In this episode, Lucy and I talk about why the word matters, and why the built environment is a maternal mental health issue — narrow pavements, dominant cars, playgrounds without benches, libraries closing under austerity. Why Bogotá's manzanas del cuidado (care blocks) might be the most underrated urban infrastructure in the world. Why nearby nature — the cemetery five minutes from the door, the pocket forest at the bottom of the walk-up — is not a consolation prize but the entire point. How a community bioblitz, iNaturalist, and the City Nature Challenge can give a beloved patch of land enough teeth to survive a planning meeting. And the question I have been quietly reorganising my whole intellectual life around: what if we stopped asking how nature heals us, and started asking how to design communities that don't require us to heal constantly?

Find Lucy at lucyfjones.com. Matrescence and Losing Eden are available wherever you buy books.

You can see the rest of the life unfolding from there. Former Parks Commissioner of Bogotá, where he helped build more than 1,000 new parks and grew the Cyclovía program from 17 km to 130 km — now adopted in 350+ cities worldwide. Founder of 8 80 Cities. Two-term chair of World Urban Parks. Runner-up in the 2022 Toronto mayoral race after entering 100 days out and pulling 100,000 votes against an entrenched political establishment.

In this episode — recorded in person at the Toronto Botanical Gardens during the Urban Ravine Summit, where I'd just delivered the opening keynote — Gil and I dig into what cities already know how to do, and the courage most are missing to actually do it. We talk about why public engagement is broken in most cities, and what real listening looks like (hint: it involves pizza, juice, and a school at 3 p.m.). Why tree canopy averages mask brutal equity gaps — and the unprecedented redistribution Gil would push for if he were mayor. Why walking is the most underrated urban idea on Earth, and why "becoming a bicycle city" is the most overrated. And why elections, more than any master plan, are what actually change cities.

We also talk about the dying Cyclovía he inherited as commissioner and grew tenfold; Janette Sadik-Khan's pedestrianization of Times Square; Anne Hidalgo's car-free schoolyards in Paris (350 and counting); the Texas border towns where every public school is locked at 4 p.m. while one in three children doesn't have a park within walking distance; what Tirana, Malmö, and Rotterdam are doing that more famous cities aren't; and the simple thing Gil does mid-run when his heart rate hits 145 — which I have since tried, and which works.

Plus the line I haven't been able to stop replaying since we sat down: "Engagement shouldn't be tokenism. It should be real listening."

Find Gil at gpenalosa.ca and 880cities.org. Sign up for his free Cities for Everyone webinar series — every other Tuesday at 11 a.m. ET.

Nature isn't just disappearing from our landscapes. It's disappearing from our minds.

In this episode, I sit down with Prof. Hans Van Dyck, behavioral ecologist at UCLouvain and head of the Behavioural Ecology and Conservation group, to talk about what happens to a species — and a society — when children grow up without meaningful contact with the living world.

We get into the winners and losers of human-altered landscapes, and where Homo sapiens really sits on that spectrum. We talk about niche construction and its hidden cost — how we built a world for ourselves, and what we quietly subtracted in the process. Hans walks me through Robert Pyle's devastating 1978 concept of the "extinction of experience," and why disconnection compounds across generations. We get into shifting baselines — why each generation inherits a smaller idea of what "normal" nature looks like, without knowing it. And we talk about the move from nature blindness to biophobia: the teacher who brought tissues for children to clean their hands after touching plants, the teenagers who fled a butterfly on a café terrace, the children in hazmat suits at a tree-planting (a story Adrian Wong from SUGi first told me in S6E7).

Hans also makes a compelling case for school yards as one of the highest-leverage interventions available to us — for biodiversity, for reduced bullying, and as an equalizer for children whose families can't drive to the countryside on weekends. And he reminds us that you don't need to know the name of a single species to do this work. Curious children are already doing it for us.

Hans's December 2025 op-ed in De Standaard — "Children can no longer tell a blackbird from a sparrow" — is a wonderful companion to this conversation. He's also the author of Het orakel van de bosnimf. Van vlinders en mensen (Lannoo), and his scientific work is available on Google Scholar and ResearchGate.

Recorded inside NYC City Hall in November 2025, just after Zohran Mamdani's election as New York's next mayor but before his inauguration, this conversation traces how the job came to exist, why the Fifth Avenue redesign won't break ground until 2028 ("utility spaghetti" is the answer), and how 26 blocks of Jackson Heights became Paseo Park — one of the most ambitious community-led open streets anywhere in the world.

We also talk about finding the "public realm Avengers" inside government, why "1% for Parks" isn't a rallying cry most New Yorkers can picture, and Ya-Ting's three favorite public spaces in the city (spoiler: one is under the Brooklyn Bridge).

Since this recording, Ya-Ting has joined NYU Tandon as Chief of Staff and Director of Strategy in the Office of the Dean.

This week, Nadina speaks with Laís Fleury — original story architect behind the Netflix documentary The Beginning of Life 2: Outside and children-and-nature lead at the Alana Foundation — about why urban children may be the planet’s most underestimated conservation strategy.

They cover: nature deficit in megacities, why Rio schools aren’t using the national park in their backyard, how one teacher with no extra budget built a natural playground that became municipal policy, and the single most clarifying argument for why this work matters — for children and for the planet.

No national park required.

In this episode, I talk with Christina — Emmy-nominated TV producer turned urban greening practitioner, and founder of I Dig to Learn on Roosevelt Island — about what actually happened when 400 New Yorkers gathered to plant New York State's first-ever Miyawaki method pocket forest. We get into the wood wide web, why a 20-year career at Sesame Workshop turned out to be perfect training for ecosystem restoration, and what Christina did not expect when she handed 1,500 baby trees to 400 strangers on a Sunday in April.

We also talk about the woman who came back every week to water the specific tree she and her son had planted. About beach plums, the Lenape Center, and what Henry Hudson's journals tell us about what Manhattan used to look like. And about why a pocket forest might be the best gateway drug urban forestry has ever had.

Visit the Manhattan Healing Forest at South Point Park on Roosevelt Island — public, free, and on Google Maps. Learn more about the forest at sugiproject.com. Find Christina and I Dig to Learn on Instagram at @idig2learn.

In this episode, I talk with Ian Mostert — youth health worker turned urban greening practitioner, and Project Manager for Child and Nature at IVN Nature Education — about what actually changes when you transform a paved, fenced schoolyard into a green community space. We get into why the hardest part of greening a schoolyard has nothing to do with plants, why he starts every stakeholder conversation with childhood memories instead of data, and what happens to bullying, concentration, and teacher burnout when children finally get the outdoor environment they're built for.

We also talk about the boy who couldn't function inside a classroom but lay on his stomach for half an hour watching ants — and became calm. About the teenagers who had been dealing drugs on a schoolyard and agreed to clean it up every morning because someone finally included them in the community. About why Ian insists every greened schoolyard must be open to the neighborhood 365 days a year, and why that single condition transforms a school amenity into a third space that struggling families desperately need.

The conversation ends where I think the whole urban greening movement needs to go: the bureaucratic silo problem that makes holistic investment nearly impossible, why storytelling will get us further than data ever has, and Ian's dream of one million green schoolyards worldwide.

Find Ian and IVN Nature Education at ivn.nl.

In this episode, I sit down with Lauren Zullo, Managing Director of Impact at Jonathan Rose Companies, at their Midtown Manhattan headquarters to talk about what happens when you design affordable housing around health — and how nature fits into that equation. Lauren's work sits at the intersection of housing, sustainability, and the social determinants of health, and she makes the case that housing touches every single one of them: air quality, food access, social connection, financial stress, and the immediate environment in which people live.

We talk about how Jonathan Rose Companies brings nature into 19,000 units of affordable housing across the US — from trees for shade in the Bronx to green roofs that make rooftop solar more efficient in DC — and why the business case for green space isn't about ecosystem services but about building places people actually want to stay. Lauren also shares the story behind Sendero Verde in East Harlem, one of the largest affordable Passive House buildings in the world, where the courtyard follows a Lenape walking trail and the plantings were chosen based on the indigenous species that once grew on the site.

Find Lauren Zullo and Jonathan Rose Companies at rosecompanies.com.

In this episode, I talk with Dr. Geoffrey Donovan — forest economist, 23-year USDA Forest Service researcher, and founder of Ash and Elm Consulting — about why the health benefits of urban trees dwarf every other benefit we talk about, and why most people still don't believe it. We get into the emerald ash borer study that produced the headline "when trees die, people die," the Portland research showing the inverse — tree planting linked to decreased cardiovascular mortality — and why the strongest evidence sits at both ends of life: babies born heavier when mothers live near tree canopy, and people living longer in greener neighborhoods.

We also talk about biodiversity and immune development, including Geof's studies linking genus-level plant diversity to lower rates of childhood asthma and leukemia, why peak exposure to grayness may be a risk factor for ADHD, and what a pregnant woman can actually do with all of this research. The conversation ends where I think the field needs to go: science-based storytelling, why Geof reads Seamus Heaney to audiences after the graphs, and why trees don't make cities more livable — they make them survivable.

Find Geof and Ash and Elm Consulting at ashelmconsulting.com.

In this episode — the Season 7 premiere — I talk with Nuno Curado, founder of Wild Eindhoven, from a bench along the river Dommel in the center of Eindhoven. We walked from the High Tech Campus into the city along the river, barely touching a road, talking about beavers, birdsong, mushrooms, and what happens when people start paying attention to the wildlife that's been around them all along.

We discuss how Nuno, a newcomer from Portugal, turned his own process of discovering Eindhoven's nature into guided walks that help residents connect with the living city beneath the asphalt. We talk about the beaver that appeared five meters from a walking group and why he calls it "a very marking moment," and why finding your first mushroom changes the way you see everything after it.

The conversation also explores Nuno's work at Trefpunt Groen Eindhoven, a 25-year-old organization that acts as the voice of nature in Eindhoven's urban development — and a model I think more cities need.

This episode will resonate with urban ecologists, nature educators, municipal planners, and anyone who's ever jogged through a park without once looking up.

Find Nuno on his website, Wild Eindhoven, and on LinkedIn.

In this bonus, in-the-field episode, I’m joined by Adrian Wong of SUGi inside a 130 m² pocket forest at the Southbank Centre — surrounded by brutalist concrete, cultural landmarks, and constant city noise. Just two years ago, this space was solid concrete. Today, it’s six metres tall, buzzing with insects, birds, bats, and even owls.

We talk urban acupuncture, microclimates, the Miyawaki method, biodiversity returning at speed, why this forest has never been watered, and what happens when you give nature space above and below ground — even on top of a parking structure.

You’ll hear the city in the background, feel the temperature shift, and understand why this unlikely forest has become one of the most powerful proof points for rewilding cities from the inside out.

Recorded on location at Southbank Centre, London.

Want to see what this pocket forest actually looks like? Follow @sugiproject on Instagram for photos, videos, and updates from SUGi’s forests around the world.

In this episode, Nadina Galle talks with Kyle McLoughlin, a Board Certified Master Arborist and founder of Ironwood Arboricultural, from his two-acre, tree-filled property in St. George, Ontario. Together, they unpack why fungi should be foundational knowledge for anyone caring for trees — and why “there’s a mushroom, cut it down” is more often fear than good practice.

They explore Armillaria and other misunderstood fungi, how decay actually affects tree risk and failure probability, and why arborists should think more like physicians: diagnosing before treating. The conversation also examines how many urban fungal problems are created not by nature, but by how we design, dig, drain, and pave our cities.

Nadina and Kyle discuss the tools that could help shift tree care from reactive removals to proactive preservation — including pneumatic excavation, sonic tomography, and ground-penetrating radar — while returning to a core insight: better growing conditions matter more than any technology.

This episode will resonate with arborists, urban foresters, city managers, and anyone involved in tree risk, urban tree preservation, or the future of urban nature. By the end, you’ll never look at a mushroom on a tree the same way again.

Find Kyle and Ironwood Arboricultural at ironwoodarboricultural.ca and @ironwoodarboricultural on Instagram.

We’re sitting outside the entrance of Amsterdam’s public library, but you wouldn’t know we’re actually on top of a parking garage.

At street level, it feels like any ordinary city square: tourists dragging suitcases toward Centraal Station, bikes skimming past, a baby crying somewhere behind us, delivery vans humming in and out. It’s noisy, bright, busy — the usual Amsterdam blur.

What’s unusual is the shade we’re sitting in.

Above us is the canopy of a multi-stem tree whose roots never touch the ground. Around us are four modular “jungle blocks” from The Urban Jungle Project — 3D-printed structures made from recycled plastic, filled with a custom lightweight substrate, carrying four– to six-metre-tall trees. A tiny jungle hiding in plain sight.

Before The Urban Jungle Project arrived, this rooftop square was barren and brutally hot — just flat paving on concrete, radiating heat back into the city. The kind of leftover space you cross quickly because there’s no reason to linger.

Now: bees drift between branches, the air feels cooler, and people instinctively pause in the shade. A lifeless roof has become a place with atmosphere, texture, invitation. A place with a pulse.

Greening the “impossible”

This is exactly where Daan Grasveld likes to work: the spaces that shouldn’t be greenable, by any standard definition, anyway!

Roofs that were never engineered for soil. Squares tangled with cables and pipes. Balconies, façades, leftover corners of the city where conventional planting isn’t an option. All the places that fall outside the imagination of typical urban greening.

The Urban Jungle Project was founded to prove those definitions wrong.

Daan and his team have spent the last decade obsessing over a single question: how do you let nature thrive in places that weren’t designed for it?

Their answer is what he calls the three S’s: stress tests, substrate, and sensors.

Stress tests: stability in the sky

If you’re going to lift a tree into the air — onto a roof or public square — you have to replace what roots normally do.

Stress tests ensure the canopy won’t tip, shear, or tear free in a storm. Engineers run wind modelling, pull tests, and structural calculations so the system can sit on a roof without drilling, anchoring, or compromising the surface below. Everything remains modular, plug-and-play, and reversible.

Substrate: soil that isn’t soil

Conventional rooftop soil is heavy. Too heavy.

So The Urban Jungle Project developed a “jungle mix” — a lightweight substrate that’s less than half the saturated weight of typical rooftop soil but still holds enough water, air, and nutrients to keep a tree healthy. The goal isn’t rapid growth; it’s slow, steady, stable growth with full ecological impact.

