We’re calling in slow media.
Feeling into the need for slow, emotionally grounded, and resonant content, we’ll be pausing weekly episodes to fully embody a slow media approach. The past ten years of interviews have shown us how media should be slow, rooted, and steadying, and this shift to slow media will honor all that we have learned from years of beautiful conversations.
Over the coming months, we will be bringing you print, film, long form media, deeply focused podcast series, and in-person events that will center community and connection. We invite you to dive in deep with us. Stay tuned to our socials, newsletter, website, and podcast feed for updates and announcements!
We’re embracing content that is deeply-rooted, resourced rather than reactionary, and that offers perspectives based on lived, tangible experiences. Society is moving at an inhuman and inhumane pace right now. Rather than submitting to a culture of constant productivity, we are focusing on moving at the earth’s pace. We’re answering to nature, spirit, and community, not to the clock.
We need our community of support more than ever to make this happen. Join us on Patreon at patreon.com/forthewild where you’ll get special updates on our projects, or make a one time donation at forthewild.world/support
Music by noah klein. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full description, references, and action points.
This week we are rebroadcasting our episode with Dori Midnight, originally aired in October 2022.
“With a prayer to imagine beyond the current structures and systems, and kind of weave ourselves into, and be wrapped inside of, the invisible cloak that is interdependence, that is mutual aid, that supports us to reach towards each other and reach towards a vision of mutually flourishing life.” This powerful vision is shared by this week’s guest, Dori Midnight. In this sweet, meaningful, and meandering conversation, Dori discusses magical and liberatory practices, ancestral Jewish healing traditions, and the necessity of reclaiming Judaism from Zionism in the name of collective liberation. She shares sweet stories of garlic and cedar, the generosity of belonging, and the blessing of our collective and intricate work as we stretch toward liberation.
Dori Midnight practices intuitive healing, weaves collaborative, liberatory ritual spaces, makes potions, and writes liturgy, spells, prayers, and poems. For over 20 years, Dori has been practicing and teaching on ritual and remedies for unraveling times, reconnecting with traditions of Jewish ancestral wisdom, community care work, and queer magic and healing. Music by 40 Million Feet, Katie Gray, and Aviva Le Fey. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
This week we are rebroadcasting our episode with Kimberly Ann Johnson originally aired in April 2023.
Feeling into the state of our nervous systems and our relationships with each other and ourselves, this episode offers a powerful perspective on the importance of recognizing and tending to how life feels. Together, Ayana and this week’s guest Kimberly Ann Johnson discuss the depths of pleasure and the dimensions of healing. Kimberly brings deep knowledge regarding reproductive and sexual health, especially paying attention to the often untended somatic nature of sexual boundary repair and the complicated nature of what we bring into sexual relationships.
This conversation is steeped in trust and intimacy. Kimberly’s focus and understanding offers a guide to the ways we might come to handle and regulate our own nervous systems in order to act in alignment with our desires, rather than with the prescribed roles we have been put into through societal conditioning.
Kimberly Ann Johnson is a Sexological Bodyworker, Somatic Experiencing practitioner, yoga teacher, postpartum advocate, and single mom. Working hands-on in integrative women’s health and trauma recovery for more than a decade, she helps women heal from birth injuries, gynecological surgeries, and sexual boundary violations. Kimberly is the author of the Call of the Wild: How We Heal Trauma, Awaken Our Own Power, and Use It for Good, as well as the early mothering classic The Fourth Trimester, and is the host of the Sex Birth Trauma podcast.
Join us on Patreon at patreon.com/forthewild for an extended version of this episode.
Music by Lake Mary & Talk West and Katie Gray. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
This week we are rebroadcasting our episode with Sophie Strand which originally aired in November 2022.
In this winding and lucid conversation, guest Sophie Strand invites us to investigate our relationality, to embrace rot and decay, to welcome our demons to the dinner table, and to prepare for uncertain futures with tenderness. Sophie brings to light the wisdom of the compost heap. What myths do we need for modernity, what wisdom is sedimented within our bodies? Sophie and Ayana tap into deep lines of thought and myth, weaving together conversations and concepts from thousands of years of human history. As the interview asks, “What is it to be human on our most basic level?” To be a human is to be in complicated and compromising relationships – relationships that implicate us within the other, that show us that love is a process of altering and of deep work. Purity is not an option. Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine will be published by Inner Traditions on November 22, 2022 and is available for pre-order. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions in Spring 2023. Subscribe for her newsletter at sophiestrand.substack.com. And follow her work on Instagram: @cosmogyny and at www.sophiestrand.com.
Music by Tan Cologne and Mitski. Cover image by Alexandra Levasseur. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Maya Khosla which originally aired in November 2022.
What can the forest teach us of grief, of joy, of humanity? This week, poet and scientist Maya Khosla invites listeners into the forests of Northern California to find deep reverence for the power of biodiversity. Maya’s expertise on wildfires shines through this deep and well-informed conversation as she and Ayana share a love for the forest and deep-seated awe for the complexity of forest life. Maya introduces listeners to the science behind forest fires and urges us to see fire as not simply “destructive,” but rather as one of the many cycles of earth. From practices of cultural burning to current studies on post-fire diversity, the creative and regenerative power of the forest cannot be overlooked.
Maya Khosla is a wildlife biologist and writer. She served as Sonoma County Poet Laureate (2018-2020), bringing Sonoma’s communities together through poetry gatherings and field walks after the 2017 fires. Sonoma County Conservation Council (SCCC) selected her as one of the 2020 Environmentalists of the Year. Her poetry books include “All the Fires of Wind and Light” from Sixteen Rivers Press (2020 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award), “Keel Bone” from Bear Star Press (Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize), and “Web of Water: Life in Redwood Creek”. Her writing has been featured in documentary films including “Village of Dust, City of Water,” about the water crises in rural India.
Music by Lake Mary, Forest Veil, and Bird By Snow. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
Inviting listeners into his deep connection with the forest and the natural world, Ross Reid brings an inspirational energy and commitment to this interview. Connecting around their shared love for old growth and wild places, Ross and Ayana consider what it means to get people interested in protecting the places that sustain us. How can we inspire the connection with the land that brings people to defend it?
Ross shares the journey behind his work as “Nerdy About Nature,” and the passion for education, science, and the outdoors that drives the project. Breaking down what he wants people to get from his content, he considers how to get people to pay attention to the issues that matter without feeding into the seemingly endless loop of the attention economy. Ross and Ayana delve into critical questions about advocacy and activism in times of social media, and consider what it would truly mean to engage in action that connects and protects.
This conversation brings together rooted optimism, an understanding of the importance of education and knowledge sharing, and a dream of better systems that protect both people and the land. Ross leaves listeners to investigate their own connections to the land and to consider the many ways it is mediated by cultural and political intervention.
Based in the Cascadian bioregion, Ross runs a passion project called Nerdy About Nature in which he shares fast-paced, fun, informative videos about nature and the world around us as a means of breaking down barriers to access factual science-based education, while providing critical insight and constructive conversation on environmental and social issues to encourage positive changes in this world to create a more diverse, inclusive, equitable and just future for us all.
Music by Green-House courtesy of Leaving Records. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Jarod K Anderson, originally aired in January 2023.
Bringing us into his world of nature, awe, and magical poetry, guest Jarod K. Anderson reminds us that our human journey is worthy of just as much love and affection as the natural world around us. When we come to nature with intention, how might it guide us towards love and inspiration? In a time where so many of us are feeling lost, confused, and not connected to a purpose, we often abdicate our power to make meaning in favor of buying prepackaged narratives about who we are based on what we consume. Tapping into the beauty of telling our own stories and making our own meaning, Jarod and Ayana counter what we have been taught about worth. This episode highlights the power of the humble in the face of the grandiose and attention seeking. We are people of a place, Jarod reminds us, and the intimate, internal, and local work we do matters, just as our small bodies in this vast universe matter infinitely.
Writer, Poet, and podcaster Jarod K. Anderson (creator of The CryptoNaturalist Podcast) has built a large audience of readers and listeners with his strange, vibrant appreciations of nature. Ranging from optimistic contemplations of mortality to appreciations of single-celled organisms, Jarod is forever writing love letters to the natural world.
Music is “Pine Chant” by Sara Fraker and Lachlan Skipworth. “Inspired by tree-ring growth data from the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, Pine Chant is a sonic embodiment of twelve Arizona trees and an emotional response to climate crisis.” Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
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 Leaving Records.
Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
In the spirit of the solstice, we are taking a pause from our regular episode schedule. We’re also taking the time to express our immense gratitude for the wonderful community that makes For The Wild possible – our lovely team, our community of guests, our Patreon community, and our listeners all over the world. The past year has been one of beautiful synthesis. We released over 40 new episodes, and it is incredible to see the conversations, actions, and connections that have been sparked by For The Wild.
Tune into this update for some messages from our team, reflections from Ayana, and updates on upcoming projects!
In an effort to continue this work and support our small team we would deeply appreciate your support. As a grassroots, independent media producer, listener support is one of our main funding sources. If you have found value or meaning in our offerings, please consider making a one time donation at forthewild.world/donate or by joining us on Patreon at patreon.com/forthewild.
Music by Proxemia. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
Continuing the conversation series, “The Edges in the Middle,” presented in collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, For The Wild is delighted to share this conversation between Báyò Akómoláfé, Sa’ed Atshan, and Cecilie Surasky.
Starting from the premise that all people belong and all lives are grievable, Bayo, Cecilie, and Sa’ed will explore how honoring each other’s grief may allow us to reclaim each other’s humanity and perhaps shed light on a path forward to belonging in Israel-Palestine, for Muslims, Jews, and Christians, and for all people around the world. Bayo, Sa’ed, and Cecilie will journey into what it might be like to glimpse at the world through tears: what visions are possible when we postpone the compulsion to see everything clearly?
“The Edges in the Middle” is a series of conversations between Báyò Akómoláfé and thought companions like john a. powell, V, Naomi Klein, and more. These limited episodes have been adapted from Báyò’s work as the Global Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley's Othering & Belonging Institute. In this role, Báyò has been holding a series of public conversations on issues of justice and belonging for the Institute's Democracy & Belonging Forum, which connects and resources civic leaders in Europe and the US who are committed to bridging across difference to strengthen democracy and advance belonging in both regions and around the world. Báyò's conversations encourage us to rethink justice, hope, and belonging by sitting amidst the noise, not trying to cover it up with pleasant rhythms. To learn more about the Democracy & Belonging Forum, visit democracyandbelongingforum.org.
Music by Sitka Sun generously provided by The Long Road Society Record Label. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
“No organism is an island.” As Sandor Katz reminds us in this delightful and informative episode, all life on earth is deeply interdependent. Though modern food systems alienate us from our environments and from the ways, we cannot totally sever ourselves from the environments and nutrients that make life possible. Sandor shows that alienation and disconnection will not free us. Rather, settling into the overlapping and diverse entwinement of the more-than-human world may bring connection and sustenance in close relation to our food production. The story of humanity is embedded in our food, embedded in the daily tasks and practical measures that sustain us.
