For The Wild

“What might happen if we saw a migrant child at the border as our own daughter? Or George Floyd gasping for breath as our own brother? Or Brianna as sister? Or the Asian American women slaughtered in Atlanta as our own aunties? What might happen? What would we risk? What movements would we build? What would we demand? How would we harness our rage? How would we reimagine a world in which all of us are safe? What might happen if we made love the ethic that guided all of our actions?” This week we ground down in visioning our shared survival with guest Valarie Kaur, who reminds us that for millennia prophetic voices have been trying to remind us that we belong to each other, here on Earth, and if we were to recognize this simple truth, what would the world look like? Valarie shares that in recognizing this reality of inherent belonging, we might have to “love beyond what evolution requires.” A revolutionary love for each other, our opponents, and ourselves. Valarie Kaur is a seasoned civil rights activist and celebrated prophetic voice. Valarie now leads the Revolutionary Love Project to reclaim love as a force for justice in America. As a lawyer, filmmaker, and innovator, she has won policy change on multiple fronts – hate crimes, racial profiling, immigration detention, solitary confinement, Internet freedom, and more. She founded Groundswell Movement, Faithful Internet, and the Yale Visual Law Project. A daughter of Sikh farmers in California's heartland, Valarie earned degrees at Stanford University, Harvard Divinity School, and Yale Law School. Valarie's new book is See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love. Music by AMAARA and Madeleine Sophia.Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.Support the show

In this magnetic conversation, Ruth and Ayana consider where a politics of love can breathe, radical softness, mindsets of abundance, climate justice advocacy, and the steps we can take to create systems of wellness. In recognition of what might feel like a painful transition for many, Ruth guides us to think about what practices and acts of care we can implement with each other as a way of willing a more beautiful world back into existence. Support the show

In the fast-paced movement of today’s media, it’s easy to become entangled in narratives of extinction, loss, a lack of time, and a tremendous amount of misanthropy. However, when we pause to look within the ecosystems around us we can find examples of life pushing through the most difficult of circumstances. Our more than human kin continues in defiance, refusing to cease their own lineage under the current modern paradigm of exploitation and desecration. In this week’s episode, we look into a thriving life paradigm, which places a reverences for life at the center of all action, with guest Woman Stands Shining (Pat McCabe). In this expansive conversation, Woman Stands Shining coalesces topics of Indigenous sovereignty, land back, how gender and consent behave in different paradigms, and the vital importance of moving out of modernity’s obsession with intellectualism as the primary way of knowing, into a powerful call to choose a timeless paradigm that is life-affirming for us all. Woman Stands Shining (Pat McCabe) is a Diné grandmother, activist, artist, and international speaker. Her primary work is proposing to the Five-Fingered-Ones, that paradigm is a choice, and pointing to Indigenous cultures as examples that we have evidence that human beings can participate in paradigms in which we can become beings capable of causing all life to thrive. Music by The Range of Light Wilderness, Violet Bell, and Sea Stars. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.Support the show

When we hear about the Green New Deal, it is almost always in context to policy and business within the United States. The urgent push for an energy transition away from fossil fuels often obscures the reality of extractive frontiers and the supply chains that green energy necessitates. This week, we slow down and explore the structures behind “our” energy systems, what a Green New Deal means for “resource-rich” countries in the Global South, and what a globally accountable Green New Deal could look like with guest Thea Riofrancos. As we explore what a renewable energy transition looks like from the so-called peripheries of extraction, Thea guides us to think about the relationship between solidarity and consumption, collectivity, and the vital importance of pushing for policy, systems, and organizations that empower public services, forms of sharing, and economies of care. Thea Riofrancos is an assistant professor of political science at Providence College, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Radcliffe Institute Fellow. Her research focuses on resource extraction, renewable energy, climate change, green technology, social movements, and the left in Latin America. These themes are explored in her book, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador and her co-authored book, A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal.Music by 40 Million Feet, Mitski, and Alexa Wildish. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.Support the show

In order to limit global temperature from exceeding a 1.5°C increase, we need to cut global emissions by 45% in the next 10 years. However, recent reports indicate that if our current global pledges were enacted, we’d only reduce our emissions by 1%. We are living through what some might define as an ongoing climate emergency, and this will only continue for future generations. Instead of fixating on how to “stop” climate change-related disasters or putting our trust in ineffective government bodies or greedy purveyors of “green” technology to “save” us, this week, we think about how we can have community resilience, ingenuity, and wellbeing amidst unpredictable circumstances with guest Lil Milagro Henriquez-Cornejo of Mycelium Youth Network. For Mycelium Youth Network, the capacity for community resilience is inextricable from reconnecting with ancestral knowledge and reestablishing our relationships with one another and Earth. Lil Milagro Henriquez-Cornejo is the founder and Executive Director of Mycelium Youth Network, an organization dedicated to preparing and empowering young people of color for climate change. Lil Milagro is a veteran of social justice organizing with over 18+ years of experience working on a myriad of issues, including access to higher education for low-income people and communities of color, food sovereignty, environmental racism, union democracy, and labor organizing, among others. In 2017, she founded Mycelium Youth Network. Music by Harry Foster, Lea Thomas, and Ian George. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.Support the show

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Queen Quet, originally aired in November of 2018. The Anthropocene tells the story of compounding injustice towards people and planet. It tells the story of growth for growth’s sake, living beyond boundaries sacredly assigned to us. In this episode, we are honored to be in dialogue with Queen Quet, Chieftess and Head-of-State for the Gullah/Geechee Nation, who is striving for justice on the front lines of the most pressing Anthropocentric intersections: climate change, resource extraction, corrupt and negligent government bodies, encroaching development, and exploitative tourism. Queen Quet, Marquetta L. Good-wine is a published author, computer scientist, lecturer, mathematician, historian, columnist, preservationist, environmental justice advocate, film consultant, and “The Art-ivist.” Queen Quet was selected, elected, and enstooled by her people to be the first Queen Mother, “head pun de bodee,” and official spokesperson for the Gullah/Geechee Nation. She is the founder of the premiere advocacy organization for the continuation of Gullah/Geechee culture, the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition. Music by The Gullah Singers - Live recordings from Gullah/Geechee TV Nayshun Nyews with Queen Quet and The Gullah/Geechee Nation International Music & Movement Festival. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.Support the show

The ubiquity of water is demonstrated in almost everything we come into contact with. It’s responsible for everyday objects like blue jeans, bread, and coffee, it rushes through pipes below our feet, is necessary for industrial violence like fracking, mapped through watersheds, exists as a healing modality, and is also a great source of pleasure - yet most of us take water for granted as a mundane necessity, rarely stopping to look at how tightly water is woven into politics, science, and the economy. This week on the podcast we look at the power and ubiquity of water in a world where it is becoming scarce with guest Andrea Ballestero. Andrea explores the tensions that exist between a human right and a commodity, water futures, pricing mechanisms, the fallacy of rationing and block pricing, and water scarcity. Andrea Ballestero is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rice University and she is also the founder and director of the Ethnography Studio. Her background includes a law degree, training in Natural Resource Policy, and a Ph.D. in anthropology. Her recent book, A Future History of Water, examines the daily work of implementing the human right to water in Costa Rica and in Northeast Brazil. This book is open access and available for download for free on her website. Dr. Ballestero is currently researching cultural imaginaries of the underground in Costa Rica, particularly aquifers. Her research and all of her publications can be found at https://andreaballestero.com/.Music by The Pit-Yak Aiodoi, Palo-Mah (Suculima), and Jahnavi Veronica.Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.Support the show

Environmental and ecological sustainability movements have often negated their complicity in white supremacy, heteronormativity, patriarchy, and capitalism, citing that their pursuits and causes are objectively positive because they are on behalf of the so-called “natural world.” This week on the podcast, we dig deeper into this topic with Guy Ritani and Toad Andrew Dell of PermaQueer. We discuss greenwashing, queering permaculture, what culturally relevant permaculture looks like, the ethics of frugality, and the importance of recognizing our responsibility in the web of things. PermaQueer is an ecological education project that focuses on accessibility to LGBTQIA and BIPOC folx. Toad and Guy who run PermaQueer, teach Permaculture through a queer lens with attention to the decolonization of its practices with more inclusion and access to marginal demographics. To them, permaculture provides a method of accessing and managing resources that care for communities needs with relatively small financial inputs. Music by Eliza Edens and India Blue and Joshu.Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.Support the show

“I validate the idea that survival is the ultimate act of creation in a world that has reduced us to fascist arithmetic, of being a quantitative statistic, not a human soul. So we still found a way to care, love, and create - isn't that art? I teach people to decipher the art that they’re already doing, recognize the artistry and the everyday miracles of life around them, and create from that place.” This week we immerse ourselves in the aforementioned call to recognize the myriad of creations all around us from guest ALOK, who guides us in an ever-expansive dialogue around spiritual wellbeing, the importance of creative literacy, and the tremendous freedom that awaits us when we make gender unknowable. We begin our conversation by foregrounding the importance of moving out of the paradigm of understanding trans and queer as something that is exclusive to the body. Instead, ALOK shares how challenging the gender binary is not only in service to our collective wellbeing but is a reverential offering in acknowledging our true celestial expansiveness that has been dimmed under binarism, heteronormativity, and colonialism. ALOK is a gender non-conforming writer and performance artist. Their distinctive style and poetic challenge to the gender binary have been internationally renowned. As a mixed-media artist Alok uses poetry, prose, comedy, performance, fashion design, and portraiture to explore themes of gender, race, trauma, belonging, and the human condition. They are the author of Femme in Public (2017) and Beyond the Gender Binary (2020).Music by Soda Lite, Rising Appalachia, and Lady Moon & The Eclipse. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.Support the show

“There's no magical return. We're not all going to return to an unblemished time in history, and if we know that...what do we have to do? Who needs to have conversation with whom? Who needs to heal what relationship? Who needs to ask for what permission? Who needs to offer something back?” This week on the podcast, Prentis Hemphill offers us these questions in conversation about how we can be in relationship with each other at this very moment in time. In recognition of the tremendous intricacies of our experiences when it comes to our collective histories, forced severances, and the manipulation of trauma in our society, Prentis shares how embodiment is a resource that allows us to connect with the Earth, recognize grief as an entry point, and shape the impossible into possible. Prentis Hemphill is a movement facilitator, Somatics teacher, and practitioner, working at the convergence of healing, collective transformation, and political organizing. At present, Prentis is the founder and leader of The Embodiment Institute and The Black Embodiment Initiative as well as host of the Finding Our Way Podcast.Music by Tan Cologne, This Flame I Carry, and The Breath.Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.Support the show