Category: Climate Resilience
-
Teaching the Love of Plants: Nature Therapy with Children
Originally published in the Climate Psychology Alliance-North America blog By Jenni Silverstein, LCSW, Santa Rosa, California My new “office” is a garden hidden behind a berm at a therapeutic farm. The farm rescues animals and brings children from foster and group homes to tend them. Each creature comes with its own story of being saved from…
-
When the Tubbs Fire Changed My World and My Practice: Holding Space in the Era of Climate Crisis
Originally Published in the Climate Psychology Alliance – North America Blog Psychotherapists, regardless of our theoretical background or treatment modality, share a common critical capacity: the ability to hold space for difficult emotions and experiences. This capacity is hard to measure, define, or teach. It entails a moment-by-moment dance of empathy, compassion, presence, self-reflection, and…
-
British Petroleum will Manipulate Me No More
I don’t remember when I first heard of the Carbon Footprint. But over the years, the idea escalated from a troubling thought into an obsession. The average American puts 16 tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year. That is 4 times the global average, and 16 times more emissions than people in the global…
-
A Tale of Two Fires: 25 Years in California
When I was 20 years old, I worked as a counselor at a backpacking camp in California’s Trinity Alps mountains. An East Coast city-girl by birth, I loved camping and hiking and mountains but I’d never seen a peak above 3000 feet, and I’d never set foot in the wilderness. That summer, I was graced…
-
Love and Grief in the Redwoods
A very wise midwife once told me, “you cannot vibrate in love and fear at the same time.”* I pondered this for a long time, believing it made sense, but not embodying it. Until one evening years later, when I had a profound experience in my first garden. I had been practicing a form of…
-
The Four Seasons: A Creation Story
THE FOUR SEASONS A Creation Story, by Dani age 6 Once, before there were trees or plants or animals there were only the 4 elements: Water, Fire, Air, and Earth. At first Water and Fire were enemies; Earth and Air were allies. But then a new alliance came. Earth and Water were allies – and…
-
Mothering In the Age of Climate Crisis
For my entire life, I have been an environmentalist. As a child eager to save the whales and pick up litter from the park, as a teen lobbying for the end of garbage incineration and boycotting aerosol hairsprays, as a young adult awed by the EarthFirst! rallies I attended to save the precious old growth…
-
Community After Disaster, a Therapist’s Musings
Here in Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino counties, the entire community experienced prolonged and extensive hyper-arousal – days on end of watching and wondering where the fires would burn next, and far too many sleepless nights. According to the literature on disasters, what follows is a brief honeymoon period, characterized by community cohesion and gratitude. Sonoma…