This conversation bubbles over with wisdom, as Sandor shares stories and lessons from his decades of experience experimenting with the art of fermentation. Fermentation is the manifestation of biodiversity, and as Sandor emphasizes, the study of fermentation is as much a study of our own tastes and cultural transitions as it is a study of our environments.
Sandor Ellix Katz is a fermentation revivalist. He is the author of five books: Wild Fermentation; The Art of Fermentation; The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved; Fermentation as Metaphor; and his latest, Fermentation Journeys. Sandor's books, along with the hundreds of fermentation workshops he has taught around the world, have helped to catalyze a broad revival of the fermentation arts. A self-taught experimentalist who lives in rural Tennessee, the New York Times calls him “one of the unlikely rock stars of the American food scene.” Sandor is the recipient of a James Beard award and other honors. For more information, check out his website www.wildfermentation.com.
Music by Matthewdavid. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
In this week’s episode we tap deep into the trust, desire, intimacy, and vulnerability that come from relationality. Betty Martin offers her vast knowledge of bodywork, somatics, and consent to give listeners insight into what she calls “The Wheel of Consent,” a quadrant that details a practice of giving and receiving.
Betty reminds us that access is a gift. No one is born with the knowledge of how to give and receive in the “perfect” way, rather we must learn and feel together – navigating boundaries and allowing ourselves to find what feels right. Intimacy is a deeply vulnerable act, and Betty discusses how we can create a sense of acceptance and safety as we root in our bodies rather than societal expectations.
Throughout the conversation, Betty emphasizes that consent should be the baseline for interaction, not just in intimate relationships but in the world writ large. The questions we ask and the people we include in conversations about consent matter. Only in knowing our limits as individuals, as a society, and as a part of the more-than-human world can we find the true meaning of trusting ourselves, of tapping into generosity, and of comfort.
Dr. Betty Martin has had her hands on people professionally for over 40 years, first as a Chiropractor and upon retiring from that practice, as a certified Surrogate Partner, Sacred Intimate, and Somatic Sex Educator. Her explorations in somatic-based therapy and practices informed her creation of the framework, The Wheel of Consent®. She wrote a book about it, called "The Art of Receiving and Giving: The Wheel of Consent", and travels the world teaching other practitioners how to use the practices and the model to keep their clients safe, and their sessions effective and satisfying.
Music by Roehind and Vaughn Aed.
Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
How can a relationship with one animal open the door to the depths of humanity? In this episode, returning guest Kurt Russo shares how he came to see the world through Tokitae, a Southern Resident Orca held captive in the Miami Seaquarium for decades. As he mourns Tokitae’s recent death, Kurt reflects on the ways nature gives us signs of the greater mysteries of life.
This conversation is equally rooted in the material realities of protecting the Salish Sea, the Snake River, and the more-than-human kin that call those places home, and the spiritual questions that cruelty and disregard for the more-than-human provoke. How has humanity gotten to such a point? Kurt shares guided wisdom about the realities of commodification, ecocide, and the capacity of the human soul for intentional cruelty. How we fight against such darkness matters not just for humanity, but for all with whom we share this precious earth.
Kurt Russo is currently the Executive Director of the Indigenous-led nonprofit, Se’Si’Le, that is dedicated to the application of ancestral knowledge to reimagine our relationship to the nature of nature. He worked for the Lummi Nation from 1978-2020 in the area of sacred sites and treaty rights. He also served as Executive Director of the Native American Lands Conservancy in California from 1998-2016 and was Senior Advisor to the Kumeyaay-Digueno Land Conservancy of southern California. He was the co-founder and Executive Director of the Florence R. Kluckhohn Center for the Study of Values from 1987-2002. He has a BS and MS in Forestry and a PhD in History. He has worked abroad with Indigenous communities in their efforts to preserve their ancestral lands and knowledge in Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile.
For an extended version of this episode, join us at patreon.com/forthewild
Music by Francesca Heart and Julius Smack. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
Blending theory, practice, and fascinating cultural vision, this week’s conversation with Erin Manning calls into question the systems and practices that keep us stuck.
Erin’s imagination and openness seem endless as she describes how we may work to create movements for other ways of being. Crucially, Erin describes her understanding of modalities of being, explaining that neurotypicality is a system that undergirds our ways of knowing and our ways of being a body. There is no singular “neurotypical person” just as there is no singular “neurodiverse” person. Rather, we are trained into a choreography that encourages us to “practice neurotypicality well” and punishes us if we do not.
Understanding the ways these systems work is vital as we untangle the hegemony and oppression that have dictated what counts as knowledge, what is valuable in a body, and even what bodies are “worth” being alive. The episode shares the resounding call that “we owe everything to each other.” How can we give into that call?
Erin Manning grounds in the interstices of philosophy, aesthetics and politics. Pedagogical experiments are central to her work, some of which occur at Concordia University in Montreal where she is a research chair in Speculative Pragmatism, Art and Pedagogy in the Faculty of Fine Arts. She is concerned, always, about alter-pedagogical and alter-economic practices. She has written The Minor Gesture, For a Pragmatics of the Useless, Out of the Clear, and The Being of Relation (forthcoming).
Her artwork is textile-based, relationally-oriented, and often participatory. Her current research is focused on 3e —an exploration of the transversality of the three ecologies, the social, the environmental and the conceptual.
Music by Johanna Knutsson courtesy of Patience Records. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
This week we are taking a pause from our regularly scheduled releases to rebroadcast Corrina Gould’s potent and powerful episode that originally aired in November 2020.
We hope that this episode serves as a reminder of humanity and land rematriation in the face of deep colonial violence. The genocide in Palestine highlights the ways colonial forces of greed, extraction and brutal disregard for life and ties to the land are bearing their bloody teeth. We cannot return to “normal.” How can we catalyze action towards a future of reparation, responsibility, and reciprocity?
In this episode of For The Wild, guest Corrina Gould reminds us that the land can sustain us in a way that would provide for our wellbeing should we choose to really re-examine what it is we need to survive. But more than a conversation on the wealth of the land, we explore responsibility and reciprocity on stolen homelands by asking what it means to be in right relationship? How can we foster integrity in conservation and land restoration work amidst a world that continues to peddle scarcity, greed, and extraction? How can folks contribute to the re-storying of the land, even if through small acts?
Corrina Gould is the spokesperson for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan/Ohlone. She is an activist that has worked on preserving and protecting the ancient burial sites of her ancestors in the Bay Area for decades. She is the Co-founder and a Lead Organizer for Indian People Organizing for Change and co-founder of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. Music by Shayna Gladstone and Amo Amo. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
This week, Fariha Róisín offers both timely and timeless wisdom on what it means to live in a body that has experienced trauma. This is a conversation that bears witness to the deep terror and distress of the world and still charges forward with undying compassion and care – the compassion and care of wild survival.
Offering both deep personal reflection and spacious contemplation about the state of the world, Fariha reminds us that our bodies guide us to what we need. This episode brings up the things that we so often don’t want to touch – trauma, abuse, global systems of disregard – and handles them with care and love. Fariha shows us what it means to take pain seriously.
Throughout the episode Fariha threads in a profound relationship with god, and a type of faith that is filled with questioning, fueled by queer thought, and driven by love. In even the darkest of times we can turn to love, accountability, and community to find the care that we need.
Fariha Róisín is a multidisciplinary artist, born in Ontario, Canada. She was raised in Sydney, Australia, and is based in Los Angeles. As a Muslim queer Bangladeshi, she is interested in the margins, in liminality, otherness and the mercurial nature of being. Her work has pioneered a refreshing and renewed conversation about wellness, contemporary Islam and queer identities and has been featured in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, and Vogue. She is the author of the poetry collection How To Cure A Ghost (2019), as well as the novel Like A Bird (2020), Who Is Wellness For? (2022) and her second book of poetry is entitled Survival Takes a Wild Imagination, due fall 2023.
For an extended version of this episode join us at patreon.com/forthewild
Music by Misha Sultan (with special thanks to Patience Records), Amo Amo, Colloboh (with special thanks to Leaving Records), and Amber Rubarth. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
Invoking ancestry, magic, and a deep relationship with the Dead, this week’s guest Perdita Finn invites listeners into a world of mystery. Perdita’s work, including her new book Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World, calls humanity to engage with a faith in the unseen world, a faith in surrender, and a faith in the other side. For Perdita, this faith is not rooted in an otherworldly abstract idea of spirituality, but rather a grounded, embodied experience.
As we come to face the existential questions of our time – war, climate change, and disasters of all kinds – Perdita reminds us that we are not alone. We can lean on our ancestors, both human and more-than-human, for strength. As we live into the long story of our souls, what wisdom can we pull from lives beyond this one? Tapping into creativity, resilience and connectedness, life comes after life, comes after life, and the meaning of our cyclical lineage is ever-present.
Perdita Finn is the co-founder, with her husband Clark Strand, of the non-denominational international fellowship The Way of the Rose, which inspired their book The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. In addition to extensive study with Zen masters, priests, and healers, she apprenticed with the psychic Susan Saxman, with whom she wrote The Reluctant Psychic. Finn now teaches popular workshops on Getting to Know the Dead, in which participants are empowered to activate the magic in their own lives with the help of their ancestors. She is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World and lives with her family in the moss-filled shadows of the Catskill Mountains.
For an extended version of this episode please join us on Patreon at patreon.com/forthewild
Music by The New Runes, Left Vessel, Eliza Edens, and Arthur Moon. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
As those of us in the Northern Hemisphere enter into autumn, this week’s guest Jacqueline Suskin reminds us that the earth gives us dedicated time for reflection. In a conversation that roots deeply into seasonality and life’s rhythms, Jacqueline’s meditations and suggestions feel perfectly timed.
Jacqueline uses her book A Year in Practice as a practical guide for finding inspiration and meaning throughout the seasons. Detailing her ongoing connection to the earth and the wonder she feels about humanity's place within and as a part of nature, Jacqueline details the way our rhythms are drawn from those of the earth. Even as the climate changes and we are beginning to lose the predictability of earth’s rhythms, our bodies carry the memory and significance of the seasons.
Jacqueline reminds us that to find meaning in the sea of hope and hopelessness within modern movements, we must bear witness to the earth.
Jacqueline Suskin is a poet and educator who has composed over forty thousand improvisational poems with her ongoing writing project, Poem Store. Suskin is the author of eight books, including the forthcoming A Year in Practice (Sounds True December 2023), with work featured in various publications including the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the Los Angeles Times. An ecstatic earth-worshiper, she lives in Detroit where she works as a teaching artist with InsideOut Literary Arts, bringing nature poetry into classrooms with her Poem Forest curriculum.
Music by Green-House generously provided by Leaving Records. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
What is life at the edges of ecosystems, at the moments of convergence? In this week’s episode, guest Obi Kaufmann introduces listeners to his understanding of consilience – emphasizing the importance of art and science in sacred relationship.
Obi shares in a reverie about what California has been and could be, and in doing so, he invites guests to imagine a world where we recognize nature as the undeniable truth of who we are. Obi brings rooted knowledge and esoteric inquiry to this conversation. His nuanced understandings of conservation, rewilding, and relating to the natural world, pull us into a framework for seeing a world of deep, beautiful relationality, even amidst pain and loss.
