Chrysalis with John Fiege

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Show notes: https://www.johnfiege.earth/18-lois-gibbs-the-legacy-of-love-canal/

18. Lois Gibbs — The Legacy of Love Canal

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When Lois Gibbs moved into the Love Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls in 1972, she had no idea how radically her life was about to change.

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She was newly married, with a baby son. Her husband had a well-paid job at the Goodyear chemical plant, and she loved her white picket fence in this recently constructed neighborhood with many other young families.

Over the next several years, her son began to have seizures, which was one of many mysterious illnesses that emerged among children in the neighborhood, including Lois’s second child.

She started asking questions, and she refused to stop asking questions.

She and her neighbors began to organize, eventually attracting the attention of the national media and even the President of the United States.

The secrets they discovered, and their refusal to leave politics and science to the so-called experts, changed the environmental movement forever.

I got to sit down with Lois on stage in front of a sold-out audience at the University at Buffalo on April 20, 2023, to talk about her story and where its led her since those tumultuous years in the 1970s.

Lois Gibbs is a legendary environmental justice pioneer, and her vibrant spirit is a massive inspiration to me in these dark times. Her stories are incredible, and they reveal how her persistence, resourcefulness, and strategic intelligence were instrumental in the struggle to clean up hazardous waste sites in the United States.

I’m John Fiege, and this is Chrysalis. You can subscribe at johnfiege.earth, where you will also find show notes and all episodes of the podcast, plus my writing, photographs, and films.

Here is Lois Gibbs.

Watch the Video on YouTube

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Credits

This episode was edited by Isabella Fleming and Blake Barit. Color grading is by Isabella Fleming. Music is by Daniel Rodríguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker.

A special thank you Nick Henshue and Ken Zidell of the Department of Environment and Sustainability for organizing the event.

A special thank you as well to Hope Dunbar at the University at Buffalo Archives, who helped organize the event and provided all of the archival photographs.

Thank you to the co-sponsors of the event: Department of Environment and Sustainability, Department of Media Study, and University Archives at the University at Buffalo—and to the Center for the Arts for providing the space and the video recording.

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Show notes: https://www.johnfiege.earth/17-transformation-for-a-new-era/

17. Transformation for a New Era

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Today, I’m relaunching the Chrysalis newsletter and podcast with a new website, a new logo, and a new purpose. In the past year, here in the United States, we have witnessed one assault after another on environmental protections and ecological health, coupled with simultaneous assaults on democracy, civil rights, international cooperation, the rule of law, common decency—even truth itself. Through this difficult and painful year, as the news has been clogged with a dizzying and endless string of stories about the U.S. government’s assault on people and the natural world, I have reconceived and reworked Chrysalis to respond to our current moment.

I launched the Chrysalis podcast in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was an experiment. I’m primarily a documentary filmmaker, making films about environmental issues and our relationship to the natural world, but I wanted to tell more stories, be in conversation with more people, more frequently, and reach a wider audience.

The last podcast episode I released was eight days before the American people elected Donald Trump to be president of the United States for a second time. After his election, we found ourselves in a new historical era.

American administrations of every political stripe have failed to prioritize or effectively confront the cascading crises of climate change, habitat destruction, mass extinction, and environmental injustice. Nonetheless, Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 Presidential election was the realization of a worst-case scenario for the environment and those who care about protecting it.

After the 2024 election, I asked myself what I could do with the podcast, and my work more generally, knowing that there was about to be a full frontal assault on wolves and birds, forests and wetlands, clean air and clean water, environmental regulations, environmental justice, the clean energy transition, efforts to reduce plastics and other waste, and who knows what else from this new regime that was willing to break laws and ethical norms to enrich themselves and their political donors at any cost to the country or the planet.

I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t know what to do.

Before the election, in August of 2024, I found out that I was awarded the largest and most competitive grant of my career. The National Endowment for the Humanities was going to give me a development grant for my new film about consumption and waste in New York City. I was planning to focus on development of the project for the next year in order to apply for the even larger production grant the following year.

When Trump was elected, I knew there would be no second grant. Even though past Republican administrations were hostile to the arts and humanities, the arts and humanities endowments survived their administrations and funded projects that didn’t align necessarily with Republican priorities. Trump 2.0 felt like it was going to be different. I decided I needed to figure out how to use my development grant to make the entire film very quickly.

I put the podcast on pause to focus on making this film while I could. Then, in April of 2025, Trump cancelled my development grant, along with almost all other National Endowment for the Humanities grants. The letter I received, notifying me that the grant had been cancelled a week earlier, stated “NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda...The termination of your grant represents an urgent priority for the administration, and due to exceptional circumstances, adherence to the traditional notification process is not possible.” Exceptional circumstances indeed.

I am very lucky to be a professor at the University at Buffalo, and this New York State university stepped in over the following several months to find replacement funding for much of what I lost to Trump’s assault on the federal government. This film project is now underway, despite the set-backs, and I’m ready to get the podcast back up and running.

Here’s my plan: first, I’m bringing all of my work—writing, podcasting, photographs, and films—under a single new digital roof at johnfiege.earth. I’ve moved the website to a non-profit, distributed, open source publishing platform, called Ghost, which has no owners or investors.

Second, I will be adding my own essays to the newsletter, examining current environmental topics, and releasing those written pieces as audio essays on the podcast, as I continue to release long-form conversations with environmental thinkers.

