image credit | Jessica Harper

Season 5, Episode 3: The Pathway from Eco-Anxiety to Thriving

Thomas and Panu discussed Thomas's new book, Surviving Climate Anxiety and its messages about coping with climate change by focusing on happiness and thriving. Thomas offered an inside view of the book and how it would benefit readers. He shared insights from his psychology background and emphasized the importance of understanding our emotions and identities. Panu and Thomas also talked about using storytelling to connect with readers and how personal stories can help us understand and tackle climate-related challenges. Join us for a thoughtful conversation about finding hope in difficult times.

Links

• Surviving Climate Anxiety Book 

• Thomas Doherty on CBS News

• Book Excerpt on Oprah Daily: 3 Surprisingly Effective Ways to Combat Climate Anxiety

• Daphne Chouliaraki Milner How to Live With Climate Change Without Burning Out. Atmos

Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

Introduction voice: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness (CC&H), an international podcast that explores the personal side of climate change. Your feelings, what the crisis means to you, and how to cope and thrive. And now, your hosts, Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala

Doherty: Well hello, I'm Thomas Doherty.

Pihkala: I am Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. This is our podcast, a show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change and other world issues and environmental issues and social issues and political issues and our personal lives. We asked this kind of provocative question about, what would it mean to be happy in the modern world?

Pihkala: Yes, and today we are starting a conversation on Thomas's new book. We have been mentioning that several times in the podcast episodes, but now it's actually coming out in October 2025 with the title Surviving Climate Anxiety, a Guide to Coping, Healing and Thriving.

I'm happy to have a paper copy of the galley, sort of the pre-version in my hands here in Finland and I got the electronic version slightly before. So in the cover, at least of this version, there's a green mountain and a human being on top of it raising their arms and hands to the air as I made it. So does that resonate with some of your feelings after the long arduous work of finishing the book?

Doherty: Thanks, Panu. I really appreciate that. You know, I hadn't thought about that interpretation of the cover, so I'm looking at it right now. And yes, that's that is that is that that's a true that's a good example of a feeling of a climate feeling that I inhabit a little bit, making it making it to the top.

It really, you know, it's also a we made it to the top because someone designed or created that image and suggested that image. So I am aware that behind the scenes, there was like a conversation even about the cover itself and the colors and the and the design, you know. But I do love the cover of the book.

And it was part of the mission of the book to be accessible and to bring some energy of calmness and lightness to these heavy topics. And so I think the art design of the cover is very successful in that regard. We could talk more if you like, you know, I've talked to different people about the cover and their interpretations of it, but it works well as a multi-level sort of stimulus, know, people look at it from different directions.

Pihkala: Yeah, thanks for the reflections and the text is also easy to pick out if you see this in a bookstore or at an internet bookshop. Having worked with publishing houses myself, I know that it's a collaborative effort and for some of you dear listeners it may come as a surprise that authors might not have a final say in relation to the title for example and I know that there was a discussion you had about that also and now climate anxiety and surviving that features heavily in the cover but of course this book is even more widely about living in the midst of the climate crisis so lots of synergies with this podcast and on the pages. There's also references to what we have been talking about here. How would you formulate it, Thomas, if someone asks you what's the sort of mission of this book or what would you especially like to bring to the world via this book?

Doherty: Yeah, I think the mission is, you know, the subtitle speaks to the mission, you know, a guide to coping, healing and thriving. because, the climate anxiety, just like we have talked about many times in the podcast, that that's sort of like is the stimulus. That's what brings you into the space sometimes, that natural sense of anxiety or fear or concern.

That's just the beginning of the journey. We talked about, could we call the book climate change and happiness or, you know, personal sustainability or, you know, so it was really important. I think what's most what's most there's two things that are unique about this book, I think one, the biggest thing is that I talk about being happy and I talk about thriving, which is often not talked about. Much of the discourse on climate change is still sort of stuck in the early stages of we're in a crisis and people are trying to raise the alarm and that is still needed for some for some parts of the population but for much of the world we've been alarmed for years and years and years so the need is for how do we recognize our our moments of happiness while we're while we're struggling.

I think that have that being risky and brave enough to talk about what does it mean to be happy? Just like again, with this podcast is really what's unique about the book. And then also the, you know, there's the sequencing of the book where it's coping. Yes. But then we, know, a lot of it is about identity, you know, and that's the missing factor for most people in their coping is that they haven't been able to clarify their identity about nature, their environmental identity, all their values and their personal history and their childhood experiences and all the things that form them are kind of still unprocessed. They're just in there. So it's a consciousness raising about, you have an environmental identity. So identity is so important. And that even among environmentalists and long-term activists, they haven't really had a chance to do that work. So I think that identity piece is really a key and I think once people have it, then they can use it and grow it on their own.

Pihkala: Yeah, totally agreeing on that. I have been reading and glancing a lot of books about eco-anxiety and climate anxiety, as you know, and we have talked about many of them in the podcast and even interviewed several authors of them. But I haven't seen as much emphasis on identity in other books. think it's a theme which is present in some other volumes, but I do think that's a strength here. And of course for a long time you've been a proponent of the importance of environmental identity and that is something we usually always discuss with the podcast guests also and this general idea of flourishing and striving for happiness also in these troubled times. If that would come from a person who is sort of bright-siding I would be quite critical about that. I've seen some texts on climate anxiety, which are more like, well, you know, don't be so anxious. Let's focus on the good instead. And that's part of the thing, but also the troubles need to be taken seriously. But you are taking the problems seriously and you have long life experience and history. So that I also think is one of the strengths of this book. That's even though there is this emphasis on flourishing, there's also understanding of the darker sides of life. So that's not really a question, but if you want to reflect on that, that's one possibility.

Doherty: Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of parts in the book that are quite dark really in the sense of really trying to look honestly at problems in the world. You know, whole chapter four is on adapting so it's on doing your own personal climate. You know, your IPCC report, your individual problems with climate change report, which actually requires you to, you know, look at how, where you live in the world, what the threats are to you from weather and and upheavals and so it's actually going even deeper into some of these problems than we would even be comfortable doing typically. And then of course the healing section part three is the hardest in some ways the hardest one of the hard sections because that's what we talk about being a hostage politically to a lot of the political propaganda and corruption in the world and dealing with our anxiety, dealing with despair. Dealing with broken places and nature.

And if we're on a tour of the hard parts of the book, where I really waited to put the really, really hard stuff was in the challenges chapter toward the end. And that's really where we kind of list just the many challenges that people are likely to face when they're trying to make positive change, whether it be political corruption, whether it be ignorance or propaganda or entrenched habits or you know all of those things and that if I only wrote that book no one would want to read it you know if only you know and that's how it is with a lot of books that we get we feel like we need to read them out of duty out of some sort of grim duty.

I remember years and years ago, I saw a video from the thinker Theodore Roszak talking about eco-psychology in the 90s. And even then he was saying, you know, we're trying to find something beyond just grim duty, you know, and that was his term. So this book is trying to get trying to we're doing the duty of being honest and looking at these things for sure. And it can indeed be grim but it's not the only part of the process. There's a lot of place for joy and gratitude and contemplation and reverence and patience and compassion, you all those sorts of soft, softening feelings also.

Panu: Yeah, thanks for spending time on that and I love the wording about grim duty and the importance of being open to that full spectrum, not just the grimness of things. And speaking of the difficulties and the troubling, one interesting dimension here is that you draw from your experience in healthcare also. Well it's been a while I think now since you were working full time there but for example the harm reduction approach I don't think I've seen that linked with climate distress dynamics before so would you like to describe that to the readers?

Doherty: Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, the book does draw from a lot of influences that are not traditional because again, working when I was a graduate student, I ended up working a lot at hospitals and health psychology and behavioral medicine. So working with people that were dealing with medical illness, I did my dissertation research on a cardiac rehab unit. So it was people that were had suffered heart attacks or had open heart surgery and were trying to recover.

And anyone who's a who's actually a medical care provider, health care provider knows that many, many cases in the hospital or in the clinic are people that are anxious or depressed or coping. And so you need you need some skills for this. one and one of the big issues is addiction, people that are addicted to tobacco smoking or other behaviors, alcohol where sometimes you can't get them immediately to stop doing the behavior because they're addicted to it and because, you know, all the different structural things involved there.

Harm reduction is sort of like recognizing the harm and shrinking it as much as you can without assuming that it's going to go away entirely. And it's a generally very effective approach across all kinds of health behaviors, whether it be sexual transmitted diseases or alcoholism or drug use or really any problematic behavior. You shrink it. I mean, concretely, if you're smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, that's very terrible for your body and your lungs and will shorten your life. if you can shrink that to smoking one cigarette every six months, you know, at a party, then someone who's addicted to nicotine might be able to do that and still, you know, really be quite healthy.

So it's just flipping it around because often we try to eliminate the problems entirely. And that's a good strategy, but if you can't do that strategy, you need another strategy. That's where harm reduction comes in. And of course, with broadly more accurately with climate change and also metaphorically that the harm reduction model is helpful because we realize, well, I can't, I can't change the state of the world and I can't change the fossil fuel companies immediately or any of these things, but I can certainly do what I can to reduce the harm, shrink the impacts, and then I can also think about that in my personal life. I don't have to be perfect. So it's the opposite of perfectionism.

Pihkala: Yes, sort of restraining from the idea that all problems can be solved in the near future. That reminds me of the work of, for example, Vanessa Andreotti, who I was listening on online at an event in Helsinki last week. They make the very good point that part of the problem are our ways of reacting to problems, our ways of framing problems, including the idea that things can be neatly solved. But anyway, this connects with the idea of living with ambiguity and ambivalence, which we have been discussing a lot in the history of the podcast.

Doherty: Yeah, not all problems can be solved, period. Like life, aging, illness, infirmity. You know, it's challenging to live on the planet as human societies and groups in the best of times. And there are wicked problems and things like that. So it's really about engaging.

You know, part of the section one of the book is very, very basic and concrete. chapter one is how to think. So it's not what you should think, because in my book I'm not telling people what they should think. I'm not advocating for positions per se, but I'm telling them these are, I'm advocating for ways that you could think about things and ways to have, you know, metacognition to think about your thinking and, and be aware of assumptions you're making. So that's where like something like higher reduction comes in because it sort of changes your thinking. It gives you another way to look at problems.

That's a big part of this book is just, you know, getting better at your thinking, getting better at how you're feeling and how you're managing emotions, getting better how you're dealing with your nervous system and stress. So part one is very concrete. It's basic really, even if you're an expert, it's helpful personally to remind yourself to think about your thinking and think about your feelings.

Pihkala: Yeah, and very pragmatic also. So skills of living in a reality like this. And as you know, I'm always happy if people include at least implicitly existentialist themes of living with finitude and those limitations to the human condition. But for listeners, part one in Thomas’s book is called Coping. It has four chapters, Thinking, feeling, calming, adapting. Listeners of this podcast will find many common themes in our episodes also from these sections but also you'll find new information and new ideas and also practical ideas for how to calm oneself down and also how to reframe one's thinking like the upside down pyramid, which we have been discussing with some guests also in this podcast. Thomas, if you think about part one, what are some of the major takeaways? I know that you already mentioned some of them in our talk this far, but what's on your mind when thinking about part one?

Doherty: Yeah, well, you show up, Panu, of course, in the book a fair bit as well. One of the takeaways is the climate emotions wheel and different ways that we think about feeling. So that's an important one. You know, it's the idea of 360 emotions or, know, that we're able to be cosmopolitan in our emotions and really have the capacity to feel intense feelings of all kinds. So whether it be sadness or anger or frustration, you know, to feel what we're feeling as deeply and honestly as we can. That also includes calmness or boredom or reverence or patience. We then get into this idea of emotional regulation and that you can regulate your emotions. So question one is what am I feeling, which is very helpful. And you can spend a lot of time sorting that out with feelings vocabulary. Then the second is what do I want to be feeling, which is more of the aspirational question. Like, well, if I could access some feeling states I'd like to access this kind of feeling or that kind of feeling. So if I'm a parent and I'm spending time with my child on a nice sunny day, I want to access some feelings of joy and gratitude and presence. Or if I'm dealing with a problem, I want to activate my determination and my grit and my creativity. The third question is more of the existential question of what should I be feeling like what is the true feeling that I should inhabit here even if it's uncomfortable or difficult that's where the growth is so that's a good takeaway from the emotions chapter.

Pihkala: Totally agreeing and some of the sentences have lots of beautiful content like this one from its page 43. “As with breathing, we can come into awareness of our emotions by paying attention to them and assigning them words. We can become attuned to their rhythms and even influence their depth and pace”. This is the emotional regulation we discussed above. I like the images of becoming attuned and rhythm and influencing the depth and pace. It's related to this idea you mentioned that we can't fully control our emotions and feelings. It goes back to the surfing metaphor for example, which we sometimes have been discussing here. That as a surfer you can't control all the waves but there's a lot of skills that you can learn how to ride them.

Doherty: Exactly, even the even the master surfers that we marvel at they can't have they have no control over the wave itself at all. But they have control over their angle and approach to you know slipping on top of it. I'll tell you another thing that people have asked me this kind of question and the “how to think: points that I think is really interesting is this idea that we're all familiar with this idea. This is attributed to Albert Einstein that we cannot solve problems at the same level we created them. That's a famous saying from Albert Einstein, which is, you know, really helpful for us. It's sort of if we live in a certain way or had a certain practice that created problems, then often we'll have to create a different way of living or a new practice to not have the problems. Otherwise, we'll just keep recreating them over and over again. So that's a huge insight in itself. But one thing that came to me in the writing of the book was that we also cannot solve problems at the same level we discovered them and that was an insight for myself. you know, because when I discover a problem that I need often to then educate myself more about the issue and build my capacity. So I can then overcome it.

When we discover problems, we're often quite naive and we don't know the whole story. But if you stop there and just start trying to solve right there, you're kind of stuck in the same emotional and thinking system and you're not really growing. So, that I think is really helpful because you know for example as we've talked about many times there's these feelings of grief and loss and fear but that's what happens when we discover yet. That's the feelings of discovery that are happening but the solving requires often different kinds of feelings. So you can't solve problems at the same level of emotional functioning that you discovered them or the same level of intellectual functioning. So that I think is in a nuanced approach that is helpful for people in the book.

Pihkala: Hmm, yeah, very interesting and in my mind links with thinking about processes and trajectories which have been close to me as you know. And one very important dynamic in the book is that you include these case examples of people who come to talk to  therapists, namely you, and you're able to illustrate many kinds of issues people may have in relation to climate matters and also their personal issues via these case examples. And of course, I know that you have been modifying them so that they are not completely recognizable as people but as combinations. Would you like to say a bit about that part of the book?

Doherty: Yeah, no, that's a great one. Let's let's focus on that for the last part of our conversation because that that's another interesting one because that was one of the case stories was one of the initially one of the hardest parts of the book for me to write and the most challenging at the outset and then became one of the more enjoyable processes of the book as well you know, because I'm a clinical psychologist and I'm really trained to be an academic writer and you know, I didn't go to a creative writing program. I went to a clinical psychology writing program. So, I did have literature and poetry experience in my younger life when I studied literature, but you know, graduate school, as anyone knows who's gone to graduate school, they'll beat all that out of you. All of that creativity will get driven out of you to write articles with footnotes and all this sort of academic scientific writing. And it isn't about telling stories really. It isn't about creating characters like in a novel or in a in a nonfiction narrative book. It's really about all the facts.

So even myself, I'd learned to like dispense with all the case studies when I read a book and just kind of drill down and figure out the facts. What is this writer trying to tell me? And I don't need to hear all these fluffy stories of people. But I had to really flip that around for this book because, rightly so, the publishers made it clear that if you want to speak to the public, Thomas, you need to tell stories. That's how people understand. And so luckily I had help. And then of course I did all the characters that are described in the book have a core of a real person or multiple cores of multiple people that were because what happened is I only have one book to write and I couldn't have it was in like war and peace where I could have 100 characters so I only have about 20 so I had to really condense and so some of the characters had to do double or triple duty you know to illustrate different aspects of the problem so there was no one person that I have met that could that could be the only character because we talked about so many things.

But once these characters started to get created they did you know much like in fiction? They took they take on a life of their own like you start to see “How would brandon the character do this? what would they say ?” I came to really love the love the case studies and you know again really nothing's in there that isn't true to life for people and I've actually had people think that some of the case studies were more real than they were. So I had to say, “well, these are composites”. So literally this person that lived in the world, I there isn't a person just like that. But it's based on several people. And just last night, someone, one of my friends who I've given an advance copy said, I really, they wanted to meet Brandon. They wanted to meet this character. I I'm sorry, well, you can't meet them because they don't exist for real. But they felt a kinship with the character.

Yes, it was our friend Greg Hill's birthday yesterday. Just a Panu it will know this. We interviewed Greg on the podcast. It was his birthday yesterday. So I got to spend some time with him and some other friends. We were talking about the book. So, yeah, he could have been because he could have easily in real life, there could be a character like that that would walk into the room and be known by these people because it was.

So anyway, that the characters are really and I think readers will naturally gravitate to certain characters because they resonate with the story and the character and, It's less shameful for us as readers to identify with someone else having a problem than to just put it only on myself. Like Christina, the character who's the really savvy political operator and climate and environmental advocate who really does well in politics and understands policy and all that really was harboring this secret shame that she wasn't comfortable going in the outdoors herself or hiking on a solo hike and just being competent in what she considered to be the outdoors or the wilderness and so really helping her to build that that confidence so she could go do her pilgrimage trip, you know, in Europe. It was really fun and rewarding to sort of, you know, put those stories together because I do think they'll be inspiring to people.

Pihkala: Yes, thanks for spending time on that and I do agree there's lots of things that people can resonate with and human interest will be generated and in relation to the style of the book this also has the benefit of you having to lecture much less because you can describe dynamics via stories and it's always pleasant when there's less lecturing and not to mention teaching in the boring sense. So that brings a lively character to the book and I think that was a great thing to do. Well, dear listeners, as we said this is the first one of several episodes which will be focusing on Thomas's new book Surviving Climate Anxiety soon available at your virtual bookstore. I hope you have enjoyed the conversation. I surely have. Like usually, I've been speaking from the Helsinki evening before the boys come home and there will be family sauna. Thomas how does the rest of the day look like for you? There might be some book related issues I suppose.

