Wildfires, extreme heat, ice storms and other weather events have Oregonians thinking about climate change in a much more personal way. We talk with clinical psychologist Thomas Doherty, who helps people cope with anxiety, depression and other mental health issues brought on by the climate crisis. His new book, “Surviving Climate Anxiety,” teaches how to cope and heal from the psychological impacts of our environmental crisis.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We’re going to spend the hour today with the Portland-based clinical psychologist Thomas Doherty. He has focused on the intersection of climate change and mental health for about 20 years. His new book is called “Surviving Climate Anxiety: A Guide to Coping, Healing, and Thriving.” It’s about the very real psychological challenges that people all around the world are facing right now as they reckon with floods, fires, drought, and heat, that have all been made much worse by human actions. It’s also a book about the necessity of fostering connection, community, and even joy in chaotic times. Thomas Doherty, it’s a pleasure to have you back on the show. Happy New Year.
Thomas Doherty: Dave, it’s really nice to see you. Happy New Year to you as well.
Miller: There are a lot of potential triggers for people who deal with serious climate anxiety, but a common one is having to personally reckon with climate-related disasters in their own state, in their own city, in their own homes. What are some of the events that you’ve heard people in the Pacific Northwest struggling with, in over the last five years, say?
Doherty: Yeah, it’s a great question, because when I first started working on this 15 years ago or 20 years ago when I was doing some research, all this climate stuff was talked about in a speculative sense of something that would happen in another place or in the future, and then over the last intervening time, the climate impacts have actually hit home. As someone who lives in Oregon and has spent a lot of time living in the Pacific Northwest, I think there are some key moments of kind of loss of innocence. The Columbia Gorge fires of several years ago, ice storms, heat dome, all those kinds of things where we realized that we’re not as safe as we thought here in the Pacific Northwest.
Then in Portland there’s been issues with trees falling down during the winter from ice. Our majestic trees can also be seen as a hazard. And then more recently, of course, we’ve had the kind of underreported but catastrophic flooding in the Pacific Northwest, particularly north of here up in Washington, and people that live in those regions know about it or people that go into the national forest or into the national parks know how this has been really destructive.
Miller: As you were talking, it reminded me that one of the painful paradoxes of climate change is that the natural world, and the place where a lot of people who who either grew up here or were drawn to the Pacific Northwest, some of the places that they go to for solace or think of as beautiful and a kind of a place of safety, because of climate change, that those very same landscapes can become places of danger. What happens when that switches in some of our brains?
Doherty: Yeah, and that’s a relatively new phenomenon too. Again, when I first started working on this, generally going out in nature was seen as a very positive, benign thing, and particularly during COVID people really leaned on that ability to go outdoors. But then with smoke, air quality, heat, then that got taken away, so it was kind of a double whammy. All of this climate anxiety, climate grief, it’s kind of a curriculum. We have to learn to master it in the modern world. One of the really tough lessons on the curriculum is realizing that it’s no longer just a one-way street where nature takes care of me, I can go to my treasured parks and forests. It’s a two-way street where I need to actually be compassionate to nature itself and learn to love so-called damaged places, at least damaged in my eyes, and that requires the ability to sort of be a caretaker of the land and realize that we have a responsibility.
And then also, as I talk about in my book, one of the biggest barriers is actually going to places because we think places are destroyed or damaged, but once we go there we realize the place still exists and it lives, and life is quite resilient. When we learned years ago after the Mount Saint Helens eruption that everybody thought the disaster, the impact area, would just be decimated forever, but life was resilient and came back, even within weeks. A lot of this in the book, I say it’s a doorway, not a wall. This is a way for you to grow larger and make yourself larger, rather than shrinking.
Miller: How is climate anxiety different from other kinds of anxiety and how is it the same?
Doherty: That’s a great starter question. I think you can approach what we call climate anxiety in three ways. One, it is just simply a normal emotion. Anxiety is a sense of apprehension about a vague threat. It’s a very useful emotion to have. It keeps us safe, and so we never want to lose that ability, but it serves a very, very specific function. It’s like a warning light on your car’s dashboard. Once it goes off, it’s done its job. It doesn’t fix your car, it doesn’t do anything, and so the anxiety is a normal feeling that we need to honor, express.