Think of it as an urban bonsai with full-size benefits.

Sensors: seeing what trees can’t say

Sensors fill in the system’s blind spots. They track soil moisture, temperature, and electrical conductivity — especially important for projects in Berlin, Brussels, and Austria, where the team can’t visit regularly.

Sensors allow the team to water just enough, but not too much, and to learn across sites. Over time, the data sharpens, patterns emerge, and the system gets smarter.

Green-as-a-Service

The Urban Jungle Project doesn’t install greenery and walk away.

They call it green-as-a-service — long-term care, monitoring, and performance guarantees. Clients aren’t buying a product; they’re buying a living system that continues to function.

Remote data guides maintenance, while local contractors handle hands-on tasks. It’s a model built for scale: a distributed network of micro-forests, each linked by a shared intelligence.

Soon, anyone will be able to participate. Future jungle blocks will include QR codes that invite passersby to upload photos. AI will analyse canopy colour, density, and signs of stress.

Urban nature becomes visible, trackable, and co-managed. Stewardship becomes a shared act.

Still, Daan insists: sensors are not the goal. They’re an intermediate step.

The long-term vision is passive systems — water buffers trees can draw from capillarily, substrates tuned to hold just the right moisture, and evaporation models that replace constant sensing. Over time, trees become more autonomous and resilient.

For Daan, success means using the least amount of technology for the most amount of impact (me too!).

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When “nothing” becomes something

Of course, critics argue that trees belong in the ground. And Daan agrees. But in cities, the comparison isn’t between a tree in a jungle block and a tree in a forest.

It’s between a tree in a jungle block and no tree at all.

Here on this roof, the difference is tangible. Without these blocks, there’d be nothing — no shade, no bees, no place to sit. Just a heat trap.

With them, the temperature in the shade can drop by 13°C. Birds arrive. Office workers linger. Kids climb onto the benches. A “dead space” becomes a social one.

Inside the library, looking down on the canopy, Daan reflects on what keeps him going: pride, humility, a family business now spanning generations, and the strange, beautiful challenge of building nature where the city forgot to make space for it.

Every site is different. Every tree is individual. Nature has been refining its intelligence far longer than we have. Their work is about meeting that intelligence halfway.

This episode is about that meeting point.

It’s about the rooftops, garages, and forgotten corners of the city.It’s about designing for constraint, not perfection.And it’s about treating even the smallest patch of hardscape as a place worthy of shade, habitat, and care.

A jungle on a rooftop may look improbable. But when you sit beneath its canopy, feeling 13°C of relief on a hot Amsterdam day, improbability starts to look like possibility.

Happy trails,Nadina

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By the time I emerged from Oxford Circus station, I was in the usual London blur: buses exhaling at the curb, office workers weaving through tourists, sirens somewhere between streets, a thin strip of sky squeezed between glass and stone.

If you’d stopped me right there and said, “You’re standing in the middle of a National Park City,” I probably would have raised an eyebrow.

But that’s exactly where I was headed: London National Park City HQ, just a short walk from the junction that appears on Monopoly boards and traffic reports. A “visitor centre” not for a distant wilderness, but for the city itself.

Inside, the energy is different. Plants on shelves. Big green maps on the walls. People wandering in for an open day, asking some version of the same question: So… what is this?

When I ask Mark Cridge, the director of National Park City Foundation and London National Park City, he laughs.

“People hear ‘National Park City’ and go, ‘Wow, I love it… what is it?’” he says. “That emotional reaction is the door we walk through.”

He tells me that in a normal National Park, your first stop is the visitor centre: you grab a map, learn the trails, find out where you can swim or hike, and what to watch for this season. They wanted a similar place for Londoners who don’t think of themselves as “nature people” at all—the ones on their lunch break, the ones who didn’t come looking for nature, but might discover it anyway.

“A National Park City is a special place where people connect with nature,” Mark explains. “And we use that connection as a starting point to reimagine what our cities could and should be like over the next couple of decades.”

Not just a few more trees on the edges. A different story about the whole city.

The map that changed the story

Every movement needs a beautiful object to make its idea hard to unsee. For London National Park City, that object was a map.

Years ago, the design studio Urban Good—founded by the wickedly talented Charlie Peel, whom I had the joy of working with on the Urban Nature Amsterdam Map—took a classic Ordnance Survey–style map of London and quietly rewired it. Streets and buildings were pushed into the background; parks, rivers, canals, front gardens, playing fields, and scraps of scrub were pulled forward. The result looks less like a street map and more like a circulatory system: green and blue veins running through the body of the city.

“For a city everyone imagines as grey and sprawling, it turns out London is over 50% green and blue space,” Mark says. “When you count all the parks, rivers, canals, gardens, and trees.”

Maps are never neutral. They tell you what matters. Most city maps say: the “real” city is buildings and roads; nature is decoration. The London National Park City map flips that logic: nature is the structure. Everything else has to negotiate around it.

Half the city already green and blue. Half still up for grabs.

In 2019, after years of work by explorer and educator Daniel Raven-Ellison and a coalition of citizens, organisations, and the Mayor, London was formally recognised as the world’s first National Park City.

It wasn’t a trophy for being done.

“It’s not an award,” Mark stresses. “We’re not saying London is perfect. We’re saying this place has recognised the problem and is willing to share responsibility for doing things differently.”

That willingness is captured in the London National Park City Charter: seven commitments that thread nature through everything from housing and transport to culture, health, and play. Clean air. Swimmable rivers and canals. More space for wildlife, more opportunities to be outside together, and new ways of making decisions that take nature seriously rather than treating it as an afterthought.

After the confetti of that first announcement came a harder, quieter question.

“Okay,” Mark says. “Now what?”

A movement that has to move without you

When he joined as director three years ago, Mark realised they weren’t just managing a project. They were trying to steward a story.

He keeps coming back to a line from the book New Power by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms: “It’s only a movement if it moves without you.”

“If everything depends on a small central team,” he says, “we’ll never move fast enough for the emergencies we’re in.”

Those emergencies stack on top of one another: climate crisis, biodiversity collapse, loneliness, kids growing up with no independent time outdoors, and no sense of belonging in green spaces.

In an emergency, you use every means at your disposal. You don’t ask, “How can our organisation do more?” You ask, “How can thousands of other people do more, together?”

The Rangers

For London National Park City, that means focusing their limited energy on two things: celebrating what’s already working, and growing a network of “Rangers.”

The celebration piece is straightforward: find the people already doing interesting work, tell their stories, and make it easier for others to copy them. That matters in an emergency: proof that something is possible is often the most powerful fuel.

The second piece is more unusual. Rangers are not uniformed park staff patrolling big landscapes. They are people already doing things in the city’s overlooked corners: the ones running the community garden, organising the children’s nature club, restoring a local pond, planting street trees.

Many of them felt isolated, like their project was a one-off. The Ranger programme gives them a shared identity, a peer community, and practical support.

“We want the Ranger community to be as diverse as London,” Mark says. “Because London is one of the most diverse cities in the world.”

He tells me about Divya. She works a standard nine-to-five, but her passion is fruit trees—especially the unexpected, exotic ones tucked into backyards and side streets. She runs Fruity Walks, an Instagram account and walking series that charts these trees across the city.

She’ll spot a fig or guava leaning over a fence, knock on the door, and ask: how did this tree get here? Often, the answer is a story of migration—a parent or grandparent bringing seeds from another country, planting them as an anchor in a new place. Divya collects those stories and turns them into walks: people literally tasting the city’s cultural history as they go.

Then there’s Katie, a Ranger involved with an allotment site in Newham. She is, by Mark’s account, a powerhouse of community energy, but becoming a Ranger gave her something else: confidence and a sense of being part of something bigger.

She created a literal green sofa at the allotment—a place where anyone can sit and talk about how they’re really doing. Mental health. Money worries. Loneliness. From that starting point, people drift into gardening, into community, into having somewhere to show up each week where they’re expected and welcomed.

These are small scenes. A fruit tree in a back garden. A sofa in a plot in East London. But they’re exactly the kind of scenes that add up when you see a city as a whole landscape rather than a collection of separate projects. London National Park City’s role is to be the mycelium under the surface: connecting, feeding, and amplifying (this makes me so happy).

The National Park Cities around the world

The idea has already jumped continents. Today, there are four recognised National Park Cities: London; Adelaide in Australia; Chattanooga in Tennessee, the first in North America; and Breda in the Netherlands.

I like that the movement’s next adopters weren’t the usual superstar cities. Instead of New York or Paris, we get Adelaide, Chattanooga, and Breda. That makes the idea feel more universal, less like a branding exercise and more like a toolkit.

To help other places get started, the team created a “Journey Book”: ten broad steps any city can take to become a National Park City, from building a loose coalition to assembling a portfolio of evidence. When a city feels ready, its case is reviewed not by a distant expert body, but by a peer group: people from existing National Park Cities, campaigners from other places, and advisors who visit in person, ask questions, and check that the coalition is real and broad—grassroots groups, city officials, businesses, cultural institutions.

“It only works if it all works,” Mark says. “You can’t just have volunteers without government, or government without community. You need a shared ambition.”

Right now, most of that interest is in the Global North: the UK, Europe, North America, and Australia. Mark is clear that this has to change.

“The idea of a ‘National Park City’ is, in many ways, a very Western concept,” he acknowledges. “If this is going to be a truly global movement, cities in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific have to lead their own versions of the story.”

The colours shift with the climate: greener, healthier and wilder in London; greener, healthier and cooler in Adelaide; greener, healthier and browner in a desert city where success might mean shade and soil moisture rather than lush lawns. Indigenous knowledge and local cosmologies have to shape that work, rather than squeezing every place into a London-shaped mould.

The core remains the same: people and nature belong together in cities, not in opposition.

The movements in the movement

Lately, Mark and his colleagues have been asking a question that sounds simple but carries sharp edges: if your city is a National Park City, what new rights should people and nature have there?

One example is the right to grow. On public land that’s suitable for it, the default should be yes to growing food and plants, not no-unless-you-convince-us. Cities like Hull and some London boroughs are experimenting with this. It’s not about turning every street into a farm; it’s about permitting people to reconnect with soil, seasons, and where their food comes from.

Another is the right to access: a genuine right to move through and enjoy paths, riverbanks, and green spaces that, on paper, may already be public but in practice are fenced off, unwelcoming, or unsafe.

There’s a right to decide: building citizens’ assemblies, participatory budgeting, and “legislative theatre” into how decisions about land, water, and climate are made. Because if the decision-making system doesn’t change, the outcomes won’t either.

And there’s the right to swim: a movement called Swimmable Cities argues that rivers, canals, and lakes should be clean enough to swim in. When you take that as a starting point, the next questions become practical: what needs to change in infrastructure, law, and behaviour to make that true?

Declaring these rights is not a magic trick. But it does reframe everything. Instead of asking, “Is this realistic?” you start asking, “If we believe this should be normal in a National Park City, what needs to shift to get us there?”

Underneath all of this sits a more intimate issue: our own fraying relationship with nature.

Raising wild kids in the middle of the city

We talk about recent research by Professor Miles Richardson, showing that human connection to nature has dropped sharply over the past two centuries. Not the amount of time we spend outside, but the depth of connection. Our sense of noticing, caring, and feeling part of nature rather than seeing it as a neutral backdrop.

Richardson points out that a baby born in 1800 and a baby born in 2025 are the same baby: same eyes, same brain, same innate wonder at ants and leaves and puddles. What’s changed is what we wrap that baby in.

“We see kids lose that connection in their early teens,” Mark says. “And a lot never really get it back, especially in cities.”

So what does active engagement look like in practice? It doesn’t have to mean hiking for hours. It might mean learning the names of the trees on your street. Noticing when the swifts arrive each spring. Joining a local group that’s planting bulbs on a scrappy verge. Asking why the butterflies you remember aren’t around anymore. Writing to your councillor about glyphosate on pavements. Letting your kids jump in puddles instead of dragging them around.

“It’s about creating the conditions for nature to thrive,” Mark says. “And recognising you have a meaningful role in that, right where you live.”

He came to this work without a formal background in ecology. He grew up on a housing estate in Scotland, where you didn’t have to go far to find fields and hills. As a child, he’d leave the house in the morning and come back by dinner, feral and happy. It’s a kind of roaming freedom that feels almost unimaginable for many children today.

Now he lives in central London, spends more time than he’d like in front of a laptop, and doesn’t have an allotment or garden of his own. What he does have is a daughter, recently dropped off at university, who grew up “on a Monopoly board” and still craves camping trips and long walks.

“We never really made a big thing of it,” he says. “We just spent time outside when we could. Slowing down, noticing. She gets a lot of joy from that. That gives me hope.”

As a mother raising a young child in a dense city, I ask him the question I know many listeners hold in their bodies: Is it actually possible to raise a deeply nature-connected child without a backyard, in an apartment, in a place like central London?

“It has to be,” he says simply. “That’s where most people live. It’s not about perfection. It’s about keeping that thread of connection from snapping, through what you do together and how you talk about the world.”

Looking ahead five to ten years, there’s an old internal goal that makes both of us smile: 25 National Park Cities by 2025.

“Dan (Raven-Ellison) will hate me saying this,” Mark jokes, “but I always thought, if we don’t make it, we’ll just change it to 30 by 2030.”

Right now, there are four recognised cities and a pipeline of others: Glasgow, Cardiff, Belfast, Southampton, Rotterdam, and more. There’s growing interest in North America off the back of Chattanooga. Early conversations are starting in Asia, Africa, and South America.

The most interesting question isn’t how many cities get the badge. It’s what happens as more places start thinking this way. What happens when enough mayors, teachers, developers, parents, and kids begin asking, “If our city were a National Park City, what would be normal here?”

What does the Internet of Nature mean to you?

Near the end of our recording, I ask Mark the same closing question I ask every guest:

What does the Internet of Nature mean to you?

He pauses, then talks about network effects. The way one reconnection can lead to another. How a movement grows not in straight lines, but in branching, rhizome-like patterns: one Ranger inspiring another; one city making it easier for another to follow; one child’s joy in a local park nudging a parent to get involved; one map changing how thousands of people see the place they call home.

“The more we connect with nature, the more we bring others into that story,” he says. “That’s the network effect I’m interested in.”

Maybe that’s the quiet power of a National Park City: not a single grand project, but a million small rewrites of what a city is for.

