you never know

My entry for the Third Coast Festival’s ShortDocs Radio Ephemera Audio Challenge:

The idea behind the challenge is to create an audio story from two books archived from the Prelinger Library and include the voice of a stranger. I ended up combining these two books: Trees as Good Citizens (a civic-minded planting guide), and Control of Body and Mind (a kind of science book with a moral hygiene edge).

The voices of strangers are: Dr. Simon Evans, Neurologist and Cleve Backster, Polygraph Expert

Check out all the imaginative Radio Ephemera stories on their archive.

I was inspired by Psychobotany’s experiments with primary perception in plants, as developed through the research of Cleve Backster, who used a polygraph test to determine electrical resistance in the organism. The idea that plants can somehow sense our emotions or thoughts appeals to me: communication on another, more basic, more energetic level. What do we have to learn from other species?

Check out Psychobotany’s experiment here.