The Feels

Climate work is emotional work

One of the most memorable interviews I did for the latest season of Threshold was with Tim Lamont, a marine biologist based in the UK. Tim studies coral reefs. Hark listeners might remember him describing how he rigged up underwater speakers and played recordings of healthy reefs, with the hope that the sounds might attract fish and help new reefs get established. Spoiler alert: it worked. And it’s wonderful. Tropical coral reefs are among the most endangered habitats on the planet; even if we manage to hold average global temperature rise to 1.5ºC, many of them will not make it. Anything we can do to stem the loss of these biodiversity hot spots is a win we should be shouting from the rooftops.

Listening to Tim tell me the story of this experiment, hearing the joy in his voice and laughing with him about some of the silly details — all of this made the interview stand out in mind. So did the amazing science embedded in his story, including the fact that teeny-tiny little coral planulae seem to be attracted to the sounds of healthy reefs as well, at least in controlled settings. These are beings without brains, ears, or the other equipment we tend to assume are necessary for listening, and having preferences. It’s all pretty mind-blowing stuff.

But when I think back on that conversation with Tim now, the part of it that really makes it feel transcendent is the sadness. His, mine, and our shared experience of it, unplanned, unscripted, and undeniable. Tim is a scientist, and also a human being who is clearly madly in love with the ocean, and coral reefs in particular. The force of that love entails an equally forceful grief; his feelings of wonder, curiosity, and excitement lead inevitably to his feelings of tremendous loss. It’s all mixed together in him, because it’s all mixed together in the world.

It’s rare to meet a scientist — or any person — willing and able to go to all those places in one conversation. We don’t want to bum each other out. We don’t know if we can open up to the hard stuff without getting completely overwhelmed, or overwhelming the other person. And most importantly, we don’t know what to do with all these painful feelings. If you care about what’s happening to our planet, you want to be useful, and allowing the soul-crushing sadness to emerge can feel like the opposite of that; like an obstacle to action, a threat to whatever reservoirs of hope we might be guarding.

But somehow Tim and I managed to wander into those foggy bogs of grief a few times during the course of that interview, and back out of them, alternating between marveling at the wonders of coral reefs and feeling the terrible weight of their loss. As we began to wrap up, I made some sort of comment about how much we had moved between different emotional ecosystems, and how I was grateful for it. Tim agreed, and then went on to share this:

TIM: I try and do a lot of public engagement stuff because I think it’s valuable. And I think more and more, environmental science is a societal challenge rather than a challenge for scientists. But sometimes it frustrates me when you see environmental reporting that’s done under the narrative of “climate change is the baddy, but it’s okay because all these people are replanting corals and it’s great.” You can see why people do it, because it’s a very popular narrative arc, you know. But it’s just more complicated than that. And it’s harder than that. That’s why you see so much reporting like that, because it is the easy out. It’s the way to try and salvage a good news story out of a terrible story. But unfortunately it’s not that simple.

AMY: Yeah. I hear you. I know that there are editors out there that are just saying, “please give me a positive environmental story. You’ve got something about how coral reefs are coming back? Great. Done.” And then it’s on to the next. And we [at Threshold] really want to not do that. But at the same time, we don’t want to fall into “everything’s f***ed.” It’s like...the complicated middle is where it’s at.

TIM: Yeah. It’s almost like it’s a sort of era-definingly difficult challenge!

[We both start to laugh at this point.]

TIM: Almost like there’s no easy answer.

AMY: Yeah! It’s almost like we’re in an unprecedented situation as a species, and we don’t know how to think or talk about it.

I loved this little exchange so much. It was so real, and such a relief to acknowledgement reality. Tim has done some amazing science that can be helpful in coral reef conservation, but he’s doing that work within the context mass coral reef death. How do we tell that story and stay true to all of its elements, without flattening any of them down? How do we communicate multiple dimensions of the climate crisis, even when they collide? There’s no easy answer. But it’s essential that we try; that we let ourselves laugh and cry, hope and mourn, that we make space to raise our fists in rage and lift our faces in wonder. The climate crisis is an “era-definingly difficult challenge.” So is thinking about it. Talking about it. Feeling it. How could it be otherwise, really?

To hear the whole episode featuring Tim Lamont, look for “Emergency Services” on the Threshold feed in your podcast app, or click here.

To hear more about the importance of feeling our climate-related emotions, listen to the latest episode of Threshold Conversations, featuring my brilliant sister, Audrey Martin. She’s a Bay Area psychotherapist and one of the leaders of Climate Psychology Alliance North America.

I want to give her the last word, here, actually, because I love this sentence, drawn from her description of her services on her website:

Through talking and listening we hope to understand together what is known, but also what has been difficult to know.

This is what we have to do for and with each other around climate, too. Talk and listen, and try to understand — really feel and comprehend — both what we know, and what is so incredibly difficult to know.