Interview with Suzi Gablik

She studied with Robert Motherwell, lived with the Magritte family, and hung out with Jasper Johns. In 1966, Suzi Gablik had a one-woman show of her collage paintings exhibited and catalogued in New York. She later brought a prodigious and caring voice to art criticism, as a respected reviewer of art in London for Art in America, and authored her engaging trilogy of scholarly writings on art and culture Has Modernism Failed?, The Reenchantment of Art, and Progress in Art. She also wrote Magritte, Conversations Before the End of Time, and her memoir Living the Magical Life. Currently, Suzi Gablik hosts a blog featuring her latest cultural and political essays at virgilspeaks.blogspot.com.
We talked about:
Is the human species fit to survive? ● The downside of technology ● The divided United States ● Obama's moral authority ● A burning house, a bus careening off a cliff ● 9/11 as political instigation ● The unbearable places we must go to heal ● Negative capability and extreme sports ● Suzi's magical life of receptivity ● The patriarchy and the black madonna ● The karmic thread of who you are ● How to face the darkness without despair ● Preciousness and unviability ● The artist as role model ● The paradigm of dead objects and the egocentric art world or an alternative: an aesthetic response to the cries of the world ● An alligator named Virgil
Visit: virgilspeaks.com
Enjoy the show! (The interview is about 55 minutes.)
Listen at your convenience!
Click through to buy some of Suzi's books on Amazon right from this site in the sidebar to the left.

Interview with Derrick Jensen

"We need to bring down civilization, because it's killing the planet," says our guest, author and activist Derrick Jensen.
Formerly a college professor and a commercial beekeeper, Jensen's prolific career as an author has given us A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, Endgame, Listening to the Land, Strangely Like War and Walking on Water. He also co-authored Railroads & Clearcuts and Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control. He has written for The New York Times magazine, The Sun, Audubon, and many other publications.
In 2008 Derrick Jensen was named one of Utne Reader's "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World."
We talked about:
Preparation for truth-telling ● Above ground and below ground activism ● The only language destroyers understand ● The essence of Derrick's philosophy and passion ● Normalizing insane behavior ● Reform or revolution? ● What do we need to do? ● Living in the culture of make-believe ● The relationship between eroticism and violence ● Collapse and the shape of things to come ● Hypocrisy in the environmental movement ● Owning prejudices and shifting alliances ● Do we need to harden our hearts or to open them? ● Discernment, compassion, compliance and fierce love
Visit: derrickjensen.org
Enjoy the show! (The interview is about 52 minutes.)
Listen at your convenience!
Click through to buy some of Derrick's books on Amazon right from this site in the sidebar to the left.
This podcast episode contains explicit language.

Interview with Jim Merkel

Radical Simplicity! The Living Hero program presents an interview with author, educator, and activist Jim Merkel.
Jim began as a military engineer. Just after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, Jim quit his job and took immediate personal responsibility for his own part in global problems. This meant taking radical actions to scale back consumption and deeply reconsider life in all its dimensions. He subsequently authored Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints on a Finite Earth. Merkel received an Earthwatch Gaia Fellowship to research sustainable living in Kerala, India and in regions of the Himalayas.
He founded the Global Living Project and was hired by Dartmouth College to serve as its first Sustainability Director.
Jim lives the life of radical simplicity—cycling hundreds of miles to give lectures and workshops at colleges , universities, and community centers. He is a homesteader, growing and preserving his own food, and living on about $5,000 a year. Jim has given hundreds of hours of his time as a volunteer to share his wealth of knowledge on the new good life of sustainable living.

We talked about:
• the present pulse of the sustainability movement
• the real root of simplicity
• engaging the heart
• Jim's childhood and influences
• the real challenge of society: the common good
• how radical simplicity crosses party lines
• Jim's revolutionary shift after Exxon-Valdez
• what it means to exceed the carrying capacity of the Earth
• what is an ecological footprint
• Jim's view of the economic crisis
• living on $5000 a year in America
• the roots of violence and fear
• population control, women, and wisdom
• falling in love with the Earth

Enjoy the show! (The program is around 50 minutes)
Listen at your convenience!

Interview with Carolyn Raffensperger

The Living Hero Podcast proudly presents an interview with environmental lawyer and public health advocate, Carolyn Raffensperger. Carolyn is executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network, where she has worked since 1994.
In 1982, Ms. Raffensperger left a career as an archaeologist in the desert Southwest to join the environmental movement. She first worked for the Sierra Club where she addressed an array of environmental issues, including forest management, river protection, pesticide pollutants, and the disposal of radioactive waste. As an environmental lawyer she specializes in the fundamental changes in law and policy necessary for the protection and restoration of public health and the environment.
We talked about:
• faulty assumptions underlying environmental decision making
• the precautionary principle--what is it?
• a new report on health, aging and the environment
• reversing the burden of proof on the safety of industrial chemicals
• corporate structure and your inalienable right to a clean and healthy environment
• changing laws: rights of future generations and the commonwealth
• reform: the biggest obstacles and the greatest opportunities
• the essential nature of the arts and how they function in the process of change
• genetically altered seeds, the sex of plants, and the farmer-scientist breeding project
• “turning the Titanic,” ecological medicine and the economics of aging
Carolyn is co-editor of Precautionary Tools for Reshaping Environmental Policy published by M.I.T. Press (2006) and Protecting Public Health and the Environment: Implementing the Precautionary Principle, published by Island Press (1999). Together, these volumes provide the most comprehensive exploration to date of the history, theory, and implementation of the precautionary principle.
Carolyn Raffensperger is responsible for coining the term "ecological medicine" to encompass the broad notions that both health and healing are entwined with the natural world. She has served on editorial review boards for several environmental and sustainable agriculture journals, and on USEPA and National Research Council committees. Her bimonthly column for the Environmental Law Institute's journal Environmental Forum appeared from 1999 until 2008.
Our guest has also been featured in Gourmet magazine, the Utne Reader, Yes! Magazine, the Sun, Whole Earth, and Scientific American. Along with leading workshops and lecturing frequently on the Precautionary Principle, Carolyn is at the forefront of developing new models of government, which will depend on precaution and ecological integrity, and guardianship for future generations.
For more information, visit the websites of The Science and Environmental Health Network and of Guardians of the Future .
Enjoy the show! (The program is 45 minutes)
Listen at your convenience!