Push the River, It Pushes Back - Kevin Fedarko, Author - DS Pod 276

Kevin Fedarko is a writer, journalist and river guide explores the interface between wilderness and industrialization, most recently through the lens of the Grand Canyon. Fedarko recently published "A Walk In the Park," the story of his somewhat ill-conceived but ultimately successful quest to walk the trail-less expanse of desert wilderness that hides beneath the canyon's rims. We talk about the struggle to tell a story about the Colorado and the canyon that contains it that avoids the conventional morality tale of environment good, technology bad; the astonishing feat of engineering, unseen since the Great Pyramids that holds back Lake Powell; the punishment of untrailed nature; and the mythology of science, man as an island, and the wilderness as something we both crave and fear.

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00:00 Go! 00:06:42 The Process of Writing and Sharing 00:14:15 Parallels in Creative Industries 00:18:51 Interplay of Wilderness and Modernity 00:23:03 Natural vs. Industrial Forces 00:30:21 The 1983 Spillway Crisis 00:35:22 Contradictions of Nature and Technology 00:40:44 Stories Tell Themselves 00:47:00 How Humans Understand the World 00:50:12 Science and Storytelling Paradox 01:01:03 Challenges of Long-held Beliefs 01:09:57 River Dynamics and Geology 01:13:58 The Great Unconformity 01:19:11 Hiking the Grand Canyon 01:24:22 Trail Challenges 01:33:42 Navigating the Desert 01:40:05 No Trail is Walked Alone 01:42:07 Nature and Solitude 01:48:37 Deep Immersion

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PODCAST INFO: Anastasia completed her PhD studying bioelectricity at Columbia University. When not talking to brilliant people or making movies, she spends her time painting, reading, and guiding backcountry excursions. Shilo also did his PhD at Columbia studying the elastic properties of molecular water. When he's not in the film studio, he's exploring sound in music. They are both freelance professors at various universities.

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