Most of us are trying to avoid how awful it feels to live in an era of extraction and destruction by disassociating, denying, and carrying on with the urgent matters of daily life. Lingering in the background is often this haunting question, What can I do? Without a map to help us answer this question for ourselves, many of us just give up and hope someone else will figure it out. Sound familiar?
There is perhaps nobody who has thought more about the question, “what can I do?” than my guest in this episode of Climate Magic, best-selling author and heart-centered strategist Dr. Katharine Wilkinson. Her books include the bestselling anthology All We Can Save, the New York Times bestseller Drawdown, and Between God & Green. She has a new book coming out soon, Climate Wayfinding. Katharine helps us figure out how to water the seeds of our inner compassionate warrior spirit, hold out our hands to invite people in, think of our climate work as an oak tree thinks of dropping acorns, and find our way in the labyrinth of climate pathways.
Shownotes
- Climate Wayfinding program
- Climate Wayfinding book
- All We Can Save project
- All We Can Save book
- Katharine’s website
- Plum Village
- Project Drawdown
- Drawdown, the book
- Between God & Green book
- Britt Wray’s Unthinkable project and resources, website
- Yale Center for Climate Communication surveys and data on people’s beliefs about climate change, here
- (not mentioned, but relevant) the 89% Project
- Koan definition
- “Pluralistic ignorance” (not mentioned as such, but this is the phenomenon described where we do less if we think others don’t agree with us)
- My substack essay on “Unnaming Climate” apropos of our conversation on this topic in the interview
- Bill McKibben piece about renewable energy as freedom
- Nature Climate Change article on messaging conservatives about climate change through their daughters
- Fabulous episode on the International Court of Justice’s ruling on climate justice from Outrage + Optimism, an interview with one of the youth law students from Vanuatu
- Brief description of Julia Cameron’s practice “Morning Pages” from The Artist’s Way
Katharine’s Time Magazine articles
Transcription
Wilkinson: The question is, can we tend that possibility in ourselves and in each other? This sort of light up the ecosystem that I think really does want to try to bring humanity into alignment with the rest of life.
Ray: Welcome to Climate Magic, where we explore the emotional life of climate politics. I'm your host, Doctor Sarah Jaquette Ray, chair of the environmental studies department at Cal Poly Humboldt.
As you may know already, the spirit of this show, Climate Magic, is to try to help the 89% of us humans on this planet who care about the climate crisis, but don't quite know what to do about it or how to engage it.
As my guest today notes, only 8% of these folks say in surveys that they do any kind of climate action. Most of the rest of us are trying to figure out how to avoid these awful feelings by disassociating, avoiding, and carrying on with the urgent matters of daily life. But often lingering in the background is this haunting question, what can I do?
And without a map to help each of us answer this question for ourselves, many of us just give up and hope someone else will figure it out.
Sound familiar? There is probably nobody who has thought more about this question, what can I do?, than my guest today, Dr. Katharine Wilkinson. Katharine has dedicated the last chunk of her life to creating a map for figuring out how to know what is uniquely each of ours to do.
Our conversation is about her journey from being a big seeker and feeler as a kid growing up in Atlanta, to pursuing big questions as a religious studies major in college, to doing climate work for a while with Project Drawdown, to burning out, to turning toward practices of the heart, of the soul, of the spirit, of the earth, of relationships and community, for sustaining her own climate action and inspiring others to do so too.
This journey takes us through her leadership of Project Drawdown to her work on the All We Can Save project and bestselling anthology of women's climate voices by the same name, to her current project, Climate Wayfinding, which is a training and a book and a community of educators and leaders, which I got to participate in last year and had a great time.
We talk about the role of compassion, of resourcing ourselves, and of not being attached to the outcomes of our efforts, as a kind of compass for this question, what can I do?
Katharine is an author, a strategist, a teacher, and one of 15 Women Who Will Save the World, according to Time magazine. She is co-founder and executive director of the All We Can Save project, creator of All We Can Save Circles and Climate wayfinding, and co-host of the popular podcast with doctor Leah Stokes called A Matter of Degrees. Her books on climate include the bestselling anthology All We Can Save, co-edited with Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, The Drawdown Review, the New York Times bestseller Drawdown, and Between God and Green, which we talk about quite a bit in this episode. She has a new book coming out soon on climate wayfinding.
Previously, Dr. Wilkinson was a principal writer and editor in chief at Project Drawdown. She facilitates and speaks internationally, including a Ted talk on climate and gender equality that has more than 2 million views.
