Dominic Boyer is an anthropologist, content producer and environmental researcher who teaches at Rice University, where he served as founding director of Rice’s Center for Environmental Studies. Some of his recent books are Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene and Hyposubjects: On Becoming Human. The book we’re talking about here, though, No More Fossils, is a short, stunning analysis of the function of fossils during this era of human-propelled environmental destruction and develo...
Jul 31, 2025•1 hr 12 min
Dr. Rupa Marya is a physician and activist. She's been a major part of revolutionary health initiatives like the Justice Study, which looks at the links between police violence and health in Black, brown and Indigenous communities, and Seeding Sovereignty, a group that promotes Indigenous autonomy in climate action. She's also the co-author, with Raj Patel, of Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. Inflamed is a book that can help us locate the roots of disease in a system of over...
Jul 06, 2025•51 min
Kilian Jörg is an artist and philosopher who is interested in understanding how art can intervene to disrupt the ecological catastrophe we’re currently witnessing. His current research focuses on the car as a metaphor for the toxic behaviors of modernity, the psychological effects of living in a time of ecocide and what sorts of activist strategies for reclaiming land might be effective at shaking off the psychology of resignation. My conversation with Kilian Jorg was one of the most enjoyable i...
Jun 24, 2025•1 hr 5 min
Alexander Gallant is a folk singer-songwriter from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. His songs are simple and direct but also singular and sardonic. He takes a lot of inspiration from the folk revival of the 1960’s, but uses a specific blend of open tuning style fingerpicking and percussive strumming, paired with funny, personal poetry. He released his debut record, Waiting Tables Blues with Tibet Street Records in November 2023. His second record, Rubber Monster Suit, is a collection of songs about livin...
May 22, 2025•1 hr 20 min
Caleb Wellum is a professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He’s also the editor of Energy Humanities and a member of both the Petrocultures Research Group and the After Oil Collective. As an historian who studies the intersection of energy, culture and political economy in the twentieth century, he’s invested in understanding how natural resource development and especially oil extraction became a force that shapes social reality today. The book ...
May 16, 2025
James Rowe is a professor of Political Ecology and Cultural, Social, and Political Thought at the University of Victoria and the author of a great book called Radical Mindfulness: Why Transforming Fear of Death is Politically Vital. Radical Mindfulness examines the root causes of injustice and how the fear of death works as a major cause of injustice globally. One of my main takeaways, so to speak, after reading and thinking about the book a lot is that there is a specific responsibility that wh...
May 03, 2025
Imre Szeman is the inaugural Director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation and Sustainability and Professor of Human Geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough. His recent book, Futures of the Sun: The Struggle Over Renewable Life, examines corporate and state control of the transition to renewables.We talk here about how Futures of the Sun explores the competing eco-stories being offered by people intent on shaping the transition to fit their vision and version of a renewable ...
Apr 22, 2025
Max Haiven is the author of many books on finance capitalism, social movement organizing, anti-fascist revolt and the politics of revenge. His latest project focuses on games as a major feature of everyday life under advanced capitalism. His writing on games has really grown my understanding of what’s going on when people take on the sort of abstract agency they can experience in an imagined environment when they play.Beyond writing about games, Max has designed a wicked new board game called Bi...
Apr 20, 2025
Mark Bourrie is an Ottawa-based author, lawyer, and journalist. He holds a master’s in journalism from Carleton University and a PhD in history from the University of Ottawa. In 2017, he was awarded a Juris Doctor degree and was called to the bar in 2018. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, including a National Magazine Award, and received the RBC Charles Taylor Prize in 2020 for his book Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson. His most recent books include Big Men Fear...
Apr 17, 2025•49 min
Judy Haiven is the co-founder of Equity Watch and part of the national steering committee for Independent Jewish Voices Canada. She worked for nearly 20 years as a professor of industrial relations at Saint Mary's University in Halifax. Now, her main focus is left wing activism and political writing. As a Jewish person who supports Palestinian human rights, her voice is a powerful source of moral courage at a time when the ongoing genocide in Gaza is still cloaked in claims that opposing Zionism...
