Biocitizen Banter #4: Interview with Javiera Malebrán Muñoz, Educator at the Omora Ethnobotanical Park in Cape Horn!

Welcome to Biocitizen Banter, a podcast dedicated to environmental philosophy featuring lively discussions between people active in the effort to bring biotic health to our communities and commonwealth.

In this episode Ex. Director Dr. Kurt Heidinger interviews Javiera Malebrán Muñoz who has been teaching Field Environmental Philosophy for the past 5 years at the Omora Ethnobotanical Park in the Cape Horn archipelago in southernmost Chile. She has worked closely with our friends Drs. Ricardo Rozzi and Francisca Massardo and also with LA director Jesse Carmichael and Chile director Vicente Aguirre Diez.

Javi was supposed to come to Western Massachusetts this summer to share her immense cultural and academic background with Our Place students, but COVID-19 cancelled out plans.

This discussion introduces you to her, and her Omora Park friends’, powerful way of imagining a world where we live as “family” with all the creatures we share our biomes with. Hers is a voice of inspiration, urging us all to ACT!

Isla Navarino, looking over the Beagle Channel to Tierra Del Fuego
Javi is on the left, Jesse on the right and up on top is Marysia!
About the author

1 Response
  1. Javi Malebrán

    Thank you Kurt and all the Biocitizen family for this interview! I hope next summer we’ll have better luck!

    **No birds where harmed during tha making of this podcast 🙂

    Also, the bottom picture is not just a random road sign ..
    There’s a saying in Chile, something that you say to someone that’s been bothering you: “ándate a la punta del cerro” roughly “go away to the top of a hill” .. an equivalent to “go fly a kite”. There’s a place near Punta Arenas called “Punta del Cerro” as you can see in the picture, and I believe that saying was born in Punta Arenas or maybe San Gregorio (a huge “estancia” east of Punta Arenas and on the way to Pali Aike National Park, where we were headed that day) .. what you might not see in the picture is that the area is completely flat, a huge grassland and not a hill in sight. So I sent my friends to “the top of the hill” and we all took a picture there so we could all say “been there!!” and have proof of that if ever someone else told us “ándate a la punta del cerro”

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