Green Flame on Matriarchy with Heide Goettner-Abendroth
This episode of the Green Flame comes to you from Germany. We interview Heide Goettner-Abendroth, philosopher and researcher on culture and society, focused on matriarchal studies.
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
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Connie Barlow is a leading advocate for the “assisted migration” of native trees poleward in this time of rapid climate change. Beginning in 2004 in a paper cowritten with Pleistocene ecologist Paul S. Martin titled, “Bring Torreya taxifolia North — Now,” Barlow’s advocacy subsequently expanded to include even common native trees of North America.
The following video introduces a learning and action series for helping trees adapt to climate change — species by species, decade by decade. This is not a replacement for stopping the burning of fossil fuels, logging, and other carbon emissions sources, but it is necessary addition.
In her series, Barlow invites citizen naturalists are invited to research a favorite native tree species and begin to work with others to keep up with the northward movement of forest zones by planting and monitoring small numbers of wild seeds of common species onto private forested lands well north of where those seeds were collected.
This “assisted migration” in a time of unprecedented climate shift will be increasingly necessary in the decades ahead. Foresters can create the maps to show us where species will need to move to. But we citizen naturalists will play a complementary role in ensuring that the full diversity of genotypes keeps pace with a warming and drying continent.
Importantly, human action will mimic what birds, rodents, and other native seed dispersers have been able to accomplish on their own in previous periods of Earth history, when warming occurred at a slower, more natural pace.
Note: Three tree paintings by Illinois artist Mary Southard are included, as are several still shots from the 20th-century classic animated short film, “The Man Who Planted Trees.”
The series host, Connie Barlow, is the founder of the citizen activist group Torreya Guardians. She is the author of “The Ghosts of Evolution.”
Frenchwoman Maïmouna Doucouré, who wrote and directed ‘Cuties’ (English translation), a film which has sparked an online petition calling for it’s removal from Netflix’s streaming platform, has defended her work against the scrutiny it has come under (largely as a result of the way Netflix chose to represent her film), by asserting that we need to not “blame the girls” in these potentially accurate portrayals of their lives and behaviors.
As one of the many who has not seen the film, I have seen the promotional material: a still image from the film and text provided by an unknown individual describing a girl “who becomes fascinated with a twerking dance crew“. The children are eleven years old. The young actors are striking poses that are not hard to see as sexually suggestive. New to social media, my burgeoning role as SJW internet troll is shocking to me, mostly in my quick adaptation to this drug. Perusing the pile-on, there were shades of every argument: from people who had seen the film, explaining that it was about the sexploitation of young females; to people who, enraged, called for it to be removed from the streaming platform altogether.
The alarming normalization of sexualizing children has long been evident in Netflix.
Perhaps not so blatantly as now, but children’s, particularly girl’s, sexualization of themselves (by the age of seven according to Dr. Jessica Taylor) is something that has also long existed in this and other modern, civilized cultures and I would argue, needs to be addressed.
As the creatrix of this soft-core child pornography, Doucouré has here deflected the legitimate question about her responsibility as storyteller to the “sex-worker” argument.
No one said anything about blaming the girls.
The argument against pornography is that real people, in this case eleven year old girls, do the things in real life, in front of a camera. In the case of feature films, often exhaustively with rehearsals, memorization and multiple takes [nearly 700 underage girls auditioned for the lead roles]. It is not just a story anymore. It is perpetuation. Psychically, it is normalization, not a challenge, for participants and audience both.
The shame never belonged to the exploited. To have been exploited is a hard thing to admit in a culture that believes that the shame does belong to the exploited. I think that explains much of the drive toward liberal feminism among young women who do not have direct experience with, or on whose livelihood still depends the pay-for-rape industrial spectrum.
I agree that the film should be taken down, but the story will and must be told.
Disappearing unpleasant or untrue or unwanted theories, arguments or stories transforms them from reasoned, hard “No“s back into question marks.
Trinity La Fey is a smith of many crafts, has been a small business creatrix since 2020; published author; appeared in protests since 2003, poetry performances since 2001; officiated public ceremony since 1999; and participated in theatrical performances since she could get people to sit still in front of her.
For this episode of the Green Flame we celebrate the United States launch of the Women’s Human Rights Campaign with WHRC U.S. co-contact Thistle Pettersen and U.S. WHRC media moderator Austin DeVille.
Our skill-share highlights the WHRC effort to offer mutual support in the face of inevitable backlash:
It is of the utmost importance strategically when you are engaged in radical political movements to anticipate and prepare for push-back and to stand in unity against it. On that note, the Women’s Human Rights Campaign USA has a special committee dedicated to lending solidarity to anyone who has received backlash for signing the declaration. This committee will promptly send a letter to the opposing party in defense of the signatory’s right to resist threats to her safety and dignity. To contact the Solidarity Committee, send an email to solidarity@womensdeclaration-usa.com
We thank Thistle for permission to include her performance Michigan aka Gender Hurts in our program.
This episode of The Green Flame features an interview with James Darling who is currently on the 8th day of a hunger strike against logging of old-growth forests in British Columbia, Canada (occupied First Nations territory). You can contact James at: (250) 816-4321, or at james0darling@gmail.com.
In this interview, James talks about why he started the hunger strike, the old-growth logging in British Columbia, the path forward for the movement, and revolutions that have used hunger strikes.
