Deceleration Podcast
Deceleration Podcast is talking all things climate and environmental justice, rooted in San Antonio and the South Texas bioregion with global concerns. For the Earth. And all Her families. Eds. Marisol Cortez & Greg Harman Deceleration.news
Episodes
“Project Matador” outside of Amarillo, Texas, pairs Fermi America and the Texas Tech University System seeking a pod of “hyperscale” data centers over 6,000 acres across a privately owned and operated electric grid. Already permitted for 6GW of power with 93 planned gas-fired turbines and seeking to build multiple nuclear power plants, this is a truly climate-breakdown accelerating power footprint that brings severe...
Across Texas we’re seeing an explosion of two kinds of industrial warehouses going up: one to fill up with humans in the some of the most miserable conditions imaginable as part of the drive to deport millions (including many being actively stripped of citizenship or refugee protections to do so), the other to fill with an emerging human-like/human-displacing (anti-human?) consciousness. This week, Deceleration spea...
Humankind didn't evolve in heat like this. It's been well over 100,000 years since the planet has seen the sort of scorching temperatures that have become the norm in the last few years. And that goes for Texas, too, where many are still tempted to shrug and claim, 'This is Texas. It's always been hot.'
But this is not the heat (or the humidity) of our parents or grandparents. And ...
Liam Ramos and father freed from Dilley Detention, but Federal Judge Biery's words need to be heard by those who snatched him. Plus: Extended dialogue with Gaige Davila about his years chronicling Texas Gulf fights over colonial extraction and plans for a new Deceleration newsletter, 'Coastlines & Faultlines.' Plus words from Syris Valentine on defeating Climate Behemoth and Sulma Franco on the cr...
Strange times, indeed. Deceleration turns 10 this year. Founder/Managing Editor Greg Harman speaks with Executive Editor Marisol Cortez and contributor/Alternative Futures correspondent Syris Valentine about the year behind and year ahead for Deceleration. More video is part of the recipe, so join us as we dust off some of these innerwebbings.
Marisol's recs for 2025 stories:
Deceleration’s Marisol Cortez speaks with Ashish Kothari on his work with the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, recently returned from the People’s Summit and COP30 in Belem, Brazil. An activist and author based in Pune, India, Kothari has been at the forefront of movements both in India and globally to imagine and enact on-the-ground alternatives to “development” as a colonial and often environmentally destructive p...
In a community conversation closing out a gallery exhibit organized by ABOUT Face: Veterans Against the War, panelists from Texas and California discuss the histories of veteran activism against war and occupation and why soldiers today have a “right to refuse” Trump administration orders to deploy against US cities.
This panel was the concluding event of the multi-day Veteran Voce, hosted by Galeria E.V.A.
Deceleration’s Marisol Cortez speaks with Anel Flores about their new novel Curtains of Rain/Cortinas de Lluvias (Jaded Ibis Press, 2025), a queer coming-of-age story that explores the intersections of homophobia and transphobia with environmental racism in South Texas, specifically the industrial contamination inflicted on Mission, Texas, for decades by companies like Monsanto. But it’s also a book about the beauty...
Deceleration’s Marisol Cortez remembers our friend and neighbor Jack Elder who passed away last month, speaking with friends and comrades George Cisneros, Carlos Nicolas Flores, and Leslie Provence. Elder came to national attention in the 1980s for his work in the Sanctuary Movement, which aimed to assist refugees and asylum-seekers from the US-backed wars in Central America. But he was also a math teacher, a friend...
Deceleration’s Greg Harman speaks with Dave Cortez, Executive Director of the Lone Star Sierra Club, as part of Preparing to Protect, a series of interviews with those most targeted by the eliminationist engine of MAGA on how they are organizing to bash back to keep our communities safe. Topics in this podcast include right-wing organizing and rising autocracy in the United States, failures of organizing in Texas en...
It’s the hottest year ever…again. Heat-related deaths have been spiking year over year. As Deceleration wrote recently, there were nearly 600 heat-related deaths in Texas last year. In Bexar County, 12 local residents died from the heat that same year, according to data released to the Texas Tribune. Border counties have seen hundreds die from the heat since 2010, according to data released to Deceleration. So how a...
Boca Chica, the “little mouth” of the Rio Grande/ Rio Bravo is increasingly the epicenter of NewSpace new colonizing impulses bridged by an explosion of billion-dollar LNG projects seeking to feed Texas-fracked methane to the world market. It’s here in the lower Texas coast that has so far avoided much of the spoilage of the upper and middle coasts, themselves awash with petrochemical and fossil fuel facilities and ...
Deceleration Conversation: An April 2023 community conversation with Colombian decolonial scholar-activist Arturo Escobar, produced by Deceleration in partnership with UTSA. Financial support from the La Fundación Estudio, Mediación, Paz y Resolución de Conflictos (CEMPROC).
Guests: Arturo Escobar, Scholar/Activist; Diana Lopez, Southwest Workers Union; Society of Native Nations; Kimiya Factory, Black Freed...
What do building relationships of trust and care between neighbors have to do with climate justice? Everything, according to local organizer Kara Jordan, an herbalist, regenerative agriculture specialist, and mother whose work highlights the interdependence of all beings. Focusing on social and environmental justice, Jordan explores the spaces between grassroots and institutional initiative with curiosity and play. ...
We've heard that this summer has been one of the hottest the Earth has seen since long before official record-keeping began. But policymakers and public health officials too often strain to understand how that heat is impacting people. Medical anthropologist Rose Jones has called the systems of tracking and understanding heat a “train wreck.” Here in dialogue with Deceleration Jones explains why our understandi...
Attacks on US energy infrastructure across the US are increasing. Incidents in Texas logged by the US Department of Energy shot up in 2021 and 2022. Meanwhile, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission is mulling shifting more security obligations from plant owners to local law enforcement. Deceleration spoke with with Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, about all this and ...
Deceleration Podcast #28: In the middle of October, San Antonio played host to the Climate Justice Alliance's Our Power Communities Summit. The gathering called together roughly 50 frontline community environmental-justice organizers from around the nation to “reground” the alliance members and begin developing a collective response to emerging so-called false solutions to the climate crisis.
Guests (i...
In the shadow of the port shipping most of all US crude oil to the rest of the world, four 'Clean Slate' candidates are running for local City Council seats. They are bound together by shared values and policy interests—including a prioritization of clean air and water and the defeat of proposed desalination projects being built almost exclusively to benefit industrial users. One candidate is the president...
This week, Deceleration speaks with the amazing team behind the Anti-Creep Climate Initiative, who utilize Marvel characters to educate the public about the dangerous fallacies behind fascistic thinking on global environmental challenges. Their webzine is a powerful and gorgeous read. In it they demonstrate how many of these dangerous concepts come straight out of Western environmental canon. They also show clearly ...
Somewhere in between decentralized rooftop solar and sprawling rural utility-scale solar farms is a middle path that could allow companies go 100-percent renewable in under a year. New solar startup Evergreen is about to unleash the "Goldilocks" of solar with a trio of projects in South Texas. And they expect to scale up quickly in this overlooked niche, says Evergreen CEO Cris Eugster. Local listeners may...
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