Third, we have a new logo, designed by the talented Alexa Rusin, using one of my butterfly photographs. The new logo is a completely new look that helps tie my photographic work to the newsletter and podcast, but it still represents the theme of transformation at the heart of the Chrysalis project and the beauty of the world that I want to protect and nourish.

And lastly, I am introducing a paid subscription option for the newsletter and podcast. Since the podcast’s inception, a hardworking team of students and interns has helped make the show possible, but my very limited financial resources have prevented me from growing, working more quickly, and releasing episodes more frequently. I want the newsletter and podcast to always be freely available to anyone, without advertising. However, the Chrysalis project needs more funding to grow and become self-sustaining, and a paid subscription option is a key element of this effort.

Paying members will have access to the same newsletters and podcasts as the free option, but they will also have access to the community comments section of the newsletter and to streaming of my documentary films, both shorts and feature-length films. I want to make sure that money never limits anyone’s access to Chrysalis, but I also want to give audience members the ability to support the project, help it grow, and subsidize free access for everyone else.

Tomorrow morning, I will be releasing the first new episode: my conversation with the legendary environmental justice pioneer, Lois Gibbs, who was a young mother in the 1970s when her children became sick in her new neighborhood of Love Canal, in Niagara Falls, New York, right next door to where I now live in Buffalo. Lois refused to sit down and be quiet, as leaders in government, industry, and academia dismissed and derided her as an hysterical housewife. Her story has been widely known for decades, but she’s a real rock star, and her stories are unbelievably power when you hear them from her. Her vibrant spirit is a massive inspiration to me in these dark times. I interviewed Lois live in front of an audience, and we were able to film the event, so we’ll also be releasing the video version of the episode on our new Chrysalis YouTube channel.

Lois will be kicking off what I call our Toxic Spring here at Chrysalis. The next week, we will release my conversation with Jim Morris, who wrote a brilliantly reported and devastating account of the largest cancer cluster ever to be identified at a single work place. That work place was the Goodyear chemical plant, also in Niagara Falls. In fact, Lois Gibbs’s husband in the 1970s worked at the Goodyear plant while she was at home fighting to expose the truth about toxic chemicals under their feet.

The Toxic Spring and the connections to Love Canal will continue with a live recording of the podcast on March 11 with Mike Schade, who works on campaigns to reduce toxic chemicals with a group called Toxic-Free Future. Mike started here in Buffalo and used to work with Lois Gibbs.

The following month, on April 16, I’ll be doing another live podcast recording with two other people related to Love Canal. The first is Luella Kenny, who was another mother at Love Canal in the 1970s, alongside Lois Gibbs, but Luella was also a cancer researcher. I’ll be in conversation with her, along with Keith O’Brien, who wrote a book that features Luella and Lois’s stories, called Paradise Falls: The True Story of an Environmental Catastrophe.

Both of these live shows will be released later as podcasts. If you’re in Buffalo, check out our website for more event details.

Regardless of where you live, the best way you can help us grow and get the word out is to subscribe to the newsletter at johnfiege.earth and then tell your friends about the newsletter and podcast.

I would also love to hear from you—your reactions to the show, what you’re interested in reading on the newsletter or hearing on the podcast, or anything else you’d like to share. You can contact me anytime at johnfiege.earth.

It’s a been a rough year for many of us, but I’m looking forward to exploring the new possibilities we have in this pivotal moment in history to transform ourselves and our relationship to the natural world. Please join me.

It’s going to be a fun ride.

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Notes and Media Recommendations

In His First 100 Days, Trump Launched an ‘All-Out Assault’ on the Environment

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/30042025/trump-second-administration-first-100-days-assault-on-the-environment/

TRUMP’S ASSAULT ON THE ENVIRONMENT HAS BEEN EVEN WORSE THAN EXPERTS PREDICTED

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-assault-environment-climate-change-fight-1235494125/

Trump’s Assault on the State of Our Health and the Environment

https://www.nrdc.org/media/trumps-assault-state-our-health-and-environment

Cultural groups across U.S. told that federal humanities grants are terminated

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/03/nx-s1-5350994/neh-grants-cut-humanities-doge-trump

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Credits

This episode was edited by Isabella Fleming. Music is by Daniel Rodríguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker.

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The tires of your car have a chemical in them, called 6PPD, that slows tire degradation by binding with oxygen and ozone that could break down the rubber. But these same reactions that protect the rubber are also creating a new chemical, called 6PPD-quinone, which scientists just found in 2020 to be highly toxic to aquatic organisms.

6PPD is in essentially every tire made since the 1960s, and aquatic ecosystems around the world, particularly in dense urban areas, are in danger.

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Coho salmon is particularly susceptible to the toxin, and salmon populations in the Seattle area have been decimated by stormwater runoff containing the tiny particles that wear off tires as they speed down the road.

Now that the science is clear, the search is on to find a substitute for 6PPD; but for many years to come, the pollutants will continue to shed from our tires and into our waterways.

How to stop the stormwater from getting to the salmon and other aquatic organisms is one of the many ways that the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance is advocating for the ecological health of Puget Sound and other waterways in the Seattle area.

Sean Dixon leads these efforts as the executive director of the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, which is part of the worldwide network of waterkeepers.

I discuss with Sean the work he’s doing in Seattle but also the waterkeeper movement more broadly and the importance of organized, community-engaged action to protect waterways and the diverse ecosystems that depend on them across the planet.

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This episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Projects series. You can listen on Ghost, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.