A visitor centre tucked off a busy street. A green sofa on an allotment. A kid in a tower block who grows up knowing the fig tree outside their window has a story. A parent who realises they don’t have to move to the countryside to give their child a wild heart.

A city that stops treating nature as scenery and starts treating it as the main character.

Happy trails,Nadina

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By the time the lime tree poked me in the ear, I’d already given up on trying to look composed.

We’re sitting in the middle of the Forest of Thanks in Parsloes Park, East London. My hair is caught in brambles, something twiggy is definitely inside my sock, and there’s a yew tree nudging my shoulder like an impatient dog.

Four and a half years ago, this was a lawn.

Today, it’s a 10,000 m² forest of 30,000 native trees. Oak, elder, lime, cherry, yew. Layers of canopy and understorey so dense that, from the outside, the forest reads as a single volume of green.

And somewhere in that weave, there’s a fox.

Adrian Wong, SUGi’s UK Forest Lead, tells me about the time they flew a drone over this very forest to take monitoring shots. Later, reviewing the footage, the team froze on a frame: a fox, curled up, mid-nap, suddenly awake and staring directly up at the drone, as if to say: Excuse me. I was using that.

None of them even knew it was there.

We talk a lot about “creating habitat” as if we’re granting permission for nature to enter. In reality, these pockets of life feel more like invitations. The moment you loosen your grip on a piece of land, there is an almost shocking speed with which something else moves in.

Foxes. Tawny owls on the South Bank. Parakeets threading their way across the city. Kids who’ve never held a spade before.

All of them finding a way back in.

The size of a tennis court

SUGi calls these sites “pocket forests”—tiny but potent ecosystems. The sweet spot, Adrian says, is about the size of a tennis court: 260 m². He now shepherds 31 of them across London. Globally, SUGi has planted more than 250 forests since Elise van Middelem left the advertising world to devote herself to ecological regeneration just six years ago. And that advertising background is exactly what sets SUGi apart: storytelling is in their DNA (just look at their Instagram).

A tennis court is such a humble unit of measurement.

We’re used to talking about forests as something vast and far away. Places you fly to. Places a government protects (or doesn’t) somewhere out of sight. But a tennis court? Every city in the world has a hundred forgotten spaces that size—grass verges, leftover corners, rooftops, vacant lots, the dead zones around car parks and estates.

SUGi calls what they do urban acupuncture: finding precisely those overlooked sites and inserting a sharp, concentrated dose of life.

A stitch of canopy between two parks. A scrap of woodland in a schoolyard. A thicket on a traffic island where previously there was only noise and exhaust.

You don’t need a national park to shift a city’s nervous system. Sometimes, you just need enough needles in the right places.

The three rules of a tiny forest

The method behind these mini-woods is the Miyawaki method, named after Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki. Adrian explains it in three steps:

* Plant absurdly denseTwo to four trees per square meter. In conventional forestry, you might leave two meters between each sapling. Here, a young oak and a cherry might be just 30 cm apart. To a horticulturist, it looks like chaos. To a forest, it looks like succession fast-forwarded.

* Treat soil as a living systemMost urban soils, Adrian says, are “dead or very close to it.” So SUGi rebuilds them: composts, wood chips, sometimes nutshells to aerate, mycelium, worms—ingredients that keep releasing nutrients slowly over the first three years while the forest establishes. It’s not about feeding individual trees; it’s about waking up the whole underground.

* Mulch like your survival depends on itBecause in the first years, it does. Thick mulching keeps moisture in, suppresses aggressive weeds, and, crucially in cities, makes irrigation mostly unnecessary.

This year, London had an unusually dry spring and summer. Out of 31 forests, only three needed watering. Once. Survival across the network? Around 87%.

When he tells me that, I think of something else: Adrian is the only person responsible for maintenance on all 31 London forests.

One person. Thirty-one sites. Monthly checks. Some light weeding where bindweed might strangle young saplings. The odd remedial intervention.

That’s it.

In a world where we’ve been trained to see nature as something incredibly fragile—something that will die the moment you look away—the idea that one person can “look after” 31 forests mostly by paying attention and leaving things alone is quietly radical.

Messy on purpose

As a trained horticulturist, Adrian admits the hardest part of this work isn’t the physical labour. It’s the restraint.

Traditional horticulture prizes tidiness: pruning at the right time, deadheading, weed-free beds, and carefully shaped shrubs. The Miyawaki method asks for almost the opposite: plant densely, then get out of the way.

Leave the broken branches. Let things die where they fall. Allow weeds to speak for the soil—telling you, through their presence, where there’s compaction or deficiency. Intervene only when a species is about to smother the whole system (hello, bindweed), or when human safety is at risk.

“It’s still a struggle for me,” Adrian laughs. “You see something, and every part of your training wants to tidy it. But the weedkiller doesn’t just kill the weed. It kills life in the soil, too.”

We talk about aesthetics. About how English garden culture has exported a particular vision of beauty—manicured lawns, tightly controlled beds, clean edges—to the world. And how hard it can be to convince people that “wild” can be a compliment, not a criticism.

But as regulations like the UK’s biodiversity net gain rule (requiring new developments to increase biodiversity on site by at least 10%) kick in, wildness is becoming less an option and more a necessity. Grass mixes and quick wins have their place, but high-quality habitat almost always looks… untidy.

Not neglected. Not abandoned. Just alive.

A school by the runway

Of all the stories Adrian shares, the one that sticks with me most doesn’t take place in a picturesque park. It happens 300 meters from the runway at London City Airport.

There, there is a school for students who’ve been expelled from all other schools—a last chance to get their exams and a diploma. Many of them don’t have gardens. None had access to a safe green space on site.

The only available space used to be a parking lot. Over time, it became overgrown and dangerous—broken surfaces, rubble, places where kids could get hurt. It was fenced off.

When SUGi came in, they had to dig through 50 cm of asphalt and concrete before they even reached rubble. Only then could they start bringing in soil and building a forest.

There was, understandably, resistance.

Gardening isn’t “cool” when your world has taught you that toughness is a survival skill. When no one you know spends their free time in gardens. When green space is something you see in other people’s neighbourhoods, not your own.

So they started small. A few students. Some kids from a nearby primary school. A pile of tiny trees, just 40 cm high.

Because the Miyawaki method uses soft, prepared soil and small saplings, planting is physically easy. You can plant five trees in three minutes. The feedback loop is immediate: hole, tree, pat, next.

By the end of the session, the reluctance had transformed into competition:

“I planted twenty!”“I did twenty-five!”

Group photos show big smiles and bigger attitudes. Many of the pictures couldn’t be used publicly because of gang signs. But behind those gestures, something more interesting is happening: kids who’ve been written off by the system are, for an afternoon, just teenagers having fun in the dirt.

I keep thinking about that forest a few years from now.

Planes will still be landing. The noise will still be there, though softened by leaves. Polluted air will still blow across the site, though filtered a little more each year by bark and stomata. But the biggest change might be invisible on any satellite map: the memory in a young person’s body of what it feels like to plant something and watch it grow.

Corridors into other worlds

Another of Adrian’s favourite sites is in Battersea. The forest sits just a short walk from one of London’s most beautiful parks. Yet the residents of the nearby estate rarely use that park.

“Demographic divide,” he says. One road, and a world apart.

