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My guest for this episode is Samantha Zipporah. Samantha is devoted to breaking the spells of oppression in reproductive & sexual health through education, healing & liberation. She has over 20 years of experience honing her craft as an educator, guide & caregiver tending to fertility, sex, & cycles spanning the full womb continuum. Sam’s work rises from an ancient lineage of midwives, witches, & wise women. A fierce champion of critical thinking skills, her knowledge is integrative & inclusive of modern medicine & science as well as traditional & ancient healing practices. Sam provides vital education for everyone from professionals to preteens in her books, courses, & live classes. Her online community The Fruit of Knowledge features monthly live workshops & an abundance of resources & dialogue for womb wisdom keepers & seekers.
In this conversation Samantha and I talk about rewilding contraception, and a few of the threads connected to that.
Notes
Samantha’s Website
https://www.samanthazipporah.com/
Samantha’s Linktree
https://linktr.ee/samanthazipporah
Samantha’s Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/samanthazipporah/
Other Mentions:
- Peter’s “How to Rewild Yourself” Memes
- Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
- Sand Talk by Tyson Yonkaporta
- Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici
- IUD Side Effects Facebook Group
- IUD Awareness Website
- Please Bleed: Plants and Practical Magic
- Conscious Contraception Skillshare
- Miscarriage and Abortion Support Course
- Incidence of Post-Vasectomy Pain: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Look. My time is precious. If you follow my work, you know my process for “how I decide to read a book” is extensive.
I like a lot of what David Graeber wrote. So, I was excited and skeptical about The Dawn of Everything, when it promised to completely dismantle many ideas that are foundational to rewilding, in terms of the origins of civilization and inequality. I was so disappointed with the lack of research, the lack of citation, the cherry picking of information and data, and mostly the pretentious tone, that I gave up on the book 100 pages in. I began to write a review, but I already wasted a couple of hours reading and don’t have the heart to write out a review… especially since so many have already been done. So instead, below is a list of really great reviews and rebuttals to the absurd claims in this book.
Let me say that there were a few points that they make in the book, but these points are already made by the existing people working and writing in this field. There was nothing new in this regard, only that many of these points haven’t reached the general public yet. While it may be good that some of these points are getting out there, they are doing so clouded in lots of other bullshit.
The Ecologist Magazine
All things being equal
WHAT IS POLITICS Youtube Channel:
10.1 What is an “Egalitarian Society”? David Graeber & David Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything”
10.2 The Dawn of Everything: How Graeber & Wengrow’s book sets us up to fail at politics
10.3 The Ingredients of Hierarchy: Graeber & Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything, Chapter 3
10.4 What Causes Seasonal Political Structures? Graeber & Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything Ch. 3
Author Chris Knight
Wrong About (Almost) Everything
Hannes Wingate is an artist, builder, designer, and outdoor survival-skills instructor. He was educated at Central St. Martins College of Art in London. He is known internationally for constructing giant, human sized nests from natural materials found within close range of the build site. He has traveled the world, spending time living with and learning traditional skills from the Sami, Maori, Basque and Native American cultures.
In this conversation Hannes and I discuss his practice as an artist, looking at how he transforms people’s perspectives through his sculptural art, storytelling. We touch on some interweaving philosophies and practices like biomimicry, ancestral skills and how creativity lends itself to state resistance. In the second half, Hannes debriefs my experience at Boulder Outdoor Survival School.
Notes:
Boulder Outdoor Survival School
In this episode I talk with my friend, Rachael Rice. Rachael is an artist, writer, death worker and certified weirdo who crafts scroll-stopping content for people who want to shape change. Her work centers collapse-informed learnings about grief, death, myth, magic and meaning-making in pale times. A neurodivergent queer witch navigating multiple health diagnoses and broadly coded as a white cis woman, Rachael is of Swedish, Scottish, Irish, French, German and English ancestry living and loving with her partner whose income supports her work on the lands of the Chinook in Portland, Oregon. She works in a dozen kinds of media, plays four instruments, speaks three languages, parents two children, and hollers at one cat, usually not all at once. In this conversation, Rachael and I discuss what it means to be “collapse aware,” what death work is and how it relates to societal collapse, and ways you can engage with it.
