Chrysalis with John Fiege

Subscribe to Chrysalis at https://www.johnfiege.earth/Show notes: https://www.johnfiege.earth/20-todd-scott-detroit-greenways-coalition20. Todd Scott – Detroit Greenways CoalitionListen to Chrysalis on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Captivate.The ways we live our lives, design our communities, and move around within those communities are all intimately connected to the ecological health of the planet.Most North American cities are designed around the automobile or at least cars have come to dominate these urban landscapes, far more than in European or Asian cities.There are few cities in the world more closely associated with the automobile than Detroit, Michigan. Motown.But the privileging of cars in Motor City, and other cities around the country and around the globe, has had dramatic costs, from polluted air and water and a high number of traffic fatalities, to transportation inequality and high levels of carbon pollution.The Detroit Greenways Coalition is looking to change all that, right in the heart of the world’s automotive power center. Todd Scott is the executive director of the Detroit Greenways Coalition, and he joins me to discuss how their work promoting greenways throughout the city is improving people’s health and happiness, beautifying a very industrial city, reducing inequality and climate impacts, and a whole host of other benefits, even economic development.Listen on Apple PodcastsThis is a tale about Detroit, but if this work can happen in Motor City, it can happen anywhere, and Todd’s stories will inspire you to go outside, find some green space and some fresh air, meet your neighbors, and explore wherever it is you live.Listen on SpotifyI’m John Fiege, and this is Chrysalis. You can subscribe at johnfiege.earth, where you will also find show notes and all episodes of the podcast, plus my writing, photographs, and films.Here is Todd Scott.Listen on YouTubeCreditsThis episode was researched by Lydia Montgomery and edited by Sarah Westrich, with additional editing by Isabella Fleming, Amy Cavanaugh, Arthur Koenig, Kate Fair, and Marta Kondratiuk. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker.-----------Subscribe at https://www.johnfiege.earth/

Subscribe to Chrysalis at https://www.johnfiege.earth/Show notes: www.johnfiege.earth/19-jim-morris-dont-worry-nothing-here-will-hurt-you/19. Jim Morris — Don't Worry, Nothing Here Will Hurt YouListen to Chrysalis on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Captivate.You may have Goodyear tires on your car or truck. Many Americans do. Goodyear is the leading tire manufacturer in this country.Listen on Apple PodcastsWhat you may not know is that the process of making these tires has led to horrendous impacts on the environment and human health.We think of tires as being made of “rubber,” derived from the sap of rubber trees, mostly from Southeast Asia—a process that’s led to massive deforestation in the region. However, natural rubber makes up only a portion of a modern tire, usually around 19% in cars and 34% in trucks. The rest of the tire is made up of a mix of other materials, including synthetic rubber, derived from petrochemicals, and other chemical additives.In episode 16 of Chrysalis, I spoke with Sean Dixon of Puget Soundkeeper about the toxic effects of one of the chemical additives in tires, called 6PPD.A different chemical additive, which prevents tires from cracking, is produced using a chemical called ortho-toluidine, or simply O-T. This chemical causes bladder cancer, and it generates another chemical as a byproduct, called diphenylamine or DPA, which is a possible carcinogen that may damage the bladder, kidneys, and liver.Right now, I’m in Buffalo, New York, right next door to Niagara Falls, where there’s a Goodyear plant that’s been using ortho-toluidine since 1957.Since the 1980s, at least 78 workers at Goodyear have developed bladder cancer, making it one of the nation’s worst known cancer clusters at a single workplace.Jim Morris is a Houston-based investigative journalist, who has spent his career tracking the path of toxic chemicals through American industry and into the bloodstreams of workers. In his recent book, The Cancer Factory, Morris tells the story of workers at the Goodyear chemical plant in Niagara Falls who were exposed to ortho-toluidine and what their plight reveals about the ongoing failure of American industry and government to protect its workers.I interviewed Jim, live on stage, at the University at Buffalo, on September 26, 2024. In our conversation, we explore the failures to protect workers and the environment from deadly chemicals and what changes are needed to prevent these tragedies in the future.At the event, we were very lucky to have one of the Goodyear workers and bladder cancer victims in the audience. His name is Harry Weist, and we invite him to say a few words at the beginning. Then, at the end, he comes on stage to participate in the question and answer session. Hearing from him directly, with tears in his eyes, is very powerful.This story is historical, but it is also very much alive in the present. Just a week before we recorded the interview, Jim broke another Goodyear story—this time, rather than being about workplace exposure, the story was about ortho-toluidine pollution in the neighborhoods around Goodyear’s Niagara Falls plant. Jim wrote the article together with Emyle Watkins, an investigative reporter at WBFO, Buffalo’s NPR Station.Jim and his collaborators at Public Health Watch, WBFO, and Inside Climate News, obtained previously undisclosed Department of Environmental Conservation documents through open-records requests that show that Goodyear has been putting ortho-toluidine in the air around its Niagara Falls plant at levels 1,000% higher than what New York State regulators now consider safe for the public to breathe.Here’s what he and Emyle Watkins write in the article:“The state officially knew of the excess plant emissions no later than February 2023, when a Goodyear contractor submitted a report detailing test results. But a January 2010 email to Goodyear from Jacqueline DiPronio, then an environmental program specialist with the DEC in Buffalo, suggests the state had suspicions about the pollution-control equipment 13 years earlier, after the company submitted data of dubious quality.”Whether it was a year and half earlier, or 13 years earlier, the Department of Environmental Conservation did not notify the public after it learned of the elevated ortho-toluidine levels in the air. The families living near the plant in Niagara Falls did not know they were being exposed to elevated ortho-toluidine levels until Jim and his collaborators published their reporting.Soon after they published this article and several follow-up articles, the Department of Conservation initiating a process that will force Goodyear to install new technology that brings the level of ortho-toluidine emissions from the plant into compliance with current regulations. Many activists are still dissatisfied with how the state is addressing the problem, but Goodyear must now have the new pollution-control technology installed and functioning by the end of October 2026.That’s the power of great journalism.If you listened to my interview with Lois Gibbs that I released last week, a lot of this might sound familiar. Lois’s husband in the 1970s worked at this same Goodyear plant, while she was at home fighting to uncover the truth about the chemicals buried under her Love Canal neighborhood.Jim quotes Lois Gibbs in his article saying, “‘Nothing changes in Niagara Falls. Nothing changes at the DEC.’” She also told him that “emissions from Goodyear’s stacks used to fall on workers’ vehicles in the plant parking lot and dissolve the paint. The company regularly paid to have the vehicles repainted.”What is clear to me from all of these stories is that these chemical companies are run by people who have shown again and again that they are willing to put the lives of their workers and their neighbors at great risk in order to maximize profits for themselves.While government officials in New York have hardly showed a backbone or a sense of urgency with regard to Goodyear’s toxic emissions, at least we’re in New York, where we have some functioning environmental regulations.The role of state governments is more important than ever now that we have a president in the White House who calls environmental regulations “illegitimate impediments.” In July of 2025, President Trump gave two-year exemptions from EPA emissions standards to over 100 facilities, including chemical plants, refineries, and other polluting industries around the country. And the people who live in the neighborhoods around these facilities have limited, if any, information about what they and their children are breathing or drinking on a daily basis.As always, we need good journalism to expose the abuses of government and industry. Not surprisingly, Trump has also waged an unprecedented assault on journalism.Jim Morris is one of those essential journalists. He has won more than eighty-five awards, including the George Polk award, the Sidney Hillman award, three National Association of Science Writers awards, and three Edward R. Murrow awards. He is now the executive director and editor-in-chief at Public Health Watch.I’m John Fiege, and this is Chrysalis. You can subscribe at johnfiege.earth, where you will also find show notes and all episodes of the podcast, plus my writing, photographs, and films.Here is Jim Morris.-----------CreditsThis episode was produced and edited by Amy Cavanaugh, with additional editing by Isabella Fleming. Music is by Daniel Rodríguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker.-----------Subscribe at https://www.johnfiege.earth/

Subscribe to Chrysalis at https://www.johnfiege.earth/Show notes: https://www.johnfiege.earth/18-lois-gibbs-the-legacy-of-love-canal/18. Lois Gibbs — The Legacy of Love CanalListen to Chrysalis on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Captivate.When Lois Gibbs moved into the Love Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls in 1972, she had no idea how radically her life was about to change.Listen on Apple PodcastsShe was newly married, with a baby son. Her husband had a well-paid job at the Goodyear chemical plant, and she loved her white picket fence in this recently constructed neighborhood with many other young families.Over the next several years, her son began to have seizures, which was one of many mysterious illnesses that emerged among children in the neighborhood, including Lois’s second child.She started asking questions, and she refused to stop asking questions.She and her neighbors began to organize, eventually attracting the attention of the national media and even the President of the United States.The secrets they discovered, and their refusal to leave politics and science to the so-called experts, changed the environmental movement forever.I got to sit down with Lois on stage in front of a sold-out audience at the University at Buffalo on April 20, 2023, to talk about her story and where its led her since those tumultuous years in the 1970s.Lois Gibbs is a legendary environmental justice pioneer, and her vibrant spirit is a massive inspiration to me in these dark times. Her stories are incredible, and they reveal how her persistence, resourcefulness, and strategic intelligence were instrumental in the struggle to clean up hazardous waste sites in the United States.I’m John Fiege, and this is Chrysalis. You can subscribe at johnfiege.earth, where you will also find show notes and all episodes of the podcast, plus my writing, photographs, and films.Here is Lois Gibbs.Watch the Video on YouTube-----------CreditsThis episode was edited by Isabella Fleming and Blake Barit. Color grading is by Isabella Fleming. Music is by Daniel Rodríguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker.A special thank you Nick Henshue and Ken Zidell of the Department of Environment and Sustainability for organizing the event.A special thank you as well to Hope Dunbar at the University at Buffalo Archives, who helped organize the event and provided all of the archival photographs.Thank you to the co-sponsors of the event: Department of Environment and Sustainability, Department of Media Study, and University Archives at the University at Buffalo—and to the Center for the Arts for providing the space and the video recording.-----------Subscribe at https://www.johnfiege.earth/

Subscribe to Chrysalis at https://www.johnfiege.earth/Show notes: https://www.johnfiege.earth/17-transformation-for-a-new-era/17. Transformation for a New EraListen to Chrysalis on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Captivate.Today, I’m relaunching the Chrysalis newsletter and podcast with a new website, a new logo, and a new purpose. In the past year, here in the United States, we have witnessed one assault after another on environmental protections and ecological health, coupled with simultaneous assaults on democracy, civil rights, international cooperation, the rule of law, common decency—even truth itself. Through this difficult and painful year, as the news has been clogged with a dizzying and endless string of stories about the U.S. government’s assault on people and the natural world, I have reconceived and reworked Chrysalis to respond to our current moment.I launched the Chrysalis podcast in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was an experiment. I’m primarily a documentary filmmaker, making films about environmental issues and our relationship to the natural world, but I wanted to tell more stories, be in conversation with more people, more frequently, and reach a wider audience.The last podcast episode I released was eight days before the American people elected Donald Trump to be president of the United States for a second time. After his election, we found ourselves in a new historical era.American administrations of every political stripe have failed to prioritize or effectively confront the cascading crises of climate change, habitat destruction, mass extinction, and environmental injustice. Nonetheless, Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 Presidential election was the realization of a worst-case scenario for the environment and those who care about protecting it.After the 2024 election, I asked myself what I could do with the podcast, and my work more generally, knowing that there was about to be a full frontal assault on wolves and birds, forests and wetlands, clean air and clean water, environmental regulations, environmental justice, the clean energy transition, efforts to reduce plastics and other waste, and who knows what else from this new regime that was willing to break laws and ethical norms to enrich themselves and their political donors at any cost to the country or the planet.I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t know what to do.Before the election, in August of 2024, I found out that I was awarded the largest and most competitive grant of my career. The National Endowment for the Humanities was going to give me a development grant for my new film about consumption and waste in New York City. I was planning to focus on development of the project for the next year in order to apply for the even larger production grant the following year.When Trump was elected, I knew there would be no second grant. Even though past Republican administrations were hostile to the arts and humanities, the arts and humanities endowments survived their administrations and funded projects that didn’t align necessarily with Republican priorities. Trump 2.0 felt like it was going to be different. I decided I needed to figure out how to use my development grant to make the entire film very quickly.I put the podcast on pause to focus on making this film while I could. Then, in April of 2025, Trump cancelled my development grant, along with almost all other National Endowment for the Humanities grants. The letter I received, notifying me that the grant had been cancelled a week earlier, stated “NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda...The termination of your grant represents an urgent priority for the administration, and due to exceptional circumstances, adherence to the traditional notification process is not possible.” Exceptional circumstances indeed.I am very lucky to be a professor at the University at Buffalo, and this New York State university stepped in over the following several months to find replacement funding for much of what I lost to Trump’s assault on the federal government. This film project is now underway, despite the set-backs, and I’m ready to get the podcast back up and running.Here’s my plan: first, I’m bringing all of my work—writing, podcasting, photographs, and films—under a single new digital roof at johnfiege.earth. I’ve moved the website to a non-profit, distributed, open source publishing platform, called Ghost, which has no owners or investors.Second, I will be adding my own essays to the newsletter, examining current environmental topics, and releasing those written pieces as audio essays on the podcast, as I continue to release long-form conversations with environmental thinkers.Third, we have a new logo, designed by the talented Alexa Rusin, using one of my butterfly photographs. The new logo is a completely new look that helps tie my photographic work to the newsletter and podcast, but it still represents the theme of transformation at the heart of the Chrysalis project and the beauty of the world that I want to protect and nourish.And lastly, I am introducing a paid subscription option for the newsletter and podcast. Since the podcast’s inception, a hardworking team of students and interns has helped make the show possible, but my very limited financial resources have prevented me from growing, working more quickly, and releasing episodes more frequently. I want the newsletter and podcast to always be freely available to anyone, without advertising. However, the Chrysalis project needs more funding to grow and become self-sustaining, and a paid subscription option is a key element of this effort.Paying members will have access to the same newsletters and podcasts as the free option, but they will also have access to the community comments section of the newsletter and to streaming of my documentary films, both shorts and feature-length films. I want to make sure that money never limits anyone’s access to Chrysalis, but I also want to give audience members the ability to support the project, help it grow, and subsidize free access for everyone else.Tomorrow morning, I will be releasing the first new episode: my conversation with the legendary environmental justice pioneer, Lois Gibbs, who was a young mother in the 1970s when her children became sick in her new neighborhood of Love Canal, in Niagara Falls, New York, right next door to where I now live in Buffalo. Lois refused to sit down and be quiet, as leaders in government, industry, and academia dismissed and derided her as an hysterical housewife. Her story has been widely known for decades, but she’s a real rock star, and her stories are unbelievably power when you hear them from her. Her vibrant spirit is a massive inspiration to me in these dark times. I interviewed Lois live in front of an audience, and we were able to film the event, so we’ll also be releasing the video version of the episode on our new Chrysalis YouTube channel.Lois will be kicking off what I call our Toxic Spring here at Chrysalis. The next week, we will release my conversation with Jim Morris, who wrote a brilliantly reported and devastating account of the largest cancer cluster ever to be identified at a single work place. That work place was the Goodyear chemical plant, also in Niagara Falls. In fact, Lois Gibbs’s husband in the 1970s worked at the Goodyear plant while she was at home fighting to expose the truth about toxic chemicals under their feet.The Toxic Spring and the connections to Love Canal will continue with a live recording of the podcast on March 11 with Mike Schade, who works on campaigns to reduce toxic chemicals with a group called Toxic-Free Future. Mike started here in Buffalo and used to work with Lois Gibbs.The following month, on April 16, I’ll be doing another live podcast recording with two other people related to Love Canal. The first is Luella Kenny, who was another mother at Love Canal in the 1970s, alongside Lois Gibbs, but Luella was also a cancer researcher. I’ll be in conversation with her, along with Keith O’Brien, who wrote a book that features Luella and Lois’s stories, called Paradise Falls: The True Story of an Environmental Catastrophe.Both of these live shows will be released later as podcasts. If you’re in Buffalo, check out our website for more event details.Regardless of where you live, the best way you can help us grow and get the word out is to subscribe to the newsletter at johnfiege.earth and then tell your friends about the newsletter and podcast.I would also love to hear from you—your reactions to the show, what you’re interested in reading on the newsletter or hearing on the podcast, or anything else you’d like to share. You can contact me anytime at johnfiege.earth.It’s a been a rough year for many of us, but I’m looking forward to exploring the new possibilities we have in this pivotal moment in history to transform ourselves and our relationship to the natural world. Please join me.It’s going to be a fun ride.-----------Notes and Media RecommendationsIn His First 100 Days, Trump Launched an ‘All-Out Assault’ on the...