The local community garden approached SUGi with a vision: could a forest help create a corridor—not just ecological, but social—between the estate and the park? A green thread pulling people across that invisible line?

They built the forest on a raised deck, visible from the surrounding tower blocks. Parents send their children down to play there, knowing an adult in the garden keeps an eye out. From their kitchens, they can look out over an acre of green and see their kids learning how to plant, harvest, and get dirty.

It’s childcare, education, community safety, and mental health support, wrapped in a single layer of soil.

When we talk about the benefits of urban trees, we often default to numbers: degrees of cooling, percentages of flood mitigation, tonnes of carbon stored. All vital. All true.

But when I picture this particular forest, I don’t see a graph. I see a parent looking out the window, exhaling for the first time that day. I see a child running unsupervised—but not alone—for the first time in their life.

Those are benefits that never make it into a cost–benefit analysis. Yet they’re the ones that change how a city feels from the inside out.

Recharging the green battery

At one point in our conversation, we talk about mental health and the “green battery” feeling you get after time outdoors. Adrian is working with the University of Oxford on a study examining how volatile organic compounds emitted by trees affect anxiety, pulse, and mood in people spending time near these forests.

The idea is simple but powerful: good green space doesn’t just feel nice. It changes your body, your hormones, your ability to cope. The effects can last long after you’ve left.

Most of Adrian’s working days are spent in forests, moving from site to site. Occasionally, he’s in the office for a few days straight.

“I can definitely feel the difference,” he says.

So can I. When I go too long without trees, without soil under my shoes, my brain starts to fray at the edges. Screens feel harsher. Problems feel bigger. The world seems more brittle.

We live in a time where global crises feel relentless. A broken, fragmented world, scrolling past on endless feeds. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, small, powerless.

But you cannot doomscroll with your hands in the dirt.

You cannot simultaneously dig a hole for a sapling and refresh the news. Your attention—the scarcest resource of our time—has to be somewhere else.

Maybe that’s part of what these pocket forests do. Not just for birds and bats and foxes, but for us. They give our minds somewhere else to be.

Urban acupuncture, human resilience

Near the end of our conversation, I ask Adrian what the Internet of Nature means to him.

“It’s the connection of nature and humanity,” he says. “It’s understanding that we are part of nature, not apart from it. And that by putting your hands in the dirt, by planting a tree, your life can be improved so vastly. It seems like such a small thing, but it has such a huge impact.”

I think back to that fox, caught by accident in a drone shot, staring straight up at the camera. To the teenager trying to plant a tree upside down because no one ever showed him which way the roots go. To the little boy who planted four oak saplings in one hole, proudly announcing he was “making a really big tree.”

We talk a lot about resilience in the context of climate, infrastructure, and policy. But resilient cities require resilient humans: people who can tolerate uncertainty, adapt, and feel rooted even as the world shifts under their feet.

You don’t build that resilience only in meeting rooms and strategies. You build it in places exactly like this: under a lime tree, with brambles in your hair, soil under your fingernails, and a fox somewhere close by that you might never see—but who now has a home again.

Maybe that’s the quiet genius of urban acupuncture.

You look for the tender points in a city—its concrete deserts, its forgotten edges, its schools by runways and estates by parks—and you press a forest into them.

Not with the arrogance of “bringing nature back,” but with the humility of remembering: nature never really left.

We did.

And these little patches—no bigger than a tennis court—are how we find our way home.

Happy trails,Nadina

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If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with a friend or colleague who might love it too?

We’re walking through Philips de Jonghpark in Eindhoven — pines, oaks, understory saplings, the kind of layered canopy you barely register until you’re suddenly inside it.

“This park is so much more than a walk in the park,” Pieter van den Braak tells me. It’s where he comes for inspiration — and where, years ago, he began finding his way back to himself.

The quiet slide downward

In his late teens, Pieter had one dream: become a professional basketball player. When that dream slipped out of reach, he wasn’t prepared for what filled the space — drifting between jobs, no clear direction for his studies, days spent on Netflix and gaming, mornings without motivation.

Not a dramatic collapse. Just the slow, heavy fog of not knowing what to do with your life.

“I got lost,” he told me.

Eventually, he did something almost embarrassingly simple: he went outside. Carp fishing gave him an excuse to sit alone in nature, and those hours by the water began to shift something inside him.

“It made me feel part of the earth again,” he said. Not lonely — connected.

Awe, insignificance, and the reset button

We talked about the meme: go touch grass. It’s meant as a joke, but it captures something true.

Standing under old trees or in open sky shrinks your worries just enough to breathe again. Writer Oliver Burkeman calls it cosmic insignificance — the strangely comforting realization that your problems are not the center of the universe.

“It brings you back into the here and now,” Pieter said. And once you’re here, the world looks different.

What immersion really means

When Pieter says “immerse yourself in nature,” he doesn’t mean a long hike or a sweeping landscape.

He means:

* going outside without a goal,

* slowing down without effort,

* letting the surroundings reset your tempo.

A pocket park counts. Five minutes counts. A single tree outside your door counts.

“Start your day outside, not on your phone,” he told me. “Just five minutes. It changes everything.”

From personal healing to public storytelling

When Pieter tried telling friends how nature was helping him, most shrugged — I don’t know anything about nature.

That disconnect stuck with him. He wanted to build an online space that didn’t overwhelm people or shame them for not knowing species names — a place that made nature feel inviting again.

That became Nature Land (N8RLND), a media platform of documentaries, videos, and podcasts about nature’s impact on daily life. An antidote to doomscrolling. Inspiration instead of anxiety.

Their first documentary? New York City — proof that even the most concrete places hold pockets of wildness if you know how to look.

What the Internet of Nature means here

At the end of every episode, I ask each guest what the Internet of Nature means to them.

For Pieter, it’s simple: “A place where you can feel inspired instead of lonely.”

A place to connect with others searching for meaning, to rediscover curiosity, to remember that you’re part of something bigger.

As we wrapped up our walk, the trees around us felt less like scenery and more like steady companions — reminders that healing doesn’t always require a breakthrough. Sometimes it begins by stepping outside and noticing one living thing.

If cities want to support mental health at scale, maybe the first step is also the simplest: make it easy for people to get a five-minute nature microdose.

Happy trails,Nadina

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If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with a friend or colleague who might love it too?

We explore why large trees provide exponentially more shade, cooling, habitat, and carbon storage than saplings; how risk-averse maintenance has erased vital hollows and “imperfections” that wildlife depends on; and why the real frontier of the urban forest is private land, where most canopy sits and most removals happen. Jan Willem shares how Terra Nostra and greehill are using LiDAR-based smart inventories to create accurate, city-wide digital twins — not to replace arborists, but to free them to focus where their expertise matters most.

We also talk about Ukraine’s lanes of heroes — memorial trees that carry names, grief, and continuity — and what they teach us about trees as living memory, not just infrastructure. Technology can help us see what is worth keeping. But meaning is what keeps it standing.

When I arrive at the Natural History Museum in London, I don’t head for the dinosaurs.I stay outside.

Beyond the marbled halls and souvenir stalls, the Nature Discovery Garden unfolds like a living time machine — five acres of meadows, ponds, and hedgerows tucked into the heart of South Kensington. It tells the story of life on Earth across half a billion years in just a few hundred steps. But the real story here isn’t about the past. It’s about what’s alive right now — what’s learning, adapting, disappearing, and returning in one of the densest corners of the city.

