Want to feel better? Get unstuck? Be inspired? Remake the world? Then this episode is for you. We talk with Katherine Wilkinson, author of the book Climate Wayfinding, and Colette Pichon Battle, lawyer and co-founder of Taproot Earth, about finding our way through the climate crisis.
To read more about Climate Wayfinding, or order a copy of the book, click here.
This episode was hosted by Carlyle Calhoun and Eva Tesfaye. Eva conducted the interview. Sound design by Kurt Kohnen, and our theme music is by Jon Batiste.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We're a part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. To help others find our podcast, hit Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. WWNO's Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
_________________________________________________
TRANSCRIPTION
EVA: Hey Carlyle!
CARLYLE: Hey Eva!
EVA: So before we talk about anything else, I really wanna play you this song, I’ve had it stuck in my head all week.
CARLYLE: As long as it’s a good one, go for it.
Song: Crossroads
CARLYLE: Tracy Chapman! I love her.
EVA: It’s called Crossroads by Tracy Chapman. I’ve been listening to it non-stop these past few days and it’s really been making me feel more empowered. Can I be super honest to you and the listeners?
CARLYLE: Sea change is a safe space.
EVA: yeah, I've been feeling really burnt out lately, and I'm just overwhelmed with all the climate stories I need to report on, but also just how bleak they all are. I mean, the US is more focused than ever on drilling and exporting fossil fuels, and then here in Louisiana, they canceled two of the biggest projects to rebuild land on our sinking coast. So I'm just feeling, like, really lost right now and, like, what is the point?
CARLYLE: Ugh, yes. Well, first of all, I'm right there with you, and I mean, it's pretty hard not to feel that way lately. But I feel like that's why we keep coming back to, we need to find a balance. We want to keep reporting on the really big problems and issues we're facing, but we don't want to forget about telling positive stories. Like, there's still good things happening out there, and we don't want those to get lost. And in fact, we need to hear those. So, we decided that that would be your assignment, to bring us some light.
EVA: Don't worry, I didn’t let you down. I’m actually so glad I took on this episode because we’re going to talk about this new book that found me at just the right time. It’s called Climate Wayfinding: Healing Ourselves and the Planet We Call Home by Katherine Wilkinson.
CARLYLE: Yay Katherine Wilkinson is so amazing! She is actually one of the authors we talked to in one of Sea Change’s earliest episodes about climate writing.
EVA: Yes! So for those who don’t know her already, Katherine is a writer, teacher and climate activist. And she’s been doing this workshop for a few years now called Climate Wayfinding: it’s designed to help people navigate their feelings about the climate crisis and take action.
And she’s turned it into this pretty interactive book. And I pulled one of those activities from the book for us to do together right now.
CARLYLE: Let’s do it.
EVA:Okay. So the first one I wanna ask is: Reflect on the roots of your climate awareness and concern. Can you identify a spark, a waking, a calling in?
CARLYLE: Wow. That's a good question. I remember in school when I was growing up, it was a lot focused on, um, saving the rainforest, which is amazing, and, uh, and the ozone layer, which we should say we fixed.
So, you know, shout out to good news, and then I, I think it was just kind of a slow build of awareness of more and more media attention and then, of course, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. But then I remember being at the coast of North Carolina and where I was working at the newspaper and seeing a manatee and being like, "Uh, you're not supposed to be here. Why are you here? " And the downtown flooding more often, and just realizing I cared deeply about what was happening. You know, I've been in journalism and, and known that's what I wanted to do, for a long time. But knowing that I wanted to especially focus on telling these stories, and find ways to connect with people beyond the scary headlines or numbers. So yeah, I guess it was kinda like mini little sparks. What about you?
Eva: Yeah, I mean, I think similarly, like I I'm Gen Z, so I feel like it was always in the background. remember being like six or seven being taught about global warming and but it was always in the background.
Like, there wasn't really a sense of urgency about it. It was like, "This is happening. We gotta recycle." Um, but that was it. And then I think the moment that I was really called to do the work in climate that I'm doing now was when I was a young journalist in Birmingham.
I didn't have a beat yet. I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to cover. And Hurricane Ida hit Louisiana, and WWNO, uh, reached out to our station and asked us for help covering it. So I helped from afar, and
I mean, uh, it was horrible, but I felt so useful. I felt like I was really helping people, and I realized that environment, climate journalism is really what I wanted to do. And that's how I made connections with WWNO, and now I'm here reporting on climate. So, I mean, it's nice to think about, like, why I got into this in the first place.
