ASLE EcoCast Podcast

We sat down with the co-editors and one contributor to a new collection: Italian/American Fantastika: Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction from Pinocchio to Star Trek. The text looks at how Italian-Americans and also Italian-Canadians have contributed to some of the most notorious speculative stories in horror, fantasy, and science fiction in ways previously overlooked. The Ecofeminist Fantastika...

We spoke with Denise Baden to chat about her work as a sustainability professor in a business school. From developing sustainability curriculum, writing theatre to resist doom and gloom environmentalism, or championing characters in popular media that lead sustainable lives, Baden is busy. We discuss her initiatives and what's to come in this month's episode.   For more of Denise:   Website: dabad...

We sat down with Matthew Thompson to discuss his forthcoming book: On Life Support: Eco-Dystopian Cinema in the Long 1970s. The book charts various environmentalisms in 1970s films, containment vs. contamination, that evolved out of the environmentalist work of the 1960s typified by Rachel Carson and Paul Ehrlich. Thompson's idea of "contamination" jockeys with the conceptual north star of recent...

This month, we got to speak with Chaz Yingling and Andrew Kettler about their forthcoming book: The Once and the Future Cow. The book's aim is to show an understudied history of the cow not just in the American West, but on the islands in the Caribbean. But recentering the cow also means paying attention not to the typical unilateral framing of human-nonhuman interaction as humans impacting cows,...

Kaja sat down with Lindsay and I this month to discuss how scholars typically focus on the "were" in the term werewolf, but she wants us to bring more focus to the "wolf" aspect. Why are we fascinated by the prospect of becoming a wolf, and why do coyotes captivate us when they come into cities? In her new book, The Ecogothic Werewolf in Literature: Wolves, Woods and Wilderness, she tells us what...

What is ecofascism and who "is" ecofascist or "does" ecofascism? Alex Menrisky walks us through why his new book is titled "Everyday Ecofascism," or the ways that ecofascism is not solely a far-right governmental structure but a genre, a mode of storytelling. This means that ecofascism emerges through not just laws and political leaders but through quotidian acts and utterances by citizens and pol...

This month we had a fascinating conversation with Bart Welling, whose presentation at the ASLE Conference this last summer was caught by Lindsay! Bart's research was informed by his own road trip around the country, a month-long, 12,000-mile trip. This chat was particularly special as Bart is still completing his book project, and we aim to have more episodes in the future with more research-in-pr...

This month we sat down with Jon Pitt to discuss his new book "Botanical Imagination: Rethinking Plants in Modern Japan." The book spans Japanese writers and filmmakers from the 1930s to today whose works all ask a similar question: What would it mean for humans to be more like plants? Looking at the ways that this question informed critiques of colonialism and even today immigration in these works...

For this month’s episode, we sat down with Rachel DiNitto to discuss the pioneering edited volume Eco-Disasters in Japanese Cinema (2024) and her own chapter in it on "Toxicoscapes." With thematic coverage that ranges from contaminated childhoods, to nuclear anxiety, and all the way to apocalyptic futures, this manuscript both expands the overall definition of “eco-disaster” and focuses in on the...

In this episode, Alex sat down with Amanda Baugh to chat about her new book, Falling in Love with Nature: The Values of Latinx Catholic Environmentalism. An ethnographic study of Hispanic Catholics, Baugh's book argues to widen the definition of environmentalism to include those who commit more sustainable actions (recycling, public transportation) not because of an express desire to be an environ...

For this episode, we sat down with Kate Rigby to discuss her new book Meditations on Creation in an Era of Extinction. The text is a reclaiming of the ancient theological meditation form, the hexameron, to consider the climate crisis and mass extinction. Meditating on a day of creation in each chapter, she tells us about the insights each day of creation has for the Anthropocene like contemplative...

We sat down with Melody Jue for a second episode to discuss her new work Coralations, a fascinating deep dive into the coral we know and the coral we need to know. Though tropical corals inundate perceptions of coral, there are other deep water and cold water coral that have different connections or coralations to anthropogenic climate change. By rethinking "normative coral," new media across phot...

This month's episode is a podcast about a podcast! We sat down with Nate Otjen and Jessica Ng, two of the leaders of the audio story series "Mining for the Climate," to discuss the audio documentary series and its investigation of the rhetoric arguing for continued mining as essential to the "green transition." The first season, set in Gaston County, North Carolina, details the controversy surroun...

In this month's episode, we spoke with Sarah Dimick about her new book Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures. It connects literature and the environment through an idea of seasonality and rhythm. Climate change can be understood as a time of unseasonableness, of environmental events and cycles being outside normal rhythms of time. Living today is defined by this arrhythmia, and Sarah...

Today's episode begins a slight turn toward ecoaesthetics in the next few episodes, and we begin with Carolyn Fornoff's new book Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change (2024). Carolyn spoke to us about subjunctivity, a grammatical mood characterized by hypotheticals, and how its imaginative style has sprouted up in recent Mexican film, activism, and texts...

In the final episode of our extinction series, we chatted with two extinction biologists, Hope Sutton and Sara Schweitzer, who work for the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission. Sara is the assistant chief and wildlife diversity program director and Hope is the eastern wildlife diversity supervisor. We discussed their challenges in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Asheville and their t...

In this second episode of our ongoing extinction series, we sit down with Jean-Thomas Tremblay and Steven Swarbrick to discuss their thought-provoking co-written manuscript, Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction. Our conversation with them touches not only on the concrete topics of extinction and cinema, but also explores the theoretical potential of negations and contradictions as frameworks fo...

In this first episode of our extinction series, we met with Todd May to discuss his new book Should We Go Extinct? A Philosophical Dilemma for Our Times. This massive question is accessibly analyzed yet Todd also brings in issues underdiscussed in extinction discourse: Who is the inexact "we" behind the question, how do different humans contribute to ecological crisis and therefore human and nonhu...

In this episode, we met with Nadia Colburn to discuss her new poetry collection I Say the Sky! Deeply engaged with the ecological collapse happening around us while also reinvesting in our own existence, her poems range from the simplicity in appreciating the beauty of an onion to reassessing childhood trauma. We also talk through her multi-hyphenate pursuits and the continual search for the "symp...

In our final episode of our polar environmental humanities series, we have Penn State English professor Hester Blum on to discuss her environmental humanities research on polar ecomedia! Dr. Blum discusses the ephemeral texts and productions aboard Arctic and Antarctic voyages including newspapers. Newspapers on polar voyages? Yes, you heard that right. These texts have contemporary and global les...

In our second episode of our polar environmental humanities series, we jump from the landscape paintings of the circumpolar north to the southern continent of Antarctica and speak with Dr. Elizabeth Leane at the University of Tasmania! As a Professor of Antarctic Studies, we discuss her work on perceptions of Antarctica historically and also sensorially. From pandemic misconceptions of cleanliness...

This is the first episode in our polar environmental humanities series with Dr. Isabelle Gapp from the University of Aberdeen! We met to discuss her new book, "A Circumpolar Landscape", and the fascinating comparisons between Scandinavian and Canadian landscape painting beyond national borders. We discuss the way the paintings can often exhibit masculine performativity in their erasures and how th...

Our conversation with Professor Angus discusses her brand-new book Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography. As the title suggests, Angus connects photography with the materials that make it possible: bitumen, silver, platinum, iron, uranium, and rare earth elements. Each has been used at various points in photography's history to physically produce an image, and Siobhan tells us how...

Our conversation with Professor Goode explores her recent book Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability. Two recent phrases form the impetus of her book: "We Can't Solve the Climate Crisis Unless Black Lives Matter" and "Climate Change Is also a Racial Justice Problem". Goode traces these back to the enigmatic Thomas Jefferson to illuminate and enmesh the supposedly protoecologic...

This episode is a goodbye and a hello. Brandon Galm, the creator of EcoCast in 2020 and co-host since its inception, is now stepping away from the podcast to make more time for his new roles at Cloud County Community College in North Central Kansas. We say hello to Alex Tischer, a recent graduate from Wright State in English who is now applying to English Ph. D. programs. Brandon and Alex are on e...