Pretty Heady Stuff

Alyssa Battistoni is an assistant professor of political science at Barnard College. She is the coauthor of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal and the recent Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature.

Alyssa knows why you feel helpless to stop the end of nature. In Free Gifts, she looks at the history of environmental degradation under capitalism and explains how an economic system that expropriates from the natural world has normalized an unapologetically exploitative relationship to the Earth. Her work gives us essential tools and strategies for regaining the freedom to respect nature, built from her sense that we don't actually want to dominate it, but instead that something is putting pressure on us in our everyday lives and compelling that domination.

In the end, she contends, we don't need individual responsibility, we need collective power to preserve the systems that sustain us, and end the systems that don't. We need the power to restructure the system that is leading us down the path to environmental collapse.

Battistoni writes that "capitalism limits our ability to treat nonhuman nature as something other than a free gift. It constrains our ability, individually and collectively, to make genuine decisions about how to value and relate to the nonhuman world, and to take responsibility for those decisions." What she calls the "structure of market rule" compromises "our ability to take responsibility for the world we have made." This is because ultimately "markets are indifferent to our purposes, seeing only prices" that "detach intentions from consequences."

We talk about these ideas, and about the consequences of the now-normative "absorption" theory of pollution, which commodifies our ability, as living beings, to suck in and survive all of the poisons produced under capitalism. In the end, it's a hopeful conversation, though; one that bangs the drum for winning back the planet.

Timothy Leduc is faculty in Land-based and Indigenous Social Work at Wilfrid Laurier University in Brantford, Ontario. He is author of A Canadian Climate of Mind (2016) that looks at climate change as a spiritual initiation into healing the pain at the root of modern culture.In this conversation, we talk about being stuck within a system that extracts and destroys the Earth, not knowing how to hold onto hope within that system, and being, instead, moved by the numinous "technologies" of nature. At a time when there is crisis everywhere, can education find ground to bring people together? Can social workers acquaint themselves with ecological connections? Are we able, as a people, to break from the doom and gloom of modern industrial capitalism?Leduc is a thinker who gains power and solace from engaging with Indigenous knowledges; knowing that he is limited as a settler and as a human with a necessarily finite capacity for reasoning, he also finds meaning in humility.

James Adomian is a brilliant stand-up comedian, voice actor, writer and impressionist known for his work on Comedy Bang! Bang!, Last Comic Standing, and his many hilarious podcast appearances. He's also one of the funniest people in the world. Renowned for his impressions of figures like Bernie Sanders, David Attenborough, Elon Musk and Mike Lindell, Adomian's recent comedy special Path of Most Resistance showcases a remarkable range of talents, including the ability to skewer some of the central political absurdities of our time. There's a tendency to see comedy as political in a sort of surreptitious way: sneaking it past people by making them laugh. ‪@JamesAdomianXOXO‬ is a good example of this, but in our conversation he discusses the different strategies comedians take today to commit to what's historically been called "gallows humour." Do artists build trust with their audiences so that they can bring them to the gallows, or is it better to find a tactic that puts them immediately off-balance: bombarding them with the obvious perils that populate the world?In the places where Path of Most Resistance dives into these lived realities, Adomian can bring you through that peril using a dizzying array of characters. One of the things he explains is that comedy has been hamstrung by the paucity of opportunities to do real sketch comedy. The centrality of Saturday Night Live means that the sketch work that exists in its orbit really stays in the shadows, unless it buys into the lowest common denominator logics of "the algorithm."This is where James is at his most vociferous: eviscerating the "brute force" dumbing down of audiences today that are being made more vacuous by a highly resourced right populism and dog whistle politics of division and discrimination thriving on social media. One of the most fun interviews I've ever done. Hope you enjoy!

Watch Path of Most Resistance on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ5DFrdOyig

Harsha Walia is a South Asian activist and writer based in Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish Territories. Author of the essential Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Walia has been involved in community-based grassroots migrant justice, feminist, anti-racist, Indigenous solidarity, anti-capitalist, Palestinian liberation, and anti-imperialist movements, including No One is Illegal and Women’s Memorial March Committee. The poet and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa once wrote that “The world is not a safe place to live in. We shiver in separate cells in enclosed cities, shoulders hunched, barely keeping the panic below the surface of the skin, daily drinking shock along with our morning coffee, fearing the torches being set to our buildings, the attacks in the streets. Shutting down.” In this discussion, Walia and I talk about working to shut down the structural forces that are trying to force us to shut down, to drink shock and resist panic.We look at the fascistic violence happening in the United States, the Trump administration’s blood-soaked invasion of Venezuela, and the ongoing push, in Canada, for a border enforcement regime that aligns more closely with the United States’ crackdown on immigration. What, if anything, does the spectre of securitized borders mean in the context of rising eco-fascism and global resource wars? Canada claims to be a climate leader and yet remains a place for rapacious extraction; we profess to being a bastion of multiculturalism and humanitarian values, but wage war on Indigenous communities and perceived others. Walia helps us understand the links between systems of border reinforcement and the monopolization of violence by police. Under capitalism, this sort of fascistic slide is central to the consolidation of moneyed power. It facilitates oligarchic rule. And the accelerating annihilation of democracy should not come as a surprise in this context. If twelve people can possess the wealth of four billion, then democracy will not be allowed to live. If eighteen trillion dollars can be hoarded by a small group of elites, then democracy will be destroyed in order for that system to continue. But we can’t let it, because the possibility of self-determination and the social good are literally at stake. This is why Walia proposes the idea of becoming ungovernable: becoming capable of democracy in the direct sense of disrupting, building support structures for disruptors and generating the momentum needed to take power and protect all people. According to Walia, the infrastructure that the left requires to contest fascism will need to be developed outside the digital realm that you are currently reading this in. If solidarity is to become a serious threat to the status quo, it cannot be reduced to a sentence shared in the comment thread. A shift could send shockwaves, but we’ll need to reanimate the democratic muscles that seem to have atrophied over the course of neoliberalism’s deranged ascent.#leftpolitics #anticapitalism #anticolonialism #ice #fuckice #antitrump #antizionism #antifascism #socialism #venezuela #handsoffvenezuela #monroedoctrine #maduroarrested #nooneisillegal

In this episode of Pretty Heady Stuff, Halifax's Poet Laureate Anna Quon talks about the places and people that her poetry comes from, why she is committed to using art as a means of documenting the suffering and joy that we experience, and how to advocate for more inclusive forms of care.

Quon is a writer and writing workshop facilitator. Her first novel, Migration Songs, was released by Invisible Publishing in 2009, and her second novel, Low, in 2013. Her latest, Where the Silver River Ends, which makes a trilogy of her first two unrelated stories, was published in 2022. Her short film Me and My Teeth is available on CBC Gem as part of the Reel East Coast series (Season 10).

In the wake of October 7, two political modalities have emerged: one is an imperialist one that seeks to forcefully normalize the retaliatory genocidal violence Israel has inflicted on Palestine, the other is an anticolonial one that refuses the racial domination of people rendered disposable by the imperial machine. A primary effect of the so-called "Palestine exception" -- where one can protest, petition and pressure government to stand up to monstrous violations of human rights, so long as they do not try to hold Israel accountable for its crimes against humanity -- is that people like Rana, who speak the truth about what is happening, are blamed, blacklisted and denigrated. In this conversation, Zaman and I discuss the ostracism and silencing she has repeatedly experienced, with the most recent attacks coming as a result of the YMCA in Halifax awarding her a Peace Medal, only to rescind it days later in the face of a targeted pro-Israel smear campaign. This is not the first time that Rana has faced backlash for resisting the destruction of Palestinian life. It must, however, be the last. The cowardice and complicity of YMCA Canada is an embarrassment for an organization that claims to be intent on "igniting the potential in people and strengthening our evolving communities." Shrinking away from the risks of confronting injustice has earned YMCA a place on the list of organizations that supporters of Palestinian liberation are encouraged to boycott. Stand in support of Rana Zaman, a crusader for human rights in spite of censorship, state-sponsored violence and Zionist propaganda. Resist the manufacturing of amnesia. Fight for a free Palestine.

Kai Bosworth is a human geographer and political ecologist, and an Associate Professor at the School of World Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University. He is currently working on a book project provisionally entitled ​Protectors of the Subsurface: Militant Investigation and Critical Imagination in Anti-Oil Activism. In this discussion, we look at his terrific book Pipeline Populism at a moment of petro-populist boosterism in Canada, the United States and in many polities globally. Pipeline Populism aims to understand opposition to pipelines in the US and the ways these moments have transformed the politics of climate justice. The book is part of Bosworth's broader interest in affect and emotion, radical politics and the ways that nature and ecology get enlisted enrolled in social projects of oppression or liberation. #pipeline #oilandgas #oil #politics #energyshift #populism

Many academic workers are striking for better labour protections, including CUPE 3916 in Nova Scotia, but where are the connections forming between different labour movements? Can we forge deeper solidarity in this moment of crisis? Do we blow up the system or try to repair it?Nora Loreto, host of the podcast Sandy and Nora Talk Politics and author of many books on politics, and Alex Khasnabish, Professor of Anthropology at Mount Saint Vincent University, help us understand why the university is such an "important social location," what its histories are, and how those histories are brought to bear on the present composition of the institution.Since universities are systematically underfunded and neoliberal austerity has further starved its labour force, these places of knowledge creation and learning have been turned into a reflection of the broader gig economy. Instructors who have to work within that system are left feeling wholly devalued, while the managerial class that operates the university are left with few levers they can pull to make change. In this context, what sort of alternative vision for the university as a site of engagement is possible? Why can't universities rehabilitate themselves and seek more community connections? Alex, Nora and I unpack these and other questions here.#university #labour #strike #collectivebargaining #unions #education #equity #leftpolitics #policyalternatives

Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She’s the editor of a number of academic journals, including the Journal of Palestine Studies. She’s also a policy member of Al-Shabaka and the Palestinian Policy Network.

