Send me a voice note!
Action: Send me a voice note w/ your climate questions for my podcast! 🗣️ 🎙️ | Facts + Feelings: How to Grow from Crisis 🚨🌱
Welcome to We Can Fix It, where we tackle the climate crisis with facts, feelings, and action. Written by me, climate scientist Kim Nicholas.
Hi friends,
Greetings from the train to Paris! I have work there next week, and on the way, Simon and I are taking advantage of the Swedish holiday weekend to see where my parents lived in Heidelberg when they were first married, and try their all-time favorite restaurant (no pressure!!).
This month, we’ll look at ways to grow better through struggling with crisis; and I’ll ask you to send me your burning climate questions by voice note, so I can answer them on my new podcast!
Action: Send Me Your Climate Dilemma
(& you might end up on my new podcast!)
This month, your high-impact climate action is to send me a voice note. 💚
Specifically, a voice note asking for advice on a climate dilemma you’re facing. I’ll try my best to answer your question on a new podcast I’m working on.
The first podcast season will focus on the highest-impact actions within your Five Climate Superpowers:
1. Citizen: Elect climate champions
Fed up with climate laggards in office in your town/region/country? Or have a success story to share about getting a climate champion elected?
2. Professional: Cut workplace emissions in half by 2030
Does your workplace have climate goals in line with science? More importantly, are they following them? How would you even know what’s legit??
3. Investor: Switch to a fossil-free bank
Have you managed to move your money out of the big bad banks? Or have inertia, bureaucracy, and logistics gotten in the way?
4. Consumer: Let go of frequent flying
People find this one of the hardest actions. Where are you at with flying less (or going flight-free)? Ready to try to get started? Or were you surprised by anything when you skipped a flight?
5. Role model: Build a strong climate community
Are you feeling alone in the climate crisis, or do you have a strong, fun group of Climate People around you? Have questions on finding your peeps, or tips on what worked?
In your voice memo about one of the above areas, please let me know:
Where are you eager to take climate action but feel stuck? Tell me why.
Where have you tried to take climate action and ran into roadblocks? What happened?
What climate action success stories can you share to help others?
Share your question with me by clicking here:
Thanks so much for sharing, I’m excited to hear from you!!
Facts + Feelings: Better after Crisis?
What if things could be better on the other side of major crisis? Not just “bouncing back” to the same old baseline, but “bouncing forward” to a new and more meaningful way of being?
This is the idea of posttraumatic growth. It’s been around psychology for decades, and I think it offers important lessons in the climate crisis.
Growth can result from “the potentially transformative power of suffering” if:
A major crisis breaks your core beliefs.
In response, you can ruminate, cope, or struggle.
Through struggle, especially with support, you can achieve positive transformation.
Posttraumatic growth can help you function better than you did before, with more focus on what really matters.
It starts with crisis
The process of posttraumatic growth involves a “seismic event,” a crisis big enough to disrupt core beliefs and “shatter the individual’s understanding of the world and [their] place in it,” as psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun wrote.
Core beliefs help us understand the way the world works, guide our decisions, and provide meaning and purpose. Cracking them is deeply distressing.
Response to crisis
From this shattered foundation, there are three options:
Anxious, repetitive thoughts: a natural response to the crisis, but can be paralyzing and lead to a decline in function (the opposite of growth).
Coping: using strategies to “bounce back” to the previous baseline. This is sometimes called resilience. It implies recovery, but no growth.
Struggle, which can lead to posttraumatic growth.
Note that growth is not inevitable, but it is possible in response to crisis. Tedeschi and Calhoun speculate perhaps people with the highest coping capacity might experience little growth, because they don’t struggle enough!
Paths to support growth
More recently, Tedeschi wrote in Harvard Business Review about five ways leaders can help others achieve growth following crisis. Slightly reworded, they are:
Learn: face the truth of the trauma and rethink identity, worldviews, and future plans.
Share: make sense of the trauma by talking about what’s happened, its effects, and your struggles and concerns.
Service: “people do better in the aftermath of trauma if they find work that benefits others”.
Regulate emotions: tolerate uncertainty, observe and acknowledge difficult emotions, and use practices like movement and mindfulness to increase agency.
Create narrative: Develop an authentic story that lets you accept the trauma, see new priorities and possibilities, and meaningfully craft future chapters.
Dimensions of posttraumatic growth
As you struggle, and especially if you have the supports above, you might experience the benefits of posttraumatic growth:
Personal strength: self reliance, ability to handle difficulties, acceptance, “I’m stronger than I thought.”
New possibilities: new opportunities, interests, and life paths; “I can do better things with my life,” “I can make a change.”
Improved relationships: closer to others, more able to count on and accept needing others; more compassion; prioritizing relationships; express emotions, “I learned a great deal about how wonderful people are.”
Appreciation: for the value of life and each day, and prioritizing what’s really important, thanks to noticing what might have been taken for granted before.
Spiritual growth: better understanding of and engagement with existential matters or faith from reflecting on life’s big questions of values and ethics.
In sum— there’s the possibility that our struggles in the climate crisis can lead us to positive transformation. Hang in there, friends!
P.S. Don’t forget to please ask your climate questions and….
Parting Tidbits
Recent news
I spoke to NPR about high-impact climate actions, as part of a Short Wave episode on the Climate-Kid Question:
Book Recommendation
Blue Skies, by TC Boyle. Painfully dark and painfully funny climate fiction about the clueless Americans ignoring nature, each other, and their own agency as climate disasters become their daily life, and the shrill, myopic, and ineffective scientists who try to stop them.
xo,
Kim
I really like your "growth after crisis" drawing and description! It's important to paint a picture of a better future. It's easy to describe all the bad stuff but we should be "selling" our vision of a healthy and more equitable society.
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Your first bullet list item... "A major crisis breaks your core beliefs." Agreed. It seems to me that humans will not deal with a climate crisis until it is their very own climate crisis. Sure, people have been dealing with climate crises for all of history, but someone else's climate crisis is not a crisis for me...so my core beliefs stay intact...for the time being.
I am reminded of an analogy... When I was studying permaculture and organic farming some years ago now, I became interested in soil microbiology...I was studying farm soils and native soils and compost heaps. I did a *lot* of hot composting which basically transforms organic waste into soil through a fairly well-defined succession of microbial communities, and I spent a lot of time studying these communities under the microscope. In general, in a well-managed composting scenario, the goal is to try to keep the microbes in the pile healthy, well-fed, watered...and *aerobic*...because anaerobic microbes often produce chemicals which are toxic to plants. So one goal is to make sure the compost pile has plenty of air/oxygen. This is typically accomplished by turning the pile, thus introducing oxygen and causing more aerobic microbe growth and therefore suppressing anaerobic microbe growth. As an aside, aerating soil is one of the major sources of the greenhouse gas CO2 in conventional tilled agriculture because tilling the land introduces oxygen into the soil which encourages more aerobic microbe growth (as you know, we aerobes inhale oxygen and exhale CO2).
Back to my story... As I said, turning the pile introduces oxygen into the melange and causes aerobic microbes to grow, and they eat the organic matter in the pile. The reason this is good for plants has to do with the different ratio of Nitrogen and Carbon in most microbes (i.e. bacteria) when compared to plant or animal cells but that story is for another time.
So if the aerobic microbes have lots of food, water and air, they thrive and reproduce and their numbers vastly increase and this leads to over-population. Aerobic respiration produces heat, so just like having too many people in a room can make the room become uncomfortably hot, the pile gets too hot for certain microbes and they get replaced by microbes which are more heat-tolerant. This cycle repeats until the pile is too hot and there are too many microbes competing for the limited resources of air...and they start to die off, and as the pile cools down, they are replaced by anaerobes who don't require air/oxygen...which by the way poisons your compost pile.
So... I have asked myself many times... Why don't the aerobic microbes agree to limit their consumption and thus save themselves from heat shock, suffocation, starvation, and a massive die-off?
Now you can (try to) make the anthropocentric argument that we humans are more likely to make better "decisions" than microbes...but I'm not convinced...and I don't think the fossil record is particularly convincing either.
A major crisis breaks your core beliefs. Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. Sometimes it's just too late...but one thing is certain...microbial life will be thriving long after human beings are forgotten.
I don't see this as a "well, we can't do anything so let's just give up" position. Rather I think it is good science. We humans try to solve problems because we evolved to try to solve problems...but we probably shouldn't ignore the likely outcome here... Without a major crisis, core beliefs will not change. We may not be able to shorten the timeline of our inevitable extinction (that darned fossil record again lol) by working together to mitigate a global climate crisis...but the journey is just as important as the actual outcome, n'est pas?