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

  “The sooner we are able to get rid of these two commodities, oil and coal, the better it will be... But 'green' technologies such as electric cars, solar panels, and wind turbines, don’t come out of thin air.” –Guillaume Pitron In this episode, we revisit our past conversation with Guillaume Pitron, an award-winning journalist and documentary-maker for some of France’s leading TV channels. From...

“For Palestinians, agriculture seems to be the only option. This is why we see the vicious, atrocious, and systematic attacks against Palestinian farmers.” In this episode, we welcome Rami Barhoush, an activist and president of the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature, known as APN, based in Amman, Jordan. The independent non-profit organization seeks to enhance the capacity of Arab peoples, in...

“If you’re actually targeting migrants as the source of the problem, if we’re thinking about climate migration as one of the amplified 'threats' from the Department of Defense’s point of view, then you’re never actually going to solve the problem because you’re only addressing the symptom and not the root cause.” In this episode, we welcome A. Naomi Paik, an interdisciplinary scholar whose work ex...

"“There’s a lot of evidence that the world, and our experience of life, has massively sped up... We’re all speed-reading life now, and we’re living at a pace that makes deep thought impossible.” In this episode, we welcome Johann Hari , a writer and journalist who has written for the New York Times , Le Monde , The Guardian and other newspapers. His TED talks and NowThis viral video have been view...

In this episode, we welcome Jason W. Moore, an environmental historian and historical geographer at Binghamton University, where he is professor of sociology. He is author or editor of several books: most recently, of Capitalism in the Web of Life ; and, with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things . His books and essays on environmental history, capitalism, and social theory have...

“In a way, Western science compartmentalizes a lot of the information through those boxes or as I say, through those puzzle pieces. Indigenous science looks at the entire picture to formulate our information and our questions.” In this episode, we welcome Dr. Jessica Hernandez, a transnational Indigenous scholar, scientist, and community advocate based in the Pacific Northwest. Her work is grounde...

“One of the most powerful untapped resources is spirituality. Spirituality—particularly spirituality from Black and Indigenous communities all over the world—has been so denigrated and so viciously attacked that many people are unaware of its transformative potential.” This is a replay of our past interview with Chelsea Mikael Frazier, Ph. D., a Black Feminist eco-critic who writes, researches and...

“We’ve collapsed the idea of community with 'connectivity'. But being 'connected' doesn’t mean you have any sense of community. To have a community, you need something very visceral, you need to be in close proximity with people, to communicate on a day-to-day basis, to understand the flaws of people. It’s not about curated existences.” In this episode, we welcome Brad Evans, a political philosoph...

"Why is it important to focus on regular people, people in the in-between, people who bear some cost but also reap some profit? Because it gives us an insight into most people’s lives. As long as we don’t understand how we become acquiescent, not much will change." In this episode, we welcome Amalia Leguizamón, Associate Professor of Sociology and core faculty at the Stone Center for Latin America...

“This is what I call the agrobiopolitical paradox at the center of the modern agricultural state: Paraguay trying to push hard to get more soybeans out there and on the other hand trying to create institutions to protect people from all the soybeans that the left hand is putting in place.” In this episode, we welcome Kregg Hetherington, Ph. D., who is a political anthropologist specializing in the...

"That neoliberal, technocratic environmentalism is also what we would call depoliticizing... it avoids the more transformative types of policies or solutions that extend outside of the policy realm and are necessary for confronting the climate crisis as we recognize it today." In this episode, we welcome Kai Bosworth, a geographer, political ecologist, and Assistant Professor at the School of Worl...

Emma Dowling IS a sociologist at the University of Vienna in Austria. She has previously held academic positions in Britain and Germany, and her most recent work asks what our economy looks like when viewed from the perspective of care, charting the material conditions that shape its configurations. Emma is the author of The Care Crisis - What Caused It and How Can We End It? published with Verso...

