Kate Marvel

I do feel this sense of connection to the entire planet, that this is all basically bonus life. I talk a little bit in the book about how that makes me deeply annoying because it makes me kind of like an evangelist. I want to go door to door, knocking on people’s doors and saying, “Have you heard the news about planet Earth?”

Narration

The first time I saw Dr. Kate Marvel speak about climate change, I was mesmerized. In addition to having a name that sounds like a superhero, she’s a real life one, too. The way she talks about physics and the climate of this planet makes it all sound like magic. And it is. As Kate puts it, “Earth is the only good planet out there that we know of,” and that’s part of why it’s so distressing that it’s changing. To address that, Kate wrote a book called Human Nature that looks at climate change through the lens of nine different emotions: wonder, anger, grief, guilt, surprise, pride, love, and hope.

Kate

I don’t necessarily have hope because I don’t necessarily need it. Saying, “Do you hope we can fix this?” is kind of like saying, “Do you hope you can clean your bathroom?” Just clean your bathroom. You know what to do.

Narration

I’m Willow Defebaugh, and this is The Nature Of. Each week, we’ll look to the natural world for insights into how to navigate the experience of being human. This week, we’re looking at the nature of our changing climate and how we feel about it.

Many of us struggle to talk about climate change. It’s overwhelming and emotional. This conversation is going to give you the tools to talk about it with confidence in data from a NASA climate scientist, and she’s also a human being who’s navigating her own feelings about climate change.

Willow Defebaugh

Kate, you wrote a book exploring climate change through the lens of nine different emotions, and I basically devoured it all in one sitting. It was the book I did not know that I needed, and I desperately did. So as we start off, we are going to kind of go on a little journey through those nine emotions. But I’m curious, to begin, what made you decide on this approach?

Kate

 I was really struggling for a while because I knew that I wanted to write a book about climate change, but I just kind of couldn’t find the angle. Because I would write something and I’d be like, well, that’s too sad, and I don’t just feel sad. And I would write something and be like, oh, this is way too mad. And I think it is totally appropriate to be mad, but it’s not the only thing that I felt. And then after, I’m not going to lie, four years of trying, I kind of hit upon this idea like, oh, I’m just going to write about all of them, every single emotion that I can think of right now.

Willow

All of the feels.

Kate

All of the feels.

Willow

And it’s noteworthy because you are a climate scientist and the sciences often discourage a more feely approach. I’m wondering if you can speak to if there were any internal struggles related to that. You mentioned in the book a certain conflict of interest.

Kate

Totally, yeah. I mean, I kind of realized that, look, I study the Earth, and everybody and everything that I love lives here. And that means that, yeah, I have a conflict of interest and I feel things about it. And I kind of realized, it was scary for me for a while thinking, oh, can I come out as a human being? Can I say I am a scientist, but I’m also a full human with feelings about the thing that I study? Does that reduce my credibility? Because aren’t we all supposed to be these objective, science robots? And I don’t want to live in a system that incentivizes people to lie about being humans, to lie about having emotions, because I think that’s what we are when we pretend that we don’t have feelings. That doesn’t make us credible, objective scientists. That makes us liars.

Willow

It makes you more untrustworthy.

Kate

Yeah. I don’t want to be a liar.

Willow

And the idea that scientists can be objective, the idea that any of us can be objective and unfeeling when what we’re talking about here is the future of this planet, of people that we love, of future generations, it’s just… It’s wild, and it really speaks volumes.

Kate

Yeah, I totally agree. There are ethics. You can strive to try to find out the whole truth. You can try to be open-minded about things, and those are good things, and those are things that we should do as scientists and journalists and storytellers. But fundamentally, it’s just not possible to pretend that you don’t have emotions.

Willow

Yeah. It was a big part of our journey with Atmos, too. In the beginning, when we were publishing stories about the climate crisis that were fairly emotional, I had similar questions in my mind of, are we breaking the ultimate journalistic taboo here? And we just decided to do it anyway. Because I think that if we want to really reach people on the subject of climate change, we have to speak to our humanity, and we have to feel. We have to feel it.