Doctor Wilkinson holds a doctorate in geography and environment from Oxford and a religion B.A. from Suwanee. Are you ready to enter into transcendent space and time with me and my guest, Katharine Wilkinson? Let's dive in.
Wilkinson: I loved the idea of magic because I think we're going to need something operating on another dimension, right? Like, I mean, let's just be real.
Ray: Let's be real. And I was going to actually start with a question about – we both have religious studies bachelor's degrees.
Wilkinson: You know, if we've ever shared the youngies looking for a way you could ask the big questions,
Ray: what's your life? How do all these people find meaning? Why don't we just all die so early. Yeah I guess I mean, the magic part that you just said, which is so beautiful, kind of helps me start with that question. You know, what's why? What were you doing in religious studies degree and draw the connection there with what you're doing now.
Wilkinson: Yeah. It is. This is so fun. I love thinking of about those days. Yeah. I went to college thinking that I was going to do literature because I love literature, and I really loved a high school English teacher, and environmental studies that I thought I was going to sort of weave the humanities and environment in, in that way. And then I took an intro to religion class that was fantastic. And that professor said, you really should take a class with this other professor. And then I took that class and it was fantastic. And meanwhile, I took some sort of mediocre Shakespeare classes, and I just kind of got sucked into this really wonderful interdisciplinary department, small department.
I was at a small liberal arts college, and I was like, oh God, this is where we get to “God”. Or “not, God”, as the case may be. You know, this. Is where we really get to talk about the big stuff. This is where we get to engage the big stuff. And far from giving up literature, that was there, but so was anthropology and so was history, and so was philosophy.
And all of these kind of wonderful disciplines coming together.
And in that department at the time, there were, many of the professors were thinking in some way or another about the nexus of religion and social change or social problems. So, and there were at least two professors at the time who were kind of cross-listed with environmental studies. And so it felt, yeah it felt like the place to probe more deeply, like what's the role of values and beliefs and the stories that we tell and the paradigms we hold collectively, and what those mean for how we relate to this planet and one another?
And I would say in a lot of ways, that continues to be the throughline of my work.And I, I've been thinking about it recently as like maybe more the applied environmental humanities is maybe now something that I'm doing. Because I think we all need spaces for holding those big questions. And those spaces are, frankly, very hard to come by in this, in this life. And they are only increasingly needed as the world seems to get increasingly difficult.
Ray: Yeah. I thought of my religious studies degree as something from the past that I, that I was a little embarrassed that I did that it was sort of navel gazing of me to think I was going to go and be like sitting in a monastery somewhere or something. I was so I was into Taoism and Buddhism and stuff, and I was like, oh yes, this is what it's all about. And I, for some reason got this memo that religious studies or the spiritual life was not about social change and social problems.
Wilkinson: Oh, interesting.
Ray: And so it has come full circle now for me. So that's a my thread of that is like, oh, it's full circle. Now I get that we have to transform ourselves to transform the world, as Grace Lee Boggs would put it. And I get that much better now.
And you just beautifully described it, and it feels like home to listen to you say that. So thank you.
Wilkinson: Well, dang, I wish those professors of yours had done a better job on that front. That would have been really delicious.
Ray: They probably did do a great job. I was just not ready for it. I don't want to blame them. You know, it's…
Wilkinson: Really interesting, to be talking about this and monasteries because I just spent last week at Plum Village. So I've been thinking again…
Ray: What's that? What's Plum Village?
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.
Ray : Yeah, I love it. I think there's a the capacity for spirituality to be both/and– both an isolated, solitary thing that you need to pull away from society to go get clarity, and also the space where you can figure out where that intervention, when you come back, what it might be. That of course presumes a kind of individualistic model of the self that I understand has some problems to it. But I am swimming in that water. That's the water I know. So, you know, I'm trying to build the better thing from the water I’m in. You know, that works for me. The both/and model. Totally. I remember being puzzled by reading about Thoreau and thinking in Thoreau. Went to the woods, right. And he escaped. And there's that kind of pastoral retreat motif, speaking of literature and environment, of escaping society into nature, because society is so upsetting.
Wilkinson: I mean, it is.
Ray: It is upsetting. No denying, no denying. But the idea that one would do a retreat in order to come back with more clarity, wisdom, motivation, energy, vision. Yeah. I think I'd like to hold on to that. That truth too.
Wilkinson: Totally. I mean, I think that, you know, I'm at my home in Atlanta, Georgia, which is also where I grew up. And of course, this was the home of Martin Luther King Jr. And so there is something, I think, for me also about growing up here and being so cognizant of the role of the black church and the civil rights movement, right, that there like really would not have been a civil rights movement were it not for the infrastructure of the black church, which has organizing components and communication components, but also healing components and ethical components and how do we tap into some deeper well of spirit to try to continue through these unthinkable conditions? And, and places like the Highlander Folk School. That's where Rosa Parks was on retreat before the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
And so I think there is this really important interplay between when we pull back from the fray to cultivate those deeper sources of courage and compassion and vision. And then, you know, we think more about the visible direct action, etc. moments of, of social change. But both of these pieces are so, I think, critically and intrinsically related.
Ray: And Plum Village and you've just been there so, so you yourself are tapping that kind of thing a little bit now too, which is so beautiful. Would you say that you, would you say that's happening with you? How would you describe the courage, vision, clarity, whatever that you are coming back from that with?
Wilkinson: So when we arrived, there were 200 or so folks. And we also were split into what they call sharing circles and our, our little sharing circle, our family, it was the “understanding” family, which is a pretty nice family to be in for a week. The first question that we all responded to as we arrived there was, what are you thirsty for? And, and I sat with that question for a minute, as other people answered and sort of let it percolate. 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.
And I think I also, there were things that happened on that retreat, sort of outside of the level of the mind, right? Somewhere deeper in, in the body. That just left me feeling like, deeply reconnected to the vibrancy of life. And healed and, in some ways, you know, sitting meditation, walking meditation, some other beautiful kind of ritual elements that we did together and just being held in this really loving way, that I think is actually really rare in this work, that we are not often sort of just swept into the arms of community and care simply because we are who we are. Right?
Ray: Yeah. Thank you. Wow, I love that you are really touching on a really big two threads there that I really want to just underscore. One is this one of trying to use that space away or that you can call it retreat, refuge, solace, whatever, whatever you want to call it. And it can happen in any way, shape or form in someone's life, to cultivate that compassion and to, sort of transform fear into compassion, which I think is a beautiful way to think about it.
And I feel that way every single time I walk into a classroom with my students, frankly, like, I can't hate these students, right? It's not going to work, you know? And I think that their inherent nature is greedy and deluded and has ill will or whatever, I'm not going to teach them, you know, and this sort of practice for me, that I had to do a lot of retreats for, to develop, so that point is to walk in every single day before I walk in, I take a deep breath and say compassion and I it completely shifts everything in my body about teaching. So I, I love that you underscored that because that has become really critical practice for me to keep showing up for the work I'm doing.
And the second thing is this oak tree metaphor. I just love it because I was just trying to explain to my students yesterday about what it would feel like to not be attached to the outcomes of our actions, and it was just mind blowing. I was like, I need to see evidence. I need to see evidence. I mean, it is not just a nonprofit world. It is capitalist, human nature, the way we're all, you know, our cells are telling us where is the evidence that this is working, or else it's not a good use of my time. So I love that invitation for listeners to imagine what it would feel like to not be attached to the outcome and not be so tight about outcomes. Because we're not going to see these outcomes. You know, we're not going to see the outcome in our lifetime. And we still have to do the work.
So we have to find some other motivation for it.
Wilkinson: Totally. And there's so much right? There's so much that is needed and that is worthwhile doing. And so I think that like, we can give ourselves a little bit of a break because it's like, there's far more that's worthwhile than we could ever entertain in an entire lifetime. So, yeah.
Ray: Along those lines, you're also inviting us to think about a lot of the work that's doable, that's not really visible and doesn't really get the credit for being, you know, essential to getting the job done. And that's really where I think a lot of what you do is all about. And so I wanted to lay the groundwork for some for what sort of thematically– your why, if you will– I'll say it this way, most people think of solutions to climate change as technological, maybe political, certainly scientific, and sometimes just about individual behavior change. And you've worked for Project Drawdown for a while, which of course is a repository of these solutions. And I'll put that link in the show notes because it's all on their website. But you've really shifted to doing work that's much more, as you just described, about stories about oak trees and news hearts, minds, bodies, that relationship that you just described, that visceral relationship of connection to the earth, this now feels to me like being more in touch with your why and this invisible work that doesn't get a lot of attention. And that's really what this with the show is about too.
I would love to hear you share a bit about your shift from the kind of more tangible stuff about getting emissions out of the atmosphere to this other thing that you're doing, why do we need this other stuff?
