Lydia Pelot-Hobbs and Jack Norton, co-editors of the collection The Jail is Everywhere, join me in this interview to discuss the “quiet jail boom” in numerous counties across the United States. They examine how the county jail has become the preeminent site of the adaptive, expansive, and shapeshifting carceral state, as well as the local and nationwide struggles to end it.
Read More#362 | Tourism Is A Prism: Cultural Homelessness & The Consequences Of Hypermobility w/ Chris Christou
Chris Christou joins me in this winding discussion to explore the subjects and themes raised in his phenomenal podcast, The End of Tourism, described as “a project about the deep causes and consequences of tourism, wanderlust, spectacle, exile,” and “an invitation into the local resistance and resilience movements in the face of each of these things.” In my discussion with him, Chris reflects on the historical moment he chose to begin this project: during the earliest waves of the global pandemic, at a time when global tourism effectively collapsed.
Read More#361 | To The Trees: Diversifying Tactics To Defend The Sacred w/ Eleanor Goldfield
Journalist and filmmaker Eleanor Goldfield joins me to discuss her documentary To the Trees, which documents humankind’s relationship to the sacred Redwoods and the tactics tree defenders use to protect old-growth forests from the clear-cutting practices of the lumber industry. In our discussion, Eleanor disputes the claims made by the industry of practicing sustainable harvesting practices in the Pacific Northwest, and how it is part and parcel of a larger global effort by extractive industries to greenwash ecologically destructive practices in the name of sustainability and the "green energy" transition.
Read More#360 | A Hundred Years Of Covid: Plague As A Process, Not An Event w/ Nate Bear
Social critic and writer Nate Bear joins me to discuss his work over the years communicating his insights into the intersections between the ongoing pandemic, human-caused climate disruption, and biospheric collapse. Nate describes how the abandonment of the population to repeated infection, mass illness, and death, is layered into the compounding crises affecting the living systems of the planet today.
Reading Nate Bear’s writings have been a balm for me. His essays are fascinating and educational, citing diverse sets of scientific research and historical accounts that bring our Covid age into a starker clarity. While many of the subjects he chooses to cover are often dire in nature, I find it reassuring to read his honest assessments of the global pandemic and how it intersects with the broader existential and ecological predicaments we face on this planet we all share. As listeners of this podcast have shared with me, having meaningful discussions about—or in the case of Nate’s essays, reading about—our global predicament, and the political, economic, cultural, and historical reasons why it’s occurring, can provide psychological and emotional relief from the inane, obfuscating, trivial bullshit that demands our regular attention.
Read More#359 | Earth’s Greatest Enemy: The US Military-Industrial Complex Is A Climate Behemoth w/ Abby Martin
Independent journalist and documentarian Abby Martin joins me to discuss Earth's Greatest Enemy, a feature length documentary that examines one of the largest polluters and contributors to global climate change in the world: the United States military. I ask Abby what the seeds of this massive project were, and why the military-industrial complex is the "elephant in the room" in the political discourse on human-caused climate change. Also, we connect this subject to the horrific mass violence in Gaza being enacted by the State of Israel—with full US complicity—to the ecocide implicit in the maintenance of US hegemonic interests globally.
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