S1E97 - Eleanor Goldfield on "To the Trees" & Forest Defense

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Eleanor Goldfield comes on to talk about her film, "To the Trees," a documentary that highlights forest defense tactics in Northern California. The film is meant to call into question our current relationships to nature, how we might reframe them, and why that reframing is vital to our survival and having a livable future.

Guest Info

Eleanor Goldfield (she/her) is a filmmaker and journalist who works to highlight different movement and struggles. You can find her work and her film "To the Trees" at tothetreesfilm.com and artkillingapathy.com. Eleanor can also be found on Twitter @RadicalEleanor and Instagram @RadicalEleanor

Host Info

Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: Eleanor on "To the Trees" & Forest Defense

**Inmn ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today, Inmn Neruin, and I use they/them pronouns. Today we are talking to a filmmaker about a really beautiful film called To the Trees. And I'm really excited for you all to hear this conversation. We're going to talk a lot about logging and forest defense and just kind of like the extraction industry in general, and then just about some, you know, cultural or psychological paradigms that we have around resource extraction. But first, we are a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts. And here is a jingle from another show on that network. 

**Inmn ** 01:40 And we're back. Hi, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Could you introduce yourself with your name, pronouns, and a little bit about your background, and what you're here to talk about today? 

**Eleanor ** 01:55 Sure, thanks so much for having me. My name is Eleanor Goldfield. She/her. I'm a queer creative, radical filmmaker, and journalist. And I've been doing frontline--I hesitate to say activism--I've been doing frontline actions and journalism since 2010 together. And before that I'd been doing organizing and community organizing since about 2003, before the second Iraq War. And I'm here today to talk about my latest offering in the film domain, which is called, "To the Trees," and it's about forest defense tactics in so-called Northern California and also about our relationship to nature and the necessary shift that that must take for us to have a livable future.

**Inmn ** 02:50 Cool, um--I mean, not cool that a film like this needs to get made but cool that a film like this now exists and can teach people a lot of really awesome things. I highly encourage everyone to go out and watch the movie. It's really wonderful. It's really beautiful. But could you kind of give us just like a recap of the movie.

**Eleanor ** 03:17 Sure. Yeah, and the films available at ToTheTreesfilm.com. And all of my work is also available at ArtKillingApathy.com. So kind of a general overview of the film is that I went out there to do.... This is kind of how I work. I ask folks if they need any support--and I'm ground support, by the way, because I don't do heights. Although, I did climb a redwood when I was out there, which was a terrifying experience. And I'm never doing it again.

**Inmn ** 03:49 They're so big, 

**Eleanor ** 03:51 They're ginormous. And that was my first...that was the first tree I decided to climb because...yeah, whatever. And it took me 45 minutes. And it's 200 feet up in the air, and I was terrified. And it took me like 15 minutes to get up the courage just to step off the platform. And the tree sitter, they were like, "You just step up," and I'm like, "What do you just step up? I'm gonna die," and they're like, "No, you're not. You're gonna be