Kate

Yeah, I totally agree.

Willow

So the first emotion that you explore in the book is wonder, which is one of my all-time favorites. And I’m curious if you can begin by sharing a little bit about what makes Earth so rare and wonderful. You’ve called it the only good planet in the universe. So what exactly is it that makes Earth so wonderful?

Kate

So I trained as an astrophysicist. And so you can believe me when I say that every other planet is just garbage.

Willow

You heard it here first. Every other planet is garbage.

Kate

I mean, I love shit-talking other planets. And the thing that’s really special about Earth is, it is the only planet that we know of that has literally anything fun on it. All the other planets are, at least in the solar system, are like rocks or suffocated by a really thick atmosphere or just literally gas where you would sink and you would get crushed.

Willow

Oh, great.

Kate

So there’s no planets that are any good that are within basically the ability of a human to get there within our lifetimes. We do know that there’s planets orbiting other stars. From everything that we have seen, all of those are also trash. And anyway, if we found one that wasn’t, you would die before you got there. We don’t have any way of traveling there.

And the reason that the Earth is so special is, we are a really good distance away from the sun. We’re not too close, we’re not too far. But another reason that we’re really special is, we have an atmosphere. This always blows my mind that if the sun were the only thing that was heating us, we’d be freezing. We’d be too cold to support life. We would be an ice world. And the reason that we are able to live here is that in the atmosphere, the sort of naturally occurring atmosphere, this tiny, tiny, tiny percent of it is greenhouse gases, these molecules that trap heat. 

And we are talking tiny amounts here, like less than a third of a percent naturally occurring. But they’re so powerful, they’re so good at trapping heat, so it’s not only that we are a great distance from the sun, we also have this amazing blanket that makes us the absolute perfect temperature.

Willow

Incredible. So OK, we’ve established that Earth is a rare and extraordinary place, and all other planets that we know of are trash. So let’s talk a little bit about how the Earth is changing. I think this is truly one of your superpowers, your ability to explain climate change, whether it’s to a denier or to a skeptic or children. So can you give us the concise explanation that someone who’s listening can take to their family reunion?

Kate

OK, I’m going to try. All of the energy on Earth comes from the sun. The sun’s this giant, nuclear fusion reactor in the sky and it shines and we get that sunlight on Earth. We are also shining, but because we’re a lot colder than the sun, you can’t see the light that we give off. It’s what’s called infrared light. So the Earth is heated by the sun, and we shed this infrared light out into space. Now—

Willow

And the Earth is shining, and you also point out that human beings are shining, too.

Kate

Yeah.

Willow

Everything is shining.

Kate

Yeah.

Willow

Incredible.

Kate

If you take a picture of somebody with an infrared camera, you see that rainbow light up. That is us shining. That’s us giving off heat in the infrared.

Willow

Magic.

Kate

 And we’re a very similar temperature to the Earth, actually. The earth is about, on average, 60 degrees Fahrenheit. We’re 98.6 Fahrenheit. So in the scheme of things, that’s basically the same. So we’re shining in a very similar way to Earth, but the Earth’s atmosphere, like I mentioned, is full of… Not full of, very sparsely populated by greenhouse gases. And these are molecules that are really good at trapping infrared radiation, the exact form of invisible light that we’re giving off. 

When they absorb that infrared radiation, they take it in and then they spit it out. And they spit it out in all directions. And that means some of our own heat gets spat back down to our planet. And so the more greenhouse gases there are in the atmosphere, the hotter the Earth will get. And for me, that’s really incredible because we know why the planet’s temperature is changing, because we know why it has the temperature in the first place.

Willow

So you identify as a mad scientist at one point in the book, which I love. Brilliant. And that’s understandable given the lack of appropriate response to what you just outlined for us. Climate change. And in the anger chapter of the book, you tell a number of infuriating stories related to the fossil fuel industry and executives. I’m wondering, is there one specific story that, when you think about it, just still pisses you off?

