Animate Earth Talks
Animate Earth offers regular free online conversations with a host of friends, contributors and speakers with an animist worldview. All our free talks are recorded and made available for as a community resource.
Please register and join us live for our latest upcoming talks as we love to hear your questions and comments.
Follow our YouTube channel for regular updates.
Talks
Animate Earth Annual Confluence 2025
Animate Earth Annual Confluence 2024
Animate Earth Annual Confluence 2023
Recorded Talks
Land Song of Scotland with Madge Bray & Malin Lewis
How do we bring ourselves back into the conversations of nature and the songs of the land? We bring together two ‘musical medicine makers’ from the heart of Scotland who are working with the harmonies and sounds of the human, through using traditional instruments and voice, to bring us back into balance and harmony with the ‘more than human’ world. Madge Bray is the holder of a indigenous Scottish tradition of keening as a way of ritual grief tending that brings us back into relationship with each other and the land and Malin Lewis, working with the old indigenous way of the bagpipes, to articulate the songs emerging from the landscape around us.
Standing Up For The More Than Human with Sam Lee & Angharad Wynne
This talk with Sam Lee marks the start of a 6 month programme songs of Return, exploring the meeting points between animate art, activism, science and spirituality with the aim of helping you become an agent for change. Sam Lee encourages communities to create their own cultural connections with nature through storytelling, art, and shared experiences. Meaningful environmental change often begins with stories and emotional engagement rather than data alone, and everyone can play a role in protecting the natural world.
Of This That Call The Rain with Hanien Conradie & Colin Campbell
In African traditional practice, the Rainmaker works on behalf of their village to restore balance and harmony by making beauty, repairing damage and offering gifts at the rivers and springs in gratitude for the rain. By painting tree stumps with ochre, by replanting where the earth is exposed, by making exquisite arrangements of the natural materials of place, the clouds themselves cannot help but be allured to release their waters from the sky.
Old Songs Singing In Our Bones with Angharad Wynne
Only a few generations ago our ancestors listened to the trees, took counsel of rivers, sat vigil with fire and sought guidance from mountains – it was as commonplace as breaking bread. This bone knowing still sings in our blood, though it’s often suppressed or kept secret for fear of seeming weird or out of step with our modern world. And yet, reclaiming our birthright – that of deep connection and inter-being with all life is becoming increasingly vital as we battle the burn out, disconnect, anxiety and a dragging sense of separation served up to us by our modern modes of living. Reclaiming our wild, falling in love with our instinctive, imaginative animal selves and attuning to our place as a keystone species in the web of life is a crucial personal step in building a future in which all beings can thrive on this beautiful Earth.
Listening To The Land with Manda Scott & Colin Campbell
Recorded for our Listening To The Land Podcast in collaboration with The Real Farming Trust this episode asks: What can we learn from indigenous traditional knowledge as we remember and build our relationship with the land? Do we need to look for the fragments of ancient knowledge and practice in the places we find ourselves, or can we develop a capacity for reciprocity and understanding through our own ability to listen?
Magical Land with With Sue Davidoff, Allan Kaplan and Hanien Conradie
In Afrikaans, the name Towerland means Magical Land. Join us for a visit to Towerland with Sue Davidoff, Allan Kaplan and Hanien Conradie, a mountain wilderness on the South Cape of Africa, thought to be an origin place and still carrying the memories of our ancient ancestors, the First People. For many years this land has been stewarded in service to the wider web of life. Now it seems as though the fissure between ourselves and the natural world does not exist, making it one of the rare places on earth that we can still experience the relationship our earliest ancestors may have had with the world around them.
Breathing The Oceans Alive with Eleanor O’Hanlon
Eleanor is a writer and conservationist, with a passion for re-connecting with the inner, spiritual dimension of our relationship with wild animals and the natural world. Her book Eyes of the Wild Journeys of Transformation with the Animal Powers takes the reader on a remarkable journey of close encounters with whales, wolves, polar bears, brown bears and wild horses, in the company of indigenous guides and field biologists who are renewing ancient ways of finding inner connection with the wild.