Notes:
Rachael’s Website
Rachael’s Instagram
Mentions:
Collapse Care w/ Carmen Spagnola
“Curse of Knowledge”
Death Doula/Midwife
Lotka Volterra Cycle
Diminishing-Returns
In this episode of the Rewild Podcast I talk with David Ian Howe about dogs and rewilding. David is a professional archaeologist trying to popularize the science of anthropology, most often through comedic videos. He is known for his interest and expertise in understanding ethnocynology–the study of the ancient relationship between humans and dogs. As rewilding is in part, a critique of domestication, the relationship between humans and dogs is an interesting area of exploration: at what point does mutualistic symbiosis become parasitic, or vice versa and is the human and dog relationship reflective of that? Listen in as David and I discuss this ancient relationship, among a few other topics.
Notes:
Links to David’s Work
David’s Website
David’s Youtube
David’s Patreon
David’s Instagram
David’s TikTok
Mentions
Ashkelon dog cemetery
Prehistoric Dogs as Hunting Weapons: The Advent of Animal Biotechnology by Angela Perri
Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness by Donna Harroway
Wolf In Dog’s Clothing? Black Wolves May Be First ‘Genetically Modified’ Predators
Wolves in the Land of Salmon by Dave Moskowitz
Domestication Gone Wild
Neoteny
Foxy Behavior: how a Russian fox farm uncovered the basis of canine domestication
Wolf Totem Jiang Rong
Wolves and Ravens
Badgers & Coyotes
Did Dog-Human Alliance Drive Out the Neanderthals?
The dark side of oxytocin, much more than just a “love hormone”
Riot Dog
This Article Won’t Change Your Mind
Ancient Anxiety and ADHD
Donny Dust
Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society
On this episode of the Rewilding Podcast, I converse with Carmen Spagnola about the necessary self and community care that comes with the realization that we are living in a collapse. Carmen works at the intersection of somatics, trauma recovery, attachment, and mysticism. Her approach to collapse – navigating the converging emergencies of large scale cooperation dilemmas – weaves Wendell Berry sensibilities with Octavia Butler realities. Her book The Spirited Kitchen: Recipes and Rituals for the Wheel of the Year, comes out in the fall of 2022.
Notes:
Carmen’s Social Media
Carmen’s Website
The Spirited Kitchen Book
Utne Reader/Geez Magazine: Preparing for a Beautiful End
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
Peak Oil
Truth and Reconciliation Commission
The Oil Drum
John Michael Green
Sharon Astyk
Carolyn Baker: Love in a Time of Apocalypse & Conscious Collapsing
The Collapse of Civilization May Have Already Begun
Wilderness First Responder
Peter Levine
Stephen Porges
Believers by Lisa Wells
The “Collapse” of Cooperative Hohokam Irrigation in the Lower Salt River Valley
Seven in ten Americans identify as Christian. For a movement like rewilding to gain more traction, it must intersect with the belief systems of the culture at large on some level. I am not a Christian, though I am interested in the intersection of rewilding and christianity. Since I live in the United States, I feel it’s important to understand enough about the dominant cultures here and where to find common ground in rewilding narratives. In this episode I chat with two friends of mine who are both pastors. Solveig Nilsen-Goodin and Aric Clark.
Rev. Solveig Nilsen-Goodin is an ordained pastor in the Lutheran Church, a spiritual director, grief coach, writer, author of the book: What is the Way of the Wilderness: An Introduction to the Wilderness Way Community, and co-editor and contributor to A Grounded Faith: Reconnecting with Creator and Creation in the Season of Lent. Solveig helped found EcoFaith Recovery, and founded and pastored the Wilderness Way Community for eleven years. She and her husband Peter are raising two teenage boys in NE Portland.
Rev. Aric Clark is pastor of Mt. Home and Sherwood United Methodist Churches. He is also a writer, a speaker, and an activist who lives in Portland, Oregon. He is the co-author of Never Pray Again: Lift Your Head, Unfold Your Hands, and Get To Work, a book which challenges readers to embrace a concrete other-centered spirituality, and editor of Faithful Resistance: Gospel Visions for the Church in a Time of Empire. When not pastoring, writing, or protesting he is parenting two teenagers and indulging a love of tabletop gaming.
Our conversation topics range from anarchism, feminism, death, grief, decolonization and the histories of the church, the challenges of working in institutions and much more.
Notes:
- Christian Anarchism
- Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza
- Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
- Catholic Worker Movement
- The Smell of Rain on Dust by Martin Prechtel
- Finisia Medrano
- Hildegard Von Bingen
- Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World by Lisa Wells
- Rewilding the Way by Todd Wynward
- Ched Myers
- Watershed Discipleship
- Ecofaith Recovery
- Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days of Reconnecting with Sacred Earth by Randy Woodley
- A Grounded Faith: Reconnecting with Creator and Creation in the Season of Lent
- The Leaven Community
- What is the Way of the Wilderness?
In this episode I converse with writer Sophie Strand. I’ve found her writing to be particularly inspiring to my rewilding journey in terms of understanding and thinking about masculinity. However, we cover much more than that. Our conversation branches off in many directions, though the main thread is around connecting our personal narratives in rewilding to the larger cultural narratives found in our mythologies–and the mythologies that make the most sense from a rewilding perspective. It was such a pleasure to converse with someone as deeply researched and passionate about this topic as Sophie is. She has many insights to share and I’m honored to have her on the podcast. Looking forward to reading her book when it comes out this fall!
Notes:
Sophie’s Links
www.sophiestrand.com
cosmogyny on instagram
Pre-Order Her Book: The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine
Mentions
Sophie’s Favorite Mythologists/Writers:
Shawn King
Robert Bringhurst
Ursula LeGuinn
Donna Haraway
Merlin Sheldrake
• Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life by Carl Kerényi
• Beard Tax
• Matters of Ancestry by Jason Godesky
• Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death by Bernd Heinrich
• Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds by Thomas Halliday
• Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation by Rupert Sheldrake
• Toxoplasmosis: How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy
• Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom
• Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World by Lisa Wells
• Shamanic Voices: A Survey of Visionary Narratives by Joan Halifax
Recently one of my patrons asked me what my day to day rewilding looked like. This is a glimpse into some of that, but also with perspective on what it might look like for others.
Far right fascists have laid claim to the conversation of overpopulation. This was easy for them to do, considering the most famous historical promoter of this idea was a classist and racist who proposed killing the poor. Though he is wrong about population in so many ways, the basic ecological framework is real: animal populations grow to meet their food availability. The more food available, the more a population grows. The human population has increased exponentially since the “neolithic demographic transition” or in lay terms, the invention of full-time agricultural society, or, when humans began creating their food and became their own managers of the food supply. This makes population growth, and overpopulation, a central component of civilization. Understanding and speaking about overpopulation is a necessity, because it is a reality. We must wrestle this conversation away from fascists so that we can discuss it through a lens of reproductive justice as the collapse of civilization intensifies.
My guest today is Jason Godesky. Jason is an old friend and colleague of mine. We met in the early 2000’s on an internet chat board called “Ish Con” short for Ishmael Conference. It was a place to discuss the ideas presented in the books by Daniel Quinn. It was here that I gave Jason the nickname, “The Machine Gun” for his ability to remember and rapidly deploy facts, journals, studies, ethnographies, and more to back up many of the positions in what we would later call Rewilding. When ishcon closed down in 2006, I bought the domain rewild.info and invited Jason to help create a new online chat board specific to rewilding. Jason is well known for his essays on his now defunct blog, The Anthropik Network. A few years ago when Rewild Portland acquired rewild.com, I asked Jason to write the content to help people describe what rewilding means. These days his main focus is on using storytelling and gaming to promote the concepts of rewilding. Though, every once and a while he’ll post a new essay on a particular topic of interest. It’s his latest essay, entitled “Overpopulation” that we’ll be discussing here on the rewilding podcast today.
Notes:
Jason’s Projects
Mentions
- Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
- Making Kin Not Population
- Perceptions of the Environment by Tim Ingold
- Population Growth Daniel Quinn
- Lotka–Volterra equations
- Law of Limited Competition
- Europe & The People Without History by Eric Wolf
- The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter
- Against the Grain by Richard Manning
- All Things Being Equal: A Review of The Dawn of Everything
- Overshoot by William Catton
- The Neolithic refrigerator on a Friday night
- Why These Bears “Waste” Food
- Jevons Paradox: The Efficiency Dilemma
- Disinterpretation
- Degrowth