speaker-0: Think about this so much, Dana, having grown up in Atlanta, and you cannot move through this city and not think about the role of the black church in the civil rights movement. You can't understand second-wave feminism in the absence of consciousness-raising circles in living rooms, right? That were happening before any demands ever reached a legislature. You can't understand abolitionism in the absence of Quaker meeting houses, and where have these spaces been? In the environmental movement, in the climate movement, we are so able to give each other what we need in this time. We just have to do it.

speaker-1: Dr. Dana Fisher. Welcome to the Apocalyptic Optimist Podcast. We'll talk about what's broken and how we, and yes, even you, can actually fix it. Today I'm speaking with Katherine Wilkinson, best selling climate writer and teacher who Time magazine r named one of fifteen women who will save the world. She just released her new book, Climate Wayfinding. And I'm delighted that Katherine is joining us today for the podcast while she is recovering from or in the middle of, I guess, her book tour, right? Thank you for coming on the on the program.

speaker-0: Thank you so much for having me, Dana. It's really nice to see you and I feel like ⁓ yeah, happily we can celebrate that there are many, many, many more than 15 women who are trying to save the world.

speaker-1: That's for damn sure. Yep. For sure. So today we're gonna talk about how we keep going in the current moment, especially when many people were feeling like they were in this process of climate optimism during the Biden administration, and we're now having to deal with this transition to what, you know, some people might call climate apocalypse ⁓ under the Trump administration. And your book provides this this, you know. guide in a lot of ways for that. So I thought we would start by ⁓ talking about climate wayfinding. It presents a path forward to help readers navigate, and this is these are words from you, from ache to action and doubt to possibility. So can you tell us about what motivated you to write the book?

speaker-0: Yeah. ⁓ and maybe it's interesting because this book kind of and the the work that sits behind it actually cuts across those what we might call high watermark years for the climate movement and now this bottoming out that many of us are are experiencing and and grappling with. So yeah, so maybe the the first thing I'll just name is that ⁓ the need for this work has been true no matter where we are on the ups and downs of climate. But climate wayfinding is it's sort of an unusual book, certainly in my bookmaking experience, in that it has lived in the world as a program for the last four years. let me think, ⁓ yeah, maybe maybe I'll take us back a little bit, Dana, to the the di the an another another low water mark of the pandemic when ⁓ right we were hunkered down and one of the I don't know there were no silver linings in the pandemic but one thing the pandemic made possible for me or I felt was possible in a different way was to take up the practices of the artist way, which is Julia Cameron's very beloved book about how we nurture our creative lives. And one of those core practices is to wake up in the morning and first thing free write by hand, ⁓ before you do anything else, three pages on a legal pad, just scribbling whatever wants to come first thing in the morning. And I found myself

speaker-1: Before coffee, is that what you're saying? Before coffee or with coffee?

speaker-0: Maybe it depends how involved your coffee making process is.

speaker-1: Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah. Okay. So go ahead.

speaker-0: I think I was probably having coffee and writing ⁓ at at the same time. But I found myself one morning writing about this persistent drumbeat question that we hear all the time as climate people. What can I do? And I had started to think about that question almost as something more like. To use a fungal metaphor, the fruiting body of bigger, deeper wonderings that we are often holding about meaning and belonging and how to cope and what it means to contribute. And I was reflecting on my own winding climate journey ⁓ and realizing that that question, of course, does not have easy answers, but there had been a series of practices that I was using both consciously and subconsciously. To keep working my way into answers. So that scribbly writing on a legal pad became ⁓ an article for Time magazine. An article is wonderful. Probably people read it and they don't actually do any of the suggested steps. And so within the confines of the All We Can Save Project, which is the climate learning and leadership nonprofit that I co founded with Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson and continue to shepherd. We started to design this program that we called Climate Wayfinding to welcome in the big questions that we're holding about our climate engagement, about what it means to be human in this time, and move through a process of looking inward with care, outward with curiosity, and forward with courage so that we can move beyond the stuckness of the heaviness, the bigness of the questions, the uncertainty that is just. inbuilt into this time, no matter how how much we're winning or how much we're losing, and to keep finding those those next footholds forward. So that is a long answer to to that question, but it is all of that work and thinking and the programmatic content that then became this thing with pages, ⁓ this this new book.

speaker-1: Well, that's that's amazing and that's a really helpful way of trying to contextualize where you were and when you were thinking about it. And I mean, it's it's funny to imagine that we really it wasn't really that long ago that we were all were all in lockdown. I have to say the silver line for me was I got to spend a lot more time with my daughter who was just getting at that age where she was like, Leave me alone, mom and then she was all of a sudden in lockdown with us. So I got to I got to suspend her youth a little longer before she wanted to go out and be your own person. Which I guess is selfish of me, but I did enjoy that part.

speaker-0: That sounds that sounds completely lovely. Yeah.

