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

Dr. Patricia Kaishian, a mycologist, discusses the connection between fungi and their fluid, interconnected identities. They explore biases in mycology and the importance of honoring and expanding awareness. The concept of deep time in relation to the climate crisis is also discussed. 'Forest Euphoria,' a book on organisms challenging norms, and individuals making a positive impact are highlighted.

In the episode, we welcome Dr. Eshe Lewis to discuss her life and learnings as an activist, anthropologist, and storyteller. Eshe walks us through glimpses of her time with Afro-Peruvian women as part of her doctoral research and how this experience transfigured beyond the siloed parameters of academic study into personal, historical, and political realms.Eshe’s conscious intent of questioning, complicating, and re-positioning anthropology not only as an academic discipline, but a field of ethical practice, casts an inspirational light on the role and reachability of storytelling. Join us as she voices this critical exposure of in-between, multi/cross-lingual modes of communicating—not only as a means of empowerment but as an invitation to lean into joy and awe.(The musical offering featured in this episode is Scissor-tailed Flycatcher by Ben White. The episode-inspired artwork is by Taylor Tinkham.)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 United States started to heavily invest in subsidizing growing wheat for exporting purposes. That resulted in flooding international markets, including Jordan’s markets. Cheap American wheat left many of the small-scale farmers unable to compete under record prices.”In this episode, we welcome Lama Khatieb, co-founder of Zikra for Popular Learning: a Jordan-based collective that aims to empower community members to revalue their identity and culture, through the cultivation and sharing of their local and traditional knowledge. We visit themes of agricultural interdependence in relation to Jordan’s history of wheat and bread production, how small grassroots initiatives are taking matters of food sovereignty into their own (literal) hands, and more.Lama endeavors to draw the richness of village life and local harvesting practices to our attention. Through the efforts of the Al-Barakeh Wheat Project (whose name also entails the practice of blessing and abundance), Lama and fellow participants respond not only to Jordan’s current dependence on imported wheat but aim to tap into the wider cultural and ecological ramifications of losing local practices.Join us as we dive into what the spirit and practice of “Barakeh” teaches in terms of cultural reclamation, small-scale initiatives, food interdependence, and relationships with the land.(The musical offering featured in this episode Concept of Love by Cheery. The episode-inspired artwork is by Lucy Halsam.)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

In this episode, we welcome anthropologist Daniel Ruiz-Serna, whose work, situated in the Choco region of Colombia, aims to expose the entanglement of political and ecological violence whereby echoes of conflict/healing reverberate through place. In light of the enmeshment between war and land, Daniel welcomes a framework of living territories, as traced by his life/work with the diversity of human and more-than-human communities of Bajo Atrato, Choco.Tune in as Daniel invokes questions around: What stories do the land and its respective guardians cry out in the face of ongoing damage—that which exceeds designated categories of violence, and thus, so-called systems of repair? Accordingly, when it comes to human and more-than-human rights, what are the shortcomings of legal justice systems insofar as they fail to consider the life and spirit of territory, as well as those who are inextricably tied to the life of such territory? How might the legal language of “justice” and “repair” be limited by, even tethered to, the roots of oppression? And what kinds of schisms, shifts, and stories are needed to reframe these concepts?The musical offering featured in this episode When You Carried Me by Oropendola.Support Green Dreamer: GreenDreamer.com/support

“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.)