For The Wild

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Giuliana Furci originally aired in June of 2021. So often fungi are pitched as being at the forefront of innovation, whether being used to create vegan leather, pharmaceuticals, or being incorporated into various biotechnology products, but this fixation on innovation can obscure our ancestral relationship to fungi and the wisdom they can share with us about decomposition. This week, we slow down to acknowledge the beauty and power of fungal decomposition with guest Giuliana Furci who shares a lesson in divine time, the transformation of energy, and the necessity of decomposition. Take a moment this week to learn about fungi’s profound interspecies companionship and the simple reality that the world cannot regenerate itself without fungi. Additionally, to learn even more about these topics, look into supporting Fungi Foundation by joining them for their Fungi Foundation Virtual Speaker Event and Fundraiser on June 26th via their profile and webpage. Giuliana

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with K’asheechtlaa (Louise Brady) originally aired in April of 2021. Many of us have access to more choices than we ever thought imaginable, in fact, it is quite easy to find ourselves amidst an abundance of products, eating foods cultivated across the world, or selecting from a myriad of variations of the same “thing”. But this “abundance” of choice masks ecological depletion, and as we gain access to that which is far from our homes, actual place-based abundance is often jeopardized. This week on the podcast we explore this in context to herring in Southeast Alaska with guest K’asheechtlaa (Louise Brady). Everything from chinook, seals, whales, eagles, halibut, and dolphins, all depend on herring directly or indirectly. In addition to nourishing so much of the Pacific marine ecosystem, these kin are embedded in the culture and spirit of  Sheetʼká (Sitka). But as herring have been utilized in pet food, fertilizer, fish meal for aquariums and salmon farms, and mar

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack) originally aired in February of 2020. From roller coaster rides at Disney World to museums dotting the Pacific Northwest, symbols of mining and the Gold Rush remain deeply enshrined in the collective imagination of the mythic West. Hidden beneath this cultural veneer, the material realities of today’s superscale mining are often out of sight, out of mind. In this week’s In The Field episode, we trace the historical contours and material legacy of the mining industry across so-called British Columbia, unearthing stories from a region that bears an estimated 1,100 abandoned mines, 150-year-old mining laws, and more mining exploration companies than anywhere else on Earth. Guided by the raw testimony of mother, water protector, and organizer Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack), this episode braids together the history of the Gold Rush and colonization in B.C., the state of salmon, the practice of free, prior, and informed consent, dirty mining for a

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with ALOK, originally aired in August of 2021.“I validate the idea that survival is the ultimate act of creation in a world that has reduced us to fascist arithmetic, of being a quantitative statistic, not a human soul. So we still found a way to care, love, and create - isn't that art? I teach people to decipher the art that they’re already doing, recognize the artistry and the everyday miracles of life around them, and create from that place.” This week we immerse ourselves in the aforementioned call to recognize the myriad of creations all around us from guest ALOK, who guides us in an ever-expansive dialogue around spiritual wellbeing, the importance of creative literacy, and the tremendous freedom that awaits us when we make gender unknowable. We begin our conversation by foregrounding the importance of moving out of the paradigm of understanding trans and queer as something that is exclusive to the body. Instead, ALOK shares how challenging the gender b

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, originally aired in January of 2020. Our hearts and minds are set to work by the urgent eco-social crises of this time. Caught in a cultural twitch of frenetic production and the sticky paradigms of modernity, we’ve penned vocabulary and designed technologies, manufactured frameworks and crunched numbers in an effort to diagnose and “treat” planetary collapse. We are invited by this week’s guest, Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, to pause and abandon solutionism, step back from the project of progress, and dance into a different set of questions: What does the Anthropocene teach us as a destabilizing agent that resists our taming? How can we show up in our movements of justice if “the ways we respond to crisis is part of the crisis”? What happens when we unfurl into a space of slowness and relinquish human mastery to a wider cosmic net of relations? Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.) considers his most sacred work to be learning how to be with his daughter and son,

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Dr. Kim TallBear originally aired in February of 2020. Intimacy and sexuality is the soil that gives rise to creativity, pleasure and regeneration of new life. As mainstream understandings of sex, marriage, and family shift, Dr. Kim TallBear highlights how the colonial project of nation-building disrupted the vitality of Indigenous kinship by imposing heteronormative monogamous marriage and the nuclear family structure. How have these constraints bred hyper-sexualized, paradoxical and fetishized beliefs that degrade relationships, wellbeing of communities and the land? Dr. Kim TallBear is Associate Professor, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta, and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience & Environment. By unraveling the doctrines of scarcity and separation, we are challenged to shatter pervasive beliefs of boundaries, binaries, and scarcity within our relations. Music by M83, Frazey Ford & FRASE. Visit our website at f

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Ruth Łchav’aya K’isen Miller, originally aired in September of 2021. “If this new green economy continues to perpetuate the same ethos that resource extraction has, we will not find any solutions and we will see our suffering perpetuated.” Heeding this call from Ruth Łchav’aya K’isen Miller, we explore the fruitful spaces between radical imagination, public policy, and on-the-ground activism as we think about what it means to take meaningful steps towards creating a non-extractive future. In this week’s episode, Ruth shares how tending to the future must center Indigenous values and lifeways. With this in mind, we look at the totality of what a “just transition” can offer us beyond limited definitions shaped by economics, policy, and job growth. Instead, Ruth shares the ways in which a just transition can be understood as a cyclical movement inspired by kinship, care, and reciprocity. Ruth Łchav’aya K’isen Miller is a Dena'ina Athabaskan and Ashkenazi Ru

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Woman Stands Shining (Pat McCabe), originally aired in September of 2021. In the fast-paced movement of today’s media, it’s easy to become entangled in narratives of extinction, loss, a lack of time, and a tremendous amount of misanthropy. However, when we pause to look within the ecosystems around us we can find examples of life pushing through the most difficult of circumstances. Our more than human kin continues in defiance, refusing to cease their own lineage under the current modern paradigm of exploitation and desecration. In this week’s episode, we look into a thriving life paradigm, which places a reverences for life at the center of all action, with guest Woman Stands Shining (Pat McCabe). In this expansive conversation, Woman Stands Shining coalesces topics of Indigenous sovereignty, land back, how gender and consent behave in different paradigms, and the vital importance of moving out of modernity’s obsession with intellectualism as the primary way

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Prentis Hemphill, originally aired in July of 2021. “There's no magical return. We're not all going to return to an unblemished time in history, and if we know that...what do we have to do? Who needs to have conversation with whom? Who needs to heal what relationship? Who needs to ask for what permission? Who needs to offer something back?” This week on the podcast, Prentis Hemphill offers us these questions in conversation about how we can be in relationship with each other at this very moment in time. In recognition of the tremendous intricacies of our experiences when it comes to our collective histories, forced severances, and the manipulation of trauma in our society, Prentis shares how embodiment is a resource that allows us to connect with the Earth, recognize grief as an entry point, and shape the impossible into possible. Prentis Hemphill is a movement facilitator, Somatics teacher, and practitioner, working at the convergence of healing, c

In this episode of For the Wild, Ayana and returning guest Dr. Vandana Shiva discuss the crumbling of the colonial paradigm and the promise of re-commoning the commons for our collective future. Situating us in the exigency of food and seed sovereignty for our present time, Dr. Shiva reminds us that seeds and living systems are not open access systems to be privatized, patented, or exploited. Rather, the commons are central to all of life. In this multifaceted episode, we discuss threats to the commons by Big Tech; the brilliance and sophistication of Indigenous seed cultures and breeding, the toxicity of GMO crops for our bodies and the planet, the benefits of agroecological farming, and the need for diversity in our ecosystems and justice movements. Tying the green-washed quest by tech barons to digitalize the world to legacies of colonialism and imperialism under a similar “civilizing” mission, Dr. Shiva warns that the ruling class operates from a place of fear of any being alive and free on their own term

