This week’s episode of the Mother Earth Podcast features our first visual artist on the podcast, Madeleine Jubilee Saito. Madeleine addresses the climate crisis through poetry comics, an artform that combines drawings with words. Madeleine’s poetry comics on the climate crisis take us out of the language of science and into the language of feelings and emotion. In our conversation, we discuss the role of feelings, emotion and human connectivity in solving this crisis. 

 

Madeleine’s art conveys a critical message: we are all inextricably linked; we cannot see ourselves separate from each other or from nature and we must cultivate solidarity and come together as one in order to solve the climate crisis. Madeleine says that “the idea that we are somehow separate from nature is an illusion. I draw to celebrate the beauty of the natural world, trees, forests, and hills and to convey the reality that nature is not something that is other to us.”

 

Madeleine’s work is featured in the anthology All We Can Save: Truth, Courage and Solutions for the Climate Crisis. She is also the creative director and operations lead at The All We Can Save Project. Madeleine is involved with the Sunrise Movement hub in Boston and has also worked with the national team as a designer. 

 

In our conversation, Madeleine and I discuss the role of art in social movements and the how art can help us express our feelings and emotions in this time of a climate crisis. Madeleine leaves us off with a compelling reading of her own work, 30 days of comics / 2019: on climate crisis.  Join us for this first of its kind interview on The Mother Earth Podcast. Learn more about Madeleine and our other guests on our website.

 

For People and Planet, thank you for listening. 

 

-Matt