This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It's been a very strange spring, to say the very least.

So many of us are stuck inside as tulips emerge from the dirt and birdsong erupts from outside,

all those signs of life returning after the winter.

So we'll start the show today with one of the great thinkers about the relationship between people and nature, Bill McKibbon,

who's at home in the woods of Vermont.

I'm Bill McKibben, and I'm a writer, and, you know, I spend a lot of my life working on the big

crisis of our time, the climate crisis.

And so, of course, the last few months, the last few weeks, I've been watching with great sadness and great interest as we try to deal with this crisis that has befallen us right now,

the coronavirus, and thinking about the ways in which it overlaps with

the other bigger, ongoing dramas on our planet.

Okay, we're just wandering down the driveway to the little marsh at the end,

because the last few nights the wood frogs have suddenly appeared their raucous spring ritual.

And here's just this little swampy marsh.

Now the wood frogs will be quiet for a little while

because they can hear us coming and they get a little nervous.

But I bet if we stand over there quietly for a minute,

the sound of the wood frogs will start to pick up again.

Let's see.

We may have to back further away. There's no possible way to get past the sadness of this moment.

It haunts everybody all the time.

But it is good sometimes to be able to remind yourself that the world, the planet, at least

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