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

Camille Sapara Barton, an advocate for grief practices, shares profound insights on embracing grief rather than overcoming it. She discusses the challenges of information overload in modern life and how it affects our emotional well-being. Exploring the impact of capitalism on our humanity, Camille highlights the importance of community rituals and somatic practices for deeper self-awareness. She encourages reconnecting with our bodies and honoring traditions, particularly in helping future generations navigate unresolved pain.

What does it mean to remember ourselves as representatives of our rivers, oceans, and other earthly bodies of water? Why is it vital to recognize the failed logic underpinning regulatory systems that take on an “innocent until proven guilty” approach to water pollution? And how can we leverage our tools as artists, storytellers, and creatives to co-create felt change?In this episode, we dialogue with Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo and Blake Lavia of Talking Wings Collective for a synergistic conversation — where they invite us to think and dream with water.Join us as the artist-activist duo expands on how the legal frameworks surrounding pollution often exist in “grey areas”; why we need to problematize such “bureaucracies of death” as maintaining worldviews of separation between people and our waterful world; and what it means to replace extractivist modes of relating with our ecosystems that better align with the Indigenous framing of “Water is Life.”Tune in and subscribe to Green Dreamer via any podcast app; get our show notes at greendreamer.com; and join us on Patreon for the extended version of this episode.www.patreon.com/greendreamer

In this conversation with Dr. Juanita Sundberg, we explore how our relationships with the more-than-human world are often shaped by our institutions and knowledge systems — which don’t always honor the diverse cosmologies and relationalities of life. Juanita draws on her work with Indigenous communities and organizations as she highlights how our existence is determined not only by political and societal constructs of borders and boundaries, but by some of the most overlooked elements of the living world.What is the significance of unraveling colonial modes of relating? What does it mean to nuance the concept of “human exceptionalism"? And how do we collectively re-enliven and heal such senses of dissociation?Tune in and subscribe to Green Dreamer via any podcast app, and read our episode transcript and show notes at greendreamer.com.

How do we recalibrate the metrics of mainstream politics, such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) often used to define a nation's “success” — and recenter them on our collective and planetary wellbeing? What could a truly regenerative economy encompass, and what might that mean for our immediate and long-term activism?In this episode, we welcome Amanda Janoo, who feels called to help build just and sustainable economies through goal-oriented and participatory design policies.Join us as Amanda shares about the limitations of mainstream economics; what the “Wellbeing Economy” is all about; how it relates to other models such as circular economy or degrowth economy; and more.Tune in and subscribe to Green Dreamer via any podcast app, and get our show notes at greendreamer.com.

In this episode, Sophy Banks shares her rich wealth of knowledge, teachings, and experiences about what it means to truly support ourselves and others through both collective and personal traumas. Cultures of individualism often lead us to navigate trauma on our own— without rituals of shared and collective space holding. For some, particularly those who have been victims of oppression, colonialism, and dispossession, the rivers and oceans of grief held within are often too vast and too deep to be carried alone.Join us in this episode as Sophy offers medicine for our souls, asking vital questions about collective grief tending. How do we notice trauma? How do we disrupt ways of managing grief that possibly reinforce systems and cultures of destruction? And what does it mean to truly care for and hold one another through times of darkness and despair?Tune in and subscribe to Green Dreamer via any podcast app, and join us on Patreon for the extended version of this episode.

What do the terminologies we often use to describe plants reveal about human and human-plant relations? How is the current landscape of the plant world entangled with human histories of desire, power, and imperialism?Drawing from her experience living across various countries and continents as a third-generation migrant, Jessica J. Lee delves into the nuances of shifting attitudes towards both plant and human migration stories throughout time. Join us as we explore how terms such as “weeds,” “naturalized” or “invasive” are defined and used to describe the plant world, how we might expand our understandings of belonging through recognizing the movement, as well as rootedness, of plants, and more.Subscribe to Green Dreamer and support our show at Patreon.com/GreenDreamer.

How do we show up as sensitive, creative and intuitive beings in a system that does not honor the uniqueness of our spirits? How can we stay true to our calling when we’re so busy simply trying to survive?In this episode, Niharika Sanyal shares sweet fruits of wisdom on the radical act of honoring our unique gifts as offerings during times of darkness. In guiding us towards the deepest desires and whispers of our hearts, Sanyal draws from her personal experiences, yoga philosophy, and Vedic myths. Her teachings shine a light on the collective pathways that can lead us towards more divine ways of being, feeling and co-existing through tuning into our innate inner wisdom, knowledge and unconditional love.Get our transcript and episode show notes at greendreamer.com; support our show at patreon.com/greendreamer.

“We consume not only stuff but also knowledge, experiences, critique. And this consumption, many times, is not even digested. It is the consumption for consumption’s sake so that we can feel better.”What might it mean for humanity to reach a level of maturation to be able to confront the multilayered crises we now face—calling upon us to “grow up and show up” for ourselves and our planet? And how might recognizing the differing historical contexts that we were raised within help us to have more empathy when navigating our generational differences?In this episode, we revisit our past conversation with Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, a Brazilian educator and Indigenous and Land Rights advocate. She is a professor and Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities, and Global Change at the University of British Columbia. She is one of the founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective and part of the coordination team of the "Last Warning" campaign.Vanessa is also the author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and Implications for Social Activism.

What could it mean to heal our relationship with the dead, the decaying, and the dark in order to move towards more liveable futures? What possibilities might arise when we shift from cultural narratives of fear, discomfort, and disgust with these unseen worlds — to ones which honor the wisdoms that they may be able to offer?In this episode, Perdita Finn draws on her book Take Back the Magic to invite us to find kinship and guidance from beings that have passed.Through a renewal of ancient practices and rituals, Finn invokes the reclamation of our bodies, inner wisdom, and personal mantras that keep us whole and grounded during the troubled times of modernity.Subscribe and listen to Green Dreamer via any podcast app and read on for our episode transcript.

In this episode, geographer, writer, and sound artist AM Kanngieser invites us to reconsider the diverse ways in which we register both sound and silence — pushing back against the idea that listening itself is a virtuous act with universality in experience.Through their own journey as a geographer and sound artist, Kanngieser sheds light on the colonial repercussions of extracting sound, knowledge, and information from landscapes and communities that have historically been taken from without consent. What are the moral considerations for using recording technologies initially developed for military surveillance? How do we ask for permission to capture sounds—not just from the people of a place but also from the land themselves? And what does it mean to blur the boundaries of our various senses as we become more attuned and responsive to the world?