Extreme flooding, drought, and wildfires – why? Why did scientists leave out models showing extreme warming? UK expert Ranjini Swaminathan takes us inside the future-forecast machine. Then eco-feminism revisited: U.S. Green Party founder Charlene Spretnak & Susan Griffin on “Women & Nature – Speed, Consciousness & Quantification” at the Chicago “Techno-Utopianism and the Fate of the Earth” Forum.
This is Radio Ecoshock.
Listen to or download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (57 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)
**** NOTE FROM ALEX ****
GRAB U.S. CLIMATE INFO BEFORE IT IS DISAPPEARED!
American climate science and government assessments are fundamental for English language climate education and public understanding. On January 20th, a lot of that could go away. The incoming President Trump already called climate change “a hoax”. He has publicly sworn to do away with regulations limiting fossil fuel production and use in any way.
You may want to download some key factsheets from climate.gov. Will there even be a climate.gov in the Spring? A number of senior climate scientists resigned or left the country, along with promising Post Docs and students, during the last Trump Administration. This looks a lot worse, as Trump assumes unlimited power.
In just one example, Trump is set to appoint ultra-conservative Russell Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget. Vought already tried to kill the National Climate Assessment, called the “crown jewel of US climate research” by Scott Waldman at climatewire. Used by corporations, states and municipal government and other countries, the next National Climate Assessment is due in 2026 or 2027. If it comes out at all, the “Assessment” could be loaded with praise for fossil fuels and low-ball estimates of climate impacts. No doubt this will unfold despite continuing climate-fueled disasters in the United States and abroad.
Really, the Trump team wants to end public-funded climate science, and perhaps science altogether. Why should taxpayers lay out that money? Trump already took the United States out of the Paris climate Accord and will do so again.
Anyway, the climate information landscape is about to become deformed and depopulated on a variety of platforms and institutions. We are in the age of roaring denial. Grab the relics you may need now, quickly.
==============================
THE FUTURE MACHINE
RANJINI SWAMINATHAN
As global temperatures go higher than expected, why did official science avoid models suggesting higher than expected temperatures? Does that matter for big impacts like flooding, drought, or wildfires? What drives them? We get a flurry of questions from a humble paper that at first glance appears to be a discussion among experts on climate modeling.
Fortunately, we have the Lead Author to explain. Dr. Ranjini Swaminathan is an expert in climate modeling at the University of Reading. Yes, she has published on cognitive robot systems and pattern recognition. But she tends to ask real questions affecting billions of people. How can we conceive a very different future?
Listen to or download this 29 minute interview with Ranjini Swaminathan in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
This interview is based on the paper “Regional Impacts Poorly Constrained by Climate Sensitivity” (December 5, 2004, Open Access). That title may sound obscure, but the stakes are high. We also get a clear concise understanding of the real drivers of three top news-makers: floods, drought, and wildfires. It’s not just heat or the level of carbon dioxide, or how easily climate is changed.
The largest single Earth model project, the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, or CMIP, chose just 18 models for integration. Trying for accuracy, and projections useful for governments, they left out models allowing higher possible temperatures. Given historic damages already, it is easy to be paranoid. Is it possible high-warming models were excluded to force agreement to official figures, or is this just a discussion among scientists trying to get the best possible results?
American scientist Zeke Hausfauther published a paper saying those higher range models should be left out. This new work by Swaminathan and colleagues, supported by a lot of testing, suggests these models should be used for two reasons. The question of climate sensitivity does not affect the drivers of floods, drought and wildfires. Second, some of the models not used prove better at forecasting (and hindcasting) those three important sources of disasters and crop failures. We need them.
As a person who knows little about modeling, the main insights in this paper for me are the case studies, like the forces that deliver monsoons rains to millions, or wildfires that now threaten even in winter, like California’s Palisades in early January. The paper is free – Open Access – so take a look and glean more for yourself.
================================
2 FEMINIST SPEAKERS FROM 2014
(great talks, still great today)
TECHNO-UTOPIANISM AND FEMINISM
Technology men are plotting to take over your life and mind. Artificial intelligence is not made to help you. It is designed to help owners make wealth. We know now AI is not going to save us and may hasten our end.
It seems appropriate that we are now going to two speakers from the conference “Techno-Utopianism and the Fate of the Earth.” It was held in New York City on October 25th and 26th, 2014. This teach-in was presented by the International Forum on Globalization and the New York Open Center. It was recorded by Dale Lehman of WZRD radio in Chicago.
Charlene Spretnak
“The Resurgence of the Real”
Charlene Spretnak is a founder of the U.S. Green Party, author, and eco-feminist.
“Her book The Resurgence of the Real was named by the Los Angeles Times as one of the Best Books of 1997. In 2006 Charlene Spretnak was named by the British government’s Environment Department as one of the “100 Eco-Heroes of All Time.” In 2012 she received the Demeter Award for lifetime achievement as “one of the premier visionary feminist thinkers of our time” from the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology.”
These talks from the Techno-Utopian form were originally broadcast on Radio Ecoshock “The Anthropocene And Techno-utopia” Posted on November 27, 2014.
Listen to or download this 18 minute talk by Charlene Spretnak in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
CHARLENE SPRETNAK TRANSCRIPT
[Introduction by Forum host]
And our final panelist today will be Charlene Spretnak. She is the cofounder of the US Green Party and the author of “Green Politics”, “The Resurgence of the Real”, “Relational Reality”, and many ecosocial essays. She was named by the British government as one of the 100 eco heroes of all time, and her book “The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art “was just published this week. Charlene will be speaking today on the importance of understanding organic dynamic interrelatedness in assessing technology.
Welcome, Charlene.
[Charlene Spretnak]
I’m going to come at this subject from, somewhat different direction, building on these astute critiques my fellow panelists have given about, essentially, a lot of examples they stated from what is the mechanistic world view, and that, of course, has shaped our systems of knowledge. It shaped the way we were all socialized and the way we relate to technology.
So the mechanistic worldview holds that every person and every entity is essentially separate and discreet, and entities, whether they’re people or marsupials or poplar trees, they can be in some kind of relationship or not, but that certainly doesn’t affect their internal constitution and the way they function physically, so that’s the mechanistic perspective, but there’s also a relational perspective, which acknowledges that every entity exists in a field of dynamic interrelationships, and they definitely do affect how your internal organ systems work and how you function in the world. And the interrelationships are dynamic, meaning they’re always in flux. They respond to minute changes. They’re creative, unpredictable, and full of possibilities.
Now, even in the 19th century, there were some people who saw there are some real problems with the assumptions and premises of the mechanistic world view, and really there’s been this attempted correction of it going on, at least since 1905 with Einstein’s two papers, which established a relational perspective on matter and energy.
But it’s turned out that the mechanistic worldview has been very difficult to dislodge. You may remember that there were a number of best selling books in the last quarter of 20th century, and these were all about the implications of relational discoveries in quantum physics and then chaos theory and then complexity studies, and these books asserted that soon this relational thinking from these discoveries would ripple out and transform all our institutions. Right. We can look around and see that our institutions were not transformed, and I think that’s probably because the nature of those discoveries was too abstract for most people to pay a lot of attention to.
There was one partial success story, of course, from that period, which started out being called alternative medicine and then complementary medicine, integral medicine, which was eventually given a small grudgingly given a small and very incongruous place in the mainstream medical system. But the millennial turning came and went, and I was still waiting to see the big correction, the grand correction to the mechanistic world view, and I have to admit I really, got to a point where I thought, I may not see this. It may not happen in my lifetime. Okay. But then around 2004, I opened the newspaper one morning and I saw a small article, and it was on a discovery about the human body. And the researchers said they were very surprised by the findings, so I read that article and I was very surprised by the findings. And then a few weeks later, I saw a similar one, and then I saw more in the months years that followed.
So I started saving all these because I saw that what these new discoveries had in common was that they were challenging the prevailing view of the human organism as essentially, a bio-machine, a very complicated bio-machine. These discoveries were actually revealing what they were surprising because they were revealing the extent to which the human organism actually is structured by and functions through dynamic interrelationships. I had bulging files of this eventually, and I drew them all together and presented them in this book “Relational Reality” a couple of years ago. But they kept on coming, so I have another bulging file and you’ll see them now because you’ll be able to recognize, ’Oh, I see’. That’s another one that is showing these relational results that go against, the mechanistic assumptions. I’m gonna give you just a few examples.
“direct and even observed violence affects the human body at the cellular level”
One of them was, they did a study a few years ago of 906 elderly adults, and they found that the ones that had, few friendships or other social interactions had a rapid decline in motor function, standing, gripping, balancing, and then there was a, study 2 years ago, 2012. This is about children, the development of children, and they found that, children who between ages 510 experienced violence, either physically, being brought on them or even witnessing violence, those children then had an erosion in the telomeres, which is part of the DNA structures in their cells, a shortening of the telomeres, which is what happens in the aging process. And the study found that the more types of violence the child witnessed, the faster the telomeres eroded, shortening their lifespan. So direct and even observed violence affects the human body at the cellular level. And then also, our body mind is in dynamic relationship, not only with other people, but with the rest of the natural world.
So one study a few years ago of people who live in, the projects in Chicago in this one housing project, it found that the residents who were at the far end of the project, next to trees and green open space, they not only had less anxiety and depression, but they had many fewer incidents of physical diseases, like diabetes, asthma, intestinal problems, and back pains.
[RELATIONAL PHYSIOLOGY]
There are so many, actually, recent discoveries about the relationship between humans and nature that you may have noticed that hospitals have now redesigned their decor to have nature motifs, which costs a lot of money, so that’s that’s how established it is only in the last 12 years with all this research. And if you’ve been in a hospital recently, you may have noticed the drapery often has a leaf motif, and in the patient’s room, they’ve put a big photograph of a mountain scene, and in the corridors, they have these little water fountains, you know, with water running over stones, and sometimes in the MRI room, the last thing people see when they’re being rolled in is the blue sky with white fluffy clouds. The reason they’re doing that is because it’s been, very firmly established that, connecting with nature, even through a photograph, helps our healing process, and I call this new field of knowledge that’s emerging relational physiology.
It’s different, I feel, because these discoveries, unlike the earlier ones, are so concrete and so accessible, and it’s moving very quickly into mainstream areas.
[BRAIN CONNECTIONS]
But what I’d like to focus on in the time remaining is just one of our organs, the brain, because it’s always been held in the mechanistic view of the human body mind, of course, that we arrive in this world with a certain, capacity of mental functioning. You might be born smart or born dumb or something in between, but it’s understood that you arrive with a certain kind of brain, and that’s it. Now, however, that assumption’s being strongly challenged by several studies that found there are numerous relational factors from infancy on through childhood that affect the development of an adult’s level of intelligence.
[FIVE EXAMPLES]
Here are five examples of, what I call the relational physiology of intelligence.
1. Breastfeeding
The first one’s breastfeeding. So researchers have realized for a long time that breastfeeding is good for the physical reason that there are neurosugars in the breast milk that helps brain development, but now studies have also, determined that the hours of interaction between the mother and the baby are exchanging all kinds of information through touch and language and other body language that stimulates brain development. And one study said that it controlled for lots of socioeconomic factors, but it said a baby who is breastfed for 1 year without other food being added yet gets a 6 point bounce on an IQ test, even though we know there are problems with IQ tests, but a standardized intelligence test. Six points is what they determined.
Number 2, certain brain disorders [e.g. Autism]
There’s the example of autism. This is a new study that was just published, last month by the University of California, Davis. You cannot make a definite diagnosis of autism before age 2, but as young as 6 months, certain symptoms start to show up, like rapid eye move movement or fixation, unusual fixation on an object or, abnormal repetitive movements and not wanting to make eye contact. So this study, identified a number of infants who were symptomatic between ages 6 months 1 year, and it divided them into 4 groups. 1 of the groups got this therapy called early start, and they trained the mothers and sometimes both parents how to do certain motions, certain sounds, often down on the carpet with the child, certain movements every day.
And by the time these babies were 3 years old, the group that had had the early start intervention had no symptoms of autism, no language delays, and no other developmental delays. So this relational interaction had affected the brain and probably the synaptic, pathways.
[FAMILY DYNAMICS]
And then number 3, family dynamics.
Well, about 25 years ago, it was, noticed by some researchers that, again, drawing on the IQ test, the first born child, eldest child in a family tends to generally, generally, score 2 or 3 points higher on the IQ test than his or her siblings. So, of course, they figured there must be something going on with the brain of the first born, but in 2007, a study was done in Norway of 2,041 military records of 18 to 19 year old boys who have to go into the service, and the researchers then looking at these records had not only the IQ, score of the test the military had given, but it also had the family history of each boy.
And what they found was if the first born child had died early in childhood or even if the first two children had died early and the third born had been raised as the eldest, that child then scored the extra 2 or 3 points on the IQ test at age 19 that’s generally seen of the first borns. So family dynamics were affecting the development expression of intelligence, and they didn’t speculate why, but, you know, parents tend to give, the eldest child more responsibility. Watch the kids. We’re going out, and the eldest tends to identify more with the adult world and test taking. It must It might have something to do with that, but they didn’t say.
[DAMAGED DEVELOPMENT]
And then number 4, violation and damage to the developmental process.
It’s been found in many studies cross culturally that whipping, spanking, beating a child lowers IQ, and the more spanking, the more it lowers the IQ. And culturally, if it’s accepted and expected that all children will be whipped or spanked, you can see culturally, collectively the scores are suppressed, even factoring in for socioeconomic factors, so the violence is apparently an anti relational trauma to the whole system.
[RELATIONS AND INTELLIGENCE]
And then last, number 5, language and the relational formation of our intelligence.
A researcher named Betty Hart found in the mid-nineteen-nineties that children who were exposed to a lot of language in conversation before age 3 did much better in reading and math and intelligence tests in school than children who had heard fewer, many fewer words during that period, so there’s been a lot of studies recently working off of that and developing it, and one thing they found is that if the child was hearing a lot of words in conversation, not from the mother or primary caregiver, but rather from the television set, it not only didn’t have the same effect, it had a detrimental effect on their intelligence abilities later.
[SILICON VALLEY PARENTS KEEP KIDS AWAY FROM SCREENS]
Before I go on, let me just say the baby Einstein device, do you remember that? Why that went by the by? When those children got to 1st and second grade, they had lower ability than the ones, so what I started to say before I thought of that, you cannot substitute the organic with a technological and expect that it’s not going to be damaging, and that fact is apparently very widely recognized among high-tech parents in Silicon Valley. You may see some of these articles in the paper where they go to these big names and say, wow. Your house must be like an electronic cottage, the journalists will say, and the guys, ‘No.
No. No. No. No. We don’t we don’t let our kids go on that.’
And they said, really? You don’t? ’No’. They, you know, either have no televisions and computers in the house or screen time or at a certain age they’ll let them have 1 or 2 hours a week, or they send them even to Waldorf schools, no TV in the house. So one of the journalists asked these high-tech couples why they keep their children away from screen time, and they replied, quote, ‘because we’ve seen what it does to people who were raised that way.’ Unquote.
Meanwhile, of course, their own company’s marketing departments are just going full bore to convince parents all across the country that it’ll benefit their child hugely to have them glued to a screen from infancy on when, in fact, this electronic immersion is tremendously damaging to their development.
In summary, we are just now beginning to grasp in mainstream venues that we human organisms are far, far more dynamically interrelated than modern thinking ever assumed. And, of course, this deeply relational nature of reality was and is self evident to indigenous cultures, but we hyper-modern folks are pretty much at a kindergarten level of figuring out our own physical nature and how we work. It’s not the way we were schooled.
One way for us to assess the effects of technology in our lives is to pay attention to whether time spent on an electronic device is significantly reducing the time and availability we need for organic relationships. But we face two difficulties in making assessments like that. First, because modern people are socialized in the mechanistic world view, every new device seems really swell, and we’re slow to see the detrimental effects. And second, because we do not yet recognize all that needs to be protected in this life, it’s hard for us to make those assessments. But just keep in mind that we exist in, each of us, every moment, we’re embedded in these gazillions of organic dynamic relationships. It’s exhilarating.
Thank you.
END CHARLENE SPRETNAK TRANSCRIPT
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SUSAN GRIFFIN TRANSCRIPT
The next speaker from the forum “Techno-Utopians and the Fate of the Earth” is the famous eco-feminist Susan Griffin. Her topic is “Women & Nature” Speed, Consciousness & Quantification”.
Listen to or download this 14 minute talk by Susan Griffin in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
[Introduction at the forum]
Next, I’d like to welcome Susan Griffin.
Susan is a poet, essayist, playwright, and screenwriter. She’s the author of over 20 books, including “Women in Nature”, which inspired the eco feminist movement. Her book on nuclear weapons, “A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life Of War”, was a New York Times notable book and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Susan was named by Utne Reader as one of 100 Visionaries for the new millennium. She’s currently writing a book called “Sustainability and the Soul”, and her remarks today will reflect that work.
Thank you, and welcome, Susan.
[Susan Griffin]
“I contemplate a tree. I can assign it to a species and observe it as an instance. I can dissolve it into a number, but it can also happen if will and grace are joined. That as I contemplate the tree, I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an it.”
Those are the words that Martin Buber wrote in 1923 in his classic, I Thou. I think what we’re stating here today is that what we have in our society today is an “I/it”, not an “I/thou” relationship with nature. And that “I/it”, by the way, relationship extends to various groups within our culture. The way we view indigenous peoples, the way we view women, the way we view people of color is also tends to be more objectifying and closer to an “it” than a “thou”. But at the same time, you know, more science is discovering intelligence in the universe and in nature every day.
I learn about something. It seems that I learn about something new some way that plants have intelligence, extraordinary. The the abstract thinking of slime mold, have you heard about that? It’s quite amazing. They can solve these incredible labyrinthine problems.
But we still are hanging on to this experiential attitude. We may have a cognitive recognition of intelligence and or soul or an inner life and nature, but we hang on to this idea of the universe as essentially dead. And that creates some problems for us. It leads to global warming, it leads to economic inequities, But there’s also another problem, which is essentially psychological. And this psychological problem reinforces the economic and social attitudes that we have that are exploiting the earth.
And that that is that we can’t have a meaningful relationship anymore with many of us with nature. And that’s because it’s very difficult to maintain or to even initiate a stimulating relationship with a corpse. So we’ve got some solutions though. A solution like the steam train, which really inaugurated in many ways the industrial revolution. The steam train had another purpose, and that was it functioned as a kind of mechanical Viagra for both sexes, of course.
It brought excitement back into life. Now, of course, the steam train promised a kind of utopia as every new invention does. Marc Seguin, for instance, who is a inventor of the wide cable suspension bridge, you know, wrote that the enjoyment, the commodities of life, which had been reserved for only [those with] a fortune, will be shared by all classes. Now, in fact, we know that that’s not at all what happened with the industrial revolution nor with the steam train, that the industrial revolution led to terrible economic inequality as people took the train into the cities. There was a surplus of labor.
And in addition to that, children were exploited in labor. But clearly, at the same time, the steam trade had something really thrilling to offer, and, Sequin talks about that. Long ribbons of iron along which rush rapid as thought, those affordable machines, which seem to eat up space with a spontaneous impatience and which seem almost alive in their breathing and their movement. So you can see the the erotic nature of this great love of steam trains.
So here’s the incredible thing.
The formidable erotic powers of the steam train seem to restore the life force that our worldview had stolen from nature, even while it was instrumental in destroying nature. Does anybody know what this is here? [1800’s photo shown] Bison skulls. So what would happen is on the steam trains that went west, one of the, attractions of that rail trip to the west was that the train would stop in certain places where buffalo her herds roamed, and the men on the train could get off, and they could shoot. And so the the buffalo almost became extinct.
In the early part of 19th century, speed itself became the object of adulation. It was worshiped by many, including, especially, the Italian writer and founder of a movement called Futurism, FT Marinetti. And I’m gonna read you a few words from an essay he wrote called the new religion morality of speed. The futurist morality will protect man against the inevitable decay produced by slowness, memory, analysis, rest, and habit. Human energy multiplied by a hundredfold by velocity will dominate space and time.
[Alex adds: What Susan raises is SO relevant today, as 2025 unfolds. Wiki says of Futurism:
“The Manifesto of Futurism (Italian: Manifesto del Futurismo) is a manifesto written by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, published in 1909.[1] In it, Marinetti expresses an artistic philosophy called Futurism, which rejected the past and celebrated speed, machinery, violence, youth, and industry. ”
Does that sound familiar?
————– Back to Susan Griffin transcript
Velocity has given human life one of the attributes of divinity, the straight line. Velocity is naturally pure, slowness is naturally unclean. After destroying traditional good and evil, we are creating a new good, speed, and a new evil, slowness. We intend to glorify war. This is from another piece that he wrote called The Futurist Manifesto.
He wrote, “we intend to glorify war, the only hygiene of the world, militarism, patriotism, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and contempt for women”. You see the the way that all of these things fit together, Marionetti became, he was the head of of what was the Futurist Political Party, which merged in Italy with the Fascist Party, And he became a a staunch supporter of Mussolini, leading to this. Doesn’t that look like those Bison skulls? [World War II Photo ]You know, that’s Florence after a bombardment in World War 2. So seeing nature is dead, then we create our own deaths.
But instead of questioning our worldview at any point, we simply accelerate our efforts to awaken ourselves, to restimulate ourselves. So we’ve come up with a new kind of Viagra, and that is electronic Viagra. So I thought of this when I saw an ad for some sort of software, something to do with computers. It was something that that was a faster connection. It probably had to do with the Internet, and it was faster because speed is the most important element that is advertised for anything in the world of computers right now.
So shows a guy, and he’s getting this really fast connection, and he declares, I never felt more alive. But, actually, what a computer is, it’s a simulacrum of life, and it’s dead. It’s it’s a dead simulacrum of life, what you’re seeing on the screen. So once again, the claim was made with computers is that it’s gonna equalize everything. It’s gonna put us all on an equal footing, especially politically.
We’re gonna be able to get the word out, and to some extent, we can do that. But what the computer with its speed is best at is accumulating big data. And big data is very good for accumulating big wealth. So that’s its main function in the business world. I wanna quote to you from Emma Uprichard from the University of Warwick.
She’s a professor of sociology. And this is what she has to say about big data. It’s being presented as the future problem solver for all things, from breast cancer to low cost governance, from better security to predictive systems, from smart cities and better traffic and water systems to an end to urban squalor. It promises cleaner, more sustainable renewable energy, better banking, better governance, better education for all, more efficient, faster, more cost effective everything. If we thought utopian authors were full of hope for better futures, the public discourse of big data is akin to a future fairy godmother with a magic wand, granting wishes to help solve some of the world’s most wicked problems.
Of course, you know, I’m not arguing here against the collection of data at all. I I love the data about the 99%, for instance, versus the 1%. There’s some very important data that that is also being, you know, young people are being studied, and it’s found, for instance, that in the United States, young people tend to be 75 times more violent than young people in other nations. So this kind of data is useful, but numbers are stripped of the earth. They’re stripped of place.
I mean, the numbers the big data, the computers have realized Marinetti’s dream. They’re stripped of place, time. They’re stripped of also of stories, breakfast, lunch, dinner, smiles, tears, empathy, emotional intelligence, not to speak of, in fact, the real erotic mysteries that come to us from sunrise, sunset, the night sky, a flight of birds, migrating south for the summer, or the eyes of somebody we love. Numbers don’t have any of that. That’s their virtue.
They’re supposedly objective, and therefore, they’re placed, by the way, above human responses and above us. For instance, you know, I hate public polls, and I hate polls of all kinds of questionnaires. For instance, if I’m asked, you know, have you ever been arrested? I would have to say, “yes. I was arrested”.
And then that would place me, closer on a scale to a psychopath because I’ve been arrested. That’s part of the data that makes you say, however, it doesn’t ask me what I was arrested for or why I was arrested. I was arrested once protesting apartheid, once protesting the build up to the war in Iraq, and another time because I refused to move when I was witnessing an incident, incidents of police brutality. There’s this other idea that somehow the data is never wrong, but it’s often wrong because the data comes from us, ultimately, a subjective viewpoint. This idea that an objective viewpoint is possible is not even possible in science, much less in social science.
What we’re doing is we’re completing a sort of ultimate feedback cycle. Another way to think about it is that it’s a very elaborate Ponzi scheme. You know, we’re promised that we’re gonna get rich, but actually it’s impoverishing us all. Not only is it impoverishing the environment, but we’re starting to impoverish ourselves. When we impoverish our idea of the body and the way we heal and approach the body, that’s a that’s a very serious lessening of of ourselves, of our being.
But what we’re also impoverishing right now is consciousness. Ironically, we start with an epistemology saying, there’s an “I” and an “it”, and the “I” is supposed to be in soul and have intelligence and empathy, and the “it” is an object. Now, we’re making consciousness itself into an it.
[Alex Smith: At this point, to meet our time limitations in the radio show, I removed a few minutes of Susan Griffin’s comments on education in the United States. We go to her conclusion, which follows from her beginning remarks.]
Susan Griffin Conclusion
I’m gonna end with a quote because there are many cultures that still do carry an understanding of nature as “thou” and live by that. And I’m gonna quote you from, a poem by the Senegalese poet. I’m gonna end with these words. The Senegalese from the Senegalese poet, Tirose DuSalle.
“Having become choreographers, the stars orchestrate in their white robes, tapestries of dreams, pain and joy, pulsations of love in the heart of life.”
END SUSAN GRIFFIN TRANSCRIPT
That was ecofeminist Susan Griffin. These presentations come from the New York City teach-in at the end of October 2014 called “Techno Utopians and the Fate of the Earth”. Our recordings are courtesy of Dale Lehman of WZRD Radio.
According to a Google search for this title, this is the only record of this Forum remaining on the Internet. However, you can hear five other speakers in this audio file on radio4all.net uploaded by Dale Lehman.
The other speakers in this 1 hour 27 minute raw recording are:
Ralph White, NY Open Center: Welcome (0:00-4:29)
Jerry Mander, IFG: “Questions We Should Have Asked About Technology” (4:44-24:31)
Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute: “The Party’s Over” (24:41-44:56)
Anuradha Mittal(India) Oakland Institute: “Stealing Nature” (45:05-1:04:50)
Andrew Kimbrell, ICTA: “The End of Market Capitalism” (1:05:04- 1:27:13)
Another five more speakers from the forum are available here from Dale’s event recording: Bruce Thompson, Randy Hays, Richard Heinberg, Joshua Farley, Lisi Krall, Tom Butler, & Wes Jackson.
All programs at radio4all are free, with no sign-up required, no ads or newsletters, just grab the files and listen.
That’s it for this week. Please help me keep going if you can. This is listener-supported climate journalism working hard to save the future.
Join me again for Radio Ecoshock next week.
I’m Alex Smith.