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Do you contemplate topics like climate change, biodiversity loss, and the risk of civilizational collapse? If so, then you probably understand something about bargaining – a psychological defense mechanism that’s one of the five stages of grief. With just a wee bit of embarrassment, Asher, Jason, and Rob reveal damning episodes of bargaining from their personal histories (involving green consumerism and cult-like devotion to technology). Having admitted their sins, they discuss the allure of false solutions to our environmental predicaments and how even veteran environmental journalists can be susceptible to it. Stay to the end for thoughts on how to avoid getting hoodwinked by the horde of ecomodernist tech bros who continuously shove unworkable "solutions" down our throats. Originally recorded on January 16, 2025.

Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.

Sources/Links/Notes:

• Julia Musto, "The end of the world as we know it? Theorist warns humanity is teetering between collapse and advancement," Independent, January 13, 2025 (about Nahfeez Ahmed's take on superabundance versus collapse).
• Rob Dietz, "Chris Smaje Vs. George Monbiot and the Debate on the Future of Farming," Resilience, October 27, 2023.
• Crazy Town episode 32 on cognitive bias
• Megan Phelps-Roper's six questions
• Crazy Town episode 45 on feedback loops, featuring an interview with Beth Sawin
• Post Carbon Institute's Deep Dive on building emotional resilience

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Peter Kalmus, climate scientist and returning friend of Crazy Town, used to live in Altadena, California, where one of the disastrous Los Angeles wildfires struck on January 7th. Having learned that his former house had burned, Peter penned an emotional article for the New York Times about his family's decision to leave LA two years prior, out of safety concerns about frequent heat waves, drought, and just the sort of tragic conflagration that has reduced parts of LA to ashes. Get Peter's take on this historic wildfire, what nature is trying to teach us, and how to think about unnatural disasters now and in the future. Note: this interview was recorded on January 24, 2025.

Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.

Sources/Links/Notes:

• Peter Kalmus’s article in the New York Times from January 10, 2025: “As a Climate Scientist, I Knew It Was Time to Leave Los Angeles”
• Peter’s book, Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution
• News story about the huge Bobcat Fire that struck Los Angeles County in 2020
• Article in Science about the damage from Hurricanes Helene and Milton
• Peter mentioned the Clausius-Clapeyron equation, which relates vapor pressure to temperature.

FeedSpot ranked Crazy Town as the #1 environmental economics podcast.

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In the world of college sports, money talks and the volleyball team walks, er, flies 33,000 miles to play games. The NCAA, like almost everyone else, is playing games with Mother Nature. What do we expect student-athletes to gain from ignoring the climate emergency (not to mention putting their health at risk)? Who cares, as long as we can wring a few more dollars out of the TV deals -- am I right?!? Jason, Rob, and Asher propose a new plan for college sports and for taking the climate emergency seriously.

On a happy note: FeedSpot ranked Crazy Town as the #1 environmental economics podcast.

Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.

Sources/Links/Notes:

• Jeff Eisenberg, "Conference realignment has redefined 'travel ball'," yahoo!sports, September 11, 2024.
• Stanford University's Woods Institute for the Environment and Doerr School of Sustainability
• Stanford has the most winning NCAA program, counting all sports. (2nd and 3rd are UCLA and USC, by far!)

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The US Fish and Wildlife Service decided to "manage" barred owls by shooting half a million of them over the next three decades. Jason, Rob, and Asher (along with the postal workers at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry) are upset about this plan for addressing the predicament of invasive species. Surely there's a finer tool than a double-barreled shotgun for conserving ecosystems and protecting the species that inhabit them.

Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.

Sources/Links/Notes:

• Bill Lucia, "Plan Finalized to Kill Thousands of Barred Owls around Northwest," Washington State Standard, August 28, 2024.
• U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Final Barred Owl Management Strategy, August 2024.
• "Killing barred owls to save northern spotted owls: Rethinking American wildlife conservation," On Point, WBUR, 9/5/2024.
• Avram Hiller, Jay Odenbaugh, and Yasha Rohwer, "A Dystopian Effort Is Underway in the Pacific Northwest to Pick Ecological Winners and Losers," New York Times, August 8, 2024.
• Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, "Northern Pikeminnow Sport Reward Program."
• Robert Dietz and Brian Czech, "Conservation Deficits for the Continental United States: an Ecosystem Gap Analysis," Conservation Biology, August 16, 2005.
• Tom Murphy, "Metastatic Modernity #12: Human Supremacy," Metastatic Modernity Video Series, August 9, 2024.

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Rob, Jason, and Asher talk about joining the new Trump Administration, at least until Elon Musk eradicates it. They explore the implications of Trump 2.0 through three reality-bending lenses – shifting baselines, entropy, and the upside of down – and three ways of responding: resistance, resilience, and regeneration. They decided they couldn’t stomach a fourth R – respect.

We’ve added something new to this and future episodes: VIDEO! If you’d like to feel even more like you’re in the room with the Crazy Town gang, please check out the video and let us know what you think. 

Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.

Sources/Links/Notes:

• Daniel Pauly’s 1995 article, Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries
• Randy Olson’s op-ed in the LA Times, Slow-Motion Disaster Below the Waves
• Video of Howard Dean’s speech with the infamous “Dean Scream”
• NASA’s description of the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy law (Be sure to read it before the incoming US administration repeals the laws of thermodynamics!)
• Thomas Homer-Dixon’s book The Upside of Down

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Sometimes you just wanna hear from someone else. In this bonus episode, Alex Leff enters Crazy Town to introduce his podcast, Human Nature Odyssey. Before playing the first episode of the podcast, Jason, Rob, and Asher find lots of laughs with Alex as they contemplate environmental destruction, gorilla suits, the fate of civilization, tandem bike rides, imaginary games, and how to make a podcast. If you need a little more encouragement to check out Human Nature Odyssey, our friend Tom Murphy (author of the Do the Math blog) gives it his highest recommendation.

Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.

Sources/Links/Notes:

• Human Nature Odyssey on Apple Podcasts
• The work and philosophy of Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael
• Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
• Alex Leff’s Patreon page for Human Nature Odyssey

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After a full season of trying to escape more than a dozen evil -isms (fun things like capitalism, industrialism, extremism, and otherism), Rob, Jason, and Asher come to one conclusion: there is no true escape -- at least not for those of us who want to help their communities collapse and re-emerge gracefully. Join the boys as they explore what the cult classic Groundhog Day has to teach us about navigating the endlessly insane world of modernity and reflect on key lessons and actionable steps we can all take to navigate the Great Unraveling of environmental and social systems.

Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.

Sources/Links/Notes:

• Trailer for the cult classic Groundhog Day
• Article: "Harold Ramis didn't intend 'Groundhog Day' to be Buddhist, but it's a dharma classic" by Perry Garfinkel in Lion's Roar
• Article: "Was Modernity Inevitable?" by Tom Murphy in Do the Math
• Article: "Hospicing Modernity: Not a new idea" by Eliza Daley in Resilience
• Article: "Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System" by Donella Meadows, published by the Donella Meadows Project
• Multisolving Institute
• Book: A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for the Twenty-First Century by Daniel R. Brooks and Salvatore J. Agosta, published by MIT Press

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The drive to belong to an in-group and the tendency to observe differences in others are core parts of the human condition. But differentiating can (and often does) turn deadly when it morphs into othering. Jason, Rob, and Asher try not to other one another as they explore the roots and consequences of othering, and the ins and outs of belonging as a key organizing principle of society.

Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.

Sources/Links/Notes:

• Wes Tank rapping Fox in Socks
• The Sneetches and Other Stories by Dr. Seuss
• Definition of othering from the Canadian Museum for Human Rights
• Stereotype Content Model
• Susceptibility to othering
• Othering and Belonging Institute
• Book by john a. powell and Stephen Menendian - Belonging Without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World
• Crazy Town episode 51 on colonization and the mindset of extraction
• Seeing White podcast
• Racial Equity Institute
• Colonial roots and other drivers of genocide in Rwanda
• Trump’s reprehensible remarks about immigrants and about liberals
• The dystopian, othering politics of Balaji Srinivasan (article by Gil Duran in The New Republic)
• Christian Picciolini’s Ted Talk about how he stopped othering and helps more people do the same
• Marnita’s Table
• Needham Resilience Network

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The forces of media, technology, and even the wiring of our own brains seem aligned to draw people toward extremism. But never fear: Asher, Jason, and Rob unpack why we're so susceptible to wackadoodle viewpoints and offer ways to tamp down extremist thinking and behavior in ourselves, our communities, and across society. Along the way, they tour the worlds of extreme sports, extreme politics, and extreme yogurt. They even question their own decidedly non-mainstream views on the environment and the economy.

Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.

Sources/Links/Notes:

• Kevin Roose’s article in the New York Times “A QAnon ‘Digital Soldier’ Marches On, Undeterred by Theory’s Unraveling”Definition of extremism from the Anti-Defamation League
• Concepts of “malignant bonding” and “scarcity mind” in the article “Widening the ‘We’” by Colin Greer and Eric Laursen
• Zeynep Tufecki’s 2018 article in the New York Times “YouTube, the Great Radicalizer”
• Kari Paul’s 2021 article in the Guardian “‘It let white supremacists organize’: the toxic legacy of Facebook’s Groups”
• Peter D. Kvam et al., “Rational inference strategies and the genesis of polarization and extremism,” Nature, May 5, 2022.
• Statistics on rising levels of hate crime in the United States
• Statistics on domestic terrorism in the United States
• Statistics on antisemitism around the world
• Crazy Town episode 78, which includes the six questions Megan Phelps-Roper developed to challenge her entrenched beliefs.
• Rapoport’s Rules for constructive criticism
• Post Carbon Institute’s Deep Dive on Building Emotional Resilience
• Diane Benscoter’s nonprofit, Antidote.ngo, which runs recovery groups for people caught up in disinformation.
• Thought reform consultation
• Crazy Town episode 89 on escaping individualism, in which we discussed mutual aid networks
• Lawsuit to allow social media users to control their algorithms
• Ranked choice voting

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The myth of human dominion and exceptionalism is as old as the Bible and as unquestioned as gravity, at least in "modern" society. Rob, Asher, and Jason explore the ways that humanocentrism has come to dominate the planet and our minds, while pointing to ancient and newly emerging ways that the more-than-human world is respected and protected, even the dung beetle.

Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.

Sources/Links/Notes:

• Eileen Crist defines (and critiques) anthropocentrism.
• Global biomass of wild mammals
• Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass.
• Decline of pollinators
• Decline of flying insect biomass
• Daniel Quinn’s book Ishmael
• Human Nature Odyssey podcast with Alex Leff
• Tom Murphy’s journey of understanding the pitfalls of human exceptionalism
• Two-thirds of the world’s longest rivers have been dammed.
• Declining wild bird populations in North America
• Ed Yong’s book An Immense World
• Yellowstone to Yukon conservation initiative
• Restor
• Douglas Tallamy’s book Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard
• Story of mining permit revocation in Panama
• Timeline of expansion of the rights of nature that was compiled by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund
• Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights
• Stop Ecocide International
• Crazy Town episode with Danielle Celermajer on multispecies justice
• Robin Wall-Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass
• Prominence of nature in the Tuvan language
• Holding the Fire episode with Anne Poelina
• Quote by Kenneth Brink of the Karuk Tribe
• Quote by Sammy Gensaw II

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