Ro Randall is one of the greats. You have probably never heard of her, but she is one of the greats. She is a retired psychoanalyst who has had super-useful things to say about the psycho-dynamics of community groups, climate change (see a review of her great novel about climate activism, hope, despair etc Transgression here and interviews with her at the foot of this post.
I just listened to a 2022 interview she did on the podcast “Bridging the Carbon Gap” a series I have already raved about here and here.
What makes this one interesting (to me), beyond her clarity and deployment of terms like “finite pool of worry [see here about contrary evidence for instead a finite pool of attention”] and bringing of her decades of knowledge and experience to the questions posed her, is that she is really trying to find out what her interviewers think and feel, and even being willing to suggest that they are seeing-but-not-seeing what is going on.
Randall’s comments on climate and the curriculum (a question the interviewers ask all guests, with varying degrees of success) are also very much worth your time.
Meanwhile, I listened to the “teaser” trailer for a new 4 part podcast series called Overshoot: Navigating a world beyond 1.5 degrees, which launches on Monday 6th October.
Overshoot is one of those words that you’re hearing more of. My first real encounter was in about 2000, when I read, (and was convinced by, tbh) the fairly Malthusian 1980 book by WIlliam R. Catton Jr. More recently it is a Malm and Carton book. The gist of the podcast series is “Well, Paris has failed [Paris was always going to fail – see what I wrote in 2015 about the institutional reasons it was hyped”] so, you know, ‘now what?”
It will be interesting to see if they tackle the reasons for the failure – not of states and corporations: that is kind of obvious/inevitable – but the more difficult and distressing (because not inevitable) failures of social movements. We shall see (well, hear).
2013 interview
2020 interview
2021