Welcome to the first episode of a special four-part edition of our Luminaries series that focuses on creative work about watersheds. This special edition has been curated by Caitlin Scarano, a recipient of the 2024-25 Public Humanities Collaboratory Watershed Fellowship.

Caitlin is a writer and poet whose current project explores cultural, political, and ecological interrelationships within the Skagit River watershed, from the dams of its upper reaches out to the Salish Sea. During this four-part series, she interviews four writers and artists whose work on watersheds are luminaries for her.

Today, Caitlin speaks with author and longtime environmental journalist, Lynda Mapes. Over the course of her 27-year career as a reporter at the Seattle Times, and as the author of seven books, Lynda has earned numerous awards, including the Kavli Gold Award for Science Journalism from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a National Outdoor Book Award, and the Washington State Book Award for nonfiction.

In her work, Lynda centers connections between people and the natural world. Following a confluence of storylines about one of the largest dam removal projects in the world on the Elwha River, Lynda connected deeply with this watershed and the people who care about it. Caitlin talks with Lynda about her reporting and writing, and the ethic of relationality behind them, that led to the book Elwha: A River Reborn.

"Luminaries" is produced by the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University. This series invites people to share stories about writing and art that illuminates their environmental thinking or work.

In the final episode of "The Art of Reconnection" series, co-host Daniela Naomi Molnar speaks with poet and ceremonialist Danielle Vogel about the scope, power, and possibility of language.

Danielle is an experimental poet who is committed to an embodied, ceremonial approach to poetics and relies heavily on field research, cross-disciplinary studies, inter-species collaborations, and archives of all kinds. Her installations and site-responsive works are often extensions of her manuscripts and tend to the living archives of memory shared between bodies, languages, and landscapes. She is an associate professor at Wesleyan University and the author of several poetry collections, including A Library of Light, Edges & Fray, and Between Grammars.

Daniela and Danielle's conversation is an ode to the power of language — how the written and spoken word rings throughout the body, how it connects with extremely subtle forms of language both inside and outside our bodies, and how writing, editing, and reading become a ceremony.

Their conversation ranges from darkness to lightness, from cellular activity to glacial activity, from the personal to the collective. They celebrate the way language acts as a mediating agent between our material and immaterial worlds, allowing us to connect to and therefore mend our interior lives and our environments.

Daniela and Danielle invite us to wonder: How can language help us touch time? How do syllables and syntax carry memory in the same way a human body or a geologic body might? And how can becoming aware of the embodied nature of language help us connect across time, across lives, and across bodies?

This podcast series was produced by the Spring Creek Project, an initiative of the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts at Oregon State University. The series was created in collaboration with The Arts Center in Corvallis, Oregon.

In part three of "The Art of Reconnection," series co-host Lee Running speaks with guest Ben Goldfarb to take us on an exploration of roads. Their conversation invites us to see these in-between places in new ways.

Ben is a conservation journalist and award-winning author. His writing has appeared in many outlets, including The Atlantic, National Geographic, and "The Best American Science and Nature Writing." His first book "Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter" won the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. And his latest book "Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet" was named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times.

Lee creates arresting objects using cast iron, enamel, glass, bone, and handmade paper. Her work intimately explores the impact of human-built systems on the natural world, often incorporating the bodies and bones of animals killed on roads. She invites her audiences to renew their sense of kinship with non-human beings.

Lee and Ben have each spent a great deal of time thinking about, walking along, and studying roads. Throughout this conversation, the two discuss this edge landscape, the species that live and die there, and how these arteries of civilization impact non-human beings and ways of life.

Their conversation invites us to wonder how systems designed to connect people and places actually function to separate us from place and from each other. And they talk about how their art and writing call on us to take notice, to see, hear, feel, consider, and connect to the places we speed past.

This podcast series was produced by the Spring Creek Project, an initiative of the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts at Oregon State University. The series was created in collaboration with The Arts Center in Corvallis, Oregon.

In part two of "The Art of Reconnection," series co-host Daniela Naomi Molnar speaks with guest Marcia Bjornerud about the narratives, notions of time, and deep wisdom embedded within rocks.

Marcia is a writer and a structural geologist whose scientific research, which focuses on the physics of earthquakes and mountain building, has taken her around the globe. She is a contributing writer to The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, and the LA Times. She is also the author of the books "Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World" and the recently published "Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks."

Throughout Marcia's scientific and academic career, she has learned to listen to landscapes. She and Daniela discuss how the Western fallacies of objectivity and stability may act as a barrier to our innate capacity to notice landscapes not only with our instruments and hypotheses but also with our senses, our lived experiences, and our inherent curiosities.

Daniela is a poet, artist, and writer who creates with color, water, language, and place. She makes large-scale abstract paintings with pigments she creates from plants, bones, stones, rainwater, and glacial melt. Gathered from specific biomes she has visited, these paints become palettes of place with which she investigates the earth's site-specific capacity for both memory and resilience.

This conversation muses on the vast time scales of geologic change, the alienation and spiritual poverty of the modern Western world, and how careful listening to the slow-moving land may help rattle apart the cage of human exceptionalism that has plagued our current era.

Daniela and Marcia also invite us to wonder: What memory does the ground beneath you hold? How does connecting with that story change your experience of the place? And what might it mean for our collective future if we adopted a more geo-centric vision of the world and our place in it?

This podcast series was produced by the Spring Creek Project, an initiative of the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts at Oregon State University. The series was created in collaboration with The Arts Center in Corvallis, Oregon.

