The Green Flame

This episode of the Green Flame comes to you from Germany. We interview Heide Goettner-Abendroth, philosopher and researcher on culture and society, focused on matriarchal studies. She has published various books on matriarchal society and culture, and has become the founding mother of Modern Matriarchal Studies. We also include three poems by Heide in German and English.

The International Academy for Matriarchal Studies and Matriarchal Spirituality: https://www.hagia.de/en/international-academy-hagia/

https://www.goettner-abendroth.de/home/

Our song for this episode is "Grace" by Beth Quist. http://bethquist.com/

This episode of The Green Flame podcast focuses on the proposed Batoka Gorge Dam on the Zambezi River on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe, just downstream from the world-famous Victoria Falls.

The Batoka Gorge Dam would damage some of the most important habitat in the region and harm the local indigenous communities while profiting transnational corporations to the tune of billions. We hear from three organizers working to stop this dam.

Moonga is Zambian born and currently lives in the United Kingdom. She has lived in the area close to the Zambezi and the Gorge currently under threat. Moonga has a passion for the environment and is an activist on issues that affect the under-privileged in Zambia.

Marie-Louise Kellet is an organizer with "Save the Zambezi," a Waterkeeper Alliance Affiliate that is fighting the Batoka Gorge Dam project, and is based in Capetown, South Africa.

Rebecca Wildbear is a river and soul guide who helps people tune in to the mysteries that live within the Earth community, dreams, and their own wild Nature, so they may live a life of creative service. She has been a guide with Animas Valley Institute since 2006 and is the author of the forthcoming book Playing & Praying: Soul Stories to Inspire Personal & Planetary Transformation.

For this episode of The Green Flame, we speak with Sergio Alexander Kochergin, a filmmaker, organizer, former U.S. Marine, and native of Ukraine. He did two deployments to Iraq in 2003, 2004, and 2005, and testified before members of Congress in 2008 as part of the new Winter Soldier hearings organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War. Sergio lives in Michigan City, Indiana where he is the co-founder of Politics Art Roots Culture, or the PARC center, which is an event and community space.

We speak about Sergio's childhood in Crimea, his experiences emigrating to the U.S. and joining the military, his time in Iraq and how he came to oppose the war, and the political situation in Ukraine over the past decade. Sergio draws fascinating parallels between the civil war in Ukraine and what is happening in the U.S. today.

PARC Media (Produced by Sergio): https://www.patreon.com/PARCMEDIA

Fragments - AERØHEAD https://soundcloud.com/aerohead Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0

Radical Discourse: The Wind That Shakes the Barley

This episode of The Green Flame is a group discussion of the 2006 Ken Loach film "The Wind That Shakes the Barley."

We recommend watching the film before listening to this episode to better understand the discussion. You can view the film for free on Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/TheWindThatShakesTheBarleyFULLMOVIE

The title of the film "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" comes from an Irish ballad written by Robert Dwyer Joyce (1836–1883), a Limerick-born poet and professor of English literature. The song is written from the perspective of a doomed young Wexford rebel who is about to sacrifice his relationship with his loved one and plunge into the cauldron of violence associated with the 1798 rebellion in Ireland. The references to barley in the song derive from the fact that the rebels often carried barley or oats in their pockets as provisions for when on the march. This gave rise to the post-rebellion phenomenon of barley growing and marking the "croppy-holes," mass unmarked graves into which slain rebels were thrown, symbolizing the regenerative nature of Irish resistance to British rule. As the barley will grow every year in the spring this is said to symbolize Irish resistance to British oppression and that Ireland will never yield and will always oppose British rule on the island.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley

I sat within a valley green, I sat there with my true love, My sad heart strove the two between, The old love and the new love, - The old for her, the new that made Me think of Ireland dearly, While soft the wind blew down the glade And shook the golden barley

'Twas hard the woeful words to frame To break the ties that bound us 'Twas harder still to bear the shame Of foreign chains around us And so I said, "The mountain glen I'll seek next morning early And join the brave United Men!" While soft winds shook the barley

While sad I kissed away her tears, My fond arms 'round her flinging, The foeman's shot burst on our ears, From out the wildwood ringing, - A bullet pierced my true love's side, In life's young spring so early, And on my breast in blood she died While soft winds shook the barley!

I bore her to the wildwood screen, And many a summer blossom I placed with branches thick and green Above her gore-stain'd bosom:- I wept and kissed her pale, pale cheek, Then rushed o'er vale and far lea, My vengeance on the foe to wreak, While soft winds shook the barley!

But blood for blood without remorse, I've ta'en at Oulart Hollow And placed my true love's clay-cold corpse Where I full soon will follow; And 'round her grave I wander drear, Noon, night, and morning early, With breaking heart whene'er I hear The wind that shakes the barley!

For this episode of the Green Flame we celebrate the United States launch of the Women's Human Rights Campaign with WHRC U.S. co-contact Thistle Pettersen and U.S. WHRC media moderator Austin DeVille.

Our skill-share highlights the efforts of the Women's Human Rights Campaign's work to offer mutual support in the face of inevitable push back. We thank Thistle for permission to include her performance Michigan aka Gender Hurts in our program.

