Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth: How to Live with Care and Purpose in an Endangered World

Climate anxiety is real--and this practical, accessible guide helps address it on personal, relational, and structural levels, from the founder of the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth.

Summer after summer is the hottest on record. People’s homes are flooding, burning, blowing away. We live with the loss, pain, and grief of what’s happened, and anxiety for what might happen next, as the systems in which we live are increasingly strained. Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth addresses our collective concerns with empathy, grace, and practical strategies to help us all envision a viable future. By moving through your personal and general climate anxiety, frustration, helplessness and grief, you can move toward a sense of shared purpose and community care. You’ll find actionable steps for connecting with others, identifying and activating community abundance, matching your skills with organized climate activism, and imagining a radically more livable future in order to bring it into being. Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth meets you where you are, not sugarcoating the realities of this growing crisis, but offering practical strategies for meeting a climate-changed present and future with emotional honesty and communal support.

In 2014, when Kate Schapira first set up a Climate Anxiety Counseling booth in her hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, far fewer people were talking about climate change and its attendant anxiety, leaving those who couldn’t ignore climate change and the forces that cause it feeling frantic and alone. Seeking a way to reach out and connect, Schapira set up a Peanuts-style ＂The Doctor Is In＂ booth to talk about climate change with her community. Ten years and over 1200 conversations later, Schapira channels all she’s learned into an accessible, understandable, and aware guide for processing climate anxiety and connecting with others to carry out real change in your life and in your community.

Kate Schapira is a senior lecturer at Brown University where she teaches nonfiction writing, with a focus on narrative, diverse formal strategies, and environmental and ecological storytelling. She’s the author of Time to Be Something Other Than Human and six collections of poetry. She engages with the public about climate change and mental health through the Climate Anxiety Counseling project. Kate lives in Providence, Rhode Island.