“One in four bites of our food is pollinated by honeybees, but at what cost in the system that we are in now? How could that look different if our agriculture was more localized, regionalized, and sustainable?” In this episode, we warmly welcome Ang Roell—founder of They Keep Bees —to discuss their practice of working and learning with honeybees as models of resilience, care, and responsiveness. Ang’s work, which demystifies bees to decenter logics of power-over relations and consumer-driven wor...
Dec 26, 2023•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast In Green Dreamer's episode 413, we welcome Dr. Hilding Neilson, who shares with us his knowledge of the night skies and expertise as an astronomer traced by his Mi’kmaw lineage. Trained in the Western-scientific sphere of astrophysics and shaped by Mi'kmaq methodologies, Dr. Neilson aims to disrupt the Euro-centric claim on the night sky as codified through historical and modern Astro-colonial pursuits of objectivity, discovery, nomenclature. In demanding that Indigenous stories and systems of k...
Dec 14, 2023•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, we are joined by A. Laurie Palmer: a writer, artist, and author of the book The Lichen Museum . In paying attention to lichen, Laurie looks to these symbiotic organisms as a template for enriching human and multi-species relationality. How might lichen, and their refusal to be scientifically categorized, offer a model of living that nurtures slowness, adaptability, and diversity? In what ways do they remind us how to practice mutual aid, and reconfigure narratives of dominance? ...
Nov 30, 2023•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, we welcome our guest Dekila Chungyalpa, who reminds us of our intra-dependant existence with all of life. Traced by a lineage of Tibetan Buddhist practitioners, Dekila weaves together teachings from her cultural and religious upbringing with her work as an environmental program director—from which she invites us to reflect on the ways in which Western conservation efforts fall short. In her work with faith-based organizations, Dekila prompts a dialogue around binary paradigms th...
Nov 11, 2023•35 min•Ep 411•Transcript available on Metacast “My life goal is to get our governments to understand that Indigenous sovereignty and freshwater fish futures are completely linked.” In this episode, we welcome Dr. Zoe Todd, who invites us to think alongside a critical lens of Indigenous fish philosophy and examine relationships between Indigenous sovereignty and fish well-being in Canada. By asking how we can learn with fish as they “listen with their whole being,” Zoe prompts discussions on compassionate listening, the fundamental link betwe...
Oct 27, 2023•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, we welcome our guest Charlotte Wrigley, who invites us to contemplate the upheaval of extinction as a discontinuous process—a becoming, rather than an end. Charlotte’s inquiry into this matter straddles the edges of human relations, geography, climate science, and ethics against the backdrop of permafrost and its changing form. Unveiling the intra-connected worlds of thawing permafrost and de-extinction efforts, Charlotte waltzes with sticky tensions of a rapidly heating planet ...
Oct 13, 2023•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast “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, S...
Sep 29, 2023•48 min•Ep 408•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Patricia Kaishian , 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 wit...
Sep 14, 2023•56 min•Ep 407•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ethi...
Aug 25, 2023•50 min•Ep 406•Transcript available on Metacast “[...] 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...
Aug 10, 2023•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, we welcome anthropologist Daniel Ruiz-Serna , 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...
Jul 27, 2023•41 min•Ep 404•Transcript available on Metacast “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 Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein , whose research on small-scale particles points us to a large, cosmic picture. From particle physics and astrophysics to astronomy and Black feminist scien...
Jul 14, 2023•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast “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,...
Jun 29, 2023•54 min•Ep 402•Transcript available on Metacast “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. Expa...
Jun 17, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast Support our show starting at $2/mo or via a one-time donation: www.greendreamer.com/support
Jun 06, 2023•8 min•Transcript available on Metacast For Green Dreamer’s 400th episode, we welcome Anand Giridhardas, a writer and journalist whose books include The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy (2022), Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018), The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (2014), and India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking (2011). A former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times for more than a decade, Anand has also writt...
May 22, 2023•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast “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 struct...
May 12, 2023•55 min•Ep 399•Transcript available on Metacast “Once you start rebuilding more localized systems, they are almost without exception, going to be kinder to the environment and kinder to people structurally. ” In this episode, we are honored to welcome back our guest Helena Norberg-Hodge, a linguist, author, and filmmaker, and the founder of the Local Futures. As a pioneer and proponent of localization (decentralization), as well as her experience living in deep relation with the people of Ladakh over a 40-year period, Helena encourages “local...
May 05, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Ep 398•Transcript available on Metacast “When I talk about extinction as a bio-cultural process, what I’m seeing or what I’m talking about is the fact that there’s lots of different species who are alive and who are working within a cultural entanglement which is shaping their capacity to either thrive or perhaps become endangered and go into decline... I see art as giving people a way to engage with that grief, and to engage with that emotional connection with the subject, but also to engage with a sense of agency over it.” In this e...
