July 10, 2023 • 51 mins
We’re in a massive climate crisis, but it’s hard to think about it, isn’t it?
It’s a great temptation to shut our eyes to climate change. It’s overwhelming. This week on the show, climate activist and author Bill McKibben on facing the reality of the climate crisis, understanding what needs to change, and what you can do - not just to change the course of humanity and the planet, but to feel more hopeful and connected as this all unfolds.
In this episode we cover:
- Is halting climate change really dependent on personal recycling and whether we use plastic straws?
- Why don’t we take action when the evidence of the climate crisis is literally everywhere?
- Is it okay to have intense emotional responses to wildfires, floods, and the inaction of those “in charge”?
- How the boomer generation is using their experience and their wealth to revisit the activism of their youth (and supporting younger activists at the same time)
- Why the “will to act” is so important to sustained change
- How talking about our fears and our ecological grief gives us common ground to fight for our future - and our present.
Related episodes:
For more on activism in the face of impossible odds:
Women, Life, Freedom: Grief and Power In Iran, with Nazanin Nour
Wonder in an Age of Violence with Valarie Kaur & See No Stranger
Notable quotes:
The climate crisis is a really interesting test of whether or not (our) big brain was a good adaptation or not. It can get us into a lot of trouble, but can it get us out? My intuition is that it's actually going to be less the size of the brain that matters than the size of the heart that it's attached to. - Bill McKibben
About our guest:
Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. His books include The End of Nature, about climate change, and Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?, about the state of the environmental challenges facing humanity. He’s a contributing writer to The New Yorker (read his latest piece here), and founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of sixty for progressive change.
About Megan:
Psychotherapist and bestselling author Megan Devine is recognized as one of today’s most insightful and original voices on grief, from life-altering losses to the everyday grief that we don’t call grief. She helms a consulting practice in Los Angeles and serves as an organizational consultant for the healthcare and human resources industries.
The best-selling book on grief in over a decade, Megan’s It’s Ok that You’re Not OK, is a global phenomenon that has been translated into more than 25 languages. Her celebrated animations and explainers have garnered over 75 million views and are used in training programs around the world.
Additional resources:
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
We are at a place where we have the first
truly global crisis we've ever been in, so the question
becomes some can we actually cooperate as a species. So far,
the evidence is not overwhelmingly great. But you know it's
not hopeless either.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
This is it's okay that you're not okay, and I'm
your host, Megan Divine. This week on the show, Climate Change.
Climate change is something that affects every single one of us,
and it is really hard to look at. It's such
a great temptation to shut our eyes to what's happening.
It's overwhelming. This week on the show, climate activist and
author Bill mckibbon on facing the reality of the climate crisis,
(00:46):
understanding what needs to change and what you can do
not just to change the course of humanity and the planet,
but to actually feel more hopeful and connected as this
all unfolds. This episode is a deep, kind heart conversation
about truly terrifying things, and I hope you'll lean into
it with me. It's coming up right after this first break.
(01:15):
Before we get started, one quick note. While we cover
a lot of emotional relational territory in each and every episode,
this show is not a substitute for skilled support with
a licensed mental health provider, or for professional supervision related
to your work. Hey, friends, you made it in my mind,
a lot of people would be like tempted to skip
(01:37):
this episode after hearing the opening clip. So I'm really
glad you're still here. The climate crisis is just so overwhelming,
and I try to keep my eyes open to so
many difficult things, as we know, but even I find
myself shutting down with each successive catastrophe, especially when it's
set against the backdrop of corporations and governments who simply
(01:58):
do not care. It's a lot. I saw something on
Twitter the other day that suggested that having emotional reactions
to climate catastrophes should be treated as quote a mental illness,
like sorry, your hometown is flooded and wildfire smoked turned
the sky orange, but you're resilient work on your own
coping skills, like having emotional reactions to climate catastrophes should
(02:23):
be treated as quote mental illness, Like there's so much
wrong with that statement. Our personal resilience is not the
problem here. And I know this is a much bigger
topic than we had time to get into with today's guest,
but if you're having a complex set of feelings associated
with the ongoing, unfolding climate crisis, you are definitely not alone.
(02:46):
Not having any feelings about it would be weird anyway.
We definitely get into just how dire things are in
this conversation, but we also get into hope, like real, tangible,
actionable hope that is not like wishful thinking dressed up
in fairy robes, you know, like none of that stuff,
(03:08):
Like actual hope with somebody who has been immersed in
the work of climate change for decades. Bill mckibbon is
an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively
on the impact of global warming. His books include The
End of Nature about climate change, and Falter Has the
(03:28):
Human Game Begun to Play Itself? Out? That one's about
the state of environmental challenges facing humanity. He's a contributing
writer to The Yorker and founder of Third Act, which
organizes people over the age of sixty four progressive change.
That Third Act is a super cool initiative you're going
to hear us talk about in our conversation. There's so
(03:48):
much goodness in this episode, and if you like me,
tend to turn away because things are too much. Be
sure to listen through to the end for your questions
to carry with you. They're really good this time. All right,
let's get to my conversation with author and activist Bill McKinnon. So,
(04:09):
I am so glad to have you here with me today.
I know that you don't necessarily do a whole lot
of interviews, so I'm just really honored to have you
with me here today.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Well, making it's a pleasure to be with you, in
part to be able to say thank you for your
good and important work, and it really is. It's a
pleasure to get to chat.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Thank you so much. Okay, So there are so many
places that we could begin our conversation. I've spent the
last three days reading your books and reading your articles
and watching you speak. We were talking before we got
rolling that I was recently visiting my folks, and a
lot of that time I was spent sort of immersed
in your work. And I'm going to say something You've
(04:51):
probably heard a lot, But spending so much time in
conversations and in material about climate change, I found myself
feeling really defeated. Is that sort of a common thing
you hear a lot when people are sort of engaging
with your work.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
I don't know about defeated necessarily, but definitely scared and upset.
I'm doing nothing to sell books, I can tell, and
that's you know, I'm afraid that's appropriate. It is a
scary and upsetting thing. We're talking about by far, the
biggest thing humans have ever done, by far, the most
(05:30):
dangerous thing humans have ever done. We're talking about something
that is now playing out in real time, very much
in front of us. There's a great temptation to shut
one's eyes, and sadly that's the one thing we can't afford,
because we desperately need as many people as possible at
work on this if we're to have any chance of
(05:53):
really not of stopping global warming too late for that,
but of stopping it short of the place where it
cuts civilization off at the knees, which is what's going
to happen if we don't get our act together quickly.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Yeah, and I've read that you've said that those like
the doomsday descriptions of what scientists projected back in the eighties,
right when we've kind of first started talking about what
was then? What was it then? Greenhouse Green Greenhouse facts yeah, yeah,
and that those predictions that they made back in the
eighties were too conservative given what's unfolded sense that's right.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
I mean I wrote the first book about all of
this back in nineteen eighty nine, So in many cases,
I was just about the first reporter, first rioter, to
get to sit and talk with the climate scientists who
work on it. Scientists are by their nature conservative. They
underestimate rather than overestimate. It's just the kind of nature
(06:49):
of the profession. They were exactly right, I mean, eerally
accurate about how much the temperature was going to go up.
It's gone up on pretty much exactly the curve that
people like James Hansen, the great NASA physicists, first predicted,
but they underestimated how much damage that increase in temperature
(07:13):
would do because we'd never done this experiment before, at
least with humans around to watch. So so far, we've
increased the temperature somewhat more than a degree celsius let's
say two degrees fahrenheit in round numbers, which doesn't sound
like that much. I mean, it was sixty degrees when
I walked the dog this morning. If it's fifty eight
(07:36):
degrees when I walk the dog tonight. My body won't
be able to tell the difference, so better off thinking
about it. In other units, the amount of extra heat
that we trap near the planet every day because of
the carbon we've put there by burning fossil fuel is
the heat equivalent of about four hundred thousand horosima sized
(07:57):
explosions daily.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
And you know that, then it's easier to understand how
big big things have happened, and sooner than we thought
they were going to We've melted most of the sea
ice in the summer Arctic. We now see massive melt
underway in the Antarctic. These are things that in the
late nineteen eighties scientists hoped we might not see till
(08:23):
the latter part of this century. But we're seeing them already,
and we're seeing things as a result that we didn't
really predict what happened. For instance, the jet stream works
off the difference in temperature between the equator and the poles.
There's less difference now, so that jet stream is acting
(08:43):
in super funky ways, and we get these long periods
of either drought or flood, depending on which side you
get stuck on, and so on. So the damage that
we've seen already very very substantial, the biggest wildfires we've
ever seen, the biggest rainstorms in human history, on and
(09:03):
on and on. They're already big, big problems. Sadly, the
real danger is that we're currently on a path to
raise the temperature about five degrees or six degrees fahrenheit,
not the two degrees we have so far. And if
we do that, it won't be three times as bad.
(09:23):
It'll be worse than that, because the damage won't be
on a kind of linear scale, it'll be on an
exponential one. You go past certain tipping points that then
everything shifts. Once there's no ice left in the summer Arctic,
the world gets very very different.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
For instance, the abstract nature of it right until it
becomes personal, Until you're personally affected by it, it doesn't
seem real, and certainly with floods and fires, fires showing
up in places where they haven't been experienced and floods
showing up like it's art to get personal, which is,
(10:02):
you know, honestly, it's too late, right, like too late
not to do anything, but like it's this weird human
thing that we don't take something seriously until it impacts
us personally, and directly.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
You know, when I wrote that first book, Megan, I
was twenty eight and my theory of change was people
will read my book and then they will change. And truthfully,
a lot of people read it. It came out in
twenty four languages. It was a bestseller all over the place.
