Green Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration

In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Patricia Kaishian , a mycologist, writer, and educator who gestures to mycology as a queer discipline. Situated as a queer member of Armenian diaspora, Patricia threads connections between the often misunderstood and mis/under-represented displacement of mycelial bodes and her own. Offering a glimpse of the complex, fascinating, taxonomy-defying world of fungi...

In the episode, we welcome Dr. Eshe Lewis to discuss her life and learnings as an activist, anthropologist, and storyteller. Eshe walks us through glimpses of her time with Afro-Peruvian women as part of her doctoral research and how this experience transfigured beyond the siloed parameters of academic study into personal, historical, and political realms. Eshe’s conscious intent of questioning, c...

“[...] The United States started to heavily invest in subsidizing growing wheat for exporting purposes. That resulted in flooding international markets, including Jordan’s markets. Cheap American wheat left many of the small-scale farmers unable to compete under record prices.” In this episode, we welcome Lama Khatieb, co-founder of Zikra for Popular Learning : a Jordan-based collective that aims...

In this episode, we welcome anthropologist Daniel Ruiz-Serna , whose work, situated in the Choco region of Colombia, aims to expose the entanglement of political and ecological violence whereby echoes of conflict/healing reverberate through place. In light of the enmeshment between war and land, Daniel welcomes a framework of living territories, as traced by his life/work with the diversity of hum...

“I think the bigger question is not necessarily specifically about physics, but generally speaking, about how we culturally engage with science and the role of science in our communities and how it shapes our mindset and what our mindset about science is. ” Joining us in this episode is theoretical physicist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein , whose research on small-scale particles points us to a larg...

“The legacy of Earth colonization… is still [in its] early days. We can protect this shared environment and also what I see as the intangible heritage of humanity. Space belongs to us all.” In this episode, we are joined in conversation with Dr. Aparna Venkatesan, a cosmologist working on studies of “first-light” sources in the universe. She also works actively in cultural astronomy and space poli...

“It’s very important that we translate how different knowledge systems have been privileged and others have been marginalized and repressed and erased. To have true knowledge symbiosis, where there is harmony and balance and inter-relationality and each contributing respectfully with care, thoughtfulness, humility, that is a process and it’s a messy and tangled process.” In this episode, we welcom...

For Green Dreamer’s 400th episode, we welcome Anand Giridhardas, a writer and journalist whose books include The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy (2022), Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018), The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (2014), and India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking (2011). A former for...

“Hundreds of people have been murdered over sand in the last few years. Even though most of us barely ever think about it, sand is actually the most used natural resource in the world after air and water.” In this episode, we welcome journalist Vince Beiser, the author of The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization. Vince guides us in an exploration of sand as a nat...

“Once you start rebuilding more localized systems, they are almost without exception, going to be kinder to the environment and kinder to people structurally. ” In this episode, we are honored to welcome back our guest Helena Norberg-Hodge, a linguist, author, and filmmaker, and the founder of the Local Futures. As a pioneer and proponent of localization (decentralization), as well as her experien...

“When I talk about extinction as a bio-cultural process, what I’m seeing or what I’m talking about is the fact that there’s lots of different species who are alive and who are working within a cultural entanglement which is shaping their capacity to either thrive or perhaps become endangered and go into decline... I see art as giving people a way to engage with that grief, and to engage with that...

“If we’re soaking in all these default practices that are power-over practices that are reflected to us through the media, through our families and communities, through how the economy works, it means we’re embodying things that we might not even agree with that might not at all align with our values, but we’re embodying them anyway.” Staci K. Haines is a somatics innovator and the author of The P...

Dr. Andreas Weber is a biologist, philosopher, and writer, whose work focuses on re-evaluating our understanding of the living and dying. Andreas proposes understanding organisms as subjects , and hence the biosphere, as a meaning-creating and poetic reality. Accordingly, he holds that an economy inspired by nature should not be designed as a mechanistic optimisation machine, but rather as an ecos...

“Where is the space for a collective life? If you yell at the planet and say, ‘Why aren’t you acting collectively?’ You don’t understand this social system. This economic system has stolen collectivity from people.” In this episode, we welcome Vijay Prashad , an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. Vijay begins by sharing about the turning points in his life that led him to focus his work on...

In this episode, we welcome writer, artist, and technologist, James Bridle . James’s artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide and on the internet. They are the author of New Dark Age (2018) and Ways of Being (2022), and they wrote and presented the radio series "New Ways of Seeing" for BBC Radio 4 in 2019. Join us as James investigates and complicates m...

“I like thinking with viruses because they’re constantly infecting us, changing our nature. Some of them are even changing our genome. We’re constantly in relation with the world around us even though we can barely perceive and understand all of this complexity.” In this episode, we are joined by anthropologist Eben Kirksey, who invites us to think and feel through a new wave of viral theory throu...

"I came up with the idea of ‘Eating the Landscape’ because I was thinking about our Indigenous ancestral foodways. It’s not just about food. It’s not just about nutrition. ‘Eating the Landscape’ is about this large, interconnected matrix of our relationship to place." In this episode, Enrique Salmón, Ph. D. guides us to see Indigenous foodways as parts of an interconnected matrix of our relationsh...

“What we might want to do is learn where the word desertification comes from and when it should be used and when it is ill-used, at least to move forward into a more hopeful, more informed, more generous future that I think we all want.” Why should we challenge mass tree-planting projects as being politically neutral—as something that ought to garner universal support? What is the significance of...

“I use the language of entanglement rather than interdependence because entanglement implies that what’s fundamental is relationships.” What are some of the limitations of human rights frameworks and the institutions that uphold them? What does it mean to go beyond recognizing our interdependence to seeing our deep entanglements with our more-than-human world? And how is the much more holistic fra...

“One thing that the United States got really good at doing was basically replacing all colonial products with synthetic ones—swapping technology in for territory and replacing colonies with chemistry.” How have synthetic chemistry and technology allowed the United States as an empire to cease its reliance on colonies? And what is the significance of recognizing the greater history of the empire—be...

“We often forget that Black farmers were the foundation of the civil rights movement. Actually, a lot of Black agrarian scholars and organizers, and even some policy advocates that have been doing this work for a long time, would say that there’d be no civil rights movement if it wasn’t for Black farmers.” In this episode, we welcome dr. shakara tyler, a returning-generation farmer, educator and o...

“What I find worth remarking upon is the fact that the vast majority of people are so alienated from the Bluefin’s life world that they don’t know what an extraordinary creature she is—and instead just widely see her as a foodstuff, trafficked on the global market. It’s imperative for that worldview to change.” In this episode, we welcome Jennifer E. Telesca, Associate Professor of Environmental G...

In this episode, we welcome Thom van Dooren, a field philosopher and writer. Thom is Deputy Director at the Sydney Environment Institute and teaches at the University of Sydney and the University of Oslo. His current research and writing focus on some of the many philosophical, ethical, cultural, and political issues that arise in the context of species extinctions and human entanglements with thr...

In this episode, we welcome Rebecca Giggs, an award-winning author from Perth, Australia. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Emergence, the New York Times Magazine, Granta , and in anthologies including Best Australian Essays , and Best Australian Science Writing . Rebecca’s nonfiction focuses on how people feel towards animals in a time of technological and ecological change. Rebecca’s debut...

“One of the introductions to Counseling Psychology teaches the Freudian concept of neutrality—when the patient’s social identity, when politics leave the door and you start treatment. But if we leave out identity, if we leave out the very sources as to why my client is sick in the first place, then I don’t see why this is not a cycle.” In this episode, we welcome Gabes Torres , a therapist, organi...