JACKIE WANG on Carceral Capitalism /189

This week we are thrilled to bring you a special conversation from a dear friend of the podcast, Bayo Akomolafe. Recorded while in Ghana for the Three Black Men Tour, this conversation features the voices of Bayo Akomolafe, Resmaa Menakem, Orland Bishop, Victoria Santos and Okhiogbe Omonblanks Omonhinmin, all of whom were involved with the conversation and presentation of the Three Black Men tour. 

In 2023, Resmaa, Bayo and Orland shared space as they visited three cities across three continents, tracing a diasporic route in reverse from Los Angeles in The United States, to Salvador in Brazil, and finally to Accra in Ghana. 

Through the tour, these three visionary Black men, sharing their leading edges, are inviting us into a radical re/imagination of how we respond to our time. They sense into emergent possibilities, triangulating toward a synthesis of new forms, new magic, and new directions.

This conversation touches on the community of care that Bayo, Resmaa, Orland, Victoria, and Omon contributed to and experienced across the tour, the lessons they learned from this undertaking, and visions for what is to come. As each conversation partner emphasizes, “Blackness” is about far more than pigmentation. It is a call to re-story the world, to reimagine possibilities. Together they discuss the cracks, callings and visions that invite us into a paradigm shift that none of us could imagine alone.

Learn more about the tour at https://www.threeblackmen.com and https://www.centerforhealingandliberation.com

The music that opens and closes this episode is by 808 X Ri. And with courtesy of the Leaving Records record label, the music breaks you heard today are  by The Growth Eternal. Artwork by Jon Marro. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.

For an extended version of this episode join us at patreon.com/forthewild.

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with adrienne maree brown which originally aired in April 2019.

adrienne maree brown begins this week’s episode by asking, “If we were not ashamed of our pleasure, what would become possible? If we started to understand that pleasure is something that everyone should have access to, what would become possible?”

This week on For The Wild, we are exploring how to embody pleasure in its many forms with adrienne maree brown. Drawing upon Audre Lorde’s seminal publication, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, adrienne maree brown’s latest book, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, reiterates how once we truly know the pleasure of being alive, suffering becomes unimaginable. Above all, pleasure resides in our body, but many of us seem to forget this through lifetimes of social conditioning, performative identities, and the multitude of ways in which capitalism and patriarchy have filtered love and desire through the lens of ownership. Yet, whether we are cognizant of this or not, our pleasure and our liberation remain inextricably bound together.

adrienne maree brown grows healing ideas in public through her multi-genre writing, her music and her podcasts. Informed by 25 years of movement facilitation, somatics, Octavia E Butler scholarship and her work as a doula, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination and Transformative Justice as ideas and practices for transformation. She is the author/editor of several published texts, cogenerator of a tarot deck and a developing musical ritual.

 Music by The Boom Booms, JB the First Lady, and Small Town.

Introducing listeners to his way of worship and connection to the Earth, this week’s guest Erik Assadourian offers insight into the religious framing and practical applications of the Gaian way. Erik shares his spiritual path of recognizing interdependence with the Earth and shares how he dreams towards a future where we exist in a mutualistic relationship to the Earth. Ranging from topics of degrowth to tangible spiritual practices for connection to the Earth and its seasons, Erik’s wisdom and groundedness is a balm for those tired by the rhetoric of our overculture. 

Together, Erik and Ayana consider the value of spirituality and theology while also reckoning with the complicated and often harmful ways such ideologies have been applied throughout human history. Taking this into mind, the conversation delves into our culture of consumerism and extraction while also considering the philosophies and paradigm shifts that may guide us out of it. Using religion and connection to the sustaining force of the Earth as a guide, how might we build communities of care not just for humanity, but for the Earth itself? In a time when so many of our environmental fights feel urgent, Erik calls listeners to consider how we might build a culture and framework of environmentalism meant to propel us through to a long future. 

Erik Assadourian is the director of the Gaian Way, a spiritual philosophy and practicing religious community. He is also a sustainability researcher and writer. Erik was a researcher with Worldwatch Institute from 2001 until its end in 2017. At Worldwatch, he directed or codirected seven books, focusing on consumerism, eco-education, global security, sustainable communities, and economic degrowth.

Music by Algorhythm.Code. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.

Winding through questions of philosophy, science, and meaning making, this week’s episode brings together vital thoughts on what it means to live an embodied life in an entangled world. Guest Merlin Sheldrake shares the motivations that drew him to study fungi and the complex ways this study has shaped his life and thought. 

