“I think the bigger question is not necessarily specifically about physics, but generally speaking, about how we culturally engage with science and the role of science in our communities and how it shapes our mindset and what our mindset about science is. ”Joining us in this episode is theoretical physicist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, whose research on small-scale particles points us to a large, cosmic picture. From particle physics and astrophysics to astronomy and Black feminist science studies, Chanda’s work spans a wide range of disciplines, practices, and texts.Named as one of 10 people who helped shape science in 2020 as part of Nature’s 10, Chanda also leads in expanding awareness of and unpacking racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression that continue to govern scientific scholarship, particularly the field of physics. Through her deep love of math and physics as a form of storytelling, Chanda is committed, in her own words to “understanding the biggest story there is: the origin and history of the universe”—histories stemming from pluri-cultural lenses.Tune in to this episode as Chanda talks through some of the themes explored in her latest award-winning book, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, pointing to the entanglement of Western scientific institutions tethered to specific cultural and historical hegemonies. Shining a light on the political nature of technology, she problematizes supremacist ways of knowledge-seeking and questions universalized visions of advancement—including the idea that expanding the accessibility of broadband internet connection to every community on Earth is a shared and necessary goal of inclusivity.(The musical offering featured in this episode is Trust The Sun by Oropendola. The episode-inspired artwork is by Fernanda Peralta)This episode was brought to you by our supporting listeners. Join us on Patreon to help us keep our show alive: www.greendreamer.com/support

“The legacy of Earth colonization… is still [in its] early days. We can protect this shared environment and also what I see as the intangible heritage of humanity. Space belongs to us all.”In this episode, we are joined in conversation with Dr. Aparna Venkatesan, a cosmologist working on studies of “first-light” sources in the universe. She also works actively in cultural astronomy and space policy, is recognized internationally for her research and DEI leadership, featured widely in the media, and received numerous prizes and awards. Dr. Venkatesan is deeply committed to increasing the participation and retention of underrepresented groups in astronomy and the sciences and is active in developing co-created scientific partnerships with Indigenous communities worldwide.Invoking us to think deeply about the ‘culture of science,’ Dr. Venkatesan offers an invitation to examine tapestries of life in relation to the more-than-earth world. Through joyful rhetoric and a love for the language of science, she calls for reflective examination deemed necessary to preserve the heritage of our ancestral global commons—space—that is currently under threat by extractive and colonial interests. In response to the growing privatization of the cosmos, Dr. Venkatesan urges for the immediacy of un-rooting these legacies by inviting other ways of knowing and engaging in communal practices of interplanetary justice as luminous as the night sky itself.(The musical offering featured in this episode Carolina by Mother Juniper. The episode-inspired artwork is by Lucy Haslam.)This episode was brought to you by our supporting listeners. Join us on Patreon to help us keep our show alive: www.greendreamer.com/support

“It’s very important that we translate how different knowledge systems have been privileged and others have been marginalized and repressed and erased. To have true knowledge symbiosis, where there is harmony and balance and inter-relationality and each contributing respectfully with care, thoughtfulness, humility, that is a process and it’s a messy and tangled process.”In this episode, we welcome Melissa K. Nelson, an Indigenous ecologist, writer, editor, media-maker and scholar-activist. Expanding on her years of community based work as well as mixed background and heritage, Melissa reflects on climate change as a symptom, rather than a cause, of disharmonious imbalance with the earth. She invites us to ask: how might acts of ‘balance’ be more dynamic than we may perceive? And how might we re-examine, re-situate, and even re-claim the word “sustainability” to invoke more than maintaining stasis, or keeping a status quo? In staying with these questions, Melissa reminds us of the importance of death, decay and composting; concepts so often eschewed under the house that modernity built. In composting that which needs to change, Melissa gestures towards practices of embodied story-ing that is relational, place-based, and ancestral. Ultimately, Melissa asks of herself and us: what does it mean to become, or be in the process of becoming, a good ancestor?(The musical offering featured in this episode Carolina by Mother Juniper. The episode-inspired artwork is by Lauren Rosenfelt.)This episode was brought to you by our supporting listeners. Join us on Patreon to help us keep our show alive: www.greendreamer.com/support

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For Green Dreamer’s 400th episode, we welcome Anand Giridhardas, a writer and journalist whose books include The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy (2022), Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018), The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (2014), and India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking (2011). A former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times for more than a decade, Anand has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Time, and is the publisher of the newsletter The Ink. Spanning themes of philanthropy, political change, and social media, Anand unsettles the assumptions of “win-win” social change. How does the rise of elite philanthropy and plutocratic “do-gooding” coincide with the hoarding of power? We look at how in an age of bifurcated American politics, many people fighting for social change face burnout or have given up. Accordingly, Anand calls for the need to stay with the art of persuasion and simultaneous calling-in and calling-out—digging deeper into the political spectrum rather than simplifying people’s complex humanity into binaries. This episode was brought to you by our supporting listeners. Join us on Patreon to help us keep our show alive: www.greendreamer.com/support //The musical offering featured in this episode Drop The Stone by Oropendola.//  

“Hundreds of people have been murdered over sand in the last few years. Even though most of us barely ever think about it, sand is actually the most used natural resource in the world after air and water.” In this episode, we welcome journalist Vince Beiser, the author of The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization. Vince guides us in an exploration of sand as a natural resource and the ways in which its extraction and exploitation, quite literally, upholds structures of modern civilization. Exposing the multi-layered histories, uses of, and even violence that ensues around sand as a resource, Vince calls for an exploration of diverse, plural models that include but are not solely dependent on sand as an infrastructural material. How does unveiling the economy of sand, in turn, speak to landscapes of injustice, where the clearness of glass as end products juxtaposes the outsourced pollution that exits their factories? And how might our questioning of “how and why” sand is culled into our lives turn our attention to the literal and metaphorical cracks that splinter the seemingly indestructible foundations of the project of modernity? This episode was brought to you by our supporting listeners. Join us on Patreon to help us keep our show alive: www.greendreamer.com/support (The musical offering featured in this episode At the Edge of It by Oropendola.)