CARLYLE: First of all, I didn't even know that origin story of yours. I love knowing that, but I agree. I'm already feeling better.
EVA: So the book not only has these prompts for reflection, but also draws on poetry, music and conversations with climate leaders.One of them is Colette Pichon Battle. She’s a lawyer and co-founder of Taproot Earth, a nonprofit based in the Gulf South that advances climate justice around the world.
And so I sat down with Katherine and Colette and I’m super excited to bring y’all this conversation.
EVA: I’m Eva Tesfaye.
CARLYLE: I’m Carlyle Calhoun.
Today on Sea Change, Eva talks to Katherine Wilkinson and Colette Pichon-Battle about how to figure out, where we are and where we should be going, individually and collectively, when it comes to the climate crisis. It’s a beautiful, uplifting conversation so stick around b/c we all need that right now! That’s coming up.
Interview
Eva: Welcome to "Sea Change," y'all. I'm so glad you guys are here.
Katherine: Eva, thanks for having us.
Colette: Thanks for having us.
Eva: Okay. Katharine, so you've written several other climate-focused books, like "All We Can Save," "Drawdown," and "Between God and Green." What makes this book different from the other books you've written, but also different from other climate books out there? And, um, maybe you can talk a little bit about how the idea for this book came about, 'cause it's really interesting.
Katherine: Yeah, sure. Well, no shade to climate books that talk to you. Uh, that is what I have done, uh, with all those other writing and editing projects. But I felt like we were in a moment that, like, we're not in need of more information, we're in need of orientation, and we are desperately in need of getting folks who care, who are concerned, off the sidelines and into this work in some way.
And man, we have got to keep those who are in it, in the depth of it right now, keep our sort of broken, tuckered out hearts, going. And so that's really what, this book is about, and it is quite different from those other books in the sense that it grew out of a program.
It has lived in the world for four years now as an experiential learning journey that's run on college and university campuses across the US and Canada. And so everything that's made its way into this book has been tested and honed with actual humans, right? It's not just like, "I think this will be useful."
We know, and we've been gathering data and feedback, that it does help people go from feeling stuck, isolated, overwhelmed, depressed, burned out, into a sense of clarity and connection and renewal, in some cases, a sense of purpose, a sense of like, "Let's do this, and I've got a role to play." And, Colette, I think, is maybe one of the most, like, embodied examples of, "Let's do this.
I've got a role to play," I could possibly think of. So this feels really exciting to have this conversation.
Colette: it's like my mantra. Let's do this.
Katherine: Let’s do this because, like, what else are we gonna do? But do this.
Eva: Yeah. Colette is one of the, the Lighting the Way stories, which are kind of these, like, interactions, conversations with, climate leaders that you've spoken to. Um, and,
Katherine: One thing that, stuck out about the interview with Colette is this idea of kind of talking to someone who has seen so much destruction and loss firsthand and is still fighting anyway. I think that's kind of a huge reason why I choose to live in Louisiana and report in Louisiana. I'm curious about, you know, this is a state that has gone through so much loss, and how do people keep going?
And I just wanna-- you, Colette, to talk a little bit about, like, what calls on you to keep going. 20-year-- Almost 20 years. It's
Colette: Yeah. You know,It was twenty years, since Katrina last year, and this has been a twenty-year journey for me. And so like that mighty river. It has not been a straight line, you know what I mean? I'm often asking myself that question. I, I take a walk now every day to my family cemetery, and I greet my, my grandparents and my great-grandparents and those who have gone before me, and I just say, "Just pray for me," you know? "Help us." It's just very simple. but I-- as I'm walking, I know that I'm walking on land that was created by a river system that, is responsible for draining almost, what, two-thirds, of the water in the US end up flowing down.
That means I live on soil that is from people from all over, and I can feel the energy of that, and that keeps me going. You know? I'm not fighting for just me or just my community. It feels like this is work that is being done for a lot of, people in a lot of communities, especially in the United States and in North America.
So I think the, the going part is, there's some spirit around here in South Louisiana. we don't question it. we know it's there. You can feel it if you allow yourself to. And if you ask for it to guide you, and if you keep yourself, as centered as you can in the terrible moments, our ancestors, the people and the trees and the animals, that have gone before us and, and will come after us, they, they can come with you.
Katherine: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Eva: Yeah. Like, remembering, you're connected to everything. And I feel like that's, that's kind of a theme in the book too.
Katherine: Eva, this is making me wonderr, could I read a poem?
Eva: Yeah. Yeah. Do-- You wanna pick one?
Katherine: Colette called in the Mississippi. Um, and there's this gorgeous poem by the extraordinary Lucille Clifton, that is in the chapter about connecting with community and seeing ourselves, so profoundly interconnected and across, generations.
So both geography and topic maybe makes it seem right. and this is called "The Mississippi River Empties into the Gulf."
The Mississippi River empties into the Gulf, and the Gulf enters the sea and so forth. none of them emptying anything. All of them carrying yesterday forever on their white-tipped backs, all of them dragging forward tomorrow. It is the great circulation of the earth's body, like the blood of the gods. This river in which the past is always flowing. Every water is the same water coming round. Every day someone is standing on the edge of this river staring into time, whispering mistakenly, "Only here, only now."
Eva: Wow.
Colette: I see.
Katherine: Lucille, always.
Eva: Yeah. So I wanna talk about kinda-- So in the book, you identify wayfinding as figuring out where we are and where we need to go, and I think that's a really good, like, starting place to think about things.
And so I wanna talk about the where we are piece first. so our listeners have probably heard us use the words like climate anxiety, climate grief, but in your book, you talk about how, there are many more emotions than that. So could you talk a little bit about the climate emotions wheel?
Katherine: Yeah. Yeah, this is a wonderful tool that the Climate Mental Health Network created based on some fantastic research by psychologists and mental health researchers, and it helps us see that there are all of these different ways we feel about climate change and being human on Earth in this time. And not all of them are heavy.
And what's helpful, I think, about anything on a wheel is it tells you that you're not just stuck i- in one of those, right? a wheel kind of wants to keep turning. and I also think it's an invitation to say however we might feel, and I think it's especially important for young people because we know that around the world, almost half of young people say that the way they feel about the climate crisis, climate change impacts their day-to-day lives. And it's not just young people, right? We know that this is a much broader experience, and especially as we shift from most people experiencing climate change as an abstract thing to, no, this is something happening now, impacting places that I love now.
I'm seeing this, I'm feeling this.You know, it's not pre-traumatic stress, it's actual stress. and that just becomes so much more important. And what I notice is that we have so few spaces to take those feelings, right? Fewer and and fewer of us belong to, a house of worship, and even when we do, they may not be equipped to hold this. You could have every psychologist and psychiatrist and therapist and social worker on the planet turning their attention to this, and there aren't enough of them to go around. Classrooms are so focused on the intellectual piece, right? A lot of times in movement and in, in organizations, we-- we're so busy on the strategy side, right?
That we think like, "Well, we don't have time for feelings." Um, and, and I think that that is a great risk to us, both as just a human community, but certainly as a movement. It is terrible social movement strategy not to be thinking about the heart in all of it.
Eva: Colette, how do these emotions show up in the work that you do with frontline communities?
Colette: Oh my gosh. I just wanna thank you for the question, Eva, because it's, it's, it's import-- our emotions are important, and somehow we have been colonized to think that the intellectual answer is the answer when some of us know deeply that the spirit has to be part of the answer, and the gut has to be part of the answer. And so, um, I really appreciate when Catherine said, "You're stressed right now" and the emotions show, you know. Black and brown and poor folks are demonized when they show their rage for systems that could be designed better, for information that we knew a long time ago, for decisions that could…and political action that could have been made already, but have instead been Sacrificed for the profits of such a few people when so many people could have been saved. And, many times over it's hard to, sit people inside of that and then expect them not to rage.
And so at Taproot Earth, which is the organization I help to co-lead, we make space for rage. We make space for it, you know? Let's,deal with some of this stuff. You are not crazy. This is crazy. You are not crazy.
And so last year in twenty twenty-five, we did a Sacred Waters pilgrimage down the Nile, the Mississippi, and the Amazon. We went to three of the five largest rivers, in the world, and we gathered water and did ceremony and ritual there with the indigenous people of those places, and we asked for our ancestors to join us for this next round of fighting that we were gonna need to do. And we brought that water back to East Africa, where the oldest human remains are found, and we gave that water to the eldest woman of the tribes that are originally are from those places.
And those women who were sitting there, the, it, of the Kikuyu tribe, were praying for us the whole time we were on that pilgrimage. And You know, my blood is of the Choctaw Nation.
My blood is of Africa, and what I got a clear call, to do was ritual. Now, what I know is that that ritual that I did is the ritual you do before war. People were waiting. You pray for peace, but this was to fortify yourself for what is to come, and the emotions that you get to express when you are in ritual or in ceremony, you get to be sad, you get to be happy, you get to be powerful, and you get to break down. And it is ritual and ceremony that'll get us through a lot of this emotional piece, and it'll also inform and guide and protect the strategy.
Eva: Yeah. That is so amazing, and I think it's hard because climate change is such a scientific issue that, like, a lot of science is, is going into it, and I'm usually talking to scientists about this. And I usually talk to scientists about this. You saying, Colette, is, like, we kinda need to move away from that, like, Western enlightenment type of thinking, where it's like science and reason are a separate thing from emotion. And I'm thinking like, the marrying of the two and understanding that there are other ways of knowing, spiritual ways of knowing, emotional ways of knowing to help us get through this crisis.
Colette: Yeah. And, and I would say the marrying of the two is-- it's an interesting use of terms because these things were extracted from our humanity, like oil extracted from, the ground. we used to have all of that together. We're really putting ourselves back together again, and that's really the opportunity.
Eva: I, I, I love the way you described, Colette, about ritual holding and informing strategy. and what's so interesting,we, we have research that tells us that the thing that gets women stuck between climate concern and climate engagement is that they think they don't know enough.
Katherine: And part of what I care so much about is saying, "This is not the only way we know.” We sell ourselves short on the deeper knowing that is so present in us just because we're alive, just because we're human, just because we are part of this community of life.
Eva: Okay. Yeah. So let's kinda talk about how you get to that place of, like, taking action. And Katharine, in one part of the book, you have a chapter that's about solutions. And one thing that really stuck with me is the fact that there are so many different solutions to climate change, and that itself can be, like, overwhelming and make you feel like you don't really know what to do.
And what I love, is you drew on James Baldwin to help figure that out. I always kinda go to James Baldwin in times of crisis.
Katherine: it's always a good idea.
Colette: You can't lose with that
Eva: Yeah. So could you talk a little about that and what you borrowed from James Baldwin?
Katherine: Y- yeah, yeah. Well, there was a, a lecture that he gave that then evolved into an essay in a book, but the, the line from it that really just has stuck with me over the years is, "We made the world we're living in, and we have to make it over."
And it's so simple, but it's so profound, and you know, we can do a lot of pointing fingers about who's gotten us here, but this sense of, like, stepping into our agency, stepping into a sense of responsibility for the future and making the world over. And this overwhelm, in another life, I worked on the Project Drawdown team, wrote most of that book, Drawdown, that shockingly is almost 10 years ago.
It's a compendium of solutions, and you might flip through it and go like, "Oh, wow. there's so much here, I have no idea where to begin." And that work came from sort of the, you know, the mind of the analyst, right? Let's, let's do the math. And it's helpful. That data gave us a grounded narrative of possibility that I think we, we really needed.
But for a person who only has so many hours in the day, so many years in a life, like, where are you gonna focus? Certainly not on 100 climate solutions probably. Um, that the spirit of the artist can come in, right? Like, that's what I hear in James Baldwin's words. Like, what solutions do we wanna be in creative relationship with, with this world remaking, effort?
And I think that's an invitation to curiosity, to wonder, like, where is our energy taking us? Because this is a long slog we're in. Like, this is long-haul work, and so you've gotta find a piece of it that, like, you know, makes your heart kinda pitter-patter a little bit, right? Like, it's gotta be a piece that you really have to have some excitement around to be able to keep showing up again and again over over time.
Eva: And Colette, I'm wondering how-- do you ever feel like overwhelmed by the amount of solutions and like how, how do you kind of get through that? I
Colette: Well, this is where I make lots of friends who are Black and brown and poor, and lots of enemies who are not. And I think we're looking at solutions the wrong way oftentimes. I think
We're making it easy for privileged Global North country residents to think that a new way of purchasing or consuming is gonna get us out of this, when really we have to be much more honest about what the problem is, and it is our consumption patterns to begin with. And so Taproot has really begun to understand that that a cause of the climate crisis is a philosophy of extraction, and the philosophy of extraction is in almost everything that we have built in our US system for sure, I would say Western civilization systems.
And a solution to a philosophy of extraction that it drives a capital-based system is to actually shift Our economic system away from extraction into repair. Now, listen, listen, I'm telling you, half the room likes me now and, and the other half is like, "Oh, no, no." Because we participate in this capitalist system.
We maintain it, we manage it, we uphold it, and then we wonder why we're in this state, and we look for somebody to blame. If you wanna really deal with the problem, we have to deal with ourselves.
And I'm not even a rich American. I'm just a regular one, you know, and living in the middle of the bayou. we are socialized to consume without any care as to who we just took that from, as to where that just came from, including all of the critical minerals that are gonna be needed for the wealthy Americans to all shift over to electrification and renewable energy.
We will cause war and death and more problems in other places, and we won't care, and we'll feel good about ourselves when we do it because we went electric or we went off the grid or we went whatever. We are misunderstanding the problem still, and I am sad about that because it's going to require a lot of middle-class Americans to actually say, "Okay, what's the problem?"
The problem is we live, we have learned, we have all been socialized into a system of extraction to take to a, a, a level of harm.that either cannot or will never be repaired, and then we try to build on top of harm, and then we wonder why what we produce is more harm.
This is why you have to bring in that spiritual work. This is why you have to bring in that cultural work, or else you will believe that the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions gets us to a climate solution. It will not. It will get us to reduce greenhouse gases, but we will have the same imbalances and the same problems at the societal level that you get with disaster.
Those are the systems we have in place right now, and we believe that it is, you know, the job of somebody else to, Stop drilling, which I believe we should stop oil and gas drilling. and I'm saying that from South Louisiana.
I know what that means. Everybody's scared. All of our jobs are gonna go away. But how many jobs does it actually create? And look at the billions they're making to create this imbalance. And can't we think of anything else that won't blow up our boys? Can we think of anything else that won't poison our babies?
Can't we think of anything else to invest in? And why should we sacrifice things that we love? I love these trees, man. I love this bayou. I love them-- those gators out there. I see 'em every morning. I love all of 'em. Why should we sacrifice that so a few companies can make billions of dollars? We gotta rethink this, and it's not gonna be as easy as we think it is.
It's not gonna be recycling. I'm sorry. It's not. That's not good enough. Taproot is working to identify frontline communities right now who are building climate solutions around the world in the Gulf South, in Appalachia, and in the Black diaspora.
And the solutions are not just how much carbon can you sequest. The solutions are, is the community involved? Is there a democratic and collective decision-making process? Are there values and principles that are driving this thing? Are you using alternative methods of resourcing? Is the community in control collectively of its resources, or arethings being privatized?
That gets to solutions. And so this is where I, I'm still, you know, I'm, I'm working on making friends even, and you know, and I, I, I heat 'em up a little bit. They don't always like that, this part of my conversation, but I still believe we can do something.
Katherine: Yeah. I love, Colette, that you, in the book, I unpack a little bit, don't do anywhere near the justice it deserves because it is, like, I think kind of a sacred text, Donella Meadows' work on leverage points in a system. And you're just going straight for paradigms, right?
Which are the most powerful, the ability to…
Eva: can you please explain what those two things are?
Katherine: Yeah, yeah. So Donella Meadows was a systems theorist, and she looked at complex systems, both, you know, ecological systems, but she might look at a city like New Orleans. She might look at a corporation like Patagonia to understand, how does change in these systems happen?
And she breaks it down. and she puts them in rank order, and they're not the things that we are often told are solutions, right? I mean, they're on there.
Changing laws is on there. Shifting capital, that's on there. But the most powerful thing is what she calls paradigms, which are basically our shared beliefs about how the world works and what's, what's good and what's right, and the ability to reshape paradigms, right? So, so a very classic paradigm that has existed in, in this country for a long time is that it is economy versus environment,
Colette: Right.
Katherine: and that's goes straight to the heart of what, what Colette's talking about. And if we can't, like, rattle ourselves out of that paradigm, that these things are in opposition to each other, and that actually at the end of the day, there is no economy without
Colette: Say it again, sister. Say it again.
Katherine: Um, and, and that that is about questioning these fundamental values that we hold. And I, I think a lot about something I heard Cherrie Mitchell, who's also has a, a Lighting the Way story in the book. She's an amazing author and teacher and Wabanaki leader, and she's like, "It is so much about enough."
Colette: Mhm. I see.
Katherine: what is enough? And I've been thinking about that so much with this data center build-out. Like, my God, what is enough? And the truth is that in our economic system, nothing is enough.
Eva: Mm-hmm.
Katherine: answer is that nothing is enough. And so we- if we wanna move out of extraction, if we wanna move back into reciprocity, and all the repair that Taproot, I think, talks about so beautifully, in this consumer culture, we've gotta have a reckoning with enough,
Colette: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Eva: Yeah. That is a really good way to put it, so okay. this book, you could read it on your own and do all the little activities on your own, but you also have a section at the end of each chapter that, like, basically tells you how to lead your own workshop and discussion group about this.
So I wanted to ask you, why was it important for you to use this book to kind of encourage people to gather together?
Katherine: I think it's just sort of a, a, a basic strategy that if you're facing a personal crisis, you don't try to go it alone. And if you're facing a planetary crisis, you really, really better not try to go it alone, right? Like, this is just like, you know, your grandma would tell you, would tell you this, right?
Like, call your friend. Call your sister. Call your people. and, and of course, it, it goes back, Eva, to some degree to that, you know, the origins of this body of work that everything we've done with Climate Wayfinding has been based in, in community.
Colette: I love that and I, I wanna agree, um, because it is the best type of disruption to a mighty force of individualism, and I think it's a solution. Building community is a solution to individualism, which is driving this economic system to profit until only one survives. It's a brilliant seed to plant. It's a brilliant seed that this book is gonna plant around many, many places, and it will, it will grow into something that can combat a very powerful force against us right now.
Eva: Yeah. Yeah. In light of that, Katherine, who do you hope will be the audience for this book and, and what kind of impact do you hope it has?
Katherine: I hope that this book will, maybe it's the first climate book someone's read, and it gives them a sense that they are welcome, um, that they belong here. That it may land with someone who has recently retired, and they're trying to figure out, "How can I use this third act of my life to help?" That it might land with folks who've lost their jobs at the EPA or the national parks, and they're now trying to figure out how to pick up the pieces from a body of work they'd been carrying that's been dismantled. That it just reaches folks who are At any kind of crossroads and I hope it feels like the kind of book that people can use and then they wanna come back to and back to as they find themselves holding new questions.
You know, the only way to answer our questions is to do the work to answer them, right? Like, people ask, like, "What can I do? What can I do?" As if somebody is gonna arrive with some perfect scroll, you know, of what they and their place with their values, with their concerns should do. And the only way that we can answer that question is to answer it for ourselves and with each other. Um, yeah.
Eva: Are there any other thoughts y'all would like to leave us with?
Colette: I think what I would like folks to, to know is that, um,when faced with impossible moments, if we choose to be our best selves, we can require less of ourselves. We can manage when faced with impossible moments, manage we choose to be our best selves, which will require us to park the egos, manage the pain, manage the trauma, make some space, manage discomfort, and don't mistake it for harm. When we choose to be our best selves, we can do beautiful things and I believe enough in humanity, enough in North Americans, enough in Southerners in Louisiana that, we can achieve that moment.
And I'm looking forward to it because I think we get to celebrate with gumbo and bread pudding and whiskey when we're done, and I'm looking forward to that great crawfish boil after we save the planet. Looking forward to it.
Katherine: Mm. May it be so.
Colette: May it be so.
Katherine: gosh, I, I'm just feeling a, just an immense amount of gratitude, uh, for this conversation and delight. I feel really nourished.
And, um, yeah, this, this way-finding thing, it continues, right? the only thing we can do is grow our capacity for it. And I took a little sabbatical last summer to focus on this book, three months sabbatical, and exactly one month in, my dad passed,
Eva: Mm, I'm sorry.
Katherine: Thanks. It was, um, it was the end of a long journey with Alzheimer's, the first symptom of which is, is losing your way. And, um, I was thinking about him, and I was thinking about love, at the end of, of working on this book. And I think that's, what I wanna leave us with, that, hope we we will approach the work of climate, the work of transforming our economy, the work of being human here and now, not as wanting to fix something, but wanting to love something.
Colette: I see.
Eva: Wow. Well, thank you both so much for this beautiful, inspiring, uplifting conversation. I know this book found me in a time in my life where I really needed it, and I feel like it's gonna do the same for a lot of people.
So thank you, Katherine, for being here. Thank you, Colette, for adding your amazing insights.
Colette: Respect.
Katherine: Mm. Thank you, Eva.
Colette: Peace
Thanks for listening to Sea Change. This episode was hosted by me, Executive Producer Carlyle Calhoun, and Eva Tesfaye. Eva conducted the interview. Sound design by Kurt Kohnen, and our theme music is by Jon Batiste. Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We're a part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX.
And to help others find our podcast, hit Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. WWNO's Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
We'll be back in two weeks.