Kate

I mean, it’s really hard to choose one thing because I’m so mad, because the entire history of climate science is people finding out stuff and then other people lying about it. I think for me, the thing that makes me so angry is Exxon’s research program. Exxon had a federally funded and internally funded research program where they wanted to discover, was climate change real? And if so, what was causing it? And they hired good scientists, they did good science, they built good climate models, and they knew, they knew exactly what was happening and what would happen.

Willow

And when was this, exactly?

Kate

This was in the ‘80s. This was ages ago. They have no excuse. They say, “Oh, it was all too uncertain.” No, it wasn’t. They’re weaponizing that uncertainty. I hate it. I’m going to go on a rant here.

Willow

Go on a rant. Go off, Kate.

Kate

It drives me absolutely bananas when people say, “Oh, well, science doesn’t have all the answers.” No shit. That’s why I still have a job. If we figured out everything, if science was done, that would be boring. That means we’ve discovered all of the secrets of the Earth. That’s never going to happen.

Willow

I mean, it would be like saying, “Oh, medicine doesn’t have all the answers. Let’s not listen to any advice from a doctor.”

Kate

Are you in the cabinet right now? Because that is literally what they were saying. I mean, it’s the weaponization of uncertainty that really gets to me because it’s taking this thing that is the pure, beautiful essence of science and trying to turn it against us. And these assholes, they knew exactly what was happening, and they chose to lie about it.

Willow

And it’s particularly infuriating because it’s not even just disbelieving research from external scientists. We’re talking about research that they themselves commissioned and conducted.

Kate

Their own internal research team. And it wasn’t like this was siloed. This was communicated. They knew about this. Climate models have been around for so long that we can actually look at their predictions. We can see, how did they do? And if you look at our very early climate models and how they predicted the next couple of decades, they did a really good job. And one of the best is the Exxon in-house model.

Willow

Let’s talk about climate models for a second because this is a big part of your work. Can you explain a little bit about what exactly a climate model is and how that factors into what you do?

Kate

Sure. So, a climate model you can kind of think of as a toy planet that lives on a computer that you can do experiments on that would be impossible or unethical to do on our planet. So if you want to, for example, understand, well, what would the Earth be like if there were no humans? You can ask everybody to move to a different planet for 200 years, or you can do that within a climate model. Honestly, it’s kind of like playing Sims all day. It is this simulation, it’s based on physics, it incorporates everything that we know about how the world works, and it is a research tool. It’s a test pad.

Willow

And seeing those possibilities, I mean, it makes me think there’s a part of the book where you are pulling at different mythologies and you reference one myth in particular, Cassandra, who is gifted with being able to see the future but cursed for no one being able to believe her. And you liken being a climate scientist a bit to this. I would imagine that’s pretty infuriating.

Kate

Yeah, I mean, people compare us to Cassandra all the time. I try to make the point in the first chapter that it was … Even though she had it real rough and nobody believed her, and that sucks, it was still so special to be the only one who knows how the world works. But yeah, it is extremely infuriating that climate scientists have been warning for decades. Like the greenhouse effect, we have known that since the 1800s. We have known that climate change was a problem and was caused by humans for decades. None of this is new science.

Willow

So you point out how some of the early witch hunts in Europe were actually driven by trying to find an explanation for this Little Ice Age for why the climate was changed. Longer winter, colder winters, shorter summer. I had no idea.

Kate

Isn’t that wild?

Willow

They believed that witches actually were controlling the weather.

Kate

Yeah. So if you look at the history of witchcraft, a lot of people think witch hunting is medieval Europe. And it wasn’t. It was kind of early modern Europe. It was the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s. And if you look at when the witch hunts sort of started to really spike, it was during this period that we call the Little Ice Age. Now we’re pretty sure the Little Ice Age was caused by a bunch of volcanic eruptions. Just by pure coincidence, a bunch of volcanoes went off roughly at the same time, and that put so much gas and dust in the atmosphere that it blocked the sun and it made the Earth a little bit colder than it would’ve been. And the effects were really pronounced in Northern Europe.

And at that time, you start seeing a lot of people, usually powerless people, usually women, getting accused of manipulating the weather or killing the crops. So a lot of what these people are accused of doing is manipulating the climate. And so I’m not saying that climate change is going to cause witch hunts, but for me, the real takeaway from that is that, look, physics can tell you what is going to happen to the Earth, but physics can’t tell you anything about what we are going to do about it or how we’re going to react. And I think that for me is the most important question.

Willow

And this comes up in the guilt chapter of the book, which we’re talking about them trying to pin the guilt on witches, on mostly women. Today, there’s no mystery about why climate change is happening. We know it’s coming from human activity and specifically greenhouse gas emissions from wealthier countries. So I’d love to dig into guilt a little bit more. When can guilt be productive and actually helpful?

Kate

Yeah, that’s a question that I’ve been wrestling with for a little bit.

Willow

That’s a tough one.

Kate

And because I do think it is one of the default emotions when we talk about climate change, both guilt and shame. And I know for me personally, and I don’t really think I’m special or unique, is that when I feel shamed, when I feel like I’m being attacked, even if I totally deserve it, I shut down and that’s not very useful. Or I wallow in guilt and shame, and that’s also not very useful.

Climate change is caused by carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other greenhouse gases building up in the atmosphere. Anything that we can do that stops that and helps take those out of the atmosphere is going to stop or slow climate change. Anything else that we do that doesn’t do that is not going to really help with climate change.

And so I think guilt is an appropriate emotion. Guilt is when you look at what and who is causing this problem. And if you look at the real inequities, the real disparities between the most developed countries and the least developed countries, both, it is very, very, very much the most developed countries’ fault. And yet, the impacts of climate change are being felt disproportionately by the least developed countries, who also have the least resources to adapt or to counter these terrible things happening. So I think guilt’s an appropriate response, but I don’t feel like it’s an ending point.

Willow

And I’m happy that you brought up guilt and shame because something I often come back to, and I think I’ve probably referenced on this show before, is that Brené Brown, who maps emotions, she has defined guilt and shame, and guilt is “I have done something bad,” and shame is, “I am bad.” And she’s found that it’s very hard for people to change their behavior when they’re in the place of shame because that’s “I am bad,” and that’s a global statement. That’s a really hard place to pull yourself out of, versus, “Hey, maybe I’ve done something bad. I can take accountability for that and I can change my actions.” So it’s kind of like, in my eyes, shame I don’t see as being super productive. But if we can focus on guilt and specifically taking accountability, then I do agree it can be productive.

Kate

Yeah, I think that’s a really good way to put it. I get wary of guilt as the sole motivator because then you get into these situations where it’s a competition to lower your personal carbon footprint, and you’re not thinking systemically. And obviously, it is both an individual problem and a systemic thing. There are things that we can do as individuals. There are ways that we can work to change the systems. But I do get very frustrated at this notion that the way to counteract climate change, the way to stop the planet warming up, is to be as sort of self-righteous as possible. Because fundamentally, the planet doesn’t care. A greenhouse gas molecule emitted anywhere is a problem everywhere because the stuff is so well-mixed in the atmosphere.

Willow

A greenhouse gas molecule emitted anywhere is a problem everywhere. Well said. So, let’s dive into fear. There’s no denying it, climate change is scary. As someone who makes these climate models for a living, what are you, personally, the most afraid of? And I want to leave this open-ended, but I also want to share that one of the conclusions you drew in the chapter, as one of the things you’re most afraid of, I found surprising.

Kate

Yeah. I think the physics gives us plenty to be afraid of. It’s just a natural consequence of the world getting warmer. We know that when it’s warmer, on average, we get more heat waves, we get more severe heat waves, they last for a longer time.

We know that warm air holds more water vapor. So when we see rainfall, we see these real downpours. And we’ve had experience with that, like Hurricane Helene, Hurricane Ida, these real, deadly, flooding downpours.

At the same time, warm air is thirstier air. And so there’s more evaporation being sucked away from the Earth’s surface. And that means that even as downpours are getting heavier, drought risk is also increasing.

We know fires are extremely complicated. They depend on what there is to burn. They depend on who is igniting them. They depend a lot on human choices and policy choices. But we do know that fire weather, those sort of hot and dry conditions that make fires really likely, that’s increasing.

We know that warm water is hurricane food. And we’re seeing stronger storms and storms that are intensifying really, really quickly, which makes them hard to predict.

All of those things are incredibly frightening. But I have talked to people who study disasters, and I think the thing that I heard from everybody is that there’s no such thing as a natural disaster. Climate change happens in the world that we build for it. And what that means is that it affects us, and it affects the already problematic and vastly unequal societies that we’ve built. There’s this notion, people sometimes say, “Oh, we’ll just adapt,” and there’s no “just” about it. When, in human history, have people ever sensibly looked at the best available science, gotten everybody on board, and proceeded in an equitable and totally fair manner that takes into account the needs of everyone? Never. That’s never happened. So the thing that worries me the most about climate change, the thing that I am the most scared of, is what it’s going to make us do to each other.

Willow

Well said. So in my eyes, grief is one of the most challenging emotions to navigate when it comes to climate change because there is grief for specific places, and you go into some of them in the book that are meaningful to you, but also there’s this larger unnameable grief, for something that almost feels too vast for us to really be able to hold or feel. What wisdom do you have for people struggling with eco-grief? And I imagine that this is a dreaded question on this book tour for you, but—

Kate

I mean, I would tell everybody, don’t listen to me. I am a physicist. I’m not a mental health professional. I don’t know anything about how feelings work other than having them.

Willow

You just wrote a book about them.

Kate

I mean, I have them, but I can’t tell anybody, “This is what to do with your emotions.” I do think it is important for me, personally, to note that grief is the flip side of joy. If you are not grieving something, if you are not sad about something in your life, then that’s a really tragic life. We grieve because we love. We grieve the places that made us happy. We grieve the people who made us happy. And I think it’s important to hold onto that because that tells me at least that there’s so much that’s still left in the world to be fighting for and to be loving.

I wanted to talk about grief in the context of what we call paleo-climate, which is climates of Earth past. We know that the planet has gone through so many different iterations in its history. I’ve got dinosaur-obsessed kids, and so I read all of these books with dinosaurs and volcanoes in the background and palm trees everywhere. And that’s what the Earth was like when the dinosaurs were around. It was a lot hotter and wetter. And then we know that the Earth went through a series of ice ages where it was much, much colder than it is now.

And the reason that I think that really resonated for me in a grief context is this notion that I’m sending my kids to go live on a totally foreign planet, the fact that their reality might be as different from the world that I was born in, as that world is from the last ice age. And I think you’re absolutely right about the magnitude and the scale of that grief. How do you even fit all of that into a single human mind? I don’t think you do. I don’t think you can.

But I wanted to talk about how there’s a difference between grieving your grandmother who had a wonderful life and is passing away of old age, surrounded by her family, and losing a friend or losing a child. And that’s what this feels like. It feels like a betrayal. It feels like this shouldn’t be happening. This shouldn’t have been taken away so soon.

Willow

And as someone with kids, how do you talk about this with your children?

Kate

We talk about the science. We lead with wonder because kids do have that sense of awe and wonder. I have a very practically minded 9-year-old and a 4-year-old who wants to be a Velociraptor when he grows up, so we have different conversations with them. But my 9-year-old is obsessed with climate solutions. He’s at that age where kids start to realize, like, “Oh my God, there’s problems in the world and you have not fixed them? What is the problem, grownups? What are you even doing?”

Willow

Relatable.

Kate

Yeah. So he’s at that stage. But we talk about the things that we can do. He told me he wants to have a lemonade stand for the climate, which not sure how effective that is as a climate solution, but—

Willow

Hey, we need everybody.

