May 6, 2024 • 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?
- 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 wealth to revisit the activism of their youth (and supporting younger activists at the same time)
- How talking about our fears and our ecological grief gives us common ground to fight for our future - and our present.
We're re-releasing some of our favorite episodes from the first 3 seasons. This episode was originally recorded in 2023.
Looking for a creative exploration of grief? Check out the best selling Writing Your Grief course here.
For more on activism in the face of impossible odds listen to these related episodes:
Women, Life, Freedom: Grief and Power In Iran, with Nazanin Nour
Wonder in an Age of Violence with Valarie Kaur & See No Stranger
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.
Bill is 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 Megan Devine is one of today’s leading experts on grief, from life-altering losses to the everyday grief that we don’t call grief. Get the best-selling book on grief in over a decade, It’s Ok that You’re Not OK, wherever you get books. Find Megan @refugeingrief
Additional Resources:
Terry Tempest Williams’ book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, and her recent .css-j9qmi7{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:row;-ms-flex-direction:row;flex-direction:row;font-weight:700;margin-bottom:1rem;margin-top:2.8rem;width:100%;-webkit-box-pack:start;-ms-flex-pack:start;-webkit-justify-content:start;justify-content:start;padding-left:5rem;}@media only screen and (max-width: 599px){.css-j9qmi7{padding-left:0;-webkit-box-pack:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;justify-content:center;}}.css-j9qmi7 svg{fill:#27292D;}.css-j9qmi7 .eagfbvw0{-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;color:#27292D;}Mark as PlayedTranscript
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 hearted conversation
about truly terrifying things, and I hope you'll lean into
it with me. It's coming up right after this first
(01:07):
break before we get started. Two quick notes. One, this
episode is an encore performance. I am on break working
on a giant new project, so we're releasing a mix
of our favorite episodes from the first three seasons of
(01:27):
the show. Some of these conversations you might have missed
in their original seasons, and some shows just truly deserve
multiple listens so that you capture all of the goodness.
Second note, while we cover a lot of emotional, relational
territory and our time here together, this show is not
a substitute for skilled support or the license mental health provider,
(01:48):
or for professional supervision related to your work. Take what
you learn here, take your thoughts and your reflections out
into your world and talk about it. Hey, friends, I
made it in my mind. A lot of people would
be like tempted to skip this episode after hearing the
opening clip, So I'm really glad you're still here. The
(02:10):
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 do not care. It's
a lot. I saw something on Twitter the other day
(02:32):
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. Having
emotional reactions to climate catastrophes should be treated as quote
(02:52):
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. Not having
(03:15):
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, Like
(03:36):
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 human
(03:56):
game begun to play itself out That one's about these
state of environmental challenges facing humanity. He's a contributing writer
to The New 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
much goodness in this episode, and if you, like me,
(04:20):
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 Mckiinnon. So,
I am so glad to have you here with me today.
(04:41):
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 (04:49):
Well, Megan, 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 (04:59):
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
(05:19):
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 (05:36):
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 we've ever done, are far the most
(05:58):
dangerous thing humans were done. We're talking about something that
is now playing out in real time, very much in
front of us. Here'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 really
(06:22):
not of stopping global warming too late for that, but
of stopping it short of the place where it cuts
civilization off at the niece, which is what's going to
happen if we don't get our act together quickly.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
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 greenhouse facts. Yeah, yeah,
and that those predictions that they made back in the
eighties were too conservative given what's unfolded.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Sense that's right. 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
(07:17):
kind of nature of the profession. They were exactly right,
I mean, eerily 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
(07:40):
that increase in temperature 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
(08:00):
sixty degrees when I walked the dog this morning. If
it's fifty eight 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 trapped 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
(08:23):
thousand Hiroshima sized explosions daily. Wow. And when 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
(08:46):
are things that in the late nineteen eighties scientists hoped
we might not see till 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
(09:07):
the equator and the poles. There's less difference now, so
that jet stream is acting 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
(09:30):
human history, on and 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
(09:50):
three times as bad. 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 (10:09):
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 starting to get personal, which is
(10:30):
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 (10:43):
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 book, but at least in
big political questions, people don't just read books and change.
(11:08):
There are 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,
(11:29):
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
(11:52):
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
(12:13):
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 (12:27):
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 like
do they not realize they live here too?
