For The Wild

Through the support of ever-growing subsidies, trade deals, and taxes global corporations have ballooned, creating a highly violent, exploitative, and absurd global trade system. So absurd, that often we fixate on the hypocrisy of how it became possible that food packaged and processed on the other side of the world is somehow “cheaper” than that which is grown by our neighbors. In this week’s episode, we learn about what continues to strengthen and uphold the wastefulness of our global trade system and how global corporations decimate diversity in terms of species, livelihoods, and identities with guest Helena Norberg-Hodge. Helena Norberg-Hodge is an innovator of the new economy movement. She is author of the inspirational classic Ancient Futures, and Local is Our Future. Helena is the founder and director of Local Futures and The International Alliance for Localisation, and a founding member of the International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture, the International Forum on Globalization and the Global Ecovillage Network.Music by Dana Anastasia and Chloe Levaillant.Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.Support the show

Struggling to change actual conditions, many have settled for changing the perceptions of the world around us. On this week’s episode, guest Tyson Yunkaporta begins by sharing the connections between perception, the branding of our identities, and the many forms of capital that become available and valuable in a perception-obsessed society. As we welcome the call to change our conditions and participate in the great “thousand-year clean-up”, we explore hybridized insight, the ramifications of clinging to dichotomous identities, and how genuine diversity is tangible preparedness and emotional resilience in motion. With this in mind, it becomes our task to figure out how we can sustain genuine diversity in our lives so we may work alongside folks with different capacities, worldviews, solutions, and thought processes in devotion to dismantling a system that necessitates abuse. Tyson Yunkaporta is an academic, an arts critic, and a researcher who belongs to the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He carves traditional tools and weapons and also works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne.Music by 40 Million Feet, Marty O’Reilly & the Old Soul Orchestra, and Violet Bell. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.Support the show

On this week’s episode, we observe the impacts of common narratives of escape and place and how those narratives underscore exploitative tourism. Bani Amor guides us through an exploration of how travel can be viewed as an extension of the colonial project and how travel media is largely a product of the patriarchal gaze. We’re invited to critically examine how places and experiences are marketed and sold particularly for white consumption, and how we can resist, while thinking deeply about the disparate dynamics between the “visitor” and “the visited.” Bani discusses the fetishization of land and lifeways and how exploitative tourism facilitates ongoing cycles of domination creating unstable economies, and rendering local communities vulnerable to abuse. Urging us to ask questions that aren’t really encouraged in the travel space, Bani asks us to ask ourselves: how can we have a connection to place that isn’t based on escapism and dominion?Music by Juan Torregoza, Peals, and Fabian Almazan Trio. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.Support the show

This week’s encore episode, originally broadcast in October of 2017, invites insight into renewed relational understanding of home, sacred rage, and protecting the breathing spaces of public lands. Terry Tempest Williams guides us to explore acts of the imagination as we shift into consciousness and expand our sense of family to both human and wild. As so many of us grapple with the omnipresent question of “what do we do?”, Terry provides us with salve through stories of the beauty and power of our gifts, and the living histories of the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau. Terry Tempest Williams has been called "a citizen writer," a writer who speaks and speaks out eloquently on behalf of an ethical stance toward life. A naturalist and fierce advocate for freedom of speech, she has consistently shown us how environmental issues are social issues that ultimately become matters of justice. Terry Tempest Williams is the author of the environmental literature classic, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; Leap; Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert; and The Open Space of Democracy. Her most recent book is The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks Music by Buffalo Rose, Kendra Swanson, and Aviva le Fey. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.Support the show

Will we “undo” or “solve” climate change? Could we still create a livable world if the answer to the previous question is no? Could we create an even more just world than the one we’ve been living in so far? This week we step away from thinking about climate change at the planetary scale and reflect on how we can respond at the community level with guest Gopal Dayaneni. Gopal reminds us to think about the climate crisis as a message in which we are being asked to respond by tending to our all of relationships, not just reducing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. In this exploration of crisis, solutions, distribution of suffering, and relations - we learn about the power of changing our relationship to a problem. Gopal has been involved in fighting for social, economic, environmental, and racial justice through organizing & campaigning, teaching, writing, speaking, and direct action since the late 1980s. Gopal is a co-founder of Movement Generation: Justice and Ecology Project. Currently, Gopal supports movement building through his work with organizations including The Climate Justice Alliance, ETCgroup, and the Center for Story-based Strategy. Gopal works at the intersection of ecology, economy, and empire. He lives in an intentional community of 9 adults and a squabble of kids.Music by Skeppet, Shingai, and Yesol.Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.Support the show

Mainstream media has gradually begun to recognize the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People (MMIWG2S) epidemic across North America, but only after constant attention and pressure from Indigenous communities, advocates, and organization - still, much needs to be addressed as there continues to be serious misrepresentation. In this week’s episode, we speak to advocate and athlete, Jordan Marie Brings Three White Horses Daniel about the tremendous ripple effects of missing relatives, where the media continues to get it wrong, and the crippling economic tolls incurred by families as they are punished during periods of urgency and loss. As a marathon runner, we also speak with Jordan about the act of running and how it can meaningfully move energy in solidarity with the MMIWG2S movement. Jordan Marie Brings Three White Horses Daniel is a citizen of Kul Wicasa Oyate (Lower Brule Sioux Tribe) as well as a passionate and devoted advocate nationally known for her grassroots organization for anti-pipelines/climate justice efforts, change the name/not your mascot, MMIWG2S and MMIP, and native youth initiatives. Jordan is the founder and organizer of Rising Hearts, an Indigenous-led grassroots group.Music by Lake Mary, Santiago Cordoba, Emily Ritz, and Arthur Moon. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.Support the show

Many of us have access to more choices than we ever thought imaginable, in fact, it is quite easy to find ourselves amidst an abundance of products, eating foods cultivated across the world, or selecting from a myriad of variations of the same “thing”. But this “abundance” of choice masks ecological depletion, and as we gain access to that which is far from our homes, actual place-based abundance is often jeopardized. This week on the podcast we explore this in context to herring in Southeast Alaska with guest K’asheechtlaa (Louise Brady). Everything from chinook, seals, whales, eagles, halibut, and dolphins, all depend on herring directly or indirectly. In addition to nourishing so much of the Pacific marine ecosystem, these kin are embedded in the culture and spirit of Sheetʼká (Sitka). But as herring have been utilized in pet food, fertilizer, fish meal for aquariums and salmon farms, and marketed as a delicacy abroad - fisheries have been mismanaged by the state of Alaska and overfished to near extinction. K’asheechtlaa is a woman of the Tlingit nation in Sheetʼká Ḵwáan, an island off the coast of Southeast Alaska. She is Raven-Frog or Kiks.ádi Clan, Kiks.ádi women are known as the herring ladies, they have a story or original instruction that connects them spiritually, culturally, and historically to herring. K’asheechtlaa is the founder of the Herring Protectors, a grassroots movement of people that share concerns that the herring population in Sheetʼká Ḵwáan, and the culture tied to it, are under threat. Music by Lake Mary, The Ascent of Everest, Alexandra Blakely, and Fountainsun. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.Support the show

When asked about implementing 5G in 2019, Brussels’ Environment Minister, Celine Fremault was quoted saying “the people of Brussels are not guinea pigs whose health I can sell at a profit. We cannot leave anything to doubt.” Comparatively here in the United States, we are bombarded with advertisements that boast about the speed, accessibility, and necessity of 5G. Of course, unlike other countries, the United States has also embraced the digitization of our life beyond recognition. There are more cell phones in the United States than there are people, so it comes as no surprise that 5G would be an easier sell to our public. Alongside guest Devra L. Davis, we take a deeper look at why the telecom industry is manufacturing demand for 5G, as well as the overwhelming amount of research on global 5G wireless networks and how they threaten various species and ecosystems. Dr. Davis is an internationally acclaimed award-winning scientist and author of more than 220 scientific publications and 3 popular books. She was the U.S. Senate confirmed Presidential appointee to the National Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board and served as an advisor to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the World Health Organization. She is currently the President of the Environmental Health Trust.Music by Jeremy Harris, Shay Roselip, and Tan Cologne. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.Support the show

Humans have often turned to the night sky for both practical matters, like direction and orientation, as well as philosophical matters, like making sense of our place in the world and communicating with the ethereal. Despite this ancestral connection, many of us either know very little about the space above us and the galaxies around us, or we don’t even have the privilege of being able to develop this connection. Did you know 85% of matter in the universe is considered intangible “dark” matter? Have you ever wondered why it’s even called dark matter? Did you know some nation-states are still considering what it would take to mine the moon? Or that we are radically altering what the night sky looks like through the increasing presence of satellites? In this week’s episode, we explore these curiosities with Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an assistant professor of physics and core faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. Dr. Prescod-Weinstein’s book The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred will be published in the US and Canada in March 2021. Music by Harrison Foster, Amaara, and Jahnavi Veronica. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.Support the show

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