Feeling It
A conversation with a climate-aware therapist who happens to be my sister.
We’re cooking up something new at Threshold and we need you to be a taste-tester!
In addition to our narrative audio documentary series, we want to start sharing shorter conversations with people doing interesting things in Thresholdy realms. Artists, scientists, writers, innovators…really anyone who’s thinking deeply about our ecological situation, and responding in some way that catches our interest.
One of those people is my sister, Audrey Martin. In addition to her private psychotherapy practice in California, Audrey serves on the executive committee of the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America, where she’s been helping to train people to lead group conversations around climate emotions, known as climate cafés.
What’s a climate café, you ask? Click play, and all shall be revealed! (Or, go to the website for the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America.)
After you listen, I’d love to hear your feedback. What sorts of information, analysis, or stories do you feel like are missing from your podcast library? Do you think this sort of format can help meet that need? Do you have any guests to recommend?
We’re sharing this episode with you, supporters of Threshold and Letters to Earthlings, because we want to make something you want to hear. Thanks for leaving your thoughts and suggestions in the comments!
And finally, proof that we truly are sisters. And that we were children in the 1970s.
It is interesting how this moves into the formatting like Death cafes. How we experience grief and loss is so connected to our need for community in processing and witnessing.
Thank you for sharing this format early in its progression. I think the interview plays well by itself. Coming in a bit spoiled for just joining this last season, but I think anything that can be used to ground us in nature before and after the conversation would be great. The prompt around the coming of spring with some field recordings as an interlude would/outro would be lovely.
I'll run with one of the messages in this excellent conversation - that there's no one way to feel about any aspect of climate change.
I would love to hear trio conversations among you and a pair of guests who are doing ostensibly similar work but have distinct complementary perspectives, such that the conversation with the pair of guests opens more space for listeners to find themselves in the range of experience.
Informed by my experience as an improvising musician, the trio setting is magical when it clicks. The trio offers a potent mix of distinct voices nudging on each other, without being too disparate, and nimble enough to gel around emergent points.
For instance, a pair of Indigenous leaders from North America and Amazonia; a pair of U.S. urban climate justice community leaders, one from a Blue state and one from a Red state; a pair of artists working in very different forms; ...
However, this might conflict with your goal for "shorter" conversations :)