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Zero: The Climate Race

Do artists have a duty to be political? Imagine series

Zero: The Climate Race

Bloomberg

Business, Science, Technology

4.8296 Ratings

🗓️ 12 February 2026

⏱️ 35 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How can music be used to communicate the climate crisis and its solutions? This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi talks with Pulitzer Prize winning composer Julia Wolfe about her recent work, unEarth, which explores climate change and habitat loss through orchestra, voice and poetry. Wolfe discusses how she did her research, captured the clash between humanity and nature, and what the piece means at a time when her home country of the US seems to be moving ever further from climate action. 

Listen to unEarth:

If you'd like to listen to the full performance of Julia Wolfe’s unEarth, it will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Thursday, 12 February at 7.30pm UK time, and will be available on BBC Sounds, at least for those here in the UK, for the next month. 

Explore further:

Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd. Special thanks to Sommer Saadi, Mohsis Andam, Sharon Chen and Laura Millan. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0

I'm Barry Rittaltz inviting you to join me for the Masters in Business podcast. Every week, we bring you fascinating

0:08.4

conversations with the people who shape markets, investing, and business. CEOs, fund managers,

0:15.8

billionaires, Nobel laureates, traders, analysts, economists, everybody that affects what's going on in the market,

0:24.7

whether you own stocks, bonds, real estate commodities, crypto, you really need to hear these

0:30.4

conversations. Sometimes it's behaviorists like Dick Thaler or Bob Schiller, sometimes it's

0:36.7

fund managers like Peter Lynch, Bill Miller, Ray Dalio.

0:40.6

Sometimes it's authors, Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short, and Moneyball.

0:45.3

Regardless of the conversation, these are the folks that move markets each week.

0:50.9

That's the Masters in Business podcast with me, Barry Rittalts. Listen on Apple, Spotify,

0:57.5

or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Zero. I am Akshatrati. This week, a monster

1:05.6

devouring the earth. Earth.

1:33.5

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to the Barbican Center to see the London premiere of a piece of music called Unearth, exploring the climate crisis.

1:44.2

It's an oratorio which uses an orchestra, singers, and narration to tell a story.

1:51.5

In this case, it involved the BBC Orchestra alongside a soprano, a men's choir, and a young person's choir.

1:57.7

It was fantastic.

2:03.2

Even though I was staring at an orchestra, some of the sounds didn't seem to come from the instruments,

2:09.5

but somewhere deep, like a creaking forest or like the sound of a crying whale.

2:16.5

And the music had this visceral power that I've not seen explored in such a way to tell a climate story.

2:21.9

So I wanted to find out more about the piece, the music, and the name unearth.

2:26.7

Unearth can mean many different things, but certainly there's the actual word on earth.

2:29.8

You're digging in and unearthing something up from the earth.

2:32.9

And then there's un as a negative.

...

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