Green Builder Media ESG specialist Victoria Muharsky talks with climate activist and author Kate Schapira about her Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth, how eco-anxiety shows up differently across communities, and why collective action such as rent stabilization can relieve it.
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Victoria Muharsky: Hello, I am Victor, ESG specialist at Green Builder Media. Today I have with me Kate Shapira, climate activist and author of lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling booth. Let's go ahead and jump into some questions on climate anxiety. So, okay, how would you explain climate anxiety to someone who is unfamiliar with the term? So when I first.
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Kate Schapira: Started talking with people about climate anxiety and feeling it myself, I might be remembering this wrong, but I don't think I'd ever heard the term before either. It does turn out that other people were already using it, but I didn't search for it or reach for it. And now it's almost like a professional field for mental health practitioners and others.
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Kate Schapira: But what I meant when I started thinking and talking about it was a powerful and, I guess, haunting fear of what climate change is bringing to the earth. And also, I would say, a discomfort with the uncertainty of what that will be. And I think that's still mostly what I mean. So again, like a fear of what climate change is bringing to the earth and the people of the earth, and then also in a discomfort with that uncertainty, what will it be not wanting, you know, wanting a certainty that we we can't have right now.
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Victoria Muharsky: Who is the predominant group that is prone to feeling eco and how does that manifest? And are you how are you seeing eco anxiety play out in real life?
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Kate Schapira: Yeah, I mean different people, different differently circumstance. People feel climate anxiety differently. So if you're somebody who has lived through a disaster, a blood or a terrible fire, a wildfire, you might fear that desire, that disaster happening again. And then some people might also fear things that have never happened to them, like having to leave where they are or having to struggle in ways that so far they've been able to avoid.
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Kate Schapira: You know, I remember talking with a yoga instructor who was worried about the life that her kids and her grandkids would have. And based on the way that she described her life in the present, it seemed pretty clear that, like, it was a pretty pleasant life. She had a lot of the things that she needed. She had a lot of options.
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Kate Schapira: And so the thing that was fearful for her was losing those options and her kids lives being, like, less pleasant and open than she wanted them to have. And that's also an area, this area of fear of things that haven't happened yet is, I think, an area where some of these people's racism or their class prejudice kind of jumps out.
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Kate Schapira: So they're like imagining that they'll have to defend themselves from people who have less than them. But like, why would those people have less? And then some people kind of fear that same defensiveness. They fear that climate impacts will give people who have more power than them, like another excuse to target them or exploit them, or put them in a position where it's even harder to avoid that exploitation.
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Kate Schapira: And I think people sometimes also fear that the pathway that they were hoping for are planning for out of their struggles will be less open to them because of climate change. So a field that they plan to work in won't be as as plausible or as successful or as viable, or that the better life for their kids that they have been working for and suffering for.
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Kate Schapira: Maybe you won't be able to come to pass because of climate impacts. And then some people fear for people who are closer to the front lines of climate disaster than they are. I remember talking with someone who, like her sister, was in the Caribbean when a big hurricane was coming through and she couldn't reach her. And then I think some people get very stressed out about like feeling ashamed, feeling guilty, feeling like they're not doing enough in the face of the scale of the problem.
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Kate Schapira: So like, I hear a lot of, like, I'm scared that I'm, you know, that I'm not doing enough. I'm only one person. And those are often people who are trying to make changes on the level of their household, or people who are sort of feeling bad for not doing that. They have heard that there are things that they could be doing.
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Kate Schapira: They know that they're not doing them and they're feeling anxiety about that. And so you can just from those examples, you can kind of see how climate anxiety or eco anxiety is another name, for it might prompt some people to try really hard to keep things the same, you know, the same as they are right now, and sort of lock themselves down into that other people.
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Kate Schapira: It might prompt them to like depression or despair or very intense guilt and shame. And then it might prompt still other people to try to organize, to take care of one another, which is what happened to me.
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Victoria Muharsky: And I wanted to talk about your activism efforts. So they've notably included the creation of the climate NZ counseling booth. What inspired you to develop this initiative, and how do you think it has helped people to cope with their worries about climate change?
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Kate Schapira: I started the Climate Anxiety Counseling booth because I was feeling a ton of climate anxiety myself, and all of the conversations that I was trying to have about it with people felt like dead ends. We weren't it didn't feel like we were communicating. They were confused, I was frustrated, and I wanted to know if anyone was feeling this way, and also if they weren't worrying about climate change, what were they worrying about?
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Kate Schapira: What was on their mind. And then I thought this sort of like, vaguely funny, vaguely non-threatening structure might make this very difficult topic easier to talk about. You know, it looks like the the booth that Lucy has in peanuts, it's literally made out of garbage, like it's cardboard and a plywood table that I found on the street. And I thought maybe people would say, oh, like, this is this is so small.
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Kate Schapira: It's so it's almost nothing. Maybe I can, you know, not the feeling, but the thing, maybe I can have this conversation with a strange person who's sitting at this booth in the street, and what I kept hearing over and over, and I do continue to hear this, was that people thought helpless. They felt isolated. They felt alone. And then so talking with me became an early step for them in breaking that isolation.
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Kate Schapira: And then when I'm having these conversations, I also ask people questions to kind of help them reveal what they know about where their emotions in response to climate change are coming from. You know, are they watching the news? Are they having conversations with people? All those things that I spoke about before, but also where those feelings might lead them.
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Kate Schapira: And for some people that does, I think, allow them to recognize their agency, right. The choices that they have in this moment, which can feel like we have very few choices. And then as I you know, you asked about the activism and organizing that I've done kind of more generally. And as I listen to more people, I also started to recognize that the Climate Anxiety Counseling booth was good for taking that first step out of isolation.
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Kate Schapira: But it's really not a good vehicle for collective action. It's these small one on one, or maybe like 2 or 3 people at a time conversations. So it can be the beginning of something collective, but it really can't be the continuation of that. And as I got more involved in supporting environmental justice efforts in Providence, that's when I started sharing that information with people who stopped or even offering them a way to get involved right then and there.
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Kate Schapira: So just a thinking about simple ways for people to become involved and to feel their agency and to feel their power in the face of this crisis.
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Victoria Muharsky: I'm glad you brought up the power behind the collective, because I'm really interested in learning more about the journey, especially with the upcoming release of your new book, lessons from the climate NZ counseling Booth How to Live with Care and Purpose and Endangered World. How you got from providing this direct support to individuals and how it got to this larger, incredible resource that's going to be reaching a much broader audience.
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Kate Schapira: So in addition to those kind of specific like community organizing connections, again, as I was listening to more and more people, I was hearing that they were feeling like very stuck on the how of responding to climate change. So, like how to connect with other people to take action, but also how to let go of their visions of the future, how to imagine and build new visions that were more livable for more people.
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Kate Schapira: Right. Like, how do you do that? And again, like, you know, these conversations at the counseling booth could help people find their paths into climate action kind of 1 or 2 at a time. But then how could that guidance be more widely distributed, and what would make people feel like they could transform their lives together on purpose to meet climate change in a real way?
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Kate Schapira: And so I reached out to people who had already done that and could tell their stories about it. I talked with people who work in policy. I talked with people who understand, like indigenous fire and water science, just people who have made this work of caring for the living systems that were all part of their life's work. And then I also started sort of codifying some of the questions that I'd been asking people at the booth just anyway.
00:09:17:04 - 00:09:38:18
Kate Schapira: And I started making them into these exercises that are in the book, questions to ask each other for reflection and kind of like self-understanding, but also shared understanding of how you're feeling, what you want to do about that feeling, what provokes that feeling, where it's where it's tending, and then practices to do to practice some element of climate action.
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Kate Schapira: And I also kind of wanted to emphasize that collective action, political action, climate action is more than some people imagine. So it can be a sit in at a politician's office for sure, but it can also be like watching the kids or walking the dog of the person who is doing that sit in. Or one person can research the green housing development.
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Kate Schapira: Another person can use what they found to speak up at the public hearing. Again, I want to stress this idea of climate anxiety is a is a state that a community can alleviate through these changes that people in it make or call for. And and one major path to that alleviation, I think, is rent stabilization. So like if you own your home, you can make changes to that home to make it more compatible with the local ecology or lower emissions.
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Kate Schapira: But as a renter, you're not necessarily able to make those moves. Right. And we also know that people need more housing much more. But if there's no ceiling on what people can charge for that housing, then the same people who can't afford housing now won't be able to afford it when it's built. And that also ties into climate migration, climate, gentrification.
00:10:51:23 - 00:11:10:24
Kate Schapira: If people have to leave where they are, are they going to be able to afford to live where they have to go? Who gets to live where? Who gets pushed out? And being housed is such a big piece of whether people can not just weather climate disaster, but also whether the long term strains from a climate crisis in other injustices that they're facing.
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Kate Schapira: And if you are a homeowner and you're not vulnerable in this way or not as vulnerable in this way, this is an excellent way for you to get involved in climate action actually is for you to push for stable, rent stabilized rent in the place where you live. If it has a lot of people who rent living there, that is a way for you to reduce climate anxiety in the place where you live.