Amy Martin's documentary series on Indigenous listening practices and the nonhuman world.
Threshold brings a literary public-radio patience to ecological reporting, using interviews, field sound, and close attention to place. Recent episodes move from curlew calls and whale songs to roadless forests, climate negotiations, and the private weight of climate grief.
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Threshold, produced by Auricle Productions, splits its output between long-form documentary seasons (most recently Hark) and shorter interview episodes released as Threshold Conversations, both hosted by Amy Martin. The narrative seasons weave field recordings and interviews into multi-voice documentary segments, as in the Hark finale, which draws on conversations with a Métis poet laureate, a Malgana woman from Shark Bay, a Noongar researcher, a Samburu man from Kenya, and an Ngarloman Injibandi cultural guide to explore Indigenous listening practices as both survival skill and mechanism of cultural transmission. The Conversations episodes are more conventional one-on-one interviews, typically 20 to 30 minutes, pairing Martin with scientists, authors, and practitioners: behavioral ecologist Ambika Kamath and scholar Melina Packer on gender bias built into evolutionary biology, journalist Ben Goldfarb on Forest Service road policy, and psychotherapist Audrey Martin (the host's sister) on climate grief and Climate Cafes. Recurring themes include Indigenous ecological knowledge, wildlife and habitat decline, the politics of public lands and road building, feminist critique of scientific authority, and the emotional dimensions of environmental crisis. Guests are typically scientists, authors, Indigenous knowledge-holders, and mental-health practitioners rather than celebrities or entertainers. Production credits recurring across episodes include producer Sam Moore and composer Todd Sikafoose, and the show identifies itself as nonprofit and listener-supported. It suits listeners with an interest in environmental science, conservation policy, and Indigenous perspectives on nature who want documentary storytelling alongside interview-based science journalism, rather than news-paced environmental coverage.
Made for: Listeners interested in environmental science, conservation policy, and Indigenous ecological knowledge who want documentary storytelling paired with interview-based science journalism.
What sets it apart: Combines narrative documentary seasons built from field recordings with Indigenous knowledge-holders alongside a separate interview strand covering feminist critiques of evolutionary biology and climate psychology, rather than sticking to a single interview format.
Threshold is a Peabody Award-winning documentary podcast about our place in the natural world. Each season, we take listeners on a journey into the heart of a complex environmental story, asking how we got here and where we might be headed. In our latest season, Hark, we hand the mic over to our planet-mates and investigate what it means to truly listen to nonhuman voices—and the cost if we don't. With mounting social and ecological crises, what happens when we tune into the life all around us? Threshold is nonprofit, listener-supported, and independently produced.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Threshold turns careful listening into environmental inquiry, linking animal voices, human infrastructure, scientific bias, and conservation choices.
Threshold makes environmental science audible, tracing how human activity changes the sound and movement of other lives. Amy Martin moves between field reporting and close interviews, connecting shipping noise to whale habitat, roads to ecological disruption, and the call of a…
Shipping noise meets a curlew's bubbling call, and suddenly your ears have homework.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A warm wildlife conversation where a giant curlew costume opens onto real conservation loss.
Curlew conservation arrives here in the unlikely form of Matthew Trevelyan walking 53 miles in a giant nesting-curlew costume. The conversation begins with the host's own encounters in Montana and Sweden, then turns to the British Isles, where curlews have fallen by half in…
A smart biology conversation about female birdsong, mating behavior, and the human assumptions science can mistake for nature.
Threshold opens with a tidy correction to a familiar nature fact: female songbirds sing too, especially in many tropical and less migratory species.
A measured look at Climate Cafes as shared space for climate grief, anxiety, and action.
Climate emotion is treated here less as private dread than as a shared psychological reality: something people can notice, name, and sit with together.
A measured, accessible look at why roadless forests matter, and why new roads are rarely just roads.
Threshold turns a fight over the roadless rule into a clear, compact primer on road ecology. The episode frames the 2001 policy as a protection for some of the Forest Service's wildest lands, now threatened by a proposed repeal, and uses Ben Goldfarb's work to explain why roads…
A reflective Threshold finale treats listening to place, spiders, and threatened black cockatoos as ecological memory.
Threshold ends its season by widening the act of listening beyond speech, toward rivers, clouds, burrows, birds, and the obligations carried by place.
A measured, hopeful look at noise pollution as serious ecological harm with unusually direct fixes.
Threshold frames noise pollution as a failure of attention: human sound crowding out the lives, signals, and quiet places around us. The episode begins close to home, with factories, construction, backyards, and the constant movement of people and goods, then follows…
Guardian science editor Ian Sample and host Madeleine Finlay unpack the week's research news.
Ira Glass frames weekly theme-driven segments spanning family secrets to Portland's protest conflict.
Shankar Vedantam unpacks the psychology behind relationships, careers, and money through researcher interviews.
David McRaney interviews researchers on cognitive bias, motivated reasoning, and why minds change.
Ryan Holiday pairs daily Stoic lessons with long-form guest conversations at his Texas bookstore.
NHPR's Jason Moon investigates the Bear Brook barrel murders and a New Hampshire wrongful-conviction case.
The speaker first saw a curlew at Freezeout Lake in central Montana, where a “small group” stood out with “super long, curved bills” and a call that “took my breath away.” Now living part of life in Umeå, Sweden, the speaker notes that curlews are the region’s symbolic animal, with a big curlew statue in town and real Eurasian curlews returning each spring.
Threshold Conversations host Amy Martin interviews behavioral ecologist Ambika Kamath and gender/sexuality scholar Melina Packer about their book Feminism in the Wild, which examines how human cultural biases have been systematically imported into biological science.
This episode explores the history and current challenges of international climate negotiations, focusing on the UNFCCC and COPs, with insights from Lina Yassin amid U.S.
Host Amy Martin interviews her sister Audrey Martin, a Bay Area psychotherapist and leader of the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America, about why people avoid their climate-related emotions and what it costs them.
Roads do not stay small.
The host announces the launch of a new monthly interview series called Threshold Conversations, focusing on ecological thinking and starting with author Ben Goldfarb discussing the roadless rule and impacts on public lands.
Threshold host Amy Martin presents the season finale of the show as a multi-voice narrative drawing on conversations with Indigenous people in Montana, Western Australia, and Kenya about listening to the more-than-human world as a cultural practice and survival skill.
This episode explores how the 1970 album 'Songs of the Humpback Whale' used recording technology to share whale songs, captivating global audiences and helping end commercial whaling by changing perceptions of animal intelligence.
Noise keeps asking its question.
This episode explores the relatively recent emergence of Homo sapiens in Earth's biological timeline, contrasting our short existence with older life forms like microbes, fish, and dinosaurs.
The host observes a group of wild elephants, including a newborn, at a watering hole in northern Kenya while discussing conservation with Katie Rowe.
This episode describes a visit to the Ratedi Elephant Sanctuary in northern Kenya, where orphaned elephants are cared for by keepers who feed them milk bottles.
This episode describes the asteroid impact that wiped out most dinosaurs 66 million years ago and how small, adaptable dinosaurs like Asteriornis survived to evolve into modern birds.
A biologist investigates whether endangered turtle hatchlings communicate before emerging from their eggs.
This episode explores the history of life on Earth through sound, from microbes to the Permian extinction, and questions what it means to listen to nonhuman voices.
A team of scientists studies dolphin families in Shark Bay, Western Australia, observing a new calf and explaining naming conventions.
The host attempts to record loon calls at a lake in Sweden, reflecting on listening to nonhuman voices.
The hosts discuss the making of Season 5 of Threshold, focusing on how the idea for Hark was formulated, blending art and science through sound and environmental listening.
The host explores the concept of quiet places and argues that nature is full of voices if we listen carefully, introducing a season about listening to nonhuman life.
The episode explores the role of sound in plant-pollinator interactions, starting with the host observing bees in her garden and explaining the science of pollination.
The host thanks listeners and explains the show's listener-funded model while walking by a creek, emphasizing deep environmental storytelling.
This episode explores the discovery of an ancient fossilized moss named after Dolly Parton, blending natural history with cultural references.
The host hikes in Glacier National Park, encountering grizzly bears and reflecting on the need to make noise for safety.
This episode features an interview with author Rebecca Solnit, discussing her work that spans topics like justice, global politics, and ecological crisis, while highlighting her unique perspective on hope and activism.
A documentary podcast episode featuring a speech at COP26 about the urgency of climate action for future generations.
This episode explores the environmental impact of steel production and the potential for decarbonizing the industry.
This episode explores the environmental impact of steel production and the potential for reimagining industrial processes to prevent climate catastrophe.
The host reflects on a mundane cook pot, tracing its origins from exploding stars to a recycled steel pot, as a meditation on listening to nonhuman voices.
This episode explores the impacts of sea level rise on coastal communities and the challenges of adapting to a changing shoreline.
The host reflects on buying a home and the associated carbon emissions, introducing a series on decarbonizing buildings.
The episode explores the feasibility of decarbonizing the U.S.
Listeners share personal stories about what they are sad to lose due to climate change, focusing on the impending 1.5°C warming threshold.
A fundraising appeal followed by a visit to a science museum to see a historic steam engine.
A fundraising appeal followed by a reflection on the atmosphere as a life-giving bubble, introducing a season about listening to nonhuman voices.
A climate crisis documentary podcast that explores the urgency of listening to nonhuman voices to prevent ecological disaster.