Speaker 1 (12:47):
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
(13:09):
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. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
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 what we
were just talking about, that there's this like psychic doubling
in a way that happens both for industries and legislators
(13:49):
who vote against Earth's best interests, in our best interests,
but also people who sort of shut down in the
face of increasing danger.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Is that true? I think that's true. In Peopil's just
like personal lives too, when they're confronted with things in
their own personal lives that or like that.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Yeah, I mean for me, 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 like to believe that we will
(14:31):
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 say that prove to
(14:54):
us that that kind of pain would never show up
on my doorstep. Yeah, and I think that that and
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 heading
another massive drought. Like when it is away from our gaze,
(15:17):
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 (15:23):
This explains, among other things. Yeah, what brilliant psychologists, the
marketers and pr guys that the fossil fuel industry is
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
(15:45):
is inconclusive, 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
(16:06):
to deal with it.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
Yeah, deferred maintenance. Right, This is why it's so hard
to get people to get their colonoscopies and get their
like do stuff preventative care, Like preventative action doesn't sell.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
Yeah, it's funny, you know, I started the first with
seven college students what became the first big global grassroots
climate 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.
(16:41):
We chose the name part because we wanted to organize globally,
and we figured Arabic numerals work better than English words.
But when we chose it, people said, oh, 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 this second place,
(17:01):
it strikes me that it's sort of 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 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
(17:21):
have had a small stroke already. That's the 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 (17:40):
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 (17:58):
Overwhelm absolutely 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
(18:21):
divested from fossil fuel. And one of the things, the
psychological things that I think I learned, was 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
(18:42):
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 after a little while you're like, yeah,
I really don't think changing this light bulb is going
to seek climate change, And so either you go to
(19:05):
look for something more useful to do or you avoid
the subject altogether.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
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, like with just all of the stuff
that we're sort of bombarded with in news feeds and
(19:30):
in communities, it is really hard not to get ground
down by this.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Yes, and that's why it's a great antidote to actually
have a movement with campaigns that matter, that people you're
working side by side with. For me, it's the most
effective antidote to what is unavoidable grief, anxiety, all those things.
(19:58):
But I don't know what I'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 seals our trajectory. That's why I continue to fight hard,
and why it seems urgent, why you know, I end up.
I mean, I've been to jail now going on a
(20:20):
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 talk to anyone, couldn't write
an email, couldn't you know, write a story, couldn't do
(20:42):
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 that too.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
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 right,
knowing that that time to act will circle back again.
This whole conversation I have Joanna Macy in my head,
(21:11):
so you and I were talking is she's just the best.
You and I were talking before we got rolling. You
lived in 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 you know what we're talking about.
But I remember back then I was doing a lot
(21:32):
of women's rights work and reproductive justice work and just
starting to get into some environmental activism, and Joanna Macy
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
(21:56):
can't be as successful as it needs to be. Totally
paraphrasing her, But how does that resonate for you?
Speaker 1 (22:03):
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
(22:23):
with that. The person I often lean on is the
great Western writer Terry Tempest. Williams. He 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
(22:45):
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
(23:07):
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
(23:28):
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
(23:49):
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 (24:07):
Hey, before we get back to this week's guest, I
want to talk with you about exploring your losses through writing.
There are lots of grief writing workshops out there with
prompts like tell us about the funeral, that sort of thing.
My thirty Day Writing your Grief course is not like that.
The prompts are deferred, theremore nuanced. They're designed to get
you into your heart and into your own actual story. Now,
(24:30):
writing isn't going to cure anything, but it can help
you hear your own voice, and that is incredibly powerful.
You can read all about the Writing your Grief Course
at Refuge in Grief dot com backslash WYG that is
WYG for Writing your Grief. You can see a sample
prompt from the course and get writing your own words
in minutes. My thirty Day Writing your Grief Course is
(24:53):
still one of the best things I've ever made for you.
Come join more than ten thousand people who have taken
the Writing your Grief Course Refugeinggrief dot com, backslash WYG,
or you can find the link in the show notes.
I love that you brought up Terry Tempest Williams along
with Joanna Macy. She was one of the people I
considered mentors to me in those early days. I love
(25:15):
her work so so much. We almost had her on
the show. I should revisit that and see what happened
to that. I think it was good. 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
(25:37):
about what she sees happening and what she's seen unfold
in this really intimate, intimate way, 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
(26:00):
just I feel like it's for me. And again, because
grief is my lens 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
(26:24):
in the face of 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 (26:43):
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 dollup of a certain kind of guilt too.
