Stories, Poems & Music - The Creative Process

How can music challenge systemic oppression and bring about social change? How can we envision alternative paths while avoiding the pitfalls of past paradigms?

Jake Fergusonis an award-winning musician known for his work with The Heliocentrics and as a solo artist under the name The Brkn Record. Alongside legendary drummer Malcolm Catto, Ferguson has composed two film scores and over 10 albums, collaborating with icons like Archie Shepp, Mulatu Astatke, and Melvin Van Peebles. His latest album is The Architecture of Oppression Part 2. The album also features singer and political activist Jermain Jackman, a former winner of The Voice (2014) and the T.S. Eliot Prize winning poet and musician, Anthony Joseph.

“I think as humans, we forget. We are often limited by our own stereotypes, and we don't see that in everyone there's the potential for beauty and love and all these things. And I think The Architecture of Oppression, both parts one and two, are really a reflection of all the community and civil rights work that I've been doing for the same amount of time, really - 25 years. And I wanted to try and mix my day job and my music side, so bringing those two sides of my life together. I wanted to create a platform for black artists, black singers, and poets who I really admire. Jermain is somebody I've worked with for probably about six, seven years now. He's also in the trenches of the black civil rights struggle. We worked together on a number of projects, but it was very interesting to then work with Jemain in a purely artistic capacity. And it was a no-brainer to give Anthony a call for this second album because I know of his pedigree, and he's much more able to put ideas and thoughts on paper than I would be able to.”

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Environmentalists, writers, artists, activists, and public policy makers explore the interconnectedness of living beings and ecosystems. They highlight the importance of conservation, promote climate education, advocate for sustainable development, and underscore the vital role of creative and educational communities in driving positive change.

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www.maxrichtermusic.com
https://studiorichtermahr.com

Max Richter’s music featured in this episode are “On the Nature of Daylight” from The Blue Notebooks, “Path 19: Yet Frailest” from Sleep.

Music is courtesy of Max Richter, Universal Music Enterprises, and Mute Song.

“The natural world has its own sonic language. Its own fingerprints. And that's one of the beautiful things about being out here. There is another acoustic environment, another sort of sonic fingerprint, and it is always changing. Every day is a sort of a different sound picture. I walk out the door and you do hear it changing over time. The leaves are coming in now, different kinds of bird song. The wind sounds different. It's a wonderful thing to be around and experience.” —Max Richter

Excerpts of interviews from One Planet Podcast & The Creative Process

SY MONTGOMERY
NYTimes Bestselling Author of Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell, Secrets of the Octopus, The Hawk’s Way: Encounters with Fierce Beauty, and other books

MAX RICHTER
Award-winning Composer, Pianist & Environmentalist (The Blue Notebooks, Waltz with Bashir, Arrival, Ad Astra) His album SLEEP is the most streamed classical record of all time. Cofounder of Studio Richter Mahr

MERLIN SHELDRAKE
Biologist & Bestselling Author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, Winner of the Wainwright Prize 2021

THOMAS CROWTHER
Ecologist - Co-chair of the Board for UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration - Founder of Restor

TIOKASIN GHOSTHORSE
Founder/Host of First Voices Radio - Master Musician of the Ancient Lakota Flute

ERLAND COOPER
Nature’s Songwriter - Composer of “Folded Landscapes”

RICK BASS
Environmentalist & Story Prize Award-winning Author of “Why I Came West”, “For a Little While” - Fmr. Geologist - Organizer of Climate Aid: The Voice of the Forest

PETER SINGER
“Most Influential Living Philosopher” - Author, Founder of The Life You Can Save

KATHLEEN ROGERS
President of EarthDay.ORG

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
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www.maxrichtermusic.com
https://studiorichtermahr.com

Max Richter’s music featured in this episode are “On the Nature of Daylight” from The Blue Notebooks, “Path 19: Yet Frailest” from Sleep.

Music is courtesy of Max Richter, Universal Music Enterprises, and Mute Song.

Photos courtesy of Unsplash
Photo credit: Kyle Johnson, Sebastian Unrau, Abner abiu Castillo diaz, Deepak Nautiyal

Will AI become conscious? President Biden has just unveiled a new executive order on AI — the U.S. government’s first action of its kind — requiring new safety assessments, equity and civil rights guidance, and research on AI’s impact on the labor market. With this governance in place, can tech companies be counted on to do the right thing for humanity? 

Susan Schneider is a philosopher, artificial intelligence expert, and founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University. She is author of Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, and The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. She held the NASA Chair with NASA and the Distinguished Scholar Chair at the Library of Congress. She is now working on projects related to advancements in AI policy and technology, drawing from neuroscience research and philosophical developments and writing a new book on the shape of intelligent systems.

"It's been surprising to me how quiet things have been in the humanities. Maybe we're all just taking it in, but I also think that - and this really makes me sad - the tech leaders have been looked at by the media and probably by the politicians themselves as being the important voices at the table for the implications of technology. And there's been a lot of confusion about scientific development versus speculation. So you're seeing everybody wanting to interview the CEOs at the big tech companies or the big AI researchers. And then all of a sudden the idea that they somehow have a monopoly on ideas about conscious machines, for example, or merging with AI. Elon Musk never stops with philosophical claims, and a lot of times you have to wonder what they're supposed to be doing for his stock values as opposed to whether they're true or not. But people just take this, sadly, as what the scientists or AI companies say. You know, well, 'they know the science, so it's got to be true.' But that is not the case. That's where the humanities should be more involved. And it's been a slow plotting situation to see people really step up. I've just been sort of taking it all in, and I've been doing a lot of advising in Washington. So maybe we're all waiting to see where this all goes, right? But I think at this point, I finally achieved a sort of confidence about how I think it's going to play out."

www.fau.edu/artsandletters/philosophy/susan-schneider/index
www.fau.edu/future-mind/

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Dr. Joëlle Gergis is an award-winning climate scientist and writer at the Australian National University. She served as a lead author for the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report and is the author of Humanity’s Moment: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia. Joëlle has also contributed chapters to The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg, and Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua.

"We're really starting to witness serious climate extremes that can no longer be ignored. And the IPCC, one of our key conclusions to that report was that effectively the human fingerprint on the climate system is now undeniable. It is now an established fact that we have warmed every single continent, every ocean basin on the planet. And again, that's a pretty serious thing to contemplate that human activity from the burning of fossil fuels and the clearing of land has led to this energy imbalance in the earth system, which is leading to a rapidly shifting climate."

http://joellegergis.com
https://climatehistory.com.au
www.blackincbooks.com.au/authors/jo-lle-gergis

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Novelists, poets, activists, translators discuss the Art of Writing and The Creative Process. This episode features:

NEIL GAIMAN - Writer, Producer, Showrunner - The Sandman, American Gods, Good Omens, Coraline

JERICHO BROWN - Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet: The Tradition
Editor of How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill

ADA LIMÓN, U.S. Poet Laureate - The Hurting Kind, The Carrying

MARGE PIERCY - Award-winning Novelist, Poet & Activist

E.J. KOH - Award-Winning Memoirist & Poet - The Magical Language of Others, A Lesser Love

MAX STOSSEL - Award-winning Poet, Filmmaker, Speaker
Creator of Words That Move

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 Dean Spade is an organizer, speaker, author, and professor at Seattle University's School of Law, where he teaches courses on policing, imprisonment, gender, race, and social movements. Spade has been organizing racial and economic movements for queer and trans liberation for the past 20 years. Spade's books include Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law and Mutual Aid, Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). In 2002, Dean founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color, and which operates on a collective governance model. His writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Out, In These Times, Social Text, and Signs.

"The belief that marginalized and hated populations can find freedom by being recognized by law, allowed to serve in the military, allowed to marry, and protected by anti-discrimination laws and hate crime statutes is a central narrative of the United States.

Politicians, primary school textbooks, and the corporate media tell us the story that the United States left ugly histories of white supremacy behind through a civil rights movement that changed hearts, minds, and especially laws to eradicate racism and bring freedom to all. This simplified narrative is relentlessly reiterated in US culture and has played a starring role in the past four decades of lesbian and gay rights advocacy where the analogy to the Black civil rights to the Black civil rights movement has been a consistent rhetorical tool. 1. I argue that social movements must abandon the widely held belief that oppressed people can be freed by legal recognition and inclusion if we are to truly address and transform the conditions of premature death facing impoverished and criminalized populations in this period."

-Normal Life
Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law

www.deanspade.net
www.southendpress.org/2010/items/87965

www.deanspade.net/mutual-aid-building-solidarity-during-this-crisis-and-the-next/
https://srlp.org

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The lone wolf is actually alone because it's looking for connection. They leave in order to find a mate and form their own pack. If loneliness is an epidemic, what can wolves teach us about loneliness, courage, and connection?

Erica Berry is the author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear. Her essays in journalism appear in Outside, Wired, The Yale Review, The Guardian, Literary Hub, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Guernica, among other publications. Berry has taught workshops for teenagers and adults at Literary Arts, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the New York Times Student Journeys in Oxford Academia.

"And I think for so long I thought I'm only going to write about the real wolf. That's the most important thing. We've had too many stories. And yet I've gotten to a point where I just think we are living in a world where any story that comes out of my mouth is shaped by these other stories I've heard which are rooted in ecology, just like stories about biology, stories about how we name wolves are rooted in human choices. Science is tied to colonialism. Stories about how people interact in the landscape are very tied to who those people are and how they feel. Are they meant to feel that they belong there?"

www.ericaberry.com
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250882264/wolfish

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Photo by Andrea Lonas

Anil Seth is a neuroscientist, author, and public speaker who has pioneered research into the brain basis of consciousness for more than twenty years. He is the author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, as well as the best-selling 30 Second Brain, and other books. He is a Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where he is Co-Director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science, and is Co-Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Program on Brain, Mind, and Consciousness, and of the Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship Programme: From Sensation and Perception to Awareness. He has a TED talk on consciousness and appeared in several films, including The Most Unknown and The Search. He has written for Aeon, The Guardian, Granta, New Scientist, and Scientific American. He was the 2017 President of the British Science Association (Psychology Section) and winner of the 2019 KidSpirit Perspectives award. He has published more than 180 academic papers and is listed in 2019 and 2020 Web of Science ‘highly cited researcher’ index, which recognizes the world’s most influential researchers over the past decade.

"This is a point in philosophy that the world as it is can never be directly apprehended by our minds. We are shielded from it by what's called a sensory veil. There are, for instance, no such thing as colors that are out there. As the artist Cezanne said, 'The colors are where the brain and the universe meet.' And color is, I think, a really good example because it is, in a sense, less than what's there because our eyes are only sensitive to three wavelengths of this huge electromagnetic spectrum, which goes all the way from x-rays and gamma rays to radio waves. And we live in a tiny, thin slice of that reality. But then out of those three wavelengths we experience our brains generate many more than three colors and almost an infinite palette of colors. So there's no sense in which our perception could ever reveal the world as it really is, that it reveals the world in a way that's very useful for us as organisms hell-bent on continuing to live and to survive."

www.anilseth.com
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/566315/being-you-by-anil-seth
https://perceptioncensus.dreamachine.world/
https://dreamachine.world/
@anilkseth

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"When I was writing On Time and Water somebody said this is not just one book. This is about your grandmother, about glaciers. You have to focus. You can't have this mythology and glacial and ocean sites, speculations about words like ocean acidification, and your grandfather's sister who is visiting Tolstoy. You have to focus. You can't put all this into a book. And then I thought, oh yes, I forgot my favorite uncle, who was the researcher of crocodiles. I also have to put him into the book. And when I put the crocodile's story into the book, it was like a keystone. Everything fell into a whole picture.

Because we live in democratic societies and literature is an art of entertainment. People want to continue reading books, and it's based on instant ways of storytelling. Of course, it's strange to live in a society where we have to entertain ourselves to understand the most important issue in the world."

Andri Snær Magnason is an award winning author of On Time and Water, The Casket of Time, LoveStar, Dreamland and The Story of the Blue Planet. His work has been published in more than 35 languages. He has a written in most genres, novels, poetry, plays, short stories, non fiction as well as being a documentary film maker. His novel, LoveStar got a Philip K. Dick Special Citation, and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire in France and “Novel of the year” in Iceland. The Story of the Blue Planet, was the first children’s book to receive the Icelandic Literary Award and has been published or performed in 35 countries. The Blue Planet received the Janusz Korczak Honorary Award in Poland 2000, the UKLA Award in the UK and Children's book of the Year in China. His book – Dreamland – a Self Help Manual for a Frightened Nation takes on these issues and has sold more than 20.000 copies in Iceland. He co directed Dreamland - a feature length documentary film based on the book. Footage from Dreamland and an interview with Andri can be seen in the Oscar Award-winning documentary Inside Job by Charles Ferguson. His most recent book, Tímakistan, the Time Casket has now been published in more than 10 languages, was nominated as the best fantasy book in Finland 2016 with authors like Ursula K. le Guin and David Mitchell. In English six books are currently available: Bónus Poetry, The Story of The Blue Planet, LoveStar, Dreamland and The Casket of Time, (Tímakistan) and On Time and Water.

www.andrimagnason.com

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