Non-Toxic

For this bonus episode of Non-toxic, we're catching up with our producer, Andrew, and taking calls from our loyal listeners while dispensing poorly thought out advice. From how to get your brother-in-law to stop watching Formula 1 to the climate impact of AI, we are covering a lot of ground this week, and hopefully, helping you live a little less toxically.

To thank these callers, we're asking listeners to head over to our Patreon to vote on your favorite question. Whoever wins this poll will receive a free Non-toxic T-shirt. Vote for your favorite here.

And if you'd like to support Non-toxic, you can go to our Patreon and smash that subscribe button.

Links:

F1's path to sustainability is ⁠"a journey"

10 ways to reduce plastic in laboratories, according to University College London

Despite Google exec claims, ⁠AI likely to increase energy use⁠ and accelerate climate misinformation

A Tory journalist went on a $4000 mushroom retreat in the Netherlands, and all she got was an awareness of life's beauty and fragility

In the Season 2 finale of Non-toxic we're talking with barrister Paul Powlesland about the universal right to enjoy natural places, despite what landowners may tell you. He's the legal counsel for the activist group Right to Roam, who are pushing for greater access to England and Wale's wild places and the end of restrictions on hikers and walkers (within reason). The more time people spend in nature, Paul argues, the more they care about it. Which is critical when it comes to building the political will to fight climate change.

And because fixing the damage we've already done to the planet is the job of a lifetime, Paul has got some interesting ideas about how to tap into a more positive vision of masculinity that also repairs the planet. Why brag to your date about a fancy car when you can tell them how lush you've made the bird habitat in your garden. (Something to listen to in the morning?) And when you're with your buddies, you could be challenging them with a friendly "Do you even plant, bro?"

⁠⁠Support Non-toxic today.

Sign up to join Right to Roam

And pick up a copy of Wild Service

Bio:

Paul Powlesland is a barrister at Garden Court Chambers. He specialises in upholding the rights of environmental activists to protest and protect the natural world, and uses environmental law and regulations to defend trees, rivers and wildlife. Paul is the legal counsel for Right to Roam and co-founder of Lawyers for Nature, and regularly gives talks and workshops on the rights of nature, the relationship between the law and the natural world and what barristers and other lawyers should do in a time of climate and ecological emergency. As a boat-dweller for many years, he is also determined to protect the rights of boaters and other Traveller groups.

Where does your crazy climate-denying uncle come up with those outlandish talking points that he trots out at Thanksgiving or Christmas? Things like: “Wind turbines cause autism!”

Whatever he's saying probably isn't something he made up on his own. In all likelihood, he's been watching too much YouTube, the source of an alarming amount of climate disinformation. But it’s not just the volume of climate disinformation that’s changing on Youtube, it’s also the specific talking points that people use to undermine public understanding.

As Callum Hood from the Centre for Countering Digital Hate explorers in a new paper, there are really two eras of climate denial: Old denial, which is the head in the sand, "climate change isn't happening” or “climate change isn't caused by humans” versus something a lot more pernicious and harder to combat. New denial. In this conversation, we get into how it is that climate deniers changed their tactics, what external conditions they are are responding to, why manosphere influencers are becoming climate deniers, as well as the financial incentives for spreading this stuff. And of course, there’s the role that tech platforms have in profiting from or combating climate disinformation.

⁠⁠Support Non-toxic today.

For our earlier conversation with Callum on incels and alphas, listen to Season 1: Episode 1.

Links:

Listen to our previous episode with Callum on the myth of the "alpha" and incels

Read the CCDH’s report on online climate denial.

The Heartland Institute’s own leaked internal memos admit they’re climate deniers.

How Jordan Peterson generates millions of Youtube hits for climate deniers

This week, we'll be talking with Mato Wayuhi, a musician, rapper, and composer from South Dakota, whose forthcoming major label debut is called Stankface Standing Soldier. You may have also heard his music in the film War Pony, and the hit television series on Hulu, Reservation Dogs.

In this conversation, we talk about the tension between being a traditional versus contemporary Native artist, stereotypes about masculinity in Native culture, and rap as reporting. Though Mato’s been around the world, lately, he has been thinking a lot about his relationship to place and his connection to his family's ancestral land back in Pine Ridge. From vegan fry bread to “Land Back,” it’s all here, on Non-toxic.

