00:00:00.000over the past few months i have journeyed to the yukon in partnership with illuminating
00:00:14.060worldviews illuminating worldviews serves as a space to examine the worldviews amidst which
00:00:19.800we find ourselves and see how they actively shape the material realities of our lives
00:00:25.320This project, rooted and colored by the land of the Yukon, makes space for questioning, examination, and future visioning centered in indigenous ideology and the sentiment of journeying.
00:00:38.700in person and on the land I've had the chance to speak with incredible thought leaders with
00:00:44.680deep connections to the Yukon all with a live audience in the beautiful city of Whitehorse
00:00:51.120except for the last event which was in Dawson City though this series is deeply local it has
00:00:59.340broad implications for our culture as a whole and I'm so excited to share it with you this series
00:01:04.740was produced thanks to the generous support of the team at Illuminating Worldviews held by the
00:01:09.640River Collective and the Northern Council for Global Cooperation. We are so grateful to the
00:01:15.260organizers, speakers, and audience members who made this series possible, and also a very big
00:01:21.220thank you to the land of the Yukon, the boreal forest, the rivers, the lakes. I am honored to
00:01:27.480have been asked to be part of this. In this episode, I'm joined by Vanessa Andorodi to
00:01:46.300speak about modernity, the necessity of endings, and the power of fluidity in approaching this
00:01:51.820world. Vanessa and I immediately connected in the Yukon, and I am so happy to share this episode
00:01:57.020with you all. Vanessa Machado de Oliveria Anderodi is a Latinx professor at the University
00:02:05.280of British Columbia. She holds a Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities, and Global Change.0.92
00:02:11.060She began her career as a teacher in Brazil in 1994 and has since led educational and
00:02:16.580research programs in countries including the UK, Finland, New Zealand, Brazil, and Canada.
00:02:27.020A lot gets neglected, a lot of our accountabilities and obligations, especially to the land and
00:02:41.620to the other relations that are being extracted and exploited in this, they do get neglected.
00:02:49.300And we now have an opportunity to see all that, to see all this harm right in front
00:03:04.140I just want to thank everyone for being here and the land and it feels really incredible
00:03:13.020to be in the boreal and amid the spring awakening and to be with Vanessa, who I've definitely
00:03:21.820been a fangirl of for years now as a little personal dream come true. So thanks Vanessa
00:03:28.240for sitting with us and sitting with me. So Vanessa and I got some time last night to
00:03:39.160start to percolate together what we might talk about today. And I want to start by
00:03:48.920speaking to the butterflies i felt in my stomach uh excited a little scared but alive again um
00:04:03.000and i don't know about some of you or all of you in the audience but
00:04:06.880for me the journey uh of awareness of what was happening and what is happening in the world
00:04:13.700has has almost kind of come to a stagnant place when I started for the wild about a decade ago
00:04:24.100or a little bit more now I remember the awakening was like transformative and I wanted to stand on
00:04:32.760my soapbox and scream it from the rooftops that like the sky is falling and I think my family
00:04:37.420even called me chicken little at that time and didn't really want me to talk at family dinners
00:04:42.200because i was so like don't you see don't you see the collapse this is coming that's inevitable
00:04:48.080um and but at that time it was really more in the fringe these conversations weren't necessarily
00:04:55.720mainstream but i thought if they became mainstream if more people saw what i saw then surely we would
00:05:03.800change surely we would be enraged we would we would we would make huge changes globally but
00:05:10.580what I find interesting is the more knowledge we consumed as a global humanity, things weren't
00:05:19.700changing. New York Times would talk about climate change, but we weren't stopping our consumption.
00:05:26.720Greenhouse gases weren't going down. And so I kind of had to take a step back and wonder,
00:05:33.740where, well, if we know what we know, why aren't we quickly moving in a different direction,
00:05:42.500but instead only consuming more, the addiction only being more engorged? But at the same time,
00:05:51.300of course, we know things are changing all over the world in all these different ways. So
00:05:57.620So I guess, Vanessa, how I would like to start this conversation is where do we go and what do we do when we have the knowledge, but we're either stuck or stagnant or the energy becomes blocked?
00:06:18.880um whether it's in our institutions in our governments in our family lives even in ourselves
00:06:25.200to not become apathetic or bored with the issues um and feeling like well what are we going to do
00:06:34.300we may as well just write it out but instead confront it we were we were talking about um
00:06:41.180As I remember, I was telling you that I wrote this book called Hospice in Modernity in 2021.
00:06:50.980And hospice in that sense means not investing in the futurity because modernity, I presented the thought in the book,
00:07:02.900modernity is dying in in this requires um a palliative care of a system that is not that it
00:07:12.820that is dying at the same time that we hold space for the birth of something new um undefined
00:07:21.580potentially but not necessarily wiser because it would depend on what we learn from the mistakes
00:07:28.060of the old. So we have to create that space, the transition space where we become both death doulas
00:07:36.260and birth doulas at the same time. And from 2021 until December 2024, I was always asked the
00:07:47.860question, what evidence do you have that modernity is dying? From January this year,
00:08:03.280But they still ask me, what do you understand by modernity?
00:08:07.800And I think that might be an interesting thing to put.
00:08:10.560So in the book, I try to create a metaphor so that we can understand why modernity could be dying.
00:08:17.900And this metaphor is the metaphor of a house sitting on a planet.
00:08:24.140And the house is becoming bigger than the planet.
00:08:26.920So the house of modernity is exceeding the limits of the planet.
00:08:32.800And this is a reference to us overshooting the limits of the planet, basically.
00:08:37.440But this house has a foundation that in the book I call separability, which is the separation or the imposed sense of separation, because we are not separated.
00:08:50.620the imposed sense of separation between humans and nature which creates a pedestal for humanity
00:08:58.240and this pedestal for humanity means different things but one of them is that the land becomes
00:09:04.880property and the intrinsic value of life is replaced by this sense of worthlessness if you're
00:09:14.000not proving yourself to be deserving of being alive by participating in the economies inside
00:09:22.140that house so that is the foundation and then there are two carrying walls the first carrying
00:09:29.020wall is the carrying wall of the modern nation state that promises to protect the people
00:09:36.360But it was actually created to protect capital and capital owners.
00:09:42.760So it only protects people when there's interest convergence between protecting capital and protecting people.
00:09:51.640Then you have human rights, civil rights, indigenous rights, labor rights.
00:09:57.040But if there's no interest convergence, it's going to protect capital and capital owners.
00:10:05.640The other carrying wall of modernity is the carrying wall of Enlightenment humanism. It's a single story of progress, development, and civilization that tries to eliminate all the other stories.
00:10:20.880So the indigenous stories, the stories of other cultures, they become either non-legible, so they don't make sense within that story, or they actually need to be eliminated.
00:10:37.400And this elimination of other stories actually happens through modern institutions, including institutions of education.0.56
00:10:45.800So when we export modern education across the world, we are selling a vision of humanity as consumers, as individuals, as people who need to live in cities.
00:11:15.800And then the roof of this house is a roof of, today we have the roof of global capital, which is shareholder capital, speculative capital, where there is a fiduciary duty to create value for the shareholders who are anonymized.
00:11:35.920So we are all part of this. Our pensions, if we have pensions, are invested in this system when we use credit cards, when you use any financial system, we are invested in that roof.
00:11:48.260And this is a structurally damaged and damaging roof because there is no way to place responsibility.
00:11:55.760Different from industrial capitalism, this roof does not obey nation states. It roams freely around the world, relatively, and we are all invested in it. It kind of captures you in this.
00:12:12.160So this house in this little planet, it's getting bigger and the planet cannot sustain it.
00:12:19.880The planet cannot sustain exponential growth and consumption indefinitely because it's a finite planet and we are now reaching the limits of it.
00:12:31.320So in the book, we talk much more about modernity being this house that is exceeding the limits of the planet.
00:12:38.300And now there are cracks that are creating ecological, psychological, and social crisis that are stacked crisis.
00:12:47.620And our system of education doesn't prepare us to deal with this complexity, to hold this complexity.
00:12:56.320So it works like a pressure cooker where we are putting a lot of energy in trying to have a narrative of coherence of the old system, the old story that has already expired.
00:13:16.060And that narrative is not holding anymore because we are reaching the tipping points and the limits of the planet.
00:13:23.820So now that we see it happening in real time from January onwards, we see that the social contract, the international social order, and even the rule of law are being rewritten because these are just agreements that worked inside the house.
00:13:47.440now we have to figure out how we are going to face that moment and most i've been trying to do that
00:13:55.420too like one one thing that i've learned is that this is not an informational problem
00:14:00.740right it's a relational problem but when we are faced with uh destabilization of this order
00:14:08.740most people will want to either uh or they naturally go into panic zone and then they
00:14:16.140want to strategize something and generally the strategy is how do I protect my family
00:14:21.280or myself in this environment or they go into a mode of dissociation
00:14:29.740where I just pretend it's not happening I keep planning for the future and just wait for the
00:14:39.240best basically but I think what we need is to bring people to a space like what we're trying
00:14:45.460to do today of inquiry into how can we exist differently how can this moment of this of
00:14:54.880destabilization of death of the old be also a portal or a threshold where we do the reckoning
00:15:02.320that is necessary we see what didn't work and we learn deeply from that to make different mistakes
00:15:09.640basically because we keep making the same ones right and then come out of that process with a
00:22:39.440I think the example that I can use here is to be, if we think about the university historically,
00:22:47.040It was created to uphold certain stories. And in the last 200 years, it has gone in the direction of upholding that single story of progress, development and civilization.
00:23:01.060The university, if we're thinking about the archetype of the ivory tower, it's built on colonialism, slavery, and its uprightness is based on sexism, racism, all kinds of different problematic things, right?
00:23:20.100But we uphold it as the place where the best and the brightest are going to climb up there, see everything with a God's eye view, and then determine for others how it should be, right?
00:23:35.100Now, that archetype is no longer, like if we're thinking about the university today, it's more like the Tower of Pisa, right?
00:23:44.460Leaning and kind of the ground is shaking.
00:23:47.380There's so many crises, and some people would want to burn it down, right?
00:23:56.120But if you fall it hard, you also lose a lot of the things that could be very useful and helpful there.
00:24:02.720So what I've been trying to open up in terms of the imagination is that if this Tower of Pisa falls in a softer way, in a more controlled way, it can become a tree and then it goes down and maybe it becomes a nursing log for other things.
00:24:24.400So all the resources that are there, all the creativity that has been put in there, all the good labor that is also part of it, then it goes back to the soil, right?
00:24:36.980Then we have the mushrooms and the moss coming through and filling in the gaps.
00:24:42.160And then it's decomposed into soil because if it falls hard, it's going to be a loss that it goes to waste, basically, right?
00:24:52.560But that process of falling, falling of a tree in a, in a softer way requires patience and requires wisdom. So that is the scaffold for us also to grow up, right? Otherwise, we will keep on responding from a space of, of dualism, of, it's a kind of a lack of maturity, right?
00:25:18.560And lack of wisdom in trying to steward an ecology away from so much harm, right?
00:25:30.740Yes, and I see that that duality, the good-bad duality, it's not helping us anymore.
00:25:38.840That was a narrative that many of us have been entrenched in, but it's also blocked.
00:25:47.480It doesn't lead to more possibilities. It stops us. And I see that in so many ways. When we think about the legal system or politics, geopolitical issues, how do we steward that to become a nursing log? Or, you know, what are the medicines there for us to be aware of?
00:26:11.720so in the in the book we talk about the difference between disinvestment and divestment
00:26:19.740divestment is just turning your back and walking away and some people need to do that i'm not
00:26:24.680discounting that this is this is a legitimate um very legitimate um response especially when you're
00:26:32.900super harmed or hurt right but disinvestment means not investing in the continuity right
00:26:41.220So you are facing the thing and you are ready to compost.
00:26:48.240So part of the work of my collective has been to,
00:26:51.640the basic work is to adjust our nervous system0.99
00:26:55.940to be able to face the shit and not run away from it.0.99
00:27:02.720So we talk about having this, like training the stomach0.99
00:27:07.320uh to face the shit and not throw up on each other uh not throw a tantrum and not throw in0.99
00:27:18.040the towel right so how do we stay with what's difficult with what's painful and um and develop0.99
00:27:26.580the capacity to compost what's harmful right but staying together and if we go back to the dualism
00:27:34.880of the good and the bad generally what happens is a split and then the people who think they're good
00:27:40.500are over here the people who think that they're good in a different way are over here and then
00:27:45.160you have the split again now we will have we will probably be forced to stay together and figure out
00:27:52.660how to approach something that is much bigger than any of the smaller issues that we had to
00:28:00.240had to face in these compartmentalized ways in politics and education.
00:28:04.760But all these different institutions cannot, on their own,
00:28:10.460address what's coming, right, with the unraveling of collapse,
00:28:19.060of psychological and ecological and social collapse.
00:28:22.480So we will be invited or are voluntold to have to face this
00:28:28.620in every institution we are, every social space we are,
00:28:33.160and we will have one incentive at least to try to do it differently.
00:28:39.840And I think that's the silver lining of all of this, right?
00:28:43.720Because what worked before is not going to work now.
00:28:47.880And I'm talking about that existentially, not just in terms of thinking.
00:28:54.040it speaks to how we relate to everything how we weave our relationship with the land how we weave
00:29:01.880our relationship with ourselves how we weave our relationship with other species how we relate to
00:29:08.900each other we will have a chance to do it differently but we also need to be ready to do
00:29:16.780that and the problem is that if we don't start preparing for that by already composting our
00:29:25.680fears right and liberating us from those fears that that event will hit us and we will be too
00:29:36.040stunned and shell-shocked to be able to respond but what if we can feel the ground shaking know
00:29:43.360the train is coming, know we are tied to the tracks, and stop talking about the colors of the
00:29:49.260ropes, right? And actually get each other, get to help each other to get off the track and figure
00:29:56.500out what to do with the train. And most of our politics, unfortunately, have been caught in the
00:30:04.280colors of the ropes that tie us to the tracks. This reminds me of something you talk about in
00:30:09.840the book, which is problems versus predicaments. And I'm going to read a quote that we can
00:30:16.120kind of get into a bit. So you explain that problems are, quote, things that can be
00:30:24.240actually or potentially be fixed. And predicaments are, quote, things that must
00:30:29.880constantly be dealt with, won't be solved, won't go away. So reflecting on this, you explain,
00:30:36.240That modernity's violence and unsustainability are usually interpreted within modernity as complicated problems that can be solved rather than complex predicaments that need to be confronted.
00:30:49.340And I think this is a really interesting distinction because of the rhetoric that we hear about problem solving and savior mentality and how we're going to fix our way out of these very complex issues.
00:31:11.560What do you see as the problems versus predicaments?
00:31:14.800so if if we looked at uh problems to be fixed in modernity you're just trying to patch the house
00:31:21.680right so patch it here if it is the nation state is better policy if it's education more education
00:31:29.180generally right nobody thinks about the foundation though it's the foundation which is the separation
00:31:35.220between humans and the rest of nature it's very it's much more difficult to tackle because if you
00:31:41.060want to fix the house, that foundation is taken for granted. Now, if you see it as a predicament,
00:31:48.480you are going to be thinking that the house itself is unsustainable, right? We will have to
00:31:54.400figure out another way to exist as part of the metabolism of the planet, not apart from
00:32:02.220the metabolism of the planet, right? And the house was created probably to protect us
00:32:07.300from the planet from the rest of nature to defeat death for example so it had very lofty goals but
00:32:14.960it didn't work and the problem is that because we have lived in this house for so long we are also
00:32:21.600framed by it our imagination our ways of thinking our ways of relating are all conditioned by the
00:32:28.560same mechanism so the predicament is what lies beyond that house right that we can what other
00:32:37.900forms of relationship what other forms of joy of healing uh lie outside the confines that we have
00:32:48.780inherited and how do we combo because we can't just escape the house and go somewhere else right
00:32:55.540We have to, like the portal is through, not out of.
00:33:00.340So as we compost what's dying within the house, that's what becomes new soil for us to learn how to exist differently.
00:33:12.440Many people have tried to say, okay, not this, then I'm going to try something else.
00:33:17.020And actually, these attempts are actually very important because normally they fail.
00:33:22.420But that failure is also part of the composting. And a lot of it is based also on a certain form, and it's ingrained. We've learned that. It's a form of arrogance, right?
00:33:36.660We want to be the ones who find the solution or who have the authority or who are betrayed over what's right, wrong.
00:33:46.800And we want that thing validated because we are used to the pedestal too, right?
00:33:52.340If we are not worthy, we're worthless.
00:33:56.440That's a way of thinking within the house, right?
00:33:59.840And figuring out how to compost that pedestal so that there's no plus one or minus one.
00:38:02.920Years ago, during my awakening time, I was really trained and conditioned to look for
00:38:18.560the solutions or follow the people that were speaking about having the solutions.
00:38:24.660And it's interesting to think about it now because I am so suspect of anybody who says
00:38:30.800that they have the answer or the solutions or they're the inventor of the thing that's going
00:38:35.680to save the world anytime i hear somebody say save the world i'm like hold on what what are
00:38:42.120you really saying here and um and and i can really see it as you speak about the arrogance and the
00:38:50.140sense of separation and how relieving it is to say i'm not going to be the one who figures it out or
00:38:56.600saves, that hero story also needs to be composted. And the story of collectiveness and not knowing
00:39:06.560the answers, sitting in the discomfort and the uncertainty. I love that idea. And I know probably
00:39:14.020a lot of you in this room also feel a relief with that idea. But where my mind is going right now is
00:39:20.580whoo like think about all the people i know just personally who aren't even touching that idea with
00:39:27.780like a 10-foot stick like they don't want to sit in the discomfort they don't want to sit in the
00:39:32.280uncertainty and the mystery they don't want to stay with the trouble um they want somebody else
00:39:37.460to fix it like look at politics i think that's so much of why people vote the way they vote is
00:39:44.460they want somebody to save them us from whatever get them what they want and so like this question
00:39:52.820is forming for me around for for those of for those of us humans who we all know some of you
00:40:03.540know others like I can speak about my family who they don't they don't want to sit in that trouble
00:40:08.840And they don't maybe think they have to because of the comforts of modernity. And the comforts of modernity, I think, are a huge block to, I don't want to use the word force, but if we have our Netflix or just the things that keep us calmed and satiated,
00:40:35.140How do we invite others who may not be comfortable with sitting in the trouble with us when they can dissociate very easily and they can get distracted very easily and they don't think that they have to deal with the uncertainty of a collapsing system?
00:40:54.920so what i have uh my work is with a research collective an arts collective and that also
00:41:05.660involves um many indigenous communities especially in the global south and one of the
00:41:12.840the idea here is to understand that collapse is not happening now it's been happening for a long
00:41:19.960time and indigenous communities have had to deal with this uh for a long time right and um one of
00:41:28.520the metaphors we use in this is and we've learned it from from brazil it's a saying that we have in
00:41:35.360brazil that is that in the situation of a flood you can only actually swim when the water reaches
00:41:44.920your bum right before that if the water is at your ankle or at your knee you can only walk or
00:41:52.940wade in the water and indigenous people have known that and they they have to know that our bodies
00:42:02.420can swim and our bodies are water right and that you are in right relation with the river even
00:42:10.300as it floods and that that communication will help you navigate or swim to safety
00:42:19.940or into death which is another form of relationship right but then there is the0.98
00:42:28.460problem of us wanting to go to indigenous communities and ask okay how do we navigate
00:42:34.400our flood over here which also often doesn't work because every flood is different right and uh it's
00:42:42.820going to be very difficult for um people from from global north for example going to the amazon and
00:42:49.000trying to understand the flood over there uh and and transfer that knowledge so what i what we
00:42:56.320learned is that uh the indigenous communities we work with they remind us that it's possible
00:43:02.380to reweave the relationship with the water it's possible to reweave the relationship with our
00:43:09.300bodies as water our bodies as land and that is the swimming part of it it's not necessarily the
00:43:17.640the gestures or or the words it is in the relationship it's how we relate to everything
00:43:26.080And getting into the depth of that before the river floods to your bum, it's extremely important because if the water reaches your bum and you don't have that relationship, you won't know what to do.
00:43:46.020And you will probably then try to hold on to your fridge, which represents your comfort, as the waters go up.
00:43:56.080So figuring out right now, as we're in this waiting period, just seeing things being rewritten, but they have not cascaded yet to the actual implications of what's happening for the social contract, for borders, or for the rule of law.
00:44:16.460that's the moment where that relationship needs to be rewoven