Power and openness to complication.
SUMMARY
I write summaries for people who have to carefully marshal their effort or attention.
How I met Debbie Chang of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby (and how she met me)
Debbie’s story of staffing a Climate Anxiety Counseling booth at River City Pride in Decatur, Alabama
The complicated ways that different kinds of power and organizing interact in their working, their falling short
An exercise for revisiting your assumptions about that
In just under a week, Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth: How to Live With Care and Purpose in an Endangered World will be officially OUT. Other people besides me have “done the booth” since I started it in 2014, and I want to share one of their stories with you.
Debbie Chang first wrote to me in 2018, interested in the climate anxiety counseling booth. She volunteers with the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, and described them to me back then as “the reason I’m a climate optimist.” She has since added, “CCL's mission is to build political will for a livable world through climate legislation, and we do that by empowering breakthroughs in individual and collective personal and political power. I have personally grown as a leader in my time at CCL, I've grown as a community organizer, and my greatest joy is watching other people grow into their own leadership and power.”
In the winter of 2023, Debbie wrote to me again. She’d recently moved to Huntsville, AL, where only 54% of people think global warming is caused by human activities [source], and thought it might be a good time to try holding some Climate Anxiety Counseling sessions. She had an event to situate her booth in—the first-ever River City Pride Festival—and the local Green Party, who were collecting signatures to get on the ballot, had invited her to share their table. Her sign charged 5 cents (like the Peanuts booth and my own booth) but grew concerned that it might get perceived as a barrier, so added a post-it note that said “actually free!” on her cardboard sign partway through the day. She had decided to let people come up to her rather than call them over, rather than the “carnival barker” method she often uses when she’s tabling with CCL, but did eventually call out a few times, “Would you like to talk about the climate?”
Debbie guesses that there were about 250 people present, including people who were tabling. (About everyone she spoke with appeared to be white, and they were a range of ages—a fair reflection of the crowd, which did hold a small proportion of people of color.) Not counting those who took photos from afar— “at least they were entertained—” five people stopped to talk with her. “I think maybe people thought that the Green Party person and I were doing the same thing, so if they talked to one they’d talked to both.” In between interlocutors, she ate two servings of cotton candy, which she loves.
The first person she spoke with acknowledged that “people need to care more” but moved on quickly. The second person stayed a little longer, saying that she and her sister were “raising our kids to be more aware.” They’d grown up in a really conservative family, and one of the things that gave her hope was “how we’re raising our next generation.” And the third person who stopped, along with her husband who didn’t say much, gave Debbie the impression they’d both been active in environmental and other advocacy work in their younger years, but were taking it easier now. She told them: good work.
“The last two were rough,” Debbie told me. The fifth one, who she told me about first, had been a conscientious objector during Vietnam and worked for the civil rights movement. He told Debbie about this time. For an hour. “He didn’t need any help,” she laughed—-no prompts, no questions, no suggestions. After she said, “It’s been great talking, but I need to go pee,” he stayed and talked to her Green Party tablemate for another half hour. He lived across from the park, he said. “Either he doesn’t have anyone to listen to him, or he needs a lot of listening,” Debbie said generously.
The fourth person who stopped told Debbie, “I get really sad. I don’t want to depress you.”
“I’m a climate optimist,” Debbie assured them. But as they kept talking, Debbie got more and more worried that she was going to leave this person in a darker place than when she’d arrived. About five minutes in she reached across the table and asked, “Can I hold your hand?”
“I told her I admired her strength, what she did. Work that needs to be done”—details I’m not sharing, because this person didn’t give permission—”but I was worried I wasn’t tapping into what gives her hope, rather than saying where I find hope myself.” Debbie also noted that as a relative newcomer to the area, she didn’t know a lot about local opportunities for collective climate or environmental justice advocacy—while she directed this person to the Green Party’s signatures, and made a couple of suggestions based on their area of work, she didn’t yet know what else they might do to connect and act, to find belonging and to be less helpless.
We agreed that when you’re more optimistic than the person you’re talking with, it can be hard to cross that gap, or to check in with them without making it sound like they’re asking them to comfort you. I suggested asking, at the end of her next conversation with someone whose heart is broken by the climate crisis, “Is there something from this conversation that you want to take with you?” And Debbie had the idea to add some gratitude just for stopping at all: “Thank you for sharing and for your bravery.” If you feel like nothing will help, then stopping to talk about it anyway can take some courage.
Debbie told me later, “I think that climate activism has a specific connotation to it. It attracts a certain type of person—usually politically liberal, usually privileged enough to have time to volunteer. The reason I was attracted to your booth idea, and one reason I did it here, is because I think that climate anxiety is a little more universal. Anyone can have concerns about climate. You don't have to be a privileged activist, you don't have to be liberal. I thought that it was a little more approachable.”
CCL is reviewing and updating its mission after a decade of exponential growth, Debbie told me. They count the passing of the Inflation Reduction Act, which is funding environmental justice projects in Alabama, among their victories. I have been pretty CCL-agnostic over the years—their efficacy, and what they were doing with the leadership and power they were building, was not clear to me—and I am so disgusted right now with the current federal administration’s funding of genocidal violence that it can be hard for me to remember what that money might mean to the people of Alabama, and of the other places who might be able to use it to approach cleaner water, safer homes, less polluted air, farming methods that can ride out climate disruption.
I am not a climate optimist (I’m not really an anything optimist) and I would love for the country I live in to be as democratic as it claims to be. “Why should elected officials listen to us?” Debbie asked rhetorically in her notes to me. “Especially decision makers who disagree with us? We need to find ways to build enough power to compel them to at least consider us. And we can't do that alone.”
When we act, we act both with and among others. The relationships among the kind of training and relationship-building to affect policy that Debbie does, the intensely local environmental justice efforts that I have lent my weight to, the federal government’s domestic decisions and its international ones, are as complex as a nutrient web, as full of life and death. Sometimes people say “it’s complicated” as a reason to stop trying to understand something. But complexity is a reason to seek understanding of a system, so that you can also understand your way within it.
QUESTION: What’s an assumption you have about power as it relates to climate change, the forces that cause it, the ways that it affects the systems you’re part of…?
PRACTICE: Revisit that assumption with the goal of complicating it. This could mean looking up laws and regulations, mapping out the different advocacy groups where you live, or even assessing how power operates in your own workplace, organization, or place of study. While you’re doing this, take breaks where (if your body allows) you move heavy objects, punch the air, or do a wall push-up or two—some level of exertion that is not harmful for you. What else would it help you to know, in order to act effectively within these systems?
I wrote a book, LESSONS FROM THE CLIMATE ANXIETY COUNSELING BOOTH: HOW TO LIVE WITH CARE AND PURPOSE IN AN ENDANGERED WORLD (Hachette Go, 2024). This newsletter holds the ways that what's in it has branched out: new reflections, events and workshops, unresolved questions, further reading, ways to connect and act. I'm glad to be here on earth with you.