Alyssa Battistoni takes apart the hostile system that incentivizes taking selfishly from nature

About this episode

Alyssa Battistoni discusses the exploitative relationship between capitalism and nature, advocating for collective power to address environmental issues.

Alyssa Battistoni is an assistant professor of political science at Barnard College. She is the coauthor of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal and the recent Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature. Alyssa knows why you feel helpless to stop the end of nature. In Free Gifts, she looks at the history of environmental degradation under capitalism and explains how an economic system that expropriates from the natural world has normalized an unapologetically exploitative relationship to the Earth. Her work gives us essential tools and strategies for regaining the freedom to respect nature, built from her sense that we don't actually want to dominate it, but instead that something is putting pressure on us in our everyday lives and compelling that domination. In the end, she contends, we don't need individual responsibility, we need collective power to preserve the systems that sustain us, and end the systems that don't. We need the power to restructure the system that is leading us down the path to environmental collapse. Battistoni writes that "capitalism limits our ability to treat nonhuman nature as something other than a free gift. It constrains our…

People in this episode

Host: Pretty Heady Stuff

Guest: Alyssa Battistoni

Topics covered

• environmental degradation
• capitalism
• collective power
• nature
• Green New Deal

Keywords

• environment
• capitalism
• exploitation
• Green New Deal
• collective action

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Barnard College

Books & works: A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature

More episodes of Pretty Heady Stuff

• Steven Swarbrick conceives of a world where Palestine is free because none of us "belong" · June 4, 2026
• Vijay Kolinjivadi and Aaron Vansintjan want a world where "sustainability" isn't meaningless · May 27, 2026 · 1h 4m
• Arang Keshavarzian examines the politics of modern Iran and devises an escape from perpetual war · May 13, 2026 · 1h 1m
• Aaron Hagey-MacKay opines on satire as sensemaking, and scenarios where we 'bend but don't break' · April 28, 2026 · 1h 3m
• Ava Val believes in comedy as a source of joy, site of community and weapon against cynicism · April 20, 2026 · 47 min
• Wim Carton dissects the gore, gaslighting and chaotic consequences of fossil capitalism · April 2, 2026 · 55 min