Climate Change and Happiness

 

image credit | Jasmin Sessler

S6 E1: Revisiting “On the Birth of Climate Therapy” with Rosemary Randall

Thomas Doherty, Panu Pihkala

Season 6, Episode 1: Revisiting “On the Birth of Climate Therapy” with Rosemary Randall

Panu and I wanted to share a classic interview with UK therapist and writer Rosemary “Ro” Randall. 20 years ago, Ro led some of the first public therapeutic groups to address people’s troubled feelings of guilt and despair about human-caused climate breakdown. These “Carbon Conversations” groups highlighted the struggle to live ethically in societies that continue to feed the problem. The groups were the forerunner of the global “climate café” movement, grassroots programs like the Good Grief Network, and a variety of climate-conscious counseling and therapy initiatives like the UK and US Climate Psychology Alliance. Randall’s work adapting William Worden’s research on the tasks of grief remains a model for creating theoretically and empirically grounded climate mental health care approaches.

Rediscover her papers:

Loss and Climate Change: The Cost of Parallel Narratives (2009)

Journal: Ecopsychology

Core Focus: This highly cited paper analyzes how public discourse splits into two parallel narratives: terrifying future climate problems and bland, painless solutions. Randall argued that this "splitting" is a defense mechanism protecting the public from mourning the real lifestyle and ecological losses that action requires.

A New Climate for Psychotherapy (2005)

Journal: Psychodynamic Practice

Core Focus: This foundational paper examined why the psychotherapy community had largely ignored the climate crisis. It proposed using psychological and therapeutic insights to dismantle human defense mechanisms like denial, apathy, and avoidance toward environmental breakdown.

Original Episode Summary and Links (Oct 28, 2022)

Thomas and Panu were honored to host Rosemary Randall, pioneering British psychotherapist whose 2005 paper “A New Climate for Psychotherapy” and Carbon Conversations group anticipated the current Climate Conscious Therapy movement. Thomas and Ro reflected on the significance of Ro’s adaptation of psychological grief models to help support and empower members of the public who were experiencing distress as they confronted their own carbon footprints. Panu focused on Ro’s current sense of the emotional impacts of the climate crisis on young people and her new program on Living with the Climate Crisis with the UK Climate Psychology Alliance. As Ro has noted, “It’s a cliché that the antidote to climate despair is action. Far less attention is paid to the process of moving from a state of acute distress, anxiety and grief into a form of action that feels commensurate, practically possible and sustainable over time. This is the process which Living with the Climate Crisis groups aim to address.” Join us for a consoling and thought provoking conversation. 

• Climate Psychology Alliance-UK

• Carbon Conversations

• Cambridge Climate Therapists

• Rosemary Randall, 2005 A new climate for psychotherapy

• Rosemary Randall, 2009 Loss and Climate Change: The Cost of Parallel Narratives

• Ecological Footprint

• Sally Weintrobe (Ed.) 2012  Engaging with Climate Change

• Ncazelo Ncube The Tree of Life Project

• What is Public Narrative and How Can we Use it?

• Panu’s essay on climate grief (BBC Climate Emotions series, 2020)

• Thomas on Climate Change and Grief: A Dual Process Approach

• Ezra Klein (2022, Sept 20). The Single Best Guide to Decarbonization I've Heard

Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity. 

Thomas Doherty: Please support the Climate Change and Happiness Podcast. See the donate page at climatechangeandhappiness.com.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

Introduction voice: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness, 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 am Thomas Doherty. 

Panu Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala. 

Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. Our podcast. The show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about what we call climate change. The climate crisis. Global warming. Our carbon footprints. Our collective and personal carbon footprints. But in this show we focus on the emotional aspects of climate. And today we’re really honored to have a guest that I’ve known of and followed for many years. 

Rosemary Randall: I’m Rosemary Randall, but most people call me Ro. Which is a name I’ve had since childhood. 

Doherty: And Ro, welcome. Ro is coming in from Cambridge in the UK. And, again, as you know with our podcast this is Thomas and I’m in Portland, Oregon, USA. So I’m just starting my day. Getting my daughter off to school and sitting down to chat. And Panu is toward the end of his evening in Finland. And Ro is toward the end of her day. Late afternoon in the UK. 

I became familiar with Ro around 2008 when I was working on the Ecopsychology journal. We were helping to get this academic journal off the ground and she was one of the people that we approached to publish a paper. And she wrote a very influential paper on climate change and grief. One of the first papers to really address people’s grief about their carbon footprint. And their grief about their own involvement in climate change. And that kind of set a tone for a lot of what we know as “climate psychology” and climate therapy now. 

So I’m really honored to have Ro here. And to just kind of chat about what she’s doing now. And some of her insights. And I know Panu has also followed Ro’s work. Panu do you want to get us started with a discussion today?

Pihkala: Warmly welcome Ro. Very good to see you. And we’ve been talking over the years. And your work has been an inspiration for me since 2013. So not as long as for Thomas, but still for many years. But, would you like to start Ro by going back a bit? We’ve talked in detail about how you got involved with climate psychology and climate emotions in the first place. Would you like to share something about that background?

Randall: Well, I’m a psychotherapist. And so that’s where the interest in psychology and emotion comes from. Along with all the things that took me into that career in the first place. But when I think about what first made me concerned about the environment, I think back to a conversation with a cousin of mine from when I was about 19 or 20. And he was visiting from the states. His family had emigrated. My father’s brother had emigrated to the states just after the second world war. And he said to me “do you know what ecology is?” And I said, “well kind of.” But I didn’t know what he knew. And I hadn't read Rachel Carson. And he had. And he was part of the burgeoning environmental movement in the United States. And that was when I began to think and I began to connect. And I began to value in a different way a lot of the childhood experiences that I had with my parents growing up. Being in wild places. Camping. Being outside. Being connected to the natural world that supports us. 

And for me that was the beginning of joining to other concerns I had which also have strong roots in my family background. But values to do with socialism. Values to do with feminism. And I think that it was that conversation with Michael, my cousin, which brought into my life something which hadn't been there before. The idea that our relationship to the natural world was also political. And culture. And a source for great concern. Back then. So it’s something that has run through my adult life. Sometimes more strongly. Sometimes more weakly. 

Pihkala: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. And often in this podcast we talk about environmental identity. And people’s life paths and trajectories. And that’s, of course, something which is studied in environmental education research. And the connections between psychology and education are very close. And awakenings. And epiphanies. Something which may happen for many people. And I hear you sharing a story of one kind of those. 

Later on know that you also did some research on climate activists yourself. And thought about various phases that people may go through in this journey. But, how did it then go with combining the official work that you are doing with psychology and therapy and with environmental and climate concerns? When do you consider that that kind of work started for you?

Randall: I think for a long time they were quite separate. I practiced in private practice as a psychotherapist. I worked as a counselor in the university. And I lived a—I suppose—low impact kind of life. And for many years I think that was about it. I had lots of friends from the early days of the environmental movement. From a time when I was on the editorial collective of a magazine called undercurrents in the 1970s. And I retained some of those connections. But I think those two strands of my life were actually quite separate until the 2000s when the news about climate began to hit me much more. And I began to think about it. And I began to write about it. And I began to wonder why when other professions seemed to be waking up to the climate crisis, psychotherapy wasn't. And I wrote a paper which was published in 2005 which I called “A New Climate for Psychotherapy” because I wanted psychotherapists to wake up. I wanted to say come on guys we should be concerned too. There are groups with names like Historians for Climate, where are the therapists?!

But the curious thing was that my colleagues didn't really respond very well in my immediate environment. Or even particularly more widely. But I went to a conference at the Center for  Alternative Technology that year in 2005. I’ve got back in touch with some of my old friends from the environmental movement. And I presented a version of this paper which was very brief but in which I described the process of disavowal. Where people know with one part of themselves exactly what’s going on and with another part of themselves they just carry on as usual. That splitting of the mind that allows that was a revelation to many of the people I was speaking to. 

And so I discovered that the people who were really interested weren't my therapeutic colleagues, but they were the people in the burgeoning climate movement in the UK that I was now meeting. And that set me on a different path. Along with another of those epiphany moments that Panu was talking about. Because my son who at that point was [age] 20, 21 had fetched up working at the Center for Alternative Technology. And we went out on a walk. And I’ve told this story many times. But we went out on a walk and he was lecturing me about carbon emissions and carbon footprints. And I was like what? Who are you talking to? I know all this. But of course I didn't. And he knew much more than I did. 

And that was the point at which I realized the enormous difference between an average UK footprint. Which was then thought to be a 10 ton footprint. And the sustainable footprint which was 1, 2 tons. And I didn’t want to believe it. I found myself in the process of disavowal. Temporarily.  But there I was. And it was another of those epiphanies where you think what I’m doing is not enough. I have to take this more seriously. I have to change direction. And that was when I brought climate and psychotherapy together both in my own mind and in my own life.

Doherty: That’s really great, Ro. And just tracking along with this. And I think for the listeners, as we’ve talked about before, there’s sort of a timeline of climate change. If we lined up all the listeners in a row from the elders to the young people. The elders can find these moments where climate entered into their life. Or their awareness of climate change changed. Ro is giving some great examples of that. For young people, they’ve always known about climate change. It’s always been a spector in the back of their minds from birth. But there’s a lot of people—some of the listeners—who have been doing this work for a while. And their environmental journey is long. And it does go back to sort of “pre-Inconvenient Truth” times. “Pre” when climate change was a pressing issue. When it was more of a general ecological awakening that Ro talked about. So it’s just really helpful.

And then of course the other piece that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is this idea of a carbon footprint calculator. Which is a thing that was created inadvertently by… Well it was sort of a construct in research in sustainability, but it was popularized as most people now know from British Petroleum and their “Beyond Petroleum” advertising campaign. So they kind of inadvertently brought this into the public. I think partly, as we know, to distract from their own role in the climate crisis. And to put it on people. So there’s this whole dilemma of us taking responsibility, but also being blamed personally for things that are well beyond our control. 

And then that, of course, I think is where the grief comes in. I mean I’ve been thinking, you know, which came first, the calculator or the grief. Right? But it seems to me, Ro, when you started. And I can really see you going around. You know, who are these far out people going around to these meetings with carbon calculators and having people talk about them. But as soon as people did, it seemed to me that they opened up to the feelings. And to the grief. And to the powerlessness. And the climate hostage situation that people are in. And is that how you got into the grief work then? Because the calculators brought people’s grief out? 

Randall: Yes. It was. What my son was working on at that time with his colleagues was a carbon calculator. And I think the recent publicity about BP’s role in this I think has sometimes been slightly confusing because I think for me the carbon footprinting really goes back into the work of Mathis Wackernagel. The ecological footprint. I think that this whole debate takes you into the question of how we look at this. On the need to adopt a systems understanding. We need to look at this from a psychosocial perspective. Where we don’t give up personal responsibility, but we do also take account of the complex systems that make us complicit in it. 

And where I began was with the carbon footprint calculator. We used to go around in Cambridge where I live to all kinds of public events with a calculator. We would often calculate people’s carbon footprints. And what I did was I tried to train people in the use of this so that we weren’t just asking people about the numbers. We were asking people how they felt. Because when you ask people about the areas of carbon footprint. Your home energy. Your travel. The food that you eat. And the money that you spend. You’re delving intimately into people’s experience. And when people look at the impact of what feels like an ordinary life, it’s a very upsetting experience. And that took me very rapidly into the need to support people in talking about how serious climate change was. And how much it meant that life had to change because however you chop it up if you want to live in a world that has any form of equity and justice and how the lives of those in what I call the overdeveloped countries have to change. And I think that’s a very hard thing to take on. And there’s been quite a lot of pushback against that in some courses. And that technology will always save us. That life doesn't have to change because the planes are magically going to fly on vegetable oil regardless of how many hectares of land that might take. So I think it’s a difficult and complex problem. Because of course the moment you ask someone to think about reducing their emissions, you’re into systemic issues. Which means that that’s difficult. 

Doherty: Yeah into the ecological issues, you know, “when you pull on one thing in the universe it is hitched to everything else” as John Muir said. Let me add one more point and then turn it over to Panu. We don’t have time to get deeply into grief and loss work, but I think for the listeners it seems to me that what was really helpful Ro that you did was bring in the work of William Worden who was one of the researchers who studied grief. Grief that happens when something we value is lost. Not necessarily grief about our own death, but grief if a parent loses a child. And the stages of grief that happen for people regarding that. And this whole journey of grief where we kind of are broken from life and have to eventually kind of reinvest our energy back into life after we process and work through the loss. And then all the detours that people can get into as that happens. We idealize what was lost. We get stuck and don’t want to move forward. Or we have severe emotional blocks. Or etcetera etcetera. 

But it seems to me that bringing in that particular therapeutic inside to the carbon area was really helpful because previously people were thinking about their own death. And kind of Kubler Ross kind of—denial, anger, bargaining. But the Warden stuff I thought was more accurate. That’s a summary but that’s a fair statement I think about the grief process. 

Randall: I think that’s right. And I think that the kinds of climate grief that I’ve encountered since I wrote that paper have changed. Because at that time I was thinking a lot about people’s grief in letting go of the kind of life they’d become used to. Because when you look at any plans for how life might be. Whether it’s the UK Government’s one. They all involve changes in the way that we live. But what I encounter amongst young people particularly now is a very, very acute sense of disorientation. A very acute sense of the world coming apart. [It] feels to me much more like the experience of a child losing a parent. It’s that same sense of being completely unmoored from life. Of feeling that this can’t have happened. This is impossible. This can’t be true. At the same time at which you know that this is true. You know that mum or dad is not coming back. But what you feel is the loss of everything around you that makes life safe. That makes it feel as if life has got some chance of going on being. That you have some chance of going on being. 

And I think that kind of sense of being completely poleaxed is something that has arrived in my experience in the last five years or so. I think earlier people were certainly overthrown by what was happening. But it was a much more rapid return to that sense of well I need to reorient. I need to do something. I need to think about it. I need to find a way through this. I do think that it’s harder now for people.

Pihkala: Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. And I’ve noticed similar things. Especially in my work in Finland. And it’s a kind of existential crisis. It goes to the level of people’s systems of meaning. You know, the sort of foundations of who they feel and think that they are. And how they related with the world. And some of the very fundamental basic assumptions and beliefs become challenged. And that’s, of course, a great chance for traumatic grief. And a complex combination of existential issues. Grappling with various meanings in life. And then experiencing various kinds of changes and losses and having to function in your everyday life at the same time. 

This is very closely related to some of the recent work I’ve been doing in relation to various theories of grief and bereavement. But I’m not going into details now. But that’s something that I very much valued in your work, Ro. That you have always kept both this knowledge of where people are and then awareness of the great complexity of what is happening. And I think that’s one part of the appeal of the work of you and colleagues to also the environmental activist people. Because then they start to think that hmm this might offer solutions to those dilemmas [such as] why are people not giving up driving with their own vehicles, for example. To use an example from our 2009 article. 

And also that granularity about emotions which is something we have often talked about at this podcast. And which is very close to using both. Or us three I would dare to say. And I remember reading your 2013 article from this great book Engaging with Climate Change. And that led me forward in thinking about shame and guilt also in relation to ecological issues. So I just wanted to bring those links to one of our previous episodes where we discuss guilt. Not so much shame. How do you feel about the reception of your work now in the 2010’s and early 2020’s? Have you seen more advances or new, you know, obstacles arising? I know that life is a complex mix of different kinds of developments but just wanting to ask about it? How’s it been lately about the reception? 

Randall: I think the whole field of climate psychology has developed hugely in the period since I was first so disappointed in my colleagues. I mean I have since acquired many, many wonderful colleagues and coworkers. Like yourselves who are thinking and working on these issues. Who are making all kinds of wonderful advances in understanding in complex ways these interrelationships between these wicked systems and our personal experiences of them. That’s been a huge change. There’s so many more people writing, working and talking about these things now. 

Doherty: Yeah so you’re less alone, I guess we could say. More like minded people. And I think that’s one of the consolations of this time. Ro you said five years ago or so, you know, I think there was—we’ll probably have to invent a name for it—a societal tipping point here a few years ago. I think most places around the world where climate went from a special interest kind of environmental issue to a public issue. I know in the Pacific Northwest in the US where I live it was with the fires and the smoke and the droughts. So generally the natural disasters have brought that into people. So there is a whole new audience clamoring for this kind of help.

One of the terms you used Ro that I liked in the article—which we’ll link in our show notes. When I’m training therapists I’m actively training therapists who are, you know, trying to get schooled up into all this work. And, you know, talking about the special place that therapy holds for people. It’s a place, to use a military metaphor, where we can kind of, or a sports metaphor, get off the playing field. Or get off the battlefield and take our armor off for a little bit. And sort of see what we’re doing and collect ourselves. And you call that “the hinterland.” So it sounds like that’s a concept that you’re all aware of in your group as well. And I think that’s helpful for people to find their place to take off the armor and sort of be with this. Do you want to say anything more about what you think about what that space is? Or what makes a good space like that?

Randall: For me, personally that space has come with the group I’m part of here in Cambridge. We call ourselves Cambridge Climate Therapists. And in our early conversations one of the things we talked about was this idea of the hinterland. Which was the place back from the action where it was possible to sink. And to reflect. And so it’s a place where you could feel it slowly. And you can feel it with the assistance of sort. Rather than being in action where your actions are instant. You do what seems intuitively for the moment. But being able to be in that space. When we’re in the hinterland I feel that as people with psychological skills we’re better placed to be useful to those who are taking off in very difficult actions. Getting burnt out. Suffering traumas ... And maybe generally not being able to stop enough. To examine what’s going on. And often finding that within the organizations they’re part of that the distress is being projected in very difficult and painful ways. But I think in order to be able to help people with that you do have to take this step back. You have to be in the hinterland. Where you are acting much more slowly. Reflectively. Carefully. 

Pihkala: Yes. Thanks for sharing all that. And raising up this importance is also a kind of rhythm, you know. Rhythm of engagement and withdrawal. I’ve been working with some people who organize periods of silence as a way of withdrawal. So that’s one way related to that. 

But I know that you’ve been developing this new method based on the influential old work around so-called carbon conversations. We’ll again put links on the podcast website. And there were some very good facilitators guides also for those conversations. But would you like to say something about this new development? It seems to connect with many of the themes you were describing. 

Randall: Well just a sentence about the old carbon conversations project. This was something which I started back in 2006, 2007. And we ran small groups for people who were concerned about climate issues. And who wanted to look at how to reduce their impact. And this to our surprise took off and became very popular in all kinds of places. There were some volunteers who we gave some very rudimentary training to. And this project ran for quite a long time. It was a psychologically-based project. And to me to the point where I thought it had run its course. And I wanted to move on from it. And then about three years ago. No. A year ago. Rebecca Nester who was part of the Climate Psychology Alliance here in the UK and an old facilitator of carbon conversations got in touch with me. And we had this conversation about what a group-based activity for the 2020's would look like. What would it be? 

And that was the beginning of a new project where both of us felt strongly that people need to be located collectively when they respond to the climate crisis. They need to be working with others. This could be in their own community. This could be politically. This could be at work. We need connection. And what we were seeing was that some of the people who were getting involved in climate work were moving very rapidly into action. And were not really being able to process what was happening to them. We were also seeing people of my own generation and people of the generations in between suffering from burn out. Suffering from feelings of despair and disappointment. Feelings of exhaustion. That they had been involved in these issues for so long. And so much of it seemed like you were trying to hold back a tide that you couldn't stop. So we felt that there were these huge emotional issues which were impeding and affecting people’s ability to engage in fruitful action. 

And so we began to plan for a kind of new carbon conversation. And these groups are now coming to fruition. We’ve run a pilot group and we’re going to publish the materials we hope within the next two or three months. So that other people who are skilled in facilitation can use them and adapt them to their own purposes. But in the actual framework for this work, it’s very much psychosocial. It’s very much systemic in the way that we look at things. But there are basically three chunks of material in the ten meetings. Or the ten sessions that make up living with the climate crisis. 

The first part is given over to talking about the experience of living with the climate crisis. Waking up to it. Having lived with it for decades. Being consumed by it. Whatever that happens to be. And it that we’ve looked at and will be using a method which you may be familiar with which is David Denborough and Ncazelo Ncube’s Tree of Life. Which they developed for working with trauma. But which we are using in a much more general sense. It’s a storytelling method. And it’s a method which builds strength. It doesn't focus on the trauma, it focuses on what you have within you that you can bring into a collective situation. And it has very much binded the idea of the need to look at the collective origins of distress. In the political and social systems. And to become able to speak richly and deeply with a thick narrative about them. So we’ve drawn on that in our approach to helping people understand what’s happening to them. And that makes up about a third of what we do. 

We then look at communication. Which is often something which campaigns struggle with. And we use partly therapeutic understandings of what happens when you get into really difficult conversations with your family and your friends and your colleagues. And partly we draw on Marshall Ganz’s public narrative work in that. And finally we look at the systems that people are part of and where they want to take action. How to move towards action. We look at the skills that people have. We look at how to reflect on what you’re doing. So again we’re drawing from a lot of different areas of psychological understanding in creating this. But overarching is this kind of metaphor that we have. We use the climate movement as an ecosystem. And an ecosystem where you need to find your place. The idea that there’s a place for everybody in that. But you have to find it. And at the moment you may be living in a desert. You know, there may be nothing which surrounds you. Or you may find yourself in a monoculture. Or you may be one of the old trees that just needs to kind of keel over and nourish the new growth. That’s how I feel at the moment. 

Doherty: Yes. You know, well this is beautiful, Ro. We’ll take about five more minutes and wrap up our talk today. There’s so many things. I mean again bringing in the listeners. You know, I’ve been involved in this for a long time. Panu has. But I learn new things everyday with this. That’s another important thing to keep in mind is that we’re always learning. Some of the things that Ro said today touch me deeply. I mean this idea of just a place to “feel slowly” is such a great term. Now I know Panu would get that because that kind of comes really out of I think Panu’s style. But for me that’s something. I’m pretty concrete so I get these things in my head. Oh, feel slowly. That’s helpful for me. Because most of us are feeling fast.

And then I think obviously one of the changes from the carbon conversations. I almost said “carbon confrontations” right? A little freudian slip. So, you know, it was like we were being confronted, but now, you know, we really need to bolster people more. Ro when you said like a child losing a parent. That gave me chills. Really hit me emotionally. Because that really is how people are feeling. And a situation like that is just a different emotional game. So I really do appreciate this. So anyways I’m learning and I think listeners, you know, we’re always learning through this. But Panu what are you thinking of here as we wrap up such a great conversation? 

Pihkala: Yeah I’m very grateful that we’ve had a chance to engage in this. And this new revised method of living with the climate crisis sounds very good to me. And, of course, we’ve talked about this with Ro over zoom some time. And there’s many shared interests, but I haven't heard about it at this length so I’m very glad to hear this. And I think that for the listeners this metaphor of the ecosystem also in relation to climate and environmental matters is very important. And I think that’s a message that we’ve been trying to deliver also with Thomas. That there is a place for everyone here. And it may feel sometimes that what’s the use of anything that I do. And people’s circumstances can be very different. We have various amounts of resources and possibilities and so on. But there’s something for everyone even if it’s close circles and advancing caring in this increasingly chaotic world. That’s a very fundamental and important task. So I’ve been very grateful for this conversation. 

And, as Thomas said, we regretfully have to wrap up quite soon. It would be interesting to continue this for a long time. But could I ask you? Ro still you’ve already mentioned some of these, but what are some things that give you resources and strength in these times? You mentioned the companionship of Cambridge Therapists and some. Do you want to dwell a bit on that?

Randall: As far as thinking I do with my colleagues in Cambridge Climate Therapists. I have a tendency to rush. To burn out. To respond instantly. So that group slows me down. And that’s very important to me. I also rely on my husband. Who’s also been my partner on a lot of this journey for over 40 years now. And the rest of my family. Some of whom are in Wales where we go quite often. To the little town where they live. The rural town where they live. Where climate change feels a little bit further away sometimes. Particularly this summer when in East England it was drought. Constant drought. And it's the connection to people that really sustains me. Love. Perhaps at the end of it it’s love. 

Doherty: Yeah. It is true. So much of this work. So much of what I’ve found in my therapeutic work is isolation is really the toxic piece in this. We can bear things when we’re bearing it together. So the isolation piece for all of us to keep in mind. Yeah so we’re going to wrap up today. We, again, got into the emotional side and the deep slow feeling and slow thinking. So this is good for our listeners to hear. 

And then to bring back to reality at the very end. Even though it feels like the parent is being lost, we have to remember that there are a lot of parents out there doing good work. We’ll put a link into A Guide to Decarbonization that American journalist Ezra Klein put out recently. There’s so many people doing so many interesting, positive, very smart things regarding decarbonization in the real sense, not the personal carbon footprint. But in societal change. A whole structural societal change. So we don’t want to lose those people. It does them a disservice. Our imagination makes us think that there are no adults and parents out there. But that’s not true. We know that we are adults ourselves and also there are very gifted people working in the UK and the US so we want to just shout out to them as well. 

Thank you so much Ro. It’s been really a pleasure to chat with you. 

Randall: May I say one last word which is just that I think when we think about grief, we have to remember that there is a place, the other side of it. And I think that’s what you were talking about here. Is the place. The other side of grief. You never forget the person you lost. Your life is forever changed, but there’s a place on the other side where life has meaning. And where life is worth living. And that’s where we want people to get to. Through connection and love. 

Pihkala: Exactly. Relearning the world. 

Doherty: Yeah. Relearning the world. The other side of grief. Our loss and our reconnecting with life and so we’re playing on that knife edge today here with this episode. But thanks again. Ro, what are you going to do with the rest of your evening?

Randall: I’m going to make food. And I’m going to chat with my husband. And I’m going to chill.

Doherty: Very good. 

Pihkala: Sounds excellent. My sons will finish their choir rehearsal quite soon. Luckily they still like to do that. They sometimes are tired of going to practice, but they still like the thing. So I’m going to take them home from the center of the town amidst the darkening evening in Helsinki. But warm thanks especially to you, Ro. And to Thomas and all the listeners. Do take care. 

Doherty: Yes. And I need to get my day started here. After this great start and do work on all the things we’ve talked about today. I’m going to be focusing on including checking in with my therapy group. My therapists out there in the world so we’ll definitely talk about my insights today with the therapists and spread this love around. Alright you all take care. 

Randall: Thank you very much for having me on your show. It’s been a pleasure. 

Doherty: 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 | Miguel Bruna

S5 E24: Reprise Edition from 2022 "Holding Space"

Thomas Doherty, Panu Pihkala

Here at the Climate Change and Happiness podcast, Panu and I are looking back at some of our earliest episodes. And this is a great example: Our second episode from 2022 that focuses on a core mission of our podcast, that of “holding space” — for climate emotions, for healthy sensibility and consciousness, and for creative action. Listen and look back on what at the time seemed a bit strange, and even controversial: Thinking about happiness in the context of your work addressing climate breakdown. And, as you listen, see how far you and we have come in our understanding of what healthy life and coping can be.

(And in this season of talk about Odysseus, it's interesting that we were talking about the Greek concept of “thumos” or passion, courage and life force back then!)

Original Summary:

Safe spaces are crucial for the expression of climate feelings. Thomas and Panu talk about the loneliness people feel about climate experiences. What does it take to “hold space” for climate feelings, to “stand one’s ground” and “contain” experiences of sadness, grief or rage; and to practice  “climate cosmopolitanism”? Panu looks back to pioneering work by Chellis Glendinning and shares Tim Jensen’s more recent concept of “ecologies of guilt.” Thomas reminds us of the role of values and that “We hurt where we care” echoing the writing of psychologist Steven Hayes, and classic insights about the “pains of an ecological education” going back to Aldo Leopold. 

Links

• Pew Research Center: Two-Thirds of Americans Think Government Should Do More on Climate.

• Yale Program on Climate Change: Climate Change in the American Mind: April 2020

• Chellis Glendenning My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization

• Tim Jensen (2019) Ecologies of Guilt in Environmental Rhetorics

• “We care where we hurt …” 

• Aldo Leopold

• Classical Greek concept of Thumos

• Panu’s blog: Questions for Discussion about Eco-emotions (2020)

Transcript

Season 1, Episode 2: Holding Space

[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, our podcast. It's a show for people around the globe who are thinking deeply about the personal side of climate change including your emotions, how you feel about the issue. We know that what the research tells us is most of you listening — 70% or more — really care about this issue, climate change, and want to do something about it, but, you know, only a small percentage of you actually talk about climate change in your lives, publicly. So we invert that ratio and we talk about climate change all the time here and our emotions and mental health and our feelings and that is our job here. 

Panu, today I want to, I just want to talk about this idea of holding space. This came up after our last conversation. Holding space for something. Holding space, in this case we’re holding space for emotions about climate change and I know in my work around environmental issues and psychology and ecopsychology and ecotherapy and outdoor therapy. Many times over the past years I’ve consoled myself that I’m holding space for these topics. I am creating a space, I’m trying to hold it so that we can talk about it and make it safe for others to come in. I think it's a really juicy concept for all of us. 

We don’t have to have all the answers when we’re holding space, we don’t even have to have a long term direction when we’re holding space. But we know something’s important and we want to protect the space to feel and think and be about it ourselves and with others. And I’m just wondering what you think about that in relation to your work around climate change and climate emotions and all the many things that you’re doing?

Pihkala: Yeah, I think that’s a very important concept and phenomenon. So, very often at first people feel quite lonely if they recognize climate emotions in themselves especially because in most societies and communities there’s been so few opportunities to discuss or reflect on them. That is luckily changing now rapidly in many places but there’s still that condition in many places and has been in this history. So the need for safe spaces and for someone or something to hold that space so that it becomes possible to be in touch with your emotions and feelings that’s a crucial thing in our eco-emotional work I think.

Doherty: Yeah, we have so many emotions and you know they’re all happening all the time and it’s like a train you know. As I say,  when we see the car passing on the train, the engine is far away, far ahead of us and by the time we catch up on one of the cars or whatever we’re feeling we have to realize we’ve felt all kinds of things previous to that and we’ll feel more after. But one of the things that comes up to me is almost a warrior energy, almost like a peaceful warrior energy. Certainly stubbornness, but more of a resolute kind of feeling that I am going to hold this space. You know, kind of a bravery, a courage, but also a toughness. You know toughness, I’m going to be here and I’m not going to be scared away, you know, by social pressures or someone looking askance at me. Certainly in academia there’s a holding space when you’re trying to start a new project. You know, so that’s something I’ve felt a lot. What kind of emotions come up for you or have seen in terms of the different emotional tones that come with the idea of holding space?

Pihkala: Yes, that idea of sort of standing on one's ground is one very interesting aspect of this. I often tend to think of holding space in relation to containment. That concept from psychology where something is able to be contained enough so that it can be faced with or without naming it. Even better if it can be named. But of course many climate emotions and feelings, for example, are so ambiguous and conglomerates of different feelings that it may be rather hard to name them exactly. But at least naming some main tones of that would be already very useful. And sadness or grief is one that comes up very often which is very understandable because there’s so many changes and losses happening around, and as we’ve many times discussed with you, it’s tricky because the societies around us are not especially attuned to validating grief and sadness. It’s more like: Be happy, don’t be sad attitude that one tends to find in industrialized countries, and often the people I meet have strong problems with ecological grief because of these cultural attitudes. Does that come up in your work, Thomas? 

Doherty: Yeah, no I can resonate with that very much. A holding space is sort of a … How would I say it? Most people rush, they are impulsive about a lot of this stuff and they rush into things and they try to grasp onto certain… Whatever the certain feelings are or fit in with others, and they haven’t quite done the work, I guess, to really sort out all of their feelings. I mean one of the metaphors I use with my counseling and therapy clients is “emptying the bag, emptying the sack.” You know, we carry around this sack of all these thoughts and feelings and impressions and goals and values and it just, you know, empty it out, dump it out on the table. Let's sort out all of this and so emptying out the sack of our environmental emotions can be really helpful and it's a pre step. We don’t have to work on expressing or even understanding, but you know we create space, a white space so to speak, a blank slate and then we can empty out our sack and see what the heck is in there.

Pihkala: That’s a really great metaphor I think. Probably, usually people find many surprising objects on the table after that I would suppose.

Doherty: Yeah, there’s some beautiful seashells in there and all kinds of stuff. And then there’s also, you know, bricks that we’ve been carrying for 25 or 30 or 40 years or ten years or whatever in there as well. But yeah, how to get people to, part of this is physiological, being in your body and breathing and slowing down and being present. As our stress level rises like an old mercury thermometer, you know the mercury is rising, and our bandwidth and our creativity space is getting smaller and smaller. So by the time we’re super stressed we have a very limited bandwidth and we’re very tunnel visioned, you know, and so it's backing off on that stress level and opening up that spectrum of creativity, bandwidth, expression. To see what's all in there.

Pihkala: Yeah, that reminds me of the etymology of the word stress having to do with pressures and weight that one experiences and certainty unrecognized ecological grief can be a big part of those burdens. But then of course guilt, sometimes even shame, is a big part of that in many people’s lives that I meet. And that’s one emotional tone that really needs public recognition and holding safe spaces and it's very complex because, after all, the relationship between individual responsibility and structural responsibility — that’s a tricky one. 

Doherty: No indeed, and what’s in the background in all our talks is who’s responsible and culpable for climate issues and, you know, so much of this is, you know, my term of being a “climate hostage,” people are climate hostages. Even wealthy people in affluent countries are still hostage to small groups that have kind of stymied our abilities to address the issue of climate and it's really a global injustice. And so it's that spectrum, injustice is hanging over us all the time. But the holding space, you know, as you say for shame and guilt and some of these things. And then, you know, holding space is an odd welcoming: Come on in, you know, let’s let these feelings come in and have their own value and respect. I was reading a quote from Stephen Hayes, a psychologist that’s done a lot of work around therapy creation here in the United States. He had a quote about, you know, we hurt where we care and we care where we hurt. Right, we hurt where we care, and we care where we hurt.

It’s a helpful one to think about particularly if we’re hurting. It’s because we care about something. If we’re hurting it’s because there’s a value there. You know and so again as we dig through our sack we realize underneath the guilt and the shame there’s other things there, other healthy feelings like pride and respect and health and, you know, also our values about justice and ecology and sustainability and all this sort of stuff. But yeah, so you know it's poking into these. It’s painful. Let’s just be honest, it's painful to do this work. It's not easy.

Pihkala: That's a very profound thing again that you mentioned, Thomas. There’s a couple of good books about ecological emotions which make this point I’m thinking of Tim Jensen Ecologies of Guilt in Environmental Rhetorics from 2019 where he makes the argument that even though people normally think that when they feel ecological guilt it is because they have failed, but in fact, it is because they care. So exactly the point that you were making Thomas and this can be a real discovery to many people that “hey it's actually a sign of care, empathy, compassion,” even you know love if you use that big word and the same for grief. I remember a talk that I was giving in early June to environmental educators in Finland and then saying that ecological sadness is the price of caring, and a couple of people emailed me afterwards and thanked me for saying that out loud. That was also a good reminder for me that one really needs to repeat these sort of very basic and important messages even though, you know, after being involved with this issue several years one gets so used to this, even the most important ones. But I think we really need to keep reminding ourselves and others of them.

Doherty: Indeed that’s something to take for granted and in our listeners we need to — all of us — we need to think about this. Some of you listening have been holding space for many years, maybe even longer than I am alive, and so a lot of our listeners can resonate with this and they’re holding space. So I want to honor you all — people who are holding space around the world, people who might be listening, holding space in various ways. So I want to just honor you all and thank you. So, I think it’s important to really take that in for all of us. If you’re listening you can put your hands over your heart and you can take some deep breaths and you can say yes, I’m holding space, I’m holding space just for myself, for my family, for my community, for others. You know, really just be with that, you know, and I appreciate it and you are appreciated and this is a sign of love and a sign of care. 

You know, these — I love that title Ecologies of Guilt in Environmental Rhetorics — that’s a great way — you know in our intellectual work, you know, we have these ecologies of guilt but in emotions we are here and we’re present and we’re holding space, so I just kind of want to get that out there. The price of an ecological education is living in a world of wounds. Right, you know, the Aldo Leopold quote. You know again, so like you say, Panu, we have to keep coming back to these, you know, these wisdoms, these nuggets of wisdom that we might have known for a long time but we need to keep repeating it for ourselves. But also for the new generation that are coming in here.

Pihkala: Yeah exactly.

Doherty: They haven’t spent 10, 20, 30, 40 years holding space and, you know, being with this sort of stuff. It’s all new. They’re on their first run around the track here. First lap in this crazy world.

Pihkala: Yeah, yeah that’s a very hugely important point and also my strong gratitude to all of the folks around there, some who have done for a short time and some for a very long time. My earlier dissertation research dealt with environmental history and that was a time when I really learned to respect those pioneers in the late 19th century and early 20th century who already tried to make an impact. Sort of bridge building work between generations. That’s something close to my heart also. And now in 2021, when awareness about climate emotions is spreading, luckily, so then some of these early people like Chellis Glendenning, who you have mentioned Thomas yourself, who not too many people of this new generation know about. So there’s some important wisdom in books 25, 30 years old and then not to mention Aldo Leopold and those folks back then.

Doherty: Yeah, yeah Chellis Glendenning — in her book My Name is Chellis and I’m In Recovery From Western Civilization — good job Chellis if you’re out there. Yeah, I got a chance to see her speak years ago at an ecopsychology conference. Yeah, so holding space, so it’s good to honor. I’ve got a bookshelf here with just tons of books and I’ve got all these people that have been talking, you know, it's, there’s such a …I have to vent, you know, a little bit. I talk to reporters and I know you do too and they come at this issue as if it's just brand new as if it just arrived like an egg this morning from, you know, from a chicken and it’s like, No this is — come on wake up you know we’ve been talking about — people have been talking about this forever and certainly in our, you know, we’re so ahistorical in the United States. Its terrible, you know, people forget everything that didn’t happen more than a year ago and, you know, I’ve got all the ecopsychology writers and the ecotherapy writers. I’ve got books you know on ecotherapy and ecopsychology that are you know 30, 40 years old and you know people like Joanna Macy who has been doing this, you know, doing this work for years and, you know, so there’s just more people than I can name out there, and there’s a whole new generation. I’ve got books in front of me I’ve been looking at from the library, you know, this new book by Gus Speth, They Knew. It’s about the history of fossil fuel, you know, government supported the fossil fuel system in the US through all the presidential administrations going back to the 60’s. And you know David Wallace Wells, Uninhabitable Earth, you know he’s holding space. I believe I was talking to you or it could have been someone else who knows a lot of people holding space for doom. They’re holding space for gloom, doom, the worst case scenarios. I think of David Wallace Wells as doing that really in a tragically beautiful way in his writing you know. But then I’ve got Bill Gates’ [book] — a realistic but optimistic take on how to avoid climate disaster. So he’s holding space for innovation and you know clean energy and things like that. And that book that you mentioned in one of our recent talks — Healing Through the Dark Emotions – I picked that up and I’ve been looking at that, so Miriam Greenspan, a therapist, you know. Again in the therapy world people have been holding space for, you know, that is part of the therapy, a therapist’s basic job is to hold space. 

An Ecotopian Lexicon by Schneider-Mayerson and Bellamy – that’s a great book where we look at all these different, you know, “eco” words.

Pihkala: Yeah, I guess one could speak of an ecology in the sense that also there’s a need for different niches and different creatures in different parts of the system. And, I also respect many kinds of writers on eco-emotions. Of course, it would be important to practice this climate cosmopolitanism, one of your terms Thomas, so that we wouldn’t require from others that others adapt the exact same approach as we do. That kind of binary thinking is dangerous. Of course, there’s room for many different kinds of takes on related matters.

Doherty: Yeah, exactly yeah. I think we can segue a bit to how do you do the holding space and a little more practical thoughts. And part of it is having that sense of what I call “climate cosmopolitanism” which is not a common term, but it's something I’ve kind of adopted, and by necessity for my own survival, because I don’t agree with every approach in the climate world. But I do recognize that we have to build coalitions and we have to work together and so climate cosmopolitanism is recognizing that we have billions of people on this planet and they’re going to approach the issue of climate change in very different ways, even if they agree that it’s a pressing crisis, and they’re going to come into their Politics of the Earth (which is another classic book), so they’re either going to come at it from technology or politics or from economics or from social movements or from spirituality or from the therapeutic side. Even within those silos there’s going to be variations on the theme, you know, in terms of the ecomodernists and back to the land people and the social justice people and all this sort of stuff. So we have to realize not everyone is going to do it exactly my way.

Pihkala: Yeah, totally agree on that point and in this research about emotions and feelings and environmental matters also sometimes people have the hope that if we would just find the right emotion, some people think that it might be fear others think it might be anxiety or anger, outrage perhaps, even you know guilt, or then pride. If we only could find the right one then we could do environmental communication right. Luckily, this has been challenged by emotion researchers that it's not so simple. In some circumstances anger or some valences of anger work. In others they don’t. In some instances guilt can get people move forward and in other instances it can paralyze them. So, I really think that we need sensitiveness to context and the very different conditions that people live in when talking about any practical dimension of which emotion or feeling we want to cultivate.

Doherty: Yeah, let’s — I’m going to — there’s an instrumental view about this. There’s okay, yeah, there’s a right key to the lock if we can just, you know, and so let’s respectfully back away from that for a moment. I’d love to chat about that in another episode but I think it's — there’s a danger of collapsing this holding space when we do that or when we violate that by saying I’m doing this for a reason, you’re just a tool. I understand why people want to find the right emotions and they desperately want to communicate this so I do understand that and I want to hold space for that. But you know I think practically holding space is — it’s always stepping back. It’s always taking one step backward and another step backward. You know one of my critiques of some of the, you know, big ecopsychology writers that I’ve read is that they’re not big enough. They have to step another back because they have their view. Anyone who has their big view of the world and why things are then they have to say and that is my view and I’m going to take one step back from that. And that’s hard to do because we get attached very much to our views, particularly if we’ve spent a lot of time nurturing them and holding space ourselves. We want them to be in the world and I want my voice to be heard, you want your voice to be heard. So I totally, I totally get that. But you know holding space is creating emptiness, it's creating, like you say, the container and it has to be a big container not a little container and it has to be as big as the issue so we have to keep, you know, backing up, backing up, backing up. You know, making more room. At the end of one of our recent talks you brought up the Greek word “thumos” and I wanted to hold that because that was really — I love when these really — thumos is an ancient concept and you know I was thinking about that in terms of holding space because I think that thumos is like, the way I understand it, it’s spiritedness, it can be anger, it could be righteous anger, but it's also just our heart and our spirit and - how do you understand thumos?

Pihkala: Yeah, along very similar lines and sometimes it's translated quite directly as anger but that doesn’t capture it all. I think this certain whole-heartedness or feeling which in English language when somebody’s really spirited about something I think that captures important aspects of thumos and regarding this discussion about various ecological emotions or climate feelings. I think that thumos can arise as combination of many emotions but what would be really needed is that is arises because then it means that we are not locked, we haven't blocked a way to many emotional energies, but I do make a separation between you know violent rage and thumos so I am not speaking about violent rage here, I’m speaking about a spiritedness which also still has some guidelines from compassion and respect towards others.

Doherty: Yeah. Yeah, so one of these words that we can keep developing and thumos, our classical — this brings me back to my undergraduate classical, you know, classical history training and my professors Wallace Gray and Authur Danto and some of these professors I had when I was in my undergraduate program teaching us classical civilization and thumos. You know, a lot of people think of it in terms of, you know, Achilles, you know, anger of Achilles in The Iliad there but that was rageful. So, I guess our spirit can become enraged, you know, when we know when this natural spiritedness can, we wrankle against injustice and we want to stand up for, or against, injustice and that’s one way that this fire comes out. But you know when we’re wronged or betrayed it can turn into a vengeful, a very vengeful energy and even a blind rage, and so obviously there are some listeners that’ll feel that way around climate change and around the injustices that are happening here. So that is something to make space for here, you know, that we feel wronged and you know we need, we want to avenge that. So you know um, and then I was thinking of “arete,” another juicy Greek word, you know, overall excellence. You know how we balance all of our skills and really present ourselves in a really integrated, excellent way and so, you know, climate arete you know. Certainly climate thumos, people can get around that pretty quickly. I think but climate arete, about excellence, and it’s about being our best and showing our strengths. You know like an athlete showing their best and being just on time, like an athlete or a musician or something like … so anyway our excellence.

Pihkala: Yeah, that’s another great concept and linked of course with virtues and cultivation. And one of the projects I’m finishing is with anxiety philosopher Charlie Kurth and that’s about a, sort of adaptive dimensions of eco-anxiety and the sort of need to cultivate anxiety in the context of ecological crises. So eco-anxiety as a moral emotion. So that comes to my mind from that and I do think that we need more discussions about the moral emotion framing of many climate emotions and eco-emotions. So thanks for bringing arete up. I’ll have to do some checking about that too.

Doherty: Yeah. Well you know we’re into this stuff and we know these words are really magical and these feelings are magical and they get into us. So this is a really great conversation and I look forward to some more very soon. You know in our personal conversations Panu and I, we talk about our families and our life. Panu’s in the evening in Finland and I’m in the morning — I just got my daughter off to her high school. She's in ninth grade. She just started, so she’s still nervous about going and it’s a big rite of passage for her. How are your boys? Panu, do you want to just — without unpacking everything, you want to  just say a little bit about what you’re coping with there?

Pihkala: Yeah, yeah I might as well so.

Doherty: Yeah.

Pihkala: So this is Autumn 2021, and in Finland where we are the situation is that as 40-year-olds, as me and my wife, we’ve had two [COVID] vaccinations shots - that’s another issue related to global justice we know - that still the variant is spreading and our youngest son caught it from pre-school so now half of the family is confined inside and I and the older son can luckily still go out to play some Finnish baseball. So it’s a sort of special time. But luckily the symptoms are mild but it’s a strange time that we are living. But luckily Autumn is coming and the beauty of the colorful leaves cheers me up.

Doherty: Yeah, yeah so Jakob got COVID-19 and he’s 11 did you say?

Pihkala: No, Jaakko (Jakob) the younger one is 5 and older one is 8 so.

Doherty: Well anyway listeners can unfortunately identify with that as well. I mean we’re dealing with all this stuff as well. I’ve been lucky in my family not to be touched directly by COVID-19 but that’s a thing. So even you, Panu, even you being vaccinated and doing your best it’s gotten into your family so I’m so appreciative you were able to make the time this evening.

Pihkala: Yeah it was lovely to discuss with you Thomas, again.

Doherty: So this is Climate Change and Happiness: Climatechangeandhappiness.com. As we get this podcast set up please reach out to us, let us know what you’re thinking and just let us know what you think about our conversations and we’ll talk more again soon. You all take care. 

Pihkala: Bye bye.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

 

 

image credit | Sebastian Pichler

S5 E23: A New Edition of Ecotherapy and Remembering Martin Jordan — With Hayley Marshall & Joe Hind

Thomas Doherty, Panu Pihkala

Thomas Doherty was joined by Haley Marshall and Joe Hinds, editors of the new edition of Ecotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, and Education, of which Thomas authored the first chapter.  The trio reflected on the science and stories behind ecotherapy’s rise from the margins to mainstream practice, and remembered their colleague, pioneering UK ecotherapist, Martin Jordan. Contrary to common misconceptions, outdoor or ecotherapy is neither new, nor unstudied. Thinkers like Martin, Hayley, Joe, Thomas and others have been clarifying  and building best practices in this field for decades. This episode is an essential listen for those seeking a solid background on the history and development of mental health therapy in the outdoors. 

Links

• Joe Hinds, Hayley Marshall, and Martin Jordan (Anthology Editors), 2026, Ecotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice & Education (2nd Ed.)

• Martin Jordan, 2014. Nature and Therapy: Understanding counselling and psychotherapy in outdoor spaces.

• Martin Jordan & Hayley Marshall, 2010. Taking counselling and psychotherapy outside: Destruction or enrichment of the therapeutic frame?

• Martin Jordan, Martin Milton, & Paul Stevens, 2010. EDITORIAL Ecopsychology: Past, present & future. The European Journal of Ecopsychology. 1. 1. 

• Jordan, Martin 2009 Nature and Self—An Ambivalent Attachment? Ecopsychology. 

• Hayley Marshall & Joe Hinds, J. 2017 Martin Jordan Remembered. Ecopsychology.
  

Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.

Doherty: Well Hello, Thomas Doherty. This is the Climate Change and Happiness Podcast. Typically, I'm co-hosting with my colleague Panu Pihkala from Finland, but he is unable to join us today. but it's here we're recording in the summer of 2026. And I'm really excited for this episode because we have you know, in this podcast I often have ideas of people that we would like to have as guests and colleagues and people I've worked or Panu has worked with and it's really nice to bring people in, particularly if you haven't had chance to meet them in person. and so, one of my areas is ecotherapy and doing therapy in the outdoors. So that's going to be our focus today. And I'm really glad and excited to have two special guests with us.

Marshall: Hi, I'm Hayley Marshall. I'm from the UK, the Peak District in the UK. It's very beautiful at the moment. We've had a lot of warm, wet weather, so it's really lush here. I'm an eco-psychotherapist and an ecological trainer, and I've been practicing for what feels like a very long time, but it's actually only about 20 years. So, I'm really looking forward to our conversation.

Hinds: Yeah, hi, I'm Joe Hines. I'm also in the UK. I'm down on the southeast coast of the UK. I'm also like Hayley, a practicing eco psychotherapist and an educator. I'm a teacher of psychotherapy as well. And also lapping up the good weather we're having at the moment.

Doherty: Mm. Yeah, well, Haley and Joe, it's really an honor to have you here on the podcast. I've known of Haley and Joe for well, you know, some time. Well maybe going on fifteen, twenty years. Hayley and Joe have a new edited volume ecotherapy that's just coming out now, which is the re-edition of the original ecotherapy text from 2016

So, we'll check in on that. And both Hayley and Joe have been innovators in outdoor and ecotherapy, particularly in the UK, and then the work has kind of been you know learned of over here in the US. and then we want to just recognize the memory of Martin Jordan, who was integral to this this project here in the past. but why don't we get started with a little background?

Maybe you both can just share a short a short, you know, background on how you how you came to do practicing eco therapist and what when you look into your background, either your early background childhood or your early professional life, what led you to this to this activity?

Hinds: I'm kind of happy to start there. I'm going to have to condense this, so it fits the time frame, but I was raised in rural New Zealand as a child. And I went barefoot till I was 11 when I came to the UK. I went through some fairly traumatic sort of family breakups and it wasn't until much later on in my adult life in the UK that I crossed paths with a certain Martin Jordan and he and I got talking because I came at that time from an environmental psychology background and he was very keen to pick my brains; I was very keen to pick his. And we formed a partnership, friendship at that time. And that would have been, I'm going to guess around 2012 when we first got together, and we went on some outdoor expeditions and one or two other things to the to the peak district and yeah that and that's I stepped away from environmental psychology although you never step away from it completely and realized the much you know much more valuable sort of approach to well-being which was psychotherapy.

I saw psychotherapy as a far more hands-on doing approach than the psychological perspective, which turned to be far more theoretical. I still go back to it on occasions, but I am first and foremost a psychotherapist. Psychotherapy is a far more “doing” approach.

Doherty: Mhm. That's great. What about you, Hayley? What's what do you think about your background or origin story? What comes up for you?

Marshall: well, I think in my childhood, you know, I think I think I think eco psychotherapists often have an origin story that's rooted in childhood. People who really go into this work at depth. mine's very rooted there. I grew up in rural Buckinghamshire on a farm and was outside as a small child a lot. I was pretty feral really. which was not always a good thing. I mean it sounds idyllic, but of course it you know, there's a lot of trauma kind of wrapped up in that.

So, it's very rich territory really for kind of siphon me in this direction eventually. you know, I have a very deep connection to being outside. It's almost cellular for me. I just I kind of live and breathe it and think through it, you know, think and feel through the outdoors really. but in terms of my later life, I mean I, you know, like many people, I kind of moved away from that world and became a musician. Then again, like many people got into the therapeutic world through having my own therapy. finding that really useful. Became a therapist, was a therapist for about 12 years and then started to think I can't sit in the chair for the rest of my professional career because I don't think I'll survive. and started looking for something else and actually at that time was doing a lot of walking in the Peak district, which is where I'm living. And just began searching for something that I wasn't actually quite sure what I was looking for. But at the time there were a few embryonic things going on in this country. So, I found what was called a wilderness immersion trip up on sky.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Marshall: which I've written about actually in our book and went there and went on this course and it changed my life basically. I mean I you know, I mean I won't go into loads of detail, but what was going on it was live process, you know, canoeing, camping, working with group process live in the moment and I just knew that that was what I was going to be doing for the rest of my life basically. And I've still got the sense of sitting on the side of a mountain looking out across a sea loch, you know, watching a sea eagle and just knowing that this was going to be it. And in the valley the group were, you know, that like I could see our camp and I knew what was going on in the human world.

Doherty: Wow. Mm-hmm.

Marshall: nested within this much broader, soaring Scottish landscape. And you know, it kind of went on from there really. I mean, I met Martin at a very unusual gathering of people, which is a story in itself. and you know, he and I got together and professionally and just kind of started chewing things over. And from then on, you know, it's like that's our work developed really.