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Sii-am Hamilton, originally aired in November of 2020. In this powerful conversation with land defender Sii-am Hamilton, we are invited to discuss futuristic ways forward in recognition that Indigenous communities have been practicing creative resistance against colonialism and capitalism for hundreds of years. We begin by discussing what is currently transpiring on Wet’suwet’en territories and how colonial governments are using the current pandemic (and will use future crises) to roll back regulatory measures and push development full force. Sii-am offers a holistic reflection on frontline land defense and the extent to which violence is afflicted upon land defenders, and resource extraction participants, by transnational corporations, while also reorienting us to the reality that just, dignified, and brilliant futures already exist but are not given attention, curiosity, or love because they do not serve corporate profit. Sii-am Hamilton is a land defender

What does a just climate future look like? In this bonus episode Ayana and guest adrienne maree brown discuss Imagine 2200, Fix’s climate-fiction contest, which recognizes stories that envision the next 180 years of equitable climate progress, imagining intersectional worlds of abundance, adaptation, reform, and hope. Turning towards fueling the imagination, this episode touches on stewarding a just future and the value of presence with ourselves, each other, and the movements we dedicate ourselves to. We are in a battle for our attention and for our imaginations. The winner will determine the future of the climate and of humanity. Facing this reality, and the reality of a changing climate is not easy, but despair around this can bring us closer to the earth and to each other when it is used as a learning tool. In the shift from panic to practice, visionary fiction is vital medicine, and adrienne guides us to stretch our minds to see a future beyond what the confines of white supremacy, colonialism, heteropat

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Corinna Gould, originally aired in November of 2020. Prior to settler development and extraction, the landscapes and lifeways of Ohlone territory were richly abundant with acorns, grass seeds, wildflowers, elk, salmon, grizzly bears, and berries. In this week’s episode of For The Wild, guest Corrina Gould reminds us that Ohlone territory still holds tremendous abundance and that the land can sustain us in a way that would provide for our wellbeing should we choose to really re-examine what it is we need to survive. But more than a conversation on the wealth of the land, we explore responsibility and reciprocity on stolen homelands by asking what it means to be in right relationship? How can we foster integrity in conservation and land restoration work amidst a world that continues to peddle scarcity, greed, and extraction? How can folks contribute to the re-storying of the land, even if through small acts? Corrina Gould is the spokesperson for the Confederate

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Ella Noah Bancroft, originally aired in March of 2021. “We forget that so much is given freely, that this world is meant to be enjoyed.” We heed this powerful reminder by guest Ella Noah Bancroft. As our belief systems have become entwined with the dominant economic structure, we see the commodification of our wellness, intimacy, and connectivity - a phenomenon that is severely hindering our ability to connect authentically. In conversation, Ella traces the powerful connection between our ability to go against mainstream capitalist ways of being and our capacity for deep connection with ourselves and each other. With intimacy as an entrance point, our conversation explores what happens when we derive our pleasure from extraction, the kind of deep embodiment and connectivity that threatens capitalistic and colonial structures, and how we can journey back into spaces of trust through practices that don’t have to cost us a thing. Ella Noah Bancroft is a Bundjalu

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Mike Phillips which originally aired in January of 2020. Not long ago, packs of gray wolves roamed freely across so-called North America from the grassy prairies of Florida to the snow-capped peaks of Colorado. Alongside a growing agricultural industry and settler expansion West, the U.S. government marshalled a perverse, ruthless campaign to systematically eradicate the gray wolf, a symbol of the “untamed” wild, driving this keystone species to the brink of extinction. Since the 1970s, the slow process of wolf recovery has begun, but the gray wolf remains endangered by human activity and ensnared in a dark mythic past. On this week’s episode, we speak with Mike Phillips, a conservationist and longtime ally of gray wolves, who gives voice to these great ecological engineers and their elemental place within the balance of life. Mike Phillips has served as the Executive Director of the Turner Endangered Species Fund and advisor to the Turner Biodiversity Divisi

