WFHB

Today’s show “The Disaster of Development: On Biodiversity and Species Extinction” with guest Eduardo Brodizio will forgo our usual format of segments and music breaks in favor of bringing you as much conversation as possible in the time allotted to us. Our single musical selection today is McCoy Tyner’s “Utopia” off of the 1968 album …

Today’s show "The Disaster of Development: On Biodiversity and Species Extinction" with guest Eduardo Brodizio will forgo our usual format of segments and music breaks in favor of bringing you as much conversation as possible in the time allotted to us.

Our single musical selection today is McCoy Tyner’s “Utopia” off of the 1968 album Tender Moments, featuring Tyner on piano, Lee Morgan on Trumpet, and Bernie Maupin on tenor saxophone. To me, Jazz makes a difference. To me, Utopia is that pastoral golden age that likely has no there to it, but seems far more plausible as a future we might construct than the techno-sterility of the cyborg optimists as we face climate disruption and species extinction.

Eduardo Brondizio sat down with me in the WFHB studios to discuss his work as the co-chair of the IPBES - that’s the Inter-governmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. What caught my attention, and what made me want to talk to Brondizio, is the glaring fact of impending extinctions that a huge number of species face and how climate disruption is but one driver of our dystopian future.

Our conversation was very broad and we only found our way back to species extinction in the final minutes of the program, instead focusing on the unequal suffering brought on by the development ethics of capitalist economies. But the IPBES is very broad and it looks at so many ways we are entangled in these systems of nature and life that it proves a narrow focus is to our terminal detriment.

In what follows we don’t speak with real specificity about what can be done but one thing seems clear to me: if you live in a city or town where there is a major institution, be it economic, poltical, governmental or educational, then you, citizen, have a focus of activist attention. You CAN be heard and these institutions can be made to act for the greater good. Let’s get utopian while we can.

And let's keep in mind the words of French Symbolist poet and novelist Remy de Gourmont, “Man is not at the pinnacle of nature; he is in nature, one of the units of life, and nothing more.”

GUEST

Eduardo Brondizio is the Co-Chair (with Sandra Diaz and Josef Settele) of the Global Assessment of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the Inter-governmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University in Bloomington.

RELATED

Welcome to IPBES

The End of Normal: The All-Encompassing Threat of Climate Change

Don’t Pull No Punches: Dahr Jamail on the End of Ice

MUSIC

"Utopia" by McCoy Tyner (Tender Moments)

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Kyrie Greenberg

Dockworkers have power: workers in the world’s ports can harness their role, at a strategic choke point, to promote their labor rights and social justice causes. Our guest Peter Cole brings such experiences to light in a comparative study of Durban, South Africa, and the San Francisco Bay Area, California. Cole’s research reveals how unions …

Dockworkers have power: workers in the world’s ports can harness their role, at a strategic choke point, to promote their labor rights and social justice causes. Our guest Peter Cole brings such experiences to light in a comparative study of Durban, South Africa, and the San Francisco Bay Area, California. Cole’s research reveals how unions effected lasting change in some of the most far-reaching struggles of modern times.

Important aspects of the labor struggle were shared by both groups: First, dockworkers in each city drew on longstanding radical traditions to promote racial equality. Second, they persevered when a new technology—container ships—sent a shockwave of layoffs through the industry. Finally, their commitment to black internationalism and leftist politics sparked transnational work stoppages to protest apartheid and authoritarianism.

Our opening song is by the Buddy Collette Big Band, recorded in 1996 at the Lincoln Theater in Washington DC, this is “Jazz By the Bay.” In 1953, a full year before the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, Buddy Collette and other California musicians helped end the “separate but equal" practices of the American Federation of Musicians in Los Angeles. Collette was instrumental in the amalgamation of two Los Angeles unions of the American Federation of Musicians - Local 47, the white branch with 15,000 members, and Local 767, the black branch with 800 members. Though successful, most work in Hollywood was still very hard to come by for black musicians, with Collette a notable exception. Buddy Collette will bookend today’s show and in between we’ll hear three iconic South African jazz songs that became anthems in the struggle against apartheid.

Segment One: Cole's research shows how logistics proves no nation is an island when it comes to racism and capitalism.

