Alana Afzel And your embrace of nuclear energy? Which is also in this bill? How’s that for “distributed systems of power”?
Kate Morris I embrace nuclear energy because I can do math. The coal-fired power plants set to come online in India and China alone—it’s apocalypse. But those countries also need energy, particularly air-conditioning, because they’re facing land temperatures that are killing people by the tens of thousands every year. Renewables won’t provide that quickly enough, and the only way to square the circle is nuclear. Do we need to pay attention to the trade-offs involved? Absolutely. We can’t put our heads in the sand even about the impacts of solar power and wind on ecosystems or mining waste. Trade-offs are inevitable because we are in deeply uncharted territory now.
Alana Afzel Not to switch gears from, you know, the fate of the planet to gossip—but you’ve also been in the news lately for a different reason that has gotten you a lot of heat. Allegedly you were arrested in 2026 for an indecent act in a restaurant bathroom with the musician Lucas Frisk, who then bribed the arresting officers.
Kate Morris That’s an oldie but a goodie. Right-wing media dragged it back out, now joined by lefty internet trolls. It’s the convergence of the hard right with left-wing cancel-mania, and yes, am I having a blast with all the slut-shaming. Great fun.
Alana Afzel Did the incident happen?
Kate Morris Well, I can neither confirm nor deny. I’ll say three things: I’m still madly in love with my partner. We don’t believe in monogamy. And this is clearly an awkward political hit job, so ultimately, I have no comment.
Alana Afzel But do you understand why feminist writers have taken issue with this? You proudly speak about nonmonogamy and flaunt the freedom of your own sexuality while allying yourself with politicians who want to restrict abortion access and contraception. How has Mary Randall been on women’s issues, for instance? She reinstated the global gag rule, and she’s assured conservatives and the Christian Right that she will appoint yet another pro-life justice to the Supreme Court.
Kate Morris These are acceptable trade-offs in a tactical war. We’ve been clear that we will make political accommodation with anyone who’s committed to treating the biospheric crisis as the priority, and my personal life shouldn’t play any role in that.
Alana Afzel But there are groups you won’t make accommodation with—for example, the one that’s been blowing up oil pipelines.
Kate Morris No. We categorically reject violence, even against property. These people think they’re heroes, but they don’t understand what they’re opening the door to. The entire movement is now dealing with law enforcement scrutiny and harassment. Right-wing violence has never been worse, and these pipeline bombers—they will exacerbate that. They’re endangering everything we’re working for. On a more philosophically macro level, as soon as you pick up a brick, bat, or gun and tell yourself that this is the only way, then there is no end to what you will do.
Alana Afzel It’s interesting how malleable your philosophy seems. I read your honors thesis on ecofeminism, and that young woman sounded much more—I don’t know—ecofeminist?
Kate Morris Jesus, you are going to the bone, aren’t you? There are undoubtedly components of ecofeminism I find compelling, just like there are components of Marx or Adam Smith or Heidegger I find compelling. But any earth-goddess-mother-hen squawking, no f—— thank you. I enjoy a grand vista as much as the next gal, but ultimately the solutions to our crisis are going to come from stuff like industrial carbon capture to produce building materials and hydrogen by electrolysis. We need the technocrats, scientists, wonks, and we need hard-headed women thinking about the built environment of our societies. As for what ecofeminism means to me, it’s like— Ha, okay. You want a rant that will make Sean Hannity shit his tampon? The history of capital accumulation has also been a history of women’s subordination and environmental degradation. Those three things are so intimately connected that you can’t unwind them. Our current order was built on the enslavement of women who were treated as free, on-call labor in the home. Until recently, any woman who bucked this domesticated chattel system and displayed any economic or sexual autonomy was imprisoned, tortured, burned at the stake, drowned—before the term “witch hunt” was used exclusively by insecure, baby-dicked men.
Alana Afzel You don’t think that’s still ongoing?
Kate Morris Of course it’s still ongoing! The institution of marriage still exists, doesn’t it? Shit, man, we’re a colonized gender, some of us just know how to get off with our preferred colonizing man better. What’s happened to women, it seems to me—and I think Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen got this exactly right—is that we are in the process of achieving the dream of all oppressed peoples: we’re moving into the Master’s house, when really what we should be doing is burning the house down. Instead, we’re clamoring to be a part of the patriarchal, phallocentric political, economic, and social ecology. Look at the Wonder Woman–themed presidency of Joanna Hogan. This is what we define as a powerful, accomplished woman because she’s cracked the capitalist patriarchy. But there has to be an “other” for that system to maintain because it sees a world of scarcity and the only solution is an inequitable hoarding of resources. Part of that “other” will always be women, and bitches are kidding ourselves if we think otherwise. If a system views everything in the biosphere as a resource, whether it’s buffalo, maize, fresh water, a gas deposit, or our internet data, it’s going to view women as extractive resources as well. [Laughter] Alana, c’mon, who the f—— is going to want to listen to this interview?
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I was visiting my mother when I got the call that we lost Procter & Gamble. It wasn’t that this was worse than my father’s passing, but when I got the news from Linda Holiday in Chicago, I felt a resurgence of that grief. P&G had been unhappy for some time. They were a generations-old institution suddenly caught up in an inexplicable fad that sneered at home bathroom products. You know those cosmetics we’ve been smearing on ourselves for more than a century? Turns out they’re vile markers of hyper-consumption, poisoning our water, and one can get by just fine with a simple bar of soap. Profits go down for a few consecutive quarters, and the easiest, oddly ritualistic, sacrifice is the ad agency.
“Mom?” I came out of the bathroom. “Hey, I need to make a call for work. It’ll just be a minute.”
Mom sat at the kitchen table folding my dad’s clothes before delicately packing each item in a garbage bag. It was all going to a secondhand shop in Anamosa. Though I’d forced her to get to his clothes during this trip, she’d failed to put a dent in the stacks of agricultural almanacs, magazines, and bulletins he’d compulsively hoarded in the den. Today’s Farmer, The Corn Producer, and the Iowa Farm Bureau’s Spokesman. Why he’d kept issues from the nineties was anyone’s guess.