Remarkable Objects is a DeepRoot podcast about the intersection of nature and urban design.

We think the question of how we construct cities is central to how well we function as a community. How can we incorporate nature into our cities in new, meaningful ways — creating healthy, sustainable places for people? What are the ideas, practices, and policies that will push us forward and make our cities and towns more resilient?

You can subscribe on SoundCloud or iTunes. All episodes are now available, listed below.

Episode 1: Quantifying the Landscape

For this episode, I spoke with Barbara Deutsch, Executive Director of the Landscape Architecture Foundation — a small non-profit dedicated to research, scholarship, and advocacy. Barbara said something in our interview that really struck me: “It takes a long time to grow a tree. But when you have an old, mature tree, it’s like a spiritual experience. It just speaks to you in a way that you can’t get from anywhere else.”

Episode 2: The Mighty Green Street

Episode 2’s podcast guest, Robert Goo, has devoted his professional life to improving water quality so that it can be enjoyed and valued by people, creatures, and entire communities. He focuses on methods to reduce the amount of pollutants that get discharged into our waterways by altering our design and construction practices, all in order to protect this invaluable resource.

Episode 3: Hacking the City

I wanted to talk to Robin Abad Ocubillo because he is the person who runs San Francisco’s Pavements to Parks program and thinks all the time (and I mean all the time) about this design form and how to make it successful.

Episode 4: Creativity and Constraints

Randy Neprash is an engineer (stay with me here) at Stantec and also the sole staff member for the Minnesota Cities Stormwater Coalition. And we talked about a recent change that Minnesota made to their stormwater manual that could be a game changer for urban trees.

Episode 5: Is Tree Planting Equitable?

Shannon is a post-doctoral fellow who studies (in, uh, layman’s terms) how trees influence people and how people influence trees, and she recently published a study that asked an uncomfortable but important question: Is tree planting equitable? Do subsidized trees distributed by non-profits get planted evenly across the city, regardless of income or race?

Episode 6: Undiscovered Country

This week’s podcast guest, Jonathan Russell-Anelli, is a pedologist who studies soil. He examines questions related to the composition and behavior of soils so that we can manage them better. What is the difference between forest soils and urban soils? Is there really such a thing as bad soil? Should we regulate soil quality the same way we do air and water? These are just a few of the topics we discuss in this wide-ranging episode.

Episode 7: People Habitat

I’ve been a fan of Kaid Benfield’s writing for years, so I was incredibly excited when he agreed to be interviewed on Remarkable Objects. I was first introduced to his work as a reader of “Switchboard,” the blog of the Natural Resources Defense Council. His posts stood out to me because of their conversational tone, and the knack he has for distilling ideas down to their most essential and persuasive parts. A lot of writing about design and sustainability can get really abstract and academic, but Kaid’s never did.

Episode 8: Seeing the Forest and the Trees

In this episode, we’re sharing a story about the biggest city in the United States, New York City, and how it recruited thousands of its residents to take a census of the city’s street trees – over half a million in all. Our guest is Jennifer Greenfeld, the Assistant Commissioner of Forestry, Horticulture, and Natural Resources for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. Her job is to manage, think about, and plan for nature in New York City.

Why “Remarkable Objects”?

A lot of people have asked me about the name. Why “Remarkable Objects”? There are two reasons.

The first is easy: trees, plants, soil, and water are all amazing elements of the natural world. Plants transform sunlight into energy, make people calmer and happier, clean our air and water, and provide food to living things (including us). Soil is teeming with billions of microorganisms, an entire universe of life that we actually know very little about. Water is the essential source of life.

An “object” isn’t just a thing, though. It’s also a goal – the object of Blackjack is to get 21. The object of a newspaper is to report on significant events. And the object of our guests, and the projects they work on, is to influence the way we think about, design, and build the urban environment. Remarkable indeed.