Called By Name: Listening Into the World of Elephants with Dr. Mickey Pardo

Called By Name: Listening Into the World of Elephants with Dr. Mickey Pardo

Elephants call each other by name. They grieve. They remember. They communicate across distances in frequencies we are only beginning to hear. What does it mean to truly listen to another species — one with memory, language, and a social world as intricate as our own? In this Listening Field conversation, we enter the world of elephant communication with two of its most devoted witnesses.  Dr. Mickey Pardo led the landmark discovery that elephants address one another with name-like calls — a finding that traveled around the world and cracked open new questions about animal cognition and communication.  Moderated by Katie Surma of Inside Climate News, whose reporting sits at the intersection of science, rights of Nature, and environmental justice, this conversation asks not only what elephants are saying, but what it means for us to finally listen. Dr. Mickey Pardo is a behavioral ecologist and bioacoustician interested in the intersection of animal communication, cognition, conservation, and welfare. He earned his PhD in behavioral ecology from Cornell University, where he studied vocal communication and social cognition in both Asian elephants and Acorn Woodpeckers. He completed a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at Colorado State University on vocal communication in African elephants, working in collaboration with Save The Elephants in Kenya, where he led the discovery that elephants address each other with name-like calls. This work was featured by over 3,000 media outlets in more than 90 countries, including the New York Times, NPR: Morning Edition, and BBC World, and helped contribute to the recent surge of interest in using machine learning to understand animal communication. During a second postdoc in the Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Dr. Pardo expanded his skillset into applied wildlife conservation, using passive acoustic monitoring, AI, and computer simulations to assess the status of bird populations. He is currently a Senior Scientist at the non-profit research organization ElephantVoices, where he is once again studying vocal communication in African elephants.  Dr. Pardo has authored over a dozen scholarly publications, including in top scientific journals such as Nature Ecology and Evolution and Current Biology. In addition to his scientific work, he is an outspoken advocate for the rights of nonhuman animals and for food system reform to end our reliance on animal agriculture and commercial fishing. To learn more about Mickey’s work, visit ElephantVoices’ website here:  https://elephantvoices.org/ [https://elephantvoices.org/] Katie Surma is a reporter at Inside Climate News covering the rights of nature movement and international environmental justice. Her work has a strong focus on the intersection of human rights and the environment. Before joining ICN, she practiced law, specializing in commercial litigation. Her journalism work has been recognized by the Overseas Press Club, the Society of Environmental Journalists, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers and others. Katie has a master’s degree in investigative journalism from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, an LLM in international rule of law and security from ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, a J.D. from Duquesne University, and was a History of Art and Architecture major at the University of Pittsburgh.  Learn more about Katie's work at https://insideclimatenews.org/ [https://insideclimatenews.org/] Support the show [https://www.natureevolutionaries.com/give-to-thrive]

Four Decades of Herbal Stories from Two Earth Elders

Join renowned herbalists Pam Montgomery and Kate Gilday for an intimate storytelling session spanning a combined 85 years of wisdom. Get a rare glimpse into the triumphs of their flourishing gardens and herbal apothecaries, to the challenges and hard-won lessons of their teaching and healing practices, all of which shaped their herbal journeys.  In this deep dive with two longtime friends, they share the laughter and tears of a lifetime dedicated to plants. Come walk down memory lane with these beloved mentors and gain an insightful view into what they believe is next for the future of herbalism. Support This Offering This free Earth Day webinar is a gift from the heart of our community—and we invite you to give back in support. Your donation helps the Organization of Nature Evolutionaries continue offering Earth-honoring programs like this one, uplifting Nature’s voice and deepening our collective relationship with the living world. 🌿 Make a Donation to ONE » [https://www.natureevolutionaries.com/events-programs/2026/pam-montgomery-and-kate-gilday#contribute] Thank you for helping this work grow! Pam Montgomery has been investigating plants and their intelligent spiritual nature for more than three decades. As an author, teacher, and practitioner, she has passionately embraced her partnership with the plants who are guiding us in our spiritual evolution.   She is the author of Partner Earth: A Spiritual Ecology; the best-selling Plant Spirit Healing: A Guide to Working with Plant Consciousness; and most recently Co-Creating with Nature: Healing the Wound of Separation. She teaches internationally on plant spirit healing, spiritual ecology, and people as Nature Evolutionaries.  Pam is the founder of ONE.  She has dedicated herself to co-creative partnership with all of life and feels the Organization of Nature Evolutionaries is a way to make this partnership manifest. You can connect with Pam here: www.wakeuptonature.com  [https://%20https//bit.ly/co-creative-partnership-with-nature] Kate Gilday is a clinical herbalist, flower essence practitioner and creator, Ayurvedic lifestyle consultant and herbal teacher working and living in the foothills of the Adirondack Park. She is the founder of Woodland Essence, a forest (and more) botanicals and flower essence company that she began 30 years ago with her husband Don Babineau that over time has developed a focus on Lyme, tick-borne infections and support for those challenged by chronic conditions.   Healing with Flowers is her delight and passion, along with tending her relationship with the woodlands she loves so well. Songwriter of love songs to the plants, Earth and life, she is trying her best to write and share more via her personal website: www.journeybacktotheforest.com [http://www.journeybacktotheforest.com/]   Support the show [https://www.natureevolutionaries.com/give-to-thrive]

Beyond words with Anna Breytenbach

Anna Breytenbach’s path into interspecies communication did not begin as a calling—it began during a tracking workshop in the United States. While immersed in the discipline of reading land, movement, and animal sign, Anna experienced an unexpected and unmistakable moment of communication. What occurred was specific, relational, and grounded in the reality of the moment—and it altered the course of her life. That encounter opened a body of work spanning more than two decades, during which Anna has communicated with wild animals and ecosystems across continents, supporting conservation efforts, wildlife rehabilitation, predator research, and ecological restoration. Her communication with a black jaguar named Spirit, later featured in the documentary The Animal Communicator, is one of many encounters that demonstrate how information can move clearly and accurately across species boundaries. In this session, Anna shares stories from the field that reveal how interspecies communication actually unfolds—how animals convey perception, intention, and environmental awareness, and how humans can receive that information when attention is steady, assumptions fall away, and relationship leads. Grounded in lived experience rather than belief, this conversation offers insight into interspecies communication as a natural human capacity—one that becomes available through presence, respect, and sustained engagement with the living world. This gathering is part of The Listening Field: Tuning into the heart of Nature [https://www.natureevolutionaries.com/the-listening-field], a live, interview-style conversation with space for reflection and participant questions. Anna Breytenbach is an internationally acclaimed professional interspecies communicator, based in Europe and practising for over 20 years on several continents. Native to South Africa, she mentors and consults globally. She holds a degree in Psychology and Economics, and studied telepathic animal communication with the Assisi International Animal Institute as well as tracking and mentoring at the Wilderness Awareness School in the USA. Her work is the subject of the documentary The Animal Communicator, watched by tens of millions of people and available on YouTube. As a qualified and experienced master facilitator, Anna focuses on mentoring in a practical manner that reminds us humans of the ways of indigenous nature awareness. She has guided thousands of people to rediscover and develop their natural senses and connection with all species in an honouring manner. Anna’s consultation work is exclusively with wild places and beings, facilitating peaceful interventions globally via remote work. This includes predator and cetacean research, wilderness protection, ecological restoration, wildlife management and rehabilitation. She facilitates wilderness retreats and animal communication safaris, and is engaged by communities and organisations as a teacher and inspirational speaker. Anna’s passion is raising awareness and advancing the relationships among human and nonhuman animals, on interpersonal and spiritual levels. She is a voice for animals and natural environments, sharing wild wisdoms for the benefit of all. Explore Anna’s Work: https://www.animalspirit.org [https://www.animalspirit.org/] Support the show [https://www.natureevolutionaries.com/give-to-thrive]

In the Company of Horses with Emelie Cajsdotter

When Emelie Cajsdotter was eleven years old, she stood outside the stall of a small, unmanageable pony no one could “handle.”  In a moment of shared presence, something shifted. The boundary between them softened. She did not disappear — but she was no longer alone inside herself. That moment shaped a lifetime. Over decades of living in close relationship with horses and other animal kin, that early encounter has opened into something quietly vast: a way of experiencing the world not organized around separation, edges, or isolated selves. Through life in the herd, Emelie has been shown a cosmological view shaped by continuity rather than division — one in which awareness is shared across a living field, and humans are only one expression within a larger intelligence. In this conversation, Emelie shares stories that arise directly from that lived reality. Rather than offering explanations or frameworks, her stories loosen what we habitually hold tight — our sense of boundedness, linear time, and standing apart. They invite us to sense what life feels like when boundaries are porous, when belonging is inherent rather than earned, and when the world is encountered as responsive, relational, and whole. In the Company of Horses opens a space to meet the world as the herd meets it — vast, participatory, and already alive with meaning. Emelie Cajsdotter is an author, storyteller, and the founder of Friskeröd, a sanctuary she established in 1995. She lives on the farm with her family and approximately 160 animals, and has been responsible for the daily life and care of the sanctuary for nearly three decades, supported by volunteers and community sponsorship. Trained as a homeopath, Emelie is best known for her storytelling—sharing what has been revealed to her through long, attentive relationship with horses and other animal kin. Through stories rather than theory, she conveys ways of understanding life, time, and belonging that arise from interspecies encounter and shared presence. Emelie has worked and studied in Ireland, Jordan, and New Zealand, and for many years has offered courses at Friskeröd in which other species are understood as the teachers. She is the author of All the King’s Horses, Zander and the Time, and Song of the Grass, and has participated in Swedish television and podcast projects connected with the sanctuary. To Learn more about Emelie and her work, visit The Friends of Mio website:  https://www.friendsofmio.com/en [https://www.friendsofmio.com/en] Continue into The Listening Field This webinar is part of a larger collective offering from the Organization of Nature Evolutionaries.  Visit the main Listening Field page to learn more about the full conversation series and how to engage with this ongoing exploration of listening and relationship with the living world. → Return to the main Listening Field page [https://www.natureevolutionaries.com/the-listening-field] Support the show [https://www.natureevolutionaries.com/give-to-thrive]

The Mycelial Conversation with Christopher Parker

The Mycelial Conversation opens a doorway into the living language of fungi and the ways they invite us into deeper relationship with the natural world. In this conversation, we explore how fungi communicate within ecosystems and how humans can learn to listen more deeply through relationship, attention, and practice. What stories are carried in mycelia and mushrooms? What messages travel through spores across landscapes and time? Through lived experience, forest-based practice, and cultural ways of knowing, this session invites reflection on mycelial intelligence as both ecological process and relational teacher. We explore what it means to be in relationship with fungi in the places where we live, and how these ancient beings can help us listen more fully to the wider intelligence of Nature. This gathering is part of The Listening Field: Tuning into the heart of Nature, a live, interview-style conversation with space for reflection and participant questions. Christopher Parker is a mycologist, Culture Keeper, and member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. He is the co-author of The Mycelial Healer: A Comprehensive Guide to the Cultivation and Traditional Uses of Medicinal Mushrooms [https://www.theforestfarmacy.com/en/the-mycelial-healer], a recently released book grounded in decades of hands-on practice, traditional knowledge, and applied mycology. Christopher is the co-founder, along with his wife Katherine Parker, and an instructor at The Forest Farmacy, where he teaches mushroom cultivation, medicinal uses of fungi, and regenerative forest-based practices. A self-taught mycologist, Christopher began cultivating mushrooms at a young age and brings more than 30 years of experience in mushroom cultivation, wild harvesting, herbal medicine making, and mycoremediation. He is deeply committed to food sovereignty and resilient local food systems and founded Asheville Fungi to provide mycological supplies nationwide and fresh mushrooms locally. His work is rooted in relationship with land and fungi, and in the ancestral foodways and traditional skills he carries. To learn more about Chris and his work visit his website:  https://www.theforestfarmacy.com/ [https://www.theforestfarmacy.com/] Continue into The Listening Field This webinar is part of a larger collective offering from the Organization of Nature Evolutionaries.  Visit the main Listening Field page to learn more about the full conversation series and how to engage with this ongoing exploration of listening and relationship with the living world. →Check out the main Listening Field page [https://www.natureevolutionaries.com/the-listening-field] Support the show [https://www.natureevolutionaries.com/give-to-thrive]