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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of EPIC. And joining me as my co-host, friend, colleague, a lot of different things. This person is to me, Caroline Griffith, the Executive Director of the North Coast Environmental Center. Hey, Caroline.

CAROLINE GRIFFITH:

Oh, jeez. Thanks, Tom. Nice to be here.

WHEELER:

Well, so Caroline, we have a very special guest and you have a different relationship with our special guest. So maybe you would like to do the introduction.

GRIFFITH:

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I'm very, very pleased to be able to be here with my former EcoNews comrade and colleague, Chelsea Pulliam, who actually was somebody who started conversations at the North Coast Environmental Center about eco-grief and bringing our emotions into this work and acknowledging the wholeness of our beings. And so I'm very pleased to have you here, Chelsea.

CHELSEA PULLIAM:

Welcome. Thank you. I'm so pleased to be here. Yeah.

WHEELER:

Well, let's get to know you a little bit. Tell us a little bit about your life story and how you got to work on this topic of environmental grief or eco grief or eco anxiety, climate anxiety. We could probably talk about the definition a little bit later.

PULLIAM:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So yeah, I've been involved in the world of environmental activism or nonprofit work since I was a teenager. I think I've had like a love of nature from a really young age. I was just talking the other day with my husband about, I think my awakening was watching the movie Fern Gully when I was like four years old. Do you guys remember that movie? And I think that wrote my life story for me. But yeah, so when I got to high school, started volunteering in places that I could, and then eventually got my degree in environmental education, environmental science. And then I've just worked for a variety of environmental nonprofits for I think over 15 years at this point. But yeah, and so while that work has been really meaningful and beautiful and lovely, it's also kind of come with maybe a dark side to it.

And so I kind of describe it as my journey of burnout, or maybe my journey from burnout to resilience. And so that's kind of like the path that I took. And I can talk about that more and how it ultimately led me to what I'm doing now, which is somatic eco grief work. So yeah, I think for a lot of years, I just kind of carried around this weight or there was like this, almost like this darkness that I had that I felt was really maybe normal or expected because I saw it in everyone else I was working with too. There was kind of like almost this energy of like jadedness or like nihilism. We were all showing up for the work, but there was also just this grief, right? But we weren't, I didn't have the name for it.

And so it actually wasn't until I listened to the Econews report in 2020 with Sarah Jaquette Ray, when she was talking about her book, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, that I feel like my whole life suddenly made sense. And it totally set me down this different path. And I gathered like as many resources as possible on this topic and partnered with the NEC to do a lot of lovely things, especially during lockdown. Like we started hosting Thrive, our eco grief circle, and started focusing more on solutions journalism and the Econews. And yeah, so.

WHEELER:

It's meaningful to me that that episode of the Econews helped spark a transition in you. And it's also been incredible to see the way in which the NEC has evolved because of your advocacy, because of your work to add these new program areas. I always, I feel like the NEC and Epic, we're friends, but we're also like a little bit of competitors. And so I'd look over at what you all were doing and be like, God damn, that's cool.

PULLIAM:

Oh, good, yeah.

GRIFFITH:

This work is really, really heavy, right? And I think that, and especially as we were trying to do this work in a global pandemic and shift everything that we're doing, and it was really, really helpful for all of us on staff. Chelsea, when you started bringing up these topics and we started thinking about that and we were really acknowledging that like, yeah, we're showing up, but sometimes we're not all fully there. And it really is a kind of, it's hard. And I think when I hear the terms like eco grief or climate anxiety, I'm like, wow, that doesn't quite fit what I'm feeling. I feel rage. I feel like a deep, deep rage. And I wonder if you could kind of talk about like, what all fits under this umbrella of eco grief? Cause I want to smash things. Absolutely.

PULLIAM:

Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up because it's true. We kind of use eco-grief or climate anxiety or eco-anxiety sort of as these catch-all phrases. I've more recently learned the term climate emotions or earth emotions because it really is the full spectrum of any human emotion you can have in response to anything people are having in response to the climate crisis and ecological devastation. And so it can be rage. It can be guilt. It can be numbness. And for some people it can even be hope or optimism. It depends. You know, it's it really is the full spectrum of our emotions.

And the one thing I really want people to know is that it's a super normal and even healthy response. This is from the Climate Psychology Association. Like this is not a clinical disorder, right? Like if your house was on fire and you were like, this is fine, right? That meme. Then that would probably be the concerning emotion. That would be like, that's maybe not the healthy response. But the grief, the rage, the despair, all of that, that's very natural when you're seeing something that you love, that you care about being destroyed and you want to save it, right? Or and maybe feeling hopeless or disempowered or unable to address these things.

And so yeah, I would say what we're lacking though, so even though it's a healthy normal response, what we're lacking is that is the ability to hold space for those emotions. And so because of this, we have created this culture of like climate doomism. For a long time, we were talking about climate denial, right? Like we were just so concerned like, oh my gosh, these people don't get it. They need more information. They need to be more educated. If we just give them the facts, then they'll get on board and we won't have climate deniers anymore. And we're like, okay, maybe not. But anyway, but I think what we kind of accidentally did was terrify people instead by flooding them with all of this information and really kind of like upping the scare tactics because we're like, oh my gosh, this is scary and you need to be scared because that'll motivate you to do something. But what we're finding is just numbers of people instead of getting motivated, they're getting really shut down. And I think that's because fear isn't really like a long-term motivator. It might be like a short-term thing that you can step into and say, okay, oh my gosh, I have to run away from this tiger or whatever in an hour or less. But if this is like a lifetime journey, then we need to find something else to keep us going. And so I actually want to read just a few statistics about eco grief as well and all of that. So there's more and more research coming out around this topic and 72% of people worldwide have experienced some amount of climate anxiety, guilt, anger, or depression in reaction to the climate crisis. So this is not some niche thing, like the majority of people have at some point experienced this.

And in a more recent study, an international survey on youth attitudes ages 16 to 25 toward climate change, I think they said 75% of those people said that the future is frightening. 56% said that humanity is doomed and 45% said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily lives. And so it's kind of a big deal. Yeah. And so that's why I'm really motivated to do this work. And so it's again, we're talking about like, okay, this makes sense. We understand why you're feeling this way. And there aren't really a lot of tools and resources out there teaching people how to cope with these emotions, how to hold space for these emotions, how to transform these emotions into something that is more long-term, sustainable, motivational. And so that's kind of the work that I do. And so often I'm talking about eco grief, but really what I'm trying to build is hope and resilience in people.

WHEELER:

So let's talk about hope. Why does hope matter? Why is hope a better motivator than fear in these circles? Is it kind of a more persistent actor? Does it like, does hope make us better?

PULLIAM:

Yeah, I think so. There's definitely research out there. A lot of this, I think, comes from the work of Ellen Kelsey. She wrote a book called Hope Matters by changing the way we think is critical to solving the environmental crisis. And from her research, she found that fear is a short-term motivator, but hope is much more long-term. And I really want to like piece out what hope means, because I think a lot of people hear that and they kind of equate it to wishful thinking or this very like passive thing where I can sit on the couch and I hope that something good will happen, or I wish that something good would happen, and then you're sort of like free of responsibility. But in the work that I'm doing, when we're talking about hope, we're really talking about something like what Ellen Kelsey calls evidence-based hope, or what Joanna Macy calls active hope, or what the Climate Psychology Alliance calls radical hope, or my favorite, which is hope punk.

And so all of these kind of come with this message of perseverance that we have to be actively part of the solution. And so I actually have this little description of hope punk that I'm going to read to y'all as well. So it says, hope punk believes in the possibility of a better future in the face of difficult realities to fight with radical compassion, hope, collaboration, and empathy instead of cynicism, nihilism, or fatalism. Hope punk chooses to act even when things seem bleak and invites us to fall in love with the world that we so deeply wish to change.

And so I think a lot of that is we're envisioning the world that we want to see, right? It's like it's coming from this place of deep yearning, deep love, deep desire, rather than this place of fear, which I think has been what has fueled us for a long time. And I think anytime you make a decision out of fear, it's not necessarily the best decision, right? Especially if you're doing long-term systems planning for a global issue. And so if we can start envisioning this world that we want to live in, this future that we want to exist, then I think that's what keeps us showing up. That's what makes us want to come to the table. That's what makes us go to the meetings. That's what makes us plant trees with our local whatever. Like, I think those are the things that keep us going.

GRIFFITH:

You know, something that I think we started having these conversations at the NEC when you were still working with us and here in the office and just thinking about like that, that idea of visioning, right, like that we have to we have to know what we're we're aiming for in order to think about how we're going to get there, which is really like a great idea and a great exercise. But I remember one of our co workers, Carl Ray, at one point saying, I just can't I'd like I'm having a really hard time imagining the future because I'm just so stuck in what is the present and what is the current situation. And I wonder if you have any like advice for folks are like, how do we kind of push through that? Because I think that it is we're at a point where I think climate change is a great opportunity to do things differently. But it is really hard to imagine how we do things differently when this is what we're emerging from.

PULLIAM:

Absolutely, yeah. I would say my favorite way is through solutions journalism and there are more and more resources around solutions journalism now I think even five years ago, 10 years ago, like the idea that there were that there were environmental news stories that were hopeful or where something went well, like that just wasn't readily available but now there's more and more. But yeah, it's basically when you read a story of someone in your community or another community that implemented a project and it went really well and now that community is thriving or whatever it is.

And so you can find so much inspiration from these places and so if you are interested in some solutions journalism stuff like on my website I have a long list of resources of different news outlets that do that. And then I think the other thing is there's this kind of this movement in the sci-fi community or in the fiction community where there's like now there's solar punk or climate fiction and there's more and more stories that are coming up that are less dystopian, right? Because so much of our media the last 20, 30 years has been deeply dystopian and I think that's part of why we're all so scared is because we see these stories of this deep apocalypse and everything's a desert and food is scarce and there can be truth to that. And there are people who are envisioning something else and envisioning ways that systems could work in the way that like things could look and so I find a lot of inspiration from that as well.

GRIFFITH:

There are a number of really good like speculative fiction compilations kind of around that whole idea and one that I read recently is called Afterglow and I think it was edited by forgetting her name now Chelsea but you know it who wrote the emergent strategies.

PULLIAM:

Adrienne Maree Brown, yeah.

GRIFFITH:

Yeah, so a lot of the fiction that's being and compilations being put together by Adrienne Maree Brown are much more of that, like envisioning the possibilities of what could happen.

PULLIAM:

Yeah. Yeah. One of my favorites is it's Grist 2200. So Grist is an environmental newspaper and they do this short story contest every year and it's your vision of the world or of the year 2200 and what that could look like. And so maybe if you don't want to pick up a novel, but you want some little quick reads, then I think, I don't know how many years, but I think it's been at least five years of short story compilations. And so there's tons to look through in that.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report.

GRIFFITH:

Chelsea Pulliam about eco grief and bringing our emotions into this work and acknowledging the wholeness of our beings.

WHEELER:

So, Chelsea, your business, where you provide coaching for folks who are experiencing some sort of eco-grief or climate anxiety, is Somatic Earth. Somatic is a term that I'm just recently coming to understand, and I think that you could help me here. What is somatics, and how is this related to climate anxiety?

PULLIAM:

Yeah, absolutely. So the really simple definition of somatics is the body. That's like in most fields, it just means your body. And another term that you might see that people kind of understand a little better is embodiment. And so a lot of like embodiment practices. And the reason that I was really drawn to this work is that over the last four years, when I first read A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety and started gathering a lot of resources, while I found a lot of that to be really powerful and beautiful, I found it stayed very conceptual, like a lot of the resources were like, Oh, let's talk about this. Or like, let's journal about this. Let's think about this. And I think I have a background as a dancer. And I know that when I, or I spent a lot of time walking in nature. And so I know when I move my body, it changes how I feel about things. And so I kind of indirectly sort of stumbled into the world of somatics. I didn't really know that there was this umbrella term for basically any modality that like really is body centered.

And so yeah, I think it matters because we live and have been taught to live in a culture of like disconnect and disembodiment from ourselves, from our communities and from nature. We kind of see ourselves as these islands, or at least we're very individualistic, especially in Western society. And we kind of just live from the neck up. And so we forget that the rest of our body actually has a lot of information that we have sensations, we have emotions, we have intuition, we have instinct. And that when we sort of listen to our whole selves, and we cultivate more embodied self-awareness, that different things can kind of come through. Like when you're, I think many of us have been caught in that like overthinking spiral where you're like, I don't know how to solve this thing. And I'm just like going on a loop over and over again. But we find time and again that when we sort of slow down, we become more present, we like know where we are, then different ideas kind of emerge, different emotions, different, yeah, different ways forward can become more clear.

So I think sort of a classic, like maybe like more traditional therapy is considered a sort of top down approach. Like cognitive behavioral therapy has this view of like, okay, I'm going to like, look at my emotions and manage them from my like, I'm going to think my way somewhere. And that can be very useful and powerful. And talking is beautiful. I'm not throwing shade on traditional talk therapy. But somatics just takes a different approach, and it's much more bottom up. And so it's letting what is like there, what is already present in your body, and giving it a voice, giving it some attention, and seeing what like what it wants to turn into. And I know that kind of sounds weird and vague. And some people might even find it kind of spiritualistic. I believe it's or I know it's very rooted in neuroscience and like modern psychology. But yeah, so that's that's kind of the basics. And I could say more about that. But

WHEELER:

Well, that also just reminds me, and I think that this is one of the resources that you provide on your website, that Wild Geese Boom by Mary Oliver. Yeah. Gosh, what is the line? Letting the.

