Healing the planet requires healing ourselves, says Katharine Wilkinson

Katharine Wilkinson has a Ph.D. in geography and the environment, is well known for being a co-author of the book Drawdown and co-founder of The All We Can Save Project. She joins the Newscast this week to discuss her latest book Climate Wayfinding: Healing Ourselves and the Planet We Call Home.

As a journalist, it's unhelpful for me to divorce myself from the topic of this interview, as I have experienced, time and again, the sense of "murky overwhelm" this book is specifically designed to address. But Wilkinson didn't just write this book for journalists like myself who cover ecological crises for a living. She wrote it for readers and listeners like you.

"I think we're all in our own ways grappling with this increasingly mapless time, right? And that is quite literally true," Wilkinson says. "'Is there hope?' and 'What can I do?' I think these are fundamentally navigational questions as much as they are questions of action."

What Climate Wayfinding does that I think is unique is it directly addresses the reader and takes them through a process of self-examination. Of sitting with the uncomfortable emotions one feels about our ecological crises, without judgment. And from that self-compassion, asking the reader to imagine the world they want to see instead and encouraging them to map out how they see themselves working to achieve it.

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Mike DiGirolamo is the host & producer for the Mongabay Newscast based in Sydney. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky.

Thumbnail image: Climate Wayfinding with a design background. Image by Amerpsand, courtesy of Katharine Wilkinson.

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Timecodes

(00:00) Facing our increasingly 'mapless' time

(09:43) Following our emotions

(15:07) "I don't feel hopeful today"

(18:22) Possibilities that become reality

(25:32) Culture as an accelerator for change

(35:17) A crisis of leadership

(41:40) To love something instead of fixing something