The tires of your car have a chemical in them, called 6PPD, that slows tire degradation by binding with oxygen and ozone that could break down the rubber. But these same reactions that protect the rubber are also creating a new chemical, called 6PPD-quinone, which scientists just found in 2020 to be highly toxic to aquatic organisms.6PPD is in essentially every tire made since the 1960s, and aquatic ecosystems around the world, particularly in dense urban areas, are in danger.Listen on Apple PodcastsCoho salmon is particularly susceptible to the toxin, and salmon populations in the Seattle area have been decimated by stormwater runoff containing the tiny particles that wear off tires as they speed down the road.Now that the science is clear, the search is on to find a substitute for 6PPD; but for many years to come, the pollutants will continue to shed from our tires and into our waterways.How to stop the stormwater from getting to the salmon and other aquatic organisms is one of the many ways that the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance is advocating for the ecological health of Puget Sound and other waterways in the Seattle area.Sean Dixon leads these efforts as the executive director of the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, which is part of the worldwide network of waterkeepers.I discuss with Sean the work he’s doing in Seattle but also the waterkeeper movement more broadly and the importance of organized, community-engaged action to protect waterways and the diverse ecosystems that depend on them across the planet.Subscribe on GhostThis episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Projects series. You can listen on Ghost, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!Sean DixonAs Executive Director of Puget Soundkeeper, Sean works with the entire Soundkeeper staff team, board, and network of community partners, volunteers, and advocates to drive clean water progress across the Puget Sound and its watershed. As an attorney, entrepreneur, and environmental advocate, Sean has worked for years defending communities and ecosystems from pollution, supporting sustainable fisheries, pushing for climate adaptation and mitigation, and fighting for innovative approaches to solving the myriad threats facing our oceans, coasts, and waterways. Before moving to the PNW, Sean worked as an attorney at Hudson Riverkeeper, a local sustainable seafood fishmonger, and, most recently, as Chief of Staff for the Region 1 (New England) office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.Sean currently serves as the Publications Officer for the American Bar Association’s Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources, and holds an LL.M. in Climate Change Law and a J.D. in Environmental Law from the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, in White Plains, NY, a master’s degree from the Yale School of the Environment, and a B.A. in Marine Biology and Oceanography from Boston University.CreditsThis episode was researched by Lydia Montgomery and edited by Sarah Westrich, with additional editing by Isabella Nurt, Amy Cavanaugh, Arthur Koenig, Kate Fair, and Marta Kondratiuk. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker.Subscribe on Ghost

There is a line in Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s poem, “When the Animals Leave this Place,” that I find haunting: “They said no one belongs here.”She’s writing about land that used to flood cyclically but that settlers used for farms and pastures, against the advice of Indigenous elders and without regard for the seasonality of the rain.Listen on Apple PodcastsEmbedded in these six words—“They said no one belongs here”—is the history of conquest and colonialism in America and the mentality of the control of nature, which, to this day, dominates our societal relationship to nature.The forces of nature and history and a deep knowledge of the land burst forth from Allison’s poem, along with a spirited and iconic crew of animals.Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is the author or editor of eighteen books and the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. Her most recent book, Look at This Blue, was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is currently Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside.Subscribe on GhostThis episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series. You can listen on Ghost, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!Allison Adelle Hedge CokeAllison Adelle Hedge Coke is a widely-acclaimed poet, editor, and activist. She was born in 1958 in Amarillo, Texas and spent her formative years in three separate locations: North Carolina, Canada, and the Great Plains. Initially dropping out of high school to work fields in order to support herself, Coke completed her GED at age 16 before enrolling in courses at North Carolina State University. She went on to receive an AFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College. A recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and the First Jade Nurtured SiHui Female International Poetry Award, she is now a distinguished professor at the University of California at Riverside. Outside of these duties, she works with underserved incarcerated youth and serves on multiple literary and editorial boards.Hedge Coke has authored six full-length books of poetry, her first of which (Dog Road Woman) won the 1998 American Book Award. 2022's Look at This Blue was a National Book Award Finalist. More broadly, her works have achieved wide and extensive acclaim. In addition to these collections, she has written ten poetry anthologies and an immensely evocative and powerful memoir, Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer: A Story of Survival, which discusses her upbringing, her story-cultural heritage, and the tumultuous experiences that have helped inform her identity, perspective, and journey.Subscribe on Ghost"When the Animals Leave this Place"By Allison Adelle Hedge CokeUnderneath ice caps, once glacial peaksdeer, elk, vixen begin to ascend.Free creatures camouflaged aswaves and waves receding farfrom plains pullingupward slopes and faraway snow dusted mountains.On spotted and clear cut hills robbed of fir,high above wheat tapestried valleys, flood plainsup where headwaters reside.Droplets pound, listen.Hoofed and pawed mammalspawing and hoofing themselves up, up.Along rivers dammed by chocolate beavers,trailed by salamanders—mud puppies.Plunging through currents, above concrete and steel man-made barriersthese populations of plains, prairies, forests fleein such frenzy, popping splash dance,pillaging cattail zones, lashing lily pads—the breath of life in muddy ponds, still lakes.Liquid beads slide on windshield glassalong cracked and shattered pane,spider-like with webs and prisms.“Look, there, the rainbowtouched the ground both ends down!”Full arch seven colors showered, heedwhat Indigenous know, why long ago,they said no one belongs here, surrounding them,that this land was meant to be wet with waters of nearbynot fertile to crops and domestic graze.The old ones said,“When the animals leave this placethe waters will come again.This power is beyond the strength of man.The river will return with its greatest force.”No one can stop her. She was meant to be this way. Snakes in honor, do not intrude.The rainbow tied with red and green likethat on petal rose, though only momentarily.Colors disappear like print photographs fade.They mix with charcoal surrounding.A flurry of fowl followlike strands, maidenhair falls,from blackened clouds aboveswarming inwardcovering the basin and raising sky.Darkness hangs overthe hills appear as black water crests,blackness varying shades.The sun is somewhere farther than the farthest ridge .Main gravel crossroads and back back roadsslicken to mud, clay. Turtles creep along rising banks, snapping jowls.Frogs chug throaty songs.The frogs only part of immense choirheralding the downpour, the falling oceans.Over the train trestle, suspension bridge withcurrent so slick everything slides off in sheets.Among rotten stumps in black bass ponds,somewhere catfish reel in fins and crawl,walking whiskers to higher waters.Waters above, belowthe choir calling it forth.Brightly plumed jays and dull brown-headed cowbirdsfly as if hung in one place like pinwheels.They dance toward the rain crest,the approaching stormbeckoning, inviting, summoning.A single sparrow sings the stroke of rainpast the strength of sunlight.The frog chorus sings refrain,melody drumming thunder,evoked by beasts and water creatures wanting their homes.Wanting to return to clearings and streams where ash, orwhite birch woods rise, tower over,quaking aspen stand againststorm shown veils—sheeting rains crossingpasture, meadow, hills, mountain.Sounds erupt.Gathering clouds converge, push,pull, push, pull forcing lightningback and forth shapingwindy, sculptured swans, mallard ducks, and giantsfrom stratocumulus media.As if they are a living cloud chamber,As if they exist only in the heavens.Air swells with dampness. It has begun.In 1993, Cid Corman selected "When the Animals Leave This Place" for the Charlie and Thelma Willis Memorial Editor's Choice Award (Abiko Quarterly, Kyoto, Japan) and Ed Friedman pressed it in The World, Poetry Project at St. Mark's. "When the Animals Leave This Place" is in Blood Run, Salt Publishing London & Cambridge, UK 2006, US/Global 2007.Poem reprinted courtesy of Allison Adelle Hedge Coke.Subscribe on GhostCreditsThis episode was researched by Lydia Montgomery and edited by Sofia Chang. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker.

I love beautiful pictures of animals surrounded by their natural habitats. It’s exhilarating to see idyllic environments and the animals so amazingly well-adapted to live in them. It’s also comforting to know those places still exist, despite what we’re doing to the planet.Listen on Apple PodcastsBut there’s a danger in that exhilaration and comfort: these animals appear to live in a world so separate from our own, and at the same time, we might be lulled into thinking that this other world and these habitats are safe.Kara Maria’s paintings take a very different approach to representing animals. Her work features extinct, endangered, and invasive species, but they all float in abstract worlds, popping with color and soaked in the impact of humans on their lives.Subscribe on GhostKara’s work is captivating. It’s also an alarm sounding about the dire threat that Earth’s biodiversity faces in the age of humans. Her paintings of animals bring the biodiversity crisis to our front doorstep and spur us to think about how our actions are at the root of the ecologically devastating changes happening around the world.Kara Maria is based in San Francisco, and her work is held in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the San Jose Museum of Art, among others. She’s been awarded a number of artist residencies, including the Recology Artist in Residence Program at the San Francisco Recycling and Transfer Center, which we talk about in this episode.This episode is part of the Chrysalis Artists series. You can listen on Ghost, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!Kara MariaKara Maria makes paintings and works on paper that reflect on Earth’s biodiversity crisis and the place of endangered species in our increasingly unstable environment. Borrowing from the broad vocabulary of contemporary painting, Maria blends geometric shapes, vivid hues, and abstract marks with representational elements. Her recent work features miniature portraits of disappearing animals, focusing attention on the alarming rate of extinction now being caused by human activity.Maria received her BA and MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. She has exhibited work in solo and group shows throughout the United States at venues including the de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, CA; the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Sonoma, CA; the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; and the Katonah Museum of Art in New York.Her work has received critical attention in the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Art in America. In addition, Maria has been selected for many awards and honors, including a grant from Artadia, New York, NY; an Eisner Prize in Art from UC Berkeley; and the Masterminds Grant from SF Weekly. She has been awarded artist residencies at the Montalvo Arts Center, Recology Artist in Residence Program, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and at the de Young’s Artist Studio.Maria’s work appears in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA); the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (Achenbach Foundation); the San Jose Museum of Art; and the Cantor Center at Stanford University; among others.Subscribe on GhostCreditsThis episode was researched by Lydia Montgomery and edited by Sarah Westrich, with additional editing by Arthur Koenig and Marta Kondratiuk. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker.If you enjoyed my conversation with Kara, please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform.

Before I read Brian Teare’s poem, “Doomstead Days,” I had never heard of a doomstead. It’s a clever portmanteau, combining homestead with doomsday: an alternative universe where the homestead is a preparation for the climate apocalypse.Listen on Apple PodcastsThe poem Brian weaves around his encounter with this word is a lyrical romp through our connection to land, water, and each other. Water flows, gender is fluid, and the rigid binaries of our imaginations dissolve.Brian’s exploration of the doomstead unearths some vital questions about ecological crisis. How do we respond? How are we, as a society, fleeing to our doomsteads and hiding, waiting for disaster, hoping to survive? What does it look like for us to leave our doomsteads, engage the problems directly, and find collective solutions?Brian Teare is the author of eight chapbooks and seven books of poetry, including, Doomstead Days, which won the Four Quartets Prize. He is the recipient of many awards and honors, including fellowships from Guggenheim, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Pew. He currently lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia. He’s also an editor and publisher and makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.At over 1300 words, this poem is much longer than the others we’ve featured in our Poets series, but it’s worth it.Subscribe on GhostThis episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series. You can listen on Ghost, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.Brian TeareA 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of seven critically acclaimed books. His most recent publications are a diptych of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage: the 2022 Nightboat reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and the fall 2023 publication of Poem Bitten by a Man, winner of the 2024 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eight years in Philadelphia, he’s now an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.Subscribe on GhostDoomstead DaysBy Brian Tearetoday’s gender is rainit touches everythingwith its little silverepistemologymottled like a brook troutwith a hundred spotswhite as bark scarson this slim trunkthrust up fromone sidewalk squarethe four square feetof open groundgiven a street treetwiggy perimetercontinually clippedby parking or car dooror passing trash truckthat snaps an actualbranch I find hauntingthe little plot its winged achenesauto-rotate down toit’s not that I don’tlike a wide sidewalkor the 45 busthat grinds right bybut if organismsdidn’t insist onforms of resistancethey’d be deadof anthropocentrictechnomechanicalsystems whose gridsrestrict the livingthrough perpetual stressthat elicits intensephysical responselike an animalpanic hittingthe psoas with crampsor root fungus sunk inthe maple’s allotmentof city propertyas tolerably wide as the migrainethat begins at the baseof my skull & pincheswith breadth calipersmy temples untilthe feel of flay arraysthe dura’s surfaceinside the bones insidethe head the healer holdsin her hands & saysthe occiput is shutflat & irks the nervesthat thread through itsunappeasable shuntinto the spine I seea white light I keepthinking about the waylong drought dries outtopsoil so deep beneathits surface the firsthard rain wreaks floodtaking the good dirtwith it the way today’swet excess escapesits four square feetof exposed root& rivers outa flex of sedimentalluvial overthe civic cementof the anthropocenein currents a supplerippled velvet dunas Wissahickon creekin fall’s brief seasonof redd & spawn when brook troutin chill quick shallowsonce dug into gravelto let nested eggsmix with milt& turn pearlstranslucent as rawunpolished quartzeach white eyed ovaflawed by a black fleckmy eyes close overat the height of migrainefertile error waitingwith incipient tailready to propel itdeeper into nauseauntil the healer haltsits hatching & calmsneuralgia betweenthe heels of her handspressing the occiputback open intothe natural curvethe bones forgetthe way the banksof the Wissahickonhave forgotten rapidsrinsing schist shadedby hemlock that keptthe brook trout coldeach patterned aspectof habitat lostfirst to dams & mills& industry runoff& plots of flaxGermantown plantedfor paper & clothmade with water’s power& hauled out ofthe precipitous gorgeup rough narrow roadssouth to the city portbefore adelgidstook the crucial darkfrom under hemlockssun heating the rockycreek down steep rillsto the lower Schuylkillwide in its final milesdammed at Fairmountfor two centuriesof coal silt & dredgefabric dye & sewagethat gave rise to typhus& refinery spillsthat gave rise to firerinsed by this genderthat rememberscurrent’s circuitanadromous shad& striped bassleaving the Atlanticheading uprivershedding saltwaterfor fresh in runswhose numbers turnedthe green river silverif color counts asepistemologyspring sun on the backsof a thousand shadis a form of knowing local to anothercentury & the dullercolor of oursis the way the wordgender remembersit once meant to fuckbeget or give birthsibling to generate& engender allfertile at the root& continuousas falling watermolecules smoothingthe sparkling gnarlof Wissahickon schistuntil its surfacemirrors their forcethe fuel element& fundament alikederive thriving frombeing at its biggestwhen it’s kineticenergy headedtoward intensityeverything’s bodyconnected by this totally elasticmaterialityI feel as ecstaticwide dilationwhen the shut skullgives up resistanceto the healer’s hands& the occiputopens its bonesmy mind’s eye goesokay I’m awake nowrowdy with troutpsoas relaxedmy body’s a conduitit roars with...

What is our relationship to the land, to its other-than-human inhabitants, and to the rest of humanity? These are fundamental questions for thinking through how we can transform ourselves in ways that allow a multiplicity of ecologies and human communities to thrive alongside one another. And these questions are not just fundamental to us as individuals—they are essential to how we view our cultures, traditions, institutions, and ways of knowing.Layel Camargo lives at the vibrant intersection of ecological justice, queer liberation, and indigenous culture—a cultural space that offers a distinctive vantage point on how our societies work, while holding enormous potential to both see and reorient our relationships to the land and to one another.Listen on Apple PodcastsLayel Camargo is an organizer and artist who advocates for the better health of the planet and its people by restoring land, healing communities, and promoting low-waste and low-impact lifestyles. Layel is a transgender and gender non-conforming person who is an indigenous descendant of the Yaqui and Mayo tribes of the Sonoran Desert.I met Layel at a climate storytelling retreat in New York City in 2019, where I became a huge fan of their work and of their way of being in the world.Layel is a founder of the Shelterwood Collective, a Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ-led community forest and retreat center, healing people and ecosystems through active stewardship and community engagement.Subscribe on GhostOur conversation explores the idea of culture as strategy in confronting the climate crisis, diving into Layel’s work in video, podcasting, and poetry and the origins of their approach to this work of healing people and planet.You can listen on Ghost, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!Layel CamargoLayel Camargo is a cultural strategist, land steward, filmmaker, artist, and a descendant of the Yaqui tribe and Mayo tribes of the Sonoran Desert. Layel is also transgender and non-binary. They graduated from UC Santa Cruz with dual degrees in Feminist Studies and Legal Studies. Layel was the Impact Producer for “The North Pole Show” Season Two. They currently produce and host ‘Did We Go Too Far’ in conjunction with Movement Generation. Alongside Favianna Rodriguez and at the Center for Cultural Power, they created ‘Climate Woke,’ a national campaign to center BIPOC voices in climate justice. Wanting to shape a new world, they co-founded ‘Shelterwood Collective’. The collective is a land-based organization that teaches land stewardship, fosters inventive ideation, and encourages healing for long-term survival. Layel was a Transformative Justice practitioner for 6 years and still looks to achieve change to the carceral system in all of their work. Most recently, Layel was named on the Grist 2020 Fixers List, and named in the 2019 Yerba Buena Center of the Arts list of ‘People to Watch Out For.’Quotation Read by Layel Camargo“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”- Toni Morrison, Song of SolomonSubscribe on Ghost

