Climate Change and Happiness

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**Season 5, Episode 1: Youth and Intergenerational Connections with Sarah Newman and Larissa Dooley of the Climate Mental Health Network** Sep 12, 2025
Show notes

image credit | **Juliane Liebermann**

**Season 5, Episode 1: Youth and Intergenerational Connections – With Sarah Newman and Larissa Dooley of the Climate Mental Health Network**
Thomas and Panu were joined by Sarah Newman and Larissa Dooley of the Climate Mental Health Network. Sarah discussed her long-standing personal experience with eco-anxiety, and how it influenced her life choices and led her to establish the Network. Larissa, Director of Research and Programs, first learned of climate change's psychological effects during her graduate studies; the increasing frequency of wildfires in California later motivated her to devote her research to addressing the mental health impacts of climate change. The group discussed how Panu’s insights on climate emotions and grief have been influential on the Network’s programs. Thomas emphasized the importance of sharing personal journeys and highlighted the inspiring nature of stories that led to the mission-driven work many individuals undertake in response to climate threats. See the show notes for helpful resources for teachers and parents from the Climate Mental Health Network.
**Links**
Climate Mental Health Network
CMHN Resources:
Climate Emotions Wheel
Toolkit for Middle School Educators
Climate Change and Kids' Well Being: A New Guide for Parents and Other Caring Adults
Future Climate Collective
Future Council Documentary
**Transcript**
[on vacation]

Season 4, Episode 27: On Raising Anti-Doomers with Ariella Cook-Shonkoff Aug 15, 2025

Show notes

image credit | Annie Spratt Season 4, Episode 27: On Raising Anti-Doomers with Ariella Cook-ShonkoffIn this enlightening episode, Thomas and Panu sat down with Ariella Cook-Shonkoff, a licensed therapist and author of Raising Anti-Doomers: How to Bring Up Resilient Kids Through Climate Change in Tumultuous Times (2025). Ariella shared her journey from motherhood amidst California wildfires to writing a book that empowers parents to foster resilience in their children. Panu Thomas each reflected on their own parenting, and enjoyed hearing of events on Ariella’s “eco-timeline” like her childhood outdoor experiences in Connecticut and her opportunity to meet one of her idols, Jane Goodall. Join us and learn more about Ariella’s positive approach to parenting in the climate era. LinksAriella Cook-ShonkoffSelected Writings2025 Raising Anti-Doomers How to Bring Up Resilient Kids Through Climate Change and Tumultuous TimesSalon 2023 Grieving together, and also apart: A Jewish American wrestles with identity, belonging and traumaGrist 2021 Here’s how to talk with your kids about climate anxietyGlamour 2019 I’m Not a ‘Natural Mother’—And That’s OkayTranscriptTranscript edited for clarity and brevity. If you appreciate the Climate Change and Happiness podcast, be sure to preorder Thomas Doherty’s new book, Surviving Climate Anxiety: A Guide to Coping, Healing, and Thriving available at an online bookseller near you. [music: “CC&H theme music”]Introduction voice: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness (CC&H), an international podcast that explores the personal side of climate change. Your feelings, what the crisis means to you, and how to cope and thrive. And now, your hosts, Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala.Thomas Doherty: Hello, I'm Thomas Doherty.Panu Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. This is our podcast, a show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about issues like climate change, changes in the planet, changes in the weather, and changes in our lives and in our families. That’s our territory to talk about and Panu and I get to meet a lot of people in the world and collaborate with people. And today, we have a person that we both know and I'm really proud to introduce a special guest.Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: Hello, my name is Ariella Cook-Shonkoff, everyone. I'm a licensed therapist, both an art therapist and an eco-therapist based in Berkeley, California. And most recently, I have a book coming out called Raising Anti-Doomers: How to Bring Up Resilient Kids Through Climate Change in Tumultuous Times.Doherty: We're really glad to talk to Ariella. She’s someone we've both interacted with. Ariella has been in an eco and climate conscious therapy group that I did some time back. It’s a personal pleasure for me to see colleagues writing books and putting themselves out. I was able to look through Ariella's book and we'll talk about that. But it's nice to see that this work is getting various treatments in people's lives and people are moving forward on this and in therapy. So, a lot of good things are in the pipeline here. Panu, do you want to get us started? Pihkala: Warm welcome, Ariella, also on my behalf. Lovely to have this chance to discuss with you and I really love the wide range of content in your book. Before digging deeper into that, we'd like to ask you something about your journey to becoming a person who wrote this kind of book. Would you like to share something, how has it been with you and the modern human world?Cook-Shonkoff: Absolutely. Well, I guess this journey began for me back in 2018 when I came into motherhood and around the time that wildfires were intensifying in Northern California. I had just had my second daughter and I was returning to work after maternity leave. There were nearby wildfires, and the air was thick with smoke. It was this kind of combination of going back to work and sitting in an office with clients where no one was really talking about what was going on outside and also the vulnerability I felt inside leaving my child under these circumstances. There’s a sense of safety, even though, where I lived, we were fortunate, and we didn't have direct impacts. You feel like, am I safe to leave my child? Can I really separate from them? And isn't it strange that no one's talking about the elephant in the room right now? So, that brought me on a journey into writing about it and I'd already been freelance writing for some time about motherhood mostly, but I started to really focus more on climate and parenthood. It's eventually led into this book project and the book that's finally coming out this year.Pihkala: Thanks for sharing that and there's a lot that I can also personally resonate with. My kids are just a couple of years older than yours. Also in Finland, what Lindsay Galway has called ‘climate of silence’ was quite heavy and also silence around the emotional dimensions of those issues. Can I still ask you if you look back to your own childhood and youth, what role did the modern human world play for you, or did it have a role back then?Cook-Shonkoff: I love this question, Panu, thanks for asking it. Yeah, it had a starring role in my childhood, actually. I grew up in a small town in Connecticut that felt pretty rural, and I spent a lot of free time in the woods behind my house, with the kids in the neighborhood, by the creek, I was out. And it was a value of my family, so my parents took us on hikes. That was pretty common for us. I was just outside a lot, in the modern human world. I loved animals at an early age. Actually, funny enough that you asked this question because in writing the book, I realized how this is reintegrating my life in adulthood in a way. I even went through a period of activism in my teenage years to do with animals and environment. So, it's really been a common thread.Doherty: What kind of activism were you involved in when you were younger?Cook-Shonkoff: Well, I was the only member of my family to become vegetarian at age 14 when I learned a bit more about factory farming. I started writing then for junior and senior year op-eds in my local paper, just a couple. But I then went on to become one of the presidents of the environmental club, and we did various things, such as picking up trash around town and eventually going to marches—well, maybe was more in college, now that I think about it. But yeah, we held Earth Day events in high school. We were active. This is really cool. I don't know if this is in my book, but Jane Goodall, her organization, Roots and Shoots, was this youth environmental program that opened in my town, Ridgefield, Connecticut. I was interviewed on the panel with her and got the privilege of meeting her in this interview and it was really cool. So yeah, there was a lot. Doherty: That's great. We’ve done