Have you defined what fighting climate change looks like to you? Maybe it’s doing restoration or clean up shifts in your neighborhood parks. Maybe it’s supporting your local farmers, or planting out your own thriving garden. Maybe even working directly on climate solutions for a living (thank you!!).

But, have you defined what it is you’re actually fighting for? Not just resolving an issue at hand, but something that we are implementing instead? 

Many folks have probably heard the Frederic Jameson quote, “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” And as we’ve just spent the last 5+ years witnessing a pandemic, increasingly frequent and devastating climate disasters, state-sanctioned violence in the US, Palestine, Iran, and Venezuela, it’s really easy to think that this is it. 

I’d argue that, if you’re an environmentalist, you disagree. Why would we commit ourselves to this struggle in any capacity if we didn’t think things could change for the better? 

Still, what does that change actually look like? What does it feel like? What is that place where we win? And what have we won, exactly?

In this episode, my guest Nathalie Muños and I talk about how the fight for a climate just future is also a fight of the imagination. Specifically, we talk about the role of visioning and protagonism as tools to help us strive and win.

We end the conversation applying these two concepts of visioning and revolutionary protagonism to Nathalie's vision for a new food system (aka Nathalie’s climate MO), and key roles that she sees coming into play that inspire personal transformation towards enacting that new reality. 

Thanks for listening!

What decisions have we made in pursuit of fiscal responsibility, social acceptance, and family approval? What would it take to be courageous enough to leave this prescribed life? And to support ourselves financially, socially, professionally through that change? These are questions my guest Megan Wang answers for herself, and for us in this episode.

Megan is someone who has embarked on her transition into climate justice work, having chosen to leave a life in corporate america and pivot full-time into climate education, regenerative agriculture, local policy, and small-scale whole-sale baking.

In other words, Megan is someone who heeded the call of her Quarter-Life Climate Crisis.

We talk about what it took for her to decide to leave the life she and her loved ones had built together – one of financial security, a marriage, a home, but one that ultimately was no longer in alignment with the life Megan knew was possible and necessary.

That leap into the lesser known climate space also came with critical mindset shifts around finances and resources. Megan shared that, “As soon as [she] came to understand that money was just one piece of a broader support system, [she] could let go of having to control that one piece so much… We can find abundance in so many different ways.”

Basically, this episode is about creative ways to make working in climate work for you. And how we can create a life worth living, and make a living doing it. Spoiler: it’s hard work, and it’s work we can all do in our own ways.

I hope you’ll give it a listen and better yet, tell me what you think of it!

Thanks for reading and listening!

In this essay, we will... convince you that nuance, patience, and diversity is a climate solution, and that working in HR can be climate work.

This episode is about some of the fun, odd, and unexpected shapes that climate work can take. And, a critical way that climate work can transcend our 9 to 5s, to something much deeper: an embodied practice of exercising nuance, patience, and compassion to counteract the climate crisis.

Kavita Shah (she/her), says it best. As a Training Manager for the East Bay Regional Park District, lives her passion for leadership development and watching people learn amidst the fields of wildflowers she’s grown to love. She’s where curriculum development meets conservation.

But, her work goes far deeper than that.

From anti-harassment and implicit bias trainings to chainsaw certifications, Kavita talks about empowering her colleagues to see themselves as not only stewards of the land, but also stewards of how a community relates to that land.

That’s a particularly daunting conversation to invoke, especially as a young, queer woman of color whose audience is predominantly older, white, cisgender men. To Kavita, that’s where the real work happens.

So our conversation also explores what it takes, and more importantly, what it means to expand our capacity for nuance and to move people to a new way of seeing and being. We talk about skills like noticing what activates you, assessing the value of how you choose to respond, and the ever important art of the pause.

Which is not to say give airspace to racists and fascists, but to recognize the capacity for change in every person in every moment, and that their ideas and feelings don’t exist in a vacuum. I believe that if we give people a compelling enough reason to change their thoughts and actions, and a safe enough environment to try it out, they just might. (I highly recommend listening to adrienne maree brown talking about making the revolution irresistible!!)

And while we won’t have bandwidth for every person in every moment, change like this requires as much time, trust, and patience as we can devote to it.

Because the cost of not having nuance and compassion – like, I don’t know, the psychopathic billionaires running the world right now – is too great to keep believing we can afford. As Kavita says “if you feel like the world is always out to get you, or that it’s always someone’s fault that you feel a type of way… it’s really easy to grow really cold and hard.” We can’t afford coldness or hardness. Nihilism or fascism. Because that’s a huge reason we got here in the first place.

I really enjoyed making this episode because the message to me feels clear: the work of solving the climate crisis will demand the work of solving a dominant culture of disposability and canceling. Our muscles of discourse and generative conflict have been intentionally atrophied by a society that sells us on individualism. The climate crisis is a beautiful invitation to breach these metaphorical and quite literal (border) walls. In this episode, Kavita shares actionable tools to do just that.

I hope you’ll listen and share your thoughts with me. Maybe we can build back those muscles together and reach out for each other too <3

My very first Quarter Life Climate Crisis interview is with Rachel Sarah (she/her), who among many many titles and accolades identifies as a mother of two, an author, a journalist, a teacher, an original prius owner, and an environmentalist. To aspiring climate communicators, coalition builders, and path pavers; to floundering 20 somethings learning about finances and insurance; to aspiring elders to kids and critters who will inherit this world: I hope you find nuggets of wisdom and inspiration in Rachel’s story so far.

How do we fight for a climate just world while being forced to participate in the very systems that perpetuate the climate crisis? How do we survive increasingly perilous and hostile socio-economic landscapes while building towards alternatives that we know are possible?

Welcome to Quarter Life Climate Crisis, where I talk to folks who have some answers.