But in the climate era, we could think of it as a very complicated emotion because it’s not easy to express, first of all, because there’s a lot of politicization and polarization, and sort of fear of sharing this stuff. And of course we can’t necessarily easily deal with climate change because it’s this big political gridlocked global situation that includes power and corruption and advertising and the oil companies and all that sort of stuff. So it’s complicated.
And then another interesting way to think about climate anxiety is that it’s beyond a feeling, it’s a kind of identity, it’s a way of signifying things. When I meet someone who says they’re climate anxious, it tells me some things. It says they care about nature, the natural world, the well-being of their family or their children, some values that they have is under threat. And they then can meet other people that have this feeling and join together. When I meet people who either are not climate anxious or even sort of a climate skeptic or denier, it tells me that they care about other things more than climate. So climate anxiety is also kind of a healthy and kind of empowered kind of identity.
Miller: You have a shorthand for the way you approach climate therapy. Three words: validate, elevate, create. Can you walk us through those three pieces? Validate first.
Doherty: This is a good technique for a lot of things in life, but particularly in terms of climate concerns – validate, elevate, create – validate that this is, as we’re talking about, this is a real issue. This is normal. It’s sane. It’s healthy to be concerned.
Miller: It’s the opposite of gaslighting?
Doherty: Exactly, you’re un-gaslighting, you could say, or something like that. I hadn’t heard that before, but you’re exactly right on it. It’s the opposite of gaslighting. It’s validating, it’s, yes, this is consensual objective reality, you’re in the right place. And that itself is very healthy because one of the biggest difficulties with climate anxiety is isolation. People feel isolated, they feel alone, they feel strange, they feel unvalidated. So validate. And then elevate is interesting because that says let’s make this the most important thing to talk about, at least for now.
Miller: Which seems counterintuitive!
Doherty: Yeah, because usually we push it away, and the cultural narrative is, oh, that’s not as important as your job or your family or the current political situation in Washington, or etc., etc. And those other things are important as well, obviously, but in therapy we elevate things, or even just in a deep conversation with someone, we elevate things and make them important so we can understand them, and so that’s what we’re doing when we say we elevate. For now, I can change regular therapy to ecotherapy when I elevate those issues and say for now, we’re not gonna talk about your family dynamics or your parenting or your job or your high blood pressure or whatever, all these important issues, we’re gonna talk about your concerns about climate.
And then create is the special ingredient because most climate grief or anxiety, it does shrink us down, it makes us feel small, it makes us feel constricted. So when we say let’s get creative about it, it opens us up so that practically is questions like, where did this come from? How did you learn about this? Where do you get your information? What does this mean to you? What are your values? What is under threat? And that smuggles in positive emotion, ‘cause curiosity and creativity is a positive emotion and that is actually an opening emotion and it leads us to sort of broaden and build, and so it’s an antidote to that sense of doom, a doom spiral. So validate, elevate, create, and usually create will then create some new knowledge, some new thinking.
Miller: One of the points you mentioned there, one of the questions was where do you get your information? Early on in the book, you have a whole section about essentially news diets. How do you recommend that people balance awareness of what’s going on and an openness to take in often very bad information about the world. Balance out, on the one hand, and prevent overwhelm on the other?
Doherty: The first chapter in the book is how to think, and a big part of this is thinking about thinking or metacognition because in order to really cope with climate and these other global issues, we have to be able to expand in two ways. We have to be able to take in more difficult information because whatever problem you start to study, it’s going to be probably worse than you realize.
Miller: You say that you have to be open to the fact that it could be even people come to you with catastrophic thinking and you say, yes, yes, yes, and it could be even worse.
Doherty: It could be even worse. Let’s not be naive. We know any listener who’s a natural scientist or a conservationist or who studies species or landscapes knows once you dig into it, problems can be worse. But also things can be much better than you expect. For every problem that we can identify, there is one person or many people that are working on it. There are programs. I was just this morning reminding myself of all the climate action programs in Oregon and there’s so many all around the state. We have community emergency response teams and we have social justice interventions and many, many cities have programs. There’s so much out there.
Actually, it’s paradox because in doing this work I get inspired quite often by the people that we meet, young people, people from all around the world. We know objectively that the majority of people in the U.S. and all around the world care about this issue and want action and literally every place we go in the world, I don’t care what country, you’re going to find people that care. So we have to be open to that as well.
Miller: You’ve given an exercise to some patients who are overwhelmed by the news that they imagine that their own lives are the news.
Doherty: Yes, exactly.
Miller: What does that mean? What does the exercise look like?
Doherty: Your life is the news, and that’s a good catchphrase to remind ourselves, because when I get up in the morning I could, like some people, immediately go to my phone or go online or turn on the television. That is a kind of news, but I can also just step out of my door and look around in my neighborhood. That is the news. That is in fact more important and more, really, timely for me than what’s happening in Venezuela or something like that, because that’s my life.
So the key is to not think of the news as all of these distant things that you cannot control and that of course are mostly problematic because most of the news that we see on the news channels is problematic news. So your life is the news kind of helps us to recalibrate our news diet. If you take a news break for a day or a few hours or a weekend and then think about your life as the news, it actually puts you back into an area where you have your your own senses and your own sense of control and it’s just kind of a recalibration.
Miller: That makes sense to me, as you’re describing it, but I can easily imagine someone saying that your life is the news, it leads to self-centeredness or selfishness. How do you respond to that?
Doherty: I think it’s all about the balance. We can actually understand things better and be more effective taking care of any issue in the world, however far away, if we get our own house in order and our own life in order, and there is this kind of black and white thinking that it’s either all or none. I need to take all of my consciousness and all of my energy and put it out into the world, or I’m somehow being a bad person or something like that. One of the thinking skills is avoiding black and white thinking, again, keep in mind that… I mean, radio is different because radio’s been around for a while, but most of the communication news channels, especially social media, online news, our phones are highly addictive, so we have to be able to separate out our tech addiction from this actual urge to help. So it’s a little bit of a self-exploration, and I say just experiment with it.
Miller: You grew up in a blue collar family in Buffalo, New York, in Western New York. You were the first member of your family to go to college, and then you had a pretty circuitous path, it seems to me, to therapy. Can you give us a sense for the jobs that you held as a young adult?
Doherty: Yeah, sometimes people ask me how did you get to this work, and I say the work kind of found me. Like many people, I was interested… I grew up in a working class family in Buffalo, New York, not an outdoorsy kind of family, but like a lot of people, I had a natural impulse to want to explore, to see the American West, to do outdoor things, and so I kind of indulged in that.
I went to college in New York City, and let me add a construct that’s helpful here. It’s this idea of environmental identity I talk about in the book. It’s just our sense of identity in relation to nature and the natural world. Now when I was younger, I didn’t realize I had an environmental identity, but I was building one, so part of that is influenced by Buffalo, New York, where I grew up in that landscape. And then all the other landscapes that I wanted to explore, and I came out west and I was a river rafting guide and I worked in the Grand Canyon, when I was in college I actually went to Ireland and studied there, because my grandfather’s from Ireland. And I realize now that all these experiences, the Irish experience, the New York City experience, the West experience, the Grand Canyon, they all were building this environmental identity that I had. When I work with people, part of my job is helping them to develop their own environmental identity. And so I take great comfort, and it helps me to link these experiences in a narrative, in a coherent kind of place-based narrative.
Miller: Is this a kind of retrospective sense making, or in the moment did it seem like there was a path?
Doherty: I would say in the moment it sometimes did not seem like it was a path. Like many young people, I struggled to figure out what my path was in the world and I guess I am stubborn, so I stuck with this nature path. It’s funny, I actually worked in Oregon for an outdoor therapy program that was run by a psychologist, and he also did river rafting, and I naively thought that all psychologists had river rafting companies and did outdoor therapy. And that was quite rare, but it did expose me to this unique intersection of mental health treatment and the outdoors kind of like outward bound style adventure therapy. That was kind of by chance, but then I kept that line, and then when I went to graduate school, I kind of kept that going and then there were other developments in the world, like this idea of eco-psychology, and then of course climate change, it was like a bunch of tributaries and it started to flow together.
Miller: At the beginning of one of your chapters, you have an epigraph by the British writer Melanie Challenger. She wrote this:
“The world is now dominated by an animal that doesn’t think it’s an animal, and the future is being imagined by an animal that doesn’t want to be an animal.”
How do you understand that quote?
Doherty: Well, I love Melanie Challenger’s work because she’s one of these wonderful naturalists that really makes sense of nature and the natural world and that epigram is in the part of the book where I explore sense of place and in the book there’s kind of like level one activities and level two.
