Brandon Ballengée - Biodiversity, muscular hope, and the persistence of life

Origins Podcast with Ryan McGranaghan

Brandon Ballengée has a unique quality of attention, one that is not constrained by traditional distinctions between art & science and working & living. He wants to share that capacity to witness to liberate everyone's imagination of what this world can be, a world we are of rather than just in. This ecological consciousness informs his work as a visual artist, biologist and environmental educator.
Show Notes:

• biodiversity (07:00)
• trophic networks (13:10)
• ethnography and buffer zones (15:00)
  • citizens getting involved to help biodiversity
  • participatory and co-creative nature of his work
• commons spaces (16:00)
• Garret Hardin Tragedy of the Commons (16:20)
• antiform and antidisciplinary (17:00)
• complexity (17:10)
• Malamp project (19:50)
• evince empathy not fear (21:30)
• consilience (23:15)
• the myth of either/or (24:00)
  • the complexity in us
• how do you do both art and science? (24:30)
• how we might approach conservation - connection (27:30)
• Ghosts of the Gulf exhibit (28:40)
• Stan Sessions (29:00)
• Taylor Energy Spill (32:30)
• What adaptation looks like (33:45)
• how we persist (35:00)
• giving yourself over to culture (38:30)
• Atelier de la Nature(39:00)
• Newton Harrison and ecological art (44:30)
  • Project about cajun prairie
• the impact of our actions (47:30)
  • Rebecca Solnit - Hope in the Dark
  • Poetry Unbound: Yusef Komunyakaa Praising Dark Places
• long view of time, the long arc of change (47:45)
• muscular hope (48:00)
• superorganisms and cooperation (50:00)
• civic engagement (50:30)
• Lightning round (55:00)
  • Book: Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold (and EO Wilson's the Future of Life)
  • Passion: food as a way to educate
  • Heart sing: learning about gardening
  • Screwed up: process to make crude oil paintings
• Find Brandon online:
  • Website
  • Twitter: @bballengee
  • Atelier de la Nature
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ five-song music playlist series
  • Brandon's playlist