 So on behalf of the public library, we want to welcome you to the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramatr Shaloni, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. As the indigenous stewards of this land, and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramatr Shaloni have never ceded, lost, nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place. As guests, we who reside in their traditional territory recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. We wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramatr Shaloni, and by affirming their sovereign rights as first peoples. Tomorrow, July 27th, Ursula Pike discusses her new book, An Indian Among Los Indígenas, a Native Travel Memoir, with novelist Michelle L. Lapena. This Sunday, July 31st, in the Main Library's Karat Auditorium, the Indian-born American photographer, writer, and conservationist, Subhankar Banerjee, will speak about art, social transformation, and his a library, a classroom, and the world, a project in the 2022 Venice Biennale Art Exhibition. And on Sunday, August 21st, on Zoom, and also in the Main Library's Karat Auditorium, SFPO will host a panel discussion on the past, present, and future of food cooperatives in the Bay Area, learn how food cooperatives have been an integral part of the food and justice movements, and workplace democracy in the San Francisco Bay Area since the 1960s. Today's program is a part of a month-long series of programs at SFPL, devoted to nature, the environment, and climate. You can also find out about these and other SFPL programs by visiting our website, SFPL.org. So that ends my announcements on upcoming programs. I will put the links to the programs I have just mentioned in our chat. Please note that today's program is being recorded. If you have questions for our presenter, please keep your microphones off and type your questions into the chat, or hold your questions until the end after Jennifer Atkinson's presentation. There will be a short question and answer session, but she will make herself available to answer your questions. I'll now say a few words about today's speaker. Dr. Jennifer Atkinson is an Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Washington. Her seminars on Echo Grief and Climate Anxiety have been featured in the New York Times, National Geographic, the Los Angeles Times, NBC News, the Seattle Times, WRIST, The Washington Post, and many other outlets. Jennifer is currently working on a book titled An Existential Toolkit for a Climate Crisis, co-edited with Sarah Jacat Ray, which offers strategies to help young people navigate the emotional toll of climate breakdown. Jennifer Atkinson is also the author of Gardenland, Nature, Fantasy, and Everyday Practice, a book that explores garden literature as a fantasy genre, where people enact desires for social justice, joyful labor, and contact with nature. Her writing on the history of gardening and hard times has been featured on programs like NPR, The Conversation, and Earth Island Journal. We're honored to have Jennifer Atkinson as our guest today. And with that, I will turn the microphone over to you, Jennifer. Thank you so much, John. And I'm going to go ahead and share my screen here. And can you confirm that I am sharing my PowerPoint slides and not my notes? Looks good. Because I've done the same thing myself. Well, thank you so much for inviting me here. I want to especially thank the San Francisco Public Library and all of the staff who've made this happen, and for everybody who's joining tonight. I myself am joining you from Seattle, Washington. And I want to acknowledge that our campus, the University of Washington sits on the unceded Sammamish and Duwamish lands and waters, which are part of the shared waters of tribes and bands within the Suquamish, Tulelip, and Muckleshoot nations. So my plan is to talk for about 45 minutes, and then I'll leave time for Q&A at the end. And I know that sometimes folks have to leave early to log out early. So if you can't stick around for the whole session, but you want to learn more, you can check out my podcast on the slide here where you'll find a lot of the research and articles and concepts that I'm about to cover in my slides. And I can drop that in the chat as well. Okay. So most people kick off climate presentations like this by listing a bunch of bad news, which is certainly easy to find. Last summer, we had the heat dome event in the Pacific Northwest where I live, which brought the highest temperatures ever recorded in Seattle and Portland and Western Canada, which soared to 121 degrees. Scientists said that it was one in a thousand year event. And hundreds of people died in a region where most of us don't have air conditioning. We're currently on track, as I'm sure many of you know, to break even more records this summer all over Europe and North America and seemingly everywhere you look. We've got disappearing wildlife, melting ice sheets, dying oceans, vertebrate wildlife populations are down by 60%. Tens of millions forced to flee their homes every year. One million species at risk of extinction. We could go on and on. But I think most of you already know this story. And for those of us who do follow the news headlines and scientific reports or come to climate talks like this, we can get pulled into a downward spiral of heartbreak and grief. Someone once described living in this age of climate breakdown as an experience of broken record, record breaking. I think that's a really perfect summary of our time. So the point I want to make today really is that in addition to all of this external damage that we're seeing, there's also a landscape of damage that we're carrying inside of us. And there really has been an explosion of research on this emotional and psychological toll just in the past four years. The term eco-anxiety was the runner up for Oxford's Word of the Year back in 2019. And then last year, Google searches for the term climate anxiety were up 565%. The American Psychological Association has started to pay attention. A couple years back, they put out a major report where they defined eco-anxiety as a chronic fear of environmental doom. You also see terms like climate trauma, pre-traumatic stress, global dread. I almost always cite the definition of science writer Britt Ray who wrote, quote, at its simplest at this late stage in the climate crisis, eco-anxiety is merely a sign of attachment to the world. And I myself became interested in this topic partly because of my direct experience of the endless wildfires in California, which is where I grew up and I still spend a lot of time there with my family who have been directly impacted. But even before that, I was really struggling with climate despair just in response to the day-to-day stuff. The latest IPCC report would come out or I'd see a terrible headline and it would plunge me into a really dark place where I felt like nothing I was doing really mattered because the problem was just so big. And I share this not because my personal experience is really that important or even unique, but actually for the opposite reason because it's not unique. So many people feel this way, but talking about dark emotional dimensions is not something that we commonly