⁠Support Non-toxic today.

Listen to Mato's music on his bandcamp, or however you stream music. The songs in this episode are "Part-time Indian" and "STANKFACE," as well as "Switch Lanes," which is off of the Reservation Dogs season three soundtrack.

This week we talk to photographer, filmmaker and artist Richard Mosse, who spent two years documenting the desctruction of one of the most ecologically sensitive areas of the world, the Amazon Rainforest. Using infrared film, GIS mapping technologies, and ultraviolet cameras, Mosse explores every scale of the rainforest, from miscroscopic organisms to hectares of cleared land. On the human level, the film follows both the indigenous people who are trying to hold on to their way of life and the loggers, ranchers, and miners who are trying to carve out a living at the edge of the world. The result is an immersive, unflinching multichannel film called Broken Spectre.

Joining Non-toxic from his studio in New York, Richard discusses the best ways to get powerful men to let you film their crimes, why women bare the brunt of the Amazon's destruction, and whether there's anything an artist can do to try to avert catastrophe.

Support Non-toxic today.

For more on the climate impacts of beef, listen to our conversation with journalist Joe Fassler from Season 1.

Guest Bio: Richard Mosse is an Irish artist currently based in New York. Documenting some of the most significant humanitarian and environmental crises of our time, his work has been the subject of solo shows at museums including The San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art, The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and The Barbican Art Gallery in London, among others. For his groundbreaking work, Mosse has received the Prix Pictet 2017 Prize, the 2014 Deutcshe Börse Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He holds an MFA from Yale.

Links:

How American's love of beef is helping destroy the Amazon

What Jair Bolsonaro did to the Amazon

Brazilian president Lula pledges ‘new Amazon dream’ at rainforest summit

Brazilian police identify gang leader mastermind who orchestrated murders of environmentalists in the Amazon

This week, we're joined from Berlin by sustainability expert and author of The World Is On Fire But We’re Still Buying Shoes, Alec Leach. As a former fashion editor, Alec has spent a large part of his career understanding how men in particular are convinced, persuaded and tricked into buying things they don't really need. While in the past, we might’ve thought of the young woman at the mall as the stereotypical overconsumer, Alec argues that there's a new paradigm at play, that the so-called hypebeast—the nerdy, internet-obsessed, sneaker-collecting guy—has become the new model that fashion and luxury brands have cultivated. With disastrous consequences for the planet.

This episode is part of the Non-Toxic Performative Male Book Club. It’s a series of all the author interviews I’ve done over the years, featuring some of the smartest writers, journalists, and academics I know. If you’re into Non-Toxic book coverage, click on any epsiode with the tag “Performative Male Book Club” to find more good books for guys who read, or pretend to.

To keep the show going, become a subscriber today.

In this episode of Non-Toxic, we talk to Nathaniel Rich, author of Losing Earth: A Recent History. It’s a bracing conversation about the little known story of the 1980s, when scientists, politicians, and policy-makers were all in agreement that something had to be done to lower carbon emissions—and how at the crucial moment—they failed to act. There are some surprising insights about what went wrong, how to talk about climate change, as well as what we’ve learned about moral urgency since those early days when many people thought all it would take to change the world was laying out the facts.

⁠Support Non-Toxic today.⁠

Guest Bio:

Nathaniel Rich is the author of Losing Earth: A Recent History , a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Award, and a winner of awards from the Society of Environmental Journalists and the American Institute of Physics. He is also the author of the novels King Zeno (MCD/FSG, 2018); Odds Against Tomorrow (FSG, 2013); and The Mayor’s Tongue (Riverhead, 2008). Most recently, he released a new collection of nonfiction stories about the uncanniness of life in the climate crisis called Second Nature.

In this episode of Non-toxic, we're talking with activist Amanda Sukenick and philosopher Matti Häyry about the state of antinatalist thinking, exploring the arguments about risk and the potential for suffering that have come to animate a certain corner of the "doomer" climate conversation.

