Chrysalis with John Fiege
I’m a professor, filmmaker, and storyteller interested in the question of how we can transform ourselves—as individuals, as societies, as an entire species—in ways that allow our planet’s ecological systems to thrive. I began this work through the study of environmental history and cultural geography. I then became a filmmaker and photographer focused on stories of transformation in the face of ecological peril. Most recently, I launched the Chrysalis newsletter and podcast to have conversations with a wide variety of environmental thinkers, as well as to share my writing on our relationship with the natural world. My newsl...
29. Henri Cole — “Haiku”
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Henri Cole wrote his poem, "Haiku," after visiting a jellyfish exhibit at an aquarium. In the poem, he places himself on the beach, in red pajamas, observing and contemplating what he calls the “unnatural cycles” that have emerged in our world.
He jumps between the global and the self, switching between third person and first person, connecting our individual lives to the uncanny and unsettling natural worl...
28. Beth Osnes — Shine: A Climate Musical
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Show notes: https://www.johnfiege.earth/28-beth-osnes-shine-a-climate-musical
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Young people are a crucial part of transforming the climate crisis into a more promising future, but their voices are seldom included in discussions of how to reshape our societies in response to the threats of climate change.
Beth Osnes wants to change this and get young people more involved in these crucial climate conversations. She is a theater artist who works with young people in...
27. Alina Simone — Siberia's Black Snow and the Environmental Threat of Authoritarianism
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Imagine going up against a coal company to protect the health of your children and your community. Here in the United States, it's a daunting challenge; but in Putin's Russia, it's far worse.
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Alina Simone is a documentary filmmaker whose recent film, Black Snow, tells the story of a brave woman in Russia, named Natalia Zubkova, who went up against...
26. Christi Cooper — The Biggest Crime Against Humanity Ever
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The oil industry is scared. The impacts of climate change are upon us, and oil companies knew decades ago that burning fossil fuels would warm the planet.
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A paper published in the journal Nature in March of 2026 by several Stanford University researchers quantifies the economic impacts of fossil fuel emissions, concluding, for example, that emissions in the U.S. since 1990...
25. Abraham Joffe — The Polar Bear Trade
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Why is there an international trade in polar bear body parts, despite their iconic status as a symbol of climate change?
More than any other animal, the polar bear is an icon of climate change.
Considering this iconic status, you might be surprised to learn that there is an international trade in polar bears.
In the early days...
24. Laura Dunn — Live! Prophets! Live!
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If you’re concerned about what we’re doing to the climate and ecosystems around the planet and you’ve ever expressed those concerns to anyone, you probably know what it feels like to be seen as a Cassandra—the pessimist, the naysayer, the party pooper of Greek mythology. But the part of the myth we often forget is that Cassandra was a truth teller. She was right!
The...
23. Christy Rupp — From Rubble Rats to Plastic Pangolins
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Show notes: https://www.johnfiege.earth/23-christy-rupp-from-rubble-rats-to-plastic-pangolins
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Waste is often invisible—or at least many people work hard to make it disappear. Through landfills, incineration, and cargo ships traveling across oceans, we have become adept at pretending that waste is not a problem and that it can disappear.
Who is Christy Rupp?
Christy Rupp is a New York City-based artist who has spent her career bringing waste to light, making the in...
22. Revisiting Poisoned Ground at Love Canal with Luella Kenny – Photographs and Upcoming Live Event
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Show notes: https://www.johnfiege.earth/22-revisiting-poisoned-ground-at-love-canal-with-luella-kenny-photographs-and-upcoming-live-event
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See Luella Kenny Tour Photos
In 1978, Luella Kenny was living in the Love Canal neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, when her 6-year-old son, Jon Allen, mysteriously became ill. He was in and out of hospitals over the next several months as he struggled with seizures, hallucinations, swelling, nausea, and labored breathing. Over and over, Jon Allen would never recover in the hospital, the doctors would...
21. Ken Baker — Rethink Food
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New York City is one of the wealthiest cities in the world–and the financial capital of the world. And yet, food insecurity in the city is rampant. About one in three adults and nearly half of families with children experience "food hardship" each year, defined as "sometimes or often running out of food, or a person worrying that they will."
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...
20. Todd Scott — Detroit Greenways Coalition
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20. Todd Scott – Detroit Greenways Coalition
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The ways we live our lives, design our communities, and move around within those communities are all intimately connected to the ecological health of the planet.
Most North American cities are designed around the automobile or at least cars have come to dominate these urban landscapes, far more than in European or Asian cities.
There are few ci...
19. Jim Morris — Don't Worry, Nothing Here Will Hurt You
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19. Jim Morris — Don't Worry, Nothing Here Will Hurt You
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You may have Goodyear tires on your car or truck. Many Americans do. Goodyear is the leading tire manufacturer in this country.
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What you may not know is that the process of making these tires has led to horrendous impacts on the environment and human health.
We think of...
18. Lois Gibbs — The Legacy of Love Canal
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18. Lois Gibbs — The Legacy of Love Canal
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When Lois Gibbs moved into the Love Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls in 1972, she had no idea how radically her life was about to change.
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She was newly married, with a baby son. Her husband had a well-paid job at the Goodyear chemical plant, and she loved her white picket fence in...
17. Transformation for a New Era
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17. Transformation for a New Era
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Today, I’m relaunching the Chrysalis newsletter and podcast with a new website, a new logo, and a new purpose. In the past year, here in the United States, we have witnessed one assault after another on environmental protections and ecological health, coupled with simultaneous assaults on democracy, civil rights, international cooperation, the rule of law, common decency—even truth itself. Thro...
16. Sean Dixon — Puget Soundkeeper
The tires of your car have a chemical in them, called 6PPD, that slows tire degradation by binding with oxygen and ozone that could break down the rubber. But these same reactions that protect the rubber are also creating a new chemical, called 6PPD-quinone, which scientists just found in 2020 to be highly toxic to aquatic organisms.
6PPD is in essentially every tire made since the 1960s, and aquatic ecosystems around the world, particularly in dense urban areas, are in danger.
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Coho salmon is particularly susceptible to the toxin, and...
15. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke — "When the Animals Leave this Place"
There is a line in Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s poem, “When the Animals Leave this Place,” that I find haunting: “They said no one belongs here.”
She’s writing about land that used to flood cyclically but that settlers used for farms and pastures, against the advice of Indigenous elders and without regard for the seasonality of the rain.
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Embedded in these six words—“They said no one belongs here”—is the history of conquest and colonialism in America and the mentality of the control of nature, which, to this day, dominat...
14. Kara Maria — Precious and Precarious
I love beautiful pictures of animals surrounded by their natural habitats. It’s exhilarating to see idyllic environments and the animals so amazingly well-adapted to live in them. It’s also comforting to know those places still exist, despite what we’re doing to the planet.
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But there’s a danger in that exhilaration and comfort: these animals appear to live in a world so separate from our own, and at the same time, we might be lulled into thinking that this other world and these habitats are safe.
Kara Mar...
13. Brian Teare — "Doomstead Days"
Before I read Brian Teare’s poem, “Doomstead Days,” I had never heard of a doomstead. It’s a clever portmanteau, combining homestead with doomsday: an alternative universe where the homestead is a preparation for the climate apocalypse.
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The poem Brian weaves around his encounter with this word is a lyrical romp through our connection to land, water, and each other. Water flows, gender is fluid, and the rigid binaries of our imaginations dissolve.
Brian’s exploration of the doomstead unearths some vital questions about ecological crisis. How do we respond...
12. Layel Camargo — Queer Ecology, Indigenous Stewardship, and the Power of Laughter
What is our relationship to the land, to its other-than-human inhabitants, and to the rest of humanity? These are fundamental questions for thinking through how we can transform ourselves in ways that allow a multiplicity of ecologies and human communities to thrive alongside one another. And these questions are not just fundamental to us as individuals—they are essential to how we view our cultures, traditions, institutions, and ways of knowing.
Layel Camargo lives at the vibrant intersection of ecological justice, queer liberation, and indigenous culture—a cultural space that offers a distinctive vantage point on how our...
11. Forrest Gander — "Forest"
Lichen is a strange presence on this planet. Traditionally, scientists have understood lichen as a new organism formed through symbiosis between a fungus and an algae. But the science is evolving. It seems that there may be more than one species of fungus involved in this symbiosis, and some scientists have suggested that lichen could be described as both an ecosystem and an organism. Lichen may even be immortal, in some sense of the word.
In lichen, the poet Forrest Gander finds both the mystery of the forest and a rich metaphor for our symbiosis with one...
10. Dave Cortez — The Education of a Chicano Climate Warrior
Our love for the world around us and our passion for protecting that world can come from many different places. It can come from a connection to the land, or a magical experience we had with other people in a particular place, or our sense of awe from the beauty of the living creatures that inhabit these ecosystems. But that love and passion can also come from seeing or experiencing the destruction of the same ecological web, from pollution in the air that rains down onto a playground, or the clearing of a wildlife habitat to make way for...
