A podcast series that explores how to orient your life around nature — told through the perspective of the planet’s lifeworlds.
To restore land we must restore relationship, and relationship must be cultivated through embodied practice. Together we travel across biomes and continents, meeting a wide range of characters who reveal these mindsets, skills and actions that are required to partner wisely with other forms of life.
We begin to change the world when we change our ways of seeing and being. Lifeworlds points us towards a deeper reformulation of core human identities, asking who it is we share the Earth with and what our human role may be at this pivotal moment in time. A key cause of the crises we face is precisely our disconnection and blindness to other lifeworlds.
My intention with every episode is to leave you inspired, and equipped, with a bundle of tools to expand your journey into nature’s astounding realms and become an agent of the Earth’s will.
Read below for more context…
I’M YOUR HOST,
ALEXA FIRMENICH
My work is guided by the thrilling question of how to rekindle the biophilia of human beings. How do we begin to see everything in nature as vividly alive, intelligent, and related to us?
I've tried to answer this from a range of perspectives, whether as a political scientist, sustainability consultant, journalist, investor, deep ecology facilitator, wilderness guide, essayist, and occasional poet.
I am the co-founder of Naia Trust, an animist investment vehicle that invests in early-stage nature-based solutions and scientific research. I was most recently co-director of SEED, a new biodiversity research and advocacy center housed inside the Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich. I am an Associate Associate at Leaders’ Quest, an international organisation that develops learning programmes for top executives and family offices. I am a founding board member of Terra Habitus, a Mexican environmental fund that operates large- landscape conservation and watershed restoration projects, and a Board Member of the ecological accounting firm Global Footprint Network.
Currently I am living between Switzerland and Ibiza. You can read more of my creative work on www.alexafirmenich.com
ABOUT THE NAME
“LIFEWORLDS”
Permit me creative license to deviate from the familiar word you may have come across in German phenomenology or the theories of Husserl, Heidegger, Patočka, Haberman, Merleau-Ponty and others.
This is how I will use the term lifeworlds:
A lifeworld is the world as each organism interprets and experiences it.
My lifeworld (above)
My lifeworld, your lifeworld
The world around us often can feel like this image, where we inhabit the same physical environment, but different lifeworlds/subjective experienxes. And your world might appear to be invisible and unknowable to me.
In reality, these spheres are not separate.
Life as we experience it is a bustling composition of all of our individual lifeworlds, blending and fusing to generate the collective lifeworld that we all share.
My lifeworld, your lifeworld, the butterfly’s lifeworld, the ocean’s lifeworld
The aim of the podcast is to illuminate these lifeworlds, making them accessible, visible and beautiful, and to shift the belief that humans are the center of everything.