Doherty: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Marshall: So yeah, I mean that's you know, that's the kind of abridged version.

Doherty: Yeah. How old were you when you had that really that special outdoor trip?

Marshall: In Scotland? I was in my early forties then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, I wasn't mega young or anything like that. So, it's yeah, yeah.

Doherty: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well that's helpful because this can happen every any time in your life. And I think you know, one of the themes that I like to talk about with people is that, you know, you don't have to have an idyllic childhood, you know, with a grandparent mentor, you know, on a farm somewhere is not the only origin story. That is one of the common ones, but

Marshall: Mm.

Doherty: I know I did not have outdoor special background experience till until my twenties, you know, really when I left where I was from and traveled. So, it could be at any age. So, listeners out there, you know, I always like to highlight this because sometimes people think, I'm not enough. Like I can't be an ecotherapist or an environmental person because I didn't have the right childhood and that's just not at all the case. You know, this is always available for us.

Marshall: Yeah, I think that's really true, you know, because there’s someone I'm working with now, his origin story would be like in London. He often talks about the alleyways behind the house, you know, where they grew up and the richness of that ecological spot, and he was outside, but it was an urban landscape.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Hinds: And there are some good theories to suggest that our sort of development is not really caught up with the predication of sort of living in urban environments. We're evolutionarily geared to live in natural environments and it's only in relatively recent human history that we live in urban environments. In fact, I think WHO, the World Health Organization, made a statement in 2006 that for the first time in human history, the majority of the world's population now live in cities. And that the innate tendency for us to want to connect with nature is of course still very much alive and well in us, absolutely.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it kind of simmers underneath and every once in a while, it gets rediscovered, in the news or something like that. So, the modern world keeps distracting us from that. and I'm looking at this paper, we were talking earlier, Hayley and Martin Jordan did a paper back in 2010 taking counseling and therapy outside, destruction or enrichment of therapeutic frame.

Marshall: Yeah. Mm.

Doherty: And I was saying that I still refer to this paper and use it when I help to train, you know, ecotherapist or in classes because one of these papers that does lay out some of the groundwork here.

Hinds: I think you may be Hayleys first fan, Thomas.

Doherty: Yeah, yeah. That's great. Well, it gets at these terms like nearby nature, the idea that, you know, nature can be right in our neighborhood. I just saw a study come out about that just the other day. People are still realizing that nature can be a whole range of things from wild places to, you know, domestic nature in in your home.

And then the whole construction of what wilderness is and getting past some of these social ideas. and then you know what why this paper I thought was good was because I know you both were really what would I say, very honoring the actual psychotherapeutic process and really, you know, using theory, like not just saying I'm going to throw out all the all the psychotherapeutic knowledge I have, but actually integrating things,

Marshall: Yeah. Mm. No. Yes.

Doherty: We talked to Mark Williams. I don't know if you know Mark Williams in in Wales, but I we just interviewed him recently and he's also kind of I think on the current vanguard of this kind of work with the theory. But yeah, what where I'm going with this for either the public or for our ecotherapy listeners out there, you know, it's come we've come a long way. What do you remember what it was like to talk about this in 2010 when you were talking about this?  I imagine you must have gotten a lot of pushback from the traditional therapists who thought therapy should be in a room.

Marshall: Yeah. Yes, there was quite a bit. I mean I think it was a mixture of very exciting and just feeling like certainly for me, you know, like I was let off a leash. but not so much so that we were, you know, using this word again, going feral.

Doherty: Mm

Marshall: I think there's a sense of going wild, you know, which is different for me because there's a sense the difference I understand there is something about being let out with some discipline. So, we still wanted to hold the frame, and we were critiqued for that. We were critiqued by the traditional therapy community. You know, lots of people thought we were wrecking the frame just by definition, just by taking it out of the room. And then there were other people who thought we were overly clinging onto it [the room]. You know so that, so we were kind of caught in the middle and I think Martin in particular was very keen on, you know, holding our mid-ground, which I think that article does do.

Doherty: yeah, interesting. Yeah.

Marshall: And you know, we formulated a lot of the article through simply going out and doing it. There wasn't any training, certainly not in this country then. And there are now, its big changes, you know, over this period of time. so basically, we’ve had sort of guinea pig clients, which sounds terrible, but I mean it you know, it was it was agreed. These people kind of knew what we were doing. and then we did a lot of co-supervision and we were also formulating a little training course at the same time, and Martin was writing his PhD. So, we were really trying to fathom it out, and it was a mixture of going out and doing and then coming back in and talking and reflecting and thinking theoretically and sifting through what was in the existing kind of psychotherapeutic literature as to what would be useful to support what we were trying to do. So, you know, to be able to hold the work but not clamp it down so much that you lose what actually is gained through taking it out. yeah, I mean you know just thinking about it now, I remember it was it was it was tremendously exciting. You know so exciting and Martin was an absolute joy to do it with because he was a very funny man. There was a lot of laughing and a lot of irreverence and yeah, a lot of swearing

Doherty: Yeah. there's a there's an art to this.

Hinds: Yeah, that's my memory of him as well. We got on far too well. And that's the thing. Interestingly, in 2006, I was presenting ideas of environmental psychology and wellbeing and being out in nature to psychology audiences and I was getting the same response. You know, on occasions I would be laughed at for presenting, you know, these, these kind of, you know, parallel ideas. And, and the strange thing is, you know, 10, 12, 14 years later, the people that were laughing at me have got on the bandwagon and all their research seems to be around doing well-being studies in the outdoors. Nobody likes a good idea, do they really? Especially if it's new.

Doherty: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And laughing at is there's some statement in the in the Tao or something about if you someone you know doesn't laugh at the idea then it's probably not a really new one or a good one.

Hinds: Yeah. I like that. Yeah, I like that idea.

Yeah. yeah, I'm just resonating because I'm very similar in time frame to you. I finished my psychology program and was licensed in practice 2004 and I started teaching and doing classes and yeah, certain people always have gotten this immediately. They understood exactly what was happening. And other people they just realized they had just mental categories that were separate and they could not link therapy and nature. And then they would often make a joke like, are you are you therapizing trees or something like that? You know, it was because they were uncomfortable.

Marshall: Really. Yeah.

Doherty: I mean, this is a deep topic. There's a lot of uncomfort and you know, repressed, you know, connections with nature in our society and people f feel like, you know, when you bring it up, they're resistant to it because it's different and scary that we don't need to go deep into that right now. But yes, and you know, creating the training program that you couldn't have. So, I think that's really that's really what happened with me. Yeah. Yeah.

Marshall: Well, I have a working theory about that, Thomas, that the act of play is sometimes a very, dangerous and frightening place for people to retreat to. And of course, the nature of play is, often naturally, you know, associated with childhood in outdoor places and that that somehow the retreat into or the regression into a childlike state is something to be avoided, something that is frightening. And I've seen it; I've seen an awful lot in practice that the people who have this desperate need or urge to go and play, climb a tree, run about, to resist the temptation to do so desperately because it will remind them of things that they've done a very good job of purposefully forgetting.

Doherty: Yeah. I think either personally and then also societally there's a social silencing about climate change and, you know, destruction of places and our need to have a healthy environment. yeah.

Marshall: Sure. Yeah. I think that's really important because I think, you know, eco psychotherapy is an enlivening practice. and it brings all sorts of things alive, you know, not just personal material, it's like the deeply held cultural problems and trouble, you know, that we've we were all carrying somewhere that we're actually quite cut off from still.

Hinds: If we were to see those things and to actively engage them, it would mean that we would feel the compulsion to do something. that's what, putting things into action and doing things is what people would rather not do because it takes away from their day-to-day lives, their day-to-day activities. If I was to see the truth, that means that I would feel the compulsion to want to do something about it. I'd rather bury my head, please, because... Yeah.

Marshall: Yeah.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And I know even in the UK, I mean in the US we have some terrible repressive things happening regarding, you know, environmental protections and also environmental protest. So that's a piece. Luckily, ecotherapy itself doesn't have to be overtly political like that. And it's still, I think people I know in the US here even where I live in Portland and I supervise therapists. Many, many therapists, especially since COVID, are doing walking therapy and outdoor therapy. And it that used to be seen as quite strange, you know, back in the old days as we were talking about. But now it's not uncommon at all for therapists to advertise that they do walk and talk therapy. And I find the public likes it. They want it. They are they are calling for it. So, it's interesting.

So, you did the re I've got these books sitting here in front of me. I've got the original ecotherapy and now the new ecotherapy theory, research, practice, and education. So, I thought we should spend some time here to talking about how that ecotherapy volume has changed and what you know, what what's exciting and interesting about this new volume and how, you know, what you discovered in in in working on it or just your experience with that.

Hinds: Yeah. I mean, to start us off, the book could have been a more expanded version than the current one because we managed to get some really very interesting people, some indigenous people from Australia and other contributors who didn't actually manage to get to submit a chapter in the end. it's not as expansive as we would have liked it to have been. But in terms of the obvious difference from the last edition, it's got an education sort of section about how do we teach these ideas? And some of the ideas about, Hayley might want to speak about is the supervision of ecotherapy outdoors, which again has had very, very little airtime. So there has been some definite important developments in the new edition based on those two elements.

Doherty: Yeah, yeah.

Marshall: Mm. Yeah. For me, I was particularly keen on getting the education side of things going in this volume. It's a sign of the times, you know. When I first started, there weren't any really training courses. Now there are a few here. but I think what still needs addressing is the notion of what kind of education, you know, what kind of process do practitioners doing this work actually need? Do they need the one we're always doing, you know, with main or mainstream psychotherapists, or do they need something else? To really support more expansive notion of what this practice is. And you know, my feeling is it's the latter that we actually need to really think carefully about the way people are being, not trained , I don't like the word trained, you know, even it's like educated, led out into onto the land and allow the land to teach.

So, you know, we've got we've got a smallish education section in this book and supervision is also part of it. Again, same idea, you know, what is supervision, you know, how's that different for a for an ecological practitioner? does it need to be outside for instance, you know, and of course it's very different if it is. I mean the minute you start to include a much broader intelligence in the work; very interesting things happen.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Marshall: it's not pure purely human anymore, you know, and what does that do? And so, I thought it was it was really important for us to start to stretch out into that realm. And as Joe says, you know, s some of the I mean, we have a lot of revised chapters in this book because a lot of them stand the test of time really well. I mean yours is one of them.

Doherty: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Marshall: Both Joe and I have written ones that were still in there. We've you know, we've tinkered with them a bit, but basically, they hold up well even after this period of time. so, it's important to say that. And yes, it was disappointing that we didn't have other voices from up, you know, like the southern hemisphere. But you know, there are limitations when you're bringing a book together like this and you know, it took a while even to get this one together, didn't it, Jo?

Doherty: Yeah. Yeah. No, and it's the aspiration even back to the early eco the first eco psychology volume from Sierra Club Press and Rosak and those folks back in the like mid-nineties, ninety-five, they ended up having to like to interview some people to get them into the volume because they were trying to do the same thing. So, it's a general, you know it’s the story of this, yeah.

Marshall: Right. Yeah.

Hinds: So, I'm very much with Hayley on this, is the idea that we have a tendency in the world generally and certainly in education that we tell people the way things are. And as my good friend would say, no one's learned a bloody thing by being told. And the importance is to offer a situation or an environment where there can be some self-discovery. And I think that it is very much in the format of therapy itself. The education of people about things, it has to have a more of an experiential and self-discovery element attached to it rather than a more of the typical dictatorial style. It's good to have conversations. It's good to have a chat about the things that people come up with while they are going through some processes. And I think that the teaching or the teachers that I've come into contact with, a lot of them, the teaching is purely about them and for them. It's not necessarily about the people they want to educate. I've also met some people who have been wonderful people in terms of being able to communicate really important concepts without it being, you know, rammed home, unpleasantly in that sort of typical educational style. And I think there's something about that, the more organic experiential encounter with things, is, I think, you know, Hayley is getting at here which I'm very much on board with.

Doherty: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, experiential education. I mean, many people in this work have an experiential education, outdoor education, outdoor adventure background, which lends itself to that. It's an adventure. It's something that's discovered. I have a quick detail question because people are some people are new to this. so, Hayley you said something really nice about letting being let out and onto the land and allowing the land to teach and broader intelligence. And I totally agree, but can you give an example, even just off the top of your head, about what that might look like in a session, I have some ideas about this, but like an office-based session versus an outdoor session -- what's that intelligence? How does it show up? Do you have a sense of it?

Marshall: well, I think it can show up in a variety of ways. I mean it does depend on the on the receptivity of the people, you know, the people that are involved in the actual work. But I think there's you know, one obvious way is in the power of the symbolic realm, so like the metaphorical realm, you know, the way that the languages of the more if you like the more than human, which is a David Abram phrase, speak to us through our bodies. So, you know, like shapes, colors, movement, smell, this whole sensory world, the way all of that starts to enliven someone and their body can effectively start to change the way they think, the way they feel. So, I mean, you know, we sort of know some of this stuff very instinctively. It's like, you know, if you've got something on your mind, often it's great just simply to go outside and go for a walk. And that's a very ancient practice. You know, it's like the medicine walk. We go out, we seek medicine, and the medicine comes through the speaking of the outdoor world, you know, the way it moves in that kind of non-symbolic, it's like through movement and then more obvious symbolic realm which we can sort of associate to through metaphor. and you know so something will appear, I mean, you know, as if by magic, you know, suddenly on the path like where I work, you know, at the moment, the frogs are out. So, they're everywhere. You know, they're leaping about

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Marshall: so, whatever someone's got going on in their head, they can start to associate with what's around them. Or a classic is like a bird of prey, you know, flying above. If someone's got something really menacing going on in their head, they can start to say, Yeah, it's just like that, you know, that's exactly how I feel. And then they'll see the bird of prey do something that starts to alter, you know, the way they are interacting with the voice in their head. I mean that's a very obvious example. it's very rich territory and I think the practitioner's task is to be able to hold a very broad open space to allow in those associations which could go in any direction. They could go quite spiritual for instance. They could be really practical.

Hinds: Yes. I think I'm totally with this as well. And I think sometimes the practitioner is sort of operating from, you know, backstage as it were and observing. And when the conversation is, you know, the person is trying to make sense of something, you know, there may be a link that could be initiated because of something that they've forgotten, they're a bit blind to, but their focus, their attention on the thing is a valuable piece of information. I've had a similar thing where, you know, a dying man who I used to work in a palliative care setting would always be drawn in the woods to the rotting stump. And we would work with that and then we managed the winter and the springtime and we didn't quite make it to the summertime. But in the springtime, through the process of the work, he was drawn to the little shoots of green that were coming through the leaf litter. it was just a sign that, you know, that there'd been some real progress with him working through some kind of very heavy, very dark, stuff. And he managed to find the life in the end. that sort of work is incredibly moving for both of us, ideally, but sometimes I am moved by the work because of, as Heidi says, the symbolism. It's quite the metaphor. It's quite powerful stuff.

Doherty: Yes, it's really beautiful. I'm thinking about a client that I do walking therapy with, really you know, He’s like rain or shine. He's in his eighties and he's an outdoor person and dealing with dementia and his partner and his own physical frailty. we're in the woods where we hike, you know, age, death, decay, life are all together. It's like all happening at the exact same time.

Unlike in the human world where we kind of put death and decay, you know, away somewhere else, in the woods it's just all right in front of us. So, it's just fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful.

Marshall: Yeah.

Hinds: Yeah.

Marshall: Yeah. And that it is beautiful and the other thing that I really like about that way of working is that it although it you know, we're still doing psychotherapy, like the client has come with something that's to them, there's still a way in which it takes people out of out of that just human domain. It's like we're actually also interacting with the world around us. There's a kind of a fractal, you know, like we're working with a bit that's in us that's resonating with things that are going on a much broader frame.

So, you know, like you've just said, like life and death, it's kind of it's all there at the same time. And actually, other things are living and dying. It's not just us that's doing it. you know, and it and that's cause that's one of the critiques of people who are taking the work out, is that it's still saying, “humans are at the center of everything”. And of course, sometimes we are. But actually, I think this practice really does, generally speaking, invite us to think beyond ourselves. You know, and that and that's a mighty thing. The world needs it.

Hinds: Yeah. Yeah. Or as somebody would say to me, try and get over yourself. You know, the idea becomes very transpersonal, doesn't it? It becomes very existential. It becomes very Daoist like because a lot of the Daoists, you know, would paint these paintings, these wonderful, you know, natural environments with a human, very small in the corner or to the center. know, it's just putting us and things into perspective.

Doherty: Yeah, that's well said. Well said.

Marshall: Yeah.

Doherty: Yeah, yeah, exactly. This is so wonderful. We're going to move toward closing here, but it's just a joy to meet people that are, you know, validating to like, yourself. Like so it validates all the things that that I think about. Even years ago, doing, you know, what we call wilderness therapy in the US, we had a saying, we just got to get the young people they were working with. We just need to keep them safe so the real therapists could work, like the big therapist, which is nature. We just got to make sure they don't get frostbitten toes or not drink water and things like that. So, you know, because we're facilitators of this. and that is the same in a city park too. it's just a different scale.

What I where I go with this is that it's just it's just a sense of surprise. Like if you're walking and then particularly with animal sightings, like if a blue heron flies overhead, everyone stops immediately, whatever they were thinking about, and they look at it and it's a moment of presence and that is generally universal. I was just visiting my daughter who's eighteen and she's doing a just, you know, fledgling travel and she's working in Colorado in the US.

Marshall: Yeah.

Doherty: near the Rocky Mountain National Park. I would just saw her a week ago. And when you go to these places, I'm sure it's the same in the Peak District. When there's an animal, like a deer or like there, there's moose or deer or great horned sheep. People just stop. Like all the cars stop. Everyone stops and they look. And no one is upset about it. Like they're not honking like let me get past because everyone, it's just a magical connection.

Marshall: Yeah.

Doherty: So, some of this is really quite hardwired into us, I think this this sense of wonder.

Marshall: Yeah.

Hinds: I think the animals have got an awful lot to teach us and I think our superiority sometimes gets in the way of us being able to understand that they've got an awful lot to teach us.

Doherty: Yeah, and I appreciate that you all can get at this in your book and in our conversation, really deep like transpersonal, mystical, spiritual ideas. But you're still doing it in a very, like Hayley said earlier, disciplined way so that you know, we can get this into the therapy journals and the therapy practices. It takes it's kind of hard to do that, you know.

Marshall: Mm. Mm. Yes.

Doherty: It's easy to blow the frame, like you say, and just be mystical and throw and say I'm going to be a radical, but it's hard to actually get the system to change. So, I really appreciate that you guys are working in that direction. Yeah.

Marshall: Yeah.

Hinds: You definitely need the theory, you definitely need the feeling, you definitely need the spirituality. It's the mind, soul, and body. If you don't have the holy triad there, you don't have the mind, which is the theoretical frame, you don't have the spiritual connection, and you're not using your body, you're not walking, then of course you're going to be missing something. So that holy trinity is really very important, the mind, the body, and the soul.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Marshall: Yeah. And you know, I think there is a navigation to be made with the mainstream. I think that's probably another conversation. Yeah, we'll come back. We'll deal with that next time.

Hinds: We've got to come back.

Doherty: Yeah. But you're doing it and yeah. Well, we always say, you know, that time is not enough and I want to keep this conversation going anyway in some other form. But listeners, you've got a really good intro, I think, to this work and to Hayley and Joe's background. In the show notes to the episode, we'll put links to the new volume and some of these classic papers and whatever else you both would like to share because there's there is a new generation of people just discovering this work and it's really, I think grounding to know that there are some elders and people that have been you know doing this for a while, you know we're not alone. That's just another general takeaway in all this work. We're never alone either with other people that care the same or other species or the earth. So, with that we're going to wrap it up.

Marshall: Okay. Yeah.

Doherty: but Hayley and Joe, such a pleasure to chat with you on the podcast and we will get this out this summer and I'll let you know. Hayley, and Joe and listeners and also speaking for Panu who's not with us today, everyone be well.

Marshall: Thank you.

Hinds: Thank you very much, Thomas, Thank you.

 

 

image credit | Richard Vanlerberghe

S5 E22: “The Body Keeps the Storm” with Clayton Aldern

Thomas. Doherty, Panu Pihkala

Season 5, Episode 22: “The Body Keeps the Storm” with Clayton Aldern

Climate change is not just happening around us, but also inside of us. Thomas and Panu join journalist Clay Aldern who explains how heat, storms, and other climate shocks can shape our minds and bodies in surprising ways. Their talk focused on climate trauma, eco-anxiety, and epigenetics — the idea that stress can leave marks on our biology and may even affect future generations. As Clay noted, “The climate’s always kind of reaching in and adding a little more weight.” This captures the episode’s core message: the environment is not distant; it is part of us.

This episode is very relevant for anyone trying to make sense of climate stress about summer heat.

Links

• Clayton Aldern

• Yoko Nomura (2019) Children of Superstorm Sandy Study)

• Heat and (Mis)Preceptions

  • Marlon, J.R., Begotka, N., Preston, A. et al. (2026). Experience-driven perceptions misalign with assessed heat risk in the United States. Nature Communications

  • Heat Risk Perception Map Yale Program on Climate Change Communication

• Heat and Aggression

  • Kristen French (2026) Heat Probably Doesn’t Make You More Aggressive: An interview With a Behavioral Economist About Cake, Climate Change, and Cooperation. Nautilus

  • Craig Anderson (1989) Temperature and aggression: ubiquitous effects of heat on occurrence of human violence. Psychological Bulletin

• Resources

  • Neuro-Climate Working Group

  • 2026 Rachel Carson Award to Ferris Jabr - Becoming Earth

  • Seeds of Radical Renewal Fellowship

  • GRIST News Climate and Data Desk “The only newsroom focused on finding solutions at the intersection of climate and justice.”

• Earlier CCH Episode:

  • Season 3, Episode 15: Radical Joy in the Midst of Environmental Grief with Trebbe Johnson

Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.

Doherty: Well Hello, I'm Thomas Doherty.

Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. And this is our podcast, a show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change, obviously, and other issues which could include politics or the natural environment or your life or your family or the season. This episode should be coming out in the summer of 2026 and we are really lucky to have a special guest with us today.

Aldern: Hey, my name's Clayton Aldern and I'm a senior data reporter at Grist and occasionally I introduce myself as a recovering neuroscientist.

Doherty: Great. yeah, I met Clay at the Northwest Science Writers meeting this past January and we traded books. His book The Weight of Nature has recently won a Rachel Carson Award,

Aldern: Yeah, well second place. I was a very happy first runner up to Ferris Jabr who took home the gold,

Doherty: Yeah. well that's tough competition. That's tough composition. I know Ferris a little bit as well. But Clay is an interesting person. He's a data journalist and wrote a weighty book on the weight of nature and it's actually stuff that we talk about here in terms of how our being on the planet affects our bodies and our minds and how we think about this stuff and how it affects our very sense of self. So we're going to get into some of that here. Panu, do you want to get us started?

Pihkala: Warmly welcome, Clay, also on my behalf. Lovely to meet you and discuss with you about the inner and outer impacts of climate change. And of course, these are interrelated. But it would be lovely to hear something about your background. How did you become so interested in climate related things and working heavily with them?

Aldern: Yeah, happy too. It it's a little bit of a circuitous path. I was in grad school for neuroscience about a decade ago when I came across a paper that somebody showed me illustrating the relationship ostensibly between climate and conflict. You know, this this kind of econometric study or behavioral economic study that'll occasionally come out of econ departments that that Illustrates that even if you correct for all the sociodemographic variables under the sun, all the confounders that you can think of, there still seems to be some kind of marginal relationship between heat and the risk of violent crime in some capacity, or indeed in this case the risk of conflict, right? Interpersonal conflict, both at the individual level and indeed the neighborhood or the state level.

And as a as a practicing neuroscientist at the time, this the kind of thing that sets off some alarm bells, right? Like, well, if we can parse out all of the potential confounders, and there's still some marginal effect here, relating temperature to behavior in the specific manner. Like, what is going on? And I kind of just couldn't get this question out of my head. I ultimately wound up doing a master's in public policy, kind of running away from academic neuroscience with my tail between my legs a little bit. but it was really a means to think about how I might move a little closer to a practice in which I was grounding the science I was interested in conducting in what I considered to be the real world, right? Or the social realm.

I'd been studying science for who knows, a decade or two at that point. And I didn't know anything about government or how people worked in practice. And so I wound up studying climate change and security as part of this policy degree. This is in 2015 because of this connection that seemed to be flourishing under the surface in some capacity. And it's been over the past ten or so years that I've indeed tried to move away from the lab per se and out into the real world thinking about the manners in which science works to affect real people, right? Biological processes are bearing out in our bodies all the time. Obviously these questions bear on policy design decisions, policy analysis decisions. And so I've kind of seen the project writ large is one that you know seeks to take the methods of neuroscience and indeed computational neuroscience and the tools of the trade when one's thinking about scientific literature review but then zooming the lens out and really seeking to ground some of these effects translationally, thinking about the manners in which the science in the lab has relevance for real people.

That's kind of been the project of my past decade. And it's led me through journalism, it's led me through the public sector. right now I run the data desk at grist.org which is the United States' largest environmental magazine. we work on climate change and environmental justice and energy justice. And at some point an editor said to me, hey, you know, you have this background in neuroscience. You really should do “this is your brain on climate change” kind of a thing for us. And I was skeptical at the time, despite having seen the occasional study here and there, but as I started to pull at these threads more and more, it became clear that there was a lot of meat on this bone, that there was specifically an intersection worth noting between a changing climate and a changing brain. And so the book that Thomas mentioned is the result of that research effort and it's an attempt specifically to ground the science of climate change in our neurobiology.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Panu, why don't you follow up again? You have another question you often ask people in our episodes at the beginning.

Pihkala: Yes, very interesting to hear about that Clay and that kind of book has been much in demand. So really happy that it's out there. When you think of even earlier past in your life, did you have some things which you later have connected to this interest in climate matters? Were you one of these people who go out a lot into the nature or the modern human world? Or is that something which has come only later in your life?

Aldern: Well it's interesting you ask because I think if you would have asked me a couple months ago I might have said something like, Well, I don't know, I I'm from a rural community, I spent a lot of time outside as a kid. Certainly I have some relationships with place and with places that have changed and those relationships are such that certainly they spur some kind of interest in a changing environment.