PULLIAM:

Oh, your soft animal body, or... Yeah.

WHEELER:

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

PULLIAM:

Yeah, yeah. So I think remembering that we're animals can be really powerful, remembering that we're part of the ecosystem, that we're part of nature can be really powerful. Yeah. And so I talk about somatics, but I actually, I kind of, I do eco-somatics and I try not to like overcomplicate it for people, but it's bringing in that nature therapy aspect too. It's like, if somatics is about seeing us as holistic beings, then that inevitably has to include nature. Like we don't exist and we don't experience, or we experience our world through our surroundings. And so that's a huge part of like the work that we do. And when you bring somatics into eco-grief, then it's rather than just like conceptualizing it, like, okay, I've talked about it. Cool. And then you kind of go on and the feeling is still there. Instead, we can really like sink into the body, slow down, find that emotion in the body.

Like the presencing is sort of like the foundational tool of somatics is like, maybe you sense a tightness in your chest or in your throat, or like a fire in your belly or whatever it is. So if you can locate it and you can like give it a description and then you can tend to it, you can even like ask your emotion, what is it that you're wanting right now? Or like, hey, I see you. And so that's a big part of what we do in somatics. And when you make space for emotions versus suppress them or ignore them, or try to numb them, which is what we've kind of been taught in our Western society, then a lot of really amazing things can happen. I've only been doing this work for the last year, but it's been deeply transformational and like deeply powerful seeing what can come up when we sort of really tend to our present moment experiences and get more in touch with our sensations. So.

WHEELER:

So let's, let's give folks a little bit of a toolkit if we can in, in this radio show, and I know that you have more opportunities for folks to work through these issues, but let's talk about some stuff that folks can do and let's first highlight self-care. Yeah.

PULLIAM:

Totally, yeah. So I kind of have this list of strategies for avoiding burnout or cultivating more hope and resilience in your life and the first one really is self-care. And I know for a lot of folks that seems like obvious, but for other folks it kind of feels selfish or like something that there's not a lot of time for. I see this, it's super prevalent in the activism world that the cause comes first, right? And I think that's because we've built these movements of sacrifice rather than these movements of like longing and desire.

And so, yeah, let me read this quote really quick from Sarah Ray. She says, to burn out, trying to resist a system that is fueled by burning things out is not resistance. And so I really, I think about that as like, we often accidentally use the same strategies and methods to resist climate change or resist the fossil fuel industry or resist whatever it is we're fighting against with the same way of like not prioritizing the health and well-being of our members or volunteers and our staff. And so if we can create a culture of not just self-care, but like collective care, especially through rest and more nature time, like I really think we would see a huge transition in our movement spaces. And yeah, I think, I can't remember the other statistic right now, but it's something like, oh yeah, this survey by Opportunity Knox, as many as half of nonprofit employees are burned out or on the verge of a burnout, which is high. Like a lot of these statistics I'm reading are really high. And so yeah, so self-care, like it seems selfish or silly or obvious, I don't know, but it's so important and collective care more than that. Yeah.

WHEELER:

I know I struggle with that one, and I feel like being raised culturally Catholic, there is also something about like, you know, you should be the martyr. You should put the cause, you should put the collective above the self, and it's one that I'm always struggling with individually.

PULLIAM:

Yeah, yeah, totally. And I think it's just like the heart is so beautiful and it's just not sustainable, right? It's why we see so much turnover in our staff and we don't want that, right? We wanna build these like long-term communities that can keep showing up. And I think the more rested we are then the better work that we can do, right? I think both can be true. Like we can like deeply take time for ourselves and for each other and do the work probably even better than we would have if we were just like running on empty.

GRIFFITH:

Yeah, what I think about it too, just like from a standpoint of not just I want to keep doing this work, I want the people that I work with to keep doing this work, I want more people to do this work and it needs to be something that is fun in addition to meaningful, right? It can't just be, you know, I think that there are definitely some of us who are attracted to the idea of like fighting the fight at all costs, but it is not sustainable and if we want more people in this, we also need to create those spaces where we are taking care of each other collectively, that it isn't like we're expecting people to come and throw themselves on the fire for the movement.

PULLIAM:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and I'll share a little anecdote. Like one of my favorite parts of the NEC, like our weekly staff meetings, is when we would do our personal check-ins. Like that was like so special and nourishing and it was like really meaningful that we would set aside time, not to do work, but to check in and be like, how are you right now in this moment? Like, how can I listen to you? How can I like respond to you? And like that created this culture of like, I don't know, I felt like we built a real community when we would do that.

GRIFFITH:

Yeah, yeah, and we sustain that.

PULLIAM:

Yes, awesome, yeah. Yeah, okay, so I do have some other strategies and I'll move on to them. So the second I've definitely talked about quite a bit, but holding space for our emotions. So again, we're kind of taught to suppress, ignore, deny, or we kind of get overwhelmed by them when they build up. But if we can like learn to regularly tend to them, then that can be really valuable. And so there's a lot of resources out there. There are like classic eco grief groups that you can attend and there's like so many of those popping up online or in your community. So if you search for like eco anxiety group or eco grief group in your community, like it's likely that something will pop up. They're also called climate cafes. I think listening benches, there's a few out there. I host one every month, it's called embodied ecology. So it's a somatic approach to holding space.

But yeah, so there's a lot of resources around that. And there's also, you can read a lot of books on it. Like Active Hope is a really good one by Joanna Macy and she gives like some really clear strategies and tools about how to tend to her, like she calls it honoring our pain for the world. So the next strategy is we've already talked about as well as solutions journalism. So this is about cultivating that evidence-based hope coined by Ellen Kelsey and looking for the trends and the stories of what is going well in the world and being inspired by that and sometimes being comforted by it, but also being deeply motivated by it. So again, you can check out my website and I have that list of resources. Yeah, so solutions journalism. The next one is meaningful action. And so I think a lot of people show up to this work and they're not sure what to do. And that's fair because there's not one right answer. It's gonna take a huge collection of strategies, resources, approaches to really address the climate crisis. And so I love this resource. It's the Climate Action Venn Diagram by Dr. Ayanna Johnson. We've used this in our work a few different times.

You can see it in EcoNews, but it's basically this triple Venn diagram. And you answer three questions. The first is, what brings you joy? The next is, what are you good at? And the next is, what is the work that needs doing? And at the intersection of that is the meaningful action that you can take in your community. And I find that that can be really give people a sense of like self-efficacy and empowerment, because that's another thing that we didn't quite touch on, but disempowerment is a huge part of this climate doomism culture. And so finding things that are specific to certain people that they really enjoy can, again, be that long-term motivator and give them that sense of ability to show up in a meaningful way. And then the last thing I'll talk about is solidarity. So everywhere I am, I'm always talking about community. Community, community, community. Like we need to be in community. We need to be way less isolated, way less like having this feeling of like, oh, it's my responsibility solely to fix this thing. And Adrienne Maree Brown from Emergent Strategies, she talks about this idea of critical depth versus critical mass. And so like going deep in your communities versus trying to build huge coalitions that don't have strong ties.

And so, yeah, we're part of this huge collective. It is an international movement. And so remembering that other people can step up when you need to step back and take a break and vice versa, you can step up when they need a break and doing this work in together rather than on your own. So those are my strategies. And I'm sure there's lots more.

WHEELER:

Well, so many of those have, when you say them, I realized the parts of my job that I actually love, which is working with folks like you and doing the work. It makes me feel less anxious. It makes me feel like change is possible. I think that the hardest part of this job is when I'm just sitting alone at my computer, then, then the doomism starts to pervade.

GRIFFITH:

And it seems so simple, right? But I've had those revelations recently as well, where I'm deep in it, my head is in a computer, I'm looking at some document that's making me really angry and feel disconnected. And then I go and hang out with people, or go out in nature. We've been doing bike rides lately, which make me so happy. It's just a simple little thing, right? But then I'm like, oh, right, this is why. This is why we do this work, to have good lives and have connections.

WHEELER:

So, Chelsea, you have a wonderful website that is full of resources, somatic.earth. You also, as you mentioned, have a free monthly workshop. Can you talk a little bit about this resource and we'll have a link to all of these things in the program notes, which you can find on the lostcoastoutpost.com

PULLIAM:

Yeah, definitely. So yeah, my monthly workshop is called Embodied Ecology. It's an eco-grief and hope circle. So yes, we're going to spend time with our grief, but we're also going to cultivate hope and envision the future that we want and talk about meaningful action. And so that's one that happens on the, I believe the third Wednesdays of the month in the evening. And then the other thing that I have is if you're looking for more like individual one-on-one support, then I have a program called Hope Punk. It's somatics for eco-grief, and it's a way for you to sort of hold space for your eco-grief, but ultimately build more embodied resilience in your life so that you can keep showing up for the important work that we're all trying to do. And so if you want to learn about either of those things, you can again, visit my website, which is somatic.earth.

WHEELER:

Well, Chelsea, it was so much fun to see you today. We miss you here in Humboldt, but I'm so thankful for this resource that you're providing for our community.

PULLIAM:

Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me on. It was a real honor.

WHEELER:

All right. Well, this has been another episode of the Econews Report. Join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.