Audra Mitchell: Rethinking conservation, biodiversity, and extinction (ep418)

Written By kamea chayne
“Some of the work that communities are doing to protect the land and themselves don’t always look like conservation... It could be preserving language, simply surviving, [or] refusing to be sent away from their homes.”
— Audra Mitchell

What does it mean to recognize the limitations of “biodiversity” as a gauge of planetary wellbeing? How do we make sense of the heads of big corporations like Shell being major patrons of the largest conservation organizations? And how might a politics of disability justice shape diverse futures beyond an exclusive framework of Western-Scientific conservation?

In this episode, we converse with scholar and anti-oppression activist Audra Mitchell on how intersecting forms of systemic violence work to extract, eliminate, and conceal cultural and ecological plurality—and how the survival, preservation, and organization of oppressed and marginalized communities alone resist such violence.

 

About our guest:

Audra Mitchell (she/her or they/them) is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Political Ecology at the Balsillie School of International Affairs/Wilfrid Laurier University, on the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples. Her/their work confronts how intersecting forms of structural violence (colonialism, racism, ableism, anthropocentrism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy and eugenics) shape ecosystems on a global scale, including through patterns of extinction, extraction and pollution. Audra is also engaged in multi-media collaborative work to challenge oppressive futurisms and to co-compose alternative worlds in which plural forms of thriving are possible. A multiply-disabled person, Audra is also working to bring crip, disability justice and anti-ableist approaches into ecological futuring practices.

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transcript

Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Audra Mitchell:

One of the things that I find really troubling about extinction is that it has become such a household term that it's easy to forget its roots, particularly in colonization.

One of the best books that I've read about this is called Against Extinction by Bill Adams, which is actually about the conservation industry, but is very critical about its rootedness within various forms of British and other European colonial traditions particularly within the American and Canadian states and their settler colonial practices of expansion. The work of Dorceta Taylor, I think, is also really instructive in learning about this, how national parks and other areas that are understood as being real mainstays of conservation are very much about ensuring the access and privilege to natural spaces or what's often thought of as wildlife, to white people, to abled people, and particularly through the expulsion of the people who have co-created those ecosystems over time. So there's that one that kind of very much land-based and land-intensive approach to conservation which has become dominant over the last hundred or so years. It's very much rooted in settler colonial processes and increasingly in capitalist processes and the accumulation of capital.

This is where we see things like biodiversity banking or financial approaches to conservation that are rooted on the idea that all values or all essentially, you know, existence values of any other life forms can be marked within the capitalist system and are essentially subjects for speculation and investment in themselves. So I think it's really important when we think about a term like biodiversity, which has become since the late 1980s, really the thing that most people in the Northern world anyway think about when we're discussing conservation is that it emerged in the same time and place as the Washington consensus, as all of these ideas about neoliberalism and the various forms of globalized capitalism that have so shaped contemporary conditions, right? So it's part of those systems.

Now, I want to be very clear that in no way would I try to undermine or criticize the work of people who are using these structures that have been accumulated around conservation or around biodiversity to try to protect their own ecosystems or their own cultural systems. For instance, a lot of indigenous groups around the world engage quite brilliantly with these systems in order to make sure that their own cultures and traditions survive and to make sure that they are understood as of those ecosystems. So it's not to say that anything that's to do with conservation or biodiversity is inherently bad, but it does have this very, very deep entrenchment within capitalism and colonialism.

And that's not even to mention what's called ex situ conservation, which is generally speaking related to genetics, whether it's the harvesting of seeds or genetic materials, often their privatization and things like seed banks or even if its states that are running seed and gene banks, there's still this understanding that they become the property of particular people or of particular sources of power and that they're brought out of and really taken out of that continuity in which they have come to be within ecosystems. So I think it's really important to keep that in mind when we think about conservation. There are alternatives to conservation. Taking care of country, of water, whatever it might be to a particular community that aren't reducible to this very Eurocentric idea of conservation or biodiversity.

Kamea Chayne: There's so much here. And yeah, a lot of people in the field of conservation, I think, are there and show up with positive shared values of truly wanting to protect our planet and their diverse ecosystems and communities and trying to see how they can contribute. So, I also definitely want to honor that as we go deeper into these critiques.

You share that Western conservation approaches not only ignore but also magnify powerful forms of structural violence, meaning that they might not actually be so effective with their stated intentions and can even contribute to the destruction of unique life forms and communities of our planet, which might go against their initial values and intentions. And crucially also, you point out that the heads of corporations like Shell or Big Pharma have been significant patrons of the major conservation organizations. So how do we make sense of this and what do you feel is most pertinent to share in terms of the relationship between conservation and broader structures of power?

Audra Mitchell: I think it goes back to, as I was saying, the fact that conservation and biodiversity has, since its inception within these terms, at least within the Eurocentric tradition, been understood as a site of investment, as a site of profit making. So for me, the fact that the people associated with major companies, people who have held C-suite level jobs within extractive organizations, this isn't actually any kind of deviation from the history of this project of conservation. It's actually very much in line with its aims. And again, where you see people who are members of European royalty playing major roles, this has always been the thrust of mainstream conservation.

One of the big shifts that I have been working with and trying to bring about is the idea of divesting from that kind of conservation. You mentioned before a lot of the folks who genuinely really do want to protect the planet. So I think some of the energy that those folks, sometimes the exact same individuals are bringing towards movements to divest from organizations that are involved in climate damaging activities, whether that's their own pension systems or whether it's banks or whether it's extractive corporations. I think it's important to bring that same attitude towards conservation projects. And part of this is, I think, being very critical about this notion of biodiversity.

So one of the things that I try to do in the book Revenant Ecologies is to introduce what I'm very much seeing this as a kind of a holding term. Its not to replace biodiversity or to certainly not to impose it over anyone else's terminology, but I have this concept of bioplurality. And this comes from really spending a lot of time with communities specifically indigenous communities where I live Anishinaabe Haudenosaunee communities and also within Australia and I'd like to especially thank the members of the Yolngu community in Bawaka who have really generously shared their worldviews with me.

There’s this notion that difference is not a matter of internal sameness and external difference, right? The difference is about co-constitution. This always gets a little abstract when I try to talk about it because I, coming from a Eurocentric system, I'm not all that articulate in talking about this way of thinking. But it's this idea that difference itself is not something that can be separated or atomized, right? And I think within the concepts of biodiversity that are dominant there's this desire to not only protect difference, but to produce difference as something that is essentially fungible in the same way that currency is, right? So to understand species as almost like financial instruments, and to understand life forms themselves or individual beings almost as one would dollars or cents or any other currency, right? So the idea that they are fundamentally interchangeable. Whereas the notion of bio-plurality—or as I say, this placeholder term that takes so many forms depending on the culture and the place—is the idea that all differences differences co-constitutes.

You can't just replace what has been destroyed. When there's damage to an ecosystem, there needs to be a process of healing, but also you can never completely reconstitute that system as it was.

So when we see projects around things like restoration or no net loss, this is all operating within that idea that you can destroy an ecosystem and then just put back something similar enough. If we take that to the global scale, these ideas of biodiversity banking, this is the idea that you can take a part of the world and it's usually areas located global south and ask people to not use their land in particular ways and often people who have been co-creating those ecosystems for thousands of years. The idea here is that by asking people to not use the land that it would somehow offset destruction that's taking place somewhere else in the world. So from a biodiversity perspective in many ways this seems to check out on the capitalist balance sheet you have destruction here and you have some kind of saving here which is directly related to capitalist accumulation.

But when you look at it from the perspective of bio-plurality, it's the destruction of unique systems that can never emerge quite as they were again. And so for me, the important takeaway is that this is violence. This isn't just the destruction of what Eurocentric systems might see as property. This is violence against unique relationships that can never be again as they were. And this is not to, I mean, I should mention that half of this book in particular is about the return and regeneration of worlds. But I think when we're thinking about the harms that paradigms like conservation and biodiversity can do, it's really just being aware that they're homogenizing. It's the great irony, I think, that they're in some ways obsessed with difference and with preserving certain kinds of difference, but only by transforming it into a kind of difference that's legible within their own systems. So that takes violence and it's part of what I see as a bigger eliminative and assimilative project.

Kamea Chayne: There's so much that you just shared here that I really need to sit with for longer. But I guess just to clarify and perhaps lean into this a little more, I'm thinking about how the concept of biodiversity kind of centers on the noun of a fixed snapshot in time in terms of what is as the way to define and measure our quote unquote planetary well-being. Is that part of the contention here, that there are alternate maybe less quantifiable ways to gauge the state of our collective and planetary well-being such as active processes, on relationships, on power, access, control, stewardship, and sovereignty and so forth? Does this feel aligned with the heart of this critique?

Audra Mitchell: Absolutely. I think one of the biggest problems with the mainstream approaches to conservation and biodiversity and even to that understanding, as you say, it's a noun-based understanding. And this is one of the really resonant teachings that a lot of folks I've worked with over the years have learned from folks like Robin Wall Kimmerer, other Anishinaabe folks who are writing about their noun or their verb-based languages, right? There's a tendency within the Eurocentric tradition to want to solidify things into nouns or into objects that can be, as I said, made into commodities or made fungible or exploited in various ways.

One of the things that I'm interested in is the movements, the pluralizations that happen across these worlds that sustain them but also allow them to transform.

And one of the elements of racial colonization has always been the attempt to arrest certain forms of being to constrict the ways they move or not move. And again, I mentioned not moving there, this is something that I think disability justice theorists are talking a lot about in ways that are really fruitful for thinking about global politics, is that it's important not to in some ways kind of hold up movement as the key, right, because there are, when we're thinking about life forms that are being violence by mainstream political and economic systems, many of them are facing this challenge to survival because movement and motility is different for them or isn't as easily accomplished for them as it might be for other life forms, including different human groups. So I think the emphasis here would be on various kinds of movements, various kinds of transformations of becoming, slow and fast within all kinds of different temporal registers. I think what might be most relevant here getting away from the more theoretical side of it and towards the more activist or community organization is to just be aware of how much conservation and biodiversity resist transformations of themselves or within themselves.

One of the things that I do get into in the book and some of the other work I've been doing is the policing element of conservation. There's been some really excellent work over the years on the militarization, especially in the southern sub-Saharan Africa. There's well-entrenched examples of militarized and very heavily policed essentially conservation areas, whether they're run by governments or whether they're policed by essentially mercenary groups. But even in contexts such as here in Turtle Island, North America, the policing of access to these systems, the punishment especially for indigenous peoples or land-based peoples for “breaking the laws” that have been imposed on their land and from which many of them have been expelled, this is all to me an attempt to resist the movement and transformation of spaces.

So it's important I think to be clear that none of this is to deny the harms of extinction or to say, oh well, it's all changed, so it's all fine, right?

There's a big difference between the changes that are brought about through eliminative forms of violence and domination and the struggles that are taking place to try to transform those very systems.

And so I think my main point here is that conservation and many of the efforts to protect biodiversity are cracking down on the latter. They're trying to stop those mobilizations and those transformations in the name of protecting a kind of stasis that really only serves the interests of those groups that are currently in power.

Kamea Chayne: And on this front, something that I've been thinking about is how people often critique the lack of diversity historically to the present that there is in the field of conservation and might call for more diversity and inclusion in the field as a response. And I've wondered whether this lack of diversity is to be attributed to unjust systemic barriers, such as informal education or funding, more broadly speaking, or possibly because the concept of conservation focused on biodiversity itself is something that does not necessarily resonate with other biocultural approaches to caring for lands and waters and living communities, such as causes of indigenous sovereignty or community-based politics targeted at the decentralization of power. I mean, in reality, it's probably a mixture of all of the above, but I wonder what else you might have to add or say on this.

Audra Mitchell: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right about all of those things. Although I think from my perspective, I'm less concerned, and this is me personally, I think there's a lot of good reasons for folks to enter this work of conservation and biodiversity protection. And in many ways, I think there are places where more traditional or more emergent ways of protecting land can cross over with the values of biodiversity. But I don't think it should be assumed that that's the case.

But for me, I'm less concerned with the exclusive elements of it than I am with the destruction or denial that there are alternatives to conservation. So I think there's been some really wonderful work about indigenous forms of conservation, just one that springs to mind. I was recently reading Jessica Hernandez's Fresh Banana Leaves and one of the things that she brings out in this critique is that you know the knowledge that is brought forward as being relevant to conservationists sometimes doesn't even track. It's not just that it's being expropriated, which it is, or appropriated, it's not just that it's being instrumentalized often in ways that end up harming indigenous communities by, for instance, undermining their sovereignty or resulting in further land grabbing, but also that it's sometimes very much at odds with the social cultural systems or even something I write about in this book as well is that in many communities there are political agreements with particular, could be animal life forms, plant life forms or entire ecosystems. And often the imposition of what is essentially a colonial capitalist and often racialized legal system automatically undermines that. And so that's part of, you know, I think what you were getting at before, where we were talking about how conservation can work against what its stated aims are.

That makes perfect sense if we understand that each ecosystem exists within a social, cultural, and political framework where the integrity of the ecosystem is related to those relationships, those laws. So when another set of laws or relationships is brought in, that can be inherently unsettling. I'm going to go on a bit of a tangent here, although not entirely. One of the books I read this year that I just thought was really wonderful was Sami Shalk's Black Disability Politics and one of the arguments in that book is that the work that Black folks, particularly in the US, have been doing around disability doesn't always show up as disability. It doesn't always use that word disability, right?

Aside from its relevance to some of the disability justice work I've been doing recently, this also really resonates for me in this context of conservation because some of the work that communities are doing to protect the land, to protect themselves, to protect coexistence on this planet doesn't always look like conservation.

It doesn't always show up as conservation. It could be protecting language. It could be—a lot of the communities I've worked with—it's things like weaving or gardening, right, which have in some ways a direct relationship to what Western scientists or Eurocentric scientists might see as being biological or ecological, but are much more applied or much more direct. It could be simply surviving. It could be refusing to be sent away from their homes, right? So it may not always be primarily or explicitly about these terms, conservation and biodiversity, but one of my main thesis is that any effort to break down systems of oppression is an effort to protect life on Earth because these communities, whether it's black, indigenous, racialized, queer, disabled, all of the communities that are fighting that are currently marginalized by these systems have consistently pointed out that it is these systems of oppression that are destroying the planet and that are destroying the possibilities for ongoing coexistence on it. So for me anything that fights that system is part of this effort and anything that is part of that system or helps to sustain it is inherently counter to those goals.

Kamea Chayne: I think I'm just wondering whether this all implies and speaks to the limitations of inclusivity politics, of attempting to realize planetary thriving for all diverse communities inside of homogenized frameworks and systems and ways of knowing and relating to the world. And I think I've just personally struggled articulating this thought and challenge to friends and people who aren't really actively engaged in these topics. So I would appreciate hearing your thoughts as well on the limitations of working inside of existing frameworks and electoral politics even.

Audra Mitchell: Yeah, that's a big one. And I think, you know, I was listening to Vanessa Andreotti, who's a colleague and a friend, but on your podcast here on Green Dreamer, was talking about the house and the fact that to some degree, we are all the house of modernity, the house of capitalism of all of these systems, to some degree, and to different degrees, we are all in relation to this house, whether we want to be or not. So it's something that I mean, I guess very first off, I would say, everything that I'm doing is certainly, supremacy, a beneficiary of settler colonialism. So I certainly can't claim any exemption from this. But the way I've been grappling with it is, so I have this acronym I've been using. And I'm a bit of a nerd, so I've even made a 3D model of it. It's an eight-sided prism.

And I call it the CRACHE plus system. It's an acronym that stands for colonialism, racism, ableism, anthropocentrism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, eugenics, and then the plus is to recognize other systems of oppression that are always emerging and recombining. Now this of course isn't my original thinking. As I say, this is the benefiting from hundreds of years of theorizing and practical action by marginalized groups who are fighting the system. But what I try to do is whenever I'm trying to understand the sources of a problem, whether it is a conflict that's going on in my neighborhood or whether it's the pandemic or whether it is climate change, it's trying to look at it through that prism, that prismatic understanding that however you turn that prism, all of those different forces and logics are conditioning each other. They cannot work except for in combination with each other.

And it's not to say that any one is more important than the other, but that we are essentially trapped within this prism and its reflections are touching everything that happens within contemporary structures of power. So on the one hand I would say I absolutely cannot claim to nor would I expect anyone to be able to work entirely outside of that prism. But to be able to open up spaces for critique that are other than that system, right?

I don't think there's ever a pure outside. But I think the most important thing is to realize that this system is not the only way of organizing.

And it's not even contemporarily the only way, right? I mean, there are many, many different legal political orders, some of which have been around for tens of thousands of years. So I think just as the system of oppression is. So for some people that might look like working within formal systems of politics and electoral politics and often working from the inside. For others it might be as simple as surviving and helping others to survive.

So we've been talking a bit about disability justice throughout. One of the things I've found most amazing is throughout the last few years and the ongoing pandemic the degree to which people who are disabled or otherwise connected to or have lived experience that helps them to understand the nature of being physically compromised or somatically or neurologically or however it might present itself by these structures have come together to find these micro ways of resisting these micro politics that can be as simple as simply checking in on someone or bringing food to someone, right?

So I think given that the violence is pragmatic I think there's a real need to take a very prismatic approach to the ways that it is resisted. And I think that's what is really inspiring me in thinking about futurisms from the margins and the genius ways that people who are most affected by the system are finding ways to work both within and without it at the same time, without expecting some kind of purity with regards to that. I don't know if that answered your question at all.

Kamea Chayne: Yeah, and I really appreciate this prism analogy and this ‘all of the above’ invitation that you offer. I would also love to speak with you about the concept and narratives around quote unquote human extinction and how they might be problematic in various ways. So what should people keep in mind when encountering these narratives and how does this relate to the critiques you've already named of the field of conservation?

Audra Mitchell: Yeah, thank you for that question. I am personally becoming more and more worried about the fusion of these narratives. I think, first of all, that there's a conceptual slippage between this idea of species extinction, which itself, I may not get into the details just now, but is rooted in some scientific traditions that suggest a kind of very dichotomous, either it's extant or it's extinct kind of approach, right? But I think there's slippage between that concept and the ideas of massive changes in the way that humans inhabit the Earth, the way that something like humans show up in this space, in this ecosphere.

So what I would say is it is a broad field and the more I've been connecting with people who are working in the areas of human extinction or existential risk, the more I'm realizing that there are people resisting the mainstream narratives. But the reality is that this is largely a discourse that's being promoted by people in situations of extreme privilege and power. We're talking billionaires, we're talking people like Elon Musk, you know heads of state, conservative governments. These are people who are concerned with maintaining the power of the CRACHE Plus system, right? They're people who see, who understand humanity with a capital H, that idea that there is a humanity, to be essentially white, cis-gendered, abled in various ways or non-disabled, to be above and outside of embodied-ness of ecosystems.

And I think we see this in this absolute resentment of things like mortality, right? So this movement to live forever, the kind of bioengineering movement to try to escape the limitations of embodiment that come with being an earthly being. And maybe one that has received quite a lot of attention is this desire to leave Earth and colonize outer space, which is really a rejection of any limitations of earthly living, right? I think its important to bear in mind that human extinction is a continuation, or this narrative of human extinction, is a continuation and in some ways an accentuated expression of this fear that this very specific model of what humanity is and can be is under threat, right?

And one of the things I've found most troubling is that, you know, people who are, many people who are writing in this or working in this discipline aren't even trying to hide the fact that they find the survival of racialized people, the survival of disabled people or neurodivergent people to be a threat, that they find the existence of trans people, of queer people of various identities to be problematic as beings that have futures, right? That they tend to be extremely uncaring about the broader ecosystemic relationships that might attend a future where this kind of humanity thrives. So I think in many ways, some people have been surprised when I've been talking about the fact that these two things are converging. I mean, if we look at the Living Planet reports, the last couple of Living Planet reports in particular, I think there was one that came out in 2020 that—and this is the World Wildlife Fund for Nature— this is their major report on the state of biodiversity and their recommended strategies for the future. This report very, very explicitly expresses this anxiety over the destruction of humanity or the fact that humanity may not exist in the future.

What I find particularly interesting about that is the recommended remedy, which is to adopt the late E.O. Wilson, who was deeply lauded as a kind of a father of conservation in that patriarchal language, but who had very, very troubling views with regards to, let's say, cultural diversity and the role of humans within ecosystems. Anyway, so he has this idea that half of the Earth's surface should be annexed for conservation. And so we see that being taken up by very mainstream conservation organizations and by a lot of people who donate to these organizations or who are feeling increasingly worried about this direct line that's being drawn within mainstream narratives about human extinction, this idea that humans are next, kind of, right?

So my warning about this is, well first of all, this is a very particular notion of humanity that is being protected here, just as it's a very particular notion of difference that is protected under biodiversity, and it is one that already has an enormous unequal amount of power and authority in this world. But also that the attempts to protect it, there's this sense of, you know, anything is acceptable to ensure the survival of humanity, right? Whether that means the mass land grab that would be required by this, what they call land sparing approach or this 50%, this half-earth approach that E.O. Wilson has suggested, right? Also deeper policing, deeper attempts to extend the financialized and biodiversity banking approaches that I mentioned earlier into areas where indigenous and land-based communities are hanging on to their land and are fighting these forces, right? So I think it is deeply connected.

But I think the important thing for a lot of people to remember when we're looking at these discourses of human extinction is does this humanity include you? Unless you are a member of that community, usually a very wealthy white male non-disabled cishet person. It probably doesn't include you. It probably doesn't include most of the beings and communities and life forms that you're connected to.

I think the most important thing right now is to be very critical and to fight the enclosure of the future and the colonization of the future by these discourses and the people who are promoting them and to really move towards multiple futures.

And one of the things that I think has really influenced me in this regard is reading Indigenous Futurisms. A couple of the books that really stay with me are Louise Erdrich's Future Home of the Living God and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Theieves. And in both of these books, you hear this theme and it gets explicitly stated a couple of times in both books that it's worth it to fight for a future even if it doesn't include you whoever the subject is. And I think that's the approach that has really come to me through all of this is that it's worth it to fight for the survival of Earth's ecosystems, of Earth's beings and to essentially love unconditionally what comes.

That doesn’t mean accepting eliminative violence or accepting these power structures, but to fight for and love of these ecosystems even if they don't ultimately maintain into the future and especially even if the subjects that we are now or that some of us might have unequal access to, even if those subjects don't persist into the future, to still love the planet and what it can become.

Kamea Chayne: We are nearing the end of our conversation here, but what else would you like to share that I maybe didn't get to ask you about, perhaps in terms of some of your inspirations from your research, and what calls to action or deeper inquiry would you like to leave with us?

Audra Mitchell: Well, I think the things that are inspiring me right now come down to a few things that relate to the need to really love and desire difference. And again, a lot of this is coming back to disability justice thinking or critical disability studies. So for me, a lot of these discourses, whether it has to do with the type of ecosystem that proponents of mainstream conservation are trying to produce or protect, or whether it has to do with this model of humanity that people who are concerned about human extinction are trying to again produce and protect. One of the things that I think many members of the disability and queer and many other communities face is that you know, family members, communities often wish that we were otherwise. And often the wish to be otherwise or the wish that someone else were otherwise, it can be quite a progressive and quite a liberatory impulse, but at the same time it can be extremely normative.

And I see this impulse writ large in these futurisms that are saying, okay, we want a future, but only if it meets these requirements. We're not willing to have a future that is compromised, say, by having much wider understandings of humanity or much wider understandings of what an ecosystem can be saying “we only want this kind of future”. And so going back to that notion of unconditional love, I really think it's about trying to want to love and protect the earth and ecosystems for what they are while allowing them to emerge into whatever they might be, right? So I guess the metaphor I would use is: if one were to lovingly parents a child desired by the community. It is absolutely necessary and possible to try to protect that child from violence while still actively wanting for them to be themselves, wanting for them to grow into whatever it is that they inherently are to express that kind of irreducible difference that is in them.

This is the kind of ethic and call to action that I want to bring in different forms to future-ing and to thinking about ecological futures in particular because we know that at this point Earth is definitely going to look different from the futures that even 30 years ago we would have been presented or I would have been presented in school or that we would have been trying to create and trying to hope for. My point is to try to cultivate an ethics of unconditional love that says we will fight this violence so that Earth can become what it becomes but without having this condition that it must conform to certain norms or certain demands for the possibility of particular ways of life.

The continuation of capitalism or the continuation of systems that demand debilitating forms of work or that demand the continual annexation of land, right?

To really cultivate a sense that our job as stewards of the earth, as people who care about these communities, is really to learn how to move well with it and in particular to develop skills for coexistence.

I think much more importantly, there's so much focus within academia in particular, and I'm certainly guilty of this, on trying to come up with what are I think in quite an ableist way often called visions, or kind of complete plans. Or to, especially in futurisms, to try to come up with scenarios or very detailed understandings of what the futures would be or feel like or look like. I think the much more important call to action right now would be to try to cultivate ways of desiring difference, of ensuring that it continues in the world, of coexisting, and of figuring out how to defend against the forms of violence that would work to eliminate it.

Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, we are coming to a close here, but we will have more references and resources from this episode linked in our show notes at greendreamer.com. And for now, Audra, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been a huge honor to have you here. What final words of wisdom would you like to leave with us as Green Dreamers?

Audra Mitchell: Just as I say, let's get out there and practice unconditional love.

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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