Segment Two: San Francisco and Durban, South Africa - two essential locations where a commitment to black internationalism and leftist politics sparked transnational work stoppages to protest apartheid and authoritarianism.

Segment Three: A simple metal box changed the face of the world. With containerization the cost of transportation was massively reduced and this forced changes in labor relations in manifold ways.

Segment Four: Peter Cole is the founding director of The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project (CRR19). This Race Riot, a term we’ll explore, was an explosion of racially-motivated violence, where whites “rioted” against blacks, leaving 38 people dead (23 black, 15 white) and 537 injured. The worst incident of racial violence in city history, it remains largely forgotten, and it’s this that the CRR19 seeks to correct.

GUEST

Peter Cole is a professor of history at Western Illinois University and a Research Associate in the Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Along with Dockworker Power (University of Illinois Press) he is the author of Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia (Pluto Press).

RELATED

Building Worker Power on the Docks: an interview with Peter Cole (Jacobin)

Chicago 1919 Race Riot Retrospective

Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project (YouTube)

Our guest is Vivien Fryd, Professor of Art History at Vanderbilt University, and author of Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970, published by Penn State University Press. As part of the feminist movement of the 1970s, female artists began consciously using their works to challenge social conceptions and the legal definitions …

Faith Ringgold’s "Slave Rape Story Quilt" (1984-1985)

Our guest is Vivien Fryd, Professor of Art History at Vanderbilt University, and author of Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970, published by Penn State University Press.

As part of the feminist movement of the 1970s, female artists began consciously using their works to challenge social conceptions and the legal definitions of rape and incest and to shift the dominant narrative of violence against women.

American artists such as Faith Ringgold, Suzanne Lacy, and Judy Chicago insisted on ending the silence surrounding sexual violence and helped construct an anti-rape, anti-incest counternarrative that remains vibrant today.

Second-wave feminist artists established and reiterated the importance of addressing sexual violence against women and their successors in the third wave then framed their works within that visual and rhetorical tradition. Fryd shows that this work had prepared the ground for the #MeToo Movement, but as well shows that #MeToo is the common ground on which all women walk.

Because though Fryd’s book focuses on specific artists working at a specific time, she shows how rape and incest and all forms of slavery are features of patriarchy and so-called civilization that are even celebrated in works of art, and valorized through the celebration of that art, from the Greek myths to the present day.

And take a slice of American Pie and find there "Founding Fathers," owners of black women and children, not reasoned fully human and so available for sexual use and the reproduction of profit.

Vivien Fryd is a scholar of PTSD and herself a survivor, and this groundbreaking and timely project explores sexual violence as a discrete subject of American art with open eyes and unflinching analysis.

GUEST

Vivien Green Fryd is Professor of Art History at Vanderbilt University and the author of Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815–1860 and Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe.

RELATED

A half-century before the hashtag, artists were on the front lines of #MeToo by Vivien Fryd

An Exhibition About Revolution that Keeps Faith with Ringgold

Faith Ringgold review – critique of racist America as relevant as ever

Meet the College Women Who Are Starting a Revolution Against Campus Sexual Assault by Vanessa Grigoriadis

The Persistence of Patriarchy: An Interview with Carol Gilligan (Interchange)

MUSIC

Joni Mitchell, “Not to Blame” (1994) Turbulent Indigo

Rhiannon Giddens, “At the Purchaser’s Option” (2017) Freedom Highway

Tori Amos, “Pandora’s Aquarium” (1998) From the Choirgirl Hotel

Peggy Seeger, “Reclaim the Night” (1979) Different Therefore Equal

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Kyrie Greenberg

In her new book, Carceral Capitalism, poet and scholar Jackie Wang confronts mass incarceration in the US by delving into the processes that feed into and maintain the prison system: anti-black racism, predatory lending, algorithmic policing, privatized prisons, credit scams, data analytics and histories of exclusion. The so-called ‘race-neutral’ technologies like credit scoring, data mining, …

In her new book, Carceral Capitalism, poet and scholar Jackie Wang confronts mass incarceration in the US by delving into the processes that feed into and maintain the prison system: anti-black racism, predatory lending, algorithmic policing, privatized prisons, credit scams, data analytics and histories of exclusion. The so-called ‘race-neutral’ technologies like credit scoring, data mining, and algorithmic policing provide a justifying veneer of scientific legitimacy so that criminality and poverty become self-fulfilling prophecies of capitalist rationality.

