Last Born In The Wilderness

[Intro: 11:43] 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. In her essay 'Storytelling is an Emergency: An Ecological Reading of Scheher

Journalist Shane Burley joins me to discuss his newest book, 'Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse,' published through AK Press. Smoke choked cities. Supply chain disruptions. Pandemic. Riots. Fascist violence. The calamitous events of 2020 sent shock waves through the social fabric of the United States. There is the pervasive sense that we've crossed a threshold, one that cannot be walked back or reversed. In 'Why We Fight,' Burley navigates this territory of the here and now, providing deep insights into the conditions that gave rise to some of the most dramatic developments of the past several years. In this interview, I ask Burley to provide updates into the evolution of fascist politics during this time, and what antifascist resistance to the far right looks like, and must adapt to, in a time of apocalyptic rupture. Shane Burley is a writer and filmmaker based in Portland, Oregon. His essays, criticism and journalism has been featured in places like Jacobin, Al J

[Intro: 12:43] Journalist, activist, and author Eric Laursen joins me to discuss his recent book ‘The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State,’ published through AK Press. Anarchism presents a unique challenge to State power. Since it emerged as a coherent political and social movement in the 18th and 19th centuries, anarchists of various stripes and creeds have pointed to the illegitimate power the State holds, and the role it has played in the dominance of Capital in forming and shaping the trajectory of human societies up to the present day. What would a contemporary critique and theory of the State look like through an anarchist lens? The State, like so much since the dawn of the 21st century, has had to adapt itself to the crises of the times we live in, from climate disruption, economic expansion and contraction, and the Covid-19 pandemic. We can then ask: has the State been up to the task? Or, instead, has it only further exasperated the conditions we live within? How can anarchism

[Intro: 9:24] Ecologist and prolific author Carl Safina joins me to discuss his work with the more-than-human (animal) world, particularly his writings about the cultures and emotional lives of various animal communities, beautifully documented in two of his most recent books, 'Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel' and 'Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace.' Human beings, or to be more specific, human beings within modern industrial cultures, tend to believe that Homo sapiens are the only species on Earth that are cultural. As Safina has documented in his work, this is simply not the case. Numerous species have culture, including, but not limited to, various primates, birds, and whales. What we can learn about the evolutionary function of culture from these animal communities, including the role the perception and appreciation of beauty, plays in the evolutionary process? At the very end of this interview, I ask Safina to discuss his appreciation of Herman

[Intro: 6:52] Critically acclaimed author Melissa Febos joins me to discuss her most recent collection of essays, ‘Girlhood’ — "a gripping set of stories about the forces that shape girls and the adults they become." I first became aware of Melissa and her book Girlhood from an essay she published in The New York Times Magazine titled ‘I Spent My Life Consenting to Touch I Didn’t Want,’ adapted from an essay published in the then-to-be-released ‘Girlhood’. Her personal reflections on the concept of "empty consent" from her experiences attending a cuddle party (pre-pandemic), compelled me to contact her to discuss the complex issues she deftly navigates through that essay. After reading Girlhood, I recognized the significance of her masterful writing and exploration of her own childhood and development into womanhood. We discuss, within the 47-minute interview, a few of the significant insights I drew out of my reading, including the gradients of consent and trauma, and the role men can, and must, play in up

Oh goodness, finally, it’s done. It took too long to produce — a month or so longer than I intended to put this all together. I became exhausted, weary of hearing my own voice, editing hours of audio, listening and trimming and organizing and reorganizing and recording my wandering commentary, cutting and slicing and trimming, exporting, finding mistakes, fixing and then re-exporting, uploading chunky hi-quality audio files, writing provocative titles and descriptions, editing eye-catching designs — all about the end of things. Death, love, grief, anger, plagues and human resistance to systemic violence, denial-isms — the void at the heart of it. It’s all enough to make one take a long nap, and believe me, I took plenty. This long, seven part series (something I half-seriously call an episode) is a labor of love. With each part, I was able to pull at the threads of this work over the previous 100 episodes; each major theme I’ve explored through dozens of interviews coalesced into seven hours-long audio comp

Finally, we have reached the end—in more ways than one. This long series has been a labor of love. It took too long to produce, but ultimately, preparing and releasing each of these parts has been a gratifying, and even cathartic, experience. This last part, fittingly, is a meditation on endings, transitions, the death of things. And, most importantly, love—the love that accompanies all of it. We are meeting a time of many endings. The overly-complex systems that govern modern human life are meeting their inevitable demise. Centuries of human industrial activity has thrown the living systems of the Earth into disarray, and mass extinction ensues. The global climate is beyond repair, with enough heat baked into the system to guarantee several degrees of warming over the next several decades and centuries—a fact that cannot be contested. The question of human extinction is less a matter of "if" but more a matter of "when." If what is happening is happening, how, then, shall we live? This part seven is not m

