Last Born In The Wilderness

Eliot Jacobson—climate science communicator and “know-it-all doomer”—joins me to discuss his eclectic background, climate change data, how and why 2023 was off the charts, and what it means to be a doomer. Support the podcast and listen to this interview before the public release: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness

In the second part of my two-part interview with author and journalist Shane Burley, we continue our discussion about the contexts that underlie the dramatic escalation of violence by the State of Israel in the Palestinian territories since Hamas’s October 7th attack. We focus on the validity of claims made by pro-Israel Zionists of antisemitism on the part of Palestinian liberation activists in d...

Journalist and author Shane Burley returns to the podcast to discuss his article The Story of a Post-Holocaust Group Seeking Revenge Against Nazis is Part of the Story of Israel Itself, published by Religion Dispatches. He addresses historical traumas and contexts that underlie, in part, the dramatic escalation of violence by the State of Israel in the Palestinian territories since Hamas’s October...

Journalist and author Shane Burley returns to the podcast to discuss his article The Story of a Post-Holocaust Group Seeking Revenge Against Nazis is Part of the Story of Israel Itself, published by Religion Dispatches. He addresses historical traumas and contexts that underlie, in part, the dramatic escalation of violence by the State of Israel in the Palestinian territories since Hamas’s October...

Historian and author Betsy Gaines Quammen returns to the podcast to discuss her new book, True West: Myth and Mending on the Far Side of America, published by Torrey House Press. Building on her previous book, American Zion, Gaines Quammen follows the historical roots and trajectories of troubling political trends in the Western United States, decoupling the myths and material realities of the lan...

In this expansive discussion, investigative journalist and food columnist Arun Gupta tackles the extremely online drama between "progrowth" and "degrowth" leftists about one of the cheapest fruits you can find in the supermarket: the banana. Will we have bananas under socialism? // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/arun-gupta-3 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreo...

In this expansive discussion, investigative journalist and food columnist Arun Gupta tackles the extremely online drama between "progrowth" and "degrowth" leftists about one of the cheapest fruits you can find in the supermarket: the banana. Will we have bananas under socialism?  Support the podcast and listen to this interview: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness

Darcia Narvaez returns to the podcast, along with co-author G.A. Bradshaw, to discuss their new book, The Evolved Nest: Nature's Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities published by North Atlantic Books. By drawing on the ancestral legacies of child-rearing and broader nesting practices and contemporary breakthroughs in neurology and developmental psychology, we can better under...

Darcia Narvaez returns to the podcast, along with co-author G.A. Bradshaw, to discuss their new book, The Evolved Nest: Nature's Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities. Support the podcast and listen to this interview: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness

Acclaimed author John Vaillant joins me to discuss Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast, a masterfully written chronicle of the destructive power of fire in the twenty-first century. Fire Weather is an astounding chronicle of the boreal fire that swept through Fort McMurray, Alberta in May 2016. Over the course of 24 hours, the nearly 90,000 residents of this modern-day bitumen subarctic boom town...

Acclaimed author John Vaillant joins me to discuss 'Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast', a masterfully written chronicle of the destructive power of fire in the twenty-first century. Support the podcast and listen to this interview: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness

Jonathan Howard MD joins me to discuss his timely book, We Want Them Infected: How the Failed Quest for Herd Immunity Led Doctors to Embrace the Anti-Vaccine Movement and Blinded Americans to the Threat of COVID, published by Redhawk Publications. As much as Jonathan Howard’s book is a scathing examination of how various very influential and contrarian doctors misled the US public about the corona...

Biological anthropologist Dr. Cara Wall-Scheffler joins me to discuss the evolution of human locomotion and how it dovetails into the findings and conclusions of the research article she co-authored, 'The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women’s contribution to the hunt across ethnographic contexts', published last month in PLOS ONE. The data gathered and examined across numerous foraging societies by the...

Legal historian and author Nate Holdren joins me to discuss broken sociality, political and social loneliness, and social murder and its depoliticization during the pandemic, as elucidated in his Peste Magazine essay Broken Sociality: Isolation in the Pseudo-Return to “Pre-Pandemic Normal”. The pandemic emergency has been declared over, both here in the United States, and by the World Health Organ...

Conspirituality podcast co-host and journalist Matthew Remski returns to the podcast, bringing his ongoing analysis of online cultists, grifters, and conspiritualists to a discussion that relates to the book he co-authored with co-hosts Julian Walker and Derek Beres titled Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, forthcoming from Public Affairs/Random House in June....

Author and former climate journalist Dahr Jamail returns to the podcast to discuss the 20th anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq by United States-led coalition forces. Jamail began his journalistic career as an unembedded journalist documenting the war from the ground beginning in 2003, highlighting the countless war crimes committed by the occupying forces against the civilians of I...

Social critic and activist Alley Valkyrie returns to the podcast to discuss the recent wave of strikes and civil disrupt in France. As someone who has spent most of their life within the borders of the United States and a current resident of Rennes, France, Alley provides a well-rounded description of events that have led to one of the largest strikes and protests in recent memory in the nation. /...

Clark from the Atlanta Community Press Collective joins me to discuss the Stop Cop City movement, also known as the Defend the Atlanta Forest (or Defend Weelaunee Forest) movement in Atlanta, Georgia. Clark is not a representative of the movement, but through his coverage, speaks clearly to the concerns raised by activists and forest occupiers of the construction of Atlanta Public Safety Training...

Writer John Halstead returns to the podcast to discuss his widely read article, 'umping the Gap: Where Green Transphobia Leads,'published at A Beautiful Resistance. John Halstead’s article uses the ideological trajectory of Paul Kingnorth, co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project and a fierce critic of “Big Green environmentalism,” to examine trans-exclusionary politics and rhetoric in certain left...

Evolutionary epidemiologist and author Rob Wallace returns to the podcast to discuss his new collection, The Fault in Our SARS: COVID-19 in the Biden Era, published through Monthly Review. This discussion is long, but certainly worth a listen. Entering year four of the pandemic, Rob Wallace has diligently, and extensively, written two books worth of essays on the various facets of the SARS-2 outbr...

Investigative journalist and author Justin Mikulka joins me to discuss the recent train derailment in East Palestine, bomb trains, and the devastating consequences the lack of regulation of the railroad industry is having on the environment and human communities across North America. // Episode notes + transcript: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/justin-mikulka // Sustain + support...

Animist artist, practitioner, and facilitator Dare Carrasquillo (formerly Sohei) returns to the podcast to discuss death practice, collectivism as the politics of wholeness, trauma and the story of the self, and the proto-human matrifocal coalition and the ritual of no. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/dare-sohei-2 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/las...

Journalist Brian Mier, co-editor at Brasil Wire and correspondent for teleSUR English, returns to the podcast to discuss the recent chaos in Brazil, days after the inauguration of popular center-left President Lula da Silva. What are the Bolsonaristas attempting to accomplish? What guides their actions? Why is this event so similar to the infamous chaos at the US Capitol on January 6th? Brian Mier...

Author and journalist Shane Burley returns to the podcast to discuss the anthology ‘No Pasaran: Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis,’ published this fall through AK Press. Burley is the editor and a contributor to this collection. In catching up since our last interview, I ask Shane to clarify where the far-right stands in a "post-Trump" context. What inroads have far-right, and explicit...

Author Travis Linnemann joins me to discuss his recently released book The Horror of Police, published by University of Minnesota Press. A good amount of ink has been spilt on the subject of policing—its historical origins; the oppressive and repressive role police play in the day-to-day lives of various marginalized communities; how “copaganda” shapes our collective perceptions of police and poli...