Cultures of Energy

Ep. #100 - Robert Macfarlane


Listen Later

On this week’s landmark 100th episode of the podcast, the artist-almost-known-as-Bebeny tells the true crime story behind her name. Then (14:07) we welcome to the centenary party celebrated writer (and walker!) Robert Macfarlane, author most recently of Landmarks (PenguinRandomHouse, 2015) as well as a frequent contributor to The Guardian. We start with how Rob got from his humble beginnings in 19th century Victorian literary studies to the marvelous entanglements of language and landscape that have been his muse and craft for many years now. Rob talks about his work to salvage the linguistic attentiveness to nature found in the cultures of Britain as well as his fascination of late with what happens when a rapidly changing climate outstrips our lexical resources. That leads us to “solastalgia,” the existential distress we experience through rapid environmental change and dwelling loss. And to Rob’s landscape word of the day project which reveals a hunger for biodiverse terrain language. We ruminate on the “English eerie” as an alternative to the pastoral and how it impacts our peripheral vision of environmental disruption. We touch on the plastics crisis, apocalyptic dreams, shifting baseline syndrome, the gap between childhood and nature, and children as wondernauts. Rob tells us about his trip to the Onkalo nuclear waste storage facility in Finland, a structure devoted to the time scale of eternity, and the problem of communicating danger to future cultures. Then we share our encounters with ice, talk cryo-human relations and the true meaning of nostalgia. If you enjoyed this conversation, please check out Rob’s new film, Mountain (dir. Jennifer Peedom, 2017), and his beautiful new children’s book done together with Jackie Morris, The Lost Words (Hamish Hamilton, 2017), which we’ll go ahead and call our official Cultures of Energy holiday gift recommendation. Please also take a moment to review the pod at iTunes and support the indiegogo campaign for the graphic novel The Beast https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-beast-is-a-comic-about-two-dirty-industries-art-comics#/ which thematizes the entanglement of the oil and advertising industries in Canada.

...more
View all episodesView all episodes
Download on the App Store

Cultures of EnergyBy Dominic Boyer

  • 4.9
  • 4.9
  • 4.9
  • 4.9
  • 4.9

4.9

55 ratings


More shows like Cultures of Energy

View all
The New Yorker Radio Hour by WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

The New Yorker Radio Hour

6,780 Listeners

The LRB Podcast by The London Review of Books

The LRB Podcast

298 Listeners

On the Media by WNYC Studios

On the Media

9,195 Listeners

The Political Scene | The New Yorker by The New Yorker

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

4,044 Listeners

New Books in Psychoanalysis by Marshall Poe

New Books in Psychoanalysis

189 Listeners

Jacobin Radio by Jacobin

Jacobin Radio

1,459 Listeners

The New Yorker: The Writer's Voice - New Fiction from The New Yorker by The New Yorker

The New Yorker: The Writer's Voice - New Fiction from The New Yorker

2,136 Listeners

Columbia Energy Exchange by Columbia University

Columbia Energy Exchange

399 Listeners

The Dig by Daniel Denvir

The Dig

1,582 Listeners

The War on Cars by The War on Cars, LLC

The War on Cars

920 Listeners

Tech Won't Save Us by Paris Marx

Tech Won't Save Us

573 Listeners

The Ezra Klein Show by New York Times Opinion

The Ezra Klein Show

15,845 Listeners

Ones and Tooze by Foreign  Policy

Ones and Tooze

339 Listeners

The Interview by The New York Times

The Interview

1,587 Listeners

Ordinary Unhappiness by Patrick & Abby

Ordinary Unhappiness

225 Listeners