Why Climate Magic?

A new podcast on the emotional life of climate politics to support the climate-weary and leverage our hearts and minds in service of the planet.

If you find your imagination cannot stop itself

From churning out the scripts of the Death Machines,

Pull its plug. Dismantle it. Reprogram it.

Dream daylight. Manufacture daylight. We are the magicians.

Make magic.

- Krista Franklin, “Call”

When we think of the word “climate,” most of us cringe and conjure images of the apocalypse. Climate change comes with all kinds of unpleasant associations, about which media and scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades. From wildfires and hurricanes to rising sea-levels and biodiversity loss to wars and refugees to diseases and polluted water, air, and food. You know the drill.

This association is true in the sense of the natural sciences, but psychological science tells us a different story. As much as we might need the sciences of geophysics to grasp climate change, in order to actually address it, we need the sciences of emotions and the sciences of how humans work. In a new script, where we have agency to fix these huge problems, where we figure out how to leverage our hearts and minds for planetary health, we need more inspiration than doom.

This is the call of our lifetimes. What is getting in the way of us facing this with courage and justice, on a personal and collective level? With 70% of Americans believing in human-driven climate change, why do only a small fraction of those people do anything about it?

This show is for that “sweet swath” of concerned people who are not sure what to do. It’s also for that small fraction who are working their hearts out, but not seeing the results. When it comes to the environment, these are terrifying and grievous times. Burnout, psychic numbing, empathic distress, vicarious trauma, dissociation, cognitive dissonance, moral injury, institutional harm, disenfranchised grief, pre-traumatic stress, and sundry other psychological phenomena— what Glenn Albrecht calls “psychoterratica”— can make it even harder to show up for the planet.

Most of what we hear about when we hear about climate change comes from a perspective of the natural sciences-- physics, environmental science, chemistry, oceanography, and the like. We absolutely need all those beautiful scientists documenting what’s going on and reporting it to the rest of us.

But humans are made up of brains, hearts, and bodies, and there are forms of expertise in the psychological and social sciences, wisdom traditions, and social movements that can tell us a lot about how to motivate humans to believe, think, and act in service of planetary health. Project Drawdown founder Paul Hawken perhaps said it best when he wrote:

“The most radical climate technology is the human heart and mind, not a solar panel.”

No shade on solar panels. His point is this: we need something magic. Not magical thinking, but a way to tap the potential of humanity to close this “value-action gap” between caring and getting to work. We need us—the magicians—to unplug and reprogram this self-fulfilling prophecy of the end-of-times. By accepting the forecasts of our extinction, we are likely to become so weighted by despair or so numbed that we detach. When we think of “climate,” we need to have that warm fuzzy feeling that makes us want to lean in, not check out. We need to tap our climate magic.

What’s Climate Magic? It’s a radio show on KHSU.org, in my hometown in Humboldt County, California, and as of today, a podcast available to a wider audience. The spirit of this show is to activate people to feel empowered to lean into their climate despair and do something. It is to support people who are already doing a lot and feel inadequate. It is to help all of us see more ways to build coalitions and connections with each other, to see and celebrate the work everybody is doing out there. It is to build a sense of collective efficacy against the stories of apocalypse and inevitability, individualism and isolation, doom and gloom, which all just serve those in power to keep extracting value out of the earth, the most vulnerable, and us. It is to support the emotional infrastructure needed to build a world we would desire instead of the one we fear will come to pass, and already is. It is to ease suffering, activate our capacities and potential, and help us find meaning in facing our predicament with courage and determination. It is to unplug the Death Machine, rewrite the scripts, and dream daylight.

In each episode, I interview a person who is puzzling on these questions too. They’re experts on the intersection of emotions and climate politics. They are experts on healing the earth and healing ourselves. They are neuroscientists and social psychologists and therapists. They are journalists, writers, and activists who have thought a lot about how to avoid burnout while contributing their part—their personal climate magic—in these overwhelming times.

What’s your climate magic?

(Huge gratitude to Mike Dronkers (my sound guru), KHSU, Abigail Smithson, Jeff Crane, Kiana Znika, Nicola Waugh, and Cal Poly Humboldt for supporting this project. And special thanks to all my guests who have spent so much of their precious time talking with me. My wish is that their magic transmits to you through this show!)