Doherty: Well, know, life goes on. actually have, I still see clients in my practice and I've got to go actually talk to one of my clients. So that's keeping me real, keeping me honest. Yeah. And I've got one of the practitioners. I know a young person is doing an internship here in Portland, so I'll get a chance to meet them. And so I get to support some younger, younger scholars and therapists and take my daughter to the dentist and you know do all the life things that we have to do. So that's my day but thanks Panu I really it's an honor to chat with you about the book and I really appreciate it.

Pihkala: Yes, feeling very glad and honored about that. That's to listeners. You can find us at climatechangeandhappiness.com. thanks to everyone who supports us at Patreon. That's an opportunity. And until we meet virtually next time, take care.

Doherty: Thanks, Panu.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

The Climate Change and Happiness Podcast is a self-funded volunteer effort. Please support us so we can keep bringing you messages of coping and thriving. See the donate page at climatechangeandhappiness.com.

 

 

 

image credit | Plastic Lines

Season 5, Episode 2: Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth with Kate Schapira

From Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth

“In 2014, when Kate Schapira first set up a Climate Anxiety Counseling booth in her hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, far fewer people were talking about climate change and its attendant anxiety, leaving those who couldn’t ignore climate change and the forces that cause it feeling frantic and alone.  Seeking a way to reach out and connect, Schapira set up a  Peanuts-style "The Doctor Is In" booth to talk about climate change with her community. Ten years and over 1200 conversations later, Schapira channels all she’s learned into an accessible, understandable, and aware guide for processing climate anxiety and connecting with others to carry out real change in your life and in your community.”

Join Kate in discussion with Panu and Thomas, and learn how you too can create safe spaces to talk, feel and dream about how we can master and move through the climate crisis. 

Links

• Kate Schapira

• Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth 

• Newsletter  

• Bluesky 

• Instagram 

Support: World Central Kitchen

Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

Introduction voice: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness (CC&H), an international podcast that explores the personal side of climate change. Your feelings, what the crisis means to you, and how to cope and thrive. And now, your hosts, Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: Well hello, I’m Thomas Doherty.

Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. This is our podcast to show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change and other environmental issues. And if you've listened to us, you know that Panos in Finland and I'm in the U S and the West coast and we have guests. We talk about what it means to live in the modern world and ask this provocative question about what does it mean to be happy with climate change and other issues. And part of that is talking about how we feel about things, getting those emotions out, which isn't always easy. So I'm really glad to be able to talk about that today. And I'm honored to have a special guest.

Schapira: Hi, I'm Kate Shapira. I'm a writer and teacher who's become a climate listener out of my own climate anxiety in order to connect with my community. I live in Providence, Rhode Island on Narragansett land.

Doherty: Yeah, and Kate is someone I've been aware of. If you're aware of the literature at all and climate, climate psychology, she's had a great book on her climate anxiety counseling booth, we'll, which we'll talk about. Panu and I love meeting people that have been doing this work in different innovative ways. So it's really nice for us to connect and listener you can kind of join in listening on our conversation today. We're recording in the summer 2025. It's a beautiful day where I am right now, but there's a lot of troubles in the world as well, and it is a heat wave here. So, you know, we're enjoying ourselves and then we're carrying a lot of things. But that is our life. So Panu, do you want to get us started with Kate and our conversation?

Pihkala: Warmly welcome, Kate, also on my behalf. Lovely to be talking with you. I have been following your work since the late 2010s and have your book here with me in Helsinki. And dear listeners, we are also going to talk a bit about comics today, which we don't do often enough. Peanuts by Charles Schulz will be mentioned today and it will remain to be seen in what connection. But Kate, it would be lovely to start by talking a bit about your background. All of us have our own journeys towards being more aware of climate crisis and all the things that are related to it. Would you like to share with us something about your own journey and relation with the modern human world and climate change and emotions and so on?

Schapira: Absolutely. And also thank you both for having me. I'm so glad to be here. I feel like my sense of the climate crisis became acute in probably 2012, 2013. And there's sort of two simultaneous origin stories for it. The one that I tell the most often is about reading an article, an older article about oral bleaching and It was one of the first things that I had ever read that spoke about climate impact in the past tense. So not, this is going to happen if we don't do X, this could happen if we don't do Y. was like, this has already happened. And the ability of these reefs to regenerate and survive is in some cases in doubt and in other cases, we know that they cannot. And that really threw me. I cried a lot. I was at work. I was in my office waiting to speak with a student. We were in tears, went out into the hallway. My coworkers were very kind, but they didn't seem to understand why I was so upset. And I remained upset. I cried at work. I cried at dinner. I sat on the couch and cried. But you can't do that forever, Sooner or later, you're gonna need to figure out something else to do.

And for me, part of what got me unlocked from it, so my husband James Kuo is a cartoonist and illustrator, and we have a lot of these Peanuts by Charles Schultz's collections around. And so I was looking at one of those and I saw that Lucy, one of the characters, has this little booth that says, psychiatric help, five cents, the doctor is in. And that just kind of got mixed up in the duct tape ball of my mind to think what if I made a little booth and set it up in a public place in order to talk to people.

There’s some there was some precedent for that in my creative practice. I did a lot of poetry on demand when I first moved to Providence. So I'd set up with a little table and a little typewriter. Sometimes as part of like an arts festival or something at the museum, sometimes just for funsies. And people would come up and say, would you write me a poem about changing my name? Or would you write me a poem about this show that I love? Or would you write me a poem about faking my own death? Never gonna forget that one. And so I was in the habit of creating this like small collaborative spaces to have conversations with people that were a little bit out of the ordinary. And that helped me construct this little container to have some of these conversations. In downtown Providence is where I started right across from the big bus station that our city has at the entrance to a park.

That's the sort of official origin story. The less official one, which I have spoken about, but I do want to bring it forward here because it's a little it's a little heavier and some listeners may resonate with it more, is that before any of that happened I was corresponding with a poet friend who was very much in a state of grief and anger of the same degree to the one that I reached later. And I told her I couldn't talk about it. I asked her not to talk about it. which wasn't the right thing to do. But I didn't have a way to talk about it with her in a way that I could handle. And I pushed her away. When I started doing my own learning about how bad you could feel, what was going on, and then how to talk with people about it, I eventually did reach out to her again and say, “hey, I screwed this up and I'm really sorry. I wish I could have been there for you.”

Doherty: Yeah, that's beautiful. Thanks for sharing those multiple levels. Yeah, and think a lot of people could identify with both of those things. It's not easy. We've talked to people about it, know, an eco wake up or a waking up syndrome. And if you've had the syndrome and you've gone through it, then you certainly understand it. But it is kind of a paradigm shift to do this.

Yeah, there's a lot there to unpack. I think to bookmark just your, from therapy, we would say your “symptoms”, like you were crying that day. That was an intense emotional experience for you. And then I was really curious about how you did the booth. I know it's kind of like a performance art. I see it as like a performance art kind of thing. I've seen people do poetry on demand. I've always thought that would be a really challenging thing to do. It's like slam poetry or something where you have to make up something on the spot. You used your strength, like you channel your superpower. Panu, what do you think? Where are you interested in going with our conversation?

Pihkala: Warm thanks, Kate, for sharing all that, really appreciated it. There's lot of connections with various emotions and also people's journeys or trajectories. One of the tools I've been working with a lot over the last years is the so-called process model of ego anxiety and ecological grief. There are some connections to that, moving from semi-consciousness to awakenings and then the shocks included in that process. And I think all of us can resonate at least in relation to non-environmental themes with experiences of letting somebody down and perhaps not first realizing how badly we've let somebody down, but it's also very human when it comes to very difficult topics.

So just wanting to validate that also, that it's no wonder that many of us often have failed to really be there and listen. And I think that if one reaches a state of intention to later do something about it, that's very, very valuable. I'm also glad to hear that you reached out to the person later on. And would you like to share something about that later communication? How did you feel about it or how did it go?

Schapira: As I remember it it—it was pretty quick and light. She was at an event that I was doing not for the book, but for something else. And I saw her there and I spoke from the stage that I recognized this shortfall in how I'd responded to her. And she accepted that, which I appreciated.

Doherty: Did you feel some lessening of your own guilt then from that?

Schapira: Oh, no! You're asking the wrong guy. But I am glad I did it because I know, because it was the truth, which I think is important, and because it was the right thing to do.

Pihkala: Yeah, thanks for being open about that also. I'm reminded of a younger colleague and doctoral student, Anette from Finland, who is researching ego-emotions from a psychoanalytic perspective, which is not so common these days in Finland. Other schools of psychology are more prominent, but she has a great story of talking with climate issues with her aunt who first was totally unable to listen to any of that. But then she tried to channel psycho-dynamic wisdom, building a sense of safety and acceptance and speaking gently from one's own experience. And then one day in a sauna, which is a typical Finnish place for deep conversations and deep sweating, the aunt said that, “I've realized that I've been so horrified by the whole theme of climate change that I haven't been able to take in what you have been saying”. So that was really profound I think that she's been talking about this openly with her aunt, Annette (Mansikka-aho is her last name) the relationship of her own to climate matters didn't change completely but I regard it as a great psychological and psychosocial achievement that she was able to vocally say what kind of psycho dynamics were present. So that took some time but wanted to mention since the theme of fifficult conversations is much present here. Would you like to continue Kate by telling us and the listeners a bit about how has the journey with the booth has been for you? You set up a booth and what happens with people?

Schapira: I will tell you that, but I’d like to first response to something you said about difficult conversations. I'm Jewish. I come from a Jewish family. And I had a conversation last year with my cousin. have a boy cousin who's the same age, about how to talk to the relatives on his side of the family about Palestine. When he would try to bring it up, people would become very closed and very insistent on the things that they had learned and the things that they had taught that were a justification of violence, increased violence from the Israeli government and military. And we were sitting on the roof of the building where he lives and it was a hot night, it was summer. And I remember asking, you know, well, how did you come to change your mind? How did you start to know that this wasn't right, that this wasn't something that should continue?

And he talked about stuff that he'd read by Palestinian writers, starting to read some history, getting a picture of life there that he hadn't had access to as a young man growing up in an American Jewish community. And I said, well, did you used to think some of the stuff that your other family thought and thinks now? And he said, yeah. And I said, well, do you think that maybe it would work to say, hey, I used to think that too, or I used to feel that way too. And this is the thing that made me change my mind. And I think he's done some of that. I think some of it has worked and some of it hasn't. know, people are deep in, and I think that the conversation that you relate about your colleague and her aunt really shows this, people are deep in what they don't wanna know, what they don't wanna feel even more. Right? They don't want to feel that. People don't want to feel that they were wrong about the commitments that they've made or the courses of action that they've been taking. And so offering people an opportunity to watch you have been wrong and make a shift, I think is a great gift. And even if people aren't ready to accept that in the moment, it's still a a good offering to make.

Back to your question about the booth, sometimes that's a tactic that I will use. I will use that method. If somebody comes up saying something that I don't get a lot of like climate deniers, occasionally I will get some climate change trivializers. Sometimes I will also, people will come up just thinking something that isn't true, like thinking that something is more important than it is or less important than it is. And so that's a moment when I might make that invitation and use that method to say like, yeah, I used to think that too. And here's how I came to change my mind.

And an example of that, again, if you don't mind my saying, is that, I'm somebody who came to quote unquote, “environmentalism:, the way that I think a lot of upper middle class white Americans do, which is what I am. You know, I read Ranger Rick magazine, which is like a nature magazine for kids listeners my age might remember that. You know, I lived in a place where there was a lot of like plant and creature activity and my mom and I would enjoy the plant and creature activity together. We'd walk in the woods.

We still walk around the yard and check out what's going on with all of the plants and creatures every time that I go home. But I did not develop (and through the booth, I did develop and other things that I'll talk about in a moment). How humans also have a responsibility to one another in this moment. I had a pretty strong sense of like human nature relations and the responsibility that humans might have to the more than human world and the living systems that we're part of, but I really didn't have a strong corresponding sense of how other humans were also part of that system and how part of addressing the wound, right, that exists in our present moment is setting right human to human relations in conjunction with setting right human and more than human relations.

Doherty: I'm glad you talked about the background in the Ranger Rick because that's always another of our questions is the deeper background, the seeds of this kind of stuff. We have these deeply held values that we take over our lives and when that coral bleaching story broke through like it really pierced some of those values that you had developed over time. I think people are practically cursed with these deeper values. I'm sure you find similar deeper backgrounds when talking to children and elders and parents at your booth. So your background is as a writer, a poet, an educator, I assume, right? Professor maybe. When you did the booth, did you have any counseling training? Did you see it as counseling or did you see it more as just, “I'm just gonna do this creative thing.”

Schapira: Well, the counseling is obviously partly a joke. It's a reference to the peanuts cartoon. And one of the things that I realized, again, I didn't go into it thinking this, but I realized this as I continued to do it, is that Lucy isn't able to offer psychiatric help any more than I am. Lucy isn't a psychiatrist. Lucy is a child. She is wildly unequal to the situation that she is making claims about. And that is true for many of us in this in this climate moment, right? In what Grace Lee Boggs calls like “this time on the clock of the world”, many of us are feeling profoundly unequal to the situation that we're in. And so the joke of the sign ended up being kind of funnier even than I originally imagined because it was a way to say, yeah, I don't have all the answers or even like two, but I have some questions. Maybe we can ask those questions together.

 I will also say that I had had, not, I wouldn't call it counseling training, but I've had some listening training. I staffed the sexual assault hotline when I was in college. As a teacher, I'm often listening to what my students are telling me about what they're dealing with and what they would like to, trying to help them figure out what they would like to do about it. Not in a counseling way, but just in a like, I'm,

receiving the full picture of what you're dealing with kind of way. And I got a lot better about that as the years of the Booth have gone on. I think when at the beginning, I was maybe more inclined to give advice or to argue very much too early in the process. And as I think many therapists do also, although again, that's not the training that I have, I got better at first making sure that the person who's talking with me knew that I was hearing what they were saying.

Doherty: Yeah. Yeah. And I wasn't I wasn't implying that your work was less than because you're not a training as a counselor. There's a funny thing about some of this work because this is just human conversation. You know, it's just human listening. So it's kind of like emotional intelligence is another way you could have called it emotional intelligence booth about climate change or something. And then yes, we have these specialty areas, but then a lot of artists do work with the public that is therapeutic. Like it's not therapy but it's therapeutic. I'm thinking of that artist Marina Abramovic which I think you know who just sits with people and people line up just to sit and be you know share presence that's so profound and all that kind of stuff. Where do you find yourself going with your family or your personal life, your creative writing or your book or you know where where's your edges now? Let's shrink it down to whatever little micro edge that you want.

Schapira: My God, that's such a large question. One thing is when I had been doing the booth for a few months, and this is chronicled in lessons from the climate anxiety counseling booth as well, someone came up to me and said, we're having a meeting tonight about stopping this liquid natural gas facility, this liquefied natural gas facility in the Port of Providence, is toward the southern part of the city. A lot of industry is already there. It's also very close to where many people live and it's very close to the major hospital complex in Providence, including the only level one trauma center in the state. And they want to increase the amount of liquefied natural gas that's flowing through. And they want to build this facility that is in the floodplain and is going to worsen the risk for constructions that are in the floodplain. And they want to run highly explosive methane fuel through it. Do you want to come to this meeting and talk about what we're going to try to do to stop it? And so that was the beginning of the thing that I was talking about before realizing that part of this work is figuring out how to protect and sustain the lives of other humans, as well as of coral and squirrels and turtles and redwood trees, all of which I love, and learning that many of the same things that sustain those things are also helpful and necessary to the sustenance of other people. Many of the same things that threaten those living creatures also threaten the lives and sustenance of other human people.

I continue to be involved in trying to support the lives and sustenance of other human people.in the place where I live. I'm connected with a number of community efforts to do that, which I can talk about a little bit more if you're interested. So that's one thing that I'm doing. I've become very attentive to, and to some extent involved in things like comprehensive plans for housing and construction and infrastructure in the city where I live. I sometimes say that climate anxiety is a community problem with community solutions.

And what I mean by that is partly, let's speak with each other. Let's listen to each other. Let's find out what each other are dealing with and let's be responsive to that. But it also means things like rent stabilization and building affordable, energy efficient housing. It also means things like creating a path to that housing for people so that they're not going to have to sleep outside and then get swept away in the next hurricane or die of heatstroke in the next heat wave. This is a community task that we're taking on. If people are on the move because of climate effects on the place where they live, I would like there to be enough housing in the place where I live to accommodate everyone who's already here and to accommodate the people who are coming in so that they won't be feeling a scarcity that is threatening and not necessary. So there's inner work that you can do, and I encourage people to do it, that has to do with questioning your feelings of scarcity, recognizing feelings of sufficiency, recognizing feelings of sufficiency. Learning what you value and appreciate about the place where you live and want to sustain, learning what aspects of that might be malleable or you might be able to get that sustenance and satisfaction in a different way. That's all inner work and relational work. It's something that you can talk about with other people. It's something that you can invite other people into. You can have social times about it. It's also something that needs attention at structural, infrastructural levels and the structural and infrastructural work is harder to do if you haven't done the relational work.

One of the things that struck me as was starting to read your book, Thomas, is you really stress the reason to contend with and incorporate your emotional responses to climate impacts is so that you can show up as your best self with the people around you in the moment that we're in. And so I think the value of having a lot of these conversations and the importance of having a lot of these conversations is so that when we have to contend with things like housing policy or a city budget, we're doing so as our most generous and present selves.

Pihkala: Thanks for all that, Kate. think that's wonderfully put. And the book, Lessons from the Climate and Exciting Counseling Booth has a really powerful social dimension and kind of eco-social justice dimension in it. And in my view, very nice weaving together the inner and the outer and including some of the spiritual aspects also. I don't know if you would call it that yourself, but that's what I would call it. And discussing many emotions, including the role of anger and determination and emotion regulation by getting angry on purpose at times, which is a nice theme and not very much discussed yet in relation to ego emotions or polycrisis emotions or whatever we call them. But I think that the theme of being with people where they are is a sort link between what you did with the booth and what you're doing in the social networks and avoiding hierarchies and that sort of thing, but drawing from people's different skillsets and expertise. Warmly endorsing all that myself and learning. More from it and listeners, if you want, connect with earlier episodes with Bob Doppelt and Susie Moser, for example, who are participating in similar kinds of movements.

