This is episode #425 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen on Spotify (become a paid subscriber there for its ad-free version), Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever else you listen. Substack paid subscribers get the ad-free version right here on the page.
I've known Katharine Wilkinson's work for a long time, but only recently got a monkey wrench far enough around my heart to open it up and engage with it seriously. Her new book is Climate Wayfinding: Healing Ourselves and the Planet We Call Home, and she says plainly what most of climate work treats as a fluffy nice-to-have: the core of this work is spiritual, and she probably knew it at 16.
Dr. Katharine K. Wilkinson co-founded and leads The All We Can Save Project and co-edited All We Can Save with Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. She was lead writer of Drawdown and co-hosts A Matter of Degrees with Dr. Leah Stokes.
Listen in as she reteaches me how to listen to the wisdom centers of my body, and why it is that we have grown so practical that we have lost touch with such a basic skill.
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Full Transcript
Host introduction
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to Reversing Climate Change. This is Ross Kenyon. I'm the host of Reversing Climate Change. I've been working in climate for about a decade now.
And I'm so happy that you're here. Thanks for joining me.
I'm so happy to have Dr. Katharine Wilkinson on. If you work in climate, if you care about climate stuff, you are almost certainly familiar with her work. She co-hosts the podcast A Matter of Degrees with Leah Stokes.
They're both alumni of this podcast.
Katharine co-edited All We Can Save with Dr. Ayana Johnson and also has been involved with the All We Can Save Project that grew out of that book. Katharine has a new book called Climate Wayfinding: Healing Ourselves and the Planet We Call Home.
I really liked it. It asks so many good questions. It offers great advice if you're trying to figure out where you plug in. I've been asking myself a lot of these questions recently. That's right, even me, who, I am certainly well known for the specific things that I do. Mostly memes. Most people come up to me and wanna talk about memes, but even still, I'm often looking for: is this the best use of my talents?
What should I be doing? And Katharine has a lot of great advice and exercises and meditations and just like a ton of great recommendations for songs and art in the book. It's a cool book. I've been in climate for a long time, as I mentioned, but even still, I found it offered me some new ways of seeing my career and who I wanna be and what I've done.
So I would certainly recommend picking up a copy of this. Moreover, Katharine wanted me to be sure to tell people that you should start a book club with some friends. You should read this with some pals. Try to figure out how to best use your talents in service of life.
And Katharine helps me go to some places that we don't often go to in as much depth as we do in this episode. And I am so happy that we did this right now, because I think too much earlier and I just would not have been ready for what she was trying to teach me. I hope you enjoy. Katharine, thanks for being on.
Respect your work a lot. Thanks for being who you are and helping us have these kinds of conversations. I really respect that a lot. Thanks for listening, and here is the episode.
The episode
Ross Kenyon: Katharine, thank you so much for being here.
Katharine Wilkinson: Ross, it's a, it's a real pleasure to get to have some time and conversation.
Ross Kenyon: We were just joking before this that I've engaged with your work and known about it for a long time, but I feel like only recently have I been able to get the monkey wrench around my heart and open it up enough to kind of engage with it in a more serious way. So maybe it was actually better that we haven't done this previously.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: It is the way that it is, is what you said, I think.
Yes. Yes.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yes, we're doing it now, so it's perfect. But I appreciate that need for the, for the monkey wrench, to crack some space open in the heart, which is, yeah, not always particularly welcome in climate conversations or climate engagement. So I get that completely.
Ross Kenyon: I so badly did not want it to be true. If it was a more technocratic problem, it seems like there's a solution that doesn't involve becoming, I don't know, a mechanic of the human soul or something. Yeah, mechanic is even, like, the wrong way to put it, too. It also has that sort of, like, monkey wrench.
Katharine Wilkinson: Gardener of the human soul, or…
Ross Kenyon: That's way better. Why…
So I was just looking at the famous Wendell Berry quote right before this, that the next big division between humans will be between those who want to live as creatures and those who want to live as machines, and all the imagery I just used was all machinery oriented.
Katharine Wilkinson: Well, it's so, it's so ingrained, right? The machinery language, the war language. I mean, how many decades have we been talking about fighting climate change, right? Which, you know, is like, well, hang on. Is that, is that what we're here to do actually?
Ross Kenyon: I've heard people complain about that language around people who are cancer survivors. Like he, you know, he lost his battle or whatever. Is that really the best way to understand disease and bodies? Is this related in some way, probably?
Katharine Wilkinson: Totally. And just the, yeah, the, I don't know, the sort of dualism of it all. And I've not had cancer, so I can't, I can't say, but I think there's probably something about, you know, this is actually part of my being in the same way that other, you know, microbes, bacteria, like all sorts of things are part of my being.
Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: That's such an interesting ontological point where that way of framing it is very much that there is a body that is non-cancerous and cancer is sort of an abnormality or an invasion or some sort of non-endogenous part of the body.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah, a small villain.
Ross Kenyon: Does that harm our ability to understand what's truly happening to ourselves with language?
Is that deceptive in some way that seems small but is actually very misleading?
Katharine Wilkinson: Mm. I mean, I just, you know, hear in the back of my mind Thich Nhat Hanh's insights about interbeing, right? And yes, I think the truth is that we interare with cancer, we interare with the atmosphere, we interare with, you know, all of the things both that we celebrate and that we villainize.
And that maybe is, I don't know, the fundamental lesson perhaps of this moment that we're in, and one that sounds really nice, right? Until you get into those snarlier iterations of what interbeing really might mean.
Ross Kenyon: How am I supposed to raise a venture round for interbeing? What are you… You're terrible advice. What am I supposed to do with that?
Katharine Wilkinson: I don't know. I feel like that's where sort of like the VC gods and their ayahuasca extravagances might be useful. Unclear. Unclear.
Ross Kenyon: I've read a book and had a guest on years ago. She was doing really interesting work on psychedelic tourism and the kinds of people who are best able to spend large amounts of money for these concierge spiritual services, you might say, from shamans. And…
Katharine Wilkinson: Concierge spiritual services is a great description. It's a great description.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think there's something to that phrasing, maybe. But she was saying that many of the people who are using it were actually using it to make better business decisions, which just strikes me as a category error in some way. It seems weird to meet the Earth Mother and then ask for, like, round sizing info.
There's something about it that just…
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah. It feels discordant, to be sure. A kind of fairly, I don't know, secret is a strong word, but a part of my life I don't often bring into the public square is that I absolutely adore and ride and train horses. Perhaps if we were living on a planet that didn't have so many challenges, that might be what I did with all of my time.
But it's kind of my side love, I guess, is a good way to put it. But I was talking with a dear friend who's a trainer, and we were lamenting what has happened in the world of horses, which is that more and more and more money has poured into it and it's become, you know, more and more and more expensive and inaccessible.
And I was like, "You know, rich people just have a way of gravitating towards magical things and sort of ruining them." And I think that's probably what's happened with the concierge spiritual services as well, right? It's… Yeah. And what do we make of interbeing with all of that?
So yeah, here we are. Here we are, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it's money. There's also some part of it that feels competitive in the same way that with kids, it's actually really hard to get them to just, like, play soccer. You know, they have to be on the club team. You have to… It has to become, like, your entire life. Is there no ability to just goof around a little bit?
Like, when did it become this way, and what does it say about us?
Katharine Wilkinson: Right. Just space to play and experiment and enjoy, to be amateurs, right? To just do something for the love of it rather than the potential professionalization and monetization of it. Totally. Let these fricking kids kick a soccer ball around. That's what I say.
Ross Kenyon: It's really tempting to link all these things together to be about why humans are maybe not super at home on the planet, writ large, and something does feel to be shifting in this way. It's tempting to do that. It's an easy move rhetorically and philosophically to make, so it makes me wanna resist it a little bit, but it does feel intuitively true to me.
Something is just sort of broken or wrong in there that's pushing us to do all of these things in the fastest, most expensive, bizarre ways possible. Am I… Is there something to that, or do you think it's a stretch?
Katharine Wilkinson: No, I'm with you on that. I've been sort of rumbling about the meaning of home and what it is to belong to a place. I've been thinking about this a lot in the aftermath of Wendell Berry's passing, who I think in so many ways, of course, wrote about but also embodied what it meant to belong to land.
And I do think, certainly in kind of dominant cultures, we seem to be really struggling with what that could mean, and how that could guide and shape our lives. And I for one certainly feel the ache for it.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, me too. I'm someone who's read so many of the Port William books, and I understand the idea of membership, and I would like to do that. But also, the next person who offers me a good paying job someplace I have no connection to, I will probably just take it. And I like hypocrisy. I like the idea of the universality of sin.
I like Christianity. There's something to that that I'm like, "Okay, I understand why the world looks the way it does and why people respond to incentives in ways that collectively look like madness and are so disappointing."
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah, and…
Ross Kenyon: I have not been able to enact any of those Berryian ideas.
They're just, they're just like pretty words on a page for me, and I am a poser.
Katharine Wilkinson: Mm.
Ross Kenyon: I didn't mean to cut you off. What were you gonna say about it?
Katharine Wilkinson: No, well, I appreciate just sort of the honest assessment of feeling like a poser, and I think maybe in some ways the vast majority of us are, right? If we are at all awake to the challenges, if we are attuned to values that would be in greater alignment with life, and we are trying to live within these current systems, right?
And pay rent or pay a mortgage and make sure we have healthcare, right? All the things. Like, I think we are just in this extremely mucky, liminal, conflicted time. And yeah, even the people that I think of as living kind of the most, like, radically in alignment with their values, there's still discordance, right?
There is still the reality of the world as we wish it to be and our lives as we wish them to be, and what it looks like today, this afternoon, you know?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot, and even in media representations of that very well-integrated village life, like the beginning of Fiddler on the Roof, for instance, during "Tradition," there's the "It was a horse. No, it was a donkey." And we all get along perfectly, but the shtetl has its problems too.
And the same thing with Hobbiton. The Sackville-Bagginses are just the most grasping, horrible, kind of parvenu hobbits that exist. The Shire, people romanticize it, but the Shire's got its issues too. It's not just a paradise. Wendell Berry, in my mind though, I can't remember too many of those things in Wendell Berry where I'm like, "Oh, he's really picking on the Sackville-Bagginses version there," like in Hannah Coulter or Jayber Crow or something.
I don't remember any of those scenes, but surely it has to be there, right?
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah. I mean, I think the reality is humans are humaning, wherever we are. I went to Plum Village, speaking of Thich Nhat Hanh, last fall for a retreat of climate and nature leaders, and the head abbot of Plum Village said, you know, "Wherever there are humans, there is suffering." So, you know, like the grumbly retreat attendees, they also exist at Plum Village.
You know, and it's sort of helpful to remember that even in a space that feels like a sanctuary from so many of the troubles of the world, we arrive with all of those troubles kind of in our beings, and they express in, you know, sometimes unfortunate ways. So yeah.
We're just, you know, we're young. We're a young species with some growing to do.
Ross Kenyon: Sure are. My monastery experiences have all been like that too, where I always expect them to be less human, and then I've heard monks complain about other monks or people who are visiting or the food. I'm just like, "We're talking about politics? Like, if anyone's supposed to be non-dual, it's gotta be you guys.
Like, you should be above this and offering me something different from the regular world." But no. It turns out the answer is no, that does not necessarily go away. I'm so sorry to report. Wouldn't it be nice?
Katharine Wilkinson: Oh, wouldn't it be nice? Yeah, for sure. I think maybe you have to somehow tap into another species' monastery if you wanna have that.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. I'm like trying to even imagine what that might be like. You strike me as someone who's both smart but also wiser or maybe focusing more of your career on wisdom at this point. You've done enough of the book learning, the knowledge. It turns out maybe that wasn't what the world needed, and you've turned to something else.
Is that an accurate characterization or do you dispute that?
Katharine Wilkinson: Well, I feel really humbled, I think, by that.
Ross Kenyon: …thing to accept, if someone says about you, but…
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah. But yeah, I certainly feel, I don't know, to bring in a little Berry, you know, "the impeded stream is the one that sings." Like, sort of feeling like whatever these waters are of my work in the world, they don't seem to be able to continue down the more kind of tactical, you know, robust theories-of-change sorts of pathways.
I do really fundamentally feel like the core of this work is spiritual work, and I think in some ways I knew that at age 16 when I had my own environmental awakening. I think I probably knew it when I was studying religion in undergrad. And, you know, the world of climate work would largely tell you that that's all sort of a fluffy nice-to-have, but we really need to be thinking about energy systems.
And of course, we do need to be thinking about energy systems. And, you know, what we notice is that we change the tech and we encounter the same wrinkles. So yeah, it's, I don't know, it's a funny thing perhaps to find oneself in the decade of the 40s going like, "Wow, 16-year-old Katharine really was actually pretty on top of this. What happened?"
Ross Kenyon: You were looking at mountaintop removal, right? I think that's what did it for you when you were 16.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah. I spent a semester my sophomore year of high school at this amazing experiential education school called the Outdoor Academy in Western North Carolina. So I was living in the woods with 25 kids, living in a one-room cabin with 10 girls and a wood stove. You can imagine the excitement of that.
And so I was becoming, like, totally enchanted with the ecosystem of the Southern Appalachians and having some really heartbreaking encounters with particularly the impacts of extractive industry in that part of the world. And mountaintop removal, of course, is one, and clear-cutting and, you know, really harmful forestry practices is another.
So yeah, as I think this often happens, the enchantment or the falling in love also comes with heartbreak and, you know, the wounding of the world that echoes then in the wounding of our own, you know, spirits and hearts. So yeah. That was the entry point for me at 16.
Ross Kenyon: Would you say that your subsequent maturation was becoming more practical and trying to tamp down some of the simple spiritual, basically inarguable points of, "Hey, we just shouldn't do this. Something about this is just deeply wrong. I don't need all of the graphs to prove it. There's just something about this that we've made a wrong turn if this is what we need to do to have a comfortable life."
And then now you are maybe returning and thinking… 'Cause the life cycle story for humans is very much that teenagers are angsty and idealistic and naive, and that's all true, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are perceiving reality incorrectly, and the solution is to become practical and adjusted to a very dysfunctional world.
But I think people often stop at that second step, and then their career is over, and it's probably hard for many of them to tell what exactly they did and contributed. I haven't gotten there that far, but I know that I want to avoid that for myself. Is that kind of what happened to you, or did I miss something there?
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, what started to happen as I kind of tinkered in the world of making change, initially in very small ways, right? In the high school that I went to, the college that I went to, right? Okay, how do we change the food that we're serving in the dining hall? How do we get some funding towards clean energy, even if we can't change the entire mix of electricity we're using on this campus, right?
Like, starting to try to tinker a little bit within these systems, you know, you very quickly get acquainted with the realities of decision-makers who are mostly thinking about money, and perhaps not so much about the espoused values of a place. And so how do you make an argument that they can hear and that they might actually act on?
And then, of course, I was also encountering, you know, what it meant at that time to be a young woman and, all right, I've gotta go get some academic bona fides, and I've gotta, you know, have some credentials if I wanna be taken seriously and potentially, you know, have access to rooms where we're making choices about our collective future.
And, you know, I think I did all of that pretty diligently. And I found also that it was often, like, pretty soul-crushing to contort myself into those worlds. And certainly I went down some paths. You know, there was a stage after grad school where, you know, this was after the Waxman-Markey failure, kind of the breakdown of climate legislation in the US, and the Copenhagen negotiations fell apart, and it was like, okay, well, maybe business is a way we really move things forward.
And so I went into consulting for a spell and, like, I just cried in the bathroom a lot. Like, it was not the place for me. And so, you know, even as I was, like, trying, right, sometimes to kind of put on a particular hat or step into a particular persona of change-making, so to speak, yeah, there were just moments where it was like my very being was like, "No."
You know, we're in a desert, and, you know, this is a moss we're talking about. Like, this is not gonna fly. We simply have to get out of here.
Ross Kenyon: Good for you for realizing that. I think some people, your gut might be screaming and they're like, "Better tamp that down as quick as possible so I can get the promotion, and it'll be different when I'm in charge." And maybe, but also maybe not.
Katharine Wilkinson: I think it's probably a, I don't know, it's a double-edged sword of having, I think, you know, like I think I have a much more, I don't know, what's the language we use now? Like, highly sensitive people. Like, my nervous system will just be kind of like, "No can do. No can do, lady." And that is, yeah, sometimes a challenge, and I think in its way also a real gift.
Ross Kenyon: Your new book about climate wayfinding, it has… My understanding of it is that there's a philosophical openness to a diversity of approaches. Now, different personalities, you know, some person might be a saguaro and be super at home in that corporate environment.
Is there not a sense that we would be better off if everyone just became a moss like you and was emotionally attached to this and spiritually directionally correct in a way such that we didn't necessarily need to be doing minor corporate changes? 'Cause I've been really hard on these people recently.
I saw… I told this story on the podcast recently where the same week that Amazon put out the Melania documentary, I saw the CSO of Amazon bragging about some very small, like, last mile delivery change, and I had to… I was wondering, I'm like, "Does this person know that what they're doing is ridiculous, or are they playing the game very successfully and making changes where, like, it's better that they do that than not?"
But are they connecting all those ideas, or do they have to practice cognitive dissonance just to stay, like, non-psychotic, basically? 'Cause it sounds… I don't think I could do it. I think I'm highly sensitive in a similar kind of way, where I cannot fake it to that extent. Do not put me in a position where I need to pretend that that's okay, because the truth is coming out, and it's probably not gonna work out for me career-wise to do that.
So is it good that we have people who are able to put those feelings, like, compartmentalized and do the work, or is that maybe the wrong way to understand the diversity approach of your work?
Katharine Wilkinson: Mm. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a good interpretation. You know, climate wayfinding is meant to be a useful framework for kind of discovery and discernment, right? That allows for a breadth of propensities, contexts, values, skills, right? Like, all of these things that I think it would be pretty presumptuous and maybe not all that helpful for me to say, like, "Well, hello, every possible human out there. This is how you should do it," and I know, because I'm a moss. No.
You know, I think the truth is that we are in this mucky liminal time that we were talking about, right? And we need those who are willing and able to slog it out on the inside of certain institutions and spaces, and those who are going to build entirely new things, right, with as little connection to those existing institutions and systems as possible, and probably a bit of everything in between.
I mean, I was thinking about this recently reading Leah Stokes' new book, The Carbon Wave. Leah and I are friends and podcast collaborators, and it's the inside story, told through kind of four core characters, of how the Inflation Reduction Act came to be. And I had so many moments, particularly with the folks who were working inside the Senate and inside the White House, of like, wow, what a freaking miracle that they could show up every day into the fraught terrain of those places, right?
With such clear, strong commitments to a more livable and just future, right? And figure out how to monkey wrench, right, change through those systems. So I think I have a… Yeah, I think I have an appreciation for perhaps that biodiversity of ways that we might do this work. And I think when we are working within more, shall we say, compromised spaces, I think being attuned to the ways that we might be, like, buying the BS, right?
Are really important. I think that's a… Like you're on a tightrope, I think, in those kinds of worlds, right? Both to stay in them and to meaningfully change them. I think it's really tricky.
Ross Kenyon: How do I know if I am respecting a diversity of approaches, and how do I know when I'm enabling greenwashing?
Katharine Wilkinson: Oh, man.
Ross Kenyon: It was all fun questions to start. I'm sorry, Katharine. I don't know how to untangle this one.
Katharine Wilkinson: You know, the immediate thing that I think about is that those are hard questions to answer alone or in a silo, right? And I think it's where having a brain trust, right, is useful, right? Of actually thinking kind of more in the form of a council than just by ourselves, and ensuring that that brain trust or that council is not just made up of people like me, right?
But actually, you know, having a kind of container for the push and pull. But I don't know. I think there's something with greenwashing that's like, I think you just feel it in your gut. You know, if you're willing to tune into what the wisdom centers of the body might have to say, right?
And I think the unfortunate thing is that certainly in the ways most of us are educated, we are disconnected from those more embodied ways of knowing, and those embodied ways of saying like, "Eh-eh. Red flag. This ain't it. This ain't it." I don't know. How do you think about that, Ross?
Ross Kenyon: How do I figure that out? I don't know. I can be both very idealistic and very practical, and it depends on when you catch me.
Some days I can think of even things like enhanced oil recovery maybe being okay in some circumstances, because it's improving the carbon intensity of the barrel of oil that would otherwise likely be produced. And maybe that on net is better than not having oil and gas involved in carbon capture or carbon dioxide removal at all.
And then you might catch me the next day and I'm like, "Is this actually extending the lifespan of fossil fuel infrastructure in ways that if we all focused on this, it would decarbonize much quicker?" I've worked in carbon removal for a decade, and I think it's pretty well known at this point that we are going to need some amount of CDR to balance the carbon budget of the planet over the course of this century.
But I do wonder, splitting attention into decarbonization and CDR over the past decade, did this result in less decarbonization happening overall? And if so, you're like, my God, that is probably not worth it, because if decarbonization doesn't happen quickly, basically nothing else matters.
And now that, like, solar radiation management and things like that are becoming increasingly prominent, I'm asking myself some of those same questions too, where it's like, if I have to decide to save the Thwaites Glacier or not, like, fine, spray whatever you have to do to avoid the ice shelf collapsing.
But I'm also wondering about the second order effects of, am I extending fossil fuel lifespan or, like, humanity not committing to changing the way that we're living here because we know that there's some sort of way out of this, even if the way out is not good at all, or we don't fully understand it? Which is a long way of saying I'm very confused about how to evaluate my own career, about what to do next, about how to provide what I hope is ethical climate leadership in a podcast that reaches a decent number of ears and don't want to be misadvising people for how to live and think about the world.
But I don't know that I have great definitive answers. I think I have good questions. That's about it, though. And you should not be coming to this show for this is absolutely the way you should think, and if you disagree with me, you're a bad person and go away. I reserve those for very few things. So again, long, long-winded way of saying I don't know.
Please help me. Please teach me how to feel that in my body. Please help me to understand how to evaluate.
Katharine Wilkinson: Well, the first thing is I just want to affirm the power of having good and present questions. I think, you know, I think back to the, "Let me show you my charts and make my case and take you through my PowerPoint deck," and, you know, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, right? Like, what has been role modeled so much is a sense of absolute clarity and certainty.
And I think we have had far too little role modeling, far too little kind of cultivation, intentional cultivation of how do we elevate the questions, and how do we sit with them and work with them individually and together to try to work our way into answers again and again. And I, you know, I really can't imagine a more critical skill in this time than the capacity for inquiry and the capacity for discernment, right?
Again and again and again and again, both about our own roles in the space, but also about these much bigger questions, some of which you were just raising, Ross, right? And I don't have easy answers. But I do know that we have been wildly short on spaces for naming and holding the questions well.
And I think that has been a real detriment both to, you know, to leadership and also to the movement as a whole. I think it's really fundamental infrastructure for us, these kind of spaces of querying. And so I'm excited that that is something you're doing with this podcast, that you're just, yeah, creating an opportunity for the questions to come and the rumbling to happen.
And who knows about answers? You know what I mean? I feel less and less certain about most things these days.
Ross Kenyon: That's so fascinating, because one, you're a PhD, and shouldn't you have all the answers already? But also you strike me as someone who has really strong moral convictions, and I think one of the downsides of… I did PhD work in political philosophy, and I feel really comfortable with, like, noticing trade-offs, or this way of thinking illuminates this but it obscures this thing over here, and you can get the parallax view, and I feel comfortable with that.
But it also causes me in cases to lose a sense of justice or of moral clarity, where I can understand multiple perspectives but I have a harder time disqualifying some or saying, "This, I think, should just be ruled out." There are some bright line cases where it's very obvious to me, as I think it should be to everyone.
But for a lot of things I don't have the really strong clarity, and to some people, they really like that. And so I get a lot of feedback from people who wish there was more spaces to engage with that, because we don't necessarily disagree on all matters because one group is good and one group is bad.
There actually is a lot of good that's spread and distributed throughout the human hearts of the entire planet, and that's a hard lesson to know. And it's also one of the reasons why someone like Hannah Arendt pissed everyone off so hard, is because that's like a really hard lesson to teach and you can't put it on a bumper sticker super easily.
It's interesting to me that even you maybe don't, because you do seem like someone who, moral vision does not seem to be something that you are lacking or struggling with. It seems… I read you, and you can be very ecumenical, but I think you do have a sense of the world that you want to create and what it would take to get there.
Maybe you're underselling it or being too humble or maybe I've misunderstood you entirely.
Katharine Wilkinson: Hmm. No, I appreciate that, Ross. And yeah, I think I do have a strong sense of moral vision. But, you know, I encounter this sometimes. I've had a few requests to participate in debates about various difficult climate quandaries. And I just have this, like, yeah, like my body's just like, "No."
I don't wanna be in a debate. I don't wanna, like, you know, stick…
Ross Kenyon: …down too, by the…
Katharine Wilkinson: …a stake in one side of this. Like, yeah, I find that, you know, I can understand what can be generative about that model, and for me personally, it just feels profoundly unhelpful in some way, or at least something that I'm like, I…
It doesn't feel like the right use of my time.
Ross Kenyon: But we're glad that someone will do it, right?
Katharine Wilkinson: We are glad. We are glad. We are glad.
Ross Kenyon: …isn't that we should only ask… Like, someone in the group needs to be the person that gets called on to provide answers in a debate format, and we are lucky to have people like that. Can we… Is that true?
Katharine Wilkinson: I think so. I mean, I think it is certainly one useful way of approaching, right? That someone says, "Yeah, I can make a really strong case on one side or the other of this proposition," and then we have something to kind of poke and prod at, right? And similarly with the other.
And I think there's part of me that just… I don't know. It's just not my MO. It's just not my MO.
Ross Kenyon: Have you tried and done a less than stellar job, or do you just have the sense that this wouldn't feel correct to you in some way?
Katharine Wilkinson: I mean, I think probably the last time I actively participated in a debate was in college. Like, I have a recollection around the, around the 2004 elections and, like, really taking on someone from the Young Republicans with quite a lot of gusto. And then I went to graduate school at Oxford, where it feels like there are debates happening all the time.
You know, you've got the Oxford Union, and it's this very kind of lauded format for exchange. And so I went, you know, I went to a number of them. And I just… I think perhaps it just rubs so much for me up against the power of staying in a question, right? To be like, "I have the absolute answer to this, and let me lay it out for you."
But I don't know. Maybe that's a good growth edge for me to come back to. Maybe I should say yes to one of these debate invitations and sort of test out some of this theory.
Ross Kenyon: If there were a debate, what would be the proposition that you would feel most comfortable arguing and break you out of this question-asking way of being?
Katharine Wilkinson: I think I could make a pretty strong case around that, you know, an anthropogenic problem needs anthropogenic solutions, which means we have to center humans in, call it what you will, addressing climate change, healing the climate crisis, you know, moving solutions forward. I think we treat people as a nice-to-have in that, and not kind of the heart of the matter.
And I think I could roll up my sleeves and make a case for that.
Ross Kenyon: This is me ringing the dinner bell for everyone who wants to take the con on that. Katharine, let's come back to this point about the body. I have difficulty feeling all of the feelings in my body. I feel disconnected from it in many ways, and I have to sort of coach myself through what it means to, like, re-somatize what is otherwise intellect for me.
It's all cerebral stuff, which has served me really well as an adaptation in my life in some ways, but I'm at the point where the benefits from that lopsidedness have… the other side of the sword is cutting me at the same time. So I'm trying to figure out ways to better balance that and understand that, and that is part of why your work has been especially useful and interesting to me recently.
But I always need reteaching. I feel like it's one of those things I need the grooves to just get, like, deeper and deeper in how do I feel this and make decisions where I'm listening to what you called the wisdom centers of the body?
Katharine Wilkinson: Mm-hmm. So I think there's a useful moment for interruption when we get into the buzzing, spinning, you know, wheels of the brain just going, going, going, to see if we can actually, right then, sort of pause. I'm closing my eyes 'cause it's like literally tune inward, and simply ask ourselves, like, "Where am I feeling this in my body? Are there sensations that I notice?"
You know, maybe there's a vibration, maybe there's a sensation, maybe there's, you know, like something in the gut or something at the throat, right? Like, I think things can move in us in different ways, in different places. And I think it's a helpful, then, invitation down a path of, like, what's happening there?
Right? And not just to notice, and to let it be what it is, what it's gonna do, and to inquire. Like, is there something I need to be hearing? Is there something I need to be heeding? Is there, you know, a message that, as the noisy mechanics of the brain are going, hasn't had the space to come up?
And I have found, you know, meditative and mindfulness practices to be really useful, and to try to do more interweaving, right? Of like, okay, I'm wrestling with something in my brain, like maybe this is coming out on paper in free writing, and I'm also paying attention to, like, what am I noticing in my body at the same time.
So I don't think there's, you know, there's not like a magic trick to it. But I do believe that our bodies would like to be helpful to us. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Was this something that you have done since adolescence when you're at this place when you're 16? Or is it something that you had to add into your life later? How did this come about?
Katharine Wilkinson: I think there was probably some, you know, some kind of instinctual or subconscious aspect to it, and I think probably, like a lot of folks, I have learned some of this in therapy. I've learned some of this, you know, from, like, listening to and reading and practicing with different kinds of teachers. And then just, like, having the affirmation of how useful it is to bring into the work.
But I also think there's a way that horses have been a really useful teacher on this, right? Like, they are, they're prey animals, so their bodies are so alert and attuned in a way that I think we can't possibly understand, not being ourselves prey animals. And things happen with them somatically, like, before we can even realize that they're having a reaction, much less what they are having a reaction to.
But there's something about spending time with horses that makes you more attuned to, like, what is happening in the physical being of, you know, of this other creature, and also for myself, right? Like, what… And they're intuiting all of that, right? So there's a… Yeah, I think there's a somatic training that is just inherent to working with horses that probably, in its own circuitous way, has been really helpful for me, too.
Ross Kenyon: …think that there's part of you that is still locked down with regard to the suffering of the world? I think whatever happened to me that locked this up, I think it's partially a rational reaction to how much brutality exists in the world. And I think children get that earlier than maybe we would like them to think.
They know that the world is not the nicest place, and I think there is a "lock it down or emotionally die" rational response here. How much should we be opening ourselves up to the true weight of what the world really is?
Katharine Wilkinson: Hmm. I mean, I think it's impossible, it's impossible to process the actual full weight, right? Like in, at least in the details, right? To actually metabolize every day all of the horrors. And I think that, you know, back to the truth of interbeing, I think that there's not a way to not feel it. There are ways to numb it.
There are ways, as you say, to sort of lock it down and not engage with it, but it is, it is there, right? And so I think the choice that we have is whether to tend to it, to let it become a form of guidance and fuel those emotions that we're having. Or if we're in the lockdown mode, to know that, you know, we're creating a source of paralysis, right?
We're creating a disconnect from, I think, really important kind of, like, earthly knowing and earthly feeling that is calling us towards a different way of being. And for sure there are times when, you know, even just to be, like, tolerable to the people I love in my life, I'm like, I have to, I have to blinder, right?
Like, I have to not be, like, constantly in process. But to have those, like, very regular spaces and supports to feel the feelings, I've found to be incredibly necessary. Or I think I run a risk of, you know, kind of exiting myself from the work that I know I'm here in this body and in this lifetime, if that's what it is, to do.
Ross Kenyon: You set yourself up exactly where I was going to place you next, which is that if I close my eyes, I know that you're smiling. And I think people listen to podcasts, you know when I'm laughing or you know when guests are laughing, right? Or they're smiling. Like, you, for like a straight hour, I think even for sad questions, there's an upturned lip.
There's a warmth to you. You engage with these serious matters, I think, with some amount of joy and reserve, or a strength there that might even be called happiness or vocation or something else. What gives you the ability to do that? 'Cause I don't show up to my work like that every day.
I think I'm vocationally called to much of what I do, and I think I am in the right spot, but my mouth is not always upturned like yours is. What's going on in there?
Katharine Wilkinson: Well, I have to say, I definitely don't think it is always upturned.
Ross Kenyon: I don't mean to lay that on you too. This is too many things I'm…
Katharine Wilkinson: But I do, you know, I do think that part of, you know, in Climate Wayfinding, there's a step of the program, the experiential program, and a chapter of the book that's about offering our superpowers, and noticing when we're at that nexus of power and joy, of the kind of, like, fire in the belly welling up and some, like, delight that is kind of spilling over.
And I think for me, one of those areas where there's a nexus of power and joy is in the work of being a messenger, of being in the written word or the spoken word. I love words. And so I think there's probably a bit of that. And there's probably… Like, I haven't been thinking about this consciously, but I do think that what I have learned in that role, that messenger role, over many years, and certainly some flops, is that, like, the inner, like, raging, righteous, like, you know, activist may have such important things to say and be creating conditions in which they can't be heard.
And so I think that there is something about… Yeah, I think that there is something about communicating with more warmth, with more sense of, like, whoever it is who I may never know that is listening to this and receiving this. They deserve to have an encounter with this conversation that feels generous, right?
That feels like an offering, and not like an encounter with a front of battle or something like that. We just have so much of that. We have so much of that. And also, Ross, I think it's probably partially the conditions that you're creating, of generous questions and space for exploration.
And that just, yeah, that feels good. That feels good.
Ross Kenyon: Katharine, thank you so much for being here. I am so happy we got to do this together.
Katharine Wilkinson: As am I, Ross. This is a really nice chance to get to know you. So thank you for having me on.
