How to Live With Climate Change Without Burning Out
Daphne
As someone who has dedicated your career to educating yourself on this topic, what does meaningful climate action look like today?
Thomas
I’d say meaningful action starts by looking inward. A big part of my book, alongside thriving, is this idea of environmental identity. Before grief or action, we need to ask: Who are you? Where did you grow up? What do you value? We hurt where we care. If you care about the environment, it means you have values, it means you have something that you live and care for. Building that environmental identity—just as we build our gender, cultural, or sexual identity—gives us solidity. From there, environmental actions will flow naturally from values, and not just from what’s in the newspaper. Once you connect your values to your actions, that link is unbreakable.
Whether you “succeed” or not is almost irrelevant because you’re living by your values. Like an athlete, your job is to show up and do your best. Winning or losing isn’t the point. Research on environmental action shows there’s a line between our values, our understanding of threats, and our sense of efficacy; this belief that “I can do something.” That way, if you see a threat that doesn’t align with your values, and you know you have something to offer, you’ll feel motivated to act. If you don’t act, you’ll feel uncomfortable.
And then the direction really depends on the person. It could be private actions, like how you live at home, what you buy, what you eat. It could also be public actions: advocating at work, engaging in journalism, or participating in activism. Most environmental action is invisible. It happens in homes, workplaces, committees, government offices. The missing piece for many people is efficacy. They feel the threat and the impulse to act, but don’t see how to act for themselves. And when you don’t feel capable, you avoid it. So the simple answer is: Look inside. Start with your values—the ones you’ll carry through your life.
Daphne
This book comes out of many years of work. Over that time, both the climate crisis and the political landscape have changed dramatically. What was the biggest challenge or learning as you pulled it all together?
Thomas
One of the biggest challenges was not getting hijacked by politics. The rise of demagogues, fascism, the constant crises we read about every day. It’s easy to let your nervous system be taken over by the news. It feels endless, like nothing you do will matter. It breeds powerlessness.
In fact, the easiest way to make someone feel powerless is to have them watch the news for 30 minutes. The easiest way to make them feel powerful is to have them look around their life for 30 minutes and notice their resources. For me, it was a daily exercise in protecting my consciousness so I could keep creating.
And of course, not giving up on myself, asking, who am I to write this book? Like I said, every day there was the risk of being hijacked by a new story or idea that would turn me into a consumer instead of a creator. But I had to preserve that little flame of efficacy, like a candle. This is my one life, and I’ll do the best I can.
Daphne
If there’s one practice or perspective you hope every reader walks away with, what would it be?
Thomas
One would be this: You don’t need to solve climate change in order to cope with it. We often think, if I don’t have an answer, I can’t cope. But most of life is like that—we can’t “solve” our family relationships, aging, injustice, or getting everything we want. But we learn to cope with those existential challenges.
This is especially important for young people because they link their coping with answers and activism. That’s important to a certain extent, but if coping only depends on success, then failure feels like you can’t cope or can’t be happy. The secret is realizing you can cope, and you can have moments of happiness even while struggling for solutions.