In this episode, host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Prof. Banu Subramaniam, the Luella LaMer Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, Banu engages the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology and is most recently the author of Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism. The book is about plant worlds and the legacies of colonialism. It focuses on three subfields: plant taxonomy, plant reproductive biology, and plant biogeography. Plant taxonomy is a critical node of colonial botany and its enduring afterlives. Plant reproductive biology chronicles how the imaginaries of gender and race under colonial sexuality were imposed on plants. Finally, understanding plant biogeography through invasion biology centres questions of what belongs, or doesn’t, when and where.

Colonial routes of plants included the famous spice routes and transportation of lumber resources, plantation crops, and horticultural specialties but also a trove of other agricultural plants and animals. In the book, Banu writes, “The site of the herbarium cataloging the richness of plant diversity vividly captures the colonial project—a global mortuary that revels in the violent necropolitics of botany.” The fifteenth century ushered in a more systematic and and systematized knowledge of plants, with one figure looming large. Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist, taxonomist and a colonial figure himself, who wrote Species Plantarum, published in 1753. He introduced a novel system of classification and nomenclature—a “sexual system” organized as a binomial with a genus and species name (for example, Homo sapiens for humans). He organized plants and flowers around an anthropomorphic imagery and in sexual binaries—male and female.

In challenging these views, Prof. Subramaniam emphasises how an interdisciplinary approach can make one a better scientist, looking at knowledge not just as truths but as legacies. She looks to indigenous, disability and queer studies to both conceptualise a different sense of time and to find more syncretic symbiotic stories that do not privilege the “human.” She writes in the book that “Disability is an important topic within botanical worlds because the plant literature repeatedly notes, often with alarm, the immobile, stationary, and rooted nature of plants.”

In the conversation, Prof. Subramaniam juxtaposes Linnean classification with two historical moments that demonstrate the power of food, colonialism, and capitalism. First, the making of the treatise Hortus Malabaricus in the late seventeenth century, which compiled a list of plants of the Malabar region; and second, the Traditional Knowledge Database Library (TKDL) in the twenty-first century, which compiles details of traditional knowledge in India in an attempt to combat the biopiracy at the core of Western science.

From here, the conversation moved on to “plant sex” and how it is imbricated with botany’s history of classification, with histories of race and sex and how it perpetuates biological storytelling. As she writes in her book, “Why look through the eyes of European puritanical sexuality to see only a binary cis-heterosexual male/ female plant world? How might the exuberant sexuality of plants allow us to recognize the exuberance of human sexuality?” We need vocabularies that capture their playful, affective worlds that build community and intimacy with the world around them.

On invasion biology, she notes that the history of empire is enlightening because it reveals a profound botanical amnesia about the role of empire in shaping the biogeography of nonhuman entities in the world. Rather than the ‘native’ and the ‘foreigner’, she looks to diasporas and diaspores to retell this story. We also spoke of the science of plant breeding as the opposite of play and as one of violence and increasing control over the biology of plants.

Prof. Subramaniam closes her book as she began, with the sublime. For her, the sublime in Western thought and Western biological thought is at the heart of the separation of humans, of humans and God, of humans and other things. This idea that somehow humans are somehow a special species ordained with unique powers. She concludes that she is very much writing against the idea of the sublime, or the imagination of a restoration biology, but rather advocating for adapting to environments and living with the rest of nature.

Books by Prof. Banu Subramaniam: 

Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism, University of Washington Press, 2024

Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism, University of Washington Press, 2019

Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity, University of Illinois Press, 2014 

Coedited books:

MEAT! A Transnational Analysis, Duke University Press, 2021 (co-edited with Sushmita Chatterjee).

Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties, Rowman and Littlefield, 2005 (co-edited with Betsy Hartmann and Charles Zerner).

Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation, New York/London: Routledge, 2001 (co-edited with Maralee Mayberry and Lisa Weasel).

In this episode, host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Pranay Lal, a natural history writer, public health expert, and climate change advocate. He is the author of two books on natural history. Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent (2016), his debut book, won the Tata Lit Fest Award and Delhi World Book Fair Award 2017. It was listed among Mint’s 50 most significant books about India since Independence. His second book, Invisible Empire: The Natural History of Viruses (2021), also received multiple awards and was named among the 20 Best Non-fiction Books of 2021 by GQ and won the Green Lit Fest Award 2023. Both books have been translated into several languages.

