The public park in Providence, Rhode Island, featured a unique initiative that began almost a decade ago.
It was called the ‘Climate Anxiety Counseling’ and was located at a booth which was created by one of the town’s writers and activists Kate Schapira.
The project is meant to help people who have been experiencing increasing climate-related fears making them feel alone in their problems.
However, as a poet and nonfiction writing instructor at Brown University, she identified the source of her anxieties to be her imagination rather than personal experiences. She started this unusual booth in order to bring others back into a conversation.
From Imagination to Grounded Conversations
Schapira then realized that her discussions with friends petered out because of these fears.
She wanted to talk with people whose imaginations were filled with disastrous ecological scenarios.
The first person who visited the booth shared his private nightmare about a world without clean water or that had been devastated by catastrophic events due to climate change.
During this period time, Schapira held more than 1,200 talks on climate worries setting up booths at various venues including county fairs as well as farmers’ markets just to name but a few.
Her reflections from all these engagements eventually resulted in her maiden non-fiction work titled “Lessons from Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth: How to Live with Care and Purpose in an Endangered World.”
Insights from Conversations
Schapira learned many things during her time running the booth. One of the key things she discovered is that much of the emotional pain that people go through as they think about climate change arises from feeling isolated. People felt alone despite knowing that it was an issue for everyone else.
Surprises Amidst Conversations
To her surprise, there were not many encounters with climate deniers though they were occasionally encountered among visitors, probably less than one percent.
Schapira observed that they would sometimes go round in circles talking about global warming without any concrete suggestions as to how it could be reduced.
Breaking the Circular Pattern
There is an urgent need for collective action in ending the cycle of climate anxiety. She also calls on people to get involved in advocacy and organizing, suggesting that everyone should know their strengths and find opportunities where they connect with larger needs.
Within climate action, the book acts as a guide by pointing out these areas of intersection between skills and requirements of this movement.
Mitigating Climate Anxiety
The first step for such persons would be keeping off from those scenarios that arouse their fears so as to manage their anxieties according to Schapira.
Moreover, it is important for them to practice talking about their fears even if the listener stays silent.
When individuals share their fears, they develop a mode of observation which can help in preventing it from going further into a panic attack.
Shifting the Climate Conversation
In her opinion, most conversations related to global warming concentrate on its enormity and external causes.
On the contrary, she emphasizes that change takes place through conversation at home, in community and relationship circles.
She also opposes what we think that our ability to drive change is limited given that we only have few chances although she insists it has been entrusted more into our hands than expected.
In conclusion, Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth by Kate Schapira has become a platform where people can lean on in search of comfort in their fear of climate changes.
With her talks and further publication, Kate emphasizes the importance of collective action, dialogue and individual empowerment to address global warming.
Her effort is a reminder to us the need to combine our forces against the endangered planet.