Kate

We need everybody. We need the lemonade on board. But we talk a lot about climate change as a physical phenomenon, as something that just kind of falls out of the equations of the way the world is. But we also talk about it as, this is not an inevitability. That is the one thing that the science is so clear on, is that the future is really up to human beings.

Willow

So it sounds like not shying away from having the conversation about it, focusing on the science and solutions, is just really the best any of us can do.

Kate

Yeah. That’s how I feel.

Willow

I love that you also turn pride and this emotion on its head and talk about this almost invisible army of people who are just out there doing their part for the planet, and how proud you are of them. How can anyone listening become part of that army?

Kate

Yeah. I’m going to defer that question to our mutual friend, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson.

Willow

I knew she would come up at some point.

Kate

She always comes up. And I think the way she talks about it is just really correct, that this is not a scientific problem. This is not a problem with techno fixes that we’re going to be able to just engineer our way out of. Yes, science is important. Yes, technology is important. But this is a problem that affects everybody on Earth. And do you have a job on planet Earth? Congratulations. You have a climate job. And so the way she talks about it is you have to think about what you’re good at, what needs to be done, and what you love. And the intersection of all of those things is what you need to be doing. We can’t solve the climate crisis. We can’t stop the world from warming with miserable people who are going to burn out immediately. We need to find ways to keep going. And that is both the scary thing that, oh my God, it’s going to take all of us, and a hopeful thing like, oh my God, it’s going to take all of us.

Willow

Which brings us to one of the most dreaded subjects for all environmentalists, I feel. And I’m not going to ask you the dreaded hope question.

Kate

Oh, thank God.

Willow

But I’m going to ask you a version of it, which is in the chapter on hope in the book, you outline a number of different environmental success stories, none of which are direct one-to-one comparisons for the mammoth that is climate change. But can you pick one in particular that gives you hope?

Kate

Well, I am going to back up and say I don’t necessarily have hope because I don’t necessarily need it. Saying, “Do you hope we can fix this?” is kind of like saying, “Do you hope you can clean your bathroom?” Just clean your bathroom. You know what to do.

And for me, the fact that we know exactly where greenhouse gases are coming from and we have the solutions that we need, almost all of them, right now to stop doing that, that gives me hope. And so if you look at the history of environmental action, environmental legislation in this country, the Clean Air Act is really a miracle. It saved millions of lives. It kept millions of people out of the hospital. And that was really the culmination of a whole bunch of different factors. There was a giant environmental movement, so the Earth Day protests of 1970, I think, and a bunch of sort of political conditions that made it advantageous for Richard goddamn Nixon, of all people, to be like, “All right, I’m going to throw the American people a bone and sign this.”

And I think the reason that I like that story is, A, it’s just incredibly effective, just an amazingly good thing; and B, it shows that things don’t need to be going perfectly in order to make progress. You don’t need to have a savior figure. You don’t need to have a politician that you like or can stand. You need to create the conditions where this has to be done.

Willow

And the kind of flip side of understanding that human actions have changed our climate is that human actions can change our climate. We’ve done it before in a way that is having destructive results, but we can do it again. We can make a change.

Kate

Yeah. I mean, it drives me crazy when people act like, “Oh, this is the only way we can ever get energy is to dig up old shit out of the ground and set it on fire.” I hope that when my kids are older, they will be like, “I cannot believe you people did that. What a stupid way to get energy, especially when there’s a giant nuclear fusion reactor in the sky right there.”

Willow

Fossil fuels are not an inevitability, and that is really the lie that is sold to us.

Kate

Yeah, they absolutely are not.

Willow

So in the final chapter of the book on love, you share about a health diagnosis and how it changed your outlook on life in some ways. I’m wondering if you can speak a little bit to that perspective shift and why you wanted to end the book with love.

Kate

Sure. So I wanted to end the book with love because I actually do think that’s the most important emotion. That is the thing that I feel kind of subsumes all the other emotions and takes them in and magnifies them. But it’s also Katharine Hayhoe, who is a climate scientist colleague of mine, amazing, always makes the point that this is a really effective way to reach people, is to talk about saving the places we love, keeping the people we love safe. That is really effective because most of us feel that emotion.

So talking about the health stuff, I’ve been wrestling with this question of, are humans part of nature or are we separate, and how interconnected is everything, basically my whole life. But when I was younger, I was really healthy. I never got sick. I would get injured and recover immediately, and I took that for granted. Definitely not all young people are like this, but I was young and dumb, and I just assumed that that would last forever. And it didn’t.

I was diagnosed with a blood clot in my brain. I was very, very lucky that they caught it in time. There’s still scar tissue in there. There’s probably a brain tumor that was pressing down that caused it. None of this stuff is news that you want to get, but that really caused me to both reevaluate and just completely overhaul my relationship, even to that question, are human beings part of nature? Because I am both unnatural—because if modern medicine had not intervened, I definitely would not be around anymore—but also, I do feel this sense of connection to the entire planet that this is all basically bonus life.

I talk a little bit in the book about how that makes me deeply annoying because it makes me kind of like an evangelist. I want to go door to door, knocking on people’s doors and saying, “Have you heard the news about planet Earth?” Because you’re just so desperate for everybody to see this thing that has filled your life and made it make sense and given it meaning. And that’s kind of the way I feel about living here.

Willow

It makes you appreciate how much of a gift all of it is.

Kate

Such a gift.

Willow

And this is really the central question of the book. It’s called Human Nature. And so what has kind of emerged as the inevitable conclusion about human nature for you?

Kate

I think the conclusion is that there’s nowhere else. We’re all bound together, both to the world and to each other. We all have to obey the same laws even if we don’t want to. The laws of physics tie us to this place. Even if we managed to build a stupid rocket and go to another stupid planet, physics still applies on that other planet. We cannot get around reality. And that is both terrifying and constraining, but also liberating and beautiful, the fact that we are capable of so much, we are so changeable. We are not one thing. We are everything.

Willow

And how beautiful is it that these laws that bind all things together, that bind us together, that are also resulting in climate change, which is arguably scary, are also these tethers of connection? It makes me think that the consequence of everything, it is that connection. It’s that love. Everything happens because of the interconnection, which—

Kate

Absolutely.

Willow

—We call physics, magic.

Kate

Yeah. It seems so banal. When you’re younger, you smoke weed and you’re like, “Man, everything is so connected.” And then you get older, you’re like, “Oh God, everything is totally connected,” and that is… It’s just so beautiful to see it fall out of the science and to see how rich and beautiful, but also terrifying, those things are. We talk a lot about ecosystems as models for how we should be or how we should operate, but ecosystems are full of things that kill and eat each other, and nature is not particularly kind. Nature is beautiful, but it can also be terrible and unfeeling, and that’s what we’re for.

Willow

It’s beautiful and terrible and truly all of the feelings, which is why you couldn’t have chosen just one for this book. And I’m glad you didn’t.

Kate

Absolutely.

Willow

Thank you for sharing all your wisdom. Thanks, Kate.

Kate

Thanks for your work. Thanks for your perspective. Thanks for having me here. It’s been so wonderful.

Narration

At the end of each episode, I offer a series of prompts for you to take into your everyday life. This week’s are, what emotion do I struggle with the most around climate change? How can I reframe my job to see it as a climate job? And how can I better get in touch with my emotions around climate change? Follow the links in the show notes for additional resources related to this episode.

The Nature Of is an Atmos podcast produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Newsom of Magnificent Noise. Our production staff includes Emanuel Hapsus and Sabrina Farhi. Our sound designer is Kristin Mueller. Our executive producers are me, Willow Defebaugh, Theresa Perez, Jake Sargent, and Eric Newsom. Atmos is a nonprofit that seeks to re-enchant people with our shared humanity and the earth through creative storytelling. To support our work or this podcast, see our show notes or visit atmos.earth/biome. That’s atmos.earth/biome. I’m your host, Willow Defebaugh, and this is The Nature Of.