Apr 14, 2025•50 min
Deborah Britzman is a practicing psychoanalyst and philosopher of education. Her research connects psychoanalysis with pedagogy, teacher education, and the idea of vulnerability as a "constitutive inequality." We discuss her recent book When History Returns, which brings together theories of learning with the paradoxes of social strife. It argues that history "returns" through transitional scenes of inheriting a past one could not make, experiencing a present affected by what came before, and fa...
Mar 31, 2025•56 min
Abdaljawad Omar is a Lecturer in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at Birzeit University. He has written some indispensable articles on the assumptions people have about Palestine and Palestinian resistance, on the internal tensions in the Palestinian diaspora, the complicity of the United States with Israel’s genocide, and the ongoing exterminationist attitudes that Western elites have toward Palestinian society.Ajay Parasram has roots in South Asia, the Caribbean and the settler...
Feb 24, 2025•Season 4Ep. 1
Mark Stoll teaches American environmental history and American religious history at Texas Tech, where he also serves as director of Environmental Studies. Stoll’s latest book is an environmental history of capitalism, Profit: An Environmental History (2022). From the publisher: "Profit — getting more out of something than you put into it — is the original genius of homo sapiens, who learned how to unleash the energy stored in wood, exploit the land, and refashion ecosystems. As civilization deve...
Jan 27, 2025•41 min
Sarah Marie Wiebe is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria whose research and solidarity work focuses on community development and environmental justice. When we last spoke on the pod, we looked at her writing broadly, but this time around we’re marking the release of her fantastic new book Hot Mess: Mothering Through a Code Red Climate Emergency, from Fernwood Publishing. Hot Mess is a remarkable book, giving readers a nuanced effort to navi...
Jan 07, 2025•51 min
Ava Val is a comedian, actor, writer and musician based in Toronto. She’s made multiple appearances at Just For Laughs and The Halifax Comedy Festival, and recorded stand-up sets for CBC Gem, Crave TV, and CTV. She has a weekly podcast of her own called PodGis, which is a great place to get a taste of her high energy, clever comedy. Val released her debut special, So Brave, earlier in the year. The special coincided with what Val called her 3-year “hormoniversary,” or the third year she’d been t...
Dec 20, 2024•43 min
Andreas Malm works in The Department of Human Geography at Lund University. He’s a scholar of human ecology and environmental history and has written several books, including The Progress of this Storm, Fossil Capital, How to Blow Up A Pipeline and White Skin, Black Fuel. Wim Carton works in the same department as a human geographer. The main focus of his research is the relationship between society and nature and how society-nature relations are informed and changed by ecological crisis. Right ...
Nov 15, 2024•45 min
Jennifer Wickham is a filmmaker and a member of the Gidimt’en Clan of the Wet’suwet’en people. In 2012, she moved home to defend her clan’s territory against multiple pipeline projects, and especially the aggression of Coastal GasLink. Her work on the documentary film Yintah is the main focus of our conversation. Yintah is about the Wet’suwet’en fight for sovereignty, and like some other documentaries that depict that fight, there is, in the film, a powerful dream of freedom for Indigenous peopl...
Oct 24, 2024•44 min
Alder Keleman Saxena is an environmental anthropologist whose research looks at the links between agricultural biodiversity and food culture, especially in relation to nutritional health in the Bolivian Andes. Her collaboration with Anna Tsing, Feifei Zhou and Jennifer Deger for the online Feral Atlas project is an absolute gift to anyone concerned with ecology, but specifically from the perspective of reckoning with the impact of human activity on the planet. The book that came out of that digi...
Oct 17, 2024•49 min
Robert Neubauer studies the media strategies of Canadian environmental and pro-resource extraction social movements, with a focus on populist discourse and public mobilization around proposed energy infrastructure. He is currently a Post-doctoral Researcher and Limited Term Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Victoria, where he teaches on contemporary media studies and climate politics. In this episode, Robert and I chat about how an effective communication st...
Sep 20, 2024•1 hr 26 min
Alice Mah is Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies at the University of Glasgow. Prior to this, she was the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded project “Toxic Expertise: Environmental Justice and the Global Petrochemical Industry.” Her work focuses on toxic pollution and environmental justice. She writes about social and ecological transformations and is always trying to develop anti-colonial ecological futures. Cara Daggett is an associate professor of politica...
