You and Betty and the nancy's and bills and joes and janes will find in the study of science a richer, more rewarding life.

Hey, welcome to Inquiring Minds. I'm Andrea Viscontas. This is a podcast that explores the space where science and society collide.

We want to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it matters.

We are approaching our 400th episode, and that's kind of shocking to me. And of course, to my producer, Adam Isaac.

And we've been talking about what we can do to keep this show relevant, but also do a little bit of a

look back at the 400 episodes we've created together. And one of the ideas we came up with

is to have a guest host for a series of episodes.

This is where we get to bring in some friends.

We get to bring in other people that we've either spoken to on the podcast in the past or have wanted to

or just a whole other lens on the work that it is that we do.

So for this first guest-hosted episode, I wanted to bring on

my friend Majel Connery. Hi, Majel. Hello. Majel is a musician. She's a composer. She has a PhD in

musicology on 20th century opera. And she essentially is one of these intellectuals that is just really fun to have

conversations with on topics that are super deep, but especially when they pertain to sound.

And Majel, I wanted to first talk about your project Rivers. Tell us about that project and what you did.

Yeah. First of all, I've never been introduced as an intellectual before. I was like,

is this strange or flattering? I can't decide. I think it's flattering. So the project is called

The Rivers are Our Brothers. It's actually a quote from a letter by a Native American chief Seattle beseeching the government to interact with the land, in this case, the United States of America, as though it were our closest kin. This is an idea in Native American

ethos that you have to treat the land like it's one of you. You should relate to it, like a brother

or a sister or a cousin or a mother. It's also been turned into a beautiful children's book.

So the concept behind Rivers are Our Brothers is to increase the impact that an artist can

actually have on change as regards like environment and policy.

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