Climate Change and Happiness

image credit | Miguel Bruna

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)

In Episode 3, Thomas and Panu explain “eco-anxiety,” the history of the concept, how to manage eco-anxious feelings, and how to understand climate anxiety as a primal emotion, a cultural idea, and a mental health diagnosis. Also, look forward to guests like Québécois psychologist and ecotherapist Karine St. Jean in Episode 4, and noted conservation psychologist and IPCC author Susan Clayton, and global women’s health researcher Jade Sasser later in the season.

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”]

logo design | POLLARDdesign

Welcome to the Climate Change and Happiness podcast. You’ll meet hosts Dr. Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala. Panu talks about his books and workshops on climate feelings, drawing on his background in eco-theology. Thomas speaks from the front lines of research into the mental health impacts of climate change, and shares insights about coping from his counseling practice. In this and future episodes, listeners learn a new vocabulary for climate feelings, drawing from different languages and insights from mental health therapy. “Climate Change and Happiness” is a provocative title. What does it mean to be happy at this time? We invite you to join us on this journey. 

Links

• Panu Pihkala books in Finnish: 

  • Päin helvettiä? Ympäristöahdistus ja toivo [Eco-anxiety and hope], October 2017, Helsinki: Kirjapaja. Table of contents and short description available in English in Panu’s blog 

  • Mieli maassa? Ympäristötunteet [A Handbook of eco-emotions], October 2019, Helsinki: Kirjapaja. 

• APA Task Force on Psychology and Global Climate Change 2009

• Finnish mental health site: www.ymparistoahdistus.fi

• Finnish words: 

  • Vimma (a good kind of rage)

  • Haikeus (“I will miss this when it’s gone”)

  • Suloisenhaikea (bittersweet, sweet and “haikeus” at same time). 

• Miriam Greenspan (2003) Healing Through the Dark Emotions (excerpt)

• Glenn Albrecht et al (2007). Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change

Upcoming Episodes

In Episode 2, Thomas and Panu talk about “holding space” for climate feelings, including “standing one’s ground,” and practicing “climate cosmopolitanism” by having a wide sophistication about other’s climate feelings and beliefs. In Episode 3, they explain “eco-anxiety,” the history of the concept, how to manage eco-anxious feelings, and how to understand climate anxiety as a primal emotion, a cultural idea, and a mental health diagnosis. Also, look forward to guests like Québécois psychologist and ecotherapist Karine St. Jean, noted conservation psychologist and IPCC author Susan Clayton, and global women’s health researcher Jade Sasser.

Transcript

Season 1, Episode 1: Climate Change and Happiness

[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.

Thomas Doherty: Hello I am Thomas Doherty.

Panu Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness, the show for people around the globe who are thinking deeply about the personal side of climate change, particularly their emotional responses and their feelings.

I, Thomas, am a clinical psychologist based in Portland, Oregon in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Panu is a climate emotions researcher with a background in theology, based in Helsinki, Finland - or nearby there. In this podcast we talk about our research and our activities and our personal experiences and our families and ways we cope with climate stress and build capacity for hope and happiness and how you can too as the listener. Today I want to get into the “why” of this podcast, you know, why this provocative title, Climate Change and Happiness, what is a climate emotion, how are we qualified, Panu and I, to talk about this, and why should people listen? So I’m going to turn it over to Panu to chat about this and we’re going to play off this idea. Morning for me and evening for Panu.

Panu, how is it going?

Pihkala: Thanks for asking, Thomas. In Helsinki, we are at the borderline between summer and autumn while we are recording this episode, so there’s already yellow and red leaves on trees, but still more green. That’s going to change relatively soon and autumn has for a long time been one of my favorite seasons - well practically I like all four of them or eight of them. It’s also interesting how various cultures have different numbers, they have given names for seasons and so on. But regarding our subject, climate emotions and climate feelings, I think autumn is a sort of special time for that also because it so starkly reminds us that things are changing.

Doherty: Yeah, so Panu, tell me about this - what draws you to this podcast? How does this help you personally, why do you think this is important for people?

Pihkala: In this podcast, we are exploring climate emotions and feelings from many angles. Of course, we can’t escape some facts - we are white males in rather privileged positions, but we really try to take an open view towards various experiences that people have in the world. Also, perhaps some experiences that the more-than-human-world have.

Emotions and feelings are on one hand sort of everyday subjects. Everybody knows roughly what we are talking about, but then actually when people really start researching emotions and feelings -- or affect as the one term that is growing in popularity--  it’s rather complex.  Also myself, coming from a background in religious studies, theology, interdisciplinary environmental studies and moving more and more into studies on emotion and anxiety; I’ve been surprised how complex and, at the same time, fascinating the area of emotion and feeling is. That’s a richness and it’s also a difficulty and complexity especially when talking about emotions related to such a complex phenomenon as climate change, or the climate crisis.

But how about you, Thomas? What’s your sort of starting thoughts about climate emotions and climate feelings?

Doherty: Well Panu, you know I was really drawn to work with you because of your research. You’re one of the leaders in the world in terms of researching climate emotions and you’ve got this depth in your background of theology and eco-theology. Myself, a clinical psychologist, who was drawn into this climate work some years ago and have been immersed in it now for, you know, almost 20 years. People, I think, need a place to be with climate emotions in a public forum and it is so rare. I know I get a chance to do that with people through my personal -- my clinical work and my counseling and therapy and through teaching that I’ve done and through public groups. But it’s so rare.

I would joke that this is a show for “climate and emotions nerds” and I say that in the best way possible because we - you know you and I - are of a handful of people that can, you know, not only spell “solastalgia” but also define it and also differentiate from other kinds of feelings words and that’s really fascinating right? Solastalgia being a neologism, coined by Glenn Albrecht in Australia, you know, this stress about the changing environment around us. So, I think it is really important to have a place for people to sit and be with and hear people talk about this, right? And, you know, and to break this down, you know? What’s the difference between an emotion and a feeling, for example? Or you know, affect as a jargony word that academics use, but why would we use that term instead? So these are all things that we can get to.

You know emotions are physical manifestations of our living. You cannot be alive and not have emotions. All sentient beings have emotional responses to the world around them and feelings is the language that we developed to talk about our emotions and that’s limitless. There are so many different feelings words and feelings vocabulary. So I think I want to make sure that people come away from our talk with an increased feelings vocabulary about their experience of climate change. That would be a really great deliverable for us and I hope listeners are curious about this and starting to think about their own thoughts and feelings about climate change.

Panu say a little bit about your most recent - well you can talk a bit about, I know you’ve written book in Finnish about climate emotions and you’ve done some research; so what are some of the climate emotions that you’re talking about in your research and what are you observing and then I can share a little bit about what I see.

Pihkala: Yeah, I did these two popular science books in Finnish. The first one about eco-anxiety and hope, the second one about ecological emotions - Ympäristötunteet - for those many of you who know the Finnish language. When I did the first one in 2017, I already realized the different feelings of sorrow, sadness and grief are a big part of those experiences when one speaks roughly about eco-anxiety or climate anxiety and also, feelings of guilt, inadequacy, sometimes bordering on shame. I did mention many other emotion and feeling words in that book especially the varieties of hope, despair, hopelessness and so on were a very important part there. But, I also realized that there’s so many other shades and tones in emotional experiences and that led me to do this whole handbook of various ecological emotions and feelings, and it was a journey of exploration for myself also. I was meeting a lot of people through my lectures, leading workshops around Finland mostly - some abroad - but mostly in Finland and as a result of that, I learned to appreciate the multi-colored-ness of people’s climate feelings, or climate affect.

Doherty: Yeah, so I mean what are some juicy climate feelings words that you’ve worked with.

Pihkala: Anger is a very important emotion of course, and one of the challenges when talking about emotion and feeling, including ecological or climate emotion and feeling, is that if only one term is used for a major affective dimension such as anger or sadness, then many things tend to get lost or obscured. If we think about anger, for example, there’s a sort of silent rage that many people are feeling because of all the injustices and losses related to the climate crisis. Then there’s sort of aggressive rage over social media, for example, related to the psychosocial difficulty of these issues. But then there’s also a good kind of rage. I’ve called that “vima” in Finnish language.

Vima is an old Finnish word and [William Faulkner’s] The Sound and the Fury that was translated with the word vima. So it's kind of good fury and that’s one interesting aspect. And I see that for example in many young climate activists, for example. So they are really making an effort to be non-violent, but channel their thumos, as the Greeks would say, coming back to the nerd issue, their vima or positive climate outrage or fury into constructive action. So that’s one dimension that I’ve been fascinated about.

How about you Thomas? I bet that you meet a lot of different climate emotions or feelings as part of your therapy work, so what’s some that come to your mind?

Doherty: Yeah, well I really love this and we’ll capture the theme, this good fury. What I think is helpful, Panu, is that you’ve - again, you’re getting more nuanced in the vocabulary. You know, feelings vocabulary when it’s limited we have just a few words - it’s like a watercolor paint set and we only have, you know, five basic colors, you know, red, orange, black, blue, green — and so our painting is going to be relatively in primary colors and simplistic. Anger is a primary color kind of emotion. But there’s so many nuances in anger and you’ve been able to find value in anger and actually parse that out so, you know, because anger can be very toxic for our mind and our body and for our relationships. And anyone who’s done environmental work knows that when you get too stuck in anger it’s not good for your work or for your outlook and things like that. So you’ve been able to find this kind of righteous anger which is a very healthy and evolutionarily adaptive emotion to feel anger and to stand up for yourself. And I do think we need to hold close to that kind of healthy anger and knowing it’s very powerful and very hot and very fiery, so it’s dangerous in its way.

My work with climate feelings comes out of my work in general with my clients around all kinds of feelings about their life, and I tend to do both descriptive work with feelings where I help people to kind of name what they are feeling and the spectrum. Someone might feel stressed or fatigued, for example, but within stressed or fatigued, just say that word stress, eco-stress, climate stress, life stress. You know I might feel somewhat anxious; I might feel burned out; I might feel cranky, depleted, edgy, exhausted - I’m reading off of my feelings vocab list that I use. You know, I am overwhelmed or rattled; suspenseful, tense, tight. These are all pieces of stress and fatigue and some are more neutral like weary. To be weary is just to have a busy, full day and to be weary at the end of a day whether it’s good or bad. And it’s quite normal and healthy to feel weary if you’re living a full life and so it’s certainly normal to feel weary about climate change and weary about environmental issues and just weary, worn out, depleted. You know our battery is tapped out.

I tend to try to reserve words like burned out or things like that because that’s a more final kind of feeling. When a house is burned out, you have to basically tear it down and rebuild and so we don’t want to get to a place where we’re burned out. So we’re both working with feelings, but we’re also trying to find an optimal level and be very nuanced in our language. And I try to get people to come at some more what I call neutral or sort of middle-ground feelings like feeling “vulnerable,” for example. I think is a great word that I like to work with with clients and really sit with our vulnerability because that doesn’t imply an ultimate direction it just means that we’re vulnerable. Then once we get to that point then we have a little more choice.

And then of course we can think about feelings that we want to be feeling, you know like that good fury, or maybe present, curious, engaged. You know you talked in another conversation about togetherness and so there are other feelings that we want to cultivate. So for me it's about describing, sitting with, expanding, and then cultivating you know the feelings that we want to be feeling.

What are some other kinds of feelings - you know cultivating kind of feelings - that are coming up in your research that people might want to feel about climate change?

Pihkala: Yeah, that's a very important method in my mind what you just described. Helping people reflect about what they are seeing about what they see others feeling. I came across similar methods in a project I was doing with the Finnish Mental Health Society. It is an old organization which promotes sort of proactive mental health skills — so trying to avoid any pathologization of mental health issues -- and we had shared interests because that’s been my focus related to eco-anxiety, because fundamentally it's a very rationale reaction and it may turn up into a problem if it gets too intense.

But I really want to stay clear of this pathologizing tendency and sometimes emotional feeling words are used also for those purposes. For example, if our only word for sadness is grief and then we see even grief in a sort of medicalized way that’s highly problematic and again seeing the different shades and learning to appreciate emotions and feelings as part of life. So what you talked about you know trying to find different tones and sort of acceptance also that we have feelings and there’s fluctuations also and then there are all sorts of things that we can do to work towards the goal, where we can sort of surf better with the waves of emotion.

That’s a metaphor coming from Miriam Greenspan, a therapist from the [US] East Coast. Her book Healing Through the Dark Emotions is one of my favorite emotion books actually, and this metaphor of having recognized the force of emotion, the wave - to use the surfing metaphor, I know Thomas you are on the West Coast so I thought this might be appropriate - actually some people surf even in Finland it’s pretty cold here but yeah! So, surfing on the wave you have some control, but you don’t think that you can control the whole sea either. So that metaphor has some strength in my mind.

Doherty: Yeah, exactly and we do go surfing here. You can surf. There’s no such thing as bad weather only bad gear. So if you have a good enough wetsuit you can surf anywhere. And I love that and that’s something that all of our listeners can sit with for a moment. You know we can control our behavior on the wave but we cannot control the ocean. You know we can come into harmony with the swell and the wind, and we can certainly pick better or worse days to go try to struggle with the breakers in the ocean. And that’s what surfers do. They become very wise about timing and they’re patient. So all that said, such a deep metaphor. Some years ago I was involved with a whole seminar at the American Psychological Association at the meeting in Hawaii, we did a whole workshop on surfing and psychology. And we had several different researchers talking about surfing and there’s a rich literature on surfing about connection with nature and consciousness and all of that.

But the surf metaphor is helpful in our daily life, exactly. You know that’s another image for feelings is we have this curve, this despair and empowerment curve. We’re going to be up; we’re going to be down. As we become interested and excited about a project and taking action we get inspired and we have energy and then once we realize how complicated the project it is and how difficult sometimes we get fatigued and we lose our inspiration and even come into a despair place. Anyone who has done a project — and Panu you and I, we talk about our writing — I’m in a bit of a despair place in a project I’m trying to finish up so I feel like I’m on mile 23 of a marathon here and I just need just push it out this chapter on climate change for a clinical psychology textbook — which is great that we’re writing about this in a clinical psychology textbook. So it's a great project, but it’s also tough to pull this stuff together.

So, surfing the wave, you know I think this summer [Summer 2021] - the IPCC 6th assessment report, the 6th cycle is coming out and we’re getting the physical basis report coming out and you know with climate change we have direct mental health impacts from disasters and storms and problems, and we have indirect as all this washes over our society. Then, we have the subjective impacts of just bearing and sitting with this global problem, this global hyper object of climate change, and so we really need feelings skills. That’s why we have this podcast. We need some concrete, daily feelings skills.

You know the IPCC 6th cycle there’s nothing particularly — if you follow this and many of our listeners probably are experts on this more so than myself — but there’s nothing particularly new in the 6th cycle; there’s nothing particularly new in any of these. They’re simply becoming more clear and there is more consilience in the science about climate. Global warming exists. We know that it’s caused by human activities and not just natural activities, we know that it’s having impacts, social, humanitarian, economic impacts. Now we’re having attribution studies where we can actually link a storm or a flood to climate change and we can kind of tell how much it’s been amplified due to, you know, human centered climate change.

This research is scary to people and so I think one practical skill is to work on working with our fear. There’s a difference between being afraid, being anxious, being apprehensive, being frightened, being nervous, being panicked, paralyzed. So people have this kind of spectrum and I try to help people move from that to a place of alertness and presence and vulnerability and awareness, centering, breathing, all of these kinds of therapeutic things that we can talk about in upcoming episodes. We can have the capacity to sit with looking through an IPCC report and gleaning what we want to get out of it that is new and notable and potentially helpful for us, not simply living in fear of this knowledge that we’re creating. I mean it’s unprecedented, the knowledge that we know of climate change, we don’t want to live in fear of it.

Pihkala: Yeah, exactly. The different shades of fear and anxiety and worry. Ranging from panic to very constructive worrying which is related to proactive action also so that’s another very important topic and the workshops that I’m leading often together with various experts, many of the people who come there have a long history with environmental issues. Then there’s some more common features in those kinds of people’s experiences. For example, the danger of burning out or becoming clinical because if you love the natural world and know what’s going on there’s so many losses around and it’s difficult to make changes and sometimes it's difficult to read the good news. Media and communication is another big subject here. For some other people it may be guilt and shame are more central emotional issues and that’s made more difficult by different structural things and political action or inaction where often the responsibility is left too much for the individuals, and causing complications of guilt and shame, for example.

But despite people having very different situations and feelings and emotions, some dynamics are similar like the need for emotion skills that you, Thomas, mentioned and also, the desire to be validated by safe others in one’s emotional experiences. Validated, recognized, sometimes even, you know, held, holding in the psychological sense or containment to use another term from psychology. So that’s what I see happening a lot in these workshops also. Even though that might not be a very thorough investigation of all the emotional tones, there might just happen enough validation and holding so that it becomes beneficial for people and let’s hope that this podcast at least sometimes could function in that way also for people.

Doherty: Indeed Panu, I second that emotion there. I mean being validated and I hope everyone who is listening to us, no matter where you happen to be. You know Panu and I are separated, you know, around the globe and we do expect people are going to be listening in from any place on the planet and, you know, I do want people to feel validated and, you know, as we get this podcast set up and running, climatechangeandhappiness.com, I look forward to hearing from people and hearing questions and things that people might want us to explore.

But I do want to validate. It is just the basic point. As a clinical psychologist, I can tell that it is totally normal and sane to be concerned about issues like climate change and, you know, environmental degradation and toxins in the environment. And it's very normal to feel sadness and grief around extinction and things like that. These are a sign of health actually and a sign of values. So as we talk more, you know, we realize that we’re in pain or we’re hurting because we have values. We can get into these words and get really strong with them and really get creative with these climate words. You know one thing that Panu and I like to share is different cultural terms and words and we have fun with this. That’s where this title comes from Climate Change and Happiness. We are — it’s a provocative title I know — but we are playing with the idea of what would it mean to be happy in this world and can we claim some legitimate happiness and how new is this anyway? We talk about - you know one of the words I love is the Portuguese word of saudade and we’ve talked about weltschmerz, you know, in German. Saudade you know that sort of longing, that kind of delicious longing for something from the past, a very sensual kind of feeling of longing and missing something. How do we differentiate words like saudade or weltschmerz which is “world weariness” and “world pain"?  How do we differentiate some of these words that we’ve known and lived with for years? These are parts of the human experience and how does that relates to climate change, for example?

We have neologisms like solastalgia which is a very kind of painful word. It really describes a pain and a loss and almost a ripping away. You know, of course, the term comes from Australia where those massive coal-mining projects have been tearing up the environment and people are seeing their places, you know, landscapes destroyed. So that’s a very painful kind of emotion. It’s a victimized kind of feeling. But how do we claim this and move past victimhood to more of a fully-feeling self. I know Panu, you have great Finnish words that come into play here.

Pihkala: Yeah, one example of that is haikeus which is sort of realizing that you will miss this when it’s gone and also realizing that the process is ongoing. That’s sort of related to many existential themes deep down, haikeus, and then we also have a combination of suloisen and haikea which means it's not exactly bittersweet but almost so it's sweet and haikea at the same time. That’s one of the mixed feelings that the climate crisis brings us and also one sign of health and one sign that the process has gone a bit forward. There’s always many factors affecting these emotional processes and it's not just up to the individual but luckily the individual also can do a lot in many cases and we know that people’s circumstances are very different here. So if one can also feel happiness or even bittersweetness in addition to sadness and solastalgia and all the trouble, that’s already something and testifies to the human ability for meaning-making even though the times may be very rough as they have been in human history many times.

Doherty: Indeed. So I hope this gives people a taste of what we’re coming after in the Climate Change and Happiness Podcast. Again, this is a show for people around the globe who are thinking deeply about the personal side of climate change including their climate feelings. I think we were able to get into a bit of the why of this podcast and why we would title it “Climate Change and Happiness.” The difference between climate emotions and climate feelings: Emotions are in your body, you all have them. Not everybody has feelings though until you grow them and explore them so we’re going to explore them in this podcast and we’ve had a lot to share and I think it’s a great resource for people. So, Panu I’m going to start my day here, it’s actually Labor Day here in the US so it’s a holiday - a national holiday and there’s some beautiful weather here in the Pacific Northwest and I’m going to spend some time with my daughter and I’m going to spend some time on my writing today and my life, and you’ve got an evening and some children that will be coming up to see you soon.

Pihkala: Yeah, that’s true and in our house on Monday there’s the public sauna also for house inhabitants so that’s up on my list after the boys go to bed, I’ll go to the sauna and talk with the old guys who regularly come there.

Doherty: That sounds very civilized Panu and very Finnish and I would love to be there with you, so you have a great evening and I look forward to more of these conversations in the future. Take care.  

Pihkala: Likewise, Thomas and thanks for all the listeners.

Doherty: Take care everyone.

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