Level one activity for nature is understanding that there is a whole spectrum of nature. I have nature in my backyard, I have nature by the ocean, and I can find my own pathway to outdoor activities and get the benefits and that’s sort of the beginning. But the deeper level, as we kind of hinted at earlier, is like how do I deal with the complex questions of damaged nature or what does it mean to be Indigenous, as I say, European heritage person who does have genuine desire to connect with the landscape but isn’t a Native person
That brings us into this idea of what does it mean to be a human animal? What does it mean to be a being that’s evolved to be in close connection with nature. Some of what I love about this work is that it starts with the personal and psychology and therapy and my coping, but then it brings us into science and evolution and culture and the arts. So that epigram is both a creative question but it also speaks to some of the the political issues we have in our world, where our economic system and… we have a lot of protections for nature in the U.S. with national parks and things, but there’s no overprotection of nature in our Constitution or in a lot of our laws. So we do exist as a society as we’re somehow separate or different than nature, and that is just one of the paradoxes that we all need to live with and sort of cope with.
Miller: Can you tell us about a grassroots program called Radical Joy for Hard Times?
Doherty: Trebbe Johnson is one of these great people that you meet when you start doing this work. That’s a program that actually is specifically designed to go to damaged places in nature and help people to reconnect. I talked to her, I have a podcast and I interviewed her a while back. What she said was interesting. She said visiting a damaged place in nature is kind of like visiting a sick friend. You avoid going, you don’t want to go, but when you go there, you realize oh, it was really nice to meet this person and I really feel good to see them. They’re still the same, they’re just going through an illness. That’s what she finds in her programs when people actually go get over their reluctance to go to a fire damaged place or some other kind of damaged place, they actually notice the life, and then they have a positive growthful experience. So it is radical in that sense.
Miller: I found that to be a profound way to think about “damaged places.” I mean, it would be cruel for us to not visit a human loved one who is sick and the idea of saying, no, I’m I’m not going to go there because I’m not gonna go to the hospital or go to their house as they’re convalescing because they’re not who they once were, and it makes me sad, or I only want to see them at their best. That’s not the mark of love or friendship, but it’s not uncommon to feel that way about a beloved place that has been burned in a fire. I had never thought about, I guess, land that same way.
Doherty: It’s kind of a radical idea that it makes us think and challenge ourselves because you talked earlier about being selfish, people concerned about being selfish, and then you realize, hey, I’ve just been sort of using this nature place as a commodity as something that I can just use like a product, and it is a living place. It gets into that more complicated thinking.
And then we start to realize that life, like say a forest, we have different stages of forest, we have an old growth. For most people, they think of an old growth climax forest as the healthy forest. But in fact a forest can be healthy after a storm, there’s new growth, there’s more weedy opportunistic species, so there’s always life in damaged areas, it’s just different qualities and categories of life. And so, in many ways, metaphorically, we need to become like those weedy plants that can thrive in damaged areas. Again, I love this, because the deeper you go, there’s more imagery and there’s more insight.
Miller: You note that one of the qualities of environmental grief is that it’s partly anticipatory, meaning it’s an awareness, not of what’s already been lost, but losses to come. What are the specific challenges that come from that?
Doherty: Earlier we talked about environmental anxiety and how kind of interesting that is, and environmental grief is also interesting because grief is also just a normal feeling, when when something I love is lost or taken away I naturally feel sad and it signals that it was of value and it’s a growth.
One of the exercises I do with people to help understand their grief about nature is a grief map where we’ll have them draw, well, what are things that you’re mourning that have actually long gone, like maybe the historic salmon runs of the Pacific Northwest. And then there’s a set of things that are being lost as we are living now, you hear in stories about bleaching coral reefs or things like that. So there’s kind of current things that are sort of being lost, and then of course, because we can understand science in the future, we can anticipate things that might go away, and that’s the excruciating pain of climate anxiety and climate concern because we feel like we we have to act and we’re not acting enough and things are slipping through our hands.
It’s a painful thing to get into, but it is liberating to be able to talk about that, because then of course for each grief there is an action. Now for things that have been lost in the past, I can memorialize them, I can recognize them, I can tell their stories. And for things that are in danger right now, I can actually take an action. There’s the Elakha Alliance here in Oregon, it’s an environmental group that’s trying to recover the sea otter. You might be familiar with them, it’s one of my favorite groups here, and they’re trying to bring back the sea otter and then help bring back the kelp forest, so that’s a way of kind of regenerating, right?
