Show Up for the Planet

(upbeat music) Hi, Headspace, I'm Clover, a climate activist, and a founder and executive director of Force of Nature. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Noga Levy-Rapoport, Daze Aghaji, and Dominique Palmer to discuss how we deal with climate anxiety and how caring for ourselves is crucial to caring for the world. (upbeat music continues) (bright music) Why do you feel that it's a tipping point? I think it's just the urgency, especially because we have a lot of different crises that are kind of coming together and a lot of them are so interlinked and it feels like everything's reaching to this boiling point, and I'm thinking about the future that I want to have and the future that's in front of us if we don't take actions, really. Yeah, I feel like we're at this really strange point of where this path that we're moving forward is no longer doing us any good, and we kind of need to kind of stop and basically like reassess everything and probably change everything to get to the world that we truly deserve. And I think as our generation, we've grown up with recession, we've grown up with political polarization, we're growing up in a pandemic, you know, and I feel like we've got to a point of we're saying, "Enough's enough." What might your advice be to someone right at the start of this journey, who potentially feels incredibly overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem, by how many problems exist within the problem? If you're feeling so overwhelmed and you're feeling this hopelessness, this despair, it's also showing that you really care about the issue, and the movement needs more people who care about the issue, and it's really about taking that time to look at yourself and look at what skills you have and what things you've always wanted to try out. I've had my hands everywhere in organizing strikes, in live streaming, in media, in literally being a supportive person and bringing snacks and good vibes to events that have happened, in speaking and doing all these kind of things. And throughout that, I learned that we're all valuable and we're all needed and all those different skills are valuable. This journey has very different time slots for everyone. It's not about like knowing what you're doing, it's about kind of being open to what's happening around you, and I think that's the most beautiful part about activism is like you never know what journey it's gonna take you on but you're there for the ride, you know? And there's something that's deeply empowering about that. I recall so clearly that feeling of elation and total support and overwhelming power and reenfranchisement that I felt at my first ever climate strike. And it really made me feel like I could make a difference, it was something that made me feel like I could find a direction. Just remember that all of us are all trying to...