Ecologist Dr. John Tweddle, who heads the museum’s Center for UK Nature and leads the UK Nature Recovery Research Theme, meets me in a glass-walled classroom overlooking the garden. He tells me the project began with a question: what if a museum didn’t just display nature — what if it grew it, monitored it, learned from it in real time? “We started to look at how we could use our five acres as effectively as possible to tackle the planetary emergency,” he says. “To connect people with nature and to do solutions-led research.”

What emerged is a living experiment: cables running beneath the soil, sensors on poles, microphones listening from the canopy — a publicly accessible laboratory. It’s not a closed research site but a shared testbed — open to visiting scientists, students, and community groups exploring new tools for nature recovery. The goal is not just to beautify, but to measure, understand, and share. To show what it means to care for nature while being watched by it.

The science beneath the surface

John calls it a “living lab.” The phrase fits. They test everything from soil DNA to insect calls to temperature gradients across paving stones. It’s a way to track how species survive and adapt in urban spaces — and how design decisions, even small ones, ripple through an ecosystem.

Take environmental DNA (eDNA), a method that reads traces of life from soil and water. “As an organism moves through an environment,” John explains, “it leaves behind tiny fragments of DNA — from skin cells, pollen, or waste.” In one year, just six soil samples on a one-acre section of the garden revealed around 2,000 species that the museum had not previously recorded in that survey context. Two thousand lives we’d been blind to — now illuminated by science that listens rather than captures.

And beneath the hum of the city, there’s another layer of listening — bioacoustics and ecoacoustics. Tiny microphones hidden in the hedgerows record the soundscape of the garden: the flutter of wings, the rasp of insects, the low thrum of traffic. Together, they reveal a portrait of coexistence — species adapting, avoiding, or embracing the rhythms of human life. “As soon as visiting hours close,” John says, “the corvids appear from nowhere. They’ve been hiding all day, waiting for quiet.”

Soon, they’ll add another kind of listener: automated insect cameras that photograph each landing moth or bee, training algorithms to recognize species the human eye might miss. These AI-assisted traps will run alongside traditional ones, testing what machines can learn from motion and wingbeat alone.

The data is still being analyzed, but already patterns are emerging: how noise pollution overlaps with bird song frequencies, how bats navigate light spill from nearby windows, how biodiversity hums differently after rain. It’s early-stage research, yet it offers something quietly profound — a way to hear the city’s living pulse.

That’s what this interview is really about: learning to listen. Not just through microphones or code, but through a shift in posture — from mastery to attentiveness.

The museum’s approach to biodiversity monitoring isn’t to replace experts, but to democratize their insights. To bridge the gap between what only scientists could once see and what anyone with curiosity might learn. “We want to make the invisible visible,” John says. “And help others do the same.”

Data, but make it human

Later, John describes how he spends the first fifteen minutes of his workday here, simply walking through the garden. “It grounds me,” he admits. “I need to be in nature every day.”

It’s an unguarded moment, but one that reveals the real heart of the project. The data has value, yes. But the act of being with nature still matters most. The garden isn’t just a monitoring site; it’s a place of recovery. Recovery from the commute, from screens, from disconnection.

This is the paradox at the center of so much of my own work, and of the Internet of Nature itself: how to use technology not to distance ourselves from nature, but to draw us nearer to it. To replace surveillance with stewardship.

Here, the technology isn’t hidden; it’s woven into the landscape. Visitors can see the sensor boxes, the wiring, and the microphones. Instead of alienating, it invites questions. When people ask, “What does that do?”, it opens a conversation. The science becomes public, transparent, and accountable. And in the background, all those data streams — soil, sound, temperature — flow into a shared platform co-developed with Amazon Web Services, creating one integrated “data ecosystem” for the garden’s living archive.

And that’s the beauty of it — science in plain sight.

Lessons in coexistence

As we walk, John points out subtle rhythms: how the birds return the moment the gates close at dusk, how certain species avoid paths when school groups flood in. These patterns reveal not just ecology, but coexistence — how human routines shape the choices of other beings. The garden is learning from its residents as much as they are from it.

That humility extends to their research design. Sensors corrode, data corrupts, hard drives overheat. Even digital systems, it turns out, have lifecycles. John acknowledges the irony: in trying to save nature, scientists can consume vast amounts of energy and storage. “Training models and warehousing recordings have a sustainability cost of their own,” he says. “We’re learning where the sweet spots might be — the right data volume to analyze, to store.”

That’s what I love most about this project — it’s not the perfection of the system, but its self-awareness. The willingness to ask, “How much is enough?” In a world obsessed with big data, the museum is choosing to listen more carefully, not more loudly.

John’s favorite phrase — one that has echoed in my mind ever since — is simple: “Data alone will not help nature recover.”

You could etch that above every environmental dashboard and monitoring app in existence. Because the truth is, the planet doesn’t need more numbers; it needs more care.

A model for cities everywhere?

The Urban Nature Project’s next phase isn’t about scaling technology — it’s about scaling learning. They’re now developing case studies for developers and municipalities: how to depave, rebuild ponds, or protect wildlife during construction.

“It’s the applied science we’re doing to tackle the conservation evidence gap,” John explains. It’s pragmatic, hopeful work — showing that restoration isn’t theoretical, but practical and replicable.

Beyond the lab, the museum runs community science programs like Nature Overheard and the City Nature Challenge — inviting students, families, and curious visitors to join BioBlitzes, log sightings on iNaturalist, and even study how road noise affects insects (a study designed by middle schoolers!). In this way, every passerby becomes part of the experiment, every phone a potential sensor.

I see a model here for cities everywhere: evidence-based yet empathetic, rigorous yet relational. The museum could have walled this garden off as a research site, but instead, they made it a commons — a place where five million visitors a year can wander, listen, and wonder.

Because in the end, biodiversity isn’t just about how many species live somewhere. It’s about how many stories we allow to coexist.

Not a monument, but a mirror

Before we part, I ask what the Internet of Nature means to him. John thinks for a moment, then says: “It’s how we connect different information sources in a way that supports nature… mostly about skill-sharing around recovering nature.” I love that — the idea that the “internet” in this case is not just digital, but human: a network of knowledge, humility, and repair.

As I leave, the evening light begins to hit the sedges and oaks, and I can almost hear the city exhale. The museum behind me holds the fossils and artifacts of what’s gone. But outside, in these five acres, is the story of what might still endure — if we’re willing to listen, measure wisely, and act with restraint.

This is what John has built: not a monument, but a mirror. A reminder that cities are ecosystems too, and that the data we collect should ultimately serve something quieter, older, and wiser than ourselves.

Happy trails,Nadina

We discuss why most city trees never make it past adolescence, why climate-ready trees won’t save us without climate-ready soils, and how stormwater makes or breaks survival. Erwin explains why tree professionals can’t afford to be “softies,” why spreadsheets might be the Lorax’s greatest ally, and how making civil engineers happy is the secret to long-lived urban forests.

Plus: the tragedy of cutting down trees before they reach maturity, what it takes to plant for 80 years instead of election cycles, and why, for Erwin, the city only truly comes alive when its people can sit in the shade of a tree.

