Last Born In The Wilderness

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

Independent political analyst and CounterPunch Radio host Eric Draitser returns to the podcast to provide an update on the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. The last we spoke about this subject was March 2nd, seven days into the invasion. Eight months into this war, I ask Eric: Where do the Russians and Ukrainians stand in this blatant war of aggression by Putin? Who stands to gain from prolonging this conflict? What are Russia and NATO's endgame? For all the calls for an end to the conflict through negotiation, what, in fact, could or would that even look like? As the war drags on, we look on in horror as this neocolonialist, revanchist invasion grinds more human bodies on the fields of battle. Russia, to meet the imperialist vision laid out before the world, conscript thousands of men to continue the war. Many more flee the country to escape such a dire fate. While Ukraine is reduced to rubble, Russian society is flung into numerous, cascading crises — both material and existential in scope. Geopolitical conflicts proliferate across Europe and Asia, generating new and preexisting tensions between nations. Eric, in covering this war since its first days, provides a measured and nuanced overview of events as they stand today. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/eric-draitser-3 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Death Panel co-host and disability justice advocate Beatrice Adler-Bolton returns to the podcast to discuss their new book Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto, co-authored with Artie Vierkant and published through Verso Books. Health Communism “offers an overview of life and death under capitalism and argues for a new global left politics aimed at severing the ties between capital and one of its primary tools: health.” Throughout this 90 minute interview, Beatrice and I build on our last discussion in March (during which we discussed the “sociological production of the end of the pandemic”), incorporating concepts outlined in Health Communism. Key among those is defining the “surplus” class or population(s), in which, under the economic valuation of life under capitalism, whole populations are relegated to a regime of “extractive abandonment” — “the process by which these populations are made profitable to capital”, and a “means by which the state constructs “health” culturally, politically, and institutionally.” // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/beatrice-adler-bolton-2 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Dr. Mohamed Abdou joins me to discuss Islam and Anarchism: Relationships and Resonances, published this year by Pluto Press. What are the relationships and resonances between anarchism and Islam? Anarchism, through its Western manifestation, claims "no gods, no masters" as fundamental to anti-authoritarianism, both in theory and practice. Through that lens, what "relationships and resonances" then exist between anarchism and a religious and spiritual system such as Islam? And, ultimately, what can self-identified anarchists in predominately non-Muslim majority Western nations, and practitioners of Islam the world-over, learn from one another? // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/mohamed-abdou // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Anarchist writer and activist Peter Gelderloos returns to the podcast to discuss ecological revolution from below, beautifully documented in his book The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below, published this year by Pluto Press. Nothing short of revolution is required to address the global ecological crisis. The technocratic solutions presented to us by various capitalist nation-states are less than sufficient in mitigating the most dire consequences of biospheric collapse and runaway climate change. In fact, more than just merely insufficient, these top-down so-called “solutions” reimpose the dominant socioeconomic and political order producing the crisis to begin with. As Gelderloos describes and points to The Solutions are Already Here, numerous land-based movements around the world are rising to the occasion — actively protecting territories from extractive capitalist enterprises, reclaiming what has been taken and exploited for industry, and building resilient autonomous communities and networks, many of which that span the artificially imposed rural-urban divide. To really grasp the scale and scope of this ecological revolution from below, Gelderloos lets representatives of these movements speak for themselves, weaving them into a tapestry that enlivens a radical imagination of what a post-capitalist world may hold. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/peter-gelderloos-2 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast