The Chatterbox

Join us live for a journey into the world of carbon, the most versatile element on the planet. Your tour guide is New York Times bestselling author Paul Hawken.

Carbon is the only element that animates the entirety of the living world. Though comprising a tiny fraction of Earth’s composition, our planet is lifeless without it. Yet it is maligned as the driver of climate change, scorned as an errant element blamed for the possible demise of civilization.

In his new book Carbon, Paul Hawken looks at the flow of life through the lens of carbon. Embracing a panoramic view of carbon’s omnipresence, he explores how this ubiquitous and essential element extends into every aperture of existence and shapes the entire fabric of life. Hawken charts a course across our planetary history, guiding us into the realms of plants, animals, insects, fungi, food and farms to offer a new narrative for embracing carbon’s life-giving power and its possibilities for the future of human endeavor.

Hawken will illuminate the subtle connections between carbon and our collective human experience and ask us to see nature, carbon and ourselves as exquisitely intertwined—inseparably connected.

This program contains EXPLICIT language. 

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On this episode of American Prestige, Danny and Derek speak with Chicago-based historian and writer Charlotte Rosen about the end of so-called “Resistance history”, a particular strain of liberal historiography that emerged during the first Trump administration. They talk about Resistance history’s defining characteristics, how it might have been an overcorrection to defend liberal democracy against attacks by Trump, how historians who engaged in this form of history viewed it as political action, some of the movement’s biggest figures, the apparent elitism and self-promotion among its proponents, the AHA and the decline of the history profession, and more.

Read Charlotte’s piece “The End of Resistance History” over at Protean Magazine.

On today’s show, Carlos Dávalos is joined by two atmospheric scientists, Mayra Oyola-Merced and Ángel Adames Corraliza from the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They discuss how weather systems differ across tropical and mid-latitude regions, how meteorological data is in question under the Trump presidency, and the politicization of weather agencies. And they advise people to pay attention to weather issues from around the world like the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), the potential collapse of the rainforest, and the increasing number of aerosols in the atmosphere from wildfires.

The history of modern meteorology is a Western history, but people around the world have had complex understandings of the weather for much longer than our modern data systems. Adames Corraliza explains the Taino hurricane cemi, a pre-colonial numinous object that represents the counter-clockwise circulation of hurricane winds. 

Oyola-Merced describes the inequities in weather system research, which lies primarily in the northern hemisphere. But there are open access sources of satellite weather data that counteract the dominance of the Global North in weather science. 

Featured image of Ángel Adames Corraliza, Mayra Oyola-Merced, and Carlos Dávalos courtesy of Sara Gabler/WORT.

The post Colonialism and the Weather appeared first on WORT-FM 89.9.

The folk tales collected and rewritten by the Brothers Grimm may ‘seem to come from nowhere and to belong to everyone’, Colin Burrow wrote recently in the LRB, but ‘this is an illusion’. In the latest episode of the LRB podcast, Colin joins Thomas Jones to talk about the distinctive place and time in which Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm lived and worked, as well as the enduring appeal and ‘vital weirdness’ of the tales.

Sponsored links:

Visit the Munch exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery: https://www.npg.org.uk/munch

See The Years at the Harold Pinter Theatre: https://theyearsplay.com

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Recorded on the anniversary of the coup that removed Kwame Nkrumah on February 24, 1966, and in the wake of Ghana’s recent presidential inauguration, this episode examines Ghana’s political economy to make sense of its democratic present. 

A three-decade-long tradition of electoral alternation between two dominant political parties has earned Ghana a reputation as a bastion of democracy in coup-prone West Africa. Yet its spiraling inequality, recurrent debt crises, and growing civic unrest suggest a society that is far from prosperous. Ghana’s seemingly stable neoliberal present sharply contrasts with the more turbulent early years of its postcolonial history—characterized by the high-modernist project of the Nkrumah government to push through the industrial transformation of a primary export economy crashing against the rocks of vested domestic and international interests.

How did that period of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary ambition and intrigue give way to the seemingly tamed Ghana of today? Why has a two-party system characterized by alternation without change proven so durable? In light of the anti-galamsey protests, the emergence of social movements critical of the economic status quo, and the rise of the nominally anti-imperialist military regimes to its north, are there indications in Ghanaian society of what might replace the neoliberal two-party system? To examine these themes, Sa’eed Husaini, Africa Is a Country’s West Africa regional editor and cohost of The Nigerian Scam podcast, is joined by Gyekye Tanoh, the Ghanaian social activist, political economist, and former head of the Political Economy Unit at Third World Network-Africa

Our artificial intelligence miniseries returns with a guest spot by This Machine Kills cohost, Jathan Sadowski, about his brand new second book The Mechanic and the Luddite: a Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism.

For the full episode support the show at http://patreon.com/theantifada

Song: Manuel Göttsching - E2 - E4

From the archive, this week’s episode is a conversation with author and artist Jenny Odell. Speaking about her book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, she challenges the social and cultural ideas that underpin standardized, mechanized time, and imagines how we might instead attune to the rhythms of the Earth and embrace interruptions that allow us to glimpse the inherent unpredictability and creativity of every moment. What choices, what futures, might become possible, she asks, if we stepped out of chronos time and towards a kairos time?

Read the transcript. 

Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time. 

Photo by Chani Bockwinkel.

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Civilisation always wants more energy.

The idea that our global society will merely switch from one energy source to another is fantasy masquerading as policy. Every time human beings discover a new energy source our overall consumption of raw materials increases. Whether that’s wood powering newly discovered coal mines in the 19th Century, or fossil fuels manufacturing renewable technology, the history of human energy consumption shows we have no precedent for the policy adopted by every single nation in the world.

So where did the idea come from?

Jean-Baptise Fressoz, historian and author of More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy, joins me to explain this false history — that we have projected a story of technology onto a story of materials, explaining that raw materials never become obsolete. He explains how the phrase “energy transition” was coined by atomic scientists after World War 2, and only gained traction after being adopted by President Jimmy Carter, revealing how these fantastical notions were rubbished in the scientific discourse until the private sector inserted itself into the conversation, buttressed by the nonsense published by neoclassical economists.

Jean-Baptiste’s research is astounding, and this episode is filled with incredible insights and revelations, and he ultimately points to the same conclusion as almost every guest on this podcast: There is no such thing as “decarbonisation” or dematerialisation”. The only meaningful policy that will protect the planet is reducing our pollution and consumption.

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Laurie Taylor talks to Ivan Markovic, Lecturer in Human Geography at Durham University, about the unique social atmosphere surrounding tobacco use in modern Britain, from its encouragement as part of the Home Front ‘mood management’ during the Second World War to the impact of smoking on 1980s workplace regulations and the UK ban on its use in public places in 2007. Does smoking still play a significant part in the British cultural imagination? Also, Tricia Starks, Professor of History at the University of Arkansas, discusses cigarettes and the Soviet smoking habit. How did the USSR become the first mass smoking society whilst simultaneously opposing this quintessential capitalist product?

Producer: Jayne Egerton