e112 listening - how can listening help ?

(various layered excerpts from my soundscape compositions throughout this episode)

Conclusion 1 : we need to face reality and learn how to unlearn

• Mayer Hillman, e01: ‘We’re doomed. The outcome is death, and it’s the end of most life on the planet because we’re so dependent on the burning of fossil fuels. There are no means of reversing the process which is melting the polar ice caps. And very few appear to be prepared to say so.’
• Joan Sullivan, e01 terrified ‘even if we are doomed, and I think we are, I refuse to do nothing…’ 
• Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective : ‘we need to walk a tightrope between desperate hope and reckless hopelessness, balancing rational and relational rigour.'

Conclusion 2: we need to develop and implement a radical theory of change through the arts

• David Haley, e19 : ‘we now need aesthetics to sensitize us to other ways of life and we need artists to sensitize us to the shape of things to come.
• Jen Rae, e19 : ‘The thing about a preparedness mindset is that you are thinking into the future and so if one of those scenarios happens, you’ve already mentally prepared in some sort of way for it’. 
• David Maggs, e109: ’If we only speak with our arts, and do not listen with them first, revelation is replaced by dictation…’

Conclusion 3: we need to transition out of modernity

• Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective : ‘We are part of a much wider metabolism, and this metabolism is sick. There is a lot of shit for us to deal with: personal, collective, historical, systemic. Our fragilities are a big part of it. This shit needs to pass, so that it can be composted into new forms of life, no longer based on the illusion of separability.’
• Eric Beinhocker: e19: ‘Humankind is in a race between two tipping points. The first is when the Earth’s ecosystems and the life they contain tip into irreversible collapse due to climate change. The second is when the fight for climate action tips from being just one of many political concerns to becoming a mass social movement. The existential question is, which tipping point will we hit first?

Conclusion 4 : we need to change the story

• George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage: ‘Despair is the state we fall into when our imagination fails. When we have no stories that describe the present and guide the future, hope evaporates. Political failure is, in essence, a failure of imagination. Without a new story that is positive and propositional, rather than reactive and oppositional, nothing changes. With such a story everything changes’. 
• George Marshall, e01 : ‘we need passionate storytellers to break habitual patterns, discover alternative values and consider new perspectives’.

Conclusion 5 :  we need to connect our efforts

• Todd Dufresne, e19: ‘whoever survives these experiences will have a renewed appreciation for nature, for the external world, and for the necessity of collectivism in the face of mass extinction.’
• Asad Rehman, Green Dreamer podcast (e378) : ‘Our goal is to keep our ideas and policies alive for when the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable’. 
• George Monbiot,  tweet November 13, 2021 :  ‘We have no choice but to raise the scale of civil disobedience until we have built the greatest mass movement in history.’

My question to you is ‘how can listening help’?

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This episode is longer than the usual 5 minutes because that’s how long (8m 30s) it took to tell this story.

This episode is a selection of quotes and findings from my learning and unlearning journey about art and the ecological crisis that I presented during my keynote speech to the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology ‘Listening Pasts - Listening Futures’ conference on March 24, 2023 at the Atlantic Centre for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. 

I warmly thank the authors I have quoted.

I also thank the Canada Council for the Arts for their support of the Sounding Modernity project and travel funds to attend the conference. 

I am grateful and accountable to the earth and the human labour that provided me with the privilege of producing this episode. (including all the toxic materials and extractive processes behind the computers, recorders, transportation and infrastructure that make this podcast possible).

My gesture of reciprocity for this episode is a donation to Atlantic Center For The Arts.

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END NOTES FOR ALL EPISODES

Hey conscient listeners, 

I’ve been producing the conscient podcast as a learning and unlearning journey since May 2020 on un-ceded Anishinaabe Algonquin territory (Ottawa). 

It’s my way to give back.

In parallel with the production of the conscient podcast and its francophone counterpart, balado conscient, I I publish free ‘a calm presence' Substack see https://acalmpresence.substack.com.

Your feedback is always welcome at [email protected] and/or on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Threads, BlueSky, Mastodon, Tik Tok, YouTube and Substack.

Share what you like, etc

I am grateful and accountable to the earth and the human labour that provided me with the privilege of producing this podcast, including the toxic materials and extractive processes behind the computers, recorders, transportation systems and infrastructure that made this production possible. 

Claude Schryer

Latest update on July 8, 2025