Seikaly and I talk about the question of Palestine and the ongoing catastrophe. When we spoke, the central focus was famine, which for a moment felt like a moral line in the sand for even Western liberals that hadn't taken a stand. Now, Western powers are trying to shift our gaze to peace, the need for peace and to begin the reconstruction of Gaza.... By whom? We don't know. We assume Jared Kushner, since we are clearly in the worst possible universe.

The attempt, now, to normalize the murder of more than 30,000 children in Gaza, the self-congratulatory desire to move past it, ignores the fact that Gaza is still being starved and bombed. Israel is violating Trump's fake "peace plan" because it never planned to pull back; the occupation was always violence without end; it was built on what Abdaljawad Omar calls the "Zionist fantasy of total domination."

October 7th drove this hypermilitarized nation to unleash genocidal fury on the people of Palestine. Since that date, its been flexing its state-of-the-art capacity for industrial slaughter. In a recent speech, Netenyahu said that his country needs to become a modern "Super Sparta" -- meaning, more militaristic and aggressive in its ambitions, and also more isolated and garrisoned-off from the rest of the world.

Israel is an ultranationalist ethnostate with a nuclear arsenal that is threatening to respond to the collapse of what was left of its fragile public image by stockpiling more weapons and embracing their isolation. Some might say it's normal, or at least predictable, for a country that's always at war to invest so heavily in defense and to worry about fortifying its borders.... But that is not what Netenyahu meant by making Israel a "Super Sparta." Israel is building what my guest Sherene Seikaly calls a "paradigm" of imperial power, over and against much of the Arab world. And it is doing so to maintain a system of oppression and dispossession. Everything is out in the open now: the Israeli parliament just voted to annex all of the West Bank.

Omar says that there are multiple futures that could proceed from October 7th. Will this moment of insurgency against an unhinged occupying power be "the first cracks in an imperial juggernaut and its outpost, the sign of the end of their imagined permanence"? Will it mean the end of the Palestinians? he asks. Their "bodies scattered, dispersed, maimed beyond recognition." Or can it be "something else: the endurance of the unbearable, the persistence of what was meant to be erased, the resurrection of a people who refuse to vanish"?

Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano (https://www.sarahsteinlubrano.com/) got her PhD from Oxford and Masters degree from the University of Cambridge. She works with the Sense and Solidarity Initiative and the Future Narratives Lab. She's also served as the head of content at The School of Life.Her new book, Don't Talk About Politics, has me reeling. (https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/dont-talk-about-politics-9781399413916/) The implications of her no-nonsense approach to what works in political communication are pretty radical. Lubrano, I think, is trying to outline a path to more flexible, accessible ways of communicating and organizing than the ones we have. She says that the act of building social relationships--not doing more prestigious things like making documentaries and writing books--is the single most important site of politics.So, how do we make political appeals to people while reckoning with the widespread social isolation they're feeling? Sarah says that “discourse, which is so highly valued in theory in our society, appears" to be quite "ineffective in practice.” With many of the political conversations we have, it feels like there's a wedge in place before we can even begin to engage. Lubrano says it's because we're forced to choose between the model of discourse as a battle or the idea that it's a "marketplace of ideas." These two polar opposite metaphors are the only ones we seem have for how conversation nourishes a democracy. At its core, her book is concerned with what it means for democracy to be reduced to either marketing or killing. The questions that Sarah is currently taking up in her work have obviously become more pressing with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the far-right social media influencer who was shot at a public event in Utah this September. This was a globally witnessed murder that sent shockwaves through state politics, the alt-right media sphere and into the far reaches of the internet. Lubrano recently wrote in The Guardian that there are "lots of reasons why debate (and indeed, information-giving and argumentation in general) tends to be ineffective at changing people’s political beliefs. Cognitive dissonance... is one. This is the often unconscious psychological discomfort we feel when faced with contradictions in our own beliefs or actions, and it has been well documented."I connected with Sarah again, after we recorded our initial conversation about her book, because Kirk's murder represents a crossroads for a lot of people, and a moment to reflect on the poisoning of public discourse. How did Kirk change people's minds? Was it through debate? Or did his organization Turning Point mainly use the spectacle of a debate as recruitment strategy? How and when do we change our minds? #debate #rightpopulism #farrightinfluencers #democracymaynotexistbutwellmissitwhenitsgone #charliekirk #leftpolitics #politicaltheory #solidarity