A climate and community workshop at the local library, and what I wish we’d done differently.
SUMMARY
I write summaries for people who have to carefully marshal their effort or attention.
-Running a workshop with the stated goal of identifying community abundance
-An exercise for doing that, in theory
-The ways that we did and failed to do that within the workshop itself, in practice
-A reading from Donella Meadows, and a livestream from Lauren Jordan and me
Earlier this month, the Rochambeau Library in Providence hosted me for a climate and community workshop. We were doing this in the wake of a screening of the Climate Future Film Festival, and Lee and I had adapted a couple exercises from the book, based on what she thought would be useful to library patrons: about fourteen people in this case, ranging from their early 20s to (he informed us) 94 years of age. (This will be important later.)
Lee had led viewers in “Lifting and Letting Go” from Chapter 6 after the screening, so we did that one again. Some of the people at the workshop had also been at the screening, and two times is more of a practice than one time, right? We followed that with an adaptation of “Declaring Your Abundance” from Chapter 2 that Lee and I had created:
QUESTIONS:
What do you do with other people in response to climate change—the effects you know about, the effects you feel, the things that cause it?
What are some community or collective responses to climate change that you know about, but don’t do?
What are the obstacles to you doing the things you don’t do?
How could you help each other overcome those obstacles, or find another path to action that suits you better?
PRACTICE: Make a plan to either do one thing with one person who’s there (“Come with me to the wind farm hearing / wetland replanting / rent stabilization rally”) or support one other person while they do a thing (“I will pick up your kids from school / your dad’s prescriptions / takeout for your dinner while you go to the hearing”) and exchange contact info if you don’t have it.
This exercise involved placing sticky notes of different colors (which is what they will mummify me in when I die) on a bulletin board, and sharing answers to the questions aloud. It also involved me and sometimes others repeating those answers loudly, because P, who was 94, was saying that he couldn’t hear what people were saying, that he couldn’t follow what was going on.
At the beginning of the event, he asked if I would take my mask off so he could hear better. (Some of the other people in attendance were masked, some weren’t; some responded to my request to say everything louder for him, some didn’t.) At first I said no, but as the workshop went on, I started taking my mask off to repeat to him what others had said, then putting it back.. This made me nervous, and sad; that I hadn’t prepared a good way to make the workshop accessible to him made me feel ashamed. Later, during the “make a plan” section, I sat with him to try to make one, but he had a better and clearer time with one of the younger attendees, who sat by him and invited him to mainly tell stories rather than converse.
Meanwhile, the other people present had semi-ignored the with other people and community or collective parts of the questions, maybe because I hadn’t emphasized them strongly enough. I definitely didn’t stress the “support one other person” part of the practice, because I was flustered by P’s situation. People did walk away with some shared plans, and I think they mostly had a fine time. But all the way home I was thinking about the dance that we could have created and didn’t.
If everyone, not just me, was wearing a mask and pulling it down only to speak, then pulling it back up.
If everyone who took a turn speaking had stepped over to P, said their say loud enough for him and the rest of the room to hear, and then stepped back to their seat.
If more of us, including me, had seen and approached the openings to practice the thing that the workshop was about within the workshop itself.
Despite all the time I’ve spent doing this connective and collective stuff with people, I am still thinking about dancing more than I’m dancing. I think this is true for many of us who are trying to meet change with change. We do know what might be good to do with and for one another, but we aren’t in the habit—not just of doing it, but of marking the moment to do it, the way to do it, when it appears. This really is what I hope Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth will help people practice, and get better at: the how of “community,” of “action,” of “care,” of “transformation.” A how reached by missing a chance and catching it next time, which is also a dance, I guess.
MEDIUM READING: Donella Meadows, “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System”
LONG VIEWING: On Friday, 3/22, at 2:45 Eastern US Time, I’m going to talk with Lauren Jordan of the One-Year Sustainability Challenge for about an hour. (Please click on that link if only to see an extremely adorable drawing of Lauren and me.) Lauren has some questions for me, and we’ll do a couple exercises from the book on-stream as well, if you’ve been wondering how they work. The chat will be open! Please join us!
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.