Daniel Immerwahr: Empire remade through technology (ep388)

One thing that the United States got really good at doing was basically replacing all colonial products with synthetic ones—swapping technology in for territory and replacing colonies with chemistry.
— DANIEL IMMERWAHR

How have synthetic chemistry and technology allowed the United States as an empire to cease its reliance on colonies? And what is the significance of recognizing the greater history of the empire—beyond the borders of its symbolic “logo map”?

In this episode, we welcome Daniel Immerwahr, a historian and the Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University. His most recent book is How to Hide an Empire.

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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 clarity.

Daniel Immerwahr: I've been teaching US history for a while in California. I was working as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, and I was also teaching at a prison, in San Quentin prison. And I was doing a normal thing that US historians do: I was teaching the class in the normal way, in the Jacksonian era, we get all the way up to the Civil War, Progressive Era, all that kind of stuff, and just trying not to screw it up. But then in the middle of all this, I took a research trip to Manila, in the Philippines.

And I have known, of course, because I'm a historian, that the Philippines had been a colony of the United States for about 50 years. But I think there's a difference between reading the lyrics and hearing the music. And that was the kind of fact that I knew in a vague sense, but didn't really fully appreciate the significance of until I arrived in Manila and just looked around and saw, oh, yeah, this place has clearly been part of the United States and has an ongoing relationship, and I'm not sure that the way I'm teaching US history is really getting that.

So I came back with my mind scrambled and I realized that what I wanted to be able to do was to tell a history of the United States that took seriously the fact that the United States is a territorial empire, and it has a number of overseas territories, and they're actually a really important part of its history.

Kamea Chayne: To start off with the basics, and something that people may find more relatable, you address and unpack this logo map of the United States, which is that symbolic map of the shape of the US as a country. What issues should we take with this reductive map and what are some of the complexities of what it hides and leaves out?

Daniel Immerwahr: So let's say what the logo map is. I think if you ask most people to map the country in their minds, what they will draw in their mind's eye is that familiar shape, that contiguous blob. We all know exactly what it looks like. And there's a political scientist, Benedict Anderson, who called that map, the logo map, on the understanding that if the United States had a logo, that that might not be a bad one—and he's right about that. But the thing is that those borders that you can so easily call to mind only correspond to the borders of the United States for three years of its history.

There are [only] three years where [the logo map is] the right map of the country.

It's wrong from the start because, as you know, if you took a history class, the United States started out smaller, and it was only through a series of wars and purchases and Indigenous dispossessions, that it got the shape that we're all familiar with. But the part that we don't always talk about is that three years after it acquired that shape in 1857, it just kept going. The United States took first, uninhabited islands, then Alaska, which is absolutely enormous. And by the end of the 19th century, it had a formidable overseas empire and heavily populated.

Those parts of the country so often get written out of its history and of our understandings of it, to the point where the normal reaction that you get or I get, as a historian when I say, yes, I'm a U.S. historian and I look at places like Guam and Puerto Rico, is a furrowed brow.

Kamea Chayne: What do you think has been the significance of this shape, particularly if it only really lasted for three years, as a true representation? Why has the symbol not changed or at least become more, “inclusive”, in a sense, if the US is so hell-bent on exerting and showing the world its global domination and power?

Daniel Immerwahr: I think the shape is not only inaccurate, but it's also misleading, beyond the geographical inaccuracy. And what it misleads about is the character of the country. If that's the only part of the United States you're looking at, you're looking at a selectively cropped family photo, and you're looking at places that are largely states. And so then the proposition is the United States is a republic: here's the land, and all these places that you're seeing on the logo map are ruled under the same law, and this is a shining republic and not an empire.

