TALATERRA

Dinah Awino Kawino is the founder and director of Akadi Eco and Mentorship Ventures.

Akadi Eco is a consulting firm based in Kenya. It focuses on bringing environmental mentorship and sustainability solutions to educational and community spaces.

This year, Akadi Eco is leading an initiative called  Pendo Mazingira. Pendo Mazingira is Swahili for "Love Environment."

Awino describes this program as “an eco-sensitivity mentorship program...

Christina Carter is the author, illustrator, and founder of Gumnut Trails—a unique collection of Outdoor Adventure Guides that help families rediscover the joy of exploring nature together.

In this episode, we dive into how Christina’s own nature-rich childhood inspired her to create the “Lonely Planet of childhood adventures”—starting with four beautifully illustrated Guides across Melbourne.

Each Adventure Guide transforms an ‘ordi...

We are all in the attention economy.

Louise Karch (pronounced CARSH) makes sure good people like us break out not blend in.

Louise is delighted to speak us. She has a special fondness for environmental educators having been an Outward Bound Instructor.

For over a decade, she also was a career management professional, She was honoured to study with and support Richard Bolles, the author of the bestselling career/life planning in histor...

Episode description:

Join us as we dive into the world of innovation with Vanessa Thompson, Managing Director of The Sustainability Experts. Vanessa shares bold strategies for sparking disruptive ideas, seizing new opportunities, and leveraging cutting-edge technologies to transform businesses and careers.

A renowned keynote speaker and consultant, Vanessa partners with startups, VCs, and global corporations to deliver powerful solut...

Last week I launched the new newsletter. It’s called Transferable Solutions and the theme of the newsletter is “Environmental Skills, Reimagined.” When I started The Freelance Project, I wanted to explore what freelancing looked like in environmental education. The people we've had the opportunity to meet through the podcast have shown us there are dozens of ways to approach working as an environmental education professional. 

With ...

Today we get to learn from Kalliopi Monoyios, visual science communicator and lead author of "Visuals as a Catalyst for Climate Science Communication," a chapter in the book "Storytelling to Accelerate Climate Solutions" (Springer Nature, 2024).

In this episode, Kalliopi and I discuss the value of visuals in climate change communication. We discuss what effective visuals look like and also talk about creating culturally relevant and...

A conversation with Emily Coren and Hua (Helen) Wang, editors of Storytelling to Accelerate Climate Solutions (Springer Nature, 2024). They collaborated with 44 authors to create a resource addressing many forms of climate communication.

Each of the book chapters addresses a specific type of storytelling. You’ll find chapters about entertainment education, locally-driven narratives, youth engagement, Hollywood, climate fiction, musi...

Introducing a new feature to the podcast. This new feature is called INSIGHT. With each episode we’ll explore some aspect of freelancing and how it intersects with the environmental awareness work being done by independent professionals worldwide. In this first episode, we consider seven types of freelancing as described by Nikita Tambe, a contributor to Forbes magazine. Which type of freelancing best describes you?

Let’s talk. I am...

Maria Coryell-Martin is an expeditionary artist.

That’s right.

Expeditionary, as in expeditions. What type of imagery does this bring up? If you imagine an artist traveling with a scientist or an explorer, you are imagining things correctly.

This episode originally aired in 2019. Back then, Maria took a few moments to speak with me while she was packing for her trip to meet a scientist in Alaska.

In this episode, we discuss Maria’s jou...

Wendy Nadherny Fachon is an author, journalist, podcast host and environmental educator. Her work is published by Natural Awakenings Magazine, Sustainable Living News, and Dreamvisions 7 Radio.

After working many years in the healthcare industry, Wendy left her position to focus on children's health and wellness issues. She developed an afterschool walking program, which gave rise to her radio show, the Story Walking Radio Hour.

How ...

Today, we get to learn from Gloria Desanker, geospatial storyteller, founder, and Principal Consultant at Map Nerd Consulting.

More About Gloria

My name is Gloria Desanker, and I founded Map Nerd Consulting so that I could work as a Geospatial Storyteller to help others unlock the power of location-based insights. My services are designed to uplift community stories, especially communities of color. I offer tailored GIS solutions, vi...

In this episode, we get to learn from Dr. Tom Rhoads, an economist and professor at Towson University.

Dr. Rhoads shares his transition from sports economics to environmental economics and his research integrating economics into environmental education.

Dr. Rhoads explains that his interest in environmental education began about five years ago when he noticed a shift in the demographics of his class, with more environmental science a...

I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Bill Reynolds, Lars Wohlers, and Mike Mayer, co-founders of Experiential Interpretive Design, a coaching company they founded to help individuals, organizations, and sites develop the interpretive experiences they provide.

In this episode, we learned about the founders, their respective specialties, and why they founded EID.

Today is part 2 of this conversation. In this episode, I sit down with...

In this episode, we meet the co-founders of Experiential Interpretive Design (EID) -- Bill Reynolds, Lars Wohlers, and Mike Mayer. Collectively, they have many years of experience in interpretation and experience design and bring to EID the experience they gained from various roles in tourism, planning, heritage interpretation, environmental education, and coaching. We learn about the founders, why they started EID Coaching, and di...

Janice Kelley is the founder and program director for Nature Detectives, where children in kindergarten through third grade discover the mysteries of the outdoor world on their school campus, at home, at a park, and in their neighborhood.

She is the author of several publications, and when she was here before, we spoke about her book "Mornings on Fair Oaks Bridge: Watching Wildlife at the Lower American River." Today, we’re talking ...

Roots of Success (RoS) is an empowering environmental literacy and job training program that prepares youth and adults with significant barriers to employment to access jobs and career pathways in environmental fields and to improve environmental and social conditions in their communities. The program is centered around a federally registered Department of Labor Apprenticeship and Pre-Apprenticeship program and 10-module course. We...

Today it is my pleasure to introduce you to Jerry Willenbring.

Jerry is a community organizer, teacher, and guide. He is also a physicist and an electrical engineer who has taken on electrifying California.

Literally.

In 2020, Jerry formed Electrify California, a nonprofit committed to providing education and resources to guide the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. When Jerry and I met we talked about why he started Electr...

Erin Majeske is a mother, wife, dreamer, kitchen experimenter, wannabe gardener, nature explorer, and founder of Barefeet Farm School. When she's not in the outdoor classroom with preschoolers, she loves to enjoy the beautiful Pacific Northwest with her family and make as much music as possible.

In this episode, Erin shares how the need for a summer job led to her opening Barefeet Farm School. She shares her successes, challenges, a...

Today we get to learn again from Dr. Brad McLain.

You might remember my conversation with Dr. McLain about identity theory and the professional identities of informal science educators.

In this episode, we pick up the conversation where we left it and talk about Dr. McLain’s new book called Designing Transformative Experiences.

In his book, Dr. McLain leads experience designers through the  methodology he developed through years of wo...