In this essay, we will... convince you that nuance, patience, and diversity is a climate solution, and that working in HR can be climate work. This episode is about some of the fun, odd, and unexpected shapes that climate work can take. And, a critical way that climate work can transcend our 9 to 5s, to something much deeper: an embodied practice of exercising nuance, patience, and compassion to counteract the climate crisis. Kavita Shah (she/her), says it best. As a Training Manager for the East Bay Regional Park District, lives her passion for leadership development and watching people learn amidst the fields of wildflowers she’s grown to love. She’s where curriculum development meets conservation. But, her work goes far deeper than that. From anti-harassment and implicit bias trainings to chainsaw certifications, Kavita talks about empowering her colleagues to see themselves as not only stewards of the land, but also stewards of how a community relates to that land. That’s a particularly daunting conversation to invoke, especially as a young, queer woman of color whose audience is predominantly older, white, cisgender men. To Kavita, that’s where the real work happens. So our conversation also explores what it takes, and more importantly, what it means to expand our capacity for nuance and to move people to a new way of seeing and being. We talk about skills like noticing what activates you, assessing the value of how you choose to respond, and the ever important art of the pause. Which is not to say give airspace to racists and fascists, but to recognize the capacity for change in every person in every moment, and that their ideas and feelings don’t exist in a vacuum. I believe that if we give people a compelling enough reason to change their thoughts and actions, and a safe enough environment to try it out, they just might. (I highly recommend listening to adrienne maree brown talking about making the revolution irresistible!!) And while we won’t have bandwidth for every person in every moment, change like this requires as much time, trust, and patience as we can devote to it. Because the cost of not having nuance and compassion – like, I don’t know, the psychopathic billionaires running the world right now – is too great to keep believing we can afford. As Kavita says “if you feel like the world is always out to get you, or that it’s always someone’s fault that you feel a type of way… it’s really easy to grow really cold and hard.” We can’t afford coldness or hardness. Nihilism or fascism. Because that’s a huge reason we got here in the first place. I really enjoyed making this episode because the message to me feels clear: the work of solving the climate crisis will demand the work of solving a dominant culture of disposability and canceling. Our muscles of discourse and generative conflict have been intentionally atrophied by a society that sells us on individualism. The climate crisis is a beautiful invitation to breach these metaphorical and quite literal (border) walls. In this episode, Kavita shares actionable tools to do just that. I hope you’ll listen and share your thoughts with me. Maybe we can build back those muscles together and reach out for each other too 3