You know, it's like your books, but at least in
big political questions, people don't just read books and change.
(10:40):
There were a lot of forces, beginning and ending in
a sense, with the power of the fossil fuel industry,
that kept us from making the changes that we could
have made early on. Those changes, had we made them
early on, would have been fairly small, and they would
have gotten us out of an awful lot of trouble. Now, sadly,
(11:01):
we've waited so long into this mess that the changes
necessarily have to be big and disruptive. The Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change, which are the group of climate scientists
that the UN assembles to offer their collective wisdom and
all of this, said two years ago that we had
until twenty thirty to cut emissions in half on this
(11:24):
planet if we wanted to meet the targets, the temperature
targets that we'd set in Paris just a few years ago. Well,
by my watch, twenty thirty is what six years and
seven months away. That's an awful lot of work to
cram into that period of time. If we'd had thirty
(11:44):
six years, if we'd started back when we got our
first warnings, then it would have been a lot easier.
But if you point out human nature doesn't necessarily work
that way, and the self interest of oil companies definitely
doesn't work that way.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Yeah, you know what I don't get, and this has
bugged me forever. But like you said, the self interest
of the oil companies and fossil fuels and those sorts
of things, and the people who draft and vote for
legislation that continues to damage the planet and communities, do
they not realize they live here too.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
I think that if they stop to think about it,
their calculation, at least their internal psychological calculation, is if
I make enough money, I can build a wall of
greenbacks around my house, my family, whatever it is I
care about, and will be okay. But motivated reasoning is
(12:41):
a powerful, powerful thing. You know more about it than
I do. And I think it's also possible for people
to convince themselves that all scientists are engaged in some
conspiracy theory or whatever it is if it's in their
momentary self interest to do that.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
Yeah. In the End of Nature, Bill you wrote that
there is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad
to pretend that it's not really there, that we're not
really at a crossroad, right, And I think that's you
know what we were just talking about, that there's this
like psychic doubling in a way that happens both for
industries and legislators who vote against Earth's best interests, in
(13:23):
our best interests, but also people who sort of shut
down in the face of increasing danger.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Is that true? And do you think that's true in
Peopil's just like personal lives too, when you're confronted with
things in their own personal lives that are like that. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
I mean for me, it's it's this desperate desire to
believe that we're okay, that we have some control over
our safety and are the safety of our loved ones right.
For me, it's that same mechanism. This is this is
my this is my griefy Rosetta stone for all of
life is that we we like to believe that we
(14:03):
will be okay, and the people we care about will
be okay. Right, That's why there's so much shame and judgment,
Like when you hear that somebody's child was killed by
a drunk driver, right, Like I wouldn't have been on
the road that late at night, or I would have
paid more attention to the road, or I'm a better
driver so I would have been able to evade it.
Like all of these if then statements that we can
(14:24):
say that prove to us that that kind of pain
would never show up on my doorstep. Yeah, and I
think that that going back to what we were talking
about a moment ago with climate change, when it is
quote unquote just Haiti getting swamped, when it is just
Central Africa hitting another massive drought, like when it is
(14:47):
away from our gaze, we can tell ourselves that we're
safe and everybody we love is safe. And for me,
it's that same mechanism, right, it's the same grief avoidance.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
This explains, among other things. Yeah, what brilliant psychology the
marketers and pr guys that the fossil fuel industry set
to work beginning about nineteen ninety. We now know how
smart they work. They hired a bunch of the people
who used to work for the tobacco industry, and the
message that they brought was the same, the science is inconclusive.
(15:18):
We don't know for sure what's going to happen. And
that wasn't true. The science actually was conclusive. But I
think it was psychologically powerful for a lot of people
just the thought that maybe we didn't actually have to
deal with this. The next generation or the one after
that or something would be the ones who would get
(15:38):
to deal with it.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Yeah, deferred maintenance, right, This is why it's so hard
to get people to get their colonoscopies and get there,
like do stuff. Preventative care, Like preventative action doesn't sell.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Yeah, it's funny, you know. I started the first with
seven college students what became the first big global grassroots
i'm A campaign about twenty years ago. We called it
three fifty dot org. Now, the name came from what
the scientist told us was the most carbon we could
safely have in the atmosphere, three hundred and fifty parts
per million. We chose the name part because we wanted
(16:14):
to organize globally and we figured Arabic numerals work better
than English words. But when we chose it, people said, wow,
it's a bad name because it's depressing. We're already past
three point fifty, you know, And I said, well, in
the first place, honesty has its virtues too, And in
the second place, it strikes me that it's sort of
(16:35):
like going to the doctor. If the doctor says, you know,
keep eating like this and someday your cholesterol will be
too high, you know, you'd stop for a cheeseburger on
the way home. But if the doctor says, huh, you're
already in that zone where people have heart attacks. You know,
you might have had a small stroke already. That's the
(16:55):
day where people say, what pill should I take? You know.
Maybe it was a way to make it a little
more real. At any event, it worked pretty well. We've
organized twenty thousand demonstrations in every country on Earth except
North Korea at this point, so that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
And I think also like it gives people a goal
instead of like everything is terrible, everything is dire, we
have to act fast, like all of which is all accurate.
I just feel like we interpret that sort of stuff
as it's already too late and collapse into despair and.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Overwhelm absolutely, like most people who do this kind of work,
and for me it's just volunteer work. I'm a self
taught organizer, but I've sort of helped lead very large campaigns.
The campaign against the Keystone pipeline that was Big Oil's
first defeat, This fossil fuel divestment campaign that's now at
about forty trillion dollars in endowments and portfolios that have
(17:53):
divested from fossil fuel. And one of the things the
psychological things that I think I learned cause that you
had to have a goal that was on the one hand,
plausible you could make a story about how you might
reach it, and also plausibly large enough to matter. You
(18:14):
had to have a story about why it actually would
make a difference. It's quite easy to get people for
a little while to do really easy things change your
light bulbs. But people have pretty good built in bullshit
detector too that you know, after a little while you're like, yeah,
I really don't think changing this light bulb is going
to beat climate change, and so either you go to
(18:37):
look for something more useful to do, or you know,
avoid the subject altogether.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Yeah, I think there's a lot of that. There's nothing
I can do because the corporations in the greed are
bigger than us and too much to battle. And honestly,
like with all of the cascading disasters, with climate disasters,
with gun violence, with like with just all of the
stuff that we're sort of bombarded with in news feeds
(19:02):
and in communities, like, it is really hard not to
get ground down by this.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
Yes, and that's why it's a great antidote to actually
have a movement with campaigns that matter, that people are
you're working side by side with. For me, it's the
most effective antidote to what is unavoidable grief, anxiety, all
(19:28):
those things. But I don't know what'll I mean, I
hope I don't find out, but I don't know what
it'll feel like when we reach the point where if
we don't do our job well soon, what it really
does just just seals our trajectory. That's why I, you know,
continue to fight hard, and why it seems urgent, why
you know, I end up. I mean, I've been to
(19:49):
jail now going on a dozen times, I think, which
is not at all how I thought my life would
turn out. But I will say that once or twice
there in jail I felt a certain kind of relaxation
isn't the right word. But there was nothing more I
could do. I was there. I couldn't do anything, couldn't
(20:10):
talk to anyone, couldn't write an email, couldn't you know,
write a story, couldn't do all the things I'm used
to doing. Just my being there was going to have
to be enough, and that was There was a kind
of relief for that too.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
I got to say, I feel that there's a certain
sort of rooted piece of being in knowing that you
have taken the action you can take to this point,
and at this point there is no further action, ye right,
knowing that that time to act will circle back again.
You know, this whole conversation, I have Joanna Macy in
my head. So you and I were talking is she's
(20:45):
just the best. You and I were talking before we
got rolling. You live at Vermont, and I went to
graduate school in Vermont, and a lot of my graduate
studies were just deeply informed by Joanna Macy and friends.
We'll link to Joanna Macy's work here. So what we're
talking about, But I remember back then I was doing
a lot of women's rights work and reproductive justice work
(21:06):
and just starting to get into some environmental activism, and
Joanna Masie was the only one that I found at
the time really talking about the grief inherent in activism.
And her whole thing was that, like, if we don't
let ourselves feel the grief that we feel, our social
justice work can't be as successful as it needs to be.
(21:31):
Totally paraphrasing her, But how does that resonate for you?
Speaker 1 (21:35):
I think that's probably very true. I mean, look, I'm
a white male of a certain era. You know, I'm
an old guy, so being open about things like grief
doesn't come super easy to me. I'm always grateful for
my friends and colleagues for whom that can help me
(21:55):
with that. The person I often lean on is the
Great Western Ride Terry Tempest Williams, who was one of
my oldest and dearest friends. But who's writing, especially in
books like Refuge and if people are interested, she just
wrote a piece. She's from Utah. She just wrote a
piece in the New York Times about Great Salt Lake
(22:17):
and drying up and what that felt like. And I
know it took a lot out of her to write it,
and you can see it on the page. Well, you know,
somehow we need to come to terms with that grief.
The thing that makes it hard is that the patient's
not dead yet. You know, you're more like the doctor
(22:38):
in the emergency room who's you know, it's psychologically easier
to just keep running around, you know, thinking of the
next trick you can try. And we're still very much
in that phase. There's lots of important things we still
can be doing, but there's lots of things we're not
getting back too. So you know, one way out for
(23:00):
me is to remind myself every single day that for
all the insults that it's taken, the world we live
on is still incredibly beautiful, and that it's not going
to be more intact than it is right now. And
so one of our jobs, as the creature with consciousness
who can look around, one of our jobs is to
(23:21):
be out there bearing witness to its great beauty. So
if I'm home, I'm out in the woods some part
of every day. Just for that reason.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
Before we get back to my conversation with Bill mckibbon,
I want to talk with you about getting help inside grief.
