Jay Griffiths

Catch Jay on DO Radio 03 to 09 August on Where To Next with Dan Kiernan

Jay Griffiths is a writer whose work moves between anthropology, ecology, indigenous philosophy and myth in pursuit of a wilder, truer understanding of what it means to be human. A self-described "messenger" for voices and creatures too often ignored by the dominant culture, she brings a restless intellectual humility to her work.

She is best known for:

Wild: An Elemental Journey, which drew on years spent among indigenous cultures across the Amazon, West Papua and the Arctic, including a transformative encounter with ayahuasca.

Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time set the brutal, linear "Chronos" of Western culture against "Kairos," the felt, right-timed rhythm of a life well lived.

Kith: The Riddle of Childscape examined childhood across cultures, and

Why Rebel gathered her essays on activism, including her account of being arrested at the 2019 Extinction Rebellion protests in London - a trial in which the judge, bound to convict her, nonetheless told the defendants, "You have to succeed."

Her latest book, How Animals Heal Us, explores the "mindedness" and ethical lives of animals, from the chivalry of Yellowstone's Wolf 21 to the dreaming of jumping spiders.

At the heart of Jay's work is the conviction that the modern mind has been colonised - by clock time, by the attention economy, by a culture that has forgotten its kinship with the non-human world.

She coined the term "mental sovereignty" to describe the deliberate, daily work of reclaiming one's own attention, and argues that the ethics many indigenous cultures live by - don't be greedy, share, use everything, never be cruel - were shaped by watching animals long before they were written into human law.

Do Radio Show Notes

In conversation with Dan, Jay explores curiosity as a discipline, the etymology of language as a kind of ecology, the sacredness of the Welsh landscape, and why the wolves of Yellowstone might have more to teach us about ethics than we'd like to admit.