Season 4, Episode 20: Changing Summers and Winters: Moods, Music & Family
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.
Links
Zadie Smith: Elegy for a country’s seasons
Poem by SZ Chao: “Not all warmth consoles”
Soft Loft Summer Sadness
Lana Del Ray Summer Sadness
John Cox Weather For Dummies
US NOAA / National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center Long Range Forecasts
Transcript
Transcript 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 planet's future. So, it's an interesting situation where I'm sort of keeping an eye and other senses open on what's actually in his body and mind and how he is feeling and coping. But so far, it seems that he's been able to hold that information but also enjoy life and function in the world at the same time. That I think goes to some of the quite deep dynamics of the matter.
Doherty: Yeah, that's an important point with children. So, it could go either way with children. Some children are naturally, I was going to say naive, but they don't think about these things. They're just looking forward to the summer and they're not overly thinking about the weather. But then some kids could really get into researching or even anxiety or catastrophizing or start researching disasters and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, as a parent, getting ahead of it yourself and like with all parent climate coping things, you've got to have your own house in order in terms of your own mood and how you're thinking about it. Moving toward it versus avoiding it, I guess.
Pihkala: Yeah, and I was about to ask, I know that you have been working hard in finishing the forthcoming book and I hear that the title is actually in the final form and will also be related to climate anxiety. What kind of advice about coping are you giving in the book? Would you like to share some of that?
Doherty: Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, Surviving Climate Anxiety: A Guide to Coping, Healing, and Thriving is going to come out this fall. And it's already on pre-order on Amazon. The first part of the book is about coping. There's a chapter on how to think, a chapter on how to feel, a chapter on your body, essentially, how to de-stress, and then the fourth chapter is how to adapt. I have the reader go through what I call their own IPCC report or their individual problems with climate change report, which is essentially kind of what we're talking about. It's like, what does your individual climate report look like? So where do you live, and what is the typical weather there, and how is it changing, and what are the dangers for you. It is literally like making your own climate report because you have to think about the history and what do we know and then what's going to change and how much can we predict based on what we already know, which we know a lot and where are my risk factors. So, it really works for anyone in any social class or any place because for some people, it’s worrying about their vacation property somewhere that's going to fall into the ocean because they're wealthy. The other person is worrying about whether their crop or their garden or their farm or orchard or their grape vineyard will survive. So, it's really looking at weather dangers where you live in storms or wildfires or smoke. But it's amazing when you actually lay it out, logically people can do it. You know, it's not that hard. The reason it's sequenced that way is because first of all, how are you thinking about this? Let’s get on top of your thoughts. Are you catastrophizing? Are you looking at both sides? Are you looking at the positive and negative? And then, what are your feelings? How do you feel? So that's all that writing. And then your body, of course. If you're freaked out and have a stress reaction and a fight or flight response, then you're not going to do well. But once you calm your body down, then suddenly you can have this logical inner dialogue about what are my risks. And then suddenly you're coping, you're adapting. It is possible to do. It's just that everything's happening so quickly and everybody's so overwhelmed that they're having a stress response and they don't know what they're feeling, and their thoughts are jumbled. And then, it's very difficult and it leads to this doomism kind of scenario. Does that make sense?
Pihkala: Yeah, it perfectly does. Thanks for sharing a bit about what's coming up there. In my work with the process model, for example, there's discussion of many linked dynamics and this reality that there's going to be different phases and stages and sometimes growth in coping skills. Then, there may be more difficult periods, but it all adds up. So, everything that we can learn in relation to how to think and feel as you say and how to cope. I would sort of offer that as a word of encouragement if there's somebody listening who feels a bit desperate about coping. So especially with the help of others, it's likely possible to grow in skills.
Doherty: Yeah, for sure. In terms of coping, there's a book called Weather for Dummies, which in the US, we have this series of books ‘for dummies’ that simplify topics by John Cox. It is really good. I know Bill Gates always recommends it in his reading lists and it is helpful to read that. Then, you could look at the US Climate Prediction Center from the government. Everything is in danger in the United States because of the great crisis in our central government. But we do traditionally have really good materials for climate prediction here in the U.S. All of that has unfortunately been politicized and a lot of it is being censored. But there is information that we can find so we can plan. So, there is no reason not to have a sense of what your season is going to be. And it's fairly clear that wetter places are going to be wetter, drier places are going to be drier, fiery places are going to be more fiery, stormy places are going to be more stormy. That's the gist of it. So, I think people can get ahead of this a little bit. Then there's all the music and the art. In my climate playlist for the book, I have a song called “Summer Sadness” by this band Soft Loft. And it's simply exactly what that is about feeling sad in the summer and trying to sort out things. The singer Lana Del Rey has another song called “Summertime Sadness” as well. So, there's a whole genre of songs that flirt with this idea of being sad in the summer for various reasons. And then there is summer seasonal affective disorder, a true psychological issue. The flip side of winter seasonal affective disorder where people get really irritable, they can't sleep. So, it's more an activated kind of depression in the summer than it would be in a more lethargic winter depression.
Pihkala: Yeah, when listening to you, Lana Del Rey's song started playing in my head, so that resonates. And listeners, there's a couple of episodes in the history of this podcast where we discussed these climate emotion playlists. And now, Thomas has some new playlist related to the book. So, I would recommend going back to those ones and music is also personally a major resource, both as listened to and as played. One thing we haven't revealed is that we actually got to play some music together when I was in Portland. There was the episode of us meeting in person and that was also nice, and I think something which is ancient and universal and hopefully that might happen more often again in Western industrialized societies - doing music together.
Doherty: Yeah, exactly. I think the takeaway as we wrap up today is thinking ahead to your season and committing to be your best self and to have your eyes wide open to what you're getting to so you can adapt. The other term is climate adaptation. So, we have to learn to adapt and change our life to fit the changed world and part of climate adaptation is survival and it's really basic. The basic base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. We have to make sure we have food, shelter, clothing, but then there is self-actualization and living our lives and following through on our dreams. And life doesn't stop. So, it's all of that. And I think it is possible. Like anything else, the sooner we get thinking about it, the better in terms of getting ahead of things. Whether that be a vacation or a wedding or fixing your house up or your living situation or thinking about your job. I feel for people that are in really extreme situations with this, but all of us have our story. Well, let's wrap it up. This was really nice. I always get a lot out of these conversations. This is part of it, just talking about this with people especially those who care and understand. So, listeners, I hope you felt heard and witnessed out there. And yeah, keep us in mind at climatechangeandhappiness.com. Send us your thoughts or ideas. You can send a message to us on our website. And I wish everyone health, wealth, and safety here for the new season. Panu, what are you heading for the evening?
Pihkala: Well, since it is a nice, warm spring evening, I'm probably going to spend some time outdoors and take a look at those spring flowers. How's the day ahead for you, Thomas? It's your morning.
Doherty: Yeah, I've got to get some work done today. I've got to try to be productive today on my book project and on my psychology work and all this kind of stuff. But it is a really pleasant day as well. I also have to clean up my front porch, put my plants in better pots and do a lot of those seasonal spring things that are really pleasant. So, that's where I'm at today. Anyway, Panu, be well and listeners, be well. Everyone take care, keep in touch, and we'll talk to you next time. Bye bye.
Pihkala: Take care.
[music: “CC&H theme music”]
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