This week we are rebroadcasting part two of our interview with brontë velez (they/them), originally aired in October of 2019. We dive into the capacity for pleasure amidst times of great uncertainty and historical oppression. What does “pleasure in the apocalypse” mean? As brontë defines it, pleasure is what makes us come alive, so how can we create a culture that is deeply attuned to our senses and directs our desire towards Earth and each other? By feeding our senses, how might we confront the isolation and industrialization of our bodies, while acknowledging the limitations of grief in that “suffering is not accountable to the Earth.”brontë’s work and rest is guided by the call that “black wellness is the antithesis to state violence” (Mark Anthony Johnson). As a black-latinx transdisciplinary artist, designer, trickster, educator and wakeworker, their eco-social art praxis lives at the intersections of black feminist placemaking, abolitionist theologies, environmental regeneration and death doulaship. the

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with brontë velez, originally aired in October of 2019. brontë velez opens this week’s episode inviting us to think about how submission to Earth is an invitation into a more life affirming world. What does a future look like in which white, human, and patriarchal supremacy surrenders its power in an act of pleasure? In Part One of this expansive conversation, Ayana and brontë delve into topics surrounding authentic expression, the distortion of feminine and masculine powers, beauty and aesthetics, queerness, dominatrix energy, and power as agency. brontë velez (they/them) is guided in work and rest, by the call that “black wellness is the antithesis to state violence” (Mark Anthony Johnson). as a black-latinx transdisciplinary artist, designer, trickster, educator and wakeworker, their eco-social art praxis lives at the intersections of black feminist placemaking, abolitionist theologies, environmental regeneration and death doulaship. they embody this commitment

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Dr. Kate Stafford, originally aired in September of 2020. The bowhead whale can live up to 200 years old, meaning that the bowhead whales of today know and remember a world that sounded, tasted, and felt very different than the one we live in. Perhaps their living memory has yet to normalize marine pollution, anthropogenic sounds, and the underwater effects of globalization and heavy industrialization. In this episode of For The Wild with Dr. Kate Stafford, we listen to the many songs the ocean body sings, asking; how does a warming climate alter the Arctic’s soundscape? Why are the waters of the Arctic becoming louder, and what does this mean for kin like the bowhead? Dr. Kate Stafford’s research focuses on using passive acoustic monitoring to examine migratory movements, geographic variation, and physical drivers of marine mammals, particularly large whales. She has worked all over the world from the tropics to the poles and is fortunate enough to have seen

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Chris Hedges, originally aired in June of 2019. All too often our conversations around the consolidation of wealth and power in America blindly fixate on the politics of the Right and Trump as the anti-hero archetype. We must deepen our analyses and rethink our movements beyond the two-party divide in order to truly understand and hold accountable the socio-political and economic forces that have brought us to such a crisis. This week, we speak with journalist and author Chris Hedges who guides us through the history and inner workings of neoliberalism, the rise of corporate capitalism, and our descent into fascism. Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers University, and an ordained Presbyterian minister. He has written 12 books and writes a weekly column for the website Truthdig and hosts a show,

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Michael Meade, originally aired in June of 2019. The crises of cosmological, mythological and psychological disconnection from nature, from ourselves, and from each other may drive us to places of darkness and suffering; and yet there is great potential in that darkness to interact with creative energy. Retracing meaning through archetypal myth offers an opportunity to understand the great challenge of our time to heal the planet from its wounds, and to refresh our dominant worldview with one based on connection and imagination. This week, journey into Michael Meade’s expansive vision of awakening ancient meaning for the individual and collective consciousness. Michael Meade, D.H.L., is a renowned storyteller, author, and scholar ofmythology, anthropology, and psychology. He combines hypnotic storytelling,street-savvy perceptiveness, and spellbinding interpretations of ancient mythswith a deep knowledge of cross-cultural rituals. He is the author of The Geniu