9. Elizabeth Bradfield — “Plastic: A Personal History”
When we’re gone from this Earth, what will we leave behind? What will we pass down to those who come after us?
Plastic. If nothing else, lots of plastic. A plastic bag might take 20 years to break down, but harder, thicker plastics, like toothbrushes, might take 500 years or more to break down.
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Elizabeth Bradfield is a poet and naturalist who sees first hand, in her work as a marine educator, the ravaging impacts of plastic on marine life. But she also confronts plastic and our collective addiction to it...
8. Salma Arastu — We Are All One
Art can show us the pain and trauma and suffering of the world, and often it does. But art can also go the other direction. It can reveal the beauty, harmony, and unity of the world.
The canvasses in Salma Arastu’s series of paintings, We Are All One, are full of soft colors, continuous lines, immersive habitats that flow into one another, and—sometimes—two-dimensional representations of humans and animals occupying the same space, echoing cave paintings.
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Salma found the continuous line in her study of Islamic calligraphy when s...
7. John Shoptaw — “Near-Earth Object”
I’m continually amazed by the immensity of the world that a small poem can conjure. In just a few lines or words, or even just a line break, a poem can travel across time and space. It can jump from the minuscule to the incomprehensible vastness of the universe. And in these inventive leaps, it can create, in our minds, new ideas and images. It can help us see connections that were, before, invisible.
John Shoptaw has conjured such magic with his poem, “Near-Earth Object,” combining the gravity of mass extinction on Earth with the quotidian evanes...
6. Constanza Ocampo-Raeder — Tasting the Wind, Talking to Rocks, Listening to Rainbows
Official camarones ban season poster in Lunahuana, Peru. Photograph by V. Constanza Ocampo-Raeder © 2021.
Modern society has removed many of us from an intimate connection to the land, the water, and the elements. Air conditioning in cars and artificial light in our homes allow us to carry on without paying much attention at all to the forces of nature around us.
These relationships to ecological surroundings are something entirely different for those who fish artisanally along the coasts of Peru.
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Constanza Ocampo-Raeder is an anthropologist who writes beautifully a...
5. Vernon Haltom and Junior Walk — Coal River Mountain Watch
Many assaults on the environment happen slowly and continually, almost invisibly to us: starting a car engine, buying meat at the grocery store, throwing away a plastic straw.
Mountaintop removal is different. It is sudden and violent and intentionally, unmistakably destructive. Coal companies will blow off the tops of mountains with explosives in order to more easily and cheaply access the coal seams underneath vast swaths of forest, streams, and wildlife habitat. They destroy massive areas of wild land to produce a dirty energy that heavily pollutes the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. Their use of explosives also...
4. Heather Houser — Deluged by Data in the Climate Crisis
Here’s something we hear all the time: if only more people knew more about environmental problems, then they would certainly act in some ecologically beneficial way. But the problem is, it’s not true. We’re now deluged with data about the climate crisis; and yet, this abundance of available environmental information has not led to an abundance of environmental action.
This deficit model of climate communication is flawed, even though scientists, environmentalists, and other proponents of climate action continue to speak and act as if people would do more if they just knew more about the cl...
3. Adam Rome — An Historical Perspective on Our Environmental Future
The full-page ad for the first Earth Day, published in The New York Times on January 18, 1970.
Each year, we celebrate Earth Day; and each year, our collective actions lead to more greenhouse gas emissions, more habitat destruction, and more species extinctions. It’s hard for Earth Day not to feel like more of a superficial patting of ourselves on the back or a greenwashing opportunity for corporate sponsors than a serious call for transformative change.
The first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, was something totally different. With 12,000 events across the country and more than 35,000 speakers from ev...
2. Rev. Kyle Meyaard-Schaap — The Biblical Call for Ecological Care
Martin Luther Hammers His 95 Theses to the Door, by Ferdinand Pauwels
Environmental activists often focus on facts and data, as if more climate information will lead to more climate action. That strategy may be effective with some communities, but overall it hasn’t prevented global emissions from climbing year after year or habitats from being destroyed day after day.
Many folks in the environmental movement are thinking a lot about how to make messaging more effective. But it’s not just the message we need to question—it’s also the messenger.
In the U.S...
1. Jacqui Patterson — Envisioning Eco-Communities amidst Toxic Legacies
From the South Side of Chicago, to Jamaica, to South Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, Jacqui has continually asked what deep, transformative change looks like. She grounds her theory of change in community-led advocacy. She envisions a world of eco-communities and works with real communities across the country who have already created elements of these utopian visions.
But never does she lose sight of climate change and environmental exploitation as multipliers of injustice.
