Radio Aurora: Letters from Earth

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 desert cities--than actually exists. I wrote this piece while camping in the heart of the Delta, among flocks of migrating Snow Geese and other migratory birds that stop here to feed, as they travel the Pacific Flyway.

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.

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 Neruda. I also talk about the real mothers of the world, who work to keep all our children whole.

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.

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 region, and the joys of picking raspberries.

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.

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 based on the Jewish v'ahavta prayer that tells us to incorporate our core beliefs into every aspect of our lives, and "choose life, that you and your children may live."