The Shape of the World

Latest Episodes
Episode 29: Disruption & Resilience
When Jane Watson encountered a ruined meadow of seagrass in the ocean, instead of getting furious, she grew curious.
Season Five Coming Soon
Season Five Will Launch July 2022 New episodes, new guests, new insights about nature and our built environments are coming soon. And more on how we can live together--with nature, with cities and wi
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...