Podcast Summary

Podcast: On Being with Krista Tippett
Episode: Ruth Wilson Gilmore — “Where life is precious, life is precious.”
Date: March 30, 2023
Host: Krista Tippett
Guest: Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Overview

This episode features a powerful and illuminating conversation with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a geographer, prison abolitionist, and founder of carceral geography. Gilmore is deeply influential across activism, academia, and social transformation circles. The theme centers on how we collectively imagine and work toward a world organized around human flourishing, deep democracy, and the radical reimagining of systems like policing and prisons. The episode explores what abolition truly means, the roots of organized abandonment, and the necessity of presence, interdependency, and hope in envisioning and building a just society.

Roots and Early Influences

Childhood Foundations (04:29–12:32)

• Gilmore grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, in a family steeped in activism—her grandfather and father were labor organizers, and her upbringing emphasized skepticism and independent thinking.
  • “I was taught as a very young child to be extremely skeptical of whatever I learned in a formal setting.” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore (04:46)
  • She recalls wondering about existential and social questions as a child, such as “Where did the money go?” during the Great Depression and “Why was I born a Negro?”
• Discusses desegregating a private girls’ school and the influence of her church, Dixwell Avenue Congregational, the oldest Black Congregational Church in the U.S.
• She describes her family as "decidedly Afro Saxon"—a New England Black working-class ethic rooted in Congregationalism and a strong sense of duty.

Abolition: Presence and Vision

Reframing Abolition (13:55–22:07)

• Abolition is defined not as erasure or absence, but as presence: “Abolition is presence.” (14:59)
  • “For many people, the word abolition or abolish, the verb, suggests an erasure, an absence... We are not nihilists. Abolitionists are quite the opposite in every imaginable way.” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore (15:00)
• Cites W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of "abolition democracy"—abolition as the building of new social relations, institutions, and joy.
  • “If industrial is all the things we know industrial to have been, then abolition also has got to be all kinds of presence, presence, all kinds.” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore (19:45)
• She also draws inspiration from contemporary historians amplifying the silences of archives, especially regarding enslaved people and their agency.

The Lens of Geography

How Geography Shapes Understanding (21:01–28:22)

• Gilmore’s transition from drama to geography allowed her to see the world through systems, connections, and spaces.
  • “The study of geography and the study of drama are actually very similar. They're both about making worlds.” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore (24:12)
• Defines geography as not "where is Nebraska," but “why is Nebraska?” — emphasizing the making and unmaking of places.
• Freedom is conceptualized as a place:
  • “Freedom is a place, and we make it, and we make it, and we make it.” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore (26:37)

Freedom as Interdependence

• Shifts focus from “freedom from” to “freedom for”—a collective, contextual practice.
• Introduces the idea of life in rehearsal: “Abolition is life in rehearsal... radical dependency, that it's not something an individual can do for themselves or can embody as one person.” (28:04–28:22)

Carceral Geography and Systems

What Are Prisons Made Of? (30:05–39:22)

• Gilmore describes how the physical and social components of prisons (land, labor, capital, state power) reflect complex, interconnected systems. Prisons are not marginal—they sit at the interface of multiple societal processes.
  • “What are [prisons] made of? They're made of land, they're made of labor, they're made of money capital, and they're made of the state's capacity to organize land, labor and money capital that way.” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore (31:56)
• Shares a story of Mexican American mothers in East LA fighting a new prison, whose organizing led them to environmental justice action when they discovered that asthma and missed school—not “crime”—were central to the prison pipeline.
  • “Those mothers basically did before we the abolitionists of the late 90s and this century figured things out. They figured out how to think about what prison is made of beyond some term like crime or criminals.” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore (37:48)
• Crime and racism are omnipresent issues but are not the linear causes or solutions; rather, vulnerability and organized abandonment are the structural drivers.

Organized Abandonment and Social Healing

The Concept of Organized Abandonment (43:47–50:54)

• Organized abandonment is introduced as a framework to understand how systems (like deindustrialization or gentrification) create vulnerability and harm, often mistaken as personal failure.
  • “Vulnerability to some kind of harm, to premature death, is... not a result of an individual's failure. So many things go together that produce vulnerabilities… That is organized abandonment of the people left behind.” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore (44:54)
• Gilmore gives examples from U.S. and South African communities, where recognizing organized abandonment helps activists identify levers for change.
• She discusses the compounding of disorder when organized systems pull resources and support away from communities, fundamentally altering daily relations and well-being.

The Philosophy: "Where Life Is Precious, Life Is Precious"

Deep Democracy and Human Flourishing (50:54–58:05)

• Gilmore describes the axiom “Where life is precious, life is precious”—meaning societies valuing and investing in all members see less violence and less need for retribution.
  • Story from a Fresno youth group: Responding to skepticism about abolition, she explains that in places without life sentences or the death penalty, people rarely commit murder—so the value placed on life becomes self-reinforcing. (53:32)
• Her vision for a post-carceral society is rooted in deep democracy, where decision-making comes from the ground up, centering the value of every life.

Examples from World Movements

• References the Brazilian MST and South Africa’s shack-dwellers movement as global models of grassroots, participatory community-building prioritizing shared access to resources (like land).
  • “Through this deep democracy, understanding radical interdependency, create for themselves the subjectivities that make life precious.” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore (58:05)

The Evolving Meaning of “Human”

Ecology, Geography, and the Web of Life (60:40–62:56)

• Gilmore describes her changing notion of “the human”:
  • From performing a special, unique role on the planet to recognizing humanity as part of an interconnected planetary geography:
  • “The beauty of being able to be self conscious is lovely. I doubt it is exclusively human. And so my curiosity is to figure out how the preciousness of life extends in every way—between and among humans, but also with the trees and, and the grass and the water and all of the things that make life. Life.” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore (62:56)

Memorable Quotes and Moments

• On the Core of Abolitionism:
  • "Abolition is not primarily a matter of what to get rid of, but what to build and to orient around being present, for example, to human vulnerability and to the ingredients that make for deep human flourishing." — Narrator (02:07)
• On Geography as World-Making:
  • “The study of geography and the study of drama are actually very similar. They're both about making worlds.” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore (24:12)
• On Freedom:
  • "Freedom is a place, and we make it, and we make it, and we make it." — Ruth Wilson Gilmore (26:37)
• On Organized Abandonment:
  • “Vulnerability to some kind of harm, to premature death, is not a result of an individual's failure… That is organized abandonment.” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore (44:54)
• On Human Interdependency:
  • “Abolition is life in rehearsal… Most importantly, radical dependency, that it's not something an individual can do for themselves.” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore (28:22)
• On Evolving Consciousness:
  • “This is evolution consciousness… We have the capacity to imagine things and to realize those imagination, that imagining. And that's not idealistic, and it's certainly not idealism. It's where people coming together… create for themselves the subjectivities that make life precious.” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore (58:02–58:05)
• On Human Ecology:
  • “If we understand ourselves as space time, we also understand ourselves as part of the living matter of this planet, which itself in its entirety is living matter riding a hot and cold rock of formerly living or energetic matter.” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore (61:47)

Key Timestamps

• 04:29 – Gilmore describes childhood influences and skepticism
• 14:59 – On abolition as presence, not absence
• 19:45 – “Abolition democracy” and building presence
• 24:12 – Parallels between drama and geography
• 26:37 – “Freedom is a place…”
• 28:22 – "Life in rehearsal" and radical dependency
• 31:56 – What are prisons made of?
• 37:48 – Mexican American mothers and environmental justice
• 44:54 – Organized abandonment explained
• 50:54 – “Where life is precious, life is precious”
• 58:02–58:05 – On consciousness, evolution, and deep democracy
• 61:47 – The meaning of being human in planetary context

Tone and Style

The episode weaves deep scholarly insight with accessible, lived wisdom. Gilmore is lucid, warm, philosophical, and precise; Tippett steers the conversation gently, allowing Gilmore to clarify and deepen complex ideas. The language often evokes both intellectual rigor and poetic possibility.

Conclusion

This conversation offers a transformative lens on what abolition means: not simply ending something harmful, but creating the conditions—structures, relationships, communities—where flourishing becomes possible and violence unthinkable. Gilmore urges listeners to think in systems, embrace interdependency, and remain committed to the “long game,” continually creating worlds where, indeed, life is precious.