You know how people say, like, maybe you should talk
to someone, Well, it's not that easy finding skilled. Grief
support is hard. We get a lot of messages from
people wanting to speak with me directly, and we used
to say no all the time because I didn't have
time in the calendar. Now we are saying yes for
(24:01):
a limited time and a limited number of people. To
apply for one of the grief consultation spots on my calendar,
send us an email at support at refugegrief dot com,
or use the contact form at Megandivine dot co. If
individual work with me is out of reach for you,
or that waiting list gets too long, you can still
join me every month for a live Q and A
(24:23):
at Patreon dot com backslash Megan Divine. Details on both
of those options are on the show notes. All right,
let's get back to the conversation. I love that you
brought up Terry Tempess Williams along with Joanna Macy. She
was one of the people I considered mentors to me
in those early days. I love her work so so much.
We almost had her on the show. I should revisit
(24:44):
that and see what happened to that. I think it was.
It was a scheduling glitch for us. And thank you
for telling me about that article. Because I have not
seen that I will find that. And I'm just I
love her so much. To me, she straddles those realms
of telling the truth about what she sees happening and
what she's seen unfold and this really intimate, intimate way,
(25:08):
this intimate relationship with her home and her landscape, and
talks about actions to take, and talks about the beauty,
and talks about the pain of seeing what's ahead, seeing
what's already changed, what's already lost, and what is ahead
on the chopping block, and I just I feel like
it's for me. And again, because grief is my lens
(25:29):
through which I see most things, I feel like being
afraid of what it will feel like if we truly
pay attention to the devastation that has already come and
the devastation that is ahead, if we truly turned our
gaze to that, the grief would overwhelm us and we
wouldn't be able to act. And in the face of
(25:50):
that's probably not a conscious fear, but like in the
face of that, we say, it's not that bad. Too
many things to fight, let me find Like that we
deflect ourselves to something that feels less overwhelming, because that
emotional visceral response would be too big for us.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
I think, yeah, if you're attuned to what's going on,
then there are daily opportunities for worry and grief around
the world. They also come, in this case with a
added kind of dollop of a certain kind of guilt too.
(26:28):
Pakistan last fall had the worst flood since Noah, the
kind of flood you can only have in a globally
warmed world where warm air holds more water vapor than cold.
It just started raining in August and it did not stop.
There were places, large places that got eight hundred percent
of their annual rainfall in thirty days, so eight times
(26:51):
as much rainfall as they get in a year they
got in three weeks. People who live in mudhouses they
work great most of the time. They're smart architecture. When
it rains for three weeks without stopping, they melt away
around you. Thirty three million people were displaced. Well, the
two hundred million people are so in Pakistan. They've produced
(27:12):
way less than one percent of all the carbon in
the atmosphere. The three percent of the world's population that
calls itself Americans has produced about twenty five percent of
all the carbon in the atmosphere. It's you know, the
good things in our lives, big houses, cars, airplanes, so on,
that have you know, at some level caused the problems
(27:36):
that hit all of us, but that hit the people.
The iron law of global warming is the less you
did to closet, the sooner and harder you get hit.
So there's some kind of guilt added on top of that.
But we also don't seem very well built to figure
out how rationally to deal with I mean, in the
same way that people are you know, busy and sis
(28:00):
that schools shouldn't teach about, you know, slavery or something
because it's you know, makes us feel bad. We don't
quite know how to handle the fact that we owe
a real debt to much of the rest of the world.
And so the good news is it's a payable debt.
There's a lot of things that should be giving us
heart right now. In the last ten years, scientists have
(28:23):
engineers really have cut the cost of renewable energy ninety percent.
We now live on a planet where the cheapest way
to generate power is to point a sheet of glass
at the sun. That's hogwarts scale magic. You know, I'm
an occasional Sunday school teacher. That's water into wine kind
(28:45):
of miracle. So there's no longer a deep technological or
financial obstacle to keep us from making very rapid progress
and decarbonizing the earth. But it would take a huge
push to do it at the speed that we need to,
and it would have to be a push against the
(29:05):
extraordinary power still of the oil industry to keep us
from keep us locked for as long as possible in
their business model. One of the things that's hopeful to
me is that becomes less a kind of story about
dread and despair than a story about real, hopeful and
bright possibility. I mean, we could get our energy from
(29:30):
heaven instead of hell, and not only would we knock
the worst edge off the climate crisis. You know, maybe
nine million people a year on this planet die from
breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel. That's one death
in five. If you've been to Delhi or Shanghai recently,
it won't come as a huge surprise because you've seen
(29:51):
what the air there is like. But really it's true
in this country too. There's millions of cases of childhood
asthma every year, mostly with black brown kids who have
the ones who have to live near the highway, near
the refinery, whatever it is. We don't need any of that.
We can get rid of that, and in short order,
(30:12):
not only that, depending on a resource that only is
available in a few places, like coal and gas and
oil means that the people who control those places get
way too much power. So you know, in our country,
that was our biggest oil and gas barons, the Koch brothers,
who took their winnings and used them to degrade our democracy.
(30:33):
In Europe, it's Vladimir Putin who's used his winnings to
launch a land war in Europe in the twenty first century.
We don't need that the sun and the wind everywhere.
After seven hundred thousand years of combustion, humans could give
up their habit of setting stuff on fire and we'd
be quickly better off. So that's a really beautiful story
(30:57):
to tell.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Yeah, I think we get trapped in the binary right,
Like if I have to give up my comforts, my transportation, autonomy,
all of those things, I'm not going to be able
to live well if I make choices that let other
people survive. I didn't really say that very well. But
(31:19):
it's like it's this binary right either or, And also
like how I was talking about this with an investment broker,
going over like you know, what things do you invest in?
And I was like, it all comes down to how
much of other people suffering are you willing to tolerate
for your own gain? And that's like that sounds really crappy,
but this really is sort of the equation that we
(31:41):
have a lot, right, like understanding the downstream effects of
our choices and not that you're a terrible person for
making those choices. And I think this is where it
gets tricky. And you brought up how much communities of
color are impacted by climate change. This is sort of
true across the board, right, Like if we start paying
attention to the impact of our choices, then we're going
(32:04):
to have to be uncomfortable. And we interpret that as
like if I do the work to make you safer
than I am less safe. Right, If I do the
work to include you, that means that I'm excluded. Yes,
And there's just this like such a scarcity model of
community and existence and consumption, like one of us has
(32:26):
to win and the other one has to lose, and
that's not serving us.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
The big news is that technology has done some of
this work for us. I mean, look, I live in
a house that runs on solar panels, and I have
a car that connects up to those solar panels, and
it works fine. You know, it's as good as any
car I ever had, maybe better. I have an induction
cook top in the kitchen. It doesn't cost any more
(32:51):
than my guest. It costs a lot less once you
know to operate. We have a heat pump in the
basement instead of a furnace. It works just fine. So
some of these changes are easy enough to make now,
but you do have to be willing to make them.
I think we also have to be willing to be
honest about the degree to which we need to take
(33:13):
some of our winnings that we've accumulated in the rich
parts of the world by burning fossil fuel and let
people in the rest of the world have some small
share of them so that they don't drown whatever. I mean.
We are at a place where we have the first
truly global crisis we've ever been in, so the question
(33:36):
becomes some can we actually cooperate as a species. So far,
the evidence is not overwhelmingly great, but you know, it's
not hopeless either. It takes some solace from the fact
that the only other existential crisis we've faced, the one
(33:56):
that comes from nuclear weapons, we've actually avoided since we
dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one else
has done it, and they knock on wood. But there's
some sign that we're capable of sometimes rising to the occasion.
But in this case, it definitely requires people working together,
(34:19):
and that's why this movement building has been so interesting.
One of the things that's interesting for me about this
avoidance sort of stuff that we've been discussing on a
level is that most of the work has been done
by young people. I started through fifty dot org with
seven college students. We had this massive divestment campaign that
(34:42):
was mostly run by kids in university around the world.
When they got out of school, they wanted to keep working,
so they formed the Sunrise movement that brought us the
Green New Deal. The junior high and high school kids
who kind of have followed Greta Tunberg, who is one
of my favorite people to work with. I really really
adore her and her embrace of her autism as a
(35:05):
kind of superpower. Has been ennobling to watch. But she
and she'd be the first to say, look, there's ten
thousand Gretas and they really are around the world, and
they have ten million followers. That's how many kids were
out on school strike and twenty nineteen before the pandemic hit.
So kids are doing their job. At a certain point.
(35:26):
I'd heard one too many people my age say well,
it's up to the next generation to solve these problems,
which strikes me as nonsense of the highest order. I mean, look,
they're doing the leading. Sure, you know they have a
lot at stake, but a it's not their fault. So
(35:47):
it's kind of ignoble to, you know, take the world's
biggest problem and dump it on the lapse of junior
high school students. But it's also highly impractical. For all
their energy and intelligence and idealism, young people lack the
structural power to make change on the scale we need
in the time that we have, which is why in
(36:08):
the last few years my volunteer work has been organizing
older people. We've started this thing called Third Act, which
organizes people over the age of sixty for progressive action.