“Once you start rebuilding more localized systems, they are almost without exception, going to be kinder to the environment and kinder to people structurally. ” In this episode, we are honored to welcome back our guest Helena Norberg-Hodge, a linguist, author, and filmmaker, and the founder of the Local Futures. As a pioneer and proponent of localization (decentralization), as well as her experience living in deep relation with the people of Ladakh over a 40-year period, Helena encourages “locality” grounded in community accountability, slowness, and (bio)diversity. Join Helena and our host Kamea as we explore the systemic barriers surrounding notions of philanthropy and investment, gift economies, and re-structuring community fabric from the bottom up. Throughout the conversation, Helena urges us to sit with the complexities of modern economic and agricultural practices that extract, monopolize, and homogenize cultures and lifeforms. Ultimately she asks: how might we avoid falling into the pit of “shame and blame” responses to these atrocities, and rather, shed light on historical matrices that have shaped where we are today? In doing so, how can we encourage and learn from existing practices and cultural paradigms that embody localization at its core? (The musical offering featured in this episode Drop the Stone by Oropendola. The episode-inspired artwork is by Art Twink.) This episode was brought to you by our supporting listeners. Join us on Patreon to help us keep our show alive: www.greendreamer.com/support

“When I talk about extinction as a bio-cultural process, what I’m seeing or what I’m talking about is the fact that there’s lots of different species who are alive and who are working within a cultural entanglement which is shaping their capacity to either thrive or perhaps become endangered and go into decline... I see art as giving people a way to engage with that grief, and to engage with that emotional connection with the subject, but also to engage with a sense of agency over it.” In this episode, we welcome Rosamund Portus, an artist, writer and researcher of environmental humanities. Drawn to bees at an early age, by way of her exposure to gardening, Rosamund conducted her undergraduate dissertation on humans’ understanding of bee culture. She later pursued a Ph.D. in the social and cultural dimensions of bee population declines. In turn, Rosamund has gone on to complicate black and white “whodunit” narratives around species extinction, while advocating for creativity and art as pathways of relational becoming. Speaking from her context of living in the U.K., and through a lens of “bio-culturalism,” Rosamund is interested in how modern, consumerist, human culture (at least in the West) have become entangled with a perception of bee culture, particularly the trope and role honeybees in agricultural systems. She invites us to challenge what renders a “meaningful” life and death, which species get to matter within mainstream extinction dialogues, and how storytelling plays an important role in enriching our capacities of engagement with bees, other species, and ourselves. (The musical offering featured in this episode At the Edge of It by Oropendola. The episode-inspired artwork is by Cherie Kwok.) This episode was brought to you by our supporting listeners. Join us on Patreon to help us keep our show alive: www.greendreamer.com/support

“If we’re soaking in all these default practices that are power-over practices that are reflected to us through the media, through our families and communities, through how the economy works, it means we’re embodying things that we might not even agree with that might not at all align with our values, but we’re embodying them anyway.” Staci K. Haines is a somatics innovator and the author of The Politics of Trauma. In her decades of working and teaching in the field of somatics, Staci has grown fascinated with the “how” rather than the “why.” She invokes questions such as how we are shaped, how we cultivate resilience, how we practice, and how we transform. Observing somatics as a holistic paradigm shift, Staci offers insight into the body as a form of place—a place where the personal meets the collective. With this in mind, she invites us to explore how working with embodied somatic practices in safe and accessible ways can shape the ways in which we want to respond to, act on, and heal cycles of trauma. By leaning on the phrase “we become what we practice,” Staci poses somatics as a relational space where social justice, collective aliveness, and personal healing align in untangling the knots of exploitative power. Ultimately, she expresses the urgent need for collective resourcefulness as guided by somatic awareness.  (The musical offering featured in this episode is Trust The Sun by Oropendola. The episode-inspired artwork is by Nano Février.) This episode was brought to you by our supporting listeners. Join us on Patreon to help us keep our show alive: www.greendreamer.com/support

Dr. Andreas Weber is a biologist, philosopher, and writer, whose work focuses on re-evaluating our understanding of the living and dying. Andreas proposes understanding organisms as subjects, and hence the biosphere, as a meaning-creating and poetic reality. Accordingly, he holds that an economy inspired by nature should not be designed as a mechanistic optimisation machine, but rather as an ecosystem which transforms the mutual sharing of matter and energy into deeper meaning. Reflecting on his former education in biology and marine science, Andreas enriches a discourse on the limitations of objectivity under a strictly scientific lens. Through a “both-and” perspective, Andreas walks us through what he calls “poetic ecology,” as he navigates the nuance of ecological Eros of tapping into the aliveness of being. This aliveness, he proposes, emerges from a sense of desire, which within a Western worldview tends to exclude more-than-human relationships. However, by respectfully acknowledging other worldviews of dividuality, rather than just individuality, Andreas signals the attention given to our inner experiences of Eros that inevitably enhance the aliveness of the whole. (The musical offering featured in this episode is Over It by RVBY MY DEAR.) This episode was brought to you by our supporting listeners. Join us on Patreon to help us keep our show alive: www.greendreamer.com/support