Episode 300 —

A Seven Part Series

Bear with me on this.

Part One: Mother Earth, In Spite Of Everything

I wanted to do something different, original, for this episode, this milestone of 300. As you will hear in my introduction, I will be releasing seven parts for this, covering numerous themes that I've explored over the past 100 episodes of Last Born In The Wilderness.

This first part is quite substantial, in and of itself. Weaving together fifteen carefully selected interviews, I present a narrative that conveys one of the most persistent themes of my work: ecological catastrophe, climatological disruption, near-term extinction, ruptures in the life-destroying industrial model, and humanity’s capacity to reclaim our regenerative role—in spite of the outcome.

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Part Two: Last Born In Brazil

From December 2019 to February 2020, I was in Brazil. Without full comprehension, I (we) stood on the edge of a pandemic. The global scope of the crisis had yet to be fully felt and realized. Before "normal" ended. Before lockdowns, mask burnings, social isolation, uprising—I was in Brazil, with its complexities, beauties, intensities, realities.

In collaboration with Brazilian political theorist and journalist Mirna Wabi-Sabi, five interviews were conducted during my time there: two radical organizers (one an infamous political prisoner) of the More Love, Less Capital (Mais Amor, Menos Capital) event; a scholar, historian, and daughter of the African diasporic spiritual tradition Candomblé; a renowned photojournalist and activist documenting Indigenous resistance; a linguist and anthropologist conducting field work in Amazonia, working to preserve the dying languages of Indigenous communities.

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Part Three: Plague Days, Fertile Grounds

The fertile grounds that bred a novel, deadly coronavirus and the misinformation that accompanied its spread is our subject. Over the last year-and-a-half since COVID spilled over, and more specifically, when our collective reaction to it began to reshape every aspect of our lives, I conducted numerous interviews to make sense of this thing.

Disruptions in the very fragile (and simultaneously resilient) global economic system, mass death, overburdened healthcare workers, the widespread proliferation of conspiracy theories, fascistic outbursts, mutual aid networks, and the uncomfortable questions that arise, characterize this audio narrative I’ve cobbled together for your listening pleasure.

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Part Four: Righteous Rage, Stochastic Terror

In 2020, a pandemic began to course its way through the collective body, and the dead began to pile up. Tens of millions of U.S. citizens lost their jobs, and the capitalist system shuttered. As it turns out, these are the perfect conditions for revolt.

On May 25th, George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer in the streets of Minneapolis. Everyone saw the video, and it was undeniable. We witnessed something as old as this country itself play out, again. Riots broke out, but this time, the righteous rage persisted and spread.

Each of these nine interviews, interwoven with commentary, documents this time of expansive unrest and stochastic terror.

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Part Five: Fascistic Flashpoints, Gazing Into The Void

Let us gaze into the void at the heart of this country.

What happened on January 6th was neither the beginning, nor the endpoint, of the fascist trajectory this nation has been lurching headlong toward. It was a flashpoint.

The events that led to this explosion of violence did not happen in a vacuum. Donald Trump’s rise to the highest political office in the land was neither an anomaly nor an accident. Decades of neoliberal decay, widespread white anxiety, and the inherent spiritual rot at the core of this settler-colonial project has almost guaranteed the growth of a virulent fascism in our time of mounting crises.

This compilation of ten interviews, conducted over the past two years, is an attempt to track the various forces that led to the MAGA riot at the Capitol. Weaving together interviews that track the decline of the U.S. empire, the ramping up of the sadistic treatment and dehumanization of undocumented immigrants along the border, the metaphysical landscape of the “post-modern” age we reside in, and liberal democracy’s historic failure to counter the fascist creep, this audio compilation attempts to make sense of the dangerous moment we find ourselves in, and where this trend ultimately leads.

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Part Six: Hungry Ghosts, Unraveling Colonial Bodies

We are haunted beings. Unintegrated traumas, like ghosts, possess us, poison us — until they don’t.

Colonization, rupturous, severs the body from its relations, from ancestors and earth. It flattens the diversity of human experience, relying on the multifaceted dynamics of intergenerational trauma to replicate itself, in perpetuity. Like ghosts, these traumas haunt us, hijack us. The line between the abuser and the abused is blurred, trauma compounds, cutting in all directions.

Decolonization is an ongoing counter-process to this. Naming these ghostly bodies, making them visible, speaking to them, opens up revolutionary space for healing, reforging relation to all beings, corporeal and non-corporeal alike.

This compilation of eleven interviews pulls on the threads of these subjects, navigating the contours of developmental psychology, ancestral trauma, whiteness, depression and shame, gender and masculinity.

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Part Seven: Transitions, Death, The Ruptures Of Life In Between

Finally, we have reached the end—in more ways than one.

This long series has been a labor of love. It took too long to produce, but ultimately, preparing and releasing each of these parts has been a gratifying, and even cathartic, experience. This last part, fittingly, is a meditation on endings, transitions, the death of things. And, most importantly, love—the love that accompanies all of it.

We are meeting a time of many endings. The overly-complex systems that govern modern human life are meeting their inevitable demise. Centuries of human industrial activity has thrown the living systems of the Earth into disarray, and mass extinction ensues. The global climate is beyond repair, with enough heat baked into the system to guarantee several degrees of warming over the next several decades and centuries—a fact that cannot be contested. The question of human extinction is less a matter of "if" but more a matter of "when." If what is happening is happening, how, then, shall we live?

This part seven is not meant to be overly bleak, but instead, sober and life-affirming. Weaved together with commentary, these six interviews reflect on the nature of the crises we are all living through right now, from the macro scale of this predicament to the deeply personal. And truly, what it all comes back down to, simply, is love—to love and to be loved in the face of our collective death, with all the grief and despair that accompanies it.

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The Work —

“A podcast about death, dying, and the ruptures of life in between.”

My name is Patrick Farnsworth. I’m a long-form interviewer, occasional writer, and host of Last Born In The Wilderness, a podcast I’ve produced for the better part of a decade. I’m also a co-host of Attack & Dethrone GodCast, and the author of We Live In The Orbit Of Beings Greater Than Us, a compilation of close to thirty interviews originally aired on Last Born and interlaced with commentary, published through Gods & Radicals Press.

My work explores a diverse set of topics through an overarching framework that is undeniably collapse-aware. I grew up in occupied Shoshone-Bannock territory (Southern Idaho) and became politicized in my teenage years, beginning with a personal exploration into the roots of United States imperialism, capitalism, settler-colonialism, and white supremacy. Inevitably, my focus turned toward the intersecting crises of catastrophic climate disruption and global ecological collapse—the “Anthropocene.” In attempting to further understand these subjects, I began to produce Last Born In The Wilderness, a podcast featuring discussions with a wide variety of individuals exploring these difficult subjects in their own respective fields. I share these interviews with anyone curious to listen.

With that said, my political/spiritual philosophy is explicitly anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, ecologically-centered, and animist. We are facing the potential extinction of our species. Building solidarity and doing the sacred work, in spite of the inevitable, is still worth it. The alternative is too horrifying to consider.

If you are able and willing, consider supporting my work through a one-time donation through PayPal or Venmo. Also, you can sustain my work on a monthly or yearly basis through my Patreon page, which is my main source of income at this time. Patrons of my work gain early access to all my interviews before they’re released publicly, and access to some exclusive content as well.

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