Take Heart: A Conversation With Kathleen Dean Moore

I’m so thrilled to share this episode with you, dear listeners, in which I have the privilege of interviewing one of my hero-writers, Kathleen Dean Moore, whose 2016 book Great Tide Rising: Toward Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Changewas life-changing for me.

In this moving conversation, we explore the extinction crisis, what love really means, the importance of facing grief directly; about the necessity of locking the door to despair; and the importance of maintaining outrage as a measure of love and conscience. I’ve long loved the way Kathleen weaves a rich multiplicity of perspectives into her writing: that of mother, grandmother, naturalist, philosopher, professor, and earth-lover. Kathleen speaks about moral courage, about the shift in her writing from praising the beauty of the natural world to a fierce call to defend it. We explore how to speak to children about the climate crisis, and the big question: What can one person do? (I love her answer to this!) We discuss some favorite passages from Great Tide Rising as well as from her beautiful new book, Earth’s Wild Music. I find her work and her words so simultaneously heartening, sobering, and a powerful spur to caring action. I hope you enjoy her as much as I did. I can’t recommend her books highly enough.

Please also check out Music to Save Earth’s Songs, a project she’s developed as part of the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University which includes 20 4-minute concerts weaving music and spoken word. Detaisls are below on that as well as where to find her beautiful books.

Kathleen Dean Moore, Ph.D., served as Distinguished Professor of Environmental Philosophy at Oregon State University, where she wrote award-winning books about our cultural and moral relations to the wet, wild world and to one another. But her increasing concern about the climate and extinction crises led her to leave the university, so she could write and speak full-time about the moral urgency of climate action. Since then, she has spoken out across the country, publishing Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, a collection of short essays by the world’s moral leaders about our obligations to the future. That is followed byGreat Tide Rising: Toward Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change (2016); Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World (February 2021); and Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change(April 2021). Her work on the extinction crisis includes a film, “The Extinction Variations,” a collaboration with a classical pianist. She writes from Corvallis, Oregon and from an off-the-grid cabin where two creeks and a bear trail meet a coastal inlet in Alaska.

Find Kathleen’s wonderful books here:

https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/371383.Kathleen_Dean_Moore

Here are details about an upcoming book launch party online for Earth’s Wild Music

https://events.oregonstate.edu/event/earths_wild_music_book_launch_party

And here are details and a link to the wonderful project Music to Save Earth’s Songs: 

https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/feature-story/music-save-earth-s-songs

In a series called “Music to Save Earth’s Songs,” the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University will offer twenty, four-minute concerts that weave music and the spoken word to celebrate the creatures that fill the air with sound – frogs, wolves, songbirds, growling grizzly bears – and to inspire action to save them. Videos will be released online on Mondays and Thursdays at 6 pm, from now through March. The series is inspired by a new book by Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth’s Wild Music.