Obi Kaufmann is an award-winning author of many best-selling books on California's ecology, biodiversity, and geography. Obi’s signature style is as artful as it is analytic, combining masterful renderings of wildlife, hand-painted maps, and data-driven storytelling to present a hopeful and integrated vision of California’s future. An avid conservationist, Obi Kaufmann regularly travels around the state, presenting his work and vision of ecological restoration and preservation from the Klamath-Siskiyou Wildland Center to the Mojave Desert Land Trust. Most recently, Obi was the artist-in-residence for the National Park Service at Whiskeytown National Recreation Area. You can catch him every month in conversation with author and tribal chairman Greg Sarris in their podcast called Place and Purpose. A lifelong resident of California, Obi Kaufmann makes his home base in Oakland and is currently working on Field Atlases to come.
Music by Memotone, Magnetic Vines, and Daniela Lanaia. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
Bringing us to the Wind River Reservation, this week’s guest, Jason Baldes, shares his work to bring back wild Buffalo to Wind River and to rematriate land to the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes. Jason offers his deep wisdom about the ecological, spiritual, and cultural importance of Buffalo.
Jason’s work with the Wind River Tribal Buffalo initiative has already had an immense effect. The physical and cultural landscape of the so-called United States is steeped in a colonial worldview, but work like Jason’s is changing the tides and aligning conservation with long-standing Indigenous values. This healing work honors those ancestors who had Buffalo, land, and ritual stolen from them by the United States government.
Jason, an enrolled member of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe, received both his bachelor's and master's degrees in Land Resources & Environmental Sciences from Montana State University, where he focused on the restoration of Buffalo/bison to Tribal lands. In 2016 he spearheaded the successful effort to relocate a herd to the Wind River Indian Reservation and works with both the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes in buffalo management and expansion. He is an advocate, educator and speaker on Indigenous cultural revitalization and ecological restoration who has also served as director of the Wind River Native Advocacy Center, where he was instrumental in the passing of the Wyoming Indian Education for All Act. He currently splits time as executive director of the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative, and Tribal Buffalo Program Senior Manager for the National Wildlife Federation's Tribal Partnerships Program. Jason sits on the board of directors of the Inter-Tribal Buffalo Council and the board of trustees for the Conservation Lands Foundation.
For an extended version of this episode, please join us at patreon.com/forthewild.
Music by Jayme Stone and A.R. Wilson. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
Continuing the conversation series, “The Edges in the Middle,” presented in collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, For The Wild is delighted to share this conversation between Báyò Akómoláfé, Madhulika Banerjee, and Minna Salami.
Speaking on the theme, “Democracy and Its Exquisite Others,” Báyò, Madhulika, and Minna delve into an exploration of what it means to truly participate in democracy, as an embodied, collective action. In this thoughtful and informed episode, they investigate the idea of “Eurocracy'' and unpack what the eurocentric definition of democracy has meant for the world as a whole. Envisioning other ways of creating democracy, Báyò, Madhulika, and Minna describe festival democracy, democracies of contestations and dancing, and democracies of the more-than-human.
“The Edges in the Middle” is a series of conversations between Báyò Akómoláfé and thought companions like john a. powell, V, Naomi Klein, and more. These limited episodes have been adapted from Báyò’s work as the Global Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley's Othering & Belonging Institute. In this role, Báyò has been holding a series of public conversations on issues of justice and belonging for the Institute's Democracy & Belonging Forum, which connects and resources civic leaders in Europe and the US who are committed to bridging across difference to strengthen democracy and advance belonging in both regions and around the world. Báyò's conversations encourage us to rethink justice, hope, and belonging by sitting amidst the noise, not trying to cover it up with pleasant rhythms. To learn more about the Democracy & Belonging Forum, visit democracyandbelongingforum.org.
Music by Sitka Sun generously provided by The Long Road Society Record Label and by Maree Siou. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
“We’re not trying to be right. We’re trying to see if we can see clearly.” In this agile and authentic episode, returning guest Stephen Jenkinson offers a lucid view of the world. How might our understanding of the world change if we approached life with a willingness to see things as they are rather than a need to only affirm that which we desire?
Ayana and Stephen journey together to consider what had brought us to this modern time – prompting vital questions about the value of tradition, the importance of strangerhood, the possibility of reckoning, and the meaning of ancestry. Stephen asks questions that disrupt and unsettle the status quo, and perhaps these questions will lead us to the lessons we so deeply need.
STEPHEN JENKINSON, MTS, MSW is an author, culture activist, ceremonialist and farmer. He teaches internationally and is the creator and principal instructor of the Orphan Wisdom School, founded in 2010. With Master’s degrees from Harvard University (Theology) and the University of Toronto (Social Work), he has worked extensively with dying people and their families, is a former programme director in a major Canadian hospital and former assistant professor in a prominent Canadian medical school. He is the author of several books including 'Reckoning', 'A Generation's Worth', 'Come of Age', 'Money & the Soul's Desires' and the award-winning 'Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul'. Stephen is the subject of the National Film Board of Canada documentary 'Griefwalker', and 'Lost Nation Road', a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the wheelhouse of a mystery train. Nights of Grief and Mystery world tours, with singer/ songwriter Gregory Hoskins, are odes to wonder, love letters for the willingness to know endings.
Music by Nights of Grief and Mystery. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
What does it mean to settle, to be in a settled place? This week’s guest, AbdouMaliq Simone has dedicated his work to investigating the specifics of urban organization as they are created by people. In this erudite and globally-positioned conversation, Ayana and AbdouMaliq meditate on how the design of our environments shapes us.
AbdouMaliq talks us through the uncertain, vulnerable, and dynamic positions in the choreography of global cities, and contemplates what it means to live an urban life. From the entanglements of resistance and protest, to surveillance and governance, to the effects of climate change on the city environment, AbdouMaliq brings nuance and depth to this vital conversation. As humanity shapes the city, it shapes us in turn, and as the world rapidly urbanizes, AbdouMaliq calls listeners to think about what an urban politics could be.
AbdouMaliq Simone is Senior Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield and co-director of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab, Polytechnic University of
Turin. https://beyondinhabitation.org/
Music by Jahawi. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
In an episode that cuts straight to the soul, this week’s guest Andrea Gibson joins Ayana in a conversation that asks what it means to truly live. Andrea contemplates the ways we cope with loneliness and the deeply rooted societal fears of disconnection and of death. Facing fear, confusion, and loss head on, Andrea reminds us that healing is a return to the self, a return to community.
Andrea’s openness about their diagnosis and emotional journey, brings depth and emotion to the conversation. Through poem and spirituality, Andrea draws us to see the beauty in being alive in this particular life, in our particular bodies, at this particular time. Their presence and attention is life-giving.
As Andrea shares their journey connecting to the eternal, genderless “We,” they invite listeners to contemplate their identities beyond this life alone. As we let the need to know fall away, what miracles might reveal themselves to us?
Andrea Gibson is one of the most celebrated and influential spoken word poets of our time. Best known for their live performances, Gibson has changed the landscape of what it means to attend a “poetry show” altogether. To hear Gibson is like hearing songwriters play their music, their trademark honesty and vulnerability are on full display. Gibson’s poems center around LGBTQ issues, gender, feminism, mental health and the dismantling of oppressive social systems. The winner of the first Women’s World Poetry Slam, Gibson has gone on to be awarded the LGBTQ Out100 and has been featured on BBC, NPR and CSpan. Gibson is the author of seven award winning books and seven full length albums. Their live shows have become loving and supportive ecosystems for audiences to feel seen, heard, and held through Gibson’s art.
Music by John Carrol Kirby (generously provided by Patience Records), Kesia Negata, and Katie Gray. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
Death is a process of decomposition, how can we come to embrace this reality? This week, guest Katrina Spade joins Ayana for a fascinating conversation on the possibilities of burial practices, ways to connect with death, and the value in thoughtful death plans. Sharing her journey to founding Recompose, “a licensed, full-service, green funeral home in Seattle offering human composting,” Katrina shares that the way we design death rituals matters in how connected we feel to the process of death.
Detailing the science, logistics, and art behind human composting, Katrina imbues the conversation with passion, concern, and a spirit of learning. Through Recompose, Katrina has witnessed the beauty that comes from watching new life blossom from death, and from the connections family members of the deceased can have with the soil created from the composting process. The intention and compassion we put into death-care matters. As Katrina reminds us, there is so much to be gained from intimacy with death.
Katrina Spade is the founder and CEO of Recompose, a public benefit corporation leading the transformation of the funeral industry. Katrina is a designer and the inventor of a system that transforms the dead into soil (aka human composting).
Since founding in 2017, Katrina and Recompose have led the successful legalization of human composting in Washington State in 2019. Recompose became the first company in the world to offer the service in December of 2020. The process is now also legal in Oregon, Colorado, Vermont, California., and New York.
Katrina and her team have been featured in Fast Company, NPR, the Atlantic, BBC, Harper’s Magazine, and the New York Times. She is an Echoing Green Fellow, an Ashoka fellow, and a Harvard Kennedy School Visiting Social Innovator.
Music by Yesol. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
It is with a heavy heart that we share that Tokitae, a Southern Resident Orca held unjustly in captivity for 53 years, has passed away. To honor her memory, this week we are rebroadcasting our episode with Kurt Russo on the People Under the Sea, originally aired in October of 2018. This conversation explores the powerful memory held by Southern Resident orcas, the threats they face from vessel noise, chemical pollutants, and declining Chinook salmon population, the health of the Salish Sea, and the efforts of the Lummi Nation to return Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut (also known as Tokitae/Lolita), from where she was being held captive at Miami Seaquarium, to her natal waters in the Salish Sea. Tokitae’s life ended while in captivity, but we hope that her memory may serve to inspire the fight for right-relationship and reciprocity with our more-than-human-kin.
Kurt Russo is the executive director of Se’Si’Le, an Indigenous-led nonprofit dedicated to the perpetuation and practical application of Indigenous ancestral knowledge. Kurt has worked with Indigenous communities since 1978 in the areas of sacred site protection, Indigenous treaty rights, environmental cross-cultural conflict resolution, and the intertextualization of ways of knowing nature. He was co-Founder and Executive Director of the Florence R. Kluckhohn Center for the Study of Values and the Native American Land Conservancy, helped establish the International Indigenous Exchange Program (Northwest Indian College), the Sacred Lands Conservancy, and the Foundation for Indigenous Medicine. He has a BS in Forestry from the University of Montana, an MS in Forestry from the University of Washington, and a Ph.D. in History from the University of California (Riverside). He is a veteran and served in Vietnam where he worked with Montagnard Indigenous communities.
Music by Monplaisir and Amoeba. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
Introducing listeners to her fierce devotion to community and care for the animal world, Keiara Wade, the Compton Cowgirl, considers the ways care work includes the human and more-than-human. Though the connection between humans and animals is often unspoken, it is a vital tie, and Keiara emphasizes the way the specific tie between human and horse can be incredibly therapeutic, healing, and nourishing.
Keiara shares her journey with the Compton Cowboys and her experiences as a Black cowgirl. The Compton Cowboys were founded in 2017 by a group of Compton locals who had grown up riding together. Recognizing the importance of intergenerational community and influence, Keiara hopes that this program and connection to the horses can continue for generations to come. Compton Cowboys is about so much more than just riding, and Keiara shares the significance of making spaces for young people to feel heard and valued . The respect and accountability necessary for a good relationship with a horse is also necessary for a good relationship with each other. How might animals be our guides and companions in making the world more equitable?
Keiara Wade is The Compton Cowgirl of the Compton Cowboys.
She is in the process of pursuing her barrel racing career and becoming the first black woman to make it to the NFR. Horses have always been her positive outlet to the traumatic world in which she grew up. She believes in giving back to our younger generations by allowing them the experience of the equine world and possibly leading them away from the streets and gang violence. She recently moved to Houston to accomplish her dream, supported by the Compton Cowboys and the Compton Junior Equestrians program. She is a mother of two children Taylor and Michael.
This episode of For The Wild is brought to you by Catori Life.
Music by Jess Williamson, Kaivalya, and Sarah Maricha White. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
What is intelligence beyond, preceding, and following human intelligence? This week, Ayana is joined by guest James Bridle in a conversation that considers multiple forms of intelligence and ways of being.
Bringing a rich background of research on forms of intelligence, from artificial to mycelial, James posits that it is a critical failure to use human intelligence as the benchmark for all forms of knowing. Seeing intelligence as both relational and embodied, James points out that knowing has never been an independent or alienated act. Rather, it is our specific set of modern conditions which primes us for alienation and separation – both from ourselves and from the earth.
James encourages listeners to move from helplessness and fear to agency. In the same way that human agency created these systems and methodologies, we can also harness our agency to change the way they are used, to rethink our relationships to technology itself. How we heal our relationships is how we heal the world.
James Bridle is a writer, artist and technologist. Their artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide and on the internet. Their writing on literature, culture and networks has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Wired, the Atlantic, the New Statesman, the Guardian, and the Financial Times. They are the author of 'New Dark Age' (2018) and 'Ways of Being' (2022), and they wrote and presented "New Ways of Seeing" for BBC Radio 4 in 2019. Their work can be found at http://jamesbridle.com.
Music by Memotone. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
This week’s guest, Toko-pa Turner, invites us to consider that our dreams may serve as important guides throughout our lives. Diving into the intimately intertwined world of psyche and matter, Toko-pa considers the ways we may rehabilitate our imaginative capacities. We cannot simply dispose of that which goes beyond physical observation. Instead, centering the importance of feelings and sensing, Toko-pa encourages us to take time and pay attention to dreams.
Dreams and our interior worlds, according to Toko-pa, are deeply important within our personal searches for belonging. Modern society demands that we estrange parts of ourselves in order to “belong,” but this false belonging will never satisfy. Rather, Toko-pa focuses on finding interior belonging. What is internally guiding us towards our potential?
Blending the mystical teachings of Sufism in which she was raised with a Jungian approach to dreams, Toko-pa Turner is a Canadian author, teacher, and dreamworker. She founded The Dream School in 2001, from which thousands of students have since graduated. She is the author of the award-winning book, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, which explores the themes of exile and belonging through the lens of dreams, mythology, and memoirs. This book has resonated for readers worldwide, and has been translated into 10 different languages as well as winning multiple awards for excellence in publishing. Her work focuses on the relationship between psyche and nature, and how to follow our inner wisdom to meet with the social, psychological, and ecological challenges of our time.
Music by Magnetic Vines and Tarotplane. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
In this week’s episode, guest Amy Glenn invites listeners on a journey to consider the value in caregiving and companioning. Rooting the conversation in her experience as both a birth and death doula, Amy details the deep work of holding space for all of life’s moments.
Amy points out the thresholds of everyday life, and the value in sitting with uncertainty. Companioning, storytelling, and ritual making are all vital as we come to contemplate what it means to hold space for death. Offering breathing techniques and a meditation on the breath that holds us between birth and death, Amy calls to mind the importance of making space for contemplation. How can we make space for self-care and self-regulation as we cope with the journeys of life and death?
Amy Wright Glenn earned her MA in Religion and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. She earned her BA from Reed College in the study of Religion. Amy taught for eleven years in the Religion and Philosophy Department at The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey earning the Dunbar Abston Jr. Chair for Teaching Excellence. She is a birth and death doula, hospital chaplain, Kripalu Yoga teacher, and founder of the Institute for the Study of Birth, Breath, and Death. From 2015 to 2020, Amy served as an active contributor to PhillyVoice writing on topics relating to birth, death, parenting, and spirituality. Amy is the author of Birth, Breath, and Death: Meditations on Motherhood, Chaplaincy, and Life as a Doula and Holding Space: On Loving, Dying, and Letting Go. Amy has trained thousands of professionals in the work of holding space for life’s transitions ~ and focuses specifically on grief and bereavement care. To learn more, visit: www.birthbreathanddeath.com
Music by Charlie Warren, Doe Paoro, and Amber Rubarth. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
Continuing the conversation series, “The Edges in the Middle,” presented in collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, For The Wild is delighted to share this conversation between Báyò Akómoláfé, Naomi Klein and Yuria Celidwen.
Speaking about climate grief and hope, Báyò, Naomi, and Yuria build together to consider the value in tapping into the depth of emotion as we feel it, not as we are told we should feel it. In a time marked by disruption, loss, and demise, grief may be an invitation into depths that demand to be listened to, and as we embody the grieving process we are called to surrender to feeling.
“The Edges in the Middle” is a series of conversations between Báyò Akómoláfé and thought companions like john a. powell, V, Naomi Klein, and more. These limited episodes have been adapted from Báyò’s work as the Global Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley's Othering & Belonging Institute. In this role, Báyò has been holding a series of public conversations on issues of justice and belonging for the Institute's Democracy & Belonging Forum, which connects and resources civic leaders in Europe and the US who are committed to bridging across difference to strengthen democracy and advance belonging in both regions and around the world. Báyò's conversations encourage us to rethink justice, hope, and belonging by sitting amidst the noise, not trying to cover it up with pleasant rhythms. To learn more about the Democracy & Belonging Forum, visit democracyandbelongingforum.org.
Music by Sitka Sun, generously provided by The Long Road Society Record Label and Mikalya McVey. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
To listen to the extended episode, join us on Patreon at patreon.com/forthewild.
In an increasingly unequal and precarious world, how might we come to combat disconnection and disillusionment? In this episode, guest Cuck Collins dives deeply into the world of wealth hoarding and staggering inequality. Recognizing the complexity of these issues, Ayana and Chuck engage deeply with questions of philanthrocapitalism, tax spending, the wealth defense industry, and power inequities across society.
Chuck explains that as wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer hands it perpetuates and increases anti-democratic values and economic instability, leading to uncertain and uneven futures. This growing inequality is deeply intertwined with the capitalist extraction that has led to the climate crisis. As the fossil fuel industry has worked to shape public response to the climate crisis through denial, doubt, and delay, it is clear that the politics of our times are ensnared within corporate interest and greed.
At the same time, the climate crisis calls us to reckon with our value systems and to question the cultural conditionings by which we have been surrounded. It is delusional to think that even the wealthiest among us will be able to escape climate crisis entirely. Instead of relying on broken and untrustworthy systems, how can we seed a new economy of solidarity as we work to live within Earth’s boundaries?
Chuck Collins, co-editor, Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of numerous books including Born on Third Base, The Wealth Hoarders, and Economic Apartheid in America. Altar to an Erupting Sun is his first novel.
Music by Vide Geiger, Sean Smith, and The Ascent of Everest. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
Embracing the mountains, desert steppe, and islands of Patagonia, this week’s guest Diana Friedrich grounds listeners in an expansive and profound landscape. As she describes her work to protect swaths of land through Rewilding Argentina’s Patagonia Azul project, Diana and Ayana share in a love for landscapes that offer both challenge and refuge.
For Diana, conservation work is a calling to enter into deep community and to build trust over a shared love for the land. This means reimagining economic systems, challenging industrial greed, and countering our current culture of consumption and exploitation. Diana brings expert insight as she talks listeners through the complexity of international biodiversity goals and declarations. Though this, Diana emphasizes the importance of creating truly protected local areas rather than just relying on regulations and declarations. The deep commitment and intentional work of rewilding is vital as we work to support and to be a part of a world teeming with biodiversity.
Diana is a naturalist and adventurer. From a very early childhood, her parents took her and her four siblings traveling to the wildest and most remote places of Argentina and Chile. Right after finishing high school, she volunteered and worked at several conservation organizations in Argentina. She received a degree in Nature Conservation in South Africa and worked in nature reserves and communities in Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Tanzania. In Argentina, Diana coordinated field activities at the hooded grebe Project for three seasons and worked as a field technician on Rewilding Argentina’s projects to reintroduce giant anteaters and red-and-green macaws. She currently lives in Patagonia and manages the Patagonia Azul project’s Parks and Communities Program.
Music by Bird By Snow, Papa Bear and the Easy Love, and Aviva Le Fey. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
How are the crises of our times crises of being, crises of becoming? In this week’s conversation, Ayana is joined by returning guest Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé. Ayana and Báyò dance together through questions of crisis, identity, and rupture. As we attempt to break from the monoculture that cements us as citizen subjects of empire, Báyò suggests that we need an ontological mutiny.
Pointing out the possibilities of a more generous and spacious politics, Báyò calls listeners’ attention to the duplicity of safety. Perhaps the things from which we recoil contain promise. As we try to stabilize, cracks will emerge, and Báyò invites us to nurture each other through the ruptures. How might we descend to the crises of our times, and embrace the decay and compost that modernity has come to detest?
Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea and Kyah, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Bayo Akomolafe is the Founder of The Emergence Network and host of the postactivist course/festival/event, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’.
For an extended version of this episode join us on Patreon at patreon.com/forthewild.
Music by Julio Kintu (Chloe Utley), Jahnavi Veronica, Leyla McCalla, and Los Hombres Calientes. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
Engaging crucially with food as a cultural, spiritual, and generational experience, this week’s guest Abena Offeh-Gyimah highlights the connections between ancestral foods, and the soil, seeds, and people who play a part in sustaining ancestral foodways. Focusing on the ancestral foods of Africa, and specifically her home-country of Ghana, Abena shares stories of connection, trust, and community fostered by food.
Abena calls listeners to pay attention to the technical and spiritual aspects of seeds that connect them to past, present, and future landscapes. Through this deep connection, Abena points out the absurdity that certain companies claim to own seeds as if they could own life itself. Seeds carry with them the miracle of life and abundance, how might we shape our food and agricultural systems to honor this sacred reality?
Abena Offeh-Gyimah is the founder of BEELA Center for Indigenous Foods in Ghana, a project that seeks to preserve indigenous African seeds, foods, and practices. Prior to this role, Abena worked as the Project Lead for the Jane Finch Community Research Partnership, with extensive experience in community engagement, ethical research, program development, partnerships & collaboration, and with previous organizations like North York Community House, Black Creek Community Farm, Jane Finch Center, and with Building Roots Toronto. Abena brings years of experience in conducting ethical community engaged research practice, work in local food systems, seed sovereignty, and collaboration in food sovereignty movements. Abena is a writer, a poet, a researcher, a naturalist, and a conservationist.