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As Executive Director of Puget Soundkeeper, Sean works with the entire Soundkeeper staff team, board, and network of community partners, volunteers, and advocates to drive clean water progress across the Puget Sound and its watershed. As an attorney, entrepreneur, and environmental advocate, Sean has worked for years defending communities and ecosystems from pollution, supporting sustainable fisheries, pushing for climate adaptation and mitigation, and fighting for innovative approaches to solving the myriad threats facing our oceans, coasts, and waterways. Before moving to the PNW, Sean worked as an attorney at Hudson Riverkeeper, a local sustainable seafood fishmonger, and, most recently, as Chief of Staff for the Region 1 (New England) office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Sean currently serves as the Publications Officer for the American Bar Association’s Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources, and holds an LL.M. in Climate Change Law and a J.D. in Environmental Law from the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, in White Plains, NY, a master’s degree from the Yale School of the Environment, and a B.A. in Marine Biology and Oceanography from Boston University.

This episode was researched by Lydia Montgomery and edited by Sarah Westrich, with additional editing by Isabella Nurt, Amy Cavanaugh, Arthur Koenig, Kate Fair, and Marta Kondratiuk. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker.

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There is a line in Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s poem, “When the Animals Leave this Place,” that I find haunting: “They said no one belongs here.”

She’s writing about land that used to flood cyclically but that settlers used for farms and pastures, against the advice of Indigenous elders and without regard for the seasonality of the rain.

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Embedded in these six words—“They said no one belongs here”—is the history of conquest and colonialism in America and the mentality of the control of nature, which, to this day, dominates our societal relationship to nature.

The forces of nature and history and a deep knowledge of the land burst forth from Allison’s poem, along with a spirited and iconic crew of animals.

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is the author or editor of eighteen books and the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. Her most recent book, Look at This Blue, was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is currently Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside.

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This episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series. You can listen on Ghost, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.

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Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is a widely-acclaimed poet, editor, and activist. She was born in 1958 in Amarillo, Texas and spent her formative years in three separate locations: North Carolina, Canada, and the Great Plains. Initially dropping out of high school to work fields in order to support herself, Coke completed her GED at age 16 before enrolling in courses at North Carolina State University. She went on to receive an AFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College. A recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and the First Jade Nurtured SiHui Female International Poetry Award, she is now a distinguished professor at the University of California at Riverside. Outside of these duties, she works with underserved incarcerated youth and serves on multiple literary and editorial boards.

Hedge Coke has authored six full-length books of poetry, her first of which (Dog Road Woman) won the 1998 American Book Award. 2022's Look at This Blue was a National Book Award Finalist. More broadly, her works have achieved wide and extensive acclaim. In addition to these collections, she has written ten poetry anthologies and an immensely evocative and powerful memoir, Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer: A Story of Survival, which discusses her upbringing, her story-cultural heritage, and the tumultuous experiences that have helped inform her identity, perspective, and journey.

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"When the Animals Leave this Place"

By Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

Underneath ice caps, once glacial peaks

deer, elk, vixen begin to ascend.

Free creatures camouflaged as

waves and waves receding far

from plains pulling

upward slopes and faraway snow dusted mountains.

On spotted and clear cut hills robbed of fir,

high above wheat tapestried valleys, flood plains

up where headwaters reside.

Droplets pound, listen.

Hoofed and pawed mammals

pawing and hoofing themselves up, up.

Along rivers dammed by chocolate beavers,

trailed by salamanders—mud puppies.

Plunging through currents,

above concrete and steel man-made barriers

these populations of plains, prairies, forests flee

in such frenzy, popping splash dance,

pillaging cattail zones, lashing lily pads—

the breath of life in muddy ponds, still lakes.

Liquid beads slide on windshield glass

along cracked and shattered pane,

spider-like with webs and prisms.

“Look, there, the rainbow

touched the ground both ends down!”

Full arch seven colors showered, heed

what Indigenous know, why long ago,

they said no one belongs here, surrounding them,

that this land was meant to be wet with waters of nearby

not fertile to crops and domestic graze.

The old ones said,

“When the animals leave this place

the waters will come again.

This power is beyond the strength of man.

The river will return with its greatest force.”

No one can stop her.

She was meant to be this way.

Snakes in honor, do not intrude.

The rainbow tied with red and green like

that on petal rose, though only momentarily.

Colors disappear like print photographs fade.

They mix with charcoal surrounding.

A flurry of fowl follow

like strands, maidenhair falls,

from blackened clouds above

swarming inward

covering the basin and raising sky.

Darkness hangs over

the hills appear as black water crests,

blackness varying shades.

The sun is somewhere farther than the farthest ridge .

Main gravel crossroads and back back roads

slicken to mud, clay.

Turtles creep along rising banks, snapping jowls.

Frogs chug throaty songs.

The frogs only part of immense choir

heralding the downpour, the falling oceans.

Over the train trestle, suspension bridge with

current so slick everything slides off in sheets.

Among rotten stumps in black bass ponds,

somewhere catfish reel in fins and crawl,

walking whiskers to higher waters.

Waters above, below

the choir calling it forth.

Brightly plumed jays and dull brown-headed cowbirds

fly as if hung in one place like pinwheels.

They dance toward the rain crest,

the approaching storm

beckoning, inviting, summoning.

A single sparrow sings the stroke of rain

past the strength of sunlight.

The frog chorus sings refrain,

melody drumming thunder,

evoked by beasts and water creatures wanting their homes.

Wanting to return to clearings and streams where ash, or

white birch woods rise, tower over,

quaking aspen stand against

storm shown veils—sheeting rains crossing

pasture, meadow, hills, mountain.

Sounds erupt.

Gathering clouds converge, push,

pull, push, pull forcing lightning

back and forth shaping

windy, sculptured swans, mallard ducks, and giants

from stratocumulus media.

As if they are a living cloud chamber,

As if they exist only in the heavens.

Air swells with dampness.

It has begun.

In 1993, Cid Corman selected "When the Animals Leave This Place" for the Charlie and Thelma Willis Memorial Editor's Choice Award (Abiko Quarterly, Kyoto, Japan) and Ed Friedman pressed it in The World, Poetry Project at St. Mark's. "When the Animals Leave This Place" is in Blood Run, Salt Publishing London & Cambridge, UK 2006, US/Global 2007.

Poem reprinted courtesy of Allison Adelle Hedge Coke.

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This episode was researched by Lydia Montgomery and edited by Sofia Chang. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker.

I love beautiful pictures of animals surrounded by their natural habitats. It’s exhilarating to see idyllic environments and the animals so amazingly well-adapted to live in them. It’s also comforting to know those places still exist, despite what we’re doing to the planet.

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But there’s a danger in that exhilaration and comfort: these animals appear to live in a world so separate from our own, and at the same time, we might be lulled into thinking that this other world and these habitats are safe.

Kara Maria’s paintings take a very different approach to representing animals. Her work features extinct, endangered, and invasive species, but they all float in abstract worlds, popping with color and soaked in the impact of humans on their lives.

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Kara’s work is captivating. It’s also an alarm sounding about the dire threat that Earth’s biodiversity faces in the age of humans. Her paintings of animals bring the biodiversity crisis to our front doorstep and spur us to think about how our actions are at the root of the ecologically devastating changes happening around the world.

Kara Maria is based in San Francisco, and her work is held in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the San Jose Museum of Art, among others. She’s been awarded a number of artist residencies, including the Recology Artist in Residence Program at the San Francisco Recycling and Transfer Center, which we talk about in this episode.

This episode is part of the Chrysalis Artists series. You can listen on Ghost, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.

Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!

Kara Maria makes paintings and works on paper that reflect on Earth’s biodiversity crisis and the place of endangered species in our increasingly unstable environment. Borrowing from the broad vocabulary of contemporary painting, Maria blends geometric shapes, vivid hues, and abstract marks with representational elements. Her recent work features miniature portraits of disappearing animals, focusing attention on the alarming rate of extinction now being caused by human activity.

Maria received her BA and MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. She has exhibited work in solo and group shows throughout the United States at venues including the de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, CA; the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Sonoma, CA; the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; and the Katonah Museum of Art in New York.

Her work has received critical attention in the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Art in America. In addition, Maria has been selected for many awards and honors, including a grant from Artadia, New York, NY; an Eisner Prize in Art from UC Berkeley; and the Masterminds Grant from SF Weekly. She has been awarded artist residencies at the Montalvo Arts Center, Recology Artist in Residence Program, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and at the de Young’s Artist Studio.

Maria’s work appears in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA); the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (Achenbach Foundation); the San Jose Museum of Art; and the Cantor Center at Stanford University; among others.

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This episode was researched by Lydia Montgomery and edited by Sarah Westrich, with additional editing by Arthur Koenig and Marta Kondratiuk. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker.

If you enjoyed my conversation with Kara, please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform.

Before I read Brian Teare’s poem, “Doomstead Days,” I had never heard of a doomstead. It’s a clever portmanteau, combining homestead with doomsday: an alternative universe where the homestead is a preparation for the climate apocalypse.

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The poem Brian weaves around his encounter with this word is a lyrical romp through our connection to land, water, and each other. Water flows, gender is fluid, and the rigid binaries of our imaginations dissolve.

Brian’s exploration of the doomstead unearths some vital questions about ecological crisis. How do we respond? How are we, as a society, fleeing to our doomsteads and hiding, waiting for disaster, hoping to survive? What does it look like for us to leave our doomsteads, engage the problems directly, and find collective solutions?

Brian Teare is the author of eight chapbooks and seven books of poetry, including, Doomstead Days, which won the Four Quartets Prize. He is the recipient of many awards and honors, including fellowships from Guggenheim, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Pew. He currently lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia. He’s also an editor and publisher and makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

At over 1300 words, this poem is much longer than the others we’ve featured in our Poets series, but it’s worth it.

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This episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series. You can listen on Ghost, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.

A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of seven critically acclaimed books. His most recent publications are a diptych of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage: the 2022 Nightboat reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and the fall 2023 publication of Poem Bitten by a Man, winner of the 2024 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eight years in Philadelphia, he’s now an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

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Doomstead Days

By Brian Teare

today’s gender is rain

it touches everything

with its little silver

epistemology

mottled like a brook trout

with a hundred spots

white as bark scars

on this slim trunk

thrust up from

one sidewalk square

the four square feet

of open ground

given a street tree

twiggy perimeter

continually clipped

by parking or car door

or passing trash truck

that snaps an actual

branch I find haunting

the little plot

its winged achenes

auto-rotate down to

it’s not that I don’t

like a wide sidewalk

or the 45 bus

that grinds right by

but if organisms

didn’t insist on

forms of resistance

they’d be dead

of anthropocentric

technomechanical

systems whose grids

restrict the living

through perpetual stress

that elicits intense

physical response

like an animal

panic hitting

the psoas with cramps

or root fungus sunk in

the maple’s allotment

of city property

as tolerably wide

as the migraine

that begins at the base

of my skull & pinches

with breadth calipers

my temples until

the feel of flay arrays

the dura’s surface

inside the bones inside

the head the healer holds

in her hands & says

the occiput is shut

flat & irks the nerves

that thread through its

unappeasable shunt

into the spine I see

a white light I keep

thinking about the way

long drought dries out

topsoil so deep beneath

its surface the first

hard rain wreaks flood

taking the good dirt

with it the way today’s

wet excess escapes

its four square feet

of exposed root

& rivers out

a flex of sediment

alluvial over

the civic cement

of the anthropocene

in currents a supple

rippled velvet dun

as Wissahickon creek

in fall’s brief season

of redd & spawn

when brook trout

in chill quick shallows

once dug into gravel

to let nested eggs

mix with milt

& turn pearls

translucent as raw

unpolished quartz

each white eyed ova

flawed by a black fleck

my eyes close over

at the height of migraine

fertile error waiting

with incipient tail

ready to propel it

deeper into nausea

until the healer halts

its hatching & calms

neuralgia between

the heels of her hands

pressing the occiput

back open into

the natural curve

the bones forget

the way the banks

of the Wissahickon

have forgotten rapids

rinsing schist shaded

by hemlock that kept

the brook trout cold

each patterned aspect

of habitat lost

first to dams & mills

& industry runoff

& plots of flax

Germantown planted

for paper & cloth

made with water’s power

& hauled out of

the precipitous gorge

up rough narrow roads

south to the city port

before adelgids

took the crucial dark

from under hemlocks

sun heating the rocky

creek down steep rills

to the lower Schuylkill

wide in its final miles

dammed at Fairmount

for two centuries

of coal silt & dredge

fabric dye & sewage

that gave rise to typhus

& refinery spills

that gave rise to fire

rinsed by this gender

that remembers

current’s circuit

anadromous shad

& striped bass

leaving the Atlantic

heading upriver

shedding saltwater

for fresh in runs

whose numbers turned

the green river silver

if color counts as

epistemology

spring sun on the backs

of a thousand shad

is a form of knowing

local to another

century & the duller

color of ours

is the way the word

gender remembers

it once meant to fuck

beget or give birth

sibling to generate

& engender all

fertile at the root

& continuous

as falling water

molecules smoothing

the sparkling gnarl

of Wissahickon schist

until its surface

mirrors their force

the fuel element

& fundament alike

derive thriving from

being at its biggest

when it’s kinetic

energy headed

toward intensity

everything’s body

connected by this

totally elastic

materiality

I feel as ecstatic

wide dilation

when the shut skull

gives up resistance

to the healer’s hands

& the occiput

opens its bones

my mind’s eye goes

okay I’m awake now

rowdy with trout

psoas relaxed

my body’s a conduit

it roars with water

passing from past

to present through

pipes & riparian

ecotones alike

all of my fluids

pollutants cycling

back into my own

watershed toxins

& heavy metals

bonded to blood

stored in liver & fat

C8 glyphosate

mercury & lead

it’s awkward okay

I keep thinking about

the man who asks me

to visit his doomstead

which seems kinky

for a first date

what’s the safeword

for men with genders

built for the world’s end

men with weaponized

genders hoarding solar

power & canned goods

bottled water genders

tending small vegetable

gardens out back

behind the chickens

concrete genders sealed

in lead their doors

secured from inside

with thick steel bars

fringe libertarian

endtimes genders

hetero girlie

camo gun calendars

apocalyptic tits

pinned on brick walls

by lone bunks

so the men can cross out

each day once

civil society

ends with a pathetic

snivel like please help

doomstead men live

doomstead days already

sealed in extreme fiction

as if there were

ever a way to stay

safely self-contained

by which I mean

the anthropocene

is its own gender

biospheric in scale

its persistent flux

from fossil record

to Antarctic ice core

so uncontainable

we all exhibit it

with a local sense

of personal chosen

expression strategic

or contingent

like fertility

medicalized tracked

managed or casual

happy fucking

without a condom

risky given the odds

leveraged against us

& the blameless

microbes seeking

homes in our nooks

& tubes so I don’t

visit his doomstead

a psychic structure

I feel in my head

as blocked thought

I watch play out

in the Schuylkill

where it pools wide

shallow with silt

above Fairmount dam

I stand on the bank

& know I’m not

supposed to posit

an analogy

between the river

& my body but

courtesy of this dam

the city siphons

its water into me

another human

intervention

diverting its path

each of my cells

a little prison

the river sits in

so we’re related

on a molecular

level so intimate

I think I can say

it wants speed

& movement free

enough to jump

the strained relation

to human needs

it serves without relief

without the hands

that hold my bones

& tend my fascia

that remember

a different posture

without blockage

or pain a model

for undoing harm

done by capital

empowered to frack

during record drought

millions of gallons

of toxic wastewater

injected into earth

or kept in open ponds

prone & porous

in western counties

where river otters

have rebounded after

last being spotted

in the Allegheny

in 1899

otters are raucous

& chirp chitter

chuckle & grumble

when wrestling together

or sliding on ice

playful biophony

rivers have missed

for a whole century

like brook trout rooting

in loose cool gravel

or the plash of insects

fallen from hemlocks

the intact eastern

riverine biome

one serious mess

of sound enmeshed

in sound enmeshed

in biotic patterns

as heavy as traffic

when the weekend

weather is nice

& I ride the early

27 bus

to the Wissahickon

it’s not that I don’t like

the city it’s just if

biodiversity

is a measure of health

a city is

by definition sick

with people & built

structures crowding

out other lives

though I love signs

species persist

this sidewalk moss

probably bryum

argentum native

to guano-covered

seabird rookeries

this fertile gingko

stinking up the street

with stone fruits

crushed underfoot

this nameless fern

in a downpipe drain

so modest in scale

like the simple songs

of house sparrows

everywhere though

this chubby one

is hustling a fallen

everything bagel

of seeds & crumbs

& it’s not that I don’t

like people either

our sociality

genitals & smells

interesting diction

surprising privacies

revealed at parties

bars & in bedrooms

our genders in acts

various & wet

as thought product

of dissolved salts

washing our brains

in rich cognition

that falters without

water which can’t be

taken by the head

in the hands & held

in the hopes of healing

its body is too vast

its mind boundless

by definition

the world is awake

be careful my dears

it is the gender

that remembers

everything

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This episode was researched by Elena Cebulash and edited by Sarah Westrich and Mo Armstrong. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker.

What is our relationship to the land, to its other-than-human inhabitants, and to the rest of humanity? These are fundamental questions for thinking through how we can transform ourselves in ways that allow a multiplicity of ecologies and human communities to thrive alongside one another. And these questions are not just fundamental to us as individuals—they are essential to how we view our cultures, traditions, institutions, and ways of knowing.

Layel Camargo lives at the vibrant intersection of ecological justice, queer liberation, and indigenous culture—a cultural space that offers a distinctive vantage point on how our societies work, while holding enormous potential to both see and reorient our relationships to the land and to one another.

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Layel Camargo is an organizer and artist who advocates for the better health of the planet and its people by restoring land, healing communities, and promoting low-waste and low-impact lifestyles. Layel is a transgender and gender non-conforming person who is an indigenous descendant of the Yaqui and Mayo tribes of the Sonoran Desert.

I met Layel at a climate storytelling retreat in New York City in 2019, where I became a huge fan of their work and of their way of being in the world.

Layel is a founder of the Shelterwood Collective, a Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ-led community forest and retreat center, healing people and ecosystems through active stewardship and community engagement.

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Our conversation explores the idea of culture as strategy in confronting the climate crisis, diving into Layel’s work in video, podcasting, and poetry and the origins of their approach to this work of healing people and planet.

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Layel Camargo is a cultural strategist, land steward, filmmaker, artist, and a descendant of the Yaqui tribe and Mayo tribes of the Sonoran Desert. Layel is also transgender and non-binary. They graduated from UC Santa Cruz with dual degrees in Feminist Studies and Legal Studies. Layel was the Impact Producer for “The North Pole Show” Season Two. They currently produce and host ‘Did We Go Too Far’ in conjunction with Movement Generation. Alongside Favianna Rodriguez and at the Center for Cultural Power, they created ‘Climate Woke,’ a national campaign to center BIPOC voices in climate justice. Wanting to shape a new world, they co-founded ‘Shelterwood Collective’. The collective is a land-based organization that teaches land stewardship, fosters inventive ideation, and encourages healing for long-term survival. Layel was a Transformative Justice practitioner for 6 years and still looks to achieve change to the carceral system in all of their work. Most recently, Layel was named on the Grist 2020 Fixers List, and named in the 2019 Yerba Buena Center of the Arts list of ‘People to Watch Out For.’

“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”

- Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

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Lichen is a strange presence on this planet. Traditionally, scientists have understood lichen as a new organism formed through symbiosis between a fungus and an algae. But the science is evolving. It seems that there may be more than one species of fungus involved in this symbiosis, and some scientists have suggested that lichen could be described as both an ecosystem and an organism. Lichen may even be immortal, in some sense of the word.

In lichen, the poet Forrest Gander finds both the mystery of the forest and a rich metaphor for our symbiosis with one another and with the planet, for the relationship between the dead and the living, and for how our relationships with others change us indelibly. In his poem, “Forest,” lichen are a sensual presence, even erotic, living in relationship to the other beings around them. They resemble us, strangely, despite our dramatic differences.

The words of the poem teem with life, like the forest they explore, and Forrest’s marvelous reading of the poem adds a panoply of meanings and feelings through his annunciation, his breaths, his breaks. It’s phenomenal.

This poem, and his work more broadly, is about nothing less that who we are on this Earth and how we live—how we thrive—in relationship.

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Forrest Gander writes poetry, novels, essays, and translations. He is the recipient of many awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his book, Be With. As an undergraduate, like me, he studied geology, which became foundational to his engagement with ecological ethics and poetics.

Forrest often collaborates with other artists on books and exhibitions, including a project with the photographer Sally Mann. His latest book of poetry is a collaboration with the photographer Jack Shear, called Knot (spelled with a “k”). He recently collaborated with artist Ashwini Bhat on an exhibition at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles, called “In Your Arms I’m Radiant.”

His poem, “Forest,” is from his 2021 collection of poems, Twice Alive.

Forrest has taught at Harvard University and Brown University. He spoke to me from his home in Northern California, where he now lives.

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This episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series, which focuses on a single poems from poets who confront ecological issues in their work.

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Born in the Mojave Desert in Barstow, California, Forrest Gander grew up in Virginia. He spend significant years in San Francisco, Dolores Hidalgo (Mexico), Eureka Springs, and Providence. With the late poet CD Wright, he has a son, the artist Brecht Wright Gander. Forrest holds degrees in both Geology and English literature. He lives now in Northern California with his wife, the artist Ashwini Bhat.

Gander's book Be With was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. Concerned with the way we are revised and translated in encounters with the foreign, his book Core Samples from the World was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gander has collaborated frequently with other artists including photographers Sally Mann, Graciela Iturbide, Raymond Meeks, and Lucas Foglia, glass artist Michael Rogers, ceramic artists Rick Hirsch and Ashwini Bhat, artists Ann Hamilton, Tjibbe Hooghiemstra, dancers Eiko & Koma, and musicians Vic Chesnutt and Brady Earnhart, among others.

The author of numerous other books of poetry, including Redstart: An Ecological Poetics and Science & Steepleflower, Gander also writes novels (As a Friend; The Trace), essays (A Faithful Existence) and translates. Recent translations include It Must Be a Misunderstanding by Coral Bracho, Names and Rivers by Shuri Kido, and Then Come Back: the Lost Neruda Poems. His most recent anthologies are Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin American (selected by Raúl Zurita) and Panic Cure: Poems from Spain for the 21st Century.

Gander's books have been translated and published in more than a dozen other languages. He is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim, Whiting, and Howard Foundations. In 2011, he was awarded the Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellowship. Gander was the Briggs-Copeland poet at Harvard University before becoming The Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University where he taught courses such as Poetry & Ethics, EcoPoetics, Latin American Death Trip, and Translation Theory & Practice. He is an Emeritus Chancellor for the Academy for the Academy of American Poets and is an elected member of The Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Gander co-edited Lost Roads Publishers with CD Wright for twenty years, soliciting, editing, and publishing books by more than thirty writers, including Michael Harper, Kamau Brathwaite, Arthur Sze, Fanny Howe, Frances Mayes, Steve Stern, Zuleyka Benitez, and René Char.

“Forest”

By Forrest Gander

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Erogenous zones in oaks

slung with

stoles of lace lichen the

sun’s rays spilling

through leaves in

broken packets a force

call it nighttime

thrusts mushrooms up

from their lair

of spawn mycelial

loam the whiff of port

they pop into un-

trammeled air with the sort of

gasp that follows

a fine chess move

like memories are they? or punctuation? was it

something the earth said

to provoke our

response

tasking us to recall

an evolutionary

course our long ago

initation into

the one-

among-others

and within

my newborn noticing have you

popped up beside me love

or were you here from the start

a swarm of meaning and decay

still gripping the

underworld

both of us half-buried holding fast

if briefly to a swelling

vastness while our coupling

begins

to register in the already

awake compendium that offers

to take us in you take me in

and abundance floods us floats

us out we fill each

with the other all morning

breaks as birdsong over us

who rise to the surface

so our faces might be sprung

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Our love for the world around us and our passion for protecting that world can come from many different places. It can come from a connection to the land, or a magical experience we had with other people in a particular place, or our sense of awe from the beauty of the living creatures that inhabit these ecosystems. But that love and passion can also come from seeing or experiencing the destruction of the same ecological web, from pollution in the air that rains down onto a playground, or the clearing of a wildlife habitat to make way for a fossil fuel pipeline.

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Dave Cortez has been organizing for environmental justice in Texas for the better part of two decades. He lives in Austin now, but the love and passion that guides him came from the Rio Grande, the Sierra Madre Mountains and the high desert of West Texas. And from fighting a copper smelter and other threats to the land, air and water in and around his native El Paso. Dave has a fierce love for his El Paso Community. But cutting his teeth as an environmental justice organizer in his hometown wasn't easy.

Dave is now Director of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, where he’s bringing his El Paso roots and years of experience on the streets and in the communities around Texas to the Sierra Club’s statewide campaigns.

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I’ve known Dave for many years and used to regularly attend environmental justice meetings in Austin that he helped organize. I’ve seen him rise from an on-the-ground organizer to the leader of the Texas chapter of one of the oldest and largest environmental organizations in the world.

Our conversation tracks his education as an environmental justice organizer. From the playgrounds of El Paso to the gentrifying neighborhoods of Austin, his story reflects the changing nature of the American environmental movement and the exciting possibilities of more robust connections between community-based frontline environmental justice struggles and the large and powerful environmental organizations with nationwide influence.

You can listen on Ghost, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other podcast platforms.

Dave Cortez is a 3rd generation El Pasoan now based out of Austin where he lives with his partner and six year old daughter. He grew up and learned organizing on the frontera, where industrial pollution, poverty, gentrification, racism and the border wall are seen as intersecting issues. Dave serves as the Director of the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter, and has been organizing in the Texas environmental movement for 18 years. Dave is supporting staff and volunteers across Texas who are organizing for power by centering racial justice and equity alongside frontline communities directly impacted by polluting industries.

"There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. Malcolm knew this. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew this. Our struggles are particular, but we are not alone. We are not perfect, but we are stronger and wiser than the sum of our errors. Black people have been here before us and survived. We can read their lives like signposts on the road and find, as Bernice Reagon says so poignantly, that each one of us is here because somebody before us did something to make it possible. To learn from their mistakes is not to lessen our debt to them, nor to the hard work of becoming ourselves, and effective.

We lose our history so easily, what is not predigested for us by the New York Times, or the Amsterdam News, or Time magazine. Maybe because we do not listen to our poets or to our fools, maybe because we do not listen to our mamas in ourselves. When I hear the deepest truths I speak coming out of my mouth sounding like my mother’s, even remembering how I fought against her, I have to reassess both our relationship as well as the sources of my knowing. Which is not to say that I have to romanticize my mother in order to appreciate what she gave me – Woman, Black. We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present. We do not have to suffer the waste of an amnesia that robs us of the lessons of the past rather than permit us to read them with pride as well as deep understanding.

We know what it is to be lied to, and we know how important it is not to lie to ourselves.

We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is all about – survival and growth.

Within each one of us there is some piece of humanness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis and is grinding all our futures into dust. If we are to keep the enormity of the forces aligned against us from establishing a false hierarchy of oppression, we must school ourselves to recognize that any attack against Blacks, any attack against women, is an attack against all of us who recognize that our interests are not being served by the systems we support. Each one of us here is a link in the connection between anti-poor legislation, gay shootings, the burning of synagogues, street harassment, attacks against women, and resurgent violence against Black people. I ask myself as well as each one of you, exactly what alteration in the particular fabric of my everyday life does this connection call for? Survival is not a theory. In what way do I contribute to the subjugation of any part of those who I define as my people? Insight must illuminate the particulars of our lives." - Audre Lorde

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When we’re gone from this Earth, what will we leave behind? What will we pass down to those who come after us?

Plastic. If nothing else, lots of plastic. A plastic bag might take 20 years to break down, but harder, thicker plastics, like toothbrushes, might take 500 years or more to break down.

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Elizabeth Bradfield is a poet and naturalist who sees first hand, in her work as a marine educator, the ravaging impacts of plastic on marine life. But she also confronts plastic and our collective addiction to it as a subject of poetry.

Her poem, “Plastic: A Personal History,” is what she calls a “cranky naturalist” poem, which is pretty funny, but embedded in the humor are big questions: how has plastic become part of who we are as individuals and as a species? Now that we know the dangers and devastating effects of plastic production and disposal, how must we change our relationship to this petrochemical product? What kind of world are we making, and what alternatives do we have?

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of five collections of poetry, including, most recently, Toward Antarctica. She co-edited the newly-released anthology, Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Sun, and Orion, and her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize and a Stegner Fellowship. She teaches creative writing at Brandeis University and is founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press. She lives on Cape Cod, where she also works as a naturalist and marine educator.

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This episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series. You can listen on Ghost, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.

Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!

Born in Tacoma, Washington, Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Toward Antarctica, which uses haibun and her photographs to query the work of guiding tourists in Antarctica, and Theorem, a collaboration with artist Antonia Contro.

Bradfield is also co-editor of the anthologies Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, and Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic/Artistic Collaboration, 2005-2020.

A professor and co-director of Creative Writing at Brandeis University, Bradfield has received a great deal of recognition through awards and fellowships. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Sun, Orion, and her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize and a Stegner Fellowship.

Based on Cape Cod, Liz also works as a naturalist, adding an engaging and proactive component to back up the prowess of her evocative literature. She also is the founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press, a journal and grass-roots initiative that, through monthly publications, aims to expose the broader community (beyond academia) to relevant literature and art.

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By Elizabeth Bradfield

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How can I find a way to praise

it? Do the early inventors & embracers

churn with regret? I don’t think my parents

—born in the swing toward ubiquity—chew

& chew & chew on plastic. But of course they

do. Bits in water, food-flesh, air.

And their parents? I remember Dad

mocking his mother’s drawer of saved

rubber bands and his father-in-law’s red,

corroded jerry can, patched and patched,

never replaced for new, for never-

rusting.

Cash or plastic? Plastic. Even

for gum. We hate the $5 minimum.

Bills paperless, automatic, almost

unreal.

My toys were plastic, castle

and circus train and yo-yo. Did my lunches

ever get wrapped in waxed paper or

was it all Saran, Saran, Saran?

Sarah’s mom

was given, in Girl Scouts, a blue sheet

of plastic to cut, sew, and trim with white piping

into pouches for camping. Sarah has it still,

brittle but useful. Merit badge for waterproofing.

For everlasting.

You, too, must have heard stories,

now quaint as carriages, of first plastic, pre-plastic.

Eras of glass, waxed cloth, and tin.

Of shared syringes.

All our grocery bags, growing up,

were paper. Bottom hefted on forearm, top

crunched into grab. We used them

to line the kitchen garbage pail.

Not that long

ago, maybe a decade, I made purses for my sisters

out of putty-colored, red-lettered plastic Safeway

bags. I’d snag a stack each time I went, then fold

and sew, quilt with bright thread, line with thrift store

blouses. They were sturdy and beautiful. Rainproof

and light. Clever. So clever.

I regret them.

And the plastic toothpicks, folders, shoes that seemed

so cheap, so easy, so use-again and thus

less wasteful, then. What did we do before

to-go lids? Things must have just spilled

and spilled.

Do you know

what I mean? I mean, what pearl forms

around a grain of plastic in an oyster?

Is it as beautiful? Would you wear it?

Would you buy it for your daughter

so she in turn could pass it down and

pass it down and pass it down?

Elizabeth Bradfield's Website