Jennifer Atkinson: The Search for Environmental Hope

IAS faculty member Jennifer Atkinson’s podcast Facing It was featured in the Washington Post Magazine’s cover story for their Earth Day edition. The article, titled “The Search for Environmental Hope,” included an interview with Atkinson and several naturalists, scientists and climate activists about how they engage with the question of hope.

When climate news is a constant churn of doom, is it possible to ever feel optimistic? We need hope to meaningfully address climate change, as despair invites paralysis and surrender — but is hope, at this point, magical thinking? In exploring this question, journalist David Montgomery — whose brother and niece were killed by the 2017 mudslides in Santa Barbara (linked to the region’s historic climate fires) — discovered Atkinson’s podcast on climate grief, and used her work as a way to make sense of the losses he and others have suffered as climate impacts grow more deadly. Montgomery interviewed Atkinson about ways to channel despair into more meaningful forms of climate action in the wake of loss, and included those insights alongside excerpts from her podcast “Facing It” in the story.

In addition to featuring Atkinson’s work, “The Search for Environmental Hope” includes interviews with Terry Tempest Williams, Doug Peacock, J. Drew Lanham and Varshini Prakash, co-founder of the Sunrise Movement. From engaging in individual acts of climate vigilance, to believing in the possibility of systemic reforms, to adjusting the way we think of our environment, all of these figures say there is a path forward — and that despair may not be the enemy after all.