do in climate discussions. And I think there are several reasons for that. In my own case, and this is true for many educators and activists, we often feel like we have to always project optimism and hope or the people around us will lose heart. But I think the bigger reason that our society has consistently refused to face the psychological elements of climate breakdown is that we have primarily treated the climate story as a science story. For the past 30 years, scientists have been the main communicators. And so we've talked about planetary destruction using statistics and graphs and numerical equations. And this is not at all to disparage scientists. I mean, they're just doing what scientists do and that kind of rhetoric is the nature of the discipline. But there are other ways to tell the story, especially when in the midst of all these external changes, many of us are carrying a deep unconscious grief. Because on some level, we know that the world is dying, that systems are unraveling, and that there's more loss to come. And in a society of collective denial or organized mass distraction like ours, that pain becomes a kind of shadow that follows us around making us really more and more desperate to avoid what we know is true. So even for non-scientists, that scientific framing, using the rhetoric of members and data to represent loss, that can be very alluring because it excludes those subjective elements. And then climate activist Margaret Klein Solomon, whose book is featured here, she talks about this compartmentalization in her work and how for many years she really relegated climate to what she calls the science part of her brain because it just felt less painful until discovering really that the that strategy doesn't work. We could just as well say that something like cancer is an issue for science to solve. But of course, anybody facing a diagnosis or who's close to someone who's ill immediately understands that a big part of the challenge is processing the fear and grief of anticipatory loss. You can't just tell that person with cancer, well, this is something for for science to sort out. But even if it did work to push that heartbreak out of the conversation, one of the main arguments I want to make this evening is that there is something essential that's lost in doing so. And that's actually going to be the second half of my talk. But before I get to that second part on grief and hope and resilience, I want to spend a moment outlining what some of the mental health impacts of climate change are. So that that version that I just described, where a kind of a sense of of loss or decline follows you around like a shadow, I think that that might fall best under the concept of solastalgia. I think many, many people are now familiar with this term, which was coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht. He's playing on the language of nostalgia, longing for a time or place that you can't go back to. But solastalgia happens when home itself becomes unfamiliar. So it's not that you've left a place, but the place has left you. The air quality is different. You can't see the stars at night, the trees are dying, you see less birds, bees, whatever. Actually, there's a great article in The Atlantic just from last weekend that came out on this, this concept of solastalgia and Glenn Albrecht's work. But there are also more acute forms of climate distress, which is the second bullet. And what originally motivated me to learn about this topic was seeing the impact on my students. So these are some quotes from the first day of one of my classes at the University of Washington. This is just a few months ago, when I asked students how they felt about the future. And you can see here, I feel hopeless, useless and minuscule. Why even bother bringing children into an already dying world, whirlwind of despair, overwhelmed by anxiety and grief. Seeing the planet breakdown has made me breakdown. This goes on and on. And the data show that this is, it really is a global phenomenon. It is not just tree huggers out here in Seattle or San Francisco. Last fall, the largest research study ever done on the mental health impacts of climate change for young people showed that it's causing profound psychological distress. This was published in the Lancet after the team surveyed 10,000 teams from across the world. So Nigeria, Finland, Australia, Brazil, India, the Philippines, the U.S. 56% of youth say they believe humanity is doomed. 45% said climate anxiety disrupts just daily activities like sleeping or focusing on schoolwork. 77% characterized the climate future as frightening and one and four said they were afraid to have children. The authors actually referred to this distress among youth as a case of moral injury. And I found that framing very powerful. So this emotional harm is a matter of intergenerational inequality. It's also a matter of racial and economic inequality. So in the responses published in that study, concern about climate change was concentrated much more heavily in poorer countries and communities of color. And of course, these are the people who have contributed the very least to greenhouse gas emissions that are wrecking the planet. But now they're the ones that are the first to suffer and the ones taking the brunt of climate impacts and therefore the highest emotional toll. So just one example from this slide in the Philippines, 92% of youth said that the future was frightening compared with 68% in the U.S. And I think it's also, again, very powerfully captured in the statement from Mitzi Tan, a person from the Philippines who told those researchers that she grew up afraid of drowning in her own bedroom. And that really aligns with the third category of increasing numbers of people who've experienced actual trauma from extreme climate-related events. And there's a huge body now of mental health research, including that report from the APA I mentioned that has linked extreme weather disasters to chronic anxiety, depression, traumatic grief, post-traumatic stress, substance abuse, and sleep disorders. And these impacts have been shown to develop in anywhere between a quarter and a half of people impacted, which really isn't surprising, right? Like, people lose loved ones in fires and hurricanes and floods, as well as their homes and livelihoods and communities. And once again, we're overwhelmingly talking about marginalized communities, communities of color who lack resources to escape, to survive, to recover. The next bullet point here, climate change is disrupting people's identity and livelihood and subsistence. And this is especially true for people whose ways of life are closely tied to the land. So within many indigenous communities, the warming climate is wiping out hunting, traditional hunting and cultural practices, whether that is the decline of salmon here in Washington state or communities in arctic regions who can't travel to ancestral sites or hunt in the old ways because the landscape is melting. And when we talk about climate change as an existential threat, this is really a quintessential example since it's not only a threat to life and survival, but also to these people's culture to their relation to the past and really their entire way of being in the world. And for that reason, the ongoing experience of climate or the current experience of climate injustices is magnifying both past and ongoing traumas for colonized people. And Nyla Burton has a really powerful article on this. I put the title on this slide because I think it's an important one. If you do any follow-up reading after today, and I also included a link to it on the resources page of my website, which I'll come back to at the end. Another area of research that's rapidly growing has linked hotter temperatures to increased aggression. So on hot days, for example, you see more fights at ball parks and people honking their horns. There are higher incidences of domestic abuse, violent crime. And because this is a talk with the library, I have to throw in some more literary references in here. So even Shakespeare commented on this. One of these cases of science finally catching up with common folk wisdom, that passage there is from Romeo and Juliet. And then the last area I'll mention where we see the mental health toll, climate change is with suicide, with examples that range from despairing activists to suicide among Arctic communities, like I just mentioned. And we're seeing this from impoverished regions in India with farmers taking their lives in the face of film crops all the way to affluent places like Australia, which had a really visible spike in suicide during the millennial drought when farmers watched their livestock die and their land dry up and blow away. A few years back, you might also remember the Virgin Islands were hit twice in a single season with devastating hurricanes. And the governor there declared a mental health state of emergency when attempted suicide became a secondary disaster. And studies show that 40% of children impacted had post traumatic symptoms. So all of this is really just a snapshot of some different ways that our climate crisis is driving a mental health crisis. But I want to argue that there's really much more to the story here and that it's not just that climate is impacting mental health, but the reverse is also true. So our ability to cultivate emotional resilience is going to determine how well we respond to this crisis. And I think this is really where our agency lies. And so the story isn't all bad news. In fact, while some people might see the focus on emotional responses as a way of kind of retreating from the social and political changes that are truly needed to address climate change, that inner resilience is precisely what equips us to do the work of addressing the structural conditions that are driving climate upheavals in the first place. So we have this reciprocal dynamic where climate impacts mental health and mental health impacts climate and what we do next. So with all that said, my main purpose today is really to share some thoughts about how we might start the process of building that existential capacity by reimagining our relationship with climate grief and anxiety. And then second, how we might reconsider some conventional assumptions about hope as we think about our future and the work that we need to do. So I'm going to dive into that first piece by reading a three minute excerpt from a podcast that I created called Facing It I mentioned at the beginning. The podcast explores how dark emotions like grief might actually be a doorway to something powerful that we've forgotten in this whole conversation about climate change. And in this particular excerpt, I'm reflecting on the course I designed at the University of Washington to help students cope with climate distress. And what I found when I walked into the class on the first day was a room full of students who saw grief as a problem to be solved. And they wanted me to help make it go away. And I think that's really what enabled me to recognize a kind of misunderstanding that I myself have been carrying around as well. Okay, so reading from the podcast excerpt here. And this is actually, these are images from one of my students. When I first launched my seminar on eco grief, I was every bit as distressed as my students and looking for ways to extinguish my pain for all this suffering. But something unexpected happened along the way. I had always thought of grief as a bad thing, a dark state to avoid or overcome as quickly as possible. I thought that feeling grief was like succumbing to a preventable illness, or that once it took hold, I might fall into a bottomless hole of despair. But something, I'm sorry, but in time, it dawned on us that maybe we were seeking solutions to the wrong problem. We all wanted to fix the way we felt so we could go back to feeling happy. But grief isn't something to be fixed, because it's not dysfunctional. In fact, it's a healthy and necessary process we have to undergo in order to heal. First, grief isn't just one of many options for accepting loss. Grief is the process of accepting loss. I get why many people working towards sustainability want to sidestep emotional issues and push the public straight into action. The situation is urgent and dwelling on our feelings can seem like an extravagance as the fires close in. But the problem is when we try to jump straight to the final step without first processing the emotional toll of all this lost beauty and life, we're bypassing the very insights that motivate us to fight for our world in the first place. Ignoring ecological grief is like trying to rush through any great loss, a job, a home, someone you love, without pausing to acknowledge what you're leaving behind. And in all those cases, we're not just losing something we once had. We're also losing the future that many of us had counted on. We can't act creatively and honestly in this new reality until we mourn the passing of the old one. And all the ancient wisdom traditions affirm this truth, that grief is not here to take us hostage. It is the agent needed to transform us so that we can confront a similarly transformed world. But as the podcast series progresses, I try to push beyond just reframing grief as something that's not bad, to also consider ways that it is actively good. First and foremost, grief arises from love and deep attachment. You will not grieve for something you don't love. It is a way of honoring our connection and our empathy with other species or other people. So when we feel that pain, we remember that our existence and well-being are deeply intertwined with other lives. And I didn't personally watch it, but everyone was quoting that line from a recent superhero mini-series based on the Marvel comics, where a character says, what is grief if not love persevering? I'm also so drawn to this quote from Malchia davidge-serral, where she wrote, joy is not the opposite of grief. Grief is the opposite of indifference. Grief is an evolutionary indicator of love, the kind of great love that guides revolutionaries. And recognizing this has been very essential for my students as well as many climate activists who have internalized the assumption that grief leads to inaction. And let's be honest, we live in a very grief-phobic culture where the moment you say that word, the image that comes to mind is someone who can't get out of bed because they're so immobilized by pain, someone who's depleted rather than actually being driven by passion and out in the community or the streets creating change. So that misleading assumption then gets exacerbated by the pervasive messages to avoid negative feelings when we feel distressed, messages that we shouldn't dwell on our pain, like dwelling is a bad thing. So we're told to move on as if grief and movement are somehow mutually exclusive. The truth really is that when we see grief as an outgrowth of love, it may very well be that these are the emotions that will save us if anything saves us now. And that's because there's just no limit to the links that we'll go to protect what we love. As so many social justice movements have shown us, love is more powerful than fear, rage, hope, all of the other emotions. And that's because as David Stearall points out, or at least suggests I think in this reflection, those emotions don't just rouse us to action, but they sustain us in that engagement over the long haul. So for example, something like fear actually might be very good at mobilizing action at the outset, but what we have to keep in mind is that we are going to be dealing with climate change for the rest of our lives. And if fear and anger are the organizing principles or the motivating emotions, that will lead to burnout. So we really have to ask ourselves, what is the most sustainable strategy over the long haul? A final point I'll make just in these reflections on grief and love is that I think one reason it's hard for us to see the value in dark emotions is because we have a very binary mindset that splits emotional responses into two mutually exclusive camps. And that's especially true when we talk about hope versus despair. And that binary thinking has probably contributed significantly to the rise of climate doomism in recent years. I'm sure you're all familiar with the label of a climate doomer, someone who says it's too late, we are already screwed. A lot of climate scientists and activists are now arguing that our culture at least here in the US jumped from denial to doom almost overnight. And that that's become the new big obstacle to motivating people. So climate scientist Jacqueline Gill in this first quote on the slide has commented extensively on her frustration with immediate focus on apocalyptic outcomes. And true as well with Michael Mann, probably the best known climate scientist in the US who's the guy who created the famous hockey stick graph of carbon emissions. So Mann has spent well over a decade in these legendary Twitter battles and media debates where he's tirelessly debunking climate deniers. But in his newest book he says he's now redirecting all that energy to rushing around debunking climate doomers who say it's too late to save ourselves. So he calls this the new climate war, which is the title of his book. And when I first heard researchers talking about this reversal, I didn't really know if I believed it. You know, it seems like a really provocative headline, right, or kind of a catchy headline. But it really makes more sense, as explained by psychologists like Leslie Davenport, who identified both of these positions as a basic psychic defense against the human discomfort with uncertainty and ambiguity. We don't like to be in an in-between state where we're unsure what's going to happen. And so while that can sometimes lead to disavowal and just turning away, other people go towards doom, right? It can't do anything, it's too late. And Davenport says paradoxically moving to either one of those places provides a kind of psychological relief because it gets us out of that gray zone where we're staring into the void and having to sit with ambivalence and uncertainty. So to bring this back to my point about grief, I would say that, you know, doomers do acknowledge and embrace grief, but they misunderstand it as an excuse for inaction. It's as if they see grief as an end point rather than a doorway, as Margaret Klein saw them and so beautifully put it. And then hope is the final emotion I want to address as I wrap up this introductory part before my kind of steps for coping. Hope is the one that gets the most time in climate communication by far. I mean, we're really obsessed with hope and climate work. You often hear the message like no matter how bad things get, the one thing is like we can never lose hope. And from my own experience, it is by far the single most common and most predictable question I get in the Q&As after my talks is like, what gives you hope? It's also a very deeply polarizing concept that also falls into that binary mindset that I mentioned where it's either promoted as a kind of panacea, the thing that will save us, or it's dismissed as the trope of fools, like people who just don't get how bad things really are. And what I think is actually probably a more useful way to think about it is in terms of the difference between passive hope and active hope. So the first version is essentially a kind of wish for a happy ending and something that can keep you on the sidelines by deferring action onto the future or onto other people. And I think that's really why people will rightfully dismiss that kind of hope as quite counterproductive. Another pitfall of this passive version of hope is that it is based on expectation of a particular outcome. And that is very problematic in a reality like the one we live in where setbacks are inevitable and setbacks are relentless if we do this work. If we need reassurance of the probability of winning before we act, we will very quickly fall into disillusionment because the odds are really challenging. But if we think of like Vakalov Havel's famous definition of hope on the slide, the question of probability is really irrelevant. As many of you probably know, Havel was a major figure in creating the Czech Republic after the fall of communism in the Soviet Union. And after spending many years as a political prisoner himself, he wrote, hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out. So the trick really is to find motivation in our values and a sense of justice because unlike outcomes, those can never be taken away. So even when things seem hopeless, our sense of purpose is what keeps us going. And for that reason, I think a lot of people in climate work will use the language of purpose or meaning instead of hope. But there are others who like the term active hope or as I mentioned radical hope. Diego Arguellis Ortiz is a Costa Rican climate writer who talks about this in a piece he wrote where he says, real good useful hope has nothing to do with positive news. Instead, it is profoundly linked with action, both ours and those of others alongside us. There's only one way to earn hope and that's rolling up our sleeves. I think this is a really powerful way to frame hope as something we have to earn or do rather than something we just get to have. But if we are being honest here, I think we also need to recognize that hope is not the end game. Getting people to take collective action is the point, not just making them feel good or hope. So while there are multiple steps in managing climate anxiety, despair and distress, and I'm going to list off five of them, my podcast also walks listeners through those steps. I just want to remind everyone here that getting actively engaged in climate solutions, which is number five is really at the heart of this whole list of recommendations. Everything else is really trying to get us there and sustain us there sometimes when we fall out, which we will do from time to time. So this is the checklist that I use with my own students. So the first one, the most powerful place to start is simply acknowledging and making space to talk about our emotional responses to this mess. That I think can sound too simplistic to be of much use. But it is actually much more profound than it appears at first glance. And that's because a huge part of our depression and anxiety comes from feeling alone and isolated. And we've all had that moment of wondering, like, am I the only one that feels this way? The research shows that when you feel isolated like that, you are not empowered to take action. That really causes withdrawal. And so openly acknowledging and talking about these emotional responses helps create a sense of solidarity and community, which counteracts that perception of isolation. Another insight about the power of acknowledging painful feelings is captured by psychologist Rosemary Randall. And she points out that, sure, you know, we can repress this painful stuff. And most of us have a lot of practice doing it just to get through the day. But at what cost? When we continually push that grief down and pretend that things are more or less okay, we become disconnected and avoidant. And Randall writes, as I put on the slide, the present continues to feel safe, but at the expense of the future becoming terrifying. On the one hand, nightmare on the other, false comfort. This image, by the way, is from your region in San Francisco a couple of summers ago. Some of you might remember this orange sky. The third reason that acknowledgement is so crucial is simply because our culture doesn't really have established norms for recognizing or mourning the loss of nature. And the reason that's a problem is because mourning is a social process. And we actually understand this quite well in the case of familiar cultural norms around maybe the death of a person. There's a reason that across cultures and throughout the ages, people who lose a lost one or communities who lose loved ones will turn to social rituals like funerals, visuals, memorials. It can even be just really simple practices like sending sympathy cards. People can join support groups. They can get help from books or therapists. And it's the social nature of those rituals that validates our pain and it removes our isolation from others. Again, that is healing in itself. The problem is if you feel grief for the disappearance of snow on the mountains behind your town or the death of millions of animals in a wildfire, there really aren't established social structures to acknowledge that. So this is known as disenfranchised grief, a kind of pain that is made invisible and that deepens the harm that we've already experienced. Okay, so that's the starting point. Just naming and collectively acknowledging all these forms of loss. Number two, how can we reframe anxiety and grief as tools that can actually empower climate solutions? And I already covered some of this just in highlighting how grief can intensify love. But one thing I'll add here is just a reminder that any framing that suggests that climate anxiety or depression is a mental illness, that is very dangerous and misguided, because it locates the problem in the individual instead of the social structure. Rather than thinking of eco-anxiety as a dysfunction, I encourage my students to see it in a completely reversed perspective as a moral emotion, is a response that arises from an accurate assessment of the situation and a sense of compassion, desire for justice. I am by no means the first person to say something along these lines. This quote from Jidu Krishnamurti, it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, the salvation of the world lies in the hands of the maladjusted. So these insights really apply to other forms of emotional maladjustment as well, whether we're rejecting racism or violence or inequality. So this is just a trick that you can do for yourselves as well as for others. If somebody expresses one of these dark emotions, see if you can help them recognize it as a sign of emotional health and compassion, how anger and outrage arise from a sense of injustice. When a person shares something they fear, that itself reveals trust and courage to speak openly. We might acknowledge how shame and awareness of complicity can ultimately open the way towards dismantling systems of oppression if it's channeled into collective political action. Feelings like uncertainty can be reframed as an opportunity for creative potential and so on. Then number three, rewrite the story. Again, very important for the audience today and the mission of libraries like San Francisco Public Library and all libraries around the world is this reminder that we live our lives by stories. It is how we make sense of the world, how we understand ourselves and others, how we envision the future. So be aware of the kinds of narratives that you're consuming and reproducing yourself. Most information people get about where the planet is headed comes from the media and research shows that 85% of environmental news is told in the negative frame and it is actually designed that way. The news is a profit-driven enterprise that cannot survive if it doesn't draw our eyeballs to the screen. So it is the sensational stories of hurricanes and fires and destruction. Granted, those are absolutely real, but they are going to get more play than subtle or nuanced stories of community change and boring, long-term behind the scenes work of generating solutions. So we have to be aware of that. We also have to be aware just of the addictive nature of catastrophic news, which is deliberately engineered to keep us coming back for more and brain scans show how we get a dopamine hit every time we check back again and again to stay current on the latest update. But when you do that, the long-term or cumulative result is this perception that we are living in an apocalypse. And all you have to do is think about the times that you have gotten sucked into doom-scrolling loops like we all did in the first months of the COVID pandemic, during an election cycle, or really any time where you just cannot step away from the news. The moment you do, there's like a physical reaction where you feel vulnerable. Like you're compromising your own survival because we are so hard-wired to think that knowing what's going on means that we're safe. And that fixation with catastrophic stories and images is absolutely exacerbated by media companies. But at another level, it is also a function of our own psychological makeup. And this is what's known in psychology as the negativity bias, where even if we're presented with an equal amount of good and bad information, our minds are hard-wired to pay more attention to the bad stuff. And there's an evolutionary function to that, right? In a world of saber-toothed tigers and poisonous snakes, it's advantageous to have a brain that is hyper-aware of anything that can pose a threat. But in today's world, where images are broadcast around the clock and show every bad thing happening everywhere in the world on the screen, they're in front of us 24-7. Like the phone is next to you or cereal bowl. It's on your pillow at night. Our nervous systems are not equipped to tolerate that endless chronic stress. And it can have real physiological impacts that are quite detrimental to mental health over time. So I want to be very careful here. This is a tough tightrope to walk because I'm not saying that we should sugarcoat reality or stick our heads in the sand and avoid bad news. But just being consciously aware that the media is deliberately appealing to the negativity bias that in itself is its own crucial step towards building resilience because it reminds us that those catastrophic stories are just one version of reality. And there is in fact a whole universe of empowering stories that are happening at the same time as the bad stuff. Every person engaged in creating change in every part of the world in countless ways. We see incredible shifts underway in financial markets and technology, school, social justice, you know, agriculture, youth movements, energy. Those solution-based stories are vastly underreported but they are every bit as real. This is just a bunch of screenshots that I took spending 10 minutes online. This is just from, you know, over the course of a couple of weeks. It's not like I had to dig over the last couple of years to find good stories. Small snapshot for a week. If you like a kind of a shortcut for finding these, there are groups that actually aggregate this type of news for you. I really like the beacon that's put out by Grist, which is on the top left here. It's a newsletter that sends a daily dose of good climate news. The Solutions Journalism Network is a consortium that reports on solutions to problems across the spectrum. And it's important to know that their goal is not to avoid the bad news. I mean, they will still tell that part. But what they add is the piece that's missing from mainstream accounts, which is how people are responding. And so their, you know, their goal is not to make us feel good. It's to provide a template for interventions that have worked in one context so we can apply them in others. And then a lot of these, they're crowdsourced. So I think that's cool. I need to speed up here. It looks like I'm still on step three. Again, stories. I have a background in the humanities and English, so this is near and dear to my heart. But stories have implications for the kind of future that we're going to create. And so this is the idea behind the famous Jameson quote that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. That perceived inevitability of our political and economic institutions thrives in a story that does not give us alternative stories. I'm sure I don't have to tell you that the genre of apocalypse is the dominant genre of any discourse about the future. It's the genre of mainstream news, of climate fiction, of Hollywood film. In a recent article, I made the obvious and completely unoriginal argument that we can't create the future we desire if we can't imagine what that would look like. This image, by the way, is a work of concept art based off the novel, That's a Sacred Thing by Starhawk, based in San Francisco as well. It's one of two few works of eco-utopian fiction, but definitely worth a read. I also really love Joanna Macy's framework where she breaks down the three dominant stories that are currently competing to define this moment we're living in. The first is the business as usual story, which wants to preserve the status quo and it argues that economic growth and technological innovation and free market solutions are going to lead to prosperity for all. The second is the story of the great unraveling, which predicts irreversible social and ecological collapse, mass extinction, conflict over vanishing resources. Obviously, that one is the dominant narrative of the climate movement. Then the third story is what Joanna Macy calls the great turning, which sees in our current moment the possibility of profound social transformation towards genuine sustainability and environmental justice. And this is important. Macy says the point is not to argue over which of these three stories is correct since they are all happening. Rather, the question is which one do we want to invest in? And so she writes as the box at the bottom, that third story of transition, healing and recovery is where you will turn when you acknowledge that the first story is leading us to catastrophe, but you refuse to let the second story have the last word. So I just spent the last six minutes saying something that so rights activists and filmmaker Valerie Coorer said in one sentence when she asked what if the darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but a darkness of the room. So which story are you going to live in? Is this moment a womb or a tomb? Number four is to connect. As I already noted, talking openly about eco grief is really a way of connecting and building community. So it's important to seek out others who share your concern. But the other point I want to make here is that often the source of our despair isn't the crisis itself so much as a longing for fellowship or the absence of a sense of purpose in the midst of profound difficulty. And Rebecca Solnit's book here is one of the best accounts I know in making that point. It's just packed with meticulously researched examples of how throughout history when you look at periods of crisis like wars or natural disasters, people's spiritual lives and deep sense of meaning are not inhibited because of those events. In fact, the opposite is often true. The sense of purpose and fellowship that we crave can be deepened through adversity. And there's actually great joy and often a sense of adventure in knowing that you're part of a historic movement that is rising up to confront the greatest challenge and injustice of your time. So if you don't know where to find that connection, please go to the resources page of my website. I've listed a number of groups. Some meet virtually, some meet in person, and they are all having these discussions and building community around eco anxiety. With some of them, you can take part in their meetings, but some of them actually will give you templates and instructions to facilitate your own. I really like the climate courage workshops. They're very international. So being able to talk about climate emotions of people around the world is really fascinating for my own students and gives them a lot of perspective as well. The Good Grief Network, it's fantastic. They have absolutely fundamentally shaped my work and they're still going as strong as they have been from the beginning. And then the last minute here as I wrap up, I promised I'd come to this point to get engaged and take action. And I've already shared the caveat that our impulse to immediately jump to action should not be a way to avoid dwelling with hard feelings. But in the same way that action doesn't excuse us from self-reflection, neither should our painful feelings excuse us from doing the work. In fact, diving into the work is itself a powerful antidote to despair. And as a spoiler alert here, this is the answer that I give when people ask, how do we maintain hope? And what I say is don't get hung up on cultivating hope. Hope is what happens when you do the work, right? It's the natural outcome of that process. And it's not because of some naive belief that like one person going and planting trees or going to a climate march is going to solve the problem. Once again, the real power of getting engaged is it helps us build solidarity. And cognitive psychologists will repeatedly emphasize the importance of imagining ourselves as part of a team. And that's partly for the reasons I already discussed about how purpose can counteract loneliness, but also because working as a team addresses the really practical concern that our individual actions are too insignificant to matter. So I always hear my students say that any effort that they're going to take is just futile and pointless because their personal impact gets dwarfed by the scale of the crisis. This is what Sarah Jacquet Ray and other psychologists call the drop in the bucket imaginary, which is just ubiquitous in climate discourse. It's very debilitating because it leads people to throw in the towel before they even start. We need to also remember, though, that this is a very American or Western individualistic response. And it is one that the fossil fuel industry loves to perpetuate. I'm sure everybody here has heard by now that BP actually invented the carbon footprint calendar or calculator. They probably have a calendar out there as well, because they want us to focus on personal responsibility and individual habits rather than engaging in mass movements to transform the larger system. But if we see ourselves as working collectively rather than individually, we can recognize that all contributions sync up with the larger network of change. This is what Adrian Murray Brown calls emergent strategy, a movement that spirals out from all kinds of small local actions and connections to create larger complex systems. Economist Danela Meadows makes a similar point when she reminds us to think about leverage points where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything. So I'll end by saying that this is really where we can recognize some very good news at the heart of our climate crisis. And that is that the solution to the existential loneliness many of us feel is also the solution to climate change, that they both boil down to solidarity and collective action. So again, if you want specific ideas and opportunities, like, well, what does that mean? What do I do? Please visit the resources page of my website or, you know, any of a thousand other climate groups who are ready to welcome you into the movement. My website, which is in the yellow box at the top of the slide also has a bunch of further readings and it includes all the stuff I mentioned in my slides today. And finally, if you want to connect on social media, I try to post new talks and workshops and podcast episodes. If you want any of those updates, I actually use Instagram much more than Twitter. I can only handle one media platform in my life. But in terms of the books for further reading on the topic, these are some of my favorites. And much of the material I just shared comes from these researchers. So I want to acknowledge the extraordinary work of my colleagues and friends that are featured here. Thank you. Thank you so much, Professor Atkinson. If they are members of the audience who have questions for Jennifer Atkinson, you can put those questions in the chat and she will answer them. Yeah, I might start with a question I have for you, Jennifer, which pertains to the book that you wrote, Gardenland. So you've written extensively on gardens and gardening, and I'm sure there's probably more than a few gardeners among today's audience members. Could you say a few words about how you see the activity of gardening in relation to today's topic of climate anxiety? Yeah, I've had more than one friend and colleague point out the irony to me of going from joy and fantasy, which was sort of the thematic undertone of my book on gardening, to grief and despair, but also hope and action and climate change. So I'm obviously very interested in the way that emotions shape, emotions, memory, identity, affect, all of those shape our relation to the natural world. And so, you know, I guess one of the things that comes to mind, I was just having a discussion with an author about a week ago who was saying she was pointing out the kind of the irony and the real fear or the paradox in that for so long and for so many people, nature can be a source of healing. It's a tonic. It's the thing that you go to when you're feeling distressed, whether that's hiking, being outside, being with trees, being with your pets, gardening, whatever form that takes. And it has become a sort of a particularly bitter irony that now the place that we might go for relief for therapy for medicine is itself under distress, right? So what does it mean if you run to blow off stress about your climate research, but you can no longer go outside and run because the air quality is so bad or the heat, et cetera. So I think it's important, the one thing I would say about gardens and this is true of, I think the way our practices should be more generally is that we need to remember to see nature and to see life everywhere all around us all the time. It is very easy to get sucked into a mindset where, again, the news is dominating our views of the living world and what we see as fires and catastrophe and death. That is happening. That is true. But what else is true? We always have to ask that question. What else is true? And we can always look around us and see how much left is there to save. I love the title of Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson's new book, All That We Can Save, right? That's really, she wants us to focus on, there's still so much left. I mean, regardless of how much has been lost. And if we make that our focus, that really gives us, I think, the courage and the resources that we need to fight on behalf of what is left. Thank you for that. That makes a lot of sense. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the book, All That We Can Save, SAPL has several copies, so feel free to make use of our collection. I remember also, Jennifer, listening to one of your podcast episodes, and that you brought up an interesting experiment that I believe took place at Columbia University, where students were asked to fill out a survey in this room. And while people were filling out the survey, the room started filling up with smoke. And people were loathed to stop doing what they're doing and acknowledge the smoke. And I thought, you know, living in California, that that's something that Californians can relate to because the fire season seems to be becoming a year-round thing. And, you know, acknowledging that, I suppose, is an issue. Yeah. And specifically, what the takeaway from that experiment was, there were two versions of the smoke-filled room. In one, a person was in the room by themselves, and they were filling out a survey, and they started to smell smoke. And they got up, they opened the door, they went to see what was wrong, they alerted somebody. In the other experiment, they had people in the room who were planted there to just