speaker-1: Yeah. Well she and she were if she were here right now she'd be rolling her eyes, but she's in her job, so she's on her job.

speaker-0: ⁓ You're entitled to IRO as a daughter. That's just part of the part of the job description.

speaker-1: Absolutely. So before I wanna get I wanna get more into the weeds about the program in a second, but before we do, I wanted to talk I wanted to ask you a kind of a broader question. So you talk a lot about community, ⁓ and you note that we're not talking enough with family and friends and bringing conversations about climate into the work pi place, which I think is a wonderful and much missed point that a lot of people are not talking about because we have this crazy level of polarization in the world today. And so I was hoping that you could talk a little bit about how we should approach climate communication and communicating with friends and neighbors. Like I have a neighbor who I'm very afraid to mention climate to right now. What how do we approach it and what what are your suggestions on that?

speaker-0: Mm. Well, maybe the maybe the place to start is that we probably don't need to be having climate conversations with everyone, right? If there's a neighbor that you know, right, that is so someone who is so entrenched in I'm making this up, but surmising, ⁓ perhaps rejecting the scientific consensus around climate change, that may not that may not be a good use of ⁓ your magical time and energy, right? but I think it is worth grounding this question in some data, ⁓ which is that the climate we love a little data. ⁓ and I'm a I'm a kind of recovering social scientist. So ⁓ you know, putting putting that hat on, right? We we know that the climate majority around the world is real, right? Upwards of eighty-nine percent of people say that they want to see more action from governments, but the kicker

speaker-1: Love data do.

speaker-0: Is that most of the majority thinks that it is a minority. Right. And so if you think, ⁓ I care and I'm an outlier, yeah, you probably aren't gonna be ⁓ raising this topic in conversation. But also you may not be raising it in conversation because it's really heavy and we're in an already very heavy time, right? That to talk about climate is to also welcome in. Some emotions of sadness, of fear, of anger ⁓ for young people in particular, a sense of being betrayed by leaders, right? That's all big stuff. ⁓ and I think not all of us feel necessarily equipped for that. And we might not be engaging in the conversation because we've had a lot of bad climate conversations. I can certainly say that. You know, a lot of times I'll I'll find myself in a in a climate encounter unexpectedly and sort of getting even from someone that ⁓ is you know is is fully invested, like it's just, hey, this is too many facts and it's too many, like let me rattle off this thing and you should have said this thing, and you know, like it doesn't feel welcoming and it doesn't feel particularly human oftentimes. So I think All of those kind of snarls that we might have around why we're not having climate conversations start to tell us a little bit about how we might approach it, which is to center ourselves as human beings, not as fact slingers or chart holders or, you know, right, is to actually come from a place of you're a human and I'm a human. And here's what I'm noticing, and here's what I'm experiencing, and here's what that brings up in me. What about you? Right. ⁓ the role of of generous questions that are less about, I need you to have the right answers to this thing, and more about what are we individually and collectively experiencing, and how does that make us feel and what's at stake? And what would we like to see moving forward from here? And how to do that is often a big question mark, right? Like people might like, Yeah, that sounds great, but how? And I think having some kind of generous structure for climate conversations that feel more human, more heart forward is really helpful. And so that is what I did when the answer when the All We Can Save anthology came out, and I designed All We Can Save circles, which Amazingly, ⁓ are still happening. People are still signing up to to lead those almost six years later. And that is what is here in this book. There is a a reading group experience that's actually built into every chapter of of the book, ⁓ that are grounded in yeah, just those sorts of approaches that might lead us into a climate conversation that we wouldn't otherwise be having that we might not otherwise feel equipped for and we might discover actually that we are really adept at having with one another.

speaker-1: That's great. So I'm going to skip forward in my questions because we because there's so many that are connected here with all we can say that I want to talk a little bit about that for a second. So ⁓ I know that you developed this ⁓ program and these practices through the project. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how that works. Like, did you work with a number of different circles simultaneously, or do you have like a centralized way of communicating with the different circles? And then also. if you can talk about how you un how you think about going from the individual actions that folks are doing in these circles in you know through the collective to getting us to the kinds of systemic changes that we need to to see happen to address the climate crisis. So it's a very big question. But I feel like I wanted to just tie it all together because I know you have an arc of how this whole project came to be and I and it's so interesting.

speaker-0: Yeah. Well, I'll speak first to the All We Can Save Circles, which we released into the world as you know, just an open source self-led experience. ⁓ I cooked up the idea after that book was well on its way to publication. So they don't live inside the book. They just ⁓ the materials for that live on the All We Can Save Project website. And what you know, it was in many ways an experiment, right? We didn't know if anyone would take them up, where they would take them up, how they would take them up, and what the outcomes would be. And so we've learned a lot in the last six years. and they've happened everywhere from like high school eco clubs to groups of C-suite executives and kind of everything in between. ⁓ they've happened in in some 50 countries. And ⁓ and they have spilled over in lots of ways we will never know about because they're open source, because our ability to gather data was very dependent on people being willing to share ⁓ and they could access the content without ever telling us that they were going to be doing a circle. So there may be more than 2500 that we don't know about. but what we have heard from people is that in many cases. This formation of community through an all we can save circle has continued on in different ways. There is, for example, in Atlanta, what started as ⁓ a group of, I think, four people doing the all-we can save journey together in someone's backyard during the pandemic is now a network of over 600 women in sustainability. We have heard about a circle in North Carolina, a group of women. Who then got deeply engaged in trying to reform the zoning practices and policies in their county to avoid kind of the worst aspects of suburban sprawl. Just a few weeks ago at San Francisco Climate Week, I was somewhere and someone came to me and said, I did an all we save circle. And that sparked the idea for this company that I have now built. ⁓ So it has come alive in so many different ways. And many more than we will probably ever, ever know. But I think the continuation of these communities is probably, I don't know, the most exciting, the most gratifying that people were able to weave and sustain these relational webs in the work that are so needed to keep us in this work over time. When we started to pilot the climate wayfinding experience, which is a much you know, ⁓ it's facilitated, it's much more hands-on, it's much more of a kind of deep experiential learning journey. Our team led all of those pilots in the beginning. And we were seeing very consistently, kind of qualitatively, we use this eight dynamics of climate engagement framework. And we were seeing expansion for every cohort on all eight of those dynamics. ⁓ and some of them really dramatically so. And we are also hearing from people the power of the experience of moving from overwhelm, ache, a sense of isolation, maybe burnout for the grizzled climate veterans in the mix, you know, or a sense of doubt about about what could be into some clarity, a sense of possibility, connection, renewal, forward momentum. So we were like, great, this is wonderful, but we're a tiny, tiny team. We are just a smidgen of a nonprofit. And so to begin thinking about what climate wayfinding could do and be at any kind of meaningful scale, we needed to figure out how to put it in other people's hands. And over the last couple of years, we have trained almost a hundred facilitators from 75 colleges and universities across the US and Canada. We have another hundred folks who are gonna train with us. In August, many of them in higher ed, but also cultural institutions like the Monterey Bay Aquarium, other leadership programs, community organizations, all folks who are educators, formally or informally, hold space, build community, and are thinking about what we might call like the more human infrastructure of the climate movement. ⁓ that You know, we we could maybe talk more about this, Dana, but I think has such an important relationship to sort of the big moments of social change that we're all working towards. ⁓ but it's small, it's quiet, it's often invisible, and it is often overlooked. So you know, even when we were training facilitators and they were beginning to bring climate wayfinding into the classroom across a whole range of academic disciplines, into co-curricular spaces. Doing it on retreats, like it's come to life in all of these different ways. Still, right, still ⁓ we weren't meeting the need. We have this in living interest form list, and we know that there are hundreds upon hundreds of people that wanted the climate wayfinding experience that we were still not able to deliver. And of course, it's not just students, right, who are struggling with how do we navigate this increasingly mapless world. So the book was an effort to take. The to take the content, the ideas, the practices, the experience of the program and put it into a format that makes makes it accessible for anyone with a library card and and internet access. ⁓ and I'm sure we will learn a lot about what this work does as it as it moves into the world. But I'm thinking about recently a a program of students at Ithaca College in New York, and we We, you know, we get data in when these cohorts wrap. And one of the students said, I think I learned more about climate change in this three day retreat than I have in three years. And that is but but it but I think the insight to me about it is that it is not by and large a shortage of information that is the challenge. It is a shortage.

speaker-1: But also bad, you know.

speaker-0: Of sense making and integration and orientation because it's not it's not about content delivery, right? It's not taking a group of students and trying to fill them up with as much information about climate change as you possibly can in three days. But it's an invitation to do that, that, that integrating between what have I learned about the problem, about solutions, with who I am and what my emotional experience of this is, what my talents are, what my gifts are, and what this might mean in my unique context and community. ⁓ and getting to sort of weave and quilt those pieces together, I think helps us go from I don't know enough to take action or I'm too small or I don't have anything to offer to actually I'm part of this bigger web and I have a place here and I belong.

speaker-1: I'm gonna have put my social scientist hat on for a moment here because this story is so exciting. And just to ask you if you had the opportunity to do any follow-up longer term to see, to track, you know, what are the paths that people are taking and if you can see where the paths are going. And if you can't, if you do have that, I would love to hear about it.

