What if one of the most powerful tools for saving the Amazon rain-forest was a bee most people have never heard of?

Enter the stingless bee – a 65 million year old resident of Earth that produces honeys teeming with medicinal molecules and has co-evolved with indigenous Amazonian communities across millennia. Today, these bees are at the keystone species at the heart of a pioneering conservation movement spanning science, law, economics and Indigenous rights: one that recently secured the world's first legal recognition of the rights of an insect.

Dr. Rosa Vásquez Espinoza is the National Geographic Explorer and conservation scientist whose NGO Amazon Research Internacional is spearheading these initiatives. In this episode we explore the life world of the bees themselves, the pioneering science and bio-economies emerging around their extraordinary honey, the deep co-evolutionary bond between stingless bees and Amazonian communities, and how bridging indigenous and Western knowledge is proving essential for the forest, for the communities who steward the bees and the legal frameworks being built to protect them.

Episode Website Link: https://www.lifeworld.earth/episodes-blog/stinglessbeesamazonfuture

Links:

• Amazon Research International: Main Site
• Dr Rosa Vasquez Espinosa
• Book: The Spirit of the Rainforest
• Youtube: STINGLESS BEES AND THE BIODIVERSITY OF OUR AMAZON
• In Peru, a Mission to Save the Stingless Bee
• Nat Geo: Stingless bees make ‘miracle liquid.’
• Guardian: Stingless bees from the Amazon granted legal rights in world first
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Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock, Ellie Kidd & The Rising by Tryad CCPL.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today’s episode explores a simple but urgent question: is our education system still fit for the world we’re entering? Climate disruption, AI, and uncertainty demand new forms of education fit for complexity and change.

A rich lineage of alternative and experimental education has been evolving for decades, seeking to make learning more holistic, place-based, creative, and ecologically grounded. The focus of today’s conversation is one of those institutions: Black Mountains College in Wales. BMC is building a university model explicitly designed for a warming world, where nature is often the classroom and curriculum blends ecology and climate science with the arts, systems thinking, and community-rooted practice.

I’m joined by its co-founder and CEO, Ben Rawlence, award-winning writer and former human rights researcher, to explore:

• The historicity of Western educational systems
• What the role of a university should be in society
• Black Mountains College as model of the future of education
• The role of ecological imagination
• Youth, eco anxiety and the challenges of parenting in today’s planetary moment

Episode Website

Links:

• Black Mountains College
• Think Like a Forest by Ben Rawlence
• Guardian: ‘We create changemakers’: the new UK college dedicated to climate crisis
• BMC and ecological imagination by Joseph Rowntree Foundation
• List of alternative schools and earth centered curriculum centers
• The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies of Ecological Revolution from Below
• Britt Wray on Climate Grief
• Future Council
• Re-imagining education conference

Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.