'Sink into your grief.' How one scientist confronts the emotional toll of climate change - Science Magazine

Sustainability scientist Kimberly Nicholas says confronting climate change requires acknowledging values and feelings as well as advancing science and policy.

“I was trained to be calm, rational, and objective, to focus on the facts,” sustainability scientist Kimberly Nicholas recalls in her new book, Under the Sky We Make: How to Be Human in a Warming World.

But as research has increasingly revealed how climate change will forever alter the ecosystems and communities she loves, she has struggled to address her feelings of sadness.

“My dispassionate training,” the Lund University researcher writes, has “not prepared me for the increasingly frequent emotional crises of climate change,” or how to respond to students who come to her to share their own grief.

“Being witness to the demise or death of what we love has started to look an awful lot like the job description.” But Nicholas says the untimely death of a close friend helped persuade her that the only way forward was to acknowledge that “we are not going to be able to save all the things we love.” Instead, she says, we have to “swim through that ocean of grief … and recognize that we still have time to act, and salvage many of the things we care about.”.

Nicholas is no stranger to the emotional blowback climate science can provoke.

In 2017, she and climate scientist Seth Wynes, now at Concordia University, published a high-profile paper showing the most effective actions to reduce an individual’s carbon footprint—such as flying less or shifting to a vegetarian diet—are rarely emphasized by governments or educators.

Some commentators suggested Nicholas and Wynes were promoting a “culture of death” or a “liberal-environmentalist suicide pact.” That “taught me a lot about how [these issues] can resonate in a very personal way,” Nicholas says.

“As a scientist, I have extra authority on my subject of expertise, but no special insight into what makes a life worth living.”.

People who are concerned about the climate crisis, but don’t see how they can make a difference, either personally or collectively.

You’ve said climate change really hit home when you realized as a doctoral student that hotter temperatures could spell the end for the wines you knew and loved.

So we’re testing out some new varieties that might do better.” It feels really different to document things analytically—and then to experience them viscerally.

A: There are things that are changing beyond recognition right now from climate change, and that makes me really sad.

Q: You argue that one key to stabilizing the climate will be a change in mindset—a shift away from what you call the “exploitation mindset.” What has that meant, for you personally!

And part of [confronting climate change] is really about changing hearts and minds [to] change behavior.

… A big wake up moment for me came at a climate science conference.

[The presentations] were a litany of depressing things happening because of climate change.

I realized we really have an obligation to model the change that we want to see?

Q: Do you think the scientific community has done a good job helping people move from climate despair to action.