Amy Martin from Threshold Podcast sits down with Bingeworthy

It's Earth Week! So we're looking at the Peabody-winning team behind Threshold Podcast, where one environment-themed story is told over an entire season.

At the turn of the last century, I found myself with an undergraduate degree in Environmental Studies, a desire to write, and a willingness to call up anyone (or fax anyone, rather) a story idea for a pitch.

With all my new knowledge, I was sure I had found my new beat: The Environment. But when I brought these ideas to the newsroom, which was largely run by chain-smoking grumpy white men at the time, I was mocked for my interest.

They would say: We've already got one guy who does that…go find something else, something that’s interesting, where things happen. Write about that. And then he would turn around, take a big gulp from his giant styrofoam coffee cup, and continue on with his day.

Things have changed. And thankfully, people like Amy Martin, founder of Threshold Podcast, hung on through that ugly and difficult age of the 1990s to reach this new age of enlightenment.

Threshold began back in 2016, and by 2019, it had three ambitious seasons under its belt when it won the Peabody. In 2022, the fourth season was released.

For Season 1, Amy chased some bison around Yellowstone National Park, and then looked, closely and thoughtfully, at the annual cull of the bison. The story meets folks of all stripes: from hunters to conservationists, Indigenous folks to historians and Park Rangers…it’s the full range of what it means to interact in and around the bison, as a way to actually understand why, from all stakeholder perspectives, this cull happens.

Season 2: Cold Comfort, toured the Arctic, from Greenland to Norway to Alaska, to look at the global importance of these polar regions; how they connect to each other through all of us.

Season 3: The Refuge, focused on the Arctic National Refuge and the controversy around oil drilling rights. It won a Peabody for 2019 (which I briefly touched in in last week’s Peabody issue). It remains one of the best examples of balanced and nuanced journalism that connects to Indigenous communities that I’ve heard.

For Season 4: Time to 1.5, the series spun in a whole new direction.

The whole series, which sits at 14 episodes plus bonus material, works towards the ambitious goal of helping us to better understand what this limit of 1.5 means: which is getting the entire world to agree to a hard limit, a ceiling, 1.5 degrees Celcius of climate temperature warming, by 2030.

The number 1.5 was the entire focus of the Conference of the Parties (COP) in 2021. It’s also the last point at which global scientists agree we won’t do irreversible damage. It gives us hope that we haven’t just blown it completely.

But it’s not a hard number; it’s the most slippery number that exists because it’s not set on a temperature dial. It’s also based on thousands of other invisible (and unknown) variables. It also means that grasping its importance is also no easy task.

With Amy as our guide, Season 4 tackles the understanding of what 1.5 means. And it travels some big distances….it begins with a guided tour of our atmosphere, and then goes back to the founding of the slave colonies in the West Indies, and then back to an old village in England that is thought to be the seat of the Industrial Revolution...and then brings us to Glasgow, Scotland, to feel like an embedded observer at the COP26 meetings held in the fall of 2021.

If that feels like a long journey, you’re not wrong.

It’s also not a Hero’s Journey story (see my conversation with Amy below to dive deeper into that one).

Instead the story weaves and wiggles through every area of curiosity, connecting each of the dangling threads of ideas, and maybes, and connections.

It takes time and consideration to get there. At times it was challenging to follow the narrative; I found it helpful to see the mini-stories inside of the larger whole. There’s a 3-part story about steel (Episodes 3 and then 8 and 9). Steel is what made the Industrial Revolution possible, and has since become the literal backbone of industries.

But how do we reconcile the fact that the problem (steel) is also the solution (steel). And that making steel is also the dirtiest process known to humans. So, we go back to Coalbrookdale, the seat of the Industrial Revolution, and then on to Sweeden, where a company is pioneering a technique to make steel without coal (fossil-fuel-free steel, as it were).

Amy’s narration style is Radiolab meets The Moth, where she uses personal narratives to bust science out of a stayed academic realm.

It’s also full of passion. Her tone compels you to care, to be part of the solution. And perhaps to rise, and spend time following the flowing threads of her storyline, in order to earn a deeper understanding of the topic at heart here.

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The following is an excerpt from a Zoom interview with Amy. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Samantha Hodder: When did you come to the idea for Threshold? What was your original vision for it, and what led you to push forward into that space?

Amy Martin: I kind of started conceiving of [Theshold] around 2015. So many of the podcasts [in the US] at that time (and this is changing) tend to be made by people on the coasts, in sound booths; they don't leave the room. They were mainly talking to people in cities [like Brooklyn Los Angeles]. There are a lot of people in between those two places that have really interesting stories to tell…but [I also wanted to] get outside and actually interact with the living world.

I've nothing against big cities and coastal places, that's all fine. I just wanted to get out into places where people maybe weren't hearing from folks and from the creatures and places themselves.  And I really wanted to be on the ground and in the world.

What I did not really think about is making a show that goes to those places that are more out of the way are expensive and time-consuming. After a while, I was like, oh, yeah, maybe that's why all those podcasts are made in sound booths! Because they are way cheaper and easier.

But I didn't know that after I'd already fully committed, which is wonderful.

SH: I really respect that you figured out a way to turn this into a narrative and then into a storytelling machine.

How did you decide you were going to go into this field of storytelling, own it and do it?

AM: I didn't come out of a traditional news background. I learned how to do radio news working for an NPR affiliate when I was in college. And then I had a whole career as a musician. And then I came back and started freelancing because I missed it. And I loved it. 

I just felt like a really strong need to try to connect the dots between what's happening in human society, what's happening politically, are our human history and the deeper time history that those human histories are playing out.  

I think it's impossible to look at any particular situation, if you look with any depth at all, all those things start to weave together. So to make this a little bit more concrete… thinking about the story of the American Bison [the story from Season 1]…what happened to it, what’s happening in terms of its restoration…to try to tell a story about that is just solely focused on the biology of the animal, to tell it as a strictly wildlife story, is impossible, because that animal has been so deeply, deeply impacted by humans.

And the relationships between humans and that animal that goes back thousands and thousands of years; and then another wave of humans came in and had a totally different kind of impact. You pull any pull on any one thread and they all start to become visible.

In terms of making it into a podcast, maybe because [these] stories are so multi-layered and complex, they involve so many different kinds of things that we often like to keep in separate categories; politics over here; history over there; environmental science up here….all those things are part of the stories that I'm interested to tell. And I really needed a longer form to be able to do it.

SH: What are some of the upsides and the downsides of building storytelling around animals, and places and ideas, rather than following a story that's really rooted in one person?

It's not a Hero's Journey. It's a more decentralized story.

AM: I think I'll start with the downsides. I think one of the downsides is that it's really easy for [the stories] just to become about everything, and it can't be in order for it to be interesting. There's got to be a sorting process of what goes in and what goes out. And it can be really hard.

And I think sometimes, that's one of my biggest concerns with my own work. How do we narrow it enough so that it has a throughline and keeps moving and keeps people interested? Because I'm so interested in everything, but I don't want it to be scattershot. 

It’s a big ask of the listener to come along on something that isn't the Hero's Journey. The Hero's Journey is what we are all primed and ready for we've all been fed it since before we were even able to read ourselves. There's such a place in the consciousness for that story.

And there's a way that I could turn so many of the things that were reporting on into that if I wanted to; I could find the person who was struggling and oppressed, by this or that, and then they had this thing and went out on some kind of quest and came back with the knowledge, or the learning or though. And it's tempting, because those kinds of stories are just like apples like they're right there ready for the picking.

Asking people to invest their time and ideas to move back and forth between learning some science to learning some history to understanding the connections between that science and the history, to something that's playing out right now…and asking big questions that we don't answer that leave us together in this thinking space. That's a lot to ask of listeners, but I've been really pleasantly surprised by how much people seem to like it.

The pros [the upsides] of this approach is that by kind of pushing myself and listeners to work a little harder, and dig a little deeper, you get the reward of the folks who want to go there with you. And there's more of them, I think, than we might expect.

I just am bored to tears with a story of the heroic activist here, and terrible corporation over there. Or Republican this Democrat that; I already know where it's going the minute you give me the first couple sentences. It's also deadly to this whole thing we're trying to do about preventing our planet from collapsing under the weight of us.

SH: If you were to give advice to someone thinking about starting a podcast that lands on environmental themes….What can you sort of sum up for your last seven years of telling environmental stories in the way that you do?

AM: I think we need as many people from many different walks of life and parts of the world thinking about the environment as possible. So please, yes! Do that! Don't let any crotchety old news person tell you no!

In terms of what other people are doing, I think it's more important to try to understand what’s really super-exciting and interesting to you. And maybe not even a particular story, although that's fine, but what sorts of things do you wish you were hearing or that you can imagine yourself making that would bring you joy that would feed you and give you a lot of energy?

Because this is really exhausting work, it takes a ton of time and energy to do it well. So you have to be getting something back in the process.

SH: So congrats. You won the Peabody for Season 3, The Refuge.

AM: Honestly when you said congrats, you won the Peabody, there's still a part of me that's like, what did what? It feels so unreal, maybe a little bit also because it came it happened during the pandemic, so it all was virtual.

One thing that the Juries said in the award for us was that they noted the importance of talking to all different stakeholders that we have strong feelings about the history and of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but that it wasn't reduced down to a simple story. And then it prioritized the voices of people who live in and around the [actual] Refuge. So that was great that they saw that and highlighted that.

SH: What was the daisy chain between Season 3 and Season 4?

AM: I thought it was important to go to a UN Climate Conference [A COP] at some point, if I could, as an environmental reporter, and as a human.

[I didn’t want to have] only climate change sort of be the center of the story. Not because climate change isn't important…I'm laughing as I say this, of course climate change is unbelievably important! But I didn't want Threshold to be defined as the climate change podcast.

After we the bison season, so many people said: do one on wolves! Do one on caribou! And that would be great; but I don't want to just have every season be another cool animal.

When I went to the Arctic for Season 2, I was very conscious to say: not I'm going to the Arctic to report on climate change. I'm going to the Arctic to meet people who live in the Arctic and let them tell me what is important in their lives. And climate change was something that came up over and over, but it wasn't the only thing or the main thing for lots of people.

I think a better way to put it is that it’s woven into everything that we're all doing all the time. For many generations of humanity that is going to be the case. It would be ridiculous for a show like ours not to put it at the center eventually.

It was something that had really grabbed my attention, that 1.5 limit, and also the controversies around it.  

SH: From a production standpoint…tell me when you sat down to design the season: did you plan it all in advance? Do you batch the episodes? Or do you do it all at once? It’s a big, big season. Do you look at it as a whole? Or do you look at it in chunks?  

AM: All of the above! I'm trying to look at the whole constantly, it's almost like a painting, where I step back sometimes to look at the whole work…tut then I'm always trying to pull back and think: Okay, how does this fit? How does this fit into a potential episode that I'm thinking about? And how does that episode fit into this broader thing, and then back down to that small scale?

SH: I think the way you've really challenged my thinking about this is to not necessarily lean on the Hero's Journey narrative line, because it's convenient and easy. And you're right, we're really super programmed to think in that way!

AM: Yeah, I think the climate crisis in particular really confounds old storytelling forms. And that is part of the problem with feeling and thinking when we organize ourselves intellectually and socially through story is that something this big, and this complicated, really just doesn't fit neatly into that into any forms. I actually feel like that's a real call to action for those of us who do tell stories, to figure something else out.

I'm sure I can go back and listen to it now and hear all kinds of places that like should have cut this or that. But at a certain level, you just gotta do what you can, and then get it out. Then, take what I'm learning from that and try again another time.

SH: It seems from listening to your episodes over all these years that your funding base is really broadened and changed. What percentage comes from donors and what from funding bodies?

AM: I don't have the exact percentages memorized for what they are right now. But I can tell you that the vast majority of our funding comes from individual donors. And a portion of that is our listeners who incredibly generously chip in when we ask them for money at the end of the year, which is what we do every year now. And it's amazing. It's crucial to our survival. And then major donors who are giving significant gifts, sometimes significant gifts. We [also] have some folks who've made commitment for multiple years.

Our Executive Director, Deneen Wiske, came in, looked where we were at, looked at the world of, the kinds of things we're trying to do, and, said: You know, I think [individual donors] is where we need to focus for now. Because we don't fit into the earned revenue model well.

Shows that are able to make a lot of money through selling ads are shows that are generating [regular] content. And that's just not us, it's not what we're going to do. So that isn't a great fit for us; our reporting does end up being a very long cycle. And we just want to really make sure that our funding never looks like it is influencing our reporting.

We are applying for grants, we'll continue to apply for grants, and we hope that grant funding can in the future become a bigger piece of the pie. But grant funding is very fickle. It takes a ton of time, and you never know what you're going get. The cycle is slow, as it should be. We can't wait for an 18-month grant cycle to make a decision [about where to go for reporting trips]. Our individual donors are really keeping us alive right now. Thank you donors!

SH: Last question. What can you tell us about what's coming up next on the show? What do we have to look forward to?

AM: Well, we're not saying anything yet about what the content is going to be about. But I can tell you, I'm going to take off on a reporting trip here in a couple of days to Australia. It’s really exciting. And, we’ve hired a new producer who is going to be doing her own season. In the future…I don't have a timeline for when that would drop or anything yet…but there are going to be other people who are making seasons of Threshold in the future, in addition to me. I'm not quitting and handing over the baton, but there'll be seasons where other people are the producer.