Radical Pamphlets Hear and Now

Welcome to Radical Pamphlets Hear and Now, an audio production of the New Perennials Project at Middlebury College. For centuries, pamphlets were utilized to demand reform, equality, and justice. Nowadays, they can offer common sense, and practical advice to slow down and attend the here and now, wherever you are. Visit https://www.newperennials.org/ for more information.

Written and read by Middlebury College student Mary Nagy-Benson urging her classmates, and all young people who spend four years on a college/university campus, to acknowledge and engage with the town or city in which it and they are situated. In Nagy-Benson's words: "Too often, attending college can be made to feel like a necessary four-year detour through a quaint small town on the way...

 Inspired by John Dewey and Henry David Thoreau, Matt Schlein, outdoor educator and founder of The Willowell Foundation and the Walden Project in Monkton, Vermont, calls out the many ways the indoor classroom-model of education fails all who participate in it, particularly students, and calls for alternatives that are alive with hope, compassion, wisdom, and respect for integrity of all who engage...

Written and read by actor, director, and educator Lindsay Pontius about an experience on her farm with a cross-species teaching and learning activity involving a veteran teacher and a horse. In Pontius' words: "For more than 40 years, I have had horses in my life. Mostly, my horses are pets and partners. But I have always wanted to share with other humans the wisdom and gifts the horses...

Imagine a group of plants getting together and figuring out how to communicate their displeasure with and to their human neighbors. What would they say? Listen in here to find out. They begin with this: "Dear Neighbor - The irony is not lost on the authors of this pamphlet that it is printed on the pulped remains of our kin. But as it is still a durable format for conveying information in you...

Written and read by Middlebury College student Kylie King on the importance of slowing down and taking more time with what she calls long-form content, and less time with social media sites that thrive on shortness and speed. As King explains, "deep understanding and insight are a result of being fully absorbed by what you are learning and opening yourself up to it. Spending an extended amoun...

A just and sustainable future will require rebuilding rural America. For too many decades, the countryside has been exploited and depopulated to support urban society, and enrich only suppliers and processors. For too many urban people with progressive politics, rural areas are dismissed as parochial, and resented for holding disproportionate power. And young people in rural communities have moved...

In the revolutionary spirit of Thomas Paine, author, historian, and gardener Kathleen Smythe declares in her pamphlet that the time has come for declaring independence from a global agricultural system that robs us of our food sovereignty and treats both consumers and farmers as mere colonial subjects; from the living Earth as inexhaustible rather than an exquisite complex of life that has slowly...