Thresholds is happy to introduce "Borrowed & Returned," a new podcast from the Brooklyn Public Library about the books that have changed America. This episode was made in partnership between Borrowed & Returned and Thresholds. You can hear the whole interview with Ayana Elizabeth Johnson in our feed.

Episode description:

When Silent Spring came out in 1962, it was an instant best-seller and led to the establishment of the EPA, as well as the ban of harmful pesticides such as DDT. But Rachel Carson’s seminal work also shifted our way of thinking about nature. For the first time, the environment was not just something out there that could be tracked and measured, but something that lived inside all of us.

Hear more of Borrowed & Returned at https://www.bklynlibrary.org/podcasts/

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Jordan sits down with marine biologist, writer, and climate advocate Ayana Johnson to talk about her mission to fight climate fatalism, her love of Rachel Carson, and her skepticism of the impulse to look for "hope" in the face of climate change -- as opposed to possibility, or joy.

Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist, policy expert, writer, and teacher working to help create the best possible climate future. She is co-founder of Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank for the future of coastal cities, and is the Roux Distinguished Scholar at Bowdoin College. She authored The New York Times bestseller What If We Get it Right?: Visions of Climate Futures.

Previously, she co-edited the climate anthology All We Can Save, co-founded The All We Can Save Project, and co-created and co-hosted the Spotify/Gimlet climate solutions podcast How to Save a Planet. She also co-authored the Blue New Deal, a roadmap for including the ocean in climate policy. Previously, as executive director of the Waitt Institute, she co-founded the Blue Halo Initiative and led the Caribbean’s first successful island-wide ocean zoning effort. Early in her career, she developed U.S. federal ocean policy at the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

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Jordan sits down with Claire Vaye Watkins to talk about how the grief over her mother's death diffused into a homesickness for the landscape of the Mojave Desert, where she grew up, and the way that that singular landscape then formed her own writing style, which the New Yorker dubbed "Nevada Gothic." They also talk about postpartum depression, Watkins' autofiction novel I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness, and hauntings.

Claire Vaye Watkins was one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” and one of Granta's "Best Young American Novelists." She is the author of I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness, Gold Fame Citrus and Battleborn, which won the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. A Guggenheim Fellow, Watkins is also the co-director of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada.

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