The Conversation

Patrick Crouch is the Program Manager at the Earthworks Urban Farm in Detroit, Michigan. The farm is a project of the Capuchin Soup Kitchen and is the only certified organic farm in the city. 

Agriculture's urban history is an early theme in our conversation, as is the need to make food a human right rather than a market commodity. We also discuss how the structure of modern civilization, from our urban planning to our economy, encourages us to value people solely for their productive capacity.

Like Wes Jackson, Patrick walks between two ideological poles we have seen in this project. His outlook is at once physicalist, secular, and scientific, but he is unimpressed by scientific utopianism. At the same time, while he encourages communing with the world and appreciating its intangible qualities, he rejects biocentrism as impossible and argues that one can find other life intrinsically valuable without spirituality.

Jenny Lee is a co-director of Allied Media Projects, a Detroit organization focused on the intersection of media and social justice. AMP stages the annual Allied Media Conference and, partnered with the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition, organizes on a variety of media education and outreach programs for communities marginalized by traditional media.

Jenny and I talk about digital justice, inequality, media landscapes (or should we call them ecologies?), the relationship between offline and online community, narratives, and the myth of individualism. You will hear echoes of systems thinking that has appeared in Frances Whitehead, Wes Jackson, and David Korten.  Speaking of Korten, he appears directly when we discuss narratives. Gabriel Stempinski's ideas are present but offstage, especially when we discuss whether the internet can foster meaningful physical communities.

As you will soon learn, Frances Whitehead is a remarkably difficult person to put a label on. Artist, designer (designist?), planner, environmental thinker, dot-connector, collaborator... the list could go on. Our conversation spanned two recording sessions, totaling 7.5 hours and producing 5.5 hours of tape. I have edited this down to 36 minutes and, of course, sacrificed an immense amount of content and nuance. So view this as a fast and condensed introduction to Frances' thought.

And what themes come up, you ask? Complexity is a unifying theme, tying together the prospect of an environmental crisis with the new role of art and artists. We also talk about how excess irony can cripple change, the difference between intentionality and morality, and the necessity of creating new knowledge on the borders of specialties.

Aengus and Micah return to interfere with your podcast enjoyment. In their third status update, they attempt to synthesize some of the broader trends in The Conversation to date, from the rift between anthropocentrists and biocentrists to the difference between tech optimists and tech skeptics. They also look at the appeal of teleological explanations and concept of historical progress. The update concludes with a dissection of the (flawed?) concept of The Conversation.

Carolyn Raffensperger, JD, is the executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network and the author of Precautionary Tools for Shaping Environmental Policy and Protecting Public Health and the Environment. Not surprisingly, she is well known for her work on the precautionary principle, but her thought ranges across a wide variety of questions that address the relationship between law and the environment.

This is the first substantive discussion of law in The Conversation but, as always, we range over a variety of other topics including science as a social institutions, the tension between the individual and the collective, and spirituality. Utilitarianism is a large part of this conversation and Carolyn argues that it is the invisible idea beneath much of our socially and environmentally reckless behavior.

Carolyn's episode connects to a large number of other conversations in the project, from moments of resonance with Timothy Morton and Wes Jackson to a sharp critique of Max More, David Miller, and Robert Zubrin. The back-and-forth between More's proactionary principle and Raffensperger's precautionary principle is especially intriguing.

The episode concludes with a suggestion that The Conversation is not amongst our interviewees, but between interviewees and audience. Does Carolyn's critique destroy the hypothesis beneath this project? Rest assured, Micah and I will discuss.

Dr. Wes Jackson is the founder and director of The Land Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to rethinking agricultural practice and creating new farming systems which result in conservation and ecosystem resilience. Wes's conversation begins with soil and rapidly expands to address how we make choices about the massively complex and intertwined systems we live within--there is definitely a resonance between Wes Jackson, Timothy Morton, and David Korten. The problem of scientific fundamentalism also arises and Wes presents a thorough critique of many ideas put forth by Robert Zubrin and Max More (would Colin Camerer fall into that category? You tell us). Hubris, creativity, limits, and the fallacy of unlimited growth are all major themes as well.

Dr. Robert Zubrin is the president of The Mars Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the exploration and colonization of Mars. We begin by discussing why space exploration and colonization is good but, as with my conversation with Chris McKay, Robert and I use space as an entry to discussing issues back on Earth. A major theme of this conversation is environmentalism, which Robert classifies as a form of anti-humanism, offering a strong anthrpocentric response to the biocentrism of Jan Lundberg and David Korten. This flows into a conversation about how we define progress and where we find value, in which John Zerzan's ideas make their inevitable cameo. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of Robert's mixed feelings about the transhumanist ideas discussed by Max More.

David Miller is a state representative and mineral explorer in Wyoming. Rep. Miller was the architect of Wyoming's House Bill 85, the so-called "Doomsday Bill," which created a committee to study Wyoming's response to a collapse of the US Federal Government. Our conversation spans themes from across the entire project, from the transhumanism of Max More to the primitivism of John Zerzan to the scientific optimism of Ariel Waldman. This conversation also grows naturally out of the previous conversation with Dr. Joseph Tainter. Similar themes of debt and complexity arise and Rome makes another appearance, but the context is different this time. The episode concludes with Micah and Aengus discussing the role of facts in the project and if one can be a technological positivist without opening the door to transhumanism.

Dr. Joseph Tainter is an anthropologist and historian who has studied collapse in numerous ancient civilization and penned The Collapse of Complex Societies. This is our first deeply historical episode and Dr. Tainter begins by offering his definition of complexity and taking us through the story of Western Rome's collapse. Extrapolating from the past, Dr. Tainter paints an alarming scene of our possible future. In our conversation, he critiques the primitivism of John Zerzan, the transhumanism of Max More, and the technological optimism of Ariel Waldman and Colin Camerer. What are we left with? Not optimism, not pessimism but, perhaps, Ragnarok.

David Korten is an economist, author, and progressive activist with a background in international business. He is the president of the Living Economy Forum, co-chair of the New Economy Working Group, co-founder of YES! Magazine, and a member of the Club of Rome. His books include When Corporations Rule the World and The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. Our conversation covered a broad range of topics from economics to ecology, cultural myths to systems thinking. As you would expect, connections abound: questioning the purpose of an economy ties David's conversation directly to Laura Musikanski, Timothy Morton's mesh returns in a different form, and we hear a bit of the biocentric/anthropocentric tension that appeared in my conversation with Chris McKay.