How does the outdoor industry profit off of “the wilderness” as an extractive, consumable experience? How have outdoor apparel companies benefited from sanitizing the history of national parks and public lands? And what does it mean to recognize the colonial mentality behind certain forms of exploration — bagging peaks, checking off trails, and securing photographs of scenic spots without going any deeper?

In this episode, Green Dreamer’s Kaméa Chayne speaks with Joseph Whitson, a political ecologist and the author of Marketing the Wilderness.

Join us as we peel back the layers of the recreation-industrial complex — politicizing the idea of “protecting the wilderness” often portrayed as a bipartisan interest — and sit with what it means to travel, hike, and recreate in the “great outdoors” while confronting questions of complicity.
Episode musical feature: “Eden” by Ryne Meadow

"There is an uncanniness, a way in which [fungi] were not behaving perfectly, in which it's hard to study them in a petri dish… They upset that wish that everything would fall into binaries and categories that have made sense." – Maria Pinto
This episode features Maria Pinto, an author and educator who teaches for the literary nonprofit GrubStreet. Her book of lyric essays about mushrooms, Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival, was published by Great Circle Books at UNC Press.
We invite you to…

• tune in and subscribe to Green Dreamer via any podcast app;
• tap into our bonus extended and video version of this conversation on Patreon here;
• and read highlights from these conversations via Kaméa’s newsletter here.

Episode artwork: Paul Lewin

Song features: “If You Want To, You Will” by Lemon Myrtle

What does belonging mean within a fractured world? How do we liberate ourselves from systems that attempt to turn us into mere cogs in a machine? What can sitting with the paradoxes of being human teach us?

In this episode, Green Dreamer’s Kaméa Chayne speaks with Sophia Kai of Journey of the Soul, whose work lives at the crossroads of world, folk, and medicine music — blending languages, poetry and healing into musical journeys that transcend borders and open the heart of humanity.

Join us as we unravel the messiness of being human in these troubled times, and contemplate where journeying toward a collective remembrance may lead us.

We invite you to…

• tune in and subscribe to Green Dreamer via any podcast app;
• tap into our bonus extended and video version of this conversation on Patreon here;
• and read highlights from these conversations via Kaméa’s newsletter here.

Musical features: “Touchée” (Live in Corfu) and “Ultima Luz” by Sophia Kai