Green Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration

In this enlightening conversation, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a Queer Black feminist love evangelist and author, explores the rich insights gleaned from marine mammals' echolocation. She delves into the difference between colonial identification and kinship, emphasizing the importance of community and self-representation. Reflecting on Audre Lorde's legacy, Gumbs discusses survival as not just existence but as an invitation to thrive and connect. The dialogue weaves in poetry and communal care, all while celebrating ancestral connections and the transformative power of deep listening.

How is the common portrayal of Australia’s first peoples as hunter-gatherers who lived on empty, uncultivated land misguided, and wrong? What does the word “Country” mean in Aboriginal Australian thought? And what do we need to interrogate in terms of the subjectivity of how knowledge is produced or how stories are substantiated?In this episode, we are honored to speak with Bruce Pascoe, a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man best known for his book Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture.Join us in this warm, grounding conversation as we explore Aboriginal Australian agriculture, land practices of working with fire, maintaining respect for and falling in love with Mother Earth, and more.We invite you to…tune in and subscribe to Green Dreamer via any podcast app;subscribe to Kamea’s newsletters at kamea.substack.com;and support our show through a one-time donation or through joining our paid memberships on Patreon or Substack.

Laura Marris, a writer and translator known for her insightful book 'The Age of Loneliness,' explores the connections between loneliness, ecological loss, and public health crises. She discusses how our longing for connection can catalyze ecological awareness and community ties. The conversation delves into the role of nature in combating loneliness, the importance of intergenerational ecological memory, and how local activism can foster deeper relationships with the environment. Marris emphasizes the need for diverse expressions to combat feelings of isolation.

What does it mean to expand political action beyond the voting booth? What are some ways that colonialism and imperialism persist today? And what is the relationship between building community locally and confronting issues abroad that we may be entangled in?In this honest, hard-hitting dialogue, second-time guest Nick Estes returns to invite us to think critically beyond the suffocating cycles of electoral politics.Join us as we honestly face the limitations of representational change, while looking to the peripheries for alternative sources of inspiration and guidance.We invite you to…tune in and subscribe to Green Dreamer via any podcast app;join us on Patreon for the extended version of this episode;and subscribe to our newsletter and latest updates here.

In this episode, Sadiah Qureshi invites us to unravel histories of science, race, and empire to understand the social dynamics that we have inherited in the present. How do we begin to heal from constructs of division and racialization that have led to real-life consequences and systemic injustices for so many?Join us as we discuss how historical contexts influence how knowledge is shaped, the presumptions underlying “conservation” and “de-extinction” projects to interrogate, and more.We invite you to…tune in and subscribe to Green Dreamer via any podcast app;join us on Patreon for the extended version of this episode;and subscribe to our newsletter and latest updates here.

Bethany Brookshire, an award-winning freelance science journalist and author, delves into the complexities of how we label animals as 'pests.' She discusses the cultural evolution of this term and its ties to power dynamics and social justice. The conversation highlights how urban pests like rats symbolize broader societal issues, while proposing a shift in mindset towards coexistence with wildlife. Brookshire also shares insights on the ecological importance of overlooked species and emphasizes the need for innovative solutions that respect both humans and animals.

What does it mean to expand our perceptions of wealth — and question what it means to build freedom and security in life? How might we re-ground our understandings of democracy in traditional ecological knowledge? And how do we embrace an all-of-the-above approach when it comes to our possibilities for systemic change?In this episode, we are honored to welcome Joseph Gazing Wolf, who offers a wealth of wisdom drawing upon his life experiences growing up in landless, abject poverty.Join us as we explore how what it means to become “uncontrollable” in the eyes of mainstream systems, what we can learn from the diverse Indigenous knowledges rooted in different places around the globe, and more.We invite you to…tune in and subscribe to Green Dreamer via any podcast app;join us on Patreon for the extended version of this episode;and subscribe to our newsletter and latest updates here.

What does it actually mean to build “movements” — understanding this word not as a loose terminology overarching certain causes but as a substantive call for intentionally spun and co-conspired webs of relations? How can clarifying the words we use around organizing help to prevent co-optation and dilution? And how do we navigate the paradox of needing funding from often “dirty” sources in order to get by — while simultaneously attempting to subvert the underlying structures of power themselves?In this part 2 of our conversation with Rasul A. Mowatt and Too Black of Laundering Black Rage (tap into part 1 here), we continue to sink in more deeply to unravel our entanglement in systems of exploitation.Join us as we learn about what it means to tether ourselves to “organizations” beyond feeding into the optics of collective action; how we can practice “reverse laundering” to help funnel more resources towards “illegitimate” places of need; how to disentangle movement building from cycles of electoral politics; and more.We invite you to…tune in and subscribe to Green Dreamer via any podcast app;join us on Patreon for the extended version of this episode;and subscribe to our newsletter and latest updates at greendreamer.substack.com

What does it mean to understand laundering in the context of how Black rage often gets converted to fit the interests of capital — against the very people experiencing that anger as a response to state violence? How do we remain cautious of different forms of co-optation, including through the arts, that end up distancing people from the material conditions that originally sparked the rage?In this part one of our two-part conversation, we are honored to welcome the co-authors of Laundering Black Rage, Rasul A. Mowatt and Too Black — who guide us to critically reflect on key happenings in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd — and more recently, the murder of Sonya Massey.Join us in this vital and sobering dialogue as we discuss how activism for social causes is often subverted, redirected, and laundered into forms deemed palatable by the state — only to be fed back into reinforcing the system itself. We also explore how cities, to be distinguished from “society”, are set up inherently as sites of extraction — enforcing complicity by design.How do we confront our entanglement in such processes of laundering — while staying focused on the types of efforts that can more directly address the sources of systemic harm?www.patreon.com/greendreamer

With a significant part of the global population now reliant on paved road systems for the daily functioning of our lives, it is easy to overlook the impacts they have on our human and more-than-human communities.But how did so many of us become seemingly locked into this dependence on the “normalized violence” of these networks? And what does it mean to support harm reduction in the context of built infrastructures — or even dare to lean into possibilities of regenerative road ethics?In this episode, second-time guest Ben Goldfarb of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet (previously featured here) calls on us to confront the harmful-by-default impacts of our road systems. Join us as we uncover the various forms of highway pollution that communities of color are disproportionately subjected to; how roads impact our more-than-human communities beyond roadkill; what road decommissioning projects have entailed in practice; and more.What does it mean to alchemize change for transport systems that are quite literally being rigidified as they further expand — entrenching us deeper into these status quo ways of world-making?We invite you to…tune in and subscribe to Green Dreamer via any podcast app;join us on Patreon for the extended version of this episode;and subscribe to our newsletter and latest updates here.