speaker-0: Well, I'll say we would love to do more of that. The approach that we have done to date is to do some deeper dives with participants in the early cohorts and also with our facilitators who are not just facilitating climate wayfinding. There are ways in which their approach to climate education kind of evolves in all sorts of different ways beyond this program specifically. And we have written some of those up as stories on our website, which is climatewayfinding.earth. And I would say there's a there's a range of things that have been true for people. ⁓ often there is a sense of like a very profound but very qualitative shift that one of the facilitators herself described as turning her grief into love. Her anxiety into hope and her rage into joy. And so then that ends up showing up right in all of these different ways, where on the surface level, well, she's still a professor, she still teaches at the intersection of climate and psychology, but qualitatively how she's doing that, right, has really shifted. There are other people who have come in thinking maybe there's a role for me in climate, but I'm, but probably not. ⁓ And I think about, for example, a dance professor who came to our first higher ed pilot cohort. And when we got into the content around leverage points for systems change and the role of shifting culture and narratives and paradigms, like her light bulb went off. And it's like, well, that's actually dance goes from something adjacent to something really essential. Right. And then that opened up kind of a whole interesting path for her. ⁓ I think also about another pilot cohort participant who had spent his his professional career in political organizing and strategy, often ⁓ working at a municipal level, had not done anything on climate and ended up ⁓ had mostly worked on education and ended up getting deeply engaged in ⁓ in gas bans and passing passing ⁓ you know, policy at the at the city level to prevent. gas infrastructure in in new buildings. So these are just like a handful of examples. ⁓ but we would be I I think super stoked to to do to do more of that kind of longitudinal look over time. and we're still pretty nascent. So I think there's still a lot, a lot to learn.

speaker-1: I really encourage you and hope you'll be able to figure out ways to do this more long-term follow-up because as somebody who's doing an evaluation around civic engagement, there's so much we can learn about people's wayfinding and also the paths that they take that I think will inform not just your work, but also just our understanding of climate action and how people are constructing lives around climate, you know, engagement and activism that I think will be really valuable. So I just would say that's so important. ⁓ and then I was gonna add

speaker-0: Well, I'll just add if there are any funders out there who are listening to this, this is precisely the kind of thing that is hard to get funding for and not inexpensive to do. So, ⁓ because I couldn't agree more. I think it's shocking. I I think I write in the book actually that we know, you know, we know vastly more about how the climate system works than we do about the contours and the participants in the climate movement.

speaker-1: ⁓ yeah, and mean ⁓ the whole social side, period, but absolutely around the climate movement, you know. I mean, you and I have had these conversations before, but absolutely I mean, and actually this this leads ⁓ me to another question I had, which is about thinking, you know, so you talk about how people can work from climate ache to climate action. and I just want to talk you you've mentioned the climate movement a number of times here and I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about how the program helps people find their place in the climate movement. Because I think one of the things that is so difficult, especially in this period of what you know, my people call ⁓ climate movement abeyance, which is this period where people are feeling so ⁓ isolated and afraid and overwhelmed by what we're seeing politically across the country around a whole bunch of issues. that people have withdrawn in many ways or redirected. So I'm just wondering if you can talk a little bit about how this this wayfinding process can help people with that.

speaker-0: Hmm. Yeah, I think we're I think we're facing two challenges, right? One is that big challenge of getting people to step off the sidelines and into engagement. And then the other is keeping people engaged over time. Right. And there's ⁓ yeah, it's no surprise that people are burning out and bowing out. It is a lot to show up for. an existential crisis ⁓ day in and day out over years, right? Especially when it feels like all of the powers that be ⁓ are are are working against you, right? Sort of shoving the the the boulder back back down the hill and and you're getting flattened by it. Right. Like that's that's where we are. Yeah. And and it's been, you know, sort of an interesting and heartbreaking pulse taking for me these last few weeks of book tour of kind of how are we doing as a community? How are we doing as as a movement? And I'll I'll just give one one example. I went to Living Future, which is this wonderful annual conference of what I think of as kind of like the the bleeding edge of the green building space, folks who are really thinking about, you know, how do we truly transform the built environment, which is such a big source of our emissions from both energy, materials, right? And of course has such a big impact on our lives. I gave a keynote and then I ran a workshop. And I thought the workshop was going to be very kind of like how can you use climate wayfinding in an organization to build culture and cultivate leadership and and what I found pretty quickly in that room was that people needed to hold hands and sing and cry. And so that is what we did, right? That's that's part of the role of a facilitator, is sort of where where does this room in this moment need to go? And we kind of wove that together in real time. And I think that's so telling. I mean, we were in a bloody conference room in the Sheraton Hotel in Seattle, right? This is not like a woo space, but that is where that is where people are, right? It's like, yes, let's talk about embodied carbon, but also we are embodied carbon. And And this is a totally heartbreaking time. There have been people with tears streaming down their cheeks in the book signing lines. ⁓ and I think if we are not taking seriously how heartbroken people are in this time, right? How many people have seen their work squashed, have lost their jobs, have lost their funding, or simply just feel like it is no longer worth trying because this is just too hard. we are going to have a a mass loss of talent in this movement. ⁓ And we simply, we simply can't afford that because we are already too small, right? It is already far too small a percentage of people who who have have gotten into this mix. And part of that is why, you know, in in the climate wayfinding program and in the book, Following our emotions is one of the first parts of the work because we cannot get generatively to the other pieces, right? If we try to just skip forward to action, skip forward to strategy, get into some fresh tactics, like we're keeping the numbness and the ache and the sources of paralysis in the system, right? ⁓ and we're gonna sell ourselves short on all of those other, all of those other pieces. So I think there's a really essential piece of this work that is about growing our capacity, not as, you know, mental health professionals, not as social workers, just as humans, peer-to-peer to be with one another in the very, the very difficult emotions that are coming up around this topic at this at this time. So that's one. and then being able, right, to not only Have this looking inward orientation and not only have this you know, the sort of heavier pieces of of that, but to also explore our sources of power, our sources of joy, our relationality to build this sense of community that is often, I think, where the kind of near-term goodness in this work lies, right? ⁓ that is so much a part of having this work feel. good and nourishing day to day. It's the the people we get to to do it with. ⁓ so that's just a a few of the things that I think are so important all the time, but in particular right now.

