In this episode, we are in conversation with Dr. Craig Walton, a planetary scientist based at ETH Zürich and the University of Cambridge. Craig’s work spans the origins, evolution, and distribution of life in the Universe.

In this podcast, we chat about cosmic dust, the origins of life on Earth, and phosphorus—a key element for life, known as the ‘bringer of the light of day’, and its more fiendish nickname, “The Devil’s Element”. In a paper published in Nature Astronomy in February 2024, Craig and his colleagues note that life on Earth probably originated from “reservoirs of bio-essential elements” such as phosphorus, sulfur, nitrogen, and carbon. But our earth rocks are relatively poor in reactive and soluble forms of these elements. So where did they come from? Apart from meteorites and asteroids, they could have also found their way to earth through cosmic dust, mineral grain aggregates of less than 3 mm derived from asteroids and comets. And glaciers provide settings capable of both locally concentrating cosmic dust and initiating closed-system
aqueous prebiotic chemistry in cryoconite holes, self-sustaining puddles or lakes.

In a more poetic turn, we talked about meteorites, which has been termed by Elizabeth Grosz
as the ultimate outsider, a cosmological imponderable that might burst through the perceived
limits of the known. Craig noted that these materials speak at a deeper level about where we
come from and how we should live. Potentially, all life derives from these cosmic gifts. We
are really made of stardust. Everything about meteorites and their eviscerated metallurgic
intensity speaks to their incredible durability. We then moved on to Craig’s PhD thesis on phosphorus, the backbone of DNA and our metabolism. It cycles through ecosystems in a mostly closed loop as organisms live, die and decay. This remarkable element, crucial for global food production, allows our civilization to flourish. However, with its overuse, we now face the dangers of fertilizer run-off such as algal blooms which can lead to ocean anoxic events which have been correlated with mass extinctions. For four and a half billion years, life has recycled minerals and resources, but we humans take them for granted. We churn through these resources, dump them in the oceans and move on. It can’t end well.

Outside of research, Craig writes science fiction as well as science communication articles on
a wide range of topics. If you want to hear more from Craig about all of the above, you can follow him on Twitter/X @lithologuy for updates.

The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n’ Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes.

In this episode, host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Kathryn Yusoff, Professor of
Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London. Her transdisciplinary research
addresses the colonial afterlives of geology and race as a site of planetary transformation and
social change. Her research is published in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or
None (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) and Geologic Life: Inhuman intimacies and the
Geophysics of Race (Duke University Press, 2024).

The conversation centres around the science of geology and its epistemic and field
practices. In her book Geologic Life, Yusoff notes that geology, which emerged in the late
fifteenth through nineteenth centuries as a Eurocentric field of scientific inquiry, was a form
of earth writing riven by systemic racism, complicit in the building of colonial worlds and the
destruction of existing earths. The origin stories of earth and scripts of race are natal twins.
Both mineralogical material and the subjugated person, such as on racial lines, were
categorized as ‘inhuman’. She approaches this work not through a linear historical geography
but through undergounds (as footnote, mine, appendix, subtending strata, and stolen suns)
that reveal subterranean currents.

Part of the task is to bring this whiteness down to earth through counter-gravities such as
insurgent geology, non-fossil histories and questioning stratification. Broadly, Black, Brown,
and Indigenous subjects whose location is the rift have an intimacy with the earth that is
unknown to the structural position of whiteness. This inhuman intimacy represents another
kind of geo-power: the tactics of the earthbound. So, whether it be through growing food, or making music such as the Blues, or the earth as a revolutionary compatriot, there have
always been persistent resistances against these racialized relations.

Yusoff speaks of the paradigm of the mine, which encapsulates this presumption of
extraction. She speaks of how material value is stabilized in the present from skyscrapers to
palm plantations, but both inhuman mineral “resources” and subjugated labouring people are
relegated to the underground. The mine has also inspired carceral forms such as the prison
complex.

For a more reparative geophysics, we need to embrace practices that don’t start from the
division between bios and geos and actually understand the earth and minerals as part of a
kin relationship with a more expansive understanding of how the human comes into being.
The separation between biology and geology is purely a kind of historical effect of disciplines
and disciplining practices. These changes are even more important in the Anthropocene,
where we have what she terms as a “white man’s overburden” with tech bros or
predominantly White Western men deciding the future of Earth. Geobiology is a relational
affair, and we need to see geology as a praxis of struggle and earth as iterative and
archiving of those struggles.

The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n’ Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes.

In this episode, host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Dr. Ambika Aiyadurai, an anthropologist studying wildlife conservation with an interest in human-animal relations and community-based conservation. Her monograph Tigers are our Brothers: Anthropology of Wildlife Conservation in Northeast India was published in 2021. She has written extensively on issues of caste and indigeneity in the environmental sciences and academia in India.

Ambika completed a PhD thesis in Anthropology from the National University of Singapore in 2016, and currently teaches at IIT, Gandhinagar in India.

Susan and Ambika speak of how social hierarchies impact what ‘earth’ means to its various inhabitants. For some a safe haven, for others a dangerous, hostile place. In the Indian context, this is evidenced by the deliberate invisibility of caste in environmental studies and in Indian academia. The exploitation of nature and the perpetuation of caste hierarchies are inextricably linked, with purity and pollution playing significant roles in determining access and exclusion. The lives and livelihoods of people of marginalised communities are often entwined—in a daily connection or a daily struggle—with the fabric of nature itself. Caste and class determine access to land, water, forest, pasture land.

The ‘environment’ is conceptualised as apolitical and asocial, like a kind of a local terra nullius. The social is absent from environmental studies and discourse. Nature is seen as separate from, and devoid of, humans. Indigenous worldviews, like that of the Mishmi in Arunachal Pradesh, where Ambika has worked, challenge this dichotomy, seeing instead a continuum of human, non-human, and spirit worlds. However, for a long time, wildlife conservation research and practice has ignored these communities and their knowledge.

The conservation model of ‘protected areas’ is offshoot of the dominant ‘development’ practices. The state and scientists view the forest as a place to be measured and mapped, assigning it economic value. Both protected areas and infrastructure like dams and highways cut through geographies inhabited by indigenous peoples, making them ecological refugees.

The same notions of purity and pollution lead to the idea that people need to be evicted in order to conserve, a dark history of our national parks in our country.
In finding answers to how we can approach repair and reparation in these academic and other conflict zones, Ambika speaks about the need to shift power structures, change our classrooms, to push for diversity among students, teachers and practitioner, to revamp our syllabi and be active in frontline activism.

Dr. Ambika Aiyadurai is trained in natural and social sciences with masters’ degrees in Wildlife Sciences from Wildlife Institute of India and Anthropology, Environment and Development from University College London funded by Ford Foundation. In 2017, she was awarded the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) Transregional Research Junior Scholar Fellowship. She has two co-edited volumes, Ecological Entanglements: Affect, Embodiment and Ethics of Care (2023) and More Than Just Footnotes: Field Assistants in Wildlife Research and Conservation (2023). She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IITGN.

The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n’ Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes.