Tracing the Roots of the Climate Crisis Ben Cushing
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- Science
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This podcast explores some of the root causes of the climate crisis. But, maybe surprisingly, it doesn‘t spend very much time talking about the climate crisis itself. Instead, it examines the ways that climate change grows from the same root as other crises we face, including racial and gender injustice and economic exploitation and precarity. Each of the four chapters of this podcast will explore the roots of the climate crisis from different angles - ranging from a discussion of the consequences of the capitalist economic system, to an examination of the cultural stories that justify colonialism, genocide and slavery. And throughout, it will try to keep sight of our own agency to resist systems of power and to co-create alternatives to the way things currently are.
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Chapter 1: Systems
Social systems shape the lives we live and the people we become. So, any meaningful examination of the climate crisis is going to have to consider how certain systems produce certain outcomes for people and the land. So in Chapter 1, we tackle systems.
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Chapter 2: Capitalism
In Chapter 2, we explore a pretty unnerving question: Is the climate crisis, and the ecological crisis more broadly, the predictable outcome of a certain economic order?
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Chapter 3: The Walls Built in Our Minds
In this chapter, we explore the ways that cultural ideas, such as our categories of division, function to maintain and justify various systems of domination and exploitation - from white supremacy to extractive capitalism.
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Chapter 4: Dreams
In this chapter, we reflect on our dreams. As a society, what kinds of dreams have we inherited? What are their consequences? And what kinds of dreams do we need, in order to survive the future, and heal?
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Season 2 Teaser
Season two coming soon! Over the next several weeks, I’ll be sharing interviews with academic and community leaders. We’ll be trying to get our heads around the shape of the problems we face, and we'll be exploring some possible directions toward better futures.
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David Osborn on Earthbound Climate Movements
David Osborn is a long time participant in the direct action climate movement as well as a faculty member in University Studies at Portland State University. We discuss ways that non-native and settler people (like David and I) might begin to challenge the worldviews and ways of being that they have inherited. If settler colonialism and capitalism have shaped the ways non-native and settler people see the world, and their places within it, how can they begin to challenge that worldview and develop other ways of being - forming different and more intentional relationships with each other and with the rest of the living world? In other words, if the climate crisis is a cultural problem at the deepest level, how do members of the settler culture begin to do the work of profound cultural transformation?