As Merlin shares, “an account of life that doesn't include fungi is an account of a living world  that doesn’t exist.” Our relationship with fungi is non-negotiable. Merlin invites listeners to pay attention to what this relationship means and how it shapes not only our lives, but the entanglement of life across the world. With this, Merlin also shares the ways fungal life offers a diversity of expressions and possibilities – offering up the perspective that the diversity and complexity of relationship and expression is what makes life fertile. 

Across the episode, Merlin and Ayana contemplate the history and meaning of science, and come to see life as a process and a relationship. The meaning we make does not come out of a vacuum, but rather out of relationship. Life itself, in its many forms, is improvisational. Understanding this, we are left with the provocation: How might we speak to the world, rather than about it?   

Merlin is a biologist and author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, and winner of the Royal Society Book Prize and the Wainwright Prize. Merlin is a research associate of the Vrije University Amsterdam, and works with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks and the Fungi Foundation. A keen brewer and fermenter, he is fascinated by the relationships that arise between humans and more-than-human organisms. (merlinsheldrake.com)

Music by Matthewdavid. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.

This week, Ayana is joined by Sky Hopinka in a conversation that dives deep into the meaning of art and film and the stories and emotions we share between generations. Sky grounds the conversation in his incredible expertise and thoughtful approach to media. Touching on the very questions of who we are and how we make meaning, the questions in this conversation cut to the core of what it means to be human.  

The conversation is a beautiful exploration of art, Indigeneity, intergenerational pain, and the way we make meaning in times like these. Weaving together the ephemeral worlds of emotion and identity with the grounding power of shared values and reciprocity, Sky reminds us that art is meant to provoke, inspire, and make the space needed for feeling to emerge. 

Sky Hopinka was born and raised in Northern Washington State and Southern California. He's a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non fiction forms of media. His work has played at various festivals including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival. 

Music by Arushi Jain. The artwork for this episode is Sky Hopinka; Breathings (2020). Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.

This week we are excited to continue our collaboration with UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute to bring you a conversation from The Othering and Belonging Conference in Berlin, Germany.

This conversation is introduced by Monica Jiang, is moderated by Cecilie Surasky and features the voices of Udi Raz and Yasmeen Daher. 

Speaking on the theme “Turning Towards Each Other, Not Against Each Other: Bridging in Times of Crisis” the panelists address what it means to build towards co-liberation in difficult times – especially in the context of the war on Gaza. Since this conversation was recorded on November 14, 2023, the genocide in Gaza has continued and worsened, and the loss of so many lives is tragic and incomprehensible. The words offered here aim to make space to honor pain and simultaneously to explore generative forms of allyship in the face of such violence.  

Music by Amo Amo and Ariana Saraha. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.

Tracing ancestry through the motherline, this week’s guest Sylvia V. Linsteadt introduces listeners to the world of matrilineal myth and wisdom. For Sylvia, story and myth are very much alive and can offer valuable insight especially as we consider what it means to inhabit a place. From stories of female monks, to the practical wisdom of weaving, to the veneration of The Virgin Mary, Sylvia reminds us of what it means to value the feminine. 

Throughout the episode, Sylvia and Ayana consider questions at the very foundation of our cultures. Winding through questions of patriarchy, religion, and violence, Ayana and Sylvia do not find singular answers, but rather a wisdom that arises from questioning the things that are deeply enmeshed in our culture. As we reckon with a violent and troubling world, how can we turn to stories that guide us to liberation? 

Sylvia Linsteadt is a writer and certified wildlife tracker from northern California, ancestral Coast Miwok territory. She currently lives in Devon, England. Her work—both fiction and non-fiction—is rooted in myth, ecology, ancient history, feminism & bioregionalism, and is devoted to broadening our human stories to include the voices of the living land. She is the author of the collections The Venus Year and Our Lady of the Dark Country, two novels for young readers, The Wild Folk and The Wild Folk Rising, and the post-apocalyptic folktale cycle Tatterdemalion with painter Rima Staines. Her nonfiction books include The Wonderments of the East Bay, and Lost Worlds of the San Francisco Bay Area, which won the 2018 Northern California Book Award for best general nonfiction. She is currently finishing a novel set in Bronze Age Crete, where she has lived and researched extensively. Sylvia also teaches occasional myth-oriented creative writing workshops, and shares her work out loud on her podcast Kalliope's Sanctum.

Music by The New Runes. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.