(27:03):
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
(27:26):
as much rainfall as they get in a year, they
got in three weeks. People that 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
(27:47):
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
(28:11):
that hit all of us, but that hit the people.
The iron law of global warming is the less you
did to close it, 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 insisting that
(28:35):
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
(28:58):
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
(29:20):
of miracle. So there's no longer a deep technological or
financial obstacle to keep us from making very rapid progress
of 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
(29:40):
extraordinary power still of the oil industry to keep us
from You 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 possible ability. I mean, we could get our
(30:03):
energy from 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,
(30:24):
it won't come as a huge surprise because you've seen
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.
(30:44):
We can get rid of that, and in short order,
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.
(31:08):
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 winder 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
(31:32):
to tell.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
Yeah, I think we get trapped in the binary right.
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
(31:54):
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
(32:16):
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
(32:38):
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. Yeah, And
there's just this, like such a scarcity model of community
and existence and consumption, Like one of us has to
(33:00):
win and the other one has to lose, and that's
not serving us.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
The bigness 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 than
(33:25):
my guests to 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 some
(33:48):
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
(34:11):
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
(34:31):
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,
(34:54):
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 a little
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 was
(35:17):
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
(35:40):
kind of superpower has been ennobling to watch. 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, I'd
(36:01):
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
(36:21):
it's kind of ignoble to 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 the last few
(36:43):
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 I think it
(37:04):
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 and political transformation.
(37:28):
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, the thing that
(37:50):
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 in a different way.
(38:15):
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 little less of
the kind of you know, I have to be in
(38:38):
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 for a day across the country
with people doing sit ins and rocking chairs, you know,
(39:01):
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 time understand that they had an
important role to play in trying to set things right.
(39:23):
The whole thing has felt that the very least psychologically
healthy to me and enjoin it a lot.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
Yeah, there's something so powerful in that community. One of
my favorite quotes from you is the human game as
a team sport and finding finding ways to come together.
And that's one of the things that that kind of
irks me. Kind of is not a big enough word,
but the inviting right between the generations. You've got the
(39:52):
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 of joining together with that,
(40:15):
we get into this you screwed up you are not
doing enough.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
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.
(40:42):
It was his palm Maggie Thatcher he 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 Poole
because what do you know, markets didn't solve all problems.
The second thing that happened was that people got more
(41:04):
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 go off by
(41:25):
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
(41:46):
by policemen or whatever. It is a nice side effect
of building movements is that people end up working together,
and that's what we're designed to do.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
I think, yeah, it intersects really with SIGNA did a
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, right,
And you know where I go with that is like
why are people lonely? And we're lonely because we can't
(42:18):
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, like in the climate catastrophe
or that individualism and thinking that it's you against the world,
(42:45):
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 cataclysm devastation
on social, political, environmental fronts. And what I hear you saying, yay,
(43:07):
is that community and connection is the answer.
Speaker 1 (43:10):
Absolutely, and it may be the answer to winning those fights,
but it's definitely the answer to how to be alive
at the 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 and
(43:32):
telling me that it's on their bucket list to get
arrested and could I help you know and things. Sure,
I know how to do that, but it's brush, it's
powerful stuff. And I do think, and this is the
place where I allow myself to be optimistic. I do
(43:54):
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.
(44:16):
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
(44:37):
some realistic chance at building a more interesting world.
Speaker 2 (44:43):
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
(45:06):
does hope look like for you today?
Speaker 1 (45:09):
Yeah, it's always a hard question because I don't There
are days when I don't even have you know, when
the endthing 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
(45:31):
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
(45:53):
brain that matters than the size of the heart that
it's attached to. And we shelse 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
(46:14):
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 (46:34):
Thank you so much for being here, not just on
the show but in the world.
Speaker 1 (46:38):
Back at 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 interlocutor.
Speaker 2 (46:52):
Excellent. I am so glad to hear that it's been
such an honor to talk with you. Now, 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 I leave you
(47:23):
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 I still have a hard
(47:45):
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 celebris,
it just stops. Which is a little light thought to
(48:06):
carry with you 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
(48:28):
towards the end 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
(48:49):
sustain your gaze, 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
(49:11):
be together, to 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,
(49:34):
but I do hope you found something to hold on to.
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 its Okay pod on
TikTok and Refuge and Grief everywhere else to see video
clips from the show. But there are no video clips
(49:55):
from this one because my guest lives in Rolle, 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 okaypod
on all of the platforms, so not only I can
find you, but other people can too. None of us
are entirely okay, and as time we start talking about
(50:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:29):
Please.
Speaker 2 (50:30):
Your reviews are really special to me and I love
to read them. 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 how to talk about all of
that without cliches or platitudes or dismissive statements, or telling
(50:51):
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 podcast is written and produced by
me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown, co produced
(51:14):
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 Wavecrush and background
noise provided by the new collection of Toys with digital
sound effects spilling over my backyard beds 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 hearted conversation
about truly terrifying things, and I hope you'll lean into
it with me. It's coming up right after this first
(01:07):
break before we get started. Two quick notes. One, this
episode is an encore performance. I am on break working
on a giant new project, so we're releasing a mix
of our favorite episodes from the first three seasons of
(01:27):
the show. Some of these conversations you might have missed
in their original seasons, and some shows just truly deserve
multiple listens so that you capture all of the goodness.
Second note, while we cover a lot of emotional, relational
territory and our time here together, this show is not
a substitute for skilled support or the license mental health provider,
(01:48):
or for professional supervision related to your work. Take what
you learn here, take your thoughts and your reflections out
into your world and talk about it. Hey, friends, I
made it in my mind. A lot of people would
be like tempted to skip this episode after hearing the
opening clip, So I'm really glad you're still here. The
(02:10):
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 do not care. It's
a lot. I saw something on Twitter the other day
(02:32):
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. Having
emotional reactions to climate catastrophes should be treated as quote
(02:52):
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. Not having
(03:15):
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, Like
(03:36):
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 human
(03:56):
game begun to play itself out That one's about these
state of environmental challenges facing humanity. He's a contributing writer
to The New 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
much goodness in this episode, and if you, like me,
(04:20):
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 Mckiinnon. So,
I am so glad to have you here with me today.
(04:41):
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 (04:49):
Well, Megan, 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 (04:59):
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
(05:19):
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 (05:36):
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 we've ever done, are far the most
(05:58):
dangerous thing humans were done. We're talking about something that
is now playing out in real time, very much in
front of us. Here'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 really
(06:22):
not of stopping global warming too late for that, but
of stopping it short of the place where it cuts
civilization off at the niece, which is what's going to
happen if we don't get our act together quickly.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
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 greenhouse facts. Yeah, yeah,
and that those predictions that they made back in the
eighties were too conservative given what's unfolded.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Sense that's right. 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
(07:17):
kind of nature of the profession. They were exactly right,
I mean, eerily 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
(07:40):
that increase in temperature 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
(08:00):
sixty degrees when I walked the dog this morning. If
it's fifty eight 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 trapped 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
(08:23):
thousand Hiroshima sized explosions daily. Wow. And when 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
(08:46):
are things that in the late nineteen eighties scientists hoped
we might not see till 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
(09:07):
the equator and the poles. There's less difference now, so
that jet stream is acting 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
(09:30):
human history, on and 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
(09:50):
three times as bad. 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 (10:09):
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 starting to get personal, which is
(10:30):
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 (10:43):
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 book, but at least in
big political questions, people don't just read books and change.
(11:08):
There are 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,
(11:29):
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
(11:52):
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
(12:13):
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 (12:27):
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 like
do they not realize they live here too?
Speaker 1 (12:47):
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
(13:09):
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. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
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 what we
were just talking about, that there's this like psychic doubling
in a way that happens both for industries and legislators
(13:49):
who vote against Earth's best interests, in our best interests,
but also people who sort of shut down in the
face of increasing danger.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Is that true? I think that's true. In Peopil's just
like personal lives too, when they're confronted with things in
their own personal lives that or like that.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Yeah, I mean for me, 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 like to believe that we will
(14:31):
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 say that prove to
(14:54):
us that that kind of pain would never show up
on my doorstep. Yeah, and I think that that and
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 heading
another massive drought. Like when it is away from our gaze,
(15:17):
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 (15:23):
This explains, among other things. Yeah, what brilliant psychologists, the
marketers and pr guys that the fossil fuel industry is
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
(15:45):
is inconclusive, 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
(16:06):
to deal with it.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
Yeah, deferred maintenance. Right, This is why it's so hard
to get people to get their colonoscopies and get their
like do stuff preventative care, Like preventative action doesn't sell.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
Yeah, it's funny, you know, I started the first with
seven college students what became the first big global grassroots
climate 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.