The conversation covered a wide range of topics from the dearth of interest in publishing books on natural history, the climate crises, the need for natural history museums to how the story of climate is intertwined with all other histories, and more. Pranay Lal spoke of how we have kind of compromised Earth’s functions and processes like no other organism. Every new mineral species spurs evolution. For example, rhyolite enabled the beginnings of multicellular life. However, with the rate at which we add synthetic chemicals now–22,000 every year–there are no organisms that can evolve fast enough to digest them.

He spoke of the limitations in the way we speak of each chemical cycle individually when in nature, these cycles are linked. In fact, whole ecosystems are interlinked. We depend on the monsoon rains to mix with the carbon dioxide in the air, to then mix with the silica of the Himalayas and then feed into all the rivers that originate in those glaciers, which are critical to 20% of the world’s carbon capture. Dams stop the sediment flow to the sea, which stops carbon capture, which leads to acidic rivers. Europe, recognising the importance of sediment transport, has decommissioned 500 dams. What we need is to understand landscapes and ecosystems from a deep time perspective because only then can one appreciate how things got there.

For example, there are wonderful fossils in the sandstones of Jodhpur of the earliest algae. But in India, we don’t seriously protect our fossil and geological heritage. There are no natural history museums which are accessible to the public, inviting people in and telling the stories that encourage people to think of the rocks and rivers and creatures across geological eras. In researching Indica, Pranay Lal found that palaeontologists and paleo artists in other parts of the world were much more willing to share images. Only when we know how precious the soil or rock is will we be invested in protecting it. This is the essence of what a good museum can do.

In his book Indica, one of the more striking sections which we discussed was the movement of Greater India to where it is now. We split from the supercontinent Gondwanaland through three volcanic events over roughly 100 million years, eventually docking with Eurasia. The subsequent rise of the Himalayas affected global climate and transformed the landscape across South Asia.

And in his next book, which he is presently writing, Pranay Lal will explore the connection between changes in climate and human history.

It will cover stories like the climatic reasons why Babar came to India and the creation of Bangladesh. How were historical events shaped by epidemics, famines and floods? For this we need to think at much grander scales. The book relies on existing paleoclimatic records, and other geologic, geographic resources. It looks at existing disciplines from a fresh perspective. And in these narratives how we do speak about farmers, tribal communities and nomads—the subaltern of Indian history? They were and are integral to the survival of all the grand civilizations and cities we talk about and Pranay Lal is trying to fill this gap in the histories that we talk about, formally or informally, where myths and history intersect.

In this episode, host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Heather Davis, Assistant Professor of Culture and Media at The New School in New York, whose work draws on feminist and queer theory to examine materiality, and contemporary art. Her most recent book Plastic Matter (2022) explores the transformation of geology, media, and bodies in light of plastic’s saturation.

The conversation began with Davis grappling with her own inheritance, as her grandfather worked at Dupont, to tell a story of a world which is now ‘plastic’. Through plastic’s presence, she invites us to a broader reevaluation of matter and material relations, especially under technocapitalism, where oil coats nearly every fabric of being. And here lies a deep paradox. We cannot escape plastic. Plastic is everywhere and while it is seen as disposable, it will not let go. It was designed as a protective barrier from the earth, and yet plastic cannot help but become part of it.

She discussed the relationship between plastic and plasticity, reaching back into the registers of slavery and the production of blackened bodies. Through Black feminist traditions, we understand that it was really about treating people as ultimately malleable—both superhuman and subhuman simultaneously.

Davis uses the term ‘synthetic universality’, which refers to the imprinting of plastic with a particular semiotic that is designed to be universal, placeless, and to deny its surroundings. She spoke of capitalism and profitability through the production of plastic, waste colonialism, and plastic pollution, all of which have been covered by so many writers, scientists, thinkers and activists.

And in relation to synthetic universality, what she was really trying to express was that plastic, as a material, lends itself to a certain kind of fantasy of containment. We can see this in all of the ways it’s used in the world. It’s often used as a kind of barrier or shield, from disease, and to have cleaner access to food and environments, despite some plastics like PVC having hazardous health consequences. As she writes in her book, “we fear being smothered in plastic, in its sticky, sleek surfaces, our bodies invaded by this foreign, alien material. Yet, we are also attracted to it, and especially to its promises of a clean, sanitary, sterilized life.” What we do know is that plastics are inescapable. They are reconfiguring our bodies, the atmosphere, biosphere, and hydrosphere, so it seems imperative to think with this material. Plastic matter speaks to this paradoxical relation: the ways in which plastics are impressed with an attempt to violently cleave the world in two, while also exposing how nature and culture can never be separated.

