Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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My guest this week is Bradley Rydholm.
is an outdoor educator with a passion for exploring the relationship between humans and the natural world. He holds a master's degree in Outdoor Education Leadership where he combined traditional elements of the outdoor field with ecopsychology. He brings this focus on the relationship with nature to his education work in a variety of outdoor excursions and events.He is the creator of Nature Is Not Metal, a platform dedicated to blurring the boundaries between nature and culture, urban and wild, body and mind, human and non-human. The platform seeks to use social media to creatively promote these ideas. He also writes the
Substack.In the outdoors or on the internet, Bradley aims to inspire a deep appreciation and even a sense of enchantment with our weird and wild world.
I’ll admit it. I’m a city person. The idea of living without my modern comforts agitates me to an uncomfortable degree. I of course love spending time in nature, love learning about it, and recognize how critical it is for us to realign ourselves with nature—which is why I love learning from folks who’ve really spent the time to understand how ecosystems work and are able to share that passion and knowledge.
Bradley is one such person. On the one hand, he leads amazing outdoors excursions—I’ll include some links for folks who might be interested. On the other hand, he runs the popular Nature is Not Metal Instagram account. You may already be familiar with the Nature Is Metal account, which depicts grisly animal encounters. Nature is Not Metal is Bradley’s response—which is not to say he means it as a counterargument per se. As you’ll see in our conversation, he agrees that nature is—to carry the parlance—pretty metal. But on the other hand, there are beautiful, spontaneous, even miraculous instances of cooperation that occur all the time—even in unexpected places like the suburbs. In fact one argument for the evolutionary success of human beings is our ability to cooperate with each other. So Nature is Not Metal is his way of curating and circulating these types of interspecies interactions.
Through these and other efforts like his Green Night of the Soul Substack, he grapples with some meaty ideas about animism, intelligence, violence, invasive species, and re-enchanting the world—and I brought him on the show to get into all of it.
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Guests on Urgent Futures are experts across art, science, media, technology, philosophy, economics, mathematics, anthropology, and more. We live in complex times; these are the voices who will help you orient to emerging futures.
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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lia Halloran & Kip Thorne, Cherie Hu, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, and more. Here is another recent episode with Invisible Rulers author & disinformation expert Renée DiResta:
Bradley Rydholm: Why Nature is Metal—and Why it's Not | #31