Transmissions
The Root Of The Matter: Woodland
Mae-Li Evens for Reduced Listening (UK 2022)
Mae-Li Evans for Reduced Listening (UK 2022)
32min Episode 4 of 5
Our lives are intrinsically entangled with the plant world: through the food we eat, the medicines we use, and the spaces we inhabit. In this five-part series, writer and maker JC Niala explores what the plant world has to teach us about being human. Join JC in conversation with growers, scientists, writers and activists on a journey through five different landscapes, from the familiarity of the garden to the seemingly hostile wasteland. We’ll take a closer look at the entanglements and stories underpinning the plant world to understand how plants can provide a lens on human health, history and belonging.
We think of forests and woodlands as wild spaces where we can lose ourselves in nature. They also provide us with a wealth of resources such as food, building materials and medicines. But they are also globally under threat of destruction. In this episode, JC Niala delves into the contradictions in our relationship with woodlands, and explores different ways we can think about them, if we are to use and protect them more wisely.
Lead Producer Alannah Chance
Produced by Mae-Li Evans
Music and sound design by Alice Boyd
The Root of the Matter’ is a Reduced Listening production for Wellcome Collection.
Listen to the series
Trade Winds: Ayurveda to Big Pharma: the Wonder of Healing Plants
Scrolls and Leaves (IN 2021)
Scrolls and Leaves (IN 2021)
33 min Episode 6 of 8 of Trade Winds
Trade Winds explores how movement and migration across the Indian Ocean changed us.
In a windswept mountain pass, more than a hundred years ago, a towering Afghan man hacks a Scottish trader to death. Then the killer disappears. A British officer is determined to track him down and rides along the old Silk Route into western China. No sign of the killer but he does encounter a book of Ayurveda unearthed in the nearby desert. The Sanskrit lettering details the power of Healing Plants.