We are haunted beings. Unintegrated traumas, like ghosts, possess us, poison us — until they don’t. Colonization, rupturous, severs the body from its relations, from ancestors and earth. It flattens the diversity of human experience, relying on the multifaceted dynamics of intergenerational trauma to replicate itself, in perpetuity. Like ghosts, these traumas haunt us, hijack us. The line between the abuser and the abused is blurred, trauma compounds, cutting in all directions. Decolonization is an ongoing counter-process to this. Naming these ghostly bodies, making them visible, speaking to them, opens up revolutionary space for healing, reforging relation to all beings, corporeal and non-corporeal alike. This compilation of eleven interviews pulls on the threads of these subjects, navigating the contours of developmental psychology, ancestral trauma, whiteness, depression and shame, gender and masculinity. // Timeline + sources: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/300-6 // Download: https

Let us gaze into the void at the heart of this country. What happened on January 6th was neither the beginning, nor the endpoint, of the fascist trajectory this nation has been lurching headlong toward. It was a flashpoint. The events that led to this explosion of violence did not happen in a vacuum. Donald Trump’s rise to the highest political office in the land was neither an anomaly nor an accident. Decades of neoliberal decay, widespread white anxiety, and the inherent spiritual rot at the core of this settler-colonial project has almost guaranteed the growth of a virulent fascism in our time of mounting crises. This compilation of ten interviews, conducted over the past two years, is an attempt to track the various forces that led to the MAGA riot at the Capitol. Weaving together interviews that track the decline of the U.S. empire, the ramping up of the sadistic treatment and dehumanization of undocumented immigrants along the border, the metaphysical landscape of the “post-modern” age we reside in,

Everything changed after the 3rd Precinct fell. In 2020, a pandemic began to course its way through the collective body, and the dead began to pile up. Tens of millions of U.S. citizens lost their jobs, and the capitalist system shuttered. As it turns out, these are the perfect conditions for revolt. On May 25th, George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer in the streets of Minneapolis. Everyone saw the video, and it was undeniable. We witnessed something as old as this country itself play out, again. Riots broke out, but this time, the righteous rage persisted and spread. Each of these nine interviews, interwoven with commentary, documents this time of expansive unrest and stochastic terror. Timeline and sources: www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/300-4 Download: https://bit.ly/LBW300-4 Featuring: - Silvia Federici - Gerald Horne - Chris Hedges - Mike Africa Jr. - Shane Burley - Shemon & Arturo - Vicky Osterweil - Arun Gupta - Frank B. Wilderson III WEBSITE: https://www.lastborninthewild

May we live in interesting times. The fertile grounds that bred a novel, deadly coronavirus and the misinformation that accompanied its spread is our subject. Over the last year-and-a-half since COVID spilled over, and more specifically, when our collective reaction to it began to reshape every aspect of our lives, I conducted numerous interviews to make sense of this thing. Disruptions in the very fragile (and simultaneously resilient) global economic system, mass death, overburdened healthcare workers, the widespread proliferation of conspiracy theories, fascistic outbursts, mutual aid networks, and the uncomfortable questions that arise, characterize this audio narrative I’ve cobbled together for your listening pleasure. Timeline and sources: www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/300-3 Featuring: - John Feffer - Alley Valkyrie - Jared Yates Sexton - Derek Beres - Matthew Remski - Julian Walker - Amy Lou - Shane Burley - Duncan Tarr - Ja Reyalidad - Joe Brewer - Bayo Akomolafe WEBSITE: https://w

Let's proceed to part two. From December 2019 to February 2020, I was in Brazil. Without full comprehension, I (we) stood on the edge of a pandemic. The global scope of the crisis had yet to be fully felt and realized. Before "normal" ended. Before lockdowns, mask burnings, social isolation, uprising—I was in Brazil, with its complexities, beauties, intensities, realities. My time there left its mark on me, and is still felt to this day a year plus since—having informed almost every aspect of my life and work. It is certainly not lost on me that I had these experiences on the cusp of this pandemic. The importance of the work done there needed to be represented in this long episode; this is my attempt at doing so. In collaboration with Brazilian political theorist and journalist Mirna Wabi-Sabi, five interviews were conducted during my time there: two radical organizers (one an infamous political prisoner) of the More Love, Less Capital (Mais Amor, Menos Capital) event; a scholar, historian, and daughter o

