It Needs to Be Done, and Here I Am
Sera, the Conservation Biologist, #28 in the Teaching Climate Change study
“I’m very clear about the reason I teach. I was drawn to teaching because I wanted to share information about environmental science. I remember sitting in class and being like, people need to know this.” — Sera
I am sometimes invited to lead a workshop that I co-designed called Teaching Climate Change Affectively. No, it’s not a typo. It’s a workshop on climate anxiety and how to teach the affective dimensions of it, using activities from ecopsychology and The Work that Reconnects, adapted for an academic environment. The premise of the workshop is that faculty need to a) deal with their own emotions about the climate crisis, and then b) learn new skills to responsibly guide students in learning about the impacts of climate change and how it will shape their futures.
In January, a campus counselor saw the flyer and contacted me. She said she had an activity that I might like to include. Curious, I met with her on Zoom as the fall semester was ending. She sat in front of three large, beautiful calligraphies. She didn’t know that I knew what they were: Love, Peace, and Harmony, the Tao Calligraphies of Master Sha. The counselor started to tell me about quantum physics, vibration, and harmony. She said that her mission was to bring love, peace, and harmony to campus.
Master Sha teaches that, “We live in a soup of vibrational fields. Each of our cells, organs and systems has its own vibrational field, as do our homes, offices, vehicles, neighborhoods, cities, etc., as well as our thoughts, feelings, relationships and more — everything has a vibrational field.” The counselor, a student of Master Sha, proposed that Tao Calligraphy could help students to change their vibration as they were learning difficult information about climate change.
What you do is hold an imaginary calligraphy brush in your hand and trace the calligraphy as you look at it and listen to the song, “Love, Peace and Harmony”. There is an instrumental version, as well as lyrics in Chinese, English, German, and Soul Language. The counselor said, “now, this may sound a bit strange to you….” but again, she didn’t know that I have a friend, Kathryn, who is also a student of Master Sha and practitioner of Tao Calligraphy. (She is also an animal communicator, and great at hair.) The counselor didn’t know that Kathryn basically saved my life after I suffered the suicide of a beloved. He shot himself with a rifle under his jaw, after coping with a traumatic brain injury for a decade.
In the weeks after this tragedy I sometimes literally couldn’t get off of the floor. I tried to call a counselor from my PPO and was told I had “complex grief” and they couldn’t fit me into the schedule. I was referred to a crisis hotline. I called a friend instead who called someone else and somehow Kathryn appeared at my door, offering me Soul Healing. It needed to be done, and there she was. She held my hand while I lay on the floor weeping, and she sang “Love, Peace, and Harmony” to me. She reached out to Ascended Masters such as Quan Yin on my behalf and she petitioned my ancestors for forgiveness. It was amazing. And it worked.
In a traumatic episode, you take what comes as healing. If this campus counselor, and her practice of Tao Calligraphy happens to be on the path with some of our university students, then my job is to not to get in the way of that. So, I think she was surprised when I said, “sure, I’m cool with that.”
She said, “I would like to support you, as you are preparing this workshop. Is there anything that you are struggling with personally, right now?”
Funny you should ask….This was an interesting question, since I had been told, just the day before, that funding for my position with the Office of Sustainability was being cut. It felt like being fired, except that I have tenure, so it just means that I won’t do sustainability work anymore. Instead, I’ll have a full teaching load of four composition classes, which will leave very little time for research such as Teaching Climate Change Field Notes, or for workshops to support faculty in teaching climate change. This news had just been dropped on me, and I was still in shock about it.