But I actually found something in my childhood bedroom just a couple of weeks ago that I think tells the tale a little more specifically. It was the school assignment, which I have no hope of remembering being assigned, was probably in first or second grade, in which we had to design some kind of campaign, I think was the gist. you know, we had to be an activist in some capacity. and mine was all about saving the penguins. I don't think I really got the location correct. I think I dropped them in the Arctic as opposed to the Antarctic and I there were there were quite a few misspellings, but the gist was that I was interested in conservation. I have no memory of having explicitly been interested in conservation at like age ten, but I do have the receipts to back it up and my father was an environmental activist, which again is not really something I knew or understood growing up. He passed away when I was three years old. but over the course of my life my mother has mentioned to me his work you know with the Sierra Club, for example. He worked on Paul Wellstone's campaign, who is a senator from Minnesota, and certainly a senator who thought rigorously about environmental issues. and I think there was some triangulation there in my father's life when it came to thinking through his own environmental activism. So who knows if there was any kind of epigenetic inheritance on that front. I again, you know, wouldn't boast any knowledge of these things growing up, but maybe through osmosis they made their way in.

Pihkala:  Thanks for mentioning and the human brain is very complex.

Doherty: Yeah. Yes, the human brain is complex. but what was your father's name, Clay?

Aldern: Brad.

Doherty: So here's to Brad. Father's Day is coming up this summer. So you know, honoring our people. I do think that I personally have in fact even somewhere in my office I have this three-piece poster thing from elementary school. I studied electricity, so I had like eel solar farms and various things. And so yeah, I think almost all of all of us, that's the uniform takeaway when I have people do an environmental identity exercise or thinking about their timeline. Almost everyone goes back to find things from their childhood that, if you're born after nineteen sixty-five, you're going to have that somewhere in your schooling because it was just part of the part of the culture. Yes, that's great. Brain on climate change, let's talk a bit about your book. It's a great book. It's juicy. It goes really deep. Well, I mean, I think you're a great writer, Clay, and you also just bring in literature and philosophy and you go into depth on these things. But I love chapter six. Maybe you could tell us about chapter six, The Body Keeps the Storm. I love that title. And, you know, we had talked about we've been talking about preparing for the summer here and potential heat or fire or things like that. But what would you what were you where were you going? Do remember where you were going with that particular chapter? And I think there was a fire in Gatlinburg.

Aldern: Yeah, yeah. Happy to discuss. you know, in in fact it's kind of funny I just made a reference to epigenetics because I think one of the biggest takeaways in that chapter is indeed an epigenetic takeaway. So maybe that's a nice place to start. The kind of gambit of the chapter is indeed in the title, right? It would it would say that we don't need to go to war to experience PTSD, right? The violence of a hurricane, or indeed a wildfire, or a severe drought, right? That enough. These climate shocks, the climate trauma that results from these brushes up against this violent world, they're enough to seed the symptomology of post traumatic stress disorder. And so the chapter seeks to understand what it is about climate trauma, if anything, that makes it unique and what are the effects, intergenerationally included, of experiencing it? the reason I mentioned the last part is indeed because of this this this epigenetic bit. So maybe I'm kind of giving away the punchline here, but by way of illustration, you know, one of the studies I discuss in that chapter comes from Dr. Yoko Nomura, who's a neuropsychologist at CUNY Queens, and when Hurricane Sandy rolled into town in 2014, she was in the middle of conducting this huge cohort study of expecting mothers called the Stress in Pregnancy Study. And Dr. Namura was interested in getting a sense of all the various exposures to which expecting mothers might be subject, and indeed tracking the relationship between these kinds of exposures and maternal child health outcomes in the decade of life or so. Probably misquoting there a little bit, but that's the gist. And so indeed, Hurricane Sandy, unbeknownst to all of them in the study, waltzes into New York and all of a sudden Dr. Namura has effectively two cohorts instead of one, right? There are mothers who were pregnant at the time of the storm, right? So you had fetuses that were exposed to sandy in utero effectively. And then you had mothers who had either given birth before the storm or indeed conceived after.

And so what Dr. Namura did was indeed follow this cohort-based approach and after the children were born in in each case, track these same outcomes over the first ten years or so of life. And lo and behold, what do you find by preschool age, you know? You know, ten and below, we're talking about things like in the exposed cohort, right, the children who experienced Sandy in utero and then grew up having had that trauma when they were still in the womb. By that preschool age, you see an increase in in major depressive symptomology, anxious symptomology, things like conduct disorder, ADHD. and we're not talking, you know, two percent more likely or three percent more likely. These are these are like 10X, 20X, 30X likelihoods that we're witnessing relative to those who were not exposed to the storm.

 And so there's a great question here, which is why? How? How is this possible? And Yoko Nomura would say is stress can be and indeed is inoculating during gestation, right? The world is a stressful place. It would behoove us to be exposed, right? For our developing brains to be exposed to the kinds of glucocorticoid storms, right? To the kinds of stress molecules to which they will be subject later in life, right? If we were not exposed to any stress whatsoever that would not be preparing us for the way that the world is. So stress in pregnancy can be a good thing. And indeed, in these kind of inoculating doses, it is. The problem is that everybody has a breaking point. And if one experiences something like a hurricane, lo and behold, the effects are going to be pathological in nature. And where the epigenetics comes in here is that unfortunately, because we're probably talking about epigenetic changes, because we're not necessarily talking about a genome being altered in some capacity, but rather we're talking probably about protein expression. We're talking about genes kind of being upregulated and downregulated as a function of stuff like methylation sites. When that happens and you see the behavioral phenotypes that we observe in studies like these.

There are more alarm bells going off because unfortunately epigenetic changes are heritable as well, which means the children that we're seeing with these elevated risk profiles are likely to pass on those same epigenetic markers to their children. So now we're talking about this kind of intergenerational memory of climate trauma being imprinted in this kind of neurocognitive or neurobehavioral capacity. down the line. When of course the, you know, hypothetical grandchildren in question didn't have anything to do with this storm. And so that's what this chapter is about. It's about all the manners in which our bodies encode climate trauma in this manner.

Doherty: Mm. Yeah. For our listeners who aren't versed in neuroscience, do you want to give an accessible explanation of epigenetics?

Aldern: Yeah, sure. So I mean this is a this is a relatively new field, all things considered, of science. You know, it's kind of the it's the system of like chemical annotations layered on top of your DNA. and indeed controls which genes get switched on or off without changing the underlying genetic sequences. So you can kind of think of it as the software settings on top of the hardware of DNA. and it and it basically helps decide which parts of the hardware actually run in a given cell at a given time. that's kind of the core idea. There are a handful of ways these kind of these chemical annotations work. I mentioned DNA methylation being one of them, which is basically the idea that you have these control regions on genes that can that can be tagged. And if they're tagged with methyl groups, a type of chemical, effectively you have the silencing of a gene, right? The cellular machinery all of a sudden can't easily access the DNA to read it because it's kind of been covered up by these methyl groups. Methylation is almost like a dimmer switch sitting on top of these specific genes. And again, I you know, in terms of the study I'd mentioned, I don't think anybody's actually done the relevant epigenetic work to see what's happening in in in Yoko Nomura's Cohort's case. but one can imagine it's probably something like this, because effectively there aren't too many alternatives.

Doherty: Yeah, yeah. Well this is fascinating. I mean, there's a lot of directions to go. I mean what it what it brings to mind to me this idea of eco anxiety, we talk about climate anxiety, where one worries about the climate, but eco anxiety originally was talked about in in relation to chemicals in the environment. That’s my understanding of how the term was first used in the media around endocrine disrupting chemicals. But it's sort of like this epigenetic stuff in the sense that part of the heart of eco anxiety is that it's these small kind of mysterious processes in the world, in the environment, in our bodies, in our DNA. Out in the world, chemicals that are just hard to hard to pin down and it's hard to find them. We know they're out there. It prompts this kind of like existential anxiety like I know a little bit about epigenetics but I'm like but really my DNA is turning on and off and from a storm and even though it's understandable and it's not a death sentence or it's not deterministic to who we are as people. It still feels that way to me, like it's threatening, like something's beyond my control. did you find some of that in your in your work or personally or in your writing?

Aldern: Yeah, I think I think the word control there is a big one for me. I frequently think about these effects, the relationship between a changing climate and a changing brain or a changing mind, in terms of control, in terms of loss of agency. I wouldn't say I'm somebody who subscribes to a particular definition of free will that's really getting too beat up here. and yet we love to imagine that we have something called free will. We love to imagine we are in control of our actions. But if I put twenty studies in front of you right now showing you that there's pretty reliable relationship between something like a temperature deviation and the likelihood of you maybe punching the person next to you on a bus, or yelling at the postal worker at the post postal office or offering up some act of online hate speech, which I imagine you probably won't. and yet we know that at the margins, all of these things increase in likelihood with higher temperatures relative to what one traditionally experiences. So where's the free will there, right? We have evidence that the environment reaches in and tips the scales.

That is part of the gambit of the title of my book, right? It's I'd argue that the environment is always kind of reaching in, the climate's always kind of reaching in and adding a little more weight, right? Forcing your hand a little bit in a certain direction. And it's usually imperceptible. I don't think that it's impossible to you know, train ourselves to recognize these moments. But for the most part they operate subconsciously. We are these billiard balls that are constantly being bounced around by our environmental conditions. And indeed that's what helps us survive, our ability to respond to the environment. But lo and behold, there's a narrative here that says, well, as the climate forces our hand in these manners, we are subject to less and less control in the way that we tend to imagine.

We are in the first place. it's I think a motif for me that runs through a lot of this literature, the notion of a loss of agency. Right? We think about that a lot in the eco-psychology literature. We think about you know when it comes to something like eco anxiety or climate anxiety, these you know depressive or kind of ruminative effects where if you are staring down the barrel of this doom.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Aldern:  You know, the thing that you wind up doing is just not wanting to get out of bed. unless you have some route to action, right? Unless you have evidence that the efforts that you're putting forth matter in the first place. Without evidence of that action though, you don't feel you're in control. And lo and behold, we observe the deadening depressive effects of climate anxiety.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Aldern:  when there is no evidence of control.

Doherty: Yeah. Yeah. So climate anxiety and climate grief or depression, you know, tend to go hand in hand for sure. Yeah, what are you thinking, Panu?

Pihkala: Yeah, thanks a lot for all that. That's very important and points to some key existential lessons and challenges of this time, but perhaps also some previous times that accepting that humans have influence on things, but humans are not really ultimately in control of everything. And this of course is related to notions in Western culture and science about how much in control we can be and how much dominion we can have and so on. So it's a tough lesson to really accept that we can do things but we also have to live with uncertainty and course uncertainty and uncontrollability are key elements in anxiety research.

A friend and colleague of mine did a series of radio programs and talks called Climate Change in Me in Finnish. So that's what I'm hearing here. That's how climate change is in us and in us all. How are you personally coping with all this, Clay, may I ask?

Aldern: Yeah. Mm. Mm. Yeah. Well, no longer seeking to compartmentalize between climate work and the rest of my life. I think for a very long time I went to work as an environmental journalist and my day job was writing about the apocalypse and then I would go home and kind of turn that part of me off and try to cook dinner and have a normal life and see friends. And you know, there was a there's a day I was reporting this book in which I was reading this study about you know increased COVID mortality rates as a function of point source emissions. Right. There was this moment in the United States early in the pandemic when enforcement of EPA regulations was cut such that you saw an increase in these kind of smokestack emitters all around the country because nobody was inspecting these facilities or checking permits or whatever the case may have been in a given facility. And the study was a follow up that said, well in the counties where that was true, do we see kind of any effect on COVID mortality? And, you know, of course it's a respiratory disease. Like lo and behold, in the areas in which a lack of enforcement was related to an uptick in emissions, you also saw an increase in COVID mortality. And I just remember reading this paper and being like so depressed as if I was like, this is rough, this is really rough. I like I got to take a break. And I kind of shut my computer and looked out the window. And you know, it's like 2021-2022, the sky is completely orange because it's summer in Seattle and there's a wildfire outside and it's like raining smoke, excuse me, raining ash. And there was you know, there was no escape. It was it was just the weight was right there. You know, I was feeling the weight and it was such a reminder that there is no compartmentalization, that by definition, the climate is here all the time.

You know, we are enmeshed in our environments, to borrow a word. and of course it has always been and will always be that way. And so, you know, Panu, to answer your question, you know, how am I coping? I I'm seeking to remind myself that there is no compartmentalization, that there is only enmeshment, and that the best we can do is notice the manners in which the enmeshment is bearing on our internal experience and indeed our actions, our behavior, our mental, emotional, spiritual health. I'm mostly trying to be pay better attention to those effects and I think it is with this this kind of mindful presence, with this grounded attention that we can indeed perhaps regain some of the loss of agency, some of the loss of control that we were just talking about in in in the previous segment.

Doherty: Yeah. This is really great. so we could go in a lot of directions. I want to just show in a couple of things and then we'll toss it back to Panu. Yeah, Craig Anderson, the psychologist, when I started studying environmental psychology, that was one of the first strongest findings in environmental psychology is that heat is related to violence. and so it's a really standard understanding. But I also I think it's nuanced. for listeners, it doesn't mean that just because it's hot you're going to go beat up people. I think part of the heat thing, and we maybe talk about this again another time, is that it's also heat relative to what we're used to. Like a heat wave just on its own—many places have hot temperatures all the time around the equator—It doesn't mean that those people are inherently violent. We have to be careful of these cultural stereotypes too. But I do think it's when heat pushes us out of our comfort zone when we're not used to it. And then socio economically we don't have air conditioning. We don't have trees.

So it's complicated. It it's not it's not you shouldn't be afraid of hot weather in a very simple way. It's just again something that we have to you know, part of this big piece we were talking about before the episode is that people just don't anticipate how hot weather can be in the modern world. It's hotter than it has ever been in thousands of years. And so we whatever we think is hot weather, you know, if you're not thinking big enough, as I say. So it's going to be hotter than you think. So this summer we have to be aware that this temperatures can push us way out of our comfort zones, make us uncomfortable, angry, depressed, and we have to think about caring for people and finding people that are needing cooling and so there's a lot of you know inspiring pro social things to go with this in in addition to the hard feelings. I just want to make sure we throw that in there here. but I'll be quiet for now and I'll leave it to you both to help us wrap up today here.

Aldern: Well, you know, you mentioned comfort zones, right? Which is such a reminder, again, to me, of the underlying biology, right? And it's one of the reasons why those deviations away from normal do matter so much more than absolute temperatures, right? I think I you're spot on to point at the risks of a frame that says temperature is all that matters, right?

Pihkala: Hmm.

Aldern:  Social Darwinists loved that idea. It was it was the excuse that one could make to basically you know argue that people who live on the equator are lazy. but it's not what the evidence shows. The evidence shows that it's relative deviations that matter, that it's movement away from one's comfort zone. Why does that make sense? Well, because bodies are always seeking to maintain a homeostatic set point. And we know, when we have moved away from our set point. That's what discomfort is. So I would just you know underscore that comment that discomfort is part of the story here. Discomfort is our body telling us something, right? So when I when I speak about in this kind of mindful attentiveness to our own experience I think it's I think it's you know worth

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Aldern: underlining this this notion of affect, worth underlining this notion of the kind of internal experience of the environment. Because if we can pay closer attention to how we are feeling in this world, I think we have a better chance of responding to those feelings in the way that we would prefer more frequently.

Pihkala: Thank you, Clay, wonderfully.

Doherty: Yeah. For sure. Well, this is wonderful. Panu, yeah.

Pihkala: Yeah, in pedagogy and environmental education there's a strand called pedagogies of discomforts. So the idea is that we need to encounter the discomforts and then find ways together to live with it and encounter some hard truths and then find ways to practice compassion and life together after that.

Acceptance is key there. I think also, as you say, to quote Trebbie Johnson, one of our earlier podcast guests, acceptance is not surrender. So it doesn't mean that we just let everything happen, but we can accept what we need to accept and then try to be conscious and flexible in our choices. The listeners, The Weight of Nature by Clay is in bookstores. We'll put links to the show notes as usual. We have to wrap it up here even though there would be a lot to talk about these things that we have just put on the table. But warm thanks on my behalf, Clay, for joining us.

Aldern: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Doherty: Yeah, thanks Clay. I look forward to more dialogues. I love that this is an invitation for us to be gentle with ourselves, to take care of ourselves and others in in this hot weather, particularly when it's a heat wave that we're not used to. and Clay, thanks again for your time.

Aldern: Thanks for yours and thanks for your work.

Doherty: All right. Clay, Panu, and listeners, everyone, be well and take care of yourself.

 

 

image credit | Ariv Gupta

S5 E21: “Earth From Above” – The Psychology of Seeing Our Planet From Higher Perspectives

Thomas Doherty, Panu Pihkala

Season 5, Episode 21: “Earth From Above” – The Psychology of Seeing Our Planet From Higher Perspectives 

Thomas and Panu unpacked the emotional and psychological effects we experience when we have an opportunity to see our planet and lands from on high. Artificial borders disappear and natural and human systems and patterns are revealed. Artists, explorers, and land and species protectors have long used visions of “Earth from Above” to raise our awareness and consciousness, and you can expand your own vision too. 

Links

• Victor Glover Artemis II Pilot

• How Artemis 2’s Easter Message Echoes Apollo History

• NASA's Artemis 2 pilot Victor Glover listens to 'Whitey on the Moon' every Monday. This is why.

• Edgar Mitchell Apollo 14 quote

• Yann Arthus-Bertrand

  • In 1994, Arthus-Bertrand started a thorough study on the state of the Earth sponsored by UNESCO. As part of the study, he made a picture inventory of the world's most beautiful landscapes, taken from helicopters and hot-air balloons.

  • The book from this project, Earth from Above (La Terre vue du ciel) sold over 3 million copies and was translated into 24 languages.

• Cristina "Mitty" Mittermeier

  • Founded the International League of Conservation Photographers and coined the phrase "conservation photography")

  • International League of Conservation Photographers

• Sebastiao Salgado

• Edward Burtynsky

• Inspirational Female Landscape Photographers

Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity. 

Doherty:  Hello, I am Thomas Doherty.

Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala

Doherty: And welcome to climate change and happiness, our podcast. This is a show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change and other environmental issues or environmental problems. But also it's about how to support our own happiness and wellbeing in the modern world, because that's genuine and real just as much as the problem. 

So that's where we're at with our podcast. And just before we started, Panu was saying a countdown “five, four, three, two, one” and mimicking what the NASA says when the spaceships go up into space like the recent Artemis mission. And so, our theme today is “Earth from Above” and looking at imagery of nature and the Earth, particularly that it gives us some perspective and how that's really positive for us. This summer, can we stop to think about this? Can we stop to think about this overview effect and Earth from above? Can we use photography and imagery to recharge our batteries when we're feeling down or disconnected? So as we start as I start to open up that conversation, Panu, what’s coming up from your side in Finland and from your recent work supporting environmental activists?

Pihkala: Yes, in my work life I'm still continuing with the Finnish Youth Research Society. The research about young environmental activists and experiences of repression, including threats of criminalization. It's been interesting work interviewing these young people and publications will follow at some point. The general topic reminds me of my earlier fascination with taking photographs myself. I sort of awakened to that when I was around 18. The National Geographic magazine was actually influential for me. Jim Brandenburg, the American photographer who lives in the Minnesota woods, in terrain roughly similar to Finland actually, has an attention to detail and ways to compose photographs that was fascinating and led me to take slide photos back in those times. That was one type of film that you could then project with a machine to the wall and the image quality is very good, but it requires certain handiwork then to make the images with the displayable ones. That hobby also led me to visit many photography exhibitions when I started studying in Helsinki and some of those were quite influential also and it shaped my views about environment and social justice. So, the topic also links with those themes including some issues that we also discussed earlier like space travel and the historical importance of those photos of Earth from space.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, I think it's great. And I'm glad you mentioned National Geographic because here in the US, I guess around the world, that is a publication that has brought the power of imagery into people's lives of nature and our other species and different cultures. It's such a paradox, because right now, there's a lot of negative news coming out about various wars and repressions in the world. And just kind of the inhumanity that humans can show to each other, but then there's this true tradition of a sense of beauty and love for nature. And so, I think it's helpful for listeners to just stop and just think about that because Panu mentioned this book Earth from Above by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, which many people have seen. This book is basically pictures of the Earth from the air looking at the beauty of landscapes of various kinds. And that book came out in 1999. And I have a huge, big hard copy of that here at home, as many people do. I guess it's a form of biophilia. It's a form of natural connection to nature that we like these images around us. And so, it's nice to just think about that. I've been thinking a lot and researching about the Artemis moon missions and the different Earth from space photos that are so powerful and epic making. Some of that was accidental, the stories are just interesting. The Apollo eight mission with that famous Earthrise image, the astronaut Andrew said “hey, hand me the camera. Look at that. There's the Earth. Holy smokes”. Cause they're looking at the moon, right? They're pilots. They're test pilots shooting toward this objective. They weren't going into space to take pictures of the Earth. And there wasn't even a sense that that was something important to do, you know, and that was just accidental, with this Hasselblad handheld camera, but yet it becomes one of the most shared photographs in human history. That's a real fact. And the blue marble image, you know, from 1972, the real nice one. That these are the most shared images in human history. They're free because NASA is a government agency in the US and those are in the public domain. So, you or I could just post those on our website anytime you want. That's also very special and nice. 

So anyway, I think it's just nice to recognize that apparently the recent Earth set image that Artemis took, which is also a beautiful image, was planned like they were consciously setting that image up because they were aware of this. So, this whole idea of the overview effect that, you know, our astronauts have these numinous feelings of brotherhood and sisterhood and connection to the Earth. We know this. The astronauts know this. That’s a positive evolution in our species, don't you think?

Pihkala: Yeah, the element of surprise was there and there's many stories of those early space flights where the astronauts describe spiritual experiences. The experiences are so powerful that they go to this deep dimension and from space there's the vastness of black space and then this colorful jewel-like planet Earth. And then if we go into the atmosphere of the Earth, like satellite imagery, which has also opened many new horizons and of course also the effects of climate change become more visible from those images, and the Earth looks different from there compared to maps drawn by humanity. Those borders which are so powerful cognitively, they disappear in the satellite images, and the more natural borders become visible. And at least for me and I know for many others, it has spoken of unity between regions and also between people. There's not so many boundaries visible from those spheres.

Doherty: Mm hmm. Yeah, exactly. We see ecosystems, we see bioregions, all that we see river drainages, river valleys, we see the cultivation of plants, we see the water, and all these things, which again are real. And this human map that we have superimposed is real as well in its own way, but it's really nice. It's an alternate consciousness, right? It's an alternate form of consciousness. and that means exactly what it means. We see the world in a way that expands our mind just the way people do psychedelic journeys or have religious epiphanies or transpersonal experiences. It's hard not to have that when you have these real time images of seeing something. Like when you climb a mountain peak, we can get the overview effect. You see all the land stretching around you, because you're actually there. Like you're not making it up in your mind. Like this is actually true. And we can get the overview effect from the window of a plane or a tall building.

So, it is helpful to think about what we do to alter our consciousness in a positive way to get views that get obscured. And then it also is religious for people so that's genuine and honest. The even in the recent Artemis, you know, there's a lot of Christian religion type discussion in the control room there as the integrity capsule was going around the dark side of the moon you know they said “godspeed” and you know Victor Glover the pilot of the Artemis, know, Navy fighter pilot, first African American to be in the International Space Station. He's been kind of an unexpected celebrity of Artemis. He’s also a Christian and has many children, a number of children. And he's really being honest about it, we're going to love you from Earth, and we love you from the moon. He's always using words like love and all this kind of stuff. He has these great quotes like “would love it if we all could agree for that time, just be humans. I'm challenging all of us to think more about unity”. So, he's taking on this spokesperson role, which is really, I think, genuine.

Pihkala: Yeah, and this theme of unity is of course highly significant and something that's great global photography also testifies to. I think that element is there with Yann Arthus-Bertrand showing people from around the world in very different environments but still clearly part of the same human race if I think about some other powerful photography.

Doherty:  Mm-hmm.

Pihkala: For example, Sebastião Salgado, the photographer who traveled a lot in very difficult circumstances among people suffering from various injustices. He had a life mission of testifying to that injustice and also testifying to the unity of humans in various places and evoking empathy for people who had to work often in quite difficult circumstances indeed. So, it's a wide range of effects that photography can have and can take from the local to the global, from space, from the atmosphere and just the ability and possibility to have another view on life and Earth is highly significant, I think, and may shelter us from becoming too fixated on only one way of looking at the world.

Doherty:  Mm hmm. Yeah. Well, I was kind of urging us toward the positive evolution, Panu, but I can see that you are dragging your feet there. You need to bring in Salgado and the pictures of the people in the mines!

Pihkala: Yeah. Our division of labor in this podcast works again!

Doherty:  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's fine. There's this creative tension all the time. But yes, we could have a whole episode of guests just on famous photographers and then going back to just nature and you know imagery in general. The eye of the photo person and Salgado Edward Burtynsky, the Canadian photographer that takes these big, massive pictures of like techno landscapes, that also is kind of an Earth from above, where it shows us like the hugeness of like huge factories in China and huge like land dumps where there's like millions and millions of old, you know, rubber tires that are just sitting at a dump, the scale of techno industrial civilization. Yeah, so there's all that as well.

But let's stay up in this. Let's keep our head in the sky here for this particular episode. We get a lot of those troubling images in the news every day. So, there's that division of labor in our own minds of like, how do we think about 360 emotions and how do I make sure I can legitimately have my healthy positive emotions every day, not just lapsing into despair about the depravity of some humans so I think you know that that active coping that we have to do for not only for ourselves before our children. I have that Earth From Above book that I bought, and I actually gave it to my daughter Eva as a gift for an Earth Day when she was younger. And now we just have it sitting on a shelf. It's gathering dust, but it's kind of nice to bring it down and look at it. And so, thinking about children and how children and young people need these images and these messages and to know that people are saying this stuff. 

I think it's powerful that the astronaut figure who is generally idealized in American culture, like Victor Glover, is able to say things like “this is an opportunity to remember where we are, who we are, and that we are the same thing. We have to get through this together”. I mean, that's real. And that gets into classrooms and filters into society. So, in addition to the spiritual stuff, then there's the protective. There's the impulse to protect, to care and protect the planet, which I think is also super healthy. When I look at these images I don't get an impulse to want to hurt things or destroy things or dig things up. Maybe some people do, but for me, they just naturally prompt some sort of care or gentleness. What do you think?

Pihkala: Or a sense of wonder sometimes. And also, for Yann Arthus Bertrand, many of his photos may show surprising patterns of human activity—in agriculture for example—and there's a certain aesthetic beauty in some of those forms also. There are images which are quite clearly

Doherty: Wonder, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Pihkala: just of striking and beautiful and some are ambivalent but still include beauty and in the academia folks who work with environmental aesthetics have discussed this quite deeply and I sometimes go to listen to those presentations which is interesting they may have some jargon of their own as all academic people do but the beauty in surprising places is one of the themes which comes up from there. It may be that some life forms of nature adapt to things such as not so pretty consequences of human industrialism, but then there's beauty born in those spaces also and that challenges binary thinking about places.

And in my mind, it testifies also to adaptation and resilience. So, it's a broad range of various kinds of images which can be helpful. I think it's very nice to be able to sometimes focus just on more traditionally beautiful nature imagery, whether that is from space or from high places. Ansel Adams is of course an American classic, which is great black and white photography of national parks. So, there's a strong element of photography in environmental protection and activism. It has been used to raise public attention and evoke positive feelings towards far away natural places and let that be recognized and validated here also.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Where do you, in your life, as you live it, where would you go or where could you get the overview effect or this larger view, perspective views, where would you need to go or where do you get that in your life?

Pihkala: Well, technically I wouldn't call it an overview effect, but this wide range, wide scale view I would get from hills. And the Finnish bedrock is very ancient, like 2.5 billion years old, which means that what used to be alpine mountains are now relatively low hills.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Pihkala: But we have lots of local elevation changes. They are not just so dramatic. But that means that there's rocky hills almost everywhere in Finland, except some regions. And even as a child, I liked to climb those. And it's psychologically and evolutionary interesting why so many humans, including myself, like to climb to high places and take a look around. And that's definitely been with me for as long as I remember and in Helsinki where I'm living some of those hills are natural and some are actually results of industrial activity like a hill in Vuosaari, a very eastern district of Helsinki which was born because they built a main commercial harbor there and then there was a lot of sand and gravel and stone and which had to be removed and they built a hill with it and then they planted many different species there. So, it's quite a good place for biodiversity even though it's not technically natural in any way. This could lead us into of course complicated discussions about what we mean with nature and the natural but let's not go there. But it also has a very nice view to the east. There are the archipelago and coastline.

Doherty:  Mm-hmm.

Pihkala: Lots of coniferous trees, we have many of those. So, I do go there many times a year also, often riding my bicycle and being there with the family and boys also, or taking guests who come to Helsinki. So that's the practical thing to do around here. But I know, Thomas, that the elevation differences are quite more dramatic around Portland where you are living.

Doherty: Yeah, yeah, it's neat. We have Mount Hood. it's just over 13,000 feet. That's the biggest peak and we have a number of peaks on the horizon here in Mount St. Helens, Jefferson, and the Cascade Mountains. Yeah, it's interesting. If you go up to Mount Hood, you can drive up to the Timberline Lodge, which is at 8,000 feet, which is a beautiful place. And then you can see the peak and it's quite a well-traveled mountain, even though it is technical to get up to the top. But there's a smaller little peak to the side of Mount Hood that you could see from a distance, and in between there's a little place that they call Illumination Saddle, which just the name itself tells you a little bit about it. And so, I have been there and camped up there years ago, it is really truly the overview effect because you get a chance to see the sunset and the stars and clouds come in and cover the land.

So, you can't see the ground, you're above the clouds essentially. And then watching the sun rise and the shadow of the mountain with the sun coming behind it is very powerful. It's very powerful. In fact, I really have a strong desire to get back up there. It's essentially a day hike to get up there if you walk on the snow. We don't have much snow this season, so it's probably mostly clear.

So, it does take a little bit of adventure to get up there, but it's within the realm of people’s ability. Yeah, we have those kinds of things. And depending on where you live, It's funny that you can get the, can get a sort of an overview effect. Cause like the under-view effect, if you go out into the desert or into the planes then the sky is this huge sky “big sky countries”. That's another, that's another way that people can get it.

Pihkala: Hmm.

Doherty: Yeah, in the city, I think it's a little more challenging, but sometimes you can even get from tall buildings, you can get a sense of the overview effect. I think it's really fascinating.

Pihkala: Yeah, nowadays of course drones have changed photography. 

Doherty:  Man, drones. I wasn't even thinking of that. But yes, yeah.

Pihkala: because it gives the possibility for a wider range of people to take aerial photos and some of those are really, really neat. And of course, then we all again encounter the many sides of humanity. Drones can be used for violence or for beauty. There are many options for them, and I have to mention even as a passing note that it's very fascinating what they have been able to find with aerial radar technology, for example, in South America in relation to the old civilizations in nowadays jungle areas. Taking a view of the Earth from above has also resulted in different knowledge and views about human history, even large remnants of ancient civilizations which people did not know about earlier on. but have now been revealed. That it sort of challenges some of the presuppositions of modernity, like that this is the first time in human history when such massive civilizations have been around.

Doherty: There is so much. Yes, so listeners, there's a lot here. I mean, thinking about the care of nature, there's the whole International League of Conservation Photographers, which is a whole other angle of this. And these are people that specifically take pictures of nature and other species to promote conservation.

And so, if you're not familiar with the International League of Conservation Photographers, they have a wonderful website that talks about their mission. That's a place where you might find people using drones to take pictures of landscapes and things. Another photographer is Cristina Mittermeier. She was one of the founders of this League of Conservation Photographers. So, she's an example of a woman who's doing this kind of photography. And I do find there's a little bit of a, maybe a stereotype that men have these big grand grandiose kinds of images where women conservation photographers are turning to focus on more intimate images of animals in action. And so, there's a scale piece here to think about like taking pictures of insects and bees and animals and interactions as opposed to these big epic scale images. So, there's a lot of scale that we can play with here. 

There's this great quote that I found in my research recently from Edgar Mitchell, who was an astronaut in the 70s and spent about nine hours on the moon surface in 1971 working. Keeping in mind when they went to the moon, they were only there for a very short time, you know, and they had a few hours to work. But you know, you're on the moon and you can see the Earth in the sky. So, it is really mind blowing to think about. But he has this famous more gritty quote. He said, 

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch”. 

I love that. I love that quote because it just is so kind of human. It's rougher. It's much rougher than, you know, Victor Glover's nice unity quotes, but it speaks to the same thing. It's like, hey, we got to do something about this.

So, if you feel like grabbing a politician by the scruff of the neck, I totally understand. So, we'll add that to the mix. So yes, I do actually have a goal to go up to hike on Mount Hood this spring and get up to the inspiration saddle. So that is a real thing that I want to try to do.

Listeners, I encourage you all to do your own ways of seeing nature. Again, in the spring and the summer in the Northern Hemisphere, we have these opportunities to get out outdoors, looking at the stars, etc., etc. So that's a good message for our episode today. Panu, do you want to close out this wonderful discussion?

Pihkala: Yes, thanks Thomas as always, it's been fascinating. Always when we go out there's a possibility to find something. Of course, people's places are very different and sometimes it's more difficult than in other places, but there's something which may open up either with a camera or without one. So, listeners, hope you find many things to resonate with your feelings and moods amidst the times in which we are living.

Doherty: Yeah. All right. Well, listeners, I hope you all enjoyed our episode and a little positive boost of energy for you to think about beauty and vision and scale and what we can see and how that inspires us to action.

So Panu, and listeners, and everyone, this is Climate Change and Happiness. You can find us at climatechangeandhappiness.com and send us a note and let us know what you think. Panu and everyone: Be well.

 

 

image credit | Marc Pell

S5 E20: A View From Wales with Marc Williams

Thomas Doherty, Panu Pihkala

Season 5, Episode 20: A View From Wales with Marc Williams

Thomas had a great conversation with Marc Williams, a Welsh-speaking psychologist from Cardiff University, and one of  few psychologists who, like Thomas, blends clinical and environmental psychology. Marc talked about his formative experiences growing up in West Wales and his recent research on environmental identity and evidence-based therapy for climate distress. 

Some Welsh nature terms and sayings:

• “Amgylchedd” – “environment”

• “Cynefin” roughly translates to ‘habitat’, but means ‘place of belonging’

•  ”Dod yn ôl at fy nghoed” = ‘returning to my trees’, i.e., returning to a balanced or peaceful state of mind

• “Daw eto haul ar fryn” = ‘The sun will shine on the hill again’ (better days are coming)

Links

• Marc Williams

  • Key Papers:

    • Georgia King, Matt Adams, Nick Maguire & Marc Williams (2026). Reimagining clinical psychology for a changing planet. 

    • Jessica Morgan, James Gregory & Marc Williams, M. O. (2026). ‘Taking the green pill’: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of the lived experiences of climate distress. 

    • Marc Williams and Victoria Samuel (2024)  Acceptance and commitment therapy as an approach for working with climate distress. 

    • Marc Williams (2023) Climate distress and social identity: bringing theory to clinical practice.

Fire Danger in Wales: Warning after fires near popular mountain ahead of holiday weekend

Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.

Thomas Doherty:  Well, hello, I'm Thomas Doherty and welcome to climate change and happiness. This is a podcast show for people around the globe who are thinking and deeply about climate change, but also other environmental issues and their connections with nature and all the relations with our life and our beliefs and our politics and our families. And typically I would be joined by my cohost Panu Pikala, but he's been called away today. So it's just myself hosting, but I am very lucky and proud to have a guest with me today.

Marc Williams: Hello, my name is Marc Williams. I'm a clinical psychologist and researcher at Cardiff University in Wales.

Doherty: Yes, and I'm so excited to have Marc here. I've met Marc a little bit and I've followed a lot of his work. Myself, my career has led me to bridge clinical psychology and environmental psychology, study of people's connections with nature and how that plays into our health and into therapy. And Marc is one of the few people I know in the world who has really mindfully and structurally done a similar kind of integration. So we're going to be talking about that. And if you have thoughts or questions, you can always reach us at [email protected] and recommend our show to people. Marc, glad to have you here. I know you're coming in from Wales and I'm here in Portland, Oregon, we usually step back and start a little bit of our conversation with the person's background story and a little bit of how you came to be doing this unique kind of work bridging these different kinds of psychology.

Williams: Yeah, well it's been a winding path. Can't pretend I always set out to sort of take this path, but you know, I suppose I was ensconced in nature as a child, grew up in West Wales with nature literally at my doorstep and developed that connection and I would say a sense of identity with the natural world in that this is somewhere I was often quite solitary, somewhere I would think about myself, about the world and then kind of through that and I suppose through relationship with kind of my childhood pets sort of developed an interest in more in kind of animal welfare than kind of environmentalism per se. And, you know, that led to kind of personal choices in my life around diet. But it wasn't until, you know, decades later, really, that this became anything of note in my kind of career. became a clinical psychologist. That, you know, that was an interest of mine. And then just had the good fortune, I suppose years after qualifying as a psychologist to have the opportunity to do a PhD in environmental psychology.

So this was, you know, the remit of that had to do with nature. I had obviously a lot of say in the specifics within that. And I also got to do that in Welsh. So, you know, to write that in Welsh and that was actually the condition of the scholarship. So it sort of brought together, I guess, different parts of myself into one project, which is incredibly kind of fortuitus to have had the opportunity. But then sort of was left with more questions about what do I do with this PhD certificate? Is it decorative? Do I just put it up on the wall? or do I bring that in to my career as a clinical psychologist? I'm sort of still answering that question I suppose in terms of you know how do I use this new knowledge to integrate that within clinical psychology, how to help people who are very distressed by climate change, as well as can I have a role in shaping actually the discipline of clinical psychology to meet this challenge. So yeah, I'd say that's been sort of my journey in a nutshell.

Doherty: Yeah, yeah, this is really great. There's a lot of directions we can go. Let me see what was I thinking here? Well, thought we could, among all these things, I thought we could talk a little bit about this idea of eco anxiety, because I know you've studied this and written about this. Now, this is also an area that I go deeply into in various directions, thinking about it, training clinicians, working with people. So I would love to hear a little bit how you talk about this topic. I know for myself, it's complicated. And I think it's important to think about how you get into it. I was just doing a podcast with some other folks yesterday, and people often ask me “Thomas, what is eco anxiety, is it a disorder? And I have to always step back and say, well, anxiety is a feeling and it's a normal feeling that we all have for various reasons and we can have anxiety about the environment. so that's normal, but it could be a disorder if someone is really debilitated by anxiety where they can't sleep or can't do their work or avoiding things.

But I also recently tell people, well, eco anxiety is also more of an identity. Like when someone says I have eco anxiety, it means they're signaling something to other people that they, you they believe in science, they're concerned about the climate. So it's like a statement of, least that's what I think about statement of identity, social identity. And then, you know, then it goes in a lot of directions from there, and then there's the danger of under diagnosing people's problems and assuming that they're all normal when they might actually be debilitated. So I've been trying this validate and engage model is what I call it, where you validate all the concerns, but you engage where you need to more clinically. So I just want to see how that plays out similarly or differently and how you look at this.

Williams: Yeah, well, you're absolutely right in that it's incredibly complicated and my ideas about this are always developing. I suppose with more people I encounter who would say they experience this, even broader than eco-anxiety, just distress, I suppose, because obviously it can take various kind of, have different kind of emotional emphases. But I think that even what words we use like disorder, this is a of a movement, certainly in the UK, it might be in the US as well, what this word even means and the broader implications of locating something within someone rather than within the broader system. And that there's no end to that debate and there's no easy resolution. But I would say that two things can be true at the same.

Doherty: Yep.

Williams: I think that obviously there is a real backdrop to kind of distress in relation to climate change or eco-anxiety whatever term we use but that there's always a personal story as to why someone is distressed and what particular flavor it takes on. So yeah I mean thinking about that you know when I'm working with people who worry about this there's always something to understand in terms of what are you in particular worried about, what is worrying about it for you, how does it offend your specific values and then that leads on to specific kind of resolutions or interventions, ways that can be useful to them.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I love that. I like the idea of resolutions. That's a great way to think about this because that's more open ended. A resolution could be validating students normal feelings because they're studying an environmental topic and or it could be more support or intervening even more strongly with therapy or medication if someone's really debilitated. So yeah, I like that. That that resolutions piece. And It sounds like one of the things you're doing also is really trying to study what kinds of therapy styles are helpful in this in this area and it seems like you've been pretty strong in the broadly in the in the cognitive behavioral realm with ACT therapy and compassion focused therapy. You want to talk a little bit about what you're seeing the trends are and like in the in developing and applying therapies in this area.

Williams: Yeah, it's a really interesting question. The  trends I suppose I'm aware of this through some research I'm involved in. I'm supervising a project at the moment that's doing a systematic review of all the different kinds of interventions that are being used specifically actually for young people who have eco-anxiety. And what I find most interesting about this is that most interventions don't have a clear theoretical backing at all and you know that as a clinical psychologist who's had theory and research absolutely drummed into me throughout my training and beyond that's something I'd like to comment on because I think that without theory, we can't really evaluate why something has been helpful. And it makes it harder to have a focused intervention that we could have any hope of being useful in a way that's replicable. So that's what I'm noticing is actually the lack of theory in space. Not to say universally, but in a lot of the papers we reviewed, there clearly wasn't sort of underlying theory that was explicitly articulated.

Doherty: Yeah, yeah, exactly. think there's some general assumptions. It reminds me when I helped start the Eco-Psychology Journal some years ago, trying to do an academic journal in this area and many people came in not really wanting to be questioned about their work. They just would make a statement like, well, the planet is in crisis and, you know, and then, you know, we'd say, well, what way is it in crisis? What do you mean by crisis? And there was a lot of received wisdom about, obviously in crisis, why should I have to explain this to you? So yes, it sounds like you're trying to trying to parse that out a little bit. What are you finding or what are you thinking in the theory realm?

Williams: Yeah. I think so. So I mean, you know, I suppose I've got to own up to obviously my own lens here and preconceptions because as you say, I come very much from a cognitive standpoint and I rely a lot on my prior knowledge of cognitive theory, broadly speaking, and that includes things like standard cognitive behavior therapy and offshoots you could argue to various extents, like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and the one I really find most useful, Compassion Focused Therapy. More and more, I think that is a really helpful framework to understand many of the themes that arise in eco-anxiety and climate distress where I find almost invariably there's this high level of kind of self-criticism, extremely high standards, a kind of a burden of responsibility that people are carrying to the exclusion of considering other people's roles and I just think I found some that that's useful in my clinical, I'm trying to write up a case study at the moment using that kind of framework because I think that what's inherent in this idea of compassion is helping people to not just kind of be alert to kind of suffering and people usually are, but their own suffering as part of that and to extend the same compassion to themselves that they clearly have for other people on the planet.

Doherty:  Yeah. So listeners, you know, we're talking and there's a lot of therapists in the, in the, listening group that will, will understand this. My understanding of compassion focused therapy, it often comes down to that three, three level model where we have the part of our nervous system that's approaching things and wanting things. and then there's the threat part of our nervous system that's protecting us. And then there's the soothing part, the calming part, the parasympathetic nervous system and the oxytocin and these calming neurotransmitters. I've used that in therapy a lot myself. And I always find that It's very easy for people to say what threats they're facing. Everybody's got that top of mind. And then every day they're approaching something all day, their job, their family, they're chasing things especially in kind of capitalist society. We're taught to approach. But when I say well, what are you? What are you content with or what do you calm yourself with?

Williams: Yes.

Doherty: Hmm, I don't know. I don't know. And so, that's a super useful theory. know, so, yes, and that that's like this podcast, you know, we're asking like climate change and happiness, like, when are we happy? And, you know, our happiness muscle is pretty weak, we might say, or pretty beleaguered.

Williams: What is that? What's content? Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. I think that's actually one of the reasons I really like that model is that it's one of the tests of a good theory. I think it's just how useful it is and how much it explains things to people. Therapeutically, you need that to be quite an intuitive understanding. I don't think you want something too hifalutin. You want something that people can immediately connect to. And I find it quite versatile, actually, because some of the specific kind of recurring challenges, I think, for people who are very involved in the climate movement that have to do with just the social psychology of caring about something that others don't as much or aren't as willing to talk about. And you can actually apply that idea that we have three basic emotion regulation systems to help people understand social interactions that might arise, including, well, you know, why are people shutting down when I'm trying to talk about climate change? Well, maybe their threat system is activated. How can we do this in a way that bypasses that, that, you know, helps people feel, you know, energized in a more of a drive system or helps people feel more of a connection with you that, you know, that draws on the soothing system. So you can almost repeat those three models, I think, in various situations, when you're about various kind of problems that arise from being very climate distressed.

Doherty:  Mm-hmm, yeah.

Williams: So it's versatile. you know, generally speaking, I would say I really like anything cognitive that brings in an understanding of why is it that you're finding yourself in a constant state of distress? And I think that another really useful aspect of this is what came out from a recent paper that, again, I supervised, which was a kind a phenomenological analysis of climate distress where people were saying “I should be distressed and it would be morally unacceptable not to be. And also, if I weren't distressed, I wouldn't be doing anything to fight climate change”.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Williams: So that's incredibly interesting proposition and almost, it feels like it almost undermines the entire concept of therapy in this space. So that really gave me pause for thought.

Doherty: Yeah, no, this is really great. And this is something I've been talking about with John Frazier, who we just had on our podcast recently, who works with conservation professionals and zoo professionals who, who are incredibly impacted by stress, protecting wild species and, protecting species in zoos and all the linkages between zoos and wildlife refuges around the world. Zoo folks are some of the most stressed people I've ever met but they don't seek self-care because they're very selfless and into animal rights. And so the care needs to go to the animals, not to me. And I think it becomes a badge of honor in a way. And so, yes, that's a paradox. The people that are most distressed, the climate professionals don't really have a rationale why they should take care of themselves. And then the eco-therapists are sort of like helpers looking for clients and can't find the client because the very clients they want to work with are not really interested in what they're selling.

Williams:  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, the people I've met have kind of come to me via this website, the kind of climate specific therapy website, and I haven't, you know, haven't had to go out sort of looking. But on the other hand, I can see how many people wouldn't even consider therapy. In fact, it's what came up in this paper, you know, the participants were saying “a therapist would just tell me to stop worrying or stop thinking about this or to not spend so much time being active in the climate space”. And I actually think some therapists do say that, you know, that there's some research to show that these are the kinds of responses some people get from therapists who aren't sort of climate aware.

Doherty: Yeah.

Williams: But I think linked to that what's interesting is that some people, they would like to have a therapeutic space, a counseling space, just a reflective space with someone who they know is essentially not a climate denier because that gives that person some credibility and you know that whatever they say to you, they're not saying it because they're dismissing climate change.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Yes. This is this is stuff I talk about in my book a lot. Both ways to validate people's concerns. “Validate, elevate, create” you know my catchphrase. An example of a young client who is doing activism and I said my previous therapist didn't know what a Keeling curve was, which is the measure of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, basic climate science. So what they were saying is my previous therapist had no understanding of climate science. Thus, couldn't really, I felt like they couldn't understand me or take me seriously. Yeah.

Williams: Yeah. And I think that also brings in a kind of an interesting question when it comes to the role of the therapist, because what I've found is that there's the risk that almost someone seeks out permission within the therapy space to do a certain thing. I think this can happen with the question of, should I have children or not? Which is very at the forefront of some young people's minds.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Williams: where the therapist could be in a position where there's an expectation that they'll say, yes, you may. You know, I'm not a climate denier and I know what the science says and I still think you're okay to go ahead. Where I actually think therapy can be hugely beneficial, not obviously in, you know, giving people any kind of advice in that direction, because I don't think that's the role of therapy, but in helping someone to understand “What are the factors that you're drawing down to help you make this decision? How much are you relying on your view of what's right and your kind of intrinsic values? How much are you relying on fear of what others might, how others might judge you either way?” That's another part of social psychology I think of eco anxiety that that is operating for some people is almost the fear of judgement.

Doherty: Yes. Yeah, I suppose that goes that goes in every direction because some people are isolated, which is one of the big risk factors. And so some people are fearing judgment because their very beliefs will be judged by their family or their community negatively, like they'll be made fun of or intimidated even. Or then or on the other hand, they're not they're not green enough, they're not eco enough. I think that's what happens in like extinction rebellion and some of these subcultures. Like then it's a race to see who's the most green, who's going to put in the most hours. who's going to risk getting arrested, that kind of thing.

Williams: Yeah, you know, again, what I like about compassion-focused therapy, is it has the base of—really something similar to existential therapies—that idea that well there are certain kind of undeniable facts about the difficulties of just living and I would say that one of those is that other people will judge you no matter what you do and so with the decision like having children, you know, the truth is that whatever decision you make, someone's going to judge you. The question is, what's your decision based on your own judgment?

Doherty: Yeah. We've got a little more time, so I want to swing back to the Welsh, the specific Welsh context, I think is really unique for you in terms of the language. But I do want to say it does sound like even though you're a cognitive practitioner, a lot of what you're talking about sounds very existential.

Williams: Mm-hmm. I think so. mean it's hard not to integrate things with something so complex and that presents so many different ways. I think I'm always bringing it back to well how can I how can this be expressed in cognitive terms? I like a kind of theoretical consistency, you know, I suppose I'm not in favor of sort of eclecticism, I like the integration.

Doherty: Yeah. No, that's great. And I think in your discipline there is really the model for us moving this field forward to actually be taken seriously among other therapists who do the deep theory work and frankly see, you know, eco therapy, eco psychology is really a kind of environmentalism that's not necessarily done the work to make itself a therapy yet. So anyway, this is really great. Where was I going? yes. Okay. So yeah, let's bring it out into the world. You mentioned there's a new government in Wales. And so I want to bring this into even how you think about your role in society as a person yourself as a citizen. But also, did you notice special things about doing environmental psychology or eco therapy when you were writing and working in the Welsh language versus English?

Williams: Yeah, first of all, I don't know if specialist is the word for this, but just the added challenge was almost like a personal challenge to translate concepts into Welsh because I learned Welsh in a non-academic context. After school everything was in Welsh. In school, my degrees were in English up until the PhD. So, you know, learning to translate concepts was an added sort of challenge there. But I think that one of the interesting things is just thinking about what kind of language embodies in terms of nature because what I found was when I was trying to translate certain concepts you realize that you could only go for an approximation with some things and that you know which is an odd thing to say

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Williams: It even makes you think about what does translation even mean in that case, you know? Words like Cynefin, which I guess again loosely translates to habitat, is a word we use to describe sort of the place where we belong. I think it just sort of shows in my mind that the history of the Welsh language and maybe of the Welsh people is one that's quite close to the natural world. It's possible that I'm taking this reasoning too far, but it sort of led me down a path of thinking, does that mean that almost our identity has been more close to nature in terms of how we conceptualize ourselves?

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Williams: If we're ready to refer to our own environment as a habitat, that means seeing ourselves as quite similar to the natural world. Actually this was kind of the topic of my PhD was part of it was nature connectedness. Part of my thesis was that we should conceptualize this within kind of social identity theory. That nature connectedness reflects a sense of social belonging to the natural world, like we'd belong to any other human group.

Doherty: So in Welsh, the word for environment is habitat. The use for the word that we, the English, use environment. Is that how that works?

Williams: So it's different. So the word for environment is Amgylchedd, which actually literally means the same as the word environment. Guess it's like the French; it sort of refers to stuff that's around us and it's the same in Welsh. Amgylchedd is like stuff that is circling us.

Doherty: Uh-huh. Yeah.

Williams: Whereas Cynefin is more specifically, you know, refers to kind of a place where you as a person might belong, you know, like your kind of your hometown or your culture. it's more abstract in some ways.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I love it. When I went to New Zealand, I learned about the Māori language and the idea of Tūrangawaewae or standing place. This really rich concept of my standing place where my tribe or my iwi is located and are in place. And then I have a certain authority and protection over that space but standing place I love because we can also form standing places too. We might not necessarily be gifted one by our culture, but we could choose a standing place, which then moves into stewardship and being connected and rooted and having a sense of place. And so it sounds like you worked with all those kinds of things.

Williams: Yeah, I mean, you know, not much of this came in. It's quite, you know, it's a psychology kind of PhD, so it doesn't really go much into those other things, but it sort of sparked those ideas. And Māori is interesting, because I think that's the place that's just that pushes Welsh off the perch for having the longest place name. I think maybe in Māori they have the longest and then Welsh comes second. But place names are another interesting one. In Welsh they're very kind of, I think they're called toponyms, so they always refer to, not always, but a lot of the time to geographical features.

Doherty: Uh-huh. yeah.

Williams: Which is also interesting because some of them, those purported geographical features no longer exist. what's encoded in the name is almost like a past that's no longer there.

Doherty: Yeah. Like the path that crosses over this river or something like that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, that's as fascinating. There are so many directions we can go. I want to wrap it up with something practical. And I think, I believe it's positive, but we'll see. You talked about some new government changes in Wales.

Williams: That's it.

Doherty: And do you see that as being helpful for Wales in terms of it as a nation and in terms of, you know, adapting to climate change and things like that?

Williams: Yeah, I think so. I mean, whenever I think about adapting to climate change, I was divided into mitigating, trying to actually prevent more climate change as much as possible, and then adapting. I can see it helpful for both. Certainly, there's more power, I guess, to adapt locally. Obviously, any mitigation has to be a global effort. But Wales is very vulnerable, especially vulnerable within the UK to flooding. So there needs to be enough funds within Wales for council for example to kind of not just react but to prevent damage from flooding. I don't feel that there has been enough of that thinking up to this point so that my hope is that the new government will take that seriously.

