A Hopeful Climate Conversation with Richard Powers

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

Lemonada Media

Society & Culture, Film Interviews, Tv & Film

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2025

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, we revisit a soulful conversation around climate change and the restorative power of nature with author Richard Powers.

We begin by defining the thematic through-line between The Overstory and Bewilderment (5:06), the eco trauma articulated in each text (9:10), how we may redefine hope today (16:08), and what the pandemic taught us about the climate crisis (26:18). Powers also details the ecological shortcomings of capitalism (29:00) and our myopic interpretation (and fear of) death (30:56).

On the back-half, we unpack why he writes (33:48), the need for “productive solitude” (40:40), and the singular way he writes analytical and emotional characters (44:42). To close– a fitting scene from one of Powers’ earlier works, Plowing the Dark (50:30), in which an older man enters an used bookstore, unable to find the book intended. And in the absence of that book, Richard Powers will continue to do so (52:50).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You can save every day by shopping at Whole Foods Market. Seriously. Don't just go for their big
0:05.8	sales. Walk the store and see the savings for yourself. In the meat department, look for yellow
0:11.3	low-price signs on Whole Foods Market, no antibiotics ever chicken breast and ground beef. Quality,
0:17.0	flavorful meats, price just right. Perfect for big dinners with plenty left over for tomorrow's lunches.
0:23.4	There are so many ways to save at Whole Foods Market. Now you know.
0:29.6	Lemonada. This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fricoso. Welcome to the show.
0:47.3	As some of you may know, we make this program out of Los Angeles, California have since 2016.
0:55.0	I've seen a lot in eight years of living here,
0:58.6	but nothing matches the destruction of this past week.
1:04.1	The wildfires that are raging across the city right now,
1:06.6	as I'm sure you've seen on the news,
1:09.0	have decimated an untold amount of homes, schools, and businesses.
1:15.1	Thousands of people fleeing the fires have been displaced.
1:18.8	Lives just completely irrevocably altered by one of the most horrific natural disasters in the history of Los Angeles.
1:39.3	It would take me an hour to name everyone just in my life whose apartment or home or family home is either damaged or just completely gone. On Monday, it was life as usual, and on Tuesday, everything changed. And my heart goes out to everyone
1:51.7	that is going through it right now. I don't know how this city moves on from here. I don't know
1:59.7	how it moves forward from here. It's going to take a long,
2:04.5	long time. And for the foreseeable future will be a city in repair. So if you can help and you're
2:15.2	looking for a couple good organizations and GoFundMe's to support,
2:20.6	we've included some of those links in the show notes of this episode. You can find those on
2:25.6	our website or in the description of this conversation. Los Angeles is a strange, sprawling,
2:34.0	beautiful city, but its weather, as Joan Didion once wrote, is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana, she wrote back in 1967, affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles.
	...

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