speaker-1: Yeah. I mean, and I I really I I really like the way you're talking about like community starts where you are and with the people that you're working with and you're morning with and you're you're processing everything with. ⁓ I wanted to shift gears slightly. So you talk a lot about working with students, you talk a lot about working with educational professionals, right? So faculty, others who work at universities and in schools. So I wanted to ask a two-prong question here. I mean, one part of the question is. ⁓ how are you seeing people build effectively in this context, especially because we're seeing ⁓ our educational system being, you know, under attack in a lot of ways. And so there's that side of it. But the other side of it, and this is something that I've been struggling with in my work, because a lot of the work I've been doing with folks who are participating in ⁓ you know, the pro-democracy movement and pushing back against, you know. autocracy along with other issues through activism broadly, we're seeing very few young people who are participating. And I'm curious with your work in schools, with students, if you can help us understand where are young people and what is it going to take to get them to join together with, you know, older folks and to diversify the people who we're seeing on the front lines right now.

speaker-0: Hm. So I think I think some of that is is some of the same territory I was just talking about, right? ⁓ that, you know, we know that for for young people around the world, almost half of them say that they're the intensity of their emotions about climate change, the grief, the anxiety, right, whatever they may be, are are so big that it's impacting their day to day lives. So this is not a question of whether they get it and whether they care, right? It is a question of how to be in that awakeness, right? How to ⁓ not be so overwhelmed with how big it all feels and how small we feel ⁓ that it even seems worth stepping in, right? ⁓ and I think that ⁓ there's no kind of Like, I don't think there's any kind of like magic fairy dust to that. I do think it is just actually creating the spaces that let us work through the wanderings, not be alone in it. ⁓ because right, if you think about it, if you're a young person and probably, you know, if you are in school, you are probably encountering classrooms that may be very well equipped to meet your intellectual needs. But not particularly equipped to meet other kinds of needs. And in this, you know, and this topic in particular, I think they're so interwoven. and and if you can't get this kind of support in the classroom, where are you going to find it? Right. Fewer and fewer people belong to a house of worship, even if they do, they're probably not very equipped for this either. Right. There's there's just this sort of dearth of shared spaces. to and and kind of containers to bring any of this conversation forward, right? And it's just too much to try to figure it out on our own. Or we may show up in activist organizing spaces and it's all about the strategy and the tactics. And there's just also not good kind of equipment for this more more human side. And and I think about this so much, Dana having grown up in Atlanta and you cannot move through this city and not think about the role of the black church in the civil rights movement. You can't understand second wave feminism in the absence of consciousness raising circles in living rooms, right? That were happening before any demands ever reached a legislature. You can't understand abolitionism in the absence of Quaker meeting houses and where have these spaces been in the environmental movement, in the climate movement. I found very few of them and my partner. Right. I mean, mostly I was going to kind of climate adjacent spaces to try to sort of meet the needs of the human spirit ⁓ and my own heart. And I think that's just fundamentally bad strategy ⁓ for a social movement. And and I think classrooms absolutely can become these kinds of spaces. They they have been for other movements. They can be for our movement. And

speaker-1: Sure.

speaker-0: And many of them already are, but I think we can do much more of that. And I think we can cultivate these kinds of spaces, you know, far beyond the bounds of of education. And and some of that is largely hypothesis at this point with climate wayfinding. ⁓ but I hope it is very much what we see. And and certainly I think all we can save circles were an example of kind of tending that kind of infrastructure right where we are, right? That it's it's it You know, that it is something all of us are capable of. We are so able to give each other what we need in this time. We just have to do it.

speaker-1: Really beautiful. I mean, I I was just thinking as you were talking about the ways that ⁓ that this could scale. And I was wondering if you know, you've talked about how people can go spontaneously. I've been on the website, it's beautiful by the way. and there are all these resources there. And so what I was wondering about is do you have a vision for scaling it? And in like if I said to you, What's what's your dream for that vision? How would it work?

speaker-0: Mm. Well, that's a really fun invitation. Thank you for that, Diana. Yeah.

