In the Weeds

“When you control seed, you control life on earth,” says Indian environmental activist and scholar Vandana Shiva in the new documentary film The Seeds of Vandana Shiva. Known as “Monsanto’s worst nightmare,” Vandana Shiva has been a champion of small, organic farms, since she established seed banks, in a subversive act she likens to Gandhi’s championing of the spinning wheel, to counter the efforts of large corporations to control agriculture in India through the selling of pesticides and trademarked GMO seeds. In this episode - the first of three on farming - I talk to filmmaker Jim Becket about making the film and about the story of Vandana Shiva’s life and mission.

Mermaids are the fly in the ointment in Lydia Millet’s very funny satirical novel Mermaids in Paradise, “an absurdist entry into the mundane,” as she puts it. And, yet, her mermaids, who have bad teeth and the particular features of individuals, also draw us into the wonders of the ocean itself. Mermaid lore, Millet reminds us, recalls manatees and the order of the Sirenia, and it speaks to “the way we imprint our imaginations onto the wild.”

One of the most interesting writers working at the intersection of fiction and environmentalism, Lydia Millet has written over a dozen novels and story collections, many about ties between humans and animals and the crisis of extinction. Her story collection Fight No More received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019 and her collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010.

In this episode, we discuss her 2015 novel Mermaids in Paradise and the ways in which she uses these hybrid, mythical creatures to address our environmental crises. We also talk at length about story telling, the kinds of stories we tell and how they both help and hinder our relationship with the natural world.

Mermaids are the fly in the ointment in Lydia Millet’s very funny satirical novel Mermaids in Paradise, “an absurdist entry into the mundane,” as she puts it. And, yet, her mermaids, who have bad teeth and the particular features of individuals, also draw us into the wonders of the ocean itself. Mermaid lore, Millet reminds us, recalls manatees and the order of the Sirenia, and it speaks to “the way we imprint our imaginations onto the wild.”

One of the most interesting writers working at the intersection of fiction and environmentalism, Lydia Millet has written over a dozen novels and story collections, many about ties between humans and animals and the crisis of extinction. Her story collection Fight No More received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019 and her collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010.

In this episode, we discuss her 2015 novel Mermaids in Paradise and the ways in which she uses these hybrid, mythical creatures to address our environmental crises. We also talk at length about story telling, the kinds of stories we tell and how they both help and hinder our relationship with the natural world.

As co-editors of The Penguin Book of Mermaids, a compendium of stories from all over the world, Marie Alohalani Brown and Cristina Bacchilega show us that mermaids are not always white, not always beautiful and don’t even always have a fish tail (sometimes mer creatures have the tail of a whale or an anaconda).

What they also teach us is that legends of merfolk and other kinds of water spirits exist pretty much everywhere that people do.

What is so fundamental about these myths of hybrid creatures that bridge the human world and the water world? Why are they so often female and alluring? How to the myths change across cultures? And what do they have to tell us today about our relationship to the natural world and to oceans and water in particular?

Thanks to my guests, this episode will leave you with a new understanding of what a mermaid is or, rather, can be.

Cristina Bacchilega coedits Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies and is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa where she taught fairy tales and their adaptations, folklore and literature, and cultural studies. An Anglo-Indian Italian who is non-white settler in Hawaiʻi, Cristina approaches wonder tales and other traditional narratives from a transcultural perspective that privileges the juxtaposition of different cultural narratives to highlight their distinctive worldviews and ways of knowing. Her most recent book with Jennifer Orme (2021), Inviting Interruptions: Wonder Tales in the 21st Century, features Maya Kern’s comic How To Be a Mermaid.

Marie Alohalani Brown is an Associate Professor of Religion, specialist in Hawaiian religion, culture, and oral/literary traditions at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She is a trained translator and works primarily with Hawaiian-language resources. She is the author of Ka Poʻe Moʻo Akua: Hawaiian Reptilian Water Deities (University of Hawaiʻi Press, January 31, 2022). Her first book, Facing the Spears of Change: The Life and Legacy of John Papa ʻĪʻī (University of Hawaʻi Press, May 2016), won the biennial Ka Palapala Poʻokela award for the categories of Hawaiian language, culture, and history (2016 and 2017). She is the co-editor with Cristina Bacchilega of A Penguin Book of Mermaids (Penguin Classics, 2019).

As co-editors of The Penguin Book of Mermaids, a compendium of stories from all over the world, Marie Alohalani Brown and Cristina Bacchilega show us that mermaids are not always white, not always beautiful and don’t even always have a fish tail (sometimes mer creatures have the tail of a whale or an anaconda).

What they also teach us is that legends of merfolk and other kinds of water spirits exist pretty much everywhere that people do.

What is so fundamental about these myths of hybrid creatures that bridge the human world and the water world? Why are they so often female and alluring? How to the myths change across cultures? And what do they have to tell us today about our relationship to the natural world and to oceans and water in particular?

Thanks to my guests, this episode will leave you with a new understanding of what a mermaid is or, rather, can be.

Cristina Bacchilega coedits Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies and is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa where she taught fairy tales and their adaptations, folklore and literature, and cultural studies. An Anglo-Indian Italian who is non-white settler in Hawaiʻi, Cristina approaches wonder tales and other traditional narratives from a transcultural perspective that privileges the juxtaposition of different cultural narratives to highlight their distinctive worldviews and ways of knowing. Her most recent book with Jennifer Orme (2021), Inviting Interruptions: Wonder Tales in the 21st Century, features Maya Kern’s comic How To Be a Mermaid.

Marie Alohalani Brown is an Associate Professor of Religion, specialist in Hawaiian religion, culture, and oral/literary traditions at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She is a trained translator and works primarily with Hawaiian-language resources. She is the author of Ka Poʻe Moʻo Akua: Hawaiian Reptilian Water Deities (University of Hawaiʻi Press, January 31, 2022). Her first book, Facing the Spears of Change: The Life and Legacy of John Papa ʻĪʻī (University of Hawaʻi Press, May 2016), won the biennial Ka Palapala Poʻokela award for the categories of Hawaiian language, culture, and history (2016 and 2017). She is the co-editor with Cristina Bacchilega of A Penguin Book of Mermaids (Penguin Classics, 2019).

According to Mark Zuckerberg and others, the metaverse - a would-be digital double of the real world - is good for the environment, because it will make us drive less, fly less. We won’t have to visit the barrier reef in person; we can experience it from our own living rooms. But will this descent into technology make us more alienated than we already are from the natural world? And do we really want to recreate an idea out of dystopian science fiction anyway? These are some the the issues I discuss with Lisa Messeri, Assistant Professor at Yale University in the Anthropology Department who studies science and technology and whose upcoming book, In the Land of the Unreal, explores arguments that VR - virtual reality - can be a force for good.

https://www.in-the-weeds.net

According to Mark Zuckerberg and others, the metaverse - a would-be digital double of the real world - is good for the environment, because it will make us drive less, fly less. We won’t have to visit the barrier reef in person; we can experience it from our own living rooms. But will this descent into technology make us more alienated than we already are from the natural world? And do we really want to recreate an idea out of dystopian science fiction anyway? These are some the the issues I discuss with Lisa Messeri, Assistant Professor at Yale University in the Anthropology Department who studies science and technology and whose upcoming book, In the Land of the Unreal, explores arguments that VR - virtual reality - can be a force for good.

https://www.in-the-weeds.net

Chris Schaberg, whom you might remember from my episode on SUV commercials, has written a number of books on air travel. I wanted to talk to him about the impact of air travel on climate change but also about what air travel - and, increasingly, the fantasy that we can be tourists in space as well - reveals about the relationship between us human animals and the sophisticated technology that drives globalization (and, as a fall out, climate change). I was also itching to talk about Adam McKay’s film Don’t Look Up, in which a comet hurtling towards the earth serves as an analogy for climate change, and Chris was kind enough to indulge me.

in-the-weeds.net
to contact the host - [email protected]

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Chris Schaberg, whom you might remember from my episode on SUV commercials, has written a number of books on air travel. I wanted to talk to him about the impact of air travel on climate change but also about what air travel - and, increasingly, the fantasy that we can be tourists in space as well - reveals about the relationship between us human animals and the sophisticated technology that drives globalization (and, as a fall out, climate change). I was also itching to talk about Adam McKay’s film Don’t Look Up, in which a comet hurtling towards the earth serves as an analogy for climate change, and Chris was kind enough to indulge me.

in-the-weeds.net
to contact the host - [email protected]

V3yfxuYWqRsI5hgXHPDU

Susannah Sayler and Ed Morris have been working at the intersection of art and climate activism for the last fifteen years. They are co-founders of the Canary Project, started in 2006 and inspired by a series of articles that Elizabeth Kolbert published in The New Yorker that eventually became her book Field Notes from a Catastrophe.

Adapting Kolbert’s investigative strategy, Ed and Susannah initially set out to photograph places around the world being impacted by climate change - in order to call out a warning, as the name Canary Project suggests. (Though the photographs themselves or the installations that ensued were subsequently renamed History of the Future.)

Since then, Susannah and Ed have worked on numerous projects, from Green Patriot Posters to the more recent Toolshed, and helped coordinate works of fellow artists tackling climate change. They also both teach in the Dept. of Film and Media Arts at Syracuse University.

As a former student of the arts (more the literary kind than the visual kind, but who’s quibbling), I was curious about the ability of art to engage in climate activism. What can the artist achieve that the scientist and the journalist cannot, I wondered? And, conversely, what are art’s limitations?

To see the photos and other images we discuss, go to in-the-weeds.net

To check out Susannah and Ed’s latests project go to https://tool-shed.org