Ashish Kothari is an Indian environmentalist, author, and founding member of Kalpavriksh, a non-profit working on environmental and social justice issues at local, national, and global scales. He has taught at the Indian Institute of Public Administration and the National Law School of India University in Bengaluru, coordinated India’s National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan process, and serves as a judge on the International Tribunal on the Rights of Nature. He also helps coordinate the Vikalp Sangam alternatives confluence, the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, and the Radical Ecological Democracy initiative. Over more than four decades, he has authored, co-authored, or edited more than 30 books, along with hundreds of articles. In this wide-ranging InterDialogue, Kothari traces his path from a childhood watching Delhi’s urban forests disappear into a lifetime of environmental and social justice work, and how that activism grew into Kalpavriksh and wider networks like the Vikalp Sangam, the ICCA Consortium, and the Global Tapestry of Alternatives. We discuss the biocultural and ideological diversity of the Indian subcontinent, his concept of “outscaling” as an alternative to conventional growth models, and how Adivasi and indigenous rights in India compare with frameworks in Latin America, shaped by very different histories of colonization and violence. Kothari also reflects on decades of writing—from a self-published newsletter in 1980 to the hundred-essay volume Pluriverse—and how it has supported grassroots movements and reached younger generations. We go on to explore the rights of nature movement in India—including the personhood granted to the Ganga and Yamuna rivers and the transboundary politics of South Asia’s rivers—before Kothari lays out earthy governance, his framework for moving beyond the legal limits of rights of nature toward a form of decision-making in which the rest of the natural world is already part of the process, illustrated through examples from a...

In this guest InterDialogue, folklorist and InterPlex content and operations strategist Rowan Glass converses with K. Brandon Barker, Associate Professor of Folklore at Indiana University Bloomington and editor of Children’s Folklore Review. Barker co-authored the book Folk Illusions with Claiborne Rice, introducing the term “folk illusions” to study children’s play forms in relation to the science of perception and cognition. He has also written on animal cognition and the folklore of science with comparative psychologist Daniel Povinelli, with whom he co-edited the book The Aesop’s Fable Paradigm. For several years, Barker led the Folklore and Science Section of the American Folklore Society, which he helped found. The conversation begins with two notoriously murky words: how to define both folklore and science when both terms carry so much baggage? Barker makes the case that “the folk” are far less naive than some scientists assume, and that folklore’s ethnographic methods can offer insights into problems like vaccine hesitancy and misinformation by taking seriously perspectives often overlooked by or inaccessible to scholars in other fields. Glass then addresses Barker’s research on folk illusions and what children’s play reveals about adultcentrism, body acquisition, and the science of perception. They probe the epistemological stakes of folklore scholarship in relation to the natural sciences, asking whether folklorists can or should advance universal claims and broad theoretical frameworks. They also talk about computation folklore and Barker’s work on the folklore of animal cognition. The conversation then turns toward humans’ seemingly inherent tendencies toward anthropomorphism and human exceptionalism—whether applied to animals or artificial intelligence. Barker asserts that our seemingly inherent penchant for projecting human qualities onto the non-human world might be more powerful, and perhaps more dangerous, than we realize. Timestamps 0:00 – Introduction 2:22 – Defining folklore 4:14 – Defining science and the “folk as naive” blind...

Jaishri Sanwal Bhatt is an Indian geologist and paleoclimatologist based at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore, where she combines scientific research with a strong commitment to public outreach, advocacy, and science communication. For more than twenty years, Sanwal’s work has centered on reconstructing past climate change and active tectonic processes through the study of cave records and other geological proxies, especially paleolakes and speleothems. Her research has spanned the Indian and Nepalese Himalayas, the Andaman Islands, and both the eastern and western coasts of India, engaging major questions related to earth systems, water security, and natural hazards. In this wide-ranging and engaging InterDialogue, we discuss deep geological time, the proposed nuclear energy transition in India, the value of interdisciplinarity and clearer scientific communication, Sanwal’s efforts to organize science outreach initiatives in rural India, and much more. Timestamps 2:22 – Sanwal’s background and introduction to geology 8:43 – Big History and the evolution of the Earth through geology 14:25 – Sanwal’s research 16:45 – Tracking historical precipitation patterns through sediment 21:10 – Connecting paleoclimatology to contemporary climate science 25:53 – Tracking and analyzing extreme events through rocks 29:07 – Comparing chronological dating systems 32:52 – Sanwal’s work with lake cores 37:34 – Tracking tsunami episodes in the Andamans 44:09 – Evidence of tsunamis in mangrove forests 49:00 – Local knowledge and community collaborations 52:32 – Nuclear energy transition in India and waste disposal 57:18 – Risks of geological repositories for nuclear waste 1:00:16 – Sanwal’s rural science outreach and education initiatives

Is self-organization the answer to the foundational question of why life exhibits such complexity? And can it also serve as a guiding framework for how best to save complex webs of biodiversity amid the onslaughts of the modern world? Self-organization exists throughout nature and socioeconomic structures. It refers to the spontaneous emergence of collective, complex order within a disordered system, due to localized interactions that follow simple rules, and occurring without external controls. While conceptually abstract, given that uncertainty lies at its core, the applications of self-organization are everywhere. Advancing our understanding of the non-linear processes within complex systems that drive self-organization is also becoming increasingly important for developing evidence-based policies in a world defined by interdependence and escalating stressors. Indigenous cultures, such as those that live within complex socio-ecological systems in the Amazon ecoregion, have long embraced these principles of uncertainty, interconnectedness, and non-linear dynamics. How will their wisdom, experience, and models of socio-ecological systems integrate with evidence-based policies for protecting the Amazon ecoregion? Safeguarding the Amazon is one of our world’s most pressing, complex, and vital global challenges. Among the strategies gaining traction, supported by increasing financial investment, is the intriguing proposition to transform a portion of the region’s immense biodiversity into a sustainable “bioeconomy.” However, these proposals, and the policy makers responsible for negotiating their implementation across boundaries and cultures, often lack an understanding of how both economies and ecologies self-organize and scale. Data-driven models of self-organization and critical collective phenomena in the natural world and within traditional Indigenous sociocultural structures, along with adaptive context-based frameworks, can help guide the transboundary development of a decentralized and circular socio-bioeconomy for the Amazon. Self-Organized Criticality and the Edge of Chaos Pioneering research on self-organized criticality (SOC) began in the 1980s and was made accessible to a wider audience by...

Mariana Gómez Soto is a Colombian social anthropologist, environmentalist, and activist. She holds a BA in social anthropology with minors in geography and biology, a master’s degree in social anthropology, and a second master’s degree in holistic sciences from Schumacher College. Gómez has worked closely with Indigenous communities for many years and has led key intercultural initiatives through her roles at the Gaia Amazonas Foundation and as a leader within the North Amazon Alliance. She is the lead author of a recent chapter on socio-bioeconomics and connectivity published in an assessment report by the Science Panel for the Amazon. Gómez also played a central role in founding the Amazonia Conectada coalition, which brings together the North Amazon Alliance, the Science Panel for the Amazon, RAISG, and Aguas Amazónicas—organizations with distinct areas of expertise united by a shared commitment to sustaining the Amazon’s terrestrial, biocultural, hydrological, and climatic interconnectivity. This wide-ranging InterDialogue opens with a discussion on dynamic, context-based frameworks for building and scaling a sustainable, circular bioeconomy in the Amazon. The conversation then turns to the importance of Amazonian connectivity, the evolving priorities of the North Amazon Alliance and Amazonia Conectada, and the critical role of interdisciplinary and intercultural education and collaboration in safeguarding the region’s future. Timestamps 0:00 – Introduction 1:42 – Defining Bioeconomics and Socio-Bioeconomy 5:44 – Envisioning a Circular Bioeconomy in the Amazon 9:52 – Developing Socio-Bioeconomic Trade Infrastructure 12:09 – Challenges of Modeling Bioeconomy in Practice 14:45 – Consequences of 2026 Elections for the Amazon 16:10 – Bioeconomic Product Identification and Market Integration 22:47 – Experiences Coordinating the North Amazon Alliance 24:27 – Analyzing Connectivity in the Amazon 31:47 – Hydrological-Terrestrial Interconnectivity 34:24 – Developing a New Methodology for Measuring Forest Connectivity 37:26 – Coordinating with Policymakers and the Public 44:11 – Experiences at COP30 49:49...