Katharine Wilkinson: We know when we poll, for example, young people around the world, almost half of them say that the feelings they have about climate change are so big, their, their grief, their anger, their fear, their sense of being betrayed by leaders, they’re so big that they impact their day-to-day lives. And so the emotions are with us, whether we are turning our attention to them, with intention, whether we are listening to them, whether we are following them. And I think that so often our, sometimes unwillingness, often just not having the space to greet them with some compassion and support, can become a source of feeling stuck, feeling overwhelmed, feeling, like the, the heaviness is just too big to move through. And I don’t think there’s any way to get towards bold visions and, and meaningful action without kind of moving through that, that portal of the heart,

Mike DiGirolamo: Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your host, Mike DiGirolamo, bringing you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists, and activists working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet and holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal Land. Today on the Newscast, we speak with Katharine Wilkinson, a doctor of philosophy in geography and the environment, a best-selling author, and the co-founder of the All We Can Save Project, an organization focused on climate leadership, workshops, writings, and solutions to the climate crisis. Wilkinson joins me today to talk about her latest book, Climate Wayfinding, which I have to say is less like a book and more like a journey. The volume takes the reader through personal self-examination through a variety of outlets, journaling, meditations, community exercises, and playlists. It’s an exceptional read for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the seemingly intractable environmental problems we face today, whether it’s the climate crisis or the biodiversity crisis. What it isn’t is a typical feel-good book that just lifts your spirits. It does that, but in a way that is grounded in action. Where it shines is by having the reader confront and sit with the emotions they have about these crises and unpacking what you specifically have to offer in this moment, your talents, your interests, your desires, and encourages you to go and do these things. If you’re in a career transition or you struggle with knowing what to do and feeling like there’s nothing you can do, this is definitely a book for you. Experts often say we have all the solutions we need. We just need to implement them. This book urges readers to take up that mantle and, for me at least, to challenge the leadership of the moment. And as Wilkinson says, “The climate crisis, and therefore the biodiversity crisis, is actually a crisis of leadership.”

Mike: Hi, Katharine. Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. It’s great to have you with us.

Katharine: Mike, thank you for having me on the show

Mike: So this is a book that I, and I dare I say it’s a pretty brave book, in which you address the inner work that it takes to go from a sense of, as you describe it, murky overwhelm into a place of empowerment and joy. That this was the book you have needed at various moments in your journey. What were those moments, for you, and why was this the book that you needed?

Katharine: So human beings are a lot of things, but among them we are meaning-seeking creatures who are trying to constantly make sense of the world around us, ourselves within it, and I think oftentimes we are trying to make sense of what it looks like to belong and to meaningfully contribute. And of course, that is, I think, a, a timeless kind of seeking that humans do. But in this era of climate change and ecological crisis, alongside the other, entangled troubles that we are, are grappling with, I think some of those persistent human questions get maybe bigger, get more fraught, certainly I think get more complicated. And so often for me, those crossroads that I have hit have been about where am I? Where am I going, and what does it mean to be, to be alive on this planet at this time, and to be a generative participant in, in this remarkable web of life? And a lot of those questions had to do with vocation. It had to do with, you know, w- kind of the work that I was doing within climate, environment, and I think as, as I found myself grappling, I often found myself looking for spaces to do that sense-making, that orientation, that navigation with others. And within kind of the, the formal confines of what we might call the climate community or the climate movement, I was finding those to be in pretty short supply, and often going to adjacent spaces to shore up, to renew, to grieve, to see, see a fresh path ahead. And I think that this book would have been immensely useful to me in, in those moments. And I think as a, as a, as a social movement, as an effort for transforming society, it’s essential that we have those kinds of spaces because this work is not just strategic and tactical, it is relational, it is creative, it is emotional, and it is often spiritual. And that is precisely the kind of space and support I often found myself looking for and having a hard time finding.

Mike: Y- yeah, I was gonna say that this book, hits upon something that I do think is overlooked in a lot of climate books and a lot of– and even in a lot of nature books, is that there is something in pretty inherently personally emotional about this journey and, spiritual, if you will. and so there’s a lot of people, and I’ve had the privilege of speaking with some Newscast listeners who have opined to me that they, they wish there’s more they could do or perhaps they’re in a career transition. so what would you hope that this book does for them?

Katharine: Well, I think we’re all in our own ways grappling with this increasingly mapless time, right? And that is quite literally true as the climate crisis unfolds that our literal maps are having a hard time keeping up with the changes that are unfolding, right? As shorelines slip beneath rising seas, as entire neighborhoods or towns or forests go up in flames. I don’t need to rattle off all of the, the litany of ways that literally the, the landscapes and seascapes and skies are, are changing. But that sense that our maps are, are coming up short, I think is true internally, it’s true organizationally, it’s true culturally. the, the metaphor of the maps not working is also very real. And the, the very questions that we hold, I think, Mike, and the ones that we hear often in the space of is there hope and what can I do, I think these are fundamentally navigational questions as much as they are questions of, of action. that they are, particularly what can I do, I’ve come to think of as, to use a fungal metaphor, something of the fruiting body of these bigger, deeper wonderings that, that we often hold. And my hope is that this book, just like the program that it grew out of, creates a space to say those questions are welcome, those questions are incredibly worthy, and we are so capable as human beings of giving each other the support that we need in this time to work with those questions, looking inward with care, looking outward with curiosity, and looking forward with courage so that we can find those next footholds or those next steps forward on the path

Mike: Before we continue any further, I do think that we should acknowledge, or at least this is w- how I feel about it, is that a really large part of this work is grief, is

Katharine: Yeah.

Mike: And chapter three I found, pretty hard f-for me to, get through, because of that. And there’s, questions that you pose to the reader about how they feel about the state of the planet and the state of the environment and cli- and the climate. And, and you ask them to identify, the emotions that come up when they think about this in very specific and pointed ways, not unlike therapy, I would say. and it, I just found that, this is the first time I’ve seen it actually put down on, on, on a, in a book for people to actually look at that and examine that. So I would love to talk about that. What, prompted you to write that? W-was there any inspiration that you took from psychology or therapy, when writing that chapter?

Katharine: So that chapter is called Following Our Emotions, and that language of following our emotions is quite intentional because the emotions are here with us. We know when we poll, for example, young people around the world, almost half of them say that the feelings they have about climate change are so big, their, their grief, their anger, their fear, their sense of being betrayed by leaders, they’re so big that they impact their day-to-day lives. And so the emotions are with us, whether we are turning our attention to them, with intention, whether we are listening to them, whether we are following them. And I think that so often our, sometimes unwillingness, often just not having the space to greet them with some compassion and support, can become a source of feeling stuck, feeling overwhelmed, feeling, like the, the heaviness is just too big to move through. And I don’t think there’s any way to get towards bold visions and, and meaningful action without kind of moving through that, that portal of the heart, essentially. And that chapter comes quite early in the book because I do think that is one of the first things we have to do to, to get our bearings. And as my dear friend Sherri Mitchell says, I think so poignantly, those emotions are not a sign of something wrong with us, but a sign of something being righted within us, that that is actually life in a way rising up and saying, “This is not working, and something better can and, and must emerge.” And so I think it can be painful to come into those emotions, which it sounds like that was, was your experience of, of moving through that chapter, Mike. and I think it is part of why as, as I write elsewhere in the book, that when we are facing a planetary crisis, just like with a personal crisis, we don’t want to go it alone. And so many of us, I think, are going it alone in, in those feelings, even when we’re part of environmental organizations, climate communities. We’ve got, you know, kindred spirits in, in this work. The spaces for, for welcoming those emotions to, to come to the surface, and, and hold them, and find some ways to work with them together, those are in short supply. And, and even if we had every therapist and social worker on the planet turning their attention to planetary-related, e- emotions and And, and even mental health challenges, it wouldn’t be enough. And so we, we need, and, and Dr. Britt Wray has, has argued for this, I think, so beautifully. We need these peer-to-peer capacities, and capacities to, to be with ourselves as well in, in these difficulties. And for me, my own environmental awakening was so deeply entangled with grief and the encounters that I had in, in high school at age 16 with the ecological wounds of Southern Appalachia that, you know, I, I think there’s for me no way to understand the a- the awakening or the movement into action without understanding that emotional context as part of it

Mike: Yeah, I agree with you. I think it’s essential. I think it’s an absolutely, n-necessary part of the process. and yeah, you’re, correct. it was quite painful for me to sit with that. It’s something I’ve been unpacking, for years, frankly, and I’m sure that people listening, it’s something that they’ve been, grappling with as well. There was a really great nugget of information that you put in the book that I just wanted to, highlight for you here. “I often draw back from the question incessantly posed to climate leaders, ‘What gives you hope?’ What gives me a sense of possibility feels so much more tangible, truthful, real.” I thought that was a great way to address the “hopeful question” because I feel like, a lot of climate, l-leadership thought, is, accused of being hopium, so to speak. And you’re, you’re taking that and going, “It’s not really about that. It’s actually about finding, what could we do that’s real and tangible.” so I would love for you to talk about that statement more and explain more what you mean by that.

Katharine: Well, this question, as you know, just comes up all the time, and some days I wanna scream, “I don’t feel hopeful today.”

Mike: Yeah

Katharine: And, and that’s okay, right? It doesn’t actually preclude us, I think, from persevering towards, towards possibility, right? We, we know that the future is not foreclosed. We know that we have passed some, some, some thresholds that are going to mean much more loss than might have happened had society, taken different choices and, and, and earlier substantive action. But we are not in a all-is-lost time, right? We are not all, all is for naught. We are in this profoundly liminal time where peril is present, but so is possibility, where there is trouble and there is also transformation. And I think growing our capacity to hold the simultaneous truths of all of that feels to me like one of the most essential tasks of, of climate leadership, really, in, in a lot of ways. And that possibility really does feel to me like I’m, I’m moving my fingers. Like, it feels like something I can grab hold of because it already exists in the world, right? Perhaps not at the scales or the saturation that we want to see, but it is present. It is present in the climate majority. It is present in the solutions that are already in motion. It is present in the ways we are building community. It is present in so many different, kind of, I don’t know, unfurlings. and that for me feels like, okay, I, I can see it, I can taste it, and I can begin to imagine, if these little baby possibilities, some of them not so baby, but if they really were to grow, to flourish, I can, I can imagine where that begins to, to take us as, as a human species.

Mike: And just to bring this into the, into a real world example, this makes me think of something that I, read in the book. and I’m sorry I’m gonna spoil it for folks, but you, a friend of yours, Jennifer Robinson, who is a human rights lawyer, she, you and her were, I believe, having a conversation in a pub, and at the time she didn’t quite s- connect the dots yet, and I’m assuming this was quite a while ago, connect the dots yet about the climate crisis being a human rights crisis. and she was instrumental in helping achieve that ICJ opinion on climate change. So I would love for you to tell us that story because that seems like to me to be a pretty, prime example of just the thought of a possibility being manifested into reality.

