Pretty Heady Stuff

This podcast features interviews with a variety of theorists, artists and activists from across the globe. It's guided by the search for radical solutions to crises that are inherent to colonial capitalism. To this end, I hope to keep facilitating conversations that bring together perspectives on the liberatory and transformative power of care, in particular.

Pretty Heady Stuff is a news podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 141 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Unknown Host hosts Pretty Heady Stuff, a news show with 141 episodes published.

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  Pretty Heady Stuff

  Alexis Shotwell urges us to reconnect, even if "we're irritating and we hurt each other"

  Aug 20, 202659 min

  I was wowed by this book's wisdom about the ways that cynicism, anger and protective individualism get dumped into our minds and narrow our emotional range. Talking about the differences between "complicity" and "implication" might feel frivolous or semantic as the horrors persist, but Liberation is Other People is so attuned to the wicked problems we face, and on so many registers, that its engagement with the question of what we're willing to experiment with in order to save the future feels incredibly urgent and surprisingly hopeful, since its author thinks our collaborative abilities are enough to unlock untold sources of community love, public will, imagination and problem solving. If we finally get serious and create bigger, weirder, more chameleonic containers for our climate feelings, Shotwell's gambit is that this burgeoning social infrastructure could not only fight climate despair, it could end up being a key part of how we ultimately create radically different, more durable solutions and more liveable futures together. Surprise the doomsayers! Liberation is Other People is out November 10th from University of Minnesota Press. Pre-order from @uminnpress: https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517921651/liberation-is-other-people/ #leftbooks #academicbooks #revolutionarybooks #ursulaleguin #affect #politics #community #mutualaid #climatefeelings #ecoanxiety #collectivity #solidarity #anticapitalism #climatedevastation #organizing #anarchism #isolation #power #tactics #strategy

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  Pretty Heady Stuff

  Matt Huber incites us against the capitalist ruling class to help fight inequality & global heating

  Aug 10, 202658 min

  In his recent writing, political theorist Matt Huber has been making the point that climate action is needlessly polarizing, and that this polarization can be corrected by abandoning the sorts of virtue signaling and PR pomp and circumstance that sometimes comes with climate communication. In fact, he says in his Jacobin article that it's "not clear why focusing on the direct material concerns of affordability is not enough on its own and why climate must be linked at all." In the midst of economic warfare and global military imperialism, the crises that we face do demand some form of solidarity. Huber suggests that we likely need to let go of the idea that climate itself, fear of ecological collapse, will rally constituencies to fight for a post-profit society. He writes: "All of us can agree the climate situation is bad and getting worse. After a sustained period of decline, US emissions increased in 2025. The second Trump administration has rolled back the Inflation Reduction Act and is using state power to keep uneconomical coal plants open and deregulate oil and gas production. No amount of knowledge of science or moral concern about our children will, on its own, reverse this. Given the civilizational scale of the transformation required, replacing an entire global infrastructure system that still depends on fossil fuel for 80 percent of its needs, we need large-scale political power." Read the full article at https://jacobin.com/2026/05/climate-politics-working-class-dealignment

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  Pretty Heady Stuff

  Nina Newington embraces the uncertainty of organizing to protect the natural world

  Aug 4, 202656 min

  Nina Newington is a forest protector, organizer and award-winning author. Join us for a conversation about the connections and solidarities that build strength against extractive projects and the exploitation of nature for profit. Originally from the UK, Newington has lived in many countries before immigrating to Canada. In Nova Scotia, her environmental activism began with the model of Extinction Rebellion, with the use of direct action to prevent logging and preserve the land, the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaw people. During the conversation, Newington will share some of the insights she has gained from organizing and describe the specific nature of the struggle for forest protection in Nova Scotia. At a time when it is so easy to succumb to cynicism and defeatism, the trajectory that takes us toward intersectional connection and bigger, more expansive solidarities feels like an altogether preferable one. Learn more about Nina Newington at https://ninanewington.com

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  Pretty Heady Stuff

  Chris Benjamin and Kate Brooks thoughts on how to decarbonize our lives and build a stable, equitable world

  Aug 4, 20261h 22m

  Kate Brooks works as the EAC's Community Climate Navigator, collaborating with HalifACT and other community groups to create programs supporting climate action. More recently, she joined the Food Team to assist in developing the Halifax Food Council's website. Kate comes from a public library and adult education background and enjoys learning with and from community groups in the Halifax Regional Municipality. She also ran a subsistence farm in the Cape Breton hills for over 20 years and was involved in rural food system work (farmers' markets, school gardens, and school garden entrepreneurship). She believes that tackling the climate crisis will involve learning better ways of communicating, working with and supporting one another — and she's glad to be contributing to climate action through her work on the Food and Operations Teams. Chris is a communications professional and experienced environmental campaigner with two decades of experience. He was the Sustainable City columnist for The Coast for number of years and has also authored four books. He has worked at ENGOs in Toronto and Halifax. His work has had a strong educational and community-building components, including delivering online and in-person workshops that have varied from training aspiring writers to informing grade-school children and senior citizens about the history and ongoing legacy of residential schools. He lives in Halifax with his partner, two children and an 80-pound lapdog. Follow the Ecology Action Centre's critical work and donate at https://ecologyaction.ca/

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  Pretty Heady Stuff

  Sadie Beaton rages against the extractive status quo and raves about resurgent geography

  Aug 4, 20261h 21m

  Sadie Beaton grew up in rural Nova Scotia where she could see a working wharf from her bedroom window and enjoyed countless hours exploring the rugged shorelines and scrubby Acadian forest. She eventually moved to Halifax where she got a B.A. in English from Kings College and a Masters in Resource and Environmental Management from Dalhousie University. In her recent essay "It Flows/Runs Wildly/Crazily: Unravelling Settler Legacies on Stolen Mi’kmaq Land," Beaton explores the intertwining histories that formed her identity and the relationships of complicity that obtain between her own story and the histories of Mi'kma'ki that entangle us in systems of oppression, but also present us with alternatives to the predictable slow violence of fossilized colonialism.Read Beaton's "It Flows/Runs Wildly/Crazily" at https://bit.ly/3STov6h

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