Breakthrough Dialogues

What is nature, and what isn’t? Is it helpful to make that distinction? If you had asked Alan Levinovitz a few years ago, he would have been skeptical. Today, however, he’ll defend the concept fiercely. As he argues, “largely unexamined and incredibly powerful beliefs [like nature] are dangerous, and they make dialogue difficult.” In this episode, Alex and Alan try to have that difficult dialogue. How do we preserve nature without knowing what it is, exactly, we want to conserve? Why do we tend to equate naturalness with a kind of morality? As a Religious Studies professor at James Madison University and a well-known food journalist and book author, Alan is uniquely positioned to take on these questions. The issue of natural-unnatural line-drawing is not limited to environmental stewardship – it cuts across so many different areas of our lives. Ever touched a plant to check whether it was “real” or not? Is clean meat “natural”? Does nuclear energy count as part of the primal order? Tune in to better understan