It also happened to be the same week that I signed the Scholars’ Warning letter, and I couldn’t help wondering if the two were connected. Probably paranoid, but these are strange times. The Scholars’ Warning letter advocates talking openly about climate change impacts and the possibility of near-term social collapse. I still endorse the sentiment of the letter, which concludes:
We have experienced how emotionally challenging it is to recognise the damage being done, along with the growing threat to our own way of life. We also know the great sense of fellowship that can arise. It is time to invite each other into difficult conversations, so we can reduce our complicity in the harm, and be creative to make the best of a turbulent future. — Scholars’ Warning, 2020
While most administrators were probably were too busy with budget cuts to even notice the Scholars’ Warning, at least one of my colleagues declined to sign the letter, saying that it promoted hopelessness and that Deep Adaptation was an invitation to one’s “Dark Angels” (I quote), promoting a cult-like sense of giving up on climate mitigation strategies. This has evolved into a division in the climate education world, with prominent scientist Michael Mann arguing that “if people believe there is nothing you can do, they are led down a path of disengagement. They unwittingly do the bidding of fossil fuel interests by giving up.” I don’t see myself as a “doomer” just as an educator trying to tell the truth, so that my students don’t come back to me in ten years and say “why didn’t you tell us?” That’s my litmus test.
Jem Bendell, author of the Scholars’ Warning letter, has received renewed critique from some 23 year old students at Columbia who criticize his interpretation of the science around methane, albedo, and tipping points. They call it “unfounded doomism.” This article in the Style section of the New York Times pushed the criticism further. To doom, or not to doom?
To me this feels like an emotional censorship of the difficult conversations that should be the very foundation of college classrooms. I get into email exchanges about these things, and then I hold my head in my hands and take a deep breath and ask, what is really going on here?
Last time I counted there were 2692 faculty in our university system, and 1.5 million higher education faculty nationwide (counting full time and adjuncts, and before Covid-related retrenchment). What do all these teachers think about climate change, and how are they talking to students about it? My point is simply that we don’t know, and if we don’t engage those faculty and help them with these topics, then we will be collectively communicating a very confusing range of information from doom and gloom to techno-optimism; from decolonial activism to neoliberal behavior change. Most won’t teach climate change at all, some (like the 30 I have interviewed here) will try, and a few will go all in and suffer the emotional (and political) consequences.
Of course, I didn’t go into any of this in my Zoom meeting with the Tao Calligraphy counselor, but she told me not to worry so much. “It’s just some old karma between you and the president” she said, offering to do forgiveness healing with my ancestors, and his. All in all, it was a very unusual Zoom meeting, but I did decide to include the Tao Calligraphy meditation as an option during the workshop. It is her mission, after all, and she is part of the university community, and anyway, why would such a meditation NOT be helpful — it’s kinesthetic, multicultural, meditative, and at a megahertz level compatible with brain entrainment theory.
I wondered what kind of forgiveness was being negotiated with my ancestors. Interestingly, I had a new face to put to the matter, as my oldest child had recently discovered a great, great, great, great grandmother, Mahala Hiser (McCoy) on Ancestry.com. I bet Mahala never thought she would appear in a blog!
According to a cousin, Mahala was born in 1859 in Ohio. The German Hisers came to America in the 1770s, and were related to the Eisenhauers. (The other side of my family is Swedish). We have a family farm in Iowa.
In elementary school, back in the Midwest, every year we had Prairie School Day, where we went to the historic one room schoolhouse and carried our lunch in coffee cans and wore bonnets. (I actually still love bonnets, which are very sun protective, like Mahala’s dress.) We learned how hardworking our ancestors were, and I’m sure that is true. What we didn’t learn so much about was the genocide of the indigenous peoples already inhabiting the interior, and the chattel slavery that built the country and laid the foundation for the industrial age, which created, inevitably, the climate crisis.
In Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics psychologist Donna Orange says that “neither governments nor citizens can seriously tackle climate injustice until we confront this 400 year history” (of settler colonialism, chattel slavery, and racial domination) (p. 37). She says that we compartmentalize uncomfortable aspects of history in the same way that we ignore climate change. Just as I go about my daily life (tea drawer, novel, Picard), while the Arctic melts, so did Mahala, probably; sewing dresses and shelling peas while the Sioux, the Ioway, the Illini, the Otoe, and the Missouria tribes were killed, displaced, put in boarding schools.
We cannot face one without unearthing the other, and even if I personally never murdered an Indian, and whether or not the Eisenhauers owned slaves or displaced native peoples, we all bear the psychological burden of shame. Ancestral shame causes us to continue driving, flying, and eating meat despite the fires, drought, and displacement already occurring in other parts of the planet. Whether you take a spiritual perspective, an ethical one, or that of quantum physics, it’s all related. The universe is a giant double-doughnut, an infinite torus, and we are stuck with each other across time and space. And the ancestors that came before us demand the same accountability as the generations that will come after us.
Orange even writes of karma, which the counselor said was the source of my current conflict in academia:
“…It takes a very small leap to understand our current environmental destruction as the karmic consequence of violence and possessiveness on a large scale” …. (But) “naming what we fear, and naming our secret shame, tends to increase solidarity.” (p. 108)
So perhaps forgiveness practice and Soul Healing are in fact what is needed (in addition to restorative justice practices outlined in proposals such as Just Transition, or a Green New Deal, or, as Orange suggests, the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment (ESRA) and the Global Marshall Plan.) These are extraordinarily difficult conversations. But generational trauma can be healed. We must rehumanize our institutions.
I interviewed Sera (a pseudonym) back in September. She teaches Environmental Studies at Community College of the Pacific (a pseudonym), and she completed the Teaching Climate Change workshop when I offered it last year. She said that it helped her to solidify ways she could use activities and resources for emotional work in her classroom. She became interested in doing this after getting feedback from students that her course “ruined everything.”
“Here we were talking about all these crises: water crises, glacial loss, biodiversity loss, climate change….I had a student who sat in the front row and she asked me, “What do I do? What can we do?”
Sera started to compile resources that students could work with outside of class and share with their families.
“At the time I thought this material doesn’t have a place in my course but I can direct students to do this outside of my course because you know, like ‘if you are having a hard time here are some things you can see.’ I’ve changed my opinion on that. I directly address the fact that ecological grief, anxiety, and depression are very real things, in my class.”
She has students complete the Yale Climate Communications SASSY Survey at the start of the semester, and this gives her a read on where her students are at. “I have mostly concerned and alarmed students, but then I have one student who is doubtful, and I don’t know who it is but I’m kind of more concerned about that student’s wellbeing.
“Because there’s things that are too big to let in.”
She continued:
I think you have to have a full understanding of the crisis. It’s important to have full understanding, to understand what the worst case scenario is and what our current track is and how far that is from where we want to be. I find it useful to compare those. To say “this is what a 1.5 degree world looks like” and “this is what a 3–4 degree world looks like” and “this is what a 6 degree world looks like”.
These are called RCPs, Represenative Concentration Pathways and they influence things like temperature rise (from the 1.2 increase we are already experiencing, to the 1.5 of the Paris Agreement, to a worst-case 4.8 by the end of the century). Sera takes the time to tease these things apart. “A lot of times that gets mushed together, but as a recent Twitter post put it, we have a choice in how Fk#d we are. And that’s useful,” says Sera. “That helps to make space for a serious conversation.”
Sera has a BA in Environmental studies from Berkeley, and an MA in Tropical Conservation Biology and Environmental Science earned in Hawaii while teaching high school — she also has the pedagogical training of an education degree and is attuned to adolescent development. She says she doesn’t remember ever not knowing about climate change, because her mother was the department secretary in the department of atmospheric sciences in the midwestern university town where she grew up. Sera was a youth activist herself and remembers her own activism being “tied up in a certain amount of teen angst. I remember having this really hard time understanding how we could do this to the earth and to ourselves.”
“The first time I remember talking about it I was 10 or 12 and I was talking to someone at church and explaining to an adult the difference between the ozone hole and global warming.” At the time she thought climate change was “way far in the future, 30 years from now, we’ll figure out something by then.”
“But, here we are.”
Sera and I got to talking about impostor syndrome, which is a thing in higher ed, where you get put in this position where you are supposed to be an expert and know things, yet we live in this hypercomplex world where nothing stands still, fake news abounds, and there really are no more experts.
“Sometimes I have to teach classes that are on a difficult topic. One thing I do is I go stand barefoot on the earth, to remind myself what I’m doing it for. My role is for something to come through me that can be of service to the Earth. I mess up. People mess up. You’re not going to break your students, but being aware and able to accept criticism and to change and grow is important….I know that with issues like this there’s not really a way around it. This stuff is going to come up for them, so pretending it’s not there, that’s not being of service either. That’s how feel about it.”
As our interview came to an end, she said:
