Sabrina Artel’s Trailer Talk
Weekly Radio Show
“Live on the road, from the kitchen table, from my neighborhood to yours.”
If you support independent media, live performance and the voices of your neighbors speaking for themselves, please help us by making a contribution to Sabrina Artel’s Trailer Talk. Trailer Talk is a live performance, a community event, and a broadcast. The public is invited to visit Trailer Talk and become part of this interactive experience. Thank you so much for your support! Make a donation TODAY!
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The half-hour radio show broadcasts on WJFF Radio Catskill in Jeffersonville, NY; Geneva Community Radio in the Finger Lakes Region of New York State; Glimmerglass Radio in Otsego, NY (also in England, Australia and Japan); KWMR in Point Reyes Station, CA; WFTE in Scranton, PA; and WXPI in Williamsport, PA.
If you would like to broadcast Trailer Talk on your radio station, contact us at trailertalk@gmail.com.
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8/4/17 : BEEKEEPING WITH ARTIST CHRIS HILL
In Yellow Springs, Ohio, I accepted an invite from the Nonstop Art Institute to experience the relationship between the local community and the environment firsthand. Speaking to Chris Hill, a member of the Institute who counts beekeeping among her passions, I learn how that practice is uniquely intertwined with issues concerning the divide between public and private space. At her hive adjacent to a breathtaking field of sunflowers, Chris illuminates just how crucial the unsung heroes of bees are to maintaining our ecosystem, from their pollination of flowers to their production of honey, beeswax and bee venom, which has been adopted as an Eastern mode of holistic healing. Beekeeping has been a tradition of her family’s for generations, but now Chris finds her passion somewhat endangered by the imposition of massive agricultural corporations on natural spaces.
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The environmental destruction brought on by the massive footprint of pollution-enforcing regulations by such conglomerates may very well be contributing to Colony Collapse, a result of what Chris calls “a configuration of conditions that really affect the immune systems of bees.” Luckily, the practice of beekeeping has stalwart protectors such as Chris who count it as their life’s calling, and refuse to believe that an uptick in environmental endangerment will ever fully deplete beekeeping as a crucial part of our natural world. In an effort to raise awareness around this necessary occupation and passion, American beekeepers have made the upcoming day of August 19th National Honeybee Day, meant to celebrate and enforce the need of protection for beekeeping across the world.
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7/14/17 : Rev Billy Take Trump Tower
From the decidedly uninspiring, relatively oppressive confines of Trump Tower, I manage to have an incredibly inspiring afternoon on June 22nd with the help of Reverend Billy Talen and the Stop Shopping Choir.
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Through a new practice he and his wife, collaborator and the Choir’s director Savitri D., have deemed a “Radical Ritual” –Rev Billy is seeking to re-evolve popular conceptions of protest in the era of Trump, shirking more potentially predictable examples of civil disobedience characterized by some as being tame, particularly in the ever-growing face of fearmongering and oppression nationwide. In the Reverend’s words, “We express our intimate privacy in the shadow of Evil. This may be the seed of all change, of revolutionary change”, engaging in a “radical writing” workshop that is a perfect example of smaller-scale action whose comparative size has no bearing on the weight of its potential impact.
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6/16/17 : Standing Rock Peace March
UPDATE: The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe won a significant victory today in its fight to protect the Tribe’s drinking water and ancestral lands from the Dakota Access pipeline. Also, from The Atlantic.
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With helicopters circling overhead, I interview protestors at the increasingly turbulent Standing Rock Indian Reservation, currently the center of a dispute over an intersection of land rights and environmental concerns. “The non-natives, they’re in it too, so I’m surprised that their congresspeople are not trying to stop it,” says one Native protestor who selects to remain anonymous. That shows you what big money does.” The water protectors put their bodies on the line in the face of the hostile, disturbing and violent presence of military and police forces, eschewing anything that might be obtusely labeled as “identity politics” in favor of ideologically-based inclusivity. “It doesn’t matter what color you are or where you come from,” says one speaker. “If you are understanding of the movement that we are partaking in, then you are family just like the rest of us.”
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6/10/17 : Sustainable Divestment
From New York, at a Fordham University panel entitled “Divest Invest New York: The Business Case,” I collect the opinions of a range of climate-change and business experts on the intersection of those two fields, a line of concern that has risen to particular prominence in recent years.
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As the state of the environment worldwide has crept toward an ever-increasing state of alarm, it has thus been put on an inevitable collision course with the distinctly American institution of Capitalism. Navigating this intersection has become, as panelist David Levine of the American Sustainable Business Council states, a matter of finding and creating “businesses that advocate for a sustainable economy, an economy otherwise known as ‘Triple bottom line:’ People, Planet, Profit.”
Crucial to the Fordham panel, and thus to the very goal of creating sustainable business models, is the notion of Divestment, as concrete an action a corporation or individual can take in an effort to rid themselves of connections to environmentally hazardous resources and actions. As many of the panelists saw it, divestment is a necessary tool in the economic portion of the battle against climate violence.
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4/21/17 : Catskill FARMERS
From the robust, multi-seasonal Liberty Farmers’ Market I interview an array of Catskill-based vendors carrying locally sourced food and drink.
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Many farm workers and owners count themselves as part-time upstate residents, commuting each weekend from Manhattan and Brooklyn, in some cases, to sell their produce to Catskill locals. Speaking to the farmers responsible for everything from Long Eddy’s Eminence Road Farm Winery to Franklin’s Sherman Hill Farmstead Cheeses, I gather perspectives on the importance of local farming, underlining the crucial nature of sustainability and how purchasing food from a “family operation,” as Sherman Hill’s Linda Smith puts it, is a relatively easy way to bolster the local food economy and up the ante in one’s kitchen at the same time.
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3/31/17 : TROUT SEASON Springs Open
In Roscoe, New York, the “epicenter” of the fly fishing pastime , I speak to staples of the town’s famed fishing culture such as its “First Lady,”
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3/17/17 : EXTREME ENERGY STORIES
Traveling to “gaslands” across America, from Texas to the upstate New York shores of the Delaware River, I collect the stories of those affected by the dramatic rise in nationwide gas drilling, in a variety of ways.
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“It would destroy everything,” says one Callicoon, New York farmer of the potential presence of fracking in the Catskill mountains. “One contamination and that’s it.” Despite the vastly disparate geographic differences in the respective places they reside, one thing uniting this diverse group of people is a shared understanding of the havoc drilling not only on their own land, but surrounding areas would wreak. However, this anxiety is not limited to a strictly environmental context — as one Nigerian citizen alarmed by the uptick in drilling in Baldwin Hills, California, says, gas-related development in his home village left in its wake “no safe drinking water, no light, no streets [and] no housing.”
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2/10/17 : Standing Rock WATER PROTECTORS
During the middle of November I went to Standing Rock to stand in solidarity with the Water Protectors where I was welcomed. I was invited to record, interview and have recorded
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1/19/17 : TRUMP INAUGURATION PROTEST RALLY
In the immediate lead-up to January’s presidential inauguration on November 20th, I travel once again to Columbus Circle, where a crowd noticeably larger in size and fervent in spirit has assembled to protest the now-imminent dangers a Trump administration would pose to marginalized groups,
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12/16/16 : TRUMP DAY-AFTER ELECTION ACTION
At the “We Won’t Wait” Anti-Trump rally, on the day after the election on November 9th, in New York’s Columbus Circle, a group of people as diverse as the city they are protesting from gather to register their contempt for the incoming president in wake of an exceedingly turbulent and shocking election.
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“I can’t just sit in my room and be sad,” one young woman rooted firmly outside Trump Tower says. “I have to be an activist now.” Indeed, many of the people assembled this afternoon may have not considered themselves activists, but the election of Trump has effectively and rapidly inspired them toward action. With an emphasis on accountability — “there is no one to blame here but us,” says a megaphone-aided protester — concerns and anger regarding a Trump Administration’s potential policies and the effect they might have on already-marginalized groups of people are voiced. However, fierce, action-based optimism also shines through. “Another world is already being born,” says another protestor. “And we the people can see it clear.”
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11/25/16 : Standing Rock Peace March
With helicopters circling overhead, I interview protestors at the increasingly turbulent Standing Rock Indian Reservation, currently the center of a dispute over an intersection of land rights and environmental concerns.
» read more
“The non-natives, they’re in it too, so I’m surprised that their congresspeople are not trying to stop it,” says one Native protestor who selects to remain anonymous. That shows you what big money does.” The water protectors put their bodies on the line in the face of the hostile, disturbing and violent presence of military and police forces, eschewing anything that might be obtusely labeled as “identity politics” in favor of ideologically-based inclusivity. “It doesn’t matter what color you are or where you come from,” says one speaker. “If you are understanding of the movement that we are partaking in, then you are family just like the rest of us.”
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11/20/16 : Standing Rock Sacred Fire
From Standing Rock’s many sacred sites, I continue to gather the crucial perspectives of First Nation Water Protectors. “Regardless of what we do in this world, in our lifetime,” one tells me, “we can no longer just do it here and now.
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We have to do it…looking ahead seven generations.” Thank you for inviting me to your sacred camp. I will continue to stand with you and share your voices as you protect your water and tribal lands from destruction. Please continue to stand with the Sioux Nation Water Protectors at standwithstandingrock.net and sacredstonecamp.org, as well as indigenous 1st Nations communities on the front lines through out the USA confronting extreme energy and environmental justice assaults.
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