In her new book, “Climate Wayfinding,” writer and climate activist Katharine Wilkinson puts the lessons learned in her real-world, pathbreaking collaborations into a book readers can use to heal themselves and the planet.
Over the course of its eight chapters, Wilkinson takes the reader on an extended journey. How, she asks, can we find our paths in a changing climate? How do we sustain the wherewithal to act, for the rest of our lives, to reduce the risks of climate change? One answer: By getting in touch with our emotions, with our circles and communities, and with the natural world that survives and could still thrive around us. In each chapter, Wilkinson repeats the journey of the book in miniature, leading her readers around a carefully curated trail, well off the beaten prose path of most other climate books.
Earlier in her career, Wilkinson served as senior writer for the environmental nonprofit Project Drawdown, where she oversaw the drafting of two major guides to climate solutions.
In 2020, she began two ongoing collaborations. With Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, she cofounded the All We Can Save Project and coedited the project’s first anthology, “All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis.” With Leah Stokes, she started the podcast, “A Matter of Degrees,” in partnership with the All We Can Save Project and The 2035 Initiative at UC Santa Barbara.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Yale Climate Connections: I want to talk about the way each of your eight chapters is organized, because you seem to be forcing your readers to respond in a new way.
Katharine Wilkinson: Inviting, I would hope.
YCC: That’s fair.
Wilkinson: I hope this book is an invitation into more than just sitting back and reading.
YCC: But that is how it starts. Each chapter begins with an essay. These are the most straightforward parts of the book. However, even these you interrupt with prompts for your readers. Why is it important for you to interrupt their engagement with your essay?
Wilkinson: Let me provide some context. These pages first lived in the world as an experiential program called Climate Wayfinding that I designed for the All We Can Save project, the nonprofit that I lead. This program had a deeply participatory format, as I think any good program of learning and exploration does.
The new challenge was to use the bounds of the form of a book to still create something experiential, something that had a sense of participation and exchange.
I think about those little midstream prompts in the essays almost like steppingstones; they create moments of pause and reflection. If you’re not keen on them, you just cruise right along and keep reading the essay. But they could be nice moments for a little integration, a little personalization, of what you’ve been reading.
YCC: With that in mind, let’s imagine readers encountering this transcript at Yale Climate Connections. What’s your prompt for these readers now?
Wilkinson: Well, one of the core tenets of Climate Wayfinding is that we honor the questions we’re holding. And so maybe that would be a nice place to start. What are the questions you find yourself holding today about climate and your engagement?
YCC: If you, reader, would like to respond, rejoin the conversation when you’re ready. So each of these essays is a step on a journey, a “way” that you describe in your book.
Wilkinson: Yes.
YCC: The language of path and way and journeying and compass, all of that is abundant in the book. Then, at the end of each essay is a poem. Why a poem?
Wilkinson: I love poetry, Michael. And poetry has been foundational and essential nourishment for me on my own climate journey from my earliest days of awakening as a teenager, when I started reading Mary Oliver. We use poetry in the Climate Wayfinding program; we start every session with a poem, because it grounds us in a space together. And we always read them in two voices, two different people read them, which is a really wonderful way, I think, to hear poetry.
Poetry has this incredible knack for making us more porous, for opening us up to ways of knowing that might be different than the linearity an essay can take you into. And so I think poems are a really beautiful complement to the essays. And we get these bundles of wisdom from the likes of Tracy K. Smith, Jane Hirshfield, and Ada Limon, just extraordinarily wise weavers of words who meet us in the complexity of how it feels to be a human on Earth in this time.
YCC: Your answer makes me wonder whether the poem is a necessary prelude to the next part, which is your engagement with another voice. The poem forces the reader to read differently; then we hear a new voice.
Wilkinson: Yes. We get an orienting in the form of an essay, and a kind of opening in the form of a poem. Then we’re invited to hear about the path and ideas of another climate leader whose story or work or perspective in some way illuminates the themes of a chapter but from a different lens.
I think about this as the turning of a kaleidoscope. You’re still looking at the same thing, but the lens shifts. I call these parts “lighting the way stories.” These are people who have been luminaries for me in some way, through deep friendships with some, through collaborations with others. Even the people that we look up to in this space have met crossroads, taken difficult turns, or come upon dead ends. And yet they found a way. I love that these stories show us some of that in practice with these different leaders and their experiences.
This is followed by a playlist. Music is a huge part of the climate wayfinding program. I decided I can’t take Climate Wayfinding to the page and not send people to a song that just feels right. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent honing these three-song playlists for every chapter, but they, too, shed a different light on the topic of the chapter.
And they’re really fun. To get to include Stevie Wonder in your book? Who can say no to that?
YCC: In the next sections of the chapter, you invite readers to process everything that they’ve just read. You begin with them alone. You suggest that journaling is a big part of climate wayfinding. Why?
Wilkinson: I think there’s such power in just putting our pen or pencil to the page in the form of free writing, just letting the consciousness within us flow forth without editing. Journaling can be an incredible way to unearth, to see what’s below ground at present. There is a grand-scale narrative of the climate crisis, and we are characters who are actively writing that narrative through our actions. If we can do that on the page, then it takes us, I think, a step closer to doing that beyond the page as well.
YCC: So I am co-authoring this journey?
Wilkinson: Absolutely. Absolutely.
YCC: Next, you ask your readers to step out into nature. You are very directive about wanting them to experience the Earth with their senses. Why is that an important step in the process?
Wilkinson: Going very deliberately to the ecosystems that we find ourselves within, even in very small measures, is part of finding our way.
YCC: You suggest that this engagement with nature should also take place in a gathering of others, which can be a big ask of readers.
Wilkinson: Not every reader will gather with others to journey through this book together. But for “All We Can Save,” I designed an experience called All We Can Save Circles that brought people together into groups for community-building and dialogue. It was so rich, and people were so hungry for it.
For the Climate Wayfinding program we run, we have an interest list that is 10 or 20 times longer than all of the people we’ve been able to take through the program!
So these sections of the book, called “Gather,” offer some of the communal experiences of climate wayfinding in a form that a group of friends or a group of co-workers could do. It’s not a complicated lift. You don’t need to be a trained facilitator.
We’re so capable of giving each other what we need in terms of generous climate conversation and a sense of community building. So if that’s something that calls to you, it’s here. And if it doesn’t … Well, you just buzz past those handful of pages at the end of every chapter.
YCC: You take the reader through these steps eight times over the course of the book.
Wilkinson: Buckle up. Buckle up, readers! We also periodically do these really fun mapping exercises, with big sheets of paper and markers. These techniques allow us to tap into creativity, imagination, and different ways of knowing and sensemaking. Plus, it’s fun.
YCC: Yes, all of the language of maps, compasses, charts, and graphs was helpful and engaging. Then your book comes full circle. You stress the importance of iteration, that we are finding and refinding our ways always. Are you trying to unmake your readers so that they remake themselves in the world in the process?
Wilkinson: I think the core of what I’m trying to do in this book is to meet us in our experience of maplessness. Living in a world of climate crisis, the challenges of democracy, the speeding evolution of technology, our maps are not keeping up.
And I mean that quite literally, as we think about a glacier that’s no longer there, a shoreline that’s now slipped beneath a rising sea, but also internally, personally, socially, culturally. The maps we have traditionally used to navigate our paths and lives are coming up short. New maps are not going to sweep in and solve it for us. What we have to do is grow our capacity to navigate amidst liminality, obscurity, and complexity.
The core framework for continuing to find our way over time is this interplay of looking inward with care, looking outward with curiosity, and looking forward with courage – and then doing it again and again. That’s the iterative part you’re talking about, Michael. And so the book is designed to help people do that, to do the looking inward, the looking outward. And at the end of the experience of reading the book or doing it in a reading group, hopefully, they feel they have stronger capacities and better tools and practices for this ongoing task of navigation, for finding the next meaningful steps for action on climate change, and for being human in a really tricky time.
And maybe there’s a little unmaking and remaking. I find that I need that, especially when I get into a rut. These are my go-to approaches.
YCC: Yes, at one point, you refer to “a broken open heart,” not a broken heart, but a heart that has been broken open to the world.
Wilkinson: I think it comes through in a way that often glides by us when we are simply reading and not stopping, or not being stopped.
YCC: Do you want to leave our readers with a closing prompt?
Wilkinson: I think I’ll leave readers with the questions I write about in the essay of the first chapter and then bring back at the end of the book. They’re questions I found myself asking as a newly ecologically awakened teenager. It’s a little trio.
What can I offer to our world?
Is my soul built for certain contributions?
Who am I here to become?
YCC: Those are wonderful questions to end with – and then begin again.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
