399) Vince Beiser: The global sand trade and how it remade 'modernity'
Green Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration
Release Date: 05/12/2023
Green Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration
“Once folks start to pick away at that scab of understanding how much of a role microbes play in the lives of other things in good ways and bad ways temporally, spatially, physically, and spiritually, it really does open up a rich vein of a new dimension — to start considering the world around us and how we fit in that world.” In this episode we are joined by Siv Watkins, founder of the platform “Microanimism”. Inviting us to deepen our intimacy with the complex, multi-faceted microbial world, Siv deploys the lenses of science, mysticism, and animism to advocate for some of the...
info_outline 407) Patricia Kaishan: Lessons from fungi as queer companionsGreen Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration
In this episode, we are joined by , a mycologist, writer, and educator who gestures to mycology as a queer discipline. Situated as a queer member of Armenian diaspora, Patricia threads connections between the often misunderstood and mis/under-represented displacement of mycelial bodes and her own. Offering a glimpse of the complex, fascinating, taxonomy-defying world of fungi, Patricia invokes reflections on how we can learn from, dream with, and reclaim queer existence with our fungal kin. What stories of diversity, fluidity, and resilience do they sporulate? What lessons can they inspire in...
info_outline 406) Eshe Lewis: Black anthropology and streamlining storytellingGreen Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration
In the episode, we welcome Dr. Eshe Lewis to discuss her life and learnings as an activist, anthropologist, and storyteller. Eshe walks us through glimpses of her time with Afro-Peruvian women as part of her doctoral research and how this experience transfigured beyond the siloed parameters of academic study into personal, historical, and political realms. Eshe’s conscious intent of questioning, complicating, and re-positioning anthropology not only as an academic discipline, but a field of ethical practice, casts an inspirational light on the role and reachability of storytelling. Join us...
info_outline 405) Lama Khatieb: Reclaiming local knowledge for food interdependenceGreen Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration
“[...] The United States started to heavily invest in subsidizing growing wheat for exporting purposes. That resulted in flooding international markets, including Jordan’s markets. Cheap American wheat left many of the small-scale farmers unable to compete under record prices.” In this episode, we welcome Lama Khatieb, co-founder of Zikra for Popular Learning: a Jordan-based collective that aims to empower community members to revalue their identity and culture, through the cultivation and sharing of their local and traditional knowledge. We visit themes of agricultural...
info_outline 404) Danel Ruiz-Serna: Living territories and the ecological violence of warGreen Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration
In this episode, we welcome anthropologist , whose work, situated in the Choco region of Colombia, aims to expose the entanglement of political and ecological violence whereby echoes of conflict/healing reverberate through place. In light of the enmeshment between war and land, Daniel welcomes a framework of living territories, as traced by his life/work with the diversity of human and more-than-human communities of Bajo Atrato, Choco. Tune in as Daniel invokes questions around: What stories do the land and its respective guardians cry out in the face of ongoing damage—that which exceeds...
info_outline 403) Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: The political questions of science and technologyGreen Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration
“I think the bigger question is not necessarily specifically about physics, but generally speaking, about how we culturally engage with science and the role of science in our communities and how it shapes our mindset and what our mindset about science is. ” Joining us in this episode is theoretical physicist , whose research on small-scale particles points us to a large, cosmic picture. From particle physics and astrophysics to astronomy and Black feminist science studies, Chanda’s work spans a wide range of disciplines, practices, and texts. Named as one of 10 people who helped...
info_outline 402) Aparna Venkatesan: Protecting space as ancestral global commonsGreen Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration
“The legacy of Earth colonization… is still [in its] early days. We can protect this shared environment and also what I see as the intangible heritage of humanity. Space belongs to us all.” In this episode, we are joined in conversation with Dr. Aparna Venkatesan, a cosmologist working on studies of “first-light” sources in the universe. She also works actively in cultural astronomy and space policy, is recognized internationally for her research and DEI leadership, featured widely in the media, and received numerous prizes and awards. Dr. Venkatesan is deeply committed to increasing...
info_outline 401) Melissa K. Nelson: Living in storied and moral landscapesGreen Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration
“It’s very important that we translate how different knowledge systems have been privileged and others have been marginalized and repressed and erased. To have true knowledge symbiosis, where there is harmony and balance and inter-relationality and each contributing respectfully with care, thoughtfulness, humility, that is a process and it’s a messy and tangled process.” In this episode, we welcome Melissa K. Nelson, an Indigenous ecologist, writer, editor, media-maker and scholar-activist. Expanding on her years of community based work as well as mixed background and heritage, Melissa...
info_outline THANK YOU & WHAT'S NEXT...Green Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration
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info_outline 400) Anand Giridharadas: Expanding empathy and breaking political binariesGreen Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration
For Green Dreamer’s 400th episode, we welcome Anand Giridhardas, a writer and journalist whose books include (2022), (2018), (2014), and (2011). A former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times for more than a decade, Anand has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Time, and is the publisher of the newsletter . Spanning themes of philanthropy, political change, and social media, Anand unsettles the assumptions of “win-win” social change. How does the rise of elite philanthropy and plutocratic “do-gooding” coincide with the hoarding of power? We...
info_outline“Hundreds of people have been murdered over sand in the last few years. Even though most of us barely ever think about it, sand is actually the most used natural resource in the world after air and water.”
In this episode, we welcome journalist Vince Beiser, the author of The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization. Vince guides us in an exploration of sand as a natural resource and the ways in which its extraction and exploitation, quite literally, upholds structures of modern civilization. Exposing the multi-layered histories, uses of, and even violence that ensues around sand as a resource, Vince calls for an exploration of diverse, plural models that include but are not solely dependent on sand as an infrastructural material.
How does unveiling the economy of sand, in turn, speak to landscapes of injustice, where the clearness of glass as end products juxtaposes the outsourced pollution that exits their factories? And how might our questioning of “how and why” sand is culled into our lives turn our attention to the literal and metaphorical cracks that splinter the seemingly indestructible foundations of the project of modernity?
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(The musical offering featured in this episode At the Edge of It by Oropendola.)