Kelly Moody is a critical ethnobotanist, philosopher, teacher, writer, and podcast host. After growing up in rural southern Virginia on her grandmother’s tobacco farm, Kelly’s interest in plants and ecology never left her. She received a B.A. in Philosophy and Religious Studies, and then left Virginia to travel cross-country, studying herbal medicine, land tending, ecology and botany. In the summer of 2020, she hiked the Colorado Trail documenting plants on foot and made notes on wild food and medicine gardens found along the old Ute pathways. Kelly and I discuss what it means to approach fields like ethnobotany, archeology, and anthropology both holistically and with a critical lens, rethinking relationships between people and plants, and questioning the ways we’ve explored, preserved, and defined “ecology”, “nature”, and “wilderness”. We also speak about the limits of capitalism, and reimagine a future in which infrastructure and capital could work toward ecological regeneration instead of against it.
Find Kelly at OfSedgeAndSalt.com, on Instagram, on Substack and listen to her podcast The Ground Shots Podcast, available on Substack and all streaming apps.
Songs featured: “Feet Keep Moving” by Natural Self & “Desert Dove” by Holly Arrowsmith
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#137 Critical Ethnobotany and Reimagining Our Role in Ecology with Kelly Moody