The Journalist * The Preacher * The Community Organizer

One of the most valuable lessons I have learned has to do with balance. I’ve heard it said that we consume more information in one Sunday New York Times than a person who lived in the 1800s may have in a lifetime. Worldwide connectivity, negativity bias, and a capitalist economic structure sets the ground for an overwhelming amount of data often focused on bad news rather than good. We may be capable of consuming vast amounts of information, but to maintain feelings of happiness, we must input an equal or greater amount of natural knowledge and good news: time spent in nature, feeling gratitude, enticing our imagination, and listening to inspiring stories.

This episode of Knowing intends to lighten the feeling of why bother by showing how we may look unflinchingly at hard facts and feel upliftment and agency. We invite you to the inquiry, if balance is key to living well, harmony in the world may be the result. 

Our synthesis on this episode features: the career journalist, the preacher, and the boots on the ground organizer

LISTEN: https://linktr.ee/knowingpodcast

Interviews

Alan Weisman has reported from more than 60 countries and all seven continents for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, Orion, Salon, Vanity Fair, and NPR, among many others.  His international bestseller The World Without Us, now in 35 languages, was named Best Nonfiction Book of 2007 by Time Magazine.

Reverend Billy is a character by actor and playwright, William Talen. In the early 1990s in New York City he branded his act as a “new kind of American preacher”. Billy and his choir, Church of Stop Shopping, have been referred to by academics as “performance activism,” “carnivalesque protest,” and “artivists.”

Brad Lancaster is a teacher, community developer and designer of regenerative systems. His projects lowered the temperature in Tucson, AZ. He is the author of the award-winning, best-selling book series Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond.