Dr. Madhur Anand wears two layers of jackets and stands on a sunny dock in a marina next to Alie. Both are smiling at camera.

Environmental models! Poetry! Scientists who are poets! Novelists who are scientists! Art + science = an actual -ology. Creative Ecologist, climate scientist, theoretical ecologist, author and celebrated poet Dr. Madhur Anand sits on a porch with me on an island to chat about storytelling, narratives in science, forest beetles, carbon stability, human motives, hip waders, technology meets nature, absurdity, identity, overcoming writer’s or scientist’s' block, and how accepting ourselves can be contagious. Forecast: you begin jotting down poems on envelopes.

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TRANSCRIPT

Visit the Anand Lab in Global Ecological Change & Sustainability

Follow Dr. Anand on Google Scholar & X

Buy Madhur Anand’s collections of poems A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes (2015) and Parasitic Oscillations (2022), and her book of prose This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart (2020)

A donation went to Rare Charitable Reserve

Links to things we discussed:

Modelling interactions between forest pest invasions and human decisions regarding firewood transport restrictions

Beetles, drought, and fires are a ticking time bomb in the West

Towards a Unifying Theory of Vegetation Dynamics

Apology by Plato

The More You Know The More You Realize You Don't Know