They certainly came on board on a platform of you know being more climate conscious than I'd say previous governments and I think we just have such a problem with recurring flooding where an area might experience flooding over and over again over many years. So that's the kind of thing I'm hopeful about, that there could be better preventative approaches for those kinds of problems that we have.

Doherty: But it sounds like they're generally aware of the problem and not a denying style of government.

Williams: Yeah, I don't think they're denying style. They're very kind of concerned, I'd say, conservation in general, including language conservation. I think they feel like they kind of go hand in hand. I also don't want to sound like a spokesperson for any particular kind of government. It's just time will tell, isn't it? I don't know what they'll be like. so far, there's a lot of positive energy coming out. essentially, their main aim is to try and decentralize power more from Westminster so that Wales has more control over certain functions. At the moment, it's only certain things it can do with more kind of devolved powers and not to get too technical but renegotiating a specific formula that determines how much money we get. Which at the moment is I think there's a compelling argument to say that it's not enough. So with more of those powers I think we'll be more freed up to adapt to climate change.

Doherty: Yeah, so some more self-government more autonomy, which of course plays into a long, long, long history, which we won't have time to get into. But, yeah, but it's a really proud and interesting culture. So it's really neat. And I love the language piece. Well, we're going to wrap up for now. We could easily go on as we always say so many things.

Williams: Yes, yeah.

Doherty: Marc, I just really am proud of your work. I think it's really great what you're doing. It's very inspiring. And we're going to have a bunch of links in the show notes if you're interested in some of these research studies that Marc has been working on. They're very helpful for eco therapy people. So we'll put some links in there and I'll make sure to get some of those Welsh terms properly spelled for our transcript and for our show notes.

Williams: Yeah.

Doherty: And anyway, Marc, what are you where are you going for the rest of your evening there?

Williams: Well, it's turned into quite a sunny day, so I imagine I'll take a nice little stroll on my way back home. And we've got a bank holiday weekend here, so we're looking forward to just a long weekend of relaxation.

Doherty:  Alright, well that's great. We're recording around the Memorial Day holiday here in the US, so we actually have a longer weekend too. So it's that time of the season where people are turning to the outdoors, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. And so here's wishing a good season for people and good and safe season. And Marc and listeners and everyone, Panu, where you are, be well.

 

 

image credit | Ali Kazal

S5 E19: On A Career in Climate Wayfinding: With Katharine Wilkinson

Thomas Doherty, Panu Pihkala

Season 5, Episode 19: On A Career in Climate Wayfinding: With Katharine Wilkinson

Join Thomas and Panu to listen in on their great  conversation with Katharine Wilkinson who reflected on her career as a woman working in climate science and policy, and how she reached back to her roots with her latest book and program Climate Wayfinding.

“Sometimes I think the paradox of calling is that we have certainty and uncertainty in the same breath.”

— Katharine Wilkinson, from the episode

Links

• Katharine Wilkinson

• Books

  • Climate Wayfinding (2026) 

  • All We Can Save, (2020) a collection of writings by 60 women leading on climate, co-edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson 

  • Between God and Green (2012)

• Climate Wayfinding Program

• Project Drawdown

Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.

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

Panu Pihkala: I am Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: And welcome to climate change and happiness. This is our podcast, the show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change and other environmental issues, including your positive connections with nature and your values. This episode should be coming out in the summer of 2026. And we'll be trying to anticipate a little bit about what we're going to be finding in the summer. We are really lucky to have a special guest with us today.

Wilkinson: I'm Dr. Katharine Wilkinson. I'm a climate writer and teacher. I co-founded and lead the All We Can Save project and recently published the book Climate Wayfinding.

Doherty: Yeah, and we've been chatting with Katharine. Katharine is someone we don't know personally, but we know of professionally. Katharine is kind of a veteran of climate science and communication and more recently, public expression. She has her new book Climate Wayfinding which is really great and accessible. And she's been traveling around talking about this and we're really lucky to grab her coming in from her home briefly in Atlanta, Georgia. And I'm in Portland, Oregon, and Panu, as we know, is in Helsinki. Panu, do you want to get us rolling on our conversation today?

Panu: Warmly welcome, Katharine, also on my behalf. Lovely to meet you. We often start by asking something about the person's journey towards what they later became. Would you like to share something about how did you end up being so intimately involved with environmental and climate issues?

Wilkinson: Thank you, Panu, and thank you, Thomas. It's really a pleasure to get to have this conversation and get to know you both a bit beyond the work that you've done so brilliantly.

I think like a lot of people, my arrival into this work had educational roots. When I was a sophomore in high school, freshly turned 16, I spent four months at a wonderful experiential school called the Outdoor Academy in the Southern Appalachians in Western North Carolina. So I lived in the woods with 25 kids for four months and sustainability and ecology were woven into the ways that we operated as a community, what we were learning in the classroom. I started to read Mary Oliver's poetry. I read Daniel Quinn's novel Ishmael. But I was also having firsthand encounters with the ecological wounds of that part of the world. Mountaintop removal coal mining, clear cuts for industrial timber in the national forest.

And so I was both deeply enlivened by how we were living and what we were learning. And I was utterly heartbroken about the encounters I was having with the gap between the way that we can do things and the way that so often in dominant society we do things. And I still have the journal that I had at that time at the beginning of the semester—we all made a hand bound journal—and I can remember this absolute steadiness of hand when I wrote simple, but profound words “want to help the world, be connected with the earth, change the way I live.” And I remember just so much clarity and conviction about that.

Panu: Hmm.

Wilkinson: And I think sometimes the paradox of calling is that we have certainty. Sometimes I think the paradox of calling is that we have certainty and uncertainty in the same breath. And I had no idea what that would mean for my life moving forward.

Doherty: Hmm.

Wilkinson: And in a lot of ways, I feel like that was a moment of kind of setting the compass arrow, so to speak. And I've zigged and zagged through climate work now from those early days of youth activism for 27 years and counting. Yeah.

Panu: Warm thanks for sharing that, that's very inspirational and testimony to the power of these social experiences outdoors. So a nod to all of the folks around the world who are doing environmental education and outdoor education and all that stuff.

Wilkinson: It's so powerful.

Panu: And very often the impacts are seen only years and years later on or the full impacts. Of course something is visible right away and we have an earlier episode for example with Louise Chawla who has been researching these factors and moments and influences which cause people to go into environmental or nature-oriented trajectories and I hear very powerful ones here and also reminded of the saying by a woman from the east coast that “the world called and I answered”

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Wilkinson: Yes, yes, yes, I do think there is there is a real calling that happens for so many of us and often it is a combination of heartache of some kind and enlivenment about the possibilities.

Doherty: Mm hmm. Yeah. that's wonderful. I think for our episode, since we have a lot of experience here, I think it's good for listeners to realize that what we see now is formed over many years of thinking in society. And even Daniel Quinn's novel, Ishmael, I haven't thought about that in a long time, but I remember reading that at one point. So there are novels and books, even like Katharine’s book or my book or Panu's work that people are reading now, but there were things that we were reading, you know, 20 years ago or 30 years ago that were influencing us. So it is like this long, long, long tradition of environmental protection that most people share, even though we forget that and don't see it. Yeah, there's so many directions to go, but I was curious, Katharine, to talk a little bit, if you wanted to reflect on the beginning of your career, because as we chatted earlier, women are in many roles of leadership now in the climate movement, either in science or policy, government, but that wasn't always the case. And it seemed like that was an explicit focus for you, or maybe you were pushing against some boundaries when you got started. Could you want to take us back in time? I think young people might find this interesting.

Wilkinson: And this is a fun invitation, Thomas. It's taking me back actually to a conversation I remember having with my first boss out of college. So I spent a year working for the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the big environmental NGOs in the US. And was doing a lot of work on the ground in Southern Appalachia in Tennessee. And my boss was in New York, and I was up there for some meeting or another. And we went to have lunch and he said, you just need to get a PhD. It doesn't really matter what it's in, but you're going to need to have that for credibility in this space.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Wilkinson: And I think it's a testament to what the environmental movement was like at that time. And it really did feel like if you didn't have the bona fides, if you didn't have the research chops, if you couldn't come in with, you know, a PowerPoint presentation full of charts and graphs and data, you know, good luck claiming a seat at the table. And I did do exactly that. The following year I went to the University of Oxford and started work on a on a PhD.

And I did that kind of in my own funny, wildly interdisciplinary way, looking at what was at the time kind of a burgeoning—movement is too strong a word—but initiative around climate within American evangelical Christianity. So it was a mashup of public discourse and religion and politics and culture and very qualitative work.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Wilkinson: But I can remember coming out of that PhD and even after publishing my first book, which was an academic book called Between God and Green, and in some ways still feeling like I kept finding myself in rooms where I didn't feel like I could be taken seriously. And they were often rooms full of mostly men, mostly white men. And certainly, that is where the microphones were sitting. And some years into my own climate trajectory, I found myself feeling pretty darn frustrated about that as a matter of efficacy, as a matter of fairness, as a matter of honoring kind of the full suite of talents and wisdom that we have in this community.

And in 2019, Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and I were at a conference together where we were watching these same gender dynamics play out. And we said, we've had enough of these conference sessions. We went on a rage hike along a nearby river. And I shared with her that I'd been thinking about an anthology of writings on climate by women as a way to do sort of a collective chorus uplift, if you will. And that's the work that became the All We Can Save anthology that came out in 2020.

And happily, I think in the last now almost six years since that book came out, it has shifted. I think there is much better representation, but still if you look at boardrooms, if you look at national legislatures, if you look at the places where climate decision making is happening, we still aren't anywhere close to gender parity in terms of who is at the table making decisions about our shared future.

And when that is the case, we know that the outcomes for the planet are better from the community level to the national level. Certainly, we saw that in the Paris agreement negotiations when Christiana Figueres was leading those. It's still something that we need to continue to work on. And what's been interesting for me to reflect on with this new book is that I think in some ways I am reclaiming ways of knowing and things that I knew to be important in the earliest days of my own journey, whether that be poetry, whether that be centering the human spirit, whether that is the building of community. But it took me a long time to really hold and center that in my own work, because these are the things that are coded as feminine in our world, and thus often dismissed as “nice to have”. But really, you know, all the matters of the prefrontal cortex and things with hard numbers and linear trajectories, you know, are still often the things that are celebrated.

Panu: Hmm.

Doherty: Yeah, that's great. I mean, you're more secure, developmentally, that's what we also talk about that in our podcast.

Wilkinson: Yeah, but also but also more secure professionally, right? There was something about kind of earning my stripes maybe in the space that then made professionally safe to explore more of this terrain.

Doherty: Yeah. because if you had showed up with a poem and a playlist in those earlier meetings, it wouldn't have gone very well.

Wilkinson: Yeah, I really tried. I was the lead writer on the book Drawdown, and I really tried to advocate for including just one Mary Oliver poem in that book, and I was resoundingly shot down from that idea.

Doherty: Yeah. Hmm.

Panu: Too bad, too bad.

Wilkinson: I know we need we need the poets. We really do.

Doherty: Yeah. So it's going it's going both ways. I feel like I was at a climate week event in Boston and I was really thinking that they were missing just the arts broadly at the climate week. In terms of not just arts as entertainment but the arts as agents of change. We’re going in lot of directions in our society around climate. All of these trends about bringing women, and that is still true. Most of my training groups with therapists, many of my students, many of the climate psychology alliance people are women. In fact, I'd say it's like 80 to 90 percent women. So in certain areas of the climate movement, there are a lot of women leaders, women centric. But yes, as you say, at the true power seats of the table, the true decision making behind closed doors, it is still really an old boys club still to our detriment. It's easy to think that we've made progress, but, not in all areas. So that’s really interesting.

Wilkinson: I have to share one other gender observation from the book tour with climate wayfinding that has been very interesting to me that even in rooms that have been a really kind of beautiful representative gender mix, most of the men have walked out without the book.

Doherty: Hmph.

Wilkinson: And I think that I actually sort of challenged a group last week to say, you know, if you think that this book is not for you, there may be something in this book that people you work with need you to have, right? That stretching into these spaces of the body, the heart, other ways of knowing, other ways of engaging, that are not about sort of rational debate and laying out strategy, right? But bring in these other dimensions. You may not think you need them, but there may be people that you're working with that needs you to have them. And that was interesting. For a while, I thought, maybe this is just because of all we can save and, you know, kind of the centering of women and that work. But I kept seeing this gender dynamic come up that I found fascinating and a bit discouraging because I think we all need to be cultivating the full spectrum of our capacities in this time.

Doherty: Yeah, I agree. So you're privileged to get into some more high-powered group planning and things like that. So yeah, that's a paradox. I've been talking about with a lot of my climate therapy, climate psychology people, environmentalists pay lip service to the need for self-care. But when it comes down to it, they aren't necessarily the best at this. And they do revert to the science and the instrumental. My needs, my personal needs, are second, almost in a self-punishing way. That's a whole deeper level of this.

Panu: Yeah, that would be an interesting discussion of the psychological models which are often unconscious among various people in this case, environmentalists. And of course for men it's often a tragedy of socialization that there's been so little opportunities for practicing free somatic movement for example.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Panu: Or given credit for being sensitive with creativity and arts, for example. So, it's a big societal problem. There might be listeners who haven't checked out what climate wayfinding is about. So, in a nutshell, what is it about?

Wilkinson: Well, this is an excellent question. So, Climate Way Finding is a book that actually grew out of a program that we've been running at the All We Can Save project for the last four years that was designed to help meet people in this increasingly mapless world that we live in.

This is quite literally true as the climate crisis changes our physical landscapes, but it's also true for us that maps are coming up short internally, organizationally, culturally. Our ways of sense making and navigating are not working. And I think we hear that navigational challenge in the very questions that people ask, and especially in that persistent drumbeat of a question “what can I do? What can I do?” And over the years, I started to think about that question, to use a fungal metaphor as more of a fruiting body of bigger, deeper wonderings that people are holding, certainly that I myself experienced holding.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Wilkinson: And there are entirely too few spaces to take and hold those big questions. And to work our way through the ache, through the doubt, through the sense of isolation and overwhelm or burnout for folks who've been in this work for a long time and towards clarity and a sense of possibility, connection and footholds for forward momentum. So that's what we've been doing with the Climate Wayfinding program. And in its simplest terms, it uses a range of modalities to help people look inward with care, look outward with curiosity, and look forward with courage.

And we started piloting the program. then started training facilitators. It's running now on over 50 college and university campuses across the US and Canada, but we're a tiny nonprofit and the needs for wayfinding are not just for students, right? People of all ages and career stages and climate newbies and burned-out veterans. Like we're all trying to orient and navigate this very tricky time.

And I had kind of a hand to forehead moment of like, yeah, I make books. That's one of the things I do. And we could take the ideas and the content that had been developed for the program and bring it into a book form and not just a book that talks to you, but a book that will walk with you through this journey of exploration, bringing in, of course, bookie things like essays and poetry and stories, but also journal prompts, creative mapping exercises, guided meditations, and even a collective reading group experience. trying to put the journey of climate wayfinding in the hands of anyone with a library card and internet access.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I like integrated book groups really into the content and process of the of the book. Yeah, yeah.

Wilkinson: These questions are too big to hold alone. You know, we really do need to hold them together.

Panu: Yeah, and I love the metaphor of wayfinding for many reasons. One is that I have a long history with maps and orienting the sport where you run with the map in the woods and the idea is that it shouldn't be too easy or you lose interest to it. Well, one could argue that the global situation is a bit too difficult, but anyway, there's a certain dynamic of realizing that uncertainty is always there if there's possibility for something truly big and important. So, it goes to sort of philosophy of vocation and calling, which we touched on briefly earlier on. But if we think of landmarks or things that give us direction, what would you say are some of those? I know that you are writing about them in the book, but as a metaphor and a substance question, what helps us orient in this kind of world?

Wilkinson: So, I think about that inward outward forward as almost creating a kaleidoscope. And that moving through those three lenses kind of ongoing and cyclical actually helps us see more clearly the path ahead.

And of course, the looking inward is in part about the emotions that we bring with us to this topic that this topic brings up within us. You have both done such amazing work on that. I was delighted that we were able to include the climate emotions wheel in the book.

Panu: Mmm.

Wilkinson: And welcoming those emotions in not just as something inconvenient that we would very much like to settle or have go away, but as sources of guidance as teachers in a way as an expression of life itself kind of rising up within us that I think when held with support and compassion can become profound sources of direction about what matters and where we want to send our time, our energy. But we also do, looking inward at the unique expressions of life force we each bring to this wild party of being human on earth, which are the things that give us a sense of inner power and deep joy. And sometimes our gifts, I think, are very clear. And sometimes they have a way of being quite slippery or hard to pin down. And we use a process of kind of somatic reflection to identify those sources of power and joy and then use those almost as a portal to the gifts or the talents that we want to offer and boldly claim in this time.

Looking outward, of course, is in part about what the solutions are. And, of course, we need the mind of the analyst when it comes to solutions. We want to make sure we are steering towards things that could genuinely, meaningfully help. And there are some BS solutions out there in the world.

But my experience with Drawdown was that even when you bring the kind of best of the rational mind and good hard math, what is the toolbox of solutions look like? With our own discernment, it's still an overwhelmingly long list, right? You can flip through the pages of that book. There are a hundred different things, right? Where in the world do you begin? And so, we welcome in the looking outward, our sense of curiosity, wonder. Where does our energy steer us? Not just where does the good mind of the analyst take us? So, kind of melding in the spirit of the artist.

Doherty: Yeah. Mm-hmm. That's great.

Panu: That's wonderful. Thanks a lot.

Doherty: Yeah, that's great because you have the technological expertise because of drawdown. That's a whole other part of your career that we haven't had talked about. if listeners aren't aware, Project Drawdown is a well-known program that really explains how to solve the problems of climate change. We know there's this poly crisis people talk about. There's also a poly solution. There are solutions for almost every technological problem that we have. So, I think maybe we can focus on toward the last part of our talk is what you're seeing out there in the world. To me, a lot of what's happening in climate, reminds me what's what happened in the antiwar movement in this in the 60s and 70s where people started to go inward because they really realized there was a barrier where they couldn't really make the social change they wanted.

Unfortunately, with climate change, we know that it's not so much what we can do. It's what we're prevented from doing, as I say in my book. With all the beauty and the wayfinding, we still have this force that's really stopping us. So, we have to be tough and long-term and savvy politically. That without getting drawn into the politics, you know, context of our time too much, how are you seeing people be creative? Dealing with the censorship and suppression that's happening in the US. I don't want to do the downer thing at the end of the episode, so we know that's tough, but what are the bright spots that people are pushing against.

Wilkinson: Yeah, I think this work has never been easy, but it's maybe never been harder, certainly in an American context. And I've been thinking a lot and in part, this is probably having grown up in Atlanta, where you cannot think about the history of the civil rights movement without thinking about the role of the black church. And when we look at second wave feminism, you know, before any were reaching legislatures. There were consciousness raising circles in living rooms and Quaker meeting houses played an essential role in abolitionism. There's this really important interplay between kind of the big splashy moments of social change that we think about and we're all working towards, right? The big national policy wins, the landmark opinion at the International Court of Justice, right? These big moments that come to mind when we think of what a social movement is and does.

But there's this smaller, quieter, often invisible infrastructure, the more human infrastructure of social change that is so important. And some of its inner, some of its communal. And I think for a movement in duress, you have to reckon with that, right? And you have to reinvest in that. And what I have seen as I have been traveling about with this book is how very much, we need that investment right now in the climate space and the environmental community. But also that people seem game for it in a different way.

I was at a big conference of green building professionals. gave a keynote and then I was running a workshop after and I thought it was going to be mostly about, you know, how to take climate wayfinding and bring it into your organization and build culture and cultivate leadership. And what that room needed to do was to hold hands and sing and cry. And part of what you do as a facilitator is improvise with the needs of who is in the room at a given moment. And so that is what we did. And I wouldn't have thought that that would have been possible in a professional space like that two years ago.

And I am outraged by the reasons for it. But I think we are actually going to be strengthening the very capacities that we have always needed to be a movement and to be leaders and contributors to this work who are not just in it one off, right, not just in it for an action here and there, but in deep, sustained, courageous ways and ways that I think center the realities of what it is to be human on earth in this very tricky time.

Doherty: Well said. Yeah. Yeah, this is a great place to end our conversation that we always say we could we could say more. And that's truly the case. Climate change invites us to think about time in a different way. And this is a long-haul thing. And we're growing through it. So anyway, Katharine, thanks so much for giving us some time here in your busy schedule with your book.

We'll put good show notes in our links for the episode about Katharine's work: All We Can Save, Climate Wayfinding and Drawdown. And so for some people, this will be a history lesson. For other people, it'll just remind you things you already know. Thank you very much, Katharine, and Panu, and listeners for all of our time today.

Panu: Hmm.

Wilkinson: It's really a pleasure to spend this time with you all.

Panu: Thank you, Katharine, and everyone, take care.

 

 

image credit | Christian Buehner

S5 E 18: Supporting Wildlife and Conservation Professionals with John Fraser

Thomas Doherty, Panu Pihkala

Season 5, Episode 18: Supporting Wildlife and Conservation Professionals with John Fraser

Thomas and Panu had a stimulating and wide ranging conversation with John Fraser who reflected on his career as an architect, zoo and museum designer, pioneer in conservation psychology, and creator of innovative nonprofit knowledge and conservation groups. We focused on practical ways to support wildlife and conservation professionals amidst the emotional toll of their globally important work. John also spoke about how social cohesion and community bonds build resilience in small towns like his home in Seward, Alaska.

Links

• John Fraser

  • Google Scholar

  • Dr. John Fraser Receives Prestigious Devra Kleiman Scientific Advancement Award from AZA

• Also cited: 

  • Nathan Geiger's work on active hope (Geiger, Swim & Fraser, 2024, With a little help from my friends: Social support, hope and climate change engagement)

  • Recent CCH episode with Britta Eklöf on the Challenges of Activism and Staying Involved

  • APA Div 34 Society for Environmental, Population, and Conservation Psychology

Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity

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

Panu Pihkala: I am Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. This is our podcast show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about, well, climate change, obviously, and other environmental issues. And we asked this provocative question about, you know, what does it mean to be happy in the modern world? And when we started this podcast a few years ago, happiness wasn't typically, you know, equated with climate change. But lately I've noticed that, you know, people are aware of the need for resilience and kind of positive support. So, I feel like we've kind of helped to move that conversation forward a little bit. And we are really honored to have a special guest with us today.

Fraser: Thanks, I'm Johnny Fraser. really appreciate you inviting me to your podcast. I'm gonna start again, sorry, I did need to start again. Thanks so much for inviting me to your podcast. I'm John Fraser, I'm a conservation psychologist based in Seward, Alaska, but I also spend a lot of time in New York City.

Doherty: Yeah, and I'm so glad to have John here. I have known him for some time. Actually, we met while we were both in our graduate studies, and we'll talk a little bit about that. And John is really a true polymath. He's an architect, and he's helped to advance the field of conservation psychology, and he's worked in museums and with zoos and aquariums, he's run nonprofits. He's been at the Alaska Sea Life Center in Seward. So, lots we can talk about. Panu, do you want to get us started?

Panu: Warmly welcome John, also on my behalf. Lovely to meet you. I've known your work for many, many years, both in relation to the emotional impacts of doing environmental and conservation work. That was helpful when I was writing an English paper in 2019, but you worked on that a lot earlier also. And then I've been doing a series for Finnish environmental educators about emotions and environmental education. Some of your work and work by you and your colleagues has been highly helpful. So lovely to meet you and we'll talk more about emotions in this podcast. But first I'd like to ask you something about your journey towards a person having so strong environmental values and identity. So how did that happen for you?

Fraser: Obviously, you're talking to a fellow who's retiring next month. So, thank you so much for saying you're actually looking at the things I've produced over my career. It's kind of funny to look back when people talk about my origin story because I've often said, you know, I'm just one of those shallow people that follow shiny objects. I was born Canadian in southern Ontario in Haudenosaunee lands, which is near Niagara Falls and spent in an industrial town, steel town, grew up very close though to one of my father's best friends and we spent a lot of time on his farm. I spent a lot of time with, you know, cows and horses and I didn't know about zoos at all. So, when I became an architect and was pursuing a career in architecture, was working all over the world and was asked to work on a zoo project and they there are a bunch of horses that had kicked down and eaten their barn, which I found unusual. And so I remember saying, that doesn't tell me more about these horses. Tell me about their behavior. I don't understand these horses. I learned about what are we're called Przewalski's horse at the time but are now called Mongolian horses because they no longer use the Eurocentric way of framing it. And these are these tough, tough little animals that are very aggressive. And I said, well, this is unusual, but it's a horse. And so let's think this through. And they were surprised to have an architect to immediately jump to animal behavior before you start to build a barn. That turned into an incredible relationship. And they created my career for me because I was a farm guy, I said, it's a zoo. To me, that is a farm. It's just has a lot more people looking at critters. And as they started talking about the work they do in conservation, or what conservation was, I wanted proof. So I've been one of those people that just asked questions, prove me how it works, show me the way. That that's how I ended up in zoos and aquariums.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Fraser: I was designing master planning, found myself at the Oregon Zoo, and then after the Oregon Zoo, I worked in some advertising for a while on some children's media work, built a children's museum, and was recruited to go to the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York City. It was when I was there, just in that transition period when I was working for the ad agency, that I met Stephen Keller and Carol Saunders. We were together at a conference—both Carol and Steve have passed—and so I'm honoring them by saying there was far too much wine one evening and we spent a very late night with very good wine talking about the problem of environmental issues, not being about the science of nature, but about how people behave. And that really was, I think around 2000. And so Carol and I kept that conversation going. We ended up co-teaching at Antioch University. And that's where the idea came to invite a bunch of psychologists to get together. And that led to the conference that became Conservation Psychology. In parallel to that, I was pursuing a PhD at Antioch University where I met this other fellow, Thomas Doherty, who shared an advisor. And I remember sitting with my advisor early in my school career describing my work at the Wildlife Conservation Society.

How a cup of coffee tipped the balance of what was going on in a meeting. We had a new ad agency show up. They came in, they brought donuts and Styrofoam cups full of coffee for everybody as hospitality. And one of our senior curators slammed the table down, said, these people are morons. I can't work with them and walked out the door. And I was talking to Vic Pantesco about this, my advisor. And he said, that seems an awfully extreme emotional reaction. And I said, well, believe me, you know, she was upset that they would come to a conservation meeting with Styrofoam. It was just, you know, it was to her a slap in the face of all the work she does. And so we talked more about what that, meetings looked like. And Vic said that appears to be an environmental emotional trauma that they're living through and are having difficulty processing. So we went out and did a study.

Doherty: Yeah.

Fraser: This was back in 2005. And that study mapped PTSD to the experience of environmental loss for people working in frontline conservation. It took us from that time seven years to publish that paper because we were laughed at. And this becomes my career, by the way. So I became a conservation psychologist simultaneously with identifying this traumatic issue of understanding environmental change.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Panu: Mm-hmm.

Fraser: When we first presented that at the Society for Conservation Biology in 2007, you would normally do a presentation to a whole bunch of conservation biologists and they politely clap and we talk about the decline of nature and the collapse of the world and everyone claps a little bit and then they all move on and go get coffee. And we presented and you could have heard a pin drop in the room. The room was packed. A pin would have rung around the room. And finally, we started to hear a little bit of sobbing, and somebody said, you mean I'm normal?

And this became, there were no question and answer. It was very simply people saying that rings true to my life. That this is a trauma I carry in my pocket every day. And that gave us hope. To be honest, that shaped my inquiry into what gives people in environmental work hope. And that's the papers that I think Panu, you were talking about working with. Understanding how we can prevail. What does hope, what is the shape of hope? And how does it work within communities and groups and what does social support look like? And so that became, you know, my next career. I ended up leading the wildlife conservation society and created a new nonprofit called Knology, which is a transdisciplinary social science think tank in New York city and ran that organization until I retired in 2022. That changed the world. I got de-tired. I moved to Seward, Alaska for three years, which I'm just winding up right now to help a small conservation organization in Seward.

Think about the social sciences. And I can say proudly today that I live in the 10th happiest city in America because I did the study. I tested to see how happy is Seward. It is the most beautiful place in the world. It's economically stressed. There is a housing crisis. I live in a town where some people don't have indoor plumbing and where heat is a negotiable in your lease. That you may not have heat. It may be wood fire. It's a small village. It's a summer tourism site that is very busy in the summer, but only 2500 people in a fjord. So it's but it's just beautiful. And what we learned was that people are so attached to nature that that is what gives them resilience. That's what makes them feel secure, even if they live if they are housing insecure, living at the low end on subsistence lifestyles, and often in dry cabins with no access to plumbing and no indoor facilities. You know, it’s an outhouse and this is the way people live their lives. But people who are on the lowest end of the income spectrum in our town feel seen, heard and respected by those at the upper end. We're a town that believes in each other and supports each other. 95 % of people who live in the town where I live now volunteer and donate to nonprofits. And we see this sense of social cohesion that is so powerful that it gives me joy and feeds my soul.

Panu: Mmm.

Fraser:  So this is why we decided to divide our time between our apartment in New York City and our place in Seward, Alaska.

Panu: Fascinating to hear. Thanks a lot for sharing all that.

Doherty: Yeah. Well, Panu, I know you have experience with small villages and fjords up there in Scandinavia, in the Nordic countries.

Panu: We have lakes more than fjords.

Doherty:  Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Fair enough. Yeah. What are you thinking about Panu as Johnny is telling this great story?

Fraser: that regions have keywords.

Panu: Yeah, it's moving to hear about the sense of recognition and validation from that silent room. And it's been a big paradigm change in the 2000s in relation to recognition of psychological impacts of doing environmental work. And of course that work is still ongoing and paradigm change hasn't happened everywhere, but situation is very different than it was during those times that you John described earlier. I'm fascinated by the many things that you have been involved with and sounds like there's a great number of different people, but you've been able to find common teams and what I hear from your emphasis such as working together for the common good and taking care of each other seem important to practically all of these groups and probably also a sense of efficacy that people feel that they can do things. So it's inspiring to listen to you.

Doherty: Hmm. Yeah, it is. I was really looking forward to have you on, John, because I knew we could go in a lot of directions. I think, yeah, I think what's helpful for listeners and for young people is to realize, yeah, as I write about in my book, there is a before time where people didn't think about climate change or saw it as some hypothetical speculative issue that was the same experience I had when we did the first American Psychology Association climate task force we were talking about well, you know, there's gonna be mental health impacts of climate change. It's not just gonna be the disasters and the storms and the sea level rise and it's not just the impacts on polar bears. we were still in the polar bear era where people were thinking about polar bears and melting ice flows and we said, well no, this is going to roll out across the world and across the country.

That was before Katrina had already happened. So we saw, we had a glimpse, but people didn't quite connect that with climate change at the time. But then Superstorm Sandy, and then the fires in California, and the smoke and the heat. you know, so now we know. So the future that we predicted and saw caught up with us. And it is notable that the trauma lens that you described, which seemed so far out at the time is not at all—like if we did that talk today you wouldn't even have to preface it. People would be asking you about that or young people are leading on talking about that. yeah, yeah.

Fraser: well, that's a bit of an American view of it, Thomas. I think that the Americans intentionally lived in a denial space when the rest of the world was already acknowledging that the climate change was real. you know, living in Alaska, we are seeing environmental change at a rate that is four times faster than what you see in the lower 48. And I think anybody that's in sort of arctic countries, Panu, I'm not sure you're seeing the same thing, but for us, our salmon are completely changing their whole patterns and habits. We're witnessing trees where there should not be trees. And we're seeing, you know, I live in a town that has had almost no snow for two winters. Now I live in a very tropical part of Alaska. It hovers around freezing all winter, so it doesn't really get too cold. In fact, it never gets below what in Fahrenheit is zero, but minus 20 degrees Celsius, it never gets that cold. So we're living in a very protected area.

But I think the bigger issue is that America was in denial because climate change threatened the American foundation myth. It was fundamental to American identity that prosperity and opportunity to take from nature was unlimited. And that's not true for the rest of the world where people have acknowledged centuries of change and can see and live with centuries of history. America doesn't live in that world. They live in a world where prosperity is just a replaceable, fungible thing, almost like rainforest regeneration. It's not how nature works. And one of the reasons I think is some of my colleagues that helped us with the National Network for Ocean Climate Change Interpretation when we were first starting that project in the 2000s. We were talking about one of the ways that American denial was supported was a lot of effort to make climate change seem complicated.

And when we the story down to its hub, right, its root. The muck and biota of dinosaur dirt, know, dinosaur poop compressed over time becomes something you can burn for energy. So we do, and we end up with basically dinosaur muck in space creating a heat trapping blanket around the planet and that's making it too hot. And once we could say that to a six-year-old and they understood climate change, we said, we don't think we should have dinosaur muck in space. Kids were like, totally bad idea.

Panu: Mm-hmm.

Doherty: Yeah.

Fraser: You know, we don't have to make things complicated. And think I've been very fortunate in my career to say we can simplify a lot of these basic concepts. Right. And often it's the sense of loss of love or acceptance or your foundation myth that is troubling. And if we get to that deep space of where people are and where they find love and how love defines them, then we have the opportunity to give them hope. So that's my career summed up in a sentence, and I guess we're done.

Doherty: Very well said. Very well said. Yeah. It's great. Where should we go here? I feel like there's so many. So I'm just enjoying listening to you, John.

Fraser: Well, why don't I introduce something you may not know I did? Because I worked with some colleagues at NOAA across all of the federal agencies back around 2001 to convene meetings of agencies and nonprofit organizations to think about how we measure environmental education in relation to achieving the agreements of the Paris Accord.

And in developing an understanding as a consensus the group came to realize that in the United States the territories of sovereign nations within its borders were first of all a different framing of what is the United States, what is America. It was not 50 states, it was not Congress, it was a border, a geographic concept that we all agree exists but may not necessarily agree with. But inside that there's a lot of tension around what is governance and what is our relationship to nature, that we need to reframe the understanding of how we talk about nature and sustainability.

And since then I'm inspired by my friend Janet Swim when she says, “I don't want a sustainable marriage. I want a thriving, passionate marriage that lets me live to my fullest potential. And why would I want sustainable nature? Why wouldn't I want a thriving nature that lets me live my life to its fullest potential?”. And so we've got to quit describing sustainability as if we can maintain what's wrong today, because that's okay. That makes us comfortable. Let's admit that we have gone through a strange relationship to nature. It is at a breaking point, like any divorce and if we really want this to work we need to think about what it is to thrive and to get there we need to heal the harms and so working with First Nations peoples or coming from Canada First Nations peoples in the United States who would say you know indigenous or the Native American population. Now I'm in Alaska working with Alaska native groups.

So when we talk about environmental identity. The Western European approach has been to think about environmental identity as an exchangeable part of who I am. It's like I have many other identities in different contexts and it's a measurable, describable thing. But when I talk to people who are from Indigenous communities, those are not separable parts. Nature and me are one. They exist and there is no way to unpack them as separate because my way is the way of speaking about nature. And so when I use in the place where I live on now on Sugpiaq lands, which is the population from the Kenai Peninsula, using the American term. So to be, you know, Chugachmiut from the Chugach forest people of the Chugach, you know, that basically says “we're the people here”. But here is who we are. And that's the part that is so complex in Western European framing to think of me as of place, of nature, of this nature, and therefore when I think of things converging, I use words that also mean rivers and estuary. There's no difference between estuary and my family or ideas that come together. Now I'm saying that really simply here, okay? So there's a whole lot of cultural baggage here that I would need to learn more about to talk in any more intelligent way about it, but I've been enjoying learning the language in part because it's helping me rethink how close colonial structures influence the way we see the nature around us.

And the colonial nature of English itself, the way we describe things, the way we describe places is patrimonial. We describe something like, mean, I'm, Panu, you're on this this call and you think about how Patriarchy includes last names. yet, and so when we describe places or real estate, we already describe ownership and we set preferences and that is not the way the language even works. So it means that we have to have a different relationship. When I describe you, if I say to someone today, you're a cow.

That's considered in English an insult because we treat language like animal names as pejorative. You're an eagle would be, you know, honorific. So dances with wolves was great, but we wouldn't say dances with cows. Dances with cows would be pejorative. But if someone is looking at that through the Alaska native lens, that is an honorific. To be the nurture, the giver of life, right?

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Fraser: So, you know, here we are, you know, in the English language, swine or pig is, you know, the most variations of use of a word to insult someone, right? There are many different ways to use it, but it's always an insult. It's never honorific to call someone a pig. Well, I'm going to say that there are some parts of the sex world where that's actually a positive term, but I'm going to say that these are generally considered negative terms. So I think we can think about this concept of thriving as an aspirational end goal, but really healing is a place where I think the conservation and environmental movement can help think about mind and mental process.

If we put ourselves in the space of needing to participate in healing and garden, we move into a space that is hopeful because it's action hope. And that's really Nathan Geiger's work. You know, working with Nathan on this on hope, this idea of action hope, something that is very targeted, specific and has an outcome that may not be in my life. Whereas W.S. Merwin has said on the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree. That there is this act of something I will never benefit from but if I do it, I create benevolence. I create an opportunity that is not about me. It's that transcendence beyond self. And so I think people can move into that space rather quickly when they feel that they are loved for what they are and what they contribute. And too often I think in the conservation movement, when we say I want to sustain something we cling to the idea that it's okay to be the way we are today, it's good enough. But I don't think our nature should be good enough.

Doherty: Yeah, this is great. This is great, John. I really appreciate it. mean, listeners, know, this is, well, this is what's nice about this podcast. We can have these deep conversations. You know, in my book, this is very validating to me because it's kind of what I tried to parse out in my book, you know, how to sequence flourishing and healing and identity and action. As I talk about in the book and with teaching, there's kind of level one and level two to all these topics. So level one is, yes, I have my environmental identity, and we have these Western assumptions about what identity is. But level two, again, is that it's different for different people and it's much more complex. And we all know that we can't solve problems at the same level we create them. The famous Einstein quote, but often we can't solve problems at the same level. We find them, we encounter them because the consciousness that finds the problem is not the consciousness that can solve the problem. So I think, Johnny, you're talking about this other, this other kind of consciousness where, you know, where we need to go and all the interconnections, the ecology of all this, you know, the feelings. I think the trauma piece people are much more open to accessing right now.

Fraser: Well, we can go back though to children's literature, children's TV and think about people who say profound things because they're trying to describe something complicated to a little kid. Mr. Rogers, an American TV icon, also a minister, once said, if it's mentionable, it's manageable.

Doherty: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Fraser: And it's really interesting because when you think about children who are living in abusive settings, we have made huge progress on ending child abuse. Now we're not there yet, but we've made huge progress because we now talk about it. It is not something to be shamed by if it has happened to you. And it's not something that we as a society will tolerate in the way that we have in past generations. We now talk about rape as a bad thing and we don't blame the victim and that is a radical change in mental concepts, in mental process.

So I think we're in a very different generation now. And that to me is a sign of serious hope. We may have problems with the fact we can talk about them and the fact that we do not blame the victims is already moving us into a better space. I work with zoos and aquariums. We know that veterinary medicine is the highest suicide rate of any profession. And because you deal with death constantly and you deal with very early onset terminal disease because pets don't last as long as humans.

And so people are confronting death in ways we don't anymore because medical science means that I don't have to have 12 children to have three that survived to adulthood. Right. We now have a very high success rate with children growing to adulthood. The normative expectation is my children will live and I can name them when they're born. You know, they're not just called baby for the first year. Like Sweden, you don't get a name until you're a year old because you're not even viable until you're a year out of uterus.

So in a way this idea that we don't experience death the same way that prior generations have. It's not as common in our world. So now pets become this focus where I blame the vet who is caring for my pet. I blame the vet for not doing everything they could. I blame the doctor when I have someone who is, basically in hospital on life support systems and I want to keep them alive. But that's not for the patient, that's for the family. And we're doing the same thing with how we think about holding onto this planet on this idea that I can keep harming it and harming it and harming it and it will still be okay because my life can't be bad. Those are some of the issues we carry. And so poor vets who are in the front line of this are introducing people to death much more frequently in their daily lives and are taking the blame and carrying the blame and having to euthanize animals and deal with different levels of caring from the different clients that they're working with who are basically the custodians of these patients that they work with every day. So it's a third party here that can't explain its pain. And certainly animals conceal pain. They don't show pain when they're living with cancer. Your cat does not look different other than that they start losing weight. They still act the same way.

Doherty: Hmm.

Fraser: that withdrawal and loss of love is tragic and the victim of that experience becomes a vet. So, you know, we work in wildlife, we have a wildlife response team at the Alaska sea life center. There's responsible or animal strandings for Alaska. We have a trained team ready for oiled wildlife response in the event of an oil spill anywhere. Our incident command. If we are asked by the U S government for any coast to manage and coordinate incident command for an oil spill. And so that means we have a team at the ready because we exist as a result of the remediation from the Exxon Valdez oil spill. And that means we carry with us every day that kind of trauma.

In a town that experienced in 1964, one of the most traumatic tsunamis that not only wiped out the town, but it also tore down the oil refineries, it took oil out to sea, it caught fire and came back in as a tsunami on fire. That was what hit the shore. So my community carries that and the people that I work with every day who were in town at the time who are now my age in their 60s and 70s can recall the day when the porch exploded in front of them, when the earth fell below them and when their town burned down and they lived with no resources.

And so now today to live in a house with no heat is like, well, we lived through a tsunami. It's that kind of world. That doesn't mean we're not drawing passion from nature either.

Doherty: This is wonderful, John. As we always say, we could go on and on, but we have to bring our talk to a close today. But we're going to put a number of links to John's work and writing in the show notes. we can follow up on that. We will maybe have you on for another time. And you can talk about retirement. We won't go there today. But listeners, think, you know, it's why we do this podcast is to have these conversations and just, you know, listening to someone like John, you know, such experience and eloquence about all of this stuff. We're not alone. People  are thinking about this stuff and there are hopeful stories and hope is not weak. Hope is strong and hope is real action. There are hard truths that we need to talk about.

John and I will be presenting at the American Psychological Association this summer, talking about this work and hoping to spread this. And I think the audience will be much different than these earlier audiences that we faced years ago. And so I think, you know, people are much more amenable to this. So hopefully we can move things forward. But we're going to wrap it up. Johnny, thanks so much for coming in. I really appreciate it. And Panu thanks for adding yet another interview to your long day of work there in Helsinki.

Panu: Good to meet you, John. Thanks a lot.

Fraser: Thank you both for having me. I really appreciate it. And I still like to think that love is a commodity that is free and we should be sharing it a lot more.

Panu: Exactly.

Doherty: Well said. All right, John and Panu, listeners, everyone be well.

 

 

The Artemis II crew captured this view of Earth setting on April 6, 2026, as they flew around the Moon. Image Credit: NASA

S5 E17: The Surprising History of the First Earth Day (and What It Means for You Today)

Thomas Doherty, Panu Pihkala

Season 5, Episode 17: The Surprising History of the First Earth Day (and What It Means for You Today)

A perfect listen for those feeling cynical about the current state of the environment but longing to rediscover hope: 

Thomas and Panu unravel the powerful stories behind the birth of the first Earth Day—how a simple idea, driven by US citizens from diverse backgrounds, transcended partisanship and grew into a movement with billions of supporters worldwide. You’ll learn some of the mythological and cultural symbolism that makes Earth Day—and the recent Artemis II moon mission—resonate deeply across traditions and generations. You’ll also find practical ways to reclaim Earth Day, celebrating not just ecological awareness, but our own personal connection to nature and our collective future. 

Links

• Adam Rome (2010) The Genius of Earth DayEnvironmental History (Useful primer on the first Earth Day month in the US in 1970)

• Earthset April 6, 2026

• This is the inspiring Easter message an Artemis 2 astronaut has for Earth while traveling to the moon (video). Space.com

• Anaïs Voski The ecological significance of the overview effect: Environmental attitudes and behaviours in astronauts.Journal of Environmental Psychology

• Arbor Day, celebrated worldwide, sometimes at Spring Equinox 

Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.

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

Panu Pihkala: I am Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: And welcome to climate change and happiness. This is our podcast for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about the personal side of climate change, particularly their emotions, their emotional responses. And, you know, climate change is linked to all kinds of other things in the world, including our connections with nature and other people around us and how we either suffer with them or celebrate them. So at least myself, I'm enjoying some spring weather here in Portland, Oregon, longer days. We've had our Trillium, our Trillium Festival last week. So the wildflowers were coming out. Panu, how are you doing in Helsinki? And we have Earth Day coming up and we have beautiful moon images from the Artemis, a moon flyby mission. how are you doing? And do you all have any Earth Day or Artemis moon discussions going on in Finland?

Pihkala: Thanks for asking Thomas. In Helsinki there's nice sunshine but it's relatively cold. So we had first spring flowers coming out in March but just a couple of them and we don't have many of them yet so we're still waiting for that lovely phase of spring when the flowers start to come out. we've of course been following the Artemis moon flights.

Already as a boy I was fascinated by lunar landings and all the Apollo stuff. So that's been a long time interest of mine and now my own boys, especially the older one who is now 12, roughly five years ago he was very keen about that also and was more up to date with current space exploration than I was. So certainly runs in the family and this topic also reminds me of

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Pihkala: My earlier research with the history of environmentalism and because of that I know how impactful the first lunar flights were for environmentalism, the famous photos of seeing Earth from space the first time and also how significant things happened at the early 1970s but Earth Day actually is not big in Finland. We have some other annual team days which are much more famous around environmental themes and some environmental NGOs have tried to promote Earth Day here but I've realized that it's much bigger in the states. What's your history with Earth Day Thomas yourself?

Doherty: Yeah, I think this is a great conversation for us. you know, luckily this episode will come, will come out around April 22nd, which is traditionally the Earth Day holiday. And, well, I can identify with the fascination with space program as a child growing up in the US in the 1970s. was exactly like your boys really fascinated with, images of astronauts and when I was a child, they had the moon man, human moon voyage where they had the moon buggy, the car that they drove on the moon. And of course, I was fascinated with that and drawing pictures of it in my school notebooks. So I think parents will either, you know, people of a certain age and also parents will recognize these iconic pictures of that children draw of the astronaut with the umbilical cord coming out from the space from the floating around in space. It's very kind of primal, almost archetypal image.

And so I really, like a lot of people, I'm busy and I'm jaded and cynical. And so when I, with the Artemis moon program, you know, I kind of dismissed some of it at first, but then I did really look into it, and I was quite touched by the crew on the Artemis and their much more modern progressive makeup. And been doing some research on Earth Day. So, it's a really fascinating and genuinely inspiring. Like we need, we need inspiring things. I think we should talk more about Earth Day and the history because I can share some interesting stories today and then also this the Artemis, you know, I'll turn it over to you because I think you have ideas about mythology as well here. But, know, Artemis, the early Apollo missions, you know, the Apollo missions were named after gods. was Gemini, Mercury, Apollo, and it were masculine kind of tough guy, right stuff kind of test pilot moon missions that were quite dangerous, really.

But you know, this new era we've had the space station. We have more diverse space crews the Artemis to crew, you know, as a pilot of color and a married woman scientist. You know, they, they hug each other. They cry over the over the crew leaders loss of his wife to cancer. And, you know, they have that that really genuine overview effect where they look at look at the earth and they send really heartfelt messages just like you or I would that hey, I can see that we're all together on this planet we need. We need to work together. So it's really quite beautiful. You know, it's quite human. And it reminds us that people really do care about the planet and really do care about each other.

You know, Artemis is the sister of Apollo, right? And she is the goddess of as a very independent woman. So it's a great image for today. It's an independent woman Artemis, who likes to spend her time in the woods and protect animals, right? Yeah, so what is that? What does all this conjure for you?

Pihkala: Yeah, thanks for dwelling on that. In my adult years, I've had a slightly ambivalent relationship to space programs because part of that can be technological fascination and linked to utopian dreams of if we fail at sustainability and ecological protection, then at least some part of humanity could move elsewhere in the cosmos and that's not the way to go really. But there's some genuine advancements achieved through space technology that has to be admitted and some very primal sense of awe and wonder related to space travel. So that speaks to the ambiguity also.

Doherty: Yeah.

Pihkala: And this overview effects which you mentioned is a team in environmental psychology research. For example, Annais Voskhi, from Stanford, has been doing interesting studies on the environmental views of astronauts. For example, we might put a link to that in the show notes. But everything which motivates people to care for this fragile

Doherty: Yeah.

Pihkala: in black space is very important. This topic of annual theme days also in my mind evokes ancient stuff, mythologies and rituals and practices and they are of course heavily linked to the solar cycle and to the moon cycle also, the solstice, the equinoxes and

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Pihkala: That's something that I increasingly follow in my life and I know Thomas that you do too. We've sometimes discussed this over the podcast and in many religions and meaning systems. There's various kinds of thematic days over the year and some of those have been adapted to environmental themes and actually quite early on, for example, the Arbor Day.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Pihkala: tree planting day already in the 19th century. I checked Wikipedia entry and found out that in some countries it's even older. The Spanish village of Mondoñedo held the first documented arbor plantation festival in 1594, says Wikipedia. that's old and of course environmental concerns were different.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Wow.

Pihkala: For centuries we've had people who are not happy about cutting down trees for many reasons. I think we must admit that on one hand environmentalism is a relatively recent phenomenon, but on the other hand some of its substance goes way back. also, for example, to the ways that indigenous people have reacted to more industrial and often colonizing influences.

Doherty: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so like a lot of these things, there's many, many layers. And when we stop our incessant movement and just start to consider this thing a lot of unfolds. And I think that's what helped. That's what was positive for me. I had already been I had because of my recent book and because of my work with people and the sometimes the really grim tasks we have with climate work and protecting the environment in this really violent kind of corrupt time that we're living in. I really want to test and see if Earth Day can be something that we can really embrace as something positive. And I really do believe that we can. And yes, Earth Day is not new. And one of the things about Earth Day that I like is that it allows us to really partake of all of these traditions that are quite genuine and they're international and indigenous and ancient the idea of all these seasonal holidays Easter Arbor Day, you know, the equinoxes. They're very, they're very, they're very human. And, yeah, so it's interesting,

I don't think it's, it's hard for people in the modern world to imagine just how striking it was for people to see a picture of Earth from space, from the Apollo missions, because people, it truly is a novel experience in human evolution. had never seen, we'd maybe seen some artistic rendering, but no one had ever seen a literal color photo of the planet existing, and people always use some term like in the blackness of space or something like that. So this is really, it's a really aesthetic, beautiful thing when the sun is shining on the planet.

And it does it does really, it is like a mirror, you know, like it reflects that, hey, we're on a closed sphere. And thus, we all national boundaries and all the things that we think about, they don't appear. So it is a very natural cognitive, psychological insight, that overview effect.

And, you know, people really environmentalists really use that to share that. And that was a part of the energy of the first Earth Day in the 1970s in the US. And I did some research, you know, there's a lot of instructive things with the first Earth Day. So part of it was started by, you know, a senator, a senator from Wisconsin and governor who actually was inspired by the Vietnam War, organization and mobilization and teach ins and wanted to have a teach in about the environment. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin. So he got together with a group of young people, the oldest of the oldest in the planning group was age 28. And they came out of the civil rights movement and Chicano activists, a woman who worked for the for the for the Robert Kennedy political campaign. So it was actually quite diverse. And they and they put this out this this teach in and it took on a life of its own. And it is still the largest, the largest public event and protest in US history. was three times bigger than the recent No Kings march that we had in the US.

And there was like 35,000 speakers all around the country. And mostly grassroots organized by communities by families by moms by teachers. So really, it was really a big deal. A really, really a big deal. And it was bipartisan. The there was also a Republican from California, Pete McCloskey.

Pihkala: Hmm.

Doherty: that day, that Earth Day month, there was all kinds of things going all around the country. There was TV shows. The news covered it. Magazines. The U.S. Congress actually took a day off on Earth Day so that legislators could go to their districts and speak. Corporate leaders spoke. Doctors, architects, labor leaders, religious leaders.

So it was actually much more like we think of the current of modern environmental movement. People think about pollution. They were thinking about human rights, civil rights, environmental justice. It's quite, quite amazing, really. And this is a time when there was no internet, no Facebook, no cell phones. So this was really word of mouth. So to me, it just reminds us that as what we know, people care about the planet. People care about nature.

Most people in all countries, 80% of people in the world support climate action and support government action on this. So it is the majority of people. And if we let people really be free to talk about this, they will love doing it. Now, if we tried to this in the difference with today, is that it's all politicized and people actively have made it difficult for people to do this very human, basic thing. but that's negative bad actors that have made it difficult. is a very natural, very natural response to care about other animals and nature and to, and to, and to care about the planet. So it's just good for us to think about.

Pihkala: Mmm. Thanks for sharing all that history. I knew part of that but not all of that. It's very inspiring how large the people's movement was and all the enthusiasm. Naturally when something is done the first time or the couple of first times it's often easier to get people involved but it requires the background motivation which is in this case care for the earth that exists in so many people's hearts as you say Thomas. I totally agree that we too often forget that and something not as large but with some similarities happened at the end of 2010s when climate change awareness became more widespread. Of course we've had people who have been concerned and aware of climate change for decades. But there was something of that attitude that, OK, this is a major issue. Now let's together do something about it. that's in Finland, for example, it led to the largest climate demonstrations we've had. And then, of course, COVID-19 pandemic and other things caused much trouble for that. But the fundamental great power in people who care is of course still very much present.

