Hosted by Jaha Nailah Avery and written and produced by Erika Janik and Sam Moore, this series connects the dots between current battles for environmental justice and the history of slavery and segregation. It’s the story of a place, and the people who live there and love it. It’s also the story of products all of us use every day, and the industries that depend on the rest of us to not get interested in the question of who and what gets sacrificed in the process of making them.

* 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).

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.

For 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.

Thank you to these two poets, and to Leonard Cohen.

Hallelujah.

A 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.

Elephants.

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.

One 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?