Apr 28, 2023•56 min•Ep 397•Transcript available on Metacast “If we’re soaking in all these default practices that are power-over practices that are reflected to us through the media, through our families and communities, through how the economy works, it means we’re embodying things that we might not even agree with that might not at all align with our values, but we’re embodying them anyway.” Staci K. Haines is a somatics innovator and the author of The Politics of Trauma . In her decades of working and teaching in the field of somatics, Staci has grown...
Apr 20, 2023•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dr. Andreas Weber is a biologist, philosopher, and writer, whose work focuses on re-evaluating our understanding of the living and dying. Andreas proposes understanding organisms as subjects , and hence the biosphere, as a meaning-creating and poetic reality. Accordingly, he holds that an economy inspired by nature should not be designed as a mechanistic optimisation machine, but rather as an ecosystem which transforms the mutual sharing of matter and energy into deeper meaning. Reflecting on hi...
Apr 13, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep 395•Transcript available on Metacast “Where is the space for a collective life? If you yell at the planet and say, ‘Why aren’t you acting collectively?’ You don’t understand this social system. This economic system has stolen collectivity from people.” In this episode, we welcome Vijay Prashad , an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. Vijay begins by sharing about the turning points in his life that led him to focus his work on unraveling the various atrocities visited upon people in the world. With a recognition of the power ...
Apr 06, 2023•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, we welcome writer, artist, and technologist, James Bridle . James’s artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide and on the internet. They are the author of New Dark Age (2018) and Ways of Being (2022), and they wrote and presented the radio series "New Ways of Seeing" for BBC Radio 4 in 2019. Join us as James investigates and complicates modernity’s entanglement with contemporary technology. Ever careful not to throw the baby out with th...
Mar 30, 2023•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I like thinking with viruses because they’re constantly infecting us, changing our nature. Some of them are even changing our genome. We’re constantly in relation with the world around us even though we can barely perceive and understand all of this complexity.” In this episode, we are joined by anthropologist Eben Kirksey, who invites us to think and feel through a new wave of viral theory through a lens of multi-species entanglement. Through his insatiable curiosity about nature-culture, Eben...
Mar 23, 2023•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast "I came up with the idea of ‘Eating the Landscape’ because I was thinking about our Indigenous ancestral foodways. It’s not just about food. It’s not just about nutrition. ‘Eating the Landscape’ is about this large, interconnected matrix of our relationship to place." In this episode, Enrique Salmón, Ph.D. guides us to see Indigenous foodways as parts of an interconnected matrix of our relationship to place. Introducing the concept of “kincentric ecology,” Enrique problematizes one-size-fits-all...
Mar 16, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast “What we might want to do is learn where the word desertification comes from and when it should be used and when it is ill-used, at least to move forward into a more hopeful, more informed, more generous future that I think we all want.” Why should we challenge mass tree-planting projects as being politically neutral—as something that ought to garner universal support? What is the significance of reorienting our goals towards growing trees rather than planting trees? And what could it mean to lo...
Mar 01, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep 390•Transcript available on Metacast “I use the language of entanglement rather than interdependence because entanglement implies that what’s fundamental is relationships.” What are some of the limitations of human rights frameworks and the institutions that uphold them? What does it mean to go beyond recognizing our interdependence to seeing our deep entanglements with our more-than-human world? And how is the much more holistic framing of “multispecies justice” still reductive in terms of the forms of beings that they recognize? ...
Feb 22, 2023•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast “One thing that the United States got really good at doing was basically replacing all colonial products with synthetic ones—swapping technology in for territory and replacing colonies with chemistry.” How have synthetic chemistry and technology allowed the United States as an empire to cease its reliance on colonies? And what is the significance of recognizing the greater history of the empire—beyond the borders of its symbolic “logo map”? In this episode, we welcome Daniel Immerwahr, a histori...
Feb 15, 2023•42 min•Ep 388•Transcript available on Metacast “We often forget that Black farmers were the foundation of the civil rights movement. Actually, a lot of Black agrarian scholars and organizers, and even some policy advocates that have been doing this work for a long time, would say that there’d be no civil rights movement if it wasn’t for Black farmers.” In this episode, we welcome dr. shakara tyler, a returning-generation farmer, educator and organizer who engages in Black agrarianism, agroecology, food sovereignty and environmental justice a...
Feb 08, 2023•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast “What I find worth remarking upon is the fact that the vast majority of people are so alienated from the Bluefin’s life world that they don’t know what an extraordinary creature she is—and instead just widely see her as a foodstuff, trafficked on the global market. It’s imperative for that worldview to change.” In this episode, we welcome Jennifer E. Telesca, Associate Professor of Environmental Governance in the Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment at the Nijmegen School of Manage...
Feb 01, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
