Her latest book, TRUE WEST: MYTH AND MENDING ON THE FAR SIDE OF AMERICA, was published this Fall by Torrey House Press. She received a doctorate in Environmental History from Montana State University in 2017, her dissertation focused on Mormon settlement and public land conflicts. She has studied various religious traditions over the years, with particular attention to how cultures view landscape and wildlife. The rural American west, pastoral communities of northern Mongolia, and the grasslands of East Africa have been her main areas of interest. She is the president of the Board of Directors of Wild Earth Guardians.
Although TRUE WEST focuses primarily on the intermountain west, what goes on in this region is having tremendous effect on our national politics and well-being. Just two days ago, the Colorado Supreme Court decided in favor of a suit brought by CO Republican and unaffiliated voters, working with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, CREW, against CO Secretary of State Jena Griswold and Donald J. Trump, taking advantage of a CO law that allows voters to challenge a candidate’s eligibility. In this case the eligibility was challenged under Section 3 of the 14th amendment, claiming that the former president had engaged insurrection , based on his actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol attack by his supporters at his urging. As you will hear in this interview with Betsy Gaines Quammen, recorded in the Beyond the Deep End Studio on the Winter Solstice of 2023, extremist organizing in this region over more than a decade contributed to that insurrection. We share it with you now.
Stuart A. Reid is an executive editor at Foreign Affairs magazine, and his book, THE LUMUMBA PLOT: THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE CIA AND A COLD WAR ASSASSINATION, is published by Knopf. You might wonder why we would focus on events in The Congo back in 1960, when there is so much happening right now.
Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, writes: “This is the book we’ve needed for years: a thorough, judicious, eloquent account of one of the twentieth century’s pivotal moments. Patrice Lumumba’s murder was a tragedy not just for his young and troubled country, but also for the way it stimulated Washington’s illusion that America could rearrange the world to its liking. Stuart Reid captures this ominous turning point with the clear-eyed wisdom it deserves.”
Beyond any of these considerations, the story of Patrice Lumumba is the tragic, heroic tale of a man born into dismal, colonial circumstances, with the indomitable thirst for knowledge and the chutzpah and savvy to rise to become the first prime minister of his country, the former Belgian Congo, and who, within within mere months is assassinated under the direction of the CIA.
Our guest, Stuart Reid, spent 6 years researching and writing this very engaging narrative. In addition to my appreciation of that, I am doubly grateful to him, because after engaging in an hour long interview, which I was then horrified to discover had not been recorded for unknown reasons, he graciously agreed to do a second interview, which I offer to you now.
Articles, etc., pertinent to this interview:
Stuart A. Reid is an executive editor at Foreign Affairs magazine, and his book, THE LUMUMBA PLOT: THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE CIA AND A COLD WAR ASSASSINATION, is published by Knopf. You might wonder why we would focus on events in The Congo back in 1960, when there is so much happening right now. Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, writes: “This is the book we’ve needed for years: a thorough, judicious, eloquent account of one of the twentieth century’s pivotal moments. Patrice Lumumba’s murder was a tragedy not just for his young and troubled country but also for the way it stimulated Washington’s illusion that America could rearrange the world to its liking. Stuart Reid captures this ominous turning point with the clear-eyed wisdom it deserves.” Furthermore, Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, said this in a recent interview with Ari Melber about why it’s important to study history.
Beyond any of these considerations, the story of Patrice Lumumba is the tragic, heroic tale of a man born into dismal, colonial circumstances, with the indomitable thirst for knowledge and the chutzpah and savvy to rise to become the first prime minister of his country, the former Belgian Congo, and who, within within mere months is assassinated under the direction of the CIA. Our guest, Stuart Reid, spent 6 years researching and writing this very engaging narrative. In addition to my appreciation of that, I am doubly grateful to him, because after engaging in an hour long interview, which I was then horrified to discover had not been recorded for unknown reasons, he graciously agreed to do a second interview, which I offer to you now.
LUMUMBA (2001) From the director of I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO. Made in the tradition of such true-life political thrillers as Malcolm X and JFK, Raoul Peck’s award-winning LUMUMBA is a gripping epic that dramatizes for the first time the rise and fall of legendary African leader Patrice Lumumba. When the Congo declared its independence from Belgium in 1960, Lumumba became the first Prime Minister of the newly independent state. Called “the politico of the bush” by journalists of the day, he became a lightning rod of Cold War politics as his vision of a united Africa gained him powerful enemies in Belgium and the U.S. “Peck, who assayed Lumumba’s life in a 1991 documentary, now paces the doomed man’s story like the genuine thriller that it is.” – Ella Taylor, L.A. Weekly Available for free on Kanopy.
Dannagal Goldthwaite Young is a professor of communication and political science at the University of Delaware. In addition to being an award winning scholar, she has also been an improvisational comedian. Her 2020 TED Talk (link below) explaining how our psychology shapes our politics and how media exploit these relationships has been viewed over 2 Million times. She publishes extensively in the popular press with essays and Op-eds in outlets including Vox.com, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. Her earlier book is Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States.
Her book, WRONG: HOW MEDIA, POLITICS, AND IDENTITY DRIVE OUR APPETITE FOR MISINFORMATION, was just published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
As Jaime Settle, author of FRENEMIES: HOW SOCIAL MEDIA POLARIZES AMERICA, writes of it ‘Powerful, distinctive, and utterly compelling, Wrong argues that the way we satisfy our needs for comprehension, control, and community is shaped by our social identities, which are at the core of both the supply and demand for misinformation. Because politicians and the media know this fact, they behave strategically in order to structure politics through this perspective.”
We spoke with Dr. Young on November 7, 2023 via Skype.
Links to articles/videos pertinent to this interview:
In this edition of Forthright Radio our guest is journalist, author, environmentalist, Greg King. I first became aware of Greg’s work back in the late 1980s, when we who lived in the remnants of the once great redwood biome organized to protect what remained of that ecosystem from voracious predatory capitalists, who proudly vowed to “log to infinity.”
Greg King in All Species Grove 1987 (courtesy of Greg King)
Greg is the fifth generation of his family to live in Sonoma and Mendocino Counties of northern CA, – his ancestors having arrived in the 1860s and owned what was then one of the largest redwood mills, the King-Starrett mill in Monte Rio. The The King Range Mountains were named for his great-great uncle, John King, who lived north of Westport in Mendocino County, due to his hospitality to the government surveyor before his mapping that steep coastal range in the Lost Coast. Long before Greg was born, the last of the great redwood forests in Sonoma County were cut, but there were second growth stands and massive stumps of 20’ or greater diameter which served as his childhood playground. After graduating from UC Santa Cruz in 1985, he joined the staff of the West Sonoma County Paper, now called the Bohemian, where he won his first of two Lincoln Steffens Investigative Journalism Award.
Investigating Louisiana-Pacific’s “logging to infinity” in his neighborhood led him to the Maxxam Corporation’s hostile takeover, financed by junk bonds, of Humboldt County’s Pacific Lumber Company and the ensuing accelerated destruction of the last intact, ancient redwood groves in private hands to pay off the debt. Exploring these untouched forests with the largest, oldest trees on the planet inspired a reverence and awe unlike anything he had ever experienced. The rest, as they say, is history.
In his book, THE GHOST FOREST: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods, he describes how he left his home and promising career to devote his life to identifying and protecting those few remaining giants and the biome centered on them. He is credited with mapping the remaining groves, including The Headwaters Forest, as well as pioneering tree sitting to prevent logging of redwoods in Humboldt County.
Greg King on traverse during a tree-sit in the middle of 1,000 acre All Species Grove, September 1987. Note sleeping platform on the tree in the background, tied under the lowest branch 150′ above the forest floor. (photo by Mary Beth Nearing, courtesy of Greg King)
What might have been merely a memoir became a shocking exposé of the all too successful efforts of financiers and industrialists via their creation of the Save the Redwoods League in 1917, to subvert the growing desire of the public to protect and preserve the remaining redwoods, by promoting instead small “beauty strips” along roadways to hide devastating clearcuts. As one of the first to delve into The League’s archives at U. C. Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, Greg followed the history back to the federal acts of the 19th century, that allowed well organized land fraud syndicates to place what had been 2 million acres of undisturbed ancient forests into private corporate hands. His research led him to the connections between the Save the Redwood League creators and the so-called “scientific racism” eugenics movement, which was so helpful to the Nazis in Germany, and which still plagues our nation even today. We spoke with Greg King on October 18, 2023 via Skype.
In 1996 more than 8,000 people protested ancient redwood logging at the Pacific Lumber log deck along Yager Creek, in Humboldt County. More than 1,000 were arrested. It remains the largest single-day arrest number for an environmental protest in U.S. history. photo by Greg King
On Wed., October 25, The Bozeman Film Society will be screening Butcher’s Crossing, which was filmed in just 19 days entirely in Montana, mostly on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Glacier National Park and Nevada City in Madison County were also locations. We spoke with producer, Molly Conners, about Butcher’s Crossing and producing it here in Montana.
Molly Conners is founder and CEO of Phiphen, an independently owned film, television, and digital media company focused on producing creative, smart productions for a global audience. Her films have been Emmy nominated, and she has produced or executive produced 35 feature films over the last 15 years that have earned a total of 4 Academy Awards and 11 Academy Award nominations. Some of Molly’s notable credits include the 2014 Academy Award-winner BIRDMAN, the 2009 Academy Award-nominated FROZEN RIVER, as well as the films: KILLER JOE, THE IMMIGRANT, JOE, and RULES DON’T APPLY.
