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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
For this episode we invite back the former Senior Producer of this show, our friend Gregory Haddock. Greg has been working on some awesome podcast projects this past year, and we’re super excited to have him back on the show for this episode in which we reflect on the one year anniversary of the Jan. 6th insurrection.
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Mark Dowie is a self-styled investigative historian, and the author of the recent books, Conservation Refugees and The Haida Gwaii Lesson. After a long career as a journalist, which included breaking the story of the exploding Ford Pinto in the 1970s, as well as a stint as the managing editor of Mother Jones, Dowie took his investigative approach to the field of history.
In Conservation Refugees, a revisionist history of the conservation movement, he explores how Indigenous People have been forcibly displaced from their traditional homelands all across the globe in the name of conservation. The Haida Gwaii Lesson, written as a follow up to Conservation Refugees, was designed to be a strategic playbook for Indiginous sovereignty. The book analyzes the history of the Haida Gwaii Nation, located off the Western coast of Canada, with a focus on how the Haida people have regained much of their sovereignty. It was written specifically to provide Indigenous Nations with information to aid their own struggles to regain sovereignty.
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In 2018, Virginia Tech Political Science Professor Cara Daggett wrote a paper entitled ‘Petro- masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire’ which analyzed how society’s constructs of masculinity had become prevalent in attitudes towards fossil fuel use and energy. Cara’s research focuses on feminist political ecology, in particular the politics of energy in an era of planetary disruption. While we spoke, found her definition and analysis of energy completely mind-blowing and it’s shattered my previous understanding of the word and energy as a concept. I’ll never use the word in the same way again!
In the article mentioned above, Cara addresses the new authoritarian movements in the West that embrace a toxic combination of climate denial, racism and misogyny as the planet warms. Rather than considering these issues separately, the article interrogates their relationship through the concept of ‘petro-masculinity’, which highlights the historic role of fossil fuel systems in buttressing white patriarchal rule. Petro-masculinity is helpful in understanding how the anxieties aroused by the Anthropocene era can increase desires for power.
The concept of petro-masculinity suggests that fossil fuels mean more than profit; fossil fuels actually contribute to making identities. Moreover, fossil fuel use can even function as a violent compensatory practice in reaction to gender and climate trouble.
I found this article fascinating. I’d never considered the impact that western societal pressures on masculinity could have on environmentalism. Sure, I’ve spent my career as a Wildlife Biologist constantly surrounded by female-identifying people, which is something I’ve definitely noticed, and all of the most environmentally friendly people I know are also female. But, after reading this article so many things started jumping out at me that I hadn’t noticed before, including the way that many environmentally unfriendly products are directly targeted at men, even using anti-feminine and homophobic slurs as a means of increasing sales. Gender is an intersection of environmentalism that I hadn’t noticed quite so much before. The way that Cara discusses masculine domination over the feminine, with the feminine being the Earth, sent chills down my spine and is again, something I’ve consistently noticed since speaking to her.
Why is it that destructive practices towards nature are seen as being manly, whereas being nurturing and kind to the environment are girly and practicing these things supposedly makes you less of a man? It’s a minefield.
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Close your eyes, and picture yourself underwater. See the light sway above you, as it gets darker and darker the further down you go. Welcome to the deep waters of the ocean, a place where today’s guest has spent a considerable part of her life, swimming alongside the ocean’s many flora and fauna. Dr Sylvia Earle is an icon in marine biology and ocean conservation and has been featured in popular documentaries like Seaspiracy, Mission Blue and Chasing Ice. She has won many awards and accolades including the Carl Sagan Award for Public Understanding of Science, the National Audubon Society’s Rachel Carson Award, and has authored more than 150 publications including a new book alongside National Geographic called Ocean: A Global Odyssey.
She’s also the first woman to walk on the ocean floor.
The team here at Earth to Humans is a HUGE fan of Dr. Earle and her work and we’ve had a hard time containing our excitement in anticipation of this episode’s release. We talk octopus intelligence, empathy in science and reasons why there is still so much reason to hope (even though everything seems really f@$%ed). She thinks we humans can overcome the mountain of our environmental negligence, and after this interview, we might be inclined to believe her.
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