Climate Change and Happiness

image credit | Jeremy Bishop

Season 5, Episode 15: A Journey around the Planet (Without Flying) With Thor Pedersen

Thor Pedersen embarked on a decade-long journey, traveling to every country without flying, redefining the limits of Earth-based travel. Join us to learn about the logistics and lessons of Thor’s global trek, revealing how resilience and cultural understanding transformed his mission into a powerful message about climate change and hope.

Links

• Thor Pedersen

  • (2026) The Impossible Journey

  • I visited every country in the world without flying. Here are eight things I learned.The Guardian

  • Man who visited every country without flying has finally returned home (video)

• Other topics discussed in the episode

  • Paul Salopek, walking around the world for National Geographic, the “Out of Eden walk.”

Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.

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

Panu Pihkala: I am Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: And this is our podcast, Climate Change and Happiness, the show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about, well, climate change and happiness and our relationship with nature and making a space to talk about some of these global issues and how they manifest in our life and in our values. And Panu and I have been talking for a few years. He's in Helsinki and I'm in Portland, Oregon. And we've been thinking about travel in the world and all the things that we can learn by traveling and meeting different people and we are lucky to have a special guest today. It's going to help us in our conversation.

Thor Pedersen: Yeah, hi, I'm happy to be on board. My name is Thor Pedersen. I'm from Denmark and I'm best known for reaching every country in the world without flying.

Doherty: Yes, and that's exactly true. And I got a chance to meet Thor just recently at a literary festival and got a chance to meet him and see him speak and read his book. I, like many people, learned about his journey. And he is a very unique person. He's traveled all around the world, to every country in the world, without using a plane, which required, I think, I believe, 10 years.

Many, many interesting adventures and logistical challenges to make this happen. And I'm just fascinated by the whole story. I think people who are open to experience and travel are always fascinated by stories like this. It is truly a modern day journey. I thought it would really be great to bring Thor on our podcast and share this with you, the listener, just to take this conversation in a unique direction with someone who's recently had this global experience and see what insights we can have. I know I've got questions and things I'm curious about, but Panu, do you want to get us started?

Panu Pihkala: Warmly welcome Thor also on my behalf and lovely to have Nordic connections online in this podcast also. Travel is something that a lot of people really enjoy. Of course there's in equality globally about who gets to travel and so on, but there's also very different means of travel. In our climate crisis shaped world, many people are having thoughts and feelings about travel, lots of desires to see other countries and meet people, and there's a of good happening out of that, and then people are wondering about the carbon footprint and sometimes about security issues and so on.

In this podcast we've been touching on these themes earlier, but it's been a long time since we did any focused conversation on travel and that's going to be fascinating. What would you like to share from your journey towards the time and place where you are now? How did you become a human person who has done all this and now is trying to balance between various areas of life as many are doing?

Pedersen: Thank you for the welcome and that is an interesting question. So that comprises a connection between who I was in 2013 and who I might have been when I returned in 23 and who I am today. Back in 2013, I was very ambitious and my project was mostly centered around myself, my ambition and doing something which had never been done before. And then from early on, mean, like the first weeks or the first very few months of traveling, it took a turn and it became more about humanitarian work carried out by the Red Cross. I was traveling as a Goodwill Ambassador of the Danish Red Cross and meeting with the Red Cross.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Pedersen: In every country I was going through. And also the meetings that I had with people in every country I went through. And the culture, the food, the history, the scenery, the infrastructure, mean everything that I moved through. I was looking for something positive to share from every country in the world. And that came from my eyes being opened up very early in the project where I was surprised about the level of development or the local beauty. And again, I mean, some of these cities, the architecture and the way people were dressing. And, you know, these were countries that I felt maybe less about. So I was going through some countries where, you know, to the best of my knowledge, they were lagging behind five, 10, 15 years behind in development and then arriving and seeing that's absolutely not the case.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Pedersen: In some cases they were way ahead and also that there are other ways to measure these things. So, you know, I had been to more than 50 countries at the age of 34. was 34 when I left Denmark and I thought I knew quite a lot about the world. then because I was surprised about these countries and how much positive there was to share about them, I came to the conclusion that maybe a lot of other people also didn't know these things. And then I reasoned that media, mainstream media at least, is often quite negative. By default it focuses on the worst of the worst in our world. And everything I was seeing, not everything, but most of what I was seeing was contradicting the news stream. So I felt that I had a role to play as a voice, as someone who would be sharing the positive in every country and promoting every country around the world as if it was the best country in the world. So that was sort of the evolution of my project and then as it grew and got longer and longer and more and more demanding, I also took upon myself a role as an inspiration and motivation to people who want to achieve things in life.

Doherty: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Pedersen: and when asked, talked to people and said, you know, look at what I have accomplished. And I've basically been out here on my own. So you have a team and if you can work together with this team, then just imagine the synergy and how much you guys would be able to accomplish. And I think there's a strong message in that. I also think that there's a strong message in that if you believe in something, if you have a goal and you truly believe in it and it's something you really want, then what are the main obstacles between reaching that goal and failing is your willpower. You will have bad days, it will be difficult. Not everything's going to be rosy red and fun and perfect. And you have to push through those hard patches. And when a door is locked, then you look for another door. And when someone says no, then you smile and say thank you. And you look for someone else to help you. But you find a way forward.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Pedersen: Yeah, so in 2013 nobody knew who I was and nobody would do an interview with me and I didn't have much to tell or say I came back in 2023 and yeah, I had a big online following and wrote a book and we finished a documentary film and interviews and attention and speaking engagements. So my life has been turned upside down. Yeah, I mean, we can, I can keep talking about this, but yeah.

Doherty: Yeah. No, this is great. Yeah, yeah. I like your book and I highly recommend Thor's book because it's also very personal and you talk about your background and your childhood. And you know, like many people, you were lucky enough to have connections with nature and canoeing and being. Early on, I think you found solace and support in the natural world, even alone as a child or when you needed your own space. And so I think you were comfortable on the land. And then, of course, the whole kind of Viking Nordic Scandinavian history of travel, I think that filled your sales, some of those either stereotypes or truth. But yeah, seems to me that, well, we can go in a lot of directions with our podcast

Pedersen: Yeah.

Doherty: It seems like you started off as an engineer, like working on logistics, because it was a big logistical problem. And then you came back more, I don't know, as a humanitarian or as a philosopher or something like that. So there was a huge, huge, huge personality change, I think, you know, or a growing or maturing into yourself. So jump in.

Pedersen: So my travel hero is Ibn Battuta, who was born out of Morocco some many, many hundred years ago. And there is a quote from him, which is that “travel makes you speechless and then turns you into a storyteller”.

Doherty: I love it. Yeah. Yeah.

Pihkala: That's great.

Pedersen: Yeah.

Doherty: Yeah, what are you thinking about Panu in terms of, you you're you talk to people all around the world and you're in, you know, plumbing the depths of different emotions and experiences. What's coming up in your mind?

Pihkala: Yeah, very fascinating to hear your story Thor. Thanks for sharing some elements of that and there would be a lot of stories to tell. I instantly hear that and thinking of our audience of people who are interested about various aspects of how to try to live well amidst contemporary times and you have already touched on quite important teams like willpower and courage but also the ability to ask for help when that's needed. So it seems that it wasn't just an individual hero's journey that you did but there was quite a lot of things going on between you and other people.

Pedersen: Absolutely. I mean, this is something I often stress that not just me, but anyone as far as I'm concerned who reaches every country in the world, if they think they did that on their own, then they're delusional. For me, I know that this was a collaboration with people across every continent and pretty much every country. was an enormous amount of support, sometimes really small support but meaningful and sometimes in the biggest ways imaginable but you know it's not a single person's achievement, this is a multiplayer game.

Pihkala: If you take a look back at these long journeys, is there some experience and memory of somebody really helping you out perhaps in a way that you didn't expect which comes to your mind?

Pedersen: There is, it's a bit of a story. I'll try to compress it as much as possible, but in West Africa, I had been in West Africa for quite some time and I felt that, okay, now I was starting to understand the culture and how things were and handshakes and this and that. And one of the things I clearly understood was that when you get inside a vehicle, then everybody in that vehicle is a team and that whatever that vehicle faces we face it together. So if you're in a bus, a mini bus in a Bush taxi, then you're a team. This was one thing and you do not desert your team. You know, this is one thing.

The other thing that I thought I understood was that quite often when someone pulls on a uniform, then they become unbelievably corrupted and and they might misuse their power. So the story goes that I've been through hundreds and hundreds of checkpoints on small dirt roads in rural areas and whatnot. And I'm in a Toyota Corolla and there three women in the back and I'm next to the driver up in front and we come to a checkpoint.

There is a very corrupted guy there who's blocking my passage and all my paperwork is in order, everything checks out. But it doesn't matter. The game is that they will keep asking you questions until you say you don't know or if you're confused and they will try to press some money out of you.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Pedersen: So I was in this situation and usually I understand it's a game and I do not lose my temper, but this was just it had been building up for many months. And in this situation, I absolutely lost it. And I, you know, I started shouting at this guy and going like, you know, if your country wasn't as corrupt as it was, then maybe it would be a much better country and the roads would be better and education would be better and health care would be better and blah, blah, blah. You know, you're all blocking the way for each other, this kind of stuff.

And at the point when I lose it he starts smiling because he knows now he has won. You know now he has definitely won the situation and while I'm there very very angry one of the women she comes over to me one of the women from the Toyota Comes over and pulls me aside and says just give him $20. It's all he wants then we can all continue and I explode and go like, know corruption is the cancer of a country blah blah blah.

Then the driver comes over and the driver says to me, you know, we don't have time for this. You have to point out what luggage is yours. We'll take it off and then you can stay here and we will continue without you, but we don't have time to wait. And I explode even more. I start shouting “you people have nothing but time. Everybody has time, know. Everything takes 10 times as much time as it's supposed to. You don't need to rush. You don't have deadlines. What are you talking about?” So I'm really, really angry and upset.

And then somewhere in between all of this, the police is also called over and I'm going to get arrested for not having proper paperwork or something like this. So it's a stressful situation. I'm very angry. I have the driver there. I have this woman here. I'm feeling like, where's the team? You know, we're supposed to be a team. What happened to my team? And they're all going against me. And then suddenly this corrupted guy at the checkpoint, he goes, okay, everything is fine. You can continue. And I look at him in surprise. Like he just changed his mind. I go, yeah, I know it's okay.

Doherty: Mmm.

Pedersen: it's okay yes of course I can go and I get back in the vehicle and we start driving and the women are in the back and the driver is next to me and the driver he's smiling and he's holding on to the steering wheel with two hands and he's just kind of having a good time smiling and I'm really upset you know, what happened to the team? so I look at the driver and I say so that was really nice and he's just smiling and driving and I say so you were going to leave me and he's smiling and driving he's not saying anything and then one of the women in the back said, you know, he helped you. And I turn around and I look at her and go, “what do you mean? He was going to leave me.” And the woman said he was never ever going to leave you. What he did was he was pretending. So he put pressure on the checkpoint. And if the checkpoint believed that you were going to be left behind, then the checkpoint would also be under the assumption that they would have to feed you and give you a place to stay. And then I would become the checkpoints problem. So by doing that, he was playing the game. Actually, he was helping.

So in one second, my mind goes from, this guy I thought who was working against me was really working for me, this guy that I was giving a hard time, he was my friend. And you know, this was a very surprising development for me and I learned something about the culture that I didn't understand before. And I grew, I think, in that moment.

Pihkala: Mmm, thanks for sharing.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Pedersen: My pleasure.

Doherty: Yeah, that's, that's wonderful. mean, yeah, I think all of us, have our preconceptions and then I think there's entitlement as a white skinned male. And then there's global culture. I think one thing you confronted and that we've talked about it in our in our podcast is just, you know, the world is a good place and people are good, but there is injustice and there is a history of injustice and colonialism. And so we never know. We never know what stories people hold and what past grievances they have and where we were clueless about this.

And we still have to go and try to be nice and be accepted for who we are as our own self, our own person. I mean we didn't create these past problems yet we have to speak for them. So it seemed like that was also a theme through you were a unwitting white representative of history or something like that as you went through all these countries. And so that seemed like another burden of the trip that you became more conscious of as you went.

Pedersen: Well, yes, I've had several of such encounters. But I've also had a few episodes where I kind of saw something in a different light. One time in Cameroon, I was couch surfing with this really nice guy and his family, wife and children. They had a small house down a slope. There was a busy road and then there was a dirt road heading down to their house and lots of houses following this dirt road.

And this dirt road was terrible, you would barely be able to drive a normal vehicle down it. The water had been ripping this apart for years probably. It was difficult to walk on. It's a really bad road. And one day I was having lunch with him, eating some fish and we're talking and I said, you know, you guys live here. There must be 20 houses around this road. Why don't you just knock on every door and then you agree that next Thursday everyone got to come out with shovels and then you're going to fix your road and your life will be better.

You know, this is the way I saw it. And then he said to me, well, we could do that. But then maybe after one or two hours of working on the road, a government representative would show up and say, what's going on here? Has this been commissioned by government? And then there's a no, no, we're just doing this for ourselves and go like, yes, but this is a government road.

Stop this and who's in charge and you have to come for a meeting with government. And then, you know, whoever organized would then have to head over and sit in a government office and they would ask questions and they would say, so are you competition to the sitting government? And then you might reply, no, I'm not competition. I'm just fixing my own road. The road has been like this for 10 years. Nothing is happening. And then the government would reply, it's in planning.

So don't go back out and don't do anything to that road. It's in planning. And that might mean nothing's going to happen with that road ever, but you just don't even have the chance to fix your own situation.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's interesting. That reminds me of this whole climate hostage phenomenon that I talk about in my book, this idea that people are kind of trapped. Sometimes we're trapped in a system where we can't control the larger world, and we have to learn to make peace with it and find our meaning and find our agency within that. So that's really interesting. Yeah.

Pihkala: Hmm.

Pedersen: I guess, I mean, you know everyone can do something. I mean at the point when you sit down and say there's nothing I can do. It's game over. Everyone can do something and you can do you can find you know concrete action that you can do. You can also just be a voice and you know something I found was that when I left home in 2013 I had a few small interviews here and there and nobody ever asked me if the non-flying had anything to do with the environment. Nobody asked me that question. Nobody cared. then around 2016 or 2017 Greta Thunberg she entered the stage and she did that in such a big way that it changed the way that we speak and the way that we think and the way that so many people see the world and beyond that point I started to get the first questions about so the non-flying is it because is it because of the environment you're not flying and I would explain so and I'll tell you what so no questions back in 2013, 14, 15 now we're in 2026

When I speak to a journalist, they don't even ask. They assume that the reason I wasn't flying was because of the environment. Because that is the world we live in today. They assume if you're not flying for all of that, it's because of the environment. They're not even asking questions.

Doherty: I'm so glad you shared that that's really that's really helpful. And that does indicate how the world has changed. Panu and I have tracked this world. Panu, you were going to say something earlier. Panu, do you have a thought on your mind?

Pihkala: Yeah, that's a great story of how change happens and a lot of things are going on in the world and we know there's lots of trouble but it's also very healthy to try to keep an eye on the things that have gone into a better direction. is that also and the car story reminds me of discussions we had for example with Bob Dobson on this podcast, Bobby is a psychologists and sustainability expert who is advocating for community resilience, or what he calls transformational resilience, or not just returning to the previous state of things, but growing via adversity. As well Matteo Innocenti from Italy, a climate psychologist we also interviewed, is that in when climate disasters and changes start to grow, we will need much more of that “We are in the same team just because we are in the same place” kind of attitude which you described from your time in Africa. But for the listeners I think it would be very interesting to hear that some of your observations about climate change during your travels. Is there something that comes to your mind first about that?

Pedersen: Hmm. Yeah, thank you for asking. This is truly something I never get to speak about. No one ever asks me about this. I have this unique experience of I cannot remember going through a country where people did not tell me that things were out of the ordinary. They said we had so much rain this year. my grandfather is the last one who can remember that we had this much rain where we are. Or they had no rain at all and they say we can't believe it there hasn't been a drop of rain this year or it's the summer came earlier or winter came earlier or the storms were intensified or it's just everywhere I went people were talking about these extreme observations say you know there is no denying the change it is definitely changing in our lifetime and we can see and measure the change. So that was a big eye-opener for me in terms of what we're doing to our planet and what we probably need to do if we want to keep a place on this planet.

Pihkala: Thanks for sharing, very important to hear. Another big time traveler, Paul Salopek has been writing this story for National Geographic “Out of Eden walk” where he started from Africa and has been going through Asia. That was one of his experiences also that everywhere people are actually talking about the changes that climate change is bringing. I think that's something we miss in the Western industrialized world sometimes. That's how much ordinary people all around the world really observe how change is happening. Of course, then resilience, which is a word which was mentioned, highly important. What comes to your mind? Thought about people's resilience and their skillfulness in responding to the changes that have come as a result of climate change

Pedersen: Well, I believe that people are resilient everywhere. It's just not everyone who has been tested yet. Within the Red Cross, Red Cross delegate would tell me, the people here are so resilient. They're amazingly resilient. But I would then hear this again and again and again and again. And, you know, in my experience, people are resilient. People are good at adapting and people are good at digging in if that's what they want to do. So yeah, I think we don't have to worry about resilience, but we're fragile. As humans, we're incredibly fragile. If the storms get much worse and much more frequent, what are we going to do if the temperature jumps to up or down to a degree where our fragile bodies cannot handle it.

I mean, you have entire cities, entire societies that are built up around air conditioning. You go from an air conditioned vehicle into an air conditioned office, back to an air conditioned vehicle, into an air conditioned restaurant, back into an air conditioned vehicle, into an air conditioned home, a gym, a mall, a dairy farm even, which is air conditioned. So what happens when you cut the air condition? And right now with the recent conflict in the Middle East. mean, normally I don't like saying Middle East in that way, but it is truly across most of the Middle East right now. They are worried that they will start targeting these energy plants or the energy supply. If they cut the air conditioning, then some of these cities, they will be in big, big trouble and these people will be in big, big trouble.

That's how fragile we are. You know, at the other end of it, you could be working in the Arctic or Antarctic and someone comes and takes your jacket away. You know, that's basically what would happen in the opposite. So we are super fragile. There's this standup comedian who made a joke about humans inventing helmets.  Humans are stupid enough to know that they're doing things that are breaking their heads, but they're so dumb that they invent helmets so they can continue doing the things that are breaking their heads. And that's humans, right? So we find a way to live where we're not supposed to live or we cannot live. But what happens when conditions change so much that we cannot live anywhere?

Doherty: huh. Yeah.

Pihkala: Hmm.

Pedersen: You know, it's a real risk. All the cities, all the societies, everywhere we have masses, great masses of people. This is near rivers and near coastlines. If the water comes up, I mean, there's only so much you can do. You have to move hundreds of millions of people. Where are they going to go? Kind of live on people's fields? You know, we have to manage this. And if we're capable, then it's definitely on us to do something about it.

Pihkala: Mmm.

Doherty: Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting when they research helmets, parents, you know, let their kids do more risky things when they have helmets. So helmet helmets allow us. Yeah, they we are technology does allow us to take these risks. But yes, instead of just stopping the risk, just keep doing it with the right equipment.

Doherty: Well, we've got to we've got to tie up our conversation, although we always say we could go longer. And what often happens is what just happened in our talk. think listeners, you know, we want to come back to the very beginning of what Thor was talking about the idea of resilience and see this idea of toughness and having a goal and then realizing we're never alone because that's what happens.

We learn about the world, we realize that we're fragile, we realize there are all these problems, and then we have to come back to the beginning of our journey and, and pull together our strengths and our team, and our values and our principles.

And I know when people say, “Thomas, don't you get upset, don't you get disillusioned?” and I say I do but everywhere I've ever gone everywhere in the world people care about these issues. And like you say, Thor, they were experiencing them, it's so obvious we are all feeling similarly.

Pedersen: Don't take my word for it. Paul Salopek, said it as well.

Doherty: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so I'm really honored, Thor, to have you here. I mean, it's rare to meet a true adventurer, you know, in that classic sense. So I really it does elevate our conversation. So I'm really, really proud of you and look forward to tracking your adventures going forward. It's a hero's journey where you have to share your message that you gathered over those 10 years. So anyway, let's wrap it up. We're going to put some links to Thor's book and media and I haven't seen your documentary so we'll need to figure out a way to see that and spread this word around. Stay in touch. I know for both of you its late afternoon so I'll leave you to your families and I'll begin my day here. Panu and Thor, thank you very much

Pedersen: Thank you. Absolutely. Yeah, thank you to both of you. Thank you, Panu. Thank you, Thomas. It's been a real pleasure.

Pihkala: Wonderful to talk with you too.

From Mor Keshet

Season 5, Episode 14: Art Therapy for Climate Resilience with Mor Keshet 

Thomas and Panu explored the intersection of art, creativity, and environmental psychology with art therapist Mor Keshet. Join us to discover practical art activities like mandalas and collage that help process climate emotions and foster identity and resilience.

Links 

• Mor Keshet

• Writings

• Integrative Eco Art Therapy: Addressing Humanity's Fractured Attachment to Nature, Ecopsychology (contact author for copy)  

• Post Traumatic Ecology: Learning Emotional Resilience from the Living World, Biomimicry Institute

• When Gratitude Becomes Embodied: The Mental Health Benefits of Nature-Based Awareness, Psychology Today

• Climate Psychology Alliance - North America

• Ariella Cook-Shonkoff (2025) How Interacting With Mandalas Can Heal Us

• Previous Podcast Episode: Season 2, Episode 12: Art Gives Ecological Grief a Body, with Daniela Molnar

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. is our podcast. This is a show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change and other environmental issues. And this is a place where we open up to emotions. And today we're thinking about art and creativity and our connections with nature and expression of our feelings and also art as a therapeutic tool. And to help us in this conversation, we are really excited to have a special guest.

Keshet: Hi, I'm Mor Keshet.

Doherty: Mor is a colleague of mine and Panu's from New York City, Long Island. She will tell more about herself in a minute, but she's a well-established art therapist. And we're going to get into this. So this is a creative episode for you all listeners. So you might even want to have something if you're available, something to write with or sketch with as we're as we're talking, because you might have some ideas. Panu, do you want to get us started?

Pihkala: Welcome Mor also on my behalf. Lovely to meet you. I've been following your work online and noticed that you've been using the climate emotions wheel and that easily lends itself to various creative practices and when facilitating workshops, which is what I sometimes do, I love to explore various creative and somatic methods and so on. So I'm very interested in things that you have been doing, but we often start by asking our guests something about the journey towards the time and place and style where they are now. So would you like to share something about how did you end up becoming so engaged with environmental and climate matters and arts?

Keshet: Yeah, well first of all, thank you both so much for having me here. I'm a big admirer and I appreciate, earnestly appreciate everything that you've both contributed to this field and it's wonderful to be here with you in dialogue. So I've been an art therapist since 2005. I went to the School of Visual Arts for my master's in art therapy and I've always been working with people who've experienced overwhelming life events, right? So homeless adults who were mentally ill and chemically addicted, women who experienced sex trafficking, families who were facing separation from one another.

And this really kind of came from a backdrop of being a granddaughter of an Auschwitz survivor. And I've had this lifelong interest, very, very deep interest in what kind of separates people who simply survive and people who really thrive and feel a tremendous sense of belonging and placement in the world. So this lifelong pursuit. for many years, I was kind of developing this integrative creative arts therapy approach and when I came into private practice work, while I myself have a very deep connection to the natural world, I didn't really think about the overlap and how this lends itself, which is a massive understatement, to clinical practice.

When COVID came around and we were all kind of put in this space, working with people who were already experiencing, were prone to kind of acute levels of dissociation, I was kind of confounded by how even more detached, listless, unmoored, the people that I was working with had become when all of these identity-feeding silos of work and school were out of the picture. So on a whim I started suggesting to clients, this was in the spring, right? I started suggesting to clients that we meet in the park. And I didn't change anything. I brought the same materials. I replaced the big butcher block table with a couple of beach chairs and materials that were easy to take around. But I saw almost an immediate and palpable shift. Where all of a sudden, these kind of very narrow narratives of symptomology and trauma stories and kind of repeated patterns were opening. These channels were just opening and resourcing was expanding, sense of place, sense of presence was just becoming so much more apparent and I thought this is fascinating.

And I started reading, eco-psychology, eco-therapy, and more specifically, eco-art therapy, which is still very much a burgeoning field. This is all emergent, right? And I started thinking about how I can be far more intentional in integrating some of what I was learning into my practice. And I also just said, I'm going to start offering groups. Everyone is so freaked out and isolated and alienated during this COVID time, let's see if I can help in some way beyond my therapy practice. And the groups just really started to take off and I joined the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America where I quickly was asked to co-chair our expressive arts committee and to be a regional coordinator.

And I became a faculty member with the Climate Emotions Resilience Institute and just started doing a lot of public facing work with all different kinds of organizations for a nonprofit. And it seemed to kind of coalesce into this paper that I wrote for eco-psychology about integrative eco-art therapy and how specifically it's addressing humans fractured attachment to the natural world. The shift that I have seen over the last six years of bringing this framework into my practice of working with trauma, essentially, working with overwhelming experience, and we are all either experiencing or witnessing individual and collective trauma, you know, on our communities, on our planet, on the more than human world.

It's been a wonderful journey in progress.

Pihkala: Thank you for sharing that sounds fascinating and courageous to take it outside and almost instantly rewarding is what I hear you say. And Thomas, you have a very long history of taking therapy and psychology outdoors, so I know this resonates with a lot of things in your history and mind.

Doherty: Yeah, well, more your story resonates with almost every guest we have has a some sort of origin moment or origin series of moments. And so that's, that's part of it. You know, you know, in this case, we're talking about art therapy and someone's mission or goals there, but it could be almost any aspect of life or what people do for a living. But, but in this case, it's such a rich area.

In my book, I have a chapter on creativity and arts and it was, it was a really, it was one of the most enjoyable chapters that I worked on just because there was so many. I mean, when you, when we start to realize, well, just to step back and you know, we talk about this on our, on the podcast a lot, but this idea of our environmental identity. So we have this identity in relation to nature and the natural world, which for many people can be quite dormant. Like they haven't really been coached to talk about that aspect of their identity, they haven't been coached to talk about their, you know, environmental values or their aesthetic connections or the places that they love or places in nature that really call to them. It's quite common. So almost everyone has this experience.

But you know, it's just not something that's talked about even in school. You know, we tend to, you know, science is you look at nature through science or politics or justice or natural history which is which is all which are all great but there's a whole other piece here which is you know how my connection to nature is shaped by the books that I read and the paintings that I see and the music that I listen to and once you turn people onto that then it's almost endless all the different influences.

I think artists as artists have always been pioneers in environmental consciousness in any age of human civilization so we think of the romantic movement in Europe, the romantic poets or paintings or a poet like Emily Dickinson or, or Walt Whitman. These are, these are people that are masters at expressing all different kinds of thoughts and feelings around nature and the natural world. And, and then that, and we're talking about bringing this into our own lives, you know, us, us partaking of this. And so I think, I know with myself, I've always had to reassure people, you don't need to be some sort of fancy trained artist to do this kind of thing. Cause I think there's a lot of shame and inadequacy with environmental consciousness. Like, I'm not green enough. I'm not outdoorsy enough. I'm not this, I'm not that. So I, I imagine more that that there's something about empowering people to get past their, their limitations about their preconceived limitations about creativity and art.

Keshet: Absolutely, I mean a couple of things that I always tell people and I'm happy to share with your listeners is that we all have an innate desire to self-express. Christopher Henshelwood who is a famous archaeologist in uncovering and deciphering ancient cave paintings around the world. You know, he's talked about the unique symbolic mind of our species. We've seen to have, as far as I know, across species, it's truly singular to our species to create symbol in response to our experience. And symbol, of course, can be visual, it can be written, it can be spoken, it can be moved. So we've had this innate need to literally say with our hands on the wall, I was here and it meant something to me. This meant something. This meant something to me and to the people around me.

And that is a really unique experience, which you do not have to be Picasso to enjoy. And Picasso, of course, famously said that he painted his whole life to learn how to paint like a child. But there's also, there's so many different access points to one's creativity. I also tell people, I don't draw well. I love to be incredibly expressive and spontaneous. there is photography and there's collage and there's lots of different ways that we can give form to image and to symbolic meaning in our minds. It's right there. It's right under the surface. So much of it is just giving ourselves permission, just permission to begin to tap into that primordial, you know, this repertoire. Being creative, didn't used to be something that you had to pencil in. It wasn't a hobby. You it was just an innate quality of being human. And I think it's really time that we kind of recapture that for ourselves.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Pihkala: Well said, well said. The arts and crafts is a fascinating example of this. We have a Finnish word for that. Using creativity when you are making tools that you need in your everyday life. Which used to be still common in the time of my grandfather in Finland. It's been a very rapid transition from the agricultural society to an industrial and urbanized one. And I think there's been many losses which have happened when we lost that ability to somatically and very holistically practice creativity in relation to the daily things we do. It's much more difficult to shape your laptop into something which reflects your style of being in the world. So heavily resonating with this theme of living very literally, I think, is a fundamental dimension here.

Keshet: Yeah, it's an orientation. It really is an orientation to one's life, right? It's Nietzsche's Ubermensch, where your orientation to life becomes that this is, it's all art. know, this is, we have this wild spontaneity, just like the universe and just like the natural world, to create. We are creative beings.

And we're co-creating right now in this dialogue. And if really that becomes our orientation, then in terms of environmental identity, that sense of interbeing, that sense of deep interconnection with the more than human world becomes so profound and so embodied. So embodied. Yeah.

Doherty: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So let's, let's talk about specific art activities, just to give, give us a flavor of it, even give listeners something that they could take away. I know I've been really interested in writing creative writing prompts, but more what are some examples of, you know, some of the things you do with people, some of the activities you do.

Keshet: Yeah, so I just, I want to preface it by saying that in eco-art therapy, we make art either in or with the natural world, right? So that means when we are actually in a natural landscape, in a blue or green or otherwise natural landscape, in response to the natural world, so through metaphor and symbolism. right, if a person can't easily access the outdoors for illness or being elderly and immobile or whatever it is, really kind of borrowing from nature in terms of metaphor and symbol, and also as material, borrowing from the natural world as material, whether it's incorporating natural objects into forms that we're creating or making pigments, earth pigments, almost anything that you engage with in the natural world can create pigmentation. Even water from different sources. Rainwater is going to have a very different pigment and biological makeup than saltwater and lake water and so on. So that's really kind of important to know, that you can make within this context, it's in response to or in or with the natural world. And in that sense, the natural world really kind of becomes your co-regulator and your co-therapist, so to speak. We as humans are incomparable to what the natural world can teach and lend us.

So the first prompt that I would like to share is the Climate Emotions Mandala Project which was of course inspired by Panu's research and the creation of the climate emotions wheel. When I first started doing climate cafes quite a few years ago now, it seemed kind of natural to me as an art therapist that we're gonna make mandalas. You know, this is not anything that I conceived of. Mandalas have been around for thousands of years and have been represented in just about every culture as a symbol of wholeness. Right? We have mandalas in the sky. It's the first shape. The circle is the first shape that a child recognizes in the face of their parent.

It's kind of this collective unconscious symbol of wholeness. And climate change and the polycrisis are, you know, it's anything, if it's anything, it's traumatic, it's fragmenting. So having this super accessible symbol for wholeness just seemed to be like a natural thing that can help resource people when they're talking about their feelings in response to climate change. So if you want to make your own climate emotions mandala, it's really so easy. You take a stencil, you can make it any size that you want.

But basically you can take like a paper plate or something round and make just a stencil of a circle on a piece of paper. I'm also happy to share my stencil with anyone that wants it. Kind of divorce yourself of anything that you've seen about mandalas, that they need to look symmetrical and eastern and totally balanced. That's not what this is about.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Keshet: What this is about is once you have that stencil, you notice that it has an outside and an inside, just like you have an outside and an inside. you are contending with that interface of how this changing climate, this rapidly changing world, is affecting the interiority of your experience. So you look at the climate emotions wheel. You see these different emotions, probably some if not all of which you yourself have experienced. And you set an intention, you simply set an intention to allow that to channel through you using line, shape, form, and color. There's no right or wrong. There's no right or wrong whatsoever. And you see what emerges.

And then an easy exercise that people can do in response to that, it's a Gestalt exercise where you look at the art piece, you look at your mandala, and you write down very quickly, as if this is not your piece, as if you're seeing it on a wall of a gallery, three to five adjectives that describe simply what it is that you see. And I'm almost tentative to say the second part of the prompt because I don't want for people to censor themselves. After you say these adjectives, you preface them with I am, right? So if you came up with these adjectives of colorful, complex, painful, jarred, overwhelmed, beautiful, right? You can start to see that you are in fact all of these things.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Keshet: You are, in fact, all of these things all at once, right? We can hold so much dichotomy at once. So that is a quick entree to the Climate Emotions mandala. And in terms of other projects, we're talking about the need for resilience, right? So a really kind of beautiful way for people to connect with their own innate resilience is to borrow from the natural world, right? So a prompt that I love to have people make is a river of resilience. What is within this river? Where is it flowing to? You know, what has made this river resilient? Is it the diversity that's there? Is it the foundation of the river? And really looking at that in terms of creating a map for yourself of resilience.

Then of course there is the incredible and always endlessly resourcing symbol of the tree. This is something that is symbolized in Kabbalah, in the world of the chakras, and the tree of life. The tree of life. And really kind of thinking about your roots, what is rooting you, what is foundational in your trunk? What are you reaching out towards? What is in your upper canopy? And what are you hoping to transcend for, right? So there's so many different ways that you can take or borrow from living systems and create art about them in a way that you both learn from these beings in the natural world and learn about yourself at the same time and thereby also create and deepen that environmental identity where you are in tune, you are attuned to the river, to the tree. And I mean, I can go on and on. There's so many different things.

Doherty: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. So if you're, if you're following listeners, just, just to be clear, a mandala is typically a circular kind of image and it's often spiritual, but it could be used in a lot of ways just to make sure people knew that term mandala. And if you just Google mandala and look at different mandala figures, you can see it's a universal around the world, but we're talking about making your own. And I've done exercises like this over, over time. In fact, yeah, I can remember even when I was quite young, younger, first exploring my environmental identity, some of the first art exercise I did were quite impactful because some, we've never, we've never opened up this channel of, you say, externalizing, you know, some of our feelings and thoughts in symbols and in beautiful symbols. So, you know, I was looking up the definition of, I was trying to look up the definition of art because it one of these terms we use, but like, what is it actually, what's the definition and you know, one of the, you know, one of the parts of the definition is producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.

And I thought that was really helpful, you know, because it speaks to why the creativity is needed, because those are the things that are missing from our environmental experience a lot is beauty and emotional power, especially when you're thinking about climate change. And dangerous, dangerous issues, but also just our own connections with nature, you reclaiming. It doesn't mean there's not problems. And it doesn't mean that all the other parts of reality don't exist. But what we're doing is foregrounding these true authentic experiences of beauty, connection, interbeing, you know, or the boundary of myself and my identity is fluid with nature and place and stuff like that. And then of course, emotional power because there's just really emotions are so hard to express with words, sometimes a picture or a sound or a painting or a sculpture or a physical movement is much more expressive than any language, you know, we could use. So I think it's just speaks to the power of this. What do you think?

Keshet: Absolutely, I mean there's the science of awe, right? And being in the presence of something that exceeds your current understanding of the world. And you don't have to be standing in front of the Grand Canyon to experience awe. A teenage client that I work with told me a few months ago on their way home from school, it was that golden hour, and they saw on the side of a stop sign a fully intact spider's web and that golden light coming through the spider's web. And, you know, as a result of being engaged in this work and this process, they said to me more seeing this and just pondering for a moment what that required and that this creature knows how to do that. I just felt bigger on the inside. And that was, you know, that was so poignant because this process and being able to externalize that, again, either into written or symbolic form or moved form, you know, it allows for that awe to have a space to exist and for you to metabolize it and therefore integrate it.

Doherty: Yeah.

Keshet: And I want to say in regards to the definition, sometimes in response to climate change and the polycrisis art can be quite ugly. Not necessarily beautiful, not something beautiful to behold, right? It can be ugly, it can be scary, can be anything. But there's beauty in that too. There's truth in that too.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Pihkala: Mm, yeah.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Pihkala: Yeah, very interesting. I was about to comment the same, that beauty is a quite complex thing actually. I have some colleagues who work with environmental aesthetics. So that means conceptions of beauty and good and the human relationship with the modern human world. It's quite interesting stuff, know, if you have a powerful storm generated by global warming, anthropogenic global warming, are you allowed morally to feel awe in front of it, for example? So it can lead to complex ethical questions for people. I would say that it's always possible to experience quite a lot of emotions and they can be ambivalent, but if we start self-censoring ourselves, that's going to be problematic, but this could lead into a long discussion about beauty and aesthetics and so on.

But Mor, really love your examples and I see a lot of power in them and the interplay between inner and outer for example is so important here and physical objects can help people to grasp that. Collage is a method that I know some people are using like Claude Watfern, a climate psychologist from Australia and luckily as you said, the field is growing but still there's much to be done in this field. So I'm very grateful for the work you and many people are doing.

Doherty: Yeah. And I think it's helpful to realize that this is also a developmental process because once you do get involved with arts, then you develop, then you realize you have a style or you have an aesthetic or a sensibility that's unique to you. So you might, you might gravitate toward the non-stereotypically beautiful, beautiful images or the powerful images of the awful. Awe, like awe, you know, awe or awful, you know, it depends on how you look at it. So, you know, think about this also listeners, it's a developmental piece, you start, you have these epiphanies, and then you, when you do more exercises, you start to see patterns, and growth, and style, and then you then you need to learn, as all artists do to recognize, well, I have my style that I need to kind of stand for my identity, my particular message and truth, but then there are other truths. There are other styles and then there are other modalities like painting or music, whether you're a musician or an artist or a sculptor. And, and then even one exercise I have are things that I've drawn years ago that I'll look at and I'll learn something from today from many, many years ago. That's another piece to these things last over time.

I know in my writing exercises that I've done with people around environmental identity and their environmental timeline where people will, you know, pick out different key points of their life, key, key turning points or key experiences, and then maybe write about that particular experience, something happened when they were a child or something like that, or as a young person. But then, then I might ask them to then rewrite, rewrite that experience from a different perspective in the, in the time like maybe write it from the place's perspective or the other people's perspective or the animals perspective or the sky's perspective, then you could start to look at these experiences, you know, separating yourself out of them and seeing what the other voices are. And then we get into a truly ecological, you know, ecological perspective. And then you can translate that into a short story or a fiction or a poem. So there's no end. There's no end to it. It's just, it's really I think the key thing is permission to use the tools without, like you say, censoring yourself, which is why we need support and we need our therapists and groups and things like that, Yeah.

Keshet: Yeah. Yeah, Thomas, you said many important things just now, and one of them is that images and things that you create, they are like a relic, you know, it's a time stamp. And there's few things that are, I think, as encouraging for a person who has gone through a challenging time, a challenging journey to be able to look back at that journey and to see the evolution and the emergence of a far more coherent and resourced and connected human. And I have seen that across all the settings in which I have worked. And it is so utterly affirming to be able to see the things which have remained resonant because they are true to your authentic self and the things that you have really been able to emerge from. And that quality of physical creation is really unique and really powerful, especially as we are working to help instill cultural repair as people are really shifting away from this hyper-individualized sense of being to a far more expansive sense of being.

Pihkala: Thank you for voicing all that and the word relic is highly fascinating here also. Dear listeners, I hope you've got a lot of ideas that you could do yourself and know, inviting a couple of people you trust and then showing what you have been doing or developing something together. So at the best situation, there's gonna be an arts therapists available, but if not, get active and creative. There's a lot of very good methods and as usual, we'll be posting links to the podcast websites to things that Mor has been doing and others. As always, time flies. It would be very interesting to continue, but we soon have to wrap up.

Doherty: Yes. Yeah, Mor. Thank you so much. This was a great conversation. It's, you know, Panu and I do this podcast, at least me to energize myself and to remind myself of the creative ideas I need to function. hopefully listeners got some things out of this and we'll have a bunch of neat links in the show notes

Mor, Panu, and listeners everyone be well. Thank you very much.

Keshet: Thank you both.

image credit | Dmitri Bong

Season 5, Episode 13: Fostering “Good Mind”: Teaching for Climate Change with Maria Vamvalis

“And when I talk about regenerative ways of being, I'm really talking about interrupting the logics, ways of knowing that these harmful systems have produced in us. So what does it mean to practice logics that are not rooted in supremacy of humans over animals or … what does it mean to practice a slower way, an emergent way that is rooted with connecting with life, connecting with the land? What does it mean to really hold reverence and devotion for life?”

“I believe that our actions to protect and regenerate come from love. That it's the bird song that we love that ultimately makes us want to take action to protect, to regenerate. And so this regenerative field of practice is where we can actually be really unapologetic in our deep longing for love and connection and relational vitality. And … bring that forward as a key medicine and a key frequency that is needed as an antidote to the kind of horror and despair and violence that the systems are currently producing for so many …”

Maria Vamvalis designs learning environments that strengthen collective well-being that help people rediscover their capacity to act together in conditions of uncertainty, through promoting critical thinking and relationship skills. Hear her inspiring conversation with Panu & Thomas. 

Links

• Maria Vamvalis and Anayennisi

  • Vamvalis (2023)  “We’re fighting for our lives”: Centering affective, collective and systemic approaches to climate justice education as a youth mental health imperative” 

• The Critical Thinking Consortium (TC²) Seven Transformative Thinking Habits

• The Association of Canadian Dean's Accord on Education for a Sustainable Future

• Accelerating Climate Change in Teacher Education

• Beyond Sustainability: AI, Education, and Regenerative Futures

• Program Example: Future Climate Collective (Portland, Oregon)

  • 2026 Climathon

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, well, you know, a lot of things, issues about climate change and the environment and politics, but mainly we're thinking about what it means to be happy in the modern world. And I'm psychologist and I'm coming at this from a mental health and a wellness perspective, Panu is emotions scholar from Finland. and we've got a bit of an emerging theme on today for education and schools and young people and inspiration and for that we have a special guest with us.

Maria Vamvalis: Hello, my name is Maria Vamvalis. I'm a founder of Anayennisi, a regenerative field of practice and a director at the Critical Thinking Consortium, Canadian not-for-profit.

Doherty: Yeah, we were really excited. We've already been having a neat conversation with Maria and I've been aware of her work for a while. So it's really nice to have her on the show. Panu and I know you, Maria have crossed paths in the past. So Panu, do you want to get us going?

Pihkala: Warmly welcome Maria also on my behalf. Lovely to see you again and continue our talks. You've been up to many things, but there's some common threads in them. What you said briefly about what you have been doing already includes mentions of them. So very holistic and humane and interspecies approach to things. Could you start by telling something about your path towards where you are now?

Vamvalis: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think I've always been really drawn to this deeper sense of interconnectedness, even when I was a child, this sort of relational consciousness that I did not find a lot of mirroring for as I was growing up. I think in many ways it's educated and socialized out of us. But I was really deeply concerned about the environment and, you know, really all the violence that I felt in our society and this drew me to education and wanting to figure out ways that we can teach to create a more beautiful world, know, a more joyful world, a world where we were flourishing. And I started teaching about climate change about well over 20 years ago before it was even in the curriculum because I knew that this was something young people would be dealing with.

And through my experiences as an educator, I just became more and more concerned as I saw the cultural denial and delay around the issue. And I became very concerned about young people's mental health and how education was going to ultimately respond to that. And that led me to doctoral studies where my question was, how do we teach for climate change and climate justice in ways that nurture meaning, purpose and hope? that really support the psycho-spiritual wellbeing of learners. So that's really been part of my trajectory and doing that work and then trying to bring that research really into practice in these times.

Pihkala: Warm thanks for dwelling on that and listeners, if you have listened to previous episodes you'll notice that there's a lot of common between what Maria is doing and what I and Thomas are passionate about and I also have a long fascination and interest towards education and emotions and Maria, I know that you also have some Greek roots. Would you like to say something about that?

Vamvalis: Yes, yes, both of my parents are Greek actually. They're both immigrants to Canada. My mother came when she was six years old, my father later in his twenties. And I think my Greek roots have always been deeply important to me and probably have also influenced in seeing my relatives who really had to come because of colonization and civil war and for many reasons were displaced from land that they truly loved. And seeing the impacts of that displacement on them, I think has always been something that marked me as a person is understanding that and going back to that land and feeling.

I think those ancestral connections and how powerful that is when you recognize your family has tended to the land, has tended the olive trees. And so the regenerative field of practice that I've started is called Anayennisi. And Anayennisi means regeneration, revival, rebirth, renewal in Greek. And it's really an impulse that I think we need to be taking very seriously right now in these times of, well, you know, ecological collapse in many ways is what we're seeing.

Pihkala: Yeah, that's profound. That's profound and the displacement and colonization and also resonating with what is happening globally. That's another angle to this. The world is becoming strange on quite deep levels. do you feel that this Greek heritage has affected your relationship to the modern human world? is it like having two kinds of ecosystems that you easily bond with, the one where you grew up in Canada and the Greek one, or how do you see this?

Vamvalis: Yeah, no, this is, I really appreciate your question actually, because what I want to acknowledge is how it was my privilege of connecting with Haudenosaunee knowledge keepers here in the Canadian context, that actually, I think was the first time that that relational consciousness that I spoke to about was actually deeply mirrored and met. And through those connections was was able to deepen my connection to my ancestral homelands and my sense of that deep responsibility, but also recognizing the responsibilities that I have here to the place in which I live and to the treaty relationships with the First Nations that have been in many ways dishonored in this context. And so it's really connecting my own deep ancestral roots and the love of the land that is part of bringing myself into right relationship with the land and the people and the histories of where I currently live, of where I'm currently situated. So there's really a through line and it's the Indigenous presence.

Pihkala: Mmm.

Vamvalis: and that deep respect for relationality of being in right relationship that I think has so much to contribute to the ways in which we're thinking about how to respond to the current moment.

Doherty: That's lovely. Yeah. So many resonances with other guests that we've talked about. We always ask people their origin story and it often comes back to their place of their childhood and their family and then this larger thinking about the world. And as you're talking, Maria, I think we should just also highlight the special. I think there's a unique Canadian context to this too. And you can correct me if I'm wrong, but as I've observed, I grew up near where you live Maria in New York, in Buffalo, New York, but just knowing a bit about Canadian culture. Unlike other countries, in North America in particular, you know, there seems to be this, and Canada is not perfect either, of course, but there does seem to be a much more welcoming attitude to just basic ethnicities and cultural backgrounds. And then a unique kind of Canadian outdoors nature kind of ethos. But also, think openness to the First Nations. And anyway, this it seems like there's more support for this kind of direction toward right relationships. I mean, I've been in Canada at workshops and I've seen the blanket ceremony, for example, you might be familiar with, you know, where the Native ceremony or it shows how the how the Native cultures were slowly kind of picked away through the treaties. There's just an attention like the New Zealand to the treaties like it's much more people are much more aware of the legal rights of native cultures. But you want to speak a little bit about just the Canadian side of this.