Wilkinson: It's funny, I think in so many ways, what I'm doing now is, is where I was when I kind of had my ecological disaster awakening, when I was in high school. And the realities of what it meant to work in that space, you know, it was like, well, you could go to law school and you could be an environmental lawyer. You could go, you know, you could be a lobbyist for a big green organization. Or you could… You know, it was like, huh, Okay. Interesting. And I'd actually I did my PhD research looking at the nexus of American evangelical Christianity and climate change, and through the kind of focus on discourse and narrative. And, of course, in that I was sort of sitting on the sidelines, observing and analyzing and explaining what I saw happening.
And I published that work as a book, an academic book, called Between God and Green. And when I finished that, I was like, I don't want to study this. I want to do this. Like, I don't want to study the shaping of public narrative. I want to be part of that. I don't want to be, you know, observing how people are finding their place within this bigger collective story, like I want to be in the doing of it.
And then I encountered Project Drawdown. And as you say, Sarah, it is an amazing resource for what is in the world's toolbox when it comes to climate solutions, meaning, technologies and practices that we can use to get a handle on these greenhouse gas emissions that are causing quite a ruckus for us. But what drew me to that work was less the details of, you know, there were amazing researchers doing the math on, you know, if we scale solar panels vigorously but plausibly between now and the middle of the century, like, how many emissions could that, you know, like, great, let's do that math.
But I was interested in when you start to tell a story about all of these different solutions, like what is that story? And to me, it is a story of possibility that we are in this sort of as Britt Wray says, this unthinkable situation. And yet there are reasons to think that there's possibility ahead and not just catastrophe ahead. And the thing that gets me kind of motivated every day is that I think we are each a node of that possibility no matter who we are and no matter what we have to give. And the question is, can we tend that possibility in ourselves and in each other to sort of light up the you know, light up the ecosystem that I think really does want to try to bring humanity into alignment with the rest of life.
And will we be successful? I don't know, but I can't really think of anything more worth doing while we're in these bodies.
Ray: Yeah. That connects to your last answer about the oak tree too, right? Well we're just doing what an oak tree does, you know, but you cited in your, in your, intro to the book that's coming out, which we'll talk about in a minute, that 89% of people around the world want more climate action from their governments, but that most of these people are “concerned but largely quiet spectators,” which you just mentioned. This is a problem of participation and why you think that so. And how do we get like, what is your big magic about getting them from not participation to participation? What is like what are the steps there? I don't even know if I'm participating. I mean, how would I know?
Wilkinson: I'm pretty sure. I'm don't are you are I mean, I don't have any kind of like, thermometer for it, but my gut says yes.
Ray: But like, how do you even know? Right? How does the person know I'm doing it or I'm not doing it? And how much of it is really about the way the world is framing their lack of impact? Even people who are doing a ton of stuff often feel they're not participating enough. Right? So there's a sort of like, how would you even know you're doing it?
And how would, how would we measure that? In emissions reductions? In people feel empowered? In that 89% catching up to the people who are participating, not spectators?
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.
Ray: You're I'm wanting to draw connection between something you were saying earlier about your confession with your, you know, Plum Village retreat. We just. I don't really think I'm. I'm carrying the heaviness of people's greed and ill will and delusion, as the Buddhists call the three poisons. Right. And this last thing you said about, you know, the koan of not being enough and just accepting that, and I think there's something beautiful. And you do talk about this a little bit in your book, where your new book that's coming out, which we'll get to in a moment. And where you talk about if we assume that the classroom I'm walking into is hostile, if we assume that the students that I'm working with or this group I'm facilitating or everybody around me, even if I'm not doing any of those things, is not interested in this or not taking action in this, or would be unwilling, or we would even, like, throw rotten fruit at me if I did it. We are much less likely to do it. And so that there's something and I, there's some connection there between and making assumptions about other what other people's intentions and natures are. And that sense of loneliness and smallness in “I'm the only one. Of course I'll never be enough.” I'm wondering if you want to sort of flesh out that connection a little bit too, or if you have some thoughts about that. Yeah.
Wilkinson: Yeah. I feel very strongly that it's extremely important not to go it alone. When it comes to the climate crisis, As really with any, any crisis we might face at whatever level of intimacy. And so I think part of it is, yeah. If you feel small and alone, find, find some people. Find some others.
Ray: Yeah. But also perceive others differently.
Wilkinson: Perceive others differently. And I think that, you know, I think. I think a few different things on this. So one is if we only go looking for people who align perfectly with all the things we already think and believe and hold as true and right and good, it's very hard to find compatriots.
It's very hard to find what my late Congressman John Lewis called partners in good trouble. And again, I think we need to be discerning about who we can be in generative relationship and partnership with. But I think getting uncomfortable, right? Getting to the edge of the zone that feels like a clubhouse, right. And might feel more expansive than that.
And, and I think it's also where holding this idea that the store consciousness idea of these seeds, right? That's like, well, if you're not just Sarah, how Sarah is going to be forever and always because you are Sarah, but you are Sarah, who has been intentionally watering certain seeds, and sometimes other ones come up and they may be a little bit more challenging, but it's like it's more about gardening together than it is about these perfectly rigid zones of absolute agreement, which is a challenge for me. I'm an Enneagram 1. So I really like the sort of clear rightness. This is in integrity. And, you know, it's something I've really had to work on and still continue to work on.
Ray: It's always around us right now, though. I mean, yeah, this particular koan, if you will, of is this a solidarity that is worthwhile or not? Is ever-challenging and also, is there dynamism and change possible here? Like you said, we're gardening together. We're not just static selves in these situations. And I'm making a compromise to work with you around some of my morals, so that some other of my morals can be okay. You know, I mean, this kind of calculated thing, is really, I feel like we're being asked to think about that all the time. So it is, I think, a skill of the moment that you're, you're pointing to.
I almost wonder along those lines of how we connect and find our people without being too rigid and having expansion around that, pushing the envelope on that. I kind of want to ask a weird question. And then this is my big, my last big, big weird question. And then I will let you do some, like, what have you written and what are you writing and promote that stuff. So this but this is something I've been chewing on for some time and, I'm just curious what Katharine Wilkinson has to say about this. So I was going to ask a question about your book, Between God and Green, and I'm just kind of putting a pin on it there.
Maybe that comes up into this question about, thinking about imperfect solidarities across peoples who we want a garden with, but we're not sure, given how much of our solutions to climate change are about equity, about holding the fossil fuel industry accountable, about building in a resilience, about leveraging moral injury, finding courage, building community, and also because climate change has become so politicized and therefore, you know, Republicans overwhelmingly refute it, although there are pockets, obviously, of exceptions there.
I'm wondering what you think about giving up on the frame of climate change as an unnecessary barrier to this solidarity and inviting people in? Would a different frame, like morality, which maybe you bring up in Between God and Green? Would some other frame be more bipartisan or more inviting? I am just sort of curious. I've been playing around with this idea of how the word climate is getting censored, right? It's getting canceled, and also around who feels climate anxiety when a lot of those people are in red states or are from identities or communities that are very right wing, and how the climate frame makes it difficult for them to do some of this organizing, much less inner work. Yeah, yeah. And I'm just sort of curious, is the frame climate useful right now. I’m just curious what you think about this, I mean you're very, yeah. You're on top of these things and he was thinking so much and I just, I just feel like you have some wisdom, not to put any pressure on you or anything.
Wilkinson: Now I think it's really I think it's a great question. So I'm thinking back to actually when I finished the writing of that book Between God and Green, which of course, because it was an academic book, the writing ended way before the book actually came out. But that was a very live question in the leadership of what at the time was this sort of burgeoning climate movement within the evangelical community that now, I think, in large part doesn't exist anymore.
And, that was part of the challenge, right? I was doing that research in 2007, 2008 into 2009, and even then the partisanship around the topic was really up, right. An Inconvenient Truth had already come out. Al Gore was perceived as being, you know, the big voice for this, certainly in the U.S. and so I found, like, I would do these focus groups in churches and, and people would say like, yes, I absolutely think we're called to care for God's creation.
And I care about energy efficiency. And I care, you know. And also, I'm not in. And I think that's only become a deeper, a deeper challenge.
And, you know, it's fascinating to me. Well, just to conclude that thought. So there was kind of a debate between these, these leaders at the time of like, look, this is the big challenge and we need to stay focused on this.
And we've got to, you know, get to Washington, DC and try to get some things done in terms of policy. And others were saying, we need to go headlong into seminaries and churches, around like a more kind of like a less politicized creation care conversation and really cultivate that paradigm and those values.
Ray: Wow, I love the way you're framing that. I hadn't ever thought of it that way. Just carry on. Sorry.
Wilkinson: Yeah. So, it was interesting that like, in the context of that book, as I wrapped it up, it was like TBD, you know, what they're going to decide to do. And I think what's frustrating, right, is that in so many ways, whatever language we come up with for whatever you want to call getting into right relationship with Earth, the right will weaponize it. Right? So being an environmentalist became a problem. So I'm like, we could try, you know, we could try some other language. And, and I think it's probably, I think it's probably worth it. Right. Like, like land conservation, for example, I think tends to be an easier bipartisan space where you have, like outdoorsmen and hunters who are, you know. Like they're like, yeah, cool. I can jive with that.
But it's so interesting here, here in Georgia, after the Inflation Reduction Act, may, may at rest in peace was passed. Georgia, our Republican governor, went headlong into tax credits and we became the number one state in the country for new clean energy jobs. And most of those jobs were in red districts, red congressional districts that had lost manufacturing, you know, whatever the case might have been. And so they were building batteries and electric school buses. The biggest solar manufacturing plant in the Western Hemisphere is in Marjorie Taylor Green's district.
And I think there's, and Bill McKibben talks about this, but I think there's a huge opportunity to think about renewable energy as freedom. Right.
Ray: That's the frame there.
Wilkinson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think, I do think that there is this deeper connection to place that we're often not very good at talking about, the pain of potentially losing the places we call home. Right? Or where we feel most connected, most alive, which, of course, climate change is threatening by the day. I think some of those things have real potential to come further forward. And I think there are ways to think about, for example, the accountability that absolutely needs to happen, with the fossil fuel industry and other players that have reaped enormous profits from knowingly fostering and fanning the flames of this problem.
And is there a way we can see that accountability is actually, in some way, a form of compassion that I think it doesn't feel good to be a destroyer of your home? And maybe there's a way to approach that that is with an appropriate kind of warrior spirit, but also with a compassion of, it's better for all of us, actually, if we move forward and in this way, and we leave some of these, these industries that had or had a role to play and human society in some way, and now they need to go. Yeah.
Ray: You quote Andrea Gibson in your book about, she writes, the now late poet. “Why are the keys to our future in the hands of those who have the longest commutes from their heads to their hearts?” Yeah. And so what you just said, right?
.
Wilkinson: You know, you know, it makes me think, Sarah, about that wonderful study from some years ago. Now about basically, you know, everyone's like, who are the right messengers? You know, who are the messengers who can get to these guys and. And the study, the study was like, we'll tell you if you want to get a message to
Conservative men, the right messengers are their daughters. And it makes sense, right, that it's like somehow that relationship is an invitation to go more into a heart space than a head space. Like if all we do is try to beat within the prefrontal cortex, like we can just go around and around and around. And so.
Ray: Yeah, so much about your sense of identity– in order to be if I identify as a good dad, I'm going to budge on climate. That identity threat of being a good dad is more important to me than the identity threat of what happens when I embrace climate a little bit, that doesn't feel good, but it's less awful than being a bad dad. It's right, at some these things are about our sense of ourselves and when we're making these calculations, so to speak, I don't really want to use that word, but kind of cognitive decisions every day in our lives, you know, which thing is less painful, which path is less painful? Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Yeah. And then and again, it points to the need for awareness of both the science and the wisdom of what's happening, our minds and our hearts to move the lever on this stuff, to move the participation lever, as you put it.
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.
Ray: That story is lifted my soul in the middle of the summer. I will definitely put that in the show notes and there's a wonderful podcast interview with Christiana Figueres and one of the women who kind of led the team on this, the young, the young student. That is just absolutely a balm in this moment. So I will put that in the show notes because it is so great.
And thank you for reminding me about the story and emotion and the human side that got that to happen. Yeah, yeah. That’s powerful, powerful medicine right there. Katharine. Yeah, thank you for that. I don't even remember what we were talking about to get there, but do you want to share anything else and tell us about your new book coming out? And, and you can take as long as you'd like with that, because I'm sure it was the product of a lot of thinking about your own role as a node in all of this.
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.
And the book will be out May 5th, 2026.
Ray: Thank you so much, Katharine. It has been so delightful talking to you. I can't believe that an hour plus has passed here. Where did it go? Such a pleasure.
Wilkinson: Sarah. This just. Was. An absolute delight. Thank you for having me.
Ray: You've just been listening to my conversation with Dr. Katharine Wilkinson, coeditor of All We Can Save, and creator of the Climate Wayfinding project. You can find show notes for this episode and listen to this and other episodes of Climate Magic on KHSU.org. I'm Sarah Jaquette Ray. And thanks for listening to Climate Magic.