In the next part of the conversation, we spoke about how plastic haunts particular bodies and geographic regions, it is part and parcel of mass and digital media. Plastic is not just a logistical medium, but also a medium that communicates between the living and the dead, and the living and the so-called nonliving.

Plastic never quite leaves behind its origins in fossil fuels. Indeed, it is one of the primary ways that fossil fuels have intimately saturated the contemporary world, and has become central, not just to the material culture of twentieth-century life, but to mass media and human memory.

Plastic and its chemical legacies transmit unevenly and unexpectedly but are deliberately directed towards Black, Indigenous, and poor communities as an extension of synthetic universalism. Davis talks about the old Kodak factory in Rochester and chemical contamination and the Cancer Alley in Louisiana, which is ground central for petrochemical companies.

How they connect is in the multiple hauntings created by the aftermath of slavery and settler colonialism. Hauntings of both peoples who are no longer living, but who are reanimated in film, video, and audio recordings. This reanimation, the work of many artists and activists, allows the ancestors to speak again. Davis reminds us that while these mediums are saturated in fossil fuels, it is even more incumbent that we make our words and images count.

From synthetic universality and multiple hauntings, we moved to what is such an important section of the book, which focuses on queer kin and queer futurities. Plastic spreads synthetic universality, but it is also creating queer kin. Plastic has been increasingly known to contribute to non-reproductivity while birthing a future of strange new bacterial life forms, which have adapted to deal with these chemical environments. These organisms include those that are able to eat plastic and others that have formed some symbiotic relationships with plastic. These new bacteria and fungi can be understood as queer kin, produced from the matrix of chemical companies, capital accumulation, modernity, techno-utopianism, and the creativity of bacteria.

Plastic is asking us these questions, and some of them concern reproduction. If we learn from queer theory, we can see that there are really robust, intricate, and beautiful systems of kinship that go beyond the nuclear family. She writes in the book that we need to “find ways of embracing the inevitable emergence of multiple strange and beautiful life forms while holding chemical companies to account.”

As Davis writes, “these renewed relationships between humans and plastics may not have the same kinds of reciprocal care that are expected from other kinds of familial bonds… and in a sense, maybe they do exhibit care for us, by flourishing off our waste. Whether we, those inheritors of plastic, now or in the future will care for them, and how, is an open question.”

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.

Book Links:

Plastic Matter

Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada

Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Politics, Aesthetics, Environments, and Epistemologies

Instagram: @theoryxdaddy / Twitter/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.

But now, there is a growing recognition that life and the planet change each other continually. Through a field called Earth system science that takes a holistic view and studies the connections between the animate and the inanimate, we see this idea of the world being alive over and over again. From the opposition to the Gaia hypothesis, we now have scientists who now think of planets as either dead or alive and are interested in that distinction.

Our conversation followed the structure of the book, which is divided into three main sections—rock, water, and air—which mirror the planet’s main elemental components and spheres—the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, and the atmosphere.

We started with the Earth’s crust and the unexplored recesses of Earth’s rocky interior. Jabr spoke of microbial life in extreme places like the crust, inhabiting pores and fissures in the rock that are filled with water. These microbes are intimately involved with the planet’s geological processes. They carve vast underground caverns, can concentrate precious metals that eventually become ores or reservoirs of gold or silver and have even shaped continents.

This shaping of earth by living creatures plays out at all scales, from beavers and earthworms to titanic creatures. We really do need to put animals back at the centre of the planet’s nutrient cycles. In the oceans we have whales who, through their sheer size and movements, circulate oxygen, carbon and nutrients through the ocean’s layers. In the Pleistocene, the ancient grasslands in the northerly latitudes and the giant grazers—mammoths and bison—developed a symbiosis through great spans of geologic time. Elephants in the savannahs of Africa play the same role today. A single elephant footprint can fill up with about 50 gallons of water and become a vital pond for many creatures.

From the rocky crust, we dived into ocean. Cyanobacteria and other microbial ocean dwelling phytoplankton are Earth’s original photosynthesizers. Jabr spoke of how plankton, with their sheer diversity and beauty are at the heart of both the book and every part of the Earth system. Without plankton, the modern ocean ecosystem would collapse and affect carbon sequestration. Over time, they become part of the Earth’s bones. The dust in the dust storms from Africa to South America, fertilizing the Amazon rainforest, are made of ancient plankton from an ancient lake bed in Africa. All of this is threatened by ocean acidification and plastic pollution.