We explore why our ecological crisis is rooted in a 300-year-old worldview, how oyster reefs once filtered New York Harbor daily (and could again), and why AI might help “make us all ecologists,” from smallholder farmers in Colombia to city dwellers identifying birdsong. Plus: the role of imagination in rewriting our relationship with nature, the personal challenge of writing a book with Jane Goodall’s final foreword, and why, as Tim says, “Nature is waiting. It’s time to come home.”

This podcast episode is brought to you by ⁠⁠PlanIT Geo⁠⁠.

Follow Nadina and the Internet of Nature Podcast on all social platforms:

Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/internetofnature_⁠

LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadinagalle⁠

Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/earthtonadina

This podcast episode is brought to you by ⁠PlanIT Geo⁠.

Follow Nadina and the Internet of Nature Podcast on all social platforms:
Instagram: ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/internetofnature_
LinkedIn: ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadinagalle
Twitter: ⁠⁠https://twitter.com/earthtonadina

This podcast episode is brought to you by PlanIT Geo.

Follow Nadina and the Internet of Nature Podcast on all social platforms:

Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/internetofnature_/

LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadinagalle/

Twitter: ⁠https://twitter.com/earthtonadina⁠

This podcast episode is brought to you by PlanIT Geo.

Follow Nadina and the Internet of Nature Podcast on all social platforms:
Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/internetofnature_⁠
LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadinagalle⁠
Twitter: ⁠https://twitter.com/earthtonadina⁠

This podcast episode is brought to you by PlanIT Geo.

Follow Nadina and the Internet of Nature Podcast on all social platforms:
Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/internetofnature_⁠
LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadinagalle/⁠
Twitter: ⁠https://twitter.com/earthtonadina⁠

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/internetofnature_

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadinagalle/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/earthtonadina

This podcast episode is brought to you by ⁠PlanIT Geo⁠.

Follow Nadina and the Internet of Nature Podcast on all social platforms:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/internetofnature_

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadinagalle/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/earthtonadina

Follow Nadina and the Internet of Nature Podcast on all social platforms:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/internetofnature_

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadinagalle/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/earthtonadina

Follow Nadina and the Internet of Nature Podcast on all social platforms:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/internetofnature_

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadinagalle/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/earthtonadina

Follow Nadina and the Internet of Nature Podcast on all social platforms:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/internetofnature_

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadinagalle/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/earthtonadina

Follow Nadina and the Internet of Nature Podcast on all social platforms:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/internetofnature_

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadinagalle/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/earthtonadina

Follow Nadina and the Internet of Nature Podcast on all social platforms:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/internetofnature_

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadinagalle/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/earthtonadina

This podcast episode was brought to you by The Nature Conservancy's global coalition — Nature4Climate.

Follow Nadina and the Internet of Nature Podcast on all social platforms: 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/internetofnature_

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadinagalle/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/earthtonadina

This podcast episode was brought to you by The Nature Conservancy's global coalition — Nature4Climate.

Follow Nadina and the Internet of Nature Podcast on all social platforms:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/internetofnature_

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadinagalle/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/earthtonadina

This podcast episode was brought to you by The Nature Conservancy's global coalition — Nature4Climate.

Follow Nadina and the Internet of Nature Podcast on all social platforms:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/internetofnature_

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadinagalle/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/earthtonadina

This podcast episode was brought to you by The Nature Conservancy's global coalition — Nature4Climate.

Follow Nadina and the Internet of Nature Podcast on all social platforms:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/internetofnature_

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadinagalle/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/earthtonadina

Follow Nadina and the Internet of Nature Podcast on all social platforms:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/internetofnature_

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadinagalle/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/earthtonadina

This podcast episode was brought to you by The Nature Conservancy's global coalition — Nature4Climate.

Follow Nadina and the Internet of Nature Podcast on all social platforms:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/internetofnature_

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadinagalle/

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3:21 - What is NatureQuant, who's behind it, and how did you come up with the idea?

4:52 - NatureQuant's vision

6:00 - How can doctors prescribe nature?

7:34 - What's the research on the benefits of nature on human health?

9:40 - How NatureQuant applies machine learning

10:55 - The link between living in nature-rich communities and Covid-19

14:50 - The entrepreneurial journey of NatureQuant

21:56 - The benefits of nature exposure on daily activities

26:38 - Does an increase in screen time affect us physiologically?

35:56 - Organisations that could be useful clients for NatureQuant

39:42 - How to connect with Jared

40:54 - What does the Internet of Nature mean to you?

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Produced by Studio Noord Gestoord.

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Produced by Studio Noord Gestoord.

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Produced by Studio Noord Gestoord.

We discuss how urban life is accelerating and changing the evolution of animals, plants, and insects, why citizen scientists are the key to documenting biodiversity on a global scale, how AI-powered apps can track urban evolution, and Menno's hope for the future of merging nature, ecology, and technology.

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Produced by Studio Noord Gestoord.

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Produced by Studio Noord Gestoord.

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Produced by Studio Noord Gestoord.

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Produced by Studio Noord Gestoord.

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Produced by Studio Noord Gestoord.

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This podcast is brought to you by the Connecting Nature Enterprise Platform, an innovation of the Connecting Nature project which is funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union Grant Agreement No 730222.

Produced by Little Red Flames.

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This podcast is brought to you by the Connecting Nature Enterprise Platform, an innovation of the Connecting Nature project which is funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union Grant Agreement No 730222.

Produced by Little Red Flames.

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This podcast is brought to you by the Connecting Nature Enterprise Platform, an innovation of the Connecting Nature project which is funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union Grant Agreement No 730222.

Produced by Little Red Flames.

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This podcast is brought to you by the Connecting Nature Enterprise Platform, an innovation of the Connecting Nature project which is funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union Grant Agreement No 730222.

Produced by Little Red Flames.

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This podcast is brought to you by the Connecting Nature Enterprise Platform, an innovation of the Connecting Nature project which is funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union Grant Agreement No 730222.

Produced by Little Red Flames.

Follow Nadina and the Internet of Nature Podcast on all social platforms:

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This podcast is brought to you by the Connecting Nature Enterprise Platform, an innovation of the Connecting Nature project which is funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union Grant Agreement No 730222.

Produced by Little Red Flames.

Follow Nadina and the Internet of Nature Podcast on all social platforms:

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This podcast is brought to you by the Connecting Nature Enterprise Platform, an innovation of the Connecting Nature project which is funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union Grant Agreement No 730222.

Produced by Little Red Flames.

Follow Nadina and the Internet of Nature Podcast on all social platforms:

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This podcast is brought to you by the Connecting Nature Enterprise Platform, an innovation of the Connecting Nature project which is funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union Grant Agreement No 730222.

Produced by Little Red Flames.

Follow Nadina and the Internet of Nature Podcast on all social platforms:

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This podcast is brought to you by the Connecting Nature Enterprise Platform, an innovation of the Connecting Nature project which is funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union Grant Agreement No 730222.

Produced by Little Red Flames.

Follow Nadina and the Internet of Nature Podcast on all social platforms:

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This podcast is brought to you by the Connecting Nature Enterprise Platform, an innovation of the Connecting Nature project which is funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union Grant Agreement No 730222.

Produced by Little Red Flames.