Resilience.org

A group of children gathers in a forest clearing. Before anything else begins, they check in—with themselves, with one another, and with the world around them. Each child is invited, but never required, to share how they are feeling, something they are grateful for, and what they hope the day might hold. From there, the day unfolds. Some children wander toward a creek, asking where the water comes from. Others begin building shelters from fallen branches.

The Trump administration has failed to move the needle on its goal of boosting US declining birth rates and reversing the “fertility crisis,” which Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy recently called “a threat not only to our economy, to our national security,” and Dr. Oz said has left a third of Americans “under-babied.” Falling birth rates are not a crisis, but rather a positive result of greater reproductive choice.

Recorded on: Jun 29, 2026 | As America marks its 250th birthday, Nate takes a moment to step outside of the celebrations to seek out a wider boundary perspective on this milestone holiday. He poses the question of whether the United States has truly matured as a nation over two and a half centuries, particularly through the lenses of energy, ecology, history, and culture.

Europe bans hazardous pesticides to protect its citizens. Yet the same chemicals are exported to African countries like Uganda, where farmers apply them with minimal protection, in unlabelled containers, and without legal recourse. A landmark Swedwatch report, Poison for Profit, documents the human and environmental costs in granular detail. Farmers are poisoned in fields where chemicals banned in their countries of manufacture are sprayed without protective equipment.

There is a certain kind of sadness that comes with working in the climate space. I know I am not the first to notice. Some have called it “eco-anxiety”, “eco-stress” or even “pre-traumatic stress”. As a climate communicator myself, naming this sadness has always felt right, and yet somehow the terminology has always felt off. Now that I have been studying grief, I am finally able to put my finger on it.

Expansion of the human footprint over the past century has been, by all measures, explosive. Humans are the undisputed masters of Planet Earth, shaping it to our needs and desires. One result of our “success” is the pushing of many species to the margins. The vast majority of mammalian and avian biomass now consists of our food animals, our pets, and ourselves. We’ve dominated the planet largely because of our intelligence.

The contemporary bioregional movement emerged from the 1960s counterculture, anti-war activism, ecological thought, and back-to-the-land experiments, but the impulse behind it is far older. Human societies have historically developed in relationship with particular landscapes, and for most of human history, culture was inseparable from place. Today, such place-based relationships remain especially evident within Indigenous and other Earth-based traditions.

Back in June, I arrived at the 2026 ReFED Food Waste Solutions Summit expecting conversations centered on food recovery, diversion strategies, and emerging technologies. Those conversations happened. But I left thinking about something much larger. Across discussions on policy, technology, supply chains, and community partnerships, a different pattern emerged: food waste rarely appeared as an isolated issue. Instead, it surfaced as a signal of deeper system failures and missed connections.

The world’s most biodiverse nation, Brazil, has belatedly published its UN plan for halting and reversing nature decline by the end of this decade. Brazil is home to 10-15% of all known species on Earth, 64% of the Amazon rainforest and it supplies 10% of global food demand, according to official estimates.

What if the crises of our time are not just ecological or political, but also mythological? Poet and author Sophie Strand joins Human Nature Odyssey for a wide-ranging conversation about stories, illness, ecology, and transformation. Drawing from mythology, religion, folklore, and her own experience living with chronic illness, Sophie explores how the stories we inherit shape our relationship to the living world—and what happens when those stories no longer serve us.