Pretty Heady Stuff

Jessica den Outer is an expert in environmental law who advocates globally for the Rights of Nature. Since 2017, she’s been consulted and has spoken for institutions like the UN and Harvard. She founded the NGO ‘Stichting Rechten van de Natuur’ and has received numerous awards for her pioneering work.

Shauna Doll works to control invasive species in the Halifax Regional Municipality and is a frequent author on environmental issues. There are a lot of them, and the number is growing. What is going on and what methods work to slow crisis down, halt them where possible and manage their impact? How can the rights of nature work as a framework for shifting the ways we value and devalue the world around us

Jessica's book The Forest Fights Back gives us an opportunity to discuss a potent source of resistance and coalition-building: the idea that nature has inherent rights that need to be respected.

From Pluto Press: "As the world grapples with the escalating climate crisis, ecosystems are collapsing, and the planet’s future hangs in the balance. For centuries, our legal systems have treated nature as something to be owned and exploited, but a bold new movement is challenging this paradigm.

In The Forest Fights Back, Jessica den Outer explores a groundbreaking global movement—Rights of Nature—taking on the legal system to recognise the rights of rivers, forests, and mountains to exist, flourish, and sustain their ecological balance. From the fight for the Whanganui River in New Zealand to the battle for Spain’s Mar Menor lagoon, den Outer highlights the campaigns led by grassroots communities, telling stories of determination and legal ingenuity.

This movement goes beyond law – it represents a cultural shift that could reshape how we live, think, co-exist and advocate for nature."

I was wowed by this book's wisdom about the ways that cynicism, anger and protective individualism get dumped into our minds and narrow our emotional range.

Talking about the differences between "complicity" and "implication" might feel frivolous or semantic as the horrors persist, but Liberation is Other People is so attuned to the wicked problems we face, and on so many registers, that its engagement with the question of what we're willing to experiment with in order to save the future feels incredibly urgent and surprisingly hopeful, since its author thinks our collaborative abilities are enough to unlock untold sources of community love, public will, imagination and problem solving.

If we finally get serious and create bigger, weirder, more chameleonic containers for our climate feelings, Shotwell's gambit is that this burgeoning social infrastructure could not only fight climate despair, it could end up being a key part of how we ultimately create radically different, more durable solutions and more liveable futures together. Surprise the doomsayers! Liberation is Other People is out November 10th from University of Minnesota Press.

Pre-order from @uminnpress:

https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517921651/liberation-is-other-people/

#leftbooks #academicbooks #revolutionarybooks #ursulaleguin #affect #politics #community #mutualaid #climatefeelings #ecoanxiety #collectivity #solidarity #anticapitalism #climatedevastation #organizing #anarchism #isolation #power #tactics #strategy

In his recent writing, political theorist Matthew Huber (https://www.maxwell.syr.edu/directory/matthew-t-huber) has been making the point that climate action is needlessly polarizing, and that this polarization can be corrected by abandoning the sorts of virtue signaling and PR pomp and circumstance that sometimes comes with climate communication. In fact, he says in his Jacobin article that it's "not clear why focusing on the direct material concerns of affordability is not enough on its own and why climate must be linked at all."

In the midst of economic warfare and global military imperialism, the crises that we face do demand some form of solidarity. Huber suggests that we likely need to let go of the idea that climate itself, fear of ecological collapse, will rally constituencies to fight for a post-profit society.

He writes: "All of us can agree the climate situation is bad and getting worse. After a sustained period of decline, US emissions increased in 2025. The second Trump administration has rolled back the Inflation Reduction Act and is using state power to keep uneconomical coal plants open and deregulate oil and gas production.

No amount of knowledge of science or moral concern about our children will, on its own, reverse this. Given the civilizational scale of the transformation required, replacing an entire global infrastructure system that still depends on fossil fuel for 80 percent of its needs, we need large-scale political power."

Read the full article at https://jacobin.com/2026/05/climate-politics-working-class-dealignment

Nina Newington is a forest protector, organizer and award-winning author. Join us for a conversation about the connections and solidarities that build strength against extractive projects and the exploitation of nature for profit.

Originally from the UK, Newington has lived in many countries before immigrating to Canada. In Nova Scotia, her environmental activism began with the model of Extinction Rebellion, with the use of direct action to prevent logging and preserve the land, the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaw people.

During the conversation, Newington will share some of the insights she has gained from organizing and describe the specific nature of the struggle for forest protection in Nova Scotia.

At a time when it is so easy to succumb to cynicism and defeatism, the trajectory that takes us toward intersectional connection and bigger, more expansive solidarities feels like an altogether preferable one.

Learn more about Nina Newington at https://ninanewington.com

Kate Brooks works as the EAC's Community Climate Navigator, collaborating with HalifACT and other community groups to create programs supporting climate action. More recently, she joined the Food Team to assist in developing the Halifax Food Council's website. Kate comes from a public library and adult education background and enjoys learning with and from community groups in the Halifax Regional Municipality. She also ran a subsistence farm in the Cape Breton hills for over 20 years and was involved in rural food system work (farmers' markets, school gardens, and school garden entrepreneurship). She believes that tackling the climate crisis will involve learning better ways of communicating, working with and supporting one another — and she's glad to be contributing to climate action through her work on the Food and Operations Teams.

Chris is a communications professional and experienced environmental campaigner with two decades of experience. He was the Sustainable City columnist for The Coast for number of years and has also authored four books. He has worked at ENGOs in Toronto and Halifax. His work has had a strong educational and community-building components, including delivering online and in-person workshops that have varied from training aspiring writers to informing grade-school children and senior citizens about the history and ongoing legacy of residential schools. He lives in Halifax with his partner, two children and an 80-pound lapdog.

