Chrysalis with John Fiege John Fiege

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.
Forrest 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.
This 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.
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Forrest Gander
Born 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 Zu

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.
Dave 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.
I’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.
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Dave Cortez
Dave 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 orde

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.
Elizabeth 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.
This episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series. You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.
Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!
Elizabeth Bradfield
Born 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.
“Plastic: A Personal History”
By Elizabeth Bradfield
How can I find a way to praise
it? Do the early inventors & embracers
churn with regret? I don’t think my parents
—born in the swing toward ubiquity—chew
& chew & chew on plastic. But of course they
do. Bits in water, food-flesh, air.
And their parents? I remember Dad
mocking his mother’s drawer of saved
rubber 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. Even
for gum. We hate the $5 minimum.
Bills paperless, automatic, almost
unreal.
My toys were plastic, castle
and circus train and yo-yo. Did my lunches
ever get wrapped in waxed paper or
was it all Saran, Saran, Saran?
Sarah’s mom
was given, in Girl Scouts, a blue sheet
of plastic to cut, sew, and trim with white piping
into pouches for camping. Sarah has it still,
brittle but useful. Merit badge for waterproofing.
For everlasting.
You, too, must have heard stories,

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.
Salma 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.
Since 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 Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.
Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!
Salma Arastu
An 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.”
Selected Works
A more comprehensive collection of work is available here.
Recommended Readings & Media
Salma Arastu Sharing process of her art.
Transcript
Intro
John Fiege
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 canvases in Salma Arastu’s series of paintings, We Are All One, are full of soft colors, continuous lines, immersive habitats tha

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.
John 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.
This episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series. You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.
Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!
John Shoptaw
John 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).
“Near-Earth Object”
By John Shoptaw
Unlike the monarch, though
the asteroid also slipped
quietly from its colony
on its annular migration
between Jupiter and Mars,
enticed m

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.
Constanza 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.
Constanza is from Mexico originally, and she’s married to a Peruvian. She’s now a professor of anthropology at Carleton College, in Northfield, Minnesota.
This episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Kitchen series, which explores questions of the sustainability of our food.
You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.
Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
As 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.
Cebiche/Ceviche Recipes from Constanza Ocampo-Raeder
Recommended Readings & Media
Transcript
Intro
John Fiege
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.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder is an anthropologis