Lifeworlds

About Lifeworlds

Lifeworlds is an intimate dialogue with our planet’s ecologies and with those who are translators and bridges between the human and beyond-human. Our guests are farmers, lawyers, scientists, investors, indigenous scholars, artists, and many more — with them, we explore the mindsets, skills and actions required to forge deep connections with nature and to enter into close relationship with the lifeworlds of other beings. We begin to change the world when we change our ways of seeing and being. Lifeworlds points us towards a deeper reformulation of core human identities, asking who it is we share the Earth with and what our human role may be at this pivotal moment in time. It is through the doorway of inhabiting and understanding multiple perspectives that we can begin to heal a culture and psyche that is steeped in duality. We have lost our place as humans amongst all life. This is our call for healing, engagement and wonder. www.lifeworld.earth (https://www.lifeworld.earth/) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

Publisher

Alexa Firmenich

Category

science · science · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

8 Jul 2022

Latest episode

17 Aug 2026

Latest episodes

80 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   17 Aug 2026

   Soulfire Sessions III: Many Minds – with Kensy Cooperrider

   Consciousness is one of the great running threads beneath every episode of this show: a loaded term, tangled up with questions of sentience and intelligence, and carrying the most direct ethical implications for how we live on Earth. This week I'm joined by Kensy Cooperrider, cognitive scientist and host of Many Minds podcast, circling the questions of what mind, intelligence, and experience might be beyond the human. Kensy has had hundreds of conversations with scientists working at the edges of what we know about minds, and also the most creative, concrete apertures into other lifeworlds: names, goosebumps, dreams, fire, taboos, medicine. We also discuss whether, if we're willing to stretch words like sentience across the animal kingdom, what happens when we begin to explore AI - the mineral, the silica, the metallic? Unanswerable questions, maybe, but what fun to explore. Links: Episode website link (https://www.lifeworld.earth/episodes-blog/soulfiresessionsall) Many Minds podcast (https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/many-minds/id1499167824) Kensy’s persona (https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/many-minds/id1499167824)l we (http://kensycooperrider.com)bsite (https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/many-minds/id1499167824) Many Mind (https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/many-minds/id1499167824)s with Mic (http://kensycooperrider.com)hael Levin (https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/many-minds/id1499167824) Book (https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/many-minds/id1499167824): R (http://kensycooperrider.com)ober (https://manyminds.libsyn.com/mind-everywhere)t Bringh (http://kensycooperrider.com)urst Tree of Meani (https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/many-minds/id1499167824)ng (https://manyminds.libsyn.com/mind-everywhere) M (https://manyminds.libsyn.com/mind-everywhere)any Minds: Mutuali (http://kensycooperrider.com)sms all the Way Do (https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/many-minds/id1499167824)wn (https://manyminds.libsyn.com/mind-everywhere) D (https://manyminds.libsyn.com/mind-everywhere)iverse Intelligenc (http://kensycooperrider.com)es Summer Institut (https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/many-minds/id1499167824)e (https://manyminds.libsyn.com/mind-everywhere) Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes. Music: Electric Ethnicity (https://www.audionetwork.com/browse/m/track/electric-ethnicity_157744) by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

2. 

   3 Aug 2026

   38. Mother Trees And Forest Resilience

   This episode is a live interview with Dr. Suzanne Simard at the MOTH Festival of Ideas in London. Suzanne is the forest ecologist whose researched popularised notions of the Wood Wide Web and the Mother Trees, and revealed the living networks that wire a forest together to share carbon, water and resources. We talk about the courage it took to call a tree "mother," the grizzly encounters and burned-down research plots behind the tidy data, and the findings from her Mother Tree Project and luminous new book, When the Forest Breathes - chief among them, that a forest, given half a chance and a few elders left standing, knows exactly how to breathe its way back to life. Episode Website Link (https://www.lifeworld.earth/episodes-blog/mothertrees) Links: Suzanne’s main website (https://suzannesimard.com/) The Mother Tree Project & Program (https://mothertreeproject.org/) Book: When the Forest Breathes (https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/470459/when-the-forest-breathes-by-simard-suzanne/9780241763315) Book: Finding the Mother Tree (https://suzannesimard.com/finding-the-mother-tree-book/) MOTH Festival of Ideas (https://mothfestival.org/) Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes. Music: Electric Ethnicity (https://www.audionetwork.com/browse/m/track/electric-ethnicity_157744) by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

3. 

