Happy new year to all our listeners out there! On our first episode of 2018, we speak with the author of a book about the resilience of Indigenous peoples in the face of climate change, and we’ll hear some recordings of the elusive night parrot in Australia!

Our first guest today is Gleb Raygorodetsky, the author of The Archipelago of Hope: Wisdom and Resilience from the Edge of Climate Change, a book published this past November by Pegasus Books. Raygorodetsky is a conservation biologist who has traveled around the world to live and work with Indigenous peoples. In The Archipelago of Hope, he details his experiences with a number of Indigenous cultures and the ways their lives on their traditional territories are being reshaped by the impacts of global warming.

Raygorodetsky appears on the podcast to tell us about the book and what he thinks the rest of us can learn about climate change from the Indigenous peoples of the world.

Our second guest is Nick Leseberg, a PhD student at the University of Queensland in Australia whose work focuses solely on the night parrot, a species endemic to Australia that was first discovered by Europeans in the mid-1800s. Though a wild population of the bird was found in the remote outback of Australia in 2013 — nearly 150 years after the species was first discovered — it still proved difficult for researchers to study because of its elusive nature. That is, until scientists realized that the night parrot comes out every night just after sunset to make its call for about a 10-minute period.

Just four years ago, nobody knew what a night parrot sounded like — but now Leseberg is here to play us some of the calls he’s recorded in this Field Notes segment.

Here’s this episode’s top news:

• Ivory trade in China is now banned
• ‘New’ giant octopus discovered in the Pacific
• Prince Harry becomes president of conservation group
• Paper giant and its ‘suppliers’ are essentially one and the same, investigation finds
• UN General Assembly adopts resolution to move forward with high seas treaty negotiations

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Follow Mike Gaworecki on Twitter: @mikeg2001

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