Lichen is a strange presence on this planet. Traditionally, scientists have understood lichen as a new organism formed through symbiosis between a fungus and an algae. But the science is evolving. It seems that there may be more than one species of fungus involved in this symbiosis, and some scientists have suggested that lichen could be described as both an ecosystem and an organism. Lichen may even be immortal, in some sense of the word.In lichen, the poet Forrest Gander finds both the mystery of the forest and a rich metaphor for our symbiosis with one another and with the planet, for the relationship between the dead and the living, and for how our relationships with others change us indelibly. In his poem, “Forest,” lichen are a sensual presence, even erotic, living in relationship to the other beings around them. They resemble us, strangely, despite our dramatic differences.The words of the poem teem with life, like the forest they explore, and Forrest’s marvelous reading of the poem adds a panoply of meanings and feelings through his annunciation, his breaths, his breaks. It’s phenomenal.This poem, and his work more broadly, is about nothing less that who we are on this Earth and how we live—how we thrive—in relationship.Listen on Apple PodcastsForrest Gander writes poetry, novels, essays, and translations. He is the recipient of many awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his book, Be With. As an undergraduate, like me, he studied geology, which became foundational to his engagement with ecological ethics and poetics.Forrest often collaborates with other artists on books and exhibitions, including a project with the photographer Sally Mann. His latest book of poetry is a collaboration with the photographer Jack Shear, called Knot (spelled with a “k”). He recently collaborated with artist Ashwini Bhat on an exhibition at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles, called “In Your Arms I’m Radiant.”His poem, “Forest,” is from his 2021 collection of poems, Twice Alive.Forrest has taught at Harvard University and Brown University. He spoke to me from his home in Northern California, where he now lives.Subscribe on GhostThis episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series, which focuses on a single poems from poets who confront ecological issues in their work.You can listen on Ghost, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!Forrest GanderBorn in the Mojave Desert in Barstow, California, Forrest Gander grew up in Virginia. He spend significant years in San Francisco, Dolores Hidalgo (Mexico), Eureka Springs, and Providence. With the late poet CD Wright, he has a son, the artist Brecht Wright Gander. Forrest holds degrees in both Geology and English literature. He lives now in Northern California with his wife, the artist Ashwini Bhat.Gander's book Be With was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. Concerned with the way we are revised and translated in encounters with the foreign, his book Core Samples from the World was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gander has collaborated frequently with other artists including photographers Sally Mann, Graciela Iturbide, Raymond Meeks, and Lucas Foglia, glass artist Michael Rogers, ceramic artists Rick Hirsch and Ashwini Bhat, artists Ann Hamilton, Tjibbe Hooghiemstra, dancers Eiko & Koma, and musicians Vic Chesnutt and Brady Earnhart, among others.The author of numerous other books of poetry, including Redstart: An Ecological Poetics and Science & Steepleflower, Gander also writes novels (As a Friend; The Trace), essays (A Faithful Existence) and translates. Recent translations include It Must Be a Misunderstanding by Coral Bracho, Names and Rivers by Shuri Kido, and Then Come Back: the Lost Neruda Poems. His most recent anthologies are Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin American (selected by Raúl Zurita) and Panic Cure: Poems from Spain for the 21st Century.Gander's books have been translated and published in more than a dozen other languages. He is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim, Whiting, and Howard Foundations. In 2011, he was awarded the Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellowship. Gander was the Briggs-Copeland poet at Harvard University before becoming The Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University where he taught courses such as Poetry & Ethics, EcoPoetics, Latin American Death Trip, and Translation Theory & Practice. He is an Emeritus Chancellor for the Academy for the Academy of American Poets and is an elected member of The Academy of Arts & Sciences.Gander co-edited Lost Roads Publishers with CD Wright for twenty years, soliciting, editing, and publishing books by more than thirty writers, including Michael Harper, Kamau Brathwaite, Arthur Sze, Fanny Howe, Frances Mayes, Steve Stern, Zuleyka Benitez, and René Char.“Forest”By Forrest GanderText within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedErogenous zones in oaksslung withstoles of lace lichen thesun’s rays spillingthrough leaves inbroken packets a forcecall it nighttimethrusts mushrooms upfrom their lairof spawn mycelialloam the whiff of portthey pop into un-trammeled air with the sort ofgasp that followsa fine chess movelike memories are they? or punctuation? was itsomething the earth saidto provoke ourresponsetasking us to recallan evolutionarycourse our long agoinitation intothe one-among-othersand withinmy newborn noticing have youpopped up beside me loveor were you here from the starta swarm of meaning and decaystill gripping theunderworldboth of us half-buried holding fastif briefly to a swellingvastness while our couplingbeginsto register in the alreadyawake compendium that offersto take us in you take me inand abundance floods us floatsus out we fill eachwith the other all morningbreaks as birdsong over uswho rise to the surfaceso our faces might be sprungSubscribe on Ghost

Our love for the world around us and our passion for protecting that world can come from many different places. It can come from a connection to the land, or a magical experience we had with other people in a particular place, or our sense of awe from the beauty of the living creatures that inhabit these ecosystems. But that love and passion can also come from seeing or experiencing the destruction of the same ecological web, from pollution in the air that rains down onto a playground, or the clearing of a wildlife habitat to make way for a fossil fuel pipeline.Listen on Apple PodcastsDave Cortez has been organizing for environmental justice in Texas for the better part of two decades. He lives in Austin now, but the love and passion that guides him came from the Rio Grande, the Sierra Madre Mountains and the high desert of West Texas. And from fighting a copper smelter and other threats to the land, air and water in and around his native El Paso. Dave has a fierce love for his El Paso Community. But cutting his teeth as an environmental justice organizer in his hometown wasn't easy.Dave is now Director of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, where he’s bringing his El Paso roots and years of experience on the streets and in the communities around Texas to the Sierra Club’s statewide campaigns.Subscribe on GhostI’ve known Dave for many years and used to regularly attend environmental justice meetings in Austin that he helped organize. I’ve seen him rise from an on-the-ground organizer to the leader of the Texas chapter of one of the oldest and largest environmental organizations in the world.Our conversation tracks his education as an environmental justice organizer. From the playgrounds of El Paso to the gentrifying neighborhoods of Austin, his story reflects the changing nature of the American environmental movement and the exciting possibilities of more robust connections between community-based frontline environmental justice struggles and the large and powerful environmental organizations with nationwide influence.You can listen on Ghost, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other podcast platforms.Dave CortezDave Cortez is a 3rd generation El Pasoan now based out of Austin where he lives with his partner and six year old daughter. He grew up and learned organizing on the frontera, where industrial pollution, poverty, gentrification, racism and the border wall are seen as intersecting issues. Dave serves as the Director of the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter, and has been organizing in the Texas environmental movement for 18 years. Dave is supporting staff and volunteers across Texas who are organizing for power by centering racial justice and equity alongside frontline communities directly impacted by polluting industries.Quotation Read by Dave Cortez"There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. Malcolm knew this. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew this. Our struggles are particular, but we are not alone. We are not perfect, but we are stronger and wiser than the sum of our errors. Black people have been here before us and survived. We can read their lives like signposts on the road and find, as Bernice Reagon says so poignantly, that each one of us is here because somebody before us did something to make it possible. To learn from their mistakes is not to lessen our debt to them, nor to the hard work of becoming ourselves, and effective.We lose our history so easily, what is not predigested for us by the New York Times, or the Amsterdam News, or Time magazine. Maybe because we do not listen to our poets or to our fools, maybe because we do not listen to our mamas in ourselves. When I hear the deepest truths I speak coming out of my mouth sounding like my mother’s, even remembering how I fought against her, I have to reassess both our relationship as well as the sources of my knowing. Which is not to say that I have to romanticize my mother in order to appreciate what she gave me – Woman, Black. We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present. We do not have to suffer the waste of an amnesia that robs us of the lessons of the past rather than permit us to read them with pride as well as deep understanding.We know what it is to be lied to, and we know how important it is not to lie to ourselves.We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is all about – survival and growth.Within each one of us there is some piece of humanness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis and is grinding all our futures into dust. If we are to keep the enormity of the forces aligned against us from establishing a false hierarchy of oppression, we must school ourselves to recognize that any attack against Blacks, any attack against women, is an attack against all of us who recognize that our interests are not being served by the systems we support. Each one of us here is a link in the connection between anti-poor legislation, gay shootings, the burning of synagogues, street harassment, attacks against women, and resurgent violence against Black people. I ask myself as well as each one of you, exactly what alteration in the particular fabric of my everyday life does this connection call for? Survival is not a theory. In what way do I contribute to the subjugation of any part of those who I define as my people? Insight must illuminate the particulars of our lives." - Audre LordeSubscribe on Ghost