speaker-1: Tell us, tell us.

speaker-0: So I really would I would love to see kind of as one layer of that. I would love to see sort of the terrain of climate education evolve along along these dimensions, right? And to and I think if it does, you know, these are already community hubs, right? These are already places where not just students come, but community members of all ages come that they really could. yeah, be be sort of hubs for this. I would love to see other existing hubs or kind of nexus points in our in our community webs ⁓ come to hold this kind of work. That could be faith institutions, it could be libraries, it could be community centers, right? and and I do think there's something really powerful about having physical containers for this. ⁓ there are retreat centers all over the country, right? There are spaces that are really adept at at bringing people together. And I would love to see, you know, kind of a a a pairing of programmatic content and existing physical spaces and the many wonderful people out there in the world who are good at facilitation and are good at bringing people together and convening convening this this kind of group experience. Whether or not they're climate experts, right? They don't need to be climate experts to be able to help to help build this. ⁓ so when I kind of h hold a vision in my mind, I I write in the book that we are each ⁓ a node of possibility for healing the climate crisis. I have a question.

speaker-1: about that one. Tell us about note of being noted possibility, please.

speaker-0: But in addition, maybe to each of us being nodes of possibility, this this idea of like having many, many nodes of ⁓ of of finding our way together because this is not a one-off thing, right? We are living in and through this profoundly liminal time and we are going to need to keep figuring and figuring again and figuring again ⁓ together. And I think we need these. spaces of sanctuary, of watering holes, ⁓ of of of you know, doing that that deeper human work together.

speaker-1: Networks of community. I love that. I mean, and I think the message that you're conveying here about this not being a one-off. So you can't just go on a retreat and be like, I figured it out and now I'm gonna solve the climate crisis and I'm done. I can go on my way. It's not about that, but it's rather about providing the network. I mean, and in some ways kind of the support that we'll need, which certainly if like hearkening back to the black church and the way that the black church really cultivated and nurtured the civil rights movement for so long throughout the time that there was the struggle. Yeah. I mean, and even beyond the struggle, as we know. So ⁓ yeah I think that's beautiful.

speaker-0: And that right, it's like it's about how we how we collectively cultivate deeper capacities for orienting and navigating in a world where quite literally our maps are not working, right? Because of the climate crisis, but they're also not working internally, organizationally, culturally. we we need to be better. Compass makers, right? And and and how do we do that with many ways of knowing and and approaches that are both individual and shared.

speaker-1: I'm gonna ask you a slightly apocalyptic question in here, which is it in some ways, I mean and maybe it's also just my perspective, but in some ways it feels like this moment was made for climate wayfinding, right? Because this is a moment where people are looking for connection and for space to to think about this, and they need a place place for this kind of collective grieving around climate. And I was just wondering if you feel like ⁓ as you're talking about the book and meeting with people around the country, are you feeling like people are have this appetite that you didn't expect when you were writing it? Because I'm assuming you were writing it well before all of the stuff that we're experiencing now started.

speaker-0: Yeah, it's it's it it has been It's been it's been fascinating. And and some people have said, like, how did you know? How did you know we would need ex exactly this exactly now? And and of course, you know, as I've shared, like the the thinking ⁓ that is behind this book has been cooking for some years. And of course, publishing timelines are such that, you know, you can't perfectly meet the moment at just the right time. ⁓ I am hopeful that it is kind of a bundle of nourishment and support and useful tools that is arriving just just when folks seem to to really need them. ⁓ and I'm thinking about yeah the the the depth of of that need right now. There was a woman who came to one of the first book tour events who is at the EPA and manages about 50 people and she said this is exactly the book that my team needs right now. And I cannot bring this book into the EPA right now. which is just so gutting, right? I know I'm like also if I had just bottomless money, I I would just be like, How can we send this book to everyone who is trying to survive it climate related work in the federal government who has lost their climate related work in the federal government? because yeah, I I ⁓ Yeah, it's just it's so big, it's so deep. And and even if we have another remarkable political opening, even if we manage to have some big wins, we will still need this because there is so much difficulty that is already baked into the system, right? because we are going to be figuring out how to cope. even as we figure out how to curb the sources of the challenge and like there's gonna be crossroads upon crossroads upon crossroads in the years ahead. And I wish it were otherwise. And that is just simply not the reality of our time.

speaker-1: Absolutely. So I'm going to shift gears a little bit because I know we're running out of time here to just say, so you have spent a lot of your time as basically, I mean, I would say so you so you you have a podcast. I think of you as a climate storyteller in some ways. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about, given what you know and your experience with climate storytelling, is there something that that you feel like climate storytellers are getting wrong, even though they don't mean to? But even the well intentioned ones, is there a lesson out of climate wayfinding that can help with telling the stories better and communicating the climate crisis better?

speaker-0: Mm, I love this question. ⁓ and maybe the first thing I want to say is thank goodness for all of the climate storytellers and communicators out there trying to do it. ⁓ because it's not it's not easy and it's so needed. I I think as over the years I've noticed that we have a lot of trying to tell the story that we think we should tell. And that is never the source of a good story. Right. ⁓ you know, it's been wonderful, I think, to grow our sophistication around understanding what framings are effective and what messages work and what messengers resonate. Right. And at the end of the day, when you think about stories that move you. They are coming from a different and deeper place than that. And so I'm not saying we we toss out ⁓ those those tools, right? But the stories have to come from a profoundly grounded, truthful, heart-based place, or they do just feel like tactics, right? Like there's so many things that I encounter that are sort of ⁓ you know. niblets of climate comms that I'm just like, wow, that doesn't do it for me at all. And I'm like prime audience, right? and and so I think that's like that's one thing is just like coming back to first principles of what good storytelling actually actually is. And the other is that I think we Maybe out of necessity, sometimes we overly reduce complexity, right? To make a story super clear. And I think about the lighting the way stories that are in this book, each chapter kind of brings forward the path and the work and the wisdom of an of another climate leader. And they're zigzaggy, right? And they're filled with uncertainty and they're filled with moments of. of dead ends and figuring out a different turn. And ⁓ and I think we need those kinds of stories that are, you know, emblematic of wayfinding, right? That like, you know, even the the kind of luminaries in the space are also engaged in this kind of figuring. And I think if we don't hear those kinds of stories, it makes it feel like There are superheroes in climate, and then there's everybody else. Right. ⁓ and that just could not be, could not be further from the truth that in all of these cases, no like fairy godmother came in and bopped someone on the head with a wand and said, like, you're it, you're the one. Right. They're just people who looked around in their given context, in their given community, with the skills they had, with the needs that they saw, and said, I'm willing to try. And I'm gonna link arms with some others to to try to do it. And I think those are the kinds of of stories that that we need, not of not of perfection, not of magical fix fixing, right? But like what does it look like to try to love this species of ours as difficult as it can be, and to love this chance of being alive on this extraordinary earth?

speaker-1: Yeah, I mean, I think I think that that really touches a nerve for me because I mean, so in my path, I can think of two senior folks. They both happen to be men, but I am not at all making any claims about gender here, who I remember as I was coming up trying to find my way, both of them basically telling this story about their coming up. And in both cases, I remember particularly one of one of these senior people who was a a a senior mentor or faculty person when I was starting out who was like, ⁓ well, I never got papers rejected. and and telling this story of success. So people would just give me money when I was looking for funding for projects. And the thing that's funny, I mean, it's not funny about it, is that I I know now that person's story a lot more. And I know it was a reconstruction of history that was filled with a lot of like of ⁓ Self interested, ⁓ I don't know how to say it. I mean, basically he skipped all the bad stuff and told this story of winning. And I was like, Wow, that's a wonderful story you told. But it didn't help me figure out how to be successful when all I heard was looking back, now that I'm on the top of the mountain, I won and that's how I got up here. And so I think unfortunate and I

speaker-0: I was so special and so lucky that it all was easy for me.

speaker-1: Yeah, they called me out and they said, How much money do you want? Here you go. I'm just passing you as much as you need, right? And it's unfortunate because when you reconstruct a story like that, which unfortunately I I think many women are not trained to do that. We're not told to like re every time you lose, it's a success. Figure it out, reframe it, right? Yeah. So we don't learn how I mean, we also are not taught that we should make stuff up. We are taught that we just like deal with it and move on. But that doesn't tell us this, that doesn't help us to learn the path if our path doesn't look like the successful people who we come after, right? Yeah. So I think that is so valuable for people to understand that and to tell those stories and understand how one, you know, my mom used to tell this story. Like, when one door opens a wind ⁓ sorry, when one door I just said it wrong. When one door closes, a window opens, and it's all about figuring out where's your window, right? And that's it really is wayfinding. It's just she said it a little differently.

speaker-0: Totally, totally. You know, I I have to just add in a a gender observation, Dana, ⁓ since we've since we've touched on on that note.

speaker-1: Since we've gone there, yeah, sorry, I o I I went there.

speaker-0: It has been fascinating to me in these book events, even when there's been a real gender mix in the audience, people who seem to be men walk out without the book.

speaker-1: ⁓

speaker-0: And the book signing lines are filled with w with people who seem to be women. And it has been so fascinating to me. And I thought, like, okay, is this just about, is this about all we can save? Is this about having done this book? You know, there was a collection of writings by women. Like, what where is this coming from? And I think there is something that like genuinely, genuinely men think I don't need what's in this book. And I think

speaker-1: They're told and if and if you admit you need it, you're weak.

speaker-0: Or I or here I am in this book signing line to get this book for my daughter. And I think

speaker-1: I may look at it first.