Katharine: I love this, this invitation. so Jen and I were very, very dear friends in graduate school and housemates, and of course, graduate school, is wonderful for many reasons, among them being able to, to have debates with your friends at the local pub. And, and so that’s exactly what we would get into, and Jen would say emphatically, “I am a human rights lawyer, not an environmental lawyer.” And I would say something probably not so tactful at, at, in my early 20s of like, “Well, where are you gonna practice human rights law if there is no planet for those humans to have their rights upon?” and you know, we would go on, we would go on like this. But I think actually those, those debates as, as I think can happen, especially when they are conversations that are unfolding with a lot of, mutual care and, and belief in each other, those planted some seeds for Jen of future climate lawyering that she has ended up doing alongside her work on, on human rights and, and media. And she, had worked with Vanuatu on a self-determination case for the Chagos Islands that gave inspiration to a classroom of law students at the University of the South Pacific who were understandably frustrated with the levers for change available at the national level for these small, low-lying island nations who have had so little to do with producing the problem, but ha- are, are grappling, with some of the very worst and, and deepest impacts from it. And their concept in this classroom was, if the world has a world court, then the world court should hear a case on the world’s biggest problem. And if you had asked pundits or politicians or strategists, they probably would have told you, “Forget it. That is never going to get through the UN General Assembly. There’s just, there’s just no hope.” But this Chagos Islands case had given the then foreign minister of Vanuatu some, some energy, on, on what could be possible in the realm of, of international law, and the students began to build a campaign. A legal team was formed. Jen was among the, the lawyers on that, on that legal team, and they, they started the work. And in fact, not only did, did the case get through the UN and to the ICJ, they ended up seeing an opinion in that case that was significantly bolder than the, the legal team’s wildest aspirations. And I think part of that was the outgrowth of the testimony, country after country after country- country presenting science when they had the resources to, to bring that to the court, but also stories of the ways that land and culture and community and economies are, are already being ripped apart by, by climate change. and I think it’s a, a real indication of both the, the bold visions, that, that, and the, and the sort of sense of, of possibility, however far-fetched some might believe it to be, and of the growing climate majority and this collective climate story that is being told, in all these different manifestations as it plays out around the world, but with this through line of a sense that we are profoundly connected, that it is not the right of a handful of polluting nations and polluting companies to bring the rest of humanity and, and the beyond-human world to the brink, and that we have a responsibility to one another in, in this time

Mike: Yeah, I have to say it was, it was– I, didn’t, I wasn’t expecting to read that, ch- that chapter in the book, and when that came up, it just c- everything clicked, all the accelerators for change, all the, ways in which the small conversations, the seemingly small conversations that we have with each other, even our closest friends, can end up changing things quite dramatically.

Katharine: And, and maybe I’ll, I’ll say, you know, the, I think the pr- probably I could have done it in more, in more artful ways, a couple decades ago. But the power of calling each other in, right? Of saying, you know, the, these debates that Jen and I would have were really my way of saying, “We need You are brilliant and talented, and you have a skill set that this movement needs, and, and would you, would you consider, you know, bringing that, bringing that to bear?” And there are so many people who think in their different ways, “I’m not a scientist, I’m not a policy wonk, I’m not, you know, I’m not a, an activist, so there’s probably no role for me.” And that just could not be further from the truth

Mike: Yeah, this is, and this book really asks the reader to, to really examine what their role could potentially be. There’s, so many different, journaling prompts that are in this book that I…

Katharine: Very many journaling prompts.

Mike: Yeah, and it’s, I think that’s, I just want to emphasize the importance of doing that because when you write things down by hand on a piece of paper. You might be surprised about what you can write. Because you can, your imagination really works differently when you’re actually forced to, put your thoughts onto the page, especially by hand. something I wanna talk about really quick is that you, and I really appreciate this, you mentioned that, changing culture and changing narratives is, the accelerator for change that you’re drawn to the most. It’s the one that I’m

Katharine: Here, here we are doing it, some might say.

Mike: Yeah. we’re doing it, so to speak. and you mentioned that you kinda gave it short shrift in the past, so I kinda wanna know, what changed your mind? So to speak. But there was a, a James Baldwin reference where he says that you can’t, you can, if you can shift someone’s perception by a millimeter, you can change the world. so I just thought that was something that I’d like to highlight. But yeah, I was wondering if we could talk about this. What changed your opinion on this?

Katharine: I don’t- this might be just me, so I won’t speak in universalisms, but I think sometimes I have had the, I don’t know, the, the inclination to think that things I am naturally drawn to or naturally good at, or naturally feel kind of like home, are maybe not the most important or the most valuable. That, but, like, things that somebody else is doing and good at are more important, and, and, and more significant in this work. and that is part of why there’s, there’s another chapter on offering our superpowers and, and honoring that the very things that give us that sense of kind of, you know, inner, inner fire in the belly power and, and deep joy, that, that those are indicators of our gifts and our talents that, that we can bring to, to this work. But I also think that it was a, a really powerful thing for me when I finally encountered the work of Donella Meadows, who was a systems theorist and wrote what I think of as kind of a sacred text in a way. it’s, it’s, it’s a little wonky, but, but it’s sacred about the leverage points for change in a complex system. And it’s some of the things you might imagine, right? Changing the rules in the form of policy, shifting incentives, but she puts them in rank order, and the most powerful, she says, are paradigms and our ability to reshape and transcend paradigms. And by paradigms, she means kind of our shared values, our shared perspectives in society about what matters and doesn’t, what’s possible and not, and, and so often stories are the vehicle for those paradigms, right? The narratives that, that, that we participate in, in, in our words and in our deeds, those are carriers of paradigms. And it, it left me quite invigorated about the role of cultural change, which can be diffuse, it can be slippery, it can be hard to measure. And so often it is the very thing that makes those other leverage points, possible, those others ac- those other accelerators for change possible. And in fact, I think what we’ve seen certainly in the United States is what happens when you have policy change without full paradigm shifts, right? That then the policy change can be all too easily unwound. so it’s not to say one is needed and the other is not, but it, it left me with a, a real conviction that shaping culture and narratives and, and using those as vehicles for you know, for our, our collective, our collective values is, is such powerful and important work. And in fact, I think, I think perhaps the, the fossil fuel industry and, and, and, and broader polluting industry and powers have seen the importance of those things perhaps more clearly for longer than, than the environmental movement has

Mike: Hello, listeners, and thank you for tuning in. As I always like to mention, Mongabay is a nonprofit news organization. We rely on the funding from listeners like you. So if you’d like to support the podcast, head to patreon.com/mongabay to become a monthly sponsor of the program. If you want to find where you can purchase a copy of Climate Wayfinding, go to climatewayfinding.earth or click on the link in the show notes.

Mike: Yeah. This makes me think of a conversation I just had on this podcast with a former CDC officer. His name is Neil Vora, and he was on here discussing the recent outbreak of Ebola in, the DRC. And his, like, arguably his big takeaway was we need to change hearts and minds, and law and policy will follow. And he was imploring people, essentially to take pandemic threats more seriously. And I think his argument is pretty strong that we currently don’t. So he was also saying what he always does is he tries to look at, “What am I good at and what can I contribute?” And I was in the process of reading your book at the time, and I’m like, “This is like what Katharine is talking about with Climate Wayfinding.” and he’s already doing that in his own expertise, and I don’t think he probably imagined himself doing that many years ago when he first started his, his journey to becoming a doctor. so it’s just interesting the way that we, that this manifests for different people. but yeah, that was the dots I connected on

