Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth - by Kate Schapira (Hardcover)

About the Book

"In 2013, Kate Schapira sat in her office at Brown University and read about acidic waters, ecological imbalance, dead zones, and zombie ecosystems. Before then, she'd had the same broad understanding of climate change that most people did at the time, but these articles on the permanent disappearance of coral reefs filled her with such hopelessness that she desperately needed an outlet-someone or someone to talk to who understood how she was feeling. Soon, she was setting up a Peanuts-style "The Doctor Is In" booth in her hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, to talk about climate change with her community. Ten years and over 1,200 conversations later, Schapira channels all she's learned into an accessible, understandable, and aware guide for processing climate anxiety and affecting real change in people's lives and communities. Filled with stories, questions, and exercises, "Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth" focuses on five action verbs that readers can use to build their climate resilience: recognize, release, find, build, and become. All the stories, questions, and practices included in this book have helped someone find what they wanted or needed, whether in the moment or for the years to come. Through their use of this book, readers will move through their personal and general climate anxiety, frustration, helplessness, and grief toward a sense of shared purpose and community care. "Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth" meets readers where they are with thoughtful and practical strategies to help solve this growing crisis in a way that doesn't sugarcoat the realities or scream fragility and instead offers communal support"--

Book Synopsis

Climate anxiety is real--and this practical, accessible guide helps address it on personal, relational, and structural levels, from the founder of the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth.

Summer after summer is the hottest on record. People's homes are flooding, burning, blowing away. We live with the loss, pain, and grief of what's happened, and anxiety for what might happen next, as the systems in which we live are increasingly strained. Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth addresses our collective concerns with empathy, grace, and practical strategies to help us all envision a viable future. By moving through your personal and general climate anxiety, frustration, helplessness and grief, you can move toward a sense of shared purpose and community care. You'll find actionable steps for connecting with others, identifying and activating community abundance, matching your skills with organized climate activism, and imagining a radically more livable future in order to bring it into being. Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth meets you where you are, not sugarcoating the realities of this growing crisis, but offering practical strategies for meeting a climate-changed present and future with emotional honesty and communal support.

In 2014, when Kate Schapira first set up a Climate Anxiety Counseling booth in her hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, far fewer people were talking about climate change and its attendant anxiety, leaving those who couldn't ignore climate change and the forces that cause it feeling frantic and alone. Seeking a way to reach out and connect, Schapira set up a Peanuts-style "The Doctor Is In" booth to talk about climate change with her community. Ten years and over 1200 conversations later, Schapira channels all she's learned into an accessible, understandable, and aware guide for processing climate anxiety and connecting with others to carry out real change in your life and in your community.

Review Quotes

As the climate changes, we need to become better at receiving and understanding the world around us, to see with fresh eyes and with humility. Kate Schapira's excellent and insightful LESSONS FROM THE CLIMATE ANXIETY COUNSELING BOOTH takes readers on a journey to reassess their place in a changing ecosystem, and transform the way they live within it to meet new realities. Hopeful, sympathetic, and vital.--Jeff Vandermeer, NYT bestselling author of Annihilation

"Brimming with practical strategies to engage your heart, mind, and body in the work of climate justice, this book is a roll-up-your-sleeves resource for finding purpose, community, and even joy in uncertain times. Schapira's superpower is her rich experience working with activists, mental health experts, and frontline communities, and here, she distills the resulting wisdom in a guidebook that is equal parts balm and ballast for the work ahead."--Sarah Jaquette Ray, Author of A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet

"Going beyond the lessons themselves, Schapira offers thoughtful questions and engaging practices to help us embody the personal and collective transformation needed in these climate changed times."--LaUra Schmidt, Founder of Good Grief Network and author of How to Live in a Chaotic Climate: 10 Steps to Reconnect with Ourselves, Our Communities, and Our Planet

"This is a grounded, no BS, guide for how to move through climate anxiety and grief into action. Necessary, clear-eyed, and compassion-filled, it helped me become a fuller member of my many communities."--Elizabeth Rush, Author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore and The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth

About the Author

Kate Schapira has been listening to people about climate change for ten years, at the Climate Anxiety Counseling booth and elsewhere. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she teaches nonfiction writing at Brown University and is involved with local efforts toward environmental justice, climate justice and peer mental health support. She's the author of six books of poetry, and her prose has appeared in Catapult, The Rumpus, The Toast, and as a chapbook from Essay Press called Time to Be Something Other Than Human. She never met a tidepool she didn't like.