And I'm really relieved and pleased to tell you that
people have been lining up to go to work. And
(36:28):
I think it has a lot to do with psychologies
of various kinds. One of them is political scientists have
long said that people get more conservative as they age,
and you could posit reasons for that. But if you're
in your sixties or seventies or eighties, now, your first
act was in this period of epic social and cultural
(36:50):
and political transformation, and you know you were around when
we started taking women seriously in public life. You were
there at the apex of the Civil rights movement. Probably
you marched on the first Earth Day, because twenty million
Americans were in the streets that day, nineteen seventy. And
so there's a kind of muscle memory or a kind
of collective people. When people look back on their youth,
(37:14):
the thing that they're proud of is having been part
of that. So that's half of it. But the other
half seems to be and this is seems to me
deeply psychologically healthy. As people get nearer the exit than
the entrance, it really feels to me like they're beginning
to take things like legacy and solidarity and things seriously
(37:39):
in a different way, you know, your legacy is the
planet you leave behind for the people you love the most.
And people take very seriously the thought that they're leaving
behind a planet that's shabbier than the one they were
born onto. I don't know, it's a lot of fun
to work with older people like me because there's a
(38:00):
little less of the kind of you know, I have
to be in front or kind of dominance what. We
did a big demonstration against these banks, the four big
American banks, Chase, City, Wells, Fargo, Bank of America that
are the four biggest lenders to the fossil fuel industry.
We did about one hundred demonstrations. We shut them down
(38:20):
for a day across the country with people doing sit
ins and rocking chairs, you know, all over the place.
And the big banner that we had where I was
this big banner that just said fossils against fossil fuels.
It was good to see people who could you know,
laugh at themselves a little bit and at the same
(38:42):
time understand that they had an important role to play
in trying to set things right. The whole thing has
felt that the very least psychologically healthy to me and
enjoin it a lot.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
Yeah, there's something so powerful in that community. And one
of my favorite quotes from you is the human game
as a team sport and finding finding ways to come
together in this. One of the things that that kind
of irks me, kind of is is is not a
big enough word, but the inviting right between the generations.
(39:17):
You've got the younger generation saying you created this world
for us, you jerks, and the older generation saying it
wasn't my fault. You know, I was part of the
civil rights movement, like it wasn't my fault. It was
the corporations. And instead of coming together in our love
for the world, in our care for the world, instead
(39:39):
of joining together with that, we get into this. You
screwed up. You're not doing enough.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
I think that's right. And on the deepest level, the
key dividing line in my life and I think in
the world was the moment when, in political terms, probably
with the election of Ronald Reagan, when we decided that
individualism was the most important thing, that markets were going
to solve all problems, that your job was to get rich.
(40:07):
It was his palm Maggie Thatcher who said there is
no such thing as society. There are only individual men
and women. So two things happened as a result of that.
One is that, you know, we melted the North Pole
because what do you know, markets didn't solve all problems.
But the second thing that happened was that people got
(40:29):
more and more and more isolated and alienated and off
by themselves. You're the one who really understands this stuff,
but it strikes me powerfully. We are socially evolved primates.
It wasn't that long ago that we were all sitting
on the floor of the savannah picking lice out of
each other's fur, you know, And just the command to
(40:50):
go off by yourselves and good consumers just seems to
have set us up for so much unhappiness. And it's
and one of it's not the reason we build movements.
We build movements so that we can keep the planet
from overheating, or you know, keep black people from having
to be killed by policemen or whatever. It is a
(41:13):
nice side effect of building movements is that people end
up working together, and that's what we're designed to do.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
I think, yeah, it intersects really cleanly with SIGNA did
to study. I think it's twenty eighteen or nineteen. I
should know because I cite it all the time, but
they found that loneliness is a bigger public health risk
than smoking. Yes, right, And you know where I go
with that is like why are people lonely? And we're
(41:42):
lonely because we can't tell each other the truth about
what we're feeling or what's going on for us, because
we're sort of hit with Oh you think you have
it bad, other people have it worse, or I have
it worse. And this really, like this shows up in
what you and I have just been talking about, right
in the climate catastrophe or that individualism and thinking that
(42:08):
it's you against the world, and the flip side of
that of you can't get help unless you've exhausted every
possible aspect of doing it for yourself. Right, God helps
those who help themselves. This sort of rugged individualism lays
the stage for cataclysmic devastation on social, political, environmental fronts.
(42:29):
And what I hear you saying, yay, is that community
and connection is the answer, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
And it may be the answer to winning those fights,
but it's definitely the answer to how to be alive
at a tough moment. You know, it's what we want
to do at some level. I mean to the funniest degree.
I now have lots of older people coming up from
(42:57):
telling me that it's on their list to get arrested,
and could I help, you know and things. Sure, I
know how to do that, but it's press it's it's
powerful stuff. And I do think, and this is the
place where I allow myself to be optimistic. I do
(43:20):
think that if we get through the next twenty years,
which are going to be very tough, that humans will
find far more interesting ways to amuse themselves going forward.
I think that the chances that, you know, seventy five
years from now, all we can think of to do is,
you know, go to the mall, or go shopping online,
or you know, whatever it is that seems slight to me.
(43:41):
We're really interesting species. We wandered into this enticing called
de sact of kind of high consumer consumerism, and it'll
take us a little while, but eventually we'll get out
of it. So my job, our job is to try
and make sure we get through those twenty or thirty
years so that the people who come after us have
(44:02):
some realistic chance at building a more interesting world.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
I love that I feel like you've answered my closing
question multiple times, But I'm going to give it to
you anyway. You wrote in Falter, a writer doesn't owe
a reader hope. The only obligation is honesty. You've written
about hope in a bunch of different ways. So for today,
knowing what you know and living what you've lived, what
(44:31):
does hope look like for you today?
Speaker 1 (44:34):
Yeah? It's always a hard question because I don't There
are days when I don't even have, you know, when
the anything that gets me through the day is just,
you know, anger at exon or something like that. Sometimes
that's a reasonable fuel to get you going. But the
hope is that we don't walk off this particular cliff
(44:57):
eyes closed. You know, it feels to me like climate change.
The climate crisis is a really interesting test of whether
or not the big brain was a good adaptation or not.
It can get us in a lot of trouble, can
it get us out? And my intuition is that it's
actually going to be less the size of the brain
(45:19):
that matters than the size of the heart that it's
attached to. And we shall see. I have hope in
most of the people around me and the people that
I know that they are of good heart. Sometimes that
hope is strained and tested. It's been not such a
(45:39):
great few years, you know, and I don't pretend to understand,
you know, some of the things that we see in
our society now. But that's where my hope was, that
in the end there are enough people of good heart
that we will figure out how to work together through this.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
Thank you so much for being here, not just on
the show but in the world back.
Speaker 1 (46:04):
Catch you enormous thanks for your good work. And this
has really been a fun conversation, a deep one. I've
thought about things I hadn't really thought about before, which
is the mark of a good interlocutur.
Speaker 2 (46:17):
Excellent. I am so glad to hear that. It's been
such an honor to talk with you.
Speaker 1 (46:23):
Now.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
We're going to link to your books in the show notes.
We will give people a link to the third Act,
and we're going to add in some of the resources
and the other authors that we mentioned in the show.
All right, everybody, stay tuned for your questions to carry
with you coming up right after this break. Each week,
(46:48):
I leave you with some questions to carry with you
until we meet again. Now, you know, it really struck
me in this conversation just how hard it is to
really face the climate crisis, like it is so overwhelming.
I know that sticking my head in the sand is
only going to hasten the world I don't want, but
(47:09):
I still have a hard time maintaining my gaze on
how serious, how dangerous this all is. Like there are
so many things we need to fight for, but if
we no longer have an inhabitable planet, all of that
fighting and all of our celebration, it just it just stops.
Which is a little light thought to carry with you
(47:31):
for the day. But that's not your questions to carry
with you, because at the same time that I'm turning
to face how dangerous and serious this all is. Like,
this conversation made me feel a little braver, not less overwhelmed,
but more hopeful, more able to see this as the
experiment in big heartedness. As Bill said towards the end
(47:53):
of our time together, curiosity and engagement with the experiment
feels a lot more sustainable and a lot less overwhelming
than those other two options of like collapsing into despair
on one hand, or pretending there's absolutely nothing wrong on
the other. I hope you feel the same after this
conversation today, a little more willing to sustain your gaze,
(48:16):
a little more willing to take action in ways that
feel right for you, a little more willing to open
the conversation with your people, your friends, your families about
all the feelings inside the catastrophes facing us as individuals
and as a global community. It is such a massive
grief and such a massive chance to be together, to
(48:39):
band together inside it. So how about you. I would
love to hear how not only this show affected you,
but how grief and climate change come together in you.
It is truly something we do not talk about enough.
Everybody's going to take something different from this show, but
(49:00):
I do hope you found something to hold on too.
If you want to tell me how today's show felt
for you, or you have thoughts on what we covered,
let me know. Tag at Refuge and Grief on all
the social platforms so I can hear how this conversation
affected you. Follow the show at It's Okay pod, on
TikTok and Refuge and Grief everywhere else to see video
clips from the show. But there are no video clips
(49:21):
from this one because my guest lives in role Vermont
and the internet was not strong enough for video, so
you're not going to see videos, but you will see
videos from every other guest. Use the hashtag It's okay
pod on all of the platforms, so not only I
can find you, but other people can too. None of
us are entirely okay, and it's time we start talking
(49:41):
about that together. Yeah, it's okay that you're not okay.
You're in good company. That's it for this week. Remember
to subscribe to the show and leave a review. Please.