When we’re gone from this Earth, what will we leave behind? What will we pass down to those who come after us?Plastic. If nothing else, lots of plastic. A plastic bag might take 20 years to break down, but harder, thicker plastics, like toothbrushes, might take 500 years or more to break down.Listen on Apple PodcastsElizabeth Bradfield is a poet and naturalist who sees first hand, in her work as a marine educator, the ravaging impacts of plastic on marine life. But she also confronts plastic and our collective addiction to it as a subject of poetry.Her poem, “Plastic: A Personal History,” is what she calls a “cranky naturalist” poem, which is pretty funny, but embedded in the humor are big questions: how has plastic become part of who we are as individuals and as a species? Now that we know the dangers and devastating effects of plastic production and disposal, how must we change our relationship to this petrochemical product? What kind of world are we making, and what alternatives do we have?Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of five collections of poetry, including, most recently, Toward Antarctica. She co-edited the newly-released anthology, Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Sun, and Orion, and her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize and a Stegner Fellowship. She teaches creative writing at Brandeis University and is founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press. She lives on Cape Cod, where she also works as a naturalist and marine educator.Subscribe on GhostThis episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series. You can listen on Ghost, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!Elizabeth BradfieldBorn in Tacoma, Washington, Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Toward Antarctica, which uses haibun and her photographs to query the work of guiding tourists in Antarctica, and Theorem, a collaboration with artist Antonia Contro.Bradfield is also co-editor of the anthologies Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, and Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic/Artistic Collaboration, 2005-2020.A professor and co-director of Creative Writing at Brandeis University, Bradfield has received a great deal of recognition through awards and fellowships. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Sun, Orion, and her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize and a Stegner Fellowship. Based on Cape Cod, Liz also works as a naturalist, adding an engaging and proactive component to back up the prowess of her evocative literature. She also is the founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press, a journal and grass-roots initiative that, through monthly publications, aims to expose the broader community (beyond academia) to relevant literature and art.Subscribe on Ghost“Plastic: A Personal History”By Elizabeth BradfieldText within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedHow can I find a way to praiseit? Do the early inventors & embracerschurn with regret? I don’t think my parents—born in the swing toward ubiquity—chew& chew & chew on plastic. But of course theydo. Bits in water, food-flesh, air.And their parents? I remember Dadmocking his mother’s drawer of savedrubber bands and his father-in-law’s red,corroded jerry can, patched and patched,never replaced for new, for never-rusting.Cash or plastic? Plastic. Evenfor gum. We hate the $5 minimum.Bills paperless, automatic, almostunreal.My toys were plastic, castleand circus train and yo-yo. Did my lunchesever get wrapped in waxed paper orwas it all Saran, Saran, Saran?Sarah’s momwas given, in Girl Scouts, a blue sheetof plastic to cut, sew, and trim with white pipinginto pouches for camping. Sarah has it still,brittle but useful. Merit badge for waterproofing.For everlasting.You, too, must have heard stories,now quaint as carriages, of first plastic, pre-plastic.Eras of glass, waxed cloth, and tin.Of shared syringes.All our grocery bags, growing up,were paper. Bottom hefted on forearm, topcrunched into grab. We used themto line the kitchen garbage pail.Not that longago, maybe a decade, I made purses for my sistersout of putty-colored, red-lettered plastic Safewaybags. I’d snag a stack each time I went, then foldand sew, quilt with bright thread, line with thrift storeblouses. They were sturdy and beautiful. Rainproofand light. Clever. So clever.I regret them.And the plastic toothpicks, folders, shoes that seemedso cheap, so easy, so use-again and thusless wasteful, then. What did we do beforeto-go lids? Things must have just spilledand spilled.Do you knowwhat I mean? I mean, what pearl formsaround a grain of plastic in an oyster?Is it as beautiful? Would you wear it?Would you buy it for your daughterso she in turn could pass it down andpass it down and pass it down?Elizabeth Bradfield's Website

Art can show us the pain and trauma and suffering of the world, and often it does. But art can also go the other direction. It can reveal the beauty, harmony, and unity of the world.The canvasses in Salma Arastu’s series of paintings, We Are All One, are full of soft colors, continuous lines, immersive habitats that flow into one another, and—sometimes—two-dimensional representations of humans and animals occupying the same space, echoing cave paintings.Listen on Apple PodcastsSalma found the continuous line in her study of Islamic calligraphy when she was living in the Middle East. She was born into the Sindhi and Hindu traditions in Rajasthan, India, and then embraced Islam after marrying a Muslim.It was this continuous line that became a central element of her approach to painting and a central technique she uses to express the ecological views she finds in the Quran.She seeks to transcend difference through her art and find oneness and interconnectedness in a world that continually ravages ecological systems around the planet.Subscribe on GhostSince the 1970s, Salma has been exhibiting her work nationally and internationally and writing about art. She currently lives in San Francisco, where I had the pleasure of visiting her in her studio and seeing so many of her wonderful paintings.This episode is part of the Chrysalis Artists series. You can listen on Ghost, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!Salma ArastuAn Internationally exhibited artist, Salma was born into the Sindhi and Hindu traditions in Rajasthan, India. She later embraced Islam and moved to USA in 1986. Her work creates harmony by expressing the universality of humanity through paintings, sculpture, calligraphy and poetry. She was inspired by the imagery, sculpture and writings of her Indian heritage and Islamic spirituality. She was born with a left hand without fingers. Because of her all-encompassing God, she was able to transcend the barriers often set-forth in the traditions of religion, culture, and the cultural perceptions of handicaps.After graduating in Fine Arts from Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda, India, she lived and worked in Iran and Kuwait, where she was exposed to a wealth of Islamic arts and Arabic calligraphy. Calligraphy, miniatures, and the folk art of Islam and the Hindu tradition continue to influence her work today. She has been invited to Germany twice, as a Resident Artist at Schwabisch Gmun in 2000 and by the Westphalia Wilhelm University in Münster to publish her paper “Art Informed by Spirituality” in God Loves Beauty: Post Modern Views on Religion and Art. Further she was invited to Morocco for a one- month Artist Residency Program in March of 2018 through Green Olives art Gallery. She has presented work at Stanford University, Commonwealth of San Francisco, Seattle University, Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley, and Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, St. Louis Missouri.She has displayed at 45 solo shows nationally and internationally and has won many distinctions: the East Bay Community’s Fund for Artists in 2012, and 2014, and 2020, The City of Berkeley’s Individual Artist Grant Award in 2014, 2015, and 2016. She has public art pieces on display in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and San Diego, California and has written and published five books on her art and poetry. Her most recent book deals with ecological consciousness from Quranic verses “Our Earth: Embracing All Communities.”Subscribe on Ghost

I’m continually amazed by the immensity of the world that a small poem can conjure. In just a few lines or words, or even just a line break, a poem can travel across time and space. It can jump from the minuscule to the incomprehensible vastness of the universe. And in these inventive leaps, it can create, in our minds, new ideas and images. It can help us see connections that were, before, invisible.John Shoptaw has conjured such magic with his poem, “Near-Earth Object,” combining the gravity of mass extinction on Earth with the quotidian evanescence of his sprint to catch the bus.Listen on Apple PodcastsJohn Shoptaw grew up in the Missouri Bootheel. He picked cotton; he was baptized in a drainage ditch; and he worked in a lumber mill. He now lives a long way from home in Berkeley, California, where I was lucky enough to visit him last summer.John is the author of the poetry collection, Times Beach, which won the Notre Dame Review Book Prize and the Northern California Book Award in poetry. He is also the author of On The Outside Looking Out, a critical study of John Ashbery’s poetry. He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.John has a new poetry collection coming out soon, also called Near-Earth Object.Subscribe on GhostThis episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series. You can listen on Ghost, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!John ShoptawJohn Shoptaw is a poet, poetry reader, teacher, and environmentalist. He was raised on the Missouri River bluffs of Omaha, Nebraska and in the Mississippi floodplain of “swampeast” Missouri. He began his education at Southeast Missouri State University and graduated from the University of Missouri at Columbia with BAs in Physics and later in Comparative Literature and English, earned a PhD in English at Harvard University, and taught for some years at Princeton and Yale. He now lives, bikes, gardens, and writes in the Bay Area and teaches poetry and environmental poetry & poetics at UC Berkeley, where he is a member of the Environmental Arts & Humanities Initiative. Shoptaw’s first poetry collection, Times Beach (Notre Dame Press, 2015), won the Notre Dame Review Book Prize and subsequently also the 2016 Northern California Book Award in Poetry; his new collection, Near-Earth Object, is forthcoming in March 2024 at Unbound Edition Press, with a foreword by Jenny Odell.Both collections embody what Shoptaw calls “a poetics of impurity,” tampering with inherited forms (haiku, masque, sestina, poulter’s measure, the sonnet) while always bringing in the world beyond the poem. But where Times Beach was oriented toward the past (the 1811 New Madrid earthquake, the 1927 Mississippi River flood, the 1983 destruction of Times Beach), in Near-Earth Object Shoptaw focuses on contemporary experience: on what it means to live and write among other creatures in a world deranged by human-caused climate change. These questions are also at the center of his essays “Why Ecopoetry?” (published in 2016 at Poetry Magazine, where a number of his poems, including “Near-Earth Object,” have also appeared) and “The Poetry of Our Climate” (forthcoming at American Poetry Review).Shoptaw is also the author of a critical study, On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry (Harvard University Press); a libretto on the Lincoln assassination for Eric Sawyer’s opera Our American Cousin (recorded by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project); and several essays on poetry and poetics, including “Lyric Cryptography,” “Listening to Dickinson” and an essay, “A Globally Warmed Metamorphoses,” on his Ovidian sequence “Whoa!” (both forthcoming in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Environmental Imagination at Bloomsbury Press in July 2023).Subscribe on Ghost“Near-Earth Object”By John ShoptawText within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedUnlike the monarch, thoughthe asteroid also slippedquietly from its colonyon its annular migrationbetween Jupiter and Mars,enticed maybe byour planetary pollenas the monarch by my neighbor’sslender-leaved milkweed.Unlike it even whenthe fragrant Cretaceousatmosphere meteorizedthe airborne rock,flaring it into what mighthave looked to the horridtriceratops like a monarchovipositing (had the butterflybegun before the periodbroke off). Not much likethe monarch I met when Irushed out the door for the 79,though the sulfurous dustfrom the meteoric impactoff the Yucatán took flightfor all corners of the heavensmuch the way the nextgeneration of monarchstook wing from the milkweedfor their annual migrationto the west of the Yucatán,and their unburdened mothertook her final flitup my flagstone walkway,froze and, hurtlingdownward, impactedmy stunned peninsularleft foot. Less likethe monarch for all this,the globe-clogging asteroid,than like me, one of my kind,bolting for the bus.

Official camarones ban season poster in Lunahuana, Peru. Photograph by V. Constanza Ocampo-Raeder © 2021.Modern society has removed many of us from an intimate connection to the land, the water, and the elements. Air conditioning in cars and artificial light in our homes allow us to carry on without paying much attention at all to the forces of nature around us.These relationships to ecological surroundings are something entirely different for those who fish artisanally along the coasts of Peru.Listen on Apple PodcastsConstanza Ocampo-Raeder is an anthropologist who writes beautifully and poetically about the people who catch camarones and the various types of fish used to make cebiche. She explores their intimate and visceral relationships to their environments—writing about a world of tasting the wind, talking to rocks, and listening to rainbows.She finds that efforts to protect the traditional and artisanal fishing industries in Peru have provided the cultural and political power to protect the ecosystems that support these species.I find her work particularly interesting in the context of the global seafood industry. The United Nations estimates that almost 90% of fisheries worldwide are either overfished or have already collapsed. To meet rising demand for seafood on a planet with nearly 8 billion people, seafood farming has expanded rapidly and now provides over half of the world’s seafood for human consumption. Fish farms pollute rivers, lakes, and coastal habitats, and escaped fish threaten wild populations with disease and other ecological impacts.I think Constanza’s work points us toward what a healthy ecological relationship between people and marine life could look like, even as we fight to dismantle the commercial fishing industry and repair our collective relationship to the world’s oceans.Subscribe on GhostConstanza is from Mexico originally, and she’s married to a Peruvian. She’s now a professor of anthropology at Carleton College, in Northfield, Minnesota.You can listen on Ghost, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.Constanza Ocampo-RaederAs an environmental anthropologist, Dr. Ocampo-Raeder’s work focuses on the political ecology of resource management systems in resource-based societies. Her current research projects explore the contradictions between sustainable development goals and policies that impact the livelihoods of small-scale producers, as expressed in initiatives such as food movements, protected areas and ecotourism. Dr. Ocampo-Raeder's current project focuses on the socio-ecological underpinnings of Mexico's diverse culinary traditions where she is exploring and contesting notions of fusion, mestizaje and gendered roles in the booming gastronomic economy. Her research combines ethnographic and ecological methodological frameworks to evaluate the human ecology of indigenous and rural societies in Latin America (Peru and Mexico). Dr. Ocampo-Raeder holds a bachelors’ degree in biology from Grinnell College and doctorate in anthropology from Stanford University. She has published amply in both Spanish and English, often with her undergraduate students, for environmental anthropology, food studies, and human geography journals. Dr. Ocampo-Raeder is currently an Associate Professor at Carleton College where she teaches anthropology, environmental studies and Latin American studies.Subscribe on Ghost

Many assaults on the environment happen slowly and continually, almost invisibly to us: starting a car engine, buying meat at the grocery store, throwing away a plastic straw.Mountaintop removal is different. It is sudden and violent and intentionally, unmistakably destructive. Coal companies will blow off the tops of mountains with explosives in order to more easily and cheaply access the coal seams underneath vast swaths of forest, streams, and wildlife habitat. They destroy massive areas of wild land to produce a dirty energy that heavily pollutes the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. Their use of explosives also allows them to employ many fewer miners.Listen on Apple PodcastsMountaintop removal was one of the big environmental stories in the media in the last couple decades. There were massive protests and a lot of bad press for the coal companies.Now coal production is down in the US, and dramatic and shocking stories about mountaintop removal have largely disappeared from the headlines, but mountaintop removal has not gone away. As the easier-to-access coal is mined, the amount of land that must be destroyed by mountain removal to produce the same amount of coal has increased.One report that demonstrates this is from SkyTruth, an environmental advocacy group that uses satellite imagery and remote sensing data to study environmental damage. They published a study showing that the amount of land needed to produce a unit of coal in 2015 was three times more than it had been in 1998.Subscribe on GhostVernon Haltom and Junior Walk haven’t forgotten what’s happening in West Virginia and Appalachia, because they live it every day. They both work for Coal River Mountain Watch, the organization previously directed by Judy Bonds, the renowned mountaintop removal activist from West Virginia, who was the daughter of a coal miner and died of cancer in 2011 at age 58.Vernon and Junior’s stories are urgent environmental ones, but they are also stories about the media and how we forget and move on.This episode of Chrysalis is the first in the Chrysalis Projects series, which highlights the work of community-based environmental projects.You can listen on Ghost, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!Vernon HaltomVernon Haltom has a BS in Mechanical Engineering (Aerospace Option) from Oklahoma State University and a BA in English Education from Northwestern Oklahoma State University. He served six years as an officer in the US Air Force, specializing in nuclear weapons safety and security. He then taught high school English for two years and English as a Second Language to college students for four years. He began volunteering for Coal River Mountain Watch in 2004 and has served on the staff since 2005, serving as executive director since 2011. He was involved in founding the regional Mountain Justice movement in 2004, the Alliance for Appalachia in 2006, and the Appalachian Community Health Emergency (ACHE) Campaign in 2012.Junior WalkJunior Walk grew up on Coal River Mountain in Raleigh County, WV, taking part in traditional Appalachian activities such as harvesting ginseng and mushrooms. He worked for a time in a coal preparation plant and then as a security guard on a mountaintop removal site, where he learned firsthand the damage coal harvesting had on the mountains and the communities below. He began working with Coal River Mountain Watch and other groups in 2009. In 2011 he was awarded the Brower Youth Award. Since that time his work has taken various forms, including lobbying on federal and state levels, gathering data for lawsuits against coal companies, and even getting arrested doing direct action at surface mines and corporate offices. In 2021 he was awarded a fellowship with Public Lab to help support his work monitoring the coal mines in his community via drones. Junior now serves as the outreach coordinator for Coal River Mountain Watch, monitoring coal mines in his community for environmental violations and guiding tours for visiting journalists and student groups.Donate to Coal River Mountain WatchAbout Coal River Mountain WatchCoal River Mountain Watch (CRMW) is a grassroots organization founded in 1998 in response to the fear and frustration of people living near or downstream from huge mountaintop removal sites. They began as a small group of volunteers working to organize the residents of southern West Virginia to fight for social, economic, and environmental justice. From their humble beginnings, they have become a major force in opposition to mountaintop removal. Their outreach coordinator, Julia Bonds, was the 2003 Goldman Prize winner for North America. CRMW's efforts figure prominently in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s book Crimes against Nature. They have been active in federal court to challenge the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permits for valley fills and made regional news with demonstrations against a sludge dam and preparation plant near Marsh Fork Elementary School. Find CRMW online: Website, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter.About Judy Bonds“Born and raised in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia, Julia “Judy” Bonds was a coal miner’s daughter and director of Coal River Mountain Watch. Bonds emerged as a formidable community leader against a highly destructive mining practice called mountaintop removal that is steadily ravaging the Appalachian mountain range and forcing many residents, some of whom have lived in the region for generations, to abandon their homes.” - Learn more at The Goldman Environmental Prize Website.Donate to Coal River Mountain WatchSee more of Junior’s drone work here and other Coal River Mountain flyovers here.Subscribe on Ghost!

Here’s something we hear all the time: if only more people knew more about environmental problems, then they would certainly act in some ecologically beneficial way. But the problem is, it’s not true. We’re now deluged with data about the climate crisis; and yet, this abundance of available environmental information has not led to an abundance of environmental action.This deficit model of climate communication is flawed, even though scientists, environmentalists, and other proponents of climate action continue to speak and act as if people would do more if they just knew more about the climate crisis and understood the science of climate change.Listen on Apple PodcastsHeather Houser writes about environmental ideas and themes in art, literature, culture, and the humanities. Her work blossoms with keen insights about the importance of culture in confronting ecological crisis.Heather is Professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin. I met her many years ago in Austin, when I was developing a film about dance and environmental justice. She is both a dancer and an environmental humanities scholar.Subscribe on GhostOur conversation explores climate information overload, the idea of what she calls eco-sickness in literature, the thorny topic of human population size, and whether artists should reject or rework artistic tools of the past that might be tainted by colonialism, racism, or other forms of oppression.You can listen on Ghost, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!Heather HouserHeather Houser, Ph.D, is Professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin, and the author of two brilliant books: Infowhelm: Environmental Art & Literature in an Age of Data (2020), and Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (2014), which won the 2015 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize and was shortlisted for the 2014 British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize. She is also a co-founder of Planet Texas 2050, UT Austin’s climate resilience-focused research challenge, and has led the following initiatives for the environmental humanities: 2015-16 Texas Institute for Literary & Textual Studies, Environmental Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, and Texas Ecocritics Network.Quotation Read by Heather Houser“It's astounding the first time you realize that a stranger has a body - the realization that he has a body makes him a stranger. It means that you have a body, too. You will live with this forever, and it will spell out the language of your life.”- James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

The full-page ad for the first Earth Day, published in The New York Times on January 18, 1970.Each year, we celebrate Earth Day; and each year, our collective actions lead to more greenhouse gas emissions, more habitat destruction, and more species extinctions. It’s hard for Earth Day not to feel like more of a superficial patting of ourselves on the back or a greenwashing opportunity for corporate sponsors than a serious call for transformative change.The first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, was something totally different. With 12,000 events across the country and more than 35,000 speakers from every walk of life—young and old, scientists and preachers, liberals and conservatives—the transformative power of the first Earth Day, conceived as a teach-in rather than a rally or a protest, is hard for us to imagine in our contemporary era of stark political polarization, hashtag protests, and climate denial politics.Listen on Apple PodcastsAdam Rome is an environmental historian who digs deep into the historical record and emerges with profound insights about the first Earth Day and the origins of the environmental movement. His work reveals the vital importance of understanding our environmental history in order to forge a more promising environmental future.Adam Rome was my advisor many years ago when I studied environmental history and cultural geography in graduate school at Penn State. And now, I’m very happy that he’s my good friend and colleague here at the University at Buffalo, where he’s Professor of Environment and Sustainability.Subscribe on GhostMy conversation with Adam travels through history, long before and after the first Earth Day, from beaver hats in feudal Europe; to the post-WWII era of prosperity and suburban development; and up to the present, as he probes the business world’s attempts to become more sustainable.You can listen on Ghost, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other podcast platforms.Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!Adam RomeAdam Rome is professor of environment and sustainability at the University at Buffalo. A leading expert on the history of environmental activism, his first book, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism, won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award and the Lewis Mumford Prize. His book on the history of the first Earth Day, The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation, was featured in The New Yorker. He is co-editor of Green Capitalism? Business and the Environment in the Twentieth Century. From 2002 to 2005, he edited the journal Environmental History. In addition to numerous scholarly publications, he has written essays and op-eds for a variety of publications, including Nature, Smithsonian, The Washington Post, Wired, and The Huffington Post. He has produced two Audible Original audio courses: “The Genius of Earth Day” and “The Enduring Genius of Frederick Law Olmsted.”Quotation read by Adam RomeText within this block will maintain its original spacing when published“The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.”— Rachel Carson, from Silent Spring

Martin Luther Hammers His 95 Theses to the Door, by Ferdinand PauwelsEnvironmental activists often focus on facts and data, as if more climate information will lead to more climate action. That strategy may be effective with some communities, but overall it hasn’t prevented global emissions from climbing year after year or habitats from being destroyed day after day.Many folks in the environmental movement are thinking a lot about how to make messaging more effective. But it’s not just the message we need to question—it’s also the messenger.In the U.S., white evangelical Christians are not known for their strong support of environmental protections or for believing that humans are even causing climate change, but maybe they haven’t had the right messengers.Listen on Apple PodcastsRev. Kyle Meyaard-Schaap is an evangelical Christian climate activist, which is not a combination of descriptors we often hear. Kyle has spent years building a movement of young messengers from within the evangelical community who speak a new language of creation care.He believes that Christians don’t need to look any further than the Bible to become fierce and passionate advocates for ecological protection and climate action.Rev. Kyle Meyaard-Schaap was National Organizer and Spokesperson for Young Evangelicals for Climate Action before becoming Vice President at the Evangelical Environmental Network.Subscribe on GhostI met Kyle in 2019 at a week-long climate storytelling retreat in New York City. I was super excited to continue our conversation here and dive deeper into his own ecological awakening, what scripture says about caring for the environment, and how Christians and non-Christians alike can find common values and build power together to care for life on Earth across cultural lines that often divide us.You can listen on Ghost, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other podcast platforms.Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!Rev. Kyle Meyaard-SchaapRev. Kyle Meyaard-Schaap serves as the Vice President of the Evangelical Environmental Network. He holds an undergraduate degree in religious studies from Calvin University (B.A. '12), a Master of Divinity degree from Western Theological Seminary (M.Div. '16), and is ordained in the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRCNA). Much of his professional experience has involved the integration of theology, science, and action toward a deeper awareness of the Christian responsibility to care for God's earth and to love one’s neighbors, both at home and around the world. Kyle has been named to Midwest Energy Group's 40 Under 40 and the American Conservation Coalition’s 30 Under 30 cohorts for his work on climate change education and advocacy. Most recently, he was named a Yale Public Voices on the Climate Crisis Fellow for 2020. His work has been featured in national and international news outlets such as PBS, NPR, CNN, NBC News, New York Times, Reuters, and U.S. News and World Report. He is married to Allison and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan with their son, Simon.Quotation Read by Rev. Kyle Meyaard-SchaapText within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThe Peace of Wild ThingsWhen despair for the world grows in meand I wake in the night at the least soundin fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,I go and lie down where the wood drakerests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.I come into the peace of wild thingswho do not tax their lives with forethoughtof grief. I come into the presence of still water.And I feel above me the day-blind starswaiting with their light. For a timeI rest in the grace of the world, and am free.- Wendell Berry© Wendell Berry. This poem is excerpted from New Collected Poems and is reprinted with permission of the Counterpoint Press.Subscribe on Ghost!

From the South Side of Chicago, to Jamaica, to South Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, Jacqui has continually asked what deep, transformative change looks like. She grounds her theory of change in community-led advocacy. She envisions a world of eco-communities and works with real communities across the country who have already created elements of these utopian visions.But never does she lose sight of climate change and environmental exploitation as multipliers of injustice.