Last Born In The Wilderness

I speak with Joe Brewer—complexity researcher, cognitive scientist, and evangelist for the field of culture design. We discuss the social, economic, and ecological collapse we are currently in the midst of as a result of the destructive impacts of human industrial activity and the cultural value systems that uphold these practices. We also discuss Joe's work in designing cultural evolution through "regenerative hubs"—bioregional centers designed to implement processes of healing, mending humankind’s relationship with the living planet, and establishing a right role within the planet's living systems on the regional and global level. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/joe-brewer // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

I speak with Kate Harris, author of the captivating travel memoir Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road. We discuss living off-grid in Atlin, British Columbia; Kate’s complex relationship with Marco Polo and the famed and mythologized explorers from the “Old World”; and her life-expanding decision to traverse the famed Silk Road by bike with her childhood friend. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/kate-harris // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

I speak with anarcho-primitivist writer and philosopher John Zerzan. We discuss his in-depth analysis of the roots of Time as we understand it to be in the modern sense, explored in a collection of essays, Time and Time Again; the roots of agriculture, the domestication of life, and the detrimental impact this transition has had on human health and physical development; the neuroses of mass society (alienation, depression, anxiety, etc.) with the wholesale disappearance of community; and the threat technological advancement poses for complex life on the planet. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/john-zerzan // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

In this episode, I speak with pagan writer and activist John Halstead. We discuss his excellent and perceptive two-part essay published by Gods&Radicals, “What If It’s Already Too Late?”: Being an Activist in the Anthropocene and “Die Early and Often”: Being Attis in the Anthropocene. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/john-halstead // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Psychedelic scholar, editor, publisher, and researcher Robert Forte joins me for this episode. For over three decades, Robert 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. James Fadiman, psychedelic researcher and writer, has described Robert as “a major but not well-known hero of the psychedelic movement.” // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/robert-forte // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

I speak with Ian Campbell, a community-oriented educator and co-founder of North Texas Progressive Schools (NTxPS). We discuss the fundamental principles of self-directed learning and progressive schooling, the necessity of play in childhood development, and the value of instilling democratic values and collective decision-making through education. We also discuss the potent example of collective decision-making through Ian's research into the radical social revolution in Rojava, a Kurdish-held territory in northern Syria. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/ian-campbell // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

I speak with ecologist and evolutionary biologist Chris Thomas, author of Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction. In this discussion, Chris lays out his understanding of whether we have truly entered into the Sixth Mass Extinction Event, and provides his views on whether the current rate of species extinction on this planet lives up to that dire description. Chris also discusses the difficult challenges ecologists and conservationists are currently facing in the effort to preserve species in a radically changing world, laying out the choices that lay before us when it comes to the difficult task of conserving biodiversity and preventing species loss in the face of anthropogenic climate change and other human-caused crises. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/chris-thomas // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Our guest for this episode is Ben Etherington, author of Literary Primitivism and the long-form essay The New Primitives, published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the themes of which we discuss in this episode. In this discussion, Ben lays out a nuanced examination of Primitivism, a “mode of aesthetic idealization that either emulates or aspires to recreate ‘primitive’ experience.” In modern Western societies, the primitivist ideal is expressed though variously—a few examples being recent fads like the Paleo Diet, fitness regimens like barefoot/minimalist running, radical anti-civilizational and anti-technological political philosophies (e.g. the works of anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan, and more controversially, the manifesto of Theodore Kaczynski), as well its themes and affects being represented in popular media. Primitivist themes and aesthetics run through numerous popular films, most notably in James Cameron’s blockbuster film Avatar. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/ben-etherington // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Writer Tad Hargrave joins me in this episode to discuss his work exploring, unpacking, and addressing the concept and social reality of whiteness—more broadly the roots, or lack thereof, of “white culture” as we understand it to be today. Tad and I discuss the difficult subject of race, in particular the modern and the relatively recent—historically speaking—formation of the concept of whiteness. To be labeled and exist as a “white” person in our current era is to live with certain privileges within the dominant culture of North America, some of which are subtle, and many of which are not. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/tad-hargrave // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Author and integrator Jeremy Lent returns to the podcast. Jeremy is the author of The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, and the founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute, an organization “dedicated to fostering an integrated worldview, both scientifically rigorous and intrinsically meaningful, that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the earth.” We begin our conversation discussing Jeremy’s excellent critique of cognitive psychologist, linguist, and popular science author Steven Pinker’s recent book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Jeremy initially presented his critique in his widely shared article, Steven Pinker’s Ideas About Progress Are Fatally Flawed. These Eight Graphs Show Why, which we delve into in this episode. Jeremy unpacks the underlying assumptions implicit in Pinker’s ideas, in particular Pinker’s defense, through cherry-picking of data, of the capitalist neoliberal economic order, and more broadly of the “progress narrative” that justifies or outright ignores the widespread ecological devastation implicit in the expansion and maintenance of industrial civilization and the institutions that uphold it. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/jeremy-lent-2 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast