Compost for the soul roundup: April 2025

Welcome to this month’s compost for the soul roundup!

It’s no secret that I spend a lot of time consuming all sorts of different media about our relationship with the land and the planet more generally. Quite a lot of this is captured in my monthly CPD roundups, but some is not exactly CPD in the conventional sense (and frankly I already do more than enough to meet the requirements of my professional bodies). And rather than letting these brilliant sources of inspiration go un-noted, I share them here, in a monthly roundup of inspiring and moving blogs, podcasts, films, articles, etc.

The idea is to showcase a few things every month that have either shifted my thinking or that have in some other way inspired, uplifted or motivated me over the month. They represent words and ideas that have taken root in my mind, and I offer them to you now, in the hope that you will find fertile ground in your life too.

And if you don’t want to wait a whole month for the next roundup, you might want to follow me on Instagram, where I share one of these every week. In the meantime, you can find previous summaries here.

Hard Choices, a special episode of the Dust podcast

A sci-fi podcast might seem like a bit of an unusual choice, but my goal with these posts was always to share things that I find inspiring, whether they’re directly related to sustainability or not. I haven’t shared a quote from this episode, as it’s quite plot-driven, and I don’t want to give anything away, but here is the synopsis from the show notes:

A group of alien explorers stumble upon a derelict human spaceship in the far reaches of space, revealing heartbreaking truths of their species’ entire history.

Again, without wishing to give too much away, this mini-series (Insurance, Hard Choices, and Through the Eye of the Needle) seem to have been chosen to celebrate humanity’s very best qualities – courage, empathy, friendship and loyalty. Interestingly, in these universes, these characteristics are enhanced through technology, rather than inhibited. In that sense, they’re a sort of anti-Black Mirror. They’re all well worth a listen, and Through the Eye of the Needle is just as relevant in today’s political context.

Available at: https://shows.acast.com/dustpodcast/episodes/specialepisode-hardchoices

The Scriptorium of Nature: The Yew, On Love by Rachel Fleming

I’m a recent subscriber to this particular Substack, but I’ve loved everything that has come out of it since. As I understand it, the writer, Dr Rachel Fleming, is part of the Animate Earth Collective, who ran a session on rituals at this year’s Oxford Real Farming Conference. Sadly it clashed with another session, and I haven’t had a chance to catch up yet (if it was even recorded), but if this was the tone of the session, I definitely need to.

“I, this yew tree, Eo, find that love is about committing to a piece of ground, as far down and as far up as you can reach into it. It is the intimacy with every being you share it with, however fleeting their experience of this life, however fast their heart beats against the slow heartbeat of your own. It is about knowing every breath of the air, every brush of delicate feather, every blind tender touch of those who move against you underground. It is the gentle dance with those that stand beside you, respecting these dear friends who cannot fail across the eons.”

Available at: https://thecommonwildtongue.substack.com/p/the-scriptorium-of-nature

Find Your People, by Drew Holcomb & The Neighbors

Every so often, you come across a song that perfectly encapsulates how you’re feeling in a particular moment. And this celebration of friendship and connection does just that – and to a particularly catchy tune as well!

You got to find your people
The ones that make you feel alright
That tell you the truth and wish you well
You got to find your people
Then you’ll find yourself.

Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDVl3WHoymI

Lyrebirds, famed for their mimicry, are also forest farmers, by the British Ecological Society

Having started the month with sci-fi, we’re definitely ending it firmly back on Planet Earth, albeit a fairly flung part of it from me! This is a relatively short piece summarising a longer peer-reviewed article on an interesting behaviour in lyrebirds. The thing that I find interesting about this piece is not so much the behaviour itself, but the extent of it. Of course, all animals – including humans – change their environment in one way or another, and you can argue whether it’s “intentional” in the same way as human farming. But it’s interesting all the same!

The researchers recorded lyrebirds moving an average of 155 tonnes of forest litter and soil each year through this ‘farming’ behaviour, meaning that the birds are altering millions of hectares of forest ecosystem, a scale that they say is unprecedented in non-human vertebrates.

Available at: https://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/lyrebirds-famed-for-their-mimicry-are-also-forest-farmers/
Full article: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2656.70009