What links sexual violence by soldiers against rural indigenous women and the war over natural resources? From this triggering and disquieting question, Iván González reflects on the links between violence, health and ecocide, and invites us to think about the ways in which human civilisations based on the centralisation of power have driven ecosystems and humanity itself to the limits of survival.

How do the overexploitation of marine resources and the destruction of bio-eco-socio environments relate to today’s predatory capitalism and the coloniality of “development”? María Elena Farro and Macedonio Vásquez share their deep knowledge on these issues acquired through their lifelong experience of struggle against those forces in the so called “fetid paradise” of Chimbote, Peru, where ecocide has impacted human and non-human life alike.

Nestled between the Pacific Ocean, the lagoons of the Mexican isthmus and the oil refinery in the city of Salina Cruz, the Ikoots people of San Mateo del Mar face existential challenges in the Anthropocene. In this episode, we engage in a dialogue with Beatriz Gutiérrez, an Ikoots educator and activist, and Flavia Cuturi, an anthropologist who has been involved in the social and cultural life of San Mateo for decades. Beatriz and Flavia reflect on the socio-environmental impacts of development projects on these lands, the physical and spiritual contamination, and the challenges for survival in this global crisis. They also point to the need to establish intercultural and interdisciplinary dialogues to imagine and build “alter-native” routes for “living well”, or monapaküy in the language of the Ikoots.

Alex Blanchette, author of “Porkopolis” speaks to us about how he began  researching human-hog relationships from an interest in understanding class, race and labour relations in industrial scale pig farms. In the process he realised how conjoined the lives of pigs and human workers had become. As a site for labour the industrial pig generates 1,100 products from meat to printer paper and road surfaces made possible through the hyper industrialisation of life and death and constant quest for more uniform growth. These radical interventions into animals lives continually cause problems for pig lives and the humans they are entangled with. Blanchette’s Marxist lens discusses how pigs and people serve capital through 200 different job and asks whether a work-centred life is compatible with planetary health, where the energy needs of consumerism are transforming the planet and driving people to work. Yet to do this, capitalism also requires an ethic of care for the product itself, the pig.

How can we treat the wounds or effects of the Anthropocene on the health of social groups affected by the imposition of Western social dynamics and the capitalist way of life? Latin America has struggled for centuries with disease, genocide and, above all, epistemicide caused by the imposition of health practices that disregard culturally localised knowledge. In this podcast, Cesar Abadia-Barrero talks to us about going beyond the perpetuation of colonialist dynamics in health issues, reinforcing the importance of indigenising the West, bringing "epistemologies of care" into the academic debate and into public policies. This talks about culturally localised knowledge, built from the characteristic conditions of the global south, its nature, its people and animals, its culture and history.

Katie and Julieta discuss the emergence of Environmental Reproductive Justice along the intersect of discussions around climate crisis and reproductive justice, explaining why these two fields are inseparable and are an essential partnership in these anthropocenic times. After explaining how they came to ERJ from different positions, the speakers explore and explain why it is important that we challenge the individualistic approaches within climate science and how the notion of individual agency as a the focus of solutions is inadequate for addressing our current environmental problems.

In this episode, Cristiana Bastos talks about her research carried out in different countries such as Brazil, India, Angola and others. By unveiling processes of social inequality in these countries, she shows how the social thinking present in collective health in Brazil, for example, goes through a whole elaboration on the role of tropical medicine in the history of the constitution of the nation, in which the logic of tropical germ medicine was linked to colonial systems, such as the supremacy of one group of the population over the other, in the conquest of the interior, in the subjection of indigenous forces or in the expansion of a white urban logic. These links to the subjugation of certain otherness were investigated by Bastos in his project 'Color of Labour’, highlighting how sugar cane plantations perpetuated slavery in the post-abolition period, through the migration of Madeiran workers to work in these places, carrying with them a servitude that differed from slavery, but also related to color, but which placed the immigrant under a signed work contract, perpetuating this imperialist logic.

In this podcast, we talk to Elizângela Baré about her journey as an indigenous leader in the Amazon region and how this intertwines with her academic career. She advocates that indigenous knowledge should not only be part of, but also recognized as important in the university education. We also talk about climate change and gender relations, with Eliz's critical reflections serving as the guiding thread.

How are human and non-human lives brought together, made possible, and simultaneously imperilled in the blue Anthropocene? Peru’s jumbo squid fishery provides key insights into this question. Industrial reorganisations of Pacific Ocean ecologies have entwined the lives of often impoverished and radicalised| artisanal fishers with jumbo squid populations in ways that currently enable their (re)production while simultaneously devaluing them for the creation of cheap seafood. However, the tenuous conditions that have made the fishery possible are threatened by pressure from industrial producers to remove legal protections on the fishery, multinational fleets targeting squid outside Peru’s jurisdiction, and the squids’ rapid adaptations to shifting ocean conditions that can cause dramatic fluctuations in their populations. The story of jumbo squid fishing reveals the importance of studying multispecies displacements for understanding how the extraction of certain species for the purpose of capital accumulation re-orders entire ecological assemblages. Such reconfigurations imperil the precarious multispecies networks that make more-than-human life possible in the Anthropocene.