What we see happening in Ferguson and other cities around the country is not the creation of livable spaces, but the creation of living hells. When people are trapped in a cycle of debt it also can affect their subjectivity and how they temporally inhabit the world by making it difficult for them to imagine and plan for the future. What psychic toll does this have on residents? How does it feel to be routinely dehumanized and exploited by the police?—from Carceral Capitalism

Guest

JACKIE WANG is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster, a PhD student at Harvard University, and author of Carceral Capitalism, published by MIT Press in their Semiotext(e) / Intervention Series.

RELATED

Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the politics of Safety by Jackie Wang

Against Racial Capitalism, from Occupy to the Present by Dan Nemser (book review)

The 'Superpredator' Scare (NYT video documentary)

The Cybernetic Cop: The Future of Policing (Music, text, voice & RoboCop collage by Jackie Wang, produced with assistance from Alexander.)

PALANTIR has secretly been using New Orleans to test its predictive policing technology (The Verge, Feb 27, 2018)

MUSIC

From Archie Shepp's Attica Blues

"Attica Blues"

"Steam (Part 1)"

"Blues for Brother George Jackson"

"Ballad for a Child"

"Quiet Dawn"

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

In Red Meat Republic author Joshua Specht brings to life a turbulent era marked by Indian wars, Cowboy myths, Chicago labor unrest, and food riots in the streets of New York. He shows how the enduring success of the cattle-beef complex—centralized, low cost, and meatpacker dominated—was a consequence of the meatpackers’ ability to make their …

In Red Meat Republic author Joshua Specht brings to life a turbulent era marked by Indian wars, Cowboy myths, Chicago labor unrest, and food riots in the streets of New York. He shows how the enduring success of the cattle-beef complex—centralized, low cost, and meatpacker dominated—was a consequence of the meatpackers’ ability to make their interests overlap with those of a hungry public, while the interests of struggling ranchers, desperate workers, and bankrupt butchers took a backseat.

The wide availability of beef has long been deeply entwined with the expansion of American commerce and power. As cattle ranching and meat-packing transformed the economy in the late nineteenth century, the United States acquired new territories, the apparatus of the state grew, and Americans came to expect cheap and plentiful meat.

How that came to be the case seems a representative story of the US, where, “After all, the chief business of the American people is business,” to quote president Calvin Coolidge.

Our opening song is "Don’t Fence Me In," written by Robert Fletcher and Cole Porter in 1934, performed by Roy Rogers as well as Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, and Frank Sinatra stumbled through it on the Lucky Strike sponsored program Your Hit Parade. This song, like many cowboy songs, is chock full of irony on its face, but especially so when a woman sings it, from Rosemary Clooney and Ella Fitzgerald to this 1996 version by Lari White. The idealism that imagines freedom and open spaces like the so-called open range, masks the genocidal violence of manifest destiny and the labor oppression that accompanies the golden dreams of industrial capitalists...who has the freedom to roam in the USA?

GUEST

Joshua Specht is an environmental and business historian of the nineteenth-century United States and a lecturer in History at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He’s currently a visiting assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

RELATED

The Price of Plenty: How Beef Changed America by Joshua Specht

Why Are Men So Obsessed With Steak? by Joshua Specht

Roll Jim Crow (Nan Enstad, Cigarettes, Inc.)

The Wages of Factory Work (David Ranney, Living and Dying on the Factory Floor)

The Business of Blaming the Worker (Jon Karmel, Dying to Work)

Two amputations a week: the cost of working in a US meat plant

MUSIC

"Don’t Fence Me In" performed by Lari White (featuring Trisha Yearwood and Shelby Lynne)

"Home on the Range" performed by Neil Young

"Eat Steak" by Reverend Horton Heat

"Beef" by KRS-One (Boogie Down Productions)

"The Last Round-Up" by Stan Kenton and Tex Ritter

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Wes Martin