So the thing with eco-grief, yes, it’s anticipatory, and the other key point is it’s often what they call disenfranchised, it’s not recognized, because if I don’t own something, then if it’s taken away, I really have no rights to it. So a lot of our grief and loss about nature is kind of repressed. So part of this, I was traveling recently, I was at a park that had actually a memorial to a storm where a bunch of trees came down and they made a little memorial about it, and that’s an example of taking an action.
Miller: What was your experience of seeing that plaque?
Doherty: Well, it was interesting. I was meeting with some climate anxiety researchers and clinicians and they showed it to me and it was just another example of, oh wow, people are thinking about this, people are doing things, so it actually was one of those unexpected positives. A memorial is by nature sad, but it was a positive thing to realize that people are actually thinking about this, and this leads us into art and architecture and things as well
Miller: Right, because maybe a memorial is sad, but maybe what’s sadder is not having a memorial at all.
Doherty: Yeah, that loneliness, that isolation, many people can point to experiences where like a treasured tree in their neighborhood was cut down. Maybe it had to come down because it was diseased, or maybe someone just removed it for a building, and then I have no way to express my love or connection with that tree because it’s not on my property.
Miller: I was really struck by a part of the book where you talked about the idea of waiting for the other shoe to drop, the fear that some bad stuff has happened, but the next bad thing is right around the corner. You suggest that we can let go of the idea of climate change as a shoe that might drop in the future and accept that that it’s arrived, it’s here, right now in this minute, that the other shoe has already dropped, in other words. Not that there’s nothing we can do to prevent more emissions and it’s not a powerlessness thing, but it’s that the catastrophe is already here. What does that acknowledgement do for us psychologically?
Doherty: That operates on a couple of levels, just at the level of our nervous system, it helps us to cue in. That insight came to me from a painful experience in my life because I’m a widow. My wife died of breast cancer, and I remember my therapist, sometime after my wife died, reminding me, Thomas, the shoe’s already dropped, like all this energy you’ve been carrying, it’s gone now.
Miller: The worst thing that you had been planning for...
Doherty: It had happened, and so I knew that intellectually, but my nervous system hadn’t let go of it. Our nervous system is carrying around this tension, so when we can say the shoe’s already dropped, it’s like, no, it’s here. And this is also very important politically, because one of the tropes of climate propaganda and denial is that climate change is a future event or a maybe event. And this is patently not true. We know that climate impacts are happening and have been happening.
So when we say this, the shoe drops, it’s saying no, we’re not going to buy into that story. Because what happens is when you say that story that it’s still to come, then when we do see those floods up in Washington, it’s somehow ignored, but that is the reality. And we have a responsibility to prepare for the heat or storms wherever you live, that leads to adaptation, so the shoes drop, we need to be adapting now, as well as taking action to limit future impacts.
Miller: You mentioned art just now. You have a whole chapter about the role that art appreciating or art making can play in lessening climate anxiety. What does that look like in your own life?
Doherty: I do a podcast with my colleague from Finland, Panu, and we talk about positive happiness in the climate era and a lot of it comes down to how we express things and a lot of it is channeled through art and music. One of the primary building blocks of our environmental identity is art, because often it’s the books we read, it’s the songs that we listen to, the plays that we see, the poems, the nature shows that we see. Those actually create our environmental identity, and art really just helps us to express, you know, when I read at Powell’s bookstore this past fall I had my colleague Anna come and play her viola. As I was reading, she was playing this beautiful music and it really helped to create a container for the feelings.
So art is just a ready outlet for both my creative impulses but also for me, there’s nothing like a song or a poem or a book to help capture some of my feelings that are difficult. So art is a way to express and a way to cope, but it’s also a fact and action, and many artists are activists who are using their art to help connect people with nature or to highlight climate issues and things like that.
Miller: What are some local Oregon examples that have been particularly meaningful to you?
Doherty: I think of artists like Hunter Noack, the pianist. He does in a landscape of concerts where he takes his beautiful grand piano and takes it out to the desert or out to the mountains. Part of coping with climate or eco-issues is taking time to really exercise our love for nature, and so when you go and do one of these experiences it really elevates us and it kind of recharges our battery. I know an artist and poet, Daniela Molnar, here in Portland, who actually goes up into the mountains and into places and gathers different soils and plants and then makes natural pigments and he uses them for paintings. I used to work with Kim Stafford, the poet at Lewis and Clark grad school, and he’s a great example of someone who, and his father William Stafford, can really help to capture some of the nuanced feelings we have about nature and the natural world through poems.
Miller: At the beginning, you were saying that when you start with a client, a patient, you say let’s not get into family stuff, your physical health. Let’s focus first on thought patterns and your environmental identity. But as you go deeper in the book, you note that all of these things are interrelated and you can’t just look at one thing in a vacuum. How do you approach situations where committed partners have very different environmental values or different levels of anxiety about the climate crisis?
Doherty: There’s two tools in the book that are helpful. We talked already about this idea of environmental identity, and that’s my sense of myself in relation to nature in the natural world. I have my own sort of story, and I will often have people draw a timeline of their outdoor experiences and nature experiences to help illustrate that. When you have a couple, you have two environmental identities and two eco-stories and two sets of values.
Now people generally will come together with a partner because they resonate on their values, but often, they might not resonate on all the values, so I might be with someone who resonates with my experiential desire to be out in nature and to be camping or hiking or birding, but then one of us might be an engineer who’s focused on nuts and bolts and empirical questions about climate and others more of a social justice person or someone who’s focused on the feelings. And then we might clash about evidence and what to do in our home or something like that. Someone might say, well, I don’t think recycling is useful for this reason, the other person will say, but it’s part of my values. Helping couples to realize that they each have an eco-story and how can they support each other’s and honor each other’s story is helpful.
The other construct, the basic construct in the book is this idea of what I call capital “I” “Issues” and lowercase “i” “issues.” With the environment we have a lot of “Issues”: climate change, heat, fires, social justice, poverty, hunger, those are the big issues in the world. But my “issues” are my own feelings, my own concerns, my own losses, traumas, also my own idiosyncrasies, my own neuroses, maybe I’m an overworker or maybe I’m too hard on myself or something like that. Couples have the big issues they’re working on, but they also have their lowercase high personality styles. The goal with ecotherapy is to help those to be more in harmony, understanding how the big issues affect my personality, and making sure my personality stuff or my baggage or say imposter syndrome or fear of public speaking gets in the way of me taking action.
Miller: You include a phrase by the environmental educator David Sobel who has said no tragedies before grade four, meaning, as I understand it, give kids… in this case, environmental knowledge, but I guess any kind of knowledge in an age appropriate way. But how do you decide, in the context of a climate crisis, what’s age appropriate?
Doherty: David Sobel, I learned from him in graduate school, and he’s one of these great founders of place-based education, and his point in that quote was that we need to help support children’s natural and healthy connections with nature because that builds the foundation for them as they get into adolescence to deal with these more complicated issues of social justice and climate, things like that. Young children are quite concrete in their thinking and so…
I tell a story in the book where my daughter, Ava, was about three and we were at home during the Fukushima earthquake and tidal wave in Japan, and we were watching it in real time on the laptop and she asked what was happening, I explained it was a tidal wave in Japan, and she said, well, when is the tsunami coming to Portland? Because that’s a very normal question for a child to think, and so we want to be aware that children are concrete. It’s not that we can shield them from information about the world, we just need to explain it to them in ways that they understand and make sure they know it’s not their fault. Like with a lot of this work, it’s about having present moment safety, even when I’m concerned with climate disasters of the future, right now, my nervous system, I can make sure that I’m safe. So we want to make sure that children have a sense of present moment safety when we’re talking about these things.
Miller: What kinds of conversations do you have with people who are ambivalent about having kids because of climate change?
Doherty: That’s a great use for the validate, elevate, create framework we talked about earlier, because first of all, that itself is a very difficult thing to talk about and people feel isolated and they feel judged whether they want to have children or they don’t, so really just validating that in every time and place… I mean, it’s actually a luxury and a kind of a sense of privilege to think that just having children is an easy question. When you think about history, there’s always been time and places where people from all different walks of life have questioned the ethics of having children.
So validate, elevate, let’s talk about this. What does it mean to you? I know people who’ve chosen not to have children for ethical reasons and feel good about that. I know people who have chosen to have children for ethical reasons and also feel good about that. So there’s no right answer here. It’s really telling a story, telling your truth, and standing up for it is really what this is about with the child question. But then it’s easier said than done because you have family expectations, you have cultural expectations, you have physical urges, and then you have to have the partners work together. So there’s no right answer, but validate, elevate, and then create, let’s get creative about it. How can you channel your values into the future concretely, whether it’s going to be to have a child or not. And then each person tells a unique story.