Katharine: I find that, I find that really fascinating, Mike, because the, the origins of the Climate Wayfinding program that then became this thing with pages began, and, and back to your point about the importance of, of free writing and putting our pen to paper, I did some writing back in the, the days of the, the hunkered-down days of the pandemic. I was doing morning pages and writing about, what is the deal with this question, what can I do? And our punch-list answers to that question are not working. How have I, in my own experience, in my, my own, at that time, you know, more than two decades of, of, of climate journeying, how have I been working with that question and working my way into answers? And I realized that there was a set of practices that I had been using, both consciously and probably subconsciously, or, or intuitively, that had helped me not come up with a definitive list of answers, but continue working my way into answers again and again and again over time. And it sounds like, probably he was using some of those, those same kinds of practices. And, and that is what ended up forming kind of the backbone of the experiential learning journey that is Climate Wayfinding, and then also the, the through lines of the book.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. something else I just wanted to point out before I, I tackle our next topic is that…So much of this book, what I felt was that it’s forcing the reader to, to basically no longer sit idly with the overwhelm and the sort of malaise that can come over a person when you don’t know what to do, but every day keeps passing and nothing is changing. And it’s asking you to sit with that discomfort, as it were, and really examine what your place is. and I think that is an essential part to actually, actually changing this system that we currently find ourselves in. And I don’t think it’s, I don’t think it’s a, necessarily a large of a task as people might think it is. It could be as simple as talking to your elected officials and just making that a habit instead of just becoming increasingly frustrated with them.

Katharine: Mm. Yeah, I think the, the, the opportunities for moving from I don’t know what to do into I am doing are, are vast. And, and sometimes it is the vastness of those things that can create that sense or, or simply add to that sense of overwhelm, right? That the problem is so big, we are so small, and then there’s eight million different things we could each, we could each do. And I think it is why the work of discernment, of filtering, of honing, of, of creating some clarity around what of this work is mine to do, right? To, to take… So many of us have been filled up with information and information and information, and we have had very little support on orientation. What does all of this information mean for who I am, what I might then step into in my personal life, in my professional life, in our shared public or civic life? and, as you say, that doesn’t have to be, you know, massive and, earth-shattering, right? these can simply be, the very things that make sense in the context of the lives we are already leading

Mike: I want to, unpack this question that you, it’s not really a question, it’s more of a, line of questioning, is where you, write this in the book, and I’m gonna quote you directly. You say, “I first articulated the idea that the climate crisis is a leadership crisis in 2019 and proposed the need for approaches to leadership that are more characteristically feminine and more faithfully feminist, and I further honed and unpacked those ideas in the opening essay begin of All We Can Save.” I would love to discuss this. Can you describe those ideas for us here?

Katharine: I’ll give you the, the context out of which that, that writing came, which was that from early 2016 through late 2020, I was part of the work at Project Drawdown. so I joined that team to do the bulk of the writing on the original Drawdown book, essays after essays about climate solutions, and then shepherded a, a second follow-on publication, The Drawdown Review. And what’s very clear in that work is that solutions are not the limiting factor, right? We have an abundance of technologies and practices, and in fact, many of those solutions have gotten so much better since I was sitting, at this desk writing about them day after day in 2016. And we can point, I think, to a variety of factors that have prevented those solutions from, from moving forward. but among them is leadership. It is both an issue of too much of, of the leadership of our society, the influence, the power, the resources being marshaled to keep us in this status quo system that is untenable for, for life, and too little leadership being marshaled to transform it, right? and when I was looking around, even within the climate community, I was seeing very persistently what we might call kind of patriarchal norms at work, certainly a privileging of the things that our society codes as masculine, and a disregarding of things it codes as feminine. And I ended up writing about the need for care, the need for creativity, the need for community building, these dynamics that, that I was seeing, frankly, in entirely too little of in my own experience of, of moving through, through the world of, of the climate movement and climate solutions at, at that time. that it’s not just, you know, the rational mind, the prefrontal cortex, and sort of the technical fixes that we can cook up, that we need, we need these other dimensions of our, our ways of being and knowing so that action in the world comes from a place of really rooted wisdom and is grounded in, in community.

Mike: Yeah, I, really, resonated with this statement. and as we were chatting earlier before we began this interview, the, great American writer and essayist bell hooks wrote about, wrote about this, in her book All About Love, and actually some other books as well, is that there’s this culture of domination, as it were. and when I read that in that book, it just clicked for me and I was like, “That’s exactly what all of these extractive type, industries and, and, ways of living seem to be doing, is, dominating.” And I, I just wonder how to change that. this book may provide some answers for us, but I’m always looking at how can we shift away from a culture of dominance into a culture of care and community. so I was wondering if you had any more thoughts to, elucidate on that.

Katharine: Well, what a blessing bell hooks was for, for our species. and I, I couldn’t agree more about the culture of cultures maybe of domination and the, the paradigms to, to harken back to that. I actually just this weekend read Rebecca Solnit’s new book, The Beginning Comes After the End, and in it she makes the case that we are, actually far from done, but well on our way of shifting some of those paradigms and cultures of domination and disconnection to, to something that is more about all of life mattering, and, and all of life being deserving of, of, of care and, and tending. And in fact, she says that it’s been, you know, so successful that we have this very virulent backlash against it, right? That, you, you only get a backlash if you have actually genuinely made progress, and she traces back through, you know, through the decades to, She focuses primarily on, on 1960 to today. and so I found that, I don’t know, I found that invigorating. I found that useful to acknowledge, that even though we have quite a ways to go, we are actually, we’re actually well into it, if, if, if you will. that we are building on extraordinary work by so many movement leaders and progressive thinkers, and that we should honor that and take that as, you know, fodder that’s, that’s now kind of well in, into, into the, into the hopper, if, if you will

Mike: Yeah. that’s certainly, encouraging, encouraging thought to hear from Rebecca Solnit, so I’m, I will check out that book as well. we’ve, we’ve covered a lot, of your book here, but is there anything else that I haven’t mentioned that you want to highlight for people who are thinking of, using Climate Wayfinding?

Katharine: Well, maybe just to, to pick up on one thread of, of where we just were, I found myself in the last chapter of the book, first of all, grappling with how to end a book that is, by its nature, not about something that ends, but a, but a set of, of, of practices and ways of being that we must continue through our lifetimes in this very liminal world. And I was writing about my great desire for climate healing to be motivated not primarily by wanting to fix something, which I think in its way is part of that remnant of domination and, and disconnection, but by wanting to love something. And my journey, over the last few years with the end of my father’s life left me holding a sense of that power, and the way that love operates beyond an individual being, beyond an individual body, and as the, the, the f- this force actually that we are all, a part of, that we are called in by, and that is, I think, the greatest opportunity at hand. And what I would say to anyone who maybe is finding themselves at a crossroads or holding some big, unwieldy questions that they’re not sure where or how to work with, this book is exactly the place to bring those, and it is certainly a book that you can read solo, but it is really, really rich when it is held in community. the, the program of Climate Wayfinding is a community-based experience, and I took some of the, the richest threads of that and wove into each chapter, a reading group agenda, a plan to come together and gather and deepen. and that doesn’t need to be a wild undertaking. That could be three friends, three neighbors, three coworkers, folks who might also benefit from taking this, this navigational journey, with one another

Mike: Katharine Wilkinson, it has been a pleasure speaking with you, and thank you for being generous with your time, and I’m happy to hear that, your book tour went well. So thank you so much for speaking with me today. I really appreciate it.

Katharine: Thank you so much, Mike. And if folks want to learn more about the book or the program, that is all on our website at climatewayfinding.earth

Mike: If you want to find where you can purchase a copy of Climate Wayfinding, you can also find a link in the show notes. As always, if you’re enjoying the Mongabay Newscast or any of our podcast content and you wanna help us out, we encourages you to spread the word about the work we’re doing by telling a friend and leaving a review. But you can also support us by becoming a monthly sponsor by going to our Patreon page at patreon.com/mongabay. Mongabay is a nonprofit news outlet, so when you pledge a dollar per month, you’re making a very big difference and helping us offset production costs. So if you’re a fan of what we do here, go to patreon.com/mongabay to learn more and support the Mongabay Newscast. But you can also read our news and inspiration from nature’s frontline at mongabay.com or follow us on social media. Find Mongabay on LinkedIn at Mongabay News and on Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and TikTok where our handle is @mongabay and on YouTube at Mongabay TV. Thank you as always for listening