For an extended version of this episode please join us on Patreon at patreon.com/forthewild.
Music by Buffalo Rose, Eliza Edens, and Marian McLaughlin. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
Continuing the conversation series, “The Edges in the Middle,” presented in collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, For The Wild is delighted to share Báyò Akómoláfé in conversation with scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Speaking on the theme "What if justice gets in the way?,” Báyò and Keeanga engage in a lively conversation that considers how our quest for justice shapes us and is simultaneously shaped by systems of power and control. Together, they ask: how can we move justice out of the existing political paradigm and move beyond a normative sense of justice and reform?
“The Edges in the Middle” is a series of conversations between Báyò Akómoláfé and thought companions like john a. powell, V, Naomi Klein, and more. These limited episodes have been adapted from Báyò’s work as the Global Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley's Othering & Belonging Institute. In this role, Báyò has been holding a series of public conversations on issues of justice and belonging for the Institute's Democracy & Belonging Forum, which connects and resources civic leaders in Europe and the US who are committed to bridging across difference to strengthen democracy and advance belonging in both regions and around the world. Báyò's conversations encourage us to rethink justice, hope, and belonging by sitting amidst the noise, not trying to cover it up with pleasant rhythms. To learn more about the Democracy & Belonging Forum, visit democracyandbelongingforum.org.
Music by Sitka Sun, generously provided by The Long Road Society Record Label. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
How might we tend to our bodies if we saw them as an ecosystem? In this week’s episode, guest Samantha Zipporah reminds us that our bodies and their cycles are a part of nature, not separate from it. Honoring the seasons of life, of the earth, and of our bodily cycles, Samantha highlights the importance of both fallow and fertile times, with particular attention to how this manifests for those with wombs. These intimate connections between body and earth inspire Smantha to dive deep into the power within cycles of menstruation and ovulation.
Samantha also calls us to consider the type of culture we are cultivating surrounding body sovereignty. How can we strive towards an end to rape culture that comes from an understanding of consent that occurs in connection with others and centers power with others rather than power over others? The dominant overculture encourages an intense dissociation from our bodies, but when we tune in and are present to what is occurring within our bodies and our relationships, what might we learn?
Samantha Zipporah is a midwife, author and educator in service to healing & liberation. Sam’s path rises from an ancient lineage of midwives, witches, and wise women with expertise spanning the continuum of birth, sex, and death. She is devoted to breaking the spells of oppression in reproductive and sexual health by connecting people with the innate pleasure, power, and wisdom of the body. Her praxis weaves scientific and soulful inquiry that integrate modern medicine and data with ancestral practices and epistemologies. Sam's most recent publications and offerings center the radical reclamation of contraception and abortion. Her online membership, The Fruit of Knowledge Learning Community, features access to her heart & mind via books, courses, QandAs, curated resources and more.
Music by Jeffrey Silverstein, Samantha Zipporah, and Yesol. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
In a profoundly informative and thought-provoking episode, returning guest Ismail Lourido Ali considers how we can create spaces for people to safely explore themselves and their consciousness. Ismail’s work to build an informed drug culture calls us to consider the ways we might prioritize balance and humility in conversations over moral judgment and cultural shame. Focusing on moving away from repression, the conversation weaves together nuanced ideas about pleasure, education, and societal structures.
Ismail’s approach to drug policy centers around finding spaciousness as an advocate, and making room for the growing body of knowledge around the uses, harms, and benefits of drugs. He invites listeners to dream of a conscious, compassionate, and safe world in which justice, peace, and balance are prioritized. How might the practices of harm-reduction and substance education expand to create a society that makes space for deep emotions, for crisis support, and for holistic healing?
Ismail Lourido Ali, JD (he/him or they/them) is the Director of Policy & Advocacy at the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), has been personally utilizing psychedelics and other substances in celebratory & spiritual contexts for over fifteen years. Ismail works with, is formally affiliated with, or has served in leadership or board roles for numerous organizations in the drug policy reform ecosystem, including Alchemy Community Therapy Center (formerly Sage Institute), Psychedelic Bar Association, Students for Sensible Drug Policy, Chacruna Institute, and the Ayahuasca Defense Fund.
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Music by Santiago Cordoba, Public Access, and Camelia Jade. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
Continuing the conversation series, “The Edges in the Middle,” presented in collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, For The Wild is delighted to share Báyò Akómoláfé in conversation with Indy Johar of Dark Matter Labs.
Speaking on the theme “A New Theory of the Self,” Báyò and Indy dive into the milieu of life forms entangled together on earth. The conversation asks listeners to reconsider the objective nature of self and the word around us that has been so deeply ingrained within the architecture of society. Rejecting these notions of completion and singularity, Báyò and Indy engage in a conversation that calls attention to the aliveness of the world, to the agency and intelligence of our entangled minds, and to life as an ongoing process. How might we move beyond constraining ideas of order, power, and control in order to recognize and take part in relational ecological emergence?
“The Edges in the Middle” is a series of conversations between Báyò Akómoláfé and thought companions like john a. powell, V, Naomi Klein, and more. These limited episodes have been adapted from Báyò’s work as the Global Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley's Othering & Belonging Institute. In this role, Báyò has been holding a series of public conversations on issues of justice and belonging for the Institute's Democracy & Belonging Forum, which connects and resources civic leaders in Europe and the US who are committed to bridging across difference to strengthen democracy and advance belonging in both regions and around the world. Báyò's conversations encourage us to rethink justice, hope, and belonging by sitting amidst the noise, not trying to cover it up with pleasant rhythms. To learn more about the Democracy & Belonging Forum, visit democracyandbelongingforum.org.
Music by Sitka Sun, generously provided by The Long Road Society Record Label. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
How do we face the scope of global extraction in the name of oil and gas production? Guest Amy Westervelt joins us this week to consider the full story behind these extractive industries and the role they play in shaping global structures from shipping ports, to government policies, to media talking points. Together, Amy and Ayana consider what it might mean for these organizations to be held accountable to the local and global disasters they have wrought in pursuit of profit. Amy brings specific insight to ExxonMobil’s rapid development of oil production in Guyana, which she investigated for season eight of her podcast, Drilled. Discussing this specific case and extraction across the world, Amy details the global complications and power dynamics at play, and considers the obscene level of influence huge corporations have in perpetuating global injustice.
Understanding the contours of power as it works now, this conversation also invites dreams of how we may change these systems. A world in which we hold corporations accountable and curb energy consumption in just and accessible ways is possible. How might we shift the narrative to bring visions into action?
Amy Westervelt is an award-winning investigative climate journalist. She writes regularly for The Guardian and The Intercept. Westervelt also runs the independent podcast production company and network Critical Frequency, where she reports and hosts Drilled, a true-crime podcast about climate change, and runs the company’s production team on other shows, like the Peabody-nominated This Land.
Music by Jonathan Yonts, Hana Shin, and Charles Rumback and Ryley Walker.
Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
Adding deep nuance to conversations around herbalism and the botanicals industry, this week’s guest Ann Armbrecht shares her extensive knowledge about herbal supply chains and the effects of herbal commodification. Ann focuses much of her research on the stories behind the herbal products available to consumers, detailing the complicated and often exploitative supply chains involved in the mass production of botanical products.
Ann and Ayana discuss how we might come into right relationship with the plant world. As plants invite us to imagine and create medicine, what might true health look like?
Ann Armbrecht is an anthropologist (PhD, Harvard 1995) whose work explores the relationships between humans and the earth, most recently through her work with plants, herbal medicine, and the botanical industry. She is the director of the Sustainable Herbs Program, a program of the American Botanical Council, which she established in 2016 to help bridge the gaps between the values of herbal medicine and the reality of sourcing and producing herbs on a global scale.
She is the author of The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry, that documents her journey following herbs from seed to shelf. She is also the author of the award winning ethnographic memoir, Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home, and the co-producer of the documentary on traditional western herbalism, Numen: The Healing Power of Plants. Ann was a 2017 Fulbright-Nehru Scholar documenting the supply chain of medicinal plants in India and she lives with her family in central Vermont.
Music byFlo Perlin, Jeffery Silverstein, and Andy Tallent. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
How might we honor and follow the authentic call of our purpose? This week, guest Rachel Cargle shares in a rich and enthralling conversation with Ayana that calls forth themes of rootedness, truth, and renaissance. Rachel honors a rootedness that comes from deep connection to ancestry, to Blackness, and to the earth, and she recognizes the way the earth and its cycles offer us examples of what presence and reciprocity look like.
As Rachel points out in her forthcoming book A Renaissance of Our Own, we are in need of a renaissance. Attuned to years of intense work around race and racial consciousness within the United States, Rachel uses the dreams and desires from this time as the raw materials for revolution, Rachel envisions a collective renaissance that centers on intergenerational conversation. Rooted in trust, how might we reimagine this world together?
Rachel Elizabeth Cargle is an activist, entrepreneur, and philanthropic innovator. She is the founder of The Loveland Group; a family of companies including Elizabeth’s Bookshop & Writing Centre, a literary space that celebrates marginalized voices and The Great Unlearn, an adult learning platform that centers the teaching of BIPOC thinkers. In 2018, she founded The Loveland Foundation, offering free access to mental health care for Black women and girls. Cargle is a regular contributor to Cultured Magazine, Atmos, and The Cut, and her work has been featured in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Her new book, A Renaissance of Our Own: A Memoir and Manifesto on Reimagining, comes out in the U.S. May 16th, 2023.
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Music by Eliza Edens and Mikayla McVey (generously provided by The Long Road Society Record Label). Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
Feeling into the state of our nervous systems and our relationships with each other and ourselves, this episode offers a powerful perspective on the importance of recognizing and tending to how life feels. Together, Ayana and this week’s guest Kimberly Ann Johnson discuss the depths of pleasure and the dimensions of healing. Kimberly brings deep knowledge regarding reproductive and sexual health, especially paying attention to the often untended somatic nature of sexual boundary repair and the complicated nature of what we bring into sexual relationships.
This conversation is steeped in trust and intimacy. Kimberly’s focus and understanding offers a guide to the ways we might come to handle and regulate our own nervous systems in order to act in alignment with our desires, rather than with the prescribed roles we have been put into through societal conditioning.
Kimberly Ann Johnson is a Sexological Bodyworker, Somatic Experiencing practitioner, yoga teacher, postpartum advocate, and single mom. Working hands-on in integrative women’s health and trauma recovery for more than a decade, she helps women heal from birth injuries, gynecological surgeries, and sexual boundary violations. Kimberly is the author of the Call of the Wild: How We Heal Trauma, Awaken Our Own Power, and Use It for Good, as well as the early mothering classic The Fourth Trimester, and is the host of the Sex Birth Trauma podcast.
Join us on Patreon at patreon.com/forthewild for an extended version of this episode.
Music by Lake Mary & Talk West and Katie Gray. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
Continuing the conversation series, “The Edges in the Middle,” presented in collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, For The Wild is delighted to share Báyò Akómoláfé in conversation with V (formerly known as Eve Ensler, playwright, author, and founder of V-Day and One Billion Rising). Speaking on the theme “The Promise and Limits of Restitution: Returning to ‘Congo,’” Báyò and V dance together in a conversation that shows us portals of possibility that edge us towards deep change. Discussing the Congo as both place and portal, Báyò and V contemplate the persistent and fugitive glimmer of possibility within trauma and repression. As we pay slow, deep attention and care to unraveling and processing our stories, how might we create the sacred space from which movement and growth may flow?
“The Edges in the Middle” is a series of conversations between Báyò Akómoláfé and thought companions like john a. powell, V, Naomi Klein, and more. These limited episodes have been adapted from Báyò’s work as the Global Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley's Othering & Belonging Institute. In this role, Báyò has been holding a series of public conversations on issues of justice and belonging for the Institute's Democracy & Belonging Forum, which connects and resources civic leaders in Europe and the US who are committed to bridging across difference to strengthen democracy and advance belonging in both regions and around the world. Báyò's conversations encourage us to rethink justice, hope, and belonging by sitting amidst the noise, not trying to cover it up with pleasant rhythms. To learn more about the Democracy & Belonging Forum, visit democracyandbelongingforum.org.
Music by Sitka Sun, generously provided by The Long Road Society Record Label. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Jenny Odell, initially aired in February of 2021. Our attention has operated as currency for the past couple of decades, but with the invasiveness of social media and technology, our ability to exit and enter the attention economy has been severely hindered. As we feel pressure to post and comment on everything for an unknown audience, do we inherently limit our capacity for complexity and vulnerability? And what are the extended ramifications of becoming illiterate in complexity? How does this ripple out into all of our relationships? In lieu of the demanding world buzzing inside our devices, guest Jenny Odell shares the brilliance of doing “nothing”, tending to the ecological self, and growing deeper forms of attention through a commitment to bioregionalism. Jenny Odell is a writer, artist, and enthusiastic birdwatcher based in Oakland, California. She is the author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Odell teaches digital art at Stanford University.
Music by Harrison Foster, Bosques Fragmentados, Samara Jade, and Kritzkom. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with john a. powell, originally aired in May 2019. If you enjoy this week’s episode, make sure you listen to the first episode in our special series The Edges in the Middle, which features a conversation between john a. powell and Báyò Akómoláfé .
Now more than ever, we are reminded of the vital importance of creating practices that strengthen and recognize our shared humanity. However, in order to do so, we must examine the systems, ideologies, and actions that have emboldened us to deny humanity in the first place. At the beginning of this week’s episode, john a. powell defines any practice which denies someone’s humanity as an act of “othering.” Both at home and abroad it seems we are witnessing a surge of "othering," whether it is reflected in election cycles, the rise of ethnonationalism, or the pervasiveness of violent acts. We must wonder, how and why do societies rely on the process of othering? And more importantly, how do we move into engagement, organizing, and “bridging?”
john a. powell (who spells his name in lowercase in the belief that we should be "part of the universe, not over it, as capitals signify") is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of civil rights, civil liberties, structural racism, housing, poverty, and democracy. He is the Director of the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, a research institute that brings together scholars, community advocates, communicators, and policymakers to identify and eliminate the barriers to an inclusive, just, and sustainable society and to create transformative change toward a more equitable world.
Music by Ani DiFranco.
Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
For The Wild is honored to present a series of conversations entitled, “The Edges in the Middle,” in collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute. In the first of these conversations, Báyò Akómoláfé speaks with john a. powell, Director of the Othering & Belonging Institute.
Speaking on the theme “When ‘just getting along’ isn't enough: Is belonging possible in a world rooted in othering?,” Báyò and john contemplate the ontological weight of our desire for belonging. How might we learn how to belong together? Articulating both the harsh realities of modern day division and the simultaneous reality of our connection to each other and to the earth, Báyò and john examine what it means to be “other” and to invite in the “monstrous” and the “strange.”
“The Edges in the Middle” is a series of conversations between Báyò Akómoláfé and thought companions like john a. powell, V, Naomi Klein, and more. These limited episodes have been adapted from Báyò’s work as the Global Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley's Othering & Belonging Institute. In this role, Báyò has been holding a series of public conversations on issues of justice and belonging for the Institute's Democracy & Belonging Forum, which connects and resources civic leaders in Europe and the US who are committed to bridging across difference to strengthen democracy and advance belonging in both regions and around the world. Báyò's conversations encourage us to rethink justice, hope, and belonging by sitting amidst the noise, not trying to cover it up with pleasant rhythms. To learn more about the Democracy & Belonging Forum, visit democracyandbelongingforum.org.
Music by Sitka Sun, generously provided by The Long Road Society Record Label. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Tyson Yunkaporta originally aired in May of 2021. Struggling to change actual conditions, many have settled for changing the perceptions of the world around us. Tyson Yunkaporta begins by sharing the connections between perception, the branding of our identities, and the many forms of capital that become available and valuable in a perception-obsessed society. As we welcome the call to change our conditions and participate in the great “thousand-year clean-up”, we explore hybridized insight, the ramifications of clinging to dichotomous identities, and how genuine diversity is tangible preparedness and emotional resilience in motion. With this in mind, it becomes our task to figure out how we can sustain genuine diversity in our lives so we may work alongside folks with different capacities, worldviews, solutions, and thought processes in devotion to dismantling a system that necessitates abuse. Tyson Yunkaporta is an academic, an arts critic, and a researcher who belongs to the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He carves traditional tools and weapons and also works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne.
Music by 40 Million Feet, Marty O’Reilly & the Old Soul Orchestra, and Violet Bell.
Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
Rising against growing wealth inequality and resource consolidation, guest Morgan Curtis asks how we might, rather, shape our world in reciprocity, mutual aid, and intentional community. This week, Ayana and Morgan dive deep into the need for repair, healing, and acknowledgement as we face the historical roots of modern inequity. Morgan centers her work by listening deeply to the call for radical change. This heartfelt and expansive conversation calls for us to unlearn the ways racial capitalism has taught us wealth should be passed down. Perhaps the world that we are longing for is one where abundance is not wealth, but rather right relationship - with land, with ancestry, and with each other.
Guided by the call to transmute the legacy of her colonizing and enslaving ancestors, Morgan is dedicated to working with her fellow people with wealth and class privilege towards redistribution, atonement, and repair. As a facilitator, money coach, organizer and ritualist, she works to catalyze the healing of relationships with self, family, ancestors, community, and the land, enabling the surrender of power and control so that resources can flow towards racial, environmental, and economic justice. She is in the process of redistributing 100% of her inherited wealth and 50% of her income to primarily Black- and Indigenous-led organizing and land projects. Morgan is a resident of Canticle Farm, a multi-racial, inter-faith, cross-class, intergenerational intentional community in Lisjan Ohlone territory (Oakland, CA). She is currently a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School, where she is studying the spiritual dimension of the reparations work required of white people.
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Music by Andy Tallent, Handmade Moments, and Ela Spalding. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
Gabes Torres offers her thoughtful wisdom in this conversation that weaves through healing, interconnection, and embodiment. Focusing on holistic healing and mental health support, Gabes lucidly describes the ways our individual health and well-being are dependent upon our connections and the structures of the societies in which we reside. Together Ayana and Gabes dream of what we may be free towards (not just free from) as we divest from extractive mindsets. Reverberating on a call to expand love in deeply rooted directions, this conversation offers nourishment for body and soul.
Gabes Torres was born and raised in the countryside of the Philippines. She is a psychotherapist, organizer, and artist with her work focusing on the interplay of mental health, the arts, spirituality, and justice-oriented practice. She has an MA in Theology & Culture, and Counseling Psychology; both graduate degrees were accomplished in Seattle, the city where she organized with abolitionist and anti-imperialist groups at a local, grassroots level. In her clinical practice, Gabes pays attention to healing from racial and migration trauma, while decolonizing the therapeutic space from White Western modalities. Gabes writes for Yes! Magazine, an independent publisher of solutions journalism with stories that uncover environmental, economic, and social justice intersections. She is also a poet and singer-songwriter.
This episode of For The Wild is brought to you by Anima Mundi Herbals.
Join us on Patreon at patreon.com/forthewild for an extended version of this episode.
Music by Amaara, Blue Doll, and Annie Sumi. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
Rosemary Gladstar calls forth deep gratitude and mindfulness for the plant world as she walks with us through the world of herbalism in this precious episode. Reminding listeners of the value of connecting to the wellspring of Earth, Rosemary contemplates the ways plants shape us and make us into companions when we work with them. Woven throughout the conversation is an understanding that the Earth has a destiny of its own, one we cannot completely comprehend within our human lifespans.
Rosemary Gladstar has been practicing, living, learning, teaching and writing about herbs for over 50 years. Considered a star figure in the modern herbal movement and often referred to as the ‘godmother of American herbalism’. Rosemary is the author of twelve books including Medicinal Herbs: a Beginners Guide, Herbal Healing for Women, Rosemary Gladstar’s Herbal Recipes for Vibrant Well Being and Herbal Healing for Men.
Join us on Patreon at patreon.com/forthewild for an extended version of this episode.
Music by Eliza Edens, Rising Appalachia, and Lea Thomas. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
This episode of For The Wild is brought to you Anima Mundi Herbals.
Anima Mundi was founded by Costa Rican herbalist Adriana Ayales with the intention of bringing some of the finest plant medicines, medicinal mushrooms, vegan collagen boosters, and high-potency elixirs. Anima Mundi is made in the United States with certified organic, wild-crafted, and sustainably harvested plants and herbs that are sourced from small-scale farms around the world. Their products contain zero fillers, binders, or flow agents.
We’re proud to receive the support of this woman and BIPOC-owned business that creates magic from plant allies. Our personal pick for this time of year is Anima Mundi’s Relax Tonic for Nervous System Support. To learn more visit AnimaMundiherbals.com or @animamundiherbals.
Giving listeners a glimpse into his new book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, guest Malcolm Harris joins Ayana in a vast conversation dealing with the shape and form of Palo Alto’s specific place alongside overarching systems of capital. Cutting through the romanticization and myth that surrounds much of the allure around California as place and as metaphor, Malcolm offers well-rooted thought touching on the history of Stanford University, the internet, Palo Alto’s military connections, and more. This conversation reveals the values of understanding our material realities and the structures that support society as it stands. When we understand these intricacies, how might knowledge allow us to subvert domination?
Offering his critical thought to this conversation, Malcolm reminds us that this permutation of society was not inevitable, and neither is any particular future. As examples, the practices of Land Back movements, student resistance, and collective organizing spaces, offer hope for alternatives. If specific visions of justice are impossible within this system, how do we steward a future in which they are?
Malcolm Harris is a freelance writer and the author of Kids These Days, Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit, and the new book Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World.
Music by Little Foster Music (Harry Foster), Harrison Basch, and Ian George. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
This week, Ayana is joined by Francesca Lia Block in a heartfelt conversation recognizing the search for self and love through magic, literature, and deeply-felt presence. Francesca brings listeners into her writing practices as she navigates centering beauty in a world of intensity. Moving through the depths of empathy, pleasure, and presence, Francesca considers passion as a practice of gratitude to the world around us. As she discusses her most recent book House of Hearts, with Ayana, she emphasizes the healing and growth that comes from examining ourselves and our passions deeply. As we journey through life, what mentors, books, and practices give us the inspiration we need to keep moving forward?
Francesca Lia Block, M.F.A., is the author of more than twenty-five books of fiction, non-fiction, short stories and poetry, and has written screenplay adaptations of her work. She received the Spectrum Award, the Phoenix Award, the ALA Rainbow Award and the 2005 Margaret A. Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as other citations from the American Library Association and from the New York Times Book Review, School Library Journal and Publisher’s Weekly.
Music by 40 Million Feet, India Blue, and Ariana Saraha & Flight Behavior. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
For The Wild is honored to be “episode swapping” with the How to Survive the End of the World podcast, hosted by adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown this week! Known for “learning from the apocalypse with grace, rigor, and curiosity” this episode, initially released in May 2022 is all about love.
“What is it? Why does it happen? Why does it hurt so bad? Why does it feel so good? And how might it help us survive as a species? All these questions and more get introduced, and some of them start to get answers.”
Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown are two sisters who share many identities, as writers, activists, facilitators, and inheritors of multiracial diasporic lineages, as well as a particular interest in the question of survival. Together, they embark on a podcast that delves into the practices we need as a community, to move through endings and to come out whole on the other side, whatever that might be.
To learn more about How to Survive the End of the World or listen to their full season on love, visit endoftheworldshow.org.
Produced by Zak Rosen, music from Tunede Olaniran and Mother Cyborg.
For The Wild will be back next week February 15, 2023.
Grounding this conversation within Teotitlan del Valle in Oaxaca, Mexico, guest Samuel Bautista Lazo, brings listeners into an insightful conversation on the value of craftwork that connects us to the past and plants seeds for the future. Here, Samuel outlines the weaving traditions of the Benzaa people, offering insight into a trade and lifeway shaped intimately by ancestry and the land. Through his family’s weaving business, Samuel emphasizes the importance of creating connection and meaning with the objects we need to sustain life. In an age of mass alienation and mass consumption, intimately knowing our relationship to the objects that sustain, to the skilled labor that creates, and to the land that provides is a radical act. How might we cultivate such connections within our lives?
Dr. Samuel Bautista Lazo is a Benzaa (Zapotec) weaver from Teotitlan del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico. In 2013 he obtained his PhD in Engineering from the University of Liverpool in the UK, doing research in the topic of Sustainable Manufacturing. After obtaining his PhD in the UK, Samuel decided to go back home and connect back with his community and family weaving heritage. Being back home struck a chord in his life and made him realize that his community was already practicing an ancient form of Sustainable Manufacturing that is still alive in the many craft traditions of the Central Valleys of Oaxaca and the eight regions in his state. From this place, Samuel has rooted even more within his community and family weaving business and from there and through the language of the ancient textiles he spends a great deal of time teaching, educating and planting the seeds for creating a future that heals the relationship of humans with the web of life.
Join us on Patreon at patreon.com/forthewild for an extended version of this episode.
Music by Mariee Siou. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
How do we sustain nourishing roots in a time of displacement? This week, guest Alynda Mariposa Segarra invites listeners to examine their relationship to place, comfort, and survival as they discuss their newest album LIFE ON EARTH. Through the art form of music, Alynda holds together the complexities that come with wanting and needing to run away from oppressive systems while simultaneously having to confront what is happening right in front of us. Tapping into these themes, Alynda discusses their work with Freedom for Immigrants, emphasizing the urgency of action and compassion as we work to end systems of detainment and punishment.
Winding through the intricacies of making art under capitalism, finding humility in our purposes, and fostering the safe havens of mutual aid, Alynda reminds us of the capacious ability we have to continually queer our culture. Drawing anger and vulnerability together through love, Alynda leaves us with the resounding call to live deeply in this world and to love it hard.
Alynda Mariposa Segarra is a songwriter/storyteller who performs under the name Hurray for the Riff Raff. They are a Nuyorican queer artist born and raised in the Bronx, who got much of their musical/political education from the anarcho squatter punk scene of NYC. Alynda spent years as a freight train rider and eventually learned to make music on the street in New Orleans. Alynda has used the craft of songwriting as a tool for communication and protest. They have released 8 albums of music, most recently the critically acclaimed LIFE ON EARTH in February 2022.
Join us on Patreon at patreon.com/forthewild for an extended version of this episode.
Music by Hurray for the Riff Raff. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
Calling listeners into a magnetic conversation about the power of photography and storytelling, guest Josué Rivas (Mexika and Otomí) opens up new ways of understanding art and creation. With so much capitalistic pressure on modern day creators, photography and content creation often slip into extractive mindsets. Josué invites us to challenge extractive and colonial lenses by embracing the overwhelming force of the creative urge. Humanity yearns to tell its stories. How might we break apart from the constant pressure of social media to envision the new modes of creation and creativity that these stories need in order to be told? Throughout the conversation, Josué taps deep into the healing and transformational power of Indigenous futurism. As we plant the seeds of resistance and growth for future generations, what stories do we want them to remember about us?
Josué Rivas (Mexika and Otomí) is an Indigenous Futurist, creative director, visual storyteller and educator working at the intersection of art, technology, journalism, and decolonization. His work aims to challenge the mainstream narrative about Indigenous peoples, co-create with the community, and serve as a vehicle for collective healing. He is a 2020 Catchlight Leadership Fellow, Magnum Foundation Photography and Social Justice Fellow, founder of INDÍGENA, co-founder of Indigenous Photograph and Curator at Indigenous TikTok. His work has appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times, Apple, Nike and Converse amongst others.
Music by Gerardo Vaquero and Julio Kintu, The Mysterious They, and María José Montijo. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
Bringing us into his world of nature, awe, and magical poetry, guest Jarod K. Anderson reminds us that our human journey is worthy of just as much love and affection as the natural world around us. When we come to nature with intention, how might it guide us towards love and inspiration? In a time where so many of us are feeling lost, confused, and not connected to a purpose, we often abdicate our power to make meaning in favor of buying prepackaged narratives about who we are based on what we consume. Tapping into the beauty of telling our own stories and making our own meaning, Jarod and Ayana counter what we have been taught about worth. This episode highlights the power of the humble in the face of the grandiose and attention seeking. We are people of a place, Jarod reminds us, and the intimate, internal, and local work we do matters, just as our small bodies in this vast universe matter infinitely.
Writer, Poet, and podcaster Jarod K. Anderson (creator of The CryptoNaturalist Podcast) has built a large audience of readers and listeners with his strange, vibrant appreciations of nature. Ranging from optimistic contemplations of mortality to appreciations of single-celled organisms, Jarod is forever writing love letters to the natural world.
Music is “Pine Chant” by Sara Fraker and Lachlan Skipworth. “Inspired by tree-ring growth data from the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, Pine Chant is a sonic embodiment of twelve Arizona trees and an emotional response to climate crisis.” An extended version of this episode is available on Patreon at patron.com/forthewild. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
Guided by her new book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto and fervent calls for real, deep rest, this week returning guest Tricia Hersey joins Ayana to unwind the complicated ties of exhaustion and exploitation. Tricia’s words serve as incantations against the brainwashing of grind culture as she and Ayana investigate the systems that benefit from keeping us operating. Drawing deep inspiration from her ancestors, histories of marronage, and long standing traditions of Black resistance, Tricia leans into the prophetic dreams that have long allowed for life outside of systems of exploitation. As Tricia reveals, these are times of spiritual crisis. We are asked how might we pray ourselves free? How might we dream ourselves free? Rest is a portal to new worlds, both inside and outside of the self.
Tricia Hersey is a Chicago native with over 20 years of experience as a multidisciplinary artist, writer, theologian and community organizer. She is the founder of The Nap Ministry, an organization that examines rest as a form of resistance and reparations by curating spaces for the community to rest via community rest activations, immersive workshops, performance art installations, and social media. Her research interests include Black liberation theology, womanism, somatics, and cultural trauma. She is the author of the book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto which was published in October 2022. You can learn more about her work and order the book at thenapministry.com
Join us on patreon at patreon.com/forthewild for an extended version of this episode.
Music by Real J Wallace and Fabian Almazan Trio. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
This week, guest Veda Austin invites us to consider and grow closer to water – as both a preciously vital and often overlooked life source. Veda’s work researching and making art with water has allowed her an intimate look into water’s role on Earth and within our lives. Water is our companion, and more than just companion, it is what makes us. We are continually obliged to water, and it to us, as we are in an interdependent relationship with it. Veda calls us to investigate our liquid selves – the tears and sweat that make us human, the rituals of baptism and bathing that connect us to that which lies beyond. As Veda states, water is always in search of itself. How might understanding water begin to help us in our search for ourselves?
Touching on her healing journey, art, practice, and methods of working with water as collaborator, Veda highlights curiosity, closeness, and tenderness as guiding principles. Continually on a learning journey, Veda’s work shows what is possible when water is seen as source rather than as commodity. This episode reminds us of the wisdom we inherently hold alongside the grand scale of that which we have left to learn.
Veda is a water researcher, public speaker, mother, artist and author. She has dedicated the last 8 years observing and photographing the life of water. She believes that water is fluid intelligence, observing itself through every living organism on the planet and in the Universe. Her primary area of focus is photographing water in its ‘state of creation’, the space between liquid and ice. It is through her remarkable crystallographic photos that water reveals its awareness of not only Creation, but thought and intention through imagery.
Music by Strong Sun Moon/Camelia Jade and Doe Paoro. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
In spirit of the Winter Solstice and holiday season, For The Wild is taking a break this week. We hope you are taking great care of yourself as we near the end of this calendar year. We also want to share some updates about what you can expect from the Podcast and our Patreon in 2023.
Since we released our first episode in September of 2014, we've been so blessed to create and curate our weekly episodes as offerings to the times in which we live. We remain in deep gratitude to our guests who have simultaneously comforted and stretched us, as well as to you, our listeners, for accompanying us on this journey.
In an effort to continue this work and support our small but mighty team of four, we are enhancing our 2023 offerings...
Beginning in Jan all episodes released to the public via our website, digital streaming services, and radio syndicates will be standard episodes under an hour. Episode that exceeds an hour in length will be available on Patreon. We will be organizing a series of live hangouts between guests, friends of the Podcast, and Ayana. These live hangouts will be available to our Patreon supporters. We’re excited to announce that our first hangout will be with Sophie Stand in late Jan. We're also creating a series of digital zines that will be released via Patreon.
We’re adding new Patreon tiers:
– Support us at $1/mo to access episodes that exceed one hour + transcripts
– Join at a $5/mo for digital zines and live hangouts, + transcripts & extended episodes
– Give $25/mo or more to help sustain the podcast and receive the benefits above
Sign up by the end of the year at the $5 or more level to receive the free zine, "Embodying the Revolution with brontë velez Study Guide + Resource Zine" and access to our live hangout w/ Sophie Strand.
Patreon.com/forthewild.