Miller: In the middle of the book, you have what you call a manifesto for flourishing. It’s a kind of personal affirmation and it’s a summation in a lot of ways of a lot of the themes of a couple hundred pages boiled down to a page and a half. I’d love it if you could read it and, well, is there anything you want us to keep in mind before you do?
Doherty: The manifesto for flourishing happens in section three, which is the flourishing section, and it’s where I actually confront this idea of ethical happiness. I don’t start with happiness, early. We do build through how to think and how to feel and how to connect with nature and how to deal with our grief and loss, and that kind of clears the way to actually imagine what happiness would look like. I really wanted this book to contain examples of authentic happiness and coping for people, so they could see what it looks like and what it feels like, and that’s what this manifesto is about. And I’ll just read it:
“A manifesto for flourishing. Below is a statement that summarizes what flourishing in an era of climate crisis can look like. I want you to imagine the scenario for your life and to imagine that it is realistic and attainable for you right now. You can use it as an affirmation, or you could even read it as a personal manifesto. Take a deep breath, and begin.
I carry the weight of climate change on my shoulders. I feel anxious about the heat of the summer, the air quality, the winter storms, and the future. My internal alarm systems are going off all the time. But I can take a step back and acknowledge this. I’m conscious of how I’m thinking about the world and maintaining a growth mindset. I’m prepared to discover things are much worse than I thought, but also at times better.
I’m practicing emotional intelligence. I stop and ask myself what I’m feeling, and also what feelings I want to have, and to cultivate and grow stronger. I remind myself that sustainability begins with my own foundation of personal health. I’m strengthening my relaxation response so it can balance my stress response. I know that if I feel hurt about the state of the environment, it is a signal that I care.
I tell myself, even as… even as I’m thankful for global awareness, I unplug and reconnect with my senses. I look for the news that is right outside my door, in my home, my community, and my local ecosystem. Even as the climate changes in unpredictable ways, I am developing a deeper awareness of my local weather, disaster threats, and my sources of risk and resilience. I keep learning. I find support. I remind myself that climate change is not my fault. Even as I take on responsibility, I understand that forces of power, nationalism, and unregulated commerce are driving much of Earth’s systemic troubles. Even as I feel like a hostage to dangerous forces, I focus on what I can control. I remind myself that political systems are created by people and they can be changed. When the media announces new threats, I remind myself, I already know.
I might not know every detail of the story, but I am familiar with the larger narrative. I understand that many people are still coming on board with their own version of an ecological waking up syndrome. I have compassion for them. Even as I validate their eco-anxiety, I am not swept up in their troubled feelings. Nature is not just a place outside of me. I am nature. I have a unique environmental identity and a set of experiences and values that gives me a place to stand on the planet. Even as I am part of the web of life, I am also weaving it. Even as I struggle with feelings of fear and eco-anxiety, I step back and see these as normal emotional responses. I know that standing up and publicly recognizing my eco-anxiety is a healthy form of self-expression. Regardless of who is listening, speaking my truth out loud generates energy for action.
I am a work in progress, but I have new skills and I’m building a toolkit for coping. I know I am so much bigger than my climate anxiety. I can still feel happiness at this time.”
Miller: What do you mean by happiness?
Doherty: Thanks, that’s a great question. I would turn that back around on you and say what does it mean for you, but, for me, it means being my best self and manifesting my life in a way that’s appropriate and congruent for me so that I can have what I call 360 feelings. I can feel sad things and difficult things, but I can also appreciate what I have and I can also tap into the good feelings at at any given moment.
Miller: I don’t think you’d mentioned the name of your podcast. You’ve mentioned it a couple of times that you co-host, but it’s called “Climate Change and Happiness.’” Have you gotten pushback over the years when you’ve talked about happiness or joy or contentment in the context of the climate crisis? Have people said, no, it’s not appropriate, there’s too much tragedy, don’t talk about happiness.
