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...

Marta González is a Venezuelan-American physicist and complexity scientist whose research explores the dynamics of human mobility, urban systems, and sustainability through the lens of statistical physics and network science. She is a professor of civil and environmental engineering and city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where she also serves as associate director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center. González is internationally recognized for pioneering the use of large-scale mobility data to better understand cities and inform public policy. In this wide-ranging InterDialogue, González reflects on her journey from physics into complexity science and urban research, explaining how statistical physics provides powerful tools for understanding human mobility and the collective dynamics of cities. We discuss the emergence of urban science as an interdisciplinary field, the opportunities and limitations of mobile phone and mobility datasets, and how these data can improve transportation planning, climate adaptation, and the design of more resilient and sustainable cities. González also explores the challenges of translating scientific research into public policy, including questions of data access, privacy, and collaboration between researchers, governments, and industry. We further examine the future of urban mobility, autonomous vehicles, and clean energy, as well as the importance of international collaboration and expanding scientific capacity across the Global South. Finally, she reflects on the broader promise of complexity science for addressing some of the most pressing social and environmental challenges facing rapidly urbanizing societies. Timestamps 0:00 – Introduction and Marta González’s path into complexity science 5:01 – From statistical physics to human mobility research 10:18 – Mobile phone data and the emergence of urban science 15:42 – Sustainable cities, climate adaptation, and resilience 20:24 – Privacy, data access, and international collaboration 25:42 – Using complexity science to inform urban policy 29:32 – Measuring the impact of remote work...

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

Omar Prias is an electrical engineer, professor at the National University of Colombia, and former president of the Colombian Energy and Gas Regulatory Commission (CREG). He has decades of experience in the energy sector working at the intersection between the academy, planning, and politics. This InterDialogue addresses the importance of decentralized energy technologies for sustainable development, the role of intercultural dialogue, national and global energy transition, and the possibilities of introducing advanced nuclear technologies, both new and projected, in non-nuclear countries such as Colombia. We begin by talking about the fundamental role of energy in all sectors of society. Timestamps 00:00 – Introduction 1:50 – Prias’s Background in Energy 7:57 – Industry and Energy Systems in Colombia 15:13 – Historical Development of the Energy Sector in Colombia; Energy and Conflict 22:06 – Geopolitics of Colombian Energy 26:32 – Hydroelectric Power in Colombia 44:40 – Intercultural Considerations and Energy Communities 53:15 – Intercultural Dialogue and Decision-Making 1:03:43 – Energy Transition in Colombia 1:13:41 – Nuclear Energy in Colombia 1:20:11 – Opening Spaces for Adopting New Technologies