Schapira:

Yeah, I find a lot of those frameworks very useful also in thinking about how to have these conversations with people and connect and be attentive. I'm very grateful for that. Also really, really appreciative. Many of the people that I quote in my book, but I've also been really appreciating the book. I've also been really appreciating the work of Bayo Akomolafé, who writes about a kind of undoing of certainty and an undoing of human supremacy. And many other writers and thinkers, Kyle Powys Whyte of the Potawatomi Nation writes a lot about working with the urgency that many people feel in the face of climate impacts like this is happening, it's barreling down on us, it's already injured the place where I live or it's already injured people that I know I have to do something, why aren't we doing something? And the request to be more attentive to what is already being done, what has already been done.

And I'm thinking, I'm trying to make sure I paraphrase him correctly, because I really do encourage people to be attentive to this, notice when your own urgency is maybe setting you up for a mistake, to focus your effort in a place that won't be effective or that will harm someone else. The comparison I sometimes use is like, if you're running to catch a train, right? You might bump into someone and the person you bump into might be, let's say, an elderly person who's carrying a lot of bags. It's not worth it to catch the train. It's better to help that person with their bags instead of bumping into them.

Doherty: Yeah, that's great. We always say we wish we had more time. We're coming toward the end of our time. But this has been a great little, thanks, Kate. It's been a great little inward insight into your life. So many themes, but listeners I just want to kind of try to encapsulate this a little bit. There's this hero's journey image that we know about. I talk about it a bit in my book and the master of two worlds is at the end of your whatever journey you did, you have to come back to your community and do something with this knowledge.

I think Kate, the idea that you went through the counseling booth phase and now you're working on these real things in your community, I think makes perfect sense. And I think that's what's going to be the thing for listeners. There'll be times when we're learning and on our quest to figure this out. And then we're like, OK, now I need to enact something.

Kate, seems to me you threw yourself into that as an artist or poet, you risked throwing yourself into that booth, you know, like without a net, like doing a trapeze without a net. So that was like the hero's journey there. And then Lucy, I need to go back and look at peanuts cartoons because I remember Lucy being a bit ornery and she would hold the football for Charlie Brown and he would try to kick it and she'd pull it away. So, sometimes we think we're going to kick something and that we land on our butt. Anyway, this has been really great.

Listeners, we're going to put some links to Kate's work and, you know, people like Bayo Akomolafé who we need to get on our podcast. And there's all these cool thinkers out there. So we'll put some links and Kate, we'll get links from you and this episode will come out soon and we'll get it out into the world.Kate, thanks for your time coming from the East Coast and Panu from Finland. I'm going to head off and do some of my own manifesting work here. Where are you all going now for your days?

Schapira: I have to print something out for somebody and then I'm actually going to do some climate listening down in Warren, Rhode Island, which is a town in elsewhere in the state that's really menaced by sea level rise and stormwater flooding. And they're thinking about who will be able to stay in their homes and are there streets that are going to become less navigable as time goes on? The predictions are that there are going to be parts of town that are less inhabitable. And so talking with people about what neighbors can do, what the town might be demanded to do, and working with a local organization to meet regularly to plan those things together.

Pihkala: Wow, that sounds excellent and really enjoyed the conversation with you, Kate and Thomas, as always. My evening is first for an hour discussing contemplative practices and Earth awareness at an international working group and then I'm heading for the sauna with the boys. So that's my evening.

Doherty: All right, long day. Well, anyway, we're all doing our part and listeners, I know you're all doing your part too. So be well, you can find us at climatechangeathappiness.com and Kate and Panu and listeners, take care.

Schapira: Thank you both so much for having me.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

The Climate Change and Happiness Podcast is a self-funded volunteer effort. Please support us so we can keep bringing you messages of coping and thriving. See the donate page at climatechangeandhappiness.com.

 

 

image credit | Juliane Liebermann

Season 5, Episode 1: Youth and Intergenerational Connections – With Sarah Newman and Larissa Dooley of the Climate Mental Health Network

Thomas and Panu were joined by Sarah Newman and Larissa Dooley of the Climate Mental Health Network. Sarah discussed her long-standing personal experience with eco-anxiety, and how it influenced her life choices and led her to establish the Network. Larissa, Director of Research and Programs, first learned of climate change's psychological effects during her graduate studies; the increasing frequency of wildfires in California later motivated her to devote her research to addressing the mental health impacts of climate change. The group discussed how Panu’s insights on climate emotions and grief have been influential on the Network’s programs. Thomas emphasized the importance of sharing personal journeys and highlighted the inspiring nature of stories that led to the mission-driven work many individuals undertake in response to climate threats. See the show notes for helpful resources for teachers and parents from the Climate Mental Health Network. 

Links

• Climate Mental Health Network

• CMHN Resources:

• Climate Emotions Wheel 

• Toolkit for Middle School Educators 

• Climate Change and Kids' Well Being: A New Guide for Parents and Other Caring Adults 

• Future Climate Collective 

• Future Council Documentary 

Transcript

[on vacation]

 

 

imaged credit | Ted Johnsson

Season 4, Episode 28: Remembering Joanna Macy

Thomas and Panu reflected on the profound impact of Joanna Macy on their understanding of environmental emotions and activism. Thomas highlighted Macy's role in transforming environmental engagement from an intellectual pursuit to a visceral, emotional experience. He shared a personal story of meeting Macy and read an excerpt from his new book describing one of her workshops he attended as a graduate student. Panu reflected on his experience of Macy's legacy, noting her influence on modern conceptions of eco-anxiety and empowerment, and her integration of Buddhism, ecology, spirituality and systems thinking. The discussion also highlighted some of the challenges adapting Macy’s methods for broader audiences and pitfalls of idealizing Macy’s “The Work that Reconnects” and its cultural background and  assumptions. The episode concluded by encouraging listeners to engage with Joanna Macy’s transformative teachings for themselves. 

Links

• Trip Gabriel (2025, July 23)  “Joanna Macy, Who Found a Way to Transcend ‘Eco-Anxiety,’ Dies at 96” New York Times

• Rebecca Solnit (2025, July 21) In Honor of Joanna Macy, 1929-2025

Transcript

[on vacation]

 

 

image credit | Annie Spratt

Season 4, Episode 27: On Raising Anti-Doomers with Ariella Cook-Shonkoff

In this enlightening episode, Thomas and Panu sat down with Ariella Cook-Shonkoff, a licensed therapist and author of Raising Anti-Doomers: How to Bring Up Resilient Kids Through Climate Change in Tumultuous Times (2025). Ariella shared her journey from motherhood amidst California wildfires to writing a book that empowers parents to foster resilience in their children. Panu Thomas each reflected on their own parenting, and enjoyed hearing of events on Ariella’s “eco-timeline” like her childhood outdoor experiences in Connecticut and her opportunity to meet one of her idols, Jane Goodall. Join us and learn more about Ariella’s positive approach to parenting in the climate era. 

Links

• Ariella Cook-Shonkoff

• Selected Writings

• 2025 Raising Anti-Doomers How to Bring Up Resilient Kids Through Climate Change and Tumultuous Times

• Salon 2023 Grieving together, and also apart: A Jewish American wrestles with identity, belonging and trauma

• Grist 2021 Here’s how to talk with your kids about climate anxiety

• Glamour 2019 I’m Not a ‘Natural Mother’—And That’s Okay

Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.

If you appreciate the Climate Change and Happiness podcast, be sure to preorder Thomas Doherty’s new book, Surviving Climate Anxiety: A Guide to Coping, Healing, and Thriving available at an online bookseller near you.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

Introduction voice: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness (CC&H), an international podcast that explores the personal side of climate change. Your feelings, what the crisis means to you, and how to cope and thrive. And now, your hosts, Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala.

Thomas Doherty: Hello, I'm Thomas Doherty.

Panu Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. This is our podcast, a show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about issues like climate change, changes in the planet, changes in the weather, and changes in our lives and in our families. That’s our territory to talk about and Panu and I get to meet a lot of people in the world and collaborate with people. And today, we have a person that we both know and I'm really proud to introduce a special guest.

Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: Hello, my name is Ariella Cook-Shonkoff, everyone. I'm a licensed therapist, both an art therapist and an eco-therapist based in Berkeley, California. And most recently, I have a book coming out called Raising Anti-Doomers: How to Bring Up Resilient Kids Through Climate Change in Tumultuous Times.

Doherty: We're really glad to talk to Ariella. She’s someone we've both interacted with. Ariella has been in an eco and climate conscious therapy group that I did some time back. It’s a personal pleasure for me to see colleagues writing books and putting themselves out. I was able to look through Ariella's book and we'll talk about that. But it's nice to see that this work is getting various treatments in people's lives and people are moving forward on this and in therapy. So, a lot of good things are in the pipeline here. Panu, do you want to get us started?

Pihkala: Warm welcome, Ariella, also on my behalf. Lovely to have this chance to discuss with you and I really love the wide range of content in your book. Before digging deeper into that, we'd like to ask you something about your journey to becoming a person who wrote this kind of book. Would you like to share something, how has it been with you and the modern human world?

Cook-Shonkoff: Absolutely. Well, I guess this journey began for me back in 2018 when I came into motherhood and around the time that wildfires were intensifying in Northern California. I had just had my second daughter and I was returning to work after maternity leave. There were nearby wildfires, and the air was thick with smoke. It was this kind of combination of going back to work and sitting in an office with clients where no one was really talking about what was going on outside and also the vulnerability I felt inside leaving my child under these circumstances. There’s a sense of safety, even though, where I lived, we were fortunate, and we didn't have direct impacts. You feel like, am I safe to leave my child? Can I really separate from them? And isn't it strange that no one's talking about the elephant in the room right now? So, that brought me on a journey into writing about it and I'd already been freelance writing for some time about motherhood mostly, but I started to really focus more on climate and parenthood. It's eventually led into this book project and the book that's finally coming out this year.

Pihkala: Thanks for sharing that and there's a lot that I can also personally resonate with. My kids are just a couple of years older than yours. Also in Finland, what Lindsay Galway has called ‘climate of silence’ was quite heavy and also silence around the emotional dimensions of those issues. Can I still ask you if you look back to your own childhood and youth, what role did the modern human world play for you, or did it have a role back then?

Cook-Shonkoff: I love this question, Panu, thanks for asking it. Yeah, it had a starring role in my childhood, actually. I grew up in a small town in Connecticut that felt pretty rural, and I spent a lot of free time in the woods behind my house, with the kids in the neighborhood, by the creek, I was out. And it was a value of my family, so my parents took us on hikes. That was pretty common for us. I was just outside a lot, in the modern human world. I loved animals at an early age. Actually, funny enough that you asked this question because in writing the book, I realized how this is reintegrating my life in adulthood in a way. I even went through a period of activism in my teenage years to do with animals and environment. So, it's really been a common thread.

Doherty: What kind of activism were you involved in when you were younger?

Cook-Shonkoff: Well, I was the only member of my family to become vegetarian at age 14 when I learned a bit more about factory farming. I started writing then for junior and senior year op-eds in my local paper, just a couple. But I then went on to become one of the presidents of the environmental club, and we did various things, such as picking up trash around town and eventually going to marches—well, maybe was more in college, now that I think about it. But yeah, we held Earth Day events in high school. We were active. This is really cool. I don't know if this is in my book, but Jane Goodall, her organization, Roots and Shoots, was this youth environmental program that opened in my town, Ridgefield, Connecticut. I was interviewed on the panel with her and got the privilege of meeting her in this interview and it was really cool. So yeah, there was a lot.

Doherty: That's great. We’ve done this eco-timeline kind of idea where you can trace your life. So, writing this book really does fit onto your timeline.

Cook-Shonkoff: Absolutely, yeah. As I went deeper into this work, I realized how it harkened back to my early years. And just my emotional experience throughout this, even listening to Greta Thunberg's words, it conjured up in me some part of my younger self that felt like her in a different way because it was a different time but felt indignant. Like, what are grown-ups doing? Why don't they care more? That’s a really good point about that eco-timeline. I love that tool, Thomas. So, thank you for introducing that to me.

Doherty: Yeah. Okay, so here's a standard question you'll probably get a lot going forward. But with Raising Anti-Doomers, I love the title because it really puts out a message. It puts out a call-to-action kind of thing of all the ways of thinking about this topic. How did it coalesce into this idea of raising anti-doomers? I know that's a big question, but what comes up for you about that?

Cook-Shonkoff: It's interesting because you don't know about what it's like to write a book until you get there. And I will say that as I got to the end of my book, in what's probably now the last chapter, I was talking about how we can do this and what's this positive frame for how to raise kids in this way. It's almost ‘Teflon-like,’ to be strong and resilient and to be able to withstand the bumps and the turbulence and all the uncertainties that exist in the world right now. I'd love to take credit for selecting it for my title, but I can't because it was plucked by my editor who had that foresight. And I actually love the title. I wasn't sure at the beginning. It's a strong title, and I think it's great in the end. The scope of the book is broader than climate, which I also appreciated heading in that direction. It wasn't my original intent, but that's how it developed.

Pihkala: Of all the rich contents in the book, if we would start by helping the listeners to get some overviews or what would you say are some of the fundamental principles or messages in the book?

Cook-Shonkoff: I'll mention that there's some graphics in the book, some illustrations, that I had a lot of fun conceptualizing, but I think really helped the reader go through the book. One being the parent identity spiral. So, it's like suddenly you're a parent and kind of what happens along the way. I'm not going to go through all the steps, but what happens along the way to become an engaged parent, focused on social issues, including climate. Like, how do you kind of stay engaged. I think that's an important one.

I think that the main takeaways, if I were really to boil them down to three simple messages would be that number one, it starts with you. It starts with the parent and being willing to go into the darker emotional places and really grapple with their feelings, not to avoid or make excuses, but really to go there and be able to kind of find ways to regulate themselves so that they're able to co-regulate their kids. So, I think that's number one, it starts with you.

And number two, I would say is to do something and make it sustainable and not be so perfectionist about it or well, is this really enough or I've got to do all of this for it to be worth it. It's so easy to talk yourself out of any action, but it could be so small. I'm sure we could all come up with some examples, but something around the household. Maybe it's just not getting food out from restaurants in the takeout packages because it's the single-use plastic and reducing that, or maybe it's on a grander scale or writing a letter or going to protest, but it could be really small. I think that's important to recognize.

The third point is really to keep coming back to the source of what replenishes you, what builds resilience. I have a lot of self-care exercises in the book. There's that self-care acronym, which is kind of a riot, but that was for my own personal development of it. I came up with this and was like, oh my gosh, maybe this is something I should throw into the book, because it's kind of fun. But whatever it is, spiritual, creative, physical, that really grounds you and brings you back to yourself so that you can reset when you get off the rails, which can happen.

Doherty: Yeah, did you create the ideas for the book with your own children first or did some of these ideas just come out of your family life? I know with the book that I worked on, the heart of it was really my training that I did with the public and different slides and different images that were resonant. And then of course you have to explain it all in the book. But did it start with things that you had figured out with your kids?

Cook-Shonkoff: I'd say it was a smattering here and a smattering there because I work with kids in my practice so there's some from there, some from family life, some that literally evolved alongside the book or came out of the pandemic because that was a time I was reorienting and doing things differently.

Doherty: Yeah, I've been looking through your book and now I'm more attentive to the figures because you've talked about them, but maybe we could talk about this one and literally unpack it. The pellet, the climate emotions pellet—when I saw that, I thought, that’s a really kid friendly image. Let me not say more, let me have you say what the climate pellet is because I think listeners may appreciate it.

Cook-Shonkoff: Oh my gosh, it's such a funny one. If you remember dissecting owl pellets in school, which we certainly do in the States, I don't know about where you are, Panu.

Doherty: So, owl poop basically.

Cook-Shonkoff: It's the regurgitated pellet. An owl eats different animals whole, like these tiny moles or whatever they are. But they have all the bones in the fur, and everything goes down into the stomach and eventually they regurgitate these pellets that have the bones and the fur. Anyway, I did take inspiration from childhood in different ways, and this is after I came up with the concept of the climate emotions pellet, but my child literally brought home an owl pellet and dissected it for homework on the kitchen table. So, this really does happen. But the idea being that there's a lot of different feelings that we're experiencing to do with climate change or many of us are experiencing and it's a mess. It's like a hot mess that's complex and we don't know what's what. And so, I like the idea of imagining these tweezers, like a tool in the science lab, and you're plucking out emotions and trying to distill, okay I'm looking at the illustration now. Okay, this grief that I'm experiencing or what about the awe that I sometimes feel when I'm out in nature. There are all these different feelings like the anxiety that I feel about the state of the world. And so, trying to distill those emotions, it’s like that emotional granularity idea. Then, once you can identify them and know what they are, there's some relief in that. I think it can be really overwhelming to have an unidentified mass in you. And then it's the idea of metabolizing emotions too, right?

Doherty: Oh yeah, for sure. What do you think, Panu, this idea of regurgitating? That must have some resonance in all the different research you've been doing lately.

Pihkala: Yeah of course. The Climate Emotions Wheel in which I cooperated with the Climate Mental Health Network is of course one very practical tool for observing various emotions and being able to name them even roughly. Emotional granularity is a growing thing discussed in climate emotion research. I think that's great to provide resources for people to do that. In the book, you're also looking at major questions about life and the world that people are asking, of course, for children and young people, that's part of human development. But being a parent, well, first of all, becoming a parent is quite a cosmic event to borrow a wording from Bayo Akomolafe, this very interesting thinker who has also written on the ecological crisis and becoming a father and many things. And then also realizing that kids will have to face existential challenges which can evoke existential questions and emotions in parents also. Perhaps that might be the next topic. Would you like to say something about these developmental challenges and big existential questions?

Cook-Shonkoff: Yeah, that's a big one. You're holding, as a parent, some of these existential realities of where we're at and for yourself, first and foremost. But then, when you have a child or children more innocent, kind of vulnerable lives. I think it can invoke more fear, but it also can really motivate you in a certain way. I really wanted to speak to parents. I had been speaking with somebody, Jill Kubit, who's the founder of Our Kids Climate. And she said, we're uniquely motivated as parents to do something about this. There's a unique motivation. Many people without kids are very motivated but there's that sense that you have of your heart and your desire for your worry about your own child. Are they going to be okay? What's going to happen 30 years from now or 40 years from now? What's the world going to be like? How do I raise them in a way where I can prepare them as best I can for the challenges that are unknown. I think that there's a real delicate space there and an opening and also an opportunity because I think ultimately parents want to engage and want to do right by their kids. They want to take care of them.