Vamvalis: Yeah, well, think, you know, obviously, I think this actually has a lot to do with an educational response that's needed. And we can look at the particular Canadian context, but also think about this from a global perspective as well, which is that if we think about climate emotions as signals, you know, they're signals.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Vamvalis: in many respects of us being not in right relationship with the earth. And if we resist just individualizing them and start to think about them as responses to systems that are harmful, we can look at these roots as, you know, that that coloniality, which has so much about land displacement, of disposability of peoples. Getting peoples off of the land by whatever means necessary. You know, these roots are certainly part of the Canadian context of land dispossession, of residential schools, of destruction of cultures and knowledge systems that are actually profound and sophisticated and have so much to offer. In the Canadian context, there's been a process of what's called truth and reconciliation where these histories and the truth of the histories are really coming to light.

And there have been, there are ongoing efforts to come back into right relationship, to honor, for example, where we live. And it actually affects the area where you lived as well, Thomas in New York. But there was a great law of peace that came after there were many, many wars in this area. And the great law of peace really comes back to the fact that having a good mind, you know, being a good mind. So we're thinking about this podcast as being about happiness or, you know, that the good mind is a mind that does not seek to harm others, including the more than human world. And if we think about the great law of peace as actually the citizenship law, you know, in this region that has been erased, coming back into right relationship is coming back into that good mind that we do want to see the flourishing of all life, that that is actually an impulse that we have as human beings to connect and to feel relational vitality and reverence and beauty and joy. And it's really systems that interrupt that, that are part of the extraction, you know, without any constraint.

Extraction of the earth without any constraint, whether it's, you know, to, you know, be so violent to get what it is that you need. This is really underlying so much of what we're currently facing. Like the systems that we're in have actually created the complex emotions that many of us are contending with. And to bring it back into that wider perspective. So that's, I see as a through line.

Pihkala: That's fascinating and reminds me of a phrase I haven't been thinking of in years coming from the dissertation studies time which is by Joseph Siddler this American earth-minded theologian and humanist and the line is, abuse is use without grace. Abuse is use without grace. So that's from roughly 1961. that was an early sermon on environmental matters, but really resonating with what you say, and having the right mindsets and the deeper dimensions of what is meant by morality and even by style. What is the style in which we are in the world and treat others? Whether those others are humans, humans or not, so I think you are really going to the heart of this podcast also, so how to live a meaningful and good life in the classic sense. So not just a good life of having lots of luxuries, but what is really good.

Doherty: Hmm. Yeah, good mind. love that. I love that term. Yeah, and so we've done a good job on the high ground of, I think, tracing out some of the some of the ethics and the vision of this work. Let's think about teachers and teachers in public schools, because Maria, I know you're actually the ground that you're working in is the school system. And that's an area that always needs more support everywhere, I find. So for teachers in the audience, let's think about them and our listeners. Like what are some of the practical things that you're doing in schools or what are some of your initiatives? I'd be curious about that.

Vamvalis: Yeah, yeah, yeah, we've actually there's there's a number of things that we've done. One of the things we've done is that we've actually had a national online climate education course that that actually have taught co taught with a Haudenosaunee educator to bring these ideas of truth and reconciliation and, you know, decolonization, bringing that together with climate action.

And bringing really holistic responses so that with teachers, we actually talk about supporting the climate emotions, making that a part of how we teach. Because if we only taught students the scientific evidence and projections, we all know that's very dispiriting in many ways. And then we're not actually making the space for what will arise when young people are realistically encountering the scope and scale of ecological harm. But one of the things through my work with the Critical Thinking Consortium is that we actually look at the challenges around youth mental health, which are caused by a whole series of things, you know, intersecting, and to actually intentionally teach what we call the transformative thinking habits. So through a research-informed process, we've identified seven transformative thinking habits that we believe actually help transform some of the complex climate emotions into a deeper sense of agency, including collective agency in order to tackle these issues. So critical mindedness, relational thinking, courageous thinking, visionary thinking, accepting discomfort in learning, being inquiry minded.

If we actually teach the curriculum through these thinking habits so that, and especially in the context of AI, we wanna keep a focus on thinking, and nurturing that thinking and seeing these thinking habits as a profound way to engage any subject really, that we can teach history through a visionary lens, visionary thinking and inspire it to engage the climate crisis. So that's another piece is really scaffolding how we do that work in classrooms.

Doherty: Yeah. Yeah, I'm so glad you brought in the AI as well, because that's the danger is people kind of naively kind of outsource their thinking, so to speak. AI, of course, doesn't think I'm trying to stay away from actually the term artificial intelligence, because it's really more of a problem, you know, learning machine that's based on statistics and binary thinking. It's not thinking in the same way that humans think, you know, with our heart and our gut and our mind and all this other stuff. But yeah.

Pihkala: Yeah, that was actually what I was going towards here. that's very fascinating those thinking habits. And what do you think, Maria? Are they also partly affective habits or emotional habits?

Vamvalis: Yeah, so I think when we talk about the holistic thinking, mean, when you're thinking holistically, I you really are engaging mind, body, spirit. And so when we're looking at thinking, it's not just a cognitive act. know, are thinking, we are engaging more holistically with how to approach learning and bringing the whole learner. And I think actually that distinct Indigenous knowledge systems, when you look at their educational approaches, they actually center the learning spirit. know, they use this term, Dr. Marie Bautiste here in Canada, in the Canadian context, talks about the learning spirit and that this is central to education, that we nurture the spirit. And I think we can, I think we could absolutely have a conversation to talk about the climate crisis as being something that is destabilizing not only the psyche, but really the spirit of people that the systems that we've created are harming the spirits of young people as they're thinking about if these systems are not interrupted, if they're not shifted, there's such dispiriting projections for the future.

And so I think it's helpful to actually, you know, invite us to talk about the spirit, you know, the underlying spirit, which is about again, being in right relationship to all that is, that interconnectedness, that we've been separated from the epistemologies that so many of us are trained in disrupt that way of knowing, that way of being.

Doherty: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. “Dispiriting “is another great, great term because spirit also is just if we if we if we just divorce it from the mystical side spirit is just this inspiration is just this motivation. It's our breath. So it's like getting your breath knocked out of you, so to speak. How does it look? What is some of these transformational habits actually look like in the in the classroom with an actual education topic?

Vamvalis: Yeah, so for example, let's come back to this idea of the treaty relationships being really important in the Canadian context and wanting to invite students to think historically if we're inviting them into history education, but a way for them to engage with that history. it's not just studying the past in this kind of, you know, inert, let's look at the facts of history. we could invite visionary thinking by giving them a really rich inquiry question, like what would our community look like 10, 20, 50 years from now, if we began to truly honor treaty relationships. And we open up this inquiry that's visionary, in which they have to actually understand the history of treaty relationships.

And so really rich inquiry, critical inquiry is such a powerful way of engaging learners, of supporting mental health and wellbeing, and actually being intentional about the way we're scaffolding these transformative thinking habits, you know, so that we're encouraging that kind of visionary thinking, but rooted in evidence, rooted in oral histories, rooted in making connections systemically about what happened in the past and where are we now because we've dishonored treaties? What might be possible if we honor treaties? And you can feel the sort of richness and engagement of an inquiry like that and bringing that to life because our schools aren't necessarily, they're not therapeutic spaces in that way, but they are meaning making.

They can and should be meaning making spaces. And that's what engages us. And that's what invites our wholeness as learners to come in. And to use that to actually reimagine and think regeneratively, I think would be so powerful in this current context.

Pihkala: Hmm. Yeah, that's wonderful and resonates with many things in creative pedagogies in Finland also. And I'm tempted to talk more about the Finnish situations, but I will not. How has the reception been, Maria, for the work you and others are doing in this sphere?

Doherty: Yeah.

Vamvalis: Yeah, actually, we've had a lot of really positive engagement. So one project I was involved in is we've had a climate camp that's been led by the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Dr. Hilary Inwood, the Eco Schools and our largest school board. We've collaborated to do this professional learning in the summer and brought some of these frameworks together. And you know, teachers have reported that they feel more energized, that they feel more capable and more confident of really bringing these issues forward and teaching in ways that nurture climate action and agency. And that's the big piece is nurturing collective agency in the way we do this work. With the transformative thinking habits, as we're continuing to engage educators and system leaders. We've seen again a lot of enthusiasm and excitement because people feel that sense of possibility. And I think that is really, important in this moment when so many people are feeling quite heavy and feeling a lot of despair and anxiety. So we've seen a lot of really positive reception to these more holistic approaches to this work.

Pihkala: That's very good to hear. In Finland, experience of many of us working with education and teachers is that even relatively short interventions which build resources and encourage people to be in touch with also difficult emotions and then moving forward to how to build collective agency and efficacy. So that's very powerful. Of course, there's the challenge of how to invite those teachers who are not so motivated in the first place to start coming towards these meterials. But anyway, one has always to start where we are and not everything can be at one spot just testifying to both the potential and some of the challenges from the Finnish side.

Vamvalis: Yeah, absolutely.

Doherty: Yeah, yeah, this is yeah, this is great. So pedagogy is one of those terms, you know, for listeners, that's like, you know, your theory of education, the teachers, the teachers sort of way of educating. it's one of those words that signal we're thinking we're thinking about our teaching and we're going to school about it. Yeah. So let's just stay with the teachers, because I think, you know, teachers just really do deserve support. I know I was at a climate conference last year and was a bunch of educators and education leaders talking about climate education. And I just was struck by how top down it was that even though the values and the content was good, was just all, I just felt it was just loading the teachers with so much, what the teaching standards and they have to get this information and that information. I remember saying at the group that I was with, know, what about the teachers themselves?

Like they, I think the danger is a lot of teachers don't feel confident to teach this material because they don't they haven't worked through their own environmental identity. You know Maria you're so eloquent about your culture and your background and you've clearly sat with it and worked through it but most teachers I think just haven't really thought about this. They're so I don't think they have the person skills sometimes to do this kind of work or how do we support teachers to do their own much like with therapists you have to do your own work first how can this is kind of a large just general question but like how can teachers do their own work?

Vamvalis: Yeah, yeah, it's, it's so important. And we actually at the Critical Thinking Consortium speak a lot about the inner work and how we sort of look at a Mobius, you know, like a Mobius strip, and this idea that there's no, there's no really distinction between the inner and the outer and that when we're teaching, like, our practices are, are actually so much grounded in our own beliefs as educators and how we are in the classroom has so much to do with, you know, who we are and the kind of reflexivity, you know, the really thinking about our mental models, our belief systems, our assumptions. I do think that, you know, there's many intersecting issues here. And again, this is why we can't really separate the systemic dimensions and just individualize because we've got education systems that may work at cross purposes, that in many respects, they're oriented toward educating for jobs on a burning planet right now. And so there's one issue is, you know, what is the purpose of education currently? You know, I do believe it needs to shift toward regenerative, you know, and planetary flourishing as being the purpose of education. And the work will come from that. I do think that teacher education programs really taking this seriously. So we're fortunate in the Canadian context that the Canadian deans for schools of education have actually signed an accord saying that the climate and nature emergency must be taken seriously. And we're starting to see more and more uptake in teacher education programs around this. I'm seeing signs of that as well in the United States. Some states and districts are doing this work, of course, in others, not at all. And in fact, we're going in the opposite direction. So it's uneven globally, but there's momentum and movement. I think teachers finding communities of practice is very important.

What often happens, and I found this in my research, that there'll be one teacher who's the eco teacher or the tree hugger teacher, and the school will be like, check, that teacher has us covered. And that is not the approach we need to be taking. We actually need, you know, communities of practice. So I've also been doing work with the school board here that we're building a climate education leadership program for the most motivated teachers. So they've got a space to come together and not feel alone within that larger system. And we believe in kind of doing these levers of systems change. You know, that's been part of my approach is, you know, building those communities is part of this. So even teachers taking online courses and finding others, you know, and not feeling alone. But yes, the inner work is really, really important.

Pihkala: Is this Anayennisi connected to that or more specifically what I'm asking as we come towards the close of this episode, time always runs out. What do do via that field of practice?

Vamvalis: Yes. Yeah, Anayennisi is really the place, it's a field of practice for people who want to practice regenerative ways of being. And when I talk about regenerative ways of being, I'm really talking about interrupting the logics, ways of knowing that these harmful systems have produced in us. So what does it mean to practice? Logics that are not rooted in supremacy of humans over animals or, you know, what does it mean to practice a slower way, an emergent way that is rooted with connecting with life, connecting with the land? What does it mean to really hold reverence and devotion for life?

What does it mean? Because I believe that our actions to protect and regenerate come from love. That it's the bird song that we love that ultimately makes us want to take action to protect, to regenerate. And so this regenerative field of practice is where we can actually be really unapologetic in our deep longing for love and connection and relational vitality. And you know, bring that forward as a key medicine and a key frequency that is needed as an antidote to the kind of horror and despair and violence that the systems are currently producing for so many and of course, inequitably around the world.

Doherty: Hmm. So you're such an eloquent speaker. It's just really great to listen to you. It's why we do this podcast. So I could get my, my own batteries recharged. That's so nice. I really appreciate all of the things you're saying. Unapologetic in our deep longing. That's in our deep longing. That's just such a nice, we're so far away from the, you know, the situation in the US right now is so dire. I feel like what we're talking about is, you know,

I think a lot of people are afraid in the United States because of our current government and they are afraid of even having conversations like this, or at least some of our superficial leadership is so far away from this kind of true cultural building, true knowledge that it is radical. It is very radical.

Vamvalis: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And really it's interesting because we look at the roots even of what's happening in the US and that kind of situation. We think about all these things we've been talking about and how certain ways of being of exploitation, of dominance, of hierarchy, of extraction that creates this kind of harm and fear and separation from relationality and really the joy of life. The joy of life is in the connection, it's in the loving. And why we've chosen to organize ourselves as human beings, you know, or why our systems have organized themselves is something we need to do really deep inquiries into and come back to that deeper knowing of what it is to be a good mind, coming back to the good mind, right? A good human being. And I think that this, the connections and the relationships is what forms the resilience that we need to counter the fear, to counter the kind of fear that's being really unleashed in the world.

Pihkala: Well said, very well said, I think. Even though we are over time, it reminds me of this Greek word, Spoudaiogeloion. Sorry for butchering the pronunciation, but that's the old concept for being grave merry or practicing earnestness. Spodio, Geloion. So that's the combination of comedy and tragedy and being so serious in your joy that it's able to hold both. So because of your Greek roots, just wanted to get it out there. But greatly enjoyed this conversation and very, very grateful for all the work you do.

Vamvalis: Thank you.

Doherty: Yeah, thank you Maria. Yeah, thank you.

Vamvalis: Thank you. It so nice. It went so fast. You're right. It's so lovely.

Doherty: Yes, that's what we say. Yeah. Well, listeners, we yeah, Maria, listeners, and, Panu. I want to thank everyone for the time. We're going to put a bunch of links to this community of practice and the Canadian Dean Accords and a lot of the really juicy things, especially for, know, for educators out there. This one is I mean, this is for all of us, but especially for educators out there. We only you know how challenging it is to to work in the classroom with truly holding mental health and well-being and trying to find joy. So we'll put this episode out. It'll be out soon and we'll have links to Maria's work, and Maria and Panu and listeners, everyone be well.

Panu and Thomas explored the increasing vilification of environmental and social protest. They reviewed research on the "repertoire of oppression” that state and corporate groups are employing such as disingenuous application of laws regarding terrorism and organized crime to non-violent, legal protest actions by the public and advocacy groups. These tactics enable more oppressive and violent police action, that in some cases are used to justify brutality,  killings and disappearances. While these repressive acts are typically associated with authoritarian states, they are alarmingly being used in democratic societies including Finland, the UK and the US. At the same time, counter-movements are also using legal methods to pursue more strenuous charges of “ecocide” and “climate atrocities” and practicing new and creative forms of resistance and grass roots organizing. As Panu noted, oppressive government actions can have unintended outcomes, for those who stand for Earth: Criminalization unites us even more. 

image credit | Juliette Jarvis

Season 5, Episode 11: Revisit Your New Year’s Resolutions from a Systems View

Panu and Thomas reflected on the passage of the winter season in Northern climes, lengthening daylight and earliest signs of spring. Thomas shared ways for listeners to revisit their New Year's goals and resolutions from a systems view – not just as singular actions but as ways of creating a healthy synergy in one's life. He highlighted that small changes – forgoing unhealthy food or drink, starting a new exercise plan, or doing a daily journal – can lead to broader changes in your life and relationships. Adding something demonstrably healthy will tend to beget health. Taking away something demonstrably unhealthy will tend to beget health. It’s the synergy. And further – resolutions should be seen as part of a larger system, where your personal health improvements influence and connect with broader social and environmental systems. This approach works because it reframes your resolutions as part of a larger, interconnected whole, making them feel more meaningful and impactful, which can motivate you to pursue them with greater commitment. And, it’s not too late to start. 

He and Panu also validated pressures for political action in service of justice and human rights that listeners may be experiencing given threats to civil liberty in the US and other places. Can listeners imagine their individual impulses to greater health as part of their quest for societal health?   

Links

• J. M. Berger (26 Jan, 2026) Anatomy of Extremism: What ICE Is Revealing in Minnesota | The MIT Press Reader

• Martin Niemöller, German Lutheran Pastor “First They Came…” 

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, a show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about the personal side of climate change, other environmental and global issues, and particularly their emotional responses and their feelings and their coping. So we hold the space here for the inner game of this work.

I’m coming in as a clinical psychologist who's worked in this area for a number of years and Panu in Finland, an emotions researcher who's been doing a lot of the deep unpacking of a lot of these emotional concepts that's been useful for researchers and therapists so this is our podcast and we're speaking at the beginning of 2026 and coming into late January, early February, a really interesting time on the kind of seasonal calendar. Panu, how are you doing today and how's the weather in Helsinki?

Panu: Greetings from a very cold and snowy Helsinki. So with global warming, one never knows what the winter is going to be like in Helsinki. And even earlier on, because of the Baltic Sea, it was more random than in inland Finland. But now for practically a month, we've had sub-zero temperatures and snow.

Doherty: Mmm. Yeah.

Panu: And today in the morning it was minus 19 Celsius, so quite brisk, brisk weather but beautiful, high pressure, sunlight, white snow. So that gives energy to people and that's been good. How about you, Thomas? I know that you've been traveling quite intensively in relation to speaking about your book. Have you had any chance to recover from the travels yet?

Doherty: No, not really actually. You know, on another episode we'll talk in detail, but because of my new book I've got a chance to travel and do book talks and I've been in Europe. Over the last few months I've been in the US and also in Europe and also in Dubai and the United Arab Emirates for the Emirates Book Festival, which was a lovely...

Kind of, I would almost go so far as to say life-changing experience only because I got to spend time in a very different part of the world and meet people from around the world. And so I will say though, even with all the upheaval in the world right now, politically in the US, for example, and in Iran and just all the different things that we're dealing with, it proved my, my travels have proved my point that wherever I go, I run into these really gifted people that are quite dedicated and reflective about their lives and being ethical and working on climate change and helping the earth and being expressive. So I just really feel a sense of connection, you know, with people around the world. So it really counteracts my impulse to feel disillusioned about humanity and how effed up everything seems to be.

Panu: Hmm.

Doherty: So anyway, that's a short little place where I'm sitting. But you know, there's a lot of, it's an interesting time. I think right now, people start the new year with big ideas about what they want to do, or sometimes they do, and then here we are, get into, now we're into the year a little bit. Changing so I think it's just an interesting it's just an interesting time of the year to stop and reflect and check in and things like that so anyway to more formally answer your question I'm looking for some home time and to be here in my place.

Panu: Yeah, thanks for sharing sounds very understandable and looking forward some other time to get deeper into your travel experiences.

Doherty: Yeah. So we were talking about this idea of New Year's resolutions and what happens with them after a month or so. Is that something interesting to follow up on little bit?

Panu: Yeah, lots do that also. And then there's all the newspaper and social media discussions about how well or badly the following of those resolutions went.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, I thought, you know, I thought it would be a good thing to think about because I'm sure many of the listeners, you folks out there have, well, I will make a broad generalization that people that listen to this podcast are conscious of their health and conscious of being a healthy person, both physically and mentally, socially, spiritually, all those dimensions, and are trying to be a part of the solution, trying to be their best self. I think that's, like, you and I share that, and I think our listeners share that, too. So I'm just imagining a lot of listeners either had goals in their life already or started the new year with a sense of wanting to take on a health behavior or let go of something or add something, which is totally natural and healthy. And it does support, as you say, culturally. This is kind of a meme in the news cycle about resolutions. And I think the shadow side of that, think, is that it's easy to make fun of people when they're trying to change, make fun of people when they're trying to be healthier, and kind of almost cut them down and say, we'll see these resolutions don't work.

And it's superficial and it's fake. But I think it's important to get underneath the superficiality of it and really understand it, because it is an impulse to being healthy. And people like a fresh start and an ability to cut through some of the old habits to start a new one. So I think we have to be really compassionate to ourselves. But I've seen in my work with people as a psychologist and a therapist, we talk about this a lot. But can I share a little bit about what I've learned about this?

Panu: Yeah, that would be very interesting.

Doherty: Teah, yeah. I mean, my latest thinking about it is that, you know, when you're thinking about New Year's resolutions, it's not only about the action, like the singular action, like, I'm gonna do, in the US, there's a thing about,or actually internationally doing like a dry January where people like for, know, take a break from it using any alcohol.

Panu:  Tipaton tammikuu in Finnish. Tipaton tammikuu which means dropless January, literally translated.

Doherty: I like it. That's better. A dropless January. You know, and apparently that started from a woman who was training for a marathon or something and it became a meme. But it's actually remarkably common and it speaks to people's, well, speaks to the amount of alcohol people have, but it also, people are realizing there's a lot of impacts to alcohol and oddly enough, younger generations are using much less alcohol and people are much more conscious about alcohols, negative effects, cancer, and things like that. But that's just one example of a New Year's resolution. It could be to exercise more, to be more physically fit, or to find a new relationship, or to change your job, or to fix up your home.

And those are all healthy, I think the problem in society is that people take it linearly and focus on the action. And so the success is predicated on whether you do the resolution or not, how long, so-called give up on it or surrender and so there's this impulse like to say “I'll just just surrender to society” that's not the right way to think about it. it's about the synergy you know, it's this it's a synergy because your life is a system so like when you change one thing, one small change can spark systemic change and I think that's the way to think about it. So listeners if you did have a resolution then think about what you were trying to do and how it affected your larger life because that's where the change is really.

Like for example if someone did try to do a dry january and not drink alcohol, then if you don't drink alcohol, then you have to do something else. You have to have something else to drink. You have to experiment with other enjoyable beverages. But if you don't drink, then it changes your body, and your body's not processing the alcohol and all the sugar and all the effects there in your brain. So it'll often change how people sleep, change their sleep patterns. They'll have more or less energy. They might need less other drugs. Like if someone's drinking a lot, then they don't sleep well. Then in the morning they have to drink a lot of coffee or tea to caffeinate themselves. And so that changes that. And then you might be more inspired to exercise because you're feeling healthier and then you exercise more.

It's that synergy that's really the key. And it could be keeping a journal all as your resolution or going to a yoga class You know or fitness class or playing an instrument doesn't really matter, but it changes your life. So adding something. I mean my general rule of thumb I think is that just like with cooking if you add a good ingredient to the recipe It will make the recipe better, a good healthy, you know fresh ingredient or if you take away something that's not good, then it will make the recipe better. you know, that's the goal. health is really this combination of things. So, you know, it's the synergy. So it's not too late to come back to this.

Panu: Mmm.

Doherty: You know, even now in late January, early February, this is actually the time where whatever information you gain from your life change, then you can actually act on it. So like the resolution January is like the test run. So anyway.

Panu: Yeah, it can be a return to resolutions February. And anyway, making the resolutions reflects your values and there may be very valuable commitments there.

So that's also something. And when we go into environmental and climate behavior, that commitment is highly important. And there will be ups and downs anyway in the practical choices we make, even though we make the commitments. But if we stay true to those values and commitments, that's a lot.

Doherty: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And in fact, I think each season brings its own health invitations too, because when it's certainly when it's the least in the Northern Hemisphere, when it's the spring and the weather warms and, you know, I just saw a video yesterday from an outdoor therapist in the UK and was talking about the green man archetype, know, the green man story in Celtic countries. But, you know, you start to see the green man pop out when the leaves are starting to, are starting to, you know, the little buds and things like that. But anyway, spring warm, warm weather that just sparks people to be more active and outdoorsy.

So that's an invitation. The summer is an invitation to yet another thing. The fall is an invitation to another, you know, another kind of set of behaviors and then the winter. So each season, each season has its invitations to health. But the key is like, don't give up. You can still start and it's not about the resolution only. It's about how it changes your life. If anything, it just makes you more conscious of autopilot behaviors, you know,

Panu: Mm-hmm.

Doherty: When I was traveling, I got into a, and when I went to Europe and Italy, they have a lovely, many lovely traditions of drinking, drinking a aperitif or all these kinds of really nice things. And then you get, you get totally used to it very quickly. You know, your body habituates to these things and then, you know, can you, can you shake up your, your nervous system? Essentially you become more conscious, you know, cause we, we try and you try something new and it's addicting and we're conscious of it for a while. And then suddenly it just becomes autopilot behavior.

Panu: Yeah. that can easily happen. Health and ethics are quite closely connected here. I know many people whose New Year resolutions are ethical decisions, trying to do something more or better for the world. If we take these concepts such as one health, for example, which pays attention to how the health of the planet and people and other creatures are all connected.

This connection between health and ethics and resolutions becomes ever more prominent. So hopefully that can also be sparked different times of the year. And I know that we both follow the old rhythms of nature and the festivals associated with them. So there's very interesting content in them also in relation to what kind of ethical questions and basically themes about life tend to arise in a given season.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Yeah, what kind of what are some of the ethical things you've experienced people working on?

Panu: Yeah, some people might commit to giving more to charity, for example, or trying to commit to doing voluntary work for the greater good more regularly. And that, course, is often powerful if you can form a habit towards the target of the resolution. So if it becomes part of the daily or weekly rhythm, it's much more probable that one keeps on doing it. But as we have been talking here, it's always, of course, also possible to return them if we fail to follow them. So those kinds of ethical things. in Finland, the Christian tradition is much present in culture.

And this traditional half-day between winter solstice and spring equinox. It's called Laskiainen. So it's been taken over by the idea of Christian time of fasting and Shrove Tuesday.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Uh-huh.

Panu: Is the most common name. It also has an element of going downhill on snow with sleds and different kinds of nice things we've developed in the Nordic countries that you can go downhill with. So it's like going down, descending traditionally to the fasting period, but also celebrating that it's like a carnival in its literal meaning. Saying goodbye to eating meat. That's the etymological root of the Carnival and Shrove Tuesday is an example of that. So people's resolutions to do good, sometimes in Finland, are also linked with this fasting period. And for example, the Protestant Lutheran Church in Finland has been trying to advocate for an ecological time of fasting. So that it would have a pro-environmental behaviour dimension. That's not a very popular or widespread thing in Finnish culture, but some people do it.

Doherty: Mm-hmm Yeah, yeah, that's that's what's lovely about all these holidays could you get the Mardi Gras Carnival holiday here and the yeah the Ash Wednesday and in the Catholic faith and lent Yeah, yeah, I think all of these speak to a really human tendency and need to repent, to recover, to, well, to celebrate, but also to duty, you know, what is our duty? In my book I talk about, your duty is literally like you know what is due? like what is due from you to the world? And so this conversation does move you know rather quickly to the social and political realm and justice.

Panu: Hmm. Mmm.

Doherty: And which in a natural way actually because I think then systemically people move from changes in their own body and their own small circle of health to like what is my ethical duty to the larger world. that's, you know, listeners, that's perfectly normal too, because again, from a systems perspective, these are all nested, linked up systems. My physical health is part of the larger system of nature and my family and community is part of larger social systems and political systems, national systems.

Panu: Mm-hmm.

Doherty: It is all connected. It can seem really confusing. But if you have that, you know, in my book, I talk about, know, people have this scale vertigo where there's, you know, there's so many scales of things, they're just dizzy with, with the news and different levels of things. And so that's, that's, that's like level two, that's more advanced New Year's resolution work, right? Because you realize, okay, how can you understand your small change, like whether it be something as mundane as writing in a journal each morning or walking more or exercising more or taking a break from alcohol or sugar or something like that. How does that, how can that possibly link to the state of the world? But it does because we're part of the world, we're part of nature and so when we become healthier, the world around us becomes healthier and then it, practically it gives us energy, more energy to be out in the world doing things. So it is all linked together. So it's not selfish, it's not selfish or egotistical to work on your personal health.

But you know for some people, know, the drive is to do more social work. In my book, you know, in the action section, you know, I'm trying to help people do, you know, as I say in my book, know, unburdening your conscience frees up mental energy for taking action. But what then? One of the most common barriers to environmental action is lack of clarity about what actions can have a true impact. Right. So then we then then we start to question, does it matter? You know, is it worth it? You know, my actions. But that's where this idea of ceremonial behaviors comes in, which I talk about, which is that, you know, some of these actions are ceremonial. They don't they're not going to change world by themselves. Like if you recycle, know, or exercise or recycle, or plant a garden, or go to a march, you know, or do any any of these things. But they're ceremonial in the sense that they do stand for your values. They're a way for you to broadcast your values publicly and stand up for yourself. So the metaphor is like if someone's doing martial arts, they might go into their dojo where they do their training and there's a ritual to bow before you go into the dojo or to the practice space or someone goes into a church, might, like a Christian church or a Catholic church, they might kneel or in the Catholic face, they might have the holy water and cross themselves or take their hat off in a church, all these kinds of things. Those are just ceremonial behaviors, but they stand for respect and value. So that actually means a lot.

Panu: Yeah, they work on people, that's true. Yeah, so they might not cause very much visible change in the world, but they may be linked with who you are and how you are in the world. So there may be sort of hidden power in them, even though they may seem purely ceremonial. This could lead into discussions about various things. In life and also religion including rituals and ceremonies and so on but perhaps we'll go there one day. We have been touching upon that in some of the previous episodes also.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, so, you know, to tackle that for in my book for people, I, you know, I differentiate between ceremonial behaviors, which are things that we do that might not necessarily change the world, but do stand for our values, and we shouldn't dismiss them or belittle them. And then low-hanging-through, which is sort of behaviors that are fairly easy to do right around us that we can do those things that are just, you know, right there. And you know, and then real change is where we really have to dedicate ourselves to making change. you know, low hanging fruit might be just saying, my friend goes walking every morning, so I'll join them on their walk, or I'll join a club, or I'll do something that's fairly easy and easy to get into. But then the real change is like, okay, I'm really pushing myself, whether it be an exercise routine or really going through a detox from some substance like sugar or alcohol or really making a life change, letting go of things that are painful to let go of.

I see a clear a clear analogy to what's happening around politics in the US, particularly around the crisis in Minnesota with the really heavy-handed federal paramilitaries, know, rounding up people in Minnesota and the protests and then the deaths and the shootings. You know, it's really awoken a lot of a lot of questions and crises in the United States a lot of a lot of ongoing crises are reaching different boiling points. And for some people, the ceremonial behavior is looking at the news, talking about it, potentially going to a march, or joining things that are easy to join. And then the real change is where people really will put themselves in a place of danger or try to obstruct violence and things like that, or change the government. And that's a personal choice. That's a personal choice level, going from the ceremonial things to the actual easy things to the hard things. But that can happen when we devote ourselves and take time. I think the danger is to avoid what I call theater, or in the book I call it climate theater, because it's about climate change, was basically pretending, acting as if you're making a change when you're really staying in your comfort zone. So that's one of the hard personal questions is that, how do I judge my actions? Am I being more theatrical about it or am I really devoting myself and putting myself into a change zone?

Panu: Yeah, and there might be of course different levels between the low hanging fruits and the hard stuff. And then requiring various levels of commitment and courage. And people in Europe, including Finland, have also been following closely what's going on in Minnesota and Minneapolis. And that takes a lot of courage to go to the streets and try to work for the greater goods. there also the dynamic is present that if everybody thinks that why would I be needed, then there is no group power. But then this old question of the interconnectedness between individual action and collective action, it requires the individuals to get out there and then you have collective action, which can be very, very, very powerful.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and so, you know, we'll wrap it up for today, but this, just to realize that your personal resolutions, you can recover these and they're systemic and they do lead, they do link to your larger conditions in the world. And if you have questions about this, feel free to reach out. can find us at climate, hello at climatechangeandhappiness.com,

I'll put a link in the show notes to a really interesting story about in-groups and out-groups around extremists, because we have a lot of extremism in the US right now, violence. you can be in the in-group of the extremists in the sense of being like a white person in relation to like a white supremacist, but you can also, as a white person, resist the white supremacist and the violence that they're doing. But then that puts you in danger. And so it's kind of interesting to think about all that. But you had a poem that you were thinking about earlier. Maybe we can remind ourselves of that poem as we finish up, Panu

Panu: Yeah, I've been thinking about it in relation to what's going on in the States. So that's the poem by Martin Niemöller, a German Lutheran pastor. He was thinking about the events in Germany in the 1930s. And I know that this is written in places in public in the US also. So this is how it goes.

First, they came for the communists and I did not speak out because I was not a communist.

Then they came for the socialists and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.

So with gratitude to all the courageous ones.

Doherty: Yeah. Thanks, Panu. Yeah, I haven't heard that poem in a while and it is unfortunately highly relevant right now in the world. So can you stand up for yourself in various ways? know, the message is if you stand up, people in power need to stand up for people that are powerless, I guess you could say. And if we keep giving away our power, then eventually someone will have power over us.

So these are huge questions. These are big world-changing questions, but we focused personally today listeners on your own life and realizing it's not too late for you to recover your impulse to health and lessons you've learned from any resolutions and remember is the system. So again, even certainly with the politics as well small actions small healthy actions can grow and have systemic effects. And so it's your freedom to decide what level you want to work on, but encouraging everyone to try to be their best self and to do it in connection with other people that can recognize it, just like and I recognize our efforts together.

So Panu, I'll let you go into your evening and taking care of your boys. And I'm going to get into my day and everyone be well.

Panu: Take care.

image credit | Silas Lundquist

Season 5, Episode 10: On “Kinship Medicine” with Dr. Wendy Johnson

This was a fascinating episode! Thomas and Panu welcomed Dr. Wendy Johnson, a family and addiction medicine physician, to discuss her book "Kinship Medicine." Dr. Johnson shared her journey from political advocacy to medicine (“I went to medical school to do politics better.”) and the discussion delved into the social determinants of health, the historical roots of Western medicine, and the need for collective, relationship-based approaches to well-being (“Wellness comes from communal strength.”). Wendy drew a metaphor from the chrysalis stage of development, emphasizing the importance of planting seeds for a better future and the role of “imaginal disks” that hold blueprints for future transformation. Join us for an inspiring talk in the new year. 

Links

• Wendy Johnson, MD

• Book: Kinship Medicine (2025, Penguin Random House)

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 climate change, obviously, and other environmental issues and larger questions like connection to our earth and connections to the land and connections to community and our personal health. And, you know, we always bring it back to the emotional experience and we are really lucky to have a special guest with us today.

Wendy Johnson: Yeah, thank you for inviting me, Thomas and Panu. I'm Dr. Johnson. I'm a family and addiction medicine physician, and I am in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and author of Kinship Medicine, which came out earlier this year.

Doherty: Yeah. And I'm really excited to have to have Wendy on the show with us. I got a chance to meet Wendy recently and see her read in Powell's books here in Portland about kinship medicine. And when I saw her book and started reading about it I felt a kinship to the book because it really felt like it was on a parallel track with my work and with Panu's work and with my recent book Surviving Climate Anxiety. So we've been chatting.

We've interviewed a lot of interesting people on our podcast, but Wendy is the first medical doctor that we've had on. That gives us a whole area to talk about in terms of personal health and larger conceptions of health in our in our society and how to live a healthy life in terms of one's values and how that leads to advocacy and connection. So there's a lot we can talk about. No doubt we will moan that we don't have enough time after our 30 minutes, but let's do what we can. Panu, do you want to get us started?

Panu: Warmly welcome Wendy also on my behalf. Lovely to meet you. In Helsinki there's a growing interest to planetary health. Couple of very nice doctors working on that. It's relatively marginal topic in Finnish medical research and that world. But it's growing luckily and then there's of course many good people working with the modern human world and trying to advance respect, gratitude, interconnectedness. So there's many things in common with your book. it would be very nice for the listeners to hear something about your journey towards this time and place where you are now. So not every medical doctor ends up writing about kinship medicine. So would you like to share something about that journey?

Doherty: Mmm.

Johnson: I mean, I think the roots of it come from my upbringing. My mother is the daughter of Italian immigrants who grew up in my grandmother grew up in the Alps near kind of Slovenia and Austria in Northern Italy. My grandfather grew up along the shores of the Adriatic in a town called Fano and they had, you know, they instilled in my mom a connection with nature, a connection to the land that they brought, and also a deep sense of community. Growing up visiting my grandparents, you know, it was like a very fluid situation, people coming in and out of the house, maybe they were family, maybe they were friends, maybe they were neighbors, you know, it was just like a connection to the larger community. wasn't just our little house closed off. The door was always open and people were always coming and going. So I think, and then I continued throughout my life to really have themes of living in community. I think I gravitated towards that even though it's not facilitated or encouraged really in the United States and our culture that we have right now.

And then in my practice as a doctor, think over the years, maybe those ideas of connection to nature as a child, we always took camping trips. We weren’t very wealthy. And so we did cheap vacations, but always in nature. And again, those themes, you know, continued throughout the rest of my life. And as a doctor, I think through 30 years of practicing, I have seen that the lack of community and connection to nature in my patients really is a huge influence on their health, which we don't address or talk about at all in Western medicine, almost at all. And I kind of thought about this a lot and just thought. So the frame almost that we have this very individualistic frame of Western medicine that, you know, your wellness and your health is all about your biology, your genetics is really wrong. Cause that's only about 20% actually of what determines your health. That other 80% is all those things I'm talking about, the connection to community, your social situation, your social status, your educational background, all those things we now have called the social determinants of health. And they also include your connection to the environment. And when I look around, see, you know, we are really ecosystems, medical science is really showing that with our microbiome, you know, you're actually mostly not you. You have 30 trillion cells that have your DNA, but 39 trillion cells that have other DNA, your microbiome, the organisms that, and those organisms keep you alive. You couldn't live without them.

Doherty: Hmm.

Johnson: So your body is an ecosystem in communication with other ecosystems. So really health is a communal attribute. And, those ideas developed over, like I said, 30 years of practice and seeing patients and kind of thinking about what determines their, whether or not they get well or not, whether or not they see themselves as well or not, and what determines that. And so you know, writing a book is a journey. And certainly when I started writing it, maybe these ideas weren't so formed and you kind of, you read a lot of other folks, you learn a lot of other views and you start to really think about how our frame in medicine and health really keeps us, kind of keeps us sick, keeps us disconnected and how we can change that.

Doherty: Yeah, that's beautiful. I am wondering about so many things about this. Let's hold the thought because I do want to get back to the social determinants and all of this stuff. But if we ask that question again, you know, what do you think, you know, could you say a little more about your early life and how, you know, how your journey to be a medical doctor? And how did you, I know a lot of practitioners that do this work have had to be pathfinders and even push against their training a little bit. So how did your training work and how did it, when did you decide to be a medical doctor and how did all that, what's a little bit of that story?

Johnson: Well, I have a very funny story with that. I actually gravitated towards more English. My undergrad degrees were in English and political science, and I gravitated more towards advocacy. One of my first jobs out of college was being the organizer for the 20th anniversary of Earth Day in Ohio for the events that were happening there. And so I also worked in the state legislature. And working in politics, actually got a little discouraged back in the day because in electoral politics, in the legislature, it seemed that a lot of people working in politics were, I mean, they cared about the issues, but they also cared maybe even more about the game of politics. so, especially, you know, not even the elected officials, but the people working on the staff, you know, it seemed like a lot of what we spent our time thinking about was, strategies about who was going to get elected, about who was going to do this or that, and it wasn't really about the issues as much.

And so, and I felt like the work that we did was disconnected from the lives of real people and what they really needed. You know, it was people making assumptions and judgments maybe not based on data, not based on people's stories. So I decided if I wanted to do politics better, I needed to have a position or a profession where I could really be a receptor for people's stories and really understand what people were experiencing and what they needed. And so I went to medical school to do politics better. And it seems like a weird thing, but there's a lot of, I found a lot of mentors who also seem to have that same ethos. And one of them, not mentor, because he lived in the 1800s.

Doherty: Hmm

Johnson: was Rudolf Virchow, 1800s, who was a famous German physician, of developed cell theory, helped develop cell theory. And one of his famous quotes that I love, it's kind of my guiding quote is “medicine is a social science and politics is just medicine in a large scale”. And so that's kind of one of the guiding principles of my life and how I practice medicine and what I bring to my practice.

Doherty: Hmm.

Panu: Thanks for sharing that, that's very interesting and I'd love to mention a book here which I've always found very fascinating which is Roger Caillois. Caillois I guess might be the French pronunciation, Man, Play and Games. That was written in the time when one could use the word man to refer to whole humanity so things have got better in that sense but it's about the games people play in different cultures and histories both the sort of free time games but also how

Johnson: Hmm. Yeah.

Panu: game dynamics can be linked to profound motivations of different people. And that was really eye-opening as you say that some people really just love the game and they might want to win, there might be a strong inclination towards that and then there's some games where it's more about luck and luckily also games where it's more about just the playing and the fun of it. And of course I've been leaning more…

Doherty: Hmm.

Panu: Towards the third option. And I tend to regard this as a more sort of ecological way of living, even though, of course, in the modern human world, we have also lots of competition. But I don't think, Thomas, that we've ever talked about Roger Caillois or Johan Huizinga, who wrote Homo Luden, the man who plays. So that gave me an opportunity to go there. And very interesting, to hear the story of your.

Johnson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's an, I'll have to look that book. I don't know that book, so I'll have to look at that. That is interesting. Yeah.

Doherty: Mm-Hmm. But it's it is really great to you know, it's always a good sign of a conversation when people start pulling out books like this that you know, are influential on our thinking, you know, so it tells us well, first of all, tells us we're not the first people to, we're not the first people to challenge to grapple with these questions. So, you know, we're in a place of with kinship medicine and with you know, eco psychology and a lot of these holistic, you know, topics, we're in a place of perennial questions like what does it mean to live? What does it mean to live? What does it mean to be a human? What does it mean to live a good life? You know, this episode is coming out.

Johnson: Mm-hmm.

Doherty: will be coming out in the beginning of 2026. you know, it is a great time to think about what is it, what is it, you know, come back to some of our first principles as people, like, what does it mean? we've gathered all this wisdom over the years and as I start my new year, what does it mean? What does life mean to me and how can I be my best self and how can I remember my inspirations? So I love that quote. I went to medical school to do politics better. That's a great quote.

Johnson: Right. No.

Doherty: Yeah, so you came into medical school with a sense of advocacy and also sounds like with some a little bit of rebellious questioning about the whole edifice of medicine.

Johnson: Mm hmm. Yeah, I mean, I certainly I think I come to everything in my life like that. I don't know where I got that from specifically, but I do think I'm somebody who thinks, you know, why are we doing it this way? And is this really the best way? I mean, to your to your question about the, you know, how can we live our best lives kind of, you know, I think you know, right now that's really difficult for a lot of people because things are so dark in the world and it's, you know, it's often something that comes into my office, you know, I see people who come in and, you know, how are you doing? Well, I'm doing okay, except for the world. You know, that is a very common thing my patients sit down and say to me. And I do still see patients a couple days a week.

Yeah, it's a, it's a challenging thing. You for somebody who is advocacy minded, politically minded, you know, how do you connect what's going on in the world and your feelings about it with what's going on in your own life? And you don't want to just ignore it, but you don't want to get, you know, completely dragged down by it either. And I think. In Kinship Medicine, I talk a little bit about the answers and the end of the book are, you know, first of all, building a foundation of resilience in your own community and figuring out what you can do locally to do that. Because I think our ideas about wellness, again, are very individual based. But the reality is that wellness really comes from communal strengths.

It's hard for an individual to be well when a community is sick around the individual, despite what our billionaire overlords think. So I think that's step number one. And then step number two is an idea of a sense of purpose of how you can engage with what's going on around you in a constructive way.

And there's all kinds of research showing that a sense of purpose in your life is connected to better health mentally and physically. you know, in a very tiny nutshell, that's kind of what I talk about in kinship medicine as well.

Panu: Mmm. Lovely to hear that also and listeners, if you want, can check out our previous episode with Bob Doppelt and the Transformational Resilience Coalition. There's a lot of same things going on with what Wendy here testifies, the community approach and high focus on meaning and purpose. And also perhaps the episode with Matteo Innocenti from Italy and the importance of community when there's more disaster coming also. In several European countries we've noticed that if we take nurses and doctors it's usually nurses who resonate better with eco anxiety or climate anxiety. We have been wondering about this dynamic there might be many reasons for this but does that ring any bell for either of you? I don't think too much that we have been talking about this.

Johnson: Yeah. Do you have thoughts on that Thomas?

Doherty: Yeah, well, it's funny that you mentioned that, Panu, because, yeah, I don't think, Wendy, you and I had talked about this, but, know, in my graduate school, my psychology graduate school, I ended up doing my dissertation in behavioral medicine, and I worked at a cardiac rehabilitation clinic. And then I also did training at UMass Medical Center and the behavioral medicine clinic and the John Kabat-Zinn mindfulness program and things like that. So actually I spent a lot of time in the medical system and in cardiac heart health, it is the nurses that really are attentive to that, at least in the traditional cardiac scene, at least as it was 20 years ago, the medical people were really dealing with the mechanics of really complicated surgery, like open heart surgery and placing stance and dealing with people with heart attacks. But all of the psychosocial support and the emotional, the emotional expression work was facilitated by the nurses, they essentially ran the the nurses and the physical therapists ran the cardiac, so that they dealt with all of that social stuff. And I do think that is that is a pattern in a lot of health issues. Yeah, yeah.

Johnson: Right. Right. Well, I'm going to take this back to history again and sort of surmise that, you know, you can look at that again, the roots of how we got our medical system that we have. And one of the roots goes back to Descartes and the idea that the mind and body are separated, that the body is a machine and Western medicine should be concerned about.

Doherty: Uh-huh.

Johnson: how that machine works and fixing the machine doesn't have anything to do with the mind. Now we know that that's not actually true and your mind hugely influences your physical and biological health as well as your mental health obviously but that's the roots of Western medicine. And so then another interesting thing happened around the same time we were developing the germ theory both in Europe and the United States is that this allopathic tradition of men, there used to be like a million healing traditions, including midwifery and a lot of things which were much more integrated, holistic and connected to the natural world. And then this allopathic machine view of that decided, this is the scientific view. This is the enlightenment view. this, this, is the better, superior way of healing.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Johnson: And it's dominated by white men and the white men both in Europe and in United States in different ways had ways of basically demonizing all other forms of healing, including midwifery, know, which had a lot of what I would call scientific basis, much more than OBGYN in the early years of the 1800s and 1900s. And, you know…

Doherty: Hmm. Hmm. Yeah.

Johnson: All that kind of relation to, I mean, in Europe, it resulted in witch hunts and, you know, a lot of that was killing these traditional healers. In the United States, there was this thing called the Flexner Report, which demonized all other forms. If you didn't go to Harvard or Johns Hopkins and get a medical degree. So I think that, you know, a lot of those people that had those healing skills, were women and people of color, went into the nursing profession. And then all of that other psychosocial was kind of offloaded to nursing. And so I think we inherit that division today where, you know, Western medicine still, although now in the last 20 or 30 years has said, we should pay attention to these social determinants of health, but there's still no place for it because the system kind of grew up without paying attention to it. So we have a for-profit, I mean, even in places where you guys have a much better healthcare system in most all European countries and everybody at least has access to it, it's still run on money, right? Things that you can't charge for don't really get done. And so there's no real space for those social determinants of health, but much better in Europe obviously, it's, you know, things that aren't kind of monetized don't happen quite as easily. And so that healing connection is not monetized, so it doesn't really get prioritized.

Panu: Very interesting historical thinking on this and also the very enlightenment western mindset of problems to be fixed. Which is seen in troubles around mortality and death also. there's a very common inability to think sort of in a common sense way about death and dying and doctors end up trying to fix it. And I think that extends to also other more existential questions such as anxiety about the state of the world. So if you only approach it as a mental health problem to be fixed, it's not going to get us very, very far. There's also aspects of how are we going to live in this kind of world and what kind of systemic change would we need to do so that these things would get better.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Panu: I've been hearing a couple of things that you've been saying about what kind of political work your new book is doing in the world, but I wondered whether you'd want to talk a bit more about that.

Johnson: Well, what? Go ahead, Thomas, sorry.

Doherty: Yeah, let me hold that thought, Wendy, before you jump in, before you jump in, we have about 10 minutes. And so I want to, as you answer, I want to bring it to personal health also and what we can do as people on the individual level, because I'm really curious, even a sound bite about how you, you know, advice you give to people in your book about this because.

Johnson: Okay.

Doherty: I feel like I want to make sure we land on personal well-being as we fly around the political questions.

Johnson: I think they're really deeply connected because I think that our anxiety comes from this idea that we need to fix this problem, but then we get all these things that are not fixable. We're headed towards apocalypse. so there's this disconnect culturally in our heads about the messages that we keep getting. I'm supposed to be hopeful. I'm supposed to be optimistic, but it's just we're all going to die. how can I be optimistic?

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Johnson: So a couple of things, I think it is important to have a realistic acceptance of the the mess that we're in. We're in a really big mess and faced with that. How can we have answers that might get us out of the mess? But maybe not in my lifetime. I mean, I, you know, often plant fruit. I have a little orchard in my backyard and I'll plant, you know, I planted a bur oak this last year. The bur oak is like, you know, probably two inches, three inches in diameter, you know? I am not, I mean, hopefully that bur oak will survive, but I will not live to see that bur oak be 50 feet tall. You know, I will die before then. That is okay, you know?

And so this it's connected to what Panu was saying about acceptance of death and acceptance of our lifespans and not trying to delude ourselves into thinking that if you know there's billionaires that spend two million dollars a year so that they can defy death and you know while other people don't have food to put on the table. What kind of society is that? So I think in one hand it's just OK. Things are really bad.

You know, we're facing this climate catastrophe. What can we do in face of that to plant the seeds literally and metaphorically so that at some point something better can rise out of this? And it might not be something that I ever see in my life. You know, very likely it won't.

You know, I might just be the person who got picked to live through these dark times and not see the butterfly that emerges from the chrysalis, right? But what can I do? OK, so this is a thing that I recently learned is that caterpillars have inside of them. What's called and whoever named this, I just want to meet them and thank them. They have little collections of cells called imaginal disks.

 And those imaginal disks contain inside of them the instructions for making the wings and the antenna and the bodies of the butterfly. So I think we're in a chrysalis stage right now. And our job is to be creating those imaginal disks, those little centers of experimentation and resilience and advocacy that will, you know, become the butterfly eventually, which we may not see. And so I think we all need to experiment. A writer here in New Mexico, who I stole his ideas for the book and quote him, Bill Du Bois, talks about building arcs, these metaphorical arcs. I mean, we may build 10,000 arcs and maybe only 100 of them get across the ocean and the storm that comes and become whatever and our centers of resilience from what something else can rise. So when we want to connect it to our personal health, again, I think the job of creating these imaginal disks is communal. And so what can we do? And that actually happens to be what's good for us as humans. I have another little thought experiment I give in my book, which is imagine that you and I are aliens and I gift you a little family of humans as a gift, as that you can nurture. And you have to create a world where these humans can live their best life. What world would you create? Would you create a world where, you know, there's all kinds of environmental contaminants and people are all, no, you would create a world where there's a biodiverse community that you know where these humans thrive. They need clean air, they need clean water, they need connection, they need purpose. And so those are the things that we need in our personal lives to be well.

So what can we do in a very practical, like, I hate actually, my book has been categorized as a self-help book in like Amazon and different places, and I actually hate that. My book is a collective help book. That's how I would like it, but there's not a genre of that, but maybe we should create one. So I do think that we have to look around our communities. You will find a lot of things going on that you can join up with. If you can't find that start something, but start it with other people. It's not an individualistic thing. there's so many ideas of how you can connect with nature in a communal way.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Johnson: You know, going on hikes with friends, community gardens. In Santa Fe, we have the Santa Fe Conservation Trust, which volunteers go together and work on, you know, some of the conservation projects and things that we have in the area. There's all kinds of advocacy. I think even if you live in a city, there's ways to connect with nature and with other people.

I think there's networks of mutual aid that are really important right now when people are being persecuted in all kinds of different ways. And my friends in countries that have survived dictatorships have taught me that. So I think that in a personal way, first we have to get rid of our idea that our individual self is the most important thing in the world and change from an individual centric to a more life centric mindset. And from there, you really do see lots of ways to connect with others.

Doherty: Beautiful. Beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. So as I come away with this, I thought there's a number of inspiring thoughts for my new year. But, really, you know, letting go of and it's hard to explain this, right. But letting go of personal health as a goal itself, you know, in the sense that it's never only going to ever be personal. Right. So we have to let go of personal health and, you know, really embrace collective health, which is sort of a disorient, can be disorienting for people, but ultimately more of a better orientation. Yeah. Yeah.

Johnson: I think that's right. Yeah. And I think it's just a mindset change. We get bombarded with all of this individual, the kind of capitalist infrastructure wants us to think of ourselves as individuals and wants to think, you know, how we get better is satisfying all those individual desires and needs at the expense of anybody else. And we have to just really reject those messages.

Doherty: Yeah.

Johnson: and really cultivate, as I said again, this more like life-centric. Think about how you're connected to everybody else. Think about how your actions reverberate throughout your community and make them positive rather than negative.

Doherty: Yeah. Yeah. So listeners, we're going to wrap up here in a minute, but there's a really super inspiring ways to think. you know, it's, it's easier said than done. So we want to be careful. I know for myself, I love that, that metaphor, that, that image of creating the world for the little humans that you have, you know, and I think all of us intuitively know what would make the little human family healthy.

But then if we try to say, can I do that with my life? Then we do confront this whole system and this whole history. And it can be very disempowering and very disillusioning. But if we stay with it and then create little arcs in our life and little movements in the direction, that's really where the game is, right? Just little positive movements.

Panu: Exactly, this has been very inspiring to listen to you Wendy and talk with you Thomas as always and the old wisdom of when you practice care you receive care at the same time. So I think that's very much true also in these troubled times and really looking forward to engaging more with your book and work Wendy, so lovely to meet you.

Johnson: Yeah, thanks so much for having me on. It's been a great conversation. As you said, wish I could go on longer.

Doherty: Yeah. Well, we will put some links in the show notes to Wendy's book. And she's written some really great op eds that really get into this, you know, all this collective health and really engaging with the hard politics of the modern world. So, it's super inspiring. This is a great episode. So many quotes.

You know, this idea of imaginal, imaginal disks and building arcs and what does it mean to be human? what a lovely conversation to kind of, you know, expand my mind this cold morning.

So, listeners, Wendy, Panu, everyone, be well.

image credit | C Cai

Season 5, Episode 9: Having An Attentive Heart at New Year with Stephanie Kaza

Thomas and Panu reflected on the winter season and the new year with Stephanie Kaza, noted Buddhist and environmental scholar. Stephanie shared her journey from Ohio to Buffalo to Vermont to Oregon, highlighting the profound impact of natural landscapes on her psyche. The conversation stressed the significance of community, mindfulness, and seasonal rituals in connecting with nature and coping with eco-anxiety. As Stephanie noted, "Spring starts in January" and having a mindful attitude helps us to pay attention to the world and note the subtle and never-ceasing seasonal changes. Join us for a observant welcome to the new year. 

Links

• Stephanie Kaza

• A Wild Love for the World: Joanna Macy and the Work of Our Time (Shambhala Publications)

• Green Buddhism: Practice and Compassionate Action in Uncertain Times   

• Conversations with Trees: An Intimate Ecology

• Phap Za and Phap Lu Hiking Zen

• Chris Ives Zen on the Trail 

• See Also: CCH Podcast: Season 5, Episode 7: On Hiking and Zen with Brother Phap Luu

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, our podcast to show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about issues like climate change and other environmental problems and their connection with the earth and their connection with their place. This is the podcast where we really do get into the emotional side of things and our feelings. And we are really honored to have a guest with us today.

Stephanie Kaza: Hello, I'm Stephanie Kaza and I'm here in Portland, Oregon and near the Columbia River and Mount Hood and many other beautiful home-based spots here that I love.

Doherty: Yeah we're really glad to have Stephanie here. She's she's a local to where I live and we're going to talk about Stephanie's background and her role as a Buddhist scholar and an environmental scholar and a leader and someone who has worked with Panu and so we're going to we're going to talk about this and we're going to find a nice conversation here. And at the beginning of the year, at the beginning of 2026. Panu, do want to get us started?

Panu: Warmly welcome Stephanie also for my part. Lovely to see you and have another chance to talk with you. This is the character of the global world. So it's actually me who has most recently met Stephanie, even though Thomas and Stephanie are living in the same city in Portland. In autumn in Helsinki, that was a lovely exchange about environment and Buddhism and trees and many things.

I first came across your name when I was a young scholar of religion and ecology. So that was the first connection. But later on I've learned that you have been in many ways connected with the work that reconnects movement. And we did an episode remembering Joanna Macy, who I know you worked with and knew well. And this human and emotional dimension of environmental issues is in many ways familiar to you.

For the listeners, would you like to start by telling something about your journey to where you are now? I know this is an awfully broad question, but just to give listeners some orientation.

Kaza: Well, let me do that in a sort of geographic and a spiritual way. And I think that might help generate some sense of the emotional body that I've become. was born in Ohio where my parents were going to college at the conservatory of Oberlin, surrounded by music, I must say. And I did end up going back to college there. But then we moved to Buffalo, land of snow. It was so much snow in Buffalo, the land of winter. So when my father accepted a job in Oregon, it turned out to be a pivotal change for the whole family. And as we came across the country hauling a trailer where me and my three brothers slept in the bunk beds in the back, when we hit the Rocky Mountains, something happened to my psyche. I can't explain it now. I was only nine years old, but it was definitely an epiphany, a sense of awe. I was completely awestruck by the size of those mountains.

And of course then once we landed in Oregon, was beauty everywhere. We loved going to the coast to see the Grand Pacific Ocean. You could go up Mount Hood when you needed to see snow and mountains. And now I've of course, living here I've discovered the desert lands and the great rivers of Oregon. So, and as a matter of fact, I'm doing a jigsaw puzzle right now that's the state of Oregon. And every time I see a river or a coastal city, it reminds me of another beautiful place here. So I feel quite settled now in Oregon, though there was a long period of 24 years in Vermont where I was teaching at the University of Vermont. I tried the best I could to adapt to Vermont and learn that geography and feel a sense of bioregionalism there. I learned species names. I went for hikes.

But you know, I'm a West Coast person, so I'm very, very glad to be back. For me, spring begins in January, which is where we are now. So you won't see that many flowers here, but you will see the ferns and the mosses and the lichens are ecstatic with the rainfalls of the wintertime. And then pretty soon along in February, we have our earliest hellebores and witch hazel, and it rolls out across March, April, May.

I felt very deprived living in Vermont of all those months of spring and I'm very happy to be back here. So I will say just briefly in terms of spiritual journey that many of these epiphanies that have informed my psyche have been in the natural world and a number of them have been with trees. But what has supported them has been a cultivated pattern of paying attention.

Both as a naturalist, somebody in the field, what do you look for, know, color of bark and location, all that, but as a Buddhist practitioner, how to quiet the mind and how to remove some of the impediments that human beings are forever throwing in their way and making it hard to connect with other beings in the natural world. So for me, the Buddhist practice has been very important for how I pay attention to the world that I live in today.

Panu: Warm thanks for sharing all that and as a person who has been living mostly in Finland, the idea of a spring in January is of course relatively strange, although global warming is bringing elements of that into southern Finland also. But just as an anecdote, I clearly remember the first moment I saw the Rocky Mountains on a road trip in 2011 and awe and wonder, strongly present in my experience also. And dear listeners, you can notice that Stephanie is a person who pays close attention to where she is and all the relationality and interrelationality there. But I'll give the floor to Thomas now before going more deeply into that.

Doherty: Yeah, Stephanie, it's lovely to have you because your story is somewhat similar to mine. Of course, you might remember that I grew up in Buffalo also. And I remember, I have my coming out west experiences, being a river guide, climbing mountains, living in Arizona, and all this sort of stuff.

Yeah it's it's lovely. So you know I think we're just orienting Stephanie you're a great guest for the beginning of the year because we're you know it's nice to sort of adopt some sort of beginner's mind you know approach in the beginning of the year. It's we could do it any time obviously but the beginning of the calendar year gives us a structural you know permission to do that.

There's that famous quote about when your mind is stretched it can't go back to its original dimensions and it actually was about the original quote was about seeing the Alps. The person had seen the Alps for the first time. And so yeah I know Stephanie that you're in a kind of a mature stage of your career. And last year you were helping with many things in the world.

Kaza: Mm.

Doherty: Advancing the space for this integration of ecology and natural history and attention to the earth and also spirituality. And then you were around for the end of life for Joanna Macy who's a noted environmental leader. Where are you standing in terms of your career and life course. And you know this is not a huge question just off the top of your head like how do you how do see yourself aligning or do you have any practices that align help align yourself like how you see you on a live 2026 or where you see yourself going in the next the next little short period of your journey.

Kaza: Well, let's go back to that New Year's idea because I pay a really close attention to the seasons. It's also supported by Japanese Zen. have a tea ceremony is exquisitely aligned with how the seasons change. In fact, the Japanese think of the seasons as two weeks long because there's beginning of spring, middle of spring, late middle of spring, et cetera. So using that kind of approach,

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Kaza: The new year is a wonderful chance to see the year open up for those of us in a temperate climate from the solstice time. And I watched that really closely. I look at the sunrise and sunset patterns because there's a certain point in January where the day opens at both the end of the day and at the beginning of the day. And that's a real liberation moment to celebrate.

In Japan, they celebrate the New Year's and many other cultures do too, but in Japan it's about cleaning your house and preparing for the New Year. And I think of that as developing a stable base for where you're headed during the year. When you are not confronting a lot of clutter, emotionally or physically, it really helps you see what your path ahead will be.

So there's a certain amount of what I call therapeutic house cleaning that is helpful. And then of course, being out in the natural world. Now I am working on a new book project around Joanna Macy. So for me, I will need to stay pretty close to home and set up a kind of rhythm.

So what I see is stabilizing for a kind of stable mind and a stable heart is paying attention to the rhythms of the day, the rhythms of the week, and of the month. I pay also really close attention to the rhythms of the moon because I've learned that at the dark of the moon I'm really thin. I'm not nearly as creative and when that moon turns and comes out and begins its early crescent then again the sense of emergence and that's a theme I would highlight here.

New Year's is a perfect time to pay attention to the concept, the phenomenon of emergence. What is appearing that had been silent or absent before? How do you cultivate a mind that pays attention to emergence? And I will just say I find this an incredible practice in relationship to grief and loss, which of course is with us all the time around climate change.

But I have been around people who can't come out of their grief and loss. They're very overwhelmed by it. They're in the churn, in the tsunami, and looking for beauty and emergence. Anything that's arising helps lift a person up out of a space that feels like a kind of whirlpool you can't get out of. So January, back to January, is a perfect time for that.

Because even at the smallest level little things are happening. And I did learn this lesson in Vermont with a very skilled naturalist Ian Worley because boy I thought I thought Vermont was like nothing was happening across January and February and he would always always gently correct me. No, no you think nothing's happening but actually the trees are in March they're starting to photosynthesize. Look at the bark and all the various changes in the ice and the snow.

Doherty: Hmm.

Kaza: There's always, always something to look at and there's always something emerging.

Panu: Thanks so much for sharing that. In Finland, in ancient times, the change of the year was in around November. Quite the same as in the Celtic tradition with the Samhain. The dark time of the year and all the leaves are gone. That tends to support this kind of combination of outer and inner journey.

And sometimes when there's less to see in a way in the woods, for example, there's a possibility to see something which we don't usually see. So many things about what you say resonate with me in relation to Northern Europe seasons also. And that's a practical challenge, of course, in urbanizing societies, how to actually connect with those rhythms of the seasons and days.

Kaza: Well, I think it's very important to get outside as much as you can, not to hide in the winter just because it's cold or rainy, and to get outside and see the beginning and the end of the day, or to find a place where you can see the moon at night and learn how it's tracking across your neighborhood and your skyscape, and just be watching from day to day and building up a kind of internal knowledge of these things that becomes a kind of anchor.

Even in the midst of the chaos of crazy politics and people that you don't really want to emulate and, you know, civility shredding right and left, the natural world is still founded on many basic rhythms, the tides and the moons and so on. So climate change is certainly changing many aspects of our various ecosystems and some more quickly than others.

But there are rhythms that are still functional across time. And since we're staying with the January time, I would encourage people to plan something for the end of January when the dark quarter draws to a close. And that is from that end of October, early November time to Groundhog's Day or whatever you want to call it, early February. And then,

A whole new time is arising from the end of the dark quarter. So January can be a time for preparation, for cleansing, for planning, for seeing what's ahead, but just making oneself ready in some way, understanding that January doesn't last forever, as nothing does. And I will say, parenthetically, that's one of the great lessons from Buddhism, that all things are impermanent and it helps just to not cling so much to each thing because you know it's all passing, even your own life.

Panu: There's a beginning often hidden in the end, or what seems to be an end, but Thomas, what's on your mind?

Doherty: No, I’m just really enjoying the conversation. mean, I think it's just refreshing to come back to this. think so many so many of us and I would count as many listeners of this podcast just naturally gravitate to this, you know, Earth kind of an earth based life or reality that at the beginning and end of the day, is everything is Earth based and really relish coming back to these, you know, rhythms of nature and watching the sun and watch seasons and you know our we have to be somewhat militant about doing this because this is our society you know really pulls us away from all this sort of stuff so you know I think it requires you know discipline and action to sort of make space to go outside and to be in nature and all that sort of stuff so it's a good it's a good it's just a good reminder of things that we already know but I forgot because they're just long enough. They're just long enough that I forgot the lessons of fall. I forgot the lessons of winter and like, here I am again, the solstice. And, you know, really thinking about our own rituals. Like I have a tradition of a winter solstice bonfire that I do. You know, I've been doing it for years and years. And just it's just very simple but having an outdoor bonfire and having some candles and just recognizing that time so it's really it's refreshing to come back come back to this

Kaza: Well, let me add, I do a similar fire ritual when I can get to the right location because I have an altar where I put cards for people who have died. And this is one way of, a rhythmical, steady, stable way, honoring death and honoring these individuals. I write their name and then I find an image out of a collection of photos. And that reminds me of them or makes me think that's what their spirit is, whether it's a flower or a mountain. And then we hold a bonfire in January and burn them with respect and honor. And it's quite powerful.

You could see that if you didn't burn them once a year, the altar would get very, very crowded. And it does get more crowded towards the end of the year. And I find that a very helpful reminder again also about impermanence and just how the world actually is. Now I wanted to add a little postscript about what gets in the way of remembering those things. And it's often the things that distract us. So there's a lot out here now about distraction, about electronics, about you know all the ways that we jump to the interruption and we think the interruption is more important than the steady path that we've been walking. So this now is what takes what you said discipline to observe in ourselves, in our society, simple things like agreeing not to have your phones at the table at dinner. Something that simple. You're not going to look up the weather. You're not going to look up some comment that somebody made. You're going to stay in the present moment with that person. So I find that this is a new area of mindfulness, we should say, that we didn't really worry about so much 30 years ago because people didn't have cell phones.

But now the attention economy, maybe you've spoken on about this on the program is riveted around how to steal our attention and use it to make profit. So that consumer society is ever ready to grab you away from something that wasn't costing you anything. And I think this is a particularly good focal point across the holidays. And you've already made it through Christmas or whatever other holidays you celebrate or don't celebrate.

So January is a time to return again to your disciplines, to manage those distractions and manage the stability of your own presence in your own life. I just can't emphasize this enough because I've I find it a personal struggle. What time of day to be online, how long to be online, how quickly to answer texts. People have so many different expectations.

So social pressures digitally are actually distracting us from some of the more important things we do want to pay attention to. So I just encourage people, use this month to do a kind of natural personal review of habits. January is the perfect time for this. And you can probably pick up some new ways of managing your phone. The most recent one I heard was like, leave it plugged in as if it were a landline and only use it where you leave where its home base is. Well that would change some things wouldn't it? Or don't bring it into the bedroom etc. We could talk about this a long time but this is more an example of using January as a time to renew practices that support a stable life where your attention span is useful for you know more important things like climate change, for example.

Panu: That's marvelous and highly useful. In history, often when there's been important topics where discipline is needed, some kind of spiritual orders have been born to cherish that discipline. So I don't know if somebody has already set up a sort of order of, you know modesty and wisdom in cell phone use or something that this will give me something to Google later on but only to a certain amount I won't be Googling the whole evening. And so we are now in January probably when this episode comes out we are recording this at the end of November. So one nice practice that you could try listeners if you want to and I know that many of you already do this is to think about rituals for the seasons and the special times of the year. There's a great British author, Glennie Kindred, whose book, Celebrations, has been an inspiration for me in that regard this year. She advocates for the eight sort of marker days, socials disease and equinoxes, but also the days in between and setting up some kind of physical places of remembrance for them or doing some kind of activities, perhaps even small rituals. that has been very interesting. Together with colleagues we have been experimenting with various types of these and I would encourage folks to think about what might that be in your time and place.

Kaza: You know, I will add to that that we have come up with a practice on the major holidays, aside from the solstices and the equinoxes and the cross-quarter days, things like Thanksgiving, New Year's Day, Christmas, to go out for a walk in the morning, a long nature walk, and remember the Earth before there were human holidays. Kind of get your time scale correct. You can then go have your Thanksgiving dinner or your, you know, Valentine's Day, whatever, but on these big holidays where everybody is celebrating other things and often very filled with consumer purchasing or other celebrations to return to the world before human beings. It's a good exercise for the mind.

Doherty: Lovely. Yeah, this is really great. I, you know, we always talk, consider what we're going to talk about. And then once we have it, once we have a theme, it kind of does, it does bring us together. And so yeah, what we're talking about is, you know, the underlying thing for a lot of this podcast is environmental identity and our sense of our own identity in relation to nature and the natural world and all these, all these kind of recollective practices of back to the seasons and to the time and to observation. They help us. They help us to get in touch with that identity. know, Stephanie, you're so eloquent. You know, the people like Stephanie, who are scholars and writers and spiritual leaders, can just environmentally just environmentally dangerous, rolls off your tongue. Like everything you talk about is just it's a very expressive. But for regular people, we have to sort of, you know, we have to sort of make this up as we go along.

But yeah, I know. Practically, this comes down to these practices like I think having your set of holidays, that's an underlying theme from this from this. This episode, society has all of these different holidays and culture has all these different holidays or holy days, some of which are commercial, some of which are ancient. But you know, having your own, you know, set that's underneath that for yourself. And I know for me, discovering the Celtic the Celtic seasonal round was my life changed from you know after that and it helped me to understand Catholicism and my early childhood and you know even knowing that Bridges Day exists You know the groundhog day, you know where the seeds are germinating under the ground even when the snow covers the ground Just having that is so anchoring, you know, so that solstice to bridges day, you know period is what we're talking about now

So listeners, yeah, you want to think about your holidays under the holidays, you know, in the sense of yes, there's Christmas and all these commercialized holidays, but underneath that there's ancient, very, very ancient practices that eventually go to the first humans. And so I think that's what we're that's what we're channeling. That's what we're channeling here.

Kaza: You know, we should really bring out the point that to just do this individually might be a little lonely. And so I would really encourage people to find a community, even of several people, because one of the things we most need today in terms of the climate crisis is to know what communities we're part of and to support them and to do things with them. You know, be out in the streets with them or have the dinner parties or the bonfires with them.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kaza: And we lost a lot of ground during the pandemic and we're still catching up. So great compassion for the planetary peoples on how to reclaim those public civil spaces that really nourish us because they're in person. They're our whole bodies. We get to see people's hearts and feet and hats and you don't get that, you know, on a screen. So doing things in community to reinforce these—the holidays, the rituals, the shared love of the planet. This is incredibly important and it sometimes takes a bit of sleuthing. These communities don't just show up on your doorstep and sometimes a bit of experimenting. I mean, I've gone to a number of Buddhist communities, for example, and very often it's just not quite the right fit. And I don't always know. But when you keep exploring, sooner or later you find a group you can really, you should and want to invest in because they will become companions for you in approaching more difficult aspects of the world to come. So I don't have any specific ideas or recommendations whether this is an emergency preparedness group or a singing group. But some way that you're parts of communities where the people care about each other.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Kaza: I just think this is incredibly important today in a world that's doing the best to separate us from each other. But the human heart still really wants to be with people and wants to have someone to love. tribally, we're made to be social. So let's keep that as a really important part of how we start in the new year. Who are our communities?

Panu: That's wonderful and sometimes if we just manage to open our hearts it may be that the tribe finds us. it may go that way also. Stephanie, if listeners would like to engage more with your thoughts and texts and other stuff, so what would you recommend? What could people find?

Kaza: Well, the recent books are probably the best immediate option. My book called Green Buddhism, which takes an ecological and natural history perspective and combines it with Buddhist thought. Or the tree book, Conversations with Trees, is the current title. It came out again on the 30-year anniversary or 25-year anniversary. But I would also recommend a book by Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self. And the third edition of that, I was the editor for and worked very closely with Joanna on it. So I feel like in some ways it represents some of my thought as well. And if you are particularly interested in Joanna, I edited what we call a festrift honoring volume of her called A Wild Love for the World. And I wrote the introductions and so on. And it's a good global view of her life over time with the many different chapters from around the world. It was really a joy to work on. And I'm now working on a kind of primer of her key themes and major ideas and hopefully that will come out in a year or something like that. It takes a while to make a book. But those will give you some ideas of what I've been up to and there's many articles out there as well and on occasion I do more interviews like this so I'm happy to always speak with people who are looking for companionship on this journey.

Doherty: Lovely. I will.

Panu: Thanks for sharing those and that primer project might be a good topic for re-inviting you and talk more about your close cooperation with Macy and the work that reconnects, so something perhaps for the future. As always, would be so much more to talk about, but time is running, we try to keep this at roughly 30 minutes. Thomas, over to you.

Doherty: Yeah, definitely. Thanks so much for joining us. is really a lovely conversation, really restorative, really refreshing. And that last point listeners about balancing, I would say we could say don't do it alone. But what I would what I would maybe reframe that as is balance the value of solitude with the value of community. And, you know, each of you know what you need.

But one of the risks here for you know, eco anxiety and kind of unprocessed grief is isolation. So for many of these seasonal rituals, bringing your friends like I call my eco friends in my book, you know, the people that really get it and really you understand they understand you, you understand them. That's really key. Or your children or your family. There's natural groupings here.

And it's OK to be alone on a journey for a while, but you will. I think all of us can attest we will find our tribe if you keep if you keep looking. So don't do it alone unless you really want to do it alone. but really savor this season. Panu and Stephanie, thank you so much for the conversation and everyone be well.

image credit | Nenad Radojčić

Season 5, Episode 8: A Manifesto for Flourishing

Thomas and Panu reflected on the end of the year and the winter season. They invited listeners with some provocative questions: “What does the Earth in me need?” “How to care for your Soul in a world and systems that are soulless?”  “How to honor fatigue after a tough year?” “How to keep an open mind, an open heart, open breath, and open hands?” And the podcast’s theme question: “How to be happy, ethically, in the modern world?” Panu talked about his explorations with somatic therapy and breathing exercises. Thomas read a selection—“A Manifesto for Flourishing" (at minute 22:30)—from his new book Surviving Climate Anxiety. Join us for an honest and uplifting episode. 

Links

• Anmol Irfan (December 15, 2025) Climate Conservationists Push for People to Live with Nature Rather Than Against It

• Thomas reads from his new book in January 2026:

• Free online reading with the Good Grief Network on January 13, 2026 (12:00 - 1:30 PM Eastern)

• In person at Third Place Books in Seattle Washington on January 15, 2026

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 to show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about the personal side of climate change, particularly their emotional responses and what it means to be happy in the modern world. That's our mission to stop and think about this. And as you might remember, Panu and I met some years ago, both inspired by these questions and Panu is in Helsinki and I am typically in Portland, Oregon, but today I'm in New York. So we have this international dialogue and it's toward the end of the year 2025 and we're beginning to take stock of our personal lives and our work and the state of the world. And so I invite you, we invite you all to do the same. And that's where we are today in our conversation. Panu, you've been busy. What are some of the highlights of your activities recently in your work on climate change, climate emotions, teaching, writing?

Pihkala: Yes, nice to be discussing with you, Thomas. It's been a while. We were busy recording episodes at the beginning of the autumn and now it's been a sort of recording break. In Finland, many things have been happening as usual. There's been some more events on climate emotions compared to what it was like a couple of years ago. Not as much attention as we had before the COVID-19 pandemic, but some movement towards that. But generally in Finland, of course, there's lot of worry about military aggression near Europe. So that's on a lot of people's minds. And some very direct consequences of that are happening in my life also. In a couple of days, I'll be going to military rehearsal of six days. The Finnish system is so that the military consists of reserves and then they try to find suitable positions for people depending on their professions and expertise and so on. So there's been some nice facilitation and also an effort to slow down its November end of the year what the Celts used to call Samhain and this period of the leaves falling from the trees and bare in choirs as Shakespeare put it, invites for some reflection. But I've realized that you've been also quite busy, Thomas, lately.

Doherty: Yeah, I've been identifying with the autumn and the changing of the seasons myself. yeah, so again, this is I was in a yoga. I was doing a yoga class here recently and trying to take care of myself physically. And I was really had this insight about kind of taking care of the earth within me. You know, it was a nice way to think about health is that when we take up when we take care of our own health, we're taking care of the earth within us the earth in a side of us. And, you know, because yes, there's this little more sluggish energy that that can happen toward this time of the year. As the days get shorter, and the weather gets colder. And we have to we have to warm ourselves and we have to bring our energy out. So yeah, so listeners, you can think about how how you're feeling in terms of the earth in you. We get so caught up in our heads and into politics and global events that sometimes it's easy for that basic lived experience, our mind and body get to get lost. And yeah, for me, I have been traveling, my book came out in October. I'm doing some media and talking to people and trying to essentially sell the book and share it, share it around. So it's a lot of it's a lot of marketing experiences, which isn't necessarily my favorite activity. So there's been a sense of I know, for me a sense of feeling unrooted a little bit. I think we might have talked about that old story, you know, from the 19th century where the Explorer was in Africa, traveling and have had the native porters carrying all their gear and then the traveler wanted to keep going and the porters wanted to stop and traveler was saying what's why do need to stop and the porters said, well, we're waiting for our souls to catch up to us, you know, and so I feel like there's a little bit of that, you know, catching up. with ourselves.

Pihkala: Seriously.

Doherty: Yeah, exactly.

Pihkala: Thanks for sharing that and that would be a nice metaphor for the industrialized world also. It really should wait for its soul to catch up.

Doherty: Yeah, well, lot of modern world is soul-less, right? It's not about the soul. It's about products and product productivity and the luxury of the soul is not there. Or it's commodified. Or some people have the luxury to work on that while others are just doing basic survival. So yeah, yeah. So I think a couple of themes for our talk.

What does it what does it mean to be happy? And how do we come back to our to our happiness? And what does it mean to flourish? And also, you know, the long haul nature of this, I think, some of the things I've seen about climate change and policy and the news lately has been about fatigue, public fatigue on working on these issues. And, of course, because there's so much resistance and so much injustice in the world. Just bearing witness to all of that, particularly in the United States, we've had a really tough time in the United States, a lot of problems with the US government and dysfunction and injustice. And, you know, it's just fatiguing to sit with all of that. And, you know, what does it mean to come back to the to our values and our energy and things like that?

Pihkala: Yeah, and growingly the situation is called something like the polycrisis, the many interlapping and interacting crises which we are facing. And in addition to eco emotions and climate emotions, I find myself more often on speaking assignments talking about polycrisis emotions and sometimes one aspect or facit of the crisis is more at the forefront than sometimes others. So, lots of compassion and determination for the caring folks in the US. And at the same time, when we are discussing these things which are on our minds at this time of the year and in our lives, we are sort of journeying with the part four of Thomas's book, Surviving Climate Anxiety.

We've done a couple of podcast episodes on the book, mostly about part one and part two, which were coping and identity. Then there's part three, healing, which is also much about anxiety and grief and despair and the power of place and so on that resonates with a lot of teams in this podcast. As does the whole book actually, so it's sort of extended version and a lot of creativity around the themes which we often discuss here. when we take a look at part four, Thomas, what's on your mind?

Doherty: Yeah. Well, the part four is called flourishing and that's it's sort of like after you spend time with your grief and loss and your basic coping and your environmental values, you know, what does it mean to you know, what would it mean to be happy and thrive in a life as I say in the book, you know, with an open mind, open heart, open breath and open hands. And so, you know, the open mind is being flexible and patient and continuing to have a growth mindset and learn. And then you know, the open heart is this capacity to take in all the good stuff and the bad stuff. And that's the challenge. If we as we've talked about again and again, most of the news everybody gets about climate change is negative, not the positive stuff. And it can feel grim. So you've got to really work hard to take in the good. And then when I say open breath, You know, that's really literally like breathing being in our body. And all of that sort of stuff.

You know, listeners, you can just even just now just take a breath like Pana is doing, you know, just you know, because it's easy for our breath to get tight. You know, this whole idea like I talked about earlier, the earth in me, you know, the earth in me needs open breath, it needs oxygen. And then open breath also stands in for mindfulness and being present in the present moment. And then open hands. That's kind of like. Well, I think that's a neat metaphor too, because my hands are open. That means I can grasp things and I could pick up things and I can collect things. You know, my hands are closed kind of in a fist or something like that. You know, I can't, you know, really. So, you know, so open hands, that’s sort of the general big big picture for that chapter.

Pihkala: Opening up and being open. As a very literal example from my personal life this autumn has been that I've been learning stuff with a somatic, therapeutic person and it's been nice to experiment with sort of primitive and random type of breathing.

Doherty: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Pihkala: For many years I've sometimes done this count to something type of breathing like the 5, 6, 7 method is one version of that but I hadn't really done this even more primitive and more varied style and it's really helpful I find so just sharing a very practical example of something which in my case has enabled more openness.

Doherty: And what is it tell me about the practice it how is it more varied like what's an example.

Pihkala: Well, yeah, there's many ways in which one can use it, for example, really pushing the air out from your lungs. And then also breathing in very deeply so that you can feel also the upper corners of your lungs filling up and then doing that in a—not always in a rhythmic fashion, so that also helps with the muscles near the chest if they have some tightness as often happens for people like me who work a lot with laptops in addition to being outdoors.

Doherty: Yeah, yeah. So doing that, you know, even in the yoga class that I was describing earlier, you know, sometimes, you know, the class will encourage people just to, you know, really like let it out. That primal that primal sound can be really releasing and then eventually, usually, will then tone itself to more of a, you know, when you get through it, but first of all, you got to just go and get all that out. So yeah, well, I read about screaming therapy comes and goes, but every 10 years, people rediscover it as a therapeutic thing. But I just saw an article in the New York Times about screaming therapy. And so that's another version of this primal, the primal scream. It's just it's essentially just like letting go of control to let our body express itself as it wants to.

Pihkala: Yeah, and listeners, can find an earlier episode of this podcast where we discuss Primal Scream in connection with a Finnish campaign around shouting your difficult ego emotions out. Yeah, something like two or even two and a half, three years ago, it's been a while that we have been doing this. So that's one aspect related to—

Doherty: Yeah, the shouting man.

Pihkala: —flourishing and keeping it flowing and under that part four there is a chapter on spirit also and well the etymological roots of spirit in many languages are literally related to breaths and breathing so we are dealing with some fundamental stuff here.

Doherty: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. we've got the primal stuff in your body. then I think, you know, part of the book in the chapter on happiness, you know, describes some case studies of people and families. And what does it mean to like on a mundane day to day level schedule your life such that you can like—particularly if you're in a in a in a family with parents and children or whatever—you've got to schedule all of your activities and try to balance your needs and the family's needs and, and your needs for work. And so some of this, you know, really comes down to how we take care of ourselves day to day. And there's this whole permission to allow yourself to be happy. That's another big, big piece that that that is underlying this. Because even if part of us wants to be happy, there's another part of us that might say we don't have permission to be happy.

And that's a really helpful thing for people to think about because in there are many ways many activists kind of sayings and things that's basically safe. If one person isn't free, none are free, or if one person is suffering, all of us are suffering. And so when we're aware of suffering in the world and injustice, as a way of being in solidarity with those people that are suffering or as bearing witness, sometimes it precludes the sense that we can be happy. We're not allowed to be happy or there's a guilt or shame placed on that because of a privilege or something. So that kind of messes with our ability to just be happy. And that there's two ways to deal with that. One is to just ignore all the other stuff and just be happy and just put it out of your mind. And say, you know, just don't think about that right now. Let's just be in the moment.

And that's I mean, I do that myself, you know, I'll say Thomas just let's not look at the news and think about this. It's a beautiful day. The winds blowing and the trees and the leaves are falling or whatever and let it just be here now and that so there's kind of a pushing that away. You know, the meaning focused way to do it is to say, “well, yes, we're, it's okay to have multiple feelings at the same time and to bear witness to these other things while also saying that we all deserve happiness.” It's unfair to let this situation take our happiness away, particularly for young children. You we don't want them to not be happy. We want them to have a genuine life. So there are there are there are a couple ways to deal with this, I think. But the latter is really more about finding ethical happiness that I can be doing my best and following my values and my ethics. And you know, if I have a good day and I work hard, I should be able to enjoy the fruits of my labor with my friends or celebrate my work or other people's work. And it's not fair. It's not a healthy coping skill to put all of our pleasure aside and just feel guilty and sad all of the time. That's, but you can't force people to feel things they have to they have to navigate this themselves.

Pihkala: Yeah, much resonating with what you say and even though one can't force things, at least one can invite others to think about how they are negotiating climate guilt, for example, or feelings of not being able to be enough. This Rittamättö myyydentone in Finnish, which we have been discussing sometimes also in this podcast. And it can be complex. Sometimes people can then feel guilt about not being able to get rid of guilt. So getting rid of those vicious circles and loops would be important to be able to start. Start over and you have a sub-chapter on relationships in that part of the book and of course the social dynamic is very crucial here as you say and if one can find acceptance from trusted others. It greatly helps in this negotiation of guilt and happiness, I think.

Doherty: Yeah. Yeah, one of the cases in the in the book, Sam and Liberty, a couple, you know, they were struggling, Liberty was wanting them to enjoy life, you know, what's the point of being alive if I can't live fully. And Sam was more stuck on ethics and the right thing to do. And you know, in this in the story, Sam came around to the idea that he didn't have to choose between being ethical and experiencing joy. Like that's a false. That's a false dichotomy, a false choice, you know, and so the idea that ethical flourishing means, you know, happiness in line with your values, that your good feelings need to make sense within your within your ethics and not just it basically your good feelings need to make sense in terms of your ethics, not just your ego. So it's not just pleasure. So it's not about disavowal of knowledge and responsibility about climate change or injustice, but or suppressing.

Pihkala: Basically. Hmm.

Doherty: But it's about appreciating the good things honestly and in the present moment while also having an awareness that things could be much better. So that gratitude and satisfaction have a place alongside moments of outrage and anger. So it's really a both and instead of an either or. And it takes a lot. It takes a lot of work. That's another thing I came up with my colleague Ariana. Ariana and I are working on an editorial about the modern times and coping and you know that we need to pull on our best selves when we're feeling the worst. You know, it really is. It is this ethical challenge. It's a challenge to aspire to. Have you had any moments lately yourself where you've felt you had a balance between your, because I know you're highly aware of the state of the world and if you're left to your own devices, you'd probably be pretty morose about it all. So, but have you had any times to sort of where you balanced some of that reality, cold reality with positive feelings?

Pihkala: Yeah, thanks for asking and that idea of being able to feel many things and many emotions and sometimes almost at once or at least at close sequence with each other. So that's very important also. And generally I just tend to practice a sort of existentialist type of acceptance, so sort of accepting that it's going to be flawed anyway and it's going to be okay anyway. It easily leads towards this sort of accepting ambiguity and sometimes even paradoxically just keeping on going even though it's so complex and there's always multiple viewpoints that one might take to to a situation. In my life and view it's of course also closely related to all the spiritual and religious background and then those dynamics. And I was happy that you have a chapter on spirits in the book and you discuss also many aspects related to religion and various spiritualities.

Doherty: Yeah. Well spirituality is a major calling card in this work and I find it's a it's an entry point to many people. Even the people here in New York that I've been talking to in the city. The spiritual angle is actually a very common one for people. Yeah. You know I have a manifesto for flourishing I call it in the book. You know it's this little kind of a self affirmation that you could say around being happy that, you know, sort of a realistic scenario that I challenged the reader to, to take on. I could read and go over that a little bit right now.

Pihkala: Yeah, I was just about to ask that that would be very interesting.

Doherty:

Yeah. So let's do that. And so this will be a little bit the way I present this in in in public as I do it, I presented as a little validation exercise, a visualization. So I usually ask people to become quiet and to go inward a little bit and have comfortable close their eyes and, and take some deep breaths and just just listen. It lends itself to listening to and being being kind of entertained verbally. So I'll do that right now. You know, it's a statement that summarizes what flourishing in an era of climate crisis can look like.

And you know, the goal is to imagine the scenario for your life. So listeners, can, if you're able to, in in your listening situation, if you can close your eyes, that's helpful. But otherwise, just take this in deeply and listen as I speak. And again, taking a couple deep breaths. Maybe making some sounds like Panu was talking about, you know, you know, get some air out.

Yeah, good clean breaths and then just settled in and I'll just read this.

I carry the weight of climate change on my shoulders. I feel anxious about the heat of the summer, the air quality, the winter storms, and the future. My internal alarm systems are going off all the time. But I can take a step back and acknowledge this: I'm conscious of how I'm thinking about the world and maintaining a growth mindset. I'm prepared to discover things are much worse than I thought. But also at times better.

I'm practicing emotional intelligence. I stop and ask myself what I'm feeling and also what feelings I want to have and to cultivate and grow stronger. I remind myself that sustainability begins with my own foundation of personal health. I'm strengthening my relaxation response so it can balance my stress response. I know that if I feel hurt about the state of the environment, it is a signal that I car

I remind myself that climate change is not my fault. Even as I take on responsibility, I understand that forces of power, nationalism, and unregulated commerce are driving much of Earth's systemic troubles. Even as I feel like a hostage to dangerous forces, I focus on what I can control. I remind myself that political systems are created by people and they can be changed.

When the media announces new threats, I remind myself, I already know. I might not know every detail of the story, but I am familiar with the larger narrative. Nature is not just a place outside of me. I am nature. I have a unique environmental identity and a set of experiences and values that gives me a place to stand on the planet. Even as I am part of the web of life, I am also weaving it.

Even as I struggle with feelings of fear and eco anxiety, I step back and see these as normal emotional responses. I know that standing up and publicly recognizing my eco anxiety is a healthy form of self-expression. Regardless of who is listening, speaking my truth out loud generates energy for action. I am a work in progress, but I have new skills and I'm building a toolkit for coping. I know I am so much bigger than my climate anxiety.

I can still feel happiness at this time.

Pihkala: Hmm. Wonderful. Thank you very much, Thomas, for reading that out loud and writing that. I believe it will be validating for many people. And to the book, it also brings an important element of sort of vulnerability or ambiguity. it's kind of different voice from all the parts where the main focus is on good things that the therapist has been able to help people with.

Doherty: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So being able to fly under our own wings and to and to just tell ourselves honestly that we're doing our best and that again, just because I care, it doesn't mean it's my fault. Right. Just because I'm aware doesn't mean I need to be sad all of the time.

Even in a disaster, literally a disaster event, there are moments of happiness as we struggle and find places of survival and help other people. So yeah, but again, it's something it's something to practice this this kind of happiness we're talking about is not something that's always spontaneous. It's something that needs to be practiced. But we can do it, we can do it. So it's you know, flourishing is ayou know, happiness is something maybe sport, spontaneous and wild, but flourishing is something that is cultivated, you know, it's something that you put effort into over time. Yeah.

Pihkala: Yeah, and I think closely related to self-acceptance and self-compassion. I was thinking of Tara Brach, the mindfulness teacher and writer at an earlier point in our talk today and her ideas of this trance of unworthiness which so easily is in people's body minds, especially in our neoliberal capitalist society is this sort of nagging sense of not being enough and then practicing self-acceptance and self-compassion as I hear you say I think is a highly, highly important matter and also counter-cultural.

Doherty: How do you mean? Yeah. How do you mean countercultural?

Pihkala: Because so much of our culture is tied with ideas that one should always be better and do better and buy or acquire more things to be more advanced and have more status, have a bigger house and more impact in your work and that kind of thing.

Doherty: Yeah.

Pihkala: It can be seen as counter-cultural to be happy with less and to practice self-acceptance.

Doherty: Yes, exactly. Yeah, the legom, you know, that that concept of legom that they have in Scandinavia, just just enough, you know, that we put when we pass around the, the horn of drink, you know, there's enough for everyone to drink from just we just get enough and we can share and yeah, yeah, something. Logom, sorry. Yeah, logom. Yeah. So yeah, so yeah, these are this that is countercultural, countercultural to maxing out and especially at the end of the year, a lot of the celebrations that at their heart are really about this gratitude and grace and just enough and enjoying what we have. It's easy to lose that in all of the sparkle and tinsel of the commercial items that are all, you know, climbing over the top of all of that stuff.

So yeah, coming back to the heart of the matter. So great conversation. It's nice checking with you Panu and remind myself of some of these things.

Pihkala: Likewise, Thomas, likewise.

Doherty: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So let's wrap it up. But listeners, we talked about a manifesto for flourishing a little bit today, and I shared some of that. So hopefully it's landed for you. If you're new to the podcast, that's kind of what we do. And if you've been listening, then this is where we come back. It's a long haul project here. So, Panu, good luck with your military training and all your responsibilities there. And we will speak to you again soon. Everyone be well.

Pihkala: Take care.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

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

image credit | Alex Moliski

Season 5, Episode 7: On Hiking and Zen with Brother Phap Luu

Thomas and Panu had a great discussion with Brother Phap Luu, a US born Buddhist monk in the Plum Village tradition, and co-author of Hiking Zen. Topics included the dynamics of hiking meditation, the role of mindfulness and Buddhist thought in an engaged and ethical life, ways to find peace amid the furor of politics and climate threats. 

Links

• Phap Lu / Brother Stream

• Hiking Zen

• Dartmouth Alumni Magazine: A Monk’s Journey 

• Deer Park Monastery Earth Peace Treaty Initiative

• A Simple Life: A Response to the Climate Crisis by Brother Phap Luu

• Johannes Cairns (2025) Engaged Buddhist responses to the climate crisis: Negotiations among Western Buddhist climate activists. 

Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

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

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

Panu: And I am Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: And welcome to climate change and happiness. is our podcast, our show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change and other environmental issues and other world issues. And we were always asking this provocative question, you know, what is where does happiness fit in and what does it mean to be happy in the modern world? And we approach this from different directions. I find that often for people at the end of the day, a spiritual, the spiritual dimension of this work is important. So that's one angle and we're going to get into that a little bit in terms of spirituality, but also just being in nature and actually experiencing directly, you know, connection and communion with the natural world. in order to explore this, we have a very special guest.

Brother Phap Luu: HI, I'm Brother Phap Luu, or Brother Stream, a monk in the Plum Village tradition, and I live at Deer Park Monastery in Southern California. And I recently co-wrote a book called Hiking Zen, Train Your Mind in Nature with one of my brothers, Brother Phap Xa. And so it's little fun stories about practicing mindfulness and meditation in nature over our backpacking retreat, specifically on the Appalachian Trail, a long seven week trip we did back in 2018.

Doherty: Yeah, I'm so glad you could join us. yeah, the part of the backstory is that a dear friend gave me a copy of Hiking Zan, Phap Luu's book this summer for my birthday in June. you know, I'm not a formal Buddhist practitioner myself, although I have been exposed to Buddhist practice and meditations and retreats and the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh and that's like many people that's just part of my way of understanding the world. so the book was a really great reminder to me of all of that. And I was particularly intrigued by the stories about hiking on the Appalachian Trail and just the real candid stories of what it's like to be hiking and the positive sides of being in nature, but also the challenges of pacing yourself and being with a group and managing different styles and what happens when you spill hot broth on your lap, you know, on a cold rainy day around the campfire and all the real, you know, personality conflicts that can happen when you have a small group. So it was a really lovely way to think about connections with nature and how our mind works and the Buddhist Dharma. So anyway,

Brother Phap Luu: Yeah, right.

Doherty: And listeners, know, the way this works is sometimes you just have to reach out. And I actually just reached out to the, think maybe to the publisher or something to try to get a, can I get a hold of these two, one of these monks and talk to them, tell them about my book. And so here we are, we were able to connect and Phap Luu was gracious enough to join us on the podcast. Panu and Phap Luu have met now and everybody has a lot to talk about. So it's a great, it's just a great example of an international connection. So Panu, you wanna get us started in our conversation?

Panu: Warm welcome, brother Phap Luu, also on my behalf. Really a pleasure to meet you. Hiking has been an important part in my life also and spiritual walks, the dimension of spirituality in walking and hiking. there's a bunch of connections with my own life history also.

Brother Phap Luu: obviously.

Panu: Dear listeners, walking is one of those subjects which very easily become linked with the art of everyday living. sort of art of mindful walking has lots of similarities with things which are very much needed in our everyday lives also amidst the climate crisis. But before going into specifics, it would be lovely to hear something of your background. Now, of course, there's the whole story about how an American becomes a Buddhist monk and you have a video on YouTube about climate matters also and then there's all the contents related to hiking. But would you like to start by telling something about your journey towards this place and time where you are now?

Brother Phap Luu: Sure, can give a short version. I would say the shortest version is that suffering, that's why I became a monk. How do you deal with the ill being or this suffering, anxiety, fear that we experience as human beings, right? Where nobody's in control of our future and we don't seem to be very much in control of our present moment. And yet here we are experiencing this present moment. And so I, as a young person, I was exposed a lot to nature. I think that, and that together with the fact that I was not raised in a formal religious tradition, my parents who raised Catholic, they decided not to raise us Catholic. So I was not baptized. And yeah, my father had the vision that, actually, both my parents, but really my father had the vision that my sister and I could choose whatever spiritual path, I don't think he said spiritual path, he said religion, that we want to, he wanted it to be open, because that's something that he regretted very much in his own life, that he could not choose. But even that idea of choosing a religious tradition is very modern.

I don't think he necessarily blames on his parents for that. And then my father grew up hunting with my grandfather and he never liked killing animals, but he loved being in nature. so that he transmitted to me. So from a very young age, I spent lots of time with my father in the forest and I just, you know, with my whole family really, but I guess my father saw that I enjoyed it very much. So I started going more and more. I was involved in Boy Scouts in my town. And so we spent a lot of time in nature. And then I just grew up in a very, a very wild place. I mean, I wouldn't say wild, it's domesticated Connecticut, but it's, know, it's the forest have grown back and I was in a wooded place, rather isolated on the river. There was a tonic river and so I just spent a lot of time out walking in the forest, building fires as a kid and, you know, things that I that I guess I take for granted, but not everyone has necessarily nowadays. More and more of us are in urban areas growing up. And so I just had that freedom to always walk out the door and I just was fascinated with the forest and the trees and I would just throughout various epics of my life.

Later I got into running and so I was a cross country runner and track runner. And so then I would run in the state forest or town forest near where I grew up and with my dog. And so that was just a very healing experience. Also, I grew up, you know, the other thing is I was in a ski family. So we spent a lot of time in the summer. My grandfather ran a boat shop, so we had a, we were water skiers. So he goes skiing most every day in the summer. And then in the winter we were snow skiers. we'd go up to mountains in Northern Connecticut or up in New Hampshire, Vermont and beyond the snow. And so those experiences of being, know, for the first time on my own on an isolated part of the mountain with the snow. These experiences all kind of came together into dividing a kind of spiritual path for me. And it was really when I discovered Buddhism that I found a spiritual path, a tradition, which already seemed to integrate everything that I had experienced in these wild forays into nature.

Panu: Thanks a lot for sharing all that and a lot of similarities with many people who have become environmentalists of various kinds. Being already in the woods as a child and many kinds of experiences there. From personal history there's a connection also with running in the woods, I've done orientering since I was seven, know, the sports where you have a map and compass and you run through the woods. So I've always loved that. And in your book, as has been mentioned here, there's experiences from the Appalachian Trail, which sounds fabulous. I've only been there for like one one day stretch. But in our pre-conversation, I heard that you have some hiking possibilities right next to the monastery where you are living. So just setting up the context, would you like to say a bit about the place where you are living and serving, perhaps especially in relation to the modern human world?

Brother Phap Luu: Sure, sure. So I became a monk in the Plum Village tradition. I met the Master Thich Nhat Hanh on a US tour. came on in 2002, and for the first time, and then listened to his public talk and was just, I felt this is my teacher. And I also had experience with his early communities here. we call it the plum village tradition. So the first monasteries in France, he was exiled and took political asylum in France when he spoke out against the war in Vietnam in 1966. And so he built a community there eventually in the South of France. And so when I got to ask him directly to become a monk in 2003, he said, I would need to come there to ordain and it's a decision of the community. And so I was paying off my school loans and I just sent the last check in and got on a plane when I was 27 and went over to France to ordain. And it was a very fortunate time in his life trajectory because he, first of all, he opened this monastery, Deer Park in 2000 and decided to close Plum Village for three months and bring the entire community here. So that's when I first came here to Deer Park, where I live in Southern California. And yeah, I think we managed through good conditions to find this center, this valley, Chaparral Wild in the Escondido, California, where right next to a big town, wild town park, so it's many thousands of acres altogether where we have this monastery. For me, if you go to see pictures of the old early monasteries in China in the mountains, it's kind of situated like that. So I do feel it be a great center of the Buddha dharma for hundreds of years going into the future here in America. So we have that kind of vision.

And that's something that drew me to Thai as well, is that he had the vision for long term and his approach to Mother Earth and the climate crisis also had that. He recognized that we might not as human beings make it through this moment we're having on our planet. But the Mother Earth has the capacity to regenerate itself. Just like when the tiny mammals that survived the end of Cretaceous extinction, then filled in the niche that the dinosaurs left behind. so I think that the Dhamma accounts for all those things. we are, anyhow, just to come back to Deer Park, we are really looking in this long-term way and the way in which we're living in the monastery.

And so I think it's very helpful to have these guiding visions of impermanence, of non-self, of Nirvana, these kind of three, we call it dhamma seals, are the mark of true dhamma teaching. We need to look at our bodies and look at all of the innovations and creations and institutions of our human existence as impermanent. yeah, in that way, we actually live much happier in the present moment and we can transmit that to future generations. And so that's kind of what we're doing here at Deer Park. And it's the spirit of our backpacking retreats. And like you say, Panu, we've been, the book talks about the backpacking retreats on the Appalachian Trail. We've developed ones that we do straight here from the monastery because we have these thousands of acres around us. So we've been able to do a number of retreats where we start right in the monastery and we backpack right out. And there's a campsite four miles away at a lake in the town park near us and we camp there for a few nights and hike and then we camp on top of our mountain right here for a couple nights and then come back. So it's a whole week long retreat and I found that actually some of those retreats are our most powerful ones because we have the energy of practice here in the monastery to kind of hold the beginning of the retreat and then we go out into the wild.

And I've always encouraged folks as well when they come on our normal retreats, which are more sedentary, you know, in the monastery. say, not everyone calls it, I call them our sedentary retreats. Because, know, meditation is not something we assume means you have to sit still. But actually meditation is happening in action and our teacher was an exemplar of that philosophy. And so we actually, you know, in our retreats that we do here that are mobile, you know, we say mobile monastery, know, walking meditation. We're able to benefit at the beginning from the collective energy here in the monastery and then be able to go out and do this healing that we talk about in the wild that I feel is critical if we want people to understand the preciousness of what we have on this planet Earth that we cannot, I would say maybe even possibly, but not even realistically recreate on another planet, let alone like, you know, how we could recover from the increasing temperatures of our climate. You know, and then when people do get that insight.

I mean, one thing is the work we do with climate activists who are already out there, professionals, And introducing them to mindfulness so they can take care of their emotions, especially strong emotions like despair and anger that they encounter daily as climate activists. another approach is to actually activate people through bringing them in this immersive experience in nature where they realize the preciousness of what it is we have and the interconnectedness of how we are with the natural world around us so that climate activism as it were is just a natural extension of their being.

Doherty: Lovely, lovely. Yeah, Panu, I have a number of thoughts, but Panu, what are you percolating on as you're listening? As you're listening here.

Panu: Lots of things and Thich Nhat Hanh has been a major influence for Buddhists who are active in environmental matters, but of course also for people with other worldviews and religions. So just wanting to say that out explicitly as a scholar of religion and ecology. So that's the influence has been profound. And in this podcast, we've talked about Joanna Macey and the Buddhist influencing methods for engaging with our pain for the world as Macey puts it or difficult emotions and existential questions arising out of the state of the world. And Brother Phap Luu named some of these and practicing mindfulness and other spiritual practices is one important way to engage with that. So there's lots of resonances with the larger topics around environmentalism and also also eco emotions but Thomas what are you sitting with now.

Doherty: Yeah, I'm sitting with all the fruitful directions we could go on our talk and what's best for the listeners as we hold this space. I think I want to, before we're done, cycle to this idea of eco-anxiety and coping, because I think it's a really important takeaway from this work. You know, but I think, you know, what we're talking about, we had a we had a talk with Trevye Johnson a little while back, and I and our podcast and she works and helps people to to deal with damage, damaged nature because one of the paradoxes that's coming up for people. I mean, I think most people, whether they're a nature person or even just a, you know, nature curious, as you might say, or Buddhist curious, they get the idea of how it'd be interesting to do some meditation and going to go on a mind walk but lately what happens of course is that people go into nature and they notice the weather or smoke or a wildfire or degradation and then it's really like a double whammy like they they're coming in with this innocent sense of so the opening up to inter being is beautiful but it's also when you're innocent it opens you up to all this potential pain and you know the Aldo Leopold idea of, you know, seeing all the all the wounds and pains of the world. And so they're not ready for that.

So and I think it's great, you know, there's so much here, but the idea of interbeing and that we're just part of a larger lineage of history and nature. Lately, I've been inspired by some learning I've done about different plant communities and how there's the climax communities that we like. But there's also the weedy communities that spring up and after a forest fire or after a thing. And then there's also the really hardy species like cacti and stuff like that. And so now when I go into nature and I see a so called damaged place. It's not damaged to me anymore. I just realized there's just a different life regime that's living in it. So anyway, I think listeners need to realize that yes, you should in fact go do all these experiences we're talking about, but you do have to take care of yourself because it can't open you up. It can't open you up to all of these potential woundings. then I think that leads us to this idea of compassion.

you know, how do we, how are we gentle with ourselves? Cause then we feel guilty or we're, feel we're implicit in destruction of nature. And so that's probably a really juicy thing that comes up for you. Brother Phap Luu in these, in these retreats, when people are sitting and they, someone gets up and like, how do you handle that? You know, when you're a tree, when someone comes up and says, well, I feel guilty and we're, we're destroying the planet. And you know, they're in that place of powerlessness. How do you hold that space?

Brother Phap Luu: Yeah, thank you. This is really important. I feel, first of all, we have to model the change we want to be in the world, right? So as monks and nuns in our tradition, we try to live simply. So we do use computers, know, and smartphones to the extent we need to, but we try to keep it very minimal.

And, you know, we eat together, so we share a common space. We buy food together or receive food as offering. And so that reduces already our way of living on the planet. so people can see, and I think why Deer Park is growing and more young people are coming here or becoming monastic or living nearby, working on our organic farm or our new school, is that they see that we're living the change and we're also happy, right? So, I mean, people need to see that you are a happy, person. I I still have my moments. I look within and I see how difficult are the challenges we're facing, but I learned from Thay to have a resilient joy and nourish that joy on a daily basis.

So, because I know that will allow me to respond and adapt flexibly to the challenge that's coming. If I'm caught in emotions like despair and anger, I only bash things or resign myself, right? So I found that joy and happiness are emotions that allow me to have a more skillful response to these challenges.

And that's really what we need. So first is modeling for people what a happy life is despite these challenges. And the second is as a spiritual teacher, which is a role I often find myself in, I'm cognizant that I need to curate an experience for people, that I'm part of what we're doing and the Buddha was doing and Thay was doing. It's just recognizing people.

You know, we're always self-regulating, right? And so there's a space in which, you know, some people, the space in which they can self-regulate is very small. And so you need to understand that. And then there are others who their capacity is large and others who have grown their capacity over the years through their practice of mindfulness. so, you know, being mindful, you can be aware of when somebody's gone beyond their limit and, you know, okay, adjust.

And so we do that on our retreats and on our backpacking retreats. We respond in an adaptive way. If somebody goes way beyond, then sometimes they have to come off the retreat. we always have ways like backup plan B and C. Usually we try to keep it and try to adjust the group and have more energy. I always try to have people who've been on backpacking retreats before, even though they're not formally like leaders or facilitators, but they're there as support as well because they are more able to take care of their difficult emotions in the middle of a rainstorm or, know, quite often it's just the inner storm somebody's experiencing because of some psychological trauma that's coming up for them being out in nature. And, you know, then taking people also a little bit farther in so they see that I'm a big proponent of mindful walking in so-called damage spaces. We recently did a walking meditation. I was doing a book signing right here in Escondido. And so we'd started it with a one-hour walking meditation. And so we went down and walked through the transit center in Escondido. And I mean, it's really a quite developed urban area of the town.

And we walked on the bike path that went by this, the Escondido Creek, which is a big concrete slabs. mean, there's no dirt to be seen. And then we were doing mindful movements in this opening in a gate. And then a man rode by on his bike and then he rode right past us and off the bike path and on this little dirt path along a channel. And so I, when we finished the movements, I thought, well, What the heck, let's try it. And so we walked there, we followed him and we found destroyed bits of tents and debris and, you know, all kind of, know, unhoused folk had been living basically behind this shopping center on a channel, you know, on the bank, a sloping bank of a channel. And we actually came on the man and his bike and then his partner was taking a shower and one of these camping showers that they'd managed to rig up right there.

And we did walking meditation right through. mean, we respectfully asked if we could pass and, and, you know, there are other folks back there. So it was a, you know, I think that kind of experience is important for people to have, to see that what, you know, what, what, we are hiding the, the effect, the effects of our manner of living on this planet. And in order to see it, we, I feel one of the best ways is to get on our own two feet, to get out of our car bubbles, to get out of, you know, already an e-bike is better. But if you really are two feet, you know, walking the planet and also going in places where it feels a bit edgy, you know, I, I, I'm, you know, I was cognizant. was with a group of people and we're doing this together as an experience because we need to see what's there, you know, what kind of conditions people are living in on this planet.

So that's an example. think, you know, so the first thing is modeling. The second is curating the experience for others, you know, knowing that, you know, this we need to have a, you know, I'm sure you know, as a psychotherapist that you need to know where people are at and what they can handle, you know, and what we are able to bring to them in that moment.

Doherty: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Panu: Yes, thanks for sharing that. That's a profound example of daring to be with suffering. My colleague and doctoral student Johannes Kerns, who is a Finnish Buddhist, just finished his dissertation on so-called engaged Buddhism and climate action.

So engaged Buddhism meaning, Buddhist very active in social matters and often environmental matters. And one of his points was that religion can shape how people relate to suffering. So this goes back to some of your very first sentences, Brother Phap Luu, here. And in relation to monotheistic religions, I've sometimes participated in discussions about pilgrimage.

That's one way of spiritual walking and also a metaphor of life and coming from a very nature-oriented ecumenical protestant background, it's been easy to emphasize that the journey is more essential than the destination and in monotheistic framings of pilgrimage there's different variations, but I think that the idea of being present in our lives is very, very crucial instead of focusing the attention on some destination. So in my mind that comes very close to the zen hiking thing and also reminds me of many things I've heard Buddhists say so just wanted to say that out loud.

Brother Phap Luu: Yeah, and one of the themes that I hope gets transmitted through the book is this concentration on aimlessness, like learning to walk without a destination. Because if we can apply that in the moment and then we expand it out towards our whole life and start to see that a lot of the goals and so forth, the destinations that we have in life are actually there. Even if we don't explicitly have them, they are there deep in our consciousness. They've been set through our intention when we were younger. And so in order to respond reflexively, we need to let go of a lot of those, some assumed destinations or goals. I mean, if we're going to do it as a collective in all of humanity, and if we can't do it as individuals first.

Let go of our career goals and many, many things that we expect, that we need to be happy. And that's the great teaching I got from the Master Thich Nhat Hanh because he did not have much control over his own life, right? He was exiled and he had to adjust many times. And yet he remained firm in his principles and the practice of the Dharma. And so I've learned to do that as well. I mean, I've let go of all kinds of expectations that my family, my culture. But even as a monk, I can come up with all kinds of destinations that don't necessarily bring happiness to myself and others.

Doherty: Yeah, this is wonderful. As always, we could go on and we'll have to have you come back, I think, because I feel like there is some real fruitful practical directions to go. think listeners, you know, one of the biggest things with eco anxiety is really like we're talking about just letting yourself be present. There's such as omnipresent pressure to act.

Take action to change our lives to change society to fight society to fight capitalism to kind of think that we're an atlas that's going to like balance out all this structural stuff. And that is a healthy impulse. it's because it comes deeply from our values and our deepest, you know, ethical consciousness. But, you know, there's got to be a time where you just stop for a moment. I think that's the key lesson is stopping doesn't mean stopping permanently. It means being able to stop for a moment to let this down for a moment so we can just be present, because then we can decide which direction we want to go. So I think that's the paradox with eco-anxiety is you have to just accept the world as it is and accept yourself just exactly as it is with not any action at all. It's like the old meditation saying, don't just do something, sit there like that. And it's so counterintuitive because our whole nervous system is geared up.

Brother Phap Luu: Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah.

Doherty: This massive, you know, societal fight or flight response. But, you know, so that's why I think any contemplative practice, any spirituality, any kindness, you know, it's obviously there's thousands of years of depth of history in the Buddhist tradition with this, but just letting yourself take five minutes to be off the grid, off the clock, like an athlete that takes a timeout in a game doesn't mean you're not going to go back in the game.

But so anyway, that's just something for listeners to think about. But we've got to wrap up our conversation for now. But Phap Luu, what's lingering in your mind that you want to leave us with here?

Brother Phap Luu: Well, I just want to take a moment if it's okay just to honor a teacher of mine who just passed away a few days ago, Larry Ashmore, who is my earth sciences teacher and first year of high school. he would take us every class. He'd take us on a canoe trip on the Connecticut River. So we go camping in nature for a number of days. And I realized that he really modeled for us as students what it meant to be a concern and a citizen of this natural world. And I realized on his passing a couple of days ago that a lot of what's in Hiking Zen was also what he transmitted. So I just want to take, if I could, just this moment to honor his, because it's so important in our tradition to honor our teachers and all those who have transmitted to us. We are not individuals, right? We are just in a flow, a flowing stream of community.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Brother Phap Luu: And just to also in that spirit to just add to what you said, Thomas, now, which is, think, so helpful for people who are suffering and alone with the climate crisis, how important it is to connect to community. Yeah, I think if you're feeling despair, right away, connect to somebody, you know, and try to do it in person. And because the energy you get from building community.

Doherty: Hmm.

Brother Phap Luu: is so powerful, right? And it's meeting those needs that we need, that we have as human beings, that we often forget when we're fighting to save the planet. So whatever kind of community you can build with your neighbors, with friends, please do it. We need that in order to sustain the work we're doing. So thank you for calling that out.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and like you say co-regulate and curate so I think it's not it's not just because communities can be actually negative too and sometimes you get a bunch of scared Stressed out people they can go in a negative doom spiral so I think it's that connect and also co-regulate and like you like you say like try to see when people when someone neither yourself or someone else is just beyond your comfort zone and so that that that co-regulation I would say is is part of it. We'll wrap up here in a moment and let Phap Luu close us out but I just want to say Hiking Zen the book that, Phap Luu and Phap Xa, you know, co-wrote Hiking Zen, and Train Your Mind in Nature, Parallax Press. It's just a nice, it's a nice little pocket sized book, even if you're a long time devotee of, you know, Buddhism or Thich Nhat Hanh. It's a great, like for me, it was a great refresher course in reminding me of these, of these things in my daily life. And so, and I'm, just validated because I just wrote this book, you know, surviving climate anxiety. And so there's a lot of validation when I meet someone like Phap Luu and realize, okay, my thoughts aren't that far off from other other people's thoughts. So that makes me feel good. So Yeah, Panu why don't you Leave us with some final thoughts and we'll close off this episode here.

Panu: Warm thanks, Brother Phap Luu. It's been a delight and hopefully we'll get a chance to continue the conversation sometime. As a Finn, I was very delighted to hear that the monastery even has a sauna. So it must be a very good place and it may have a sauna, I'm not completely sure.

Doherty: yeah.

Brother Phap Luu: Yeah, it's a little bit secret.

Doherty: Yeah, yeah.