this eco-timeline kind of idea where you can trace your life. So, writing this book really does fit onto your timeline. Cook-Shonkoff: Absolutely, yeah. As I went deeper into this work, I realized how it harkened back to my early years. And just my emotional experience throughout this, even listening to Greta Thunberg's words, it conjured up in me some part of my younger self that felt like her in a different way because it was a different time but felt indignant. Like, what are grown-ups doing? Why don't they care more? That’s a really good point about that eco-timeline. I love that tool, Thomas. So, thank you for introducing that to me.Doherty: Yeah. Okay, so here's a standard question you'll probably get a lot going forward. But with Raising Anti-Doomers, I love the title because it really puts out a message. It puts out a call-to-action kind of thing of all the ways of thinking about this topic. How did it coalesce into this idea of raising anti-doomers? I know that's a big question, but what comes up for you about that?Cook-Shonkoff: It's interesting because you don't know about what it's like to write a book until you get there. And I will say that as I got to the end of my book, in what's probably now the last chapter, I was talking about how we can do this and what's this positive frame for how to raise kids in this way. It's almost ‘Teflon-like,’ to be strong and resilient and to be able to withstand the bumps and the turbulence and all the uncertainties that exist in the world right now. I'd love to take credit for selecting it for my title, but I can't because it was plucked by my editor who had that foresight. And I actually love the title. I wasn't sure at the beginning. It's a strong title, and I think it's great in the end. The scope of the book is broader than climate, which I also appreciated heading in that direction. It wasn't my original intent, but that's how it developed. Pihkala: Of all the rich contents in the book, if we would start by helping the listeners to get some overviews or what would you say are some of the fundamental principles or messages in the book?Cook-Shonkoff: I'll mention that there's some graphics in the book, some illustrations, that I had a lot of fun conceptualizing, but I think really helped the reader go through the book. One being the parent identity spiral. So, it's like suddenly you're a parent and kind of what happens along the way. I'm not going to go through all the steps, but what happens along the way to become an engaged parent, focused on social issues, including climate. Like, how do you kind of stay engaged. I think that's an important one. I think that the main takeaways, if I were really to boil them down to three simple messages would be that number one, it starts with you. It starts with the parent and being willing to go into the darker emotional places and really grapple with their feelings, not to avoid or make excuses, but really to go there and be able to kind of find ways to regulate themselves so that they're able to co-regulate their kids. So, I think that's number one, it starts with you. And number two, I would say is to do something and make it sustainable and not be so perfectionist about it or well, is this really enough or I've got to do all of this for it to be worth it. It's so easy to talk yourself out of any action, but it could be so small. I'm sure we could all come up with some examples, but something around the household. Maybe it's just not getting food out from restaurants in the takeout packages because it's the single-use plastic and reducing that, or maybe it's on a grander scale or writing a letter or going to protest, but it could be really small. I think that's important to recognize. The third point is really to keep coming back to the source of what replenishes you, what builds resilience. I have a lot of self-care exercises in the book. There's that self-care acronym, which is kind of a riot, but that was for my own personal development of it. I came up with this and was like, oh my gosh, maybe this is something I should throw into the book, because it's kind of fun. But whatever it is, spiritual, creative, physical, that really grounds you and brings you back to yourself so that you can reset when you get off the rails, which can happen. Doherty: Yeah, did you create the ideas for the book with your own children first or did some of these ideas just come out of your family life? I know with the book that I worked on, the heart of it was really my training that I did with the public and different slides and different images that were resonant. And then of course you have to explain it all in the book. But did it start with things that you had figured out with your kids? Cook-Shonkoff: I'd say it was a smattering here and a smattering there because I work with kids in my practice so there's some from there, some from family life, some that literally evolved alongside the book or came out of the pandemic because that was a time I was reorienting and doing things differently. Doherty: Yeah, I've been looking through your book and now I'm more attentive to the figures because you've talked about them, but maybe we could talk about this one and literally unpack it. The pellet, the climate emotions pellet—when I saw that, I thought, that’s a really kid friendly image. Let me not say more, let me have you say what the climate pellet is because I think listeners may appreciate it. Cook-Shonkoff: Oh my gosh, it's such a funny one. If you remember dissecting owl pellets in school, which we certainly do in the States, I don't know about where you are, Panu. Doherty: So, owl poop basically. Cook-Shonkoff: It's the regurgitated pellet. An owl eats different animals whole, like these tiny moles or whatever they are. But they have all the bones in the fur, and everything goes down into the stomach and eventually they regurgitate these pellets that have the bones and the fur. Anyway, I did take inspiration from childhood in different ways, and this is after I came up with the concept of the climate emotions pellet, but my child literally brought home an owl pellet and dissected it for homework on the kitchen table. So, this really does happen. But the idea being that there's a lot of different feelings that we're experiencing to do with climate change or many of us are experiencing and it's a mess. It's like a hot mess that's complex and we don't know what's what. And so, I like the idea of imagining these tweezers, like a tool in the science lab, and you're plucking out emotions and trying to distill, okay I'm looking at the illustration now. Okay, this grief that I'm experiencing or what about the awe that I sometimes feel when I'm out in nature. There are all these different feelings like the anxiety that I feel about the state of the world. And so, trying to distill those emotions, it’s like that emotional granularity idea. Then, once you can identify them and know what they are, there's some relief in that. I think it can be really overwhelming to have an unidentified mass in you. And then it's the idea of metabolizing emotions too, right?Doherty: Oh yeah, for sure. What do you think, Panu, this idea of regurgitating? That must have some resonance in all the different research you've been doing lately.Pihkala: Yeah of course. The Climate Emotions Wheel in which I cooperated with the Climate Mental Health Network is of course one very practical tool for observing various emotions and being able to name them even roughly. Emotional granularity is a growing thing discussed in climate emotion research. I think that's great to provide resources for people to do that. In the book, you're also looking at major questions about life and the world that people are asking, of course, for children and young people, that's part of human development. But being a parent, well, first of all, becoming a parent is quite a cosmic event to borrow a wording from Bayo Akomolafe, this very interesting thinker who has also written on the ecological crisis and becoming a father and many things. And then also realizing that kids will have to face existential challenges which can evoke existential questions and emotions in parents also. Perhaps that might be the next topic. Would you like to say something about these developmental challenges and big existential questions?Cook-Shonkoff: Yeah, that's a big one. You're holding, as a parent, some of these existential realities of where we're at and for yourself, first and foremost. But then, when you have a child or children more innocent, kind of vulnerable lives. I think it can invoke more fear, but it also can reall…

Full show notes at the publisher

Season 4, Episode 25: “Queer Brown Vegan” with Isaias Hernandez Jul 18, 2025

Show notes

image credit | Jennifer Marquez Thomas and Panu were joined by environmentalist Isaias Hernandez, creator of Queer Brown Vegan. Together, they explored the profound impact of identity on environmentalism, discussing how personal backgrounds, cultural heritage, and lived experiences shape one's approach to climate issues. Isaias shared his journey from growing up in Los Angeles as a first-generation immigrant to becoming a voice in the climate movement. The conversation delved into the intersectionality of race, identity, and environmental advocacy, and revealed the challenges and micro-aggressions faced by diverse students of climate science. A key take away was the importance of finding and claiming your unique place and style, not just taking in science and research but making it your own and sharing it in your own voice. Tune in to discover how embracing your identity can empower you to engage more deeply with environmental challenges.LinksIsaias Hernandez Queer Brown Vegan on InstagramTeaching Climate Together Web SeriesIsaias and Panu DiscussionClimate Mental Health Network Grief ResourcesAnimation: The Dance: Living with Eco-anxietyTranscriptTranscript edited for clarity and brevity. [music: “CC&H theme music”]Introduction voice: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness (CC&H), an international podcast that explores the personal side of climate change. Your feelings, what the crisis means to you, and how to cope and thrive. And now, your hosts, Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala.Doherty: Well, hello. I'm Thomas Doherty.Pihkala: And I’m Panu Pihkala.Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. This is our podcast, a show for people around the world who are thinking, and feeling, and acting deeply about climate change and environmental issues, as well as their connections with nature and the planet. Of course, that includes connections to our bodies, ourselves, our families, and our communities. And so, we're starting with this provocative question: What does it mean to be happy in the modern world and what does it mean to be happy in an era of climate change and then we go from there. And today we are really excited to have a guest with us.Isaias Hernandez: Hi everyone. My name is Isaias Hernandez and I'm an environmentalist and the creator of Queer Brown Vegan, an educational media climate platform.Doherty: Yeah, and you might have heard of Isaias if you're at all thinking about eco and climate issues, but Panu and I are familiar with his work and he's coming in from LA. So, we're just going to have a conversation today, personal and professional, much as we do. Panu, do you want to get us started?Pihkala: Warmly welcome, Isaias, also on my behalf and lovely to see you again. We've had the pleasure of cooperating collaboratively with the progress of eco-anxiety and climate emotions and that's been wonderful. We often start this podcast by asking something about the guests' journey towards the place and identity where they are now. Would you like to share something about how you became who you are now, especially in relation to environmental issues?Hernandez: Yeah, my passion for environmentalism is quite unique. Growing up in Los Angeles, as a first-generation immigrant kid, my parents were actually farmers from Mexico. So, for them, they actually had much more rich ecological relationships with the land than myself, I would say. And, when people ask me when did you realize you were an environmentalist, I actually didn't really identify with that word. I grew up watching Nat Geo and Discovery Channel, seeing biologists, conservationists, and all these amazing scientists around the world traveling and talking about their work. But I always told myself, I don't think it's possible for me to really do that because my situation is different and they're the true experts. They've studied the field, and they got the degrees. So, I think that got my curiosity of having parents who always wanted me to get a good education, they said we don't care what you do, and we just want you to follow what you truly want. So, I had the privilege of saying that my parents didn't care where I went for college, they just cared that I got a degree and that I actually chose to study what I want and that I end up getting a job. I think it was in college when I was learning environmental science that I actually started to get more passionate about the subject and realize this is really what I truly want to do, and this is actually what I love. But one thing I felt the disconnect in academia is, how does this really relate to my lived experiences, but also the experiences of my other colleagues in these classes. We don't really relate to that, and I think that when you're graduating college, you have this illusion of I got my four-year degree and I'm going to work at one of the biggest green environmental NGOs (non-governmental organizations), and I'm going to become this famous scientist. And that really wasn't the case for me. I actually worked in a research lab in academia, and I absolutely did not enjoy my time doing it. I studied lizards and evolution and ecology, then I did food system work a year later for my senior thesis. I think after graduating college, I realized that social media was a way for me to actually delve into telling my own stories without feeling like I needed to be a scientist or a policymaker. I'm just an individual talking about these issues. And I think it was really unique to me that during that time there were barely any environmental creators online, but also people with lived experiences and the academic degrees that I had that were really getting to that. So, I would say I didn’t really fall into the role of an environmentalist until I was maybe 23, when I started to realize, I do think I'm an environmentalist. During college, I kept thinking, I’m still learning about how to be an environmental scientist, so I don't really know what that actually means or if I have to go to a master's program for that.Panu: Yeah, thanks for sharing that. That's fascinating and a great example of how different backgrounds can still give resources for people to be intimately engaging with these issues. We have a video in your “Teaching Climate Together” series where we discuss climate emotions and the process model of eco-anxiety. There you tell a bit about the emotional dimension of this journey and also in relation to your college experiences. Listeners, I warmly recommend that video. Would you like to share just a bit about that since our podcast is so heavily geared towards the emotional dimension?Hernandez: Yeah, absolutely. The “Teaching Climate Together” web series is a media project and initiative under the flagship of Queer Brown Vegan, where it was actually inspired back in my early days of social media when I would do infographics in 2019 of deconstructing climate words. So, it would be like, what is eco anxiety, what is climate grief, what is climate doomerism, and after a while of doing that for the first few years of my early career, I had a lot of followers asking if I could create videos on this. I said, I'm not an expert and didn't coin these words. I'm not a mental health researcher. Why would I put myself in these spaces when I don't have that background? And my team was actually very interested and kept saying, why don't you just interview the experts that already exist in these spaces and create an interview or like a web series show about it? People would watch it. And so that was actually the thing that got us to do “Teaching Climate Together.”In our specific episode, which is the fifth episode, we were looking at the emotional dimensions of climate change in response to generations of people. And it really quite shocked me that there's very limited, and I think Panu, you can agree to this, but when you Google online for any videos around climate anxiety or emotions, there's barely any videos. There's a lot of recorded digital webinars and panels, of course, which are absolutely needed. But when you look at the personal relationships of saying to myself, I'm going to use myself as the client, Panu is like the therapist in a way, but also the research and the expert, how do we add a personal story to it? And it was really quite shocking how many people were messaging me after that episode and saying they really resonated with the fact that you got someone who was in the older field of the industry that's an expert, but you got a young person who understands some of these words and these experiences and you wove them in together to make sure that whoever's watching this video, whether you're someone younger or older, can relate to either Panu or they can relate to me. Those are exactly the type of conversations a lot of young people today are having. It's like we feel embarrassed to talk to older people about these types of relationships or issues that we're having, or we sometimes feel almost neglected by the systems that it's almost like the adults are saying, you need to figure it out. When, in reality, it's not the truth. Adults are telling us that we actually want to talk about this because we are also experiencing eco-anxiety. And I think that really shifted the relationship of how young people see older people. Yes, I have eco-anxiety, but you also have eco-anxiety. And that does not make us less than or less human. It actually makes us more connected to the issues that we're trying to address.Doherty: Yeah, excellent. Yeah, so many themes that are coming up that we can explore today. Just to follow up on the last point, it is a stereotype that younger people are more concerned or more aware than elders. When you look at the research from Yale Climate Program, there's a fairly equal percentage of people who are alarmed or concerned about climate in the population, whether they’re young or old. Likewise, there's a pretty equal percentage of dismissive people among young and elders as well. So, it's a stereotype that doesn't serve us because I've known many elders who have devoted their whole lives and careers to environmental work, and they have been doing this for ages and they feel incredibly deeply about these issues. Bringing the two ends of the spectrum together is super powerful. But because of technology and our social structures, we tend to be divided by social media and the way our culture is. That’s a larger story we can't get into, but I think one of the themes today is finding your place. It sounds like, similar to a lot of people, you had to struggle to find where do I fit in. And you were either lucky enough or capable enough to find a niche for yourself and then it goes from there. Once you start, there's a synergy. I had a question—Queer Brown Vegan, I would call it your brand or your platform, is obviously provocative. It seems maybe less provocative now than it did a few years ago, but could you say a bit about that because it seemed like that was almost like a manifesto or something that you were putting yourself out there.Hernandez: Yeah, it's funny because traditionally, as a scientist myself, that comes from academia. I tried to claim Isaias Hernandez on Instagram, but it's already taken. So, I kind of struggled already to establish my public figure name. But I think the Queer Brown Vegan name actually came back in 2019 because during the time I remember in higher education, I was told never to talk about my identity and that race didn't matter. But then there were a lot of microaggressions that I would experience not just from my professors, but from my lab mentors or my lab grad students would say certain things to me that I just felt so visually uncomfortable. And I think this is something that’s a shared experience with a lot of people, whether you're a marginalized person in academia. There's certain things that were said to me that just never sat right with me. Like I had a professor once call me Mario, even though he knows I'm Isaias and the other guy who’s Latino that's on the other side of the classroom is named Mario. And it was just like those examples of dehumanization in academia. Yes, it shouldn't matter that someone misnamed you or said the wrong thing and said sorry, but it does matter because there's this ultimate sense of respect that needs to be given to students too, just as we give professors their accolades and their respective titles. But I think Queer Brown Vegan really came out of the fact that I just wanted to be very visibly like yes, I'm part of the LGBTQ community because in science people would be like, is he gay or what is he? People would always want to ask, and I just felt like what does it matter, I'm a scientist and that's really what I came here for, not for you to discuss what my identity is. And then second was the brown just being like yeah, I'm a proud Mexican person and I navigate the world. And I think the vegan part was actually funny. It's just that I had gone vegan just recently after I graduated college and then when I was coming out with the brand name, I was just like queer brown green or queer brown earth and I just said, you know what, Queer Brown Vegan just weaves in together, but it's very dynamic in your face. And I think at the time, it represented a lot of my early 20s and mid 20s. Not to say it doesn't represent me now, but I think it's always really interesting because people look at me and ask, well, what are you and then, they look into my work and they're like, you do climate education, that's very interesting. And they learn about my background, and they learn about the science that I have and everything. And they're like, okay. So, I think for me, like young people today, we're just very experimental on how we want to present ourselves to the world, but we're also not too serious because we recognize that social media is just a form of art for us too.Panu: Yeah, that's fascinating. Warm thanks for sharing that and doing that. It reminds me of this book, which is nowadays quite widely read in environmental humanities, Nicole Seymour's Bad Environmentalism, which sort of challenges some of the standard tropes and frameworks of communication in the environmental sphere. It has tended to be too wide and sometimes too serious so, a certain queer playfulness, if we call it that, is very welcome for environmental communication. Also, it reminds me of the connection between education, communication, and advocacy. And that's a sort of language challenge because we don't usually use the word education for adult audiences, even though there is the subfield of adult education, but people tend to think of children and young people. But if we are trying to positively influence someone that's technically education, but for adult populations, it's perhaps voiced as communication or advocacy. But for my part, I see the work that you are doing as a sort of resonance of education, communication, and advocacy. If you want to speak to that, please do. But I also wanted to ask about this brown dimension and Latino environmentalism and your social media, which by the way listeners is very popular, there’s over 120,000 followers on Instagram, for example. So, I've gotten a window into Latino environmentalism which has been very educational for me. I wanted to ask you about your experiences of this broad and diverse field of Latino environmentalism.Hernandez: Yeah, I think one of the reasons for being able to just lean in more to my identity is recognizing that Latinos are one of the most marginalized groups af…

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Season 4, Episode 24: On Grief and Mourning for Animals with Panu Pihkala Jul 04, 2025

Show notes

image credit | Tina Kuper Season 4, Episode 24: On Grief and Mourning for Animals with Panu PihkalaThomas learned about Panu’s recent research with Elisa Aaltola on animal ethical mourning and how this relates to feelings people have about pets and companion animals, farmed animals and wild creatures. Like many of our emotions about nature and environmental issues, natural feelings for kindred species are often ignored, suppressed or disenfranchised (not recognized and given standing) in human-centric society and economics. Ways to enfranchise grief for animals includes being honest and bearing witness, creating art and rituals, and sponsoring community activities. Being open about your moral commitments for fellow animals, and your love, care and empathy, can bring a sense of relief, honor, rest, peace and grace. This can free up your energy and commitment to change society's practices about our fellow creatures. LinksA Tribute to the The Passenger Pigeon – Memorial in Wisconsin’s Wyalusing State ParkArt Exhibition: Kindred Spirits: Honoring Animals in Death Amanda Stronza: Animal Memorials How to cope with the death of your petPihkala, Panu, and Elisa Aaltola. 2025. ‘Animal Ethical Mourning: Types of Loss and Grief in Relation to Non-Human Animals’. Frontiers in Veterinary Science 12 (April):1526302Pihkala, Panu. 2024. "Ecological Sorrow: Types of Grief and Loss in Ecological Grief" Sustainability 16, no. 2: 849. TranscriptTranscript edited for clarity and brevity. [music: “CC&H theme music”]Introduction voice: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness (CC&H), an international podcast that explores the personal side of climate change. Your feelings, what the crisis means to you, and how to cope and thrive. And now, your hosts, Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala.Doherty: Well hello, I'm Thomas Doherty.Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. This is our podcast, a show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change and other environmental issues and different tumultuous times that we're all living through. This is a podcast where we have asked this provocative question of what it means to be happy in the modern world or what would it mean for us to be happy in the modern world. Often to do that, we must go through barriers to happiness, and we have to deal with things that are not happy so we can figure out how to make sense of them or how to make peace with them. And that's kind of where we're at today. Panu, as you all know, if you've been listening, is always studying different interesting things about emotions in the world. And one of the areas that Panu has been working on is grief and loss regarding animals and other animals outside of the human animal. So that's what we're talking about today. So, I'm going to be interviewing Panu about this research. So, let's jump into it. Panu, you’ve been doing some research and we'll put information in the show notes about feelings of loss and mourning and ways to be ethically mourning loss and grief related to non-human animals. So, what kind of things have you been discovering there?Pihkala: Yes, and dear listeners, if you think of your life history, almost all of us have at least some relationship with other animals. For many people, there's been some kind of pet or companion animal in places and families where we have lived. Some people have been raising animals for various purposes and there may be emotional connections in many ways or various hobbies or practices. Some animal species in the Western World or industrialized world are often in positions where there's strong emotional connections between humans and them. Dogs and cats are prominent, but there's a lot of other companion animals and pets. The bond between horses and people who ride or take care of horses can be very strong. So, that's one dimension here and for many people, losing a close animal has been an important lesson in loss and grief because the lifespan of many animals is shorter than the human lifespan. So, depending on where you live and what kind of privileges one has, it may be that the death of a dog or cat is one of the first death experiences in close family relations. And in grief research, the focus has been on humans who are dying or suffering, but for many decades it has already been recognized that losing pets or companion animals evokes strong emotions in people, which shouldn't come as a surprise. This topic has actually been a contradictory and difficult one in many societies because there may be assumptions that deeper grief should be related to human loss, for example. So, there's been people who understand you when you talk about loss and grief after losing an animal close to you. And then there may be people who really can't resonate with that and that often leads to what is called ‘disenfranchised grief’ in research which is grief that is not given a public voice or validation. How about you, Thomas, when you think of your life history, does this resonate?Doherty: Well, I think this research is really helpful. I'm thinking about it and this whole idea of disenfranchise means it's not recognized. We don't talk about it and so we don't have language for it. But it's helpful for me to see what you've been studying because you talk about grief that we feel about pets and animals that are close to us, like cats and dogs and household pets, but then also wildlife. You link it to grief about wild animals which could be whales or extinct animals, wild condors, orangutans, or any kind of animal and the grief we feel when they're threatened with extinction, or their habitats are gone. So, that's a big thing that people feel. And then there’s this more contentious area of farmed animal grief because most of the animals on the planet right now, pound for pound, are livestock and farm animals. It is one way humans have transformed the planet. We have so many thousands of chickens and cows and all this stuff around the world. And that's just a really touchy topic on a number of levels ethically. So, it's really courageous to do this. I can touch on it on a number of levels, my own concerns about wild animals that I value and love. I've had pets, I've had a dog for many years that I had as a young adult that I had to put down when he was old and had illnesses and that was very sad. I have an ancient cat, Lakshmi, who's going to be 21 this year and she's just an old person in our home that's been here since she was a kitten. So, we're preparing for her end of life. So, that's a really personal level. And in my family, my two sisters are both very strong animal rights advocates, so we have interesting discussions about veganism and various things. My sister, Sherry, was a zookeeper and worked in zoos for a number of years and she also worked at a place called the Center for Great Apes in Florida which was a refuge for chimpanzees and orangutans that had been used in movies or kept as pets. It was essentially like a rehabilitation old folks home hospice for these large wild animals. And I think people don't even realize that these kinds of places exist for elephants and orangutans. There's a whole subculture of people that are working for animals. So anyway, I think it's huge. When you talk to people or do the research, what are some of the surprising things that you notice?Pihkala: Yes, thanks for reflecting on all that. I also met Lakshmi when visiting Portland this spring. She's old, but still going. And in my family childhood, we also had a cat so that's a personal resonance. And as you said, there's three case examples in this article. There's actually two research articles coming out, and one is already out there. It's called “Animal Ethical Mourning: Types of Loss and Grief in Relation to Non-Human Animals.” So, there's a lot in the title and it’s written together with Elisa Aaltola. Elisa is a philosopher and animal rights activist and a very empathetic person who is well known in Finland for her public work around animal rights. So, she's both a researcher and a public figure. And the three case examples have some similarities, but also differences in dynamics. And this pet and companion animal loss is luckily becoming more enfranchised if that's a word in English. So, there's more voice and recognition for that in many places, but not everywhere. Sometimes I think that the depth of those losses is still not recognized. So, how strong the emotional bond and connection may be and sometimes it's a double loss in the sense that the animal companion has before helped the human companion in facing different stresses and hardships. So, when losing an animal, one is also losing a source of support. And that may happen of course when we lose close persons, but that's something to be recognized. This wildlife grief ties with what is called ‘ecological grief’ or ‘environmental grief’ and what we have been discussing often in this podcast. Climate change related sadness and grief which is often called climate grief is also closely connected with that. In research, literature, and art-based work around ecological grief, many different animals are featured and discussed. There's some very profound artwork which at the same time tries to work against disenfranchised grief in relation to wildlife grief. And it may sometimes be challenging to think of ways to do that mourning in community. But people have been trying to find creative ways like memorials or some kind of rituals or performances. And I've been part of that work in Finland. Like this annual theme day of Remembrance Day for Lost Species on November 30th. So, there's a small but growing international movement for having an annual team day for remembering other species and those which are extinct. There's some memorials people have set up. I think one of the most famous is the memorial for passenger pigeon in the United States and that sort of thing. The third case example of farmed animal grief may be very challenging for people who feel it because of the social contradictions. We all know that there's differences in opinion about meat eating and vegetarianism, for example. And still, people are living in the same cities and visiting the same grocery stores. And one of the things I realized when doing this research with Elisa and engaging with the literature and people's experiences was learning more about how challenging it may be for people who feel this kind of grief because then they have to try to find ways to process that in communities where there's disagreement over these issues.Doherty: Yeah, let’s hold that thought on the disagreement. I'm just thinking about the art piece there. When I was working on my book, I did a little research on art and nature. There's a whole movement of people that do art regarding animals. And there's an artist, Amanda Stronza, who makes these alters to animals. People do that around roadkill animals, animals that are killed on the side of the road. I think the writer, Barry Lopez, had written a famous essay about that years ago. So disenfranchised means unrecognized, not given any rights. When we're driving down the highway, and we see a deer or a raccoon or a bird or a coyote killed on the side of the road, we just pass it by. There’s a social denial about that being an issue. Like someone's going to come and pick up that animal and take it away, but we're not supposed to mourn for it. We're not supposed to be sad for these animals. At least that's what society will tell us. But, of course, we do feel sad, and children feel sad and it's poignant that children have to learn that you're not supposed to notice this, you're supposed to just drive by. Whereas if it was a dog or a cat, then that's different. We have different rules. I've seen whole traffic stop because a dog was in the road because people don't want to hurt the dog. It's just fascinating how we have a hierarchy of different rights for things like that and obviously, if someone was actively torturing an animal that wouldn't be okay, but if it's hit by a truck, it's okay. So anyway, it's confusing so this gets into all that kind of stuff. Pihkala: Yeah, totally. Thanks for voicing that, Thomas. For children and young people, it can be very confusing. Then, thinking of why the bad treatment of certain species is widely accepted in society, for example. This hierarchy of species affects mourning practices in places where people professionally work with animals. So, one quote from a study of two professionals was by a bird caring person who was feeling bad because in Judaism, charismatic big mammals may be publicly mourned and there may be poignant practices of enabling people who visit the zoo to participate in that memorialization. But then when birds die, the attitude may be that they don't live long anyway and there's going to be new birds and that sort of thing. So, this hierarchy can exist in these places where there is caring about animals.Doherty: Yeah, and then of course, it's political. So, it's touchy. You talk about animal grief and how it can be contested, right? Meaning that people don't agree on the ethics of it. And of course, most of the animal factory farming is kept secret or suppressed from the public because if people saw what was happening in these places, they would viscerally become nauseated and then they wouldn't want the animals. We talk about ecological wake up calls around climate change or other things, but people have wake up calls around eating animals when they learn about some of the practices. It’s just complicated because there are many people that try to ethically raise animals and try to ethically do this, but once you get into this large-scale factory commodification corporations, we lose touch with the humanity of it. Pihkala: Yeah, and there's lots of developments in society and the economy which have been pushing farmers to go into more large-scale animal raising and production. So, it hasn't been easy for people who would have wanted to do that on a more personal level and small-scale level. That may be economically very difficult. Luckily, there's people who try to do that. There's a book called Environmental and Animal Abuse Denial: Averting Our Gaze by Tomaž Grušovnik from eastern Europe and a couple of others edited that one. That's an interesting book where these mechanisms of trying to keep a distance or trying to keep them hidden are used, as you say Thomas, both in relation to climate matters and to animal factory farming, for example. So, on one hand it's a very human thing to try not to look too intensively at suffering, but of course it's not very ethical and that's where the title of our article comes from, “Animal Ethical Mourning”. It's moral commitment to animals and then the grief which results from this moral commitment. I hope dear listeners that this doesn't get too heavy for you, but it's deeply entwined with love, care, and empathy. That's of course seen in children, the sort of ability to empathize with animals and, as you say Thomas, the conflicted feelings which come if they observe that the adult world doesn't bury all the animals on the roadside, for example. But overall, there’s this whole phenomenon of sadness and grief because of what happens to non-human animals. It's tied with love and care. So, on one hand it's very heavy, but it also testifies to very important and power-giving re…

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Season 4, Episode 23: On Transformational Resilience with Bob Doppelt Jun 20, 2025

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image credit | Robin Canfield Season 4, Episode 23: On Transformational Resilience with Bob DoppeltThomas and Panu met with long-time environmental and mental health advocate Bob Doppelt. Bob talked about his personal story beginning with landscape and river system conservation and moving into sustainability and leadership education. Bob also spoke of his recent activities working with the International Transformational Resilience Coalition on ways that communities can connect and adapt in the face of climate disruptions. Bob's latest work focuses on the idea of “community is medicine.” As happens when like-minded people come together, Thomas and Bob found that they had a number of mutual connections in the Oregon white water rafting community. Join us for an inspiring conversation. LinksBob DoppeltTransformational Resilience (book)The International Transformational Resilience CoalitionDavid Pollack: What is Transformational Resilience and how does it apply to the mental health and public health responses to the impacts of climate change?Campaign for Trauma Informed Policy and PracticeTranscriptTranscript edited for clarity and brevity. [music: “CC&H theme music”]Introduction voice: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness (CC&H), an international podcast that explores the personal side of climate change. Your feelings, what the crisis means to you, and how to cope and thrive. And now, your hosts, Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala.Thomas Doherty: Well hello, I’m Thomas Doherty.Panu Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. This is our podcast, a show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change and other environmental issues. And you know what they say when you pick on one thing in the universe, it's hitched to everything else. So, climate environmental issues include your family, politics, economics, your life, your spirituality. So, all this stuff. And we really enjoy having conversations with people around the world. And I'm really honored to have a guest today. A person that I've actually never met but we have a lot of shared contacts in the past as often happens. So, I'd like you to meet our guest.Doppelt: Hello, I’m Bob Doppelt. I coordinate the International Transformational Resilience Coalition. I'm happy to be here today.Doherty: Yeah, and we were just chatting before we started. Now, I used to work as a river guide and an outdoor guide in Oregon. And I knew Bob had been a river guide too and it turns out we know some of the same people and some of my mentors he had worked with. It's a small world in sustainability and climate sometimes, and we cross paths. So that's already a nice connection we're having. And I'm really interested in actually hearing about Bob's current work and all the things he's doing. Panu, do you want to get us started?Pihkala: Warmly welcome, Bob, also on my behalf. Pleasure to meet you. We have been presenting in some of the same lecture series, but we haven't actually talked with each other, so this is a pleasure. I started working on eco-anxiety and eco-emotions around 2008 or 2009, and then in a more concentrated manner after 2015. And during that period, I was very happy when I found your book from 2016 called Transformational Resilience. Terms such as eco-anxiety existed. They were not as popular as they were later on, but I was really surprised how wide-ranging that book was already, including both individual methods for calming down your nervous system when there's too much stress and lots of things around community and social relations and resources. So, I was very grateful for that, and it's actually had some influence in Finland also, but before going into details, and listeners, we will open up the concept of transformational resilience, it would be very nice to hear something about your personal journey. How did you become so invested in these matters related to environmental issues and human psychology and community resilience?Doppelt: Well, thank you both and nice to meet you both. Even though it's not in person yet. But I've sort of, like many of us in life, go in a fishtail kind of experience through life. I've been a river guide all my life, including in high school, and had always had a strong connection to the outdoors. But in doing that, one of the things I did when I was very young, I was hired at age 21, after college, to run an outdoor treatment program for 30 kids. Here are 30 kids, now take them around the country and do rock climbing, backpacking, river running, and don't kill anybody. That was sort of the message I got from the director, but we did it, and it went well. So, it was early on that I had an experience of having to work with people who were in stressful situations and in the outdoors. And it was a very interesting learning experience. So, I ended up going to grad school both in counseling psychology and in environmental science. My first actual professional experience, I worked as a counselor with troubled youth and their families. And after a number of years there, I realized that I didn't have enough understanding of what many of these kids were going through to really help them. I was trained in Adlerian counseling and Dreikurs family therapy and this didn't help many of the kids that I was dealing with, and we can get into that later. I got burned out because of that, so I went back into the environmental field. Then ended up, after many years, running the Climate Leadership Initiative at the University of Oregon, which was one of the very first social science based ethical assistance research programs in the US. So, we ran around helping organizations, state governments, country governments and others develop their first climate action plans. We went to southeast Florida and helped organize the Southeast Florida Climate Resiliency Compact which brought together the largest metro area in Florida, Miami-Dade and Broward counties to prepare for sea level rise, storm surges, and other impacts. Then, Superstorm Sandy came along which you might remember. I guess 12 years ago. We saw mental health impacts in the northeast of the US such as New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, but it skirted along the coast of Florida, and we saw the same impacts here. The other people in the climate field didn’t see that or if they did, they didn’t care much because it wasn’t their background. But because of my background in mental health, I saw those impacts and I knew they were going to get way worse because the climate emergency was going to get way worse. That led me to form the ITRC, the International Transformation of Resilience Coalition, to try to combine these two fields now 11 years ago.Doherty: Yeah, this is great. Either for young people or for people that are new in some sort of climate or sustainability, it's important to realize this is not new at all. People have been in some form of environmental sustainability for 50 years, in the modern sense of the term and certainly climate. Now someone who grew up in Oregon, I talk in the book I'm working on about the emergence of the modern environmental movement. Much of it took place on the West Coast and in places like Oregon and Eugene. So, this idea of having a climate resilience plan isn’t new. It was like 30 years ago that people were talking about this. It wasn't just yesterday. So, it's really great to talk with you. It gives a sense of the breadth and distance and depth of this kind of program. A lot of people were surprised by Sandy, but you were already involved and could see it coming. All these experiences like Sandy, Lahaina, the LA fires, and Ashley. These are all tipping point wakeup call experiences. I think Sandy's unique, and we could talk maybe more about that because it mobilized the New York intelligentsia, the New York therapists. The people that wouldn't necessarily be the Oregonian river guide types. It brought them into the mix of this so that's really a sad way to do it, but it is what's been happening. It's probably what's the case. Each disaster kind of folding in a new subculture of people into this work. Would you say that's a fair statement?Doppelt: Yeah, I think as is often the case with humans is that it's only a crisis that gets us to think differently, change our minds, etc. And this issue is so overwhelming to most people, they can't get their heads around it. So, we deal with the next crisis by trying to respond to it, and then we move on. We don't think about what's actually happening over the long term and what's needed because we're going to have more and more disasters. And just as importantly with the climate crisis, we call it the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis, because it's way more than an atmospheric crisis. We're degrading ecological systems and we're exterminating biodiversity worldwide that feeds back to increased temperatures and dysregulates the atmospheric climate system even more, which of course then feeds back and has more ecological and biological impact. So, it’s a real interactive process. Even the most destructive impacts go far beyond disasters, these extreme weather events. And that's what people haven't quite wrapped their heads around. It’s activating cascading disruptions to the ecological, social, and economic systems people rely on for food, water, shelter, jobs, health, income. And we often can't connect it with the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis. But even now, rising food prices in the US, that people are so mad about, are not all caused by, but a significant part is droughts that are impacting food, reducing the ability of farmers to produce food, etc. So, it's creating all sorts of stresses. And then on top of that, or connected to that, are these acute disasters that come in and harm and destroy people. And that is really what we really need to prepare for. That's what my organization is trying to help people prepare for and communities prepare for. Otherwise, we just sit around and try to react to the next disaster and help people through mental health first aid afterwards. And that's important, but that's not the solution at all.Pihkala: Yeah, that's a real systemic approach to these issues. Could you share with the listeners what are some of the practical methods in that kind of work?Doppelt: Yeah, good question. So as people think about it, when there is a disaster, what normally happens? People come together who don't know each other, might not even like each other, and they help each other out. They provide food and shelter or practical assistance. They go rescue somebody from a situation and they set up food shelters for people to come and get food when their home's ruined or something. That's called the community cohesion phase of a disaster or the honeymoon phase. So, we help people realize and think about if they’ve been assisted by that or participated in that in some way and if they could see that kind of mutual aid network becoming long-term and permanent. That's really what we're focused on. We are focused on helping communities and neighborhoods form what we call Transformational Resilience Coordinating Networks, TRNCs. They are these mutual aid networks. The difference is the mutual aid networks usually get established and then disappear a month, two months, whenever after disaster ends. People go back and put their own lives back together and they leave.The climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis is going to get far worse, actually in rapid order, and it's going to continue for decades. We need to establish the social infrastructure in communities that can support that community cohesion phase over the long term. That's what the Transformation Resilience Coordinating Networks are and as part of that, they need to help people learn different kinds of resilience skills and engage in different kinds of resilience activities. I can dive into that in a second. But that's really what we're trying to do. And I'll just also say that we've been working on this for quite a while. We have TRCNs, they call themselves something different, in many parts of the U.S and Canada and other places. The UN High-Level Climate Champion Race to Resilience Initiative found out about our work over a year ago and invited us to become a partner. So, we're now working internationally on this through the UN Race to Resilience Initiative and finding that different countries, different nations, different communities struggle with different issues than we do in western communities and higher income areas.Doherty: Yeah, this is great. It's like Paradise Built in Hell from Rebecca Solnit. In a crisis is opportunity in the sense that we can really build back better, and we can actually harness all the positive honeymoon phase human connections that come about in disasters because they do have this leveling effect temporarily. You didn't say it, but I think being proactive about this helps us to get ahead of disaster capitalism and some of the breakdowns. I don't know that you get into that directly, but I see you as standing in the way of that negative stuff happening.Doppelt: Yeah, we do actually get into a bit. We don't label that. I will say that Rebecca's work didn't talk about what happens after the community cohesion phase. And that's really what's important. Then you go into what we call the disillusionment phase because people have to go back and put their own lives back together so that cohesion and that community support no longer exists. And that can last for months or years and that's the disillusionment phase. That's when most of the mental health and psychosocial problems emerge. That's why we need to establish this social infrastructure over the long term, because we don't want that disillusionment phase. We want that support to be there. And what we also find is that one of the things driving much of this is the social isolation and loneliness that people feel in western and higher income nations that is very toxic today and is getting worse with social media and other kinds of things. This brings people together and creates the social connections, the social cohesion and social efficacy needed to address these common problems. And it has to happen, or it has to start in the communities. And what we find is when communities come together or neighborhoods come together to do this, it takes a while, and you normally wouldn't like each other or they have different political views, but they create the political power to push for change at a higher level. And that's really key. But we don't talk about that being the goal, initially. First, help each other out so that people will help you and you can help others. And when you help others out, you often find new meaning and purpose in your life, you feel good about what you do, you have meaning, and that's what helps prevent mental health problems or heal them when they emerge.Pihkala: Yeah, that is impressive and so important. And at some point, in our conversation, I do want to go into this topic of meaning and purpose, which I also think is highly, highly essential. And listeners, you may be familiar with the resilience concept and some of the criticism against it. I think it's a valid concept, but some of the main criticism is that if only people return to a previous state of affairs, that will not be enough. And this transformational resilience that Bob is talking about by name goes beyond that. So, it points to growth in these processes. I hear that when you talk about these issues, but…

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Season 4, Episode 22: Climate Therapy in Italy with Camilla Gamba and Lucia Tecuta Jun 06, 2025

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image credit | Alex Vasey Season 4, Episode 22: Climate Therapy in Italy with Camilla Gamba and Lucia TecutaThomas and Panu engaged with therapists and researchers Camilla Gamba and Lucia Tecuta, who shared their cosmopolitan journeys into climate psychology and eco-therapy. Lucia and Camilla described their bicultural backgrounds in Italy and the US and challenges and opportunities in translating concepts like environmental identity and stewardship into the rich Italian cultural and historic context. Join us for an inspiring discussion of activism and “il dolce far niente.”LinksCamilla GambaLucia TecutaAcademicClimate Reality Project: How the Climate Crisis is Impacting ItalyClub Alpina ItalianoVia di Francesco Pilgrimage RouteMika Waltari (1956) The EtruscanSee Season 4, Episode 21: Climate Psychology in Italy with Matteo InnocentiTranscriptTranscript edited for clarity and brevity. [music: “CC&H theme music”]Introduction voice: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness (CC&H), an international podcast that explores the personal side of climate change. Your feelings, what the crisis means to you, and how to cope and thrive. And now, your hosts, Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala.Thomas Doherty: Well hello, I’m Thomas Doherty.Panu Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. This is our podcast, the show for people around the world who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change and environmental issues and their relationship with nature and the earth and of course politics and life. And that's all fair game for our conversations. And we love to talk to people around the world because of course Panu and I are far apart. And today, we are very happy to have two special guests coming in from a country that I love, Italy.Gamba: So, I'm Camilla Gamba. I'm a therapist in private practice in Milan, Italy. Tecuta: And I'm Lucia Tecuta. I'm a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist and a researcher at the University of Bologna, calling in from Bologna, Italy. Doherty: I know Lucia and Camilla through my eco training group, and I've actually been colleagues with them. We have not met in person, but we've been colleagues now for a while. So, it's been really exciting to track their innovative work in Italy around climate psychology and eco-therapy. And I know they've met Panu and Panu has spoken with them. So, this is a nice reunion for us. Panu, you want to get us started? Pihkala: Warm welcome also on my behalf, lovely to see you again. It also brings warm memories from last December and our meetings in Northern Italy. I know that you both have been listening to the podcast too, so you know that we have this habit of asking something about people's journeys that lead them to who they are so that's one for you also. It would be lovely to hear something like that. Gamba: Sure, Lucia, do you want to go first? Tecuta: So, I guess it's a little bit convoluted, but I would start off by saying a bit about how I grew up between Rome, which is where I was born, and then around the age of six I moved from, this big metropolitan city to the East Coast, to the States. I lived a little in Maryland, a little in New Jersey, so I moved from a more urban context to a more, I guess, privileged area. And I had the privilege of growing up with a backyard in Maryland. So, I feel like that's where I really started to appreciate nature and develop that nature connection that was missing for me while I was a kid, living in a big city. I think part of why I do the work that I do right now, sort of coming full circle from my early experiences, is and actually I heard someone talk about this book in their childhood on another podcast about how they came across this book called 100 Ways Kids Can Save the Planet. I was drawn to it as a kid and that's really where I started to become more aware of what was happening. It was the 90s and Al Gore was vice president and there was a lot of talk about the ozone layer, and I remember being a little bit anxious about that. Now that I look back as a researcher that looks at eco-anxiety, I recognized my feelings as a kid as a form of eco-anxiety that I was feeling at the time. And then that ecological awareness went dormant a little bit through middle school and high school. Then, I moved back to Rome when I was a teenager and came into contact with pretty politicized youth. That's where I became more aware of the economic and social systems that we live in and social injustice. It all came together for me in the last couple of years through my awareness of climate change. I had some events that really shook me, to use a colloquial term. Most of that is the really intense heat waves that are coming through Italy in the summer. Part of that is also the really bad hailstorms that came through Bologna. This was all right before COVID. I would call it an eco-awakening. After those events, it sorts of all came together and I realized how it's all connected. And that brought back that ecological awareness that was lost throughout the years. And I think also becoming a mother had a big impact on me, just everything sort of you know multiply times a hundred. Just being scared not only for myself and my family origin but also now my son and his future and future generations and what they're going up against. And then, I guess coincidentally, if you believe in coincidences or synchronicities, I guess another term we could use. I had the chance to sort of brainstorm on psychological constructs to study in relationship to sustainability and eating behaviors. And I was looking at the literature and I actually found your paper, Panu, on climate anxiety and eco-anxiety. And that just rang like a thousand bells in my brain. And I realized, this is what I was feeling first of all. So, it was really validating and really important for me to put those pieces together. And then I was able to give that as an idea that we could look at this, in relation to eating sustainably, but also eating disorder risk. We don't really know how these things sort of move together. And so that's how I feel like everything sort of came full circle starting from like my early childhood experience and the teenage years and being really politicized and coming into contact with anarchists and communists and socialists and all of that. And then the climate eco-awakening bit. And so, I feel like I've finally started to find my place in what I think I should be doing. That’s also thanks to your course, Thomas, that really helped me. It's a big, big puzzle piece to all of this. And then meeting like-minded colleagues who also became friends like Camilla. That's another big piece of this.Doherty: Yeah, eco friends, as we say. Tecuta: Eco friends, yeah, to take a turn from your past podcast. So yeah, that's my journey in all of this. Gamba: Yeah, so my journey is not too different from Lucia. I was born in Milan. My dad's Italian. I lived here until I was eight. Back then, now still to some degree, but back then there was a lot of cement and a lot of air pollution. And then, we moved to California where my mom is originally from. It was a much healthier style there I'd say, where we were growing up in Davis, California. I moved back to Italy when I was 18 and kind of like Lucia was saying, in my time in school in California, I had a lot of awareness of ecology, ecological crisis, and starting to be aware of climate change. So, to some degree, I feel like I've always had climate anxiety without knowing what it was. And then, I like the term used Lucia, the idea that it was dormant for a while. And then in 2021, it was in the middle of the California wildfires and COVID. And I went back visiting from Italy and had what I can call now an eco-awakening. Back then, it just felt like something really disturbing was happening. And so, I did what you do, which is you Google your symptoms and somehow came across the term eco-anxiety and came across your website Thomas or maybe some of the videos you had on YouTube and I found it really interesting. I signed up for the course and, like Lucia was saying, a lot of the puzzle pieces started coming together and then something interesting happened, again the synchronicity, Lucia and I are in this WhatsApp group of English-speaking therapists in Italy. It's an informal group. Then, I think one day Lucia posted something about research on climate anxiety. And I just jumped in there and said, hey you also know about this very niche thing in Italy, because at the time, it felt like I knew very few people who were talking about this. And then we just kind of rolled with it. We took the course with Thomas; we started translating a few things that we thought would be useful. We translated the Climate Psychology Alliance handbook into Italian as well as the climate emotion wheel, we thought that was a really cool tool. So, that's kind of how we got started. And Thomas definitely also gave us the courage to say, just get in there and do the work, even if you don't feel like you know it all. You don't have to know it all to start doing this work, so here we are.Pihkala: Thanks for sharing all that. That's very interesting and wonderful to hear. There are similarities in people's journeys and then all kinds of nuances and differences. So that's always very interesting to hear. And we'd love to talk a bit more about the actual work you are doing around climate psychology and environmental psychology in Italy. But perhaps we could start by asking you something about the Italian relationships to the modern human world and perhaps especially if that has an impact on how people see issues related to climate change and environmental change. I know this is a very big question and there's a lot of variation inside each country, but it would be interesting to hear some of your observations on that.Gamba: Sure. I think one of the first things to say is that Italy is a very varied country, meaning each region has its own very specific history, its own language, now they call them dialects, and its own culture. So, I think it depends on where you go and also thinking about the specific history in relation to the land, how the land has been used over time, who's been occupying and using the land and who hasn't is very different from region to region. A lot of Italy is very densely populated and a lot of the territory, if it's not urban, it's most likely agriculture. So maybe that's one piece around the relationship to nature. And then we have the Alps and the mountains, which are maybe one of the few places that people can go to and do go to if they want to feel that they can get away and commune with nature. We're sharing with Lucia, thinking about how we can represent Italians' relationship to nature? It's a tricky one because it's been very built up. The coasts, for example, cater to a certain type of tourism. I feel like there's very little nature left there. There's a lot of cement, a lot of places that cater to tourists who maybe want to go and listen to music and dance and be on the beach with their aperitivo. The same is happening more and more to the mountains, ski resorts. So, there is some tension around that.Tecuta: Yeah, there's been a lot of, I guess what you could call illegal construction or development in a lot of natural areas. For example, a lot of the coast is privatized with what I guess is called beach clubs. So, I guess the relationship with nature, I don't want to use words that are too strong, is not particularly respectful in that sense. A lot of destruction. Gamba: It feels like nature's been sacrificed to cater to economic wants.Tecuta: Right, economic growth and tourism, like Camilla was saying, that's definitely a big, big issue. So, it's very difficult. I imagine for whoever's involved in conservation efforts and things like that. And Italy went through quite a dramatic economic boom, I guess in the 60s. I think after World War II, there's definitely a lot of poverty and hardship, a lot of migration from the South to the North, from Southern agricultural areas to the Northern cities that promised more work opportunities. So, it's dramatically changed probably in the last 70, 80 years or so. And I feel like in the Italian collective unconscious, this idea of an association between being in the city, and probably this is common in a lot of cultures and countries, but moving to the city or living in a city is associated with having made it somehow, right? Having left, sort of poor conditions and hardships. So, it's hard to find outside of specific environments, for example mountain areas, an appreciation and a respect for nature.Gamba: Yeah, it's also really hard to find in Italy. Coming from California where we have big wilderness spaces, it's really hard in Italy to find large, intact, healthy ecosystems. In Italian, we don't even have a word for wilderness, which I always thought was really interesting. But having said this about certain types of tourism, there are a few trends that I think are interesting. One is hiking and people really wanting to enjoy the mountains for what they are. In Italy we have the CAI, it's the Club Alpino Italiano. It's a really large non-profit organization which is in charge of what the US Forest Service does. So, they make sure that the trails are kept nicely and they do a lot of trainings and things like that. They have a fantastic rescue service, which I recently had the opportunity to test. I broke my ankle hiking, and I got a really good rescue operation taking place. So, shout out to the CAI volunteers or all volunteers. And then another interesting trend is what we call here agriturismo. So, tourism that goes to agricultural places is one of the ways to reconnect with nature. They might be going to farmhouses or places where they're enjoying both the place and the environment, but also the food. Because of course, food is a big part of the culture here.Tecuta: Yeah, there is definitely a movement for slow food, organic farming. And it's interesting, there's also a very niche trend of younger people. Most of them sort of migrate from the south to the northern cities to go to university or whatever, but then being frustrated and sort of disillusioned by the economic crises and the recessions and not finding jobs easily. Some of them are actually moving back south, back to more natural settings and even opening up their own small farms and going back to those kinds of roots. So that's another interesting trend, sort of trying to take care also of whatever nature is left. And then there's also another interesting movement now that I think about which is confiscated lands from the mafia. There are several associations that take those lands and of course they try to clean them up or try to give them back to the people and turn them into something socially useful. And you can even buy some products in some supermarkets that use whatever grains or raw materials to make pasta, coffee, or whatever it is. And so, when you buy that product, you're buying something that's from the confiscated mafia lands. And you're giving money to these really great initiatives. So, there's little niche movements here and there that kind of give you hope that some good is happening.Pihkala: Yeah, that's very interesting and for many listeners depending on where you come from. It's fascinating to think about these geographical and ecological factors. In Europe, we have places like the Netherlands, where there's even more management of nature, more than the human world. Then in It…

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Season 4, Episode 21: Climate Psychology in Italy with Matteo Innocenti May 28, 2025

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The Climate Change and Happiness podcast is focusing on our colleagues in Italy this season. In this episode, Thomas and Panu spoke with Milan psychiatrist Matteo Innocenti to discuss the growing awareness of climate psychology in the country. Matteo described his personal journey inspired by witnessing the effects of pollution in South Asia and how the COVID-era loss of his grandfather—a key environmental role model —inspired Matteo to devote his research to nature and issues like climate anxiety.

Season 4, Episode 20: Changing Summers and Winters: Moods, Music & Family May 09, 2025

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image credit | asaf With the coming of spring in the northern hemisphere, Thomas and Panu looked ahead to the summer and reflected on how we can no longer take for granted (or trust) that the seasons will be as they were before. What may have been a benign and clement season may now bring unexpected and uncomfortable weather – and even extreme or dangerous conditions. This profound change affects our mood, identity, families, and life plans. They referenced their own experiences and examples from art and literature. Join us and prepare for your own new season. LinksZadie Smith: Elegy for a country’s seasonsPoem by SZ Chao: “Not all warmth consoles” Soft Loft Summer SadnessLana Del Ray Summer Sadness John Cox Weather For Dummies US NOAA / National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center Long Range ForecastsAustralia 2025 Summer Forecast TranscriptTranscript edited for clarity and brevity.[music: “CC&H theme music”]Introduction voice: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness (CC&H), an international podcast that explores the personal side of climate change. Your feelings, what the crisis means to you, and how to cope and thrive. And now, your hosts, Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala.Thomas Doherty: Well hello, I’m Thomas Doherty.Panu Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.Doherty: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness, this is our podcast. It’s a show for people around the world who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change and global warming and the environment and our lives and our wellbeing and our happiness to the provocative question of what it means to be happy in the modern world. And this is one of the Thomas and Panu dialogues. We haven't had a chance to just talk amongst ourselves for a little bit and catch up on the world. We have a bit of a theme because we're looking ahead to the summer in the northern hemisphere so that's sort of our theme or coping with seasonal changes and hopefully being able to roll with all the changes in our world. So that's our theme for today. Panu, what's the latest from Finland? How are things going over there? What have you been up to?Pihkala: Thanks for asking and spring has finally arrived in Finland. Well, it's been sort of back and forth and global warming makes it more random. So, already in March there were some really nice days, but then we had a period of really cold, nasty wind from the north type of days, and we had some spring flowers covered in snow, which makes for a kind of nice aesthetic effect, the whiteness of the snow combined with the colors of the flowers, but it's not very good for the flowers themselves. But now it is warm, young people are going out on the streets of Helsinki, lots of students there. Easter is coming and on one hand, there's lots of good spring full energy around and then on the other hand, Finns are of course worried about the global, political, economic, and environmental situation as so many people are around the world. So, it's a mix of things as usual.Doherty: Hmm, so we have the seasons that we know really well, like spring, I could talk about that here. It’s high spring here where I live in Portland. The daffodils bloomed a while ago, the trilliums have already peaked, the wildflowers, at least at the low elevation, and the higher elevation wildflowers are going to be coming in the next couple of months and literally the air is perfumed by blossoms. There's a bush in my neighbor's yard that smells nice, and I could smell it when I walk outside. And so, such a gentle, nice season, the spring. But yes, well, I'll share an anecdote and then we can get into it, but I actually got a chance to see the Portland Symphony yesterday. I've been trying to educate myself on classical music and they have a nature theme this season. And so, they had Beethoven's sixth symphony, Pastoral, which is a famous symphony that people in the know would know about. They also did Vaughan Williams, The Lark Ascending, which is another famous piece, an incredibly beautiful violin piece. The Pastoral Symphony was done around 1803. Like a lot of the symphonies, it's a programmatic symphony. It's about walking in meadows, and it tells a story of being in the Austrian meadows and mountains. But it's very formulaic in the sense that there is going to be a spring and it's going to happen this way and if you go to the mountains, you're going to find all this stuff. There's a sense of eternity about it, that this is it. I think that's part of the gist of this conundrum with the seasons that they still exist, but they're not as secure as they used to be. We can't trust that they're kind of eternal like the seasons of our grandparents. We literally can’t go back to the seasons of our grandparents. So, I think that's the rub of it.Pihkala: Yeah, thanks for voicing that and I’m strongly resonating with that. In some earlier episodes of this podcast, we have touched upon the impacts of seasons on people, and I've shared that I have some symptoms of the seasonal affective disorder type, which for me the worst time is from November to February. So, I had to take some methods to cope with that. On a fundamental psychological level, I think that this continuation and alteration of seasons has been hugely important for people and a big source of safety, as you say, Thomas, and one might even speak about sort of ontological safety or security. I’m using a bit of a technical word but meaning that it's intimately tied with structures of the world. And there's some psychologists like Robert Jay Lifton, who we also have mentioned several times, who have observed the disturbing impacts of seasonal change or the randomness of it on people. And that seems to be affecting more and more people around the world. And on my desk at work is an article about various kinds of texts and eco-emotions. So, it's with literature scholars, that's one of my cooperation fronts so to speak, and it's quite interesting to observe what various writers, authors, and poets have written about this change of the seasons over the years.Doherty: Yeah, there's a lot of directions to go, but we think about mood and music and then there's family, right? Because I think we were talking earlier, we all have our plans. I mean, people in the northern hemisphere often make plans for the summer season if they're going to try to take a break or a vacation or do something with their friends or their family or go outdoors. I have a wedding. My sister-in-law, Jessica, is getting married on the solstice, June 21st, in New England in Massachusetts in the US. So, people commit to things. They commit to travel or vacations or even really treasured things they've been planning for years. In the ‘old days’ you could just plan for the season. When I taught my wilderness therapy class at Lewis and Clark, we did a week camping in the graduate program. I always did it the second or third week of August in Oregon because it's statistically the driest time of the year. So, when you would go camping in the woods, it would generally not rain, and you know it's going to be nice. But now, I wouldn't do that because by that time in the season you could really have wildfire smoke. So that's changed. So, if I was going to plan that again, you'd want to plan it earlier in the season. I'm sure there's a listener out there that has a wedding this summer because people will get married in the summer. I'm sure there's someone who's planned a wedding and they're fretting about how the weather's going to be. And that's hard, but you can't just say okay I'm planning a solstice wedding, so I know the day is going to be long and it's going to be nice. I mean, hopefully it will be, but it could be hot and there could be wildfire smoke. We don't know.Pihkala: Yeah, that's definitely the state of things now and it's impacting my inter-European travels because it may be so hot in Central Europe or Mediterranean Europe that for a Nordic person it's sort of too much. It's too much for some people who are living there and of course this theme of changing seasons is almost a matter of life or death for some people. For example, who get their living from agriculture or are living in areas where global warming is already causing very severe effects that the heat can be unbearable. So, I’m just wanting to name that. Most of our listeners probably are not living in such dire contexts, but if somebody from there is listening, I just want to say that we feel you.Doherty: Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. That's also the gist of it too. There's social justice issues and environmental justice issues. There's the book, Tales of Two Planets, about stories of climate change in a divided world that I was looking at recently and edited by John Freeman, who's a famous literary person. There are two worlds. So, we have the people that are planning their wedding and they're catering for what hors d'oeuvres and snacks they're going to have at their wedding and then there are people that are afraid that their house might burn down or that they have to move and carry everything on their backs, as refugees. There’s a variety of people that listen to this podcast so we want to lean into the positive stuff that we can appreciate and know, but also recognize there's all these other unknown lives out there as well.Pihkala: Yeah, exactly. And one of the texts I was reminded of when doing research for this article about eco-emotions and literature studies was by Zadie Smith, the famous writer who did an essay in 2014 called Elegy for a Country's Seasons. The ingress text is that it’s hard to keep apocalypse consistently in mind, especially if you want to get out of the bed in the morning. So that sort of resonates with quite a number of episodes we've been doing in this podcast. But Zadie Smith is also writing that every country has its own version of this local sadness related to changes in seasons. We'll put a link to that in the show notes and this genre of elegy. It goes close to lament, but it's related to sadness, and also related to beauty in a sort of deep way, and often to moral outrage. So, it's quite an interesting genre, I think. How would you pronounce it in English, by the way?Doherty: Elegy, yeah. We'll put a link to that. It's a really beautiful essay that uses some dark humor and also talks about how the recent immigrants to the UK see it as this climate changed place with hot weather and flooding. Whereas the old school still has the Charles Dickens white Christmas memories when the river Thames would freeze over which doesn't happen anymore. It's ironic. I got a chance to go visit London with my daughter a couple summers ago and I got to take her there for the first time. I was speaking at a conference, and it was the hottest day in history when we were there. We were at the British Museum in London, and they had to close the museum down because it was too hot, and the air conditioning wasn't working. And actually, the second day after that was the hottest day. And we were at Stonehenge, seeing this incredible Neolithic site, which I thought about my whole life, and it was also the hottest day in history there. So that's what happens. And we survived it, and it was purely just a discomfort thing for us, not a survival thing per se. But it is ironic and for my daughter, who's 17, that is normal life, and it is so strange. If you're over 20, especially if you're over 30 or 40, it really is a different world. So that's wild.Pihkala: Yeah, the sort of baseline assumptions of what the world and the weather and climate are like are different. And I think we've sometimes named in this podcast the technical term of ‘shifting baselines.’ Somebody has used ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ even to refer to what people tend to regard as a sort of normal environment and conditions, those ones which were prevailing when they were children themselves. And that means that it's difficult for members of different generations to really get a grip of how things were or are in the experienced world. So that's also a challenge for environmental education. And one of the things I'm doing right now is teaching this course on eco-emotions that I have designed and led at the University of Helsinki. It's online and I've recorded most of the lectures last year. So, it's mostly going through the students' essays and grading them. It's very interesting to read the reflections and, without revealing anyone's identity, I can say that there's some people who actually fear the summer. Exactly because they fear that it may be too hot and then if there's a lot of wildfires around, they feel global empathy and then they feel distress because of the news and knowledge about what's going on in the world and how other people and other animals suffer. So that's a thing happening in Finland also. When thinking about this, I was reminded of one of the poems in this 2020 poetry competition on the Climate Crisis and You by SZ Shao. The title is “Not All Warmth Consoles.” To fear the summer, the sweetness of fruit in decay is one line or a couple of lines from the poem. We'll put a link to that. So, some people are testifying to these kinds of emotions.Doherty: Yeah, exactly. For listeners, you can take all this in. And this also applies to people in the Southern Hemisphere. I know Australia is on track to have the warmest winter in history. And the snowfall that they do have is likely to be less. I haven't looked at New Zealand, but I assume New Zealand is going to have a similar forecast. So, people who look forward to snow and skiing and the snowpack for the climate, will also change. So, it goes both ways. But listeners can think about all the different emotional parts of this, the practical parts of it, and the poetic parts of it. And then what to do… What do you think, Panu? How do you cope with this? Do you have any things you tell yourself? You have children and try to plan the summer as well and you have your life. How do you handle it in your family?Pihkala: Yeah, well, there's plenty of dimensions to that issue and generally one way to cope is to write about it. So, I think that’s the poet who wrote “Not All Warmth Consoles.” Probably not the whole intention was related to coping, but that's part of it. Expressing some deep emotions and existential questions and thoughts. By doing that in public, it may also help others. And of course, it's a complex dynamic and it would be good for people to engage with arts that are sort of suitable for their situation. What I mean is that I think it's important that we have arts with various moods in relation to the ecological crisis. It would be good not to have just dystopian, catastrophic themed arts, or not just optimistic, how are we going to solve these issues type of arts, but a wide range of artworks. Then people can engage with various kinds of art. In my own family, the boys are now nine years and eleven years old, so they are growing up and thinking about things. The older one is a keen reader of newspapers. The Helsinki Times, Helsingin Sanomat has a kid’s newspaper which is a weekly paper. So that's been a nice one in sort of leading them into a culture of reading the news. And of course, I also try to recommend that he not read the news just before he goes to bed. It’s something that he often likes to do. By all estimations, he is not seriously distressed, but of course he is sort of worried and quite pessimistic about the pla…

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