Last Born In The Wilderness

Journalist Shane Burley joins me to discuss his newest book, Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse, published through AK Press. In Why We Fight, Burley navigates this territory of the here and now, providing deep insights into the conditions that gave rise to some of the most dramatic developments of the past several years. In this interview, I ask Burley to provide updates on the evolution of fascist politics during this time, and what antifascist resistance to the far-right looks like, and must adapt to, in a time of apocalyptic rupture. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/shane-burley-5 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Journalist, activist, and author Eric Laursen joins me to discuss his recent book The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State, published through AK Press. Anarchism presents a unique challenge to State power. Since it emerged as a coherent political and social movement in the 18th and 19th centuries, anarchists of various stripes and creeds have pointed to the illegitimate power the State holds, and the role it has played in the dominance of Capital in forming and shaping the trajectory of human societies up to the present day. What would a contemporary critique and theory of the State look like through an anarchist lens? The State, like so much since the dawn of the 21st century, has had to adapt itself to the crises of the times we live in, from climate disruption, economic expansion and contraction, and the Covid-19 pandemic. We can then ask: has the State been up to the task? Or, instead, has it only further exasperated the conditions we live within? How can anarchism present a necessary counter to the overbearing power of the State in our modern moment? Laursen provides some insights into these pressing questions in this interview. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/eric-laursen // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Ecologist and prolific author Carl Safina joins me to discuss his work with the more-than-human (animal) world, particularly his writings about the cultures and emotional lives of various animal communities, beautifully documented in two of his most recent books, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel and Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace. Human beings, or to be more specific, human beings within modern industrial cultures, tend to believe that Homo sapiens are the only species on Earth that are cultural. As Safina has documented in his work, this is simply not the case. Numerous species have culture, including, but not limited to, various primates, birds, and whales. What can we learn about the evolutionary function of culture from these animal communities, including the role the perception and appreciation of beauty, plays in the evolutionary process? At the very end of this interview, I ask Safina to discuss his appreciation of Herman Melville's epic novel Moby Dick, represented in his essay Melville’s Whale Was a Warning We Failed to Heed published in The New York Times. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/carl-safina // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Critically acclaimed author Melissa Febos joins me to discuss her most recent collection of essays, Girlhood—"a gripping set of stories about the forces that shape girls and the adults they become." I first became aware of Melissa and her book Girlhood from an essay she published in The New York Times Magazine titled I Spent My Life Consenting to Touch I Didn’t Want, adapted from an essay published in the then-to-be-released Girlhood. Her personal reflections on the concept of "empty consent" from her experiences attending a cuddle party (pre-pandemic), compelled me to contact her to discuss the complex issues she deftly navigates through that essay. After reading Girlhood, I recognized the significance of her masterful writing and exploration of her own childhood and development into womanhood. We discuss, within the 47-minute interview, a few of the significant insights I drew out of my reading, including the gradients of consent and trauma, and the role men can, and must, play in upending patriarchy in our time. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/melissa-febos // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Oh goodness, finally, it’s done. It took too long to produce — a month or so longer than I intended to put this all together. I became exhausted, weary of hearing my own voice, editing hours of audio, listening and trimming and organizing and reorganizing and recording my wandering commentary, cutting and slicing and trimming, exporting, finding mistakes, fixing and then re-exporting, uploading chunky hi-quality audio files, writing provocative titles and descriptions, editing eye-catching designs — all about the end of things. Death, love, grief, anger, plagues and human resistance to systemic violence, denial-isms — the void at the heart of it. It’s all enough to make one take a long nap, and believe me, I took plenty. This long, seven part series (something I half-seriously call an episode) is a labor of love. With each part, I was able to pull at the threads of this work over the previous 100 episodes; each major theme I’ve explored through dozens of interviews coalesced into seven hours-long audio compilations. Part one: climate catastrophe and ecological collapse. Part two: my interviews in Brazil on the verge of the pandemic. Part three: the seismic ruptures brought on by the pandemic. Part four: the national reckoning with police (white supremacist) violence last year with the George Floyd rebellions. Part five: the conditions that led to the fascist coup attempt and Capitol riot on January 6th. Part six: intergenerational trauma and the ghosts that haunt us. Part seven: grief, despair, extinction, and love. Each of these seven parts were released as individual podcast releases. Many of you may have heard these — I thank you and I hope they resonated. Along with this, I’ve uploaded each part as individual “albums” on Bandcamp, which you can download for free, or pay for, if you would be so kind and willing to do so. Each album download comes with a PDF document of the designs I made for each release, as well. EPISODE 300: https://lastborninthewilderness.bandcamp.com WEBSITE: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness DONATE: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast / https://venmo.com/LastBornPodcast BOOK LIST: https://bookshop.org/shop/lastbornpodcast BOOK: http://bit.ly/ORBITgr ATTACK & DETHRONE: https://anchor.fm/adgodcast DROP ME A LINE: Call (208) 918-2837 or http://bit.ly/LBWfiledrop EVERYTHING ELSE: https://linktr.ee/patterns.of.behavior

Finally, we have reached the end—in more ways than one. This long series has been a labor of love. It took too long to produce, but ultimately, preparing and releasing each of these parts has been a gratifying, and even cathartic, experience. This last part, fittingly, is a meditation on endings, transitions, the death of things. And, most importantly, love—the love that accompanies all of it. We are meeting a time of many endings. The overly complex systems that govern modern human life are meeting their inevitable demise. Centuries of human industrial activity have thrown the living systems of the Earth into disarray, and mass extinction ensues. The global climate is beyond repair, with enough heat baked into the system to guarantee several degrees of warming over the next several decades and centuries—a fact that cannot be contested. The question of human extinction is less a matter of "if" but more a matter of "when." If what is happening is happening, how, then, shall we live? This part seven is not meant to be overly bleak, but instead, sober and life-affirming. Weaved together with commentary, these six interviews reflect on the nature of the crises we are all living through right now, from the macro scale of this predicament to the deeply personal. And truly, what it all comes back down to, simply, is love—to love and to be loved in the face of our collective death, with all the grief and despair that accompanies it. // Timeline + sources: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/300-7 // Download: https://bit.ly/LBW300-7 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

We are haunted beings. Unintegrated traumas, like ghosts, possess us, poison us — until they don’t. Colonization, rupturous, severs the body from its relations, from ancestors and earth. It flattens the diversity of human experience, relying on the multifaceted dynamics of intergenerational trauma to replicate itself, in perpetuity. Like ghosts, these traumas haunt us, hijack us. The line between the abuser and the abused is blurred, trauma compounds, cutting in all directions. Decolonization is an ongoing counter-process to this. Naming these ghostly bodies, making them visible, speaking to them, opens up revolutionary space for healing, reforging relation to all beings, corporeal and non-corporeal alike. This compilation of eleven interviews pulls on the threads of these subjects, navigating the contours of developmental psychology, ancestral trauma, whiteness, depression and shame, gender and masculinity. // Timeline + sources: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/300-6 // Download: https://bit.ly/LBW300-6 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Let us gaze into the void at the heart of this country. What happened on January 6th was neither the beginning, nor the endpoint, of the fascist trajectory this nation has been lurching headlong toward. It was a flashpoint. The events that led to this explosion of violence did not happen in a vacuum. Donald Trump’s rise to the highest political office in the land was neither an anomaly nor an accident. Decades of neoliberal decay, widespread white anxiety, and the inherent spiritual rot at the core of this settler-colonial project has almost guaranteed the growth of a virulent fascism in our time of mounting crises. This compilation of ten interviews, conducted over the past two years, is an attempt to track the various forces that led to the MAGA riot at the Capitol. Weaving together interviews that track the decline of the U.S. empire, the ramping up of the sadistic treatment and dehumanization of undocumented immigrants along the border, the metaphysical landscape of the “post-modern” age we reside in, and liberal democracy’s historic failure to counter the fascist creep, this audio compilation attempts to make sense of the dangerous moment we find ourselves in, and where this trend ultimately leads. // Timeline + sources: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/300-5 // Download: https://bit.ly/LBW300-5 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Everything changed after the 3rd Precinct fell. In 2020, a pandemic began to course its way through the collective body, and the dead began to pile up. Tens of millions of U.S. citizens lost their jobs, and the capitalist system shuttered. As it turns out, these are the perfect conditions for revolt. On May 25th, George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer in the streets of Minneapolis. Everyone saw the video, and it was undeniable. We witnessed something as old as this country itself play out, again. Riots broke out, but this time, the righteous rage persisted and spread. Each of these nine interviews, interwoven with commentary, documents this time of expansive unrest and stochastic terror. // Timeline and sources: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/300-4 // Download: https://bit.ly/LBW300-4 / Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

May we live in interesting times. The fertile grounds that bred a novel, deadly coronavirus and the misinformation that accompanied its spread is our subject. Over the last year-and-a-half since COVID spilled over, and more specifically, when our collective reaction to it began to reshape every aspect of our lives, I conducted numerous interviews to make sense of this thing. Disruptions in the very fragile (and simultaneously resilient) global economic system, mass death, overburdened healthcare workers, the widespread proliferation of conspiracy theories, fascistic outbursts, mutual aid networks, and the uncomfortable questions that arise, characterize this audio narrative I’ve cobbled together for your listening pleasure. // Timeline + sources: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/300-3 // Download: https://bit.ly/LBW300-3 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast