Green Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration

This is a behind-the-scenes conversation with Gabes Torres, a contributor and the program advisor of alchemize, and Green Dreamer's team members Anisa Sima Hawley and Kamea Chayne. We explore the themes of imagination, escapism, dissociation, and discomfort when it comes to dreaming, sensing, relating, and becoming otherwise.

Enroll in alchemize through January 12th, 2024: www.greendreamer.com/alchemize

“One in four bites of our food is pollinated by honeybees, but at what cost in the system that we are in now? How could that look different if our agriculture was more localized, regionalized, and sustainable?”

In this episode, we warmly welcome Ang Roell—founder of They Keep Bees—to discuss their practice of working and learning with honeybees as models of resilience, care, and responsiveness. Ang’s work, which demystifies bees to decenter logics of power-over relations and consumer-driven work culture, frames a conversation around how we might learn from hive-lives in times of collapse.

Join us in this invitation to re-member our webs of interdependence—to slow down, swarm together,  and work within rhythmic fields of collective care. And join us in alchemize: radical imagination for collective transformation, to experience two practices led by Ang: “You are a honeybee” and “Pollinating networks of collective care.”

In Green Dreamer's episode 413, we welcome Dr. Hilding Neilson, who shares with us his knowledge of the night skies and expertise as an astronomer traced by his Mi’kmaw lineage. Trained in the Western-scientific sphere of astrophysics and shaped by Mi'kmaq methodologies, Dr. Neilson aims to disrupt the Euro-centric claim on the night sky as codified through historical and modern Astro-colonial pursuits of objectivity, discovery, nomenclature.

In demanding that Indigenous stories and systems of knowledge not only be heard but given a leading role on the stage of public policy making, Hilding invites us to reflect upon the value of night sky knowledge and ponder how it reflects and shapes life on earth, as well as how we choose to ethically engage with this knowledge moving forward.

In this episode, we are joined by A. Laurie Palmer: a writer, artist, and author of the book The Lichen Museum. In paying attention to lichen, Laurie looks to these symbiotic organisms as a template for enriching human and multi-species relationality.

How might lichen, and their refusal to be scientifically categorized, offer a model of living that nurtures slowness, adaptability, and diversity? In what ways do they remind us how to practice mutual aid, and reconfigure narratives of dominance?

Join us in conversation with Laurie as she invites us to dream and play with lichen through artistic explorations of multiplicity and prosperity. And join us in alchemize to be invited into imagination practices inspired by lichen ways of worlds.

In this episode, we welcome our guest Dekila Chungyalpa, who reminds us of our intra-dependant existence with all of life. Traced by a lineage of Tibetan Buddhist practitioners, Dekila weaves together teachings from her cultural and religious upbringing with her work as an environmental program director—from which she invites us to reflect on the ways in which Western conservation efforts fall short. In her work with faith-based organizations, Dekila prompts a dialogue around binary paradigms that persist even within environmental and activist movements.

Join us as we dive further into Dekila’s world and unravel the intricacies of interdependence, deep time, and more.

Episode song feature: Scissor-tailed Flycatcher by Ben White via Spirit House Records

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“My life goal is to get our governments to understand that Indigenous sovereignty and freshwater fish futures are completely linked.”

In this episode, we welcome Dr. Zoe Todd, who invites us to think alongside a critical lens of Indigenous fish philosophy and examine relationships between Indigenous sovereignty and fish well-being in Canada. By asking how we can learn with fish as they “listen with their whole being,” Zoe prompts discussions on compassionate listening, the fundamental link between the future of fish wellbeing and Indigenous sovereignty worldwide, and their relationship with art as research practice.

Tune in as we swim in waters of critical attunement to our wider ecological entanglements, as inspired by Zoe’s devotion to fish as companions of care.

Music credit: Spirit House Records

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In this episode, we welcome our guest Charlotte Wrigley, who invites us to contemplate the upheaval of extinction as a discontinuous process—a becoming, rather than an end. Charlotte’s inquiry into this matter straddles the edges of human relations, geography, climate science, and ethics against the backdrop of permafrost and its changing form.

Unveiling the intra-connected worlds of thawing permafrost and de-extinction efforts, Charlotte waltzes with sticky tensions of a rapidly heating planet and the need to “cool down” expeditious techno-races. How might we learn from permafrost itself, as well as Arctic communities / biomes, and stay with the trouble of the unfixed and unpredictable?  

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Get the transcript and episode references: greendreamer.com

Song feature: Concept of Love by Cheery via Spirit House Records

“Once folks start to pick away at that scab of understanding how much of a role microbes play in the lives of other things in good ways and bad ways temporally, spatially, physically, and spiritually, it really does open up a rich vein of a new dimension — to start considering the world around us and how we fit in that world.”

In this episode we are joined by Siv Watkins, founder of the platform “Microanimism”. Inviting us to deepen our intimacy with the complex, multi-faceted microbial world, Siv deploys the lenses of science, mysticism, and animism to advocate for some of the smallest, and most mysterious, beings on the planet.

We glimpse into the depth of entanglement between microbes (also referred to as “the smalls”) and their ancient relationship with cycles of life and death; sink into a purview of deep time; and explore questions of “what makes us human?”. Are “our” micro-biomes even “ours”?

Join us as we “shrink down” to expand cosmic perspectives in relation to the reverent, and sometimes terrifying, microbial kin.

(The musical offering featured in this episode is Scissor-tailed Flycatcher by Ben White.)

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In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Patricia Kaishian, a mycologist, writer, and educator who gestures to mycology as a queer discipline. Situated as a queer member of Armenian diaspora, Patricia threads connections between the often misunderstood and mis/under-represented displacement of mycelial bodes and her own. Offering a glimpse of the complex, fascinating, taxonomy-defying world of fungi, Patricia invokes reflections on how we can learn from, dream with, and reclaim queer existence with our fungal kin.

What stories of diversity, fluidity, and resilience do they sporulate? What lessons can they inspire in an age of ecological collapse? And what narratives can they invite us to decompose and re-birth?

(The musical offering featured in this episode is When You Carried Me by Oropendola.)

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In the episode, we welcome Dr. Eshe Lewis to discuss her life and learnings as an activist, anthropologist, and storyteller. Eshe walks us through glimpses of her time with Afro-Peruvian women as part of her doctoral research and how this experience transfigured beyond the siloed parameters of academic study into personal, historical, and political realms.

Eshe’s conscious intent of questioning, complicating, and re-positioning anthropology not only as an academic discipline, but a field of ethical practice, casts an inspirational light on the role and reachability of storytelling. Join us as she voices this critical exposure of in-between, multi/cross-lingual modes of communicating—not only as a means of empowerment but as an invitation to lean into joy and awe.

(The musical offering featured in this episode is Scissor-tailed Flycatcher by Ben White. The episode-inspired artwork is by Taylor Tinkham.)

This episode was brought to you by our supporting listeners. Join us on Patreon to help us keep our show alive: www.greendreamer.com/support