The Creative Process · Arts, Culture & Society: Books, Film, Music, TV, Art, Writing, Creativity, Education, Environment, Theatre, Dance, LGBTQ, Climate Change, Social Justice, Spirituality, Feminism, Tech, Sustainability

Step into the deep time of the forest floor, where a single fallen leaf contains the history of the world, and invisible fungal networks hum with ancient conversations. Biologist and acclaimed author David George Haskell reveals a staggering truth: we are completely dependent on the botanical world, and our belief in strict human individuality is a biological illusion.
Haskell has spent much of his life training himself to see the universal within the infinitesimally small. He's famously sat for a year in a single square meter of Tennessee's forest, a mandala experience that revealed the deep history of the world through a single fallen leaf. He's a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his books The Forest Unseen and Sounds Wild and Broken, and he received the John Burroughs Medal for The Songs of Trees.
His work often focuses on what he calls the unwaged labor of the natural world, the complex biological communities that sustain our planet without a monetary ledger. And his latest book is How Flowers Made Our World. In it, he argues that we are essentially grass apes dependent on the ancient innovations of flowering plants for two-thirds of our daily calories.
(0:00) How Flowers Made Our World
(1:33) Networked Connection is the Foundation of Life
(2:00) Contemplating the Small
(4:07) Consciousness, Intelligence & Memory in the More-Than-Human-World
(4:18) We Are Grass Apes
(5:41) Memories of His Childhood in Paris & Wild Orchids
(6:34) The Networked Intelligence of Forests
(7:45) The Earth in Full Song
(8:46) The Practice of Listening
(10:11) Escaping the Screen: Real Connections in the Classroom
(11:35) The True Cost of AI
(12:11) Transforming Ourselves
(14:23) Silence Without Expectation
(15:32) A Sensory Legacy for the Future
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

What if the defining revolution of Earth's history wasn't led by animals or humans, but by flowers? Are we truly individuals, or are our bodies and minds just walking ecosystems?
Our guest today is David George Haskell, a biologist who has spent much of his life training himself to see the universal within the infinitesimally small. He's famously sat for a year in a single square meter of Tennessee's forest, a mandala experience that revealed the deep history of the world through a single fallen leaf. He's a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his books The Forest Unseen and Sounds Wild and Broken, and he received the John Burroughs Medal for The Songs of Trees.
His work often focuses on what he calls the unwaged labor of the natural world, the complex biological communities that sustain our planet without a monetary ledger. And his latest book is How Flowers Made Our World. In it, he argues that we are essentially grass apes dependent on the ancient innovations of flowering plants for two-thirds of our daily calories.
(0:00) How Flowers Made Our World
The incredible ancient history of flowers on Earth
(4:56) Contemplating the Small
Expanding our world by restricting our gaze
(14:30) The Illusion of Individuality
Why atomism is false and interconnectedness is the foundation of life
(26:08) We Are Grass Apes
The evolutionary origins of humans and our dietary dependence on grass
(33:32) Memories of His Childhood in Paris & Wild Orchids
(38:55) The Networked Intelligence of Forests
How trees communicate and share resources beneath the soil
(44:00) The Earth in Full Song
Tracing the sonic history of our planet
(51:08) The Practice of Listening
Why tuning in to the natural world is crucial for our survival
(1:01:21) Silence Without Expectation
Sitting with nature without demanding progress or enlightenment
(1:11:01) Transforming Ourselves
Why personal change matters in the fight for the climate
(1:15:20) Escaping the Screen
Finding real human-to-human connection away from technology
(1:16:16) The True Cost of AI
The devastating impact of data centers on our fossil fuel consumption
(1:23:18) A Sensory Legacy for the Future
What we must preserve for the generations not yet born
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

How does the literature of a collective that shares neither one nation nor any one language function? What can the study of state violence in Latin America teach us about the dehumanization occurring in West Asia? And how do we imagine paths out of generations of violence to build new utopias?
In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Serhat Tutkal and Hevin Karakurt to Speaking Out of Place. These two scholars engage in a broad discussion of Kurdish history, culture, politics, literature and language, with particular attention to issues of statelessness, identity, and violence. We talk about the current moment with regard to Turkey, Syria, Palestine, and the US-Israel war on Iran and beyond. We use as a starting poet Serhat’s remarkable essay, “Note from Non-People,” and then move to a discussion of his work on dehumanization. We end with imagining paths out of cycles of violence and dehumanization, and consider specifically the way we might imagine new sorts of utopias and vistas of life-affirmation.
Hevin Karakurt is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where she studies Kurdish literature across languages and territories. In this way, she works on the question of how a literature of a collective that shares neither one nation nor any one language might function. Before coming to Stanford, she worked as a researcher in the Swiss National Science Foundation funded research project “Half-Truths. Truth, Fiction, and Conspiracy in the ‘Post-Factual’ Age”, at the University of Basel.
Serhat Tutkal is a Kurdish academic. He is a postdoctoral researcher funded by the Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation (Secihti) in Mexico. He has a PhD from Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Bogotá) with a dissertation on the legitimation and delegitimation of Colombian state violence. He mainly works on violence, racism, and dehumanization in West Asia and Latin America.
(3:54) READING "NOTE FROM NON-PEOPLE"
(8:00) DECODING STATELESSNESS
The foundational aspects of Kurdish identity and existing outside the nation-state
(17:00) THE STRUGGLE OF LANGUAGELESSNESS
What it means to borrow languages when your native tongue is unrecognized.
(31:00) DEHUMANIZATION & ACADEMIA'S ROLE
Examining the legitimation of violence and the changing role of the university in critical thought
(44:00) DATA RESEARCH & GEOPOLITICS
Connecting data research on social media racism to current events in Turkey, Syria, Palestine, and Iran.
(1:05:00) IMAGINING UTOPIAS
Episode Website
www.palumbo-liu.com
https://speakingoutofplace.com
Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social Instagram @speaking_out_of_place

“The United States has this mentality that if somebody is serving a prison sentence or if somebody is in jail, they somehow deserve whatever happens. Whether it is medical neglect, whether it is abuse by staff or the other incarcerated people, whether it is terrible food, whether it is not being able to communicate or see their family members and loved ones. What happened in 2020 is that being incarcerated became a possible death sentence. Because we saw that prison deaths jumped 77% compared to the previous year where there was not a pandemic in the United States.”
In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu speaks with veteran journalist Victoria Law. She is the author of such books as Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, Prison By Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms (co-authored with Maya Schenwar), and “Prisons Make Us Safer” and 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration. Today we talk about her new book, Corridors of Contagion: How the Pandemic Exposed the Cruelties of Incarceration.
In this devastating study, Law shows how instead of focusing on care during the outbreak of COVID, prisons took the pandemic as an opportunity to amplify their inhumanity, cruelty, and violence. We hear how contagion spread through ventilation systems and through guards who spread viruses from outside to the prisoners, we learn how things like solitary confinement and strip searches only intensified their worse aspects, and how extractive communications systems preyed on those hungry for news from their loved ones. Law also tells us of the personal stories she was able to track that give a human dimension to the statistics of the pandemic, and also remarkable stories of self-sacrifice and solidarity, as prisoners gave each other the care and support so badly needed. We end by learning about organizations that are at the forefront of fighting for decarceration and restructuring of parole boards, and other actions to fight against the inhumane and cruel practices of the prison industrial complex.
(0:00) Corridors of Contagion
(2:21) Pre-Pandemic Prison Conditions Severely crowded and destabilizing environment of jails and prisons before COVID-19
(8:42) Global Releases vs. US Incarceration
(12:44) The Horrors of Solitary Confinement An exploration of how isolation cells offer no protection from respiratory droplets or viruses
(16:55) Punished for Seeking Safety
(19:07) Dehumanization Through Video Visits
(26:47) Extractive Electronic Messaging
(33:43) Humanizing the Statistics
(43:56) Solidarity Behind Bars
(51:57) The Fight for Decarceration
Episode Website
www.palumbo-liu.com
https://speakingoutofplace.com
Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social
Instagram @speaking_out_of_place

“By pretending like science is neutral or apolitical, we're really feeding a particular discourse which serves whatever political structures are in place right now, whatever status quo is in place right now. Science can never be apolitical because it's a human activity, it's practiced in society with others, with human and more-than-human beings.”
In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Fernando Racimo, a leading scientist-activist, about his new book, Science in Resistance. This book gives a riveting account of the founding and growth of the international group Scientist Rebellion, in which now thousands of scientists from around the world have organized direct actions to draw attention to the climate crisis. Breaking through the censorship and silencing carried on by big fossil fuel companies and also scientific groups in and out of academia, which often collude with each other, members of SR have put their careers and their bodies on the line to raise public consciousness and to spur action. We talk about the connection between power and knowledge, between ecocide and genocide and the need to democratize education and research if we are going to have the kind of world we want to both live in and to pass on to other generations.
(2:00) Moving to Direct Action
(6:00) The Power of the Teach-In
(10:00) The Climate Killjoy
(11:00) The Myth of Scientific Neutrality
(15:00) Fossil Fuel Complicity in Universities
(23:00) Education for a World on Fire
(30:00) Ecocide and Genocide
(36:00) Learning from the Global South
Racimo is a scientist-activist and the author of the new book Science in Resistance. He co-founded the Danish chapters of Scientist Rebellion and Academics for Palestine and works at the intersection of academia and social movement organizing. He earned his bachelor from Harvard and his PhD from UC Berkeley and is now an assoc. professor in ecology and evolution at the Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen. He has written articles and OpEds on the urgent need for scientists to join and support social movements fighting structures of oppression, as well as on strategies for transforming and democratizing academic institutions to serve positive socio-ecological needs. He teaches ecology and evolution, degrowth and socio-ecological justice, decolonizing global health and social movement theory and practice.
Episode Site
www.palumbo-liu.com
https://speakingoutofplace.com
Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social
IG @speaking_out_of_place