Special Report: Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency (2025)

Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle join Mike for Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency (2025), third in their trilogy after Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story and Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure. Made with a Guggenheim grant, it grows from the 2020 CZU fire that forced the couple to evacuate their Santa Cruz Mountains home for two and a half months, turning a burn scar the size of Delaware into a portrait of a community, its goats, dog, and beloved peacock, that refused to fall apart. Stephens and Sprinkle unpack what ecosexual means (loving the Earth as a partner, not a mother), the indigenous fire science behind the film via Melissa Nelson and Kim TallBear, incarcerated firefighters paid a dollar an hour, and loggers, pot growers, and academics banding together to protect their neighbor Albert. They also cover weddings to nature, Sprinkle at 72 after 50-plus years as a sex educator, her breast cancer diagnosis mid-release, and a possible fourth film, about air and AI. Find out more at https://sprinklestephens.ucsc.edu/ Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support. Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth