Dr. Wilkinson said in order to face climate change, “We will need people power as abiding and tenacious as dandelions.” Photo by Viridi Green on Unsplash
The author shared her unique approach to climate action at a Bell Museum program
By Cecilia Wallace — Environmental reporter
Bell Museum visitors gathered on April 30 for author Dr. Katharine Wilkinson’s talk on her book “Climate Wayfinding: Healing Ourselves and the Planet We Call Home.”
The book is a guide to navigating climate anxiety and action through personal essays, poetry, art and more, using journaling prompts and conversation guides to facilitate discussion.
To start her talk, Dr. Wilkinson shared a video about climate wayfinding, describing how the process starts with the questions we hold.
Dr. Wilkinson’s “question” arose when she attended an experiential school, which focused on hands-on experiences, for a semester growing up. She showed the audience a note she wrote back then that said, “Want to help the world. Be connected with the world. Change the way I live.”
“I found myself in this pinch of having fallen in love with this ecosystem and feeling absolutely heartbroken about the gap between how we can do things and how we seem to do things,” Dr. Wilkinson said. “That’s the paradox of calling— that we have certainty and uncertainty within the very same breath.”
She held on to this question, wondering how she could make a change in this “mapless” world, until she began completing the creative self-help workbook “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron. As she wrote in the book, she found herself asking what could be better ways to ask “What can I do?” and what worked in her own life. Her answer was a series of practices that kept leading her to the next answer, eventually culminating in the development of the “five-step anthology.”
The five-step anthology translates overwhelm, isolation, doubt, ache and burnout to clarity, connection, possibility, action and renewal. Over time, this anthology spread, and she and her team trained over 100 educators on it.
“One of the facilitators recently ran a retreat at a small college in New York State, and one of the students said, ‘I think I learned more about climate change in three days than I have in three years,’” Dr. Wilkinson said.
Within the anthology, beyond its transition from overwhelm to connection, there are three pillars Dr. Wilkinson shared, inspiring individuals to take climate action: look inward with care, look outward with curiosity and look forward with courage.
To fully understand these pillars, Dr. Wilkinson had the audience participate in activities with our neighbors.
“Part of this is about creating space and support for the heavy emotions that we feel about the climate crisis,” she said. Then she had us turn to our neighbors, introduce ourselves and say, “I’m glad you’re here.”
This activity stressed that although we made the world we live in and must work to fix it, community is a key part of the problem-solving process.
“We are wired to orient, to navigate, to weave stories, to find our way, and I take so much hope in the capacities that are built into our brains and bodies that there is this arrow within us that we can find strength in and follow,” Dr. Wilkinson said.
For the event’s final activity, Dr. Wilkinson had the audience do their own “sound and movement of power and joy.” People lifted their hands in the air, danced and cheered as one.
Following the event, there was a book signing, a postcard activity and time to connect with fellow climate-concerned neighbors.
“We will need the kinetic power of enormous, elegant wind turbines and solar power from the transfiguration of light,” Dr. Wilkinson said. “We will need the legislative power of governments and the informational power of the media. We will need people power as abiding and tenacious as dandelions.”
More about Dr. Katharine Wilkinson’s book and anthology can be found on her website.
Cecilia Wallace can be reached at celiadw016@gmail.com.
