Last Born In The Wilderness

Clark from the Atlanta Community Press Collective joins me to discuss the Stop Cop City movement, also known as the Defend the Atlanta Forest (or Defend Weelaunee Forest) movement in Atlanta, Georgia. Clark is not a representative of the movement, but through his coverage, speaks clearly to the concerns raised by activists and forest occupiers of the construction of Atlanta Public Safety Training Center (Cop City). // Episode notes + transcript: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/clark-acpc // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Writer John Halstead returns to the podcast to discuss his widely read article, 'umping the Gap: Where Green Transphobia Leads,'published at A Beautiful Resistance. John Halstead’s article uses the ideological trajectory of Paul Kingnorth, co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project and a fierce critic of “Big Green environmentalism,” to examine trans-exclusionary politics and rhetoric in certain leftist ecoactivist movements and spaces. John has remarked Kingsnorth was an “intellectual idol” of his, helping him form many of his own ideas about humanity’s severed relationship with the earth, with poignant ruminations on the roots of anthropogenic climate change, the dead end of techno-optimism, and industrial civilization’s inevitable collapse. But, as Halstead began to more closely examine Kingnorth’s writings since the onset of the pandemic in 2020, he, like many others who admired his perspective, was disturbed by his “benevolent green nationalism,” defense of the British monarchy, and openly derisive characterizations of “wokeness” and trans identity. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/john-halstead-3 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Evolutionary epidemiologist and author Rob Wallace returns to the podcast to discuss his new collection, The Fault in Our SARS: COVID-19 in the Biden Era, published through Monthly Review. This discussion is long, but certainly worth a listen. Entering year four of the pandemic, Rob Wallace has diligently, and extensively, written two books worth of essays on the various facets of the SARS-2 outbreak, many of which are examined in this interview. Rob skewers the Biden administration’s political, institutional, and rhetorical approach to the BSL-3 [Biosafety Level 3] pathogen’s burn through the population, picking apart the scientism, employed by both the political elite and their media lackeys to rationalize and normalize the mass death and disability of millions. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/rob-wallace-2 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Investigative journalist and author Justin Mikulka joins me to discuss the recent train derailment in East Palestine, bomb trains, and the devastating consequences the lack of regulation of the railroad industry is having on the environment and human communities across North America. // Episode notes + transcript: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/justin-mikulka // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Animist artist, practitioner, and facilitator Dare Carrasquillo (formerly Sohei) returns to the podcast to discuss death practice, collectivism as the politics of wholeness, trauma and the story of the self, and the proto-human matrifocal coalition and the ritual of no. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/dare-sohei-2 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Journalist Brian Mier, co-editor at Brasil Wire and correspondent for teleSUR English, returns to the podcast to discuss the recent chaos in Brazil, days after the inauguration of popular center-left President Lula da Silva. What are the Bolsonaristas attempting to accomplish? What guides their actions? Why is this event so similar to the infamous chaos at the US Capitol on January 6th? Brian Mier answers these questions, and more, in this interview. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/brian-mier-4 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

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