In this episode, I speak with Anya Kamenetz, former NPR journalist, author of many books including a forthcoming one called Falling in Love with the World Again, and all-around advocate for the climate generation.
We explored a range of questions: What does the next generation need from us? What does intergenerational justice look like? How does embracing difficult emotions help transform our ways of being so we can bring about a better world? How can we face our fears about the world being on fire, and touch into our love of our kids and life on this planet, to sustain our work? How does the climate crisis call on new ways of partnering, parenting, even humaning? How do we shift our technological ideas about “fixing” climate change to a more human “solution” of helping each other feel a sense of belonging?
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Shownotes
- Anya Kamenetz’s website
- Anya’s excellently curated Substack The Golden Hour
- Anya’s research on climate emotions and children for the Climate Mental Health Network
- NPR pieces by Kamenetz
- Anya’s substack essay on how to use the Climate Emotions Wheel, guide for parents/teachers
- Vogue essay on Kamenetz’s book on the long-term mental health effects of the pandemic on children
- Lancet study on youth mental health and climate emotions as moral injury
- Landmark youth lawsuit in Montana about climate change
- Mimi Ito and Danah Boyd’s forthcoming book on technology and youth
- Anya and Panu Pihkala You Tube launch video of grief resources from the CMHN
- Johnathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation
- A substack essay I wrote on “Youth Are Not in Crisis,” inspired by this conversation with Anya
- R. Jisung Park’s book, Slow Burn
- Capita, an organization Anya mentioned that works on building better cities for children and the climate
- Anya’s piece on how it’s hard to do outdoor play (as required by child development policy) when it’s 110 degrees
- Yessenia Fuñes’s essay on the anti-trans fossil fuel connection
- Definition of intersectionality
- “Rio”-- The Rio Earth Summit of 1992
- Pihkala’s Grief resources on CMHN’s website
- Joanna Macy’s The Work that Reconnects
- 12 years “climate clock” from the 2018 IPCC report
- An article on the information deficit myth and climate communication
- Generational infographic on climate change from the 2024 IPCC:
Transcription
Kamenetz: My basic thing here is discovering that almost everyone feels something really intense in relationship to the world as it is right now, and the pressure on top of it to pretend like it's normal.
Ray: Welcome to Climate Magic, where we talk about the relationship between climate change and our hearts and minds. I'm your host, Doctor Sarah Jaquette Ray, chair of the environmental studies department at Cal Poly Humboldt. Climate change is so big we can't get our heads around it. Literally, our brains are just not wired to face a problem the size and scale of global warming. But can we rewire our brains to meet this challenge? How can we unlock the emotional and mental capacities that these difficult times demand of us?
Kamenetz: The thing that I don't want us to do is to feel like we have to shut it all down and burn out and go away. I think we need to keep showing up.
Ray: Today, I'm speaking with Anya Kamenetz. Anya is an award-winning journalist and a former NPR correspondent. She speaks, writes, and thinks about generational justice, about thriving and raising thriving kids, about learning and technology, and all of this on a changing planet.
She's the author of many books, including Generation Debt. ANother one called DIY You: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. Another one called The Test: why our schools are obsessed with standardized testing, but you don't have to be, and The Art of Screen Time: how your family can balance digital media and real life. And lastly, The Stolen Year: how Covid changed children's lives and where we can go now.
Kamenetz is currently an adviser to the Aspen Institute and the Climate Mental Health Network, working on new initiatives at the intersection of children and climate change. She has been a New America Fellow, a staff writer for Fast Company Magazine, and a columnist for the Village Voice. Anya just got a publisher for her upcoming book on thriving and caring for others in a rapidly changing world called Falling in Love with the World Again.
In this conversation, we talk about her journey, her thoughts on how we can support youth and the planet at the same time, the role of youth in bringing justice to center stage in the climate movement, how to build messy coalitions, the Climate Emotions Wheel and her work with the Climate Mental Health Network, and figuring out what the message for climate action should be these days. So what connects climate emotions to climate action? Don't you want to know? Listen on.
Anya, welcome to the show.
Kamenetz: Sarah. Thanks for having me.
Ray: You're probably most well known for your expertise on parenting, screen time, education, and children. But you've turned your focus to climate change. This is why I really wanted to talk to you, because I have been thinking for a long time that all of the research that's happening around youth and social media and all this stuff is missing climate change… And I listen to podcasts with all the big names on this stuff. Listener in the background, thinking “what about climate change.” I was hoping you would spread out the missing story. Why did you turn to thinking about climate change? What's missing?
Kamenetz: I mean, there are so many ways to answer that question. Just before we were talking, I was reflecting on my own personal journey. It's coming up on 20 years since Katrina and do you know, I grew up in New Orleans and going down to see the city about two weeks after the storm as a reporter, also as a daughter, helping my parents clean out their house.
That was super formative for me. But then I was thinking recently about Hurricane Irene in 2011. And that’s only six years later. And I was pregnant and I was on Fire Island, which is a barrier island. Basically, we woke up and the tide had swallowed the beach. The beach was gone. The firefighters on the island, there’s no cars on this island, it’s very small, but skinny. They came door-to-door to be like, "Look, the last boat's leaving at noon, you have to get out." It was really dramatic, and I felt so vulnerable and so afraid, and it really triggered my Katrina trauma, as it was vicarious, but very much real. To me, that was the origin point. It was thinking about how what's happening on the planet is so vulnerable for people that love and care for the next generation.
For so many years, we saw climate change as a future event. That's not true anymore. But it's still true that young people are a frontline, most affected group because if your personal timeline extended to 2100, then you have a different set of concerns. And so that's how I got so passionate about helping young people and meeting them where they are right now, in helping them meet the threats and the challenges and the opportunities at this moment.
Ray: And the compassion we feel for people who are going to be living in that. I know that one of your topics of interest is intergenerational justice, and I'm wondering if that's a little bit what you're referring to there. Can you define that and share a little bit about what we should do about that? What are some actions around intergenerational justice, what you mean by that, and why we should even care about that.
Kamenetz: The first book I wrote was about the economic futures of the millennial generation... talking about how changes we were making—the soaring cost of education, education debt, changes in the job market—that were foreclosing people's futures, or the sense that they had of their futures. And that's a theme that's really continued through my work. What I have seen, particularly in America, we don't center young people in our decision making. We don't consider them, we don’t elevate their needs. For example, the United States is the only UN member state that has not ratified the Declaration on the rights of the child. We just don’t give young people that agency. How might we have responded differently to that challenge of the pandemic if we centered young people’s needs?
The concept of generational justice is really just observing and recognizing the fact that young people are disenfranchised. They lack power as citizens, consumers, and workers. They are under the thumb of institutions like the patriarchal family. They have interests that deserve to be uplifted and centered. And what often comes with that is an unthinking denigration of young people. We don't just dismiss them, we demonize them. And this goes back to rhetoric about superpredators, often that’s racialized, or it has to do with immigrant status, or even in just a regular way, like the “anxious generation,” where we're just tarring the entire generation with being damaged and defective, rather than looking at what are we creating for these young people.
Ray: When you talk like that in defense of young people it feels so good because I’m spending a lot of time with them and feel compassion for them, and watching them respond to my generation. You said about tarring them with the anxious generation. You just said something about you creating this world for them. I think about this too. I often think we wouldn't have them diving into social media if the world they lived in felt empowering... They were participating in some kind of collective movement for them. Any number of things that could be part of their material raelities that would make them not want to be on their phones. Even this discussion of social media ignores the fact that maybe there's like a push factor out of reality pushing them into there, not just the pull factor of all of these algorithms and millionaires getting their attention... We don't talk about why reality might not be a pleasant place for them to be.
Kamenetz: I think that's exactly right. The other insight I’ve drawn on are some anthropologists on the social web like Mimi Ito and Danah Boyd who interviewed people to find out what they’re doing online and found that online can be a very vital place for connection, for creative expression, for civic engagement. But with the right support and mentorship, it can be a very positive space for young people. It's just that we have ghettoized them and determined that there is nothing that could possibly be useful or good for them on those online spaces. And we don’t bother to look or see or scaffold what could be positive for them.
Ray: So this is what your book Screen Time is about. I’d love to hear about The Stolen Year as well. This thread that draws together the pandemic and screen time. What's The Stolen Year about? And what are we looking at with the longer-term implications of mental health and youth after the pandemic?
Kamenetz: This, in a huge way, created the foundation for my focus right now on climate and the interweaving crises that we're facing. Because with the pandemic, during the pandemic, in March 2020 when everything shut down, I had a three-year-old and an eight-year-old and a full-time job covering schools for NPR.
Ray: Wow, what a perspective.
Kamenetz: It’s wild.
Ray: I should tell you I had kids the same age. I had a kindergartner and a fourth grader.
Kamenetz: Just take in that reality. We’re just five years out.
The opportunity emerged to do a book where I followed five families from around the country in really different circumstances through the first year of the pandemic. And we would check in by phone and zoom. After the vaccines came out I did a tour and visited the families. There were two things that emerged. The lack of centering of children’s needs, which became evident, especially as I paid attention to what other countries were doing.. More of our schools closed to more children for longer than any other rich country. Regardless of how you feel about closing schools, there are a lot of dynamics– inequality, racial division, social trust we did or did not have during the pandemic.
The impact that was allowed to be visited on kids, not just from school closures, but from the illness itself, from the deaths of many, many parents and caregivers—the impacts were profound. Five years later, we are still seeing those impacts. They’re moving like a wave through the generation. They are seen much more seriously in children that are disadvantaged by class. It hasn’t gone away. There’s a desire to make them go away.
When talking about this coming from the children's rights perspective, one person who was a whistleblower on the conditions of children in ICE detention under family separation.
Ray: Oh my goodness, just to think.
Kamenetz: When I see that go on your face. This is exactly what she said: she said that people don't want to hear about this because even the people who care, it’s too much. Because we have such a heart for children, and sometimes that heart leads us to be sentimental in a way that is actually not the most empathetic, compassionate.
Ray: explain that a bit more.
Kamenetz: It hits super hard, like if we think about situations around the world where harm is coming to kids. And you’d think that would cause an outpouring of action, response. Yet there’s this numbness. I’m thinking about Gaza as I’m thinking about this. That is too hard on kids. It's too hard to look at that, to think about being a mother in that situation, or that child.... and it actually stops us because it's too intense.
Ray: I see. The desire to avoid. The avoidance move, or disassociation move. That overwhelming the nervous system with grief and shock and horror and moral outrage. You just can’t even go there. So the result is you can’t go there, so you just turn away and let it happen. There’s no intervention.
Kamenetz: Exactly.
Ray: It’s funny to think on the one hand there’s an intense emotional and sentimentality toward children and at the same time we don’t give kids enough protection and rights, so is that a paradox to you? Is there a resolution there?
Kamenetz: It's a moral gap. It's sort of a gap in terms of how our emotions drive us towards decision making. And maybe that gap could be met with structures. That's why I sort of like the rights framework... If I say, If I care so much for children, I have a heart for children. That’s one thing. But if I say "children are beings that are autonomous and have their own interests and have a right to pursue those interests," then maybe you're doing a little bit of a different dimension. What do you think?
Ray: I do have that sentimentality, but also, I probably fall into some of those traps, even though I am fairly compassionate and have decided this would be my passion and purpose. But I think one of the things that I find really interesting is an example of what you’re talking about, the distinction between moral injury and climate anxiety... In the discussions of the people I’m talking to, where I first entered into this– my students aren’t ok, there’s a mental health crisis, and does climate have something to do with that? That’s how I came across this field.
And then the Lancet study that came out, where over 10,000 young people were interviewed in 10 countries around the world, and it was the largest study of its kind, and it used the framework more of moral injury than of climate anxiety. And the leveraging of harm to youth as a moral injury that can be then translated into legal terms that you can then hold people accountable for.
It’s also happening in Montana. There’s leverage there. Whereas climate anxiety is a way of saying, "oh, they're just snowflakes..." or they don’t have grit, or they’re privileged and just care about polar bears or something. And the ability to dismiss and demonize young people's climate anxiety is a lot easier when you talk about their emotions than when you're talking about the structures like you just said. Like, can we go to court on this? This is a form of abuse. That framework feels more possible in this moment. What do you think about that?
Kamenetz: That study was world changing for me as well and helped me see the dovetail between the work I had been doing on young people and the climate crisis. I agree with you that moral injury is just a really important concept for these times. I’m very interested in research that indicates that this sense of having done wrong or working under an unjust system can amplify trauma. Like with combat veterans; fi they feel they’ve done something wrong, it can amplify their trauma. We've already seen under this administration, the weaponization of climate anxiety...
Ray: Don’t even get me started.
Kamenetz: With the Climate Mental Health Network and Panu Pihkala, we created the Climate Emotions Wheel. And it was included in a press release by Ted Cruz's office, NOAA or someone included it in a lesson plan. Basically like targeting this idea that this is inflaming young people. It's undermining their mental health. And that was talking about climate change is bad for our mental health. It's so similar to the arguments around what critical race theory was labeled as being, we will make white kids feel bad if we talk about the history of america in a way that’s honest. And their feeling bad is a bad thing that shouldn’t happen. It’s easy to make fun of and poke. But I think that there's a spectrum of denial across our society. There's this hard denial on the right, but there's a soft denial on the left. What I mean by that is, if you read IPCC reports if you read climate science... you should be running around like crazy... Sometimes it seems like the Just Stop Oil kids and the climate defiance kids are the only people making sense because they are responding to an emergency like it's an emergency. And so short of that, because you may not spend your whole life yelling at oil executives, putting it in the box of mental health can feel like we’re giving it short shrift, but I don’t know any better way.
Ray: What I like about moral injury as a frame is that it kind of takes the mental health and gives legal terms for it. It makes it possible to leverage that for structural change… The emotions side of climate work was a completely separate thing, and I didn’t know how to connect it to action that changes structures. To your point of dismissal of young people’s emotions– and wanting to protect them from so-called negative emotions, is coming from that oversentimentalization of youth. “They shouldn’t be going through bad things.” Let’s protect them from it even if it’s the truth. This reframing that she did, we need more of that, like you said, young people are the only ones making sense. These different forms of disavowal, confirmation bias, rationalization to make my life more comfortable. I get more into that habit, My neural pathways are trained to make my life more comfortable. What I love about young people is that their brains aren’t as ossified. Their brains are more plastic, though I hate that metaphor, but it’s what the neuroscientists call it. They don't have as much to lose. They don't have like the children and the jobs and the mortgage or whatever. They have a particular position. And so they are out there saying, "we want the change." They have a certain moral authority... they've always been the kind of moral consciousness of mainstream society. And that’s why I am attracted to being in university settings. What’s bubbling up with youth? Whether it’s around Gaza, or climate, or LA, so thank you for all your work with youth. Also, the waves of things like the pandemic coming through, how every year in college, the kids coming through experience it one year later. It’s so interesting to see how these waves play out.
I'd love to hear some connections you would make between what's happening with youth, with climate change, and what happened with the pandemic, because one of the things I think is so interesting... When I give talks and ask how people experience climate change in their daily lives, rarely, ever, almost never do I hear the answer: the pandemic, as an example of experiencing climate change. I’m just curious if there’s worthwhile parallels to be drawn there and lessons to be learned?
Kamenetz: To reverse engineer it when schools first shut down... in order to understand what the impact might be I looked at the research on events like Katrina, an earthquake in Pakistan, Ebola, even the Rwandan genocide and other events… The 2017 Maria in Puerto Rico. These are events that shut down schools. The kinds of events that shut down schools are these kinds of events. That gives you an opportunity to kind of look at what does a large-scale disruption means. There's toxic stress on caregivers. There is an interruption of schooling… which is an interruption of a path toward a future, this idea of what is my future, where am I going? Knitting young people into the fabric of schooling– we take it for granted here in the US for the most part we’ve had wide-spread formal schooling. But it takes time to instantiate that and it can be unraveled. If you think about countries, in the last 15-20 years, a majority of young people have completed school, that can get unraveled. So something we saw that we predicted was people leaving school early, young people egoing to work, young women going into early marriage. There was a spike in child marriage during the pandemic. And this is also things we see with climate disruptions and extreme weather, interruptions in climate change for high school graduation and college-going rates in Katrina that lasted for many years... An increase in young people who are neither in school nor working, so sort of disconnected/opportunity youth.
And in the US in the last few years, that has intersected in a worrisome way with the increase of migrants especially under Biden, that there are young people who didn’t get into schools. That came here when they were 13-14 and didn’t enroll in schools. They started working. There was huge absenteeism. The feeling of not being connected to school. And all these things that happened with the pandemic happen with extreme weather events. There were $24 billion disasters in the United States in 2023.
Ray; Oh my gosh.
Kamenetz: And so it’s a tornado in Missouri or flood in Kentucky, or fire in LA was closed. LA the largest school in the country, was closed. A little hit here and there. I saw a study done by the CDC... for high school students that had been through the most federally declared disasters... for the high school students who had been through the most federally declared disasters, and in some cases that was 2-3, there was a 30% increase in their reported mental health up to five years later. The way I see it , obviously something like a Katrina or Covid, everyone pays attention. But this is the slow slide that's going on, too, there’s having to relocate, or they split up, or their mental health... there's a case cascading developmental hits that happen every single time there's a climate event.
Ray: And even if you slow it down and make it even more microscopic... I don’t know if you are familiar with the work of Jisung Park and his book, Slow Burn. He collects all this huge, big data... mostly from CA and NY– some of the biggest school districts– and shows how a tiniest degree, couple degrees temperature change on a daily basis can decrease students’ performance, and then he measures out and tries to predict what that will cost the GDP. He’s an economist, so he is “how can I use my tool to get people to pay attention to this issue.” And that’s not stuff that causes big traumatic acute events, that is a chronic, low burn set of costs that are happening almost without people noticing them, at a school level too.
Kamenetz: It's dovetailing with the work of the environmental justice movement... Our school kids are exposed to pollutants, air pollution, noise… from industrial installations, harming their development.
The flip side of that, of course, is there is a burgeoning movement for child and climate, family-friendly cities.
Ray: Yeah. Tell us more about that.
Kamenetz: Well, so Capita has a good take on child development... it just turns out that a lot of the modifications to make cities better for kids also make them better for the climate. Because children are living things. So we’re talking about fewer cars. More walkable, green space, cleaner air.
Ray; Put the kids in charge, I say
Kamenetz: If it’s stroller friendly, kid-friendly. Access to nature has so many wonderful benefits. Kids just need outdoor play. That’s written into the regulation for early childhood in many states, that they need to be able to play outside. I worked on a piece that if it’s 100 degrees outside, that’s really hard to do.
Ray: Here I am in Arcata, California. If it gets over 70, my kids start to complain. I dread to think, we’re talking about 90s, 100s.
One of the things I love about your work is that you have this really powerful journalist's eye for connecting dots between things that maybe people wouldn't have thought were connected... So I’m thinking about things like sexuality and mental health or climate change, a really systems approach to thinking about these issues. What are some of the top things you think people ought to be connecting dots between that you’d like to bring attention to that people aren't really seeing?
Kamenetz: I guess I just have to acknowledge that the information environment that we're in is really, really tough. It feels overwhelming.
Ray: You don’t say.
Kamenetz: And that’s by design. It can become more legible if you think about who benefits in the interest of who is in charge and what lines are being pursued here. When I think about what’s happening right now, and I do a weekly roundup on substack, which helps me stay on top of what’s going on. For example there was a great report that just came out from Yessenia Funes in Atmos where she showed that 80% of anti-trans groups have taken fossil fuel money. The connection is that there’s a useful distraction on the right wing. They like having a culture war that distracts from what they’re actually doing. The more we’re polarized and divided, the harder it is to feel there’s international solidarity in the ways we need to have it.
Ray: Your Substack... it's called The Golden Hour... I’ll put it in the shownotes. You’re also very conscientious about how the news is overwhelming, and you really take a scalpel to figuring every single thing you put in your newsletter goes through that filter of, Am I overwhelming? How can I think about the mental health of my reader… when I’m writing this. A great awareness of what the news cycle is doing to us in terms of overwhelm, and how that might inhibit our ability to act or engage. So you’re very thoughtful about that.
Kamenetz: I’ve learned so much from people like you and in the climate emotions community about the need to titrate and toggle. Titrating: making sure we get the right dosage of reality lest we go crazy, and toggling- making sure we are making room for the things that bring us joy, to put things in the proper perspective. Because I don’t want us to feel we have to shut it all down and burned out, we need to keep showing up. I’m writing about this week, this metaphor about the sailors doing the duty watches. If you’re on, you're on, watching for danger, when you’re off, you need to rest.
Ray: Because when you’re on, if you haven’t rested you won’t do your job. I love that metaphor. And that requires knowing that you’re in company. That you don’t have to do all the watching all the time. The vigilance. The hypervigilance around the news cycle is fomented by the individualistic soil that we’re all growing in all the time, and so that helps to know, I’m in a team of people so when I’m sleeping, I can trust that the vigilance is still maintained.
Kamenetz: Thank you for that. Picking up on that, it’s also like, I know my lane, and I know that people I trust are in other lanes. I have friends who are LGBTQ rights people, criminal justice people, housing people, and so, that’s my vibe, I have a nerd posse. It’s really good– what should I be paying attention to? It’s not on me all the time on every single topic.
Ray: And among your friends, hypothetically sitting around having some tea, it’s not each one of you is saying to another, “you have to stop what you’re doing and care about what I’m doing.” Not this sense of Drop your thing so I have more people doing my thing. I think that’s one of the interesting things I’m thinking about multiissue politics and intersectionality, layers of different forms of oppression, has led us to believe mistakenly that we are supposed to connect all of the issues and work on all the issues all the time. And you’re saying I’m going to stay in my lane, trusting that other people are in their lanes, and just because they aren’t prioritizing my thing, that doesn’t mean they’re evil.
Kamenetz: That’s exactly right. We’re coming to a different understanding of this, after some difficult years, cancel culture.
Ray: This is a whole other episode, I’m thinking a lot about this too! Ginie Servant-Miklos has just written a book called Pedagogies of Collapse and has this term in there about “imperfect solidarities.” And I’m really hopped up on this now. I love what you’re saying. What we’ve just come through on the left on identity politics is calling for a reckoning.
Kamenetz: I’d say that an exciting development in the last 8 years in movements, is the advent of climate justice as a concept, and the work of people like Sunrise Movement, and it seems obvious now, but it wasn’t for a long time, to say that the liberation of black and brown people is part of climate. And climate doesn’t exist without it. They successfully created the venn diagram that was bigger than the sum of its parts. Simultaneously made climate vital, and also helped us understand how a climate future has to have a stance in regard to the centers of power, which rescued climate.
Ray: I love the idea of rescuing climate.
Kamentez: When I came up in the 90s, and I dimly remember, my friend’s dad went to Rio. A math professor, I have no idea how he ended up there. I remember him going. I was excited, and I was a kid who grew up loving the rainforest.
Ray: You’re talking about the first Rio Climate Summit of 1992.
Kamenetz: Climate and biodiversity and saving the Amazon. I had given my birthday money to save an acre in Belize. I was a vegetarian because my dad’s friend Buddhist hippie gave me a book Diet for a Small Planet. I was into it. But that kind of environmentalism stayed so so white and so marginal. That’s your funny little hobby.
Ray: Boutique.
Kamenetz: then I was a sustainable business reporter when that was like “microsoft will fix it,” these large companies will fix it. And it will be financialized by cap and trade and we will fix it. And carbon credits. And beautiful amazing technologies. Good things came out of that. We did have an energy revolution with batteries and solar panels particularly from China. But surprise surprise, capitalism didn’t fix the problems capitalism created.
Ray: And young people did bring the climate justice movement into being, you mentioned the Sunrise Movement. That they brought it together– EJ movement was over here, and the climate movement was over here, and the twain should never meet, until young people brought them together. But still, where are the solidarity lines around all these different issues. Do you have to have people in the climate movement agree on what’s happening in Gaza in order to work together. How are these messy coalitions going to keep working. And we do need to revisit this question on the left. I’m glad we are going down this path, but it’s a whole other podcast.
I do have some thoughts about this and I imagine you’re writing about it in your next book, which I will get to a question about that. You’ve been really active in producing a lot of resources for the Climate Mental Health Network. We’ve interviewed Jyoti Mishra, Sarah Newman, and others; I would love you to tell us more about the Climate Emotions Wheel, which you mentioned earlier, what is it, what is it for, and what about the eco-grief resources too? Geek out on why you did those things.
Kamenetz: I love collaborating with Sarah and the network she’s built and a chance to create these interventions. The Climate Emotions Wheel was an idea I had- I knew about the emotions wheel. There’s a tool people use to name emotions, and they’re used by young people in social-emotional learning.
Ray: Isn't that interesting that SEL doesn’t talk about climate?
Kamenetz: Well, not yet. It’s starting to change. There should be a Climate Emotions Wheel. I found Panu’s paper and I reached out to him and he was fully game to collaborate with us. Together we decided which 27 emotions should be on the wheel. There are four quadrants: joy, fear, sadness and anger, and gradations. What’s been so beautiful Sarah is watching people use it as they will. It’s been used in classrooms, teaccher trainings, textbooks, clinicians, research as a basis for qualitiative/quantivate research, how do people name climate emotions. I created with an eco-arts therapist named Maura Kesha, we created a mandala workshop, which we’ll do this week in NYC where we have people paint in their own emotions into the blank circle. It’s been tremendous to see, it’s humbling how an image can transform. In a conversation, without making an argument. It doesn’t make an argument. It’s for you to do with as you will.
Ray: I love that you’re bringing art together. The wheel has been translated into 30 languages. I think there’s some value in (and I was talking with Leslie Davenport) in having granularity around these emotions, and acknowledging that the environment affects our emotional state. At least from a settler, western capitalist perspective that I was raised in– the idea that emotions would have anything to do with the environment.
I love your types of eco-grief with Panu Pihkala– I’ll put in the shownotes– but these graphics, which you can’t hear, around the different types of grief. Different types of ecological sorrow: disenfranchised grief, ambiguous loss, nonfinite loss, tangible loss, transitional grief, anticipatory grief, shattered assumptions, lifeworld loss, others. How did you come up with these categories. Which ones are your favorites, which ones do you feel?
Kamenetz: This is all Panu’s work, and we were just involved in breaking it down in ways that feel accessible. Our culture is bad at grief full stop. We’re bad at it. We don’t want to talk about it. We had Kuebler-Ross, created the five stages. Ok we’re done. If somebody dies, and two months later, you’re still sad, that’s considered pathological. Even in the mental health space, so what’s happened that’s beautiful, the more you have vocabulary for feelings, it gives you permission you can bring them out into the open and process them. Panu’s borrowed from literature on different kinds of loss. An example I find evocative– disenfranchised grief, an example is a miscarriage. Because if you didn’t tell people you were pregnant, and then you lose it, people don’t know so it’s not visible. There’s no vocabulary. There’s no space for that.
Ray: It can’t be collectively processed.
Kamenetz: Another example: If you’re having an extramarital affair, and your partner dies, you don’t get hnored as the widow, can’t go to the funeral. So that’s disenfranchised grief. Ambiguous loss is like it’s gone but it’s not, or you don’t know if it’s coming back. The decay of our ecologies, like I don’t know if I’m going to ski with my family next year. Yes, no. It’s not totally gone, but it’s a little gone. Nonfinite loss– it’s tapering off, not completely gone. So you continue to revisit that sorrow. Intangible: the loss of the enjoyment of going to the beach because now it’s too hot for us. So I can’t enjoy it. All these little nameless things that prick us. IF we had the space for them, we’d be able to process, mourn collectively. We have so many ways in our culture, arts, creativity, spirituality, we have so many ways to process loss. If we only showed it.
Ray: And bringing the environmental or climate into those spaces– you don’t have to invent new ones. I love these graphics. This ties into what you were saying about not being able to face something if we over-sentimentalize it, because the grief is so overwhelming. If we don’t have capacity for it, we may not do the interventions to prevent something further. Which is really the climate story. Tell us about your next book, with Bloomsbury, congratulations, it’s going to be called Falling in Love with the World Again. What’s it about and what’s the burning thing in you that wants to get this out?
Kamenetz: My basic thing is discovering that almost everyone feels something really intense in relations to the world right now. The losses to the ecosystem, democracy, world is unpredictable, avalanche of the news, and the pressure to pretend it’s normal, to keep going. It’s so profoundly alienating and disturbing. And over the last few years my life has been transformed as I find spaces to be able to articulate these feelings that are happening, to find the others, to come into a way of being that is more fluid and flexible and able to move through these feelings. I found that without exception, when you feel them, they start to transform.
I’ve been influenced by Joanna Macy’s work. 50 years ago she created The Work That Reconnects; a vocabulary of behavioral comomunal exercises what she describes as a spiral: grounding in gratitude, honoring our pain for the world, seeing with new eyes, and moving forward into action. She worked with people all over the world, Chernobyl, affected by genocide, and she found again and again that these are the types of ways of processing emotions that work and that enable you to keep going. The wheel is a little bit of a tribute to the spiral in the sense that wheels turn and spirals turn, and so you know that you're going to be able to move. Seeing that you have options. Wheels and spirals turn. You can move. If you see what is there, you have a map, you have options, you don’t have to get stuck, or afraid of going there, because where it leads you will be better place in the future.
Ray: It reminds me of her Buddhist influences nothing is permanent.
Kamenetz: My father went through a buddhist phase or awakening and I was introduced to those ideas at a young age, and yoga, and there are lots of threads in my life that have been leading to this place. But at a basic level, if we were able to acknowledge that we’re feeling because the world is the way it is, we would feel better, and maybe we’d do more things about it, because we wouldn’t be trying to avoid it.
Ray: We spend a lot of energy trying to avoid it, rather than just doing something about it.
Kamenetz: Exactly. There’s been so much work in the culture around mental health and wellness, and developing hygiene, SEL, trauma, even the worst secrets of people’s past, we’re not afraid to talk about it, but we are afraid to talk about the world is on fire.
Ray: What is missing in the conversation so far about how to cope with climate change? You’d like to add– we need to think about it this way.
Kamenetz: I do think that there's pingponging between we need to be optimistic vs. doom. I wrote about this, and we were pinned to the 1.5 degrees, 12 years to save the world, from IPCC report, and we past that, so figuring out what the message is now is really important. I see conversations about climate communications where it's like people talking amongst themselves about how to talk to an imaginary wider world, rather than like saying the things that are just true. And dealing with the fallout of that.
Ray: Can you give me an example?
Kamenetz: Just the whole idea that you need to give people hope.
Ray: So everything has to be put through that machine of hope.
Kamenetz: You have to hone your message, or people say you can’t use science or people don’t get converted by data or facts. But we’re all here because we saw data or graphs. Why do you think that actually?
Ray: All the kind of backlash against climate communication that says it can’t be doom and gloom or the information deficit myth, that reason sways people, that people will be overwhelmed and despairing and won’t persuade people on the other side. All that stuff, you're saying put all that aside and go back to what we were doing?
Kamenetz: No, I’m humble in saying nobody has it figured out. There’s something very freeing about that. I think what’s leading me to emotions– what connects climate emotions to climate action– when I look at people like children and deeply committed people and oftentimes indigenous people, they have a worldview that takes connection for granted. Out of a point of view that takes connection for granted, you take actions that protect that. Why wouldn’t I protect my mother? You don't have to convince people to act when they believe that? How do we create communities and experiences for people that surround them with that feeling of belonging and certainty and love?
Ray: I think that's the question. Beautiful. I just want to let that question linger as we wrap. And I would say that's a way more inviting question than how are you going to fix this dreadful problem. Thank you for that. I always love an argument that ends on love. And the focus you have that we have swayed from to children and caregivers and teachers; I look forward to continuing that conversation with you.
Kamenetz: Thank you. Really appreciate it.
Ray: You've just been listening to my conversation with Anya Kamenetz, author of many books, including one forthcoming called Falling in Love with the World Again. You can find show notes for this interview as well as more episodes of climate magic at khsu.org. I’m Sarah Jaquette Ray, and thanks for listening to Climate Magic.
