy between seeing things like rivers as commodities, as things to be exploited on one side and

and seeing them as animate, as living on the other side.

And when you were introducing the way that this book and other work sets up the rights of nature movement, that dichotomy is absolutely there.

We want to treat the river as alive because we don't think it's a good thing to keep treating it as a resource we see as a commodity.

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