WorldWild Podcast
Episode 57 20th April 2022
The Part of You That Gathers with Rachael Knight
Rachael Knight has long worked as an attorney with communities on issues of land tenure, resource management, and cultural revitalisation. We talk about dealing with cultural trauma, communicating with plants, creating rituals, and foraging as communion...
'It's the collective unconscious of a community that brings back, draws forward, ancestral ways that have been lost, because they are never really lost'
About Rachael Knight
Rachael Knight is an attorney with expertise in community land tenure security, community natural resource governance, legal empowerment, and community-led conservation and cultural revitalization. She is currently a Senior Associate within the Legal Tools for Citizen Empowerment team at the International Institute for the Environment and Development (IIED). She helped to found Namati, a global legal empowerment organization that helps disenfranchised communities to understand, use, and shape the law. Together with land rights advocates throughout Africa, she co-created an integrated model of community land protection that is now practiced around the world. She has worked continuously as a consultant for the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations since 2004. A graduate of Brown University and Berkeley Law, she recently completed a Masters degree in ethnobotany; her dissertation focused on the role of ceremony and ritual in conservation of land and sacred natural sites.
Further reading
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Books mentioned:
> Plant Spirit Medicine by Eliot Cowan
> Environmental Arts Therapy and the Tree of life by Ian Siddons Heginworth
> Tending the Wild by M. Kat Anderson
> Secrets of the Talking Jaguar by Martín Prechtel
> Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
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About the show
We offer a series of conversations to tap into the wildness within ourselves and to uncover what is possible when we do. It is our hope that through the WorldWild Podcast we can contribute to the revitalisation of wild food culture and conversation around the world.
Through people who know their landscapes intimately, we gather the threads to weave a rich tapestry. Piece by piece the vision of a wilder world comes into view. The wild embrace of nature welcomes us back and offers us a seat at the table. A feast, no less!