Because I like the idea of podcast episodes having a sense of timelessness about them, I have usually shied away from news and current events in these conversations. However, lately that hasn’t felt possible. What we are experiencing currently with the COVID-19 pandemic is going to echo throughout the future in ways that we can’t even predict right now. That Is why when a family friend introduced me to Elin Kelsey and her work, I knew I had to have a deeper conversation with her about her unique, evidence-based hope perspective of the world.
Elin Kelsey, PhD is an award-winning author and internationally-recognized thought-leader for hope and environmental solutions. Her work focuses on the study of the reciprocal relationship between humans and the rest of nature. Her newest book for adults, Hope Matters: Why Changing the Way We Think Is Critical For Solving The Environmental Crisis will be published by Greystone Books in October 2020. Her influence can be seen in the hopeful, solutions-focus of her clients, including the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and other powerful institutions where she has served as a visiting fellow including the Rachel Carson Center for the Environment and Society, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Stanford University in the Graduate School of Education. She co-created #OceanOptimism, a twitter campaign to crowd-source marine conservation solutions which has reached more than 100 million shares since it launched in 2014. As an Adjunct Faculty member of the University of Victoria School of Environmental Studies, she is consulting on the development of a solutions-oriented paradigm for educating environmental scientists and social scientists. Elin is passionate about bringing science-based stories of hope and multi-species resilience to the public and is not only a popular keynote speaker and media commentator, but she regularly serves as an author/artist in residence, leading hopeful environmental workshops with kindergarten to university students across North America and around the world. She is a feature writer and podcast host for Hakai Magazine and a best-selling children's book author. You can learn more about her work at www.elinkelsey.org
In this both timely and timeless conversation, we talk about what led Elin to write and create children’s books specifically, as well as how to us books and art as vehicles for larger narratives and heavier conversations. We dig into her research process of writing a book and discuss the intersection between poetry and science. I love the way Elin speaks about reframing the pervasive “doom and gloom” narrative about the environment to one that is more hopeful. She elaborates on this concept and talks about how the same reframing can be applied to our current quarantined reality, finding hope in the chaos.
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SHOW NOTES:
-Elin’s website and all of her books
-Her newest adult book (coming out October 2020), Hope Matters : Why Changing the Way We Think
Is Critical to Solving the Environmental Crisis
-Her newest children’s book (recently published!), A Last Goodbye
-Artist & Illustrator Soyeon Kim
-Brainpickings article about her book You Are Stardust
-The Open Space method of meetings
-Brian Keating, conservation advisor for the Calgary Zoo
-More on how trees communicate with each other
-Solutions Journalism Network
-The rise of #oceanoptimism
-American Revolutionary: a documentary on Grace Lee Boggs
