A hopely adventure in tumultuous times: in good company with Panu Pihkala
Field Notes: Teaching Climate Change in Higher Education
If there’s one thing to know about me, it’s that I love reading. I consider it my HABU — the Highest and Best Use for my time and energy. This works out well for me to be an English professor, and it still kind of thrills me that my actual job is to choose books and essays for people to read, and then listen and respond to what they think about them.
Right now, in my online English 100, students are finishing the semester with a literary analysis paper. One of the reading choices I game them is this awesome novella, Manna, by futurist Marshall Brain. It’s a utopia/dystopia sci-fi kind of thing in which the continent of Australia is transformed by private investors into a robotic, zero-waste, sustainable circular economy, where everybody is free to pursue their own HABU — like read books all day, or be in a rock band, or climb mountains.
The only catch is that you have to have this implant in your spine (the Vertebrane) that monitors your movements and can take over or shut down your body if you were to do something dangerous or violent. It also makes you telepathic, if certain options are selected. (You may want to pause here for an hour or two, and give Manna a read, but please come back to see how I’m about to connect this story to the existential crisis of Teaching Climate Change in Higher Education.)
So, I asked my students, in their book club forum, whether they would take the Vertebrane implant, or if they maybe found it a bit creepy. One young woman, I’ll call her Angie, posted this (and gave me permission to share it):
I’m being completely honest, I think I would take the opportunity. I’m a 20 year old creative whose love for the arts has been a prevalent force in my life since I was two, and nothing is more disheartening that the thought that there’s most likely never going to be a time where all I can do is create. It is genuinely heartbreaking that after so many years of human evolution and process, I’m still going to work my ass off in college, to get a job that I never really dreamed of, and then continue working until I fall apart to provide for myself and my family. If I could take those hours in school or the 40+ hours working a job that I hate, and put them into reading, or bettering myself, or my art, is honestly my biggest dream. Who knows where I would be if I had the time to cultivate my talents. Who knows where anyone would be?
It’s paragraphs like these that really make me stop and think — what the hell are we doing here?
As we hurtle toward the collapse of our Earth-devouring civilization, how is it that college — the “higher” education, the very place where one is meant to “cultivate talents” is instead conditioning young people to sustain, not their dreams, and not the planet, but the machine, the 40+ hour grind, providing for “myself and my family”.
How is this still the story we are telling?
And how is it acceptable that even one student anywhere, even at my own lowly community college, would use the word “heartbreaking” to describe their education?
In this precarious moment in time, college should be the place for confronting the climate crisis on a personal, community, and planetary level.
The most recent book club discussion with my friends at Gaianism.org was about The Great Work, the last offering of ecotheologian Thomas Berry. He pointed specifically to the university sector, challenging universities to decide if they will continue to train students for “temporary survival in the Cenozoic Era, or whether they would begin to educate for the emerging Ecozoic” (p. 85).
Berry pointed to four wisdom traditions that he called touchstones for this emergence. What if these were the new general education for the Ecozoic?
The general conclusion of the book club conversation was that Berry’s work had a sort of naïve feeling to it — he seemed to write from a time and a perspective of hopefulness that seems to be slipping through our fingers. I confess that I feel the same way about campus sustainability — all that “greening the curriculum” talk of the early aughts feels hollow and greenwashy in the current shadow of Covid and the budget cuts, remote learning burnout, and the general existential angst of the higher ed sector.
Why go to college when the house is on fire?
Of course, there some real efforts, and some HEIs that really “get it” like Sterling College, or Clark University, where I first experienced the Council on the Uncertain Future. At Clark, they ask the question:
How do we educate in a time of increasing uncertainty, instability, and injustice?
I’ve had to keep the Teaching Climate Change Study and Field Notes Blog on the back burner this semester. Not to sound like a whiner, but my sabbatical application to do the analysis and publish the study was denied, because the chancellor said that I had failed to provide reasoning for “why a study or textbook on topics related to climate change is needed.” (I mean, wha?) It just shows how far out on a limb I feel these days.
But, I remain committed to the project, and to an international group of scholars that meets monthly to discuss and develop an Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators, addressing climate anxiety and the related emotional complexities of being a teacher at this strange time.
My most recent guest interview was with a member of the Existential Toolkit community, Panu Pihkala. I’m going to share a lot about Panu’s work, but I’ll begin with the ending of the interview, when I asked him, really earnestly:
“what would be the best, the most radically awesome thing we could do to change the way we are preparing young people for the future?”
He responded by mentioning the work of depth psychologist Bill Plotkin.
“It’s the most radical thing we could do,” he said, “though it’s probably too much for most higher ed settings.”
Strangely enough, I have also been reading Bill Plotkin lately, starting with Soulcraft and his new book, The Journey of Soul Initiation. Plotkin leads really intense vision workshops where participants go through a metaphorical cocoon and a canyon and heal their childhood wounds in order to discover their soul purpose, who they really are. I imagine guiding my student, Angie, (the one who said “there’s most likely never going to be a time where all I can do is create”) through a Soul Initiation workshop instead of through English 100.
I’m not talking about another student success seminar. I’m talking about, why is it that two people like myself and Panu, both obsessed with thinking about teaching and climate change, would both come to the same place of Soulcraft? (I have written about this once before, here, the idea articulated by Charles Eisenstein in Ascent of Civilization, that Western culture is missing a vital “activation” of young people because we do not have a cultural coming of age tradition.)
My conversation with Panu Pihkala began with his statement that:
“Finland is a strange country.”
He described the geography of his native Finland, which is at the same latitude as Alaska, but warmed by the gulf stream. He described the Finno-Arctic peoples and their genetic difference from other Nordic lands — including Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden (where my own ancestral roots lie). He mentioned the Sámi, the indigenous peoples of the area, and the cultural connections to nature and communal aspects of the culture that persist, such as going to the sauna (pronounced “sau-na”, not “sa-na”). “There’s a certain sense of connection, not as much of the strong individualism that you find in the most Anglo-Saxon forms of culture.” This cultural background is important, because one of the main ideas in Panu’s scholarship, I think, is that our responses and experiences of climate change are culturally based, and influenced by history, language, and geography.
He described the homogeneity of Finland during the 1980s when he was growing up: “I had excellent health care, excellent public education, very safe environs, to grow…It’s difficult for people living elsewhere to imagine how safe it was in Finland.” Yet, in the background, was a growing awareness that “some things are not all right with the environment.” He remembers a chemical spill at a local sawmill, where a chemical called chlorophenol leaked into the groundwater and fish in a nearby lake, causing soft tissue cancers in the population for decades.
Panu also remembers the days after the Chernobyl disaster, when he was a boy, forbidden to play in nearby ponds or ditches because of radioactive fallout. “It wasn’t as bad as it was in Russia, but there are probable cases of cancer in Finland related to Chernobyl, and there is probably more than has been found out because it is so complicated to find the causes of cancer.” He also remembers when people noticed that it had stopped snowing as much in Finland, around 2000. This environmental precarity is a thread throughout the generally safe and stable upbringing that he experienced.
Like me, Panu is an obsessive reader who says he strives to use his healthy brain and education to “help environmental education and environmental humanities communities.” He is an internationally recognized scholar known for comprehensive literature reviews that synthesize and move forward the scholarly endeavor to understand the affective dimensions of climate change. He is also a climate educator and a bit of a public figure in Finland, giving over 50 public talks a year (pre-Covid) following his 2017 book, in Finnish, Eco-anxiety and Hope.
He peppered our conversation with references to other books and their authors, scrupulously referencing the origins of every aspect of his thinking. Peeking into his mind was like being at a large dinner party with many prestigious guests clustered in conversations throughout the house.
In a set of upholstered armchairs near the fireplace, perhaps with a warm whisky, sit some gentlemen, L.H. Bailey, who wrote The Holy Earth in 1910, theologian Paul Tillich, and the 94-year-old philosopher Robert Lifton, who studies the relationship of the nuclear threat and climate change. (Lifton’s latest book, Climate Swerve, resurrects the term “swerve” from the Roman poet Lucretius to describe an “unpredictable and unexpected movement of attention and energy” to be directed towards addressing the climate crisis.) On a nearby sofa, Panu’s Finnish mentors, author Pasi Toiviainen and educator Essi Aarnio-Linnanvuori sit together on the sofa, chiming in while having occasional side conversations in Finnish.
I am drawn to join a group of eminent sociologists and psychologists — all women — sitting around the table after a delicious meal, discussing the nuances of environmental psychology. Susan Clayton (Conservation Psychology, 2012) and Kari Norgaard (Living in Denial, 2011) are at the head of the table, with Shierry Weber Nicholsen, (The Love of Nature and the End of the World: The Unspoken Dimensions of Environmental Concern, 2002), Rosemary Randall, “Loss and Climate change: the Cost of Parallel Narratives” (Ecopsychology, 2009), and from Australia, Susie Burke and her colleagues. I imagine Sally Weintrobe sitting contentedly at the other end of the table, pleased to have brought some of these minds together in her edited volume, Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Pespectives (2012).
Meanwhile, we hear voices in the kitchen, where contemporary climate psychologists Thomas Doherty, Donna Orange, Leslie Davenport and Renee Lertzman are preparing some after dinner tea while talking with communication expert Susanne Moser.
Jennifer Atkinson Sarah Jaquette Ray, and Elin Kelsey, founders of the Existential Toolkit project and practitioners who describe and give voice to the emotional tension that we sense from students, are listening closely, carrying mugs of hot tea to the others, while children fall asleep watching David Attenborough videos in an upstairs bedroom.
And of course, Panu adds, “Joanna Macy, who is the grandmother of all these activities, is always there in the background.” It is, perhaps, Joanna Macy’s house that we’ve all been invited to.
So, I invite you, having read this far, to grab a cup of after dinner coffee and eavesdrop on a bit of my conversation with Panu Pihkala.
KH: Panu, do you do ever just stop and go, “wait what am I doing? what is happening here?” I mean, what is like to be you, and hold all of this (climate collapse, grief, emotional trauma) all the time, in your head?
PP: Ah, thanks for asking that. You know, I worked five years in the church, and while I don’t do this work now, I’m still an ordained minister for the Church of Finland. This religious/existential dimension, and serving as a local minister, it’s not always easy. You have to develop skills to both support the people and survive yourself in the middle of things like deaths or traumas. I’m not saying I have perfect skills for that kind of thing but it has given me skills that have proved useful when dealing with climate anxiety and eco-anxiety because they are such difficult issues, as we all know.
Of course, I still feel it sometimes. Personally, eco-depression has been closer to me than eco-anxiety. I haven’t had clinical depression but I’ve had persistent low moods and dynamics that are related with that. But when I started doing more explicit and embodied work related to my own feelings, as a part of developing skills to be a workshop facilitator, the general feelings of elegy or times of sadness have greatly diminished, so I think there is a connection.
KH: Yes, both Matt Lynch and I have struggled with eco-depression. Peterson Toscano’s work has really inspired me, and I resonate with Michael Dowd and the concept of Post Doom, this place on the other side of grief. You get there by doing the work — like Work that Reconnects, and your Hope and Action activities. And whatever one’s personal practice or spiritual path is, that comes up a lot.
I’d like to run another idea by you — in the interviews for the Teaching Climate Change Study, one pattern that has come up is personal trauma unrelated to the climate crisis. Do you think that kind of experience equips someone to be more engaged with climate emotions? How do you see the relationship between personal trauma and climate anxiety?
PP: Ah, yes, there is a very important and complex question. The first part is that having some history of personal trauma can result either in difficulties in encountering eco anxiety because there are not so many resources available, but on the other hand it may also give sensitivity and a courage to speak about issues related to mental health. It can go both ways, and I’ve seen both in research data and in my personal life.
And also, how much do especially strong experiences of climate anxiety connect with personality traits, or anxiety sensitivity, that’s a hot topic. There are some proposals for a scale or measure of climate anxiety. It’s the beginning of a critical discussion.
KH: Totally, yes. I tried to organize the emotion words that were used in the “Worry & Hope” study by intensity, because there are different interventions for feeling, say, a little disappointed about the future vs. feeling devastated, yet those are both a type of sadness. The more we are able to specify the emotion, I think the better we can move through it.
PP: It’s so important to have this type of empirical data, and it takes a lot of effort to do that coding. When given the chance, people recognize many emotion words, but then there are dimensions that people are not even able to recognize, and there’s cultural specifics related to that also. Guilt and shame are prime examples.
KH: For sure. Shame came out in our study and I feel like that’s the big one. There is this suppressed shame, especially in the U.S., around genocide of indigenous peoples and colonization of places like, of course, Hawaiʻi. I mean, I feel the complex shame of the settler colonialist all the time. But the reckoning with it is still taboo, and it comes out sometimes in ugly ways.
PP: Yes, psychoanalyst Donna Orange wrote about that, and Rosemary Randall has been trying to think about this for a long time, about how the psychosocial role of activists are related to repressed shame dynamics.