Declaration: https://www.womensdeclaration.com/en/

US WHRC: https://www.womensdeclaration.com/en/country-info/united-states-america/

In this episode of The Green Flame, we interview Joshua Wright about a new forest protection blockade established last week on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. The blockade protects ancient old-growth forest stands, including the 9th largest Alaska Yellow Cedar known to exist and other trees thousands of years old, in the Fairy Creek area near Port Renfrew, on unceded Pacheedaht territory. Support is urgently needed to maintain and expand this blockade. As Joshua explains, this is a critical moment for protecting the last old-growth forests on Vancouver Island. Residents of the region: contact the blockaders, donate, spread the word, and most importantly go to the blockade yourself.

https://dgrnewsservice.org/resistance/direct-action/occupation/media-release-blockade-to-protect-the-unlogged-fairy-creek-headwaters/

https://www.facebook.com/FairyCreekBlockade

https://www.theprogress.com/news/protesters-showcase-massive-old-yellow-cedar-as-port-renfrew-area-forest-blockade-continues/

Track: Evening Walk — Amine Maxwell [Audio Library Release] Music provided by Audio Library Plus Watch: https://youtu.be/PbvXvSzaJU4 Free Download / Stream: https://alplus.io/evening-walk

In this episode we discuss the film Planet of The Humans, directed by Jeff Gibbs and produced by Ozie Zehner and Michael Moore. The film shows how the environmental movement -- as defined by large environmental organizations, what we call big green environmentalism -- has been largely been co-opted by corporations and finance, and refocused from the natural world to so-called green technology that, despite what we may like to believe, will not and cannot solve the climate problem.

The film was released on Earth Day 2020 and has been viewed over 8 million times since then. The backlash to the film by the big green environmentalists was swift; within days, many big names in these organizations had posted harsh criticism of the film. Because the film dares to question the technologies these organizations have been pushing on us -- primarily wind and solar -- most criticism focused on how the film got small and inconsequential details of these technologies wrong---for instance whether solar panels are 8% efficient or 15% efficient. Of course, this misses the point of the film entirely, which is that these technologies are simply a means to keep our industrial civilization going just a little bit longer so that we may continue to destroy what's left of the natural world.

The film's detractors succeeded in removing the film from YouTube for several days in late May and early June using a copyright claim over 4 seconds of film; 4 seconds that clearly falls under fair use. The film is now available again and continues to be offered for free.

We discuss some of the questions raised by the film, the authoritarian nature of modern-day solar, wind, and biomass technologies, our responses to the film, parts of the film that resonated with us most deeply, perhaps the most controversial topic touched on the film -- population, how the media fails to communicate the full impacts of technology, the film as part of the conversation about the price of technology in our lives, and more.

Links: Film: https://planetofthehumans.com/ Interview with film maker Jeff Gibbs on The Green Flame: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gExefKn7XM Interview with film maker Jeff Gibbs on Resistance Radio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pila-SBBk5M

Reverie (Piano Version) ft. Adarsh PV by Lahar https://soundcloud.com/musicbylahar Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0

In this episode we speak with Dahr Jamail. In late 2003, weary of the overall failure of the US media to accurately report on the realities of the war in Iraq for the Iraqi people, Dahr Jamail went to the Middle East to report on the war himself, where he has spent more than one year in Iraq as one of only a few independent US journalists in the country. Dahr has also reported from Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan. He has also reported extensively on veterans' resistance against US foreign policy, and is now focusing on anthropogenic climate disruption and the environment.

Dahr's stories have been published with Truthout, Inter Press Service, Tom Dispatch, The Sunday Herald in Scotland, The Guardian, Foreign Policy in Focus, Le Monde, Le Monde Diplomatique, The Huffington Post, The Nation, The Independent, and Al Jazeera, among others. Dahr is currently and has been a feature writer for Truthout.org for five years, and his climate feature page there is titled 'Climate Disruption Dispatches'.

His writing has been translated into French, Polish, German, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic and Turkish. On radio as well as television, Dahr has reported for Democracy Now! and Al-Jazeera, and has appeared on the BBC, NPR, and numerous other stations around the globe.

Dahr's reporting has earned him numerous awards, including the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Award for Journalism, The Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, the Joe A. Callaway Award for Civic Courage, and five Project Censored awards.

Celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Izzy Award, in 2018 the Park Center for Independent Media (PCIM) at Ithaca College awarded Dahr an Izzy for his "path-breaking and in-depth reporting in 2017" exposing "environmental hazards and militarism." The Izzy Award, presented for outstanding achievement in independent media, is named in memory of I.F. "Izzy" Stone, the dissident journalist who launched I.F. Stone's Weekly in 1953 and challenged McCarthyism, racism, war and government deceit.

The End of Ice is one of Smithsonian Magazine's 10 Best Science Books of 2019, and was a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award in 2020.https://www.dahrjamail.net/

Track: Fusion — KV [Audio Library Release] Music provided by Audio Library Plus Watch: https://youtu.be/gp613GReEo4 Free Download / Stream: https://alplus.io/fusion

This episode of The Green Flame features an interview with James Darling who is currently on the 3rd day of a hunger strike against logging of old-growth forests in British Columbia, Canada (occupied First Nations territory). You can contact James at: (250) 816-4321, or at [email protected].

Press release: https://www.focusonvictoria.ca/letters/6/

Music: "Weightless" by LiQWYD. https://soundcloud.com/liqwyd Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0.

This podcast features two interviews. First, we speak with Joshua Wright about current logging of old-growth forest in the Mattole River Watershed, as well as on Vancouver Island and in Alaska. Second, we speak with Will Falk. Will is currently journeying the length of the Ohio River (the most polluted river in the United States) exploring the history and ongoing colonization and desecration of the watershed.

Will Falk's work can be found at:

• https://www.theohioriverspeaks.org/
• http://willfalk.org/

Joshua Wright's work can be found at:

• https://www.universalwildlands.com/about-the-film
• https://igg.me/at/DeschutesCampaign
• Forest defense activists in northern California can be reached on Instagram. @Redwoodforestdefense are the Green Diamond activists, and @Blockades.babes is the Lost Coast activists.

Here's two photos of the logging and threatened forests in northern California:

Music:

• The Clock (instrumental) by RYYZN https://soundcloud.com/ryyzn Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported
• Nobita by Smith the Master https://smiththemister.bandcamp.com/ Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported