Season 5, Episode 2: Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth with Kate Schapira
image credit | Plastic Lines
Season 5, Episode 2: Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth with Kate Schapira
From Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth
“In 2014, when Kate Schapira first set up a Climate Anxiety Counseling booth in her hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, far fewer people were talking about climate change and its attendant anxiety, leaving those who couldn’t ignore climate change and the forces that cause it feeling frantic and alone. Seeking a way to reach out and connect, Schapira set up a Peanuts-style "The Doctor Is In" booth to talk about climate change with her community. Ten years and over 1200 conversations later, Schapira channels all she’s learned into an accessible, understandable, and aware guide for processing climate anxiety and connecting with others to carry out real change in your life and in your community.”
Join Kate in discussion with Panu and Thomas, and learn how you too can create safe spaces to talk, feel and dream about how we can master and move through the climate crisis.
Links
Support: World Central Kitchen
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.
Doherty: Well hello, I’m Thomas Doherty.
Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.
Doherty: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. This is our podcast to show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change and other environmental issues. And if you've listened to us, you know that Panos in Finland and I'm in the U S and the West coast and we have guests. We talk about what it means to live in the modern world and ask this provocative question about what does it mean to be happy with climate change and other issues. And part of that is talking about how we feel about things, getting those emotions out, which isn't always easy. So I'm really glad to be able to talk about that today. And I'm honored to have a special guest.
Schapira: Hi, I'm Kate Shapira. I'm a writer and teacher who's become a climate listener out of my own climate anxiety in order to connect with my community. I live in Providence, Rhode Island on Narragansett land.
Doherty: Yeah, and Kate is someone I've been aware of. If you're aware of the literature at all and climate, climate psychology, she's had a great book on her climate anxiety counseling booth, we'll, which we'll talk about. Panu and I love meeting people that have been doing this work in different innovative ways. So it's really nice for us to connect and listener you can kind of join in listening on our conversation today. We're recording in the summer 2025. It's a beautiful day where I am right now, but there's a lot of troubles in the world as well, and it is a heat wave here. So, you know, we're enjoying ourselves and then we're carrying a lot of things. But that is our life. So Panu, do you want to get us started with Kate and our conversation?
Pihkala: Warmly welcome, Kate, also on my behalf. Lovely to be talking with you. I have been following your work since the late 2010s and have your book here with me in Helsinki. And dear listeners, we are also going to talk a bit about comics today, which we don't do often enough. Peanuts by Charles Schulz will be mentioned today and it will remain to be seen in what connection. But Kate, it would be lovely to start by talking a bit about your background. All of us have our own journeys towards being more aware of climate crisis and all the things that are related to it. Would you like to share with us something about your own journey and relation with the modern human world and climate change and emotions and so on?
Schapira: Absolutely. And also thank you both for having me. I'm so glad to be here. I feel like my sense of the climate crisis became acute in probably 2012, 2013. And there's sort of two simultaneous origin stories for it. The one that I tell the most often is about reading an article, an older article about oral bleaching and It was one of the first things that I had ever read that spoke about climate impact in the past tense. So not, this is going to happen if we don't do X, this could happen if we don't do Y. was like, this has already happened. And the ability of these reefs to regenerate and survive is in some cases in doubt and in other cases, we know that they cannot. And that really threw me. I cried a lot. I was at work. I was in my office waiting to speak with a student. We were in tears, went out into the hallway. My coworkers were very kind, but they didn't seem to understand why I was so upset. And I remained upset. I cried at work. I cried at dinner. I sat on the couch and cried. But you can't do that forever, Sooner or later, you're gonna need to figure out something else to do.
And for me, part of what got me unlocked from it, so my husband James Kuo is a cartoonist and illustrator, and we have a lot of these Peanuts by Charles Schultz's collections around. And so I was looking at one of those and I saw that Lucy, one of the characters, has this little booth that says, psychiatric help, five cents, the doctor is in. And that just kind of got mixed up in the duct tape ball of my mind to think what if I made a little booth and set it up in a public place in order to talk to people.
There’s some there was some precedent for that in my creative practice. I did a lot of poetry on demand when I first moved to Providence. So I'd set up with a little table and a little typewriter. Sometimes as part of like an arts festival or something at the museum, sometimes just for funsies. And people would come up and say, would you write me a poem about changing my name? Or would you write me a poem about this show that I love? Or would you write me a poem about faking my own death? Never gonna forget that one. And so I was in the habit of creating this like small collaborative spaces to have conversations with people that were a little bit out of the ordinary. And that helped me construct this little container to have some of these conversations. In downtown Providence is where I started right across from the big bus station that our city has at the entrance to a park.
That's the sort of official origin story. The less official one, which I have spoken about, but I do want to bring it forward here because it's a little it's a little heavier and some listeners may resonate with it more, is that before any of that happened I was corresponding with a poet friend who was very much in a state of grief and anger of the same degree to the one that I reached later. And I told her I couldn't talk about it. I asked her not to talk about it. which wasn't the right thing to do. But I didn't have a way to talk about it with her in a way that I could handle. And I pushed her away. When I started doing my own learning about how bad you could feel, what was going on, and then how to talk with people about it, I eventually did reach out to her again and say, “hey, I screwed this up and I'm really sorry. I wish I could have been there for you.”
Doherty: Yeah, that's beautiful. Thanks for sharing those multiple levels. Yeah, and think a lot of people could identify with both of those things. It's not easy. We've talked to people about it, know, an eco wake up or a waking up syndrome. And if you've had the syndrome and you've gone through it, then you certainly understand it. But it is kind of a paradigm shift to do this.
Yeah, there's a lot there to unpack. I think to bookmark just your, from therapy, we would say your “symptoms”, like you were crying that day. That was an intense emotional experience for you. And then I was really curious about how you did the booth. I know it's kind of like a performance art. I see it as like a performance art kind of thing. I've seen people do poetry on demand. I've always thought that would be a really challenging thing to do. It's like slam poetry or something where you have to make up something on the spot. You used your strength, like you channel your superpower. Panu, what do you think? Where are you interested in going with our conversation?
Pihkala: Warm thanks, Kate, for sharing all that, really appreciated it. There's lot of connections with various emotions and also people's journeys or trajectories. One of the tools I've been working with a lot over the last years is the so-called process model of ego anxiety and ecological grief. There are some connections to that, moving from semi-consciousness to awakenings and then the shocks included in that process. And I think all of us can resonate at least in relation to non-environmental themes with experiences of letting somebody down and perhaps not first realizing how badly we've let somebody down, but it's also very human when it comes to very difficult topics.
So just wanting to validate that also, that it's no wonder that many of us often have failed to really be there and listen. And I think that if one reaches a state of intention to later do something about it, that's very, very valuable. I'm also glad to hear that you reached out to the person later on. And would you like to share something about that later communication? How did you feel about it or how did it go?
Schapira: As I remember it it—it was pretty quick and light. She was at an event that I was doing not for the book, but for something else. And I saw her there and I spoke from the stage that I recognized this shortfall in how I'd responded to her. And she accepted that, which I appreciated.
Doherty: Did you feel some lessening of your own guilt then from that?
Schapira: Oh, no! You're asking the wrong guy. But I am glad I did it because I know, because it was the truth, which I think is important, and because it was the right thing to do.
Pihkala: Yeah, thanks for being open about that also. I'm reminded of a younger colleague and doctoral student, Anette from Finland, who is researching ego-emotions from a psychoanalytic perspective, which is not so common these days in Finland. Other schools of psychology are more prominent, but she has a great story of talking with climate issues with her aunt who first was totally unable to listen to any of that. But then she tried to channel psycho-dynamic wisdom, building a sense of safety and acceptance and speaking gently from one's own experience. And then one day in a sauna, which is a typical Finnish place for deep conversations and deep sweating, the aunt said that, “I've realized that I've been so horrified by the whole theme of climate change that I haven't been able to take in what you have been saying”. So that was really profound I think that she's been talking about this openly with her aunt, Annette (Mansikka-aho is her last name) the relationship of her own to climate matters didn't change completely but I regard it as a great psychological and psychosocial achievement that she was able to vocally say what kind of psycho dynamics were present. So that took some time but wanted to mention since the theme of fifficult conversations is much present here. Would you like to continue Kate by telling us and the listeners a bit about how has the journey with the booth has been for you? You set up a booth and what happens with people?
Schapira: I will tell you that, but I’d like to first response to something you said about difficult conversations. I'm Jewish. I come from a Jewish family. And I had a conversation last year with my cousin. have a boy cousin who's the same age, about how to talk to the relatives on his side of the family about Palestine. When he would try to bring it up, people would become very closed and very insistent on the things that they had learned and the things that they had taught that were a justification of violence, increased violence from the Israeli government and military. And we were sitting on the roof of the building where he lives and it was a hot night, it was summer. And I remember asking, you know, well, how did you come to change your mind? How did you start to know that this wasn't right, that this wasn't something that should continue?
And he talked about stuff that he'd read by Palestinian writers, starting to read some history, getting a picture of life there that he hadn't had access to as a young man growing up in an American Jewish community. And I said, well, did you used to think some of the stuff that your other family thought and thinks now? And he said, yeah. And I said, well, do you think that maybe it would work to say, hey, I used to think that too, or I used to feel that way too. And this is the thing that made me change my mind. And I think he's done some of that. I think some of it has worked and some of it hasn't. know, people are deep in, and I think that the conversation that you relate about your colleague and her aunt really shows this, people are deep in what they don't wanna know, what they don't wanna feel even more. Right? They don't want to feel that. People don't want to feel that they were wrong about the commitments that they've made or the courses of action that they've been taking. And so offering people an opportunity to watch you have been wrong and make a shift, I think is a great gift. And even if people aren't ready to accept that in the moment, it's still a a good offering to make.
Back to your question about the booth, sometimes that's a tactic that I will use. I will use that method. If somebody comes up saying something that I don't get a lot of like climate deniers, occasionally I will get some climate change trivializers. Sometimes I will also, people will come up just thinking something that isn't true, like thinking that something is more important than it is or less important than it is. And so that's a moment when I might make that invitation and use that method to say like, yeah, I used to think that too. And here's how I came to change my mind.
And an example of that, again, if you don't mind my saying, is that, I'm somebody who came to quote unquote, “environmentalism:, the way that I think a lot of upper middle class white Americans do, which is what I am. You know, I read Ranger Rick magazine, which is like a nature magazine for kids listeners my age might remember that. You know, I lived in a place where there was a lot of like plant and creature activity and my mom and I would enjoy the plant and creature activity together. We'd walk in the woods.
We still walk around the yard and check out what's going on with all of the plants and creatures every time that I go home. But I did not develop (and through the booth, I did develop and other things that I'll talk about in a moment). How humans also have a responsibility to one another in this moment. I had a pretty strong sense of like human nature relations and the responsibility that humans might have to the more than human world and the living systems that we're part of, but I really didn't have a strong corresponding sense of how other humans were also part of that system and how part of addressing the wound, right, that exists in our present moment is setting right human to human relations in conjunction with setting right human and more than human relations.
Doherty: I'm glad you talked about the background in the Ranger Rick because that's always another of our questions is the deeper background, the seeds of this kind of stuff. We have these deeply held values that we take over our lives and when that coral bleaching story broke through like it really pierced some of those values that you had developed over time. I think people are practically cursed with these deeper values. I'm sure you find similar deeper backgrounds when talking to children and elders and parents at your booth. So your background is as a writer, a poet, an educator, I assume, right? Professor maybe. When you did the booth, did you have any counseling training? Did you see it as counseling or did you see it more as just, “I'm just gonna do this creative thing.”
Schapira: Well, the counseling is obviously partly a joke. It's a reference to the peanuts cartoon. And one of the things that I realized, again, I didn't go into it thinking this, but I realized this as I continued to do it, is that Lucy isn't able to offer psychiatric help any more than I am. Lucy isn't a psychiatrist. Lucy is a child. She is wildly unequal to the situation that she is making claims about. And that is true for many of us in this in this climate moment, right? In what Grace Lee Boggs calls like “this time on the clock of the world”, many of us are feeling profoundly unequal to the situation that we're in. And so the joke of the sign ended up being kind of funnier even than I originally imagined because it was a way to say, yeah, I don't have all the answers or even like two, but I have some questions. Maybe we can ask those questions together.
I will also say that I had had, not, I wouldn't call it counseling training, but I've had some listening training. I staffed the sexual assault hotline when I was in college. As a teacher, I'm often listening to what my students are telling me about what they're dealing with and what they would like to, trying to help them figure out what they would like to do about it. Not in a counseling way, but just in a like, I'm,
receiving the full picture of what you're dealing with kind of way. And I got a lot better about that as the years of the Booth have gone on. I think when at the beginning, I was maybe more inclined to give advice or to argue very much too early in the process. And as I think many therapists do also, although again, that's not the training that I have, I got better at first making sure that the person who's talking with me knew that I was hearing what they were saying.
Doherty: Yeah. Yeah. And I wasn't I wasn't implying that your work was less than because you're not a training as a counselor. There's a funny thing about some of this work because this is just human conversation. You know, it's just human listening. So it's kind of like emotional intelligence is another way you could have called it emotional intelligence booth about climate change or something. And then yes, we have these specialty areas, but then a lot of artists do work with the public that is therapeutic. Like it's not therapy but it's therapeutic. I'm thinking of that artist Marina Abramovic which I think you know who just sits with people and people line up just to sit and be you know share presence that's so profound and all that kind of stuff. Where do you find yourself going with your family or your personal life, your creative writing or your book or you know where where's your edges now? Let's shrink it down to whatever little micro edge that you want.
Schapira: My God, that's such a large question. One thing is when I had been doing the booth for a few months, and this is chronicled in lessons from the climate anxiety counseling booth as well, someone came up to me and said, we're having a meeting tonight about stopping this liquid natural gas facility, this liquefied natural gas facility in the Port of Providence, is toward the southern part of the city. A lot of industry is already there. It's also very close to where many people live and it's very close to the major hospital complex in Providence, including the only level one trauma center in the state. And they want to increase the amount of liquefied natural gas that's flowing through. And they want to build this facility that is in the floodplain and is going to worsen the risk for constructions that are in the floodplain. And they want to run highly explosive methane fuel through it. Do you want to come to this meeting and talk about what we're going to try to do to stop it? And so that was the beginning of the thing that I was talking about before realizing that part of this work is figuring out how to protect and sustain the lives of other humans, as well as of coral and squirrels and turtles and redwood trees, all of which I love, and learning that many of the same things that sustain those things are also helpful and necessary to the sustenance of other people. Many of the same things that threaten those living creatures also threaten the lives and sustenance of other human people.
I continue to be involved in trying to support the lives and sustenance of other human people.in the place where I live. I'm connected with a number of community efforts to do that, which I can talk about a little bit more if you're interested. So that's one thing that I'm doing. I've become very attentive to, and to some extent involved in things like comprehensive plans for housing and construction and infrastructure in the city where I live. I sometimes say that climate anxiety is a community problem with community solutions.
And what I mean by that is partly, let's speak with each other. Let's listen to each other. Let's find out what each other are dealing with and let's be responsive to that. But it also means things like rent stabilization and building affordable, energy efficient housing. It also means things like creating a path to that housing for people so that they're not going to have to sleep outside and then get swept away in the next hurricane or die of heatstroke in the next heat wave. This is a community task that we're taking on. If people are on the move because of climate effects on the place where they live, I would like there to be enough housing in the place where I live to accommodate everyone who's already here and to accommodate the people who are coming in so that they won't be feeling a scarcity that is threatening and not necessary. So there's inner work that you can do, and I encourage people to do it, that has to do with questioning your feelings of scarcity, recognizing feelings of sufficiency, recognizing feelings of sufficiency. Learning what you value and appreciate about the place where you live and want to sustain, learning what aspects of that might be malleable or you might be able to get that sustenance and satisfaction in a different way. That's all inner work and relational work. It's something that you can talk about with other people. It's something that you can invite other people into. You can have social times about it. It's also something that needs attention at structural, infrastructural levels and the structural and infrastructural work is harder to do if you haven't done the relational work.
One of the things that struck me as was starting to read your book, Thomas, is you really stress the reason to contend with and incorporate your emotional responses to climate impacts is so that you can show up as your best self with the people around you in the moment that we're in. And so I think the value of having a lot of these conversations and the importance of having a lot of these conversations is so that when we have to contend with things like housing policy or a city budget, we're doing so as our most generous and present selves.
Pihkala: Thanks for all that, Kate. think that's wonderfully put. And the book, Lessons from the Climate and Exciting Counseling Booth has a really powerful social dimension and kind of eco-social justice dimension in it. And in my view, very nice weaving together the inner and the outer and including some of the spiritual aspects also. I don't know if you would call it that yourself, but that's what I would call it. And discussing many emotions, including the role of anger and determination and emotion regulation by getting angry on purpose at times, which is a nice theme and not very much discussed yet in relation to ego emotions or polycrisis emotions or whatever we call them. But I think that the theme of being with people where they are is a sort link between what you did with the booth and what you're doing in the social networks and avoiding hierarchies and that sort of thing, but drawing from people's different skillsets and expertise. Warmly endorsing all that myself and learning. More from it and listeners, if you want, connect with earlier episodes with Bob Doppelt and Susie Moser, for example, who are participating in similar kinds of movements.
Schapira:
Yeah, I find a lot of those frameworks very useful also in thinking about how to have these conversations with people and connect and be attentive. I'm very grateful for that. Also really, really appreciative. Many of the people that I quote in my book, but I've also been really appreciating the book. I've also been really appreciating the work of Bayo Akomolafé, who writes about a kind of undoing of certainty and an undoing of human supremacy. And many other writers and thinkers, Kyle Powys Whyte of the Potawatomi Nation writes a lot about working with the urgency that many people feel in the face of climate impacts like this is happening, it's barreling down on us, it's already injured the place where I live or it's already injured people that I know I have to do something, why aren't we doing something? And the request to be more attentive to what is already being done, what has already been done.
And I'm thinking, I'm trying to make sure I paraphrase him correctly, because I really do encourage people to be attentive to this, notice when your own urgency is maybe setting you up for a mistake, to focus your effort in a place that won't be effective or that will harm someone else. The comparison I sometimes use is like, if you're running to catch a train, right? You might bump into someone and the person you bump into might be, let's say, an elderly person who's carrying a lot of bags. It's not worth it to catch the train. It's better to help that person with their bags instead of bumping into them.
Doherty: Yeah, that's great. We always say we wish we had more time. We're coming toward the end of our time. But this has been a great little, thanks, Kate. It's been a great little inward insight into your life. So many themes, but listeners I just want to kind of try to encapsulate this a little bit. There's this hero's journey image that we know about. I talk about it a bit in my book and the master of two worlds is at the end of your whatever journey you did, you have to come back to your community and do something with this knowledge.
I think Kate, the idea that you went through the counseling booth phase and now you're working on these real things in your community, I think makes perfect sense. And I think that's what's going to be the thing for listeners. There'll be times when we're learning and on our quest to figure this out. And then we're like, OK, now I need to enact something.
Kate, seems to me you threw yourself into that as an artist or poet, you risked throwing yourself into that booth, you know, like without a net, like doing a trapeze without a net. So that was like the hero's journey there. And then Lucy, I need to go back and look at peanuts cartoons because I remember Lucy being a bit ornery and she would hold the football for Charlie Brown and he would try to kick it and she'd pull it away. So, sometimes we think we're going to kick something and that we land on our butt. Anyway, this has been really great.
Listeners, we're going to put some links to Kate's work and, you know, people like Bayo Akomolafé who we need to get on our podcast. And there's all these cool thinkers out there. So we'll put some links and Kate, we'll get links from you and this episode will come out soon and we'll get it out into the world.Kate, thanks for your time coming from the East Coast and Panu from Finland. I'm going to head off and do some of my own manifesting work here. Where are you all going now for your days?
Schapira: I have to print something out for somebody and then I'm actually going to do some climate listening down in Warren, Rhode Island, which is a town in elsewhere in the state that's really menaced by sea level rise and stormwater flooding. And they're thinking about who will be able to stay in their homes and are there streets that are going to become less navigable as time goes on? The predictions are that there are going to be parts of town that are less inhabitable. And so talking with people about what neighbors can do, what the town might be demanded to do, and working with a local organization to meet regularly to plan those things together.
Pihkala: Wow, that sounds excellent and really enjoyed the conversation with you, Kate and Thomas, as always. My evening is first for an hour discussing contemplative practices and Earth awareness at an international working group and then I'm heading for the sauna with the boys. So that's my evening.
Doherty: All right, long day. Well, anyway, we're all doing our part and listeners, I know you're all doing your part too. So be well, you can find us at climatechangeathappiness.com and Kate and Panu and listeners, take care.
Schapira: Thank you both so much for having me.
[music: “CC&H theme music”]
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