This podcast features interviews with a variety of theorists, artists and activists from across the globe. It's guided by the search for radical solutions to crises that are inherent to colonial capitalism. To this end, I hope to keep facilitating conversations that bring together perspectives on the liberatory and transformative power of care, in particular.
Jessica den Outer and Shauna Doll dig into the growing certainty that Nature has Rights
Jessica den Outer is an expert in environmental law who advocates globally for the Rights of Nature. Since 2017, she’s been consulted and has spoken for institutions like the UN and Harvard. She founded the NGO ‘Stichting Rechten van de Natuur’ and has received numerous awards for her pioneering work.
Shauna Doll works to control invasive species in the Halifax Regional Municipality and is a frequent author on environmental issues. There are a lot of them, and the number is growing. What is going on and what methods work to slow crisis down, halt them where possible and manage their impact? How can the rights of nature work as a framework for shifting the ways we value and devalue the world around us
Jessica's book The Forest Fights Back gives us an opportunity to discuss a potent source of resistance and coalition-building: the idea that nature has inherent rights that need to be respected.
From Pluto Press: "As the world grapples with the escalating climate crisis, ecosystems are collapsing, and the planet’s future hangs in the balance. For centuries, our legal systems have treated nature as something to be owned and exploited, but a bold new movement is challenging this paradigm.
In The Forest Fights Back, Jessica den Outer explores a groundbreaking global movement—Rights of Nature—taking on the legal system to recognise the rights of rivers, forests, and mountains to exist, flourish, and sustain their ecological balance. From the fight for the Whanganui River in New Zealand to the battle for Spain’s Mar Menor lagoon, den Outer highlights the campaigns led by grassroots communities, telling stories of determination and legal ingenuity.
This movement goes beyond law – it represents a cultural shift that could reshape how we live, think, co-exist and advocate for nature."
21 Aug 2026
Alexis Shotwell urges us to reconnect, even if "we're irritating and we hurt each other"
I was wowed by this book's wisdom about the ways that cynicism, anger and protective individualism get dumped into our minds and narrow our emotional range.
Talking about the differences between "complicity" and "implication" might feel frivolous or semantic as the horrors persist, but Liberation is Other People is so attuned to the wicked problems we face, and on so many registers, that its engagement with the question of what we're willing to experiment with in order to save the future feels incredibly urgent and surprisingly hopeful, since its author thinks our collaborative abilities are enough to unlock untold sources of community love, public will, imagination and problem solving.
If we finally get serious and create bigger, weirder, more chameleonic containers for our climate feelings, Shotwell's gambit is that this burgeoning social infrastructure could not only fight climate despair, it could end up being a key part of how we ultimately create radically different, more durable solutions and more liveable futures together. Surprise the doomsayers! Liberation is Other People is out November 10th from University of Minnesota Press.
Pre-order from @uminnpress:
https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517921651/liberation-is-other-people/
#leftbooks #academicbooks #revolutionarybooks #ursulaleguin #affect #politics #community #mutualaid #climatefeelings #ecoanxiety #collectivity #solidarity #anticapitalism #climatedevastation #organizing #anarchism #isolation #power #tactics #strategy
10 Aug 2026
Matthew Huber wants to incite a class realignment to fight global heating & the tyranny of capital
In his recent writing, political theorist Matthew Huber (https://www.maxwell.syr.edu/directory/matthew-t-huber) has been making the point that climate action is needlessly polarizing, and that this polarization can be corrected by abandoning the sorts of virtue signaling and PR pomp and circumstance that sometimes comes with climate communication. In fact, he says in his Jacobin article that it's "not clear why focusing on the direct material concerns of affordability is not enough on its own and why climate must be linked at all."
In the midst of economic warfare and global military imperialism, the crises that we face do demand some form of solidarity. Huber suggests that we likely need to let go of the idea that climate itself, fear of ecological collapse, will rally constituencies to fight for a post-profit society.
He writes: "All of us can agree the climate situation is bad and getting worse. After a sustained period of decline, US emissions increased in 2025. The second Trump administration has rolled back the Inflation Reduction Act and is using state power to keep uneconomical coal plants open and deregulate oil and gas production.
No amount of knowledge of science or moral concern about our children will, on its own, reverse this. Given the civilizational scale of the transformation required, replacing an entire global infrastructure system that still depends on fossil fuel for 80 percent of its needs, we need large-scale political power."
Read the full article at https://jacobin.com/2026/05/climate-politics-working-class-dealignment
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