Dr. SUZANNE PIERRE on Reshaping a Siloed Science /150

On this week’s episode, we connect with Dr. Suzanne Pierre, soil scientist and purveyor of Critical Ecology. Dr. Pierre is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley. She is trained as a global change ecologist and biogeochemist and researches the ways that climate change is altering the elemental exchanges between plants, soils and microorganisms in different habitats. She started writing about marginalized people’s relationships to nature and science in 2013 when she began pursuing a Ph.D. in ecology at Cornell. She’s now interested in the ways that human interactions with nature, mediated by science, labor, and freedom, have influenced local and global exchanges of the elements, energy, and social/economic power. This week’s conversation oscillates between the importance of nitrogen, building the knowledge commons, the many new entry points that climate change necessitates, and the ways in which we can root ourselves in frameworks inspired by Earth. 
 Music by Aisha Badru, Handmade Moments, and The Pit-Yak Aiodo