This week For The Wild Podcast presents Part Two of a two-part conversation between guest host brontë velez and Dr. Tiffany Lethabo King. Circumferencing Dr. Tiffany Lethabo King’s book The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, brontë and Tiffany explore sacred laughter, Black and Indigenous feminism, sexuality, liberation, ceremony, and protocol. This week we are cradled to explore where Black and Indigenous relations can meet beyond the wound. Part Two spans further inquiry into shoals, the physical desire to belong to Earth, agency, eros, spiritual correction, the pleasure and potential of failure, and that which cannot be translated, but instead has to be experienced or co-witnessed to be understood. Research for this conversation was curated by jazmín calderón torres.
Recorded in January of 2021, this interview is a companion piece to a project called Can I Get A Witness, a collaborative transmedia project between For The Wild and Lead to Life. Can I Get A Witness “traces two queer black latinx femmes, brontë velez and Stephanie Hewett, dancing before and being danced by the ecology, memory, and stories of the Tongass National Forests and Glacier Bay in southeast Alaska–unceded Haida, Tsimshian, Tlingit territories, scored by field recordings and music, interviews with Tiffany King, Wanda Kashudoha, and Kasyyahgei, with a Groundtruthing Oracle by jazmín calderón torres.
Music by Jiordi Rosales and Ashia Karana. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
This week For The Wild Podcast presents Part One of a two-part conversation between brontë velez and Dr. Tiffany Lethabo King. Circumferencing Dr. Tiffany Lethabo King’s book The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, brontë and Tiffany explore sacred laughter, Black and Indigenous feminism, sexuality, liberation, ceremony, and protocol. This simultaneously intimate and expansive dialogue allows us to rethink the stories and structures we’ve been told regarding Black and Indigenous relations. Guided by a unquantifiable love and trust in Black and Native freedom dreams, Tiffany prompts us to explore ritual, space, and connection as antidote.
Recorded in January of 2021, this interview is a companion piece to a project called Can I Get A Witness, a collaborative transmedia project between For The Wild and Lead to Life.
Tiffany Lethabo King is an Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University which is located on the ancestral lands of the Mvskoke Creek. While here, she is also grateful to be able to touch the Georgia soil where her maternal and paternal ancestors survived slavery and created New Worlds of possibility. Her research is situated at intersections of slavery and indigenous genocide in the Americas. King is the author of The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. King is currently working on a project tentatively titled Red and Black Alchemies of Flesh: Conjuring A Decolonial and Abolitionist Now.
Music by Larkhall, Stoney Creation, and MonteQarlo. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
This week, Ayana is joined by Dalit American civil rights activist Thenmozi Soundararajan in a profound conversation detailing the wounds of caste within the United States and across the world. Thenmozhi brings just conviction and soul-filled commitment to the fight to annihilate caste-based supremacy. The very involvement within systems of punishment, carcerality, and discrimination deepens a wound that separates us from each other and from the broad web of life. Speaking to the ways that carrying the trauma of caste manifests within the body, Thenmozhi emphasizes the importance of slowing down to process the grief and pain caused by mindless oppression.
Thenmozhi Soundararajan is a Dalit American Civil rights artist, organizer, and theorist who has worked with organizations around the world to address the urgent issues of racial, caste, and gender equity. Her intersectional, cross-pollinating work helps to create a more generous, global, expansive, and inclusive definition of South Asian identity, along with safe spaces from which to honor the stories of these communities. She was also an inaugural fellow of the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist, Atlantic Foundation for Racial Equity, and is a current fellow at Stanford Center for South Asian Studies. She is also the author of the newly released book The Trauma of Caste by North Atlantic Books.
Music by Justin Crawmer, June West, and Te Martin. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
We’re taking a pause this week from our regular episodes to share a special snippet from our first Slow Study with Bayo Akomolafe. This offering originates from Bayo’s course “We Will Dance With Mountains: Into The Cracks!” and is an edited curation of recorded lectures, prayers, musical accompaniments, and practice prompts offered by Bayo and co-conspirators.
This week’s preview includes a brief portion from Session One, as well as the corresponding practice prompt by Jiordi Rosales. Each session within the course includes a practice prompt for deeper exploration.
To learn more about what the course entails, contributors, and cost, visit our website at forthewild.world
What can the forest teach us of grief, of joy, of humanity? This week, poet and scientist Maya Khosla invites listeners into the forests of Northern California to find deep reverence for the power of biodiversity. Maya’s expertise on wildfires shines through this deep and well-informed conversation as she and Ayana share a love for the forest and deep-seated awe for the complexity of forest life. Maya introduces listeners to the science behind forest fires and urges us to see fire as not simply “destructive,” but rather as one of the many cycles of earth. From practices of cultural burning to current studies on post-fire diversity, the creative and regenerative power of the forest cannot be overlooked.
Maya Khosla is a wildlife biologist and writer. She served as Sonoma County Poet Laureate (2018-2020), bringing Sonoma’s communities together through poetry gatherings and field walks after the 2017 fires. Sonoma County Conservation Council (SCCC) selected her as one of the 2020 Environmentalists of the Year. Her poetry books include “All the Fires of Wind and Light” from Sixteen Rivers Press (2020 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award), “Keel Bone” from Bear Star Press (Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize), and “Web of Water: Life in Redwood Creek”. Her writing has been featured in documentary films including “Village of Dust, City of Water,” about the water crises in rural India.
Music by Lake Mary, Forest Veil, and Bird By Snow. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
In this winding and lucid conversation, guest Sophie Strand invites us to investigate our relationality, to embrace rot and decay, to welcome our demons to the dinner table, and to prepare for uncertain futures with tenderness. Sophie brings to light the wisdom of the compost heap. What myths do we need for modernity, what wisdom is sedimented within our bodies? Sophie and Ayana tap into deep lines of thought and myth, weaving together conversations and concepts from thousands of years of human history. As the interview asks, “What is it to be human on our most basic level?” To be a human is to be in complicated and compromising relationships – relationships that implicate us within the other, that show us that love is a process of altering and of deep work. Purity is not an option. Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine will be published by Inner Traditions on November 22, 2022 and is available for pre-order. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions in Spring 2023. Subscribe for her newsletter at sophiestrand.substack.com. And follow her work on Instagram: @cosmogyny and at www.sophiestrand.com.
Music by Tan Cologne and Mitski. Cover image by Alexandra Levasseur. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
In this episode centered around global consciousness and rooted local action, returning guest Dr. Vandana Shiva reminds us of the power of commitment in the fight for the Earth. Reflecting on her lifetime of devotion to the land, Vandana highlights the value of paying deep attention and of bearing witness to the interconnectedness of Earth. These thoughts deeply counter the modern state of media and movements that fleetingly follow trends without deep connections to justice and connection. Together, Vandana and Ayana piece apart the threads of our culture that lead to exploitation and extraction - focusing on the policies of division and distraction that keep us from each other. As Vandana states, “Earth is alive and her expressions are diverse.” We are all anchored to each other and to the earth. The divisions that we focus so much time on are created in order to dominate and exploit the nature on which the earthly community depends.
Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental thinker and activist, a leader in the International Forum on Globalization, and of the Slow Food Movement. She is also the Director of Navdanya and of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, and a tireless crusader for farmers’, peasants’, and women’s rights. Dr. Shiva is the recipient of over twenty international awards and the author and editor of a score of influential books, including her latest book coming out Oct. 27 from Chelsea Green Publishing "Terra Viva: My Life in a Biodiversity of Movements."
Music by Henry Johnson, Scinnlaece, and Doe Paoro. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
Breathing in the joy and lessons of the plant life surrounding us, Ayana and guest Antonia Estela Pérez share an enriching conversation on the power and magic of coming to know the world around us. Antonia dives into the tension that exists in living in and caring for lands that have been violently colonized, calling listeners to understand plants both in the ways that colonization has affected their legacies and within anti-colonial structures that suggest there are other ways to engage with the plants around us. The natural world is, in fact, not separated from any one of us, and in detailing her work with Herban Cura, Antonia brings her insight on connections to plants and land within urban settings expanding the horizons of intimacy between humans and plants across human-imposed boundaries. As Antonia shares more about her New York City and Chilean roots, she reminds us of the value of connection to places for spiritual, ancestral, and medicinal means. Cultural and ancestral knowledge are vital to everyone’s survival in a world marred by colonial violence. What healing can be found within our own backyards, our own lineages? Perhaps the plants will lead us home once again – as they always have.
Antonia Estela Pérez is a Chilean-American clinical herbalist, gardener, educator, community organizer, co-founder, and artist born and raised in New York City. Growing up in a first generation household existing at the intersections of land stewardship, education, and social justice, their passion for herbs and plant medicine bridges the relationships between rural and urban spaces. With over 10 years of education including environmental and urban studies at Bard College, Clinical Herbalism at Arborvitae School of Traditional Herbal Medicine, and learning with herbalists and elders throughout Mexico, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, and Thailand, Pérez facilitates workshops and produces events as the co-founder of NY based collective, Brujas, and Herban Cura: A space centering Indigenous, Black, Queer and Trans communities in the education of land connection. Pérez’s work is rooted in their passion for sharing knowledge that interrupts notions of individualism and separatism from nature to grow towards collaborative and symbiotic communities.
As the ocean warms and grows more hostile, the icy waters of the Taku river have served as refuge for salmon and an abundance of more-than-human kin. However, threats from mining and resource extraction are posed to forever change the habitat of the watershed. The 1957 abandonment of the Tulsequah Chief Mine in British Columbia left a disastrous environmental impact. This mine still requires billions of dollars worth of clean up action and constant monitoring to ensure the protection of this river system. The Tulsequah Chief serves as just one example of threats to the vital river systems of so-called Canada and The United States. The Taku, the Unuk, and the Stikine are all transboundary rivers beginning in British Columbia, Canada, and flowing through to Alaska. They are unique both in their beauty and abundance, and in the inter-governmental action required to regulate them. The Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909 dictates relations across international borders, but the treaty alone will not protect these rivers from acid mine drainage and continued extraction. Chris Zimmer invites us to imagine what clean, healthy rivers can bring us, and to propel love for these rivers towards ethical action. Chris Zimmer is the Alaska Campaign Director of Rivers Without Borders. Based in Juneau, Chris has been with Rivers Without Borders since 2001. Chris enjoys fishing and hunting in the watersheds he helps to protect.
Music by Jon Yonts, GoldenOak, and Larkhall.
Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
As so-called powerful “industrial civilizations” continue to decline into dysfunction, unable to care for the vast majority, the call to localize, reinvest in household economies, and strengthen our capacity for self-reliance is becoming emphatic. Amongst failing institutions and the remnants of exploitative wealth, this week’s guest, David Holmgren, encourages us to lean into crisis as a temporary portal that allows us to focus on the potential of all that lies around us. In conversation David explores creative reuse, salvage economies, ethical relationships, permaculture, and the intricacies of mass movements that are trying to override a system that is deeply committed to a machination of consumerism and debt. David Holmgren is the co-originator of the permaculture concept following publication of 'Permaculture One', co-authored with Bill Mollison in 1978. His most recent book, 'RetroSuburbia: The Downshifter’s Guide to a Resilient Future' shows how people can downshift and retrofit their homes, gardens, communities and above all, themselves to be more self-organised, sustainable and resilient into an uncertain future.
Music by Roma Ransom and Jody Segar.
Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
