This week we’re sharing a conversation with Clare Follman, a writer, activist and gardener with a masters in environmental science about her 2026 AK Press book, Scapegoat: What the Invasive Species Story Gets Wrong. The conversation covers questions of ecological balance, belonging, linguistic clarity and the stories we tell about our relationship to the rest of nature.
For the hour we talk about the so-called Science Wars of the 1990’s, debates involving scientific approaches and shared understandings of a a measurable physical reality, post-modernism, the roles leftists and anarchists played in the debates and how cults and authoritarians employ anti-realist explanations of the world to limit their subjects’ moves toward liberation.