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 (fire is next, in Berlin), Sprinkle at 72 after 50-plus years as a sex educator, Stephens's 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