Peter Godfrey-Smith
speaker
184 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 24 Aug
Peter Godfrey-Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Welcome to the ninth episode of Nature in Crisis, a close readings series for the London Review of Books, hosted by me, Peter Godfrey Smith, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney.
This is a podcast series that looks at nature writing, books about nature and our relationship to it, with an emphasis on discussions of policy, climate change, and so on.
The series has also a general emphasis on fairly recent books.
We did the last of our three exceptions to that rule, three landmark books as we see them a couple of episodes ago.
That was Robin Wall Kimmer's Braiding Sweetgrass.
From now on until the end of a series, it's all recent work.
And this month the book is Emily Rabateau's Lessons for Survival Mothering Against the Apocalypse.
This one is very much a personal book.
It's about Rabateau's recent history and to some extent her earlier history and experiences.
Her experience being a black mother of two boys in New York City during the first Trump presidency, Hurricane Sandy, COVID, and what she sees as the visible beginning of an almost omnipresent climate related breakdown, something visible in New York City, in Alaska, and many other places where she and her correspondents report from.
It's not an officially pessimistic book in the way our previous book, Royce Granton's Impasse, was, but it's fairly grim and often also angry.
In that subtitle the book has Mothering Against the Apocalypse, the phrase the apocalypse is in scare quotes, but I'm not sure why that is.
The feel of the book is mothering against the actual apocalypse, not just what's hyped to be one.
In this context, Rabuto charts a series of experiences that she takes as informative in relation to a goal of survival.
Sometimes specific to people in situations like hers, sometimes more generally.
She explores psychological survival as well as physical, especially the psychological side, and survival in relation to motherhood, health problems, real estate, Palestine, racism, and more.
There's also a recurring imagistic theme, a series of photographs and commentaries on them that do in an implicit way offer a mixed and thoroughly alloyed and question-prompting theme of hope.
The images are photographs of murals of birds, painted on walls and shutters all over uptown New York City.
Rabateau became
not entranced with them, but very interested in these, and photographed them all over town.
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