Episodes

Follow Your Current: Rivers, Resilience, and When to Swim Upstream With Matthew Best & David Stormer of Riverkeeper Jessica Morgenthal travels the long arc of rivers — from the chaotic, sediment-laden flows of an early Earth to the great waterways that built civilization, to the modern story of dams, levees, and recovery. To navigate these waters, she's joined by two river champions from Riverkeeper, the organization that helped bring the Hudson River back from the dead: Matthew Best, a fish bio...

Guests: Etelle Higonnet (Director, Coffee Watch) • Sebastian Nielsen (CEO, Slow Forest) • Andrés Montenegro (Sustainability Director, Specialty Coffee Association) What if your daily cup of coffee is actually a masterclass in resilience? In this episode of Resilience Gone Wild, host Jessica Morgenthal takes us deep into coffee's origin story — back to a plant that learned to survive through a brilliant strategy: the nudge. Coffee's caffeine was nature's quiet genius: a molecule that repels what ...

Episode 67 Evolving Your Armor in an Ever-Changing World: What Pangolins Teach Us About Updating Protection and Accepting Help Guest: Tim Santel, Retired Special Agent in Charge (SAC), U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Office of Law Enforcement; Senior Advisor & Media Relations Director, Focused Conservation What if the very thing that once protected you… is the thing that’s now keeping you stuck? And what happens when the world changes faster than your instincts can? In this episode of Resilienc...

Episode 66 Guest: Daniel J. Cox, Award-Winning Wildlife Photographer and Director of The Arctic Documentary Project for Polar Bears International What if resilience during the holidays and shifting seasons isn’t about just holding everything together? How much better would it be to meet each moment and each challenge with calm and ease? In this episode of Resilience Gone Wild, host Jessica Morgenthal returns to one of her most beloved animals — the polar bear — to explore a resilience mindset t...

Episode 65 Awakening Our Soulful Intelligence: What the Octopus — and Sy Montgomery — Know Guest: Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus What if resilience doesn’t come from thinking harder or pushing faster, but from listening more deeply to the intelligence that already lives within us? In this episode of Resilience Gone Wild, host Jessica Morgenthal explores the quiet, embodied wisdom of the giant Pacific octopus—and how soulful intelligence can help us navigate our own lives with ...

What if Thanksgiving is really an invitation to let our giving nourish the world that nourishes us? In this Thanksgiving episode of Resilience Gone Wild, Jessica Morgenthal explores the ancient ecological wisdom of the Three Sisters—corn, beans, and squash—and how their centuries-old partnership reveals a living model of regeneration, cooperation, and shared strength. Through immersive storytelling and a powerful conversation with regenerative systems expert Rob Avis, this episode shows how appr...

In “Lessons from the Wisdom of the Vines,” Jessica weaves narrative and reflection to uncover how vineyards mirror the rhythms of human life—growth, rest, and transformation. Through her conversation with Marta Mendonça, leader of The Porto Protocol, we learn how wisdom lives not in isolation but in connection: between generations, between the roots and the rain, and between people who choose to share what they know. Marta invites us to see resilience not as endurance but as renewal—to understan...

What if the things we label “icky”: decay, dirt, discomfort, are actually where transformation begins? In this thought-provoking episode, Resilience Gone Wild host Jessica Morgenthal sits down with Tim Steckel, founder of The Compost Marketing Agency, to explore the hidden brilliance of composting as a metaphor for personal and ecological renewal. From the red wiggler’s quiet labor to the microbial symphony beneath our feet, this episode redefines how curiosity, not control, fuels real resilienc...