What beckons us, calls to us from beyond? Tuning into a magic that flows from the universe, not from an individualized self, Tyson Yunkaporta offers lucid insight into the current state of the world in this week’s episode. In maddening times of dissonance and disconnection, Tyson speaks to the need for the Right Story, for LORE. As he dives into his new book Right Story, Wrong Story, Tyson discusses rampant disinformation, the stories that prop up empire, and the need for lore that cuts through such propagandistic drivel. 

This convivial and expansive conversation is a brilliant exploration and critique of the  current cultural fabric, and it invites crucial questions of how we can disrupt cycles of violence, power, and greed. 

Throughout the conversation, Tyson contemplates how we may open ourselves up to being beckoned outside of the ego, and how we may resist the individualizing neoliberal urge. Decolonization is not just about poetry, or word, or aesthetics, and Tyson strikes at the heart of how we (the collective we) must be materially and fiscally decolonial for the real work to be done.  

Tyson Yunkaporta is an Aboriginal scholar, founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University in Melbourne, and author of Sand Talk and Right Story, Wrong Story. His work focuses on applying Indigenous methods of inquiry to resolve complex issues and explore global crises.

Music by Leo James generously provided by Patience Records. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.

In a timely and heart-wrenching episode, returning guest Layla K. Feghali shares the power and perseverance of homeland, even in the face of colonial violence. As the genocide in Palestine continues and worsens, Layla offers a powerful call to listen to our rage and take real action against empire. 

Layla reminds us that in urgent times, action must come before grief and before healing. You cannot heal a wound that is still actively bleeding. Remembrance is a key part of liberation from the systems that tried to force disconnection from the land. As Layla shares throughout the episode “the land is in our bones.”  

You can find a full list of recommendations for action from Layla on our website (forthewild.world). 

Layla Feghali lives between her ancestral village in coastal Lebanon and her diasporic home in California, where she was born and raised by her immigrant family. She is an author, cultural worker, and plantcestral medicine practitioner focused on the re-membrance of baladi (land-based/folk/indigenous) lifeways and ancestral wisdoms from SWANA (SouthWest Asia and North Africa). Her dedication is to stewardship of our earth's eco-cultural integrity, sovereignty, and the many layers of relational restoration and transformation that entails. Feghali's upcoming book The Land in Our Bones, documents ethnobotanical and cultural healing knowledge from Syria to the Sinai, while interrogating colonialism and its lingering wounds on the culture of our displaced world. The book re-maps Canaan (the Levant) and the Crossroads (the "Middle East"), while engaging nuanced conversations about identity, loss, belonging, trauma, and rematriation. It features her Plantcestral Re-Membrance methodology as an emergent pathway towards cultural repair for diasporic and colonized communities, and highlights the critical importance of tending the land and life where we are to restore the fundamental integrity, dignity, and regeneration of our earth's multispecies communities.

Music by Lionmilk. Episode art by mirella salamé. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.

What if we started with gratitude? With love? In this episode Ayana is joined by longtime mentor Molly Young Brown in a discussion that tends to what it means to be human in times of polycrisis and unraveling.

Grounding the conversation in practice of group processing, activism, and relationality, Molly speaks to the reality of our time. We simply can’t go on like this, and it is dizzying to pretend anything else. This truth is illuminating, but does not need to be wholly devastating. At the peak of crises, how might we turn towards a world that imagines things differently, a world that is not driven only by profit, a world where we might center love? Molly encourages listeners to turn to deep time – our connection to our ancestors and to all who come in the future – and to root into a relationship with humanity and the earth that recognizes our interconnectedness. 

Molly Brown, M.A., M.Div. lives in Mt Shasta, CA with her husband Jim. In her work as a writer, educator, workshop facilitator, and life coach, she draws on the Work That Reconnects, ecopsychology, psychosynthesis, and systems thinking, and specializes in working with activists. She co-authored with Joanna Macy both editions of Coming Back to Life (1998, 2014) , edits the online journal, Deep Times: A Journal of the Work That Reconnects, and co-directs the Spiral Journey Facilitator Development Program. She is author and co-author of several books, including Growing Whole: Self-realization for the Great Turning; Unfolding Self: The Practice ofPsychosynthesis, Held in Love: Life Stories To Inspire Us Through Times of Change (co-editor Carolyn Treadway); and Lighting A Candle: Collected Reflections on a Spiritual Life.  Website: MollyYoungBrown.com

Music by Celia Hollander provided courtesy of the artist and Patience Records.  

Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.