Clare Follmann, M.E.S., is an author and environmentalist located in Olympia, Washington. Her writing engages with themes of landscape, ecology, climate crisis, language, and philosophy. She likes to poke holes in dominant or obsolete narratives, and strives to both listen to and help uplift the voices and stories that have been too often cast aside. Her work focuses on finding and planting the literal and figurative seeds that will help support a post-capitalist society that prioritizes the well-being of people and planet. In this episode, we discuss Clare’s book Scapegoat: What the Invasive Species Story Gets Wrong, available now from AK Press.
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Reading recommendations from Clare Follmann
Clare starts by mentioning environmentalist Lowell Diller, who passed away in 2017. She encountered him during her studies at Evergreen State College in Washington, and was challenged by his ideas about the suppression of so-called “invasive” species. Her piece for Revol Press is about Diller and his work — read it here.
From that piece:
In the late 2000s, Diller initiated an experiment to see if shooting barred owls would help spotted owls escape extinction. By the time he came to speak to our class, he’d already killed over a hundred barred owls. He said that every time he shot one, he felt like what he was doing was wrong. Diller shared that the first time he had to shoot an owl, he was so overcome with emotion that he nearly couldn’t pull the trigger. As he told us this story, he explained that, though it was hard, there was “nothing else to be done.” And even though two out of five of the sites in his experiment indicated nearly no change after barred owl eradication, Diller argued that it was the best plan available.
This led to the genesis of Clare’s work on invasive species — as she says, Diller was distressed by the policy of killing on species of owls to save another. Clare began to wonder if there was another way to think about “invasive” species, starting with an analysis of the militaristic language we use to frame these problems.
The language used is not just militaristic — it is also nakedly capitalist, as Clare goes on to elaborate. Animal populations are thought of as “stock” — a problem that only gets more pronounced as the climate crisis begins to drive migration. So-called “invasive” species may be fleeing the loss of their natural habitats, which complicates the notion of them “invading” new territories. As Clare points out, the whole discourse of “invasive” versus “native” species is riddled with imperialistic dogma, and conceptual scaffolding borrowed from war, economics and nationalism. Clare is keen to emphasise that some species do cause devastation when they migrate to new territories — but that the language we use to describe this can be unhelpful, just as the techniques for mitigating that damage can be cruel.
Clare’s book proposes a new framework — that of “drivers” and “passengers”. As she points out:
By and large, invasive species are not causing ecological damage — but are rather arriving in the wake of pre-existing ecological damage which is often caused by capitalist industry and development.
A “driver” species might well be considered invasive, and could require more aggressive management. A “passenger” species could just be swept along by the pace of human-driven, “anthropogenic” climate change, and so deserves a different approach. To Clare, the “native” versus “invasive” framing is simply outdated, and not fit for purpose in our current, environmentally precarious era. She wrote more about this in her recent article for Orion, offering five alternate terms we could use to talk about wildlife and environmental stewardship.
Next, we get into the anti-capitalist themes in Clare’s writing. Her hope for how we get to a world beyond capitalist realism rests on the idea that once the climate crisis really starts to bite, we’ll realise how wrong our metrics for measuring progress, achievement and meaning in human lives and society have been. As she says: “Hope is a choice”, but this doesn’t mean we can sit and wait complacently for change, or even disaster. We have to argue for positive change, model it in our lives, and embody it in our practices.
Another key theme the book explores is “plastic words” — these are phrases or words that began as vernacular terms, were adopted by scientists as helpful metaphors or framings, and then re-appropriated in the vernacular (particularly in politics) to become “blanket terms” that describe a natural or scientific phenomenon.
Clare offers a few examples — “management” and “development” are both used in scientific writing, but are business terms (just as the term “resources” can be found everywhere in environmental discourse despite coming from economics). When used to describe the “management” of invasive species, such terms convey the hidden message that the science is settled, and the outcomes of interventions both known and understood. The theory originated in Uwe Poerkson’s book Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language. At their worst, plastic words can be used by businesses in the practice of “greenwashing” their environmentally destructive practices.
We go on to talk about how the “invasive” versus “native” discourse mirrors the discussion of race and immigration in Trump’s America and the wider world. The rhetoric around species management hews dangerously close to racist concepts like miscegenation (interracial marriage) and eugenics (optimising evolution through drastic medical interventions, like sterilisation, forced breeding, or gene therapies).
We continue talking about this after the break. Clare sees danger in the porous linguistic border between these two discourses — accepting such framings and language in one arena, she argues, makes the language less shocking in the other. This also connects to the title of Clare’s book — she argues that similar to so-called invasive species, immigrants are often scapegoated and blamed for issues that have other, more complicated origins and causes in economics, foreign policy, and technological change.
We talk a bit more about Clare’s metaphor of “drivers” and “passengers” in light of these insights, and move on to discuss the Indigenous cultures and activist movements that we can learn from if we are to pursue a different ecological path. She mentions the Standing Rock protests, led by Indigenous Americans of the Sioux and other tribes, and the Stop Cop City protests in Atlanta as examples of activist campaigns in recent memory that reached global awareness, even if their success in achieving their aims was limited.
Clare mentions Sam Esmail’s underrated Leave The World Behind as a great example of recent eco-conscious, anti-capitalist filmmaking. It ends with one of the main characters watching the final episode of Friends as the world burns and descends into conflict — as Clare observes, a savage indictment of capitalist realism, where the characters cannot imagine the end of capitalism even as the world ends. She mentions Rob Green’s From What Is to What If as a source of some interesting counter-arguments to the depressive reading of Jameson, Fisher and Žižek’s gloomy aphorism about the seemingly unbeatable logic of capitalist ideology:
It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
In response to this phrase, which I’ve considered deeply over the past few years, I wrote these words in the introduction to The Darkest Timeline:
To confront the possibility that we have no future is also to demand that the future be reimagined anew.
While Clare’s research and her conclusions lean more towards optimism, we both share the opinion that the only way to challenge capitalist realism is to start by imagining, building and using systems (be those ideologies, activist frameworks, or cultural practices) that challenge the idea that there is “no alternative” to extractivist capitalism.
I briefly mention the statement by Anthropic developers that the preponderance of apocalyptic scenarios involving artificial intelligence in fiction had increased the likelihood that large language models would become “evil” and Skynet us to death. One can’t help but reflect on the meme of the “Torment Nexus” originally tweeted by The Onion contributor Alexander Blechman, which suggests (as the writer Jeff Vandermeer has observed) the likes of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen and Sam Altman have taken the wrong lesson from cyberpunk and apocalyptic SF:
Both Clare and I are keen to hear from listeners about post-capitalist, “optimistic”, hope-punk or utopian science fiction that might act as a corrective to such negative stories — give us your examples in the comments. I mention Vandermeer’s sublimely weird and nature-inspired Southern Reach series as a starting point (although this too has some pretty bleak insights to offer).
I also mention the writing of Arne Naess, originator of the idea of ‘Deep Ecology’, and Jem Bendell, who proposed the practice of ‘Deep Adaptation’ as a way to deal with the irreversible effects of climate collapse. Both of them share some conceptual ground with Clare’s writing, by proposing solutions that admit the scale of the challenges we face, rather than turning to false hope and ineffective activism.
Finally, Clare mentions a few more thinkers and studies that helped shape her theories, including a paper by Nicolas Reo and Laura Ogden that offers an Indigenous perspective on the global threat of invasive species. She namechecks Poerkson again, and Mark Davis, author of Invasion Biology, as key influences.
Visit Clare’s website to read more of her writing, and to stay up to date about her next book, which explores the notion of “home” in light of ecological and social crises. You can also subscribe to Clare’s Substack, which has links to other podcast appearances and livestreams where she discusses her work. She also wrote a piece about Scapegoat for Revol Press earlier this year — find that below.
Up next: Greg Blackman
My next guest is a legend of the UK soul and hip-hop scene, and a brilliant multi-media creator — Greg Blackman has worked with luminaries such as Lack of Afro, Genesis Elijah and the Dutty Moonshine Big Band among others. His powerful voice and creative approach to lyrics are unique, and recently, he’s turned his hand to audiobooks with the new satirical horror series Nothing Works Anymore. We’ll be talking about that project, his storied music career, and his advocacy for mental health awareness.
In case you missed them, here are a few things I’ve been up to recently:
My web series Crisis Masculinity ends this month — I hope you’ll check out the final chapter, which gets to the ‘what is to be done’ part of the argument.
Look out for news on a print edition of the series, which is coming soon from Bidrohi Books.
The latest guest post in the series is by Liam Arnold, exploring the mixed messages he gets from social media advertising as a quuer-identified cage fighter. It’s brilliant, funny and scary in equal parts.
I recently appeared on THIS IS REVOLUTION to discuss the series, and the manospere in general — watch that here. A few weeks later I came back to discuss the loneliness economy. Thanks to M Toussaint and Jason L Myles for these two brilliant conversations.
Revol’s latest books are out now — check out Radical Jung by Rob Faure Walker, and The People Are Not One by Daniel Tutt and C Derick Varn.
I interviewed Tutt and Varn a few weeks back as part of the ongoing Strange Exiles X Revol series. My next guest is another upcoming Revol writer, Kirsten Lee, Ph.D. — look for that in a couple of weeks.
Until next time… look after each other.
— Bram, Glasgow, June 2026