In part one of "The Art of Reconnection" our series hosts, Lee Emma Running and Daniela Naomi Molnar, engage in a rich conversation about the ways their place-based practices of artmaking have transformed the quality of attention they bring to a place and their appreciation for the deep memory that is carried by the botanical, animal, and mineral elements found there.

Daniela is a poet, artist, and writer who creates with color, water, language, and place. She makes large-scale abstract paintings with pigments she creates from plants, bones, stones, rainwater, and glacial melt. Gathered from specific biomes she has visited, these paints become palettes of place with which she investigates the earth's site-specific capacity for both memory and resilience.

Lee creates arresting objects using cast iron, enamel, glass, bone, and handmade paper. Her work intimately explores the impact of human-built systems on the natural world, often incorporating the bodies and bones of animals killed on roads. She invites her audiences to renew their sense of kinship with non-human beings.

Throughout their conversation, Lee and Daniela reflect on how foraging for, taking care of, and collaborating with their materials — from cabbage leaf, to deer bone, to ocher — has cultivated in them a nuanced attention to place and a profound capacity for holding seeming opposites: violence and beauty, loss and resilience, brokenness and repair.

They discuss how the intense sensitivity of their materials makes even the most prolific sources of pigment, like queen anne's lace, intimately site-specific; how noticing the ways materials respond to each other necessarily troubles Western notions of separateness; and how meeting grief with care and attention can reshape and heal our relationship to places of loss.

This conversation takes place shortly after Lee and Daniela's shared exhibition "Transformation/Reclamation" was installed at The Arts Center in Corvallis, Oregon, in September 2024. While in Corvallis, Lee hosted a group dinner on a roadside verge, calling attention to the often forgotten border at the edge of our roads. We enter this conversation by way of the artists' reflection on that experience.

This podcast series was produced by the Spring Creek Project, an initiative of the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts at Oregon State University. The series was created in collaboration with The Arts Center in Corvallis, Oregon.

Welcome to "The Art of Reconnection," a new podcast series produced by the Spring Creek Project, an initiative of the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts at Oregon State University. The series was created in collaboration with The Arts Center in Corvallis, Oregon.

During this four-part series, place-based artists Lee Running and Daniela Naomi Molnar invite us to imagine ways of restoring our relationship to the land. Their artistic practices have helped them hold grief and love, anger and forgiveness, reverence and wonder. By creating art from a place—working with pigments ground from ancient rock or piecing together the precious bones of animals killed on roadsides—these artists are exploring ways to rekindle sacred connection to the land and the more-than-human beings who live there.

Through conversations with each other and invited guests, hosts Lee and Daniela invite us to slow down, look deeply, and explore how places that hold the scars of human impacts not only carry the memory of loss but also the steadfastness of deep, geological time and the possibility of healing.

Because of unequal gender norms globally, women are impacted first and worst by climate change, and yet, one of the untold stories is how incredibly vital women are to local and global solutions. In this episode, Osprey Orielle Lake joins colleague Ashley Guardado to explore the ways in which empowering women worldwide is essential to climate justice work. Study after study shows that we must involve women at every level if we are to succeed in areas of just climate solutions, social equality, and bold transformative change.

Osprey Orielle Lake is the founder and executive director of the Women's Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International, an organization that unites women worldwide in building the movement for social and ecological justice. Osprey works internationally with grassroots, BIPOC and Indigenous leaders, policymakers, and diverse coalitions to accelerate the climate justice movement, build more resilient communities, and transition to a decentralized, democratized clean-energy future. She sits on the executive committee for the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature and on the steering committee for the Fossil Free Non-Proliferation Treaty. She is the author of the award-winning book "Uprisings for the Earth: Reconnecting Culture with Nature" and her new book "The Story Is in Our Bones: How Worldviews and Climate Justice Can Remake a World in Crisis."

Additional resouces:

• Why Women: https://www.wecaninternational.org/why-women
• Women Speak: https://womenspeak.wecaninternational.org/

This talk is part of the series "Collective Climate Action: Inspired Organizing for Our Future" produced by the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University. If you'd like to watch a video version of this talk, it's available on Spring Creek Project's YouTube channel.

Where is the space for hope in a world where it is almost impossible not to feel hopeless and broken? In that "almost," argues journalist Diego Arguedas Ortiz. In this episode, Diego argues that climate hope is linked with action: both ours and that of others alongside us. He follows the case of climate journalism, which was traditionally a domain of science and environment reporters; now, it is populated by political writers, sports editors and photojournalists that want to do their part. This expanding landscape offers a template for others to find their own space in the climate movement.

Diego Arguedas Ortiz is Associate Director at the Oxford Climate Journalism Network of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford. There, he supports a community of over 600 reporters and editors from more than 120 countries as they improve the quality and impact of their climate journalism. A Costa Rican reporter, he has covered climate change as his main beat since 2013. His work has appeared in BBC Future, MIT Technology Review, Le Monde Diplomatique, Univision and Anthropocene, among other outlets. His work includes six UN Climate Conferences, the Panama Papers international collaboration in 2016 and on-the-ground reporting from a dozen countries. In 2015, he was the founder of Ojo al Clima, Central America's first climate news outlet, which he led as its editor until 2019. From 2019 to 2021, he worked as an advisor on climate change communication for the Minister of Environment and Energy of Costa Rica and the Climate Change Directorate of Costa Rica.

This talk is part of the series "Collective Climate Action: Inspired Organizing for Our Future" produced by the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University. If you'd like to watch a video version of this talk, it's available on Spring Creek Project's YouTube channel.