Bear with me on this. I wanted to do something different, original, for this episode, this milestone of 300. As you will hear in my introduction, I will be releasing seven parts for this, covering numerous themes that I've explored over the past 100 episodes of Last Born In The Wilderness. This first part is quite substantial, in and of itself. Weaving together fifteen carefully selected interviews, I present a narrative that conveys one of the most persistent themes of my work: ecological catastrophe, climatological disruption, near-term extinction, ruptures in the life-destroying industrial model, and humanity’s capacity to reclaim our regenerative role—in spite of the outcome. Timeline and sources: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/300-1 Featuring: - Nicholas Humphrey - Timothy Lenton - Brian Mier - Melissa Troutman - Joshua Pribanic - Will Falk - Jeff Gibbs - Richard Heinberg - Roy Scranton - Stephen Pyne - Khalil Avi - Max Paschall - Steven Elliot Martyn - Peter Michael Bauer - Stan

[Intro: 10:22] Ian MacKenzie — visionary filmmaker, storyteller, and host of The Mythic Masculine podcast — returns to discuss manhood, mythology, and emerging masculinities in the wake of calamity.  This conversation runs deep. Ian and I attempt to navigate the complexities and shadows of men's work in our time of emerging inquiries and contemplation about gender identity and expression. We wholeheartedly acknowledge that as necessary as those discussions around these subjects are, as vital as they may be, we must ask: Where do men fit in this? Ian and I are both what can be described as cisgendered and fairly heteronormative in our relationship styles — situated on a spectrum that has, traditionally, benefited folks such as ourselves in very concrete and obvious ways. That reality is not contested by either of us. But, as we expand upon in this discussion, the patterns of behavior and the beliefs that accompany men through their lives extremely limit them in their relationships — both with others and with

Acausal heathen poet and author Ramon Elani joins me to discuss his new book, Wyrd Against the Modern World, published through Night Forest Press. This audio interview is actually a reading of a written interview I conducted with him, originally published at the Gods&Radicals Press supporter-only blog Another World. // Episode notes + transcript: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/ramon-elani-2 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

[Intro: 9:38 | Transcript: http://bit.ly/LBWbeast] 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 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 o

World-renowned environmental and reproductive epidemiologist Dr. Shanna Swan joins me to discuss her groundbreaking research identifying the causes and rate of rapid decline of fertility in the Western world, documented in her new book Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/shanna-swan // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

[Intro: 9:46] Anthropologist, experimental archaeologist, and historian Peter Michael Bauer joins me to discuss several major subjects of his work, including rewilding, collapse, and humanity's place within these frameworks. This discussion begins with Peter elaborating on the now often decontextualized and widely misrepresented concept of "rewilding." He contrasts the common, and popular, misunderstanding of this concept to his work with rewilding and its original intended meaning, and whether the term itself should now be abandoned in light of this trend. I then ask Peter to define his understanding of collapse, comparing his earlier understanding of that process to how he conceptualizes it currently — not as an event, but as an iterative, often gradual, process. His interest lies not in “weathering the storm” of collapse, but to allow this ecocidal civilization to recede and decline into irrelevance, and then foster the growth of ways of living and being that place humanity within its proper ecological r

[Intro: 8:31] Roy Scranton, bestselling author of ‘We're Doomed. Now What?’ and ‘Learning to Die in the Anthropocene,’ joins me to discuss his recent op-ed in the New York Times, ‘I’ve Said Goodbye to ‘Normal.’ You Should, Too.’ We begin this interview with Roy discussing the connections he draws between two of the major subjects he has written extensively about over the course of his career as an author: war and climate change. Having been deployed to Iraq while serving in the US Army during the US invasion and occupation of that nation in 2003, Roy provides some insights into the reasons why he volunteered to participate in that horrific conflict, and how that experience ultimately led him to write extensively on anthropogenic climate change, both from the hard scientific perspective, and from the deeper philosophical perspective as well. I then ask him to respond to scientist and author Michael Mann's characterization of Scranton and his work ("Scranton is the ultimate doomist" (https://bit.ly/3dwHRG1)),

Brian Mier, co-editor at Brasil Wire and correspondent at teleSUR English, returns to the podcast to detail some of the most prominent and pressing issues facing Brazil today, much of which was documented in the recently released Redfish documentary Dismantling Brazil: Bolsonaro's Neoliberal Agenda, which he co-produced. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/brian-mier-3 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast