ecoRI News reporter and Blab Lab host Colleen Cronin speaks with Kate Schapira, teacher, activist, and author of “Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth.” The book guides readers through personal and general climate anxiety, frustration, helplessness, and grief and toward a sense of shared purpose and community care. Kate and Colleen digest the 2024 election results in the context of climate anxiety — finding actionable steps for connecting with others, focusing our energy, and working toward a radically more livable future.

Subscribe and listen on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast.

Please share any questions or ideas with Colleen by emailing her at [email protected]

This transcript was edited for clarity and length.

Colleen Cronin 

Welcome to the Blab Lab, a podcast from the reporters of ecoRI News where we unpack the critical environmental issues facing southern New England. I’m reporter Colleen Cronin, and I’m here today with author Kate Schapira to talk about her new book, Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth.

On top of being an author and poet, Schapira teaches nonfiction writing at Brown University and has been involved in several climate-related fights, including activism against proposed power plants in Burrillville and the Port of Providence, and most recently started working in Warren to document and disseminate information about the town’s managed retreat.

On today’s episode, the two of us are going to chat about her book and how she suggests taking care and taking action.

Hi Kate, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Kate Schapira 

Thanks so much for having me.

Colleen Cronin 

It’s so good to be here with you, even though today is a tough day. We are recording the day after the election, which was probably a late night for a lot of listeners. So, before we kind of get into the book itself, I just wanted you to maybe talk a little bit about how you got into environmentalism and what you do?

Kate Schapira 

Sure. So, in 2013, I read an article about coral bleaching that talked about coral reefs primarily in the past tense. While I’d been alert to environmental questions, stuff about biodiversity, kind of a white girl environmentalism, I would say, for my younger years, that was sort of the first time I’d heard anybody or seen anybody talk about climate change and its impact as something that had happened that was irrevocable, and it really threw me into a tailspin. I cried all the time. I cried at work, I cried at dinner, and when I would try to talk with people about it, the people who loved me, who recognized climate change as a reality, who cared about me and cared about the world, kind of acted like I was nuts. And I was like, how do we talk about this if we can’t talk about it, regular person to person, in the hallway, at the table, what are some ways that we could try to talk about this? Or am I really the only one who’s feeling like this right now? So, a couple other pieces of this backstory: Before all of that had happened, I’d done this poetry-on-demand booth at a couple of local arts events, and people would come up to me, and they’d ask for a poem about changing their name or faking their own death.

Colleen Cronin 

That’s kind of fun. Very interesting.

Kate Schapira 

It was really fun. I loved it. It got me writing without having to, like, come up with an idea. And it gave them a little bit of a machinery of feeling to use, which is a quote about poetry. I can’t remember whose quote, combined with the fact that my partner’s a cartoonist.

Colleen Cronin 

I didn’t know that, that’s really cool.

Kate Schapira 

Yeah, he has a lot of Peanuts collections by Charles Schulz lying around. And of course, Lucy has a little psychiatric help, five cents counseling booth in those strips. And I think everything just kind of came together in the blender and turned into this little climate anxiety counseling booth that I made out of cardboard and plywood and wheeled downtown to Kennedy Plaza in the middle of Providence on a hand truck to see if anybody wanted to talk to me.

Colleen Cronin 

That’s so cool. I don’t know if you know this about me, but I also really love Peanuts. I was Snoopy for Halloween this year. My partner was Woodstock. I didn’t know that that was the origin story. So ,can you then talk a little bit more … you know, you get the booth down there. You’re in Kennedy Plaza. There’s tons of people around. What actually happens in the booth?

Kate Schapira 

Well, sometimes nothing happens for a while; sometimes I just sit there and people look at it, and they kind of do, like, a double or triple take, but then they, like, walk on by.

Colleen Cronin 

People trying to catch on.

Kate Schapira 

Totally, either because they’re like, “It’s not for me. This isn’t for me. This isn’t about me,” or because they’re on their way to where they’re going. I think probably the fact that I am white makes some people more comfortable talking to me than others. Sometimes people don’t stop. They look and don’t stop. Sometimes they read the name of the sign out loud to themselves, but they kind of keep walking, and then sometimes they stop. And usually the question that I get the most is, what is this? And so then I say, “I’m asking people about their anxieties around climate change, but I’ll also listen to any anxieties that you have. Do you have any anxieties that you’d like to share today?” And what I hear really ranges from, “I think about climate change all the time. It freaks me out. I’m so angry, I’m so scared, I’m so stressed,” to, “Well, I know about it, I think about it, but I have more important things that I’m dealing with on my day to day.” And then they often say what those things are: looking for work, hanging on to their housing, or finding safe housing, dealing with addiction.

Colleen Cronin 

So it’s a range, it’s a lot. Honestly, how do you deal with other people’s anxieties? How do you do that?

Kate Schapira 

You know, in a weird way, I started doing it to make myself less lonely, and that does work, that is what happened. Because when I was with someone in the recollection of a tough moment or the articulation of a tough feeling, it’s experiencing something that hurts with someone versus experiencing it alone.

Colleen Cronin 

So then how do you turn all that into a book?

Kate Schapira 

The book sort of came about because I was like, “What’s replicable about this process and what’s a way to make it happen?” The things that the conversations at the booth cannot make happen, that’s a bunch of different things. That’s working more deeply with your feelings, with people that you actually know and trust. It’s working together to kind of equip you to act on those feelings, each of you, or both of you, or you taking turns on what those feelings mean about what you should do. So the book allows for different kinds of relationships, and I think also a little bit more time than people are willing to spend or able to spend with me, like standing around at Kennedy Plaza or at the farmers market or conference, you know, whatever the thing is. And then I also did find that, like, while I don’t have a formula, there were questions that kept coming up to help people think about this stuff, things like: Who do you already talk with about this? What do you guys talk about? What do you do when you feel that way? Well, when you see such and such on the news, does that make you feel weak, or does it make you feel strong? Those, I think, form the roots of the exercises that are in the book that make up about a third, a quarter of what the book is. Questions to reflect on climate impacts, on you, on your community, the people around you, the world at large, and then practices, is what I call them. But they’re all, you could also say, like an exercise for connecting with others and taking some form of action based on what the answers to those questions were.

Colleen Cronin 

Yeah, I thought that that was actually a really interesting thing that I didn’t expect out of the book, like I knew about your climate counseling booth. I was hoping I’d get some, you know, own personal ways of taking a deep breath, almost, which I think is a lot of what’s in the book. But then also the book is a lot about taking action. You know, I saw a relationship between those two things, the sort of taking care and taking action. How do they fit together in how you see it?

Kate Schapira 

I love this question. So there’s a few different kinds of angles on this and like, feedback loops and ways that these things interact. The first is, I think that paying attention to how you’re feeling and not trying to make the feeling go away, but kind of asking, like, where’s this feeling coming from? What’s this feeling asking me to do can be the difference between like, doing something on purpose and doing something by accident. I think we’ve all probably had moments where we were feeling like, sharply moved or like, intensely wound up by something that was going on and then acted out of that feeling, and then went, what just happened. I also think that, like the actual physical stress, stress of worrying or being angry or being in grief is, again, you’re not trying to make the feeling go away. But if you have the opportunity to work with the impact that it’s having on your physical self, you might end up like, kind of wearing yourself out or down. You know, I think most people have experiences of this in some contexts, even if they don’t have it around climate change, specifically, like the day after you lose somebody, or like today, the day after the election. Like, what are people’s bodies doing to them at this moment? You don’t want to silence those messages. You don’t want to eliminate them. But there’s not really any virtue in sitting around and twitching with stress. Nobody gets anything out of that. It doesn’t move you in a direction. And I will also add a lot of this, by the way, that I’m talking about emotion and stress, I arrived at some of it intuitively, but a lot of it is coming from the somatic practitioners that I interviewed for the book. They’re the ones who have the expertise. They’ve been a wonderful source of reflection and inspiration for me.

Colleen Cronin 

And then all those people are kind of, you know, they’ve perhaps found their own action to take against climate change. One thing that I kind of saw is the connection between climate anxiety and trying to feel better. And then how does that connect to, you know, urging action. I mean, when I’m anxious about anything, it’s almost this feeling of like, “Oh, what can I do?” You know? What agency do I have? And doing something can actually help you feel better about the thing you’re worried about,

Kate Schapira 

Absolutely. And I think that that, you know, that’s sort of part of the other direction, right? That this stuff can flow. I think you described it very well. The number one thing I hear about at the counseling booth is how helpless people feel and how isolated that there’s no action that they could take that could matter. I think a lot of people, when they think of climate action, they think of something like weatherizing their house, if they have a house, or they think of something like riding their bike instead of driving, all of which is terrific. Like, yes, do that if you can do it, that’s wonderful. And the more people who do it, the less we need the other stuff that hurts us more. But it’s less common, or at least it was for many years. It might be shifting a little bit. It’s less common for people to think of climate action as going to a town meeting or doing research on a power plant. I think a lot of people wouldn’t think of going to a community emergency response training as climate action. I think it is the other thing maybe, that I try to kind of gently explore with people in the book and in conversations at the booth, and also just in conversations with my friends. Sometimes you can’t add stuff. Sometimes in order to change your interaction with the forces that cause climate change, or the impact that climate change has, you actually would need to stop doing something else, or do less of something else, which I know is very, very hard for many people to do. And so to my mind, helping somebody else do less so that they can participate in these climate actions more is also climate action.

Colleen Cronin 

Can you talk about that a little bit? I do want to get to, like, you know, chaining yourself to the giant tree to save it from getting cut down, the type of action that I think a lot of people think of when they think about climate activism. But you talk a lot about, like, taking care of someone’s kids so that they can go to a meeting. Or, you know, I mean, we just had elections yesterday. Go vote. You talk about it in the book a little bit, but I know that you do those things in your everyday life too.

Kate Schapira 

I do. One of my great teachers in this arena is named Sherrie Anne André, who I speak about in the book. And they were the originator of the Community Care role in an organization that they were part of for many years, because they realized that people were working so intently and so hard on these things that were very urgent and important and highly charged and personal to them. Often it was like people trying to protect their own communities where they lived and worked, and also, often they were people who had had other kinds of hard times in their life because of how they’d been marginalized or how they’d been oppressed. And also they were, as Sherrie said in the book, in some cases, preparing themselves to be harmed by the state, like if they were doing an arrestable action. And so Sherrie and some of the other people involved with the group were like, we can’t treat each other as resources in this way. We can’t use each other in this way. We have to also take care of each other. I think that’s a big deal both because it allows movements for justice to sustain themselves for longer, it allows those movements to be sustaining for the people who take part in them, right? Like, you go to your job because they pay you. Why do you go to the meeting? Why do you go do the action? You go because you believe in the thing that the action is about. But like, how about if there’s also, like, food, good company and a place to pee.

Colleen Cronin 

That is underratedly important.

Kate Schapira 

I’m telling you, like, you don’t miss it until you miss it, and then you really miss it. And then the other thing about those care roles is that they’re often not accessible to people for whom some of the more risky, more discipline-specific roles are not accessible.

Colleen Cronin 

You know, you’re not assuming where anyone’s coming from, and that people might really be thinking a lot about, like, how they want to get involved in climate activism, picking up this book. And so you kind of talk about grappling with what you are willing to do as well, and talking about whether or not you would participate in something that could get you arrested, could get you put in harm’s way.

Kate Schapira 

I have not done that because I’m a coward. That’s the real story. I’m good at a lot of things. I’m useful in a lot of ways, but I’m not good at that kind of physical courage, and I have the deepest honor and respect for the people who are, and I have a lot of shame about not being one of those people. And so when I was writing about it, I was trying to be really honest about that. And anytime something doesn’t work or doesn’t have the effect that I want, that I’m involved in, or even that I’m aware of, sometimes I do have this thought of, like, what if I had been willing to step out there? Like, would it have made a difference? So that’s, that’s just the truth.

Colleen Cronin 

Thank you for sharing that and being honest. And I found it really interesting to read. You know, you do talk about specifically some actions that you were involved in, or activism you were involved with in Rhode Island, particularly, you talked about Burrillville and the power plant fight there, and then also with the Port of Providence, with different results. You can’t see, Kate, but she just gave a big eye roll. I was in college for the Burrillville fight, so I didn’t cover it then, but, you know, it’s always given as an example of a big environmental win, and you were involved in it.

Kate Schapira 

I was, but I was also kind of peripheral to it. That was one of the first things that I was involved with. And I was just learning the landscape. I was just getting my feet wet, and so I think my ability to speak to it is kind of limited, but one of the things that I do think about a lot with that particular fight, and I talk about this in the book, is that the fight delayed the state Energy Facility Siting Board’s decision for a number of years, and that delay in itself was part of why the plant was not built. So that was a really valuable lesson for me. Sometimes just slowing it down is the thing that works.

Colleen Cronin 

Switching to some of the action that you’ve been involved in in the Port of Providence, there was some slowing down there, but the outcome was different. How do you feel? And how does that fit into climate anxiety?

Kate Schapira 

Well, one thing that I have to say about that fight and that loss is that I think that both environmental racism and regular racism were a huge part of why we lost that fight. The fact that the place we were fighting for was already pretty built up, was already the site of a lot of heavy industry, was already making a lot of people sick, was not seen as this is an extra reason to not want this thing here. It was seen as, like, this place is already ruined, and it’s a redline district. The highway goes through there. It’s one of the few places in the city of Providence where somebody with not a lot of income could purchase a home. Yep, I gotta say, I think that was a factor. I really do, everything from like, Oh, we’re gonna hold the hearing, but we’re going to hold it at a police station where if someone has a record or has had a bad experience with the police because of their race, they’re not going to want to come. People kind of saw it as a losing battle from the get-go, because it was a sacrifice zone. So that makes me mad a lot of the time.

Colleen Cronin 

Making you mad on the day you’re already not happy … sorry, Kate!

Kate Schapira 

No, it’s fine, you know, it’s OK. And there’s also an exercise in the book about directing your anger toward the correct people, toward the authors of your misery, which I really recommend. I like to imagine a laser beam emerging from my chest.

Colleen Cronin 

Maybe a lot of listeners who were rooting for a different outcome in the election might feel this way today. This might be helpful advice. You know, how do you keep going? Because you have kept going, you still are very involved in a lot of different avenues.

Kate Schapira 

One of the people that I interviewed for the book, a somatic coach and worker named Selin Nurgün, said that one of the most valuable lessons that they had learned from older mentor organizers was that you do need to be able to trust and step back sometimes, that someone else is going to step in for a bit, and that you’ll then step in for a bit when somebody else needs to step back. You’re not alone. If you need to sit out that meeting, somebody else can go, which is also a reason, I think, to invite people into your practices and into your work, so that there can be a little bit of redundancy. Then also the workload is held between those people when they’re both on and that makes it easier to keep going. It makes it sustainable in the sense of like, we can sustain this activity. Part of it is like you do keep going, but you don’t necessarily keep going in a straight line. Sometimes you sit back for a minute, sometimes you lick your wounds, sometimes you leap to the next thing, but sometimes you don’t, and it’s not like you’re going to run out of things.

Colleen Cronin 

There’s always things to write about; I’m sure there’s always things to advocate for.

Kate Schapira 

Exactly, and if you’re like, “Man, I can’t. I actually think it’s going to be detrimental to me and to the effort, if I’m, if I try to be part of this right now,” sitting back is actually the smartest thing that you can do. And another reason that I have all of these tools for, like, being with what you’re feeling and being deliberate about acting on what you’re feeling in the book, is if you don’t make room for that, it can make it very, very hard to work together, because you might be taking out the anger that you feel about the loss on the people that you’re working with.

Colleen Cronin 

And then that laser beam comes in again. Where are you directing your anger? Are you directing it at the right sources? Which is a good exercise for people to use. I’ve used it.

Kate Schapira

I think for all of us, you know, we’re mentioning the election, and I’ve already seen a bunch of in-fighting and recriminations starting up out in the world of the internet.

Colleen Cronin 

People sort of in the Harris camp blaming one another?

Kate Schapira

Yeah. So you see people who kind of genuinely were working for the same thing to a large degree, kind of sniping at each other. And I’ve definitely been in campaigns where that was the case, or efforts where that was the case. When the fight, part of the fight is over, if it is a fight, then a lot of that stuff can come out. And so I also really wanted to offer people some ways to work with that. I don’t know what to call it, like a reverberation of feeling from the work that you’ve been doing.

Colleen Cronin 

This whole book is based on your own experience, but it’s also based on other people’s expertise and experiences. At the end of the book, you talk about sort of your process in not just how you reached out to folks to talk to them, but also your decision to, in a lot of cases, compensate people for their participation in the book. As a journalist, you know, we don’t pay people, and have specific rules about not paying people who we speak to and having them not pay us. And you talked a little bit about being at the booth in the beginning, maybe like you were trying to get something out of talking to folks. And so there is sort of a sense of, if you felt like you were doing that, you know, how can you give back to them? So it’s not just not just taking, it’s giving, too.

Kate Schapira

Totally, and that ended up being really important, also, because a lot of the people I spoke with, because of the kinds of things that they had worked on, been involved with and known, were women or people of color, and it did not seem right to me that, as a white woman who also has, like, this professional job … part of the reason that I was able to do that is because I’m a college professor and I make enough money to live on. I didn’t need to keep all the money from the book in order to live, whereas I think a lot of people do, and that’s a factor as well. Then the other thing that I did, which I think is also maybe not usual, certainly in journalism and in other kinds of writing as well, is I sent everybody the parts of the book that they were in, and I said, “You can tell me if you want to make certain changes, or you can withdraw your participation.” And I did that, again, partly for fairness. I wanted people to have control over how they were being heard and portrayed, especially if they were people or members of groups where they’re often misrepresented. I also thought it was going to make a better book if the things that people were saying in it were the things that they most wanted to say. And I think I was right about that.

Colleen Cronin 

I’m curious about, you know, what you hope the work is giving.

Kate Schapira 

I want the book, the counseling booth, the work that I’m doing with people in Warren, even things like my teaching and like the conversations that I have with people informally, other community efforts that I’m part of. I want it to get people able to access their own power and agency, their ability to act and their ability to act together, and the power that they can generate by interacting and doing things and moving in a direction with other people. I think a lot of people, maybe they think it’s not for them, or maybe they think that the only things that are needed are things that they can’t do. When somebody is like, well, I can’t do X, Y and Z, I try to ask in a friendly way, like, “What can you do? Like, what actually is within your ability and power? What would help you do that? What are the things that you could ask for from somebody else that would help you do that? Or what could you help somebody else do?” So, I want to open up for people a kind of broader map of how to engage with the climate crisis, and it’s many manifestations and causes.

Colleen Cronin 

Thank you so much, Kate, for coming on the show.

Kate Schapira

Thanks for having me on the show. It’s always wonderful to talk with you.

Colleen Cronin 

It’s always wonderful to talk with you. I really appreciate it.

And thank you to our listeners for following along. We also want to thank Vanessa Carlton for letting us use her song “Willows” for our theme song. We record the Blab Lab at LitArts RI. It was edited and mixed by ecoRI’s publisher Jo Detz.

If you have any questions, ideas, or tips for future podcasts, you can email me at [email protected]. Until next time, you can get more Rhody environmental news at our website.