(16:41):
We chose the name part because we wanted to organize globally,
and we figured Arabic numerals work better than English words.
But when we chose it, people said, oh, 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 this second place,
(17:01):
it strikes me that it's sort of 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 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
(17:21):
have had a small stroke already. That's the 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 (17:40):
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 (17:58):
Overwhelm absolutely 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
(18:21):
divested from fossil fuel. And one of the things, the
psychological things that I think I learned, was 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
(18:42):
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 after a little while you're like, yeah,
I really don't think changing this light bulb is going
to seek climate change, And so either you go to
(19:05):
look for something more useful to do or you avoid
the subject altogether.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
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, like with just all of the stuff
that we're sort of bombarded with in news feeds and
(19:30):
in communities, it is really hard not to get ground
down by this.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Yes, and that's why it's a great antidote to actually
have a movement with campaigns that matter, that people you're
working side by side with. For me, it's the most
effective antidote to what is unavoidable grief, anxiety, all those things.
(19:58):
But I don't know what I'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 seals our trajectory. That's why I continue to fight hard,
and why it seems urgent, why you know, I end up.
I mean, I've been to jail now going on a
(20:20):
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 talk to anyone, couldn't write
an email, couldn't you know, write a story, couldn't do
(20:42):
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 that too.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
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 right,
knowing that that time to act will circle back again.
This whole conversation I have Joanna Macy in my head,
(21:11):
so you and I were talking is she's just the best.
You and I were talking before we got rolling. You
lived in 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 you know what we're talking about.
But I remember back then I was doing a lot
(21:32):
of women's rights work and reproductive justice work and just
starting to get into some environmental activism, and Joanna Macy
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
(21:56):
can't be as successful as it needs to be. Totally
paraphrasing her, But how does that resonate for you?
Speaker 1 (22:03):
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
(22:23):
with that. The person I often lean on is the
great Western writer Terry Tempest. Williams. He 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
(22:45):
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
(23:07):
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
(23:28):
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
(23:49):
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 (24:07):
Hey, before we get back to this week's guest, I
want to talk with you about exploring your losses through writing.
There are lots of grief writing workshops out there with
prompts like tell us about the funeral, that sort of thing.
My thirty Day Writing your Grief course is not like that.
The prompts are deferred, theremore nuanced. They're designed to get
you into your heart and into your own actual story. Now,
(24:30):
writing isn't going to cure anything, but it can help
you hear your own voice, and that is incredibly powerful.
You can read all about the Writing your Grief Course
at Refuge in Grief dot com backslash WYG that is
WYG for Writing your Grief. You can see a sample
prompt from the course and get writing your own words
in minutes. My thirty Day Writing your Grief Course is
(24:53):
still one of the best things I've ever made for you.
Come join more than ten thousand people who have taken
the Writing your Grief Course Refugeinggrief dot com, backslash WYG,
or you can find the link in the show notes.
I love that you brought up Terry Tempest Williams along
with Joanna Macy. She was one of the people I
considered mentors to me in those early days. I love
(25:15):
her work so so much. We almost had her on
the show. I should revisit that and see what happened
to that. I think it was good. 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
(25:37):
about what she sees happening and what she's seen unfold
in this really intimate, intimate way, 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
(26:00):
just I feel like it's for me. And again, because
grief is my lens 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
(26:24):
in the face of 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 (26:43):
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 dollup of a certain kind of guilt too.
(27:03):
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
(27:26):
as much rainfall as they get in a year, they
got in three weeks. People that 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
(27:47):
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
(28:11):
that hit all of us, but that hit the people.
The iron law of global warming is the less you
did to close it, 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 insisting that
(28:35):
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
(28:58):
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
(29:20):
of miracle. So there's no longer a deep technological or
financial obstacle to keep us from making very rapid progress
of 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
(29:40):
extraordinary power still of the oil industry to keep us
from You 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 possible ability. I mean, we could get our
(30:03):
energy from 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,
(30:24):
it won't come as a huge surprise because you've seen
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.
(30:44):
We can get rid of that, and in short order,
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.
(31:08):
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 winder 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
(31:32):
to tell.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
Yeah, I think we get trapped in the binary right.
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
(31:54):
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
(32:16):
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
(32:38):
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. Yeah, And
there's just this, like such a scarcity model of community
and existence and consumption, Like one of us has to
(33:00):
win and the other one has to lose, and that's
not serving us.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
The bigness 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 than
(33:25):
my guests to 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 some
(33:48):
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
(34:11):
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
(34:31):
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,
(34:54):
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 a little
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 was
(35:17):
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
(35:40):
kind of superpower has been ennobling to watch. 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, I'd
(36:01):
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
(36:21):
it's kind of ignoble to 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 the last few
(36:43):
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 I think it
(37:04):
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 and political transformation.
(37:28):
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, the thing that
(37:50):
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 in a different way.
(38:15):
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 little less of
the kind of you know, I have to be in
(38:38):
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 for a day across the country
with people doing sit ins and rocking chairs, you know,
(39:01):
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 time understand that they had an
important role to play in trying to set things right.
(39:23):
The whole thing has felt that the very least psychologically
healthy to me and enjoin it a lot.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
Yeah, there's something so powerful in that community. One of
my favorite quotes from you is the human game as
a team sport and finding finding ways to come together.
And that's one of the things that that kind of
irks me. Kind of is not a big enough word,
but the inviting right between the generations. You've got the
(39:52):
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 of joining together with that,
(40:15):
we get into this you screwed up you are not
doing enough.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
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.
(40:42):
It was his palm Maggie Thatcher he 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 Poole
because what do you know, markets didn't solve all problems.
The second thing that happened was that people got more
(41:04):
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 go off by
(41:25):
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
(41:46):
by policemen or whatever. It is a nice side effect
of building movements is that people end up working together,
and that's what we're designed to do.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
I think, yeah, it intersects really with SIGNA did a
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, right,
And you know where I go with that is like
why are people lonely? And we're lonely because we can't
(42:18):
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, like in the climate catastrophe
or that individualism and thinking that it's you against the world,
(42:45):
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 cataclysm devastation
on social, political, environmental fronts. And what I hear you saying, yay,
(43:07):
is that community and connection is the answer.
Speaker 1 (43:10):
Absolutely, and it may be the answer to winning those fights,
but it's definitely the answer to how to be alive
at the 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 and
(43:32):
telling me that it's on their bucket list to get
arrested and could I help you know and things. Sure,
I know how to do that, but it's brush, it's
powerful stuff. And I do think, and this is the
place where I allow myself to be optimistic. I do
(43:54):
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.
(44:16):
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
(44:37):
some realistic chance at building a more interesting world.
Speaker 2 (44:43):
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
(45:06):
does hope look like for you today?
Speaker 1 (45:09):
Yeah, it's always a hard question because I don't There
are days when I don't even have you know, when
the endthing 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
(45:31):
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
(45:53):
brain that matters than the size of the heart that
it's attached to. And we shelse 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
(46:14):
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 (46:34):
Thank you so much for being here, not just on
the show but in the world.
Speaker 1 (46:38):
Back at 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 interlocutor.
Speaker 2 (46:52):
Excellent. I am so glad to hear that it's been
such an honor to talk with you. Now, 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 I leave you
(47:23):
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 I still have a hard
(47:45):
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 celebris,
it just stops. Which is a little light thought to
(48:06):
carry with you 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
(48:28):
towards the end 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
(48:49):
sustain your gaze, 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
(49:11):
be together, to 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,
(49:34):
but I do hope you found something to hold on to.
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 its Okay pod on
TikTok and Refuge and Grief everywhere else to see video
clips from the show. But there are no video clips
(49:55):
from this one because my guest lives in Rolle, 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 okaypod
on all of the platforms, so not only I can
find you, but other people can too. None of us
are entirely okay, and as time we start talking about
(50:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:29):
Please.
Speaker 2 (50:30):
Your reviews are really special to me and I love
to read them. 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 how to talk about all of
that without cliches or platitudes or dismissive statements, or telling
(50:51):
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 podcast is written and produced by
me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown, co produced
(51:14):
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 Wavecrush and background
noise provided by the new collection of Toys with digital
sound effects spilling over my backyard beds from the neighbors
Host
Megan Devine
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