IDEAS for the week of October 17

IDEAS airs Monday to Friday on CBC Radio One
at 8 p.m. (8:30 p.m. NT) and 4 a.m. (4:30 a.m. NT)

Iraqis row their canoe in the waters of the Mesopotamian marshes near the southern Iraqi city of Basra, March 24, 2007. (AFP via Getty Images)

MONDAY, OCTOBER 17

The Marrow of Nature: A Case for Wetlands

Our relationship with wetlands is nothing if not troubled. Throughout history, wetlands have been dammed, drained and dug up to make way for agriculture and human settlement, while wetlands themselves have been cast as toxic wastelands, from the dead marshes in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings to the vegetal monster from the DC comic Swamp Thing. Yet not every perspective on wetlands is negative; Henry David Thoreau called them 'the marrow of nature' and cultures around the world have used wetlands as sites of sanctuary and sustenance. That squelchy history — and the reasons experts say saving wetlands is crucial to our future — is the subject of a documentary by IDEAS contributor Moira Donovan.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18

Freedom, Part One: Lea Ypi

As a child in Albania — the last Stalinist outpost in Europe — Lea Ypi grew up believing she lived in a free state. In 1990, the government came crashing down and she lived through a radical redefinition of the meaning of the word "freedom." Now a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, Lea Ypi speaks with Nahlah Ayed about the limitations of both liberal and socialist definitions of freedom, how to find common ground when the meaning of freedom is increasingly contested, and her memoir Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History. *This episode originally aired on March 8, 2022.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 19

Freedom, Part Two: Annelien de Dijn

Today, the concept of freedom is often associated with limited government and freedom from state inference. But Annelien de Dijn, professor of modern political history at Utrecht University, argues that's actually a relatively new idea in the longer history of thinking about freedom. For centuries, freedom was associated with democratic control over the state — not with small government. And while political groups like the Tea Party often position themselves as the heirs of 18th-century revolutionaries, she argues contemporary definitions of freedom actually emerged from an anti-democratic backlash to the Age of Revolutions. She speaks with Nahlah Ayed about her book, Freedom: An Unruly History. *This episode originally aired on March 17, 2022.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20

The Poetics of Space

Picture your childhood home as a map of the mind. Remember and imagine again how its hidden nooks and crannies give space to daydream, create and replenish. That's the central idea in Gaston Bachelard's seminal book The Poetics of Space (1958). It's a hard-to-define book — part architecture, philosophy, psychoanalysis, memoir. And it continues to feed the creative spirit and our ongoing need for purposeful solitude and wide-open fields for our imagination. *This episode originally aired on March 7, 2022.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21

Katie Mack: The End of Everything

The scientific consensus is that the universe was probably born in The Big Bang — the beginning of time and space. It's far less certain how the universe will end — with another bang or a dark, frozen whimper or something far weirder. Katie Mack is a theoretical astrophysicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, and a rising star in cosmology who studies the possible fates of the universe. She's the author of The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking). The good news is that the universe probably won't end until billions of years from now. The bad news is the "probably."

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The most active conspiracy theories in North America include the so-called ‘great replacement theory’ and Q-Anon. (Shutterstock/HollyHarry)

IDEAS IN THE AFTERNOON

MONDAY, OCTOBER 17 at 2 p.m.

How a conspiracy theory becomes 'real'

Growing up, PhD student Sarah believed in the literal interpretation of the Bible. Born into a devout evangelical Christian community, she draws on her religious past to understand the visceral belief people acquire in conspiracy theories — from PizzaGate to the 'stolen' 2020 U.S. election.