The podcast of the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS), formerly LENS.cast, is now Story+World: Changing Stories for a Changing Planet. We explore environmental art, activism, policy, and imagination in California and beyond. Season 1 is a series of conversations between LENS scholars and writers, artists, scientists, activists, and others whose work relates to LENS’s goal of understanding how today’s environmental challenges connect to longer histories of imagining the natural world.
Episode 1 features a live conversation with climate journalist Sammy Roth, who recently left the LA Times to launch Climate Colored Goggles (climatecoloredgoggles.com). Roth reflects on his trajectory from covering energy policy and politics to examining how narratives in culture and entertainment shape environmental futures. He argues that cultural changes are crucial for climate action. To explore the issues and possibilities of climate narratives, we discuss political fragmentation and polarization, fake news, a shifting landscape of media consumption, and the responsibility of scholars and storytellers in the fight for better climate policy.
Participants: Sammy Roth, Jon Christensen (LENS Director, IoES Professor, and environmental journalist), Ursula K. Heise (Distinguished Professor of English and in the IoES), and Liv Slaby (LENS podcast producer and English PhD student)
Music: “Concrete River” by Elori Saxl. Courtesy of Western Vinyl. Used by permission.
LENS.cast is a podcast from UCLA’s Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies. The show tells stories about environmental art, activism, policy, and imagination, with a focus on questions of environmental and multispecies justice. How do built and natural environments embody histories of oppression and possibilities for change? How do different communities value and protect the nonhuman beings they live with? How do artists and activists push us to think differently about our more-than-human relations? How can communities ensure that marginalized people and places are at the center of plans for ecological futures?
In our last season, we spoke to activists, experts, and artists working toward just futures for California’s Imperial Valley, Indigenous communities in Iqaluit, and elsewhere.
Season 1 of LENS.cast features two episodes about environmental justice in Los Angeles. In episode 1, we explore the history and future of Los Angeles’s remarkable trees. California is more than…
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In 2021, LENS partnered with the Labyrinth Project, a collaborative urban anthropological inquiry into nature in Los Angeles, to produce a series of episodes based on the Labyrinth team’s fieldwork…
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In Season 3 of the podcast of the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies, we speak to activists, experts, and artists working toward just futures for California’s Imperial Valley, Indigenous communities…
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