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

The Climate of Truth: Lockdown Rewilding & Environmental Resistance with Author AL KENNEDY

·1 hr 36 min·5 clips

Kennedy says accelerationism aims to brutalize people until they become violent back.

A.L. Kennedy begins with voice. She describes the Alfred Wolfson voice method as a practice of making room for someone else to read themselves into the world, and she treats that discipline as a way of listening for what is most essential in a person. That idea quickly grows beyond technique. Kennedy asks why people so often seem fully expressed only in their final moments, and why ordinary life leaves so little space for that kind of openness. Close listening makes the point feel concrete. In that work, she says, a person can suddenly appear as unmistakably themselves, with all the intimacy and strangeness that comes with it. The conversation then turns to pandemic memory. Kennedy recalls a time when people showed up for one another while governments often seemed cold, calculating, or indifferent. She describes the era as a political revelation. What the crisis exposed, for her, was not just fragility but the gap between public rhetoric and the lives that needed protection. She speaks bluntly about the way power sorted people into categories of expendability. That leads into the scale of loss and the problem of how loss gets told. Kennedy resists flattening the deaths that came with COVID. She wants the suddenness and unfairness to stay visible rather than get turned into a vague moral lesson. The discussion also touches memorials and public memory. For her, keeping remembrance in view matters because it keeps human cost from disappearing into procedure. From there the conversation moves toward environmental politics. Kennedy links pollution, climate damage, and anti-nuclear activism to the same larger pattern of harms that are often treated as background noise. She also points back to fiction as a place where those invisible harms can be named without being softened. The older and newer generations of activists enter the picture together. Kennedy contrasts an earlier time when people could live cheaply and improvise their politics with the harsher financial realities facing younger organizers now. The result is a conversation about attention, responsibility, and the price of resistance. It stays warm, grave, and intellectually alive throughout.

As heard by us

A reflective conversation linking voice, grief, activism, and climate responsibility.

A.L. Kennedy's voice work comes through as inseparable from grief, public care, and environmental resistance, and the conversation is at its best when it treats pandemic loss, anti-nuclear activism, and climate change as part of the same moral field.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

A voice-led conversation where grief, activism, and the need to be fully expressed stay in the same room.

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