Doomer Optimism

Jason speaks with Evan Welkin (@ewelkin ) about the general theme of displacement and dispossession, and what permaculture (permanent culture) means in contexts of people increasingly being uprooted from their homes for political, climate, financial, ideological, or other reasons and having to move. They discuss his growing up in a rural Oregon town where the forests were being clearcut and toxic chemicals applied, his experience in Palestinian rights activism and the general Israeli / Palestinian conflict involving two peoples who have experienced dispossession throughout their history, their experience in developing a folk school, ecovillage, and regenerative farm at his wife’s families place in Italy and the waves of shocks (covid, climate, financial) that might force them to leave, his work with an organization teaching permaculture to refugees all around the world, and much more

In this episode Jason speaks with Steven Stoll, the author of the excellent book Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia, about the history of land dispossession in Appalachia and the rise of industrial capitalism, manufactured dependency on wage labor due to land degradation or dispossession, The Whisky Rebellion, absentee land ownership and the initial squatters rights movement, coal towns and the how household gardens often served the interests of coal companies, a comparison of the experience of indigenous populations and early white settlers in losing access to land, his modern-day proposal for The Commons Communities Act and land reform more broadly, the potential of community land trusts, the broader international context e.g., modern-day land dispossession in Africa, and much more

Donald and Joey talk to writer Jordan Castro about his new novel, the history of the Alt Lit literary movement, punk rock, and the Midwest.

Jordan bio:

Jordan Casto is the author of The Novelist (Soft Skull, 2022) and two poetry books. He is from Cleveland, Ohio.

Brian Fink chats with Going Godward, offering a unique perspective on finding meaning in the chaos of life. Explore existentialism, spirituality, and optimism in this enlightening episode of Doomer Optimism.

Ashley speaks with Geoffrey, @‌longstoryfarms, about his adventures away from home, including time spent in Chile, and his moving back home to be a productive member of his community.

Join our book club community as Ashley, Donald, AC, Tiffani, and Joel gather to discuss the timeless wisdom of Wendell Berry. Delve into the captivating world of his works, exploring profound insights, reflections, and engaging conversations that promise to leave you inspired and enlightened.

Tres and Simon delve into the urgent question: What are we going to do with the suburbs? As they discuss the repercussions of unrestrained suburban expansion and its impact on the environment, you'll gain insights into the challenges of unchecked growth, from encroaching wildlife to insurance woes. Join the conversation to explore alternative approaches to suburban living and sustainable urban development.

Jason speaks with Elle (@neolithicrnsnc ) and Chaos (@chaosprime) about their village project World Tree house (@WorldTreeHealth ), Elle’s focus on creating a healing and meditation center and Chaos’s focus on building out the infrastructure for an off grid community. Along the way they discuss their diagnosis of the trajectory of society and how they see their project as a way to “rebuild before the collapse”

Ashley and Roland talk with Jonathan Rawles, son of famous survivalist James Wesley Rawles about religion, localism in the inner mountain west, the state of the redoubt movement and our thoughts on white nationalism.

Ashley and Jason speak with Ed Bourgeois about his long history in the regenerative agriculture movement, the importance of holistic science, good soil management as the foundation, and his work now building peer to peer networks among farmers working towards a regenerative transition

Nate helps Ashley think through the idea of returning home from Uruguay to Chicago by reflecting on his own story of homecoming.

Drake, Nate, and Jason talk about Silvopasture, Drake’s experience with it, and Nate’s plans for it. What it is, why it has so much potential for both food production and ecological restoration, the central role of water management, keyline design, carbon myopia, ecological prefiguration, and the numerous beings that are supporting our efforts.

Over the past several months Josh Kearns has been remote mentoring a small group of Stanford students working on biochar water treatment (mostly though one student contact). Two students just wrapped up a 10-week implementation trip in Malawi. He recorded the conversation the night before they were flying out to come back to Western Civilization. He wanted to talk to them while they were still fresh off the experience and in-context, before the mind-warp of readjusting to life in the US.

In this conversation they talked about their project and what insights and experiences they gained, what they found surprising, challenging, etc. They discussed the utility of field-based hands-on experiential education versus formal university education. They had some interesting things to say, including that living in the campus environment (in campus housing where cleaning is all done for you, eating at the dining hall where you don't have to prepare your own food, etc.) many students don't feel like "adults." Managing their own housing upkeep and meals was a salient point for them it seems.

Evan and Jason talk about Narrative Exchange, a program of bringing people from very different backgrounds and sharing stories to foster greater empathy and compassion. They also talk about many related topics including the internet and polarization, the loss of community life, Dunbar’s number, building new communities across differences, public schooling vs. homeschooling, how to be a responsible newcomer to a region, and much more

Ashley and Evan discuss global supply chains and suggest a synthesis between globalism and localism.

Braxton sits down with Ashley and Roland to discuss localism, agriculture, community, and that controversial new country music singer Oliver Anthony!

James, Keturah, Andy, and Donald talk about America and literature and American literature, its limits and possibilities.

David Caley and Medical Nemesis join Donald to talk about Ivan Illich.
Medical Nemesis wonders why Ivan Illich’s book Medical Nemesis has not taken hold in any part of our culture and how to make practical use of this knowledge. @‌Medical_Nemesis / https://medicalnemesis.substack.com
David Cayley is a Toronto-based Canadian writer and broadcaster, who is known for documenting the philosophy of prominent thinkers of the 20th century - Ivan Illich, Northrop Frye, George Grant, and Rene Girard. His biography of Ivan Illich is available from Penn State University Press: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-08812-9.html

In this episode, Jason and Patrick Heizer speak to Kristina Bostick about the Montgomery County Agricultural Reserve. Directly northwest of Washington DC, Montgomery County is Maryland's most populated county, with well over one million residents. In 1980, the Montgomery County Council made one of the most significant land-use decisions in US history by creating the Agricultural Reserve. Heralded as one of the best examples of land conservation policies in the country, the Agricultural Reserve encompasses 93,000 contiguous acres – almost a third of the country’s land. Today, the Reserve comprises hundreds of working farms that produce a variety of products plus trails and parks for public use. Moreover, it provides habitat for wildlife, helps the region meet its clean water commitments to the Chesapeake Bay, hosts educational field trips for schools and is a hub of agritourism, and much more, all within 30 minutes of Washington, DC. Kristina Bostick is Senior Conservation Associate at the Montgomery Countryside Alliance (https://www.mocoalliance.org/). She grew up in Montgomery County (hiking Sugarloaf every year on her birthday) and has returned after a number of years in North Carolina where she earned her Masters in Public Administration and worked on numerous environmental issues, including stormwater mitigation and greening local governments. Kristina values all the ways the Ag Reserve benefits the Chesapeake Bay region but nothing beats the excitement of a weekly CSA box or the first peaches of summer, all grown right here! Patrick Heizer is a simple guy. He is a husband and a father who is a research & development biomedical engineer at AstraZeneca and a permaculture farmer in Frederick County, Maryland. He writes The Counterpoint substack and can be found on Twitter @PatrickHeizer (https://twitter.com/PatrickHeizer). Montgomery Countryside Alliance is a small (but mighty!) nonprofit organization dedicated to the protection of Montgomery County's 40-year commitment to thriving farms - the Agricultural Reserve. The Reserve is a unique zoning framework that has prioritized growth near transit and keeping small family farms on the landscape near a busy metro area. MCA's Programs include: Land Link - Matching new and expanding farmers with landowners offering long-term leases in Montgomery County (http://www.mocolandlink.org/) Re-Leaf the Reserve - MCA's program in partnership with Park and Planning's Tree Montgomery to re-forest stream buffers with forest conservation easements (https://www.mocoalliance.org/releaf.html) Join us for the Ride for the Reserve Bike Tour on 9/24/23 (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ride-for-the-ag-reserve-bike-tour-and-festival-tickets-676420862007?aff=oddtdtcreator) Our Linktree: https://linktr.ee/mocoalliance Other resources I shared: Land For Good (Land Purchase and Lease Resources) (https://landforgood.org/) Future Harvest Farmer Training (https://futureharvest.org/programs/beginner-farmer-training-program/) ECO City Incubator/Training (https://www.ecoffshoots.org/) Pro Publica Interactive Climate Changes Map of US (https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/)

In this episode Jason talks with Farahn Morgan about growing up in Appalachia, moving to DC and going to college, moving back home near her family and community, and her work in news, journalism, and how she frames it: storytelling. They dig into the nature of ‘expertise’, culture, folk traditions and how they are exploited, making a living in the modern political economy and the difficulties of doing that while still preserving traditional lifeways, the blessing and curse of the coal industry, the current story she’s working on looking into wildcrafting and how it connects to the Cherokee side of her ancestry, deaths of despair, the importance of choosing to build a home and connect to place despite the currents working against it, the importance of learning from elders, her views on the Foxfire series, book recommendations for understanding Appalachia, and much more. *Note, there is a bonus section at the end where the formal conversation wrapped up but they accidentally didn’t stop recording the more informal discussion, which they both decided to leave in Bio: Farahn is a writer living and working at home in Appalachia. After spending nearly a decade in politics and media in Washington, D.C., she returned to Southwest Virginia and Eastern Kentucky to be close to her family, understand their history and traditions more intimately, and re-establish her connection to the land and herself. She is still learning. Read her words at http://LongRoadHome.substack.com, County Highway, RealClearBooks & Culture, The Washington Examiner, and WrongSpeak.

In this episode, Jason speaks with D. Mason (@dkpmason) about his life growing up in ghettos, trailer parks, and the woods in Alabama and Appalachia, learning to live off the land and becoming the Dirt Mage, getting a felony for growing and trading weed and mushrooms which many venture capitalists are now getting rich on, anarcho-communism, community empowering technology, the pitfalls of both the dissident Right and techno-modern Left, localism and cultural tensions, the importance and limits of difficult conversations, and much more

Ashley and Jason interview Jim Rutt, co-founder of Game B, a complexity-informed social movement aimed at creating systems change towards an intelligent and cooperative society. They discuss the evolution of Game B, the theory of change, current efforts to develop viable ‘proto-B’ communities, overlaps with Doomer Optimism, and much more Jim Rutt is the former CEO of Network Solutions. The New York Times once referred to him as “the Internet’s bad boy” due to his reputation for creative mischief. He sold Network Solutions at the peak of the Dot Com boom and then went into scientific research. Jim has been affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute since 2002, serving as Chairman from 2009 thru 2012. A few of his other projects are summarized in his mini-bio at https://www.santafe.edu/people/profile/jim-rutt.

A rollicking conversation with Chris Mott of "Woke Imperium" fame. We checked in on geopolitics and ideology and how these have influenced current events and crazy trends in journalism, academia, gov't, NGOs, and the PMC in general.

One fulcrum of the conversation was how the DC pride celebration has evolved over recent years to be dominated by the military-industrial-complex (Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, the CIA, McKinsey, the Pentagon, etc. all doing big floats and extravagant productions attesting to their woke cred), and how all this reflects the consummation of the marriage of progressive culture war social justice politics with neconservatism, and the seamless interplay between supposedly humanitarian intervention and militarism in the Establishments monomaniacal neoliberal messianism.

Ashley and Nate discuss the concept of Left Conservatism in a wide ranging conversation about what is sacred, the market, the state, and the process of developing politics and relationships.

A discussion of Chris' forthcoming book Saying No to a Farm-Free Future

“Everyone in the food business needs to read this book. . . . [A] lively and superbly written polemic.”—Joel Salatin, co-founder of Polyface Farm

A defense of agroecological, small-scale farming and a robust critique of an industrialized future.

One of the few voices to challenge The Guardian‘s George Monbiot on the future of food and farming (and the restoration of nature) is academic, farmer and author of A Small Farm Future Chris Smaje.

In Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, Smaje presents his defense of small-scale farming and a robust critique of Monbiot’s vision for an urban and industrialized future.Responding to Monbiot’s portrayal of an urban, high-energy, industrially manufactured food future as the answer to our current crises, and its unchallenged acceptance within the environmental discourse, Smaje was compelled to challenge Monbiot’s evidence and conclusions. At the same time, Smaje presents his powerful counterargument – a low-carbon agrarian localism that puts power in the hands of local communities, not high-tech corporates.In the ongoing fight for our food future, this book will help you to understand the difference between a congenial, ecological living and a dystopian, factory-centered existence.

A must-read!

“Chris Smaje has laid down an indictment – as unremitting as it is undeniable – that cuts through the jargon-filled, techno-worshipping agricultural futurists who promise silver-bullet fixes for having your cake and eating it too. This brilliant and compelling book is at once hopeful and persuasive about the future of food.”—Dan Barber, chef at Blue Hill and author of The Third Plate

Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future: The Case For an Ecological Food System and Against Manufactured Foods ‌https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/saying-no-to-a-farm-free-future/

Ashley speaks with Kate Parsons and Adam Mayfield about their wilderness survival skills school, the role of art in society, and mindfulness in practice. A wild ride! ‌ PRIMAL U designs and implements one-of-a-kind courses with experts in wilderness first aid, leadership, survival techniques, sustainability and mindfulness training. Primal U’s mission is to train individuals holistically, providing a space to learn and grow in an outdoor setting. Our new Primal U Artist Lecture Series showcases the practices of artists and creatives working in and with the natural world. Primal U is the brainchild of Rob Mullins, Kate Parsons, and Adam Mayfield. Parsons is an artist, educator, and co-founder of the virtual reality studio FLOAT. An Assistant Professor of Digital Arts at Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA and Instructor at Art Center College of Design, Parsons is a Montana-native who knows that country life and self-sufficiency still runs in her blood. Mayfield, who is from Los Angeles, is a mindfulness specialist, an actor (Ford vs. Ferrari, All My Children) and professional survival instructor. He is a longtime alum of Boulder Outdoor Survival School, where he taught traditional living skills to folks from all walks of life, from corporate executives and military personnel to artists and political activists. Adam is also a mentor for Inward Bound Mindfulness Education, a nonprofit organization that holds both traditional and outdoor excursion retreats across the US, Canada, and the UK, teaching mindfulness to teenagers and adults. Mullins, who hails from Ohio, is a homesteader, life & leadership coach, outdoor enthusiast, ultra-marathoner, and former executive at a Forbes 107 company. As a pharmacist, Rob has a lifetime of helping others and has had tremendous results coaching and mentoring leaders for career success. In addition he holds ACC accreditation from the International Coach Federation, is an Authorized Partner for Everything DiSC and is a registered Maine Outdoor Recreation and Hunting Guide. The three met when Parsons attended one of the wilderness training camps taught by Mullins and Mayfield at Thomas Coyne Survival Schools—one of the top survival schools worldwide. Since then, they have banded together to create a unique, hybrid curriculum: A combination of straightforward survival skills, wilderness first aid training, permaculture, mindfulness techniques and leadership coaching. ‌ Primal U Montana First Session: June 16, 17, 18 Second Session: June 23, 24, 25