Letters to Earthlings

Whoop! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letterstoearthlings.substack.com/subscribe

Related links:* Threshold Conversations: Feminism in the Wild, with Ambika Kamath and Melina Packer. Listen here.* One of Michelle Hall’s most important papers: Female song is widespread and ancestral in songbirds, Odom, K., Hall, M., Riebel, K. Nature Communications (2014).* A more recent paper Michelle was involved in: Global incidence of female birdsong is predicted by territoriality and biparental care in songbirds, Odom, K.J., Araya-Salas, M., Benedict, L. et al. Nature Communications (2025). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letterstoearthlings.substack.com/subscribe

The sounds, images, and stories from Minnesota are crushing. Enraging. Disorienting, heartbreaking, and all of the other descriptors you don’t need me to name because you’re feeling them too. I don’t know what to do, what to say, how to respond, how to be of use, how to even take in that this is reality.I still don’t. This is not a post in which I walk myself or anyone else from despair and confusion into any sort of clarity.All I know is this: I went to bed feeling overwhelmed with feelings about ICE. And I woke up with a clear, simple urge to meditate for a moment on fire. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letterstoearthlings.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letterstoearthlings.substack.comFor every minute that makes it into a Threshold episode, there are so many minutes that end up getting cut. Some of them, like this clip I’m sharing today, make it all the way to nearly-final draft. Some get half-developed and then cast aside. And many, many never get past the sketching stage.

I’m going to let the audio speak for itself on this one, except to say this: poetry is everywhere, if I remember to listen for it.Thank you to these two poets, and to Leonard Cohen.Hallelujah. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letterstoearthlings.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letterstoearthlings.substack.comA man walked 53 miles across the English countryside dressed as a giant curlew. Do you need to know more? I didn’t. I heard that much I knew I wanted to talk to him. The result is this conversation with Matthew Trevelyan, a man who combined his passion for curlews with his puppet-making skills to help raise awareness about the rapid decline of this iconic bird. I hope you enjoy it.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letterstoearthlings.substack.comElephants.I still can’t quite believe I got to see them. Listen to them. Touch their map-like skin, as creased and dry as the land they walk on.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letterstoearthlings.substack.comOne of my favorite parts of making Threshold, and just being a person alive on this planet, is sitting somewhere and listening to a place. Whatever happens to be there, doing its thing. Creatures and weather, plants and Earthly processes, all joining in to make little rhythms and melodies. Harmonies and dissonances. Blending, colliding, pausing, crescendoing, subsiding.When you’re making a narrative podcast like we do, or a radio feature, these sounds of places are called “ambi,” as in “ambience.” The stuff that’s not in focus. Background.Ambi can include human voices and human-made sounds, of course. But generally, if a person is talking, our ears snap to it, and focus on it. What was ambi becomes story, or wants to. This is cool! It shows how much we’re wired to pay attention to each other.But there’s a downside too. Our intense, instinctive tendency to prioritize human voices can and often does lead us to think of ourselves as the lead character in every situation, the star of every show. There’s us, and there’s ambi.So here’s my invitation to you: listen to this five minutes of sound from an undisclosed location, and let your imagination roam a bit. I’ll tell you ahead of time that little to nothing “happens” in this five minutes—at least not from a human perspective. And maybe not from any perspective. But is it ambi? Just an acoustic background? Or something else, maybe something more?Who decides?

What follows here is an op-ed I wrote too late in the game to pitch around very well. TLDR version: the Trump administration is seeking to change the Endangered Species Act in a way that would essentially gut it. The deadline to submit public comments on the proposed change is today Monday, May 19, at midnight eastern time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letterstoearthlings.substack.com/subscribe