Brother Phap Luu: No, no, it's just because it's still these lingering ideas that a sauna is something like luxurious. But I take the Finnish attitude that it's the doctor, right?

Panu: Yeah, it's a place for healing and social connection and can be made from wood in a very almost ascetic fashion of course you get all kinds these days and the listeners will put links to also talks by Brother Phap Luu and you can find us at climatechangeandhappiness.com warm thanks to everybody who supports us at Patreon and Please do take care amidst your lives wherever you are. thanks.

Doherty: Yeah, so Brother Phap Luu and Panu, listeners, everyone, be well.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

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

image credit | Sigmund

Season 5, Episode 6: New Options for Meetings & Travel with Josh Gutwill & Sue Allen

As the end of the year and traditional holiday travel calls, many also consider the social and environmental impacts of traveling. One area where people can have control over required travel is in the structure of business and academic meetings. Thomas and Panu spoke with Josh Gutwill & Sue Allen of the Clean Conferencing Institute about new, positive trends in virtual and hybrid meetings. Many lessons have been learned since the rapid, sometimes awkward transition online during the COVID era. Beyond the environmental benefits, one clear finding is that using up-to-date online platforms makes it easier for a wider range of people to participate and contribute who might otherwise face barriers in traditional meeting settings. 

Links

• Clean Conferencing Institute

• LinkedIn

• Three Pillars of Virtual Conferencing

• Priya Parker 2018 The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters 

• Guetter et al 2022 In-person vs. virtual conferences: Lessons learned and how to take advantage of the best of both worlds. American Journal of Surgery

• Rocio Joo et al 2022 Ten simple rules to host an inclusive conference. PLOS Computational Biology 

• Richard Parncutt 2025 The global multi-hub conference: Inclusion, sustainability, and academic politics. Sustainable Futures. 

Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

Introduction: 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.

Thomas: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. This is our podcast. This is a show for people around the world who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change and other environmental issues in the state of the world and how they can be their best self. we talk about what that means for us in our personal lives and our professional lives. And one of the things we've had on this podcast either formally or in the background, quite a number of times is travel and our sense of our own carbon footprint and how our lifestyles and behaviors weigh on the planet and what are the ethics of this. I know this is something listeners you all think about in many many ways and one of the ways that comes up is in travel and going to meetings and business meetings or professional or personal things and so we're going to get into that today with some specialists that we know that work around creative ways for people to get together in the world. So that's our focus today. We're not going to solve this. These are big systemic problems. not going to solve them, but we're going to get into some kind of interesting and some of the rare kind of optimistic and interesting parts of this conversation. So to that end, I'm really proud to have two special guests with us.

Sue: I'm Sue Allen and I'm coming to you from the beautiful state of Maine and I'm a co-director of the Clean Conferencing Institute.

Josh: Hello, my name is Josh and I'm coming from Berkeley, California and I am the other co-director of the Clean Conferencing Institute and it's a pleasure to be with you today.

Thomas: Yes, and I've got a chance to meet and present with Josh and meet Sue and, you know, as a someone who goes to academic conferences, I've been really personally pushing on the American Psychological Association, specifically one of my home organizations to think about their carbon footprint. And, you know, it's a massive kind of missing area and a lot of big academic conferences. So it's an area of kind of activism for me, but it's also there's a lot of neat technology and there's a lot of neat ways to work this. So we're going to talk to Sue and Josh about their work and their backgrounds today. Panu, do you want to get us started?

Panu: Warm welcome to you and also on my behalf. Lovely to meet you and working in academia. This is a topic that has been increasingly present, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly. It may not be easy for academic institutions to really honestly take a look at travel systems and their environmental impact and so on. But before going into that, it would be very interesting to hear something about your journeys towards being so much involved with these kinds of matters. So would you like to share something about that, perhaps starting from Sue again?

Sue: Yeah, thank you. So I started out as a physicist and got into education pretty early in my career. And I fell in love with the Exploratorium in San Francisco, a wonderful hands-on science museum started by Frank Oppenheimer. And his approach was always he and his brother, of course, were very involved in the development of the atomic bomb. And they became very concerned that the fate of the world rested in the hands of the public and the public's understanding of science in particular. So they really tried to further that goal and so created this very, at the time, innovative place where the public could come in and learn science in a really hands-on interactive way. And so I've spent the rest of my life doing science education and science education research with the goal of trying to help the public be less afraid of science, less intimidated and really engaged in ways that they feel they can understand and make good decisions.

Josh: Yeah, and I had kind of a similar path. and we actually met in graduate school where we were learning to be educational researchers and cognitive scientists, sort of applying scientific approaches and ideas to the study of learning. Soon after, Sue went to the Exploratorium. She was a little ahead of me in school, and then I graduated, and I, a few years later, joined her at the Exploratorium and spent a 25-year career there studying how people learn science outside of school. And there, most of the learning that happens at the Exploratorium is interactive with exhibits. So groups are trying to use an exhibit to try to figure something out, to do a little bit of science themselves. And it turns out that the design of those exhibits is key to that process. Thinking about the user interface and the user experience is very important for people to be able to walk up to a new exhibit that they've never seen before and just start getting going and engage in a scientific inquiry process where they figure something out for themselves. And I think that work that both Sue and I did for many years in thinking about how do we foster a social learning experience where people can interact with each other and maybe with something else, in this case an exhibit at the museum, how do we set that up in a way that just sort of frees people to engage their own creativity and their own thought process? I think that has really helped us in shifting over into virtual conferencing and helping people interact with each other in a social, professional learning environment like a conference.

Thomas: That's fascinating and I think it's yeah, number of directions will go today but I think, you know, one of the my big learnings and as a psychologist was interacting with people who work in museums and zoos and aquaria and realizing all the work that happens in those public learning spaces that are just kind of taken for granted. But it's very, very, very mindful. And I know we'll jump to the clean conferencing. I think we all know it was done because of ethics and sustainability and various things. But let's actually go back first, Often we talk about people's early experiences. So I wonder if either you have early experiences in your family or childhood or where you grew up or in younger life, that kind of predisposed you to kind of be interested in all of this sort of stuff. This idea of environmental identity we talk about a lot in our eco timeline. So when you think back on your life timelines, are there precursors that that kind of you know indicated that you might be heading along this path as an adult?

Sue: Well, one of the things that happened for me in my childhood, I was lucky enough to grow up in Sydney in Australia and I spent a lot of my young years in the back garden with a butterfly net collecting insects and discovering the incredible diversity of living things and just falling in love with that world. And a few years later, another pivotal experience I remember was being in science class and looking at

Thomas: Hmm.

Sue: A textbook that had a graph of the population of the world and it was going up pretty much exponentially at that time. This was some years ago, of course it's leveled somewhat, but I remember thinking, oh, this is not good. So that combination of the sheer joy and the concern, I think started very young.

Thomas: Mm-hmm.

Josh: I think for me it probably came a little bit later, the early experience, I think, for me was around snow. So I grew up in Massachusetts and my mother got us involved in cross-country skiing very early. And I remember the blizzard of 1978 where I think we got like four or five feet in a few days and school was closed for two weeks and we had to ski everywhere. And it was just magic. I mean, it was just incredible. It was such an amazing experience. we dug tunnels in the front yard, inside the snow and all that. And then as I got older and particularly came out to California and by then had learned to downhill ski and was really into skiing and snowboarding.

Just seeing how many years were going by in California where there was a drought or it was raining in the Tahoe area in the mountains instead of snowing because the temperatures were too high. And just really feeling the loss of that, just feeling like, we're not, this activity is going away. We may not be able to do this anymore. I was also really inspired by my sister-in-law, her name is Carla Wise, and she became a real climate activist about 20 years ago and dedicated herself to it full-time and actually wrote a book called Awake on Earth about facing climate change and how to live with it. And so just lots of conversations with her and became really inspired to get involved in this work somehow if I could.

Thomas: Yeah, lots of neat background as always. Panu,  what are you thinking over there? I mean, when you're hearing some of this stuff and how does this Sue and Josh's experience jive with your experience and what you've been learning about people?

Panu: Thanks for sharing, very interesting to hear. After working quite a lot with environmental education and psychology, there's lots of elements in what you say which are influential for people, having a chance to do something directly with the modern human world, whether it's butterflies or some other elements and connection with the seasons and having outdoor hobbies for recreation and also I hear you testify to how environmental change affects these kinds of activities and that's for many people, a growing number of people a pathway to climate matters. And for example in Finland there's lots of winter sports people participating in Protect Our Winters movements which is related to to climate change and emissions. As a Finn, I of course love the image of somebody skiing to the school. So that's what the generation of my parents still did in many places. Not in Helsinki, but in many places. This is also related to the topic of habits. That's course something which is very influential for people's behavior. And that might form a bridge to the topic of online conferencing because the way I see it, it was just a very

Thomas: Mm-hmm.

Panu: strong habits in academia also to have meetings in person and only when COVID-19 came people then realized sometimes relatively quickly that hey actually there's a lot of meetings which can be very easily done online but we just hadn't been doing that but would you like to share something about how did you then end up on this field and what did you start to do?

Josh: Yeah, sure. Back in 2016, actually, before COVID, I was flying across the country from California to Florida for a conference, and I was reading a climate change book all about what's happening to our climate and how things are shifting. And part of the book was asking about what we can all do. And I was thinking, well, what do I do that emits a lot of carbon dioxide? And realizing I go to conferences four or five times a year. And I kind of resolved on that flight to see if there was something I could do differently. And when I landed, and this is a large conference, but I sought out the president of a small association that I also attend every year whose conference I also attend and asked her about the idea of could we zoom people in to that in-person conference? And I didn't know the term hybrid conference, and maybe I don't even know how much people were using that term back in 2016, but we started talking about how it would be so good for the association to get more people to come to the conference. And I think because of my experience at the Exploratorium and all the work I've been doing on social learning, I said to her, I really want to focus on the networking parts of it. Like it seems really easy to zoom people in to hear a talk, but how do we get people at home to interact with the people at the conference? What can we do? And she said, this sounds great. Why don't you join the board of this small but mighty association and start a team to do this. And so I did and we started the Green Team and for several years and Sue joined the Green Team and for several years, we and I don't know, maybe half a dozen others before COVID worked on bringing people into the conference from home. And we had folks, we weren't selling this product or anything. We were just prototyping inviting people to try with us and see what happened. And we did crazy things that didn't work at all, know, having people join the coffee break from home and you know, there's this buzzing, loud coffee break going on and we would wave people over to the iPad and say, talk to someone at home, you know, and try to that, have people interact that way. But it got us really thinking hard about it.

Thomas: Hmm.

Josh: How do you get people to interact with each other in a networking kind of environment, virtually? We were pretty well positioned when the pandemic hit to pivot at that association to a virtual conference that would not just be an endless series of webinars, know, of talks, just one after another, deadly, dull.

Thomas: Hmm.

Josh: but would have these interactive sessions as well where people could mix and mingle.

Thomas: Mm.

Sue: So I think people were actually traumatized by COVID. Of course, in many ways, the pandemic was traumatizing. But one of the ways that it was traumatizing, we run into when we talk to people and they say, what do you do at the Clean Conferencing Institute? And we say, well, we're trying to make virtual conferencing so great that people don't really want to travel because the experience is wonderful. And they kind of look at us in a slightly odd way. And then they say they have to go and get something to drink and they disappear. So that's when we realized that

Thomas: Hmm.

Sue: People have a sort of misconception about virtual conferencing in the sense that they think it's going to be this horrible thing like Josh said of webinars one after the other and lots of Zoom fatigue and eight hours of sitting in your chair. And actually none of those things need to be true. The technology has come a really long way and how we think about it has come a really long way and the research has moved so that virtual conferencing can be much more engaging, fun and socially interactive.

Thomas: Yeah, this is great. Yeah, it is really great stuff. mean, I think a lot of us can identify with the. Well, I mean, Zoom was both a savior and online stuff was a savior during COVID and tons of innovation happened. But yeah, it was fatiguing because the because the technology itself is fatiguing. so. But I, Yeah, there's a number of precursors. I think Josh, like you said, people were doing interesting things even before COVID.

I did an online, there's an online facilitation format called the World Cafe, which is kind of a group facilitation. And I did a training with someone who did online World Cafe years ago that was super fun. They used music, they used art, they shared imagery and photographs. just a little bit of creativity makes meetings much more alive. I know when I do when I do my online trainings with therapists, I've had people come in from all around the world and just small things like each in the first meeting, everyone shares a picture of themselves, something they love about nature and a thing they're concerned. And then we just share each of those pictures. People talk about them. It really it's fun. It works really well. And it isn't that hard to do if you just play around with the technology. That's even just on Zoom. But I know there are many other interesting formats too. So I think a takeaway for the listeners is just, you know, most people aren't aware of this stuff. I mean, I wasn't aware of it until I actually saw it. So there's a lot more fun stuff out there than you might, you might realize. But yeah, go ahead.

Sue: I also think that's a very, I just think that's a really nice activity that you just mentioned because it does many things at once. That example, it's something that everyone can contribute to, a photo, a concern, a love. It provides a sense of quick trust where people can start to build relationships in a short period of time without having to know each other for years. And it's a really nice segue into the content of what you're doing because you're going to be talking about environmental issues.

Sue: It's really great if all of those things can come together so people feel like they're bringing their whole selves, their personal selves, their history, their situation, as well as their minds.

Thomas: Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly. that's exactly how it works. So it's very and then of course, it's a great icebreaker. And then you can refer back to those images, the whole rest of the group, you know, people sharing images of their family or images of them hiking somewhere beautiful or something in their neighborhood.

Yeah, there's a lot to it. People, I'll tell you one interesting tidbit is that most people when they share something they love, they share something personal like one of their own pictures, but when they share something that's concerning to them, then they often share something they pick out off the news. So it's really, and it gets into this whole conversation about how do we see the world and how do we make our reality. So we can go deep, as you know, in all these kinds of things also. But that's the whole facilitation museum interpretation piece, right? Which is fascinating. yes, let's keep going. Sue, you talked about superpowers earlier in our pre-conversation. And I think it, what do you mean by that? And how is that working in your work with Clean Conferencing?

Sue: Well, people often feel helpless. certainly do a lot of the time feel helpless in the face of this climate change. But one of the things we realized during this work is that people have more power than they think in this area. And so even in relation to virtual conferencing, people will say, well, what can I do? Actually, there's a lot you can do. If you are in the fortunate position of being a board member of a professional association or an organizer, of a conference for a professional association, then you have a very special opportunity to really make a huge difference to the planet. Every virtual conference that you hold is a big deal in terms of the number of people that are now not getting into planes and emitting a whole bunch of carbon and in terms of accessibility. two things to bear in mind if you're in that lucky situation. One is that you can alternate and you can push as a decision maker for alternating between virtual and in-person conferences and that cuts in half your emissions while still giving people the opportunity to meet in person every other year. And another thing just to put in there, where you put your conference if you're going to have an in-person one also makes a huge difference to the amount of greenhouse gas you emit. So don't just go to San Francisco because it's a cool city. But really think about, especially the Midwest, as a place that's really going to save a lot of carbon. And there are calculators to help with that. So those are the people who have really an obvious superpower. I would also just name a few other folks. If you're a funder, you have an enormous superpower because you can affect all the projects you fund in one fell swoop by pushing for less travel and more justification and low carbon options and, of course, virtual.

So you have a leverage sort of multiplicative impact as a superpower. Platform providers also have an opportunity here to really push their designs to focus more on supporting this kind of lovely social informal networking that we're talking about that's so lacking in the virtual space. And so really pushing for, I'll just give one example, which is levels of just-in-time information. As people meet each other in these spaces, there's not much time. I have to get to know you really fast and to have an access to a very appropriate level of information about you. Maybe it's just, hi, I'm Sue. Ask me about conferencing. That's my thing. Or ask me about my dog because I love dogs. That gives somebody an immediate in without having to read a whole bio. So that's something that platform providers could be doing.

Exhibitors are enormously important and they, exhibitors and vendors often drive the whole system that brings in the money that supports conferences that brings in thousands of people to travel. They, by the way, do not generally love in-person conferences either because they have to ship a whole lot of stuff and they have to talk to people who really don't want to be there and they have to put out candy to try and entice them to talk to them.

So that's not really working either. There's an opportunity for exhibitors and vendors to stay really involved in virtual conferences. And in particular, I think the way there is to really focus on going from the funnel model that they have going from many people to a few key decision makers to drop that many people phase and go straight to identifying cleverly and possibly with AI, he kinds of people that you really want to be talking to, because a few great conversations are way better than a lot of lousy ones. And the last person I just want to name is attendees. So many of us are conference attendees and we think, well, I didn't decide, here we are, we're flying around the world to be at this thing. Well, first of all, you do vote with your feet and if you don't go, that's significant. As we accumulate numbers, that's something where you become a change agent. Also, express your views to the people that are making the decisions. Make sure they know that you support alternating between virtual and in-person. And also, of course, take care of yourself when you are at a conference. Make sure that you have a good experience. taking breaks and making sure you're fully present, setting aside time as you would if you were attending a conference and really going to the virtual networking sessions, which people always say they want to network. And then when you have a session, people are a little scared and run away, which is one of the reasons we're working so hard to make social norms that make people feel more safe and secure when they're in those sessions.

Josh: And I just want to add another group, which is organizational leaders. So I'm thinking of administrators at universities or leaders at organizations that set policy for travel to conferences. For example, academics often think that if they give a talk at an in-person conference, it will count more. Than if they give a talk at a virtual conference for things like tenure or for promotion. And that's usually not true. We have some great partners at the University of California, San Francisco that are working on this, Sarah Ackerman and Katherine Gundling, that are looking at really clearly articulating the policies for regular faculty so they better understand what do they actually have to do in terms of attending conferences and disseminating their work. But the leaders of those organizations can set policies that incentivize more virtual conference attendance. For example, a lot of universities set aside funding for students to attend conferences or for junior faculty to attend conferences. And some universities like UCSF are now starting to set aside funding for attending virtual conferences. So here's some funding to register for that virtual conference. And that can really incentivize people to move away from travel and towards doing the virtual conference. So these are all, I just wanna say these are all like thinking at the systems level rather than that individual level of.

Thomas: Mm-hmm.

Josh: Each person saying, what should I do here? Should I go with my values and skip this conference? Or should I advance my career and fly to this conference? We're trying to say, let's shift that lens and instead of forcing the individual to make those kind of hard choices, let's change the systems that we're in. I think it's part of this whole movement.

that's now waking up and recognizing that thinking about climate change as something that we individually have done and collectively, but individually we each have contributed to. And that's the carbon footprint idea that was designed and disseminated by BP, a fossil fuel company, to get us to feel guilty about climate change, to get us to feel defensive and to live in apathy and denial, shifting away from that and thinking about this as a systemic issue. know, Nathaniel Stinnette, the founder of the Environmental Voter Project, says, this is a homicide, not a suicide. Meaning, are not doing climate change to ourselves, the individual person around the world.

This is a small number of actors who are forcing all of us to use particular systems of energy development, energy creation and dissemination, using particular systems for travel and lots of other things, food that are changing the climate. And we need to reframe and be thinking about those actors and the systems we’re all in.

Thomas: That's wonderfully said. I'm really glad we got it because it's at its base it's ethics and being our best selves and doing the best we can. So I'm glad we got we've covered a lot of ground. There's a lot you know for listeners there's a lot of misconceptions you know academics think they have to travel but that doesn't affect their tenure you know. In fact, most of the travel for academic conferences are well established faculty, know, so there's a lot of systemic things. Let's, in our final thing, final section here, let's turn it around to the individual, because I think we can learn a lot for our personal lives.

I you know what I'm thinking as you talk about superpowers as we individually have superpowers in our own lives I know it's not as easy when we have an organization, but you know, know, and I have talked about this, you know, in terms of our families, all of us are all of us have families, think all of us are, you know, in families, our parents, our parents or whatever.

So let's talk about that and this may be more speculative, but like we have superpowers because we, know, in terms of my family reunion or whatever, I am the organizer. I am often the funder. I am an attendee. And so have you can we speculate a little bit about takeaways for personal life? Anybody have thoughts?

Josh: Well, one thing I'll say is just that what we found is that when you hold a virtual conference, just setting aside the family reunion for a moment, when you hold a virtual conference, you tend to get a lot more people who have family responsibilities attending the conference. So people with small children who would have a really hard time leaving their kids and traveling.

Thomas: Mm-hmm.

Josh: For example, or who have pets and would have a hard time leaving them. So it can be much more accessible. It's not just accessible to people who can't afford to go to travel to another city for a conference. It can be for people who just have family obligations. Of course, there's a flip side to that, which is then, and this is kind of what Sue is talking about, then,

Thomas: Mm-hmm.

Josh: Creating your space at home where you can fully attend to the conference without distraction as much as possible. And this is another place where organizations can offer funding for people who want to stay home to rent a little shared workspace, for example, to attend the conference. If they don't have a place in their home to be able to get away from the everyday obligations to attend the conference. So there are ways to bring more people into the experience.

Sue: Then the other thing I would add is just what this has really done for me is that it has given me quite a lot of hope actually, especially this planet we're on that is so interconnected now. The idea that if we get something right, it catches on really quickly. And if we can solve making virtual meetings and virtual conferences just to that tipping point where they become really fun and really rewarding and engaging, then we believe that overnight it would be taken up because all the people who are attending, all the people who are in meetings, all the people who are even doing birthday parties virtually and discovering that there are funner ways to do it than you realised, all of that starts to build on itself. And so we do believe that this is something that you can have a lot of hope for because the connectivity of the world really works in our favour.

Thomas: Yeah.

Josh: Yeah, FaceTime has taken off, right, on the phones because it is really lovely to chat with a family member who, you my kids are away in college and it's great to be able to catch up with them and see them while I'm talking to them. I remember 20, wow, 23 years ago when my daughter was just born, my mother who lived across the country would Ichat with us. That's what it was called back then. It was called Ichat. And we set my mother up with a camera and she would read books to our children and hold up the book to the camera. And I just remember after she started doing that, when we did finally then see my mother, you know, once a year or something, would, the kids were instantly connected with her. already, felt they knew her, they felt they could just run to her and be with her. There was no hesitation, no awkwardness. And so to Sue's point, these technologies can really help keep us connected, even in between the annual or biannual family gatherings that you were talking about, Thomas. So maybe the whole family could get together a little less often in person, but much more often virtually just to keep those connections alive.

Thomas: Yeah, tons of ramifications. We're going to wrap up our discussion today. Panu, why don't you close us out? I imagine in Finland, culturally, there are ways that this is happening as well. So what are your thoughts either on the personal or professional as we wrap it up today?

Panu: Yes, thanks Sue and Charles for sharing all that and for your passion into working with the current reality and shaping it to the better and taking into account basic human needs and trying to do a systems level thinking about how to get things forward. So much appreciating that. Finland is a small country with high levels of education, so different startups and things to do with electronics. Technology are a big part of what's going on here. There's lots of things who will resonate with what you are doing and listeners will put links to the website where you can find much more information about the practicalities and different possibilities about what you and Josh have been talking about here. Also appreciating that you are view on success is that everything good counts. So it doesn't have to be that we instantly change everything into virtual, but for example just having the annual conference every second year virtually so it's already cutting half of the emissions for example and that's related to living with complexity and ambiguity that we have been often talking about in this podcast. So warm thanks from my side.

Thomas: Yeah, so listeners, I hope you got something interesting out of here. It perked your interest. We'll have some good links in the show notes. There's a ton of stuff going on in this area and it's again, as we've talked about, you have an epiphany or once you have some new creative knowledge, it can spark all kinds of things. Psnu said we can change the structure to meet our human needs so that's ultimately what it's all about. So Sue and Josh thank you so much for the work that you're doing and for the structural changes that you're making and Panu and listeners everyone be well.

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