There are some exceptions. Washington, D.C. isn't a state. And as a result, residents there have different kinds of voting rights. And then there are the Indian reservations, that if you mash them all together, cover a land area about as large as Idaho, but it's kind of easy for people to tune that stuff out, and it gets really easy when your map doesn't have Puerto Rico on it, doesn't have the Philippines on it—if we're talking about historical... doesn't have Hawai’i on it. And once you start adding those places in, then you start asking questions about not just the shape of the United States, but the character of it, too.

Kamea Chayne: The subject of plastics and synthetic materials is often examined through the lens of public health and environmentalism. And what really struck me and became apparent from your work is how important it is to understand them through the lens of power. How would you weave the topic of lab-made synthetic materials into the history of the US empire, particularly in terms of how it changed geopolitics and contributed to making the empire's reliance on colonies and their raw materials, obsolete?

Daniel Immerwahr: Once you start asking about the United States as an empire, or seeing it as an empire, you start asking different kinds of questions, like, why does its shape change over the course of the 20th century? How does it shuffle one kind of imperial expansion, taking colonies as much as the British have done, in favor of another one?

Right now, the United States controls 750 military bases outside of its borders. These aren't large bits of land, but they carpet the planet.

I wanted to ask about that transition. It's easy not to ask about that if all you're looking at is the logo map. So I started researching and thinking about the reasons. And one thing that surprised me was the role of plastics and synthetic materials in that, because I'd always seen plastics as a scourge. And yes, they're convenient, but they lead to this sort of everything is disposable, and everything damages the environment, lifestyle that we're all sort of trapped in.

One thing that plastics did is they slaked the first four colonies. Plastics and other synthetics have done an enormous job replacing the need, or the perceived need for "great" powers to seize overseas territories because they have raw materials that will be useful to industrial processes.

One thing that the United States got really good at doing was basically replacing all colonial products with synthetic ones—swapping technology in for territory and replacing colonies with chemistry.

Kamea Chayne: Besides changing their material reliances, the US and its military have also developed other technologies that changed the geopolitics of movement. What are some of these, as you call them, empire-killing technologies, that made movement easier without direct territorial control, and how might an awareness of these technologies change our perception of what counts as imperalism or domination, that don't appear as dramatic and headlines-making as an outright territorial invasion, but could be understood as being on par with it in terms of helping to accomplish and establish similar power discrepancies and subjugation?

Daniel Immerwahr: So I should clarify that I talk in the book about empire-killing technologies, and what I'm talking about there is not the end of domination—we haven't got there yet—but rather the waning of a particular kind of domination, of formal colonialism, and a sort of classic pith hat and jungle kind of way. And the United States, I think, was really at the forefront in replacing colonial domination as a way of exerting power in the world overseas, with something that I call the Pointillist empire.

All those little dots, the military bases, small islands, and uninhabited islands—the United States controls all these specks all over the planet. That makes it have a very different map than the British Empire had in the 19th century.

On the one hand, you could just sort of say, well, great. We're making great strides. And it's so good that most of the land of the planet is not under formal empire anymore. But, I think it would be a mistake to round all those dots down to zero, even if they don't control much land. They mean a lot for people who live in the shadow of the US military bases, or places where the United States stores its weapons or tests them.

So one thing I got really interested in the book is not just trying to explain how various technologies enabled that shift to a Pointillist empire, but, trying to account for what it means to live on a planet where the primary form of territorial domination is dots, not large colonies.

Kamea Chayne: And so when we read news headlines about a country invading another, as we speak, one example would be if Russia invading Ukraine, rightfully, there are a lot of outraged reactions to just coming across news like that. What do you think it means that the ways that the US has been continually expanding its power, is a lot more discreet, invisibilized? And because it doesn't exert power and expand power in that same explicit way, oftentimes the US is portrayed as a savior. I wonder how you think we might process this sort of hypocrisy.

Daniel Immerwahr: There were two reactions that I saw in people around me to the invasion of Ukraine. One was, oh, my gosh, this is horrifying and scary. And, people with Ukrainian connections were understandably really feeling it. So there was that kind of moral outrage, and rightly so. But there was another reaction feathered in, which is, I thought this kind of thing didn't usually happen anymore: land wars in Europe? It felt like a throwback. Now, that's an exaggeration. And it's not the only land war that we've seen in the 21st century, but the anachronistic feeling that we got as we sort of imagined tanks rolling across borders, it felt like it was the 1940s...

I think that's a reflection of how the United States has remade what power looks like. And let me just back up and say sometimes the United States invades other countries. The Iraq war was that. But, it is also the case that much of the exertion of power today is more subtle, quieter, or it doesn't make headlines as much. It sort of passes under the radar. And you can see that as a grand achievement. At least we're not having these bloody wars for territory anymore. And those wars were genuinely awful and bloody and far, far, far too many people died in them. So that we're seeing fewer of those seems like a real achievement.

But you might also worry that when war just slips quietly into the background as a constant low-drip, the state of policing, the violence and domination just become normalized. And we're kind of losing the ability to react politically and object to those things.

Kamea Chayne: In light of all of this, you write: "No longer would seizing large areas or zones be necessary to run a long-distance transportation network. Mere dots on the map, sometimes little more than airfields in jungle clearings, would suffice. And so, just like plastic and other synthetics, these new technologies helped to make colonies obsolete."

Perhaps all of this is a combination of happenstance and strategy, and maybe there's no clear answer or maybe there is. But I do wonder whether you think the US empire and those leading it realized that relying on controlling colonies to maintain power was a weakness and source of instability, speaking to the fact that the US and its allies won a war and gave up territory, meaning that a lot of these technological innovations to change the form of imperialism were made with specific intentions to help the empire move away from needing colonies altogether?

Daniel Immerwahr: Absolutely.

A lot of those "empire-killing" technologies really came out of the 1940s.

It's a moment when aviation, which allows disparate spaces to be connected without having a territorial link between them, when wireless communication, when synthetics all combine to give territory a different kind of political meaning, and to make it feel less essential to those in power. And that's partly a reaction to circumstances, particularly the circumstances of World War Two, but it's also a reaction to a growing sense that empire is a difficult proposition in the 20th century, because of a great anti-colonial revolt among people of the Global South.

It’s not just that the United States is a nicer kind of world power. It's that the United States catapulted to the forefront of planetary power during a worldwide planetary anti-imperial revolt that was successful, that really changed the map. And you can see a lot of the United States as sort of accommodations, as a response to that, and a realization that it's actually quite difficult to hold colonies when people are armed and forming armies, and marching in the streets.

Kamea Chayne: And so as we mentioned earlier, people tend to have more outraged responses to headlines like seeing a country outrightly invade another, so we might recognize that colonial invasion could possibly spark more cohesive and larger resistance movements, compared to more chronic and more embedded ways to exercise power. Do you think that's accurate?

Daniel Immerwahr: There's a book that came out recently by this guy named Samuel Moyn called Humane, where Moyn, who's a figure on the left, takes seriously a lot of the claims that military planners have been making. And they say, look, war just looks different now, we do it by drones, there's a lot of surveillance, we tend not to hit the wrong targets very often, it is much more precise, we aim at particular people, and we tend to hit them, and we don't have a lot of boots on the ground. And that means that we're operating with a scalpel rather than a bonesaw.

And so one response on the left is to say, yeah, right. And just to point to all of the moments when airstrikes have hit weddings—and that's a real thing. But what Moyn does is to say, yeah, it's actually kind of accurate, that military power has grown more precise, and more accurate, and that that's the problem. Because what it does, is it makes war kind of okay, in most people's eyes. And so it's a similar kind of thing with arguments about policing. One argument is, oh, what we need is police reform, so fewer chokeholds, a little more community policing. And another argument is, I don't know... that's just probably going to entrench police power even more. If you are a radical who believes that the fundamental problem is the police, then things that will make the police a little less objectionable in most people's eyes, might itself be a problem.

I don't know how I feel about that. I've read Moyn's book. I'm interested in it. I'm just not sure where I come down on it. But I do take the argument quite seriously because I think it's a powerful one.

Kamea Chayne: As you've pointed out, Winston Churchill announced in 1943 in a speech at Harvard: “The empires of the future are empires of the mind”. And relatedly, a powerful and perhaps provocative phrase from your book is language is a virus, where you note that the norm in history has been linguistic difference, not sameness.

I would love for you to introduce the concept of imperial standardization and what that looks like in the world today in its various forms, as well as why this universality, which typically might be seen as beneficial tools of convenience and efficiency, ought to be looked at with a more critical lens, especially when it comes to linguistic standardization and how that influences the ways we think and relate to each other and the world.

Daniel Immerwahr: I should clarify that that phrase, language is a virus, is not mine. I was cribbing from the performance artist Laurie Anderson, who has a wonderful song of that title.

The book is really interested in the materialities of power. What does it mean to control territory? What kinds of things can states do when they have control of the schools, etc.?

I got really interested in standardization as a form of world power and the ability to remake foreign places so that they, from the perspective of the imperialists, feel less foreign, more domestic.

That's been something we've seen a lot of, in the last 50, 70 years.

And one very particular form of it is the rise of English. I didn't realize this until I started working on the book, but English hasn't just been making a slow rise. It's made actually fairly recent rapid rise. It is now more dominant as a language, than any other language has ever been in the history of languages. It's not that most people speak it as a first language. That's not true. Mandarin is more spoken as a first language, but more people speak English as a second language. So it is just a kind of universal currency, or the universal adapter of language.

And, that's the kind of thing that it used to require conquering a colony to do, to reset the language of that place, and even then, it was kind of touch and go. But for reasons that we can talk about if you want, the United States has been really good at getting the world on English. You can have two reactions to that. It used to be a utopian dream that we could all speak the same language and just think how much misunderstandings can be prevented, if people can speak in the same tongue. On the other hand, it's hard not to see power as a huge part of this.

It's not like we're all speaking Esperanto, although many people in the middle of the 20th century desperately wanted that. It really is what Churchill said. It's an empire of the mind or it's an empire. The fact that it's English means that all gazes are a little bit tilted towards the United States.

Conversely, the United States has a much harder time understanding foreign places, because the reaction of people in the United States have had to this, is they stop learning other languages, and they start expecting that everyone would address them in English.

Kamea Chayne: Related to the standardization of language also comes the standardization of knowledge as well, which is apparent through education systems around the world. I'd be curious what you've thought through in terms of how standardizing what constitutes as education around the world and what constitutes as formal education and knowledge that is to be legitimized versus others that go unrecognized or get sidelined? What sort of impact do you think this has had in terms of the US empire and communities being able to reclaim their power?

Daniel Immerwahr: With all questions of standardization, it cuts two ways. It is nice, in some abstract way, to have people on the same page and conversant in the same techniques, and it's kind of amazing that we have a truly global scientific community where there's a kind of understanding of what counts as scientific practice, that can be done in many countries. And people can talk to each other and they can research vaccines, and that sort of thing. So I don't want to diminish what an incredible and extraordinary achievement global standardization has been in so many ways.

In the book, I go on this jag about the standardization of the screw thread, which is such a humble bit of technology, but it is awesome, an incredible engineering achievement that screws are within one or two systems, kind of interchangeable globally, and that we got everyone on the same screw thread angle—and there's still some argument about metric versus imperial, but that's it.

But, [also,] you point to one of the dangers of standardization, which is especially in areas of culture and knowledge and language… everyone being "on the same page" can mean for some people they're just playing constant home games, and other people are playing away games, and have even lost the capacity to be in touch with their own roots, their own past.

I'm a historian of the United States. In a kind of balanced world, I would know a lot about the history of the United States, but then when I would travel to Italy, people would know as much or as little about U.S. history as I would know about Italian history.

But we do not live in that world at all. That not just the form of US knowledge, but the content of it, is known worldwide, to the point where, people are following NBA basketball games all over the world. And that's just not reciprocated. People in the United States basically don't follow soccer until recently, which is a worldwide sport. And instead, [they] have this other thing that they call football, in defiance of what everyone else in the world calls football, and they just expect the world to catch up.

I think there's a kind of narcissism to knowledge standardization. And then on the receiving end of it, it can feel really violent.

Some of the people I talk I quote in the book, talk about how much they felt that they've been cut off from their own languages, cultures, thought worlds, and history, by the expectation that everyone do things the company way—which is the US way.

Kamea Chayne: Now, this is speaking in big picture terms, but from my vantage point, I see that the more explicit exertion of power through establishing colonies to feed the material needs of the empire already changed the norms of how many people relate to the more-than-human world, as in, the land became seen as this site of extraction and exploitation—rather than the foundations of kinship and community. And then the transition to industries of lab-made synthetics to divorce from a need for those raw materials just added another layer of disconnection, because it attempts to bypass our interdependence and interconnectedness.

I wonder what you've thought through in terms of how the US empire, with its planetary-wide presence, and the processes of globalization, standardization, and cultural homogenization that it's led, have influenced and remade our collective relations to our planetary body, which thrives on diversity and communities being in tune with the languages and limitations of our lands?

Daniel Immerwahr: Well, I think it's an ironic story. Because you can tell it the way you just did, which is that, we used to all be living locally, thinking locally, having a diversity of experiences and having deep connections to our environments, whether they're cultural or physical, and then, we just see the upwelling or upswing of one kind of monoculture that does to our experiences what monocrop agriculture does to just to a landscape and just turns everything into genetically-engineered weed, acre upon acre of it.

But some of that liberation from nature that the United States has been a part of, although certainly not the only part of, I think it's been kind of amazing. The world where we collectively depended on raw materials, in a direct physical way—that was a world that created a scavenger hunt for powerful people to seize distant mines and places where you could grow rubber, and it led to an enormous amount of violence. So, I want to take seriously that something politically interesting happened, when the United States debuted a lot of technologies that separated it from that kind of direct dependance on the land, because that also, I think, weaned it off of the bloody colonial wars that had really defined human history for the past couple of centuries.

Kamea Chayne: I would question whether it's sort of an illusion of a divorce from being reliant on the land through, for example, technologies like solar and wind, it also increases our dependencies on industrial-scale mining that's often taking place in developing countries, so that's also another form of exerting power through extraction that doesn't come from that sort of outright taking over of a territory, it's more so exercised through corporate monopolization and still persisting that sort of extractive dynamic... So whether it's just been another veil to our reliance on the land in order to live and survive and meet our needs.

Daniel Immerwahr: Yeah, I mean, I don't mean to suggest that this is all a happy story of scientific victories. And I think the biggest jag in the course of history is clearly going to be climate change, or it already is. It seems that a lot of the synthetic processes that the United States debuted were petroleum-based. So the one raw material that it found itself still using quite a lot of and having some sort of geopolitical dependance on was oil, which we think of as a form of energy, and it is that, but we don't always contemplate how much petroleum is also the precursor for all the plastics that we use.

They don't have to be, but they are by and large petroleum-based. And so now we are experiencing in all ways, the world that plastic made, or the world that oil made, both in terms of what happens when you burn the stuff, which is that you make the planet uninhabitable, and then what happens when you transform this stuff into a material environment, which is that you create trash that doesn't go away. So, yeah, the story is full of uncomfortable and frankly, terrifying ironies all the way through.

Kamea Chayne: Right. And there are still ongoing resource wars and proxy wars, even if at the surface, it doesn't seem like the US empire is directly involved. All of these conflicts centering on raw materials and resources like fossil fuels as well.

Daniel Immerwahr: I might push back on that a little bit. As a historian, I'm fully aware of how awful the old-school resource wars can be. And now obviously cobalt and other things that we get from mines are still really important to smartphones, etc. But it does seem like we don't see as much violent conflict, international conflict over resources. I mean, Russia-Ukraine feels like a major throwback in that way. And I think that's worth taking seriously. That doesn't mean that the process of resource extraction is a happy one on the labor side, that it does involve a lot of daily quotidian violence, because it really does, but it doesn't seem to involve cross-border invasions anymore, and it really used to.

Kamea Chayne: Yeah. And then I wonder if instead of territorial invasions, it would be taking shape more so through more systemic ways of dispossessing, for example, like local and Indigenous communities from their lands, for the same end goals of being able to take control over or extract those resources.

Daniel Immerwahr: It's absolutely the case that recent mining or any kind of use of the dead landscape, either with fossilized fuels or things that you get from mines and quarries, that's just been an absolutely brutal process from the get go, and it remains one today, you're absolutely right... About that. So both in terms of what it does to the local environment, also what it does to the larger climate we now know, and then the effect it has on anyone who lives near those places, either because they're in danger of having your land dispossessed, they're in danger of the kind of slow violence of working on those sites or they're in danger of having their rivers wrecked and their mountains destroyed.

Kamea Chayne: As you've highlighted, a lot of citizens of the United States and those who learn US history are unaware of seeing the US as an empire today, and are unaware of a lot of the history and present-day reality of the greater United States, beyond the borders of the collection of states in that logo map to its territories and military bases around the globe. I wonder if you think there have been intentional efforts to hide the empire, so to say, and if so, what purpose does that serve, and then what could come about as a result of establishing a greater understanding of this truer reality and picture?

Daniel Immerwahr: Well, it's always been the case that the US government has soft-pedaled, at the very least, its overseas holdings, including not counting people from the territories in the census, denying them the full protection of the Constitution, something that continues to this day, not putting them on maps. When it comes to the Pointillist empire, the military bases, we literally don't know where all the bases are, because understandably, but kind of annoyingly, a lot of them are secret.

So when I say that the United States has 750 bases or so, outside of its contiguous borders, that's just based on some fairly aggressive reporting, much of it by a guy named David Vine, to just count one by one where the bases are, because the United States won't tell you. And what would it mean if the overseas parts of the United States were less hidden? I mean, a few things. First, I think we'd have a more accurate and frankly, interesting, story to tell about US history, and my book tries to explain what that story would be.

There might be some policy ideas that present themselves, once you really see the extent of the United States basing system, you start to ask questions about, is this all a good idea? And I'm not the only one who would strongly support a dismantling, effectively, of the basing system. You might also ask questions about the five inhabited territories where millions of people still live, and they should have binding status referenda that the Congress should respect. But I think most importantly, you would realize…

The United States is not just a country among other countries. It is a place that has impinged on its neighbors in all kinds of ways, many of them quite material.

Something that's really obvious when you actually look at the map of all the places over which the country claims jurisdiction. And, I think it's common for people in the country to just see themselves as having a home that's a place that's either exceptionally great or whatever, but not really getting that the United States isn't just a normal country, it is a highly abnormal country, and a lot of global politics turns around that fact.

Kamea Chayne: And, you've dug into a lot of information that generally has been sidelined, at least in terms of mainstream discourses on the United States and US history. What was the most surprising or shocking thing that you've come across and learned in regards to the US empire, either in the past or its present-day reality?

Daniel Immerwahr: I was interested in ways in which the imperial history has shaped the country, and not just that it's shaped what's happened in overseas places, but it's actually shaped the history of the whole. And one thing that I found was that the name of the country shifted a little bit, as a result of its dash toward empire in the late 19th century, when the United States publicly claimed a number of overseas territories like the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, and did so really transparently, like that was headline news.

So the name of the country is the United States of America. And the people of the country have been long called Americans, but it had often been the case when speaking officially, to refer to the country by the nickname of the United States, or the Union, or the Republic. In fact, all the patriotic songs, all the national anthems, they don't refer to America—they refer to the country by other ways, often as Colombia. And the reason is that I think a lot of people understood that the Americas was a larger place, and it included South America and Central America, and other parts of North America.

But it was in reaction to claiming all those territories that you start to see the shift, because phrases like the United States Republican Union no longer describes political aspirations for a country that included the Philippines. A lot of people on the mainland were thinking, the Philippines is not going to be a state, this is not a union, this country is not a union of states.

Part of the reason for the shift to America as the nickname for the country has a lot to do with a desire to verbally get around the fact that this country was no longer a republic, a union, or a collection of states.

Kamea Chayne: Wow, I wasn't aware of that.

Well, as we're coming to a close here, what else would you like to share that I didn't get to ask you about today? And what are some of the major takeaways that you would ultimately like our listeners to walk away with?

Daniel Immerwahr: There's this idea that postcolonial theorists have had, and have been harping on for a while, which is that the places that seem peripheral are often where the action happens, and that it really helps to look toward the "edges". And this is a book that tries to take seriously places that seem to slip from the consciousness of many mainlanders—basing sites, overseas territories, turn out to be really important in wars, and major presidential elections, and major events hinge on them. So I think for me, that's the sort of takeaway. It's a different way of looking at the country, and a different way of understanding who belongs, and what places are part of its history.

~ musical intermission ~

Kamea Chayne: What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?

Daniel Immerwahr: The most recent collection of short stories by George Saunders, Liberation Day. I'm a huge George Saunders fan and I've been reading him, all his stuff. What really strikes me about him as an author is not just how clearly talented and funny he is, but a real sense of empathy and a desire to put himself and put the reader in someone else's headspace. And all of the stories are games about learning to care when it's easy not to care. And so those stories have resonated for me, not just as well-told stories, not just working on an aesthetic level, but working on an ethical one as well.

Kamea Chayne: What has been a personal motto, mantra or practice that you engage with to stay grounded?

Daniel Immerwahr: Ere toward curiosity and kindness.

Kamea Chayne: And finally, what is your greatest source of inspiration at the moment, or one of them?

Daniel Immerwahr: My students. I teach at Northwestern. And my job is half research, half teaching. So a lot of it is just me at home in my office and pulling books off the shelves and reading them and thinking thoughts. And then I get to go into the classroom and argue it out with all these really bright, excited students. It feels great. It feels like the gas tank is being refilled each time.

Kamea Chayne: Daniel, thank you so much for joining us today and helping to shine a light on what too often gets missed or glossed over when talking about the so-called United States and its history. For now, though, what final words of wisdom would you like to leave us with as green dreamers?

Daniel Immerwahr: I am actually anti-wisdom in the following sense, that we all take our lumps and learn our lessons, and we all kick ourselves about, oh man, I really should have known this. And then you think about it, and then you're like, everyone was telling me that! Like I got told that a million times and I didn't know it. And it's just a way of remembering that the stuff that we call wisdom isn't really a thing that you can tell someone. It has to come through a relationship, right? It has to come through an actual connection, and it has to come through some shared reference to lived experience. We can fill books with wisdom, and we do, and they're the most tedious books we have, because they're disconnected from real life. So not only would I describe myself as unwise, but also, I don't think words of wisdom fly very far.

Kamea Chayne: Maybe that goes back to troubling universality and standardization.

Daniel Immerwahr: Yeah, exactly. Anyway, it's been a pleasure to talk to you about this stuff.

 
kamea chayne

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

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Dany Celermajer: Multispecies justice and more-than-human entanglements (ep389)

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Shakara Tyler: Black farming as joyous, victorious, and glorious (ep387)