continue like nothing was going on. And it was the social cues from those people who did not respond with alarm that created a kind of a culture of dissociation for the others. That people were more likely then to continue just focusing on the task at hand because they did not want to be the person who stood up and said, hey, guys, I think there's smoke in this room. And I think that the lesson there was very important in that our social cues are what, I mean, if everybody keeps doing the same thing, if we keep acting like this is not an emergency, and we're behaving the same way every day, that itself is what perpetuates this culture of denial. I mean, Kari Norgard has one of the classic studies on this in her book, Living in Denial. And so I think it's an interesting point that actually goes back to one of the perennial questions that people have in climate advocacy, which is to say, what's more effective, personal action or larger collective political structural change? Do my individual actions matter at all? And the answer to that question is really complicated because the answer is yes and no. No, it doesn't make a dent in the entire global system if just you individually recycles or rides your bike. However, if in doing that, you are sending social cues to people around you, that is actually the number one predictor of behavioral change. It is not scientific data and facts. We want to believe that we are rational, and if we just have the correct data, we're going to change our behavior accordingly. Social behavioral psychology proves over and over and over again, that is not true. People make decisions based on much more kind of emotional and social cues. And so I think that's really where the power of those individual behaviors lies is the social signaling that we're sharing with each other. Thank you, Jennifer, for stressing those points. I think one of our audience members, Deborah Murphy, has a question. Deborah, did you want to say something? No, I didn't. Sorry. Okay, that's fine. Jennifer, one of my colleagues had a question along these lines that the term is sometimes served climate anger. And do you think that climate anger could be useful? You did touch upon the subject of anger. So the question is, what do you see as the relationship between climate anger and climate grief? Yeah, that's a great question because again, climate activism is not like the first social movement. So we don't need to reinvent the wheel here. We can look to so many other movements for social justice that have preceded us, that have laid the groundwork and showed the template for what works. So for example, in the civil rights movement, anger and rage were very, very powerful motivators that because really anger often arises from a sense of injustice. So it can be extraordinarily powerful in motivating people to take action. And that has been shown over and over again in social movements, even ones that rise up very, very quickly, seemingly kind of out of nowhere, sort of in response to a triggering event. So I don't want to dismiss anger. I think it is a very powerful emotion. But the question also becomes, how do we keep doing this work year after year after year? And what has concerned me in seeing the sort of spiral that my students will fall into is that that burnout can kick in very quickly. And so if it's just anger or just fear that is motivating you, I mean, even if you could operate in that mind space forever, would you want to? I think that what we've lost sight of is that these movements can actually also be predicated on joy and imagining a world that we desire, not just focusing on what we fear and what makes us angry in the present, but also turning that towards the energy of building a world that we desire. And that's really where I think the joy comes in and that is sustaining. You're going to keep coming back for that over and over again. And that can really keep a movement viable over a longer period of time. So the thing to keep in mind, I think with all of us, intuitively, we sort of know that all of these emotions can operate simultaneously. They're not mutually exclusive. I can feel anger and hope and outrage and despair and love all in the same day. But we just need to be mindful of the lengths to which some of those might actually be hijacking our entire sort of perspective on the issue and making sure that there's enough balance that we are existentially resourced enough to carry on this work over the long term. Thanks for your great answer. Audience members, if you have any questions, you can raise your hand or put questions in the chat. Jennifer, there were a few comments in the chat. I'll read those to you. One from Karen Caparo says, thank you, Jennifer and SFPL. I feel very seen after listening to this. There was also a comment from Catherine. Thank you so very much for the uplifting words and guidance. Yeah, I think, again, that dynamic of feeling seen is so important. And it in a way has been a humbling experience to me teaching this class on climate grief and anxiety because I kind of thought, oh, I'm going to provide all these great resources that are going to help students become these climate warriors and that they can stay engaged over a long term. And what they said is it wasn't any one resource from the class that helped them so much as just feeling validated by a community that that in of itself was the most powerful thing that they took away because they actually felt like I can do this work in the space because I'm not just a single person concerned about this. I am part of a much bigger movement and a much bigger team. So there's just no way to underestimate the power of that validation. So I'm really glad that that participant left that particular comment. It's a really important one, easy to overlook. And there's one more comment from our audience from Geraldine Dowming. So grateful to hear these feelings being addressed in this manner. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. And again, please, I love to keep in touch with people who are interested in these topics. So feel free to follow me on social media, reach out in that way. And I do a deeper dive on all this in my podcast as well. And then of course, the book, The Existential Toolkit for the Climate Crisis will be coming out in about a year. So keep your eyes out for that. And I'll be posting updates on that on social media as well. We have been putting Jennifer's resources and links in the chat if you have access to the chat. And following this presentation today, I will send an email out to everyone who's registered with that information in it. So you can follow up, learn more. The resources on Jennifer's webpage are really fabulous, lots of articles, as well as the podcast episodes. And that will lead you to a lot of other things, a lot of good ideas, how to engage the topics. All right. Well, thank you all for joining tonight. This has been a real pleasure. And John, for your great questions and moderation, I really appreciate it. I hope I get to come back when the next book is ready for the audience. Absolutely. We want you to come back. Thank you, everyone. Thank you also those watching on YouTube. And we hope to see you all in the future. Have a good night, everyone. Thank you.