This is the second in a two part series on climate babies. Last week, we talked to Sian Norris about far-right efforts to roll back women's bodily autonomy in order to increase populations of white Americans and Europeans and keep out people from the Global South. This week, we're thinking about the other side of the climate baby coin—from pronatalists to antinatalists—who argue humanity should cease to exist completely.

⁠Support Non-toxic today.⁠

Links:

Watch First Reformed if you haven't seen it yet.

In a survey by Hewlet Packard, 91% of parents in India, Mexico, Singapore, United Kingdom and United States reported that climate change was impacting their family planning and leading them to have fewer children.

New York Times columnist Ezra Klein says your kids aren't doomed

Climate scientist Kimberly Nichols argues you can still have kids in a warming world in Under the Sky We Make.

US birthrates continue to decline.

Antinatalist philosopher David Benetar's influential book, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm Of Coming Into Existence

An interesting account of how The Population Bomb by Paul and Anne Ehrlich, incited a mass panic about overpopulation in 1968.

Reddit's childfree community has over 1.5 million members?!

Guest bios:

Amanda ‘Oldphan’ Sukenick, is an activist, writer, film-maker, and host of The Exploring Antinatalism Podcast. She lives in Chicago.

Matti Häyry is a professor of business ethics and philosophy of social science in the department of management at Aalto University in Helsinki. He is the author of several books and papers discussing the ethical dilemmas and risks of having children, including "A rational cure for pre-reproductive stress syndrome" as well as, "If you must make babies, then at least make the best babies you can?"

You can check out Matti and Amanda's forthcoming book from Cambridge University Press, ⁠Antinatalism, Extinction, and the End of Procreative Self-Corruption.⁠

What do abortion restrictions have to do with climate change? According to believers of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, it's all connected.

Journalist and author Sian Norris joins Non-toxic to talk about her new book, Bodies Under Siege: How the Far-Right Attack on Reproductive Rights Went Global. We talk about everything from the fascistic obsession with the laws of nature to Vladimir Putin's pro-natalist vision for Russia to why far-right tradwives love to post photos of their homesteads on Instagram. If you've ever wondered why the far-right is so fixated on making more white babies in the era of the climate crisis, this episode is for you. And stay tuned for next week, when we talk to a pair of antinatalists who are advocating for all of humanity do the complete opposite: cease to exist.

⁠Support Non-toxic today.⁠

Links

A superclip of Tucker Carlson "just asking questions" about the Great Replacement.

A timeline of Repblican congressman Steve King's fliration with the Great Replacement theory

Conservative darling Victor Orban's remarks at CPAC Dallas 2022

Far-right provacteur Lauren Southern's anti-feminist highlight reel

The Center for Reproductive Rights' map of the the world’s abortion laws

A recent Gallup poll on what Americans think about abortion

Guest bio

Sean Norris is a journalist and author of Bodies Under Siege: How the Far-Right Attack on Reproductive Rights Went Global, published in 2023 by Verso. Her reporting can be found in The Observer, The Guardian, The Times, The Eye, and The New Statesman, among others.

Help detoxify the discourse by becoming a Non-toxic supporter today.

This week on Non-toxic we're talking about the state of advertising in the age of the climate crisis with Lucy von Sturmer, greenwashing guru and founder of Creatives for Climate. Lucy charts her journey from fossil fuel hack to climate activist and breaks down how ads continue to tap into the sexual insecurities and desires of men and women to sell them on the idea of sustainability—or undermine it. From electric pickup trucks that won't quit until their payload is delivered to Kim Kardashian's pointy nipple bras that are somehow connected to melted glaciers.

⁠Support Non-toxic today.⁠

Links

The forgotten oil ads that told us climate change was nothing

France outlawed fossil fuel ads. Why can't we?

Premature Electrification Ram Truck Superbowl ad

Mobil 1 explains their bizarre anti-EV ad

The Skims Ultimate Nipple Bra (now with extra plastic!)

The Creatives for Climate free greenwashing watch course

Guest bio:

Lucy von Sturmer is the founder of award-winning impact consultancy The Humblebrag and the initiator of Creatives for Climate, a global network of creatives, activists, and policy-makers working collaboratively to drive action and awareness on the climate emergency.

Help detoxify the discourse by ⁠becoming a Non-toxic supporter today.⁠