Interviews 10 — The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast

March 08, 2022

DR. G. SAMANTHA ROSENTHAL

March 08, 2022/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Beila Ungar

Author of Living Queer History · Assoc. Professor of History, Roanoke College
Co-founder of the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project

One of the things I really tried to get across in Living Queer History, and particularly in my chapter called “The Whiteness of Queerness” is to first make clear that LGBTQ histories have long been informed by white supremacy. It's kind of the unspoken thing that people don't want to talk about. It’s true all over the country. And so what I’ve started to think about is that often LGBTQ spaces are just unthinkingly white because there's a racial blindness, a racial myopia where folks are not thinking about the fact of how racial dominance is playing into that space. Or how racial dominance is playing into the way we tell stories about LGBTQ belonging.

February 28, 2022

SHINNECOCK INDIAN NATION

February 28, 2022/ Interviewed by Mia Funk

We're all part of a web like a dreamcatcher. Everybody knows a dreamcatcher and whatever you do that’s wrong will eventually come back and affect you because we’re all connected.

February 17, 2022

MERLIN SHELDRAKE

February 17, 2022/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Cooper Berkoff

Biologist & Bestselling Author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, Winnger of the Wainwright Prize 2021.

Humans have been partnering with fungi for an unknowably long time, no doubt for longer than we’ve been humans. Whether as foods, eating mushrooms, as medicines, dosing ourselves with moulds and other mushrooms that might help, parasites or others helpers with infection, mushrooms as tinder or ways to carry a spark, this very important thing that humans needed to do for a very long time, and as agents of fermentation, as in yeasts creating alcohol. So humans have partnered with fungi to solve all sorts of problems and so fungi have found themselves enveloped within human societies and cultures for a long time.

February 17, 2022

PROF. BAYYINAH BELLO

February 17, 2022/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Yesenia Olmos

Founder of Fondasyon Felicitee
Afrodescendant Ourstorian, Educator, Writer & Humanitarian

It’s true. In Haiti, to a large degree more women were involved in the Revolution, in the war, in the fighting for the nation for the very simple reason that women had more opportunities. After a certain time, we became invisible. Once you’re in your 60’s, you are missing a few front teeth, in fact, some of the women used to take a stone and break up their front teeth so that they wouldn’t be noticed anymore. “That’s just an old lady with no front teeth. Okay, she goes about her business, nobody looks at her. She can do nothing.” And those were the fighters–the greatest fighters of our revolution.

January 17, 2022

MARY EDNA FRASER & ORRIN H. PILKEY

January 17, 2022/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Panisara Jaijongkit

Environmental Artist Mary Edna Fraser & Prof. Emeritus Orrin H. Pilkey
Co-authors of A Celebration of the World’s Barrier Islands & Global Climate Change: A Primer

I think any time we are closer to the earth, we can feel the struggles of other human beings as well. –Mary Edna Fraser

All over the world, we’re seeing because of climate change we’re seeing vast changes affecting all aspects of society. That’s something that we’ve not been able to face politically. We need to do that. – Orrin H. Pilkey

January 08, 2022

GAIA VINCE

January 08, 2022/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Shannon Park

Science Writer, Broadcaster & Author
Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty & Time · Adventures in the Anthropocene

The good thing about our species is that we create our own environment. What we’ve been doing so far is creating an environment where we’re much more successful. We live a lot longer, we’re much healthier than we have been in the past. There are many, many more of us, so we’re very successful as a species and that’s been at the expense of other ecosystems, but what’s happened is we are now dominating the planet to a dangerous degree, but we are also self-aware. We’re capable of understanding that.

January 07, 2022

IAN BURUMA

January 07, 2022/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Lexi Kayser

Public Intellectual & Erasmus Prize-Winning Author
The Churchill Complex, Murder in Amsterdam, A Tokyo Romance…

I have a strong feeling that at the moment, especially in the United States, people are much more interested in the culture and backgrounds of minorities than they are in the cultures where those minorities originally came from. I think it’s a sign of people drawing inwards more and more. That goes for the Right Wing populists and White Supremacists just as much. They’re also drawing the wagons around what they see as their identity, and I think that’s exactly not the way to go…I can only emphasize that in terms of education is that everything should be fostered to open people’s minds. Open minds to the past, to other cultures and not to have minds closed by limiting ourselves more and more to the circumstances of our birth.