Writer Megan Mayhew Bergman on science, emotion, and the lasting power of ‘Silent Spring’

Megan Mayhew Bergman: I think the fundamental challenge for all of us who care so deeply about other species and the environment and the fate of our planet and the fate of other species on the planet is how do we change hearts and minds? And I think what’s hard is that we want people to know or understand the science, the anti-human exceptionalism. Readers and listeners respond to conviction and passion. And so I think that’s what all of us can do is just find a way to stay engaged in conversations and share what matters to us and share what we care about. And I think not be afraid to be tender.

Mike DiGirolamo: Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your host, Mike de Gimo, bringing you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists, and activists working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet and holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal Land. Today on the newscast, we speak with Megan Mayhew Bergman, an award-winning author, speaker, journalist, and the director of the Creative Writing program at Middlebury College. She joins me today to talk about how books on the environment can change us and sometimes the world. We cover a long list of recommendations for our listeners to check out, but our conversation focuses on the seminal classic Silent Spring by the late scientist and writer, Rachel Carson. There’s much to say about Silent Spring, its cultural, social, and political impact on the United States and elsewhere. The book is widely credited with starting the environmental movement in North America, which eventually led to the banning of the toxic pesticide DDT. Carson’s journey to writing this book was far from smooth sailing. Bergman unpacks that journey and discusses how and why Silent Spring was so influential, what lessons we can take away from it and apply to today, and why it’s very possible for another book like it to emerge in this moment. But you need not be a writer or even an activist to heed Bergman’s advice. For anyone who cares about the natural world or simply the sustainable living of the human species and wants a better world and future, Bergman’s advice is arguably relevant in many contexts. Be wary of righteousness, but approach conversations with passion, nuance, and tenderness. Megan, welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. It’s great to have you with us.

Megan: Thank you for having me.

Mike: So today we’re gonna discuss a variety of books, but we’re gonna start by discussing Silent Spring. Megan, what would you like to highlight for listeners about this book? Why was it so significant, and what was the biggest takeaway from its social impact, from your perspective?

Megan: Yeah, I remember, I think it was Catherine Schultz in The New Yorker a few years ago, and she was talking about Walden Pond and Thoreau being often quoted and lesser-read, and I thought, what feels like that to me? And for me, it was a little bit about Silent Spring and I thought, I—this is such an essential book. I want to make sure I’ve really read it, really reckoned with it. And so I tried to start reading it at night and it’s, I don’t know your experience, but it’s not a good book to read at night because it keeps you up.

Mike: Yeah. It is not a settling read. It’s quite stirring. It really doesn’t make you feel great. Something that we should talk about is how the book was formulated. So there was a partnership, as it were. Maybe partnership isn’t the right word, but there was a bit of a mentorship between the author E.B. White, who worked for The New Yorker, and Rachel Carson. What do you want to tell us about this working relationship between the two of them and how did it influence the publication of this book?

Megan: Yeah, I guess I want to back up and say a little bit more about why I think this book is truly a landmark piece of art and science literature. It’s because I think it’s one of the first contemporary books where we see a writer and a scientist who is truly almost a contemporary environmental humanist. Carson studied English and literature as an undergraduate and then studied science as a graduate, and she’s able to meld both of those intentions beautifully. She’s a lyrical, sensual writer who knows how to write directly to the public about complex issues, which is still something I think collectively we don’t do very well and we don’t do often enough. And so to me, when I think about why this book matters so much, it’s that writing to the people—not just to the people, but for the people—this is in your best interest, and let me translate this complex science into language that you can read and metabolize. And I feel like she and E.B. White have this shared sensibility. When you look at his writing for The New Yorker and helping build that magazine, it’s definitely a little less accessible. But when you think about Charlotte’s Web or his essays like Death of a Pig, E.B. White was also in this space of writing in a scientifically informed way to the general public. I think neither one of them were afraid to anthropomorphize, which is always a danger, but it is something I think that lets the general public truly begin to have an emotional, if not a spiritual, connection to nature. And I think both of them were committed to doing this with dignity. Rachel Carson had written her work and had been serialized in The New Yorker before in the 50s when she was writing about the sea. She was already a proven name, but she was considered like a public oceanographer. This is somebody who’s living and working in Woods Hole and writing about the sea in accessible, beautiful, lyrical ways, really wonderful in the way that she wrote. She actually received a letter from an editor named Olga. Olga wrote to her about the fact that she had seen these aerial pesticide sprays and that the birds were just dying in her front yard, and she was like, “You must write something about this.” Carson had been doing her own research, and Carson actually asked E.B. White to write it first and said, “I want you to write about this for The New Yorker.” White came back to her and said, “You have the scientific chops. This is your material.” Like many writers, this was not optimum timing. Rachel Carson, who maybe people know but she was just starting to go through cancer treatment at this time, she was a single woman who had adopted a relative’s child, a 5-year-old, and she had just moved to a house in Southport, Maine to try and really focus on her writing and the upside. So it’s never the right time, people say that often, but the upside is, I think she wrote this book with such moral clarity and such bravery in the face of special interests, and that E.B. White really gave her this New Yorker platform in which to do it. And for me, it feels like this really magical melding of two brilliant minds who happened to be working in collaboration at this point in time.