Pihkala: Thank you for sharing that. I think that's very wise. There's been this discussion in books related to the topic about whether these sorts of calls to be an honorable parent or grandparent work and if so, what style is needed. For example, George Marshall, the climate communicator, discussing these ads which are playing with the Second World War framings like what did you do in the war, daddy or grandfather and then applying that to the climate crisis. Well, I'm not very fond of the war metaphor here, but Marshall, for example, is quite critical of this kind of messaging because it operates so heavily with a guilt and shame possibility. And for some parents, it can cause a desire to distance themselves if they can. So, I would personally agree with what you say about the inner desire to provide a more sustainable world for the offspring. But then in situations where communication happens, it seems that people need a lot of safety so that they can go there. Perhaps guilt or the threat of guilt and shame may do it for someone, but I'd go more for the safety dimension. But anyway, I wanted to say that aloud and hear what you think of it, Ariella.

Cook-Shonkoff: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. There was a period where environmentalists had some shame and blame, like is that going to get more people involved in the environmental movement, at least in the US? And that didn't work very well. I don't think that's the wisest path. I think that tapping into parents’ or families’ values or motivations is the way in. It’s a more hopeful and positive approach rather than saying, come on, you got to do it or we're all going to die or we're all going to suffer. That’s going to shut people down, right? I mean, you can speak to this too.

Doherty: Yeah. Your book doesn't make that mistake. It doesn't sound preachy or guilt-laden at all, which is really nice. I really like images like the pellet because it's very kid friendly and I like it's a catharsis to spit out a pellet and it’s not intellectual, it’s very visceral. Like we do have to spit out these emotions and really look at them. So, I think that that really works well. The nice thing about your book is that it gets back to the body all the time and stress and physiology. You’ve done a great service. Then, this idea of a parenting club seems to be a way to not be isolated. Would that be the idea? What would be an example of a parenting club?

Cook-Shonkoff: Well, I'm speaking really broadly about anyone who's a parent or a caregiver, who's taking care of kids is part of this network of parents, this parent club. It's massive. I said in the intro, and I heard this from someone else. It was passed on to me when I was pregnant with my first child. Like, what's the parent club? I always remembered that, and I feel so connected to other parents in many ways and I continue to feel that way. I think there's so much potential in this social network. There's so much potential and I know we all have our different skills that we can bring to the table. I think on community levels, I've been interested in exploring that. I won't get started about all my local endeavors, but coming together and caring about something and saying, what are we going to do about this? And hey, what skills do we have? And what do we bring to the table? And then not only that, by having the parent club level, but then having an intergenerational level where we can involve our kids.

Last weekend, I was out in my park across my street with other parents and kids in my community. We were making signs, art, and stuff about democracy. We had art making music on and we're going to see what we do with the posters. We might use them in a rally or hang them on our garage door. There’s much that can be done. I do think that if we can get a groundswell of parents who are super motivated saying, I want this for my child, I want this for future generations, I want to leave a lasting contribution, generativity, right? That whole idea of making the world a better place or leaving something behind, like a legacy. If we can get all that together, then wow, I think it could be a tremendous boost to the climate movement and social movements in general, whatever the causes.

Pihkala: Yeah, that's very wisely put. One thing I really appreciate in your book is that you're not just recommending action as important as that is, but you're also recommending parents to model engagement with emotions and model rest and self-care. And after all, self-care has a strong history in the work of Black feminists, who argued that it's a very political emotion because it's providing resources for those opposing injustice. Would you like to say something more about this sort of encouragement to build resources and practices for rest and self-care?

Cook-Shonkoff: Yeah, I think it goes back to this point I was making earlier about coming back to the source. As motivated as parents are, we are to do something but if we burn too hot, we're going to burn out. And so, it's essential to temper that with self-care, whatever you do. I don't love that term; I think it's really overused. But it does say what it is. So, can you find ways to ground yourself, to reset yourself periodically. I think on a regular basis and it’s best if you can schedule that in and really know like, I'm going to do this on Monday or this on this day and have several practices a day if you can. It can be really short. It can be a five-minute meditation. It can be a walk around the block. It can be listening to music. Anything that brings you joy or spending time with somebody that you care about. Be critical to take that time and ideally, find ways in whatever way you can. I know that not everyone can access it for different reasons. There's barriers, unfortunately, in our society and inequities, but do whatever is possible, because that reset will mean everything in the long term and being able to do this work for the long haul.

Doherty: Yeah, it’s great. This has been really great because it's helped me to really get clear on the book and it’s anti-doomer so it's not just climate. Like you say in your subtitle, resilient children in tumultuous times. It really is the best strategy, which is not to focus on one threat, but to focus more on, like I say, your life is the news and start with your family, your life and make that a good place and then let it ripple out into the world. Your book does have, I think you talk about it, this internal locus of control where you're bringing it back into the family and into the body. So that's really great. Well, congratulations. We've got to wrap up here today. What's your next adventure for the book or your next challenge that you're getting ready for?

Cook-Shonkoff: Oh my goodness. It's like I'm just coming out of this adventure so I'm not even sure I could tell you what it is, but I think I'm curious to see what emerges.

Doherty: Well, you’ll have, I guess what they call in the US, a soapbox. You'll have an opportunity to talk about this stuff and there will be a window where you can bring attention to this through interviews and stuff. So good luck with all that.

Cook-Shonkoff: Thank you so much.

Pihkala: Yes, it’s easy to agree on that and warm thanks for the rich conversation and all the wisdom here. Dear listeners of the podcast, if you want to connect with some earlier episodes which deal with similar kinds of themes, there's one with Jade Sasser, for example, and one with Britt Wray. There will always be so much more to talk about, and we didn't go into the art-based methods stuff that we know, Ariella, you are very fond of but something for the future.

Doherty: Well, anyway, Raising Anti-Doomers by Ariella Cook-Shonkoff. And I know it's available out there already for pre-order and it's coming out sometime in August or something like that. So, we'll make sure we time our episode for your book launch, and we'll put links and things like that in the episode notes. Ariella, good luck, and Panu, have a good evening, and listeners, be well.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

Hi this is Thomas Doherty. If you appreciate the conversations that Panu and I have on the Climate Change and Happiness podcast, be sure to preorder my new book, Surviving Climate Anxiety: A Guide to Coping, Healing, and Thriving. I’ve gathered insights and strategies I’ve learned through my career in an engaging and accessible format for the public. Whether you’re new to the experience of climate distress or a seasoned environmental veteran, you’ll find something useful you can take with you for now and for the long haul. You’ll find Surviving Climate Anxiety at all the major online booksellers and in stores this fall.

 

image credit | Mick Haupt

Season 4, Episode 26: Coming Back to Climate News after a Vacation

Thomas advocates a news and technology break for people to enjoy their summer or holiday time; to reconnect with nature and their family; and replenish their own thoughts and dreams. But what to do when you come home? In this episode of "Climate Change and Happiness," Thomas and Panu Pihkala explore their own intricate balance between staying informed about global climate events and maintaining personal well-being. As they discuss the impacts of climate change—such as the recent deadly floods in Texas, and heatwave in Helsinki—they emphasize the importance of personal rituals and mindfulness in navigating the overwhelming news cycle. Join them as they delve into strategies for maintaining awareness without succumbing to despair, and discover how personal experiences and connections can serve as a grounding force in turbulent times.

Links

• Panu’s Rituals 

• Finnish summer cottages or mökki

• Summer cottage video game 

• Simple text news 

Transcript

(on vacation)

 

 

image credit | Jennifer Marquez

Thomas and Panu were joined by environmentalist Isaias Hernandez, creator of Queer Brown Vegan. Together, they explored the profound impact of identity on environmentalism, discussing how personal backgrounds, cultural heritage, and lived experiences shape one's approach to climate issues. Isaias shared his journey from growing up in Los Angeles as a first-generation immigrant to becoming a voice in the climate movement. The conversation delved into the intersectionality of race, identity, and environmental advocacy, and revealed the challenges and micro-aggressions faced by diverse students of climate science. A key take away was the importance of finding and claiming your unique place and style, not just taking in science and research but making it your own and sharing it in your own voice. Tune in to discover how embracing your identity can empower you to engage more deeply with environmental challenges.

Links

• Isaias Hernandez 

• Queer Brown Vegan on Instagram

• Teaching Climate Together Web Series

• Isaias and Panu Discussion

• Climate Mental Health Network Grief Resources

• Animation: The Dance: Living with Eco-anxiety

Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

Introduction voice: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness (CC&H), an international podcast that explores the personal side of climate change. Your feelings, what the crisis means to you, and how to cope and thrive. And now, your hosts, Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: Well, hello. I'm Thomas Doherty.

Pihkala: And I’m Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. This is our podcast, a show for people around the world who are thinking, and feeling, and acting deeply about climate change and environmental issues, as well as their connections with nature and the planet. Of course, that includes connections to our bodies, ourselves, our families, and our communities. And so, we're starting with this provocative question: What does it mean to be happy in the modern world and what does it mean to be happy in an era of climate change and then we go from there. And today we are really excited to have a guest with us.

Isaias Hernandez: Hi everyone. My name is Isaias Hernandez and I'm an environmentalist and the creator of Queer Brown Vegan, an educational media climate platform.

Doherty: Yeah, and you might have heard of Isaias if you're at all thinking about eco and climate issues, but Panu and I are familiar with his work and he's coming in from LA. So, we're just going to have a conversation today, personal and professional, much as we do. Panu, do you want to get us started?

Pihkala: Warmly welcome, Isaias, also on my behalf and lovely to see you again. We've had the pleasure of cooperating collaboratively with the progress of eco-anxiety and climate emotions and that's been wonderful. We often start this podcast by asking something about the guests' journey towards the place and identity where they are now. Would you like to share something about how you became who you are now, especially in relation to environmental issues?

Hernandez: Yeah, my passion for environmentalism is quite unique. Growing up in Los Angeles, as a first-generation immigrant kid, my parents were actually farmers from Mexico. So, for them, they actually had much more rich ecological relationships with the land than myself, I would say. And, when people ask me when did you realize you were an environmentalist, I actually didn't really identify with that word. I grew up watching Nat Geo and Discovery Channel, seeing biologists, conservationists, and all these amazing scientists around the world traveling and talking about their work. But I always told myself, I don't think it's possible for me to really do that because my situation is different and they're the true experts. They've studied the field, and they got the degrees. So, I think that got my curiosity of having parents who always wanted me to get a good education, they said we don't care what you do, and we just want you to follow what you truly want. So, I had the privilege of saying that my parents didn't care where I went for college, they just cared that I got a degree and that I actually chose to study what I want and that I end up getting a job.

I think it was in college when I was learning environmental science that I actually started to get more passionate about the subject and realize this is really what I truly want to do, and this is actually what I love. But one thing I felt the disconnect in academia is, how does this really relate to my lived experiences, but also the experiences of my other colleagues in these classes. We don't really relate to that, and I think that when you're graduating college, you have this illusion of I got my four-year degree and I'm going to work at one of the biggest green environmental NGOs (non-governmental organizations), and I'm going to become this famous scientist. And that really wasn't the case for me. I actually worked in a research lab in academia, and I absolutely did not enjoy my time doing it. I studied lizards and evolution and ecology, then I did food system work a year later for my senior thesis. I think after graduating college, I realized that social media was a way for me to actually delve into telling my own stories without feeling like I needed to be a scientist or a policymaker. I'm just an individual talking about these issues. And I think it was really unique to me that during that time there were barely any environmental creators online, but also people with lived experiences and the academic degrees that I had that were really getting to that. So, I would say I didn’t really fall into the role of an environmentalist until I was maybe 23, when I started to realize, I do think I'm an environmentalist. During college, I kept thinking, I’m still learning about how to be an environmental scientist, so I don't really know what that actually means or if I have to go to a master's program for that.

Panu: Yeah, thanks for sharing that. That's fascinating and a great example of how different backgrounds can still give resources for people to be intimately engaging with these issues. We have a video in your “Teaching Climate Together” series where we discuss climate emotions and the process model of eco-anxiety. There you tell a bit about the emotional dimension of this journey and also in relation to your college experiences. Listeners, I warmly recommend that video. Would you like to share just a bit about that since our podcast is so heavily geared towards the emotional dimension?

Hernandez: Yeah, absolutely. The “Teaching Climate Together” web series is a media project and initiative under the flagship of Queer Brown Vegan, where it was actually inspired back in my early days of social media when I would do infographics in 2019 of deconstructing climate words. So, it would be like, what is eco anxiety, what is climate grief, what is climate doomerism, and after a while of doing that for the first few years of my early career, I had a lot of followers asking if I could create videos on this. I said, I'm not an expert and didn't coin these words. I'm not a mental health researcher. Why would I put myself in these spaces when I don't have that background? And my team was actually very interested and kept saying, why don't you just interview the experts that already exist in these spaces and create an interview or like a web series show about it? People would watch it. And so that was actually the thing that got us to do “Teaching Climate Together.”

In our specific episode, which is the fifth episode, we were looking at the emotional dimensions of climate change in response to generations of people. And it really quite shocked me that there's very limited, and I think Panu, you can agree to this, but when you Google online for any videos around climate anxiety or emotions, there's barely any videos. There's a lot of recorded digital webinars and panels, of course, which are absolutely needed. But when you look at the personal relationships of saying to myself, I'm going to use myself as the client, Panu is like the therapist in a way, but also the research and the expert, how do we add a personal story to it? And it was really quite shocking how many people were messaging me after that episode and saying they really resonated with the fact that you got someone who was in the older field of the industry that's an expert, but you got a young person who understands some of these words and these experiences and you wove them in together to make sure that whoever's watching this video, whether you're someone younger or older, can relate to either Panu or they can relate to me.

Those are exactly the type of conversations a lot of young people today are having. It's like we feel embarrassed to talk to older people about these types of relationships or issues that we're having, or we sometimes feel almost neglected by the systems that it's almost like the adults are saying, you need to figure it out. When, in reality, it's not the truth. Adults are telling us that we actually want to talk about this because we are also experiencing eco-anxiety. And I think that really shifted the relationship of how young people see older people. Yes, I have eco-anxiety, but you also have eco-anxiety. And that does not make us less than or less human. It actually makes us more connected to the issues that we're trying to address.

Doherty: Yeah, excellent. Yeah, so many themes that are coming up that we can explore today. Just to follow up on the last point, it is a stereotype that younger people are more concerned or more aware than elders. When you look at the research from Yale Climate Program, there's a fairly equal percentage of people who are alarmed or concerned about climate in the population, whether they’re young or old. Likewise, there's a pretty equal percentage of dismissive people among young and elders as well. So, it's a stereotype that doesn't serve us because I've known many elders who have devoted their whole lives and careers to environmental work, and they have been doing this for ages and they feel incredibly deeply about these issues. Bringing the two ends of the spectrum together is super powerful. But because of technology and our social structures, we tend to be divided by social media and the way our culture is. That’s a larger story we can't get into, but I think one of the themes today is finding your place. It sounds like, similar to a lot of people, you had to struggle to find where do I fit in. And you were either lucky enough or capable enough to find a niche for yourself and then it goes from there. Once you start, there's a synergy. I had a question—Queer Brown Vegan, I would call it your brand or your platform, is obviously provocative. It seems maybe less provocative now than it did a few years ago, but could you say a bit about that because it seemed like that was almost like a manifesto or something that you were putting yourself out there.

Hernandez: Yeah, it's funny because traditionally, as a scientist myself, that comes from academia. I tried to claim Isaias Hernandez on Instagram, but it's already taken. So, I kind of struggled already to establish my public figure name. But I think the Queer Brown Vegan name actually came back in 2019 because during the time I remember in higher education, I was told never to talk about my identity and that race didn't matter. But then there were a lot of microaggressions that I would experience not just from my professors, but from my lab mentors or my lab grad students would say certain things to me that I just felt so visually uncomfortable. And I think this is something that’s a shared experience with a lot of people, whether you're a marginalized person in academia. There's certain things that were said to me that just never sat right with me. Like I had a professor once call me Mario, even though he knows I'm Isaias and the other guy who’s Latino that's on the other side of the classroom is named Mario. And it was just like those examples of dehumanization in academia. Yes, it shouldn't matter that someone misnamed you or said the wrong thing and said sorry, but it does matter because there's this ultimate sense of respect that needs to be given to students too, just as we give professors their accolades and their respective titles. But I think Queer Brown Vegan really came out of the fact that I just wanted to be very visibly like yes, I'm part of the LGBTQ community because in science people would be like, is he gay or what is he? People would always want to ask, and I just felt like what does it matter, I'm a scientist and that's really what I came here for, not for you to discuss what my identity is. And then second was the brown just being like yeah, I'm a proud Mexican person and I navigate the world. And I think the vegan part was actually funny. It's just that I had gone vegan just recently after I graduated college and then when I was coming out with the brand name, I was just like queer brown green or queer brown earth and I just said, you know what, Queer Brown Vegan just weaves in together, but it's very dynamic in your face. And I think at the time, it represented a lot of my early 20s and mid 20s. Not to say it doesn't represent me now, but I think it's always really interesting because people look at me and ask, well, what are you and then, they look into my work and they're like, you do climate education, that's very interesting. And they learn about my background, and they learn about the science that I have and everything. And they're like, okay. So, I think for me, like young people today, we're just very experimental on how we want to present ourselves to the world, but we're also not too serious because we recognize that social media is just a form of art for us too.

Panu: Yeah, that's fascinating. Warm thanks for sharing that and doing that. It reminds me of this book, which is nowadays quite widely read in environmental humanities, Nicole Seymour's Bad Environmentalism, which sort of challenges some of the standard tropes and frameworks of communication in the environmental sphere. It has tended to be too wide and sometimes too serious so, a certain queer playfulness, if we call it that, is very welcome for environmental communication. Also, it reminds me of the connection between education, communication, and advocacy. And that's a sort of language challenge because we don't usually use the word education for adult audiences, even though there is the subfield of adult education, but people tend to think of children and young people. But if we are trying to positively influence someone that's technically education, but for adult populations, it's perhaps voiced as communication or advocacy. But for my part, I see the work that you are doing as a sort of resonance of education, communication, and advocacy. If you want to speak to that, please do. But I also wanted to ask about this brown dimension and Latino environmentalism and your social media, which by the way listeners is very popular, there’s over 120,000 followers on Instagram, for example. So, I've gotten a window into Latino environmentalism which has been very educational for me. I wanted to ask you about your experiences of this broad and diverse field of Latino environmentalism.

