Last Born In The Wilderness

I speak with Jasper Bernes, Managing Editor of Commune Magazine. We discuss his recent article, Between the Devil and the Green New Deal, featured in the second issue of Commune Magazine. In this interview, I asked Jasper Bernes to explain the details of the Green New Deal, as has been proposed by the more progressive wing of the United States political establishment and most famously by New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of the Democratic Party. What is the Green New Deal, and what is materially required for it to be successfully implemented? // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/jasper-bernes // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Writer, political theorist, and Gods & Radicals co-founder Rhyd Wildermuth returned to the podcast to discuss his soon-to-be-released book, All That Is Sacred Is Profaned: A Pagan Guide to Marxism. We examine how capitalism directly informs the ways we relate with the land in which we live and the spirits that reside there, the bodies we inhabit, the labor we perform, the rituals we engage in, and the various ways these relationships and perceptions either highlight or obscure the exploitive qualities of the global capitalist system we are all enmeshed in. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/rhyd-wildermuth-3 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

I’m joined by Michael Sliwa, former co-host of Nature Bats Last and the author of Chasing A Different Carrot: A Manifesto For The Predicament Of Privilege, and RS, host of Moving Forward on the Progressive Radio Network. In this lively discussion, we examine the overwhelm many are feeling in trying to navigate through our times of overlapping social, economic, ecological, and political complexities. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/sliwa-rs // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Psychedelic scholar, editor, publisher, and researcher Robert Forte returns to the podcast. For over three decades, he has collaborated with some of the most influential and well-known figures within the psychedelic movement, including R. Gordon Wasson, Timothy Leary, Stanislav Grof, and Alexander Shulgin, to name a few. As the use of psychedelics enters the public discourse again, and as we continue to see the normalization of their use by Silicon Valley corporate executives and others to “significantly heighten alertness, creativity, and problem solving,” we have to step back and examine the ways psychedelic use is actually reinforcing the status quo of our society. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/robert-forte-2 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Environmental scientist and ecologist Dr. Francisco Sánchez-Bayo joined me for this episode. Dr. Sánchez-Bayo is the lead author of the scientific survey Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers, co-authored with Kris Wyckhuys, which reviews dozens of contemporary research studies from around the world, documenting the rapid decline of global insect populations, indicating that most species of insects are facing extinction. The paper also examines the primary drivers behind the loss of global insect biodiversity, pushing over 40 percent of insect species towards extinction within the next few decades and the majority of insect species by the end of the century. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/francisco-sanchez-bayo // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Change strategist, complexity researcher, and cognitive scientist Joe Brewer returns to pick up from our first conversation last year, recorded right before he and his family moved to Costa Rica to engage more fully with cultural design work and planetary collapse management. Brewer details his work in designing in-depth courses that lay the groundwork for individuals to build regenerative hubs across the planet’s numerous bioregions, and within this scaffolding of knowledge and practice, facilitate the management of planetary collapse on the local and global scale as nation-states, economies, ecologies, and the global climate system continue to break down. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/joe-brewer-2 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Physicist, engineer, and popular science communicator Paul Beckwith joined me for this episode. He is well known for his approachable and comprehensive analysis of the global climate crisis through his popular YouTube channel, where he provides a multidisciplinary examination into climate science data and research through his in-depth understanding of meteorology, oceanography, and the Earth sciences in general. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/paul-beckwith // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Engineer and writer Dmitry Orlov returns to provide an overview of the ongoing collapse of the United States empire on the geopolitical, economic, and political fronts since our first interview was recorded and released last year.  As Dmitry Orlov explains in this interview, the United States is facing collapse. The nation carries massive debt and relies on its global military presence to maintain the dominance of the dollar—a situation in which we have to ask, how long before that, too, fails? Decades of United States global hegemony are being successfully countered by other global powers, namely Russia, although in a very different fashion from how the United States has traditionally exerted geopolitical influence up to the present. Why, and how, has this happened? // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/dmitry-orlov-2 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Birgitta Jónsdóttir—former Icelandic politician, anarchist, poet, and activist—joined me for the episode. She is the co-founder of the Pirate Party of Iceland, in which she served as a representative from 2013 to 2017, and collaborated with WikiLeaks in the production and release of the Collateral Murder video resulting from the courageous leak by whistleblower and former US Army private Chelsea Manning. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/birgitta-jonsdottir // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

In this episode, I speak with Xabat, a representative of the Internationalist Commune of Rojava. We discuss the ecological dimension of the Rojavan Revolution in Northeast Syria, represented and explored in the book Make Rojava Green Again, which examines the environmental perspective and ecological practices inherent in the egalitarian and anticapitalist revolution in the region. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/xabat // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast