Build A Meaningful Life Helping Animals and Nature: Carrie & Melody Talk Personal Growth Opportunities

Carrie and Melody discuss how to incorporate animal and eco protection into your life in meaningful ways to meet your own life goals, priorities, and interests in big and small ways, syncing up with actions and virtues the world needs from us humans. 

Since the beginning of each new year is a time to reassess our own goals and priorities, it seemed a good time to have an In Tune to Nature show that focused on our own personal growth resolutions and how that can synergize with efforts to help other species. This is also a special show because it airs on the radio on our birthday, January 8th, as my co-host and friend Melody Paris and I share the same birthday – just one of the many things we have in common.

The agenda for the 1 hour show today is that before we get to some personal growth exercises and self reflections that you our listeners can use to figure out your own best path (inspired by best selling personal growth authors), I thought Melody and I would start by sharing our own path toward incorporating animal and eco issues into our daily lives (over the decades) to see how our own stories and actions might resonate with listeners or spark ideas for you. So it would be good for you to have a way to take notes during this show, and you can pause at times to answer some questions and do some self reflection (on your inner priorities, and what excites you, what you're good at, and what the world needs to protect animals and nature) before we move on to each new topic.

My sign-off each show has been “Take care of yourself and others, including other species,” and I literally think that is the meaning of life. And in this anthropocentric (human-centered) culture, I want to make sure we don’t leave other species out of that care-taking effort -- with the goal of us shifting our identities and culture toward a biocentric (life-centered) orientation and beginning to see ourselves as part of a broader community as human animal earthlings. So our resolutions/goals can be in improving our mindset and identity as well as in formulating tangible task-oriented goals/achievements. Toward the end of the podcast, Melody and I review the top 20 virtues that humans could embody, from pg 207 in my "Human Animal Earthling Identity" book, so virtue ethics plays a role in this show.

The show draws upon books like "Essentialism" by G. McKeown, "Emotional Chaos to Clarity" by P. Moffit, and "Die with Zero" by B. Perkins, and "Oasis Earth" by R. Steiner.

 

"In Tune to Nature" is a weekly radio show airing Wednesdays at 6:30pm Eastern Time on 89.3FM-Atlanta radio and streaming worldwide on wrfg.org (Radio Free Georgia, a nonprofit indie station). Hosted by me, Carrie Freeman, or Melody Paris. The show's website and action items can be found at https://wrfg.org/intunetonature/  Please support nonprofit indie media like our Radio Free Georgia station at https://wrfg.org/  Thank you!

Take care of yourself and others, including other species. That's the meaning of life!

Photo Credit: Carrie Freeman. I took this photo of my hand petting a rescued goat at a sanctuary in Georgia, as part of a Georgia Animal Rights and Protection hands-on volunteer day that Melody helped organize.