What’s new with Encounters?

For her work on Encounters, Senior Reporter Elizabeth Arnold was recently honored with The Ocean Media Award for "excellence in journalism that has raised public awareness of Alaska’s oceans." One of six awards presented to Alaska's "Ocean Heroes" by the Alaska Ocean Leadership Committee, the Ocean Media Award is sponsored by the University of Alaska School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences. Read more.

Alaska Magazine writer Melissa DeVaugh spent time recently with Richard Nelson in Sitka, Alaska where he's lived for the past 25 years. Read Melissa's article about her Genuine Encounter with the irrepressible host of Encounters Radio.

Wisconsin Public Radio's To The Best of Our Knowledge has a new program on the National Parks, featuring a segment with Richard Nelson. Richard talks about the importance of national parks and how these lands are a great achievement of American democracy. The show also features some of Richard's over the top sound recordings, including grizzly bears and wolves, from Katmai, Denali, and Gates of the Arctic National Parks. Listen to the Podcast.

Men's Journal online magazine features an article about Richard Nelson's latest polar bear encounters near the village of Kaktovik, along the Beaufort Sea in northern Alaska. The Last Polar Bears.

Encounters is now being broadcast on the XM Satellite Channel, Remix Radio, which plays independently produced radio programs.  XM radio has 19 million listeners! 30 college stations are also airing Encounters via a new radio network, WIBS.

This six CD gift set, Encounters: Radio Experiences in the North, includes 12 of the most popular Encounters episodes from the first four seasons. To purchase a copy online, go to cdbaby.com. The CD gift set is also available at these Alaska locations: In Anchorage, Metro Music and Bookstore (530 East Benson Blvd.) and in Sitka, Old Harbor Books (201 Lincoln Street) and Orion Sporting Goods (Lakeside Plaza).

Richard Nelson has teamed up with four-time Emmy award winning cinematographer Daniel Zatz to produce short films based on Encounters. Click here to view the segments about brown bears in Katmai National Park, shorebirds on the Copper River Delta, and wood frogs in the Brooks Range.

What's this about?

Where else on public radio programming can you hear polar bears growl, peregrine falcons cry and killer whales splash? In an ever increasingly urban world, Encounters: Experiences in the North brings the sounds of the northern wild to the radio for a rare, entertaining and informative weekly program. Now in its fourth season, Encounters is heard throughout Alaska and around the nation. Alaska’s acclaimed cultural anthropologist and award winning nature writer, Richard Nelson is the host of Encounters. Each 29- minute segment contains a tight weave of scientific and indigenous perspectives as Nelson bubbles over with boundless enthusiasm for all things wild. Because it is recorded live to tape, Encounters has a refreshing immediacy that makes for exciting and entertaining listening.

The carefully researched material draws information from the best scientific investigations, from discussions with scientists about their work, from accurate interpretation of conclusions in a wide range of studies, and from direct experience in the field. The programs are recorded live in the field during close contact with the subject. Whether high atop a 65 foot tree to record a program on wind, kayaking along side a pod of sea lions or getting curiously close to a grizzly bear, Nelson engages the listener in feeling the place as well as the subject.

Recently awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation’s International Polar Year program, Encounters aims to demonstrate the rewards of experiencing, studying, interpreting and living in the polar world to listeners all over the country. Our program reminds listeners about why the International Polar Year comes at a critical time in this all too globally warm earth we live upon.

Dr. Nelson has spent forty years in the north living with indigenous people and writing extensively about human relationships to the natural world. He began Encounters as a volunteer for KCAW-FM, the voice and heartbeat of Sitka, a small island town on Alaska's north Pacific coast. Encouraged by its popularity among Sitkans, Nelson began to work with KCAW program director Ken Fate who edited the program and found distribution statewide. Today the show is still distributed by KCAW, Raven Radio.