Her latest film, Butcher’s Creek, is based on the seminal 1960 novel of the same name by John Edward Williams, with a screenplay co-written by director, Gabe Polsky. An epic frontier adventure, Butcher’s Crossing, is a riveting commentary on human nature, ambition, masculinity, and man’s relationship to his natural environment. Academy Award winner Nicolas Cage stars in this tragedy about the last of the buffalo hunters in the Old West. Young greenhorn, Will Andrews, played by Fred Hechinger, has left his undergraduate life at Harvard to find adventure in the wild west. He teams up with Cage’s character, buffalo hunter, Miller, a taciturn frontiersman offering a hunt of an unprecedented number of buffalo for their pelts in a secluded valley in the Colorado Rockies. Their crew must survive an arduous journey, where the harsh elements will test everyone’s resolve, leaving their sanity on a knife’s edge.
We spoke with Molly Conners on October 13, 2023 via Skype.
As each month breaks historic records for the hottest ever recorded, we realize that hot though they have been, they may very well be the coolest we’ll ever experience in the future. As wild fires, smoke and floods devastate huge swathes of the globe, one asks what can be done? While many dither (or worse), young people take action. Through their courage and determination, with their adult allies, they demand their rights to a livable future in courts around the world.
On September 27, 2023 in Strasbourg, France, The hearing of 6 Portuguese youth plaintiffs in the historic lawsuit, Duarte Agostinho v. Portugal and 32 Others, took place at the European Court of Human Rights.
The plaintiffs want governments to set and meet science-based targets for cutting carbon emissions in the 33 countries: all EU member states, plus Norway, Switzerland, Russia, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.
The fact that the European Court of Human Rights elevated this case to its Grand Chamber demonstrates how seriously the Court takes allegations that the inadequate climate policies of these 33 States breach their legal obligation to prevent climate-related harm.
Among the third party interveners in Aghostino was the Center for International Environmental Law. We invited Nikki Reisch, the Director of the Climate & Energy Program, at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) to be our guest on Forthright Radio. At CIEL, Nikki works at the intersection of human rights and the environment, overseeing research, analysis, legal and policy advocacy related to climate change, its causes, consequences, and responses to it.
Prior to joining CIEL, Nikki Reisch was the Legal Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, and a Supervising Attorney in the Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law. She was also an Adjunct Professor in the Human Rights and Gender Justice Clinic at CUNY School of Law. Her work focused on human rights and environmental harms related to a range of domestic and international issues, including open-pit mining, surveillance of human rights defenders, immigration enforcement, torture, and arbitrary detention.
Her engagement in climate justice began with her five-year tenure as the Africa Program Manager at the Bank Information Center, where she worked to curb development finance for fossil fuels and supported front-line communities challenging extractive industry projects. In her subsequent position as the Policy Advisor on Forests and Climate Change at Rainforest Foundation UK, Nikki co-founded a global coalition tracking reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation in the UNFCCC negotiations and pursued transnational advocacy with partners in the Congo Basin to mitigate the human rights risks posed by climate change and policy responses to it.
She has litigated before domestic and international courts, appeared before UN treaty bodies and the accountability mechanisms of international financial institutions, and co-authored amicus briefs in several human rights cases. She is co-editor with Philip Alston of Tax, Inequality, and Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2019) and has published other articles and reports on human rights and environmental matters.
In our far ranging conversation, which was recorded on October 3, 2023 via Skype, she told us “Sometimes when politics break down — as they have despite decades of climate negotiations — the law can break through.”
In our conversation, Nikki referred to the European Court of Human Rights decisions as binding on the “Member States of the EU.” She actually meant The Council of Europe (46 member states, including the 27 EU states).
Award winning filmmaker Andrew Morgan’s latest film is the documentary, TEXAS, USA. As in his earlier films such as THE TRUE COST and THE HERETIC, he informs us about big topics through the impacts on individual lives.
TEXAS, USA explores what it takes to build a new, hopeful vision for democracy against entrenched, well funded forces against the full participation of all Texas citizens. The film follows progressive candidates, Lina Hidalgo, Greg Casar and Beta O’Rourke, as well as community organizers, Tori Gavito, Brianna Brown (Texas Organizing Project – TOP) and Adri Pérez, during the 2022 elections.
We see the human side of politics – whether going door to door in major cities or addressing crowds in small, rural town-hall meetings. It documents that democracy is very much alive and succeeding even in an era of reactionary politics aimed at suppressing it.
We spoke with Andrew on October 2, 2023 via Skype.
Robert P. Jones is the author of the book, THE HIDDEN ROOTS of WHITE SUPREMACY and the PATH to a SHARED AMERICAN FUTURE, published by Simon and Schuster.
His earlier award winning books include WHITE TOO LONG: THE LEGACY OF WHITE SUPREMACY IN AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY; THE END OF WHITE CHRISTIAN AMERICA; and PROGRESSIVE AND RELIGIOUS: HOW CHRISTIAN, JEWISH, MUSLIM AND BUDDHIST LEADERS ARE MOVING BEYOND THE CULTURE WARS AND TRANSFORMING AMERICAN PUBLIC LIFE.
In this latest book, he reminds us that the enslavement of Africans was not America’s original sin, but rather the continuation of a pattern of genocide and dispossession that began with the first European contact with the Indigenous peoples of this land. His reframing of America’s origins explores how the founders of the US could build a democratic society on the foundations of mass racial violence, and why this paradox survives today in the form of White Christian Nationalism. Through three stories from our history and current re-examination and reckonings by those living today, he has illuminated the possibility of a new American future in which we finally fulfill the promise of true democracy.
We spoke with him on September 20, 2023 via Skype.
Naomi Oreskes is Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. A world renowned earth scientist, historian and public speaker, she is the author or co-author of nine books, including the best-selling book, Merchants of Doubt, and a leading voice on the role of science in society, the reality of anthropogenic climate change, and the role of disinformation in blocking climate action.
Her latest book, co-written with Erik Conway, is The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, published by Bloomsbury Press.
The week beginning August 14th, 2023 has been historic for first rulings and actions for the environment and democracy. That morning, MT District CourtJudge, Kathy Seeley, rendered her masterful 103 page closely reasoned and well cited verdict in the case of Held v MT, ruling that the 16 youth plaintiffs’ constitutional rights under the Montana State Constitution were being violated by the Montana government’s laws and practices, including amendments to the Montana Environmental Policy Act (MEPA) that specifically prohibited consideration of climate change in the granting of permits by the Dept of Environmental Quality.
Ann Hedges of MEIC
We spoke with Anne Hedges of the MT Environmental Information Centerhttps://meic.org/, who testified in the case, as well as Claire Vlases, one of the youth Plaintiffs who testified.
Claire Vlases testifies as Judge Kathy Seeley listens intently
Then, on August 17, in The United States District Court for the District of Montana, Federal Judge Donald Molloy, rendered his judgment in favor of The Alliance for the Wild Rockies & Native Ecosystems Council suit against the US Forest Service, to protect the dwindling remnant grizzly bears population and to stop the Black Ram massive old growth logging project in its tracks. https://allianceforthewildrockies.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/093-ORDER-Granting-MSJ-2023-08-17.pdf This is historic, because it’s the first time in the Federal Courts that climate change was cited in a ruling. We spoke with Mike Garrity of the Alliance for the Wild Rockieshttps://allianceforthewildrockies.org/ about that decision.
Then, on Sunday, August 20th, Ecuador became the first country in history to restrict fossil fuel extraction through the citizen referendum process. Nearly 60% of Ecuadorian voters backed a binding referendum opposing oil exploration in Block 43, a section of Yasuní National Park, the most biodiverse area of the imperiled Amazon rainforest, which is home to uncontacted Indigenous tribes, as well as hundreds of bird species and more than 1,000 tree species.
Maya K. van Rossum
Finally, we spoke with Maya van Rossum, founder of Green Amendments for the Generationshttp://www.ForTheGenerations.org about her decades long efforts to secure Green Amendments in state constitutions nationwide. According to van Rossum, currently only 3 states benefit from Green Amendment constitutional environmental rights — Montana, Pennsylvania and New York. In addition to leading the effort that secured New York’s Green Amendment just over 2 years ago, and being responsible for the litigation that brought strength to Pennsylvania’s amendment, van Rossum is working to pass Green Amendments in 15 other states with more getting in contact since hearing about the Held victory.
It is worth quoting the relevant parts of the Montana State Constitution, upon which Judge Seeley based her verdict.
Article II, Bill of Rights, Section 3, Inalienable Rights:
All persons are born free and have certain inalienable rights. They include the right to a clean and healthful environment and the rights of pursuing life’s basic necessities, enjoying and defending their lives and liberties, acquiring, possessing and protecting property, and seeking their safety, health and happiness in all lawful ways. In enjoying these rights, all persons recognize corresponding responsibilities.
(1) The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations. (2) The legislature shall provide for the administration and enforcement of this duty. (3) The legislature shall provide adequate remedies for the protection of the environmental life support system from degradation and provide adequate remedies to prevent unreasonable depletion and degradation of natural resources.
I recorded the entire proceedings and produced Daily Audio Digests. After the trial, I produced archived editions of each witness’s testimony, as well as closing arguments. Unlike the trial transcript, from which the plaintiffs’ witnesses’ pre-rebuttal testimony was stricken, in these archived recordings of their testimony is intact. Here are the links to those recordings in the order in which they occurred:
Forthright Radio 