Trauma & The Land
Subtle Energies of Nature with Patrick MacManaway
A talk with ‘the land whisperer’, Patrick MacManaway. A renowned psychic who works with farmers all over the world, he will be exploring how we can use the subtle energies and flows of nature to better manage our relationships with the land, the crops and the animal and human communities.
The Land Speaks: Irish Myth & Magic with Manchán Magan
Our ancestors developed a uniquely nature-focused society, centred on esteemed poets, seers, monks, healers and wise women who were deeply connected to the land. They used this connection to the cycles of the natural world – from which we are increasingly dissociated – as an animating force in their lives.
Manchán Magan traces the footsteps of our animate ancestors across the bogs, rivers and mountains of Ireland, unearthing remnants of myth, magic and language to remind us that we can still listen to the land speak.
The Essentials of Ritual with Colin Campbell
Many of us are beginning to realise that the challenges we face, both personally and in our collectives, are not being solved by the logical, rational, materialistic interventions we are making in the world. A different way of working is required, which calls us into relationship with the unseen forces and flows and deeper levels of reality that surround us.
Ritual is one way of working with these invisible processes and all who have used these archaic and magical processes are aware, from experience, that calls are answered, that the world itself does respond, that there is possibility for reciprocity and conversation with the ineffable. And many are also aware that when we make these calls, when we perform ritual together, within a wider circle, we increase the potency of the working, both for ourselves and beyond.
Here we talk with Colin about what we mean by ritual, what is involved, why it works, and what room is there for us to develop our own practices as we cultivate a life that is in deeper relationship with the hidden world around us.
Divination with Colin Campbell, Angharad Wynne & Rachel Fleming
What if we lived in deep conversation with the ensouled world?
According to Thomas Berry, Nature itself is “the primary text” that contains all the instructions we need about how to live on the earth, balanced, interconnected, in awe and respectful of all things seen and unseen.
As long as there is wild nature the information remains, but in these times, we have forgotten how to read it. We have lost access to this interactive field of information that allows us to belong and work within the natural tides, cycles and flows of the world.
Conversations With the Land with Brid Walsh
Bríd shares her journey of connecting deeply with the land and understanding energy. Through personal experiences, including healing land trauma and reconnecting mountains, she sees humanity’s role in restoring balance with nature. Bríd Walsh, raised in rural West Cork, Ireland, has a deep connection to the land, shaped by her forester father and local traditions. As the third generation in her family to foster this bond, she listens to the land and works to remove energetic blockages, supporting healing and decision-making for individuals and landscapes.
The Common Wild Tongue with Patrick Jasper Lee
Is there a language that exists in the natural world that we as humans have forgotten? Is it possible that the world speaks and it is only us that can no longer hear? In this free event we talk with Romani Gypsy Patrick Jasper Lee about the old understandings of the common wild tongue and how we might begin to understand it again.
Land and Lineage with Daniel Foor
Many of us have been displaced from our lands and our lineages, from our relationality with the kin we evolved with and the ancestors who were buried in the ground we inhabit. Join us for this free conversation and practice session with Daniel Foor as we explore the possibilities of reconnection, belonging and participation in the world and the times we find ourselves in as a result.
The Spirit of Ubuntu with Sicelo Mbatha
Is it too late for humans to restore their belonging within the natural world? In this free event we talk with Sicelo Mbatha from the Zulu tradition about his potent and transformative approach to being in community in the wilds of South Africa, and how this urgent recovery of primary relationship with our other-than-human kin is essential for survival.
The Matter with Things with Iain McGilchrist
Who are we, what is the world, how can we understand consciousness, and can we really neglect the sacred and divine? These are all questions that are posed in Iain McGilchrist’s wonderful new book, The Matter With Things.
The Lore of the Land with Sharon Blackie and Carolyn Hillyer
What would it take to truly belong on this earth? How might we start the task of restoring balance and connection between ourselves and the rest of the living natural world?
Animism and Alchemy with Stephan Harding and Colin Campbell
Animism is the belief that we are one small part of a greater intelligent whole and within this whole we all have a part to play. This is a belief shared by our ancestors for thousands of years and with indigenous traditions around the world.
What would it mean for us to believe again?