S6 E00 Preseason Update

Transcript:

Hiya,

It’s been a while since I’ve released anything here on Saltgrass. In fact, it’s been a year and a bit since I released the Popcorn Activism episode in July, 2024. In that time I have been working on season six. It’s coming soon and will hopefully be a fun and interesting season about a trip I took in 2022 out to the remote Western Australian desert with a citizen science group called Desert Discovery.

I’ve made a very bouncy trailer for the season, and I’ll pop it up on the podcast after this. But yeah, before launching into that, I just wanted to give you guys an update. Some of it is personal, explaining the gap between seasons. Saltgrass started with a weekly release schedule, which soon became a much more sane fortnightly schedule. But even a fortnightly schedule has been challenging at times. There’ve been breaks between seasons and even mid-season breaks before, but after so many years of relatively regular releases, I thought you might wanna know why there was such a big break this time, especially without any context or supporting information. And some of this preseason update that I’m doing right now is also to help frame the upcoming season. Just some context that I felt could sit outside of the episodes. 

I have to admit, as much as I wanted to charge full steam into season six, after wrapping up season five, I just couldn’t. Things were getting patchy by the end of the season and I was already pretty exhausted. Then a few life things happened that really took it out of me, and in the end I was staggering across the finish line to get those last episodes out and found myself in some burnout. Across the last few months of season five, and within the time since then I got a life-changing diagnosis (it’s all good, but it changed everything) and a friend of mine died and my 20-year-old cat died and my partner and I broke up after four years together, my mom got cancer and thankfully had a swift recovery. But you know, there was lots of big life stuff and it kind of left me with a lot of introspection and a bit of an existential crisis of ‘what are we doing here? What is this life about?’ And you know, I’ve lived my whole life in a semi-permanent state of existential crisis, it’s just kind of how I do life. But it all came up particularly at that point. 

So there was a lot of, you know, wondering how much more of Saltgrass I really wanna do and I was already committed to season six – and I should reassure you that I do hope to do more salt grass after season six, I’ve come back around – but you know, it’s always good to ask whether it’s the right thing anymore. Even if it’s been a wonderful journey and you’ve done lots of great stuff. It’s always good to question whether it’s still a good thing. And all of that happened around the same time Saltgrass was winning awards and I should have been celebrating and I actually felt like I could barely pay attention to them or feel good about it. 

I created an update for you in April, 2024, and I didn’t talk about any of the stuff that was happening ’cause I still thought that any minute now I’d get my focus and energy back and I’d be able to snap out of it and move through.

And after the popcorn activism episode, which I knew was the last episode of season five, I really wanted to post an update and talk about how Season five went and report back on some of the things that had happened, like, how I went with the wheelie bin challenge from episode one. Which after being so hopeful about that and excited, I was honestly ready to start a whole campaign, when I applied it in my own life it was in short, a total fail. But you know, I wanted to talk about that! Reflect on it, and talk about how and why some of these good intentions and great ideas don’t fly. But I just didn’t have anything left at the end of the season, and even though I knew I was exhausted, I still thought I should be able to push through and do my usual stints of hours at a time of editing and organizing and scripting the show. But I just couldn’t.

I don’t know if you know how burnout feels, but you just keep expecting to be able to do more because you’ve been able to do more in the past, and then when you can’t, you feel really bad about not doing it. So it’s kind of this weird double blow, and in some ways it’s difficult to accept the reality of it.

I was very grateful to my day job that was easy enough to keep turning up to so I could keep paying my bills and eating food and stuff. And I’m also grateful for the patients of MainFM and the Community Broadcasting Foundation who have given me extensions and just been generally really cool about me not delivering season six on time or to schedule. Not to mention all the awesome people that I met on the trip out to the desert who have been waiting to hear what I did after sticking my microphone in their face and taking photos of them for the whole trip. And I really hope that they haven’t given up on me because the season is coming soon. 

Things started to turn around when I recognized that what I’d been able to do in the past obviously just wasn’t possible anymore. I had a reality check and I gave myself a very basic new goal of just doing half an hour a day on Saltgrass, enough to feel like there was some momentum, but not enough to make me not start at all or feel like I was constantly failing because I wasn’t able to do three, four or seven hours a day. 

I’d watched an interview with the Atomic Habits guy, and I really took on the philosophy of doing small amounts regularly rather than big chunks occasionally. And it worked! It really helped with just half an hour a day. I very slowly edited the interviews I had recorded out in the desert in 2022. Then I slowly started going through all the photos and videos I took while I was out there, and then I started thinking about which bits of audio to put in what order, and then I started scripting the first episode. And what used to take a day or two was taking a month. 

While I’ve been chipping away at all of this, much time has passed, my life has changed shape, and it seems the world has changed shape too since I started Saltgrass in early 2020, just before the pandemic hit. The context of the climate movement has changed dramatically a couple of times. The energy of the pre pandemic climate protests inspired and led by student strikers around the world was largely muted by the pandemic, but people of all ages were still taking action right through it all, and I found a great deal of reassurance that even as we worried about masks and vaccines and our own fragile bodies, people also still cared about the planet.

But things have changed again around the world. Penalties for climate activists have become much more severe, and it’s a much more serious decision whether or not to take action for a lot of people now. And the international stage is full of economic instability, war and uncertainty. And look, none of these things are new, but there are in inverted commas, more urgent things to worry about than the slow burn that is climate change.

I think many people are very worried about the changing politics across the world. It seems to be swinging to the right and to violence and the erosion of democracy. Here in Australia it feels like we’re watching from afar as America struggles internally, and Europe faces off with Russia, and Israel and Palestine Break our hearts.

So stories of local action in my small town still feel full of meaning and still offer helpful perspectives and a sense of being part of something that other people also care about; a movement. But these days it feels a little more fragile. 

In many ways it brings home just how important it is to be connected, to build community and take action where and how you can. It’s so important to remember how kind, curious, open, and generous human beings can be. It’s important to remember that many people care about the planet, about ecosystems, about plants and animals, and about each other. Saltgrass has always tried to focus on what’s possible on a human scale at a local level. The big machinations of global economies and international politics gets plenty of coverage, and there are lots of people offering insight and analysis of it all. Right from the start, I wanted to create something more tangible and more accessible, I guess more relatable. But the risk of mostly focusing on small scale actions and hyper-local issues is that when the big stuff is kicking off, it can feel a bit impotent and even maybe out of touch. 

But you know what? Even as we watch the chaos of the international stage, we all still need to make dinner, clean the toilet, make a living, walk the dog, pay our bills, vote in our local council elections. We may feel like we can’t take our eyes off the news, but we talk about it with our friends and we still have to figure out what to get our brother for his birthday. All these things, they coexist. They’ve always have. 

So anyway, it’s taken a lot longer to get here to the start of season six than I thought it would, and I just wanted to acknowledge that and say thanks for your patience. And also acknowledge that as much as I’ll be taking us on a journey out to the desert with some delightful people having a grand old time, I know that life is stressful for many people and many carry the sorrows of the world and the worries of the world with them.

I hope that this season can be maybe a little bit of escapism and a reminder that humanity also does good stuff. If you feel a bit overwhelmed by all the bad stuff. And looking into the future and trying to talk about the climate crisis can feel like you’re always looking into an inferno or an abyss of terrible things that could happen.

But right now, the birds are still singing. There are people weeding and planting down on the creek with land care. Someone somewhere is researching how to solve all of those persistent problems. Someone else is working in community to help people. And there are a bunch of people who will travel extreme distances to places that almost no one ever visits, just to see what plants and animals are out there and they’ll contribute their data to collections for everyone to share.

So I’m trying now to find some more balance in my life and in how I make the show. I was an artist before I was a podcaster, so I’m gonna bring a bit more creativity and visuals into the show. I’ve started creating some desert flora and fauna themed artwork that will go on the socials and in my TeeMill collection, so you can get them printed on beautiful organic clothing and other accessories.

I also have so much footage and photos of the trip out to the desert that even though I’m no film editor, I’m going to try to teach myself how to be, and so hopefully there’ll be some more YouTube or reels or something to go along with season six, and you’ll be able to see what I’m talking about when I share the episodes.

I’m gonna keep season six pretty buoyant. I will do a slightly depressing little roundup of what climate change means in the desert environments in episode one, but most of the time I’ll be focusing on what citizen science is, who are the people who get involved and looking at the plants and animals and amazing things that happen out in remote areas of Australia that I think a lot of people maybe don’t know about.

Anyway, thank you for listening to this little update, and I hope you enjoy season six. It’s coming really soon. Hopefully. No, it really is. It really is. For reals.