Editor's Note: This season, Grounding is collaborating with Mountain Journal, examining how climate change is affecting our landscapes, our brains and our lives. MTPR’s second season of its “Grounding” podcast is exploring the idea of dissonance — the psychological discomfort of reconciling the climate crisis with our daily lives — and is talking to experts from Missoula to Helsinki to help listeners put words to what they’re experiencing. With its “Faces of Climate” series, Mountain Journal is giving readers a closer profile of these experts and their work in navigating climate change.
Listen to “Grounding” on Montana Public Radio for more on climate change and mental health, and find the “Faces of Climate” profiles of the experts from “Grounding” on Mountain Journal, along with other “faces” in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
The climate crisis scares Hannah Dusek. But you wouldn’t know it by how directly she faces it.
“I feel like it's something that I honestly wake up every morning and I'm staring outside my window like, do we see the apocalyptic sky yet? When is it gonna happen?” Dusek said. “I feel like dance is the one way that calms me of that.”
Dusek co-founded a dance company in Missoula, Montana called Kinetic Convergence Dance. KCD put on an evening-length show in 2024 called Where Did They All Go? This production was focused on six species that an audience watched go extinct throughout the performance. And she didn’t shy away from the source of that extinction.
“I wanted to shock the audience a little bit. I wanted to kind of point a finger, like, this is your fault,” Dusek said.
Throughout this season of Grounding, host Sarah Aronson talked with academics and experts in fields ranging from environmental philosophy to the pharmaceutical industry to nail down what it means when our bodies seem to know that something is off with the seasons. What do we do with all our feelings, including numbness and apathy, within an ever-changing environment while trying to manage the day-to-day, Aronson asked her guests?
She’s also tried to find language for our experiences, words like dissonance and the myth of apathy to help us name what we've been feeling. Ultimately, it turns out many have been feeling this way, and just haven't been able to name it.
In this episode of Grounding, Dusek tells Aronson how she’s interacted with this dissonance in the face of disappearance. And artist Jonathan Marquis takes color to paper to see what relevance a physical artifact has in the face of glacial disappearance.
In this episode:
Hannah Dusek (right) is a dancer in Missoula, Montana with both Bare Bait Dance and the company she co-founded, Kinetic Convergence Dance. Dusek works at Animal Wonders outside of Missoula, where she gets to hang out with raccoons, red foxes and rats during the day. She received her Bachelors of Arts degree in dance at the University of Montana. Photo by Jake Cowden.
Jonathan Marquis is the artist behind The Glacier Drawing Project, a long-term practice of place-making and radical remembrance of Montana’s glaciers and wildlands. It is the only on-site, hand-drawn visual record of the 59 named glacial features in the Crown of the Continent and Greater Yellowstone ecosystems of Montana. Marquis began the long-term endeavor in 2014 to draw these glacial features before a warming climate melts the ice beyond recognition. Photo by Richard Forbes.
Listen to episode three, “The Vanishing Act,” via the link above, or wherever you get your podcasts.