Bram Ebus has worked on resource conflicts, drug policies, and state-corporate crimes in Latin America since 2010. He holds a master's degree from the University of Utrecht in Global Criminology with a focus on environmental and state-corporate crimes. In recent years, Bram has been active as an NGO consultant and investigative journalist, publishing for a variety of international media, and worke...

Scott Timcke, Ph. D., is a comparative historical sociologist who studies race, class, and technology in modernity. He is a research associate with the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Change and a fellow at the University of Leeds’ Centre for African Studies where he studies the overlap between algorithmic capitalism, FinTech, and neocolonialism. He is also the author of Algorithms...

Dr. Beatriz Caiuby Labate (Bia Labate) has her core interests in the study of psychoactive substances, drug policies, shamanism, ritual, and religion. She is the author, co-author, and co-editor of seventeen books, one journal special edition, and several peer-reviewed articles. She is also the Executive Director of the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. The song featured in this...

In this episode, we revisit our past conversation with Harriet Washington , an award-winning medical writer and editor and the author of the best-selling book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present . She's also the author of A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and its Assault on the American Mind . In her wor...

What does it mean to understand our roles not as Earthlings but as “Placelings”? And as we deepen into the work of collective healing, what underlies the invitation to reframe the preservation of "wildness” into a re-establishment of “kinship”? John Hausdoerffer, Ph. D., is an author and teacher from Crested Butte, Colorado, where he serves as the Dean of the Clark School of Environment & Sust...

How might we re-envision “international collaboration” beyond the political framework of nation-state institutions? And what could it mean to work more strategically in socio-ecological activism, targeting the choke points and the arteries of global trade and extractivism? In this episode, we welcome Liam Campling, a Professor of International Business & Development at the Queen Mary Universit...

What does it mean to queer resilience in the face of climate catastrophes? And how might the dominant modes of disaster relief reinforce the centralized systems predicated on extraction and exploitation? In this episode, we welcome Vanessa Raditz, a queer biocultural geographer, educator, and storyteller dedicated to community healing, opening access to land and resources, and fostering a thriving...

What might it mean for humanity to reach a level of maturation to be able to confront the multilayered crises we now face—calling upon us to “grow up and show up” for ourselves and our planet? And how might recognizing the broader contexts that each of our generations were raised in help us to have more empathy when navigating our differences? Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti is a Brazilian educator...

What would change if we viewed money as sacred, as a potential form of medicine? And how do the incentives embedded within the world of philanthropy act as barriers for it to catalyze deep transformations? In this episode, we welcome Edgar Villanueva, a globally recognized author, activist, and expert on social justice philanthropy. Edgar is the author of the bestselling book Decolonizing Wealth a...

If the popularized vision of the Green New Deal were to be realized, how might that play out? And how do we contextualize the historical process of creating nation-states deemed as “underdeveloped”, “developing”, or “developed”? In this episode, we welcome Max Ajl, Ph. D , the author of A People's Green New Deal . Ajl is based at Wageningen University's Rural Sociology Group, and he is an associat...

What have been the shortcomings of the various technologies promising to make mental health care more accessible? And what does it mean to maintain a sense of humanity in our systems of care—in a world where therapeutic support of different forms is increasingly digitized? In this episode, we welcome Emma Bedor Hiland, Ph. D. , the author of Therapy Tech: The Digital Transformation of Mental Healt...

What does it mean for those working within academia to become scholar-activists—going beyond working to rise within the ranks of educational institutions to engage with and help enact change within their communities? And why is maintaining an internationalist lens critical for those wanting to support Indigenous rights, sovereignty, and liberation? In this episode, we welcome Melanie Yazzie Ph. D....

How do we make sense of the contradiction of having both excess food and food insecurity at the same time? And how do counterculture movements like Food Not Bombs prefigure the alternative worlds that are possible? In this episode, we welcome David Boarder Giles, the author of A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People: Food Not Bombs and the World-Class Waste of Global Cities, and an anthropologist of food...