The Shape of the World

Latest Episodes
Episode 28: The Wild Card
Sarah Cowles encourages radically rethinking the synthetic landscapes found in cities. When welcoming nature to our human cities, do we aim for an...
Episode 27: The World Is Not Static
Dr. Caitlin Rankins research shows that a long-held theory about why an ancient civilization passed out of existence was wrong. Cahokia Mounds in...
Episode 26: Bees Understand the Concept of Zero
Dr. Scarlett Howards research on cognition of honeybees got a lot of media attention when in 2018, she published a paper that showed bees can...
Episode 25: Think Beyond the Possible
Tony Hisss new book, Rescuing the Planet: Protecting Half the Land to Heal the Earth, lays out both the urgency for and possibility of protecting...
Episode 24: Humans Need Nature
Jeanne Gang has an explicit intention to make the human built environment as kind as possible for birds, nature, wildlife and the Earths atmosphere...
EPISODE 23: Cutting Through the Noise On Climate: How to Do Something That Matters, Do It Consistently, and Then Move On with Your Life
Climate change is scary. The magnitude of the problem makes it hard for people to commit to direct action to solve it, hoping instead (reasonably but perhaps impractically!) that government will do the work...
Episode 22: The Grace of Going Unseen
Akiko Busch is well-known for her writing on design, culture and the natural world. Her essays continue to touch on those subjects although increasingly, it incorporates—or directly addresses—the natural world...
Episode 21: The Coat & the Goat
Andrew Robichaud explores the peculiar coexistence of people and farm animals in America’s cities. In the 1800s, it wasn’t unusual for men wearing top hats and formal attire to stride down tony Manhattan avenues right next to goats and cows...
Episode 20: The Weirdest Way
Dr. Katy Greenwald has a longstanding interest in puzzling out the success and persistence of North America's "gene thieves," the unisexual (all female) Ambystoma salamanders...
Episode 19: Different Kinds of Aliveness
David Sibley started drawing birds at age five and never stopped. Having an ornithologist father and being around his father’s friends, all of whom were also interested in birds, made birdwatching seem an ordinary thing all grown men did...