Pretty Heady Stuff

Ava Val is a comedian, actor, writer and musician based in Toronto. She’s made multiple appearances at Just For Laughs and The Halifax Comedy Festival, and recorded stand-up sets for CBC Gem, Crave TV, and CTV. She has a weekly podcast of her own called PodGis, which is a great place to get a taste of her high energy, clever comedy. Val released her debut special, So Brave, earlier in the year. The special coincided with what Val called her 3-year “hormoniversary,” or the third year she’d been taking hormones as part of an ongoing “mid-life crisis,” in her words: that “crisis” is, of course, the joyful but uncertain journey of trying to align one’s core gender identity with one’s outward gender presentation. In this conversation, we talk about how the trans community, and more specifically trans comedians, can equip themselves to contest and defy the hateful, ignorant transphobia that is surging alongside the rise of right populism. We also talk about why the theme of bravery has some connotations that aren’t particularly flattering, and the level of bravery required to stand on a stage and demand the attention of people who are there to laugh, but who also arrive, presumably, with some openness to the kind of comedic storytelling that challenges the audience as much as it amuses them. Val and I discuss what it means, in that moment of performance, to balance entertaining a crowd with being true to your sense of self and aware of your own vulnerability. I really respect Val’s radical honesty, which I told her the first time we spoke for the podcast. Now, with the special out, we were able to dig into the way she writes and structures the material, the relationship she has with the audience, and with comedy as a profession. I hope the conversation, like Val’s special, offers an access point for people that may not know about how awesome and original contemporary comedy in Canada can be, and especially for people that don’t yet have a sense of the ethics and politics of comedy that is deeply queer.

Andreas Malm works in The Department of Human Geography at Lund University. He’s a scholar of human ecology and environmental history and has written several books, including The Progress of this Storm, Fossil Capital, How to Blow Up A Pipeline and White Skin, Black Fuel. Wim Carton works in the same department as a human geographer. The main focus of his research is the relationship between society and nature and how society-nature relations are informed and changed by ecological crisis. Right now he’s writing about culture, political economy and climate action, with a special emphasis on the promises of carbon removal. In this conversation we talk about their new book Overshoot (https://www.versobooks.com/en-ca/products/3131-overshoot), the first of two books about the state of the climate crisis and the question of whether cutting emissions from fossil fuels is a purely technical or primarily political challenge. The second book will be called The Long Heat, which is a title that gives a name to the era that we are now entering, where powerful state and corporate interests continue to block even meagre climate action, making loss, damage, suffering and, basically, mass sacrifice seem inevitable, even somehow normal. Now, after the election of Donald Trump to a second term as US president, it’s clear that “the days of thinking that the US will ever be a reliable partner on addressing global warming are over,' in the words of New York Times reporter Coral Davenport. It’s hard to maintain hope in this moment, and that question of hope is something that comes up a surprising amount in Overshoot. Malm and Carton are suspicious of the palliative rhetoric of hope in the climate movement and how it tends to inoculate more active feelings of anger, frustration or grief. That said, they are a lot more suspicious of the rhetoric of hopelessness presented by those who are resigned to 1.5, 2, or 3 degrees of global heating. Overshoot is based on the notion that, since there is no reasonable hope of cutting emissions in time, we have to plan, now, to hurtle past our climate targets and pray that technology, adaptation and a little bit of luck will let us, after we’ve blown our carbon budget, bring things back within the realm of safety. The deferral of the burden is clear, but Carton and Malm break it down in a way that explains more fully how overshoot allows fossil capital to endlessly defer stranding its assets, to completely avoid any real disruption. This means that, as Wim puts it, resource radicals and ecosocialists who see a massive transformation as the only way forward have to bet, now, on the possibility of “rupture” as a response to business as usual. As this episode drops, representatives at COP29 will be debating whether or not to pick up their dismal efforts where they left off at COP28, when fossil fuels were finally identified as the root cause of the climate crisis after decades of dicking around. This absurd situation is captured nicely by Wim: “nothing really happens and we're constantly adding more and more carbon to the atmosphere.” which means that, by definition, “we're actually… going to exceed these targets.” Whether we’re ready for it or not blowing past the targets will come with extremely severe risks. Malm says the “only way to avoid the [situation] spinning completely out of control is to go after the drivers of these disasters, and that is the constant, ongoing investment and reinvestment in fossil fuels that is happening everywhere.”

Jennifer Wickham is a filmmaker and a member of the Gidimt’en Clan of the Wet’suwet’en people. In 2012, she moved home to defend her clan’s territory against multiple pipeline projects, and especially the aggression of Coastal GasLink. Her work on the documentary film Yintah is the main focus of our conversation. Yintah is about the Wet’suwet’en fight for sovereignty, and like some other documentaries that depict that fight, there is, in the film, a powerful dream of freedom for Indigenous people and an end to the war against nature. Yintah is now on Netflix (https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/8192...) after striking a deal with the streamer that will see it reach a broader audience. I was thinking about what it means to distribute a film like Yintah, which challenges the legitimacy of the Canadian state and Canadian law, on a platform like Netflix. The goal is strategic, of course: leverage the sites of power that are currently available. But the strategy is maybe more self-reflexive than it seems: in this interview, Jennifer talks about her conviction that people who identify as allies with the Indigenous nations that are resisting neocolonialism aren’t always conscious of what that declaration of solidarity means. From Wickham’s perspective, a more powerful and lasting movement of settler allyship would involve a more authentic commitment to collective survival and a sense of the sacrifices that entails. This film is beyond sobering. It exposes the continuum of tyranny imposed by the RCMP on Indigenous peoples. It demonstrates how corporate greed and the collusion of the state are creating a kind of asymmetrical war over the land itself, and energy, at a time when we understand better than ever that the only way to address the climate emergency is to leave oil and gas in the ground. Don’t develop it. Stop killing the Earth and the people who are most connected to it. I do have to acknowledge my own complicity as a white settler in Canada, and how even wanting to be correct on these issues, the desire to express solidarity in the right or best way, can work against decolonization because it gives us a sense that, at the discursive level anyway, we get it. Actions speak louder than words, and the direct action represented in Yintah is a source of inspiration for anyone that feels the battle against fossil capital is sisyphean.

Alder Keleman Saxena is an environmental anthropologist whose research looks at the links between agricultural biodiversity and food culture, especially in relation to nutritional health in the Bolivian Andes. Her collaboration with Anna Tsing, Feifei Zhou and Jennifer Deger for the online Feral Atlas project is an absolute gift to anyone concerned with ecology, but specifically from the perspective of reckoning with the impact of human activity on the planet. The book that came out of that digital adventure is called Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature, a riveting book that sets us up with a variety of different ways of approaching the destruction of nature and its disastrous consequences. Alder’s chapter in the Field Guide is focuses on a patch that is very familiar to her: Flagstaff, Arizona, and the erratic ways that market capitalism is changing the demographic make-up of Flagstaff at a moment of increasing climate peril. This conversation about climate migration into Flagstaff takes us into the topic of housing, capitalism and climate impacts, the problem of how to communicate and contextualize climate disasters, and the question of how something like a field guide can encourage us to actually dwell with the idea that human beings are both a “geological force” and a “world-ripping” one.

Robert Neubauer studies the media strategies of Canadian environmental and pro-resource extraction social movements, with a focus on populist discourse and public mobilization around proposed energy infrastructure. He is currently a Post-doctoral Researcher and Limited Term Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Victoria, where he teaches on contemporary media studies and climate politics. In this episode, Robert and I chat about how an effective communication strategy for rallying the public in support of climate action really needs to validate the public’s concerns about things like affordability and health care, while also emphasizing the urgency of the climate crisis. The way we do that, he says, is to create an effective political “container.” I get the sense that the phrase “a big tent” applies here. I’ve been hearing from a lot of people that expanding the tent, when it comes to transformative changes to infrastructure and to our lifestyles, implies the need to communicate the everyday benefits of climate action, while also being realistic with audiences about the severity of the risks we face. If we fall short in our efforts to convince folks that a radical reset is required – so, if we can’t figure out a way to undermine the cultural importance of the automobile, for example – then we’re in even more serious trouble than the science tells us we are. That’s because a creeping fatalism is forcing a lot of people to court the idea that it’s too late. Neubauer says that nihilism is potentially more dangerous than far right populism. Robert unpacks the idea of petro-populism here, which is still a concept that I struggle with a bit. I find Neubauer’s way of bringing this idea into conversation with the notion of “cultural capital” really helpful. Robert uses this famous idea from Pierre Bourdieu’s work to talk about how petro-populism expresses itself and how it has secured such a prominent place culturally and politically. Neubauer gives us a way of critiquing the propaganda of petro-populists like Ezra Levant, whose ability to manipulate a sense of pride and feelings of national belonging have proven to be remarkably effective. In response to the pull of nostalgia and easy answers, the Left can’t focus on its standard techniques of shaming and allyship. Robert feels like these are now simplistic strategies that go nowhere. Resisting the stunting effects of facile forms of solidarity or public shaming is all about accepting real responsibility for the work of decolonization. The constraints of a carbon-intensive society make it hard to imagine any alternative to the way things are, but things are changing nonetheless. As companies with skin in the carbon game realize they need to aggressively brand fossil fuels as an integral part of our lives to maintain their normalized status, the climate movement is positioning itself to counter with a totally different relationship to energy.