Threshold Conversations

Threshold Conversations features interviews with environmental thought leaders on important issues impacting cultures, communities, and ecosystems in the United States and beyond. This series aims to create space for thoughtful, civil dialogue about the urgent environmental issues we’re living with today.

Threshold Conversations was made possible in part by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists, the Fund for Environmental Journalism of the Society of Environmental Journalists, Montana Public Radio, Park Foundation, High Stakes Foundation, and Threshold’s listeners.

In this episode, John Noksana, Carolina Behe, and Mumilaaq Qaqqaq sit down with Threshold producers Amy Martin and Nick Mott to discuss Inuit food security and Inuit sovereignty in the North. 

John, an Inuit hunter from Northern Canada, and Carolina, the Indigenous Knowledge and Science Advisor for the Inuit Circumpolar Council in Alaska, discuss how food security fits into a bigger picture of Inuit self-determination. Then, we hear from Mumilaaq, who’s addressing that bigger picture on an even larger stage: in Canada’s Parliament.

DFTBA — Don’t Forget To Be Awesome. That’s the motto of Vlogbrothers, a wildly popular YouTube channel.

On this episode of Threshold Conversations, we talk with one of the creators of that channel, Hank Green. In addition to his YouTube stardom, he’s a science communicator, novelist, and entrepreneur. Hank talks to us about how DFTBA reminds us to do the work to be good friends and citizens, about his passion for bringing science to the masses, and why all great communication begins with empathy.

Dr. Robert Bullard is a Distinguished Professor at Texas Southern University and a transformational figure in the environmental justice movement.

In this episode of Threshold Conversations, Amy and Robert talk about the origins of his pioneering research, the battle to get environmental justice on the agendas of large, white-dominated environmental groups, and what gives him hope.

The word crisis comes from the Greek krisis, meaning the turning point in a disease. Today on Threshold Conversations, we sit down with Bill McKibben to talk about the dual crises of climate change and the coronavirus pandemic, what we're learning in the 2020s, and what he sees as the task of the moment: to try. 

Bill McKibben is an author, activist, and founder of 350.org.

Award-winning photographer Ami Vitale has seen the best of humanity and the worst of humanity. She’s documented war and conflict, nature, wildlife, and conservation in places from Kashmir to China and Kenya. 

How does your zip code affect your life expectancy? 

Today, we dive into conversation with Peggy Shepard, a pioneer of the environmental justice movement who has worked for more than three decades to shine a light on the ways damage to the natural world intersects with issues of race and class.

If a whale sings in the ocean, and Michelle Fournet is there to hear it through her hydrophones, how does it sound? How are these songs impacted by human activities—and by the pandemic’s quiet oceans?

In this episode of Threshold Conversations, we ponder some big and timely questions with Dr. J. Drew Lanham, a distinguished professor of wildlife ecology, author, poet, and birder. How is social justice inseparable from environmental justice? How does his favorite bird relate to the experience of being Black in America? And what experiences led him to write 9 Rules for the Black Birdwatcher? 

We sit down with award-winning journalist Alfredo Corchado. As Mexico Border correspondent for the Dallas Morning News, Alfredo is one of the nation’s leading reporters covering the complicated issues playing out at the U.S./Mexico border. 

We all depend on the food we eat, and on the people who raise, grow, and harvest that food for us. In the United States, a huge number of the people who do that work are undocumented immigrants. Today, Alfredo discusses what coronavirus means for this vulnerable and important population and his own experience growing up and working in the fields of California’s Central Valley. He also discusses the intersection of climate, immigration, and food security.

The first episode of Threshold Conversations features a conversation with Kendra Pierre-Louis, a climate reporter with The New York Times.

We discuss the intersection of the coronavirus pandemic with various environmental issues, including how both COVID-19 and air quality issues disproportionately affect communities of color; how the pandemic will affect our ability to manage wildfires; and the politicization of climate change in the United States.