Radio Aurora: Letters from Earth

Episodes

1. 13

   Aquifers

   Nestle is one of a group of giant corporations seeking to privatize the biggest reserves of water, like the Guaraní Aquifer in South America, but many people around the world, from the Amazon to the Great Lakes, believe water should be part of the commons.

   Dec 19, 2017

   10m
2. 12

   Lights

   Life in rural Puerto Rico has always included power outages, but the long blackout after Hurricane Maria is deliberate and cruel, making Hanukkah, and solidarity campaign to send solar lanterns to my home barrio especially poignant for me.

   Dec 14, 2017

   6m
3. 11

   LFE Unobituary

   From the midst of Northern California's wildfires, I keep writing the devastation of my homeland, Puerto Rico, borrowing from Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri's Puerto Rican Obituary.

   Oct 8, 2017

   7m
4. 10

   LFE-Honorable Harvest

   This episode explores the indigenous concept of honorable harvest as described by Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, and how it affects my eating and also my writing life.

   Aug 8, 2017

   7m
5. 9

   LFE-Fidel

   My perspective on Fidel, as a Puerto Rican child growing up in a time of Latin American dictatorships and political repression.

   Jul 24, 2017

   11m
6. 8

   Radio Silence

   In honor of the mobilization for net neutrality, I write about some historical moments of radio silence, the creative ways people have responded to silencing and how we always need to be ready to boost our signals.

   Jul 14, 2017

   7m
7. 7

   Delta

   California's Sacramento River Delta is an ancient marshland full of fish, small farms and wild waterfowl, and is threatened by plans to pipe water out of the Delta to subsidize unsustainable big agriculture. But California's entire economy is built on promising more water--to factory farms and...

   Jul 4, 2017

   9m
8. 6

   Letters from Earth: Birds and Bees

   This episode includes two shorter pieces, one on birdwatching and what feminist ornithology might offer us, and the other about solidarity with bees, who exist for their own purposes, and not just to get food on our tables.

   Jun 21, 2017

   7m
9. 5

   Letters from Earth: Mothers

   I wrote this after the April 13th bombing of Afghanistan with what was referred to as "the mother of all bombs," reflecting on the stories I har as a child about the bombing of Spain during the Spanish Civil War, which gave rise to Picasso's Guernica and the first poem I ever translated, by Pablo...

   Jun 7, 2017

   5m
10. 4

    Questions for the Media

    This poem was a response to badly skewed media coverage of the terrorist attacks, in one week, on Paris and Beirut. After it aired on Flashpoints, on Pacifica Radio, I was contacted by Al Jazeera to comment on the media bias.

    Jun 6, 2017

    3m
11. 3

    Letters from Earth: Picking Raspberries

    Picking Raspberries is about my summer at the eastern edges of the Massachusetts Berkshires and New York's Hudson Valley, about Monsanto's conspiracy to privatize food, migrant workers in New England, how prisons are displacing family farms, half a dozen great projects scattered through that...

    Jun 1, 2017

    8m
12. 2

    Introducing Letters from Earth

    Introducing Letters from Earth, a new environmental justice podcast by Puerto Rican Jewish feminist writer Aurora Levins Morales, exploring the natural and social landscapes of our time.

    Jun 1, 2017

    4m
13. 1

    V'ahavta

    I wrote this poem after the Orlando massacre of LGBTQ people, mostly people of color, and half of them Puerto Rican. I needed to remind myself that imagining the possibility of winning, of creating the world we want, is part of our responsibility as people who care about social justice. It's…

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    May 29, 2017

    3m