Doherty: We started that podcast right after COVID, and it was meant to be provocative and to really beg the question about what happiness might look like. My co-presenter Panu is an emotions researcher in Finland, and he does fine-grain research on different climate emotions. And you know, the answer is, it’s an interesting one, and it speaks to sort of the politics of this topic because no one officially told me they had a problem with that, but I know some people felt uneasy about it because there is this cultural story that climate change is a bad thing and it’s not, somehow, OK or ethical to be happy.
That’s one of the reasons really I wrote this book and I do that podcast is because I want people to think about this because is it really true that we are not allowed to be happy because of this climate issue? Is that the message I wanna give to my children and to other people around the world? I don’t think that’s fair. I think that’s kind of blaming the victim.
Miller: Am I right, that you also go further that you would argue that we have a responsibility to seek some version of happiness? Not just a right, but a responsibility, or am I putting words in your mouth?
Doherty: No, I would say so. I think, particularly as a parent, as an elder, as a citizen, we have a right to make it possible for people to feel happiness and to stand for this and to create a world that people can be happy. Otherwise we’re surrendering to a system that says just put up with it, and also, surrendering to doom and despair.
Now again, this is not – we gotta avoid black and white thinking – it’s not to say that there aren’t problems, but if I am in a crisis, if I’m coaching a sports team, if I’m planning my family, I want to come in with some positive messaging that we can do this and we can work on this, so I think the ethics of happiness is that it’s it’s important for us morally, emotionally, but also when we can tap into happiness, we can be more effective in innovation, problem solving, sticking with things. So there’s a lot of practical reasons why we want to support this ability to be happy.
Miller: You write this at one point:
“Using therapy to process and cope with eco-anxiety or distress is not about adjusting to an unjust situation, neutralizing your anger and indignation, or bright-siding, meaning focusing on the positive and ignoring the negative. It’s about building the capacity to hold troubling thoughts and feelings in mind, while also figuring out what to do with them.”
In other words, it’s that duality again that even when we’re feeling some version of peace or happiness, it’s not out of ignorance or ignoring things, but holding everything in our minds at the same time.
Doherty: Yeah, it’s kind of like the negative capability that the poet John Keats talked about, that ability to hold multiple ideas and multiple feelings or 360 emotions. And I should say that one of the reasons that people are skeptical about this is because their trust has been damaged, so they don’t necessarily trust the world, and there has been messaging that has tried to make the climate change crisis either disappear or be denied.
So there is a trust building process that is required to recover happiness because people frankly have been burned. They feel betrayed and they don’t trust the old messages of happiness, and so what we’re talking about here is a newer kind of happiness that’s a post-doom kind of happiness that says, yes, there is a lot of propaganda, there are bad actors out there, but we can’t let them steal happiness from us. We need to recover that. So it’s just to say if someone’s having a reaction like that, it’s probably because they legitimately feel suspicious, and that’s ok.
Miller: You have a helpful graph near the end of the book. It’s called “The Despair and Empowerment Curve,” and it’s this sort of sine curve that I imagine goes on forever. Where are you in that curve today, as we’re talking?
Doherty: Yeah, I love it. If you imagine like going up when you get out and you get a new idea, at least I get excited and I wanna learn about it and I just get ambitious about things and then once you get into it, you realize, oh, this is more complicated than I thought and the program that I wanna do might not work, or you try something and it doesn’t work. And then you get into a trough of sort of despair and disillusionment.
But if you stick with things and express and have social support, you can generally get reignited again. If you’re doing any project like you’re building a house or writing a book or having a relationship, there’s gonna be periods of ups and downs. So, especially for young people, for young environmentalists to say that you’re gonna have ups and downs and be prepared for this, I think there can be a trend, generally up or down in someone’s life. And people say, Thomas, how do you stay positive all the time? And I say, well, I don’t, it’s not possible.
Currently, I’m just as concerned about the state of the world and global politics and actions of the U.S. government. We have some serious crisis going on in the U.S. in terms of power and democracy and that brings me down even, even the last few days, I’ve been down and I’ve actually been doing a bit of a news break just to take care of my nervous system. Then there’s the year and the solstice, and right now we’re in early January, so I think it’s natural for our energy to be a little bit down this time of the year. I try to ride those kind of curves, yeah.
Miller: Thomas Doherty, thanks very much for giving us an hour of your time. I really appreciate it.
Doherty: Dave, this was a pleasure. Thanks.
Miller: Thomas Doherty is the author of the book, “Surviving Climate Anxiety: A Guide to Coping, Healing and Thriving.”
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