   2 Jul 2026

   37. Whale Lexicons: A Language of the Deep — with David Gruber and César Rodríguez-Garavito

   What does it actually mean to translate a language that has never been written down or spoken in air, whose holders are ancient ocean denizens, and may not even carry concepts we'd recognize as our own? That's the question sitting at the center of this episode, and those answering it have formed one of the more radical partnerships in science today: Project CETI and MOTH. CETI is a collective of fifty-plus scientists attempting to listen to and translate the communication of sperm whales. MOTH is a legal collective working to bring that science before courts, in the hope that whales might be granted something like legal standing and rights. In a barn in the English countryside, David Gruber and César Rodríguez-Garavito walk us through what it takes to listen this closely to another species, and whether this new convergence of human, animal, and machine intelligence could spark a watershed moment for conservation and consciousness. What we'll cover: The sperm whale's anatomy of perception, acoustic vision, and what it's like to navigate a world of inky darkness through sound The deep evolutionary kinship between humans and whales, and what their convergent vowel-like sounds suggest about the origins of language How Project CETI uses machine learning to find phonetic structure and contextual meaning in whale codas The legal arguments emerging from this research, from the right not to suffer to the right to a cultural life A remarkable multi-whale birth event — and what it reveals about coordination, kinship, and social roles among whales The ethical guardrails (NACT) proposed for AI-assisted animal communication technology, and the risks of getting this wrong Whether this new convergence of human, animal, and machine intelligence could spark a watershed moment for conservation and consciousness Episode Website Link: https://www.lifeworld.earth/episodes-blog/whalelexiconsceti ( https://www.lifeworld.earth/episodes-blog/whalelexiconsceti) Links: Project CETI (https://www.projectceti.org/) More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program at NYU (https://mothlife.org/) Nature: Description of a collaborative sperm whale birth and shifts in coda vocal styles during key events (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-27438-3) What if We Understood what Animals are Saying? The Legal Impact of AI-assisted Studies of Animal Communication (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5165527).” He Whakaputanga Moana: The first Declaration recognizing whales as sentient beings with inherent rights (https://www.whaledeclaration.com/) From Orbit to Intimacy (https://alexafirmenich.medium.com/from-orbit-to-intimacy-beyond-the-overview-effect-13f6c87c4aef) The Crimson: Are Whales Trying to Tell Us Something? (https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/10/26/project-ceti-translating-whales-scrutiny/) Time: Researchers are Using AI to Understand what Animals are Saying (https://time.com/7279997/using-ai-to-understand-what-animals-are-saying/) Lifeworlds Episode: The Sounds of Life: Bioacoustics, A.I. and Ethics – with Karen Bakker (https://www.lifeworld.earth/episodes-blog/soundsoflife) Lewis Mumford: Tecnics and Civilisation (https://www.worldofbooks.com/en-gb/products/technics-and-civilization-book-lewis-mumford-9780226550275?sku=GOR007070131&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=23923567418) From Orbit to Intimacy Listening to whales: input requested!! (https://form.typeform.com/to/srA1FU4M?typeform-source=www.lifeworld.earth) Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes. Credits: Sperm Whale Sound (Project CETI); Music: Electric Ethnicity (https://www.audionetwork.com/browse/m/track/electric-ethnicity_157744) by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock, Ellie Kidd & The Rising (https://tryad.bandcamp.com/track/the-rising-2) by Tryad CCPL (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

5,638,950

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

18 ratings

Spotify

4.9 / 5

79 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 65 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

59

Social presence

0

YouTube

93

Engagement

85

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Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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