Follow the Ecology Action Centre's critical work and donate at https://ecologyaction.ca/

Sadie Beaton grew up in rural Nova Scotia where she could see a working wharf from her bedroom window and enjoyed countless hours exploring the rugged shorelines and scrubby Acadian forest. She eventually moved to Halifax where she got a B.A. in English from Kings College and a Masters in Resource and Environmental Management from Dalhousie University.

In her recent essay "It Flows/Runs Wildly/Crazily: Unravelling Settler Legacies on Stolen Mi’kmaq Land," Beaton explores the intertwining histories that formed her identity and the relationships of complicity that obtain between her own story and the histories of Mi'kma'ki that entangle us in systems of oppression, but also present us with alternatives to the predictable slow violence of fossilized colonialism.

Read Beaton's "It Flows/Runs Wildly/Crazily" at https://bit.ly/3STov6h

Also check out "'The depth of the plough'" white settler tautologies and pioneer lies" by Erin Morton and Travis Wysote at https://www.academia.edu/38377868/_The_Depth_of_the_Plough_White_Settler_Tautologies_and_Pioneer_Lies

Katherine Stewart has covered the intersection of faith and politics for over 17 years; her work appears in the New York Times, the New Republic, Religion News Service, the Guardian and elsewhere. Her latest book, Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, is one of Foreign Affairs magazine’s Best Books of 2025. Her previous, award-winning title, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, formed the basis of the documentary feature, God & Country.

I wanted to speak with Katherine to talk about the United States' evangelical bet on Christianity as a means of galvanizing a divided nation, and her research into the ways that this has been leveraging by the elite as part of a movement for securing minority rule.

The Power Worshippers, our main focus here, looks at how "the Religious Right has masqueraded as a social movement preoccupied with a number of cultural issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage.... [T]his is a political movement that seeks to gain power and to impose its vision on all of society. America's religious nationalists aren't just fighting a culture war, they are waging a political war on the norms and institutions of American democracy.
#fourthofjuly #july4 #independenceday #americanpolitics #uspolitics #christianity #christianfundamentalism #evangelicalism #dominionism #christiannation #christiannationalism #whitenationalism

What are the politics of party loyalty in Canada? Why do politicians follow the leader and rarely rock the boat? What solutions could exist for strengthening Canada's democracy by injecting more dissent into the system? Alongside Mireille Lalancette and Jared J. Wesley, Alex Marland is the author of No “I” in Team: Party Loyalty in Canadian Politics, a book that offers in-depth analysis of the social and cultural forces that inform party loyalty in Canadian government. Their book is essential reading for anyone that wants to understand why political change is so rare in Canada. What it reveals is that ossification and pious attachment to the ruling party are the rules of the game, that Canada is, in many ways, constitutively allergic to political change at the highest level of governing power.

Alex Marland is Acadia University’s inaugural Jarislowsky Chair in Trust and Political Leadership. A Professor of Canadian politics, he has authored or edited over a dozen books, including the acclaimed Brand Command: Canadian Politics and Democracy in the Age of Message Control (2016) and Whipped: Party Discipline in Canada (2020).

#canada #canadianpolitics #canadaday #nationalism #partypolitics #partisanpolitics #politics #politicalloyalty #partyloyalty #liberalparty #trudeau #justintrudeau #pierrepoilievre #markcarney #leadership #politicalleadership

Carl Wilson is a Canadian music critic who has written for many publications including The Globe and Mail. He writes wonderful long thought-pieces on music for Slate.

Best known for his classic book Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, published in Continuum's 33 1/3 series, Wilson unpacks the claims of that book in terms of contemporary trends in music.

Let's Talk About Love is putatively a critique of Celine Dion's bestselling album Let's Talk About Love, but it's more accurately an act of self-reflection and cultural analysis that gives a robust language for understanding what's at stake when we litigate taste.

Follow Carl at https://carlwilson.substack.com/ 🎸

Why does the nation trigger so much emotion in us? How does being from a specific country shape our understanding of identity, and when does it drift into dangerous territory? Maria Janion, one of Eastern Europe’s most profound and original intellectuals, explores this fine line, and Marta Figlerowicz unpacks the trajectory of her thinking for us in The Bad Child.

Janion witnessed some of the most consequential events of the turbulent twentieth century: the rise of authoritarian nationalism in Poland, German occupation during World War II, Soviet control, and Poland’s uneasy integration into the West. As Western countries face their own nationalist resurgences, Figlerowicz believes that Maria Janion’s insights on political ontology are tools for helping us navigate our present chaos.

Marta Figlerowicz teaches comparative literature at Yale University. She is a theorist of literature from the eighteenth century to the present and of contemporary visual media. Working in over ten languages, she studies how aesthetic objects depict and mediate interpersonal and transcultural communication. Her first two books, Flat Protagonists (2016) and Spaces of Feeling (2017) reflect on trans-personal and transcultural communication within the purview of literary studies. Her current book in progress, It Must Be Possible: Global Modernisms and the Problem of Transcultural Knowledge, offers an intellectual history of the entanglements of anthropology and comparative literature at the beginning of the twentieth century from the perspectives of ethnically, racially, or (geo)politically marginalized modernist writers. Alongside her academic writing, she comments on contemporary American and Eastern European literature, film, and politics in venues such as Foreign Affairs, Jacobin, The Paris Review, and Boston Review. Figlerowicz was born in Poznan, Poland, and moved to the United States as a teenager. She obtained her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and her doctorate from UC Berkeley. A member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, her research has also been sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two daughters.#philosophy #psychoanalysis #nationalism #theory #identitypolitics #race #belonging #territory #subjectivity #mariajanion #sovietunion #anticolonialism