Interview with Vandana Shiva

Around the world civilian rights to food and water are being eroded by the patenting of life forms and by privatization of water systems. Some farmers have been hit with law suits for patent infringement, while they were planting heritage seeds. The outspoken, multi-talented Vandana Shiva, joins us to talk about these and other issues of capitalist globalization. She is a celebrated ecofeminist, grassroots activist, research physicist, author, and international advocate for alternatives to global corporate hegemony.
". . . there is a higher moral order that requires that we save seeds, because we are caretakers of the biodiversity of this planet.” says Shiva.
We talked about:
The roots of Shiva's global activism ● The violence of "The Green Revolution" ● Suicide seeds, farmers, bombers ● False pretenses of industrial farming ● What's at stake in water privatization?● World Bank legacy in India ● Capitalist patriarchy ● The false liberation of convenience foods ● Civil disobedience and seed satyagraha ● Seed saving ● Lies money can buy ● Democracy as an imperative of survival ● Seeing and acting on interconnections ● The good work of the International Forum on Globalization ● Power and the lessons of history ● A singular solution to a triple crisis ● Caring, sharing, and The Commons
Enjoy the show! (The interview is about 45 minutes.)
Listen at your convenience!
Click through to buy some of Vandana Shiva's books on Amazon right from this site in the sidebar to the left.
Visit:
Navdanya
and
The International Forum on Globalization

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!