Biocitizen Banter

Welcome to Biocitizen Banter, a podcast dedicated to environmental philosophy featuring lively discussions between people active in the effort to bring biotic health to our communities and commonwealth.

What can we do to improve the vivacity of the Connecticut River?

In this episode, Kurt Heidinger listens as Connecticut River Defenders Theresa Turner, Gary Selden, Dodo Melnikov and Priscilla Lynch explain how decommissioning the Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Station will bring health to our living river.

The Defenders are, in their own words, “a nascent and informal group (“formalized” in 2022) of seasoned social justice activists from Franklin, Hampshire, and Hamden Counties. We came together as individuals over the past two years to bring attention to the urgent problems First Light’s Northfield Pumped Storage Station has been foisting on the Connecticut River and its ecosystem for over 50 years, and to demand that our public servants charged with wildlife, water, recreation, and environmental protection remove themselves from their entanglements with First Light and their support of the 50-year relicensing of the facility.”

Welcome to Biocitizen Banter, a podcast dedicated to environmental philosophy featuring lively discussions between people active in the effort to bring biotic health to our communities and commonwealth.

Was Aldo Leopold a racist?

In this episode, Kurt Heidinger raises the question with  TT Wright, an advanced PhD candidate in the Religion and Philosophy department of the University of North Texas.

This profound question is precipitated in general by the cultural crisis caused by global warming, and struggles and conflicts arising as we evolve out of the fossil fuel era—and it summons an intersectional response.

More specifically, it is called forth by a position maintained by a “grant manager” hired by the directors of our LA School before they bankrupted and abandoned it.

This person told them to scrub all references to Leopold in content, pedagogy, marketing and outreach (and they did):

Welcome to Biocitizen Banter, a podcast dedicated to environmental philosophy featuring lively discussions between people active in the effort to bring biotic health to our communities and commonwealth.

In this episode Executive Director Kurt Heidinger discusses the meanings of Aldo Leopold’s “biotic citizen” and “land organism” with foremost ecosophists:

Baird Callicott is a founder of the field of environmental philosophy, a distinguished professor and influential educator on the global level, a former president of the International Society for Environmental Ethics, the co-Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy and author of many essential texts including Companion to Sand County Almanac and  Earth’s Insights: A Multicultural Survey of Ecological Ethics from the Mediterranean Basin to the Australian Outback.

Ricardo Rozzi has bantered here before about the biocultural conservation projects he is propelling with his teams here, in Chile and around the globe. He is the Editor in Chief of the Springer book series Ecology and Ethics and recently the recipient of the Eugene Odum Award for Excellence in Ecology Education bestowed by the Ecological Society of America. Presently he is directing the construction of the Cape Horn Research Center in Puerto Williams Chile, the southernmost town in the world, so that the biocultural history of that sublime region is understood and celebrated and so that some of the ideas and values you hear us expound, question and wonder about are nurtured and advanced.

Welcome to Biocitizen Banter, a podcast dedicated to environmental philosophy featuring lively discussions between people active in the effort to bring biotic health to our communities and commonwealth.

In this episode, The Biopolitics of COVID-19, Kurt Heidinger interviews Dr. Jerry Phillips, literature professor at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.

Our contexts:

1) “[The UN agency’s director general, Guy Ryder] said he hoped governments would recognise that they needed to reconstruct their economies around better working practices and “not a return to the pre-pandemic world of precarious work for the majority”.

He said: “The pandemic has laid bare just how precarious, just how fragile, just how unequal our world of work is. It is commonly said that this pandemic does not discriminate, and in medical terms that is right. We can all be struck by the pandemic.

“But in terms of the economic and social effects, this pandemic discriminates massively and above all it discriminates against those who are at the bottom end of the world of work, those who don’t have protection, those who don’t have resources and the basics of what we would call the essentials of a normal life.”

2) Foucault recognized a) all human societies are fundamentally biological and b) that “politics” is the way societies determine how humans, in particular, are given or denied vitality/life.

The biopolitics of COVID-19 involves the way our government determines who lives and who dies, what vanishes and what endures, and what is created, as it infects us.

3) Darwin’s acknowledgement of Malthus as a primary influence, found in his Autobiography: 

“In October 1838, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on, from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result would be the formation of a new species.”

4) COVID-19 is a result of the way mass human populations inhabit the earth.

Welcome to Biocitizen Banter, a podcast dedicated to environmental philosophy featuring lively discussions between people active in the effort to bring biotic health to our communities and commonwealth.

In this episode Ex. Director Dr. Kurt Heidinger interviews Javiera Malebrán Muñoz who has been teaching Field Environmental Philosophy for the past 5 years at the Omora Ethnobotanical Park in the Cape Horn archipelago in southernmost Chile. She has worked closely with our friends Drs. Ricardo Rozzi and Francisca Massardo and also with LA director Jesse Carmichael and Chile director Vicente Aguirre Diez.

Javi was supposed to come to Western Massachusetts this summer to share her immense cultural and academic background with Our Place students, but COVID-19 cancelled out plans.

This discussion introduces you to her, and her Omora Park friends’, powerful way of imagining a world where we live as “family” with all the creatures we share our biomes with. Hers is a voice of inspiration, urging us all to ACT!

Welcome to Biocitizen Banter, a podcast dedicated to environmental philosophy featuring lively discussions between people active in the effort to bring biotic health to our communities and commonwealth.

In this episode, Kurt Heidinger interviews Eugene Hargrove, who founded the journal Environmental Ethics, authored  Foundation of Environmental Ethics, and played a major role in establishing Environmental Philosophy as a subject of study from the elementary school- to the graduate degree- level. We hear what drove Dr. Hargrove to create the field of study, and why it remains an essential subject as we enter the Anthropocene.

As a professor (now emeritus) at the University of North Texas, Dr. Hargrove has studied and taught nationally and in Europe, Asia and Chile, and as the director of the Center for Environmental Philosophy has mentored many proteges here and abroad. He’s also been an avid supporter of the Fundacion Omora run by Ricardo Rozzi and Francisca Massardo in Chile, and serves presently as a Biocitizen board member.

Dr. Hargrove’s essay Anglo-American Land Use Attitudes explains how we in the USA have inherited a tradition of viewing land as property, and how that view that determines our relationship with, and treatment of, the living systems that sustain us.  It’s a classic expression of environmental philosophy and ethics, and you can read it here.

> In the discussion of these attitudes, Gene mentions a cave he saved; it’s the Devil’s Icebox: take a look.

Welcome to Biocitizen Banter, a podcast dedicated to environmental philosophy featuring lively discussions between people active in the effort to bring biotic health to our communities and commonwealth.

Our first podcast features an interview of Ricardo Rozzi by Kurt Heidinger.

A dynamic speaker and whirlwind of energy, Ricardo has devoted the last 20 years to researching and teaching biocultural conservation in Chile and the United States, published many articles and books on this subject (including Tracing Darwin’s Path in Cape Horn), and been a principal agent in the establishment of the Omora Ethnobotanical Park, the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve and the Cape Horn Sub-Antarctic Research Center.