Pretty Heady Stuff

Kilian Jörg is an artist and philosopher who is interested in understanding how art can intervene to disrupt the ecological catastrophe we’re currently witnessing. His current research focuses on the car as a metaphor for the toxic behaviors of modernity, the psychological effects of living in a time of ecocide and what sorts of activist strategies for reclaiming land might be effective at shaking off the psychology of resignation. My conversation with Kilian Jorg was one of the most enjoyable interviews I’ve ever done on writing and thinking. There’s something very refreshing about the way that Kilian thinks about the act of writing in the university. I’m not sure where it came from, but the more tactile and situated sort of theorizing he is able to do makes me want to spend more time with the texts that he looks at and really engage with the threads there.  Because he’s using them to weave together different concepts of liberation, with the ultimate goal, I think, of showing how to fight the imposition of one worldview on the planet. Kilian is fighting to defend other possible methods of reasoning. It might not be a magical solution for our ecological crisis, but I found that talking to Kilian about the ideas in Ecological Reasonings opened up approaches to problems like what to do about Donald Trump or artificial intelligence or our attachment to the car as a convenience we can’t live without, regardless of what it does to us.  One of the wonderful things about his book is that it is using this idea of the “resilience of Reason” to deconstruct and decompose the current technocratic world order — he’s saying that there is a continuum between Trump, the narrowing of political possibilities, and Monorationalism.  What he wants is a world where we are actively “nourishing ground for many other voices to be heard.” Where we are consciously worrying about and destabilizing the relationship between the things we consider active, aggressive and ambitious, and the things we consider passive, wasteful and directionless.

Alexander Gallant is a folk singer-songwriter from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. His songs are simple and direct but also singular and sardonic. He takes a lot of inspiration from the folk revival of the 1960’s, but uses a specific blend of open tuning style fingerpicking and percussive strumming, paired with funny, personal poetry. He released his debut record, Waiting Tables Blues with Tibet Street Records in November 2023. His second record, Rubber Monster Suit, is a collection of songs about living with sobriety and in the crumbling uncertainty of the modern political landscape. He also writes about love, about living without love, about getting older. It's a beautiful record that encompasses a bunch of different styles of music, from lush jazz-influenced cinematic soundscapes, to psych country, to acoustic singer songwriter warmth. Sarah Swire, who pops into the conversation a little later, is a multi-disciplinary artist with work spanning across stage, screen and television. They're perhaps best known for playing roles on the smash hit superhero series The Boys, in Anna and the Apocalypse, and on the popular Murdoch Mysteries. They'll be appearing this year in the upcoming Apple TV+ thriller ‘The Last Frontier’ and Hallmark’s new drama 'Ripple.' Swire is an awesome art-rock songwriter and storyteller who, when you see her live, will use wildly compelling monologues and spoken word, or what she calls word art, to create a dizzying spectacle that, honestly, has to be seen to be fully understood. Their debut album, Sister Swire, was produced by Joel Plaskett in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Beyond writing that album, which is so fun by the way, Sarah has toured and performed internationally and composed music for the BBC, Avalon Arts and The National Theatre of Scotland. In this conversation, we use the occasion of Gallant's new album coming out to explore what weird alchemy gives birth to a song, how writing music can "take the temperature of your brain," as Alexander puts it, and what sorts of expectations tend to be placed on artists in the context of 21st century digital capitalism. We're in a moment where so much music is consumed digitally and repurposed into a soundtrack for our own individual experiences through share culture. What does it looks like to try and leverage that digital space as a way of getting people out of their homes and into the public sphere? Gallant will be playing a show on May 25th at the beautiful Sanctuary Arts Centre in Dartmouth, alongside Sal. Both will be releasing albums that night; Sal's is called My Friend the Waitress and Gallant has called his Rubber Monster Suit. Gallant and Swire explain why they think people tend to be more inspired by direct experiences of art. I loved Sarah's point that, when we encounter someone who has committed to creativity out in the world, we're not intimidated or made to feel "feeble" in the way that we sometimes are when we encounter it in a digital space. Making time to summon the courage to have an out of body experience out in the world can be transformative. That's why I'm looking forward to the show on Sunday, and why I think you should go. #livemusic #acoustic #vocalist #songwriter #singer #music #musician #artist #newmusic #singersongwriter

Caleb Wellum is a professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He’s also the editor of Energy Humanities and a member of both the Petrocultures Research Group and the After Oil Collective. As an historian who studies the intersection of energy, culture and political economy in the twentieth century, he’s invested in understanding how natural resource development and especially oil extraction became a force that shapes social reality today.  The book we talk about in this conversation is called Energizing Neoliberalism: The 1970s Energy Crisis and the Making of Modern America, and it’s an incredible analysis of the role that stories about energy crisis played in creating American neoliberalism, this deregulated, highly individualistic version of capitalism that makes consumerism synonymous with personal fulfilment and the centre of so many political considerations.  What Wellum is basically saying is that we arrive at where we are today, in terms of our energy habits, the political expediency of warfare, and the expectations we have about lifestyle, comfort and the value of national identity, largely through the high stakes ideological games that were played during the 1970s, and also through some of the cinematic narratives that played out in popular culture at that time.  Returning to Cold War capitalism through his book was really instructive for me as a way of trying to understand why Trumpism is this triumphalist cultural force in the US right now. We talk about that in relation to his case studies in Energizing Neoliberalism, from the energy conservation debates that happened in the 70s, to the popular car films that were dismissed by critics as appealing only to the duped masses, to the creation of oil futures trading.  The conversation is an attempt to see how the power of neoliberalism as we know it didn’t have to develop the way it did. By constructing the oil crisis in certain ways, the United States secured a future of endless growth, limitless consumption and fleeting pleasures derived from fossil fuels. More specifically, neoliberal capitalists used the crisis to steer society in a more financialized, deregulated, and ecologically untenable direction. In Wellum’s words, this was a domestic energy crisis imagined in response to global instability.  As we fight for a clean energy future in the present, against colonial powers launching wars for resources all over the globe, we can gain a lot of lessons from Energizing Neoliberalism’s rigorous effort to recognize petro-populism as a reactionary, violent force. #fossilfuels [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/fossilfuels] #fossilcapital [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/fossilcapital] #neoliberalism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/neoliberalism] #1970s [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/1970s] #petroleum [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/petroleum] #historyofcapitalism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/historyofcapitalism] #financialization [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/financialization] #finance [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/finance] #americanism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/americanism] #coldwar [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/coldwar] #ideology [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/ideology] #petropopulism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/petropopulism] #petromasculinity [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/petromasculinity] #petroculture [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/petroculture]

James Rowe is a professor of Political Ecology and Cultural, Social, and Political Thought at the University of Victoria and the author of a great book called Radical Mindfulness: Why Transforming Fear of Death is Politically Vital. Radical Mindfulness examines the root causes of injustice and how the fear of death works as a major cause of injustice globally. One of my main takeaways, so to speak, after reading and thinking about the book a lot is that there is a specific responsibility that white settlers have to rectifying the structural wrongs we are fundamentally complicit with — and that’s whether we like it or not… and there are a lot of people who believe those wrongs exist in the past, and thus don’t need to be dealt with by folks in the present, and—conveniently—feel that it’s too far back to care. Well, the past is not passed, and Rowe asks us, on a philosophical and physical level, why we carry a resistance to healing “the historical and existential trauma” we carry. One of the things that seems to interrupt the use of mindfulness to access and heal those scars is appropriation. Radical Mindfulness talks about the corporate co-optation of mindfulness in really wonderful ways, stating that while there isn’t any need for people to be Buddhist to “benefit from meditation… naming and honoring the tradition is important to avoid appropriation.” If we don’t, we risk the side-stepping of a crucial component of that tradition: which is about transforming “fear of death into a deep acceptance of earthly life, thereby reducing destructive behaviors.”I’m not going to say that I was sceptical of the idea that fear of death is the central cause of most structures of domination, most violence, most oppression, but I just couldn’t fully wrap my head around what that meant. Radical Mindfulness helped me get the ways that fear of “finitude” drives a pathological commitment to a kind of immortalism, a commitment to preserving the nation, the corporation, the self at the expense of others, or of the Earth itself. So I think accepting death as part of the “fullness of reality” is “politically vital,” as James puts it, because if we do recognize the “flow of impermanence,” or what Dominic Boyer has called the “total excessive marvelous abundance” of lifedeath (one word) on this planet, then we can possibly get to a place politically where we aren’t as overcome by the horrible resentments, vindictiveness, protectionism and oppressive impulses that make life miserable for so many people. Rowe’s book doesn’t stay at the super high level of so much new age philosophy — so, think Rainn Wilson’s podcasts “Soul Boom" and "Hey There, Human" — it is materially about the embodied experience of whiteness, of masculinity, of settler being in the world. This is why he advocates for embodied social change within social justice movements that can, themselves, occasionally be quite exclusionary. I’m more open to the idea, after thinking about Rowe’s writing, that there is a lot of potential in mindfulness not just for the dreamy promise of epiphany, but for a kind of comfort that comes from reckoning with why we fear the things we fear.

Imre Szeman is the inaugural Director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation and Sustainability and Professor of Human Geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough. His recent book, Futures of the Sun: The Struggle Over Renewable Life, examines corporate and state control of the transition to renewables.We talk here about how Futures of the Sun explores the competing eco-stories being offered by people intent on shaping the transition to fit their vision and version of a renewable society. Imre discusses how key players are working hard to make sure a greener, cleaner future will look much like the world we live in today and examines the rhetoric, ideology, and politics of liberal nationalists intent on fighting a war against climate change, billionaire solar entrepreneurs who believe only in themselves, and the populist far right who want no change at all.Offering possible new critical and political avenues, Szeman reveals how those on the environmental left can ensure their vision of egalitarianism beyond the status quo can become the reality of our renewable future.Celebrate Earth Day by thinking with us about what's going on in the ersatz push for renewables and join the struggle for a future that is more radically democratic than the present.#earthday #climatepolitics #energytransition #fossilfuels #endingfossilfuels #oilandgas #anticapitalism #internationalism