Charles Foster Interviewed by Nick Hunt

Naturalist Charles Foster asks how we can find our way back to the deepest stories of who and what we are as humans.

Foster says we are in a mess politically, economically, environmentally, psychologically, and spiritually because we have no adequate story. He looks back to the Upper Palaeolithic world when we first acquired the brains we have now and finds old stories of connectivity and intimate relationships with everything. He asks what happened to those stories in the Neolithic, when we carved up the natural world, and in the Enlightenment, when the universe was drained of meaning. And how do we get back to them?

Foster is author of Being a Beast, a New York Times bestseller, winner of the 30 millions d’Amis prize in France, and subject of a forthcoming feature film. He is a winner of the Ig Nobel Prize for biology. Here he talks to writer and storyteller Nick Hunt, author of Walking the Woods and the Water and Outlandish.