The Tension of Emergence: Thriving in a world that remakes, not breaks

When Grief Brings Us Back to Love: The Quiet Courage of Climate Activism with Sarah Jaquette Ray

• Jennifer England • Season 4 • Episode 7

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When it comes to climate anxiety, most of us swing between utter despair or self-protective numbness. In our doom-scrolling attention economy, these are natural, but not always helpful, responses.

In this episode, Jennifer speaks with climate scholar, educator, and author of A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety Sarah Jaquette Ray to explore how we might move through the heaviest of climate emotions—without turning away, burning out, or losing touch with what we love.

They explore:

  • The toll of burnout and the unexpected clarity grief can bring
  • What it takes to face the monster of climate chaos
  • The new texture of climate activism—intimate, relational, and imperfect
  • Grounding practices to help us stay courageous and awake in ecological unravelling

Together, they reflect on the emotional and relational labor of holding space during collapse, the wisdom exchanged across generations, and the quiet courage it takes not to fix—but to animate activism with love.

Links & resources—


Gratitude for this show’s theme song Inside the House, composed by the talented Yukon musician, multi-instrumentalist and sound artist Jordy Walker. Artwork by the imaginative writer, filmmaker and artist Jon Marro.

S4. Ep 7 When Grief Brings Us Back to Love: The Quiet Courage of Climate Activism with Sarah Ray Jaquette
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Jennifer: [00:00:00] If you are new to this podcast, welcome, and if you've been with me for a while, you might remember that this podcast began with a conversation between my dad who's a climate change scientist, Dr. John England, and a globally renowned spiritual teacher, Brother David Standal Rast, around reframing what we mean by hope.

And hope not as in we're attached to a particular positive outcome, but hope in our capacity to be surprised. I began this whole podcast with a conversation around climate, and here we are again in season four with a different flavor of a conversation around how to work with our intense emotions that are surfacing subtly [00:01:00] and overtly as a global community grapple with this rapid warming that's happening and the outcome that has really dire consequences for those of us with less resources to buffer the intensity, of weather changes, whether that's forest fires or heat domes, or the necessity to migrate out of your country of origin in order to survive.

And I've noticed in myself, and I'm sure you do too, where I can oscillate between complete despair and going down a rabbit hole of anxiety and terror in terms of where this climate is headed. And then I can also, to the other extent totally numb out and check out and disengage not only from doing something about it, but also dissociate from what I'm actually [00:02:00] feeling.

And so I I wanted to explore with my next guest, how do we practically work with staying in relationship with the reality of what's happening with our climate? In the context of our doom scrolling attention economy.

But how can we work with our despair in ways that return us to our collective belonging to one another as a portal towards love and tenderness and curiosity, which. From my experience, when we can move and shift there naturally right action emerges.

And so I'm delighted to introduce you to Sarah Jaquette Ray. Sarah is a professor and chair of the Environmental Studies Department at Cal Poly Humboldt University and author of a Field Guide to Climate Anxiety.

Her work [00:03:00] intersects with climate justice, emotional resilience, and education. And she has deep insight on how grief, anxiety, and love can shape activism. Her passion to pause and to slow down and to actually engage with the emotional terrain of climate work sows the seeds of compassion, rest, and creativity that is generating the quality of human connection that's helping us bridge our inner work with collective action. So if you're in the turmoil of like what to do with this monster, I. Of overwhelm related to climate, come join us because you are an excellent company. We are not saving. We are slowing down to actually feel and then feel our way back in [00:04:00] through our love of land, our love of the ocean, our love for the mountains and rivers and fields that have given birth to our belonging on this planet. So with that, please enjoy this conversation that I have with Sarah.

I'm so grateful for your work because it's invited me to listen deeply to what climate, grief, rage, heartbreak, and even numbness have been trying to teach me and not just about. The planet, but how ourselves and how we relate to this deep dilemma.

And to me, it's a moral dilemma. It's an ethical tension. It's a spiritual question. And it all involves our emotions and the ways that we are choosing to show up in the world. [00:05:00] And with that, I, I'd love you to start with the earliest times of your own environmental activism, if you'd call it, and how you related to it, how you expressed it.

Because I find that we're in this tension of doing and not doing, and either we're martyring ourselves or we're totally checking out. And I think it, it warrants. Getting tender about the ways in which we're showing up in relationship to the kind of activism or the action that we're grappling with.

Sarah: Mm. Thank you for that beautifully posed question and all of the care you took to articulate it. I would say that , if I had anything that you could resemble or call activism at an early age, it was actually more around reproductive justice. But I would not ever have thought of myself as an activist, even in those [00:06:00] times.

And I still do not consider myself an activist. So the term itself immediately goes into a place of maybe shame or inadequacy or you know, not, not good enoughness of not being comfortable being the kind of person who's out on the, on a, on a front line or, or out in a protest, which isn't to say I haven't joined them, but that organizing and, and mobilizing in that particular way and thinking about political strategy in that way is not really where I find myself most comfortable or want to contribute my efforts.

But I have long, deep roots that I am only now coming to understand and think about in a more embracing way of deep Quaker activist abolitionist roots that I am learning more about. Literally as we speak, my mom's doing a big deep dive into it, and I'm realizing I have this long line of amazing Quaker abolitionists that [00:07:00] go, go, at least like four or five generations back, that I stand on their shoulders and think, oh yeah, that's where it comes from. is where it comes from. So, from a very early age, I had wanted to contribute. I, I am fairly well, privileged, and I have whiteness and I have college education under my belt and multiple generations of college educated family members and. Often thought, with, this privilege, you know, I'm doing a lot of harm.

What Rosenbern calls implicated subjects, you know, we're implicated subjects in so much harm that we can't even figure out how to get out of. And this causes us a lot of anguish. And for better or for worse, it often motivates the people who have benefited the most from these histories of extraction.

It often turns into the desire to try to undo those harms and, and in undoing those harms and becoming sort of the white saviour, there's also more harms you can do. And so I've definitely fallen down that path before too. But I was always sort thinking to myself very early, things aren't right.[00:08:00] 

What can I do to jump in to make them better? When I was young, the thing that really, you know, chapped my hide was the inability to access abortion and women's healthcare. To me, that felt like a root cause of lots of other things. And it wasn't until I was doing sort of social justice oriented work through college.

And then I got out of college with a women's studies minor and a religious studies major. I got outta college and worked in South Central LA doing family law stuff, nonprofit work that I realized that I knew I wanted to go back to study more, that this wasn't really my area. So again, shying away from the more in the trenches work.

I went back into the academy and I had a lot of guilt about that too. Oh, I'm, I'm not really gonna be doing the work if I'm a scholar. I only had begun to think about scholarship as activism well into my PhD. So it took me a long time, and I wouldn't say the environment even came in as an idea or a lens to which to understand [00:09:00] activism until well into my studies.

So yeah, this, these are all developing consciousness things that happen as I was studying and, and to this day I often have this purity, politics anguish that you just described of where either or martyring or completely checking out. I titrate myself between those two as well. And what I see in my students, which turned me towards the emotional resilience component.

What do we need internally in order to stay engaged with this work for the long haul? Which became kind of the motivating question for me in later years. This really was about generating. Resourcing keeping ourselves a whole while we're doing this work, and I don't, I think of myself as the, the like pit stop person.

There's other people doing the driving and I'm the person at the pit stop just making sure the tires are full. And that doesn't feel like, to me, activism, it feels like one step remove from activism [00:10:00] and an essential thing. And I also struggle with thinking of my scholarship or my writing or my sort of individualistic work as activism.

But I, I think it is, I think it's important to see it in that frame or to challenge our definition of what we think of as activism to include all these in inner examination of the inner landscape or thinking about the more tender questions that you spend so much time thinking about in your podcast.

If that can be included under the umbrella of activism. Yes, I've been doing that for a long time and, and coming to the question of what has to happen in the interior world in order to sustain that, that has come about through the process of burnout , and all the rest.

Jennifer: And when you started to weave together these different threads. Reproductive justice, abolitionism, racial justice, and then in the environmental thread, [00:11:00] climate change work. You've mentioned a self-sacrificial relationship with some of this, and I'm curious, you mentioned burnout and I'm wondering if you'd be open to sharing what got you there in terms of an experience of burnout?

Sarah: I think that it's the standard stuff of there's urgency in front of you, there's fires to put out everywhere, and your job is to put out these fires and that, and the more there are, the harder you work. And when the, the idea, I think the story one tells oneself is I will rest when this fire is put out.

Jennifer: Yeah.

Sarah: When I started to realize that, that the fire was never gonna go out. There's always gonna be many, many fires. And it really took, I think, the challenge of climate change for me to understand that although people who have been working with civil rights and indigenous sovereignty movements and all the rest of it, know that this is a long game, but for me to realize [00:12:00] how much of a long game it was, it really took the kind of climate change, wake up call.

I. Because of my own positionality. And that was when I started to think, oh, the putting it out of the fire and resting once we have arrived at utopia, that's just a myth that's never gonna happen. And so it took that recognition of, okay, well then being pure and 150%, you know, out there doing all the things is going to actually not just undermine me, but if everybody's doing that, the collective level, everybody who's working on these things and all their spaces and all their different ways, as Paul Hawkin would call it, the blessed unrest, you know, these kind of, emergent mycelium like nodes everywhere of everybody working in these ways, we're all gonna be depleted.

And when you look at the data on people who work in environmental and climate spaces and the rates of their burnout and distress. It's really discouraging. And to me, that seemed to be the place of intervention. I might have something to offer. [00:13:00] Yeah, and it, and it had to go through my own, experience of burnout, which to me, it had more of a flavor of capitalism to it.

You know in order to perform and succeed in this capitalist, heteronormative, colonial context, this is what it looked like. It looked like having this kind of income. It looked like having this kind of title having the 2.4 children, the home, all of these things.

And I think it was my burn, burn, burn to achieve. I'm putting that in air quotes, achieve this kind of story in my life that it wasn't until that. Was causing me burnout, did I realize that that could maybe not be offering what it was supposed to be promising to be offering. And so I started to read things like Tricia Hersey's.

Rest is Resistance. And Jenny O'Dell's beautiful work. Saving time and how to Do Nothing. And realizing my relationship with the attention economy, my relationship with the economy in general, my relationship with, with patriarchy perfectionism [00:14:00] as white supremacy. All these layers started to kind of add on.

And I had to get there, not just through the academic lenses of those, those frameworks, but through my own burnout and saying, this is not gonna work for me either.

Jennifer: Yeah, I, I love the image of firefighting. And I know in activism, anytime we care so much and our hearts are so attuned to the suffering and the destruction that's at play, that it's endless. You know, that feeling like there's more fires to put out. And so I can really relate to that.

And when I was in my twenties, in the context of more human rights activism, that was definitely the case. And in some ways, you know, it's been argued well, the more that we burn out, the better for the system that wants to maintain certain collusions. And, and yet, I'm curious of, of like [00:15:00] what helped you remember

This idea of rest in the felt sense in your own body?

Like what was it that helped you reorient to. A different way of relating to the trouble that was inspired by rest, inspired by nurturing. But I'm curious in terms of your own everyday experience, what reminded you or pulled you back in?

Sarah: yeah. I mean, I could probably answer that in multiple ways. 'cause it probably took a lot of different data points to say, Hey Sarah, this isn't working over here. It's not working here in these 15 different places in your life. But perhaps the most illustrative, the one that really comes to mind right away was when I started being irritated and frustrated with my students.

I remember thinking their neediness, their emotional. Intensity around all of these terrible issues that we now come to understand as the poly crisis. This was starting to be maybe, [00:16:00] you know, maybe 2014 15 was leading up to Keystone Pipeline and Standing Rock. It was leading up to the 2016 US presidential election.

So there's a lot of energy in young people at that time. I would say that was a precursor for the 2019 youth climate strikes around the world. But my students, I think in retrospect I can say they were like the harbinger of that to come because they were feeling all of that energy and they were really unhappy and I felt that their existential.

Despair was too much to handle for me. I couldn't handle it. I wanted them to just be happy. Could they please just be happy and graduate and move on? And, it stopped me kind of cold in my tracks and it burned me out. It really burned me out because I was kind of acting like therapist to each of them, which is, I wasn't prepared for any of that.

I wasn't prepared for how intense it would be and how impossible it would be to fix again, air quotes. And it really called on me to [00:17:00] rethink what my role as a teacher was, and I, I really take an extreme amount of my identity and passion for better or for worse, out of my role as an educator for these students.

And I was the only faculty in my department. Still am. I often felt like I, I alone was in charge of like, Atlas, you know, holding the world. And all of these things, you can probably start to see many of the problematic narratives underneath all of these things that were holding me up.

And no wonder they were flimsy and fell apart. And that's what happened. I really burned out with teaching and I started to not be kind to my students. I used to find them irritating and a nuisance. And in classes when they'd blow up, I'd shut down. I really was dissociating from them.

And the very thing that gave me so much passion and pleasure and felt like my purpose of life was now just like an albatross. And that was when I realized that if I was gonna stick with this path, this [00:18:00] vocation, that I would have to find a different relationship to it. And that I, I certainly, for starters, I had to figure out how to recover myself.

Because I was really in a hole at that point, pretty badly depressed. , And my children were young and it was coming you know, sort of feeling of being kind of consumed by all the demands from all sides was very intense for me. And I didn't know how to stop the demand, the flow of demand coming at me.

The metaphor I have is just like those tennis ball machines that are shooting the tennis balls at you, and I just felt like I was constantly trying to get the tennis balls and hit them and not get hit, you know?

Jennifer: Yeah. And, and to this arrival point that I am hearing you point to is this, wanting your students to be happy,

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah.

Jennifer: which is such a natural human. Desire that we share the kind of contentment or equanimity or joy together. And I think what you're pointing to is this [00:19:00] confluence of factors that was leading up to a lot of stress, particularly in the US context, but around the world, especially in the West at that time.

And so I'm just feeling that, you know, the Atlas image that you offer just holding despair and it feeling also there sort of rapid demands that you described, but also a real heaviness.

Sarah: Yeah, I had this feeling of I can't reverse the election, I can't get carbon outta the atmosphere, and it made me so angry at them, and that was where I realized, oh, I've crossed, I've crossed this line

and I might need to do some inner work.

Jennifer: Yeah. And that's a great segue because I mean, your gift has been really. Elucidating the importance of how we relate to our emotions around climate change. And I think this is a great way to transition to a question around just how did you start to [00:20:00] work with what we might frame as more difficult or negative emotions.

The despair you talk about the grief, the rage, the terror. And how did you, how did you then translate that to working with your students in a way that started to turn around the kind of sucking down energy of, despair?

Sarah: It's such a beautiful question and it's an ongoing process, but there was that u-turn inner moment where I thought, oh, my anger at them, this is not gonna work for me. I can't keep going like this. And it's not their problem. It was like they were telling me, remove the wool from your eyes, Sarah, because my own attachment to all of these stories that are, you know, these implicit stories, you could kind of detect underneath all of the flimsiness of my reactions to this.

My story was toxic positivity, you know, like hope, hold onto it. We have to have the good vibes, you know I thought it [00:21:00] was my job that they hired me for. So from a very capitalistic perspective, I thought, you know, happy people walking across the stage. That's my job. Move them through the machine, get them jobs.

And when they were asking me to remove the wool from my eyes, what, what I, the way I see that now in retrospect is that they were inviting me into getting more intimate with uncomfortable emotions that I had myself not been willing to do. And I really acknowledged that that was their invitation.

I would probably have never gotten there if they weren't saying, if you wanna do this right, you have to go there, Sarah. And they were feeling it. And if I was going to actually figure out how to help them translate. Metabolize whatever verb you wanna use there. I don't wanna say coping. But if I was gonna help them harness those feelings that I'm so grateful that they were feeling into something that would make them have good lives and be of service to the planet I was gonna have to figure [00:22:00] out what was going on, which means I had to do it myself.

So there's still these multiple peelings of the onion layer of denial and dissociation habits that I have accumulated that I think are, fascinating to think about. And as I walk through the world and try to peel away these layers, it is helping me to figure out how to teach them to do it right.

I mean, as a consummate teacher, everything I do with myself, I'm thinking, okay, how can I teach this? How can they learn it? So, yeah, to deep dive into the uncomfortable emotions are useful. They're like an alarm system.

Or they're a map or a compass. And that invitation was really important to help me crack through my own denial around what they were experiencing and what we were going through in the world.

Jennifer: And I think it's worth just a quick interjection around. Like emotions are tricky. It's interesting terrain. And, some people might think, well, why do you spend so much time in sort of the emotional [00:23:00] domain? But in terms of action, I mean, emotions can take us down and I mean, the despair can get us on the couch and numbing out with Netflix or whatever it might be,

or a sense of, and I think you speak to this in your book around there's doom, there's despair, there's distancing, there's all these different ways when the emotional. Reality of what's happening or a fear of it in terms of climate warming. And it directly impacts us. I mean, think about my backyard. It's not a day that goes by that I think, oh, I should fire smart.

My yard better. I should take down that tree. Or I should clip those branches, or will this be a bad fire season? And I know that's the case in California as well for you. And the winds are getting stronger. I mean, that's just one small example, but it, when it feels so big and so abstract, you know it on one hand.

And then for those of us [00:24:00] who more and more are impacted, it feels more and more real. The emotional element of it can either send you checking out if you're in abstract land or kind of feeling like you have no control or. The capacity to change it. So then why not just checkout? And so the emotional domain can absolutely take us down

Sarah: Yeah. I was trying to figure out, you know, why so many people care but aren't doing anything about it. How do people even come to care? Oh, but then how do they turn that care into action? That's a whole different set of things. What is interpersonal conflict and our ability to communicate well with others?

What does love have to do with it? I mean, I I, having had a background in religious studies and having been motivated by sort of deeply spiritual questions from a very early age this return to the softness of the matters of the heart as the real action was really fun. [00:25:00] Actually. It felt like a, a return to what motivated me in the first place because I had moved into environmental work.

I felt like that was more important in the world or more activist, or more materially important. And so the ability to combine my passion for what's happening in the interior world with what's happening in the exterior world, I had not really understood that you could bring those together so well.

And so that really took until my, this last, decade or so of research to do that work. But you, you, you pinpoint that exact, you know, dilemma perfectly where when we get a little sneak peek behind the curtain as to what's really going on is too scary. And most people, the elegant cognitive solution is to not look anymore, to shut the curtain back, you know, and look around and say, oh, right now there's blue skies.

The birds are chirping. I have water in my tap. I'm okay. You know, I'm gonna carry on. And to undo everything and to [00:26:00] change everything. And to completely do an overhaul of my life is too much work, too much sacrifice. And unless everybody's doing it, it's not gonna make any difference. So that's the logic that gets everyone to, to apathy or to checking out.

And I think that that's a perfectly reasonable response and I'm deeply compassionate to people who end up there. I think a lot of the emotion work and the emotional intelligence around environmental stuff leads us to compassion ultimately, that all these people out there are managing all of this difficulty.

And it, and no wonder we are not doing more. It's just too hard to face. And I think that's why we need that emotion work because we need to figure out how to get over that hurdle once we get over that it's too hard to face hurdle. You know, we, we might be able to do this, but that's an emotional job.

Jennifer: I appreciate that so much because I feel like that hasn't always been included in environmental activism work or activism work in general around the matters of the heart. And so how did [00:27:00] you, like, take us through some of these really intense, strong emotions that listeners probably right now are feeling, I know, I just speak for myself.

I can sense my, sometimes my apathy and I can sense my desire to protect. And I think about glaciers. I grew up with a dad who's a glaciologist, always pointing out ice in all its forms and just watching the ice disappear here in Canada and. Then the threat of forest fire is just as too simple, but very, these examples are present year over year.

And so it's terrifying and it's, I experience a deep, deep grief because I think someone's explained it, you know, if you grew up with a lot of birds and you started to hear the reduce of bird song over your lifetime, you have a profound sense of loss in a different way than someone born five years ago who grew up with just a little bird song in their backyard,

so I recognize that in a way, [00:28:00] our ecological web of humans, we're all experiencing loss in very different ways.

Sarah: Yeah.

Jennifer: So how do we begin to really feel and then work with. My word would be transmuting. I don't know what you would say. Working with those emotions to turn it into fertile ground.

Sarah: Mm-hmm. I love what you're saying and I'm thinking too of like shifting baseline syndrome, how people easily forget and had amnesia over what was normal five years ago and can easily be convinced that this is the new normal. So again, another really important cognitive bias that if we are aware of.

We might be able to fight it a little bit more or counter it with other data that isn't just about what our body feels. And yeah, just another place where it's like, gosh, if we just had neuroscience and the world of emotions as a lens through which we understood our relationship to this storyline of climate change we could [00:29:00] plug a lot of holes, you know?

But yeah, how do we transmute? My personal journey with this was if I started to look in behind the curtain and I looked at it harder and harder and harder and was willing to do it with the courage. So that's the first thing, courage to look at that stuff.

And it required my students holding me accountable to it. So there's that. Doing it in collective community, that was very important. I needed the support of that. I found community doing that work too, which was helpful among colleagues. So looking behind the curtain in community, and once I went that far, you sort of have a fork in the road there.

You either say, I can't take this, there's no point in this. I'm gonna be sort of nihilistic and fatalistic and just throw my hands up. Which I have heard many people's versions of that. You know, I'll, I'll never even forget my 11th grade physics teacher saying basically that to me, there's no point in recycling.

The world's going to hell. I, you know, [00:30:00] I'm gonna just live my life. This was my teacher in high school who said this to me, right? So I know that this is the storyline. I know a lot of people go there. I know my students even sometimes go there. And then the other option, is, well now that we reckon with that, it's sort of like facing mortality, I think now that, I reckon with that.

Is apathy and nihilism really a path for me? That doesn't feel good for me. I can't choose that path for me because that just seems like a life of depression. And so for me, and this is not for everybody, but I would like to encourage in my lifetime as many people to choose this other path with me, which is in the face of all of this, we have these other choices.

And all of these other choices are better than that despair off the edge of the cliff choice. This doesn't mean that we are in denial of grief. This doesn't mean that we turn our face away from what's happening behind the curtain. It is a whole new set of practices and things that come down from ancient traditions of [00:31:00] wisdom, from native peoples to all kinds of wisdom traditions have insights about this and toolkits for us to, to work on with this.

Which is that the grief is how we touch into love. Of course, that grief is, if we never loved those birds, if we never loved those, the glaciers on that ice, we wouldn't have grief about its disappearance. And, and part of what we're seeing is, you know, a lot of people who have never been conditioned to have love for these things, not caring about their disappearance, right?

And of course, the final consequences of that will be felt by everybody, no matter whether you love nature or not, so it's, it doesn't get you off the hook just because you don't care about it. But it does seem to me that the insight I get, the, the thing that really helped me transmute for me personally, and this is the one I hold onto when everything is terrible for me.

Comes from Adrian Marie Brown's work where she uses, again, an insight [00:32:00] that comes from many wisdom traditions. She puts it so beautifully, which is feed what you want to grow. And when I think about the grief and despair and I get really, really scared about the big monster in the room, like our current president in the us, when I get really afraid of how that seems to be eclipsing everything that I love, not just eclipsing in my attention way, but also ruining and destroying those things materially, I have again, several options about what I'm gonna do with that.

My nervous system can tell me any of those Ds that you mentioned. I can dissociate, I can be in denial. Those things are all really the easier path but I have now done enough work to say, okay, my instinct is to tune out of this. This is too painful. This is too hard. I don't like the monster them.

It's so scary and I'm so angry about it. Those uncomfortable emotions are like the compasses, I mentioned the map earlier. I like to think of those emotions as giving me an opportunity to [00:33:00] ask this question to myself. What is it that I'm afraid the monster is going to destroy?

And if I can articulate how that grief and fear and anger point to something that I love I can then turn all that energy I have of at the scale of it. Right? That's really what I think is at the root of a lot of people's anguish is, I can't do anything about this is powerlessness.

Turn it to empowerment, to nurture that, which I love. And so I often say to people, there's two ways to get rid of the scary monster in the room. One is to destroy the scary monster. That feels like the automatic thing to do when there's a,

the fight instinct. But another way is to grow the things that you love so that they are not so easy to destroy. And that to me feels like liberation. But to me, the feeling of nurturing something I love, no matter how tiny it is around me, you know, looking around and,

shading the bright light of what horrible things are happening because that bright light is making me [00:34:00] blinded to all the beauty around me so that I can put my attention on all the beauty, the tiny little pockets of these dandelions growing through the concrete where I can nurture and nurture and nurture and because that nurturing and that love feeling for me anyway.

And it also, there, there is some evidence to support this in sort of a neuroscientific way too, in terms of our social instincts and our need for the feeling of, of being a nurturer that those things can then grow and I'm doing something active to resource the things that I love.

We might wanna think that tearing down the threat is the most important action, but I'm, I guess what I'm suggesting is that for me to get away from that pit of despair, I.

I have to say, okay, I'm [00:35:00] nurturing that which I love. I'm taking into despair to figure out what I love, and then I'm gonna figure out practices of nurturing that, which I love. It might feel like a smaller scale than the big scary monster in the room. And that dissonance is always there. I think we just carry it.

But I, I also think that we do that in community in order to know that it is not just one drop in the ocean that I am, and the combination of nurturing what I love, the feeling of empowerment that I get from that, that then has this kind of nudge theory. I will keep doing it. I will wake up tomorrow morning and wanna do more of it.

You know, effect a si sort of like virtuous cycle

in community is the cure. I think personally for that despair, I often say to people who say. I'm in despair and despair. I mean, I love Rebecca Sonet says despair isn't legitimate emotion, but it's not a political strategy. And the way I interpret that is despair is a sign that you are suffering from individualism.

You know that once you start to realize how [00:36:00] many people are nurturing the stuff you love, all of a sudden the big scary monster in the room doesn't seem to be so loud and bright.

Jennifer: Yeah. First I wanna just acknowledge the sense of an adequacy, you know, as you, as you name that I really feel that, and I feel that. Because at this moment in my life, I'm not leading a team, a team which in some ways ripples out and, you know, influences 30, 40, 50 projects at one time.

There is a sense of, when you're working in a collective, you have such a bigger range. And so for me, working more individually on a smaller scale, I've met a different kind of inadequacy

in the last few years. 

Sarah: Yeah, 

Jennifer: and I think it, it really holds so many of us back. And I understand that there's a new, and I, I heard this from the Yale professor, I was listening to a [00:37:00] conversation between NHA I ed with ideas on CBC radio and she was interviewing Marcy Shore, who was a previous EL University professor and is move to the Monk school in Canada.

Talking about totalitarianism and how we're in a different kind of terrain right now in that historically when we had the kind of levels of threats that we've had with war and the rise of authoritarianism, that information was very difficult to find. People were covert, governments were covert about their strategies to create power imbalances or to oppress or to brutalize a population.

Now it's just overt. I. And in the overtness of we're going to open up X for mass logging or oil and gas, or we're going to colonize or take over this, country or area of land. [00:38:00] Governments are being more, whether it's flood the zone of all the different strategies that they're taking on in terms of power over.

And so my experience is that there is a deeper inadequacy that starts to emerge when there's covert actions that are taking advantage and there's a feeling like you can't stop them.

Sarah: Hmm.

Jennifer: And so I love that you're bringing up this where you place your attention, this practice of where you give your attention

Sarah: Hmm.

Jennifer: to what grows

Sarah: Yeah. And I'm not suggesting that we don't have an eye on what's happening with a top down power over. I am suggesting that there is a tendency, especially among activists in the sort of doom scrolling attention economy of the way we get so much news, as you just mentioned, that given the negativity bias in the news, which [00:39:00] is really incredible data about this and given the corporatization of news media.

It is really incumbent upon us to make sure we're cultivating the right conditions for our own activism and to be as resource as possible for it, for that which we care about the most. Right? I mean, I keep bringing this back to if we really care about X, Y, and Z, we will protect our energy and our ability to confront that thing.

So this isn't about turning it away from it in order to live in your own little Garden of Eden over here in the corner. This is suggesting how can we make sure that our conditions are as honed and as taught as possible to continue to confront these things. And so what I'm suggesting is that we become really aware of when that attention on the monster in the room starts to undermine our agency, undermine our efficacy, undermine our willingness to get up in the morning and get to work on this stuff.

Right when we slip over that line is when it might be time and it might be different for [00:40:00] everybody, right. And it might be time to just to stop doing that so that we can build back our resources. That is a titration practice. And I do think that it is a skill. It is not something that we were raised learning how to do that anyone is teaching us at school.

Our parents probably don't know how to do it. You know, it's a, it's a skill in this moment, 

Jennifer: I'd love to turn some of the attention to your students because I know there's such a deep reciprocity between your book writing your thought leadership and the work you do in teaching, and you have such a special window on this next generation, and I know you've shared with me that you've had just such a special teaching semester, and I'd love to hear.

Like how is that practice growing amongst your students? How are they working with it, and what is the felt imprint of their [00:41:00] own growing consciousness that you're learning from that's inspiring you or stretching you in new ways?

Sarah: Hmm. Yeah, I think I'd like to start with the second part of that question. 'cause that's the, that's the, to me, the juice, you know, like, oh, what are they teaching me this semester? What are they teaching me now? What is the invitation now? And I think the thing that I'm finding so exciting this semester is that this is the first time I feel like.

They're back, they're back from COVID as we're talking now in the spring of 2025. But there was a moment there with, the election, with what's happening with climate change, there was a real depression and I mean that kind of in the literal sense of student energy and aliveness.

And I had this feeling of being walking among zombies and it just is, this is sort of one of the first semesters it feels like that's not happening anymore. They're back, they're alive and they're well and they want to get to work. [00:42:00] So it's just you know, the dynamism of it is, I think the lesson there.

I used to think the students needed X, Y, and Z as their main kind of emotional skillset, but this is changing semester by semester. So I think that the constant challenge and the requirement of curiosity around what they need every semester being maybe different. I come in thinking, okay, this is what they need next semester.

So it's a surprise to adjust every time, oh, they're at this place. But I think that the the beauty of coming into class every time with a sense of I, I've really had to liberate myself from thinking that my job is to get them jobs.

That my job is to make them happy. My job is to give them x, y and skills or something. You know, I have moved away from all of that pressure and really thought

that everything in our class runs through the filter of is this thing in service of them building their heart capacities in a collective.

When I had my students, just [00:43:00] some examples of practices. The whole first month of class, we spend listening, writing, reading about theory of community collaboration, coalition building, why our interpersonal relationships are the ailment of both our, mental health and our planetary and our social government crises, right?

The whole sequence of crises are connected to a ruptured relationship. So we start off there. How is that true? How is that not true? How is it that this works in your life? How can we as a classroom, 'cause what a beautiful honor it is to have a gathering of 20 or so people in a room together twice a week.

I mean, what is that? This is like the most beautiful thing ever. And this is the practice. This is the lab for exactly what we're supposed to be doing as a collective in the world, just outta the micro scale. So every single minute we spend together is a practice for that.

How are we practicing repair when we hurt each other? You know, every single way that we show up with [00:44:00] each other has that kind of weight of this is what we need as a medicine for the world. And ever since I've shifted to thinking about class time, my syllabus, everything we read, you know, every way I communicate with them, with that lens, it has changed the way I teach entirely.

We, you know, we show up together to support each other. And in this last semester, the reason why I feel so happy about how it went is 'cause the things that they would say would be like, I wanna come to class even when I'm not doing well in class, just because I need to be in community with that group. They come for their friends. That's like super success when they didn't all know each other at all before, and they come just to be with each other. Then, you know, you've had success. And if they can come to class because they get so much out of just being together in community, then we, they've learned the most important lesson for all the bigger problems out in the world.

Jennifer: Just strikes [00:45:00] me, you know, going back to what you said earlier, when you're holding despair and then you're giving your attention to what you wanna nurture and grow and that it's not just this sweet little Eden that you sit on your mat and meditate and grow your garden and, and while that's beautiful, I hear the ache of the hard work of building community in what you're doing and it's real.

And I think that is the beauty and the heartache of being human right now, is that we are an interconnected human family with the more than human world. And it starts with how we are engaging in our relational fields. In our day-to-day lives.

Sarah: Yeah, I love watching the scales, you know, fall from their eyes as they start to figure that out over the course of many weeks. It's, it's one thing to read about it in the first month of class, 

but it's another thing to see it happen one time over [00:46:00] again and over again. And you know, I wish I knew even more practices to build that in a classroom.

We're limited by the fact that I have to give them grades at the end, that that changes things. We're limited by the fact that we're on stolen land and there's all this violence of just being on a campus. We're limited by the fact that everybody is walking around with all of their isms and their, cell phones and all the rest that's telling them to not care about anybody else.

Meanwhile, higher education is being increasingly pressurized to design itself for the old world that's vanishing, the one that we're trying to hospice. It is amping up the problematic ways that it teaches. Meanwhile, while the world is getting worse and worse and worse and needs something radically different, so we're in this kind of total ships missing each other in the night moment where higher education is trying to respond to the market, and students are getting more and more dis disillusioned with the market you know, so [00:47:00] what do they need in this moment when the university is pumping them out to get jobs in this system? And I get to have this little special third space or liminal space where we, we get to question that and wonder whether or not that's, that's what they want.

Whether that's in alignment with what they love.

Jennifer: Yeah. I, I love that, especially given the pressures on the academy right now in the United States, that there's an articulation of this and, and where there's a resistance and a resilience that feels fleshy and soft and also deeply rooted in wisdom traditions that are allowing for that relational intimacy that this time we're all calling for, we're all being called for a deeper forms of human relationship and more than human relationship.

And maybe what I'd love to end with is, you've talked about this in your book around the [00:48:00] radical ecological imagination, and I would love to ask you. How are your students, how is this exchange across generations supporting a wilder ecological imagination that includes the kind of relational intimacy that's fueling your own inspiration?

Sarah: Hmm. That's beautiful. I love that. I wanna write that down. I hope you have that written down.

I would like to muse on that question every morning when I wake up. As a practice. It's beautiful. Yeah. I think the thing is that for better or for worse, , I have always thought that college students were where it was all at for me.

And it's because they're at this amazing place where they're crossing the threshold from childhood to adulthood. I mean, these are constructs, whatever. I mean, you know, I hold those [00:49:00] words loosely and culturally that's different across different cultures, et cetera. But in sort of like my, my Western worldview, like college is where this all happens and this is why it's such a fun place to be accompanying them through this.

And. One of the things that young people have always brought into colleges is this kind of idealism. And then you start giving them tools to be change makers, and then they wanna change in the campus, and then the campus fights them. And it's just like this kind of perpetual cycle. It's always happening.

You know, it's not just in the moment of, Palestine of last year or anything. It's just sort of a constant theme in higher education. The pushing of young people to get us to be better, to get us to be more accountable, to examine our privileges and our, attachments to harmful systems. I just find that very hopeful, very enlivening.

They're making me always think about things I hadn't thought of before. It [00:50:00] takes a lot of humility too. You have to kind of surrender this idea that you are the sage on the stage, you're perfect already, and you're gonna imbue your perfection into these empty vessels of students. I mean, you have to completely blow that one outta the water If you think of this, not in a deficit model, which is what educators call that.

If you think of this more as they're coming in to teach each other and me, you can set the conditions for that knowledge exchange in a very different way than maybe if you had that more sage on the stage, traditional way of teaching. And yeah, I think that young people have the greatest stake in, in what the next world is gonna be like.

And they they're also. In general, not they're getting, they're being given less and less tools over time to figure out how to build that or what that would look like. And to the radical imagination point this has to do very much with, if, if you cannot imagine a future you would [00:51:00] desire to live in, then you're never gonna know even what the next step is to take and why you're even getting a degree.

I mean, the first thing I say to them is, you're getting a degree probably. 'cause somebody told you this is the only way to get a job and to have upward mobility in this existing system. You know, start challenging all of those things, right? Like the existing system, the narrative that college is gonna get you.

That, you know, how can you drive this, this college, experience yourself for what you want out of the world. Oh, you don't know what you want outta the world. Maybe we have to start there. And that's where the radical imagination comes in, right? If they don't even know what they want from their lives.

Why even get up in the morning? Why come to class? Why do anything? So it's really a critically important first step before you can even backward design from there about what you're gonna do in class today. You know?

Jennifer: Yeah. And it also strikes me, and I just think the beauty of your work and how receptive you are in terms of redefining what it even means to teach and what it means to [00:52:00] receive the wisdom, especially if it. Of these upcoming generations. And it seems to me that some of the ecological radical imagination is live in the moment.

In this desire for your students to come to class and just be together, even in the face of not doing well, the world not going great, family dynamic, all the challenges, like there's something so alive. Like you were talking about this aliveness. And it doesn't mean happiness. It means let's be real and be intimate and in relationship with whatever is happening in this moment.

And I, and I love that you've created space for that because there's a, shows a deep, deep trust, you know, I think about the Santa Anna winds, you know, beneath the kind of gusts of wind and fire and storms. There's something deeper that you are trusting that is going to come into being in relationship together.

As we [00:53:00] let go of all the ways we should or have to show up for a breaking world. A changing world and even our attachments to what it should look like in the first place.

Sarah: It's beautiful because every single student in that room has a completely different idea of what that world should look like, although they're environmental studies students, so there's some, some commonality 

Jennifer: Yeah, yeah. 

Sarah: But that, that ability to put aside the telos as you described it, the kind of like, we're, we're marching along in this very modernity focused way where we're acquiring these skills and we're putting them in our little basket, and we're writing it on our resume.

I mean, I, I, I acknowledge to them that they have to have that too. But I want to always do that with tongue in cheek a little. This is like the folly of participating in the dying system, but you're in this overlap place where you're gonna have to participate a little bit in this dying system in order to bring about the one you want.

So there's some pulling the rug out from [00:54:00] under them that happens there where you're like, oh, you're not in college for what you thought you were in college for. The world is ending. Oh boy, let's, what do we put into place? Because you can't just leave them there in that suspended state of you know, existential void.

Jennifer: Yeah,

Sarah: So there's a little bit of, of how do you walk that line just right. That I am always challenged by and I find the students wanna think about it alongside with me. I don't have to answer it myself.

Jennifer: so maybe to close, I would love to ask you. What's a practice that you're engaging right now that's allowing you to sit with this tension between what I like to call saving, you know, this desire to fix and solve, which is a part of all of us, and then this surrendering into a deep acceptance of being with what is, what's a practice that's supporting you?

Sarah: Hmm, that was a really great question. [00:55:00] I'd say that if it weren't for the fact that my little kids are constantly drawing me into that acceptance place, that I would have a very hard time not being in the constant saving and fixing.

Jennifer: Hmm.

Sarah: Yeah, I think the practice of turning my attention towards the children that are right in front of me yeah, my family.

That's one, there's that balance between the things that are right in front of me that feel small scale or feel mundane versus the big lofty things of saving and sacredness and all of that. That to me, despite everything I've already just said today, to me there's this sort of binary about that.

I have a hard binary that I'm working with on that. And yeah, I think it's the, okay, when, when the immediate thing around me pulls me out against my will or outside of what I would consent to is there an opportunity there for me to [00:56:00] say, okay, this too, this too. This is also an alignment with everything that I value.

'cause it is, I mean, I, if I think it through it is so yeah, that practice of not feeling so abrupt or harsh about the, mundane and the sacred in my life.

Jennifer: It feels like a different kind of relational intimacy with your, with your life, and I feel like that's what I'm taking from this conversation is this invitation that you're inviting us into to be deeply in relationship with. What is in our immediate circles and trusting that everything is there that we need.

Sarah: When I listen to you just say that I'm, I am reminded, I am, I am awakened to the incredible hypocrisy of everything I've just said. It all works. Just what, beautifully in the classroom. But then, then I go home and I'm like, oh, the relationships that are right in front of me. What a nuisance. So it's it's a [00:57:00] certain, it's certain is certain hypocrisy, and that's, yeah.

That's the practice,

Jennifer: yeah, I think that's that's for all of us. We have the ideal of where we wanna be, and then we have the, the real crux of everyday life. And I am just in really deep gratitude for the work that you have, brought to the work of climate. And environmental activism and teaching and liberation, and making sure that we're weaving together all these different threads and not seeing them as disconnected but seeing our life flow through them. And so with that, thank you for just bringing a deeper current to how we are working with climate change and global warming because it's, it's not a happy one and it's not meant to be, it is not an arrival point, but you're pointing to how we avoid this binary between saving the urgency, the martyring, and the complete checking out to stay deeply engaged.

So thank you [00:58:00] so much.

Sarah: Thank you.

Jennifer: So here's the essence of what I am taking from my conversation with Sarah. It's so easy to put the attention on the monster and to feed it, to feed our overwhelm, to feed the urgency, to feed the fear.

And when we flip the curiosity around what are the conditions that we need to stay whole and whole, not being a perfect human or. Perfectly intact, but more how do we tend the heart questions, the spiritual questions, the belonging questions that tether us to one another in order to nurture ultimately what we love. And for each of us, that's gonna be different. It could be as [00:59:00] simple as nurturing the more than human creatures that live with you, your plants, the animals, the cats, the sheep, the salamanders. To go to

a climate strike on a Friday, to simply gather and share food together. To dance together to rest. I love that activism for Sarah can look in so many different ways that action isn't about fixing or solving, but it's around. Staying connected to what brings us closest to what we love and when we can nurture what we love, the monster doesn't feel so terrifying.

I love our honesty about burnout, the more we focus on the fires to put out, the more they grow. And the harder we work, the more work there is to [01:00:00] do.

But it seems to me also that burnout happens when we don't include the emotional terrain or experiences that we're having. So this idea of trying to stay happy or look on the bright side without including our experience of despair, our heaviness, the anxiety or the terror, is also what creates a drag in our life force.

And so I love that to move out of burnout or to prevent burnout we need to include and to meet what's right here as we turn towards and not deny the changes that are before us.



Jennifer: And then finally,

grief is the tether to love. When we grieve for what's lost, it points us to what we love. [01:01:00] And so if you are feeling at all overwhelmed, caught in despair or. Feeling like, what's the point? Sarah reminds us that let your despair or grief point the way towards what you deeply care about.

And that love creates a different kind of web a web that's not created by urgency, but it is created through nurturing and deep care.



Jennifer: to learn more about Sarah's work, you can find resources and links from this episode in the show notes. If you know somebody who'd appreciate this conversation, especially if they might be feeling overwhelmed by the state of the planet .

Please share this episode. We are weaving a wholehearted web based on kinship, not kingship of the speed of one heart opening conversation at a time. And if you'd like to stay in touch with me, come get my newsletter, you can find me on [01:02:00] substack@jengland.substack.com. And if you haven't yet, be sure to click follow the show.

Wherever you get your podcasts, 'cause you don't wanna miss an upcoming micro episode that offers you a practice inspired by my conversation with Sarah that deepens the insights and integrates them into the field of your own life and you don't wanna miss it.

That's all for now, my friend. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Jennifer England. I look forward to being with you again.