This week, we have a special episode for you, a Season 2 highlight show. Season 2 of Climate Magic included twelve interviews, on topics ranging from masculinity to death practices to parenting.
Pulling the threads together in this episode, I’m struck by some consistent themes: the interplay between inner healing and political problems, and between the health of our spirits and the health of the planet. I noticed a repeated theme of the importance of small practices and a resistance to the way dominant media would have us feel about the climate crisis.
In this show, you’ll hear a similar message from multiple voices: you matter, how you show up matters, and do something, anything, to connect you more closely to yourself, each other, and the earth. If you like anything you hear in this recap episode, go back and listen to the full interviews, and get ready for Season 3, airing May 22!
TRANSCRIPT:
This episode is a season 2 recap bonus. In Season 2, I spoke with twelve incredible humans that give me hope and solidarity in these challenging times. In the next hour, you’ll hear highlights from those conversations. This episode puts these people into conversation with each other, and pulls out the threads of the key insights I’ve been gaining over the course of making this show. If you like what you hear, I invite you to go back to the whole show, and take a deeper dive.
And if this episode warms your soul, get ready for season 3 of Climate Magic, launching on May 22, starting with a student of the Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, and monastic in the Plum Village tradition, Sister True Dedication. We have a youth filmmaker, Laurel Tamayo, who calls us to action on climate mental health after disasters. Dr. Renee Lertzman is one of the OG climate emotions goddesses– she is pushing the envelope of what we know about the role of emotions in world-building and change-making. Dr. Luchia Tecuta reveals the connection between eating disorders and climate anxiety, and Rosanna Sha brings us into her world of climate journalism, and how to get people to care without fear and dogmatism.
Those are just some teasers for season 3 of Climate Magic, coming to you every other Friday, starting May 22.
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When I first imagined this show, Climate Magic, I thought of it as a peek behind the curtains of what’s happening with our hearts and minds as they confront the wicked problem of climate change. First up in our highlights then, is a podcast creator and host Dave Powell, whose show “Your Brain on Climate” captures this same brain-meets-climate vibe. In this episode, Dave and I talk about what he’s learned over the years of dabbling in climate psychology interviewing all these experts. I start by asking what happens when you put the unhappy couple of climate change and your brain on the therapy couch together? Here he is:
It's a better way to describe and like, this is the first time I've sort of, anyone's really asked me that question, so forgive me if this comes out a bit, a bit funny. I think that, so I've been working on, like, climate stuff for 20 odd years, something like that. My background, like I, started off as a climate campaigner. You know, oil companies are all bastards. All we need to do is think of a better world and they will come along.
And maybe there's a few vested interests to tackle and, and sort of gradually beginning to dawn on me and that process of, like is a bit more complicated than that. Like, I think, I think I don't think everyone who goes to work for an oil company is actually a bastard. And I don't think that like simply saying to people that they need to stop doing bad things will get them to stop doing it.
And I wonder why that is. And I didn't study psychology or anything like that, you know, any more than anyone else does, really. But just sort of beginning, you know, shortcutting a lot of the process in beginning to think like. What is this thing called climate change in our brains? Like, how do we actually understand it and represent it? And how come what I think it is not what other people seem to think is what is?
Some people care more or some people care less. And so I got more and more interested in kind of climate communications and how you talk to people realizing that, like. I don't think human brains aren’t really kitted out to understand this thing called climate change at all. I don't think we've evolved for it. Like we probably evolved the collective ability to do something about it, if we can harness that.
But I don't think we have like the conceptual toolkit for a thing that is like distant in time, bigger than any of us. You can't see it directly. It's not a tiger in a bush. It's not the immediate sort of stuff that we, you know, that we kind of are wired to do something about. And it's, you know, the idea of a hyper object is a thing that crops up in motion, Timothy Morton's idea is this is an idea that is just too big to get the human brain around. It's like, you can't ever take all of it in. It's like imagining standing really, really, really close up to a planet and trying to sort of hold it all in your arms. You can't. You can't do it. And I just find that, like, for some reason, I haven't quite got to the bottom of. I think it's something to do with Jesus. I'm sure we'll come to that in a minute, but, like.
I find it all just fascinating. Like. how is what is going on in your brain and my brain and your listeners’ brains and my dad's brain and my mate in the pub's brain when they hear this thing called climate change, what do they think it is? And like how do and then you think about that for a bit and then you go, how do you and brains think about anything? How do we make sense of the world?
Like what, if any ideas come from what do we decide to do anything. And you can still go down this rabbit hole of psychology. So, but it all of that just seems to be kind of missing that sort of how what are people actually think this thing is? What moves them to act on it? Why do we move on, act on some ideas and not on other ideas? Why do all of these brilliant things that humans do?
What are the ideas that underpin them, and how can we get some of that for climate change? And like ultimately that seems to be missing, I think, in a lot of campaign strategies and political strategies and certainly in economic strategies, which are totally not working. So mostly I did the podcast because I wanted to find out more about it.
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Dave and I go on to talk about this sticky issue of what social psychologists call ‘risk perception’-- what qualities does a threat need to display in order for us to perceive it as a risk and do something to protect ourselves? And why climate change is such a challenge when it comes to risk perception. We explore how much our sense of self is wrapped up in being a “climate person” or not, and why that matters, and how cognitive dissonance plays out in the climate world. He’s super funny, too, and so I hope you’ll check out the full episode.
From brain-curious to brain-expert, my next guest is an expert psychotherapist and climate psychology researcher. Leslie Davenport was one of the first psychotherapists to sound the alarm on climate change as a psychological problem. In her field-changing book, Emotional Resiliency in an Era of Climate Change, Leslie mapped out what’s happening in our bodies, hearts, and minds as we learn about the problems of climate distress and worry how they will or do affect us. I like to think of Leslie as the person who shows us what nervous systems have to do with system change. What’s a window of tolerance, for example, and what’s it got to do with climate change? Here’s Leslie:
LESLIE:
#1:
4:10
DAVENPORT: It's hard for me to put an exact time frame on this, but more than 15 years ago, I had my own climate awakening moment. And what I mean by that is I've just always had an interest in the environment. I would always be reading studies, documentaries just for my own interest in education.