Hernandez: Yeah, I think one of the reasons for being able to just lean in more to my identity is recognizing that Latinos are one of the most marginalized groups affected by climate change. And I think the issue with Latino communities today is that we're very vulnerable and susceptible to misinformation and disinformation. So, when I was looking in the environmental media sphere, even in the climate media sphere today, there's barely any Latinos that have bigger platforms. I could count maybe less than six or seven of us of Latino climate Americans that are representative in the U.S. And it was really saddening because I get a lot of messages from young Latinos or Latinas telling me that it's really hard for them to see themselves in these fields at times because as we know, environmental majors are not historically diverse if you look at any college from different universities across the United States. A lot of them ask me, how did you survive knowing the fact that there's no one that really looked like you or the professors were not representative of who you were? And I think it's a testament of when I talk about these Latin issues, I try not to just give them the science and data and say, this is what you should be listening to but also to relate it back to the culture.

One of those events that I recently produced here in Los Angeles Climate Week was called Climate Chisme to really bring together how we talk about gossip in our communities, but through a climate lens and get people informed. And this isn't about a climate panel and learning about why Latinos should care about climate change, but to talk about how gossip and storytelling has been used to protect our communities from floods and wildfires and to make sure that our neighbors have each other's backs and to create these types of systems of care. And I think that it was really resonant with so many people who attended the event because they had never seen it before. But two, I think that it's a testament of where we're at right now. We need all different directions to reach out to our communities and my direction is through community building and cultural storytelling. Not to say that the science and data isn't needed, because it's always needed. However, the science and data are what communicates to me, but it doesn't communicate to my mom who may not have that science degree or background and she's just trying to get through her daily life. So, we have to have these different strategies to be there. But also, for me, it's a really huge thank you because if I would have seen someone online who looked like me when I was young, I don't think I would have had so many doubts in academia every day thinking I don't think I'm good enough to be here compared to a lot of my other colleagues who came from very prestigious backgrounds and just knew what they always wanted to do like go to law school or to grad school. I had to figure out everything like how to do these things because I didn’t really have any mentorship or people who look like me.

Doherty: Yeah, this is great. And listeners, I know there are people out there that are identifying, and you don't have to be a Latina or Chicano to identify because Panu and I both dealt with this too. We've talked about this a lot on our podcast. People are trying to study these interdisciplinary issues, these intersectional issues and it's difficult to find a pathway through the disciplines and stuff like that. So, this intersectionality is really key because the difficulties in academia are intersectional, not just because of our culture, but also because there's no good department and the academic system to deal with these issues. We've been talking about this on the podcast recently with people, even established scientists, who were trying to study when they were younger. So, there's an age of intersectionality because young people come in with these new ideas and they can't find a space in the academic system. The psychology department says we don't study the environment, go to environmental studies and environmental studies are trying to be biological scientists and really hardcore experimental people who say they don’t do that emotional stuff, that’s for psychiatry, especially with anxiety or depression, you have to go to the psychiatry department for that or the social work department and they say, we’re too busy dealing with major mental illness or we're dealing with the houseless population and the fentanyl addiction so we don't have time for you. So, you just do this runaround—and if you're queer and brown, it's even worse.

Hernandez: Yeah, definitely. I think for many people, they identify with me, even if they're not the same race or identity as me. A lot of my followers always say they're very scattered from different generations, but I will say that a lot of moms always show up for me and they tell me they are teaching their kids about climate anxiety and climate education. I would say mothers have played such a huge role in being huge advocates of my work. I think there's definitely a lot of gratefulness for older generations showing up in that way.

Panu: Yeah, that's great to hear. Moms and grandmothers are some of the foundations of human communities after all. Some organizations have happened in the climate sphere. In Finland, we have Ilmastovanhemmat for example, climate grandparents organizing for climate action. But of course, their role is much larger and wider than just organized NGOs. Looking back, Isaias, to your active years, there are already many, but what comes to your mind as some of the very memorable moments on your journey, perhaps now in relation to the emotional and existential dimension of these issues?

Hernandez: Yeah, I think some of my most memorable moments are just when it comes to the planet and my relationship to mental health, I remember being a sophomore in college. I think I was 19 at the time and I think we talked about it briefly in the episode where we first learned the term eco-anxiety. I told you this, I laughed. The first reaction was laughing at it. I said, are you kidding me, people actually deal with this? And I laughed but then I talked to my friend who was next to me, and she was really scared, and she was telling me, I've been dealing with this for years, Isaiah. And we actually talked about it, and I think that was really a pivotal moment for me to recognize how many differences people have in terms of not their lived experiences, but how we can easily disregard different types of mental health issues. My mental health issue was actually the fear of not having enough money. So, I worked multiple jobs. My fear was I don't want to get kicked out of my housing and I need to pay my bills. I had more financial anxiety. For her, it was a different situation where the finances weren't really an issue for her. Her studying in this field and learning more about the depressing news that we were learning as young environmental scientists was a reality for her. And I think for me, I didn't really prioritize climate change and mental health for me because at the time, I had to deal with my own financial anxiety first.

So, when I learned that it actually helped me become more empathetic towards people and understanding that we all have different situations in life. And yes, some others have different forms of privilege, like me, do I have privilege being a male? I think to me, it helped me contextualize how we show up better for people, even if we don't understand each other and don't come from the same worlds. I think that's really helped me build the platform I have today. My platform is really focused on educating rather than interrogating individuals. I think in my early years, my writing was very aggressive. I remember some of my followers telling me that we love that we learn, but sometimes you sound mad. And now, over the years, I think I've really come more into who I am in my late twenties. And people say, I love that you're very slow in your writing and you don't judge me, and I feel like I can ask you anything and you're not going to tell me anything bad. I think those are the moments and I think with the web series, especially with our climate change mental health episode, it opened up really huge opportunities, not just for myself, but for young people to start talking about these subjects of matter in their own classrooms, which I thought was really fascinating. I remember a follower sent me a message saying, my professor is screening your episode and now a hundred of us saw it. And I was like, that's embarrassing, well not embarrassing, but it's like in those moments I didn't know that people were watching it. So, I do think that's a really pivotal time. We're headed for not just a cultural information era, but a connection era where we're trying to bid for connection and truly accept that connection for each other.

Doherty: Hmm, that's great. I'm glad you brought this up because we have a little bit of time left. We don't like to unpack two big issues at the end, but there's this phenomenon of dealing with shame, either feeling shamed or shaming other people and the microaggressions and all this sort of stuff. I'm thinking about an experience I had where there was an organization in Portland called Vive, which was a Hispanic environmental group here. I was doing a workshop with them a few years ago, and I led people in this environmental identity timeline exercise, which I do with people where they plot out their life and all their experiences in nature. It was a totally mixed group. Isaias, you would have fit well in there because half of the people were Hispanic, Chicana, of Mexican heritage, some were first generation, second generation, but with very discreet environmental experiences. And then the other half were all white environmental folks, who were more upper middle class, and then comparing people's eco timelines such as what people took for granted in terms of privilege about camping, being in the outdoors versus just basically needs and dealing with access issues and racism and stuff like that. There was a lot of shaming on the white people's side. They felt almost embarrassed that they were so lucky to have such a nice life. So, that just comes with the territory, but it seems like you're able to handle that like and it sounds like you're more sensitive to even your own passions about how you come across to people. Isn't shaming a short-term strategy that just shuts things down in the long run?

Hernandez: Yeah, I think it disempowers any movement building and I do think that there's certain types of people that are able to ground themselves in those conversations. As I've gotten older and have worked with so many people internationally and also domestically here in the US that come from different economic brackets, I think there's a lot of things that I had to do inward for my own healing of why am I acting this way or why am I trying to put it this way? And I think that's where humility in this generation and especially my generation, it’s not that it's hard to be built, because we've become such a secular society with these technological tools and not saying that social media has destroyed our mental health, but we've entered the very comparison culture and I think it's very hard for young people. It's like they're inheriting both the world that's not as stable as they were told that it was going to be, but at the same time, the people that are trying to really understand the realities.

Like even with my own best friends, who come from way different economic brackets from me, when we actually learned about our lives personally, they didn't understand how much I've had to go through to get to where I'm at but also how much they went through in their personal lives to do what they're doing. It’s not to say that my story is more superior than theirs or theirs is less than, but it's more to understand we can still love each other no matter what. And I think it's really hard to go back to those human roots at times because I think our political differences and our economic differences can try to separate us. But I have mentors who are older who have really guided me with rough conversations, and I think that's the importance of intergenerational friendships. I have friends from different age groups that have really changed the way I think and I'm very glad that I did that versus trying to just hang out only with young mid 20-year-olds or late 20s. My friends are from the ages of 20 to 60.

Pihkala: Yeah, great to hear and I think there's deep wisdom there. And I've been quite struck over the years by eco-psychologist Bill Plotkin's model of ecological centric human development, which is most extensively developed in his book Nature and the Human Soul. And there comes the idea that we also need elders, but basically people from all kinds of ages and there's developmental tasks and strengths associated with various ages. So, I’m very much resonating with this intergenerational cooperation and learning that compassion and humility. You've spoken about your environmental identity in your work. For example, we have a common love and interest in picking up mushrooms or foraging. We are coming close to the end of the episodes, even though there would be a lot more to talk about, but that's something I wanted to bring up. Would you like to speak a bit about that relationship to the land that you have and is partly shaped also by your family heritage.

Hernandez: Yeah, I think growing up, I was not really an outdoor workout kid. I was always the slower hiker, the walker in the family. My family is very athletic, but I ended up being the non-athletic one. I picked up foraging because I saw it as a way for ecological reverence. I think as a kid, I always looked at things on the ground. And I think there was this moment when I was in New Jersey living in the forest. It’s a perfect area to forage throughout the seasons or winters since there’s sometimes mushrooms there. I just picked it up and I remember just learning through how to forage different colors of mushrooms and berries in the summer season. I'm not good with plants but my mycelium is more my thing. It was really cool because when I was doing it and taking pictures, I showed my dad and my dad was like, it’s funny you said that because your own grandma actually used to forage for mushrooms in the forests of Mexico and she really loved doing that by herself and it's so weird that you picked it up. I said I didn't know that, and you don't really talk about our grandma because my grandma passed away from my dad's side at a very young age, so it was really hard for him to speak about it. I think that's one way I kind of honor my environmental identity and could reconnect with my roots even if it's not the area my grandma lived in. I think there's a way to honor your ancestors through that. And also, just teaching people about foraging. I think it's my favorite thing to do. My family thinks I'm weird for doing it sometimes, but I think it's funny because they want to just get to the top of the mountain, and I want to take my time to get there.

Doherty: Lovely. Yeah, there's so many intersections and physical ability is another unspoken intersection, not so much even just basic. I mean obviously there's different abilities, whether someone is able to walk or is in a wheelchair or things like that. But even just your preference about whether you're ‘outdoorsy’ or athletic or not is a huge unspoken stereotype in the environmental world. And a lot of people feel left out. I can't be that person because I'm not climbing a mountain or something like that. So, we've got to wrap it up. But this was a great episode. So, listeners, under the surface, we all have our origin stories, and we have our ancestors and our strengths and weaknesses and our little microshames that we have to share. So, Isaias, it's really a pleasure to have you. As always, we could do more and maybe we can do some more again in the future, but I want to wish you really well in your work and we'll be linking to a bunch of stuff in our show notes too. Listeners, we’ll have a bunch of links to various things you can follow-up that we talked about today. Panu, thank you very much for your time as well.

Pihkala: Warm thanks Isaias and as always Thomas, it's been a great pleasure to take part in this conversation.

Hernandez: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Doherty: We'll be in touch with everyone. Everyone, be well and take care.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

The Climate Change and Happiness Podcast is a self-funded volunteer effort. Please support us so we can keep bringing you messages of coping and thriving. See the donate page at climatechangeandhappiness.com.

 

 

image credit | Tina Kuper

Season 4, Episode 24: On Grief and Mourning for Animals with Panu Pihkala

Thomas learned about Panu’s recent research with Elisa Aaltola on animal ethical mourning and how this relates to feelings people have about pets and companion animals, farmed animals and wild creatures. Like many of our emotions about nature and environmental issues, natural feelings for kindred species are often ignored, suppressed or disenfranchised (not recognized and given standing) in human-centric society and economics. Ways to enfranchise grief for animals includes being honest and bearing witness, creating art and rituals, and sponsoring community activities. Being open about your moral commitments for fellow animals, and your love, care and empathy, can bring a sense of relief, honor, rest, peace and grace. This can free up your energy and commitment to change society's practices about our fellow creatures. 

Links

• A Tribute to the The Passenger Pigeon – Memorial in Wisconsin’s Wyalusing State Park

• Art Exhibition: Kindred Spirits: Honoring Animals in Death 

• Amanda Stronza: Animal Memorials 

• How to cope with the death of your pet

• Pihkala, Panu, and Elisa Aaltola. 2025. ‘Animal Ethical Mourning: Types of Loss and Grief in Relation to Non-Human Animals’. Frontiers in Veterinary Science 12 (April):1526302

• Pihkala, Panu. 2024. "Ecological Sorrow: Types of Grief and Loss in Ecological Grief" Sustainability 16, no. 2: 849. 

Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

Introduction voice: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness (CC&H), an international podcast that explores the personal side of climate change. Your feelings, what the crisis means to you, and how to cope and thrive. And now, your hosts, Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: Well hello, I'm Thomas Doherty.

Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. This is our podcast, a show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change and other environmental issues and different tumultuous times that we're all living through. This is a podcast where we have asked this provocative question of what it means to be happy in the modern world or what would it mean for us to be happy in the modern world. Often to do that, we must go through barriers to happiness, and we have to deal with things that are not happy so we can figure out how to make sense of them or how to make peace with them. And that's kind of where we're at today. Panu, as you all know, if you've been listening, is always studying different interesting things about emotions in the world. And one of the areas that Panu has been working on is grief and loss regarding animals and other animals outside of the human animal. So that's what we're talking about today. So, I'm going to be interviewing Panu about this research. So, let's jump into it. Panu, you’ve been doing some research and we'll put information in the show notes about feelings of loss and mourning and ways to be ethically mourning loss and grief related to non-human animals. So, what kind of things have you been discovering there?

Pihkala: Yes, and dear listeners, if you think of your life history, almost all of us have at least some relationship with other animals. For many people, there's been some kind of pet or companion animal in places and families where we have lived. Some people have been raising animals for various purposes and there may be emotional connections in many ways or various hobbies or practices. Some animal species in the Western World or industrialized world are often in positions where there's strong emotional connections between humans and them. Dogs and cats are prominent, but there's a lot of other companion animals and pets. The bond between horses and people who ride or take care of horses can be very strong. So, that's one dimension here and for many people, losing a close animal has been an important lesson in loss and grief because the lifespan of many animals is shorter than the human lifespan. So, depending on where you live and what kind of privileges one has, it may be that the death of a dog or cat is one of the first death experiences in close family relations. And in grief research, the focus has been on humans who are dying or suffering, but for many decades it has already been recognized that losing pets or companion animals evokes strong emotions in people, which shouldn't come as a surprise. This topic has actually been a contradictory and difficult one in many societies because there may be assumptions that deeper grief should be related to human loss, for example. So, there's been people who understand you when you talk about loss and grief after losing an animal close to you. And then there may be people who really can't resonate with that and that often leads to what is called ‘disenfranchised grief’ in research which is grief that is not given a public voice or validation. How about you, Thomas, when you think of your life history, does this resonate?

Doherty: Well, I think this research is really helpful. I'm thinking about it and this whole idea of disenfranchise means it's not recognized. We don't talk about it and so we don't have language for it. But it's helpful for me to see what you've been studying because you talk about grief that we feel about pets and animals that are close to us, like cats and dogs and household pets, but then also wildlife. You link it to grief about wild animals which could be whales or extinct animals, wild condors, orangutans, or any kind of animal and the grief we feel when they're threatened with extinction, or their habitats are gone. So, that's a big thing that people feel. And then there’s this more contentious area of farmed animal grief because most of the animals on the planet right now, pound for pound, are livestock and farm animals. It is one way humans have transformed the planet. We have so many thousands of chickens and cows and all this stuff around the world. And that's just a really touchy topic on a number of levels ethically. So, it's really courageous to do this.

I can touch on it on a number of levels, my own concerns about wild animals that I value and love. I've had pets, I've had a dog for many years that I had as a young adult that I had to put down when he was old and had illnesses and that was very sad. I have an ancient cat, Lakshmi, who's going to be 21 this year and she's just an old person in our home that's been here since she was a kitten. So, we're preparing for her end of life. So, that's a really personal level. And in my family, my two sisters are both very strong animal rights advocates, so we have interesting discussions about veganism and various things. My sister, Sherry, was a zookeeper and worked in zoos for a number of years and she also worked at a place called the Center for Great Apes in Florida which was a refuge for chimpanzees and orangutans that had been used in movies or kept as pets. It was essentially like a rehabilitation old folks home hospice for these large wild animals. And I think people don't even realize that these kinds of places exist for elephants and orangutans. There's a whole subculture of people that are working for animals. So anyway, I think it's huge. When you talk to people or do the research, what are some of the surprising things that you notice?

Pihkala: Yes, thanks for reflecting on all that. I also met Lakshmi when visiting Portland this spring. She's old, but still going. And in my family childhood, we also had a cat so that's a personal resonance. And as you said, there's three case examples in this article. There's actually two research articles coming out, and one is already out there. It's called “Animal Ethical Mourning: Types of Loss and Grief in Relation to Non-Human Animals.” So, there's a lot in the title and it’s written together with Elisa Aaltola. Elisa is a philosopher and animal rights activist and a very empathetic person who is well known in Finland for her public work around animal rights. So, she's both a researcher and a public figure. And the three case examples have some similarities, but also differences in dynamics. And this pet and companion animal loss is luckily becoming more enfranchised if that's a word in English. So, there's more voice and recognition for that in many places, but not everywhere. Sometimes I think that the depth of those losses is still not recognized. So, how strong the emotional bond and connection may be and sometimes it's a double loss in the sense that the animal companion has before helped the human companion in facing different stresses and hardships. So, when losing an animal, one is also losing a source of support. And that may happen of course when we lose close persons, but that's something to be recognized.

This wildlife grief ties with what is called ‘ecological grief’ or ‘environmental grief’ and what we have been discussing often in this podcast. Climate change related sadness and grief which is often called climate grief is also closely connected with that. In research, literature, and art-based work around ecological grief, many different animals are featured and discussed. There's some very profound artwork which at the same time tries to work against disenfranchised grief in relation to wildlife grief. And it may sometimes be challenging to think of ways to do that mourning in community. But people have been trying to find creative ways like memorials or some kind of rituals or performances. And I've been part of that work in Finland. Like this annual theme day of Remembrance Day for Lost Species on November 30th. So, there's a small but growing international movement for having an annual team day for remembering other species and those which are extinct. There's some memorials people have set up. I think one of the most famous is the memorial for passenger pigeon in the United States and that sort of thing. The third case example of farmed animal grief may be very challenging for people who feel it because of the social contradictions. We all know that there's differences in opinion about meat eating and vegetarianism, for example. And still, people are living in the same cities and visiting the same grocery stores. And one of the things I realized when doing this research with Elisa and engaging with the literature and people's experiences was learning more about how challenging it may be for people who feel this kind of grief because then they have to try to find ways to process that in communities where there's disagreement over these issues.

Doherty: Yeah, let’s hold that thought on the disagreement. I'm just thinking about the art piece there. When I was working on my book, I did a little research on art and nature. There's a whole movement of people that do art regarding animals. And there's an artist, Amanda Stronza, who makes these alters to animals. People do that around roadkill animals, animals that are killed on the side of the road. I think the writer, Barry Lopez, had written a famous essay about that years ago. So disenfranchised means unrecognized, not given any rights. When we're driving down the highway, and we see a deer or a raccoon or a bird or a coyote killed on the side of the road, we just pass it by. There’s a social denial about that being an issue. Like someone's going to come and pick up that animal and take it away, but we're not supposed to mourn for it. We're not supposed to be sad for these animals. At least that's what society will tell us. But, of course, we do feel sad, and children feel sad and it's poignant that children have to learn that you're not supposed to notice this, you're supposed to just drive by. Whereas if it was a dog or a cat, then that's different. We have different rules. I've seen whole traffic stop because a dog was in the road because people don't want to hurt the dog. It's just fascinating how we have a hierarchy of different rights for things like that and obviously, if someone was actively torturing an animal that wouldn't be okay, but if it's hit by a truck, it's okay. So anyway, it's confusing so this gets into all that kind of stuff.

Pihkala: Yeah, totally. Thanks for voicing that, Thomas. For children and young people, it can be very confusing. Then, thinking of why the bad treatment of certain species is widely accepted in society, for example. This hierarchy of species affects mourning practices in places where people professionally work with animals. So, one quote from a study of two professionals was by a bird caring person who was feeling bad because in Judaism, charismatic big mammals may be publicly mourned and there may be poignant practices of enabling people who visit the zoo to participate in that memorialization. But then when birds die, the attitude may be that they don't live long anyway and there's going to be new birds and that sort of thing. So, this hierarchy can exist in these places where there is caring about animals.

Doherty: Yeah, and then of course, it's political. So, it's touchy. You talk about animal grief and how it can be contested, right? Meaning that people don't agree on the ethics of it. And of course, most of the animal factory farming is kept secret or suppressed from the public because if people saw what was happening in these places, they would viscerally become nauseated and then they wouldn't want the animals. We talk about ecological wake up calls around climate change or other things, but people have wake up calls around eating animals when they learn about some of the practices. It’s just complicated because there are many people that try to ethically raise animals and try to ethically do this, but once you get into this large-scale factory commodification corporations, we lose touch with the humanity of it.

Pihkala: Yeah, and there's lots of developments in society and the economy which have been pushing farmers to go into more large-scale animal raising and production. So, it hasn't been easy for people who would have wanted to do that on a more personal level and small-scale level. That may be economically very difficult. Luckily, there's people who try to do that. There's a book called Environmental and Animal Abuse Denial: Averting Our Gaze by Tomaž Grušovnik from eastern Europe and a couple of others edited that one. That's an interesting book where these mechanisms of trying to keep a distance or trying to keep them hidden are used, as you say Thomas, both in relation to climate matters and to animal factory farming, for example. So, on one hand it's a very human thing to try not to look too intensively at suffering, but of course it's not very ethical and that's where the title of our article comes from, “Animal Ethical Mourning”. It's moral commitment to animals and then the grief which results from this moral commitment. I hope dear listeners that this doesn't get too heavy for you, but it's deeply entwined with love, care, and empathy. That's of course seen in children, the sort of ability to empathize with animals and, as you say Thomas, the conflicted feelings which come if they observe that the adult world doesn't bury all the animals on the roadside, for example. But overall, there’s this whole phenomenon of sadness and grief because of what happens to non-human animals. It's tied with love and care. So, on one hand it's very heavy, but it also testifies to very important and power-giving relationalities in our lives.

Doherty: Yeah, power-giving is a great term. It's an underlying hurt because we care and underlying this is love and care. The only reason we feel discomfort is because we have some value there. Unnecessary suffering is probably one of the core underlying values here. I think people really understand intellectually that we all die, animals die, there's going to be death. I don't see people mourning as much when they watch say a wildlife film where some cheetahs are chasing down a wildebeest in the savanna and they catch the wildebeest and eat it. There's an understanding of the cycle of life and that they're predators and prey. It seems to be somehow part of the natural order, but when we take it out of that and put it into this needless suffering, I think most everyone can agree that, unless you’re pathological, people don't like unnecessary suffering nor do they like waste or things that are wasteful. So, I think we can all agree on these kinds of things. Listeners, you're hearing us talk about this and you're going to have all of your connections, whether it's your pet or concerns about animals in the wild or concerns about animals and factory farms. You might have your own farm or grow your own animals or chickens for eggs and all these kinds of things. Hunting of course is a whole special lifestyle. I know a lot of people that are very ethical regarding hunting. They're not interested in unnecessary suffering of animals or wasting animals. I think it's possible for hunters to both enjoy the thrill of the hunt, but also feel grief for the loss of the animal. I think that's what we would have in the native cultures, some combination of ritual reciprocal relations, right? Like nature and humans, we give and take. We're missing so much of that in the modern world, that kind of ceremonial connection. So, it's a deep thing. We touched on this a bit, but let’s move toward this for the end of the talk. What do we do with this grief, like how do we enfranchise it, how do we give it power in examples that you've seen?

Pihkala: That's a very important question and one can take a look at what we know about grief and bereavement, about human loss and death and what kind of things and practices support a healthy grieving process, if we call it that. So, there's many possible things ranging from something one can do on one's own, for example freely writing or journaling about feelings of sadness and grief. That's something which can be done even while there might be social disenfranchised grief. Doing some kind of rituals for commemoration helps both with emotions and also has an ethical dimension, the task of bearing witness, which we have discussed in an earlier episode. “Environmental Commemoration” would be one frame here by Mihaela Mihai and Mathias Thaler, for example. Those rituals can also be done on your own or with a small, trusted group of people or at some times and places it may be possible to do that in public. There’s interesting new sorts of practices and rituals emerging. For example, with wildlife grief, there’s this annual Remembrance Day for Lost Species on November 30th. So that's an annual theme day. I think it started from Britain, from Brighton if I'm not mistaken, and then it's spread into various corners of the world, and I've been facilitating that kind of work with small groups of people in Helsinki. We usually do that annual ritual in the animal cemetery in the central park of Helsinki, which is really a forest. So, it's mostly companion animals there, but there's a memorial stone for animals who have suffered in medicine and animal testing, for example. So, these kinds of stable memorials are one option. And I know that in the States, there's a memorial for the passenger pigeon which has been there for decades already, so that's part of the public dimension.

Then of course, coping with grief is a very wide topic and there's lots of good literature on that. Personally, I've been learning much from William Worden and his tasks of mourning approach and also from Robert Neimeyer and sort of meaning reconstruction framework. It explains how we need to work through changes in meanings in life when something major happens. We've discussed this in one episode way back and in this article, there's discussion about the various types of loss and grief and there's also a separate episode in our podcast about that. And in spring 2025, the Climate Mental Health Network presented a new set of resources on ecological and climate grief based on these types of loss and grief. So, we'll put a link to that in the show notes. So, these interconnections between animal ethical mourning and ecological and climate grief are quite profound. But how about you, Thomas? With your long experience of counselling people and in psychology, what are some of the things that come up to you in relation to coping with sadness and grief?

Doherty: Yeah, I'm just thinking out loud here. I wasn't aware of the passenger pigeon memorial, but I see that it's in Wisconsin. I think with a lot of these things, we think we're alone and we think we're the only one. Then, when we scratch the surface, we realize other people think about this. So, there’s this paradox that you can't stay isolated and once you start talking about it, you find kindred spirits. I think that's one of the big universal takeaways. This animal stuff is universal. I can't imagine anyone not having some opinions on it if we just create a safe space to talk about it. It’s just so primal to our existence. So, I do think sometimes people either underestimate the resources around them or they overestimate the barriers. But it does take that initial courage to share something. I know if you go to any Audubon Society or bird society or any kind of animal rescue or animal adoption, there are so many people that devote their lives to caring for animals. People do dog walking, pet sitting, and veterinarians is another area. Either people work as veterinarians or broadly in the veterinary field and they’re all highly attuned to animals. Of course, horse people work with horses and they’re very strong, intelligent, special animals and there's rituals and things. So, there's more here and it's just these weird, disenfranchised areas are like a double reality. They exist all around us, but we kind of have to ignore them unless you get into it a little bit. So, I would encourage people to push into it a little bit. I was trying to find the words for it, because I feel like it’s still very difficult and heavy. But, once you do some of this work like looking at all these models and all the different kinds of grief, it's like a divide and conquer kind of thing. I can divvy up all of my grief feelings into smaller, palatable or more understandable pieces, versus this massive grief that you can't understand. It just feels overwhelming. So yeah, that's what comes up.

Pihkala: Yeah, warm thanks for sharing that, Thomas and I strongly agree on trying to move forward from this sense of isolation, because as you say, there's many people who feel these things and with my work around types of loss and grief, I hope that people will take their time with it. It's a lot at first glance to think of all these concepts, but hopefully that might lead to developing a vocabulary which may help at discerning what kind of actions and practices might help in the case of certain kinds of losses. In these practical encounters with the topic and with other people, often I've had to experience beforehand that it's heavy and facilitate that. Because of my earlier life history, I've been facilitating a lot of funerals, for example, so I have certain sets of skills for that. But then afterwards, it's usually a very relieved atmosphere. So, there's a surprisingly powerful sense of relief and perhaps even something like honor after collectively doing this. So, I would encourage you listeners, whatever the types of loss and grief you feel in relation to other animals are, to experiment with engaging with those even though it may feel difficult at first. And I don't want to say that it's a guaranteed relief always, but there's that possibility that it may actually be strangely relieving.

Doherty: Yeah, well it's cathartic, right? It's not uncommon for people to have strong emotions or to cry or to emote so it does get the weight off of us. There might be a place of finding some peace or some grace with this kind of thing. It's all existential at the end of the day because we're all ultimately dealing with the limited life and death and our inevitability of our death, just how do we do it in an ethical way. So yeah, this is a difficult topic. It's a big, tough topic, but that's why we have to be courageous enough to bring it up here. And you cannot go toward happiness in the world without being able to feel all these other feelings. Otherwise, your happiness feels artificial, right? So, thanks for doing this, Panu. I'm going to share this with some of my family who might appreciate this. We'll put links in the show notes to these academic papers for folks that are working in the academic world but also just some of the images and simple things that you've shared for the public because I think it's a great public service. Well thanks Panu, let's wrap it up and listeners, I hope you took something important from this and it'll allow you to go easier in your life as you deal with these issues.

Pihkala: Thanks Thomas for another deep discussion and what you say might be a motto for the podcast. It's all existential at the end of the day. Take care people.

Doherty: Yeah, for sure. All right, take care. Bye.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

The Climate Change and Happiness Podcast is a self-funded volunteer effort. Please support us so we can keep bringing you messages of coping and thriving. See the donate page at climatechangeandhappiness.com.

 

 

image credit | Robin Canfield

Season 4, Episode 23: On Transformational Resilience with Bob Doppelt

Thomas and Panu met with long-time environmental and mental health advocate Bob Doppelt. Bob talked about his personal story beginning with landscape and river system conservation and moving into sustainability and leadership education. Bob also spoke of his recent activities working with the International Transformational Resilience Coalition on ways that communities can connect and adapt in the face of climate disruptions. Bob's latest work focuses on the idea of “community is medicine.” As happens when like-minded people come together, Thomas and Bob found that they had a number of mutual connections in the Oregon white water rafting community. Join us for an inspiring conversation.

Links

• Bob Doppelt

• Transformational Resilience (book)

• The International Transformational Resilience Coalition

• David Pollack: What is Transformational Resilience and how does it apply to the mental health and public health responses to the impacts of climate change?

• Campaign for Trauma Informed Policy and Practice

Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

Introduction voice: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness (CC&H), an international podcast that explores the personal side of climate change. Your feelings, what the crisis means to you, and how to cope and thrive. And now, your hosts, Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala.

Thomas Doherty: Well hello, I’m Thomas Doherty.

Panu Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. This is our podcast, a show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change and other environmental issues. And you know what they say when you pick on one thing in the universe, it's hitched to everything else. So, climate environmental issues include your family, politics, economics, your life, your spirituality. So, all this stuff. And we really enjoy having conversations with people around the world. And I'm really honored to have a guest today. A person that I've actually never met but we have a lot of shared contacts in the past as often happens. So, I'd like you to meet our guest.

Doppelt: Hello, I’m Bob Doppelt. I coordinate the International Transformational Resilience Coalition. I'm happy to be here today.

Doherty: Yeah, and we were just chatting before we started. Now, I used to work as a river guide and an outdoor guide in Oregon. And I knew Bob had been a river guide too and it turns out we know some of the same people and some of my mentors he had worked with. It's a small world in sustainability and climate sometimes, and we cross paths. So that's already a nice connection we're having. And I'm really interested in actually hearing about Bob's current work and all the things he's doing. Panu, do you want to get us started?

Pihkala: Warmly welcome, Bob, also on my behalf. Pleasure to meet you. We have been presenting in some of the same lecture series, but we haven't actually talked with each other, so this is a pleasure. I started working on eco-anxiety and eco-emotions around 2008 or 2009, and then in a more concentrated manner after 2015. And during that period, I was very happy when I found your book from 2016 called Transformational Resilience. Terms such as eco-anxiety existed. They were not as popular as they were later on, but I was really surprised how wide-ranging that book was already, including both individual methods for calming down your nervous system when there's too much stress and lots of things around community and social relations and resources. So, I was very grateful for that, and it's actually had some influence in Finland also, but before going into details, and listeners, we will open up the concept of transformational resilience, it would be very nice to hear something about your personal journey. How did you become so invested in these matters related to environmental issues and human psychology and community resilience?

Doppelt: Well, thank you both and nice to meet you both. Even though it's not in person yet. But I've sort of, like many of us in life, go in a fishtail kind of experience through life. I've been a river guide all my life, including in high school, and had always had a strong connection to the outdoors. But in doing that, one of the things I did when I was very young, I was hired at age 21, after college, to run an outdoor treatment program for 30 kids. Here are 30 kids, now take them around the country and do rock climbing, backpacking, river running, and don't kill anybody. That was sort of the message I got from the director, but we did it, and it went well. So, it was early on that I had an experience of having to work with people who were in stressful situations and in the outdoors. And it was a very interesting learning experience.

So, I ended up going to grad school both in counseling psychology and in environmental science. My first actual professional experience, I worked as a counselor with troubled youth and their families. And after a number of years there, I realized that I didn't have enough understanding of what many of these kids were going through to really help them. I was trained in Adlerian counseling and Dreikurs family therapy and this didn't help many of the kids that I was dealing with, and we can get into that later. I got burned out because of that, so I went back into the environmental field. Then ended up, after many years, running the Climate Leadership Initiative at the University of Oregon, which was one of the very first social science based ethical assistance research programs in the US. So, we ran around helping organizations, state governments, country governments and others develop their first climate action plans. We went to southeast Florida and helped organize the Southeast Florida Climate Resiliency Compact which brought together the largest metro area in Florida, Miami-Dade and Broward counties to prepare for sea level rise, storm surges, and other impacts. Then, Superstorm Sandy came along which you might remember. I guess 12 years ago. We saw mental health impacts in the northeast of the US such as New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, but it skirted along the coast of Florida, and we saw the same impacts here. The other people in the climate field didn’t see that or if they did, they didn’t care much because it wasn’t their background. But because of my background in mental health, I saw those impacts and I knew they were going to get way worse because the climate emergency was going to get way worse. That led me to form the ITRC, the International Transformation of Resilience Coalition, to try to combine these two fields now 11 years ago.

Doherty: Yeah, this is great. Either for young people or for people that are new in some sort of climate or sustainability, it's important to realize this is not new at all. People have been in some form of environmental sustainability for 50 years, in the modern sense of the term and certainly climate. Now someone who grew up in Oregon, I talk in the book I'm working on about the emergence of the modern environmental movement. Much of it took place on the West Coast and in places like Oregon and Eugene. So, this idea of having a climate resilience plan isn’t new. It was like 30 years ago that people were talking about this. It wasn't just yesterday. So, it's really great to talk with you. It gives a sense of the breadth and distance and depth of this kind of program. A lot of people were surprised by Sandy, but you were already involved and could see it coming. All these experiences like Sandy, Lahaina, the LA fires, and Ashley. These are all tipping point wakeup call experiences. I think Sandy's unique, and we could talk maybe more about that because it mobilized the New York intelligentsia, the New York therapists. The people that wouldn't necessarily be the Oregonian river guide types. It brought them into the mix of this so that's really a sad way to do it, but it is what's been happening. It's probably what's the case. Each disaster kind of folding in a new subculture of people into this work. Would you say that's a fair statement?

Doppelt: Yeah, I think as is often the case with humans is that it's only a crisis that gets us to think differently, change our minds, etc. And this issue is so overwhelming to most people, they can't get their heads around it. So, we deal with the next crisis by trying to respond to it, and then we move on. We don't think about what's actually happening over the long term and what's needed because we're going to have more and more disasters. And just as importantly with the climate crisis, we call it the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis, because it's way more than an atmospheric crisis. We're degrading ecological systems and we're exterminating biodiversity worldwide that feeds back to increased temperatures and dysregulates the atmospheric climate system even more, which of course then feeds back and has more ecological and biological impact. So, it’s a real interactive process. Even the most destructive impacts go far beyond disasters, these extreme weather events. And that's what people haven't quite wrapped their heads around. It’s activating cascading disruptions to the ecological, social, and economic systems people rely on for food, water, shelter, jobs, health, income. And we often can't connect it with the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis. But even now, rising food prices in the US, that people are so mad about, are not all caused by, but a significant part is droughts that are impacting food, reducing the ability of farmers to produce food, etc. So, it's creating all sorts of stresses. And then on top of that, or connected to that, are these acute disasters that come in and harm and destroy people. And that is really what we really need to prepare for. That's what my organization is trying to help people prepare for and communities prepare for. Otherwise, we just sit around and try to react to the next disaster and help people through mental health first aid afterwards. And that's important, but that's not the solution at all.

Pihkala: Yeah, that's a real systemic approach to these issues. Could you share with the listeners what are some of the practical methods in that kind of work?

Doppelt: Yeah, good question. So as people think about it, when there is a disaster, what normally happens? People come together who don't know each other, might not even like each other, and they help each other out. They provide food and shelter or practical assistance. They go rescue somebody from a situation and they set up food shelters for people to come and get food when their home's ruined or something. That's called the community cohesion phase of a disaster or the honeymoon phase. So, we help people realize and think about if they’ve been assisted by that or participated in that in some way and if they could see that kind of mutual aid network becoming long-term and permanent. That's really what we're focused on. We are focused on helping communities and neighborhoods form what we call Transformational Resilience Coordinating Networks, TRNCs. They are these mutual aid networks. The difference is the mutual aid networks usually get established and then disappear a month, two months, whenever after disaster ends. People go back and put their own lives back together and they leave.

The climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis is going to get far worse, actually in rapid order, and it's going to continue for decades. We need to establish the social infrastructure in communities that can support that community cohesion phase over the long term. That's what the Transformation Resilience Coordinating Networks are and as part of that, they need to help people learn different kinds of resilience skills and engage in different kinds of resilience activities. I can dive into that in a second. But that's really what we're trying to do. And I'll just also say that we've been working on this for quite a while. We have TRCNs, they call themselves something different, in many parts of the U.S and Canada and other places. The UN High-Level Climate Champion Race to Resilience Initiative found out about our work over a year ago and invited us to become a partner. So, we're now working internationally on this through the UN Race to Resilience Initiative and finding that different countries, different nations, different communities struggle with different issues than we do in western communities and higher income areas.

Doherty: Yeah, this is great. It's like Paradise Built in Hell from Rebecca Solnit. In a crisis is opportunity in the sense that we can really build back better, and we can actually harness all the positive honeymoon phase human connections that come about in disasters because they do have this leveling effect temporarily. You didn't say it, but I think being proactive about this helps us to get ahead of disaster capitalism and some of the breakdowns. I don't know that you get into that directly, but I see you as standing in the way of that negative stuff happening.

Doppelt: Yeah, we do actually get into a bit. We don't label that. I will say that Rebecca's work didn't talk about what happens after the community cohesion phase. And that's really what's important. Then you go into what we call the disillusionment phase because people have to go back and put their own lives back together so that cohesion and that community support no longer exists. And that can last for months or years and that's the disillusionment phase. That's when most of the mental health and psychosocial problems emerge. That's why we need to establish this social infrastructure over the long term, because we don't want that disillusionment phase. We want that support to be there.

And what we also find is that one of the things driving much of this is the social isolation and loneliness that people feel in western and higher income nations that is very toxic today and is getting worse with social media and other kinds of things. This brings people together and creates the social connections, the social cohesion and social efficacy needed to address these common problems. And it has to happen, or it has to start in the communities. And what we find is when communities come together or neighborhoods come together to do this, it takes a while, and you normally wouldn't like each other or they have different political views, but they create the political power to push for change at a higher level. And that's really key. But we don't talk about that being the goal, initially. First, help each other out so that people will help you and you can help others. And when you help others out, you often find new meaning and purpose in your life, you feel good about what you do, you have meaning, and that's what helps prevent mental health problems or heal them when they emerge.

Pihkala: Yeah, that is impressive and so important. And at some point, in our conversation, I do want to go into this topic of meaning and purpose, which I also think is highly, highly essential. And listeners, you may be familiar with the resilience concept and some of the criticism against it. I think it's a valid concept, but some of the main criticism is that if only people return to a previous state of affairs, that will not be enough. And this transformational resilience that Bob is talking about by name goes beyond that. So, it points to growth in these processes. I hear that when you talk about these issues, but do you want to say something more about this transformation aspect?

Doppelt: Yeah, that's a very good point, thank you. When we first started the ITRC, now 11 years ago, we had a team of about 12 people who came together to try to form it. And we had about 30 to 40 emails flying back and forth between people trying to come up with the name. Because what we were really talking about is a post-traumatic growth, in used psychology terms, or adversity-based growth. We thought that was too wonky for the general public, so we called it transformational resilience. But, after many emails trying to come up with a nice name, what this really means is that what's happening with the climate emergency is that our way of life and how people live and what they do is being challenged. Our economic model is being challenged. We're seeing the push back on that now in the U.S.

In other words, what the climate emergency does to many people is it shatters their core views, their deeply held assumptions and beliefs about the way the world operates and their role in it. That's a classic definition of trauma. That's what trauma is about and that's only going to get worse as the climate emergency worsens and we'll have greater push back against it then. Oh no, it's not really happening or whatever. But what transformational resilience means to us and what we teach and what we help communities engage in is how to use adversities to not just bounce back to where you were. For many people, it wasn't a very good place in the first place. Why do you want to bounce back to that? And especially the way we live, our high consumption rates, our high fossil fuel rates, etc., are all not helpful to bounce back to. So how do we use the adversities to find new sources of meaning, purpose, and hope in life that actually increase our sense of well-being and the well-being of others well beyond what it was before. Because it wasn't all that healthy before for many people, and certainly not for the natural environment. So that's what we mean by transformation resilience. How do we use this experience that is just going to continue and grow worse to actually catalyze really fundamental individual, collective, economic and other kinds of changes.

 

Doherty: Yeah, this is all really great. And we're going to put some links in the show notes to the networks that Bob is talking about because I think people might want to get involved. And this is a global initiative that Bob's involved in. It's systemic and that's what's challenging about the terms because like I say in this project I'm working on, when you're thinking big, you're not thinking big enough, right? We always have to keep realizing there's another level and another level and not get too concrete. Systemically, if you help in one small area of your life or in someone's life, then it filters into other areas. And if we draw down carbon in one part of the atmosphere, it helps the whole atmosphere. So, underneath all this, I think there's a systemic insight that that is one of the foundational and juicy parts of this. Bob, how did you get involved in systems thinking? Because that seems to have animated all of your stuff going back. Do you have a story about that or how that came into your life?

Doppelt: That's an interesting question. I don't remember. It was many years ago. I think it was because I was in the environmental field, and you learn systems thinking even if it's not called that. Then I just started going to some workshops and found out how to describe it more graphically or specifically. But, let me just say one other thing in terms of terms. We work with different groups in many different continents, and you have to use different terms, different phrases that resonate and make sense to the culture and demographics of the age groups that you're working with. And we often find that we don't know what we're doing initially. And we have to share different phrases and ask people to share with us how they see these issues. That's how we learn the way that makes the most sense. You have to resonate with what is already there. Scientific facts and figures mean nothing to most people. It's their mental models. It's their assumptions of how the way the world works and how they work. That's what they see the world through. You have to try to understand that as much as possible.

Doherty: It reminds me of SustyVibes. We spoke with Jennifer Uchendu in Nigeria and their term of sustainable vibration, SustyVibes, which if they're not already familiar with your work, there'd be a good contact. That's helpful for all of us to realize. We have to be a cosmopolitan like you. We have to be able to speak different languages, go into different communities and kind of when in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Pihkala: Yeah, exactly so and regardless of various terms and various styles of life, there is still the lived experience of being alive in this strange time of global warming and biodiversity loss and all the other things. And I strongly resonate with this task of trying to listen and understand and connect with other people's experiences and then try to find ways towards increased transformational resilience or transilience which is a word that some scholars suggested a couple of years ago. Adversarial growth or post-traumatic growth has also been one of my interests and I've done an analysis of the traditional categorization of that and then comparing that to people's experiences amidst environmental issues and environmental emotions. So, I've benefited from your work Bob on that project also, but I do want to talk about the very practical resilience skills which you mentioned. So, could you share some of those practical skills and methods that the coalition uses?

Doppelt: Yeah again, thank you for that question. The most important skill is really a process, and that is to build social connections across geographic lines, economic lines, racial lines in the community. And when you do that and we help different community groups learn how to do that, we also help encourage them to help people learn what we call presencing skills, which are self-regulation and co-regulation skills. Skills to calm your body, mind, and emotions and skills to help others do the same that you interact with, that's co-regulation. And once people have calmed their nervous system, we don't usually talk about it that much in those terms, then they practice what we call purposing skills. So presencing and purposing. And purposing is how do you find new meaning, purpose, and hope in these adversities. What can you do? And most of the time, that involves rising above your own interest and trying to help others and help the natural environment. But the starting point often, not always, when we're working with community groups is to build those social connections. So there's programs that do that by holding potlucks for neighbors and having people just get together and get to meet them. The San Francisco neighborhood empowers program, which now they defunded it, which was too bad, was very successful. They would shut off entire streets in urban San Francisco and bring tables out and put tables in the middle and have potlucks. People on high rises would come down and share that. And then after they did that a couple of times, then they'd form a resilience network, a coordinating network, a steering committee of neighbors that wanted to do it. And they'd develop a resilience plan for the community, and they'd share it with everybody. It was a very, very successful program. 

There's many other examples of ways in which communities and neighborhoods can build those social connections. And as doing that, then you add these presencing and purposing skills. If you have a meeting, say let's just take a brief, what we call a resilience pause, but each group can call it something different. Let's just take a moment to calm ourselves. And there's a wide variety of age and culturally appropriate presencing skills that you can use. Sometimes it's breath-based, sometimes it's feeling the sensations in your body, sometimes it's just telling jokes and laughing often. Lots of different ways. You connect the different skills together and you help people understand that you have to stay calm and learn how to find meaning in life given all these other adversities that are going on. That's what purposing is. And I can get into purposing skills too if you want to know about that.

Doherty: That's pretty practical, Panu. Did that answer your question?

Pihkala: Yeah, that's exactly the level of detail and practicality I was hoping for. And if you want to say a bit about the purposing skills, I think that would also be fascinating.

Doppelt: Yeah, listeners, just think about what gives their life purpose. What do they find meaning in? And many times, most often for most people, it is the connections they have with other people, the relationships. But sometimes it's art, or it's helping animals, or helping other people in the community. It's hard to know. And there's other things. Each person's different. For some people, it's spirituality or religious beliefs. We just ask people to think about what helps them find meaning and you ask people how you find that and how can you connect that source of meaning with what's going on now in this disaster. Or how can you find new sources of meaning. What we often point out and we mostly ask questions is do you find that you learned new skills, that you had more skills than you thought you had or strength that you thought you had when you did that kind of work. They say, I didn't realize I could speak up for myself or whatever. And that's what transformation resilience is really about. It's about helping people understand that they can use adversities as catalysts to learn, grow, and increase their sense of well-being, mostly by just becoming aware of skills and capacities they already have that they haven't been using and then applying that to what's going on in their community and their family life. 

Doherty: Yeah, this is great. Listeners, we had an episode recently with my friend Greg Hill, who's much like Bob in doing neat work for a while. We talked about eco-friends where we have these people that we know, and we follow, and they inspire us. So, I got a lot of flavor of this from hearing Bob because even though we haven't actually chatted about this, we tracked very similar thinking over the years. So, it really is validating for me personally to hear your approach because it's similar to how I think about things. I love the presencing and purposing language. That's a key. It's more important than we realize, the language that's flexible enough for people to grab on to. That's not super academic. I'm glad we're talking after I'm writing my book because then I would have to go add a bunch of stuff in. But I do list Bob's program in my resource list. The power of art, the power of spirituality, relationships. What do they say, don't have a meeting, have a party, don't have a meeting, have a potluck. It makes it much more universal and much more human no matter whether you're in Oregon or Africa or Finland.

Pihkala: Indeed so, and we'll put some links to previous podcast episodes. There's one where we discuss various types of meaning in life for example, which is closely related to what Bob was just talking about. We are reaching our usual half an hour length, but I'd like to ask you Bob if you want to share something about what kinds of presencing and proposing skills are important for you personally in this very troubled time? Is it still the river-oriented stuff that has been dear to you for so long? Would you like to share a couple of those that are personally very meaningful?

Doppelt: Yeah, we don't live in a city, we live out in the country because I need nature around us. My wife is the same way. My wife was a veterinary technician for 29 years. So, connection with animals is very much there. But we have a group of friends that we still go rafting with when my arm doesn't hurt me too bad. That's the problem with getting older, that stuff can hurt. But also, for many years, I've practiced meditation and mindfulness. I'm a mindfulness-based stress reduction instructor and I teach part-time at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California. So, I practice those. But most importantly is just finding ways to laugh. We've got a group of friends, we just had dinner again and about once a week we have dinner with a group of and we laugh. We become 12-year-olds and laugh at the silliest things even in the midst of what's going on with the U.S. now and the presidency and we find ways to laugh about it. And I keep doing this work. My wife keeps asking, when am I really going to retire. Well, this is what gives me purpose and meaning.

Let me say one other thing just so we can get it on. If you're interested in forming your own Transformation Resilience Coordinating Network in your neighborhood or community, you can go to our website and use an application to fill out and then we invite you to become part of a community of practice that meets every other week. And there's people from all over the world that join and sometimes we're teaching skills, sometimes we're just having conversations to problem solve with the different groups and communities. We also provide an ongoing educational program about this where they can just sit through a series for a five-week period. They don't have to attend all; they can just get the slides sent to them afterwards. So, there's lots of ways to get involved. You don’t even have to join us. Just think about how you form a mutual aid network in your neighborhood and community. Get your friends together, talk about it, and get a vision together. What are you trying to achieve, what would be different than this happening now, and see if you can get that established because this is what we’re going to need all over the world as the climate emergency worsens. So, I encourage everyone to try to find a way that they can get involved.

Doherty: Yeah, thanks for adding that call to action because that's perfect. We'll put that link on the website. If you're listening to this and this is inspiring to you, go check it out, Transformational Resilience. You could find it pretty easily. And again, it's nice that this is flexible. You can move it in the direction that's good for your community. Well, Bob, I just want to thank you. It's a long time coming to get you on the podcast. I'm so glad that we did. Now we can connect some more and maybe get on the river sometime in the future. We'll say goodbye, listeners. Panu, are you going to get some rest? What's happening at your end there?

Pihkala: Well, what's happening is that the sun has already set in Finland, so time to get some rest and perhaps laugh a bit before that. Thanks, Bob, for all the practical and systemic wisdom you've shared. It's been a great pleasure.

Doppelt: Thank you both for having me and good luck to both of you and all of your listeners.

Doherty: Alright, thanks everyone and everyone be well.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

The Climate Change and Happiness Podcast is a self-funded volunteer effort. Please support us so we can keep bringing you messages of coping and thriving. See the donate page at climatechangeandhappiness.com.

 

 

image credit | Alex Vasey

Season 4, Episode 22: Climate Therapy in Italy with Camilla Gamba and Lucia Tecuta

Thomas and Panu engaged with therapists and researchers Camilla Gamba and Lucia Tecuta, who shared their cosmopolitan journeys into climate psychology and eco-therapy. Lucia and Camilla described their bicultural backgrounds in Italy and the US and challenges and opportunities in translating concepts like environmental identity and stewardship into the rich Italian cultural and historic context. Join us for an inspiring discussion of activism and “il dolce far niente.”

Links

• Camilla Gamba

• Lucia Tecuta

  • Academic

• Climate Reality Project: How the Climate Crisis is Impacting Italy

• Club Alpina Italiano

• Via di Francesco Pilgrimage Route

• Mika Waltari (1956) The Etruscan

• See Season 4, Episode 21: Climate Psychology in Italy with Matteo Innocenti

Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

Introduction voice: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness (CC&H), an international podcast that explores the personal side of climate change. Your feelings, what the crisis means to you, and how to cope and thrive. And now, your hosts, Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala.

Thomas Doherty: Well hello, I’m Thomas Doherty.

Panu Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. This is our podcast, the show for people around the world who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change and environmental issues and their relationship with nature and the earth and of course politics and life. And that's all fair game for our conversations. And we love to talk to people around the world because of course Panu and I are far apart. And today, we are very happy to have two special guests coming in from a country that I love, Italy.

Gamba: So, I'm Camilla Gamba. I'm a therapist in private practice in Milan, Italy.

 Tecuta: And I'm Lucia Tecuta. I'm a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist and a researcher at the University of Bologna, calling in from Bologna, Italy.

 Doherty: I know Lucia and Camilla through my eco training group, and I've actually been colleagues with them. We have not met in person, but we've been colleagues now for a while. So, it's been really exciting to track their innovative work in Italy around climate psychology and eco-therapy. And I know they've met Panu and Panu has spoken with them. So, this is a nice reunion for us. Panu, you want to get us started?

 Pihkala: Warm welcome also on my behalf, lovely to see you again. It also brings warm memories from last December and our meetings in Northern Italy. I know that you both have been listening to the podcast too, so you know that we have this habit of asking something about people's journeys that lead them to who they are so that's one for you also. It would be lovely to hear something like that.

 Gamba: Sure, Lucia, do you want to go first?

 Tecuta: So, I guess it's a little bit convoluted, but I would start off by saying a bit about how I grew up between Rome, which is where I was born, and then around the age of six I moved from, this big metropolitan city to the East Coast, to the States. I lived a little in Maryland, a little in New Jersey, so I moved from a more urban context to a more, I guess, privileged area. And I had the privilege of growing up with a backyard in Maryland. So, I feel like that's where I really started to appreciate nature and develop that nature connection that was missing for me while I was a kid, living in a big city.

I think part of why I do the work that I do right now, sort of coming full circle from my early experiences, is and actually I heard someone talk about this book in their childhood on another podcast about how they came across this book called 100 Ways Kids Can Save the Planet. I was drawn to it as a kid and that's really where I started to become more aware of what was happening. It was the 90s and Al Gore was vice president and there was a lot of talk about the ozone layer, and I remember being a little bit anxious about that. Now that I look back as a researcher that looks at eco-anxiety, I recognized my feelings as a kid as a form of eco-anxiety that I was feeling at the time. And then that ecological awareness went dormant a little bit through middle school and high school. Then, I moved back to Rome when I was a teenager and came into contact with pretty politicized youth. That's where I became more aware of the economic and social systems that we live in and social injustice.

It all came together for me in the last couple of years through my awareness of climate change. I had some events that really shook me, to use a colloquial term. Most of that is the really intense heat waves that are coming through Italy in the summer. Part of that is also the really bad hailstorms that came through Bologna. This was all right before COVID. I would call it an eco-awakening. After those events, it sorts of all came together and I realized how it's all connected. And that brought back that ecological awareness that was lost throughout the years. And I think also becoming a mother had a big impact on me, just everything sort of you know multiply times a hundred. Just being scared not only for myself and my family origin but also now my son and his future and future generations and what they're going up against.

And then, I guess coincidentally, if you believe in coincidences or synchronicities, I guess another term we could use. I had the chance to sort of brainstorm on psychological constructs to study in relationship to sustainability and eating behaviors. And I was looking at the literature and I actually found your paper, Panu, on climate anxiety and eco-anxiety. And that just rang like a thousand bells in my brain. And I realized, this is what I was feeling first of all. So, it was really validating and really important for me to put those pieces together. And then I was able to give that as an idea that we could look at this, in relation to eating sustainably, but also eating disorder risk. We don't really know how these things sort of move together. And so that's how I feel like everything sort of came full circle starting from like my early childhood experience and the teenage years and being really politicized and coming into contact with anarchists and communists and socialists and all of that. And then the climate eco-awakening bit. And so, I feel like I've finally started to find my place in what I think I should be doing. That’s also thanks to your course, Thomas, that really helped me. It's a big, big puzzle piece to all of this. And then meeting like-minded colleagues who also became friends like Camilla. That's another big piece of this.

Doherty: Yeah, eco friends, as we say.

Tecuta: Eco friends, yeah, to take a turn from your past podcast. So yeah, that's my journey in all of this.

Gamba: Yeah, so my journey is not too different from Lucia. I was born in Milan. My dad's Italian. I lived here until I was eight. Back then, now still to some degree, but back then there was a lot of cement and a lot of air pollution. And then, we moved to California where my mom is originally from. It was a much healthier style there I'd say, where we were growing up in Davis, California. I moved back to Italy when I was 18 and kind of like Lucia was saying, in my time in school in California, I had a lot of awareness of ecology, ecological crisis, and starting to be aware of climate change. So, to some degree, I feel like I've always had climate anxiety without knowing what it was. And then, I like the term used Lucia, the idea that it was dormant for a while. And then in 2021, it was in the middle of the California wildfires and COVID. And I went back visiting from Italy and had what I can call now an eco-awakening. Back then, it just felt like something really disturbing was happening. And so, I did what you do, which is you Google your symptoms and somehow came across the term eco-anxiety and came across your website Thomas or maybe some of the videos you had on YouTube and I found it really interesting. I signed up for the course and, like Lucia was saying, a lot of the puzzle pieces started coming together and then something interesting happened, again the synchronicity, Lucia and I are in this WhatsApp group of English-speaking therapists in Italy. It's an informal group.

Then, I think one day Lucia posted something about research on climate anxiety. And I just jumped in there and said, hey you also know about this very niche thing in Italy, because at the time, it felt like I knew very few people who were talking about this. And then we just kind of rolled with it. We took the course with Thomas; we started translating a few things that we thought would be useful. We translated the Climate Psychology Alliance handbook into Italian as well as the climate emotion wheel, we thought that was a really cool tool. So, that's kind of how we got started. And Thomas definitely also gave us the courage to say, just get in there and do the work, even if you don't feel like you know it all. You don't have to know it all to start doing this work, so here we are.

Pihkala: Thanks for sharing all that. That's very interesting and wonderful to hear. There are similarities in people's journeys and then all kinds of nuances and differences. So that's always very interesting to hear. And we'd love to talk a bit more about the actual work you are doing around climate psychology and environmental psychology in Italy. But perhaps we could start by asking you something about the Italian relationships to the modern human world and perhaps especially if that has an impact on how people see issues related to climate change and environmental change. I know this is a very big question and there's a lot of variation inside each country, but it would be interesting to hear some of your observations on that.

Gamba: Sure. I think one of the first things to say is that Italy is a very varied country, meaning each region has its own very specific history, its own language, now they call them dialects, and its own culture. So, I think it depends on where you go and also thinking about the specific history in relation to the land, how the land has been used over time, who's been occupying and using the land and who hasn't is very different from region to region. A lot of Italy is very densely populated and a lot of the territory, if it's not urban, it's most likely agriculture. So maybe that's one piece around the relationship to nature. And then we have the Alps and the mountains, which are maybe one of the few places that people can go to and do go to if they want to feel that they can get away and commune with nature. We're sharing with Lucia, thinking about how we can represent Italians' relationship to nature? It's a tricky one because it's been very built up. The coasts, for example, cater to a certain type of tourism. I feel like there's very little nature left there. There's a lot of cement, a lot of places that cater to tourists who maybe want to go and listen to music and dance and be on the beach with their aperitivo. The same is happening more and more to the mountains, ski resorts. So, there is some tension around that.

Tecuta: Yeah, there's been a lot of, I guess what you could call illegal construction or development in a lot of natural areas. For example, a lot of the coast is privatized with what I guess is called beach clubs. So, I guess the relationship with nature, I don't want to use words that are too strong, is not particularly respectful in that sense. A lot of destruction.

Gamba: It feels like nature's been sacrificed to cater to economic wants.

Tecuta: Right, economic growth and tourism, like Camilla was saying, that's definitely a big, big issue. So, it's very difficult. I imagine for whoever's involved in conservation efforts and things like that. And Italy went through quite a dramatic economic boom, I guess in the 60s. I think after World War II, there's definitely a lot of poverty and hardship, a lot of migration from the South to the North, from Southern agricultural areas to the Northern cities that promised more work opportunities. So, it's dramatically changed probably in the last 70, 80 years or so. And I feel like in the Italian collective unconscious, this idea of an association between being in the city, and probably this is common in a lot of cultures and countries, but moving to the city or living in a city is associated with having made it somehow, right? Having left, sort of poor conditions and hardships. So, it's hard to find outside of specific environments, for example mountain areas, an appreciation and a respect for nature.

Gamba: Yeah, it's also really hard to find in Italy. Coming from California where we have big wilderness spaces, it's really hard in Italy to find large, intact, healthy ecosystems. In Italian, we don't even have a word for wilderness, which I always thought was really interesting. But having said this about certain types of tourism, there are a few trends that I think are interesting. One is hiking and people really wanting to enjoy the mountains for what they are. In Italy we have the CAI, it's the Club Alpino Italiano. It's a really large non-profit organization which is in charge of what the US Forest Service does. So, they make sure that the trails are kept nicely and they do a lot of trainings and things like that. They have a fantastic rescue service, which I recently had the opportunity to test. I broke my ankle hiking, and I got a really good rescue operation taking place. So, shout out to the CAI volunteers or all volunteers. And then another interesting trend is what we call here agriturismo. So, tourism that goes to agricultural places is one of the ways to reconnect with nature. They might be going to farmhouses or places where they're enjoying both the place and the environment, but also the food. Because of course, food is a big part of the culture here.

Tecuta: Yeah, there is definitely a movement for slow food, organic farming. And it's interesting, there's also a very niche trend of younger people. Most of them sort of migrate from the south to the northern cities to go to university or whatever, but then being frustrated and sort of disillusioned by the economic crises and the recessions and not finding jobs easily. Some of them are actually moving back south, back to more natural settings and even opening up their own small farms and going back to those kinds of roots. So that's another interesting trend, sort of trying to take care also of whatever nature is left. And then there's also another interesting movement now that I think about which is confiscated lands from the mafia. There are several associations that take those lands and of course they try to clean them up or try to give them back to the people and turn them into something socially useful. And you can even buy some products in some supermarkets that use whatever grains or raw materials to make pasta, coffee, or whatever it is. And so, when you buy that product, you're buying something that's from the confiscated mafia lands. And you're giving money to these really great initiatives. So, there's little niche movements here and there that kind of give you hope that some good is happening.

Pihkala: Yeah, that's very interesting and for many listeners depending on where you come from. It's fascinating to think about these geographical and ecological factors. In Europe, we have places like the Netherlands, where there's even more management of nature, more than the human world. Then in Italy, there's more than in Finland, partly because there's been more population and older human history, so there's been more time to spread. I have to mention a very interesting historical novel by Mika Waltari, the greatest historical novel writer of Finland in 20th century, which is about the time of the Etruscans and that transition time where there were still animistic beliefs in Italy among the old tribes, but slowly the Roman Empire was building up and the changes were happening. Anyway, that's slightly an anecdote. But Lucia, you went in the direction of counter movements. And I would guess that if there's a strong utilitarian hegemonic attitude, there might also be more ecological counter movements. And I met some interesting young people, shout to Lorenzo also here. So, would you like to say a bit about those?

Tecuta: Sure, I think Camilla's more familiar with the work that Lorenzo does, if you wanted to talk about that.

Gamba: Yeah, I'm trying to think of what Lorenzo's doing, but also the network. I think that's also really interesting. I think the counter movement also involves a lot of just people pooling resources together in a very informal way. And so maybe some people like Lorenzo are bringing in a lot of eco-somatic work. There are different people doing different pieces, the psyche and the local lands and the community and the body. They’re putting all these different pieces together. That’s kind of what's coming to mind, maybe like this web that different people are weaving. And yes, Lorenzo is part of the web and Lucia and everybody doing a little piece and creating altogether in this counter movement. Nobody has the manual of how to do it. And I think we're all just trying something different and doing it together and seeing what works. There is definitely a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of interest. Maybe we don't know exactly where we're all going with this, but it's kind of fun to watch it evolve and emerge. I don't know, Lucia, if you have a similar view of all this.

Tecuta: Yeah, I mean there's growing interest and curiosity in people that work in more mainstream settings. Like we've been contacted by journalists recently to talk about climate psychology and nature connection. We're trying to propose workshops and collaborate with them. For example, there’s the Earth Festival that's coming up in Turin in November that we're thinking of offering a workshop at and yeah, it's definitely a work in process.

Gamba: Yeah, it's sort of a new thing to be a psychologist and to be talking about nature more than the human world and climate change. I think one of the things we've been finding is the more we are getting to know people, the more people are getting to know about the work, then we're starting to get interest. And so, then it's about planning and writing project proposals and getting funding. Lucia and I are just about to finish recording an eight-hour climate anxiety eco-psychology course that's going to be available for therapists as part of their continuing education credit. So, there are lots of things emerging.

Doherty: Yeah, this is really wonderful. This is what we hoped to do today. We also talked to Matteo Innocenti recently and we'll have an episode. He's a psychiatrist in Italy that you both know. And of course, he's working on disasters and the flooding. That's another whole theme we could get into, which we don't have to get into details. I think the general theme that I'm hearing over all of this episode, and listeners, you can think about this, is just the idea of translation as a theme. Like we're translating these ideas. Both Lucia and Camilla have this international cosmopolitan life where they know American culture and Italian culture. So, they're translating and there's a really fruitful translation. Well, obviously many people in America idolize Italy and the land and the connection with family and the whole culture. And of course, there's this idea of rewilding and being in nature and wilderness and these kinds of values for the US. So, there's this cross theme, which is beautiful.

There are so many more connections, we can't forget Pope Francis and his work as being one of the most potentially one of the most influential environmentalists of our era and I know the Catholic Church is also huge and diverse as well, but still we have these voices. We’ve got the pilgrimage tracks in Italy and the religious culture and its working land and nature. It’s just that depth of modern human history that literally you can excavate ruins. So, it is beautiful. So, I feel like you both are so well positioned because the pressures of climate change are going to make people more aware of their connections with nature. Years and years ago, Theodore Roszak was talking about eco-psychology, and he wanted people's connection with nature to be a celebration and something they love, not just a way called a grim duty to say the planet. So, I feel like there's this synergy between, I don't know what the word in Italian is, like joie de vivre or life philosophy, which is very nature based and the pressures of climate change and how to preserve. I think preservation of some of these treasured ways is also going to have to be a thing. Even with the Olympics and potential for snow in the Alps. So, you're just really well positioned to do whatever you can. You know, just do your part and then help new people.

Gamba: Yeah, the theme of translation is here, but another image that comes to mind is pollinators. You know, taking something good from here and bringing it over there and then making your eco-friends along the way. And so having that be a fun journey.

Tecuta: Yeah, definitely. And trying to also mesh different values. Because if we're talking about, I can't generalize to all Italians, the sort of long history of seeing nature as something tied to hardship and to work and trying to bring in seeing nature as something that is inherently valuable can be difficult to do sometimes, but really, really important. Especially in the context of everything that's happening, Olympics included. And not forget that or get carried away with just destroying what you need to destroy to make room for new stuff. That's definitely a theme for me.

Pihkala: What are some of the things, Lucia and Camilla, that you are passionate about when you think about the next couple of years and your sort of vocation on this planet?

Gamba: I think the whole theme of climate change is really important and I've been trying to get up to speed with being knowledgeable about what's happening and that's really important, but I do feel so much more joy when it comes to fostering nature connection and being in nature. I’m starting to do walk and talk therapy and trying to shift the setting of my work to more natural spaces. And what's really fun about this, going back to the eco-friends, is we've got a group of therapists who are wanting to do that together. So, the peer supervision thing to have that spread in Italy and to maybe get our professional boards on board with this to help us out with guidelines and insurance and all of that. That's something that I'm feeling really excited about.

Tecuta: Yeah, I think the same here. I'm working mostly as a researcher right now, but what I'd really like to do is spend way more time and dedicate more time to, besides the trainings that we're doing for colleagues and psychotherapists, working education or higher training or whatever is working more in the community. So even doing more workshops, like the ones that we've just started doing together to use nature connection, but I kind of want to say as a leverage that you should care about climate change as well. And sort of using that as Thomas was saying, use the joy to get people on board on what's happening, which is pretty dramatic here in Italy. The changes are quite drastic already and we’re seeing a lot of it. So, I would love to find a way of putting the two together and offering something that does spark change and hopefully get bigger players on board because you need the funding to do this kind of thing. So, that's definitely the direction where I'm headed hopefully.

Doherty: Yeah, this is great. As always, we could go on. We say every episode we could do another half an hour because there's so much to talk about. But listeners, I think this scratched the surface of the broad cultural trends in Italy and things that are going on. And we'll have some links to things that people might want to look at in our show notes. Camilla and Lucia, you can let us know about your training and various things. Maybe in that joy theme, and Panu and I are both really into language and this idea, what could listeners around the world take away as a word or a concept from Italian culture? You don't have to have the perfect one, but what are some things that come up about words or phrases or concepts that evoke this connection with nature, beauty, family, and the earth.

Gamba: So, the first thing just popped into my head, so I won't think too hard about whether it's a good answer or not. It's the “irimedi della Nonna.” It's a big thing. So grandmother's remedies. So that's usually the first go-to thing. If you have an upset stomach or a runny nose or a headache or cramps or whatever, then you're going to go to “irimedi della Nonna,” which is bound to be nature-based.

Tecuta: Yeah, that's a good one.

Doherty: Yeah, that's beautiful. We'll get the proper spelling of that. Make sure we get it in there.

Tecuta: I actually thought of another one which is so typically Italian, the one that everyone knows, but I don't know if it's right for this context, but the one that came to mind is “il dolce farniente,” which is like the sweetness of doing nothing. And I like it in the context of climate change and everything that's happening to our political and economic system as a way that's subversive. You don't have to consume, you don't have to produce, you could just be. I think it ties really well with enjoying nature. Because in nature, it doesn't ask anything of you, right? Which I think is something that's so great that you get from nature connection. You're not there as a consumer, as a worker, as a part of this machine like the system that we live in.

Gamba: Yeah, and there is a sweetness to that, right. Il dolce, the sweet, farniente, doing nothing.

Tecuta: Yeah, enjoying just being because that's so important to recharge to be able to stay in the movement for the long run if we're thinking about climate change related work.

Doherty: It's perfect. In the U.S., we have this idea of rest is resistance and then the nap ministry, which is a radical claiming of an African American culture of claiming the ability to rest. So, there's a radical side to it. I think my stereotype of Italy is that you might rush a little bit in the city, but people don't rush. That's not a cool thing to do. You want to be elegant and move slowly and savor life and so I think that's a piece. I also think that joy of being in the sun or being in nature and just this the fruit of and sweetness of life is a multicultural ideal and it is something that gets threatened and taken away. So, it's something we have to protect and teach people to do and teach our children to do.

Gamba: Yeah, and Italians are really good about enjoying the food and they want it to be from good ingredients. Mindful eating is partly embedded in Italian culture and just being aware of the ingredients and where they're coming from.

Doherty: Yeah. So, breaking down some of these artificial barriers between wilderness and nature and being the right environmentalist and all this kind of stuff. This has been great. We're going to stay in connection because we're all working on shared projects. And I have been to Italy years ago, when I was younger, but I look forward to getting back again.

Gamba: Yeah, it would be great to meet you in person.

Tecuta: Yeah, let us know.

Doherty: Yeah. Well, Panu, what's the rest of your evening like here?

Pihkala: Thank you very much, Lucia and Camilla. It's been wonderful discussing these things with you. I really loved the words. I think I'm going to practice some blessed undoing for the evening.

Tecuta: Good idea.

Doherty: And where are you both going today for the rest of your evenings?

Gamba: Just relaxing at home. We've been working hard, Lucia and I, so I think a good rest is resistance maybe.

Tecuta: Yeah, exactly. I could rest relatively because I have an almost four-year-old coming back from school soon. So, I'll try to come up with some restful games to play with him.

Doherty: All right. Well, this has been beautiful.

Gamba: Thank you so much.

Tecuta: Thank you for the opportunity to chat.

Doherty: Listeners, I hope you enjoyed our little international cosmopolitan translating conversation today. Listeners and all of you, be well. Take care.

Pihkala: Take care.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

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