speaker-0: Exactly. And and I've been thinking about it as we've had this kind of renewed conversation in recent weeks around petromasculinity and ⁓ the problems of masculinity over there in the fossil fuel land, you know, those bad people over there. And I'm like, we have such problems in this movement still that we are not all thinking about. We need multiple ways of knowing. We need our heads, we need our bodies, we need our hearts, we need collectives, like we need all of these dynamics. And I and I finally on on pub day in New York, I I just called it out and I was like, if you're a man in this audience who thinks you don't need this book, I guarantee you there is someone you work with in this movement who needs you to need this book.

speaker-1: Who'll tell you you need it even if you think you don't. I mean I think it's it's just an unfortunate case of ho you know, overwhelming hubris which we see and we've seen it time and time again in the climate movement. And I think you're absolutely right.

speaker-0: particularly men of certain, you know, of a certain age have been socialized, right? Sort of what they're comfortable with. And ⁓ and we see it also in who signs up to become a climate wayfinding facilitator, who applies to be a climate way finding facilator. We have almost equal numbers of people who identify as men as people who identify as nonbinary.

speaker-1: That makes sense. Well, it's so that is reflected in the data that I have from resistance two point ⁓ It is the exact same thing. And what I think is really interesting is the percentage of folks who identify as non-binary, the percentage of folks who identify as female keep going up, and those who identify as male go down as time goes on. And this is in comparison from Trump one to Trump two, resistance one to resistance two. I mean, we also see, I mean, I think in the climate movement, we're also seeing this shift towards more female leadership or female oriented leadership. But I think, I mean, there there's something there that that we need to call out. And so I think it's great to to think about it. And I think that the gendered part is part of the story in a lot of ways. So we don't want to ignore it and just be like, ⁓ I you know. I mean, I think the fact that that's data, right? And that's evidence about. Maybe part of the problem there. And I think that's I think that message is great. If if you're you don't think you need it, you probably need more than everybody else.

speaker-0: You probably do. And I and I think it's it's it is a we're in a we're in a shifting time, I think. And and and you know certainly I felt this in my own trajectory and climate was like there was so much that I needed from this community, from this movement that I wasn't getting. And I think that has been true particularly for a lot of women.

speaker-1: Yeah, I mean I think I think the thing that's unfortunate is we are consistently informed that the more if we just replicate the leaders, but the re leaders all well historically have come from one gender and also they're I mean, I can think about it in my my journey in academia and my journey around climate, is that we see the women then who are succeed and who are lauded are those who basically replicate these same styles. Yeah. Which is really harmful, I think, for the younger women particularly. But generally so as well. So ⁓ 'cause it's it's I we we we're running out of ⁓ sorry, go ahead.

speaker-0: My my last my last note on this, but is like if you have to show up and be someone that is not yourself, that is such bone deep exhaustion. Right. When when like the challenge itself is is exhausting enough, right? Without having to like masquerade as as someone that doesn't feel like you, ⁓ on top of all of it. So yes.

speaker-1: Yeah. Absolutely well. So the last thing that we're doing ⁓ in the podcast right now is we've been ending things with this, it's we're calling it a lightning round. Okay. So what I'm gonna do in this lightning round is I'm gonna list a bunch of issues and you're gonna tell me today if you are feeling apocalyptic or optimistic about these and I'm gonna just list them. So you just have to it's just a a word, right?

speaker-0: And from a from a global perspective or an American perspective?

speaker-1: You can do it either way as Catherine Mulkinson. So your perspective on this, all right?

speaker-0: Apocalyptic or optimistic? Okay.

speaker-1: Or exactly. Okay, first one. Climate action.

speaker-0: Neutral?

speaker-1: Okay. All right. Leadership in the climate movement.

speaker-0: These are hard, Dana.

speaker-1: I can tell you're gonna be my number three on the Likert scale. Every single one you're gonna be like three down the middle. But you're gonna be that number.

speaker-0: What's gonna be? I know. I'm like huh mm-huh Neutral.

speaker-1: How about climate storytelling?

speaker-0: Hmm. Maybe more optimistic.

speaker-1: All right. All right, here's one. Democracy in America.

speaker-0: Ooh, apocalyptic.

speaker-1: Yeah. Cultural shift.

speaker-0: Hmm. Neutral.

speaker-1: All right. Well I'm gonna end with climate wayfinding.

speaker-0: ⁓ I mean, you have to feel optimistic when it made its way into a book and the book made its way into the world. So Exactly. And we have absolutely we have, I think, already two hundred and eighty reading groups that are in motion. So

speaker-1: Yeah. Got you gotta track them. You gotta track them. Get the data. No, it's amazing. So congratulations on the new book. Thank you so much for taking time to talk to me. I know you've been so busy and I feel so lucky to have gotten to talk to you. So thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode. I hope you're feeling a little less apocalyptic and a little more optimistic now. I'm Dr. Dana Fisher and I'll see you next time. If you like this episode, like, subscribe, and even pass it to a friend. Thanks.