Crazy Town
Post Carbon Institute
With equal parts humor and in-depth analysis, Asher, Rob, and Jason safeguard their sanity while probing crazy-making topics like climate change, overshoot, runaway capitalism, and why we’re all deluding ourselves. Each fortnightly episode helps you understand the “Great Unraveling” of our environmental and social systems and describes how we can make the transition to a sustainable and equitable world. If you’re someone who questions the trajectory of society and struggles to understand why most people would rather eat nachos on the deck of the “SS Denial” than face reality, you’ll find community and plenty of laughs in Crazy Town.Brought to you by https://www.resilience.org/ and the unconventional minds at Post Carbon Institute, a nonprofit think tank that builds awareness of the polycrisis and prescribes community resilience-building as the most appropriate response.Your hosts:Asher Miller - Nonprofit executive director by day, apocalypse comedian by night. Feels most at home exploring insanity-inducing topics while trying not to spill coffee on his keyboard as he convulses over the latest ecomodernist fantasy. In danger of losing his mind every time he encounters someone using a gas-powered blower to move leaves from one spot to another.Rob Dietz - Jack-of-all-trades environmental scientist, conservation biologist, and ecological economist with a penchant for relating planetary overshoot to the catalog of movie scenes that play on a continuous loop in his colonized brain. Known for inserting random ecological facts into casual conversation, often in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice. His friends call him “pessimistically hilarious.”Jason Bradford - Activist farmer and former encyclopedia salesman with a PhD in plant ecology who gets genuinely excited discussing soil microbes and societal collapse in the same breath. Morally opposed to doomsday prepping, but predisposed toward sharing everything he keeps in his bunker, er root cellar, including potatoes, wine, and a 47-month supply of scientific esoterica and embarrassing anecdotes.These guys are the Three Stooges of sustainability podcasting, although they tend toward scientific analysis, righteous outrage, and self-deprecation rather than beating each other up with hand tools. How can they have this much fun while contemplating collapse and navigating the Great Unraveling?Heartfelt thanks to the team at Post Carbon Institute, our volunteers, and all our fellow Crazy Townies out there who help bring this podcast to life.
Episodes
Mentioned books
May 28, 2020 • 46min
Mailbag: Dark Humor and Sustainability from Listeners around the World
Heathens, kooks, and fertilizer for corn and bean fields: these are a few of the names applied to your humble hosts here in Crazy Town. We set ourselves up for abuse in this special mailbag episode, and our listeners didn't disappoint. Despite the occasional (and well deserved) insult, we love our listeners and find them to be some of the most intelligent, caring, and committed people in the world. Learn how they're working toward sustainable transportation, healthy farms, infrastructure repurposing, and community resilience, all while keeping a good sense of humor. For episode notes and more information, please visit our website and sign up for our newsletter.Support the show
May 21, 2020 • 54min
Breaking the Brady Vase: Coronavirus and Fault Lines in American Politics
Besides lessons in ethics (and in Asher's case, lessons in the English language), the Brady Bunch offers up a metaphor about the fault lines in American politics -- fault lines that include the undermining of government, extreme individualism, race and class divides, and capitalist and corporate excesses. Blood pressures soar, especially when Jason contemplates the Dunning-Kruger effect, but your intrepid hosts release the tension by suggesting some pathways out of political malaise. For episode notes and more information, please visit our website and sign up for our newsletter.Support the show
May 14, 2020 • 39min
Poked by a Porcupine: the Politics of Contraction as We Encounter the Limits to Growth
Before you heap praise on someone's cooking, even for something as delicious as porcupine pot pie, you might want to consider the effects of ego inflation and the downsides of a hyper-individualistic culture. In this episode Asher, Rob, and Jason wonder if individualism (not to mention all those other "-isms"... capitalism, socialism, communism) is simply the product of a relatively short period of expansionism, and what of our values must be kept or discarded as we enter a new era of contraction and bureaucratic breakdown. While expressing a profound desire to retain the progress humanity has made on numerous fronts (don't sleep on 21st-century dentistry), they make sure to insult one another just enough for proper ego containment. For episode notes and more information, please visit our website and sign up for our newsletter.Support the show
May 11, 2020 • 44min
Doors and Deck Chairs on the Titanic: Reimagining Lifeboat Ethics in the Age of Overshoot
As we continue heading toward planetary disaster, like the Titanic steaming toward its rendezvous with a big freakin' iceberg, we might want to figure out how to prepare and manage our lifeboats. In environmentalism’s seedy past, a famous ecologist used the metaphor of lifeboats getting swamped to argue for a "screw the poor and non-whites" strategy to deal with the limits to growth. In search of better ideas and better leadership, Asher, Rob, and Jason discuss how we can reinvent lifeboat ethics and find prosocial ways to manage humanity's shared crises. Bonus: find out what to do if you should find that the soles of your feet have fallen off. For episode notes and more information, please visit our website and sign up for our newsletter.Support the show
May 7, 2020 • 46min
Koala Butts Ablaze: Growth, Conservation, and Collapse in the Adaptive Cycle
In the disorienting days of corona quarantine, wouldn't it be dope to have a model that can help you make sense of the world? Enter the adaptive cycle from the field of systems ecology -- arguably the most important framework you never heard of. Join Asher, Rob, and Jason as they give a guided tour of the growth, conservation, collapse, and reorganization phases of the cycle, and hash out how it can be applied to the modern world. By the end of the tour, besides having a useful lens for interpreting humanity's predicament, you'll be quite confident in assessing which phase is represented by a koala with a flaming fanny. For episode notes and more information, please visit our website and sign up for our newsletter.Support the show
May 4, 2020 • 5min
Announcement: Luciferian Mailbag Call
We want to hear your Crazy Town stories and questions. Please send email to crazytown@postcarbon.org, and if your message strikes the right chord (kinda like the voicemail we dissect in this announcement), we'll discuss it in our upcoming mailbag episode.Support the show
Apr 30, 2020 • 38min
Banana Town: Where Michael Moore Stokes Controversy over Renewable Energy
Paying attention to the buzz around Planet of the Humans, the new film by Michael Moore, is like standing in the middle of a three-ring circus. In ring #1 are the filmmakers, who raise critical questions about how renewable sources can power industrial society, but do so with questionable facts and mean-spirited attacks. In ring #2 are the left-wing enviros, who are barfing out lazy accusations of ecofascism and doing all they can to avoid addressing the film’s legitimate questions about population and consumption. In ring #3 are the oil-soaked, right-wing libertarians who think this film will help them keep earning and burning their way to the bank at the end of Armageddon Road. Asher, Rob, and Jason grapple with the cacophony, hash out the good and bad of the film and the response to it, and argue for an honest, messy-middle approach to the transition away from fossil fuels. For episode notes and more information, please visit our website and sign up for our newsletter.Support the show
Apr 23, 2020 • 40min
Mayor McCheese & Modern Medicine: Squandering Energy and Rethinking Technology
Some anthropologists argue that we're living in an anomalous historical period called High Energy Modernity, which will end sooner than we might like because of declining 'net energy.' It's an era of contradictions in which we've acquired unbelievable technology but put it to some of the most frivolous uses. In this episode, Rob, Asher, and Jason ask themselves, "If High Energy Modernity is on the way out, what will we miss most, and what will we be glad to see go?" And they ponder appropriate technology and whether the digging stick is primed for a comeback. For episode notes and more information, please visit our website and sign up for our newsletter.Support the show
Apr 20, 2020 • 27min
An Ecofascist and a Social Justice Warrior Walk into a Bar: Extremist Politics and Censorship
We've seen a frightening rise in recent years of violence and violent rhetoric by so-called ecofascists, who use environmental and resource limits arguments to justify hateful views around immigration and population. But does that mean those of us who are concerned about ecological limits should keep our mouths shut? Rob, Jason, and Asher explore why squelching discussions about limits might actually backfire and fuel ecofascist views instead, while wrestling with some of the skeletons in the environmental movement's closet. Speaking of skeletons, wait until you hear our "theories" about Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold. For episode notes and more information, please visit our website and sign up for our newsletter.Support the show
Apr 16, 2020 • 55min
Foreclosing on the Frackers: Coronavirus and the Future of Energy
In the last episode Asher, Rob, and Jason discussed the danger of political denial and delusion limiting how well we respond to the climate crisis. This week we address the risk that another "d"--distraction--will keep us from recognizing the huge threats and opportunities the pandemic presents for our energy future. The lads also take a few minutes to pat themselves on the back (virtually, of course) for how much recent episodes, though recorded before the %@#*$^ virus hit, apply to our new pandemic reality, before exploring some absurdities of social distancing in Quarantine Corner. For episode notes and more information, please visit our website and sign up for our newsletter.Support the show