Aug 09, 2024•1 hr 7 min
Allie Rougeot is a climate justice activist and program manager at Environmental Defence Canada where she advocates for a just energy transition. As a speaker and facilitator, Allie talks to people about the escalating climate crisis and the solutions we can use to fight the emergency. In this conversation, we discuss the path she took to doing this work. Allie says it really started with working in support of refugees and in defense of human rights. The way this influences her approach to clima...
Jul 05, 2024•1 hr 5 min
Dr. Ingrid Waldron should not need an introduction. The leading voice on environmental racism in Canada and author of There’s Something in the Water, Waldron has built a reputation for being unusually skilled at working with and within community and at reading the social landscape for fluctuations in the way that power works. She is the HOPE Chair in Peace and Health in the Global Peace and Social Justice Program at McMaster University and both the founder and director of The ENRICH Project, whi...
Jun 03, 2024•1 hr 24 min
Catherine Abreu is a world-renowned climate campaigner whose work focuses on creating coalitions to take real action on climate change. She is the founder and executive director of Destination Zero, which—to quote their website—”partners with networks and other non-profits seeking to expand their work on climate justice, with a particular focus on accelerating the global transition away from fossil fuel dependence.” Catherine was appointed as one of the advisors to Canada’s Net-Zero Advisory Bod...
Apr 26, 2024•55 min
Darin Barney is a professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He has written some really impactful work in communication studies, and received several awards for his academic work. He is a member of the Petrocultures Research Group, the After Oil collective and Future Energy Systems at the University of Alberta, among other groups. Jesse Goldstein is an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is a printmaker and has ...
Apr 09, 2024•1 hr 21 min
Abboud Hamayel is a Lecturer in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at Birzeit University. In this conversation we talk about a number of his recent articles, and think through the implications of the October 7th Al-Aqsa Flood, or the attacks led by Hamas within the so-called Gaza Envelope. Abboud has written some invaluable pieces breaking down the assumptions people project onto Palestine in the West, on the complicity of the United States, in particular, in the ongoing annihilati...
Mar 17, 2024•1 hr 22 min
Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She’s the editor of a number of academic journals, including the Journal of Palestine Studies. She’s also a policy member of Al-Shabaka and the Palestinian Policy Network. As a historian of capitalism, consumption, and development in the modern Middle East, she has an overriding concern with how individuals, groups, and governments use concepts and material practices to shape the body, the self, and...
Mar 01, 2024•1 hr 29 min
Nadia Yaqub is Professor of Arabic Language and Culture and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research has examined Arab medieval literature and contemporary oral poetry, as well as modern prose fiction and visual culture. I spoke to her about three of her books: Bad Girls of the Arab World, which is about women and transgression in the Arab world, Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution, which is an invaluable study of Palestinian resistance through the lens of Third ...
Feb 16, 2024•1 hr 23 min
Jeff Karabanow is Professor and Associate Director in the School of Social Work at Dalhousie University. He has worked with homeless populations in Toronto, Montreal, Halifax and Guatemala. His research focuses primarily upon housing stability, service delivery systems, trauma, and homeless youth culture. I want to say, first, that right now we don’t even really know how many people are currently experiencing homelessness in so-called Canada. The number could be anywhere between 150,000 to 300,0...
Feb 09, 2024•1 hr 6 min
Veronica Post is a furniture maker, teacher and an award-winning graphic novelist based in Nova Scotia. She’s written two graphic novels so far, published by Conundrum Press; the books are part of a planned trilogy focused on the trials and tribulations of their title character Langosh and his trusty dog Peppi. The first two titles, Fugitive Days and Hot to Trot, are journalistic explorations of Veronica’s experiences that think through the realities of war, history, migration and trauma. In thi...
Jan 29, 2024•57 min
Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist and author. Levy writes opinion pieces and a weekly column for the newspaper Haaretz that often focuses on the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. He’s won numerous awards for his writing on human rights abuses in the occupied territories. Levy is known for insisting that being an Israeli patriot requires one to be critical of the occupation. When he said recently that he has never been more ashamed of his country, he was defending his country ...
Jan 12, 2024•57 min
