Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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Audio versions of this episode can be found here on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. If you prefer watching videos on YouTube, you can also find the full episode here:
My guest today is Megan Mayhew-Bergman
Megan Mayhew-Bergman is the author of three books, most recently How Strange a Season. Her essays and journalism have been featured in The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the Atlantic. She is the Director of Creative Writing at Middlebury College and the Director of the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. She serves on the board of The Thoreau Prize and Conservation Law Foundation, and co-founded GreenStory, a narrative consulting firm for clean energy organizations and NGOs.
You can find her on Substack at:
Climate change is an issue that already impacts everyone, and is poised to further disrupt everything about life as we understand it. And yet it still so often manages to be presented as a niche issue, and we’re not taking anywhere near the action we’ll need to to mitigate (or even adapt to) catastrophe. What gives? Why can’t we get it together?
Insert all requisite frustrations about capitalism and billionaires, but glossing the issue that way doesn’t address the broader dynamic in which people—whether as individuals or in communities—are not approaching the scale of the disaster with appropriate urgency and care. Climate change, among other things, is a coordination and communications problem. If we can start to address the underlying assumptions, narratives, and ideas that are perpetuating status quo, I think we’d be surprised how much of a difference that would make in building solidarity and cooperation, to encourage everyday folks to fight for a livable planet in whatever way makes sense given their circumstances.
I can spout off about this all day, but Megan is deep in the work—which expresses itself in many forms. She documents and analyzes climate-related events and phenomena as a journalist, writes deft climate fiction that digs into the messiness and nuance of living in a changing planet, advises organizations on telling strategic climate stories through her firm, GreenStory, and creates space for other writers to approach all the above as both a professor and in running the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference.
Understandably, I was keen to get into it with her, to find out how she’s thinking through these wicked problems, responses to them, and the role that artists and writers can play. As you’ll hear me say in the conversation, I came in with high expectations, and this conversation blew past them. Megan’s insights are absolutely must-listen—especially for creative folks looking to better understand how think about these issues and what they can do.
Another episode you might like:
Nora N. Khan: Language for Technology | #49
Hello everyone! After my long summer break, Urgent Futures is back! And we’re kicking things off with a banger.
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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, William E. Rees, Renée DiResta, and more. Here is another recent episode with leading existential risk researcher Luke Kemp on the past, present, and future of collapse:
