INTERVIEWS
The Final Straw Radio – On Humans in Nature and How We Imagine Belonging
This week we’re sharing a conversation with Clare Follman, a writer, activist and gardener with a masters in environmental science about her 2026 AK Press book, Scapegoat: What the Invasive Species Story Gets Wrong. The conversation covers questions of ecological balance, belonging, linguistic clarity and the stories we tell about our relationship to the rest of nature.
STRANGE EXILES PODCAST – Clare Follmann – Rewilding Capitalism
Author and researcher Clare Follmann discusses her new book ‘Scapegoat’, which challenges how we think about ecology, invasive species, the climate crisis, and post-capitalism.
PLANET: CRITICAL PODCAST – SCAPEGOAT
Non-native species management can have very little to do with ecology and everything to do with economics. That’s what activist and writer, Clare Follmann, uncovered in her book Scapegoat: What the Invasive Species Story Gets Wrong (UK version, US version). She joins me to explain how “invasive” species have been blamed for creating the conditions of environmental degradation — conditions that have actually been caused by capitalism, extraction and colonialism.
LAST BORN IN THE WILDERNESS PODCAST – Scapegoat: The Invasive Species Story, Metaphor, and the War on Nature
Scapegoat reveals the underlying cruelty and shortsightedness at the heart of the invasive species story; it wages, metaphorically and literally, war on the natural world. Follmann takes apart this narrative to point to the radical root of ecological collapse: colonialism, capitalism, and the extractive and dominator attitudes these systems enculture and codify.
THE TREEHUGGER PODCAST – SCAPEGOAT
In this episode, Michael talks with environmental writer Clare Follmann about her new book Scapegoat: What the Invasive Species Story Gets Wrong (AK Press). Together they question the fantasy of eradication, unpack “plastic words” like management and health, and examine how invasive species rhetoric can distract from capitalism, climate disruption, and the systems actually reshaping our landscapes.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT SCAPEGOAT
Incisively thought-provoking and utterly enthralling—Scapegoat is a deeply researched history of how we talk about invasive species, which is to say how we talk about science, “bad” and “good,” our own role in the natural world, and the search for a better future. This book made me want to go to a dinner party because there were so many conversations I wanted to start after reading it.
ERICA BERRY
(author of Wolfish)
The stories we tell, and the language we use to tell them, matter deeply. Follmann offers another story, with thoughtful language and without romanticizing the relatives who expand beyond all good sense, to convey a necessary message: We survive together or not at all.
PATTY KRAWEC
(author of Becoming Kin)
Follmann takes us on a journey through language itself and then back out into the world, to see the “battle” on our planet as not between species but between capitalism and all life on Earth.
Clare Follmann 