Last Born In The Wilderness

In this episode, I speak with Stephen Pyne, environmental historian and author of Fire: A Brief History. In this discussion with Stephen, I ask him to elaborate on humanity's long, deep, and complex relationship with fire. He explains how this relationship has informed everything from how our bodies have evolved to the impact this has had on our global environment up to the present moment. As Stephen has framed it, we have entered into an age of fire, which he has dubbed the Pyrocene (instead of Anthropocene); just as the Earth has passed through numerous ice ages, the industrialization of our relationship with fire (such as our use of fossil fuels and the internal combustion engine) has warmed the planet to such a degree as to completely disfigure and disrupt the planetary climate system, leading to a phase shift so large as to be barely grasped or comprehended at all. Fire and its crucial role in this shift must be not only examined in a scientific sense, but contextualized within a broader historical scope, which Stephen has provided for many years. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/stephen-pyne // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

In this episode, I speak with Social Anthropologist Dr. Khalil Avi, author of the article, Don’t Kill The Messenger!: Invasive Species and Halting Biodiversity Loss, published at Gods & Radicals. Avi addresses some of the underlying (colonialist, nationalist, and provincial) assumptions that surround the efforts to halt biodiversity loss in our age of abrupt climate change and environmental catastrophe. He challenges our notions of what it really means to halt biodiversity loss, in particular when it comes to the widespread practice of eliminating so-called invasive species in their respective environments as a means of addressing this crisis. As global climate disruption forces biological life to rapidly adapt to the changing environment, our efforts to halt biodiversity loss should include abandoning our unexamined and deeply held assumptions of what our responses to the environmental crisis should be. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/khalil-avi // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

I speak with renowned political dissident, linguist, and author Noam Chomsky. In this brief discussion, I ask Professor Chomsky to examine the current state and trajectory of the United States empire within the scope of recent history, fitting the recent “withdrawal” of the US military presence in Northeast Syria, under Kurdish governance, as an indication of what the US geopolitical influence in the region currently is. Secondly, we discuss the responsibility of journalists, especially in this time, to challenge state power and stand for those willing to risk everything to expose the crimes of the state and its corporate allies. To highlight this, we focus on the current situation of WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange, currently imprisoned in the high-security Belmarsh Prison in London. // Episode notes + transcript: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/noam-chomsky // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

In this episode, I speak with Samantha Zipporah, reproductive justice activist and author of Mapping The Yoniverse, a “sex and body positive, gender inclusive and affirming, physical and energy anatomy coloring book,” illustrated by Casandra Johns. This interview with Samantha is about reclaiming what has been lost. When it comes to our bodily autonomy and knowledge of our health, sexual or otherwise, we have, through a combination of historical and administrative processes, delegated that responsibility to the medical industry and to the state and the legislature. Samantha, in her years of work as a sex educator, doula, and activist, has worked diligently to demonstrate, for women and persons assigned female at birth, the numerous ways in which sovereignty can be attained over such bodily functions as menstruation, ovulation, miscarriage, abortion, full-term pregnancy, and childbirth. We all have these traditions of knowledge and wisdom in our lineages, even it has been obscured and seemingly lost on the path to modernity. Samantha’s work is about reclaiming that knowledge and providing the spaces for it to be practiced, and as I state in this episode, this kind of work we need to do in this time, now more than ever before. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/samantha-zipporah // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

In this episode, I speak with political writer William Hawes. We discuss his sharp and insightful essay, Questioning The Extremely Online. As we dig into William’s insights into how being “extremely online” has informed our social behaviors in the past several decades, his most cutting criticisms are aimed at contemporary political activism — both in its theory and praxis — and how even the most die-hard eco-radicals, anti-capitalists, and leftists of all stripes are (not-so) subtly impacted by the pervasive algorithmic logic of being “extremely online.” William’s insights including a recognition of who stands to benefit from this massive shift in how we process and react to information, and most importantly in how this dynamic inherently limits how we imagine and actively manifest a post-capitalist future. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/william-hawes // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

In this episode, I speak with Sam Adler-Bell, freelance journalist and co-host of the Know Your Enemy podcast, “a leftist's guide to the conservative movement.” The subject of this interview is his article, Why White Supremacists Are Hooked on Green Living, published by The New Republic. In this discussion with Sam, I ask him to elaborate on his research into the deeper connections between the roots of environmentalism and conservationism in the United States and rise of “eco-fascism” in our present time—an ideology expressed in the manifestos and stated intentions of white supremacist mass shooters in recent years, and in the rise of reactionary far right populism to refugee crises around the world. As Sam explains in his piece for The New Republic, the first thing we need to understand about this subject is that “most eco-fascists are sincere in their environmentalism,” and that the earliest forms of fascism in Europe were directly inspired by the earliest forms of environmentalism and conservationist efforts in the United States, as embodied in the projects of Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, and Madison Grant (co-founders of the Sierra Club, 1892) with the formation of the National Parks Service in the United States. The point of this discussion with Sam is to understand, as leftists, how we can more fully engage with an often misunderstood but crucially important component of fascist ideology, currently manifesting as "eco-fascism" in contemporary discourse. The emergence, or reemergence, of an ecologically-conscious fascism does not come from a vacuum; it is a direct response to the ecological and climate crises manifesting across the globe right now. Mass migrations and the inevitable sociopolitical responses (ultranationalism, xenophobia, the hyper-militarization of borders) are a part of this trend. We must learn to counter these trends and the dehumanizing narratives that allow space for them to grow (e.g. the Malthusian narrative of overpopulation as the main driver of these crises), and Sam and I discuss some of how that might be accomplished in this episode. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/sam-adler-bell // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

In this episode, I speak with Barbara Cecil and Dahr Jamail, co-authors of the How Then Shall We Live? series published at Truthout. // Episode notes + transcript: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/cecil-jamail // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

In the episode, I speak with Henry A. Giroux, McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest and the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy, and author of The Terror of the Unforeseen. How has neoliberalism paved the way for the rise of far right ideologies and populists around the world? As demonstrated in the elections of, and policies enacted by, such leaders as Donald Trump in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, a “neoliberal fascism” is emerging globally. As Henry elaborates in his book, The Terror of the Unforeseen, “neoliberalism creates an all-encompassing market guided by the principles of privatization, deregulation, commodification, and the free flow of capital. Advancing these agendas, it weakens unions, radically downsizes the welfare state, and wages an assault on public services such as education, libraries, parks, energy, water, prisons, and public transportation. As the state is hollowed out, big corporations take on the functions of government, imposing severe austerity measures, redistributing wealth upward to the rich and powerful, and reinforcing a notion of society as one of winners and losers.” (http://bit.ly/2LSXjzn)  To further this point more succinctly, Henry states, “neoliberalism became an incubator for a growing authoritarian populism fed largely by economic inequality.” (http://bit.ly/2Om8oL8) As societies become subsumed politically, economically, and culturally by the logic of a neoliberal ideology, the outcome is widespread social fragmentation and disintegration. This in turn has manifested into a groundswell of authoritarian and fascist politics in nations that have been traditionally defined as “open and free democratic societies.” As Henry challenges us in this interview, unless we critically address neoliberal capitalism and the impact this ideology has played in lives of countless human beings across the world, we cannot even begin to adequately understand and effectively resist this trend of rising of far right populist movements globally. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/henry-giroux // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

In this episode, I speak with Steven Elliot Martyn, author of Sacred Gardening: Seeds for the Reemergence of Co-Creative Agriculture, and The Story of the Madawaska Forest Garden: Co-creating Integrated Polyculture. He is the co-creator of the Sacred Gardener Earth Wisdom School. In this discussion, I ask Steven to expound on his journey of becoming a “sacred gardener,” which has included years of deep intellectual and spiritual introspection and experimentation with agricultural production, gardening, and foraging—a journey that has led to him to a recognition of the roots of our dominant culture’s profound disconnection from the sacred roots of agriculture and land use. On this path of exploration (fleshed out more fully in The Story of Madawaska Forest Garden and Sacred Gardening), Steven has cultivated an intuitive and deeply expressed capacity of being able to truly listen to the spirit(s) of the land and the living beings that reside there, having gained superb insights into how to reacquaint our culture with our sacred roots of participation and co-creative relationship with the living Earth. Steven’s development of this intuitive knowledge has manifested into something that is altogether missing in much of the dominant culture’s conception of land use and agricultural production in the modern age (a culmination of our culture’s obsession with logic, or as Steven has called it, the “cult of Reason”). In this interview, Steven refutes the idea that the development of agriculture in human societies is the result of a “wrong turn” in our development as a species (a primitivist assertion), and instead asserts that the roots of agricultural land use is rooted in our intuitive, sacred, and co-creative capacities as cultural beings with the living Earth, and that deprograming ourselves from the overly-reductionist approach to land use is essential in reclaiming our right role within the broad matrix of life, both on the local and global scale. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/steven-elliot-martyn // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

In this episode, I speak with Liyah Babayan, author of Liminal: A Refugee Memoir. In this discussion, we delve into Liyah’s profound, disturbing, and moving retelling of her childhood experiences fleeing the pogroms enacted against the Armenian minority population in Baku, Azerbaijan, in the midst of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-1990, as expressed in her memoir Liminal. After experiencing incomprehensible trauma and dehumanization, Liyah and her family fled to Armenia, where they were homeless for over three years. Liyah recalls the hostility and derision (with notable punctuations of deep generosity) her and her family experienced from her fellow citizens during this time, as is too often the case with displaced and traumatized refugee populations around the world, regardless of the context of the displacement for each respective group. After this period, Liyah's family was finally granted the refugee status required to make their way to the United States, ultimately resettling in Twin Falls, Idaho through the College of Southern Idaho Refugee Resettlement program. While Liyah and her family were fortunate enough to be able to escape the horrific violence in Baku and their desperate living situation thereafter, their difficult journey toward integration and healing was only just beginning. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/liyah-babayan-3 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast