Pretty Heady Stuff

shalan joudry writes on her website that she is "an L’nu (Mi’kmaw) mother to two teenagers, spouse to a basket-maker, as well as being a multi-disciplinary storyteller and ecologist." joudry also explains why she shares her work "as a poet, playwright, podcaster, oral storyteller, actor, singer, and cultural interpreter" -- "My ability to share my work, my thoughts, my art is thanks to many teachers over my lifetime. I’m grateful and humbled. Wela’lioq. I hope that my voice will add to the forest of voices, helping to uplift or guide others as well."In this chat, we unpack her philosophies of teaching, activism and art. As we know, we are in a time of monsters. The ecological crisis demands we recognize that Indigenous resurgence be instated as a reality, through solidarity across lines of sovereignty, to fight these monsters meaningfully. Reestablishing Indigenous autonomy over lands in so-called Canada would be an enormous step toward restoring a more relational connection to place. It would also represent a serious commitment to conciliation. Listen to shalan discuss the ideas in her beautiful, stunning poetry, her instructive but emotionally devastating 2019 play Elapultiek (We Are Looking Towards), and much more!

John Warner is a American writer, editor, and teacher of writing. He is the editor of McSweeney's Internet Tendency, a frequent contributor to The Morning News, and has been anthologized in May Contain Nuts, Stumbling and Raging: More Politically Inspired Fiction, and The Future Dictionary of America.In this conversation we talk about his book More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI. From the publisher:"In the age of artificial intelligence, generating an essay is as simple as typing a prompt and pressing enter. What does this mean for the art of writing? According to longtime writing teacher John Warner: not much.More Than Words argues that generative AI tools like ChatGPT not only can kill the student essay but should, since these assignments don’t challenge students to do the real work of writing. To Warner, writing is thinking―discovering your ideas while trying to capture them on a page―and feeling―grappling with what it fundamentally means to be human.More Than Words calls for us to use AI as an opportunity to reckon with our relationship with writing. Newly updated with practical resources for teachers and students, this is the essential book for anyone writing in the age of AI."

Joshua Frank is the author of Bad Energy: The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who Are Selling Off Our Future. Casey Williams is one of the authors of The Renewable Normal, with the After Oil Collective. Both of these books argue along the same lines that we are "in the middle of a shift in the types of energy that support it. This may seem like a good sign for the climate, but again, global emissions are not decreasing, they are exponentially on the rise."How do we reconcile this contradiction? Our books look at the rotten roots of free market capitalism for the reasons why a future of death and destruction feels inevitable. Frank writes in Bad Energy that we should see the stacking of renewable energies on top of fossil infrastructure as "a new type of imperialism, this time with a green capitalist veneer. There are just too many AI programs to run and too many tech gadgets." We talk about a world in which repaired relationships with the natural world and each other trump stupid ephemeral gadget pleasures. Technology is not the hero or the villain of this story. In Bad Energy, we read that "there is now a push for renewables to power the same economic system. This… leads to never-ending abuse of resources, like uranium, copper, and lithium." We may prefer to ignore this opportunity repair a broken balance with the non-human, and our inequitable systems of social organization, but the excuse that it is too difficult is becoming more and more flimsy, self-serving and suicidal as years elapse, moving us further and further from aligning with climate goals.

Jessica den Outer is an expert in environmental law who advocates globally for the Rights of Nature. Since 2017, she’s been consulted and has spoken for institutions like the UN and Harvard. She founded the NGO ‘Stichting Rechten van de Natuur’ and has received numerous awards for her pioneering work.Shauna Doll works to control invasive species in the Halifax Regional Municipality and is a frequent author on environmental issues. There are a lot of them, and the number is growing. What is going on and what methods work to slow crisis down, halt them where possible and manage their impact? How can the rights of nature work as a framework for shifting the ways we value and devalue the world around usJessica's book The Forest Fights Back gives us an opportunity to discuss a potent source of resistance and coalition-building: the idea that nature has inherent rights that need to be respected.From Pluto Press: "As the world grapples with the escalating climate crisis, ecosystems are collapsing, and the planet’s future hangs in the balance. For centuries, our legal systems have treated nature as something to be owned and exploited, but a bold new movement is challenging this paradigm.In The Forest Fights Back, Jessica den Outer explores a groundbreaking global movement—Rights of Nature—taking on the legal system to recognise the rights of rivers, forests, and mountains to exist, flourish, and sustain their ecological balance. From the fight for the Whanganui River in New Zealand to the battle for Spain’s Mar Menor lagoon, den Outer highlights the campaigns led by grassroots communities, telling stories of determination and legal ingenuity.This movement goes beyond law – it represents a cultural shift that could reshape how we live, think, co-exist and advocate for nature."

I was wowed by this book's wisdom about the ways that cynicism, anger and protective individualism get dumped into our minds and narrow our emotional range. Talking about the differences between "complicity" and "implication" might feel frivolous or semantic as the horrors persist, but Liberation is Other People is so attuned to the wicked problems we face, and on so many registers, that its engagement with the question of what we're willing to experiment with in order to save the future feels incredibly urgent and surprisingly hopeful, since its author thinks our collaborative abilities are enough to unlock untold sources of community love, public will, imagination and problem solving. If we finally get serious and create bigger, weirder, more chameleonic containers for our climate feelings, Shotwell's gambit is that this burgeoning social infrastructure could not only fight climate despair, it could end up being a key part of how we ultimately create radically different, more durable solutions and more liveable futures together. Surprise the doomsayers! Liberation is Other People is out November 10th from University of Minnesota Press.Pre-order from @uminnpress:https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517921651/liberation-is-other-people/#leftbooks #academicbooks #revolutionarybooks #ursulaleguin #affect #politics #community #mutualaid #climatefeelings #ecoanxiety #collectivity #solidarity #anticapitalism #climatedevastation #organizing #anarchism #isolation #power #tactics #strategy

In his recent writing, political theorist Matthew Huber (https://www.maxwell.syr.edu/directory/matthew-t-huber) has been making the point that climate action is needlessly polarizing, and that this polarization can be corrected by abandoning the sorts of virtue signaling and PR pomp and circumstance that sometimes comes with climate communication. In fact, he says in his Jacobin article that it's "not clear why focusing on the direct material concerns of affordability is not enough on its own and why climate must be linked at all."In the midst of economic warfare and global military imperialism, the crises that we face do demand some form of solidarity. Huber suggests that we likely need to let go of the idea that climate itself, fear of ecological collapse, will rally constituencies to fight for a post-profit society. He writes: "All of us can agree the climate situation is bad and getting worse. After a sustained period of decline, US emissions increased in 2025. The second Trump administration has rolled back the Inflation Reduction Act and is using state power to keep uneconomical coal plants open and deregulate oil and gas production.No amount of knowledge of science or moral concern about our children will, on its own, reverse this. Given the civilizational scale of the transformation required, replacing an entire global infrastructure system that still depends on fossil fuel for 80 percent of its needs, we need large-scale political power."Read the full article at https://jacobin.com/2026/05/climate-politics-working-class-dealignment

Nina Newington is a forest protector, organizer and award-winning author. Join us for a conversation about the connections and solidarities that build strength against extractive projects and the exploitation of nature for profit.Originally from the UK, Newington has lived in many countries before immigrating to Canada. In Nova Scotia, her environmental activism began with the model of Extinction Rebellion, with the use of direct action to prevent logging and preserve the land, the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaw people.During the conversation, Newington will share some of the insights she has gained from organizing and describe the specific nature of the struggle for forest protection in Nova Scotia. At a time when it is so easy to succumb to cynicism and defeatism, the trajectory that takes us toward intersectional connection and bigger, more expansive solidarities feels like an altogether preferable one.Learn more about Nina Newington at https://ninanewington.com

Kate Brooks works as the EAC's Community Climate Navigator, collaborating with HalifACT and other community groups to create programs supporting climate action. More recently, she joined the Food Team to assist in developing the Halifax Food Council's website. Kate comes from a public library and adult education background and enjoys learning with and from community groups in the Halifax Regional Municipality. She also ran a subsistence farm in the Cape Breton hills for over 20 years and was involved in rural food system work (farmers' markets, school gardens, and school garden entrepreneurship). She believes that tackling the climate crisis will involve learning better ways of communicating, working with and supporting one another — and she's glad to be contributing to climate action through her work on the Food and Operations Teams.Chris is a communications professional and experienced environmental campaigner with two decades of experience. He was the Sustainable City columnist for The Coast for number of years and has also authored four books. He has worked at ENGOs in Toronto and Halifax. His work has had a strong educational and community-building components, including delivering online and in-person workshops that have varied from training aspiring writers to informing grade-school children and senior citizens about the history and ongoing legacy of residential schools. He lives in Halifax with his partner, two children and an 80-pound lapdog.Follow the Ecology Action Centre's critical work and donate at https://ecologyaction.ca/

Sadie Beaton grew up in rural Nova Scotia where she could see a working wharf from her bedroom window and enjoyed countless hours exploring the rugged shorelines and scrubby Acadian forest. She eventually moved to Halifax where she got a B.A. in English from Kings College and a Masters in Resource and Environmental Management from Dalhousie University. In her recent essay "It Flows/Runs Wildly/Crazily: Unravelling Settler Legacies on Stolen Mi’kmaq Land," Beaton explores the intertwining histories that formed her identity and the relationships of complicity that obtain between her own story and the histories of Mi'kma'ki that entangle us in systems of oppression, but also present us with alternatives to the predictable slow violence of fossilized colonialism.Read Beaton's "It Flows/Runs Wildly/Crazily" at https://bit.ly/3STov6hAlso check out "'The depth of the plough'" white settler tautologies and pioneer lies" by Erin Morton and Travis Wysote at https://www.academia.edu/38377868/_The_Depth_of_the_Plough_White_Settler_Tautologies_and_Pioneer_Lies

Katherine Stewart has covered the intersection of faith and politics for over 17 years; her work appears in the New York Times, the New Republic, Religion News Service, the Guardian and elsewhere. Her latest book, Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, is one of Foreign Affairs magazine’s Best Books of 2025. Her previous, award-winning title, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, formed the basis of the documentary feature, God & Country. I wanted to speak with Katherine to talk about the United States' evangelical bet on Christianity as a means of galvanizing a divided nation, and her research into the ways that this has been leveraging by the elite as part of a movement for securing minority rule.The Power Worshippers, our main focus here, looks at how "the Religious Right has masqueraded as a social movement preoccupied with a number of cultural issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage.... [T]his is a political movement that seeks to gain power and to impose its vision on all of society. America's religious nationalists aren't just fighting a culture war, they are waging a political war on the norms and institutions of American democracy.#fourthofjuly #july4 #independenceday #americanpolitics #uspolitics #christianity #christianfundamentalism #evangelicalism #dominionism #christiannation #christiannationalism #whitenationalism