Last Born In The Wilderness

Author and journalist Shane Burley returns to the podcast to discuss the anthology ‘No Pasaran: Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis,’ published this fall through AK Press. Burley is the editor and a contributor to this collection. In catching up since our last interview, I ask Shane to clarify where the far-right stands in a "post-Trump" context. What inroads have far-right, and explicitly fascist, ideologues made in political discourse and policy in the United States over the past two years? How coherent is the far-right agenda and who are their targets? What are the paths to power? And most importantly, how can various subcultural spaces, as well as rural and urban communities, each build effective resistances to this threat? ‘No Pasaran,’ with its broad collection of voices, provides some of the most comprehensive answers to these questions. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/shane-burley-6 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Author Travis Linnemann joins me to discuss his recently released book The Horror of Police, published by University of Minnesota Press. A good amount of ink has been spilt on the subject of policing—its historical origins; the oppressive and repressive role police play in the day-to-day lives of various marginalized communities; how “copaganda” shapes our collective perceptions of police and police work; and the numerous radical, reformist, and reactionary movements that have risen up against, or in defense of, police across the United States and the world. While Travis Linnemann examines these various subjects and perspectives in The Horror of Police, he does so by delving into the ontological framework police operate within in by “drawing on the language and texts of horror fiction,” philosophy, and police procedurals in film and television. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/travis-linnemann // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Award-winning journalist Boyce Upholt joins me to discuss his article Will the Next Pandemic Start With Chickens? published at The New Republic. Boyce begins his report, as well as this interview, by describing the troubling conditions in chicken facilities in Butler Country, Nebraska, and, by extension, across the industrialized world. This past spring, a highly deadly and contagious strain of avian influenza swept through bird and other animal populations. Considering the conditions described in his piece, there is a very real possibility of a spillover event occurring in the near future, leading to an influenza pandemic in the human population. Broadly, this discussion, while examining the real threat highly consolidated industrialized food production is having on human and more-than-human beings, explores the so-called First World's relationship with food, food production, and the ecologies we are inextricably tied to. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/boyce-upholt // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Indigenous archeologist Dr. Paulette Steeves (Cree-Métis) joins me to discuss The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere, “a reclaimed history of the deep past of Indigenous people in North and South America during the Paleolithic." There are myths we are told growing up—be it via schooling, popular media, or elsewhere—that people have lived in the Western Hemisphere for only 10-12,000 years, at most. This is the Clovis First theory. In archeology in particular, this framework, that the peopling of the North and South American continents could only have occurred that recently, is treated as dogma. In comparison to the astounding discoveries made by archeologists on other continents—pushing back human and protohominid migration, settlement, and cultural development hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years into the past—why is it that this story has persisted in this field for so long? This is especially troubling when one considers the hundreds of archaeological sites that show human settlement in the Americas extending back much further into the historical past, as documented by Dr. Paulette Steeves and numerous others. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/paulette-steeves // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Independent political analyst and CounterPunch Radio host Eric Draitser returns to the podcast to provide an update on the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. The last we spoke about this subject was March 2nd, seven days into the invasion. Eight months into this war, I ask Eric: Where do the Russians and Ukrainians stand in this blatant war of aggression by Putin? Who stands to gain from prolonging this conflict? What are Russia and NATO's endgame? For all the calls for an end to the conflict through negotiation, what, in fact, could or would that even look like? As the war drags on, we look on in horror as this neocolonialist, revanchist invasion grinds more human bodies on the fields of battle. Russia, to meet the imperialist vision laid out before the world, conscript thousands of men to continue the war. Many more flee the country to escape such a dire fate. While Ukraine is reduced to rubble, Russian society is flung into numerous, cascading crises — both material and existential in scope. Geopolitical conflicts proliferate across Europe and Asia, generating new and preexisting tensions between nations. Eric, in covering this war since its first days, provides a measured and nuanced overview of events as they stand today. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/eric-draitser-3 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Death Panel co-host and disability justice advocate Beatrice Adler-Bolton returns to the podcast to discuss their new book Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto, co-authored with Artie Vierkant and published through Verso Books. Health Communism “offers an overview of life and death under capitalism and argues for a new global left politics aimed at severing the ties between capital and one of its primary tools: health.” Throughout this 90 minute interview, Beatrice and I build on our last discussion in March (during which we discussed the “sociological production of the end of the pandemic”), incorporating concepts outlined in Health Communism. Key among those is defining the “surplus” class or population(s), in which, under the economic valuation of life under capitalism, whole populations are relegated to a regime of “extractive abandonment” — “the process by which these populations are made profitable to capital”, and a “means by which the state constructs “health” culturally, politically, and institutionally.” // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/beatrice-adler-bolton-2 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Dr. Mohamed Abdou joins me to discuss Islam and Anarchism: Relationships and Resonances, published this year by Pluto Press. What are the relationships and resonances between anarchism and Islam? Anarchism, through its Western manifestation, claims "no gods, no masters" as fundamental to anti-authoritarianism, both in theory and practice. Through that lens, what "relationships and resonances" then exist between anarchism and a religious and spiritual system such as Islam? And, ultimately, what can self-identified anarchists in predominately non-Muslim majority Western nations, and practitioners of Islam the world-over, learn from one another? // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/mohamed-abdou // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Anarchist writer and activist Peter Gelderloos returns to the podcast to discuss ecological revolution from below, beautifully documented in his book The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below, published this year by Pluto Press. Nothing short of revolution is required to address the global ecological crisis. The technocratic solutions presented to us by various capitalist nation-states are less than sufficient in mitigating the most dire consequences of biospheric collapse and runaway climate change. In fact, more than just merely insufficient, these top-down so-called “solutions” reimpose the dominant socioeconomic and political order producing the crisis to begin with. As Gelderloos describes and points to The Solutions are Already Here, numerous land-based movements around the world are rising to the occasion — actively protecting territories from extractive capitalist enterprises, reclaiming what has been taken and exploited for industry, and building resilient autonomous communities and networks, many of which that span the artificially imposed rural-urban divide. To really grasp the scale and scope of this ecological revolution from below, Gelderloos lets representatives of these movements speak for themselves, weaving them into a tapestry that enlivens a radical imagination of what a post-capitalist world may hold. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/peter-gelderloos-2 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Dr. Aby Sène joins me to discuss fortress conservationism and the 30x30 plan, a proposal by Western conservation agencies and their corporate and state allies "to double the coverage of protected areas around the world by setting aside 30 percent of terrestrial cover for conservation by 2030." On the surface, the 30x30 proposal (the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework) to protect biodiversity and wildlife seems like a promising step in halting deforestation, unfettered resource extraction, and poaching of endangered wildlife across Africa, but as Dr. Sène eloquently describes in her work, this plan is but a continuation of the colonialist dynamics that have existed between the Global North and the Global South for centuries. These conservation efforts, aptly termed "fortress conservation,” is in reality part of a “colossal land grab," displacing indigenous communities from their lands and depriving them of traditional sources of sustenance and place-based cultural practices. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/aby-sene // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Michael Truscello joins me to discuss his book Infrastructural Brutalism: Art and the Necropolitics of Infrastructure, in which he “looks at the industrial infrastructure not as an invisible system of connectivity and mobility that keeps capitalism humming in the background but as a manufactured miasma of despair, toxicity, and death. Truscello terms this “infrastructural brutalism”—a formulation that not only alludes to the historical nexus of infrastructure and the concrete aesthetic of Brutalist architecture but also describes the ecological, political, and psychological brutality of industrial infrastructures.” What is infrastructure? How does it shape our lives, direct our movements, and inform our worldviews? And, furthermore, what is the nature of the systems that produce the kinds of infrastructure we live our lives within and through? As Michael Truscello identifies in his book 'Infrastructural Brutalism,' there is a brutal logic that underlies the infrastructure projects of the 20th and 21st centuries. Especially in a time of mass extinction and accelerated climate catastrophe, the very fact that the largest infrastructure project in human history, the Belt and Road Initiative, is currently underway in China speaks to the suicidal urge inherent within the imperatives of the global capitalist order. Despite the present and accelerating collapse of the biosphere, nation states and their corporate beneficiaries are racing to pave more roads, lay down more rail lines and pipelines, construct more power plants, airports, and seaports, and consequentially, decimate more ecosystems in the pursuit of technological and geopolitical dominance. Truscello walks us through this predicament, as well as what a multiplicitous response to these crises may contain. And finally, he discusses his fascinating study of various art forms that grapple with the hollow promises and lived brutalities of industrial infrastructure. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/michael-truscello // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast