A Wild and Beautiful World

Just a quick hello to note that the second season is coming soon! My guests will include cultural educator and mountaineer Rachel Heaton, lawyer Lauren Regan, Tennessee State Rep. Justin Pearson, and writers Adam Welz, Paul Gilding, Ursula Goodenough, George Monbiot, Paul Koberstein, and Jessica Applegate. Stay tuned!

"The issues that we attempt to suppress and sweep under the rug--or repress, which means we sweep under the rug unconsciously—they don't go anywhere, they just go in the darker crevices of our mind and then, like poisoning in groundwater, they seep into us, unconsciously, and we feel stressed and anxiety, and when it reaches a certain level we become more aware of it, and when we don't take action is that it just keeps poisoning us, building up, we know over and over again, and studies show this, that when people start to name the problem and figure out a strategy to address it, that their anxiety goes down."

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Dr. Lise Van Susteren is a general and forensic psychiatrist in Washington, DC, and an expert on the physical and mental health effects of climate disruption. She is a Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at George Washington University and co-founder of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance. A frequent contributor on television, radio and in the print media, she was also the expert witness on the psychological damages to children in Juliana v US Government, and the People V Arctic Oil before the European Court of Human Rights. Just last week, she was the expert witness for the youth in the Held v Montana trial.

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Work mentioned:

Ronald Wright A Short History of Progress: https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-short-history-of-progress-fifteenth-anniversary-edition-ronald-wright/15363036?ean=9781487006983 Stacey Colino, Countdown: https://bookshop.org/p/books/count-down-how-our-modern-world-is-threatening-sperm-counts-altering-male-and-female-reproductive-development-and-imperiling-th/18889230?ean=9781982113674 Stacey Colino and Lise Van Susteren, Emotional Inflammation: https://bookshop.org/p/books/emotional-inflammation-discover-your-triggers-and-reclaim-your-equilibrium-during-anxious-times-stacey-colino/9835653?ean=9781683644552 Lise Van Susteren, in progress, Climate and Your Mind Erica Chenoweth on nonviolent revolutions: https://www.ericachenoweth.com/

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This episode is the last interview of the season, though I may do a bonus episode in the coming weeks. Once I'm back in the city and have a better internet connection again, I plan to return for a new season in the fall and winter, interviewing some terrific folks about what a better and healthier world might look like: our cities, wild places, food systems, and more. Until then, I wish you historically seasonal weather, clear air, calm seas, and at least some of the pleasures of our childhood summers.

If you enjoy these conversations, please make sure to subscribe, and leave a review if you can! I'm committed to making this free and ad-free, but will happily accept donations; if you can easily support it, please do, at glow.fm/awabw.

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Many thanks to Hank Lentfer for the use of his gorgeous nature sounds, and to Lindsay Jaeger for the cover art.

"To me, that is the power of poetry, where we can take these fragments of our lives, of our psyches, and of our emotions, and to really conjure something new—not necessarily something whole and complete, but something that's beautiful and something that's empowering and inspiring from these ruins of history and migration and so on, and so that's why I really wanted to explore the fragments in my poetry and to weave these fragments together into a new tapestry, not necessarily something completely formed, but it's something that gives me a sense of self, a sense of culture, a sense of place, a sense of belonging as well."

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Craig Santos Perez is the author of seven books of poetry, and a winner of the American Book Award and a PEN Center USA Award. He is a native of Guam who moved to California at 15 and now teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Hawaii; he's also a widely anthologized essayist who has thought deeply about place and ecology.

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If you enjoy these conversations, please make sure to subscribe, and leave a review if you can! I'm committed to making this free and ad-free, but will happily accept donations; if you can easily support it, please do, at glow.fm/awabw.

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Many thanks to Hank Lentfer for the use of his gorgeous nature sounds, and to Lindsay Jaeger for the cover art.

"One of the words for which I haven't been able to find an English equivalent is the word 'nyingjey'...you'll hear Tibetans say this word very often, if you have a friend who is a little bit down, or there is a suffering animal nearby or a wounded bird or a wounded deer on the road… nyingjey, nyingjey. It's an expression of compassionate empathy, but it's not exactly the same as pity or 'poor you', that doesn't capture it, it's much more of an offering of solidarity. You're trying to almost…becoming one with the other that's suffering, so eliminating the distinction or the line that divides us."

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A friend of mine introduced me to Lhadon and Tendor by describing them as badass Tibetan activists who work at the intersection of human dignity, spirituality, and climate. Given the arc of the podcast, I was convinced–and boy am I glad that I was. They touch herein on the complexities of exile, the parallels between American and Canadian treatment of indigenous peoples with what China is doing right now in Tibet, the importance of contentment, the misuses of Buddhism by CEOs and others, greenwashing, the Dalai Lama, the speed of culture change, and Chinese exceptionalism. When she was deported from China following an arrest for a protest, government functionaries called Lhadon "a threat to the stability of China". It may seem absurdly hyperbolic that such thoughtful and gentle activists threaten one of the most powerful nations on Earth, but it may be true, in precisely the same way that the right wing is correct to be threatened by climate activists. The vision that Lhadon and Tendor offer here is not compatible with repression, nor with the exploitation of humans or the natural world–and that vision is also irresistible. Materialism can be infectious sometimes but so can its opposite and therein lies our best chance for survival. Lhadon Tethong is a Tibetan-Canadian political activist, the co-founder and director of the Tibet Action Institute, and a former executive director of Students for a Free Tibet, a global network of students and activists dedicated to advancing Tibetan freedom and human rights. Tenzin Dorjee is an activist and the author of The Tibetan Nonviolent Struggle: A Strategic and Historical Analysis; he is also a former executive director of Students for a Free Tibet. His writings have been widely published and he is a frequent radio commentator on Tibet-related issues. He is currently working on his PhD on the influence of religion on political conflict at Columbia.

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If you enjoy these conversations, please make sure to subscribe, and leave a review if you can! I'm committed to making this free and ad-free, but will happily accept donations; if you can easily support it, please do, at glow.fm/awabw.

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Many thanks to Hank Lentfer for the use of his gorgeous nature sounds, and to Lindsay Jaeger for the cover art.

"It's about being a part of, and participant in, a world that is shot through with loss, predation, grief, and yet it's all that shadowed difficulty that also makes this world so exquisitely beautiful, so holy."

Cultural ecologist, geophilosopher, and performance artist David Abram is the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. Described as "revolutionary" by the Los Angeles Times, and as "daring" and "truly original" by the journal Science, his work has helped to catalyze several new disciplines, including ecopsychology. For the current academic year, Abram is the Senior Visiting Scholar in Ecology and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University.

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If you enjoy these conversations, please make sure to subscribe, and leave a review if you can! I'm committed to making this free and ad-free, but will happily accept donations; if you can easily support it, please do, at glow.fm/awabw.

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Many thanks to Hank Lentfer for the use of his gorgeous nature sounds, and to Lindsay Jaeger for the cover art.

I had some scheduling issues with folks, so I took this opportunity to do a short episode that attempts to begin to tease out some of the overlaps and intersections of my guests so far, and where those might lead.

Coming next week will be a great interview with David Abram, followed by (in some order, perhaps not this one) Jerome Foster II, Craig Santos Perez, Lhadon Tethong and Tenzin Dorjee, and Lise Van Susteren.

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If you enjoy these conversations, please make sure to subscribe, and leave a review if you can! I'm committed to making this free and ad-free, but will happily accept donations; if you can easily support it, please do, at glow.fm/awabw.

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Many thanks to Hank Lentfer for the use of his gorgeous nature sounds, and to Lindsay Jaeger for the cover art.

"The ability to imagine what it's like to be inside another person's mind or another person's life is the beginning of compassion...and it seems to me too that moral imagination is a necessary condition for hope. When you set out to think of something new, then you have a reason to think it might be possible. If you can't imagine anything better then you'll never be able to act towards achieving it. I believe you can imagine a better future into existence."

Professor Emerita of Environmental Philosophy at the Oregon State University, Kathleen Dean Moore was the co-editor of Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, and the award-winning author of many other books, including Riverwalking, Great Tide Rising, and the illustrated Take Heart: Encouragement for Earth's Weary Lovers. She retired early from academia to focus on the climate crisis, and she's a senior fellow at the Spring Creek Project. She's one of the fiercest and wisest people I know.

What can YOU do about Climate Change? https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/10/what-can-you-do-about-climate-change-take-this-quiz-to-find-out/

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If you enjoy these conversations, please make sure to subscribe, and leave a review if you can! I'm committed to making this free and ad-free, but will happily accept donations; if you can easily support it, please do, at glow.fm/awabw.

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Many thanks to Hank Lentfer for the use of his gorgeous nature sounds!

"Sometimes [kindness] means waking people up, and that's what movements do...when we build movements, one of the reasons we do it is to bring people back to attention."

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Bill McKibben needs no introduction. He's the author of The End of Nature, which was the first layperson's book about climate change, and a book that had a profound influence on me and many others. He's also the author of many other thought-provoking books, including Falter and The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon, which the New Yorker called one of the best books of 2022. He founded the global climate group 350.org with some of his students from Middlebury College, and founded a more recent group, Third Act, primarily with retirees across the country. No matter your age, in other words, Bill may urge you, too, to get involved. Astonishingly insightful, articulate, strategic, and generous, Bill's commitment to and impact on this world would be hard to overstate; the fact that the world isn't in better shape is simply a profound nudge to the rest of us to level up.

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If you enjoy these conversations, please make sure to subscribe, and leave a review if you can! I'm committed to making this free and ad-free, but will happily accept donations; if you can easily support it, please do, at glow.fm/awabw.

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Many thanks to Hank Lentfer for the use of his gorgeous nature sounds!

"I do think it's very important to be connected to your place, even if those places change, you have to be a student of that place. So this is what we've tried to teach our kids, is that wherever you end up, that you become a steward of that place, you become a student of that place, and you look after that place because you are part of it. When you go into that new place, you are now part of it. The animals are going to know you, they're going to be affected by what you do, the water is going to be affected by what you do, the air is going to be affected by what you do, so you need to understand your role in that ecological fabric and be a good citizen in that ecosystem. And that just goes for wherever you end up."

Sonia Shah is an investigative journalist and the author of critically acclaimed and prize-winning books on science, human-animal relations, and international politics. Her 2020 book, The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, was selected as a best nonfiction book of 2020 by Publishers Weekly, and a best science and technology book by Library Journal. She also wrote Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years, and the prize-winning 2006 drug industry exposé, The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World's Poorest Patients. Her work has been called "bracingly intelligent", a "tour-de-force", "brilliant", "important", and "powerful".

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If you enjoy these conversations, please make sure to subscribe, and leave a review if you can! I'm committed to making this free and ad-free, but will happily accept donations; if you can easily support it, please do, at glow.fm/awabw.

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Many thanks to Hank Lentfer for the use of his gorgeous nature sounds!

"We have an economic system that is very profitable for the winners, and they're not that interested in the level of change that IPCC report after IPCC report is telling us we need: fundamental transformation of virtually every aspect of society….So how do we build the political power that wants that transformation?"

Naomi Klein needs no introduction. The author of This Changes Everything as well as No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, among other books, she's a professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia, and one of the very few folks to whom I'd consider outsourcing my thinking. She has been a super-power for multiple movements, and has offered her sharp analysis, warmth, energy, and commitment in myriad ways to the fight for a humane and thriving planet.

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If you enjoy these conversations, please make sure to subscribe, and leave a review if you can! I'm committed to making this free and ad-free, but will happily accept donations; if you can easily support it, please do, at glow.fm/awabw.

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Many thanks to Hank Lentfer for the use of his gorgeous nature sounds!