Spoken Earth is a podcast series in collaboration with Lacuna Magazine, interviewing some of the most interesting environmental thinkers working today. I get to meet some of the people who have most inspired me, and over the course of long, wide-ranging conversations, explore the thoughts and ideas that drive them.
Episode 1, in conversation the anthropologist Hugh Brody, discussing land rights, the Arctic, and the hunter-gatherer view of the world.
“Indigenous people do trust the dreaming. And I think a great mistake often made is to dichotomise the rational and the non rational. In fact the real human achievement is to combine the two, so you bring all your knowledge to bear in your dream.”
Hugh Brody is an anthropologist, writer, academic and filmmaker. Since he first visited the Arctic, more than 45 years ago, much of his work has focused on the Far North. He speaks several indigenous languages, has lived there for many years, and has lent his expertise to land rights cases in both Canada and Namibia.
Episode 2, speaking with with Professor Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing about how the matsutake mushroom can help us to see ourselves in another light.
“I do want to show viewers how fungi, among other things, could tell us a story. It’s a talent, how to do this, and not turn off people who are just used to humans.”
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is a professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of several books, most recently The Mushroom at the End of the World. In it, she suggests a new way to conceive of nature as a messy network of both ruin and flourishing, and with people very much entangled within it.
Episode 3, talking to the Scottish writer, academic and activist Alastair McIntosh.
“We must dance with what life there is to dance with, and only in that dance will opportunities for new life, and the conservation of existing life, come alive.”
Alastair McIntosh is a Scottish writer, academic and activist. He is the author of several books, including Poacher's Pilgrimage and Hell and High Water, and most famously, Soil and Soul: People Versus Corporate Power. He is a human ecologist, a discipline which explores the tangled wb of connections between “the natural environment and the social environment,” bringing politics, economics, sociology and more within the realm of a more traditional ecology.
Episode 4, talking to the co-founder of the Stop Ecocide campaign, Jojo Mehta.
“The head of the Royal Bank of Scotland was asked in a shareholder meeting, ‘Why is it that we are continuing to invest in these hugely destructive projects?’, and the response was, ‘Well, it’s not a crime’.”
Jojo Mehta is the co-founder of Stop Ecocide, a campaign group that is pushing to have crimes of ecocide prosecuted at the International Criminal Court. We discuss why the earth is in need of a good lawyer, and how putting ecocide on a platform alongside crimes such as genocide and war crimes would upend how corporations conceive of their duty to protect the planet.
Episode 5, speaking with environmental justice pioneer Beverly Wright.
“It’s a battle that we are winning, and we’re winning because they can’t save the planet without saving us.”
Dr Beverly Wright has had a long and distinguished career in academia and in activism, as well as being a prolific writer. At the heart of her work from the beginning has been her commitment to exposing the connections between race and pollution – tackling environmental justice. In 1992, she founded the Deep South Centre for Environmental Justice in Louisiana, the first environmental justice centre in the United States.
Episode 6, in conversation with Professor Peter Staudenmaier about the historical overlap between environmentalism and far right thought, and the growing trends of ecofascism today.
“That version of humanity is to blame, humanity is the cause of whatever ills have befallen the natural world, that notion, that temptation, has been there all along.”
Dr Peter Staudenmaier professor of modern German history at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His work focuses on Nazism and Fascism, the history of racial thought, and the political history of environmentalism. Far from being confined to history, the resurgent far right is again adopting its own creed of environmentalism, and some of it is bleeding over into more mainstream views. We discuss the history, and these new worrying trends.
Episode 7, speaking with Doctor Suzanne Simard, whose work uncovers the hidden underground networks that bind the forest together.
“Trees and plants have agency. They perceive, relate and communicate; they exercise various behaviours. They cooperate, make decisions, learn and remember.”
Dr Suzanne Simard is a professor in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia, and author of Finding the Mother Tree, both a biography and a scientific journey of discovery. It unearths a story of community within our forests, and of how ecosystems do not only compete, but also yearn to cooperate.
Episode 8, speaking with Betsy Hartmann about the dangers of focusing on overpopulation as the roots of our environmental crisis.
“The far right would like nothing better than you to be using these methods and ideas… it kind of normalises their ideas, in a way”
Betsy Hartmann is professor emerita of development studies at Hampshire College in the US, and author of The America Syndrome: Apocalypse, War and Our Call to Greatness and the feminist classic Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control. We discuss how a focus on overpopulation plays into the hands of the far right, anxieties surrounding starting a family in a time of climate change, and how visions of the apocalypse shape our ideas about the future.