From the hydrosphere to the atmosphere, we discussed precipitation in the Amazon rainforests. Life does not just receive rain, it summons it. For Jabr, learning that the Amazon rainforest generates its own rain was the seed for the whole book. The forest spews invisible plumes of tiny biological particles—pollen grains, fungal spores and microbes—which are swept high into the atmosphere by the wind, accelerating the formation of clouds and seeding ice crystals within clouds.

In the latter part of our conversation, we focused on the planetary emergency we are living through, and how music, with its mystery and emergent, is an apt metaphor to understand our planet. Music helps us understand the co-evolved rhythms between the planet and life. We have thrown this giant living entity into severe imbalance. The earth is never going to be exactly be what it was before, but we can have a variation on a theme.

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).

In this episode, host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Aseem Shrivastava, 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.

We tend to live in our heads and out of an imagination which is expatriate. We look at the earth from the outside with some key events of the modern age playing into everyone’s perception and cognition. One is the planetisation of earth, where we treat the earth as just any other planet, an attractive lure, which is more schoolboy fantasy. With this earth alienation, as Hannah Arendt puts it, we now take the Archimedean point literally, where Archimedes said, “give me one firm spot to stand and I will move the Earth.” In the process we have forgotten the living earth to which we owe our existence and to which we belong, in exchange for being able to travel into a better place in the future.

“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.”

What if the earth is alive and we are merely manifestations of some deeper consciousness? Knowledge has been given way too much priority given the vast extent of human ignorance at the individual and collective species level.

Apart from planetisation, we have two other processes of cognitive modernity that relate to this. One is globalisation, including how we view the earth only in terms of its natural resources, and the other is objectification of the body. All this alienation from self, culture and nature leads to what Shrivastava calls the disturbed ecologies of modernity.

We spoke of ecosophy and how an ecosophical approach differs from modern day ecological approaches. Shrivastava introduced metaphysical approaches where the universe has a soul, communicating through a nonverbal language. Human beings do not have a monopoly on life; ecosophy in some ways is the wisdom not just of the earth but of the living earth, not that there is a clear distinction between the living and the dead, life is a continuum.

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 Modern Condition and the Wisdom of the Earth, Inter-Actions
Aseem Shrivastava at the Bhoomi International Conference

In this episode, host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Dr. Craig Walton, a planetary scientist based at ETH Zürich and the University of Cambridge. Craig’s work spans the origins, evolution, and distribution of life in the Universe. In this podcast, we chat about cosmic dust, the origins of life on Earth, and phosphorus—a key element for life, known as the ‘bringer of the light of day’, and its more fiendish nickname, “The Devil’s Element”.

In a paper published in Nature Astronomy in February 2024, Craig and his colleagues note that life on Earth probably originated from “reservoirs of bio-essential elements” such as phosphorus, sulfur, nitrogen, and carbon. But our earth rocks are relatively poor in reactive and soluble forms of these elements. So where did they come from? Apart from meteorites and asteroids, they could have also found their way to earth through cosmic dust, mineral grain aggregates of less than 3 mm derived from asteroids and comets. And glaciers provide settings capable of both locally concentrating cosmic dust and initiating closed-system aqueous prebiotic chemistry in cryoconite holes, self-sustaining puddles or lakes.

In a more poetic turn, we talked about meteorites, which has been termed by Elizabeth Grosz as the ultimate outsider, a cosmological imponderable that might burst through the perceived limits of the known. Craig noted that these materials speak at a deeper level about where we come from and how we should live. Potentially, all life derives from these cosmic gifts. We are really made of stardust. Everything about meteorites and their eviscerated metallurgic intensity speaks to their incredible durability. And it’s a bit like us, right? There’s an unbroken genetic line between all of us here today to one pond, probably on the earth, four and a half billion years ago. It’s just absolutely crazy.

We then moved on to Craig’s PhD thesis on phosphorus, the backbone of DNA and our metabolism. It cycles through ecosystems in a mostly closed loop as organisms live, die and decay. This remarkable element, crucial for global food production, allows our civilization to flourish. However, with its overuse, we now face the dangers of fertilizer run-off such as algal blooms which can lead to ocean anoxic events which have been correlated with mass extinctions. For four and a half billion years, life has recycled minerals and resources, but we humans take them for granted. We churn through these resources, dump them in the oceans and move on. It can’t end well.