Mike: Yeah. And just for folks that, for the audience listening, so this was first serialized in The New Yorker. It was published in installments, basically. Do you have any insight into how that was received initially when it was first released?

Megan: It was controversial. It’s pretty exciting to think about it in context. She’s writing this at a time where, you know, the kind of World War I and World War II military-industrial complex is rising. It’s employed and touched a lot of people. This notion of “better living through chemistry” and employing chemists and really being excited about chemical compounds and how they could change life on Earth was presented in this sort of positive light. This was going to change lives. This was going to give jobs. And Carson came out with this really brave take that was, we have to—I think the idea is the precautionary principle—is that we have to move with more caution and more wisdom. And the other sort of… I think people have called it quietly revolutionary in planting these sort of dangerous kind of revolutionary seeds, which I think Carson does brilliantly, but it’s almost a little anti-human exceptionalist in its conception, which is: humans should not control life on Earth, but we are participants. We are part of this. Our bodies are these own permeable ecological specimens affected by this. And so she’s not only going up against the sort of mood of the time, but she’s also putting forth, I think, really ahead-of-their-time ideas like bioaccumulation and things that are accumulating in the human body, teaching people to be concerned about what’s in their milk. Just really talking, I think, about power. Who gets to decide when these things are used? These are issues that I believe were really progressive at the time and unwelcome.

Mike: And those issues are still happening in other ways today, especially when we’re talking about plastics and obviously fossil fuels. But at the time when this book was beginning to be released, Carson was pretty vilified and her character was attacked by chemical companies as it happened. Do you have any insight into how that played out and her response to it and the public’s response to that?

Megan: She was—it’s an age-old tactic of painting a woman into a hysterical corner. She was diminished for having a master’s degree instead of a PhD. People called her just a woman who likes birds and bunnies, a spinster. So her lifestyle was attacked. The attacks were quite personal. She, the attacks were quite personal. And she dies 18 months after this is published, so she’s, she’s going through cancer treatment as this is being leveled at her. But I think she had a sort of a real clarity of purpose that allowed her to stay true and also to lean on science. I will say it’s maybe in her favor that we had a more shared sense of fact in that era.

Mike: Yeah, it was interesting when I was doing research for this conversation that she gave testimony in Congress and pretty much just presented the science as it was, rather than addressing the ad hominem insults, and it worked. And so I am, I’m a bit baffled as to how, what once was seen as there was a public trust in science. There was a public trust in the truth essentially, and it wasn’t pushed back on by the general public. Rather, it was pushed back on by chemical companies and their PR firms. What’s different today, do you think, that makes something like that, that much harder?

Megan: I love that question. One of the unsettling things for me reading this book was just—I try to read it at night and it’s talking about even in the ‘60s in her day, the hundreds of chemical compounds being put into the market and the atmosphere each year. And that number is astronomically higher now. And they did have this, I think, shared firmer trust in science. Now, feeling how much that’s undermined, you name it with vaccines, with climate science. I remember talking to one of the early founders of the Southern Environmental Law Center who helped get that organization off the ground in the ‘70s. Sort of, I would guess in the wake of this movement, which is a dotted line to Earth Day and this more shared awareness of environmental, modern environmental awareness. He said in the ‘70s, we used to say, environmentalism felt less political. And you could say, “Everyone agrees upon clean water,” or we can look at this science, and now we can look at RFK and vaccines and just say, we don’t have, we have room for opinion in our headlines around scientific issues, around food safety, around vaccines, around pesticides, around chemical compounds. And climate science even. And really I think a movement toward erasure of what is inconvenient for industry and a sort of censorship of that. And I find that, I think Carson would be horrified by that, and I think she would… she also was anticipating it.

Mike: Hello listeners, and thank you for tuning in. Over the course of this conversation, many books have been and will be mentioned, so if you want to read any of them, they will be listed in the episode summary published to mongabay.com, along with links on where you can find them. And as always, if you want to provide feedback on the Mongabay Newscast, you can find the listener survey also in the show notes. Now back to the conversation with Megan Mayhew Bergman.

Mike: We’ve already talked about the environmental movement that this book spurred, but it was social and pop cultural in a sense because this book literally inspired the song Big Yellow Taxi from Joni Mitchell, if anyone’s heard that. The line “Hey, farmer, put away that DDT now” is a direct reference to this book. And I find that both moving and inspiring, and I’m just wondering what you think of that. And also, do you think that there is the potential for having a similar cultural impact today from another writer or activist who is fighting the same fight?

Megan: I love that question. I think one of the things that was really powerful was that she brushed up against almost the spiritual aspect of the human relationship with nature and brushed up against morality, which I think in modern day times we’ve been scared to touch, but that I think we might actually be hungry for this sort of moral direction and this understanding that we have a duty to things larger than ourselves and our commerce and our self-interest. I think about this essay by C.P. Snow, where he talked about two cultures. It’s a flawed essay in many ways, but he had this sense that scientific dialogue and cultural and humanistic dialogue were taking place in two different silos. And it was really hard to build a bridge between them and have that sort of dialogue, and I think it’s increasingly difficult to translate scientific issues to the public. The fact that Carson was able to do that in plain language and in metaphor and with such compelling beauty… I do think there’s space for people to do that again, I think will we do it in time and quickly enough? I don’t know. But I do think the pendulum comes back, and I think we’re in a moment where that’s gonna happen.

Mike: Yeah. I really like your reflection there about her kind of cutting to the heart of the moral questions and the moral problems that we’re facing, and yeah, I agree. That seems like it’s quite, I don’t want to say unique, but central to this book and its message, and perhaps people have been shying away from that and focusing perhaps only on the scientific information that’s being presented rather than the moral question that it presents. There is a quote in the second chapter that I wanted to highlight. She wrote, “I think that it could very well be applied to today. It says, ‘If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.’ I found that to be just… It makes me wonder, should there be, or could there be an amendment to the Bill of Rights, the United States Bill of Rights, to include that?

Megan: I think so. I’m not a legal expert, but I have worked with the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Conservation Law Foundation, and I’ve become increasingly aware of the scale and power of the law in order to enforce meaningful change. Carson has this other line where she says that something about the basic human right of citizens to be secure in his own home against intrusion of poisons, and that feels like language that both sides of America could agree upon, which is having control of your own personal safety, your own human health, your own planetary health. And I think that idea, especially when we think about younger generations and the planet they’re inheriting and the lack of safety in the planet they’re inheriting, especially around climate science, I think they have a very good case, a legal case even for leaning back on that.

Mike: It almost seems like it could be the big umbrella to unite people across the political spectrum. This sense of you have a right to be safe from these outside poisons. Intrusions that could harm you for life. Things like microplastics, things like a giant chemical plant that’s only a mile from your home, spewing toxic fumes into the air. Like it seems like that could be something that spurs a movement to unite everyone.

Megan: Absolutely. As an environmental writer myself, I think a lot about conversion moments. When are the moments when people feel compelled to either admit they were wrong, change a belief, donate money, vote differently? We live in such a time of absolutes and party lines that it’s interesting to think what are the issues or the moments or the experiences that push people toward change or having had enough or some sort of saturation point? And it seems to me that we’re on the brink of so many of those things when we think about extreme weather and climate, pollution and microplastics and control over our own bodies and experiences. And as Carson said, who wants to live on a planet which is only not quite fatal?

Mike: That’s a great quote.

Megan: It’s a n…

Mike: And so I do want to point out for listeners, just in case it hasn’t been stated, DDT was banned in 1972 in the United States as a direct result of this book. And the book is widely considered as being instrumental in the eventual formulation of the Environmental Protection Agency, which occurred under the Nixon administration. I’m actually, Megan, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on Rachel Carson’s writing on bioaccumulation of poisons in this case, pesticides. How that work could be translated to communicating the problem of bioaccumulation today?

Megan: Yeah, I think she does a great job in Silent Spring of walking through a couple of different scenarios and really using, I think, more apt, on-point language to discuss what pesticides really are by calling them biocides—they’re deadly properties—and she outlines scenarios where they kill songbirds directly or they affect the people that are moving the poisons on the truck in these aerial sprays. But she also talks about that sort of next level of passive, brushing up against these poisons passively and the way they might trigger something else in the body or change something in the body that then results, perhaps, in a cancer or an illness. This idea of bioaccumulation, of these poisons becoming more concentrated in our bodies. She was saying the body is permeable, the body is fragile. These are shared experiences, and that really gets to that dotted line of kinship with these songbirds, with these species—they’re also experiencing these adverse effects. I think that was a powerful suggestion and I think it’s interesting because, again, I think about the fact that JFK first became aware of Rachel Carson when his mother gave him, I think in the early 50s, a copy of one of her writings on the sea. And JFK is somewhat aware of Carson, but he was also, like most soldiers, sprayed down by DDT at some point in his own service. And, you having

these soldiers back for war, you did have, I think, a growing awareness of the body and relationship to chemicals. And then there was also… she very skillfully brushed up against the public’s growing awareness of nuclear testing and technology in the Bikini Atoll. And this sort of awareness that we are now in an era of powerful chemical forces and powerful science that we need to move thoughtfully through and that we all bear responsibility for. I think she very gently gets into the idea of accountability. In her last chapter when she talks about, she kind of references Robert Frost and The Road Not Taken and this sort of two paths and the different ways humans can go and proceed through this moment. I think we’d all agree that we walked through the wrong door, the wrong match.

Mike: But we could still walk through a different door. A door that doesn’t lead us towards toxic bioaccumulation. And that brings me to the central question I have here for this podcast episode: why are books like this so important, and how do they help change the world? Like, why do we celebrate this book 50 years later, even though DDT is banned? Obviously that didn’t solve the problem of chemical pollution, but it is a step. So why do we continue to celebrate this book and revisit it?

Megan: Yeah, I think I’ve been told as an environmental communicator that we don’t change our minds usually based on data. We change our minds based on emotion, but historically it’s been pretty taboo for scientists to include emotion in the way that they write. And I feel like Carson risked that here in a way that was really powerful. And I would say a contemporary author who did that to great acclaim and success would be Robin Wall Kimmerer. And I think about Braiding Sweetgrass as a book that introduces ideas of honorable harvest or thinking a little more emotionally and spiritually about how we interact with the planet. And I think those are ideas that traditional science has labeled as soft or too purple or woo for us to really make meaningful change on, but they caught on culturally. And when I think about the number of people who have had access to Carson or Kimmer, it is exciting to think about the way new ideas can blossom in the imagination and cascade through. And like you, I remain hopeful that one or two strong voices, at the right time, can change culture, can plant seeds. And Rachel Carson was a bit of a slow burn. She started off humbly, like writing little science and nature pieces for a paper in Baltimore. She had a piece published in the Atlantic. But even when she tried to first write about DDT, she pitched Reader’s Digest and they were like, no, thank you. So I think it’s important to think about possibility, that those voices, these are possible outcomes, and those voices may be among us.

Mike: It is even a bit surprising that the subject of DDT ended up in The New Yorker. And it’s also inspiring that they saw potential in it and took it on. I think it should give people a bit of hope here that even if you don’t think that your idea or your story is gonna appeal to a certain outlet or a certain platform, you may be wrong about that. It might actually be exactly what they’re looking for. So I would like to dedicate the rest of this conversation to talking about the books that, as you just pointed out, with Braiding Sweetgrass with Robin Wall Kimmer. What are the volumes that have really changed you, really spoke to you that you feel people listening should definitely pick up and read and why?

Megan: Yeah, I love that question. I’m the director of a creative writing program at a college and I direct an environmental writers’ conference, so this really is something I care so, so much about. I think about the Latin phrase se Ari, to be rather than to seem. I think I’m really moved by substance in books, and one of the books that really changed me when I read it was actually, to go back to an author we’ve already talked about, is E.B. White. And he has a collection of his wartime editorials from The New Yorker, which he was often publishing anonymously or without attribution. And it’s called The Wild Flag. In it, I feel like he has these radical suggestions. He talks about how we’re so quick to applaud a man who would give up his life for his country, but what about a man who would give up his life for his planet? And talking about the rise in nationalism and suggesting the idea of, what if we united behind a wild flag and we thought about protecting nature and peace with more porosity? He writes about the Bikini Atoll right before the nuclear testing is about to go off and says, “Never before has something seemed so precious.” And I think the thing I’m always astounded by is when people write with authority and scientific precision and tenderness. There’s something about a blend of those attributes that I find missing in contemporary conversation. I think there are a lot of people who want to write a version of “climate change makes me sad” or “a place has changed.” And I think I would always encourage humanists among us to go deeper in the science, scientists among us to go deeper in emotion.

Mike: And what are some other authors that you think do that with that precision but that authority and in a way that people can receive?

Megan: Yeah, I would say, I have a little bit of a bird nerd, so I’m gonna err on the side of the ornithologist here. But I love Drew Lanham and A Home Place, and he’s a PhD, a Clemson scientist, and I’ve heard him speak on many occasions about the leap he felt like he had to take in order to move toward a more accessible, first-person approach to write science-informed pieces that people could feel. I love Helen McDonald. I think when they write, some of my most sublime readings have been sitting in an audience when McDonald writes about watching an albatross, a baby albatross the size of a dog, take flight. And there’s real substance and expertise and poetics, all converging together to create what I think is an incredible experience. I think Vesper Flights is really artfully done. So I’m gonna err on the side of bird nerds, but I love people who can make that feel so precious. And I also loved, it’s an older book, but it was written based on the title of an Emily Dickinson poem called Hope Is the Thing with Feathers. Christopher Anos, I believe is his last name. He writes about the last of the species and the disappearance and extinction of birds like the passenger pigeon and Carolina Parakeets. And it really, to me, was a little more emotional than usual science writing. And it really brought home to me in a painful way that I still, that still registers, of what was it like to be the very last ivory-billed woodpecker calling out? And just the real, distinct, existential peril of extinction. And so those are some books that I’ve really read and revisit.

Mike: That really makes me think of a writer who we’ve had on this podcast who also writes extremely well about extinction and humans’ relationship with it. And her, and she’s Elizabeth Colbert, and I was curious to hear if you have any thoughts on her writing. I specifically read the book Under a White Sky and interviewed her about it. It might be the best book I’ve read on how humans look at extinction and how they react to it and what they try to do. It still haunts me to this day after reading it. I don’t know if you have, but what are your thoughts on Colbert’s writing and her perspective?

Megan: I think, and I haven’t read the book, but I’ve read her pieces in The New Yorker, and I think she’s incredibly skilled at writing in hypothetical scenes, which I think is technically really hard to do, but a science-informed way of saying, “It will be like this. It will feel like this.” And I think giving readers a moment to be able to sink into a hypothetical reality and visualize it. And imagine not just what are the logistics of this, but how would it make me feel to look above and see a white sky? How would it feel? I think that she’s really talented with that sort of informed hypothetical.

Mike: Yeah. And it disarms the reader and it makes them actually think about the consequences of something in a way that is non-judgmental. And yes, I agree with you on that. Have you read any climate fiction?

Megan: It took me a while to, I feel like I’ve always been finding my way through climate fiction, and it’s interesting for me to maybe say that because I would say I’ve written a little bit of it, especially I think my last book was gently that way. One thing that I think is important with climate fiction is that the plot point should never be, “And then climate change happened,” which I feel like there was a moment there where I felt like I would read a piece of climate fiction and I would think the author just, it just popped into their awareness or it’s what the plot pivots on. And for me, I really prefer climate fiction where I feel that the author understands the way environmental degradation and climate change have already, they’re omnipresent, they’re pressing down on everything. They’re creating pressure everywhere. They’re changing the lives of characters, they’re changing the ecosystems and the settings in which the characters are functioning in because I think baseline that’s already true. So I think I can be picky about my sense of an author’s willingness to be deep in that. And so I think for a while I couldn’t enjoy it and I, and then I’m not a strong reader of fantasy, which I think a lot of climate fiction moves into. And I probably should try and change that at some point, but it’s a personal limitation.

Mike: That’s interesting to hear you say. Do you have any recommendations or favorites? Because it sounds like you’ve got some very appropriately exacting standards for this, and I’m just curious what is… What is your, like that climate fiction book right there, that’s the one people should pick up?

Megan: Yeah. It’s an occupational hazard to know enough about the environment to get me into trouble and give me some standards and the same with writing fiction. Yeah. It’s my job, so I think I do snag on it, but I’ll say, I think Lauren Groff is a terrific climate-aware and environmentally aware writer. I always teach one of her stories from her Florida collection called Eyewall, and it’s about a hurricane pressing down, and it’s a little surreal. But there’s just a general awareness in her writing where she understands the urgency, she understands the science, and she understands the way it pressurizes the world. And she writes from the American South, which is a terrain that registers with me.

Mike: Yeah. I’d love to hear you say that. I’ve lived briefly in the American South and it is a special place for sure. What about the American South resonates with you, particularly when we’re talking about things like nature and environmental degradation and communicating it?

Megan: Yeah. My first 30 years were in the American South. My parents are from Virginia. I grew up in North and South Carolina. And I think to grow up down there is to understand in a horribly inherited way, the fraught relationship between humans and agriculture. Some of my favorite and most moving landscapes are maritime forests, and the South, you can feel this strange collision between old plantation culture and the way that changed the land and the forest and the human experiences in those places. And I find that tension is horrific and palpable. And whenever you have tension, that’s the ingredient for good writing. So to me, that landscape is already so troubled and rich and complex.

Mike: It doesn’t have to be someone focused on the environment specifically, but if you wanted the audience to get a sense of the American South or the landscape and nature of the American South, what would you recommend they read?

Megan: Oh, that’s a great, it’s a great question. I feel like the South has an incredible tradition in short fiction. If you think about Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, I will say, Carson McCullers, I think a lot of those books don’t hold up to contemporary scrutiny for good reason. And so I think you have to read with that awareness. And for me, that’s a challenge in terms of the literature that, and that tradition that has come out of, but I think, I think it is, I think the South is always having to reckon, and that term to me is really important in art, is reckoning. It’s, and I think the outgrowth of reckoning is something more reparative, which is energy. I would love to see us more in… I do in general think it’s best if art isn’t intensely moral, especially when it comes to fiction. I think I have a preference for seeing people in places as they really are, entrusting the reader to see our flawed human nature as represented in fiction. I think I would recommend Zora Neale Hurston and Lauren Groff as two writers that I think are really in the thick of it and also have something lyrical to offer.

Mike: So you’ve mentioned that you teach environmental writing workshops and you also teach at a university. I believe so. I’m curious, what are some of the biggest overarching lessons that you try to impart upon your students in your classes?

Megan: I think one of the biggest lessons is to be aware of righteousness. I think when we write creatively or even in nonfiction and we’re dealing with the environment or we’re dealing with issues that begin to feel moral, if we come on strong with an agenda, the reader can sense it and it feels like a rant on social media, and readers are going to retract from that. So I always tell my students the arc of discovery or the arc of failure is much more interesting for a reader than some arc of rectitude or righteousness. And so I think that’s a really important thing for writers to be in control of. I think as a socially conscious writer, it’s important to ask yourself what’s drawing you to the page and how do you create an experience for a reader that will lead them towards some sort of deeper understanding? I work with an Italian director, Laura Ti, and she gave me what I think is probably the most fundamental piece of advice, and she says, “Hide the medicine in the cake.” And so I think with narrative, the cake is often plot or language or beauty, and there are ways to sneak the medicine inside.

Mike: That’s really interesting to hear you say. Do you think that lesson that you are imparting upon your students could also apply to just people listening to this podcast right now when they communicate with other people about the environmental issues that we face today?

Megan: Yeah. I think the fundamental challenge for all of us who care so deeply about other species and the environment and the fate of our planet and the fate of other species on the planet is how do we change hearts and minds? And I think what’s hard is that we want people to know or understand the science, the anti-human exceptionalism. It’s important to get a handle on what we want them to know and what will they read or take in. And I think that troubles me when I think about our declining reading habits in America, the way we tend toward visuals. And so for me, I feel like I’m always struggling with, do I operate in reality or do I operate in idealism or how do I blend the two? But I think readers and listeners respond to conviction and passion, and so I think that’s what all of us can do, is just find a way to stay engaged in conversations and share what matters to us and share what we care about. And I think not be afraid to be tender.

Mike: Wow. That was really a very amazing answer. What are some books that aren’t specifically about the environment but could make a reader think of the environment or take some lessons away about it? Because I can think of a few off the top of my head that I would definitely recommend, but are there any that you recommend? These could be just contemporary fiction books that don’t have anything centered around the environment in their title or in their substance.

Megan: I love books that show the connection between people and place. I think that flow is underestimated in contemporary moments. And so some of the books that I think do that beautifully… anything by Jesmyn Ward, I think Men We Reaped is a book that on its more obvious level is about social justice, but I think you feel Katrina pressing down, you feel extreme weather, heat, historical injustice, and to me that’s just a gorgeous book for showing those concepts but not on the nose. Ward is just a remarkable writer. I love teaching Nabokov’s Speak Memory. It’s his memoir. And Nabokov is annoying and frustrating and pompous and all those things, but exceptional at what he does, replicating his really privileged but really nature-forward childhood in Russia before the revolution and just his own passion for science and collecting butterflies and the land in a kind of pre-phone environment, pre-tech environment is really stunning. It does something to me every time I read it. I also love Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, memoir growing up on a junkyard in Georgia. I think that’s a stunning book. And I love Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place. I think the prose is stunning. The anger is remarkably managed in voice, and it’s one of those books where I was one way before I read it and a different way on the other side of it in terms of our relationship to a tourist economy. I just don’t think you travel the same after you read that book. So those are some of the books that I love to teach because I think they show the way place lives in us. And I think that’s the, getting back to Carson, just that permeability, that flow, that environmental health and human health are forever intertwined.

Mike: Beautifully stated. I love the way that you mentioned that you were in one place before you read it and then in another after. And that’s ultimately the thing we’re unraveling or unpacking in this conversation, is how these books change you. That said, I do want to give you some space to talk about your work and what you’re working on and what you really want people to check out that you’ve been publishing.

Megan: Yeah. Thank you for that. I didn’t come prepared with good self-marketing. I love championing the work of others, but I guess environmentally I’m most proud of the work I’ve done with The Guardian over the last decade. I’ve worked with an editor there for a long time, and most recently I wrote a piece about human exceptionalism and just examining that in myself and in the world. So that’s a favorite topic and I’ve written columns about the American South and climate change and the state of fisheries there that I’ve really appreciated that home over time to write complex environmental work. I feel like they’ve allowed me to explore complexity in ways that they’re not always easy. I think what can happen with environmental journalism is that some editors want clickbait or they want a provocative title. And I really appreciate editors that allow environmental writers to really sink into complexity. My last work of fiction was a collection of stories, and it’s about environmental inheritance and social inheritance. It’s called How Strange a Season. I’m really proud of some things that I’ve done in that book, predominantly that idea I was talking to you about earlier, which is climate change not as a plot point but as a form of pressure that already exists and is like thrumming in the background of every story. Right now I’m working on a big biography. It’s my first big nonfiction book, and it’s about the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, who were the first racially integrated all-girls swing band to travel to the Jim Crow South.

Mike: Wow, thank you for sharing that, and I will drop links in the show notes of where people can find your work. Megan Mayhew Bergman, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a pleasure speaking with you.

Megan: Thank you so much.

Mike: If you want to read any of the works mentioned in this episode, please see the episode summary for the full list. As always, if you are enjoying the Mongabay Newscast or any of our podcast content and you’d like to help us out, we encourage you to spread the word about this podcast by telling a friend and leaving a review on whichever platform you’re tuning in on. Word of mouth is one of the best ways to help expand our reach, but reviews are definitely helpful as well. You can also support us by becoming a monthly sponsor via our Patreon page at patreon.com/mongabay. Did you know that we are a nonprofit news outlet? So when you pledge a dollar per month, it makes a very big difference and helps us offset production costs. So if you’re enjoying our audio reports from Nature’s Frontline, go to patreon.com/mongabay to learn more and support the Mongabay Newscast. You can also read our news and inspiration from Nature’s Frontline at mongabay.com or follow us on social media. Find Mongabay on LinkedIn at Mongabay News, and on Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky, Mastodon, Facebook, and TikTok at @Mongabay. And also find us on YouTube at Mongabay TV. Thank you as always for listening.