S1E93 - Last Born in the Wilderness on Anarchist Public Health

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Margaret and Patrick talk a lot about covid, public health, the role of anarchism in public health, and the weirdly similar origins of the names of two projects.

Guest Info

Patrick (he/him) can be found hosting the Last Born in the Wilderness podcast. You can find it at www.lastborninthewilderness.com or wherever you get podcasts. You an also find Patrick on Instagram @patterns.of.behavior or on Twitter @LastBornPodcast

Host Info

Margaret (she/they) can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Last Born in the Wilderness on Anarchist Public Health

**Margaret ** 00:14 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today, Margaret Killjoy. I say it that way because there's other hosts now and I'm very excited about that. But sometimes, apparently, we have the same voice. And so people think that we are each other, but we're not. We're different people. And you can tell because my name is Margaret Killjoy and Inmn's name is not Margaret Killjoy. It is instead, Inmn. But that's not what we're talking about. What we're gonna talk about today ... Well, we're gonna talk about a lot of stuff today. I'm really excited about it. We're gonna be talking with the host of a podcast you should probably be listening to if you're not already called Last Born in the Wilderness. And it's like the [laughing] smarter thinking version of this show. And so we're gonna talk about that. And first, here's a jingle from another show on the network, which is ... the network is Channel Zero Network, which is a network of anarchists podcasts, and here's a jingle. Buh buh bah buh buh bah [singing like a simple melody]

**Margaret ** 02:09 Okay, we're back. Okay. So if you could introduce yourself with your name, your pronouns, and then kind of maybe introduce this other podcast, this project that you do.

**Patrick ** 02:18 Yeah. Thanks for having me on. My name is Patrick Farnsworth. Pronouns are he/him. I'm the host of Last Born in the Wilderness. It's a podcast I've been hosting for quite a long time now and I ... I don't know how to describe it. Someone described it once as a podcast about death and dying, which sounds rather bleak. It's an interesting way to describe it. I mean, it's, uh, you know ... I certainly come from a radical leftist and anarchist, or as someone else has said about me, "anarchistic adjacent perspective." I'm talking about collapse. I'm talking about the implications of global climate change, climate disruption, the so-called sixth mass extinction anthropocene, like these kind of big, heady, huge global subjects around, you know, extinction and mass extinction events and so on. And I kind of also explore the history of settler colonialism and issues around whiteness, or I should say, white supremacy. I talk about a whole bunch of stuff. And I think the point of it is to really get at the question of: what are the roots of these kinds of broader biosphere crises that we're in the midst of? Why is it that human beings, or the dominant culture of human beings that we are part of, producing a mass extinction event? And what does that portend? What does that lead to? What can we expect to happen in the coming decades? And kind of wrestling with really deep ... "Deep." [said with an introspective laugh] I mean "deep" in the sense emotionally and spiritually with the question of what does extinction mean for our species? And how do we grapple with that? It's a big question. So yeah, that's more or less what the podcast is kind of addressing.

**Margaret ** 04:03 Yeah, no. Okay, wait, so with extinction, do you run into this thing .... Okay, well, no, first I'm gonna ask about your name, then we're gonna come back to extinction. Where did you get this sick name? It's such a sick name. It's obviously ... As someone who is part of a project called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness and then has a show called Live Like the World is Dying, I'm clearly a fan of this slightly long and poetic style of naming. But Last Born in the Wilderness is a sick name. I'm curious about its background.

**Patrick ** 04:28 Sure. I mean, the name itself came--it's a funny origin story really--when I came up with the name, I was homesick and I didn't know what to call this thing. I didn't even know what I wanted to make. But I was thinking about what my father would call me because I'm the youngest of this large Mormon family. No longer LDS but grew up in this LDS family, LDS environment. He would call me his "last born in the wilderness" because being kind of ... he's kind of a lovely but very quirky man who would have these very strange nicknames for his kids, including me being the youngest, being the, quote, "last born the wilderness," meaning he was paraphrasing from the Book of Mormon. There's a verse in the Book of Mormon about this family going through the wilderness and something about being the "last born in this wilderness of mine afflictions." Like it's really dramatic kind of bleak Mormon scripture stuff and it's weird. So, I don't know, I guess I thought of my dad, I thought of that, I thought of my history, I thought of ... it sounded like it could have multiple meanings. And it does because as I did the podcast more and more I started to really think about the other layers of it, of, "Okay, are we the last generation?" Like is this the end of this idea of wilderness. Wilderness itself is kind of an interesting idea. And the kind of colonialist notion, the dualism of civilization versus wilderness, and that in and of itself is a problematic idea. Like, there's a lot of layers to it that I've discovered, which is actually what I love about really cool names or titles of things is when you name something and you realize over time that it actually has other meanings that kind of come up, and you're like, "Oh, that actually means this as well. I did not know that." So that's where it comes from.

**Margaret ** 06:13 Okay, I really like that for a thousand reasons. One of the things you talked about ... I've been reading more and more stuff that's critical of the idea of "wilderness," right? Because you're creating an artificial distinction between humans and everything else, right? As if, like ... I mean, we're not capable of doing things that are not natural because we're literally, natural beings, right?

**Patrick ** 06:33 Yeah, exactly.

**Margaret ** 06:35 And the idea of untouched wilderness as this very colonial concept where it's like, actually, a lot of forests are managed by people and we're .... And it gets humans off the hook if we treat ourselves like we're bad, like, inherently, right?

**Patrick ** 06:51 Yeah.

**Mar