Doherty: Mm hmm. Yeah. And so I think, you know, another interesting story about Earth Day. So the tea was a really kind of a like a “mod squad” kind of people that came together. So you had these representatives, these older white males. It's really it's really Panu. It's such an interesting time. both politicians, you know, from California, Wisconsin, governor and governor and representative, you know, they it was a time when environmental protection was bipartisan. It wasn't politicized. These guys were not necessarily radicals. They were actually many in many ways quite conservative. Both of them were combat veterans of World War Two, for example.

And, you know, they it was lucky, you know, they pulled together this group and they wanted to call it a teach in and it was kind of dry. And then then they got this mad Madison Avenue advertising guy, Julian Koenig, who's a famous advertising person who, you know, developed some of the iconic ads from Volkswagen cars in the US, you know, this idea of think small, you know, these really kind of funny, you know, we have that show, Mad Men about advertising in the in the 60s. Well, he was one of those Mad Men characters. But he gave them a bunch of ideas like E-Day or Ecology Day, but he said, call it Earth Day, which is a great is one of the best kind of brands in the 20th century. And it was actually Koenig's birthday, April 22nd was his birthday. And so, you know, Earth Day/birthday, that was part of his inspiration.

But, you know, I think what we can take from it is that Earth Day, the first Earth Day is commonly seen as the birth of at least the modern environmental movement in the United States. And its scope and scale, as we've talked about, is really important. But, you know, I think what we can take from it is that we can think of Earth Day as the birthday of our environmental consciousness, you

Some people have a like a real clear environmental wake up like some epiphany that changes their life. But for most of us, our environmental consciousness, our environmental identity, our values, it forms, you know, imperceptibly from our childhood, and it just becomes part of who we are, you know, and on this podcast, we get people to talk about those all that stuff. But you know, so there's no specific birthday of that, except, you know, our own literal coming into the planet as organic beings.

So I think that's where I'm that's what I'm suggesting people do with Earth Day. Parents, teachers think of Earth Day as an opportunity to celebrate the birthday of our environmental values. And I think that's a pretty useful way to start thinking about this holiday that goes forward. So it isn't necessarily tied just to the 1970s. And it's much more international like right now almost 200 countries, you know, celebrate some form of Earth Day. And it is crass and maybe commercialized a little bit. But I think there's a there's like with all these holidays, there's a really healthy, kind of genuine core, like even a spiritual, spiritual core. So that's my mission, this Earth Day, to reclaim, reclaim it and not be so cynical about it.

Pihkala: Yeah, reclaiming the Earth Day. And course, Mother Earth is a very ancient symbol and a pair of words. Some of the young environmental activists who have been interviewed for various studies actually speak very movingly about them.

Doherty: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Pihkala: Ecological crisis and climate crisis damaging their mother, meaning the Earth. So that's one link here and closely related to mythologies and religion also. In Finland we celebrate Mother's Day, the second weekend in May, not too far from Earth Day. And here the start of the warmer days of summer, which usually took place in early June, which is the end of the school year in Nordic countries. So that's a big celebration of the beauty of nature. And when I was working more with religious communities, I was advocating for the idea of having different kinds of thematic days over the year. So there's this traditional celebrating nature's beauty and gratitude and those kinds of things. And then there's a need also for encountering the difficult emotions and that's more new content.

Well, the Remembrance Day for a species 30th of November is one international marker day for that, but there's many other options also. And some of these thematic days come from environmental organizations, the Earth Hour in March is celebrated by many in Finland. And then there's Overshoot Day and there's good psychological discussion of those theme days which tend to be ambivalent on one hand. They remind people of the crisis and problems, but they can also become sort of gloomy reminders and temporary evocations of guilt and shame and then people move on because it sounds so depressing. So it's difficult with the difficulty of emotions and I'm not totally happy at all with the ways that Overshoot Day is dealt with in Finland, for example. I don't see much change happening around that, but anyway, the fundamental idea of having different thematics there is for encountering various aspects of the relationship between humans and the modern human world. That's very important, I think.

Doherty: Yeah. And that's one thing, you know, you learn when you do any kind of environmental or climate work. There's a bunch of different ideas about it. You cannot, you can't get everyone to agree. And so these are primal impulses to recognize. So, you know, the earth hour, overshoot day, these each, these come from some person or group that said, how, can we do? How can we celebrate this kind of thing? And so, yes, there are a myriad opportunities and then they kind of fight for attention in our in our modern kind of you know attention economy.

And I just for listeners who are cynical about Earth Day and don't necessarily buy this. I totally get it. That's many ways how I've thought about Earth Day. By the time I came of age in the, you know, the late eighties and early nineties, Earth Day was a memory. And, you know, we had it was it was not it was seen as almost a cliche. And it's easy to feel cynical. And in fact, all of the great environmental, legal, logistical victories of the first Earth Day era, like the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, all of these things are being, you know, really sabotaged right now by the fossil fuel industry that's running, running much of the US government because they bought influence in, in Washington.

So yes, all of these victories need to be protected. So yes, there's no there's no easy answer. And there's a lot of dark forces in the world. But that should not, you know, blot out the beauty of the planet and the genuine, healthy emotions that the Artemis crew is feeling looking at the Earth that your sons, you know, feel about, you know, the idea of space, space travel, these are all genuine, beautiful things. And the way to move on this is to think about it and to be conscious about it. And again, it comes back to the things we talk about all the time, which is on this podcast, which is, know, 360 emotions, we need to feel all the different, all the different emotions and, and not, not somehow disallow ourselves from feeling the positive awe, you know, that that these things bring which are, you know, really natural, healthy human emotions.

So yeah, so listeners, you can think about the birthday of your environmental identity and values as being on Earth Day. And we have many episodes talking about this idea of environmental identity and your whole your whole life story and all the different connections you have with nature. That's I think the way to celebrate Earth Day is to is to talk about our life stories and our nature connections and do an environmental timeline and think about all the key experiences that we've had. Kind of recharge our batteries. It's springy and naturally at least in the northern hemisphere it is a time to focus on so that some of this new growth.

Pihkala: Hmm. Yeah, if you invite just a couple of people who you trust and go out and gather around this, I will be very surprised if you don't come out of that feeling more energy than you did before. There's something really powerful in sharing between people. And one option, of course, is always to do some kind of even spontaneous ritual or co-created ritual which doesn't have to be grandiose, it can be just doing some symbolic activity with the elements of nature that are close by, whether those are branches and stones or something more. And that already then brings you or us closer to the very ancient practice of using ritual to keep us conscious during the annual cycle.

Doherty: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And you know, thinking of Artemis that that that image of Artemis is interesting, you know, this goddess, god of the moon, capable woman protector, fierce. You know, one of the stories of Artemis, which I, don't think I'd ever heard that story. So she's this, you might know this story. She saw Artemis, the myths says that Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo, they were born together from Leto. But apparently Artemis was born first. And then she that assisted in the birth of her brother and helped her mother through labor. So Artemis is a hardworking, hardworking woman who of course, immediately goes into helping helps her brother, her mother, her brother be birthed. So she's also the patron of childbirth, of midwives, among other things. just, you know, and the I was reading about the person at NASA who came up with this name Artemis, they needed a name, because it had it didn't have that the program didn't have a compelling name when they were trying to sell this program to the US government and to Congress. And so, you know, they plucked Artemis out, it was actually a name that had been used a little bit already.

But one of the goals for this particular program was that it was going to have women in it And so they picked Artemis as a god goddess, but I don't think they really even realized the depth of the symbology at the time So it's really interesting, you know, so the world is a little more mysterious. You know then then we think I think sometimes and there's all kinds of larger, you know stories and trends going on. Anyway, fascinating stuff.

Pihkala: Yeah, it truly is. When I was more involved with Christian ecological theology, it was interesting to observe that when I was baptized as a baby, the date was April 22nd. Much later on when I was ordained, the date was 5th of June, which is the Global World Environmental Day. So some nice symbolism also related to this comment about the world being a mysterious place. Glad to be talking with you, Thomas, the listeners. I hope you find good ways to celebrate it.

Doherty: Same here. Yeah, thank you, Panu and listeners. Thank you. Again, allow yourself to be a little bit cynical because there's a lot to be cynical about. We all know but also remind remember that there are beautiful things happening in the universe, in the cosmos, and among all of our fellow people. I mean 86% of people in the globe, you know, endorse climate action, environmental protections, and want their governments to work together. So let's keep that in mind. All right, Panu and listeners, everyone be well.

Pihkala: Take care.

 

 

image credit | Anastasiya Badun

S5 E16: New Researcher Spotlight: Britta Eklöf on the Challenges of Activism and Staying Involved

Thomas Doherty, Panu Pihkala

Season 5, Episode 16: New Researcher Spotlight—Britta Eklöf on the Challenges of Activism and Staying Involved

Ever wondered why some people burn out or quit activism despite caring deeply? Panu and Thomas spoke with Swedish Ph.D. researcher Britta Eklöf who explored this question. Many long-term activists face barriers like social disconnection, exhaustion, and doubts about their impact. Britta’s research shows these obstacles are interconnected, and that small changes can make a huge difference. Creating social support, clear roles, and space for emotions can boost resilience and keep activists involved. It’s not just about fighting for solutions, it’s about sustaining ourselves while doing it. Join us for the conversation. 

Links

• Britta Eklöf

  • ResearchGate

  • Britta Eklöf &Christian A. Klöckner (2025). Helping young people cope with eco-anxiety: a qualitative intervention study.

  • Britta Eklöf, Sara Vestergren, Magnus Wennerhag & Christian A. Klöckner (2025). Remaining in or leaving climate activism – insights from current and former activists on sustained engagement

Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.

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

Panu Pihkala: I am Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: 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 political issues and social issues and technological issues. And we asked the provocative question, what does it mean to be happy in the modern world? And, you know, one way that people engage in express their values about nature and the natural world and human health is through activism and advocacy. And it's interesting to think about all the different life paths that people have, and also what brings people into groups and how that works in activist circles. And we have, we're lucky to have a guest with us today who's going to help us talk about that.

Britta Eklöf Yes, thank you. My name is Britta. I'm a clinical psychologist based in Stockholm in Sweden. I recently completed my PhD in environmental psychology in Trondheim, Norway. And I was lucky to have Panu Pihkala as the opponent of my thesis two months ago.

Doherty: Yeah, and we're really excited to have Britta here and she's worked with Panu and I found her research really interesting and it helped me to rethink some of my thoughts about environmental groups. So Panu, do you want to get us started?

Pihkala: Warmly welcome Britta, also on my behalf. Glad to continue the conversations. I first became aware of your work a couple of years ago at an environmental psychology conference in Aarhus, Denmark. So naming different Nordic countries. And I know that you have been living in Sweden, so that's already for Nordic countries. And I know that you have many things in your history related to environmentalism and I'd like to ask you to start by telling something about your journey towards where you are now. How did you end up being so heavily involved with environmental topics and psychology?

Eklöf :  Yeah, well. I remember, I mean, there are many starting points I could talk about, for me, watching the Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth in my teenage years, that was a big eye-opener for me. But I didn't grow up in an environment where people talked a lot about environmental issues. So I didn't really have a language for that worry.

Yeah, for any feelings about climate, really. And my first political awakening was more focused on gender equality and global justice. So in my 20s, I was more focused on that. But the information about climate crisis and the concern was really just piling up inside of me. And I was good at compartmentalizing my climate anxiety for sure. Just silently saying to myself, just don't look that direction basically. But then Greta Thunberg appeared. And soon after I heard about the Extinction Rebellion and I saw an announcement on Facebook about introductory lecture in my city and I decided to go with my friend. And I remember clearly that I had a huge resistance before going. And I was very close to cancelling last minute. But I got on my bike and I was 10 minutes late. But that meeting was transformative. I learned a lot about the climate crisis and also about democracy, civil resistance and how social movements work.

Pihkala: Mm-hmm.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Eklöf : So that was my first entry point to activism basically. then shortly thereafter the COVID-19 pandemic hit and I isolated. I was just focused on my day-to-day job.

Pihkala: Mm-hmm.

Eklof: But I clearly got mobilized during that meeting. And during the pandemic also my work contract ended and I started applying for PhD positions in environmental psychology. And I was fortunate to be accepted to one and was also lucky to be given the opportunity to study activism.

And yeah, just to round up, at that point, activism was starting to receive more attention in social and psychological research, but it was mostly focused on why people join climate social movements, and much less on what happens after they join. So, yeah, I wanted to conduct research that would hopefully be useful for activists themselves and therefore decided to study what happens after engagement, what enables long-term engagement and also what leads some people to quit and leave their activism.

Doherty:  That's great. Panu, was your take? What did you learn from the, as you were observing the dissertation process? What were the insights that you gained?

Pihkala: Yes, thanks Britta for telling about that. I totally agree that research on disengagement from environmental activism is very rare. In this podcast, we've had conversations with some scholars who have worked more on how people join environmental movements or become more environmentally aware. The work of Luis Chavala for example has been influential in that regard and listeners you can find that episode online also and having history with studies of religion and ecology I found it amusing that the word epiphany is used in some related research so people having environmental epiphanies and that the word comes heavily from religious circles having a some kind of revelation and so it links.

Eklöf : Yeah.

Doherty: Yeah, epiphany, yeah.

Pihkala: Also, know, North American roots of environmentalism and people having deeply formative experiences outdoors, but that can happen also via documentaries, for example. You mentioned Al Gore's documentary and there's several pieces of research and testimony from people all around the world that it's really been influential for many people's lives and being inspired by other people is a major thing here also.

And that leads to the topic of social dynamics more broadly. And I think that in your research there's very interesting content about the dynamics of environmental movements. And of course there's quite special things going on in the 2010s. Let me say that again. And of course there's some really special things going on in the 2020s with the COVID-19 pandemic which made on the street activities more difficult. And in relation to the culture of new environmental movements such as extinction rebellion that you studied a lot in Sweden. And it's easy to see some very good things in their culture, for example, attention to well-being and emotions and many of the topics we discuss in this podcast.

But also there is no hierarchy officially, but you know, in human groups there tends to develop hierarchy even though people say that there is none. So there's some sort of universal dynamics I see discussed in your studies but also some quite special themes from the 2020s and there's many directions to go from here but if you have some thoughts directly emerging from this, Britta, please go ahead.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Eklöf : No, I'm happy to have you lead the conversation what the next direction should be.

Pihkala: Hehehe.

Doherty: Okay, yeah. Well, let me let me jump in. I think this is this is fascinating. So you know, yes, what draws people into groups, and this role of an epiphany or a wake up call is something that I've observed many times in my life. And then many of our guests have a heavy salient experience or learning. And I know

Eklöf : No.

Doherty: Britta, appreciated your research because it reminded me of older research that I had read from the US, that people get drawn into environmental action through factors like learning something, or they already have pre-existing expertise, or they're placed in a position of leadership where then they learn something. They join a committee in their town or something like that, and it puts them in a leadership position.

What I found inspiring was that there was no one path. Sometimes someone's a pre-existing expert and gets drawn in to an issue. Sometimes someone just as a common citizen who learned something like an environmental issue in their town. Many famous environmentalists started just as regular people. And then of course there's that, there's the experience of just joining some committee or taking leadership and then suddenly you have to make decisions for your family or community which then puts you into an action position so that that I found interesting but it seems that things also are less simple now because of social media and because of technology and post covid so what you know what were you finding in your research about both what drew people in and then what what was actually causing them to disengage.

Eklöf : Yeah, well, yeah, I don't write a lot about what drew people in in my research, but for sure I discussed that in my interviews. I'm not sure if I said it, but I interviewed Swedish activists in the Extinction Rebellion Movement in Sweden, and both current activists and former activists.

Doherty: Yeah.

Eklöf : But yeah, they mentioned some kind of epiphany moment, most of them, and then also a process of anxiety and information accumulating within, and then some kind of informational tipping points almost. And then also being offered somehow a hand that drew them into the movement. So it was often through some kind of social connection. A partner or a friend that said, let's go to this meeting. And it was almost the same for me when I went to that lecture with them. But then, yeah. What's happened then when they joined? Many things, of course.

Doherty: Mm-hmm, Yeah.

Eklof: So in my research, I write about facilitators, things, factors that help them stay engaged. And I also write about barriers that were perceived by both current activists and dropouts. But for the dropouts, it was the lack of facilitating factors that could buffer these barriers or just facing too many barriers that made them eventually quit. And yeah, I can mention them briefly now, and then we can jump into one or many later. Yeah. Let's start with the barriers, actually. They are all interconnected, the facilitators and the barriers. But the first barrier mentioned was lack of social connections in the group or not finding one's role in the group. I'm going to keep it short now and just go through them.

So the first one was lack of social connections in the group. The second one, doubting that the strategy and the actions would have an impact. Third, conflicts or disagreements with the group, The fourth, exhaustion. And it could be related to both the activism itself, but also stress in private life. And the fifth one, difficulties with this type of non-hierarchical organization that Extinction Rebellion is, such as unclear leadership roles or decision-making procedures that are perceived unfair and so on. Yeah, guess had I done the interviews today, I think some activists and dropouts would probably also talk about police repression.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Eklöf : That was not a big theme in my interviews conducted back in 2020. But yeah, it has increased since then.

Pihkala: Yeah, thanks for telling a summary of those topics and recent episode of our podcast deals with politics of repression against environmental activists. So listeners, you can find more discussion of that. And actually in Trondheim, when we met with Britta two months ago, we also discussed that outside the main content of the dissertation. The second opponent was Marlis Wullenkord, who has done climate anxiety research in Germany and many kinds of environmental psychology research. So I really enjoyed the good conversations we had and I'm not going to go much into academic culture now, but you know, a dissertation event is the sort of culmination test of your PhD years and there's different cultures in relation to that. A sort of old power hierarchy culture would be that the opponents try to put the defendant into a small position. But we've been wanting to practice what might be called a more feminist approach to science and communication and academic relations where it's more discussion and learning together. And at best, and including my experience in Trondheim, is that everybody can learn if there's that kind of attitude. But also having that history means that I've been reading Britta's work in detail. So I know a lot about that content. those five barriers that you mentioned. Thomas, what's on your mind when listening to those?

Doherty:  Yeah, it's interesting. I've been trying to compare the more modern extinction rebellion experience with what I know of older environmental. mean, environmental groups have been around for generations now. And it does seem to me all of these barriers existed, say, 20 years ago in organizations, know, people being different unless it was a local group where people came from the same place, but any kind of national level group, people would be different. They would disagree. There's always doubts about impact and, but I think everything has been amplified. I mean, as we talk, it's really interesting because when I look at the research from the nineties, and early two thousands, people didn't talk about anxiety because eco anxiety was not surfaced as an issue.

Eklöf : Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Doherty: And so environmentalists didn't talk about feeling anxious. In fact, I think there was more of a sense that they were healthy and they were protecting the earth. So was actually the opposite of anxiety, but we live in different times. So I think all of these factors are amplified by technology, the weight of information, the instantaneous communication.

Eklöf : Right, yeah.

Doherty: people on their screens, social media, which exacerbates all kinds of interpersonal insecurities and relationship issues. So it does seem like a really high stakes. And of course, the stakes of climate change are much higher now. And people have experienced disasters. They have experienced floods, smoke. So we, know, it's like a kettle on a stove that's been turned up to a boil. The same ingredients, I think, where they have been there forever.

Eklöf : Yes. Yes.

Doherty: environmental groups have always been plagued by having charismatic founders that then are difficult to work with and things like that. That's forever. But now, now it's all amplified. what did you find that? How are people addressing this kind of new metaphor, the boiling pot of environmental work? Yeah.

Eklöf : Yeah, in different ways. In my analysis, I write about how people are driven by different motivations. And for people that are engaging because they want to have an impact and they want to have an impact fast, they have these instrumental motivations. For them, that is their main way to deal with it. And if they feel then that the strategy is inefficient, ineffective, yeah, thank you, that was a reason for them to disengage. And then we have another category that appreciated the social context, they found new friends maybe in the movement, and also appreciated that new type of social context that allowed them to share their climate's and validated their concerns and also having those emotions mirrored by others. For them, just being in that social context was another way to, or how to say, another coping aspect.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Eklöf :  Did I answer your question?

Doherty: Yeah, yeah, I think so. And I think it's great. mean, listeners, you can think about this yourself, but I know I, I like to, I see myself as a pragmatist. So if I'm working in a group, I want to make sure that we know what we're doing and, and, you know, we're going to have a, we're going to have an impact.

Or, you know, I flipped to the validation side, you know, where I said, impacts difficult, we might not have an impact at all. It might fail, but that's okay because we must try our values and we must do what we can do. this totally makes sense. So essentially, I think people become more savvy about these internal factors. I'm thinking of like meaning focus coping versus action and emotional focus coping and all these kinds of things. So it seems like there's a there's some sort of effective groups are able to recognize the needs of the individual person, their self, their, their need for support, their need for meaning. Yeah.

Eklöf : Right. I write about also how I write about that in terms of recommendations, a recommendation for organizer that it's good to be aware that people are driven by different motivation and also need different coping aspects. Because in my interviews, I find that it could be a source of conflict actually, when some people were more focused on, they wanted to spend time planning action and discussing strategy. And then we had another click of people in the group wanted to discuss their emotions and using the time and space for therapeutic reasons kind of. And that could be a source of conflict. The ideal case, I guess, would be that the group can acknowledge all these different needs and wishes. And yeah, acknowledge them, talk about them, and solve them collectively maybe.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Pihkala: Yeah, there may be changes in the organization or network. And while in Norway, I was talking with some people who are active in Extinction Rebellion Norway, and I heard that they had actually appointed facilitators. So they had switched to light hierarchy instead of no hierarchy at all. And then some people take more power and others are annoyed and those kinds of dynamics.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Pihkala: And you can, if people listen to me, you can hear that I'm fond of commonly set rules around hierarchy and power. I don't believe that in the long run it functions without having that sometimes difficult discussion that who is using power and just pretending that everybody has equal power. I don't think that works and that has some links to some earlier research and philosophy also.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Eklöf : Yeah, a note on that, maybe a little bit in defense of Extinction Rebellion. But I had one participant, I'm quoting her now saying that Extinction Rebellion was not built as a organization that was going to last for many years. It was built with the goal of mass mobilization and just spreading as fast as possible. And then I think it is an effective way to

have many action and many things happen quickly to just basically allow people to do whatever they want. They don't need a particular meeting and a voting system in place first. So I think it's effective in that sense. But in the long run, problems might arise with that kind of organization flat non-hierarchical structure.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Pihkala: Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. totally agree. And after all, the amount of action and attention that Extinction Rebellion was able to generate in just a couple of years was unprecedented in environmental activism. And then who knows what might have happened with the new wave of climate activism without the COVID-19 pandemic. So that was a big blow to many things. Then we could go also into activist life cycles. Often there's different age groups where people more probably turn to activism, like when you're a student or then when you're nearing the end of your working life and you have more social freedom and that sort of thing. And also during the COVID-19 years, many young activists of the new climate movement, you know, decided that they have to get places where they can study and try to get some jobs and some income in societies where there is less jobs for young people, partly because of technologization and AI lately and so on. So many things are intertwined here. But moving towards the end of our time, time flies so fast when having these conversations. It would be really nice to hear more about yourrecommendations based on your research about how to deal with these barriers constructively. You said already something about it but I noticed more.

Eklöf : Yeah, thank you for asking. So we spoke briefly about the role of the social context and that can be supported by giving newcomers or long-term activists opportunities to engage with different levels of intensity and workload basically, so that they can switch from roles depending on where they are in life. Also, roles, like knowing one's place in the group is very psychologically soothing. And also strengthening social bonds through opportunities to socialize between actions or strategy work, yeah, just relaxed opportunities to socialize basically. Also, you know, having procedures for conflict resolution in place, and as we were briefly talking about now, also frameworks for decision making, some kind of structure for that.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Eklöf : So that's the social recommendations. Also, I mentioned the barrier being exhausted from overwork. So that can be prevented through fostering open conversations about it. And encourage people to share when they feel overworked and encourage people to ask for help if they are overworked. So normalize that kind of.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Eklöf : And then I also mentioned efficacy doubts as a barrier. And that can be. How do you say? You can deal with that through also offering discussions about different ways to think about strategy and impact. We didn't have time to talk about that, but there are many ways to think about impact, no long-term impact, short-term, different outputs to focus on, et cetera. So just to inform activists about that basically.

Doherty: Yeah, yeah, this is great. I think, you know, what we can do today is is for listeners just raise these things because these are all things you're going to experience in a group. You know, are we really making a difference? What should we be doing? A word that you didn't use, which I've what I've heard, which I've heard from, especially in young environmentalists here, like in the sunrise movement is dealing with interpersonal drama, they would say, which is basically kind of individual egos, individual identity processes, people being sensitive, people being young, different levels of experience, life experience in a group, and also understanding of the issues. So it is challenging because more people are doing environmental work now than ever before, and more different kinds of people.

Eklöf : Mmm.

Doherty: the old days where there was an environmental scientist who started a group and everybody just listened to the him or her and followed orders and was sort of like in a in a military band that doesn't exist anymore. So we need much more like I think the takeaway is more flexibility and recognizing the human factors I think is a good way to think about it.

Yeah. And we're going to have links to Britta's papers and things in our show notes. And this is really good for activists and colleagues like in Climate Emergency Fund and people that we know here in the US that are doing, you know, good work on social and social action. So Britta, where's the rest of your evening going here now that we're wrapping up?

Eklöf : I'm actually gonna go downtown and have a glass of champagne actually because we're celebrating a friend who signed a book contract. Yes, and I guess also celebrating my thesis defense.

Doherty: Great, yeah. You didn't mention that, but celebrating victories, small victories is very important to coping as well. So those moments are key. Yeah, so congratulations. Yeah, to you and your friend. Yeah.

Eklöf : Right, yes. Yeah, yes. What are you going to do?

Doherty: I'm just starting my day. I'm redoing my website and I am working on talking to clients and talking to a colleague in Italy about mental health diagnosis and climate change.

Pihkala: Yeah, and it's 7 p.m. in Finland now. I'm gonna take a short walk before having a sauna. listeners of this podcast over the years, because we usually record this time Thomas' morning and my evening. That sounds like a regular thing, which is very true for Finland. Thanks Britta for joining us. It's been delightful to talk about these things.

Eklöf : Good stuff. Thanks. Thank you for having me. I enjoyed the conversation. And nice meeting you both.

Doherty: Yes, thanks and listeners you can learn more or find us at climatechangeandhappiness.com and take care of yourself as you're doing all of your good work in the world and everyone be well.