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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, executive director of EPIC. We are talking about eco-grief or eco-anxiety, whatever we want to call it. I think it's kind of telling about the the role that this is playing in the lives of folks in our community. It is something that I experience. It's something that a lot of my friends and colleagues at other environmental organizations experience. We talk about it a lot, about kind of the difficulty of doing this work. And thankfully we have someone here who can help explain the problem and ways that we can break out of it -- how we can get out of our mental ruts and become more resilient. Hanna Nielsen. Welcome to the Econews Report.

HANNA NIELSEN:

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

WHEELER:

Introduce yourself. Who are you and why are you interested in this subject matter?

NIELSEN:

Yeah, so I grew up here in Arcata, as long as I can remember, have always been really interested in doing work to try to protect and conserve the environment. I think that probably comes from living in such a beautiful, natural environment and just having a childhood growing up outdoors and feeling that deep connection. So I always knew that I wanted to do something related to environmental conservation. And then going to college and my career path moved into, I wore a lot of different hats in the environmental world, from policy to field work to environmental education. But the thing that I was always most interested in was how to engage with the climate crisis emotionally and psychologically. Because when I moved into the environmental policy world, I experienced a huge amount of burnout. First, when I did a AmeriCorps program called Civic Spark, which was focused on helping local governments prepare for climate change. So that was my first time really thinking about and being in the climate change world 24-7, 40 hours a week at my job. And I just didn't feel like there was much emotional support for doing that work. I got very depressed that first year that I was studying about climate change and thinking about it so often. And then also realizing that no one was really talking about it outside of my job. And so I felt this huge disconnect of studying the huge problem and then feeling like I just had to hold it all myself. And so then that really got me interested in looking at how we respond to the climate crisis psychologically, like why people aren't talking about it. When you start looking at the facts, I think it's sort of like blinders come off. And once you see it, you can't really turn away. For me, it became this huge thing of why aren't we all stopping what we're doing and focusing on this 24-7? Why aren't we talking about this? So then I really dove into what are the barriers to responding to the climate crisis and realizing that there's a lot of psychological barriers because of the enormity of the problem. Really got interested in that. Then years later, came back and worked for Civic Spark on the staff side and really became focused on trying to support the fellows with more resources to support their mental health in the field because I felt like I almost quit that first year because I felt so much despair around the crisis. Then when I went back and I worked for Civic Spark as the climate change service learning team, I saw that a lot of my fellows as well were feeling those same things. And so really tried to bring resources to try to support them and realizing that there was a huge gap around that, that we have a lot of people working in the environmental field that are really passionate and dedicated and care deeply about the environment, but that we don't have a lot of tools and resources to support people. And there's a huge amount of burnout then within the environmental world. But I think it extends beyond people working in the environmental field. I personally believe that we all feel it on some level. And right now I'm getting my master's in eco-psychology, which is very much looking at how we evolved with nature and nature impacts our psyche. And then we also impact nature. So, then it looks at how we can repair the relationship between the two so we can live more sustainably on the planet. So, with that view and what I believe is that we all do feel this crisis, even if we're not maybe aware of it, we're all aware of it on different levels, but we are all deeply connected to each other and the planet. And so, that can bring up these deep feelings of existential grief and anxiety for living during the time on this planet when we have the sixth mass extinction and a sense of what can I do about it as an individual can feel very overwhelming.

WHEELER:

Something else that we have going on right now, it's not just the six mass extinction we have, human genocides, it's a difficult time to be a human, I think, right? So you are also an eco-chaplain. This is my first time running into that term, or those two terms kind of squished together. What is an eco-chaplain?

NIELSEN:

Yeah, so I actually didn't know what an eco-chaplain was before I did this program either, but it's a new term and a new exploration within the field of chaplaincy, and so chaplaincy, basically, most people probably know of chaplains working within hospitals or prisons, and chaplains typically are non-denominational, so they can work with anyone of any faith. The goal of chaplaincy is to help people when they're having some sort of crisis or transition in their life to help them reconnect to their own spirituality to move through that transition, and eco-chaplains do that in the same way, except extending out to connecting as well with the earth as a spiritual resource, or that's one way with eco-chaplaincy, or as well, chaplaining people through eco-anxiety, eco-grief, or after climate disasters like wildfires and natural disasters, an eco-chaplain could come to that community and help support people, basically be able to find a resource and reconnect to their own spirituality and path to be able to move through that crisis and transition.

WHEELER:

And so how does one become ...

NIELSEN:

Yeah, so I did a program through Satti Buddha Center, so my foundation is through Buddhism, but it is non-denominational. It was a year and a half training. We did online sessions and also two in-person week-long trainings. I think there were about 30 of us. Learned a lot about helping connect people to the land through ritual, through meditation, through chaplaincy in general. A lot of chaplaincy is witnessing and being able to hold space for people and helping ask the right questions so that they can reconnect to themselves. So, a lot of practice and skills with just holding space and being a support to people when they're in crisis.

WHEELER:

Yeah. So we have this problem of eco-grief or eco-anxiety. It is rooted in our reaction to the world. Well, I guess, is it a problem? Is our kind of emotional response to this bad or is it the right human response that we're experiencing when we see something in crisis that we hold dear and is it a barrier to action though?

NIELSEN:

Yeah, I think it's a perfectly natural response. It's interesting because I think that feeling eco-grief is a completely normal response to the crisis we're in. And then also not feeling it as well because a lot of people are numb, not because they don't care, but I believe because they care so deeply and they don't have either the resources or the ability to connect with that. So I would say that it's so natural to feel that grief and anxiety. I would say it would be problematic to pathologize that grief and anxiety because having that reaction to something you love, the earth, and not even just the earth, like the climate crisis we're in also has to do with ourselves as humanity and our survival as a species. I think that's something as well that sometimes people lose track of when they think about the climate crisis or maybe don't want to face is that it's not just about the state of other species. We're also talking about our survival as a species on the planet. And yeah, and that's deeply terrifying if you actually are looking at that. And I understand why that can be too hard for people to think about and look at, but what we really need is to be able to tap into those emotions and those feelings because without that, what we're doing is we're just turning away from the crisis because it feels too hard to face. And what I'm trying to do with this work is to allow people to reconnect with their emotions, which can be hard. It can be really scary to feel deeply. I really think we need that more than ever at this time because when we don't feel, we just go on autopilot and we continue to just live the way we've continued to live without being able to process and feel the anxiety, feel the grief. We are sometimes just shut down and go into this fatalistic state either where we just pretend it's not happening. If we get too far into the grief and anxiety without the resources or support to deal with it, that can also be something that can shut us down because we feel overwhelmed. And so then we don't move into action.

WHEELER:

So it seems like there's kind of a duality here. One is when we internalize it, we're not living our best, most flourishing lives. We can have constrained lives. It can impact our decision-making in ways that may not be beneficial to us, either through denial and swallowing and internalizing things, or we can have the emotional response of being overwhelmed by it and being depressed. That's not a great place either. So there's the internal aspect. There's also this kind of consequential thing that that's also a problem, which is we need to do something about the climate crisis if we're overwhelmed by the climate crisis and we refuse to look at it because we have this emotional response to it, we're not going to be effective in addressing the climate crisis. So we have this, this dual need for action, right? We have an internal need for action and an external need for action. You said that you don't want to pathologize this, but is there a root cause behind this eco-anxiety and is attacking that root cause? Is that the way that we deal with it? Or what are our tools for addressing this feeling that some of us have?

NIELSEN:

Well, I personally believe that some of the tools are learning how to be with our emotions, our emotional response to the climate crisis, not turning away. I think that we live in a society that doesn't teach us much emotional resiliency or emotional tools for being able to be with our hard feelings. And so most of us don't know how to sit with grief, sit with anxiety. And so we turn away and try to do everything we can to distract ourselves. I really think that it's powerful and a strength to be able to learn how to build the resilience to be with hard feelings, not turn away. No, that's part of being human, part of caring. Having grief for something you care about is normal so that then you can move through that grief into a place where you can actually reinvest in meaningful actions so that the grief doesn't paralyze you. I'm a big fan of Joanna Macy's work. Yeah, so she's a Buddhist scholar, a scholar of deep ecology, and she does a lot of work in eco-psychology as well. A big inspiration, and she wrote the work that reconnects an act of hope, how to face the mess we're in without going crazy. And she talks a lot about being able to live in the in-between of being able to look at and face the despair and the challenges and the collapse that we're in right now on one hand and not turn away from that, but also, on the other hand, have hope and work towards the future that you dream about. And hope in that way doesn't necessarily mean that you believe that we're going to be able to fix everything and fix the climate crisis. Hope for her is more an action. It's an act of hope. It's moving towards the future that you want. So basically, she says that if we don't move towards or work towards the future we dream in, of course we're not going to get there. So you have to try to build and fight for that future even if you're not sure if we're going to get there because we're definitely not going to get there if you don't do that work. So she talks a lot about holding both of those, like balancing between, because if you fall into the despair and just reside there, you fall into this paralysis and you just get stuck and it's overwhelming. But if you just move into the hope without looking at the reality, then what happens is that you live in this kind of delusional world and you don't look at the reality. So it's about both and holding that in between. For me, a lot of that comes first with being able to sit with those challenging emotions, metabolize those challenging emotions, and I think that we need places to do that because we can't necessarily always do that alone. We need community. And so a lot of what I've been focusing on is really about building communities so that people can process and metabolize those hard emotions that come up around being aware of the climate crisis so that they don't get stuck in that despair, but they're able to move through those challenging emotions so that they can then reinvest in efforts that are meaningful.

WHEELER:

The idea of active hope, I think, is, is one that really resonates with me. And it mirrors a conversation that I've had a couple of times with a friend who's also an executive director of an environmental nonprofit. And we've talked about this weird place that we are in where we want to do the work and trying to find meaning and fulfillment in doing the work in that, in the act, as opposed to having some sort of an idea of what it's going to produce, because when we, when we have this idealized world that we want to achieve, we are always going to come up short of that world, trying to let go of that and just finding fulfillment in doing the thing, the human relationships that we get to forge when we're doing the thing, the sense of.

NIELSEN:

Community. Yeah. Interconnectedness.

WHEELER:

In doing this work and that sustained me in this job is is that it's a struggle. But I get to struggle with other people and it's brought me into close friendship with with folks who are aligned with me, and it doesn't make me feel as alone in this world when I know that there are other people like myself. We're also doing this same thing.

So do you have any practical tips something that I know you're doing this full program? We'll get into the program a little bit but for somebody who's just listening on the radio who wants to take something away, wants to have a new practice for themselves that is going to help them deal with the things that they're feeling -- some small practical things that folks can incorporate into their lives. Do you have any advice for our listeners?

NIELSEN:

Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned with eco-chaplaincy, I do have a background with Buddhism and so meditation has been an important grounding practice for me and there's a lot of different ways to incorporate meditation and mindfulness into your life, but I find that just bringing a daily mindfulness or meditation practice into your daily life can be a really helpful way to be able to bring presence into your life, which can then be really supportive when being able to just pay attention to your emotions and how you're feeling. So if you're, often what happens is we get really caught up in just our day-to-day and the stories we tell ourselves about how we're moving through the world and sometimes have a hard time connecting to our emotions or our physical sensations in our body and I find that meditation and mindfulness can help ground us back into our body so that we can be more aware of how we're feeling and then we can attend to it and so, I mean, if you're not familiar with meditation and mindfulness, there's lots of free apps that you can find to just guide you through a short little meditation practice, but I find that this can be just a really helpful starting place because a lot of people have a hard time even knowing what their emotional state is and so then it's hard to be able to move through or work through those emotions if you can't identify it and name it. So I think a good starting place is just being able to sit with yourself and start getting familiar with the sensations that come up and noticing so then throughout the day you can start to pay attention to, okay, I'm starting to feel grief right now or I'm feeling anxiety or I'm feeling joyful and just like starting to be more aware of that for yourself and then it gives you more ability to work through those heavy feelings instead of turn away once you practice with that.

WHEELER:

Do you have any recommended apps, or...

NIELSEN:

Yeah, insight timer is a great free one that I use.

WHEELER:

So let's talk about this, this program. You have a program coming up that folks can enroll in if they want to do a deeper dive into examining their own emotional response to this crazy world that we live in, tell us about the program.

NIELSEN:

Yeah, so I'm starting facilitating a program through the Good Grief Network, and it's a non-profit that was started in 2017, basically to respond to everything we've been talking about living on the planet during this time. And it was started by Laura Smith and Amy Lewis Ray as part of Laura Smith's graduate program in environmental studies. It was as well developed basically in response to feeling burnout of just the emotional toll of studying and being aware of the environmental crisis. And so she developed this 10-step program that brings people together in community, just a small group, it's usually 8 to 12 people that move through these 10 steps over 10 weeks. And it creates an ability to basically witness each other and feel and metabolize and move through the motions around the climate crisis, and then in the end be able to reinvest in meaningful efforts. So it moves you through this arc, there's 10 different steps over the 10 weeks, and it's two hours each week. It's a really beautiful space because it really offers this ability to dive deep with strangers that then become community. So I've run this program three times, and I've always been amazed that you're starting with these people that you don't know anything about. And then very quickly, because of the topics, because of the structure, you're just able to dive in and build this camaraderie with these people. And at the end, you feel like you have this whole little community. And it's just so beautiful to feel held and heard. I think that there's so many of us that are feeling so much around the state of the world, but don't necessarily have a place to be heard, to be witnessed, and this gives the opportunity to feel less alone. And it's also very much about, yeah, just being witnessed and held instead of having debate or dialogue or being responded to. So the structure of the program allows for people just to share whatever they need to share, but it's not about responding to that person's share. It's about accepting that person exactly where they are in community and then there's also resilient skills that are built in as well. So each week, there's a different step starting with the first one is accept the severity of the predicament. Moving into week two is be with uncertainty. Week three is honor my mortality and the mortality of all. Week four is do inner work. And so, there's these different themes and with each theme, you have a packet and you're given resources and different readings you don't have to do, but it's suggested or podcasts or poems and things like that. Then, so you can engage with as much or as little as you want to. Definitely, it's as much as you put in, you get out, but it's beautiful because every time I've done this program, I'm able to go deeper and I get something different out of it. So, it's definitely something where it's not just like you do it once and then it's something that I feel like the deeper that you go, the more you bring it into your life and incorporate it, the deeper it touches your experience in your life. And just being able to go into these really deep topics with people that are feeling similar things can be so healing. I mean, this morning even, I was just reading about the climate crisis and I was just, I just like kind of teared up and was feeling that emotional response and just feeling like, you know what? Like I need this right now. Like I need my community. I need people to sit with and feel less alone with because it's so often that I'm just go about my day. I'm not, I'm feeling it, but I'm not talking about it. And then it just builds up and spills over. And so, having this place where you can come every week for 10 weeks and be rooted in community and be able to share and move through these steps and be really heard and supported and then practice new ways of being with each other. So, it's really an opportunity to practice building communities, practice new ways of investing in community and society and ways of being that are outside of the cultural norm, cultural stories. Practicing like how do we build a new paradigm? So, it's a really beautiful program that I'm really excited to bring in person.

WHEELER:

And also terribly exciting, thanks to Queer Humboldt, it's free for participants. Yeah. So talk to me about Queer Humboldt's interest in this and the inclusiveness of this event too.

NIELSEN:

Yeah, I am so excited. I started advertising for this program through a different venue and I dropped off a poster at Queer Humboldt to advertise and then got a call for them saying that they would be interested in helping sponsor, which is amazing because typically this program does have an entrance fee for participants and so they basically are sponsoring it so that it'll be completely free for all participants which is just an incredible opportunity and what happened is they were going to start a similar type program around the same time that was basically around helping people process and be with the intense political climate and environmental collapse and a lot of similar themes and so then just great timing and they are really supportive of creating community spaces inclusive of everyone and to help support mental health in the community. Yeah, and it's a queer safe space so it's open for everyone but of course also prioritizing those identify as queer but you don't have to identify as queer to participate but yeah it's a safe space for everyone in the community.

WHEELER:

That's very cool. So it starts soon. When is your first day and how do people register?

NIELSEN:

Yeah, it starts September 15th, Sunday, two to four. So it will be every Sunday for the next 10 weeks, starting on September 15th. It will take place at Queer Humboldt. And to register, you would reach out to me. My email is hannahneilson at goodgriefnetwork.org. Should I spell that?

WHEELER:

Hanna with an H, H-A-N-N-A-N-I-E-L-S-E-N at goodgriefnetwork.org. We'll also put Hanna's email and a link to the flyer in the show notes, which you can find in the podcast app or on the lostcoastoutpost.com. So check out both of those places. You can find out more information about this event. So I think that we've talked a little bit about my own struggles with ego grief and something that I think is important is that it gets better when you address it, right? When you start to recognize that it's a problem in your life and you work towards becoming a more resilient person, you, I think, also become a happier person. You're able to better live with this grief and you're able to start to see the world a little bit differently. I think for a long part of my life, I would just see everything that was wrong. I have been able to start seeing the positive things in life. So I want to encourage people, if this is something that sounds like you, it sounds like it's maybe a problem in your life, check out this resource. I mean, it's free, not a barrier to participation. If folks aren't able to participate in this workshop, do you have other resources or other books, podcasts, things that you want to plug?

NIELSEN:

Yeah, well, there is actually a book that was written by the two founders of the Good Grief Network called How to Live in a Chaotic Climate, 10 Steps to Reconnect with Ourselves and Community and the Planet. So that's also a great resource to check out. It basically goes through the 10 steps, but more in depth, and it's also a great resource to have even if you do decide to do the 10 steps. So that's a great resource. I'm also going to be starting to lead meditations at Redwood Roots Farm Cooperative on Thursdays from 2 to 4, and that will be donation-based, but no one turned away from lack of funds. So that's another opportunity, as I was mentioning before, I feel that meditation and mindfulness can be a really helpful resource, but also as a way to reconnect with the land. My meditations are largely focused, they're nature-based, so it's really about connecting to the land we're meditating outside. And so that will be another opportunity, encourage people to stop by for that as well. Also if people are interested in this, but unable to attend this time around, there are online 10 step programs that the Good Grief Network is running currently as well that people can sign up for, and in the future, I hope to run further programs. So I think there are lots of opportunities to get engaged if not now in the future, but I would encourage now because it's free now and I don't know if it will be in the future, so it's a great time to try it out. Yeah, I think that there's starting to be more and more resources for people. I think that it's starting to be recognized how much of a toll. There's another book called Generation Dread by Britt Rae, and she basically got into this work because she was deciding if she wanted to have kids, which is actually another really interesting topic that I think more and more people of childbearing age are debating if they want to have children because of the state of the climate crisis, which is a really interesting moment in time. And so Britt Rae is a researcher that she got into looking at the climate crisis and climate psychology because she wanted to have children, but she felt like she couldn't bring herself to do that given what she knew about the environmental crisis. She did end up having kids, but she did a lot of research and basically talks about climate psychology, emotional resiliency when dealing with this work. So she wrote a book as well, and she's a great person to look up, Britt Rae, Generation Dread. So there's a lot more resources that are starting to come out to support people. And also Sarah Jaquette Rae, who is a professor at Cal Poly Humboldt, she has written a book as well about climate anxiety and brings that up a lot in her work too. So people are starting to recognize that how important it is to support people, not only in the environmental field, but just in general, people that are paying attention and aware because it is such a overwhelming situation that we're in. Psychologically, people respond best when we have a clear answer to a problem. And with the climate crisis, it can feel so overwhelming. And so just starting to build community, give people emotional resources and skills to be able to face the state of the world is so important at this time so that then we can reinvest in actions that are meaningful, which may be different for everyone.

WHEELER:

Well, Hanna, thank you so much for joining The Eco News. You can find out more about registering for Hanna's 10-week program on the Lost Coast Outpost or in the show notes if you're listening to this as a podcast. So again, thank you, Hanna, for joining the show. Thank you so much. All right, listeners, join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.