In this episode host Susan Mathews talks to Heather Davis, the author of Plastic Matter (2022) about plastic and how it has completely permeated our world. They cover a wide range of topics from synthetic universality, technocapitalism, chemical legacies, queer kin, reproductive questions raised by plastic, and hauntings created by the aftermath of slavery and settler colonialism.

Davis is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. She is the author of Plastic Matter, Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada, and Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Politics, Aesthetics, Environments, and Epistemologies. You can find Heather Davis on social media at Instagram: @theoryxdaddy and on X @heather_davish1.

In this episode, host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Ferris Jabr, author of Becoming
Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life (2024), and a contributing writer for The New York
Times Magazine and Scientific American. The interview focused on the central question in
the book: in what ways and to what extent has life changed the planet? From microbes to
mammoths, life has transformed the continents, oceans, and atmosphere, turning a lump
of orbiting rock into the world as we’ve known it. In the conversation, Jabr spoke of how
Western science in particular has segregated geology from biology, regarding planet
Earth essentially as a giant rock that happens to have some life, minimising the role of life
in shaping the planet.

Ferris Jabr has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, National
Geographic, Wired, Outside, Lapham’s Quarterly, McSweeney’s, and The Los Angeles
Review of Books, among other publications.

He is the recipient of a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant, as well as
fellowships from UC Berkeley and the MIT Knight Science Journalism Program. His work
has been anthologized in several editions of The Best American Science and Nature
Writing series.

He has an MA in journalism from New York University and a Bachelor of Science from
Tufts University. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his partner, Ryan, their dog, Jack, and
more plants than they can count.

You can find him @ferrisjabr on all social media (Twitter/X, Bluesky, Instagram, Threads,
Mastodon).

We're back with The Subverse. In this episode of the season, host Susan Mathews talks to writer and ecological thinker Aseem Shrivastava about the current crises in modern cosmology. Ecosophy, which acknowledges the living earth, is a way to address this arrythmia and our current alienation from the earth to which we belong. Aseem Shrivastava is a writer,
teacher, and ecological thinker with a doctorate in Economics from the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst. He has lectured across the world on ecological issues emanating
from globalisation. Shrivastava speaks of the present moment as an existential crisis, not just an intellectual crisis or a crisis of culture. During this fundamental upheaval in human affairs, the first thing you need to do is look at where your feet are. We need to ask fundamental questions about how we got here, and also address the terminal crisis in modern cosmology itself.

“Without Nature, we are not.”- This is the start of an article Shrivastava wrote in The Open
Magazine in 2021. He quotes Rilke and writes, “it appears that in the process of arising
within us, the earth has dreams for us!” This earth is our only home, so he asks, “Are we
ready to abandon her for the greener pastures of another planet that the space fantasists never
fail to promise us? In a gentle defiance of the European Enlightenment vision, let us seriously
consider the possibility that Rilke is right, that perhaps the Earth does have dreams for us, in
the manner that a mother has dreams for her children. And like a mother’s dreams, the earth’s
hopes for us must have power.”

Ecosophy, unlike environmentalism or ecology, fundamentally tackles things like earth
alienation and looks at the content of our vanishing relationship to the natural world in its full
physical and metaphysical depth. We need a new mythos, and we can learn from
Rabindranath Tagore in this context. Through his poetry, music, stories, plays and letter, the
mythos is all there and you don’t need to go to science to find the meaning of life.
We have a world that is arrhythmic, out of sync, not to mention suffering from psychic,
cognitive and spiritual arrhythmia too. We need to understand the real roots of the crises we
face, the limits of our knowledge, question our need to dominate and control and, in the end,
face some heart reckoning and atonement.

Aseem Shrivastava has taught at prestigious universities in India and the West and offered
courses on Global and Indian Ecosophy at Ashoka University. He has been guiding and
mentoring a number of graduate students and young people working in the realms of
Philosophy, Ecosophy, Ecology, and Economics. He is the author (with Ashish Kothari) of
the books ‘Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India’ (2012), and ‘Prithvi Manthan
(2016). He is currently at work on several books on Ecosophy:‘The Grammar of Greed:
Reflections on a Fatal Ecology’, ‘The Alphabet of Ecosophy: A Grammar for Twilight Modernity’, and ‘For Love of the Earth: Modernity, Ecosophy, Rabindranath Tagore’. All these works dialogue with the ecological challenges of 21st century global modernity.

The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n’ Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes.