Today I'm delighted to be joined in conversation by Dr David Mann founder of HaikuBox a unique smart device that allows you to listen to and monitor the bird calls in your garden 24/7.

Birdwatching offers a connection to the natural world that is accessible to all of us regardless of our backgrounds or our locations. Birding in urban areas is equally as rewarding as it is in more rural settings.

I believe people protect what they love and understand and the HaikuBox is a wonderful tool to help us build a deeper relationship with the birds and acoustic landscape that surrounds us but is easily overlooked. Beyond being incredibly fun to learn who is sharing your home with you, the HaikuBox also gathers data that conservationists are able to use to both understand and conserve our avian friends. From the impacts of solar eclipses and wild fires to migration patterns the data you help collect is invaluable to learning more about our birds.

David also shares some other fascinating uses for bioacoustics monitoring from Elephants in Africa and the signature whistles of Florida’s Bottlenose dolphins that can identify individuals to the Indigenous communities in northwestern Canada employing HaikuBox technology to ensure Beluga Whales aren't trapped when winter ice blocks the waterways.

David reminds us how easy it can be to make a difference in this world, by learning to appreciate and then simple encourage and nurture the native wild plants and wildlife that share our homes, we can make an incredible impact.

Learn more about David

Haikubox’s founder, David Mann, grew up in Syracuse, NY and spent a lot of time outdoors, no matter the weather. David was fascinated by birds and watched them at home and at nearby Sapsucker Woods on the Cornell University campus.

David went on to study biology at Cornell and earned a PhD in biological oceanography from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where his research focused on animal bioacoustics.

Haikubox was hatched when David and a colleague at the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology realized they shared a common interest and the technical skills to develop an automatic birdsong identification tool.

HaikuBox:

Haikubox brings consumers real-time bird alerts, birdsong recordings and loads of information about their backyard birds. Using its proprietary neural net trained on thousands of bird recordings, Haikubox listens 24/7 for every bird song and chirp and shares what it learns via the Haikubox Listen website and mobile app.

Includes phone and smartwatch bird alerts, the ability to favorite, download and share birdsong recordings, and learning to identify hidden species by their vocalizations. Every Haikubox owner becomes a community scientist within the Haikubox network, contributing invaluable data for scientific research.

Website: www.haikubox.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/haikubox/

BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/haikubox.bsky.social

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Today I'm delighted to be joined in conversation by Elspeth Hay author of Feed Us With Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food.

Did you know you can eat Acorns? This was the revelation that inspired Elspeth’s book and also got me hooked on her incredible work. I absolutely love trees and talk about their ecological importance, but Elspeth takes our relationship to trees, to a different level, a place where we don’t just preserve them because it’s the right thing to do for biodiversity and other species but where we can once again benefit directly from our relationship with them and they can literally facilitate our own survival.

Our Food Systems are making us and our planet sick, both physically and emotionally, our farmers are at the forefront of this rupture and sadly experience a higher rate of suicide than the general population. In this nuanced conversation we explore how reconsidering our relationship with these keystone trees isn’t just about addressing a single problem, it leads us to question and reconsider everything we have been taught about our current food systems, from yields to inputs and food waste, to the wisdom from Indigenous people and the food systems they employed. We also look back at the journey and trauma that ruptured our relationship with the lands and the economic rather than ecological reasons that laid the path we have been taught to follow.

Importantly Elspeth also offers us a tangible solution to multiple crisis within our world. Feed us with Trees offers us a viable alternative way to farm, that isn’t just a theory but is already being successfully implemented today.

Learn more about Elspeth

Elspeth Hay is a writer and the creator and host of the Local Food Report, a weekly feature that has aired on Cape Cod’s NPR station since 2008. Deeply immersed in her own local-food system, she writes and reports for print, radio, and online media with a focus on food and the environment to reconnect us with the people, places, and ideas that feed us.

Feed Us With Trees: is a hopeful manifesto about a brighter, more abundant future and a critical look at the long-held stories we’ll need to rewrite to build it.

The day Elspeth Hay learned that we can eat acorns, stories she’d believed her whole life began to unravel. Until then she'd always believed we must grow our staple foods in farmed fields, the same fields wreaking havoc on our land, air, and water. But all over the Northern Hemisphere, Hay learned, humans once grew our staple foods in forest gardens centered on perennial nut trees: oaks, chestnuts, and hazelnuts. In Feed Us with Trees, Hay brings us along as she gets to know dozens of nut growers, scientists, Indigenous knowledge-keepers, researchers, and food professionals and discovers that in tending these staple trees, we once played a vital environmental role as one of Earth’s keystone species.

Website: https://elspethhay.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elspethhay/

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Today I'm joined in conversation by Denali Sai Nalamalapu author of Holler: A Graphic Memoir of Rural Resistance.

Inspired by Denali’s powerful book about the controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline in Appalachia we discuss what activism really looks like, and not the main stream media’s portrayal of protests by those on the fringes and out of touch with society.

Denali’s book utilises raw imagery stripped bare from complicated language that opens up this conversation at a heart level to everyone, and brings to the fore the passion and love that drives people to stand up for what they believe in.

Denali encourages us to use discernment to question the narratives we consume and to find the courage to advocate for ourself and our community, and how this can take many different forms, but importantly simply allows you to embrace your existing skills and passions.

Alongside this call to action we acknowledge the resilience needed to hold the grief and hopelessness whilst balancing a belief in an alternative hopeful vision for the future and how community is both our biggest driving force and greatest asset as we embrace the stubbornness to take on what on the surface seems insurmountable.

Learn more about Denali

Denali Sai Nalamalapu (They/Them) is the author of Holler, a climate organizer and comic artist living in Southwest Virginia, originally from Southern Maine and Southern India.

Denali’s work uplifts the voices of those most impacted by climate change – rural, queer, and communities of color – through vibrant, engaging, and accessible illustrations and writing.

Denali studied English Literature at Bates College and completed a Fulbright grant in Malaysia. Denali has worked as a climate communicator and organizer since 2019.

Holler is a spectacular blend of graphic memoir and climate activism, using contemporary visceral storytelling to highlight the lives of six frontline resisters to the Mountain Valley Pipeline in Appalachia. Drawing from original interviews with Denali, Holler introduces readers to a teacher, a single mother, a nurse, an organizer, a photographer, and a seed keeper, who became activists as the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which spans approximately 300 miles from northwestern West Virginia to southern Virginia, threatened their homes, their livelihoods, their community.

These are the stories of everyday resistance, while each person has their own motivation and methods, they share a love for the land and a desire to preserve it. Denali themselves poignantly illustrates both their own experiences with climate anxiety and grief and the ways that finding community has galvanized them in their environmental work.

A deeply moving story about change, hope, and humanity, Holler is an invitation to readers everywhere searching for their own path to activism: sending the message that no matter how small your action is, it’s impactful.

Website: https://denali-sai.com/

Instagram: @Denali_Sai

BlueSky: @denalisai.bsky.social

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Thank you for being part of this journey with me, please Subscribe so you don't miss our future episodes, leave a review & share with friends to help these messages ripple out across the world.

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