Sustainability, Climate Change, Renewable Energy, Politics, Activism, Biodiversity, Carbon Footprint, Wildlife, Regenerative Agriculture, Circular Economy, Extinction, Net-Zero · One Planet Podcast · Mia Funk

Alive in the Merciful Country with Author, Activist, Stand-up Comedian AL KENNEDY - Highlights

·34 min·2 clips

Kennedy says governments want to infiltrate anything oppositional, including Greenpeace.

Kennedy begins with a claim about being essential. For her, writing is not ornament but an invitation for the reader's own voice to enter. She connects that idea to the Alfred Wolfson voice method. In her telling, the method reaches toward something close to universal humanity through expression. She recalls Wolfson's First World War memory of hearing people scream for their lives. That image becomes a hard measure of what it means to be fully alive. She keeps circling back to why people so often save their fullest expression for the end. In group voice work, she says, someone can suddenly seem wholly open and unmistakably themselves. She describes long practice with a voice teacher as a back-and-forth process of finding that state. The conversation then moves to AI. Kennedy sees it as fast, persuasive, and built to imitate human thinking at speed. Her concern is not novelty but how quickly it can draw people into ready-made beliefs. She uses anti-immigrant claims in the UK as an example, including stories about hotels and food, while pointing to the fact that people are often denied housing, work, and shelter. From there she turns to love and beauty. She resists a fixed definition, arguing that anything alive keeps changing. Lockdown becomes a test case for that idea. She remembers a shared, frightening period when dance, music, paintings, balcony saxophones, and even leaves took on new force. She also speaks about grief, saying she still misses the people and work she has lost. The closing thought is practical and unsentimental: darknesses are always present, but people can still choose safety, love, and joy in how they respond.

As heard by us

A loose, searching conversation about voice, art, and politics, held together by the wish to be fully expressed.

A.L. Kennedy turns voice into a way of getting at something plain and hard: how to make room for another person, how to reach for shared humanity, and why people so often hold back from being fully themselves.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a serious conversation where voice, grief, politics, and art keep widening the frame slowly.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Sustainability, Climate Change, Renewable Energy, Politics, Activism, Biodiversity, Carbon Footprint, Wildlife, Regenerative Agriculture, Circular Economy, Extinction, Net-Zero · One Planet Podcast