Her reviews are really special to me and I love
to read them. Coming up next week on the Pod,
(50:02):
Doctor Pooja Lakshmin on the ridiculous idea that self care
can solve all of your problems. Follow the show on
your favorite platforms so you don't miss an episode. Want
more on these topics, Look, grief is everywhere. As my
dad says, daily life is full of everyday grief that
we don't call grief, including grief around climate change. Learning
(50:25):
how to talk about all of that without cliches or
platitudes or dismissive statements, or telling people to be more
resilient like those are important skills for everyone. Get help
to have those conversations with training's professional resources. And my
best selling book, It's Okay that You're Not Okay. At
Megandivine dot Co. It's Okay that You're Not Okay. The
(50:47):
podcast is written and produced by me Megan Divine. Executive
producer is Amy Brown, co produced by Elizabeth Fozzio, Logistical
and social media support from Micah, Post production and editing
by Houston Tilly. Our intern this season is Hannah Goldman.
Music provided by wave Crush and background noise provided by
(51:09):
the new collection of toys with digital sound effects spilling
over my backyard fence from the neighbors
We are at a place where we have the first
truly global crisis we've ever been in, so the question
becomes some can we actually cooperate as a species. So far,
the evidence is not overwhelmingly great. But you know it's
not hopeless either.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
This is it's okay that you're not okay, and I'm
your host, Megan Divine. This week on the show, Climate Change.
Climate change is something that affects every single one of us,
and it is really hard to look at. It's such
a great temptation to shut our eyes to what's happening.
It's overwhelming. This week on the show, climate activist and
author Bill mckibbon on facing the reality of the climate crisis,
(00:46):
understanding what needs to change and what you can do
not just to change the course of humanity and the planet,
but to actually feel more hopeful and connected as this
all unfolds. This episode is a deep, kind heart conversation
about truly terrifying things, and I hope you'll lean into
it with me. It's coming up right after this first break.
(01:15):
Before we get started, one quick note. While we cover
a lot of emotional relational territory in each and every episode,
this show is not a substitute for skilled support with
a licensed mental health provider, or for professional supervision related
to your work. Hey, friends, you made it in my mind,
a lot of people would be like tempted to skip
(01:37):
this episode after hearing the opening clip. So I'm really
glad you're still here. The climate crisis is just so overwhelming,
and I try to keep my eyes open to so
many difficult things, as we know, but even I find
myself shutting down with each successive catastrophe, especially when it's
set against the backdrop of corporations and governments who simply
(01:58):
do not care. It's a lot. I saw something on
Twitter the other day that suggested that having emotional reactions
to climate catastrophes should be treated as quote a mental illness,
like sorry, your hometown is flooded and wildfire smoked turned
the sky orange, but you're resilient work on your own
coping skills, like having emotional reactions to climate catastrophes should
(02:23):
be treated as quote mental illness, Like there's so much
wrong with that statement. Our personal resilience is not the
problem here. And I know this is a much bigger
topic than we had time to get into with today's guest,
but if you're having a complex set of feelings associated
with the ongoing, unfolding climate crisis, you are definitely not alone.
(02:46):
Not having any feelings about it would be weird anyway.
We definitely get into just how dire things are in
this conversation, but we also get into hope, like real, tangible,
actionable hope that is not like wishful thinking dressed up
in fairy robes, you know, like none of that stuff,
(03:08):
Like actual hope with somebody who has been immersed in
the work of climate change for decades. Bill mckibbon is
an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively
on the impact of global warming. His books include The
End of Nature about climate change, and Falter Has the
(03:28):
Human Game Begun to Play Itself? Out? That one's about
the state of environmental challenges facing humanity. He's a contributing
writer to The Yorker and founder of Third Act, which
organizes people over the age of sixty four progressive change.
That Third Act is a super cool initiative you're going
to hear us talk about in our conversation. There's so
(03:48):
much goodness in this episode, and if you like me,
tend to turn away because things are too much. Be
sure to listen through to the end for your questions
to carry with you. They're really good this time. All right,
let's get to my conversation with author and activist Bill McKinnon. So,
(04:09):
I am so glad to have you here with me today.
I know that you don't necessarily do a whole lot
of interviews, so I'm just really honored to have you
with me here today.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Well, making it's a pleasure to be with you, in
part to be able to say thank you for your
good and important work, and it really is. It's a
pleasure to get to chat.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Thank you so much. Okay, So there are so many
places that we could begin our conversation. I've spent the
last three days reading your books and reading your articles
and watching you speak. We were talking before we got
rolling that I was recently visiting my folks, and a
lot of that time I was spent sort of immersed
in your work. And I'm going to say something You've
(04:51):
probably heard a lot, But spending so much time in
conversations and in material about climate change, I found myself
feeling really defeated. Is that sort of a common thing
you hear a lot when people are sort of engaging
with your work.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
I don't know about defeated necessarily, but definitely scared and upset.
I'm doing nothing to sell books, I can tell, and
that's you know, I'm afraid that's appropriate. It is a
scary and upsetting thing. We're talking about by far, the
biggest thing humans have ever done, by far, the most
(05:30):
dangerous thing humans have ever done. We're talking about something
that is now playing out in real time, very much
in front of us. There's a great temptation to shut
one's eyes, and sadly that's the one thing we can't afford,
because we desperately need as many people as possible at
work on this if we're to have any chance of
(05:53):
really not of stopping global warming too late for that,
but of stopping it short of the place where it
cuts civilization off at the knees, which is what's going
to happen if we don't get our act together quickly.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Yeah, and I've read that you've said that those like
the doomsday descriptions of what scientists projected back in the eighties,
right when we've kind of first started talking about what
was then? What was it then? Greenhouse Green Greenhouse facts yeah, yeah,
and that those predictions that they made back in the
eighties were too conservative given what's unfolded sense that's right.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
I mean I wrote the first book about all of
this back in nineteen eighty nine, So in many cases,
I was just about the first reporter, first rioter, to
get to sit and talk with the climate scientists who
work on it. Scientists are by their nature conservative. They
underestimate rather than overestimate. It's just the kind of nature
(06:49):
of the profession. They were exactly right, I mean, eerally
accurate about how much the temperature was going to go up.
It's gone up on pretty much exactly the curve that
people like James Hansen, the great NASA physicists, first predicted,
but they underestimated how much damage that increase in temperature
(07:13):
would do because we'd never done this experiment before, at
least with humans around to watch. So so far, we've
increased the temperature somewhat more than a degree celsius let's
say two degrees fahrenheit in round numbers, which doesn't sound
like that much. I mean, it was sixty degrees when
I walked the dog this morning. If it's fifty eight
(07:36):
degrees when I walk the dog tonight. My body won't
be able to tell the difference, so better off thinking
about it. In other units, the amount of extra heat
that we trap near the planet every day because of
the carbon we've put there by burning fossil fuel is
the heat equivalent of about four hundred thousand horosima sized
(07:57):
explosions daily.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
And you know that, then it's easier to understand how
big big things have happened, and sooner than we thought
they were going to We've melted most of the sea
ice in the summer Arctic. We now see massive melt
underway in the Antarctic. These are things that in the
late nineteen eighties scientists hoped we might not see till
(08:23):
the latter part of this century. But we're seeing them already,
and we're seeing things as a result that we didn't
really predict what happened. For instance, the jet stream works
off the difference in temperature between the equator and the poles.
There's less difference now, so that jet stream is acting
(08:43):
in super funky ways, and we get these long periods
of either drought or flood, depending on which side you
get stuck on, and so on. So the damage that
we've seen already very very substantial, the biggest wildfires we've
ever seen, the biggest rainstorms in human history, on and
(09:03):
on and on. They're already big, big problems. Sadly, the
real danger is that we're currently on a path to
raise the temperature about five degrees or six degrees fahrenheit,
not the two degrees we have so far. And if
we do that, it won't be three times as bad.
(09:23):
It'll be worse than that, because the damage won't be
on a kind of linear scale, it'll be on an
exponential one. You go past certain tipping points that then
everything shifts. Once there's no ice left in the summer Arctic,
the world gets very very different.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
For instance, the abstract nature of it right until it
becomes personal, Until you're personally affected by it, it doesn't
seem real, and certainly with floods and fires, fires showing
up in places where they haven't been experienced and floods
showing up like it's art to get personal, which is,
(10:02):
you know, honestly, it's too late, right, like too late
not to do anything, but like it's this weird human
thing that we don't take something seriously until it impacts
us personally, and directly.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
You know, when I wrote that first book, Megan, I
was twenty eight and my theory of change was people
will read my book and then they will change. And truthfully,
a lot of people read it. It came out in
twenty four languages. It was a bestseller all over the place.
You know, it's like your books, but at least in
big political questions, people don't just read books and change.
(10:40):
There were a lot of forces, beginning and ending in
a sense, with the power of the fossil fuel industry,
that kept us from making the changes that we could
have made early on. Those changes, had we made them
early on, would have been fairly small, and they would
have gotten us out of an awful lot of trouble. Now, sadly,
(11:01):
we've waited so long into this mess that the changes
necessarily have to be big and disruptive. The Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change, which are the group of climate scientists
that the UN assembles to offer their collective wisdom and
all of this, said two years ago that we had
until twenty thirty to cut emissions in half on this
(11:24):
planet if we wanted to meet the targets, the temperature
targets that we'd set in Paris just a few years ago. Well,
by my watch, twenty thirty is what six years and
seven months away. That's an awful lot of work to
cram into that period of time. If we'd had thirty
(11:44):
six years, if we'd started back when we got our
first warnings, then it would have been a lot easier.
But if you point out human nature doesn't necessarily work
that way, and the self interest of oil companies definitely
doesn't work that way.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Yeah, you know what I don't get, and this has
bugged me forever. But like you said, the self interest
of the oil companies and fossil fuels and those sorts
of things, and the people who draft and vote for
legislation that continues to damage the planet and communities, do
they not realize they live here too.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
I think that if they stop to think about it,
their calculation, at least their internal psychological calculation, is if
I make enough money, I can build a wall of
greenbacks around my house, my family, whatever it is I
care about, and will be okay. But motivated reasoning is
(12:41):
a powerful, powerful thing. You know more about it than
I do. And I think it's also possible for people
to convince themselves that all scientists are engaged in some
conspiracy theory or whatever it is if it's in their
momentary self interest to do that.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
Yeah. In the End of Nature, Bill you wrote that
there is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad
to pretend that it's not really there, that we're not
really at a crossroad, right, And I think that's you
know what we were just talking about, that there's this
like psychic doubling in a way that happens both for
industries and legislators who vote against Earth's best interests, in
(13:23):
our best interests, but also people who sort of shut
down in the face of increasing danger.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Is that true? And do you think that's true in
Peopil's just like personal lives too, when you're confronted with
things in their own personal lives that are like that. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
I mean for me, it's it's this desperate desire to
believe that we're okay, that we have some control over
our safety and are the safety of our loved ones right.
For me, it's that same mechanism. This is this is
my this is my griefy Rosetta stone for all of
life is that we we like to believe that we
(14:03):
will be okay, and the people we care about will
be okay. Right, That's why there's so much shame and judgment,
Like when you hear that somebody's child was killed by
a drunk driver, right, Like I wouldn't have been on
the road that late at night, or I would have
paid more attention to the road, or I'm a better
driver so I would have been able to evade it.
Like all of these if then statements that we can
(14:24):
say that prove to us that that kind of pain
would never show up on my doorstep. Yeah, and I
think that that going back to what we were talking
about a moment ago with climate change, when it is
quote unquote just Haiti getting swamped, when it is just
Central Africa hitting another massive drought, like when it is
(14:47):
away from our gaze, we can tell ourselves that we're
safe and everybody we love is safe. And for me,
it's that same mechanism, right, it's the same grief avoidance.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
This explains, among other things. Yeah, what brilliant psychology the
marketers and pr guys that the fossil fuel industry set
to work beginning about nineteen ninety. We now know how
smart they work. They hired a bunch of the people
who used to work for the tobacco industry, and the
message that they brought was the same, the science is inconclusive.
(15:18):
We don't know for sure what's going to happen. And
that wasn't true. The science actually was conclusive. But I
think it was psychologically powerful for a lot of people
just the thought that maybe we didn't actually have to
deal with this. The next generation or the one after
that or something would be the ones who would get
(15:38):
to deal with it.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Yeah, deferred maintenance, right, This is why it's so hard
to get people to get their colonoscopies and get there,
like do stuff. Preventative care, Like preventative action doesn't sell.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Yeah, it's funny, you know. I started the first with
seven college students what became the first big global grassroots
i'm A campaign about twenty years ago. We called it
three fifty dot org. Now, the name came from what
the scientist told us was the most carbon we could
safely have in the atmosphere, three hundred and fifty parts
per million. We chose the name part because we wanted
(16:14):
to organize globally and we figured Arabic numerals work better
than English words. But when we chose it, people said, wow,
it's a bad name because it's depressing. We're already past
three point fifty, you know, And I said, well, in
the first place, honesty has its virtues too, And in
the second place, it strikes me that it's sort of
(16:35):
like going to the doctor. If the doctor says, you know,
keep eating like this and someday your cholesterol will be
too high, you know, you'd stop for a cheeseburger on
the way home. But if the doctor says, huh, you're
already in that zone where people have heart attacks. You know,
you might have had a small stroke already. That's the
(16:55):
day where people say, what pill should I take? You know.
Maybe it was a way to make it a little
more real. At any event, it worked pretty well. We've
organized twenty thousand demonstrations in every country on Earth except
North Korea at this point, so that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
And I think also like it gives people a goal
instead of like everything is terrible, everything is dire, we
have to act fast, like all of which is all accurate.
I just feel like we interpret that sort of stuff
as it's already too late and collapse into despair and.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Overwhelm absolutely, like most people who do this kind of work,
and for me it's just volunteer work. I'm a self
taught organizer, but I've sort of helped lead very large campaigns.
The campaign against the Keystone pipeline that was Big Oil's
first defeat, This fossil fuel divestment campaign that's now at
about forty trillion dollars in endowments and portfolios that have
(17:53):
divested from fossil fuel. And one of the things the
psychological things that I think I learned cause that you
had to have a goal that was on the one hand,
plausible you could make a story about how you might
reach it, and also plausibly large enough to matter. You
(18:14):
had to have a story about why it actually would
make a difference. It's quite easy to get people for
a little while to do really easy things change your
light bulbs. But people have pretty good built in bullshit
detector too that you know, after a little while you're like, yeah,
I really don't think changing this light bulb is going
to beat climate change, and so either you go to
(18:37):
look for something more useful to do, or you know,
avoid the subject altogether.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Yeah, I think there's a lot of that. There's nothing
I can do because the corporations in the greed are
bigger than us and too much to battle. And honestly,
like with all of the cascading disasters, with climate disasters,
with gun violence, with like with just all of the
stuff that we're sort of bombarded with in news feeds
(19:02):
and in communities, like, it is really hard not to
get ground down by this.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
Yes, and that's why it's a great antidote to actually
have a movement with campaigns that matter, that people are
you're working side by side with. For me, it's the
most effective antidote to what is unavoidable grief, anxiety, all
(19:28):
those things. But I don't know what'll I mean, I
hope I don't find out, but I don't know what
it'll feel like when we reach the point where if
we don't do our job well soon, what it really
does just just seals our trajectory. That's why I, you know,
continue to fight hard, and why it seems urgent, why
you know, I end up. I mean, I've been to
(19:49):
jail now going on a dozen times, I think, which
is not at all how I thought my life would
turn out. But I will say that once or twice
there in jail I felt a certain kind of relaxation
isn't the right word. But there was nothing more I
could do. I was there. I couldn't do anything, couldn't
(20:10):
talk to anyone, couldn't write an email, couldn't you know,
write a story, couldn't do all the things I'm used
to doing. Just my being there was going to have
to be enough, and that was There was a kind
of relief for that too.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
I got to say, I feel that there's a certain
sort of rooted piece of being in knowing that you
have taken the action you can take to this point,
and at this point there is no further action, ye right,
knowing that that time to act will circle back again.
You know, this whole conversation, I have Joanna Macy in
my head. So you and I were talking is she's
(20:45):
just the best. You and I were talking before we
got rolling. You live at Vermont, and I went to
graduate school in Vermont, and a lot of my graduate
studies were just deeply informed by Joanna Macy and friends.
We'll link to Joanna Macy's work here. So what we're
talking about, But I remember back then I was doing
a lot of women's rights work and reproductive justice work
(21:06):
and just starting to get into some environmental activism, and
Joanna Masie was the only one that I found at
the time really talking about the grief inherent in activism.
And her whole thing was that, like, if we don't
let ourselves feel the grief that we feel, our social
justice work can't be as successful as it needs to be.
(21:31):
Totally paraphrasing her, But how does that resonate for you?
Speaker 1 (21:35):
I think that's probably very true. I mean, look, I'm
a white male of a certain era. You know, I'm
an old guy, so being open about things like grief
doesn't come super easy to me. I'm always grateful for
my friends and colleagues for whom that can help me
(21:55):
with that. The person I often lean on is the
Great Western Ride Terry Tempest Williams, who was one of
my oldest and dearest friends. But who's writing, especially in
books like Refuge and if people are interested, she just
wrote a piece. She's from Utah. She just wrote a
piece in the New York Times about Great Salt Lake
(22:17):
and drying up and what that felt like. And I
know it took a lot out of her to write it,
and you can see it on the page. Well, you know,
somehow we need to come to terms with that grief.
The thing that makes it hard is that the patient's
not dead yet. You know, you're more like the doctor
(22:38):
in the emergency room who's you know, it's psychologically easier
to just keep running around, you know, thinking of the
next trick you can try. And we're still very much
in that phase. There's lots of important things we still
can be doing, but there's lots of things we're not
getting back too. So you know, one way out for
(23:00):
me is to remind myself every single day that for
all the insults that it's taken, the world we live
on is still incredibly beautiful, and that it's not going
to be more intact than it is right now. And
so one of our jobs, as the creature with consciousness
who can look around, one of our jobs is to
(23:21):
be out there bearing witness to its great beauty. So
if I'm home, I'm out in the woods some part
of every day. Just for that reason.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
Before we get back to my conversation with Bill mckibbon,
I want to talk with you about getting help inside grief.
You know how people say, like, maybe you should talk
to someone, Well, it's not that easy finding skilled. Grief
support is hard. We get a lot of messages from
people wanting to speak with me directly, and we used
to say no all the time because I didn't have
time in the calendar. Now we are saying yes for
(24:01):
a limited time and a limited number of people. To
apply for one of the grief consultation spots on my calendar,
send us an email at support at refugegrief dot com,
or use the contact form at Megandivine dot co. If
individual work with me is out of reach for you,
or that waiting list gets too long, you can still
join me every month for a live Q and A
(24:23):
at Patreon dot com backslash Megan Divine. Details on both
of those options are on the show notes. All right,
let's get back to the conversation. I love that you
brought up Terry Tempess Williams along with Joanna Macy. She
was one of the people I considered mentors to me
in those early days. I love her work so so much.
We almost had her on the show. I should revisit
(24:44):
that and see what happened to that. I think it was.
It was a scheduling glitch for us. And thank you
for telling me about that article. Because I have not
seen that I will find that. And I'm just I
love her so much. To me, she straddles those realms
of telling the truth about what she sees happening and
what she's seen unfold and this really intimate, intimate way,
(25:08):
this intimate relationship with her home and her landscape, and
talks about actions to take, and talks about the beauty,
and talks about the pain of seeing what's ahead, seeing
what's already changed, what's already lost, and what is ahead
on the chopping block, and I just I feel like
it's for me. And again, because grief is my lens
(25:29):
through which I see most things, I feel like being
afraid of what it will feel like if we truly
pay attention to the devastation that has already come and
the devastation that is ahead, if we truly turned our
gaze to that, the grief would overwhelm us and we
wouldn't be able to act. And in the face of
(25:50):
that's probably not a conscious fear, but like in the
face of that, we say, it's not that bad. Too
many things to fight, let me find Like that we
deflect ourselves to something that feels less overwhelming, because that
emotional visceral response would be too big for us.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
I think, yeah, if you're attuned to what's going on,
then there are daily opportunities for worry and grief around
the world. They also come, in this case with a
added kind of dollop of a certain kind of guilt too.
(26:28):
Pakistan last fall had the worst flood since Noah, the
kind of flood you can only have in a globally
warmed world where warm air holds more water vapor than cold.
It just started raining in August and it did not stop.
There were places, large places that got eight hundred percent
of their annual rainfall in thirty days, so eight times
(26:51):
as much rainfall as they get in a year they
got in three weeks. People who live in mudhouses they
work great most of the time. They're smart architecture. When
it rains for three weeks without stopping, they melt away
around you. Thirty three million people were displaced. Well, the
two hundred million people are so in Pakistan. They've produced
(27:12):
way less than one percent of all the carbon in
the atmosphere. The three percent of the world's population that
calls itself Americans has produced about twenty five percent of
all the carbon in the atmosphere. It's you know, the
good things in our lives, big houses, cars, airplanes, so on,
that have you know, at some level caused the problems
(27:36):
that hit all of us, but that hit the people.
The iron law of global warming is the less you
did to closet, the sooner and harder you get hit.
So there's some kind of guilt added on top of that.
But we also don't seem very well built to figure
out how rationally to deal with I mean, in the
same way that people are you know, busy and sis
(28:00):
that schools shouldn't teach about, you know, slavery or something
because it's you know, makes us feel bad. We don't
quite know how to handle the fact that we owe
a real debt to much of the rest of the world.
And so the good news is it's a payable debt.
There's a lot of things that should be giving us
heart right now. In the last ten years, scientists have
(28:23):
engineers really have cut the cost of renewable energy ninety percent.
We now live on a planet where the cheapest way
to generate power is to point a sheet of glass
at the sun. That's hogwarts scale magic. You know, I'm
an occasional Sunday school teacher. That's water into wine kind
(28:45):
of miracle. So there's no longer a deep technological or
financial obstacle to keep us from making very rapid progress
and decarbonizing the earth. But it would take a huge
push to do it at the speed that we need to,
and it would have to be a push against the
(29:05):
extraordinary power still of the oil industry to keep us
from keep us locked for as long as possible in
their business model. One of the things that's hopeful to
me is that becomes less a kind of story about
dread and despair than a story about real, hopeful and
bright possibility. I mean, we could get our energy from
(29:30):
heaven instead of hell, and not only would we knock
the worst edge off the climate crisis. You know, maybe
nine million people a year on this planet die from
breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel. That's one death
in five. If you've been to Delhi or Shanghai recently,
it won't come as a huge surprise because you've seen
(29:51):
what the air there is like. But really it's true
in this country too. There's millions of cases of childhood
asthma every year, mostly with black brown kids who have
the ones who have to live near the highway, near
the refinery, whatever it is. We don't need any of that.
We can get rid of that, and in short order,
(30:12):
not only that, depending on a resource that only is
available in a few places, like coal and gas and
oil means that the people who control those places get
way too much power. So you know, in our country,
that was our biggest oil and gas barons, the Koch brothers,
who took their winnings and used them to degrade our democracy.
(30:33):
In Europe, it's Vladimir Putin who's used his winnings to
launch a land war in Europe in the twenty first century.
We don't need that the sun and the wind everywhere.
After seven hundred thousand years of combustion, humans could give
up their habit of setting stuff on fire and we'd
be quickly better off. So that's a really beautiful story
(30:57):
to tell.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Yeah, I think we get trapped in the binary right,
Like if I have to give up my comforts, my transportation, autonomy,
all of those things, I'm not going to be able
to live well if I make choices that let other
people survive. I didn't really say that very well. But
(31:19):
it's like it's this binary right either or, And also
like how I was talking about this with an investment broker,
going over like you know, what things do you invest in?
And I was like, it all comes down to how
much of other people suffering are you willing to tolerate
for your own gain? And that's like that sounds really crappy,
but this really is sort of the equation that we
(31:41):
have a lot, right, like understanding the downstream effects of
our choices and not that you're a terrible person for
making those choices. And I think this is where it
gets tricky. And you brought up how much communities of
color are impacted by climate change. This is sort of
true across the board, right, Like if we start paying
attention to the impact of our choices, then we're going
(32:04):
to have to be uncomfortable. And we interpret that as
like if I do the work to make you safer
than I am less safe. Right, If I do the
work to include you, that means that I'm excluded. Yes,
And there's just this like such a scarcity model of
community and existence and consumption, like one of us has
(32:26):
to win and the other one has to lose, and
that's not serving us.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
The big news is that technology has done some of
this work for us. I mean, look, I live in
a house that runs on solar panels, and I have
a car that connects up to those solar panels, and
it works fine. You know, it's as good as any
car I ever had, maybe better. I have an induction
cook top in the kitchen. It doesn't cost any more
(32:51):
than my guest. It costs a lot less once you
know to operate. We have a heat pump in the
basement instead of a furnace. It works just fine. So
some of these changes are easy enough to make now,
but you do have to be willing to make them.
I think we also have to be willing to be
honest about the degree to which we need to take
(33:13):
some of our winnings that we've accumulated in the rich
parts of the world by burning fossil fuel and let
people in the rest of the world have some small
share of them so that they don't drown whatever. I mean.
We are at a place where we have the first
truly global crisis we've ever been in, so the question
(33:36):
becomes some can we actually cooperate as a species. So far,
the evidence is not overwhelmingly great, but you know, it's
not hopeless either. It takes some solace from the fact
that the only other existential crisis we've faced, the one
(33:56):
that comes from nuclear weapons, we've actually avoided since we
dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one else
has done it, and they knock on wood. But there's
some sign that we're capable of sometimes rising to the occasion.
But in this case, it definitely requires people working together,
(34:19):
and that's why this movement building has been so interesting.
One of the things that's interesting for me about this
avoidance sort of stuff that we've been discussing on a
level is that most of the work has been done
by young people. I started through fifty dot org with
seven college students. We had this massive divestment campaign that
(34:42):
was mostly run by kids in university around the world.
When they got out of school, they wanted to keep working,
so they formed the Sunrise movement that brought us the
Green New Deal. The junior high and high school kids
who kind of have followed Greta Tunberg, who is one
of my favorite people to work with. I really really
adore her and her embrace of her autism as a
(35:05):
kind of superpower. Has been ennobling to watch. But she
and she'd be the first to say, look, there's ten
thousand Gretas and they really are around the world, and
they have ten million followers. That's how many kids were
out on school strike and twenty nineteen before the pandemic hit.
So kids are doing their job. At a certain point.
(35:26):
I'd heard one too many people my age say well,
it's up to the next generation to solve these problems,
which strikes me as nonsense of the highest order. I mean, look,
they're doing the leading. Sure, you know they have a
lot at stake, but a it's not their fault. So
(35:47):
it's kind of ignoble to, you know, take the world's
biggest problem and dump it on the lapse of junior
high school students. But it's also highly impractical. For all
their energy and intelligence and idealism, young people lack the
structural power to make change on the scale we need
in the time that we have, which is why in
(36:08):
the last few years my volunteer work has been organizing
older people. We've started this thing called Third Act, which
organizes people over the age of sixty for progressive action.
And I'm really relieved and pleased to tell you that
people have been lining up to go to work. And
(36:28):
I think it has a lot to do with psychologies
of various kinds. One of them is political scientists have
long said that people get more conservative as they age,
and you could posit reasons for that. But if you're
in your sixties or seventies or eighties, now, your first
act was in this period of epic social and cultural
(36:50):
and political transformation, and you know you were around when
we started taking women seriously in public life. You were
there at the apex of the Civil rights movement. Probably
you marched on the first Earth Day, because twenty million
Americans were in the streets that day, nineteen seventy. And
so there's a kind of muscle memory or a kind
of collective people. When people look back on their youth,
(37:14):
the thing that they're proud of is having been part
of that. So that's half of it. But the other
half seems to be and this is seems to me
deeply psychologically healthy. As people get nearer the exit than
the entrance, it really feels to me like they're beginning
to take things like legacy and solidarity and things seriously
(37:39):
in a different way, you know, your legacy is the
planet you leave behind for the people you love the most.
