Ashes Ashes is a show about systemic issues, cracks in civilization, collapse of the environment, and if we’re unlucky the end of the world. The name is borrowed from the nursery rhyme “Ring a Ring o’ Roses,” a song that children sing while spinning in a circle before collapsing on the floor in heaps of laughter. Some claim that the lyrics were written in response to England’s Great Plague and Black Death, and the line Ashes! Ashes! We all fall down is interpreted as death and the cremation of bodies. Although apocryphal, this interpretation is fitting for our times. While human civilization owes its existence to the unimaginable wealth that nature freely provides, our current growth trajectory is increasingly being fueled by the direct erosion of biodiversity, ecosystem services, cultural heritage, and more, effectively cannibalizing our future for the sake of short-term “progress.” Our show is dedicated to understanding this process, and illustrating its many forms, which includes everything from environmental destruction and unsustainable economic extraction to social atomization and isolation. Although these themes may appear dark, awareness is what can help open the door to collective action through which the strength of our communities can prevent the great falling down of life as we know it.
Episodes, complete transcripts, sources, links, credits, and more for Ashes Ashes are available here.
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Don't know where to start? We love Ep 44, Ep 34, Ep 31, Ep 28, and Ep 23 (but they're all good). Fan favorite: Ep 63
Are these topics giving you existential dread? Go here: Coping With Collapse
The IPBES Global Assessment summary is out and we're digging in to all 39 pages this week. The report lays out a grim picture of our current world in terms of life on earth, the ecosystems they create, and our relationship with them that our civilization as we know it depends upon. While not the ful...
Protests around the world in 2011 gave riot-gear dealers a three-fold increase in sales of tear gas. In 2013, Turkey used up an entire year's supply of tear gas in just two days, before promptly ordering more. 2015 was the year Kenyan police fired tear gas into a group of schoolchildren as young as...
The world may be burning, but more and more companies are giving us green alternatives to our favorite products so we can continue to shop and consume the same way we always have, but without hurting the Earth - or so they would like us to believe. Greenwashing, the practice of making bad things see...
Half of all US Citizens have their faces in a database that can be searched by facial-tracking software, and the slow creep of surveillance technology means more of us are being watched and analyzed by AI face-detection cameras, often without us knowing, and almost always without our consent. So wha...
This week we're trying a new format for periodic updates. Daniel, David, and Moriah King all sit down together to discuss a handful of important articles and texts they selected covering everything from dolphins to tragedies. We go over the key points of each piece and spend a little time discussing...
After the US government shutdown of 2018-2019 witheld two paychecks from 800,000 federal workers and countless more contractors and businesses, and with US officials encouraging furloughed employees to simply take out loans, we've got debt on the mind again. Citizens of the US and UK are experiencin...
Beneath our paving stones, paved roads, walls, windows, computers, industry, and more, is a collection of hard material no larger than a speck. Sand is the fundamental building block of modern civilization, mined and extracted more than any other natural resource after water, and this fact should gi...
It's a new year, and almost exactly one year since Ashes Ashes began, so we're taking a moment to step back and reflect on the question at the end of every episode: what can we do? This special episode features both Daniel and David explaining what they work on outside of the show to make the world...
Amazon created competition between cities to land its HQ2 location, along with hefty tax subsidy packages. While this process garnered significant media attention, businesses and municipalities regularly engage in these types of deal making in which the promise of jobs and economic development all o...
Surveillance technology continues to creep into our lives, whether it’s facial tracking in NY kiosks, invasive monitoring in Venezuela, China’s expanding social credit system, or entire cities being designed from the ground up in Egypt to better capture the intimate lives of its residents. These ini...
The IPCC recently released its most dire report yet, warning us of a planet quickly warming to 1.5C, implications for our future, and offering pathways for mitigating the damage. But at the core of these pathways are flawed assumptions, paradoxes, and impossible promises. Why do these failures persi...
This week we present a short presentation we gave during the Sound Education conference at the Harvard Divinity School. The World Might Be Broken is a summation of some of the topics we cover in this show, the way they are interrelated, and how our approach to solving them will require an awareness...
Of all Western Democracies, the US is ranked last in terms of free and fair elections (52nd worldwide). On top of the political reasons for that, our election systems (voting machines; registration lists; centralized election management systems; reporting sites) are all vulnerable and easy to hack....
The military exists to engage in seemingly endless war, but the damage doesn't stop during peace time. For decades, the US military (and many others around the world) has been systematically destroying the Earth and the very nations they're sworn to protect. Disregard for the natural world and those...
Never have as many people been locked up than right now, here in the United States. The US has more prisoners per capita than anywhere else on the planet and that number continues to climb at a terrifying rate. Once within the prison system, inmates are abused and exploited out of sight and out of m...
From the ancient philosophers, to modern day scientists, much has been said about the relationship between human population growth and its effects on environmental destruction, famine, and death. Modern policy makers and political leaders have taken inspiration from these debates to craft initiative...
Last week we explored some of the conditions of the record number of slaves all across our world today. But to really understand the issue, we need to look at the systems that create and depend upon this cheap form of exploited labor - and to do that we turn our conversation to logistics.
No other...
Despite universal condemnation of slavery, there are more slaves than ever before. They are cheaper (and more disposable) than they ever have been. Who are these people toiling without rest and what forces bind them? Can economic expansion find innovative solutions to this age-old problem? Or is sla...
Rescue ships denied; children detained far away from parents; smugglers profiting to the tune of hundreds of millions. As crises across the globe drive people from their homes, the nations of the world are stepping up border security and building walls like never before in human history. While walls...
International calls to ban autonomous weapon systems have done little to slow the escalating arms race between nations to acquire weapons of the so called third revolution in warfare - or simply "killer robots." The intersection of AI, deep learning, and lethal weaponry presents a future of war unli...
The relationship between government intelligence, the military-industrial complex, and big business goes deep. In technology hubs around the world, complex surveillance products are developed and sold to governments that deploy the tech on journalists, lawyers, academics, and their own citizens. How...
The vital systems we rely on (roads, bridges, buildings, pipes, and much much more) are crumbling and in desperate need of repairs. Worse, many of these systems are coming up on the end of their life and will require trillions of dollars to fix - just to maintain the economic status quo. Funding is...
The FCC will vote on December 14, 2017 on whether to reverse common carrier status for broadband under Title II of the Communications Act. This action will have profound effects on the internet and the way it functions. Join us in this episode as we explore exactly what this means for censorship and...