And one day, and it wasn't a particular film or article, it was just this sense that everything I was learning and reading coalesced into, “You've got to be kidding me” kind of moment. Just the reality, the intensity, the wow. What I understood then that we’re really facing just landed. It kind of went from information to this, like, visceral knowing.
And I made a decision right then at the time, I was working in health psychology. I was working in a hospital, and I said, okay, I want to pivot everything I can to address this. I don't see anything more important for me to do. But you're right, there wasn't really much out there. I don't even know if eco anxiety was named very much at that time. And so I did what a lot of people do. And I still do, you know, sign petitions and join my local clean air initiative and all those things. But I'm like, well, where can I get the most traction? And I thought about my work and I'm like, okay, so what am I trained in? I'm trained in helping people break through denial, processing deep and complex emotions and grief, supporting lifestyle changes, facilitating conversations that could be contentious, but perhaps that can be more productive.
Ray: I think it’s a good skillset!
#2
DAVENPORT: And so I originally wrote that book to say, you know, my mental health colleagues, anyone in that type of field, you know, we've got work to do and to kind of help others connect the dots the way I personally connected the dots. And so I just tried to articulate as clearly as I could how I understood the application of all of this and not that I think that this is, you know, the silver bullet. I don't think there is one, but how vital it is to be able to talk about our nervous system, our thoughts, their feelings, how tied they are to what's happening around us and have that be part of the conversation, whatever the interdisciplinary model may be, that this was a missing piece.
End at 6:59 exactly (“missing piece”)
#3
Start again at 16:57
DAVENPORT: Well, I think I want to start with how I've been redefining what resiliency means. Emotional resiliency. So the more traditional definition is the ability to bounce back from a distressing event situation, experience and get back to your life. So whatever that may be, a loss, a health issue, losing a job that, getting married or getting divorced. They both stir up things. Traumatic change. Right. But the reason that's not applicable when it comes to how much our world is changing is that there's no going back to, you know, there's no solid ground. And whatever may have been working before or we were oriented toward is quickly growing irrelevant or shifting in some way in requires a much more dynamic approach, because we spoke earlier of the escalating climate impacts, it also requires us to cultivate the ability to be with more distress. So I now define emotional resiliency for these times as cultivating the ability to remain grounded, empathetic, clear minded, open hearted in the face of increasing distress.
RAY: I really love what you're saying there about not going back as a new definition of resilience.
DAVENPORT: Yeah. And this ability to have kind of an agility, a flexibility to change course because while there are very reliable predictions related to the trajectory coming out of climate science, it's still packed with a lot of unknowns, timing, unforeseen things that can move in numerous directions.
And so how to again, remain agile, as we're involved in all of that. So it's not that we want to just aim for feeling calm all the time. We want to have our full range of emotions. You know, we're angry because injustices are happening or boundaries are being crossed. It's how we're built as humans. And yet, if we are so angry and don't know kind of how to use that productively, it erodes our own energy. We may not be making the most effective choices related to change that we're fighting for. So, I'm wondering if it makes sense to talk a little bit about what's called the Window of Tolerance.
RAY: Oh beautiful. Please. I love it. So, yes.
DAVENPORT: So I wish I could draw it because it's often depicted as two parallel lines, kind of like railroad tracks that are horizontal. And these tracks expand and contract. So there's a wider space and a more narrow space. And the idea is that most of the time in our lives, we're operating in that middle space between the two lines, there might be stressors, responsibilities, a busy schedule, a lot to do. But we're managing. We're somehow getting it done. Our feelings are could be big, but we're still functioning or somehow getting by.
If something happens that's either so big, like a climate direct impact or there's just so much going on that our plate feels too full and we move either above the line or below the line. There's something that happens to our brain and nervous system. If it moves above the line, it's usually characterized as lashing out, being really hyper reactive outbursts. Aggression could move toward violence if it if it's below the line, it's more of a checking out and numbing out could go toward substance abuse, depression. And when I spoke before about resilience as growing our capacity, another way of thinking about it is stretching our window of tolerance, stretching our zone of resilience, because there is going to be more that we need to face in our daily lives and on a larger scale. So, when it comes to I'm trying to tie all the things we've talked about together when there's a lot of threads. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When it comes to, resiliency practices and, you know, where and when and why would we want to, sort of calm down or practice self-care? It's so that we can be more effective in our lives and in our climate action, because if we're in a reactive state or we're in a checked out state, we can't do it. Yeah, yeah. We can't do it.
End at 22:12 (“we can’t do it”)
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Leslie Davenport is such a guide for all of us who are struggling with the heaviness of these times. She has the language and training of a psychologist, but leverages that so beautifully in service of helping us each figure out our own climate activation, our own climate magic. I think of Leslie as someone who maps the connection between this amorphous goal many of us have of ‘systems change’ directly to our nervous systems.
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Speaking of nervous systems for systems change, one of the movements that has done some incredible work at that interface is the world of Engaged Buddhism, which was inspired by the Vietnamese activist and zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh. The main principle of Engaged Buddhism is that it insists on the deep interdependence of inner peace and political peace. For the monastics who follow the now late Thich Nhat Hanh in the monastery he set up after his exile from Vietnam, the Plum Village, part of doing that work is supporting climate leaders in big retreats where the entire focus is about helping us bring the peace we want in the world to ourselves, so we can do that work more effectively.
Hot off one of those retreats was my next guest, the incredible author and director of the All We Can Save project, Katharine Wilkinson. In what follows, she shares the insights she gained at this retreat, which are really juicy, and talks with me about her new book, Climate Wayfinding, which is based on a training for educators that I had the great privilege to receive. Here she is:
Katharine
Wilkinson: So Plum Village. So Plum Village is the monastic community Thich Nhat Hanh, founded and Thich Nhat Hanh was, peace activist and Zen master, who was exiled from Vietnam and, and then started this whole wonderful, flourishing, now global community of communities that very much practiced Buddhism. So this is far from like the monks go sit on top of a mountain and you might hear them ring the bell, but you're never probably going to actually talk to them again.
This is really about a practice that lives in the world. And Sister True Dedication is one of the monastics at Plum Village. She described it to me as a healing hospital. You know that they hold retreats and people come. And in this case, it was a group of all of us frazzled, burned out climate and nature leaders, who needed a place to lay down our grief and be with our hearts and one another and to re-commit to how we do this work, not just what this work is that we're doing and the how.
Ray: and the why, too.
Wilkinson: And the why for sure. But I think the why is often there– like people are deeply motivated if they're in this work like there is a deep why. But the machinery that we do this work within is so much about “what's the strategy and what are the outcomes. And talk to me about the impact and raise the next grant. And do the next policy intervention. And … “, you know.
And then it's like, wait a minute. We're trying to build a renewed world, not from a place of renewal, right? Not from a place of compassion and peace and a sense of oneness. And I think having more of that attention to how do we move in the work, not just what are we trying to accomplish with the work feels, feels really important. So, I don't know, I think I support a little time in a monastery. A particular kind of monastery, maybe.
‘And what I said I was thirsty for on arrival there was to feel like humans aren't terrible.
Which is not, you know, not like a predominant,... I work so much in the space of possibility and cultivation, but I think this is a hard moment not to look around at all of the things happening in this country and beyond and not think like, wow, what? This species is a bit of a rough, a rough species. And I, you know, I shared that I'm really committed to this big collective human learning journey, that I think we're on, and I don't want to hate the students, which, of course, includes me.
So I kind of arrived with some of that heaviness, and I appreciate it very much, in fact, Sister True Dedication in her dharma talk the next day picked up that question of how do we not hate humans? And the whole room kind of went.
You know, like, yeah. And she shared many things, but one of the things she shared was this Buddhist concept of store consciousness. So there's sort of the level of the consciousness of the mind and that store consciousness is this deeper and, and collective thing that's comprised of all these seeds, seeds of joy and seeds of compassion, but also seeds of greed and seeds of rage.
And so it's really a question about what seeds are we watering and what seeds is our society watering in us?
So maybe it's because I'm a, you know, grew up in the 90s, but I was like, okay, this is sort of like, don't hate the player, hate the game. Like, don't hate the human. Hate the seed. Like, that's not a great seed. But you are still a beautiful being. And that, you know, that can be a tough compassion exercise, really.
But I, I appreciated that reframing so very much, and I appreciated it also… you know, it's autumn, in France, and the oak trees where we were just making so many acorns. And so she also taught about, you know, oak trees are just making acorns, and almost none of those acorns will actually become a tree, right? Most of them will become a snack for a rodent. I found some that seem to be lovely homes for little worms. But the oak tree is just making the acorns without attachment to which ones ever try to send down a taproot, much less become a seedling, much less become a sapling, much less become a tree.
And I thought, that is a really beautiful and powerful orientation to what we do. You know, I think living in the nonprofit world where funders are constantly like, what are the outcomes? And show us your impacts and count the things and like, make us think that you're worthy of getting another dollar! You know, it can create a really tight energy around the work. And I thought, okay, yeah, I want to come out of this moving in this work more with the generosity of an oak tree and less of the fear. Really. Right. It's like the fear that you do the work and it doesn't send down a root and it doesn't do the things you hope it will do.
Wilkinson: Yeah, it's really fascinating, even in the US, we know that from the wonderful research that Yale does, a majority of people are worried about the situation we're in. But even with like a very generous description of action, only 8% of people are turning that worry, that concern into any kind of contribution. And, and so I think there's just an enormous opportunity.
And, you know, I think the climate movement has actually done a great job of waking people up. It took a long time. But it's actually kind of amazing that people care about this, even if they sometimes still get it mixed up with the ozone hole. It’s okay, you know. But we have not done a very good job of taking people by the hand and inviting them in, in some meaningful way. And it's overwhelming to look at a problem of the magnitude and urgency of the climate crisis and the associated kind of nature crisis and, and then try to figure out, like, tiny little me? Like, what am I supposed to do? You know? And of course, it all feels small and not enough and not sufficiently impactful. And I guess I think.
You know, maybe. To draw on a Buddhist term, like, I think that's a bit of the koan, the like, unsolvable riddle of this time that nothing ever feels like enough. And we have to hold it as enough. Or maybe we're invited to hold it as enough.
Wilkinson: And I think especially for people who feel like they are in the participation camp and why aren't people bloody listening? Yeah. And more importantly, why are they doing anything?
Ray: So many reasons! List the reasons.
Wilkinson: And I think it's like, actually, I don't think I've ever done anything because someone lectured at me or like, demanded that I be different and better. Right? We change because someone says, I see something, I see something better in you.
Ray: Here's a carrot, here's a carrot.
Wilkinson: Here's a carrot, or like, here's, here's a hand, you know, to hold on to as you like, move in that direction. And I, I do think, you know, if we think of, like, fossil fuel executives as toddlers. You know, we might maybe we'd get some better, we get some better, some better strategies. I don't know. This is really, for me, really hard. And I was thinking about it a lot, actually, last week at Plum Village. Right. That from the perspective of interbeing, which I very much hold to be true like I the fossil fuel executives and we're all one.
Ray: And they're in me. Right. Like there's I was a little fossil fuel executive inside me and how can I it before I started lobbying stones at them, which of course, like you said, we do need to do, short of doing that if, if the feeling I have that I'm not big enough to do that makes me feel like just giving up, then the lifeline, there is no, no, no, don't give up. The fossil fuel executive is in you too, doing this harm– this is the interbeing kind of insight– doing this harm in the world and maybe seemingly invisible ways to you. And you can work on not watering those seeds in yourself right now.
You don't have to have a lot of power to go and take some person to court in some big, top down kind of a way. And I think to me, the kind of question of this gap between the 89% who want something done, but this sort of incredible lack of participation that your whole book is trying to change, all your work, actually your life's work, has a lot to do with this kind of, I can start with this very small thing of seeing where the thing that I'm so afraid of might be showing up in my behavior in my life. And I think, that, to me, solves the paradox, the seeming paradox between, big climate action out there and inner work over here not being good enough, you know. Yeah, big, big enough.
Wilkinson: Yeah, yeah. It makes me think, too on this piece around our hearts and accountability. So listeners may or may not have heard that this summer there was an absolutely extraordinary climate opinion that was issued by the International Court of Justice, the World Court, and this whole possibility for this opinion to come down grew out of a group of law students, Pacific Island nations –that are absolutely on the front lines of climate loss, like literally could be entirely lost in some cases due to sea level rise– who said, if this is the world's biggest problem, then the world's highest court should hear it and issue an opinion. And everyone said impossible, it'll never get through the UN. You know, to be taken to the court. It's not going to happen. The big polluters will stop it. Right?
And it did go forward. Speaking of magic.. And part of what happened at the The Hague is that all of these countries were able to stand in front of this panel of judges and tell the truth about what is happening to them. And those that had the ability to bring science brought some science, but all of them brought stories, and all of them brought emotion and all of them brought the human costs of the mess that we're in. And not only was there an amazing opinion, it went beyond everything that the lawyers who brought this hoped it could do. You know, like it was sort of mind boggling in terms of what happened.
And I think it's certainly an example of the power of courageous vision that these students had and also building a team that knows how to work, you know, the inner systems of international politics and negotiation, but also of speaking the truth with an open heart.
I will just frame some questions that are in your intro, which you've generously shared with me so I could prepare for this: “Is there a way to transform my overwhelmed grief and outrage into power, joy and meaning? Is there a way to upend my loneliness by forging connection in its place? Is there a way to turn my doubt about what I have to offer into conviction and contribute? And if it's possible to shift these things in myself, might there be a way to support others to do the same?”
I just had to quote you because it really captures the magic of this book, and I don't know whatever you want to share about it. So as we get ready to all run out and get one and be shaped this way.
Wilkinson: That was really moving, actually to hear you read that. Sarah. So thank you.
Yeah. This little book, this little book is called Climate Wayfinding. In so many ways it grew out of what I needed at various junctures of my last 25 plus years of zig zagging through being a human who cares about what's happening on this planet. And to all the beings that share it and often, what I found in that zigzagging journey is that I was going outside of the climate space to try to get shored up, more clear, more sort of reinvigorated and then back into the fray of climate and then kind of back out of it, trying to survive the climate space. And I just thought, this is nuts, right?
Like, this is not what a social movement should do. A social movement should be cultivating the people who are making everything possible.
And of course, so many of us are holding that question, what can I do? And the deeper questions that often are kind of nested within it, like Russian dolls. And where do we go to ask that question? Right. Much less work our way into some answers. So this book had kind of a fun journey where, I did Morning Pages, Julia Cameron's wonderful practice, and writing about what's a better way to answer the question, what can I do? Instead of an answer like, what are the steps, actually, that I've taken in my own life to work with that question? And then I turned that into a piece for Time magazine a few years ago. And then I thought, oh, this would really be an interesting learning journey, like an experiential program, not just something on paper. And so within the context of the All We Can Save project, which is the nonprofit I lead, we designed that program, we piloted it, and then we started sharing it with people who might want to facilitate it within higher education and beyond, which is how we met Sarah.
Ray: Full disclosure, I participated as a participant in 202… maybe, I can't remember 24. I think I'm 24 last year.
Wilkinson: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ray: It was.
Wilkinson: Wonderful. And then as we had put all of the materials together, I wrote a series of essays, and then I was like, oh, this is a book. So it was kind of , you know, an unfurling peeling of the onion kind of process. And the book is something of The Artist's Way, but for climate like it is really we have a lot of climate books that want to talk at you. And this is a book that really wants to walk with you. It's also nice to read, but it's got journaling prompts, creative mapping exercises, guided meditations, and it moves through a flow of looking inward and outward and forward so that we can, yeah, shape that clear and courageous and connected contribution that I think so many of us, so many of us crave. And I think it is when we're in that contribution that we actually feel like we can tolerate living in this very fractious, troubled time.
So my hope is that lots of people will read the book and use the book. It also has built right and within it, guides for reading the book in small groups and actually doing some of that community building along the way. And that, of course, has been a really important part of the program. And we'll keep training facilitators also. So there's lots of detail about all of this on the website for all of it, which is climatewayfinding.earth.
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You should definitely get her book– it’s just out! I love the way Katharine helps us focus on the micro-ways that we can build capacity in our work in the world. It’s not about impacts or deliverables- it’s about creating the conditions of the heart to stay engaged.
This attention to the daily practice of becoming the person who can bring about the world we desire is a major focus of my next guest, Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner. Rabbi Ora described her work as a climate chaplain in a very similar way to what Katharine said about the kind of invisible or non-deliverable kind of work of, what really amounts to, accompanying each other. For Rabbi Ora, this is about bearing witness to the daily grief and heartbreak of our unraveling world. She insisted that we aren’t going to experience one big event that will change things forever.
Here’s Rabbi Ora:
And so, you know, I think we're all continuously having these moments of revelation, these moments of reckoning, and they sit on our heart. They sit in our heart. They sit in our bodies, and then we just go on about our days. And I think that's really profoundly difficult. And it's an experience that so much of us are having day in and day out, hourly, minute to minute. And so I think all of these mini- moments of reckoning are really an invitation. They're a call to us to ask, so what do we what do we do with all this?
So I like to start with folks on thinking about what conventional chaplaincy is, because I think that can be really helpful as a basis to better understand climate change chaplaincy. So if we ask the question, where do we typically find chaplains working? It’s in hospitals. It's in hospice like you mentioned. It's in prisons. It's an elder care facilities and then less well known, but we also have chaplains working in post natural disaster spaces, in movement spaces, and also, on police forces and also in, in the military.
And like I was saying before, these are places where people are really being forced to confront their own vulnerability and/or they are places where they're being forced to confront others’ vulnerability and the limits of their bodies, the limits of their minds, the limits of their hearts, the limits of their lives, of their lifespans.
So turning our attention to climate change, this is really also what climate change is doing to us as well. But it's not confined to a particular environment like the walls of a hospital. It's everywhere and it's all around us, and it's happening past, present and future. So climate change is, you could say, forcing us or you could say inviting us to engage with vulnerability and to engage with the limits of our and others’ bodies and minds and hearts and lives.
I think we are living through a time of collective and individual traumatization.
And as human beings, I think we’re profoundly not built to be taking in that much loss. And that much fear and that much hopelessness. But that has in just a few years, become the norm. And so we're drinking from this firehose of grief and fear and overwhelm and I think that what ends up happening is alarm bells are going off, alarm bells are going off out in the world– we have people yelling, our house is on fire, metaphorically. We have people yelling our democracy is falling apart. We have people yelling there are genocides happening in the world.
And I think that we're hearing the alarms and instead of acting or running or moving in response, because that's traditionally how we would respond if something was on fire, literally, these alarms really become part of our nervous system, a chronic part of our nervous system, a chronic and continuously activated part of our nervous system. And one of the basic hallmarks of trauma is that when you are experiencing a traumatic moment or an extended traumatic time, you're not actually able to process reality as it's happening. It's like it doesn't, the body, the brain, the heart is not actually able to integrate reality.
That's why I think that chaplaincy and not just chaplaincy, but simply hearing one another, listening to one another, asking one another, how are you doing? And really listening to the response allows us to witness one another, particularly when we can't see ourselves in the moment of shattering, and particularly when we can't hold ourselves through this time of shattering. And so being witnessed when we can't witness ourselves, that's so vital. And again, that's both the role of a chaplain, and that's also the role of beloveds in community. That's the role of me. That's the role of you. That's the role of family members. That's the role of friends. That's the role of colleagues. Ideally, being able to see and hold one another when we aren't fully able to see and hold ourselves.
So I think most basically, climate change is eroding our most basic sense of trust. It's eroding our trust that our home, our planet, will be able to sustain life indefinitely. And it's eroding our trust that the future will be better than the past. And those are two profoundly fundamental and profoundly basic ways that humans have been engaging with living on our planet since time immemorial.
And so it's so profoundly painful, and it's so profoundly challenging to be living in a time where our most basic sense of trust is falling apart or shattering and being eroded. And so from that perspective, you know, I would call that a kind of spiritual crisis.
And so I think that spirituality or paying attention to existence, we could say, is important when we're living in a time of climate change, because it helps the present moment to not be stolen from us. It allows us to remain connected to the moment, to the self, to others, to nature. And all of these connections are sacred. All of these connections are sacred. Whether or not you believe in a small G god, whether or not you believe in a big G God, all of these connections are sacred and are a reminder that we are all part of this changing world.
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Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner is one of the few people I’ve had the pleasure of speaking about spirituality with on this show. Spirituality is one of the most obvious ways to center our hearts, minds, bodies, and souls in the work for climate justice. Rabbi Ora works as a climate chaplain and offers her magic through her organization, Exploring Apocalypse. She also regularly works with the BTS Center, which is an organization working to cultivate spiritual leadership in a climate-changed world. I’ll put both organizations in the shownotes; you should definitely check them out.
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Tuning into hearts and minds and souls can often be thought of as a waste of time, as selfish, or as “spiritual bypass” from the real, more important work of political change. This theme of inner work vs. political, outer work runs through many of these interviews, and it’s so fun to see how different people have chewed on it and found their own ways to reconcile the seeming paradox. For my next guest, Jennifer Uchendu, it’s not therapy or Engaged Buddhism or chaplaincy that helped her figure out the connection between the inner and outer work. For Jennifer, her own mental health and burnout raised the alarm for her. Simply put, her youth activist peers could not continue the work of political resistance and creative change without attending to their mental health. With this realization, she founded an organization called The Eco-Anxiety Africa Project, or TEAP. Let’s hear more about Jennifer’s story and TEAP:
JENNIFER
And then three years ago, I started something called The Eco Anxiety Africa project, which is what I'm now kind of known for, my work on climate emotions, eco emotions, and that came because of all of the work we're doing at Susty Vibes. As great as it was, we still felt extremely overwhelmed and stressed, because, again, as you know, climate change is so big, it's so complex, and its impacts are distributed unfairly.
So in our part of the world, when we think about climate change and environmental issues, we're thinking, Do we have a fighting chance? Can we thrive in this part of the world? What does our future look like? And then what we found, and we still have, is a lot of young people in Nigeria, many parts of Africa, are looking to escape. They're looking for a climate haven, but they're just looking for places where they can thrive and climate change as we know is a multiplier, so wherever there exists and you know, existing socio economic issues, climate change only makes things worse.
And if we're in the part of the world where you know, we're being hit the hardest, you can imagine how a lot of young people feel. And then here came Susty Vibes, this organization, making a lot of, you know, good trouble, as it were, on sustainability, doing activist and climate projects.
But it seemed like the more we knew about the issue, the more frightened we became, because it just seemed like our trees are not going to save us. You know, advocacy won't save us this. There's just so much that needs to be done. And I think that pressure and that weight started to, we started to feel it. And I myself as founder, you know, starting with this bright vision that we can do this work on our terms and young people, I started to feel extremely overwhelmed and discouraged at the same time.
And I think COP for me was that space where I felt the most frightened about the work that we did. You know, as people working on climate change issues, because I was like, they don't even think this is a big problem. You know, everyone is just going around in their fancy suits. I know I felt extremely stressed at COP. I often call it my peak eco anxiety moment, because I would go back to my room and it was my first COP, you know, at the time was cry.
I would cry because A) I have chosen a career path that literally has no no hope. You know, I didn't know what success then looked like, because it just seemed like the future was bleak. And then two, I would cry because I just didn't know a way out of it because it's like what do I do now, do I look for a different career path. But what then happens to the sufferings that will continue as a result?
And a lot of my work has been exploring the African experience of eco anxiety, as I like to call it, climate emotions, and looking at not just the differences, but what it means for us and how it can help us with climate adaptation, because that is really important. The impacts are already here, you know, it will take such a long time for mitigation to catch up, but there's already loss and damage that has been done. So how do we adapt, particularly as young people, and how do we still have the willpower to keep showing up.
And that has been my work. In the last three years, I have poured out a lot of myself, a lot of my time, into digging and understanding this experience of eco anxiety, climate emotions, and not just climate change, I like to always point out, but is the fact that our idea of the environment in Africa, and I think the global majority, is it's not just about the mountains and the trees. This is our life. This is our future. Everything that we do is tied around our food, our land and our relationship with nature.
And so if you know, if there's some sort of disruption, and we're seeing the impacts, you know, directly, then it does have an impact on how we think of our identity and our place in the world.
But we're also reflecting on what the future holds. What does it look like, you know, in a world that is climate changing, you know, if I can put that here, and how do we exist in that world?
There's the broader polycrisis that when you dig deep, dig deep, it's because we stopped caring, you know, and I've been thinking about that a lot, that sort of crisis of care. So, in fighting or in doing work, you know, for eco anxiety and climate anxiety. We do not need to stop caring, because that care is important right?
That care is necessary. It's that care that would drive what resilience will look like. You know, moving forward, because we still need mitigation. We still need brilliant solutions and thinkers, you know, to think about how to get us out of this mess. But we are in the mess already, so we need to adapt. And we need to adapt, you know, optimistically and and hopefully.
I think we need to then move into this idea of solidarity and interdependence and working together, because there's a lot of good that can happen when we work together. When I'm in a space and I listen to someone you know from Brighton, or you know from the US, tell me about their guilt and their shame. I may not be able to relate with that, and I tell them about my anger and my overwhelm and my powerlessness, they may not be able to relate to that, but we can come out of those conversation feeling heard and listen and it helps us wake up the next day so I think it's important. I'm looking at more ways to repair our relationship, not just with nature, but with each other, right?
For me, when I think of what success looks like, for example, with the work we do at tip is that someone comes into our space and you know, whether it's a cafe or whatever event we do, and when they think of the role, the jobs that they do, they think more of I would take a job that would, you know, exploit the environment. I won't be part of the polluting, you know, the polluters, because at the end of the day, these are choices that we make, and we make them for different reasons.
And so we need to go back to that sort of psychological shifts. At what point do people decide that they are going to negotiate, you know, for fossil fuel for example, they're going to negotiate to keep damaging the environment. Where did that disconnect come from? And how do we repair that disconnect? I think that might be a, you know, and I haven't always been here, right? I've always, I'm an activist, right? I've always been very angry, and I'm thinking that because I'm not so exhausted, because we've come into this poly crisis, where it's not just the climate crisis. There's a health problem, you know, there's, you know, economic inflation, there's wars, and we just don't care anymore. And so how do we reframe and use all of the emotions all of this pent up anger, how can we use it for good and how can he help. Basically.
And one thing that has been very interesting in our work, and I did this work with Britt Wray and, you know, Sally Weintraub, and we worked with elders across Nigeria, the UK, and also in the New Orleans, in the US and in Nigeria, this entire project was really to look at the roles elders come play in having conversations around climate distress and all of the worry that you know, young people are experiencing, and in Nigeria, we had our elders who were part of this project apologize and admit that they were not bold enough, they were not courageous enough. And for me, that was extremely powerful, and it was powerful for all of the young people there to hear our elders, because culturally, that's not something you see, you know in Africa, elders admitting, you know that they didn't do enough that they could have pushed more for a more livable and better future for us, and admitting that, you know, they are kind of implicit in in how we got here, it was extremely powerful.
So I think for me, things like that, right young people, being listened to our elders, admitting guilt and apologizing have been very powerful. You know, as we think of what resilience looks like moving forward. Yep.
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One thing I love about this conversation with Jennifer is how important intergenerational repair was for her and her peers. Hearing their elders apologize, and feeling validated and heard, became essential for being able to carry on. I also appreciated how she explained how the Western framework of “climate anxiety” does and does not resonate with her experiences as a female Nigerian youth activist.
It turns out that where you’re from and who you are shape your relationship to climate change— not to mention mental health– far more than people usually talk about. Mostly, climate discussions focus on “do you believe in climate change or not?” You’re either climate literate, or not. And then climate action is about convincing people to move from one side to the other.
Rarely are these conversations sensitive to the nuances of identity, and how they might affect why or how or whether a person cares about climate change. Who cares, and why? For whom is mental health a stigma, and why? How does who we are determine what we know about, and therefore feel about, climate change?
My next conversation answers this question in terms of male gender identity and masculinity. Why do men consume more fossil fuels than women, and why do they care less about climate change than women? What does masculinity have to do with climate concern? It turns out, quite a lot. Here’s Joe Henderson:
JOE
I think we should talk about those kind of economic shifts in rural America and how they impact not just boys and men but entire families and towns and communities.
One big point I would make is that I don't think we should pathologize boys and young men. I think we need to, we need to approach this from the perspective of the like, structural forces that are acting upon people and really thinking about, like, what are those structural forces? How has policy made it better or worse? What kind of interventions can we have at different scales of influence? And so that kind of the conversation.
It was really, it was really interesting. I think people felt very hungry to have that kind of conversation and to really think through like, what is justice as it pertains to this particular population? In our case, rural young men, mostly white, and I say mostly white because rural areas are really complicated. They're really racially diverse.
and I mean, I'll speak very frankly here, as somebody who grew up rural poor, I encountered a lot of people in those in those elite academic spaces who were very dismissive of rural life ways or rural kind of forms of knowledge and the people who live there, there's this kind of perpetuation, or this perception that, like, there's something like backward or wrong about people who live in rural areas, that they're somehow like failures.
Also, there's just so much more in common between rural areas and urban areas. And I wish that more people would make those connections in terms of poverty and inequality and lack of opportunity and struggling educational systems and and and there's a lot to bring all of what you were just talking about to this question of rural white men or just masculinity in general, that's easier to speak about, and how that's tied up with environmental stewardship or the inability to participate in climate concern.
So I study climate change and I study climate change education, and there's a pretty robust literature in environmental sociology, climate change education that shows that that young men, specifically conservative young men, are more likely, specifically white conservative young men are more likely to deny the science of climate change than other cohorts.
I want to be really careful with this, because it is less than older cohorts of those same kinds of men. And so there are interesting dynamics here that play out politically, around which cohorts of voters, if you're talking about politics, believe what things so for example, Young Republicans in the United States overwhelmingly accept climate science.
That puts them at odds with their party. But all of that to say, in general, there are gendered patterns to how people engage with environmental issues. I will fully agree with you that things like sex and gender are a spectrum, and that there's lots of different kinds of ways of being a man and I think actually, there's a whole field of queer ecology, which is really interesting on these kinds of points. We're kind of in that conversation, but, but focusing mostly around masculinity, and so a lot of a lot of masculine labor in areas like mine are tied up with working the land and working landscapes.
And so you have a lot of men, frankly, who are building the buildings in the area, who are extracting the timber, who are doing the conservation work, who are doing search and rescue, disaster management and mitigation, those tend to be kind of gendered forms of labor. And then you have, you know, and that, and that is about caring for the land in a particular kind of way, exploiting the land in a particular kind of way, creating value from land in a particular kind of way.
And then there's like, a lot of care labor and care work that reproduces society, that tends to be feminized. And in the United States, a lot of educational work is feminized. Wasn't always the case.
And so as somebody who sits at the intersection of education which is predominantly feminine gendered, and then environmental issues which are often, although not always, gendered in a masculine way, I was really interested in kind of, how do those things kind of come together?
A lot of resource extraction, like I mentioned my friend David Long earlier resource extraction in a place like Appalachia is, you know, generations of men breaking their bodies in the coal mines because those were some of the best jobs that they could get in their area. And now, you know, as we move away from coal and oil and gas, and as that production moves elsewhere, you have a lot of kind of a loss of your sense of community, identity, family identity. There's that loss of identity and how do people deal with that as agriculture goes away, or as extractive industries go away.
Here in the US, we're much more hyper capitalist. We're much more individualistic. And so a lot of the way men are socialized, especially during times of crisis, is in this kind of domination ethic. And so now I'm thinking specifically of really extreme examples of people Andrew Tate or Donald Trump. Right? Which is their entire M.O. is this kind of you need to be I'm going to use some natural language. You're right. You need to be an apex predator, and you need to be top of the food chain. And if you're not the top of the food chain, then you're going to get eaten. And so it's just this constant ethic of dominate, dominate, dominate, dominate.
Most of the men, as much as we're talking about this kind of crisis of masculinity men, young men in the United States, in other countries England, are actually becoming more progressive, relative to their to other cohorts of men. Young men are actually moving left. And I don't think that gets talked about enough. And, what we spend a lot of time talking about are the, the, the extremes.
This kind of, this kind of masculinity in this kind of economic devastation has all sorts of implications on men. And so I'm constantly asking this question what would it look to build a broader solidarity movement that includes a lot of downscale white men? Right.
And I think I actually this is my own little provocation. But I just feel we ask men to do so little sometimes. And men, men really need to step up in terms of mentorship roles and creating kind of more humane educational experiences, environmental experiences, things like that. There are a lot of I'm around a lot of really good, really healthy men, and a lot of us are trying to do the work, but it often feels we're crowded out by these megaphones from above that are just spouting out this Andrew Tate stuff of the taking body supplements and maxing our testosterone so that we can, be alpha men.
A lot of what we're talking about here is a kind of male insecurity that needs to satisfy itself by dominating others or dominating the land. And I think this is where something some of the indigenous ways of relating to the land are really helpful to think about more kinship to reciprocity based ways of being.
And I would love to see forms of education that are about that kind of more care based, stewardship of nature and of other people. Right? And understanding at a basic level, this understanding that how we treat nature is how we treat people is how we treat nature.
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What I appreciated so much about this conversation with Joe is that he refused to blame “men” as a monolithic category based on gender identity for climate change, or shame them for not caring enough. He insisted on seeing how many people who identify as male are shaped by a system that is creating conditions for them to be unenvironmental. In other words, the social and economic rewards for being masculine are greater than the rewards for caring about the climate. In such a system, can we blame the men? This was a profoundly compassionate invitation to think about the forces bearing on men in the polycrisis, but also, a compassionate invitation to men themselves to resist those forces.
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My next interview with therapist and activist Rebecca Weston took us even deeper on this question of how a person’s relationship to power shapes their climate emotions and concern about the planet. In the following clip, though, Rebecca focuses on this important insight that we shouldn’t pathologize climate anxiety– it’s not a sign that something is wrong, or that you need better coping strategies, or that you’re too sensitive. On the contrary, big feelings about what’s happening on this planet are opportunities for deep learning about yourself. And that deep learning can translate into decisions and actions that can help you relate much differently to the sources of our distress. This deep work, then, is not a bypass of the political work, but rather, the best way to figure out what you can do in the world.
Listen to Rebecca explain this:
REBECCA:
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RAY: I'm so excited to have you on the show. You are a therapist, a practicing therapist, and you are really focused on climate change. And I'm just curious, just to get us warmed up. What happens in the therapy room? I mean, bring us into the actual room itself. What is happening in the therapy room? How are people presenting? As if you will. Around climate emotions. And how does climate change show up in your office?
WESTON: Oh, really good question. And in, I would say two different categories. One is where people make it very explicit that's why they want to see me. And I have several clients who came to see me because they are either climate activists or they have found themselves preoccupied to a point where they're distracted and unable to focus on other things in their day about climate distress.
Others, for example, are worried about whether or not to have children. And that has certainly come up quite a bit in my work. Others have wondered about whether they should change their jobs because it's complicit in their minds with climate change. So there is a whole category of people who are very mindful and thinking a great deal about climate, whether as an activist or in their livelihoods and in the world.
There's a whole other sector who barely talk about it at all. Or don't. And given that I know that climate change is on huge numbers of people's minds, the issue of how they avoid talking about climate change also shows up in this space. And for clinicians, that's an incredibly complicated question. Do we initiate conversation about things that people are afraid to talk about? How do we signal that we're open to it without being suggestive? How do we bring in something new to a space that historically people haven't necessarily felt comfortable bringing in?
So there's a lot of different ways to think about it, where it's explicit and where it might be implicit and not brought up.
RAY: So these are two different ways that climate anxiety is showing up in sort of a very explicit way where people are naming it. And then secondarily a way where people are really not naming it. And you sort of think it's there anyway, right? It feels like it might be there in kind of a denial or avoidance way. And it's a clinician ethical question about whether to raise it. That's fascinating.
So one of the ways I imagine an audience might want to think about oh there's a therapist in the room. Let's get some help on this. So what do you do with these clients who bring it up explicitly?
WESTON: That’s what’s so interesting about climate anxiety. There's a lot of different parts that make it so fascinating. But one part of it is that it's very different from other types of anxiety, in the sense that I'm not invested in discouraging them from being anxious. If anything, I want to validate that anxiety, and I don't necessarily want to suggest that it's an easy thing to resolve or that it can be resolved within the confines of their own individual experience.
So what I often try to do instead is talk with them about ways in which this anxiety connects to other feelings of hopelessness, other feelings of helplessness, relationships from which they can draw support and care. And so I put it into a larger context of how to receive and care for each other as we try to move through this world that is producing very stressful situations for people.
So the biggest part is that I'm not trying to get rid of the anxiety. I'm trying to normalize it. And then I'm also trying to encourage them to think that the solution is not just within themselves to just put up with it or find only sort of internal mechanisms to deal with it, but to engage in the world and to engage in their relationships around the questions that matter the most to them. And that, interestingly, brings out whole histories about their relationship to trusting themselves, trusting a movement, trusting caregivers.
So if they come with a feeling that they trust in the world and their ability to get help and to give help and care that it often ends up tapping into those larger systems where they can learn how to see this anxiety is another part of what they're offering to the world and needing care for it. So it actually ends up interacting with other parts of their own personal history, other parts of their own attachment history, other parts of their own trauma history.
So it's both very, very general validating the anxiety and also very specific in terms of how they historically have handled issues of profound stress and distress in their relationships and in their world.
RAY: That must be difficult to not want to fix people.
WESTON: It is. Although I think when people bring up climate anxiety in the room, they have already gotten to a place where they wouldn't believe me, even if I tried. And I think in some ways, not taking that approach is its own sort of relief to people that they're not crazy, that they're not exaggerating the problem, that they are, in fact, in this with me and I'm with them. So I think part of the issue is that they feel as if am I crazy that this is so scary? Yes. We all at some level want relief from scary things, but I think at a deeper, deeper relational and existential place, we want a sense that we are in this together and that we are understood and that we are. We're not making it up.
And so I think that the much deeper validation that this is a profound thing, that it's a very scary thing, actually, ironically, creates a sense of safety to feel what one feels. And then in relationship that can say, we can hold this together. It's very different from the idea that we need to fix it. And I don't I mean, the kind of clinician that I am does not actually believe a whole lot in quick fixes to these things. And I believe deeply in the power of relationship to hold and contain. So it's in sync with my work.
But I have also felt, at least with my clients, that they want that deeper sense of connection. Yes. What you're feeling is real. How do we do all this together? I'm in this with you. And that's a much deeper sense of resolution and care than a kind of quick fix. And that's incredibly rewarding.
RAY: Yeah, I'm interested that your clients don't necessarily want fixing because if I felt such discomfort and I went to the therapy room, I would be thinking, just relieve me from this.
WESTON: Relief in the presence of someone else.
RAY: Yeah.
WESTON: That's right. That's what the relief comes from.
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That was founder and co-director of the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America, Rebecca Weston. If you’re interested in learning more about how the Climate Psychology Alliance tailors its interventions, research, resources, and events for different demographics, I urge you to look them up. They do special events for farmers, journalists, teachers, parents, and more. They also have a directory for climate-aware therapists, if you’re just looking for mental health support that takes climate concern into account. They’re also thinking really creatively about how to deliver these resources and support to people in a collective way– for that sweet relief of knowing you’re not alone that Rebecca described– and to break down the individualistic and often inaccessible model of therapy we usually think of. I’ve had the pleasure of doing multiple webinars for the CPA, and working with Rebecca over the years, and it’s really groundbreaking what they’re doing over there.
If you like anything you’ve heard in this season 2 highlight episode of Climate Magic, I encourage you to check out these episodes with Dave, Rebecca, Leslie, Jennifer, Joe, Katharine, Rabbi Ora, and more on spotify or apple, or on KHSU.org, where you can also find transcriptions and shownotes.
And get ready for season 3, launching Friday, May 22, at 9am on the radio station at KHSU.org, and wherever you follow your podcasts. Our first episode is with the Plum Village monastic mentioned in this recap show by Katharine Wilkinson, none other than Sister True Dedication. Sister True Dedication and I have a mindblowing conversation– she is so smart and she is really tapping all of the climate magic– about desire, and what climate action looks like from a Buddhist perspective, and other topics that are as transcendent as they are immediately applicable.
Season three also features a conversation with an expert about the link between climate anxiety and eating disorders, a topic I’ve seen show up in my students, but am happy to include a whole episode to help us connect the dots. Dr. Renee Lertzman joins us to talk about the myths of apathy and what really motivates people to engage in changemaking, Anthea Lawson is out with a new book on the depth psychology of why we shouldn’t try to save the world, Laurel Tamayo joins us to talk about her incredible film, Healing Lahaina, and what it takes to prepare for post-wildfire mental health and community resilience. LA Times reporter Rosanna Xia joins us to talk about her climate magic, too.
And there’s more, so get ready for Season 3 of Climate Magic, with me, your host, Sarah Jaquette Ray.
Listen wherever you find your podcasts, and follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. Thanks for listening to Climate Magic.