KH: I want to run another idea by you. My friend Casey Meehan talked about not wanting to put his own sadness onto his children, like, if there’s no snow at Christmas, that’s not something that they will really miss. How do we not put our own solastalgia onto a generation that has a different experience of the planet?
PP: very crucial idea, again. It’s important to emphasize that teachers shouldn’t pass on their anxiety and difficult emotions to the kids, but what is more complicated is what can be done with the situation. Remaining silent isn’t going to help, and many difficulties have come from the adults having a good intention of protecting the children and youth, but the emotional communication leaks from their bodies and words and that’s much more devastating than the case where an educator openly shows emotion. (Note: read Panu’s 2021 article “Eco-anxiety among children and adolescents in light of recent research”, here.)
If the environmental educator sometimes cries openly that’s much less damaging than if they don’t speak about the dark emotions at all, for years. That usually doesn’t work, but then again of course it’s a tricky issue because students shouldn’t have to carry the educator in the sessions — that’s not ethical either. We might be living in times where we have to carry each other and the roles may not be as clear as we wish them to be. Philosophers of education have been exploring education as a reciprocal process for hundreds of years, so perhaps we are also suffering from the idea that the educator has to be strong and carry others.
But, if educators engage in inner work with the emotions that helps a great deal, and we have experimented with this. When we have given teachers a chance to reflect on their emotions in a safe setting, they have gotten an incentive to do the inner work themselves, and to do the methods with their students. even a teacher who hasn’t had any special orientation towards this might, after short term interventions, might scale up considerably. That gives a sort of hope, also.
KH: I‘m always making the case that everybody at the university needs to be an environmental educator. This has been shoved off on the environmental studies person, who has been teaching this for maybe decades and can be really burned out, highly at risk. I’m thinking of specific colleagues of mine that I hold in really high regard, and have written about in this project, like Dr. K, and Fred, and Tom. I think everybody has to carry a piece of it so there’s a more cohesive experience for the students, that’s how I look at the role of the faculty, collectively. But what would be the ideal response of higher education, or the ideal experience for students?
PP: I couldn’t agree more about the role of different faculty. We need community building and movement building in the sense that this goes beyond those old identity projections. I’ve been thinking about about various kinds of role models. What is prone to happen is, people with lots of background in natural science and problem solving, they take a step towards climate anxiety and they are prone to have an attitude like “this eco-anxiety exists, but there’s a lot of problem solving that we can do,” whereas myself, I’m emphasizing this inner work thing, with an action component. I think it’s good that people have different kinds of role models around them.
Many of the problems in academia are structural, like students and faculty just having so much stress and too many projects. It’s easy to say ‘we should change the whole system’, but it’s harder to say how this is done in practice. But when people come together they are more able to find countercultural practices and to expose various oppressive structures, like the culture of competition in academia. That’s one dynamic that I hate, the idea that we should always compete with each other. It’s not said explicitly, but it’s embedded in all the structures.
One thing we can do is just say openly, and out loud, that this is very difficult. To say, I am personally having great difficulties answering the most central of these demands and needs. This builds public recognition of it, and builds self-compassion also. This self-compassion thing is very central. As faculty members, trying to both admit that this is difficult, and appreciating that we are trying to do good things in the midst of very difficult circumstances. Like when Covid brings additional stress and one can’t do as much as one would like to do, self compassion may sound rosy and bright, or like a guru saying “now breathe deeply,” but it’s tough work. Support from others could be crucial. One of the best things that could emerge among faculty members, is just small groups who commit themselves to supporting each other in the midst of these circumstances.
KH: One question I like to close with is “is there a particular metaphor that you find yourself using to describe your work?”
PP: The metaphor of a journey is close to me, and in the Finnish language I might use the words Pyhiinvaellus (pyhiin = to the holy/holies, +vaellus=trek/journey), or toivioretki, (toivo=hope (toivio is an old form, sort of like ‘hope-ly’, and retki=adventure, or trip).
The idea is roughly similar to Joseph Campbell:
We are on a quest during tumultuous times, but there’s often good company and lots of beauty around us still, and that gives me strength and gladness also.
Recent work by Panu Pihkala:
“Eco anxiety, Tragedy, and Hope: Psychological and Spiritual Dimensions of Climate Change.” (June, 2018)
“Eco Anxiety and Environmental Education” (December, 2020)
Panu’s blog (in English), Eco-anxiety and Hope, focuses on practical resources related to eco-anxiety and ecological emotions.