We ended our conversation with how phosphorus could guide us to life elsewhere in the universe. So far, the results indicate that we might be alone. But it could also be that we are the first on the scene, an elder species, which means we have a vast responsibility to figure out what we’re doing to each other, to the planet, and potentially to the whole galaxy.

Dr. Walton focused on the bio-essential element phosphorus (P) during his PhD at the University of Cambridge, UK. His project examined phosphorus in meteorites, the origins of life, and Earth’s crust over time. Now, Dr. Walton aims to apply this interdisciplinary scope to the broader (multi-element!) architecture of multiple problems surrounding Earth’s birth and subsequent evolution.

Outside of research, Craig writes science fiction as well as science communication articles on a wide range of topics.

If you want to hear more from Craig about all of the above, you can follow him on Twitter/X @lithologuy for updates.

In this episode, host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Kathryn Yusoff, Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London. Her transdisciplinary research addresses the colonial afterlives of geology and race as a site of planetary transformation and social change. Her research is published in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) and Geologic Life: Inhuman intimacies and the Geophysics of Race (Duke University Press, 2024).

The conversation was centred around the science of geology and its epistemic and field practices. In her book Geologic Life, Yusoff notes that geology, which emerged in the late fifteenth through nineteenth centuries as a Eurocentric field of scientific inquiry, was a form of earth writing riven by systemic racism, complicit in the building of colonial worlds and the destruction of existing earths. The origin stories of earth and scripts of race are natal twins. Both mineralogical material and the subjugated person, such as on racial lines, were categorized as ‘inhuman’. She approaches this work not through a linear historical geography but through undergounds (as footnote, mine, appendix, subtending strata, and stolen suns) that reveal subterranean currents.

In the book, Yusoff speaks of the “plateau” of white geology and its perspective as “the Overseer”, “floating” above the gravity of an earth relation. Whereas, in the broken grounds of the “rifts”, racialized subjects were torn from geography as slaves or indentured labour, under what she terms as the pressure of “unjust gravities”. So, the plateau was the geophysical zone of life which extracted resources and labour from the “inhuman” of the rift, to power the colonial earth.

Part of the task is to bring this whiteness down to earth through counter-gravities such as insurgent geology, non-fossil histories and questioning stratification. Broadly, Black, Brown, and Indigenous subjects whose location is the rift have an intimacy with the earth that is unknown to the structural position of whiteness. This inhuman intimacy represents another kind of geo-power: the tactics of the earthbound. So, whether it be through growing food, or making music such as the Blues, or the earth as a revolutionary compatriot, there have always been persistent resistances against these racialized relations.

Yusoff spoke of the paradigm of the mine, which encapsulates this presumption of extraction. She spoke of how material value is stabilized in the present from skyscrapers to palm plantations, but both inhuman mineral “resources” and subjugated labouring people are relegated to the underground. The mine has also inspired carceral forms such as the prison complex.

For a more reparative geophysics, we need to embrace practices that don’t start from the division between bios and geos and actually understand the earth and minerals as part of a kin relationship with a more expansive understanding of how the human comes into being. The separation between biology and geology is purely a kind of historical effect of disciplines and disciplining practices. These changes are even more important in the Anthropocene, where we have what she terms as a “white man’s overburden” with tech bros or predominantly White Western men deciding the future of Earth. Geobiology is a relational affair, and we need to see geology as a praxis of struggle and earth as iterative and archiving of those struggles.

Yusoff’s research focuses on the Inhumanities, an ongoing call for epistemic and pedagogical change that argues the need to recentre who and what the humanities has chosen to overlook in its stories of the earth. She is also part of Planetary Portals, a collective engaged in creative responses to the epistemic violence of coloniality and its present(s) that requires representational repair and environmental reparation. She is recipient of the 2022 Association of American Geography Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity and will be representing the British Pavillion at the Venice Architectural Biennale 2025.

In this episode, host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Dr. Ambika Aiyadurai, an anthropologist studying wildlife conservation with an interest in human-animal relations and community-based conservation. Her monograph Tigers are our Brothers: Anthropology of Wildlife Conservation in Northeast India was published in 2021. She has written extensively on issues of caste and indigeneity in the environmental sciences and academia in India. Ambika completed a PhD thesis in Anthropology from the National University of Singapore in 2016, and currently teaches at IIT, Gandhinagar in India.

