Mastodawn

#climateDiary
This is a lovely conversation between host Alex Leff and Jess Serrante. It serves as an introduction to a set of conversations I didn’t know I needed to listen to but now feel I do:

Jess recorded her friend, Joanna Macy, and made it her own podcast: ‘We are the Great Turning’.

Heartily recommend this, about Joanna, her wisdom and what it was like to know her really well

https://overcast.fm/+BA_3prPj2o

20 - Joanna Macy & The Great Turning — with Jess Serrante — Human Nature Odyssey

How do we live through wild times? Legendary scholar, activist, and systems thinker Joanna Macy named the moment we are living through the Great Unraveling—a time when our ecological, political, economic, and social systems destabilize to the point of no return. And yet, she also insisted that we stand on the threshold of a Great Turning: a profound transition toward a more just and sustainable world. Before Joanna’s death in 2025, climate activist Jess Serrante recorded a series of intimate and insightful conversations with her. In this episode, Alex sits down with Jess, weaving in clips from those recordings to explore the questions Joanna devoted her life to asking: How do we live with meaning as civilization unravels? How do we turn toward the grief of this moment—and transform it into action? And how do intergenerational relationships help us become elders for the future - when wisdom is needed most? CITATIONS We Are The Great Turning [podcast] If you’d like to support Human Nature Odyssey, please…

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Jonathan Schofield 3d ago

…I know of Joanna and her work, but I haven’t read or listened to her.

In the above conversation we hear snippets of Jess’s recordings in which Joanna describes the moment in 1977, aged 48, when the true gravity of our predicament struck her and, for 15 months, silenced her. It took her over a year to be able to speak about it with anyone close to her.

I would have been 13 in ’77. Despite all that has ensued since, it took me until my mid-50s to reach a similar point. But it’s never too late

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Jonathan Schofield

…Jess relays really well how from Joanna she learned to process her anger at what we’re collectively doing. And how to be part of The Great Turning as the human counterweight to The Great Unravelling. And how to sit with someone who is now gone.

And Alex is a thoughtful and kind-spirited host.

It’s affecting me deeply