I can’t imagine there are many people that regularly face up to the facts of the climate crisis and don’t experience some amount of climate anxiety. I know I do. Back in 2022, I was struck by a conversation I had with Generation Dred author Dr. Britt Wray, who noted that climate change actually kicks up a complex set of emotions that we are left to process. So what do we do with these feelings? It’s not an easy question to answer.
For over a decade, Kate Schapira has been focused on this question. She started the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth so she could both navigate the complex emotions we feel around climate change and help other people do the same. Now, she has a new book out, Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth - How to Live with Care and Purpose in an Endangered World, to document that work and detail what she’s learned from her years of experience. This week, she joins The Climate Pod to share her journey into understanding climate change's emotional impact, examine the importance of listening, and explain why creating intentional spaces for dialogue has been critical to her work.
[Editor’s note: You can also listen to this conversation and The Climate Pod on iTunes and Spotify and wherever else you get podcasts.]
This conversation also gave Kate and I the chance to explore the complexities of communicating trauma, navigating uncertainty, and understanding the competing feelings of despair and hope that we can all feel in the face of unfolding climate crises. We get into even tougher subjects as well - like what do we do about movement in-fighting and why does in-fighting happen in the first place? This is a really great discussion, especially if you've felt particularly anxious about all the extreme weather and climate impacts we've seen unfold this year. I’m particularly encouraged by the work Kate has done at a local level and how that’s helped her and others process the bigger picture.
Kate Schapira is a professor of nonfiction writing at Brown University and working on local efforts toward environmental justice, climate justice and peer mental health support in her home in Providence. She’s the author of six books of poetry.
More on climate anxiety and grief…
In May, my co-host talked to Dr. Jade Sasser about how climate anxiety is affecting some of life's biggest decisions. Dr. Sasser is the author of the book, Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question: Deciding Whether to Have Children in an Uncertain Future. Over the past five years, there have been a number of studies showing how the climate crisis is impacting decisions around where to live, how to invest, what to study, and more. But one particular decision has seemed to receive an outsized share of media coverage and public attention: whether or not to have a child in the middle of a climate crisis. Dr. Sasser’s work explores these anxieties and hesitations that people have about bringing children into a world in the midst of a climate crisis. Her research also looks at how the climate crisis exacerbates other social inequities and how climate anxiety affects people of different races differently. It was interesting to hear her unpack that in this conversation.
Previewing next week’s episode of The Climate Pod…
Yesterday, I talked to Todd May, philosopher, professor, author of 18(!) books, and advisor to NBC’s The Good Place about some of the thornier philosophical questions that climate change should make humans confront. I found it particularly fascinating that in asking these big, philosophical questions, we don’t always have to get to a clear answer in order to guide us toward living better and more moral lives. We’ve explored climate change from so many angles on The Climate Pod - economics, science, politics…you name it. It was really cool to explore the topic with a philosopher. I haven’t had a lot of opportunities to do that. He also has a great story about seeing a pre-famous Bruce Springsteen show that you won’t want to miss.
Thanks for reading this week.
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