They spoke of how social hierarchies impact what ‘earth’ means to its various inhabitants. For some a safe haven, for others a dangerous, hostile place. In the Indian context, this is evidenced by the deliberate invisibility of caste in environmental studies and in Indian academia. The exploitation of nature and the perpetuation of caste hierarchies are inextricably linked, with purity and pollution playing significant roles in determining access and exclusion. The lives and livelihoods of people of marginalised communities are often entwined—in a daily connection or a daily struggle—with the fabric of nature itself. Caste and class determine access to land, water, forest, pasture land.

The ‘environment’ is conceptualised as apolitical and asocial, like a kind of a local terra nullius. The social is absent from environmental studies and discourse. Nature is seen as separate from, and devoid of, humans. Indigenous worldviews, like that of the Mishmi in Arunachal Pradesh, where Ambika has worked, challenge this dichotomy, seeing instead a continuum of human, non-human, and spirit worlds. However, for a long time, wildlife conservation research and practice have ignored these communities and their knowledge.

The conservation model of ‘protected areas’ is offshoot of the dominant ‘development’ practices. The state and scientists view the forest as a place to be measured and mapped, assigning it economic value. Both protected areas and infrastructure like dams and highways cut through geographies inhabited by indigenous peoples, making them ecological refugees. The same notions of purity and pollution lead to the idea that people need to be evicted in order to conserve, a dark history of our national parks in our country.

In finding answers to how we can approach repair and reparation in these academic and other conflict zones, Ambika speaks about the need to shift power structures, change our classrooms, to push for diversity among students, teachers and practitioners, to revamp our syllabi and be active in frontline activism.

Dr. Ambika Aiyadurai is trained in natural and social sciences with masters’ degrees in Wildlife Sciences from Wildlife Institute of India and Anthropology, Environment and Development from University College London funded by Ford Foundation. In 2017, she was awarded the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) Transregional Research Junior Scholar Fellowship. She has two co-edited volumes, Ecological Entanglements: Affect, Embodiment and Ethics of Care (2023) and More Than Just Footnotes: Field Assistants in Wildlife Research and Conservation (2023). She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IITGN.

You can find more about her work leading the Environmental and Humanities research group on their website here and on the Centre for Sustainable Development website.

We start Season 4 of The Subverse, which will focus on “Earth”, with a conversation with David George Haskell, a writer and biologist. We focus on his latest book, Sounds Wild and Broken (2022), which explores the story of sound on Earth. It was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction and the PEN E. O Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. In it, David writes about how, three and a half billion years ago, sunlight found a new path to sound: life.

The wonders of Earth’s living voices emerged after hundreds of millions of years of evolution that unfolded in communicative silence. From the ancient cricket Permostridulus which bears the earliest known sound-making structure, a ridge on its wing, this sonic creativity was spurred on by some amazing marvels, anatomical and otherwise. They range from insect wings and flowering plants to ciliary hair and even milk.

Now, both land and water are far from silent; fish drum and twang, whales sing, birds chirp and wings buzz. The sonic diversity of the world is rooted in the divergent physical worlds and social lives of animals and the happenstances of history. Every species has a logic, a grammar, to its sound making. And still, the process of hearing is one of unity at the cellular level. Sound also travels across oceans, creating a sort of global unity in sonic communication.

Sound is ephemeral, instantly dissipating, and yet can be older than stone. So, in listening to animal voices around us, we are taken back into deep time and legacies of sonic geology. But it is also a ledger of loss. Our species is both an apogee of sonic creativity and the great destroyer of the world’s acoustic riches. As we get noisier, we diminish sonic soundscapes, bequeathing the future an impoverished sensory world. This sensory crisis is an important measure of the environmental crisis, and a powerful untapped tool for environmental justice.

How do we create a poetics and politics of listening? We tend to think of experiences of beauty and of creativity as somehow separate from politics and ethics, but Haskell points out that they are deeply intertwined. We are embodied sensory beings. As a species, we need to gather and celebrate the voices of non-human beings.

Technological advances have allowed us to record these soundscapes to check on the health of ecosystems. But when we get too reliant on technology, we ignore the wisdom of the people who have lived in the forest for centuries and don’t need gadgets to gauge the health of the forest, or to protect it.

David spoke of the generative capacity of sound which comes from life and interconnection. He closed with an invitation to take a few minutes of each day and listen, without judgement or expectation, and let sound do its work.

David George Haskell is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, a Guggenheim Fellow, and William R. Kenan Jr. Professor at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN, USA. His previous books, The Forest Unseen and The Songs of Trees, are acclaimed for their integration of science, poetry, and rich attention to the living world. He

To learn more about his work, you can visit his website here.
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