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cover of episode Lauren Markham on Reckoning with Future Loss from Climate Change

Lauren Markham on Reckoning with Future Loss from Climate Change

2025/2/4
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KQED's Forum
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Lauren Markham's book, "Immemorial," explores the emotional impact of climate change. The author describes a feeling of awe and complicity while observing the Alps from an airplane, prompting a search for a word to encapsulate this complex emotion. She collaborates with an artist group to coin new words for these feelings, highlighting the inadequacy of existing language to describe the changing climate.
  • The author experiences a feeling of awe and complicity while viewing the Alps from an airplane.
  • She searches for a word to describe this complex emotion.
  • She collaborates with the Bureau of Linguistical Reality to coin new terms for climate-related feelings.
  • The process of finding words becomes a journey of reconnecting with language.

Shownotes Transcript

With an unprecedented phenomenon like climate change, do we have the words or the ways to express the feelings that it creates? In her new book, “Immemorial,” Writer Lauren Markham attempts to find the language, rituals and memorials to reckon with the grief of climate change, and a future that seems to be vanishing. We’ll talk about psychologically processing the environmental realities that we face.

Guests:

Lauren Markham, writer; reporter; author, "Immemorial"