Fwd: A peculiar peacock incident 🦚

[Loretta Lohman]

Plus, a new climate book helps readers reflect on their climate journeys.

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A couple of weeks ago, a peacock alighted on my neighbor’s roof, where he spent the night. No one seems to know where he came from.

What we do know is that he’s settled into what appears to be a permanent residency. My neighbor, who keeps a flock of chickens, is feeding him. He’s fallen in love with one of the chickens, a hen named Chickira. Walking by, I’ve seen him strutting for her, his tail feathers fanned in a glorious display. (Chickira ignores him.)

For me, the arrival of the peacock was a reminder that though the world contains abundant cruelty and selfishness, it is also a place of awe, splendor, and absurdity. Savoring these moments of delight helps me keep going in the face of a global crisis.

Big questions like “How can I keep going?” and “What can I offer to our world?” are the subject of a new book called “Climate Wayfinding,” by Katharine Wilkinson, who cofounded the All We Can Save Project with Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and coedited the project’s first anthology. Read on for a conversation between Wilkinson and our books editor, Michael Svoboda.

– Sara Peach, Editor-in-Chief

‘What can I offer?’ New book helps readers navigate their climate journeys

Michael Svoboda reports:

Yale Climate Connections: The language of path and way and journeying and compass, all of that is abundant in the book. Then, at the end of each essay is a poem. Why a poem?

Katharine Wilkinson: I love poetry, Michael. And poetry has been foundational and essential nourishment for me on my own climate journey from my earliest days of awakening as a teenager, when I started reading Mary Oliver.

Poetry has this incredible knack for making us more porous, for opening us up to ways of knowing that might be different than the linearity an essay can take you into.

YCC: You suggest that journaling is a big part of climate wayfinding. Why?

Wilkinson: I think there’s such power in just putting our pen or pencil to the page in the form of free writing, just letting the consciousness within us flow forth without editing. Journaling can be an incredible way to unearth, to see what’s below ground at present. There is a grand-scale narrative of the climate crisis, and we are characters who are actively writing that narrative through our actions. If we can do that on the page, then it takes us, I think, a step closer to doing that beyond the page as well.

YCC: So I am co-authoring this journey?

Wilkinson: Absolutely. Absolutely.

YCC: Next, you ask your readers to step out into nature. You are very directive about wanting them to experience the Earth with their senses. Why is that an important step in the process?

Wilkinson: Going very deliberately to the ecosystems that we find ourselves within, even in very small measures, is part of finding our way.

YCC: You stress the importance of iteration, that we are finding and refinding our ways always. Are you trying to unmake your readers so that they remake themselves in the world in the process?

Wilkinson: I think the core of what I’m trying to do in this book is to meet us in our experience of maplessness. Living in a world of climate crisis, the challenges of democracy, the speeding evolution of technology, our maps are not keeping up.

And I mean that quite literally, as we think about a glacier that’s no longer there, a shoreline that’s now slipped beneath a rising sea, but also internally, personally, socially, culturally. The maps we have traditionally used to navigate our paths and lives are coming up short. What we have to do is grow our capacity to navigate amidst liminality, obscurity, and complexity.

The core framework for continuing to find our way over time is this interplay of looking inward with care, looking outward with curiosity, and looking forward with courage – and then doing it again and again. And so the book is designed to help people do that, to do the looking inward, the looking outward. And at the end of the experience of reading the book or doing it in a reading group, hopefully, they feel they have stronger capacities and better tools and practices for this ongoing task of navigation, for finding the next meaningful steps for action on climate change, and for being human in a really tricky time.

YCC: Do you want to leave our readers with a closing prompt?

Wilkinson: I think I’ll leave readers with the questions I write about in the essay of the first chapter and then bring back at the end of the book. They’re questions I found myself asking as a newly ecologically awakened teenager. It’s a little trio.

What can I offer to our world?

Is my soul built for certain contributions?

Who am I here to become?

YCC: Those are wonderful questions to end with – and then begin again.

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Tom Toro is the author of the cartoon collection "And to Think We Started as a Book Club..." and the creator of the comic Substack "Undiscovered Masterpieces."

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