All in Transcript

#350 | Fire Weather: The Petrocene & The Making Of A Beast w/ John Vaillant

#350 | Fire Weather: The Petrocene & The Making Of A Beast w/ John Vaillant

Patrick Farnsworth
350, John Vaillant, Transcript

Acclaimed author John Vaillant joins me to discuss Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast, a masterfully written chronicle of the destructive power of fire in the twenty-first century.

Humanity’s kinship with fire extends across the millennia. The conditions that allow fire to exist, let alone flourish, are the same that allow Homo sapiens to survive and thrive on this planet. Our relationship with this element has been mutually beneficial. Our ancestors use of fire propelled the rapid evolution of human anatomy and cognition. In turn, fire was able to spread, shaping the environments that allow us to co-exist, survive and thrive, forever binding the fates of human and more-than-human life with it.

Since the Industrial Revolution, and especially since the beginning of what Vaillant calls the Petrocene, the co-adaptive, co-evolutionary path we have carved out with this life-giving/life-destroying element has become discordant and unbalanced. Industrial humans, harnessing the incredible power of ancient fossil fuels over the past few centuries—a mere blink of an eye in Earth’s geological timescale—claimed mastery over this lively entity, and has, in turn, altered the global climate system so dramatically as to trigger a mass extinction event. A relatively small subset of the peculiar species we belong to have, with careless abandon, produced the conditions for fire to claim a larger and destructive role on the planet. Is it really that we are masters of fire, or instead, is it the other way around? 

Fire Weather is an astounding chronicle of the boreal fire that swept through Fort McCurray, Alberta in May 2016. Over the course of 24 hours, the nearly 90,000 residents of this modern-day bitumen subarctic boom town evacuated, escaping the out of control fire as it eviscerated everything in its path. Vaillant zooms in close, guiding us through the decisions made that day as the fire raced into the city, made by residents and authorities alike as catastrophe unfolded. He expands the story to situate Fort Mac as a nexus point in the larger settler colonial history of Canada and its inextricable relationship with the fossil fuel industry and extractive capitalism, all situated within our present paradigm of ecological crisis, climate change, and 21st century fire.

#345 | Rumination On Truth: The Destruction Of Iraq, Twenty Years On w/ Dahr Jamail

#345 | Rumination On Truth: The Destruction Of Iraq, Twenty Years On w/ Dahr Jamail

Patrick Farnsworth
Dahr Jamail, 345, Transcript

Author and former climate journalist Dahr Jamail returns to the podcast to discuss the 20th anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq by United States-led coalition forces. Jamail began his journalistic career as an unembedded journalist documenting the war from the ground beginning in 2003, highlighting the countless war crimes committed by the occupying forces against the civilians of Iraq, superbly documented in his first book on the subject, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq published in 2007 by Haymarket Books. 

#343 | Stop Cop City: Weelaunee Forest Defenders & The Chilling Intent Of State Terror w/ Clark (ACPC)

#343 | Stop Cop City: Weelaunee Forest Defenders & The Chilling Intent Of State Terror w/ Clark (ACPC)

Patrick Farnsworth
Clark, ACPC, 343, Transcript

Clark from the Atlanta Community Press Collective joins me to discuss the Stop Cop City movement, also known as the Defend the Atlanta Forest (or Defend Weelaunee Forest) movement in Atlanta, Georgia. Clark is not a representative of the movement, but through his coverage, speaks clearly to the concerns raised by activists and forest occupiers of the construction of Atlanta Public Safety Training Center (Cop City).

#341 | The Fault In Our SARS: Scientism, The People's CDC, & The Weight Of Virus Origin Stories w/ Rob Wallace

#341 | The Fault In Our SARS: Scientism, The People's CDC, & The Weight Of Virus Origin Stories w/ Rob Wallace

Patrick Farnsworth
Rob Wallace, 341, Transcript

Evolutionary epidemiologist and author Rob Wallace returns to the podcast to discuss his new collection, The Fault in Our SARS: COVID-19 in the Biden Era, published through Monthly Review. 

This discussion is long, but certainly worth a listen. Entering year four of the pandemic, Rob Wallace has diligently, and extensively, written two books worth of essays on the various facets of the SARS-2 outbreak, many of which are examined in this interview. Rob skewers the Biden administration’s political, institutional, and rhetorical approach to the BSL-3 [Biosafety Level 3] pathogen’s burn through the population, picking apart the scientism, employed by both the political elite and their media lackeys, to rationalize and normalize the mass death and disability of millions. 

#305 | Storytelling Is An Emergency: In Our Bones, We Knew This Was Going To Happen w/ Sophie Strand

#305 | Storytelling Is An Emergency: In Our Bones, We Knew This Was Going To Happen w/ Sophie Strand

Patrick Farnsworth
Sophie Strand, 305, Transcript

Writer, poet, and essayist Sophie Strand joins me to discuss the "emergency of storytelling" in our climate disrupted present and future, and the subjects she explores in her upcoming book releases, The Madonna Secret, and The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine.

Sophie and I entered this conversation a bit fuzzy, a little stunned. We acknowledge this from the get go. We were processing devastating news that morning: Hurricane Ida crashed and dragged itself from south to north across the East Coast, overwhelming the infrastructure, shutting down the grid and flooding cities. We discuss how climatologically, ecologically, we can feel how things have shifted tremendously — in the Northwest where I live, and in Hudson Valley where Sophie lives. While, personally, I tend to explore this broad subject on this podcast, Sophie writes about it.

#298 | Wyrd Against The Modern World: The Opposite Moment Begins w/ Ramon Elani

#298 | Wyrd Against The Modern World: The Opposite Moment Begins w/ Ramon Elani

Patrick Farnsworth
Ramon Elani, 298, Transcript

The implications of global climate change have loomed large in my mind and heart for years, and I’m sure many of you reading this can relate. The existential questions this inevitably brings up have been some of the central, binding subjects of my work. I’ve worked to address the roots of this complex catastrophe through various angles, attempting, in my own small way, to highlight the nature of this earth-encompassing shift in our planet’s biospheric composition, and explore what this means through a number of different lenses.

Human beings are social, cultural, emotional, spiritual creatures, and I doubt we are alone in this. The inevitable despair that emerges as we recognize that this titanic shift threatens the survival of future generations of human and more-than-human life in the decades to come can be debilitating, even more so when we take into account that much of what we fear is going to happen is already happening right now. Numerous scientists have observed climatic events occurring that were initially predicted to happen decades from now.

The future, as it were, has quickened to meet us.

#297 | The War On Cuba: Ground Level Impacts Of The U.S. Blockade w/ Liz Oliva Fernández

#297 | The War On Cuba: Ground Level Impacts Of The U.S. Blockade w/ Liz Oliva Fernández

Patrick Farnsworth
Liz Oliva Fernández, 297, Transcript

Liz Oliva Fernández, Cuban journalist and lead protagonist of ‘The War on Cuba’ documentary series, joins me to discuss her work with Belly of the Beast Cuba — a Havana-based media project made up of Cubans and foreigners that highlight the daily lives and experiences of the Cuban people from the ground level. 

The United States has been engaging in a multifaceted, multipronged war with Cuba ever since their revolution in 1959. Whether that is through economic pressures in the form of sanctions, embargoes, and what Fernández bluntly describes as a blockade, or through direct military incursions and threats, the U.S. has imposed an artificial scarcity on the people of Cuba. The U.S. attempts to justify its genocidal policies toward Cuba through extreme media bias, propaganda, and lies. Some of the most dramatic examples of this, lately, has been under the administration of former President Trump. Cuba has some of the best doctors in the world, and for decades, thousands of them have volunteered to aid the peoples of numerous nations around the globe, most often in Latin America, Africa, and during the worst of their battle with Covid-19, Italy. The U.S., under the Trump Administration and through the direct interference of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, pressured numerous national leaders in Latin America (Ecuador, Bolivia, and Brazil) to refuse and send away hundreds of Cuban doctors serving missions in those respective nations. As Fernández states in this interview, “the lies told by the [U.S.] media about what Cuban doctors do abroad depends on the country they are in and the agreement that that country has with Cuba.” Baseless accusations coming from the mouths of such figures as Pompeo have expressed a “concern for human rights” — stating that these brigades of Cuban doctors are actually “spies,” “slaves of the Castro regime,” “not really doctors,” “soldiers,” and “human traffickers.” These accusations, when taken at face value, are very hard to believe, as the on-the-ground reality of the overwhelmingly positive impact these missions have had is thoroughly well documented. The U.S. and its belligerent stance toward Cuba has cost the lives of countless people. The nations that were pressured to send away these doctors, due to U.S. pressures, have been of the hardest hit by this pandemic. That is no coincidence.