Chrysalis with John Fiege

John Fiege
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I’m a professor, filmmaker, and storyteller interested in the question of how we can transform ourselves—as individuals, as societies, as an entire species—in ways that allow our planet’s ecological systems to thrive. I began this work through the study of environmental history and cultural geography. I then became a filmmaker and photographer focused on stories of transformation in the face of ecological peril. Most recently, I launched the Chrysalis newsletter and podcast to have conversations with a wide variety of environmental thinkers, as well as to share my writing on our relationship with the natural world. My newsletter, podcast, and photographs are available for free to anyone. By becoming a paid subscriber on johnfiege.earth—what we call a Butterfly Subscriber—you can also stream my films and post on the community comments section of the newsletter. Your support provides essential resources for the newsletter and podcast to grow and remain free and ad-free for everyone. Humanity has been a very hungry caterpillar, eating everything in sight. Can we now transform into a beautiful butterfly ready to pollinate the flowers, rather than just eat the leaves? This is the question that animates me—and I believe that digging deeply into the question itself can catalyze transformation.

  1. 3H AGO

    19. Jim Morris — Don't Worry, Nothing Here Will Hurt You

    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 You 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 Podcasts What 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. —— Credits This 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.

    1h 39m

  2. MAR 10

    18. Lois Gibbs — The Legacy of Love Canal

    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 Canal 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 Podcasts She 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 —— Credits This 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.

    1h 45m

  3. MAR 5

    17. Transformation for a New Era

    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 Era 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 Recommendations In His First 100 Days, Trump Launched an ‘All-Out Assault’ on the Environment https://insideclimatenews.org/news/30042025/trump-second-administration-first-100-days-assault-on-the-environment/ TRUMP’S ASSAULT ON THE ENVIRONMENT HAS BEEN EVEN WORSE THAN EXPERTS PREDICTED a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-assault-environment-climate-change-fight-1235494125/" rel="noopener...

    9 min

  4. 10/28/2024

    16. Sean Dixon — Puget Soundkeeper

    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 Podcasts Coho 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 Ghost This 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

    1h 22m

  5. 10/21/2024

    15. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke — "When the Animals Leave this Place"

    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 Podcasts Embedded 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 Ghost This 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 Coke Underneath ice caps, once glacial peaks deer, elk, vixen begin to ascend. Free creatures camouflaged as waves and waves receding far from plains pulling upward slopes and faraway snow dusted mountains. On spotted and clear cut hills robbed of fir, high above wheat tapestried valleys, flood plains up where headwaters reside. Droplets pound, listen. Hoofed and pawed mammals pawing 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 barriers these populations of plains, prairies, forests flee in 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 glass along cracked and shattered pane, spider-like with webs and prisms. “Look, there, the rainbow touched the ground both ends down!” Full arch seven colors showered, heed what Indigenous know, why long ago, they said no one belongs here, surrounding them, that this land was meant to be wet with waters of nearby not fertile to crops and domestic graze. The old ones said, “When the animals leave this place the 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 like that on petal rose, though only momentarily. Colors disappear like print photographs fade. They mix with charcoal surrounding. A flurry of fowl follow like strands, maidenhair falls, from blackened clouds above swarming inward covering the basin and raising sky. Darkness hangs over the hills appear as black water crests, blackness varying shades. The sun is somewhere farther than the farthest ridge . Main gravel crossroads and back back roads slicken to mud, clay. Turtles creep along rising banks, snapping jowls. Frogs chug throaty songs. The frogs only part of immense choir heralding the downpour, the falling oceans. Over the train trestle, suspension bridge with current 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, below the choir calling it forth. Brightly plumed jays and dull brown-headed cowbirds fly as if hung in one place like pinwheels. They dance toward the rain crest, the approaching storm beckoning, inviting, summoning. A single sparrow sings the stroke of rain past 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, or white birch woods rise, tower over, quaking aspen stand against storm shown veils—sheeting rains crossing pasture, meadow, hills, mountain. Sounds erupt. Gathering clouds converge, push, pull, push, pull forcing lightning back and forth shaping windy, sculptured swans, mallard ducks, and giants from 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 Ghost CreditsThis episode was researched by Lydia Montgomery and edited by Sofia Chang. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker.

    1h 16m

  6. 10/07/2024

    14. Kara Maria — Precious and Precarious

    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 Podcasts But 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 Ghost Kara’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 Ghost CreditsThis 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.

    48 min

  7. 09/23/2024

    13. Brian Teare — "Doomstead Days"

    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 Podcasts The 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 Ghost This 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 Ghost Doomstead Days By Brian Teare today’s gender is rain it touches everything with its little silver epistemology mottled like a brook trout with a hundred spots white as bark scars on this slim trunk thrust up from one sidewalk square the four square feet of open ground given a street tree twiggy perimeter continually clipped by parking or car door or passing trash truck that snaps an actual branch I find haunting the little plot its winged achenes auto-rotate down to it’s not that I don’t like a wide sidewalk or the 45 bus that grinds right by but if organisms didn’t insist on forms of resistance they’d be dead of anthropocentric technomechanical systems whose grids restrict the living through perpetual stress that elicits intense physical response like an animal panic hitting the psoas with cramps or root fungus sunk in the maple’s allotment of city property as tolerably wide as the migraine that begins at the base of my skull & pinches with breadth calipers my temples until the feel of flay arrays the dura’s surface inside the bones inside the head the healer holds in her hands & says the occiput is shut flat & irks the nerves that thread through its unappeasable shunt into the spine I see a white light I keep thinking about the way long drought dries out topsoil so deep beneath its surface the first hard rain wreaks flood taking the good dirt with it the way today’s wet excess escapes its four square feet of exposed root & rivers out a flex of sediment alluvial over the civic cement of the anthropocene in currents a supple rippled velvet dun as Wissahickon creek in fall’s brief season of redd & spawn when brook trout in chill quick shallows once dug into gravel to let nested eggs mix with milt & turn pearls translucent as raw unpolished quartz each white eyed ova flawed by a black fleck my eyes close over at the height of migraine fertile error waiting with incipient tail ready to propel it deeper into nausea until the healer halts its hatching & calms neuralgia between the heels of her hands pressing the occiput back open into the natural curve the bones forget the way the banks of the Wissahickon have forgotten rapids rinsing schist shaded by hemlock that kept the brook trout cold each patterned aspect of habitat lost first to dams & mills & industry runoff & plots of flax Germantown planted for paper & cloth made with water’s power & hauled out of the precipitous gorge up rough narrow roads south to the city port before adelgids took the crucial dark from under hemlocks sun heating the rocky creek down steep rills to the lower Schuylkill wide in its final miles dammed at Fairmount for two centuries of coal silt & dredge fabric dye & sewage that gave rise to typhus & refinery spills that gave rise to fire rinsed by this gender that remembers current’s circuit anadromous shad & striped bass leaving the Atlantic heading upriver shedding saltwater for fresh in runs whose numbers turned the green river silver if color counts as epistemology spring sun on the backs of a thousand shad is a form of knowing local to another century & the duller color of ours is the way the word gender remembers it once meant to f**k beget or give birth sibling to generate & engender all fertile at the root & continuous as falling water molecules smoothing the sparkling gnarl of Wissahickon schist until its surface mirrors their force the fuel element & fundament alike derive thriving from being at its biggest when it’s kinetic energy headed toward intensity everything’s body connected by this totally elastic materiality I feel as ecstatic wide dilation when the shut skull gives up resistance to the healer’s hands & the occiput opens its bones my mind’s eye goes okay I’m awake now rowdy with trout psoas relaxed my body’s a conduit it roars with...

    1h 25m

  8. 09/16/2024

    12. Layel Camargo — Queer Ecology, Indigenous Stewardship, and the Power of Laughter

    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 Podcasts Layel 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 Ghost Our 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 Solomon Subscribe on Ghost

    1h 27m
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5
out of 5
6 Ratings

About

I’m a professor, filmmaker, and storyteller interested in the question of how we can transform ourselves—as individuals, as societies, as an entire species—in ways that allow our planet’s ecological systems to thrive. I began this work through the study of environmental history and cultural geography. I then became a filmmaker and photographer focused on stories of transformation in the face of ecological peril. Most recently, I launched the Chrysalis newsletter and podcast to have conversations with a wide variety of environmental thinkers, as well as to share my writing on our relationship with the natural world. My newsletter, podcast, and photographs are available for free to anyone. By becoming a paid subscriber on johnfiege.earth—what we call a Butterfly Subscriber—you can also stream my films and post on the community comments section of the newsletter. Your support provides essential resources for the newsletter and podcast to grow and remain free and ad-free for everyone. Humanity has been a very hungry caterpillar, eating everything in sight. Can we now transform into a beautiful butterfly ready to pollinate the flowers, rather than just eat the leaves? This is the question that animates me—and I believe that digging deeply into the question itself can catalyze transformation.

Information

  • Creator
    John Fiege
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    19
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © John Fiege
  • Show Website
    Chrysalis with John Fiege