Writer, poet, and essayist Sophie Strand joins me to discuss the "emergency of storytelling" in our climate disrupted present and future, and the subjects she explores in her upcoming book releases, The Madonna Secret, and The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine.
Sophie and I entered this conversation a bit fuzzy, a little stunned. We acknowledge this from the get go. We were processing devastating news that morning: Hurricane Ida crashed and dragged itself from south to north across the East Coast, overwhelming the infrastructure, shutting down the grid and flooding cities. We discuss how climatologically, ecologically, we can feel how things have shifted tremendously — in the Northwest where I live, and in Hudson Valley where Sophie lives. While, personally, I tend to explore this broad subject on this podcast, Sophie writes about it.
Transcript
#298 | Wyrd Against The Modern World: The Opposite Moment Begins w/ Ramon Elani
The implications of global climate change have loomed large in my mind and heart for years, and I’m sure many of you reading this can relate. The existential questions this inevitably brings up have been some of the central, binding subjects of my work. I’ve worked to address the roots of this complex catastrophe through various angles, attempting, in my own small way, to highlight the nature of this earth-encompassing shift in our planet’s biospheric composition, and explore what this means through a number of different lenses.
Human beings are social, cultural, emotional, spiritual creatures, and I doubt we are alone in this. The inevitable despair that emerges as we recognize that this titanic shift threatens the survival of future generations of human and more-than-human life in the decades to come can be debilitating, even more so when we take into account that much of what we fear is going to happen is already happening right now. Numerous scientists have observed climatic events occurring that were initially predicted to happen decades from now.
The future, as it were, has quickened to meet us.
Read More#297 | The War On Cuba: Ground Level Impacts Of The U.S. Blockade w/ Liz Oliva Fernández
Liz Oliva Fernández, Cuban journalist and lead protagonist of ‘The War on Cuba’ documentary series, joins me to discuss her work with Belly of the Beast Cuba — a Havana-based media project made up of Cubans and foreigners that highlight the daily lives and experiences of the Cuban people from the ground level.
The United States has been engaging in a multifaceted, multipronged war with Cuba ever since their revolution in 1959. Whether that is through economic pressures in the form of sanctions, embargoes, and what Fernández bluntly describes as a blockade, or through direct military incursions and threats, the U.S. has imposed an artificial scarcity on the people of Cuba. The U.S. attempts to justify its genocidal policies toward Cuba through extreme media bias, propaganda, and lies. Some of the most dramatic examples of this, lately, has been under the administration of former President Trump. Cuba has some of the best doctors in the world, and for decades, thousands of them have volunteered to aid the peoples of numerous nations around the globe, most often in Latin America, Africa, and during the worst of their battle with Covid-19, Italy. The U.S., under the Trump Administration and through the direct interference of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, pressured numerous national leaders in Latin America (Ecuador, Bolivia, and Brazil) to refuse and send away hundreds of Cuban doctors serving missions in those respective nations. As Fernández states in this interview, “the lies told by the [U.S.] media about what Cuban doctors do abroad depends on the country they are in and the agreement that that country has with Cuba.” Baseless accusations coming from the mouths of such figures as Pompeo have expressed a “concern for human rights” — stating that these brigades of Cuban doctors are actually “spies,” “slaves of the Castro regime,” “not really doctors,” “soldiers,” and “human traffickers.” These accusations, when taken at face value, are very hard to believe, as the on-the-ground reality of the overwhelmingly positive impact these missions have had is thoroughly well documented. The U.S. and its belligerent stance toward Cuba has cost the lives of countless people. The nations that were pressured to send away these doctors, due to U.S. pressures, have been of the hardest hit by this pandemic. That is no coincidence.
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