And people take very seriously the thought that they're leaving
behind a planet that's shabbier than the one they were
born onto. I don't know, it's a lot of fun
to work with older people like me because there's a
(38:00):
little less of the kind of you know, I have
to be in front or kind of dominance what. We
did a big demonstration against these banks, the four big
American banks, Chase, City, Wells, Fargo, Bank of America that
are the four biggest lenders to the fossil fuel industry.
We did about one hundred demonstrations. We shut them down
(38:20):
for a day across the country with people doing sit
ins and rocking chairs, you know, all over the place.
And the big banner that we had where I was
this big banner that just said fossils against fossil fuels.
It was good to see people who could you know,
laugh at themselves a little bit and at the same
(38:42):
time understand that they had an important role to play
in trying to set things right. The whole thing has
felt that the very least psychologically healthy to me and
enjoin it a lot.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
Yeah, there's something so powerful in that community. And one
of my favorite quotes from you is the human game
as a team sport and finding finding ways to come
together in this. One of the things that that kind
of irks me, kind of is is is not a
big enough word, but the inviting right between the generations.
(39:17):
You've got the younger generation saying you created this world
for us, you jerks, and the older generation saying it
wasn't my fault. You know, I was part of the
civil rights movement, like it wasn't my fault. It was
the corporations. And instead of coming together in our love
for the world, in our care for the world, instead
(39:39):
of joining together with that, we get into this. You
screwed up. You're not doing enough.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
I think that's right. And on the deepest level, the
key dividing line in my life and I think in
the world was the moment when, in political terms, probably
with the election of Ronald Reagan, when we decided that
individualism was the most important thing, that markets were going
to solve all problems, that your job was to get rich.
(40:07):
It was his palm Maggie Thatcher who said there is
no such thing as society. There are only individual men
and women. So two things happened as a result of that.
One is that, you know, we melted the North Pole
because what do you know, markets didn't solve all problems.
But the second thing that happened was that people got
(40:29):
more and more and more isolated and alienated and off
by themselves. You're the one who really understands this stuff,
but it strikes me powerfully. We are socially evolved primates.
It wasn't that long ago that we were all sitting
on the floor of the savannah picking lice out of
each other's fur, you know, And just the command to
(40:50):
go off by yourselves and good consumers just seems to
have set us up for so much unhappiness. And it's
and one of it's not the reason we build movements.
We build movements so that we can keep the planet
from overheating, or you know, keep black people from having
to be killed by policemen or whatever. It is a
(41:13):
nice side effect of building movements is that people end
up working together, and that's what we're designed to do.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
I think, yeah, it intersects really cleanly with SIGNA did
to study. I think it's twenty eighteen or nineteen. I
should know because I cite it all the time, but
they found that loneliness is a bigger public health risk
than smoking. Yes, right, And you know where I go
with that is like why are people lonely? And we're
(41:42):
lonely because we can't tell each other the truth about
what we're feeling or what's going on for us, because
we're sort of hit with Oh you think you have
it bad, other people have it worse, or I have
it worse. And this really, like this shows up in
what you and I have just been talking about, right
in the climate catastrophe or that individualism and thinking that
(42:08):
it's you against the world, and the flip side of
that of you can't get help unless you've exhausted every
possible aspect of doing it for yourself. Right, God helps
those who help themselves. This sort of rugged individualism lays
the stage for cataclysmic devastation on social, political, environmental fronts.
(42:29):
And what I hear you saying, yay, is that community
and connection is the answer, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
And it may be the answer to winning those fights,
but it's definitely the answer to how to be alive
at a tough moment. You know, it's what we want
to do at some level. I mean to the funniest degree.
I now have lots of older people coming up from
(42:57):
telling me that it's on their list to get arrested,
and could I help, you know and things. Sure, I
know how to do that, but it's press it's it's
powerful stuff. And I do think, and this is the
place where I allow myself to be optimistic. I do
(43:20):
think that if we get through the next twenty years,
which are going to be very tough, that humans will
find far more interesting ways to amuse themselves going forward.
I think that the chances that, you know, seventy five
years from now, all we can think of to do is,
you know, go to the mall, or go shopping online,
or you know, whatever it is that seems slight to me.
(43:41):
We're really interesting species. We wandered into this enticing called
de sact of kind of high consumer consumerism, and it'll
take us a little while, but eventually we'll get out
of it. So my job, our job is to try
and make sure we get through those twenty or thirty
years so that the people who come after us have
(44:02):
some realistic chance at building a more interesting world.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
I love that I feel like you've answered my closing
question multiple times, But I'm going to give it to
you anyway. You wrote in Falter, a writer doesn't owe
a reader hope. The only obligation is honesty. You've written
about hope in a bunch of different ways. So for today,
knowing what you know and living what you've lived, what
(44:31):
does hope look like for you today?
Speaker 1 (44:34):
Yeah? It's always a hard question because I don't There
are days when I don't even have, you know, when
the anything that gets me through the day is just,
you know, anger at exon or something like that. Sometimes
that's a reasonable fuel to get you going. But the
hope is that we don't walk off this particular cliff
(44:57):
eyes closed. You know, it feels to me like climate change.
The climate crisis is a really interesting test of whether
or not the big brain was a good adaptation or not.
It can get us in a lot of trouble, can
it get us out? And my intuition is that it's
actually going to be less the size of the brain
(45:19):
that matters than the size of the heart that it's
attached to. And we shall see. I have hope in
most of the people around me and the people that
I know that they are of good heart. Sometimes that
hope is strained and tested. It's been not such a
(45:39):
great few years, you know, and I don't pretend to understand,
you know, some of the things that we see in
our society now. But that's where my hope was, that
in the end there are enough people of good heart
that we will figure out how to work together through this.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
Thank you so much for being here, not just on
the show but in the world back.
Speaker 1 (46:04):
Catch you enormous thanks for your good work. And this
has really been a fun conversation, a deep one. I've
thought about things I hadn't really thought about before, which
is the mark of a good interlocutur.
Speaker 2 (46:17):
Excellent. I am so glad to hear that. It's been
such an honor to talk with you.
Speaker 1 (46:23):
Now.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
We're going to link to your books in the show notes.
We will give people a link to the third Act,
and we're going to add in some of the resources
and the other authors that we mentioned in the show.
All right, everybody, stay tuned for your questions to carry
with you coming up right after this break. Each week,
(46:48):
I leave you with some questions to carry with you
until we meet again. Now, you know, it really struck
me in this conversation just how hard it is to
really face the climate crisis, like it is so overwhelming.
I know that sticking my head in the sand is
only going to hasten the world I don't want, but
(47:09):
I still have a hard time maintaining my gaze on
how serious, how dangerous this all is. Like there are
so many things we need to fight for, but if
we no longer have an inhabitable planet, all of that
fighting and all of our celebration, it just it just stops.
Which is a little light thought to carry with you
(47:31):
for the day. But that's not your questions to carry
with you, because at the same time that I'm turning
to face how dangerous and serious this all is. Like,
this conversation made me feel a little braver, not less overwhelmed,
but more hopeful, more able to see this as the
experiment in big heartedness. As Bill said towards the end
(47:53):
of our time together, curiosity and engagement with the experiment
feels a lot more sustainable and a lot less overwhelming
than those other two options of like collapsing into despair
on one hand, or pretending there's absolutely nothing wrong on
the other. I hope you feel the same after this
conversation today, a little more willing to sustain your gaze,
(48:16):
a little more willing to take action in ways that
feel right for you, a little more willing to open
the conversation with your people, your friends, your families about
all the feelings inside the catastrophes facing us as individuals
and as a global community. It is such a massive
grief and such a massive chance to be together, to
(48:39):
band together inside it. So how about you. I would
love to hear how not only this show affected you,
but how grief and climate change come together in you.
It is truly something we do not talk about enough.
Everybody's going to take something different from this show, but
(49:00):
I do hope you found something to hold on too.
If you want to tell me how today's show felt
for you, or you have thoughts on what we covered,
let me know. Tag at Refuge and Grief on all
the social platforms so I can hear how this conversation
affected you. Follow the show at It's Okay pod, on
TikTok and Refuge and Grief everywhere else to see video
clips from the show. But there are no video clips
(49:21):
from this one because my guest lives in role Vermont
and the internet was not strong enough for video, so
you're not going to see videos, but you will see
videos from every other guest. Use the hashtag It's okay
pod on all of the platforms, so not only I
can find you, but other people can too. None of
us are entirely okay, and it's time we start talking
(49:41):
about that together. Yeah, it's okay that you're not okay.
You're in good company. That's it for this week. Remember
to subscribe to the show and leave a review. Please.
Her reviews are really special to me and I love
to read them. Coming up next week on the Pod,
(50:02):
Doctor Pooja Lakshmin on the ridiculous idea that self care
can solve all of your problems. Follow the show on
your favorite platforms so you don't miss an episode. Want
more on these topics, Look, grief is everywhere. As my
dad says, daily life is full of everyday grief that
we don't call grief, including grief around climate change. Learning
(50:25):
how to talk about all of that without cliches or
platitudes or dismissive statements, or telling people to be more
resilient like those are important skills for everyone. Get help
to have those conversations with training's professional resources. And my
best selling book, It's Okay that You're Not Okay. At
Megandivine dot Co. It's Okay that You're Not Okay. The
(50:47):
podcast is written and produced by me Megan Divine. Executive
producer is Amy Brown, co produced by Elizabeth Fozzio, Logistical
and social media support from Micah, Post production and editing
by Houston Tilly. Our intern this season is Hannah Goldman.
Music provided by wave Crush and background noise provided by
(51:09):
the new collection of toys with digital sound effects spilling
over my backyard fence from the neighbors
Host
Megan Devine
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