The Stages of Black Climate Grief
Image credit: Nikayla Jefferson
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This week, we have a special episode featuring activist and researcher Nikayla Jefferson.
Most of us are in the first stage of climate grief: denial.
But what does it feel like to enter the stage of grief? And how is that grief different for black people?
Even if you’ve seen the impacts of climate change up close, even if you’ve felt the tropical winds whip your cheeks, stood in floodwater knee deep in your own home, watched a fire come down the ridge line, said “wow, I can’t remember a summer this hot” -- you are likely stuck in some state of denial.
In this episode, Nikayla shares her journey breaking through denial and into grief.
As a black person, grieving for the planet can look different, feel heavier and more immediate.
Featured in this episode: Nikayla Jefferson, Jacqueline Patterson, and Princella Talley.
Follow our co-hosts and production team:
A Matter of Degrees is a production of Post Script Audio.
TRANSCRIPT
Nikayla Jefferson: So I was at the gym. This was last December, and I'd only been a climate organizer for a few months at this point. But I was on the tricep machine and my workout playlist was blaring some hip hop and there was this cute girl on the machine next to me. And she smiled at me and I tried to play it cool and keep going with my workout. Sweat was beginning to bead on my forehead and I continued to work my set. I was counting my reps one, two, three, four, but then everything just went kind of still because the news that morning hit me, the music and my earbuds died down. And all I could hear were the words of the newest climate report. 11,000 climate scientists warn of untold human suffering. Bad news for me and every other human on planet Earth. The word spiraled deeper, suffering, disaster, loss of land and life.
Nikayla Jefferson: My arms gave out and the weights crashed down in the machine, but I still held the heaviness in my gut and in my legs, the weight of the news pressed against my chest and I couldn't breathe. Tears and sweat rolled down my face. This was a panic attack. So I wandered dazed and numb out of the gym double doors and into the December morning air. I wandered down the street, laid back on the curb and tried to feel the warmth of the sun while I counted breaths. My heartbeat fast and hard against the band of my sports bra. I walked into the gym, gripped in the first stage of grief: denial. But when I left, body numbed, but heart tender and swollen, I moved into a new stage of climate grief, a confluence of anger, depression and sharp existential fear. My relationship with climate change was forever changed.
Leah Stokes: This is A Matter Of Degrees. I'm Dr. Leah Stokes.
Katharine Wilkinson: I'm Dr. Katharine Wilkinson.
Nikayla Jefferson: And I'm Nikayla Jefferson.
Katharine Wilkinson: And together we're telling stories for the climate curious.
Leah Stokes: So folks, this week we invited someone on the show to share her climate journey with all of us. Nikayla Jefferson, she's a researcher and a climate justice activist.
Katharine Wilkinson: So Nikayla, tell us, why did you want to start this episode with a story about grief? It sounds like a story of outright panic.
Nikayla Jefferson: Yeah. That day, for whatever reason, the reality of climate change really hit me. And I could no longer be in emotional denial about what was going on.
Leah Stokes: And why do you think about climate change in terms of grief? It's a pretty specific way of framing the issue.
Nikayla Jefferson: Well, something that I'm really worried about, and I'm worried that most people, even people who claim to care about climate change a lot are still in the first stage of grief: denial. It's like most of the world lives in the state. Even if you've seen the impacts of climate change up close, even if you felt the tropical winds whip your cheeks, even if you've stood in floodwater knee deep in your own home, you watched a fire come down the ridge line. Said, "Wow, I can't remember a summer this hot." Even if you've read the reports, you follow the news, you call yourself a climate champion. You would literally welcome a backyard wind turbine, or cover your roof in solar. Maybe you're a vegan. I don't know. Unless you felt the anger or the sadness or the true fear, you are likely stuck in climate denial.
Katharine Wilkinson: And Nikayla. I think Leah and I have our own experiences moving through the stages of climate grief that we could share. But the stages of grief that you want to talk about in this episode aren't exactly the same as ours. This is an episode about black climate grief specifically.
Nikayla Jefferson: Yeah. I think that as a black person, grieving the planet can be a bit different. It can feel heavier and more immediate because the black climate movement wasn't really born out of the environmental movement. Like I'm not an environmentalist. I feel like that's a term used by white people who donate to the Sierra Club or started some kind of community recycling program. And for them, the environment ends there. It's a relationship grounded and a sense of duty to protect the natural world. It's about preservation and conservation of rugged forests or pristine waters. These are the same people that say, well, I know some good police officers, and these are the same people that say, well, people make their own choices in life.
Leah Stokes: I think this is so spot on Nikayla. The climate movement, even in the last year, I think has gone through a big reckoning over the exact issues that you're raising here. Is our movement about protecting ecosystems and other species, which of course is valuable and important, but are we ignoring our fellow humans with black, brown, indigenous skin and saying, oh, their worries, their woes, those aren't at the heart of the climate movement, which is really quite ignorant when you think about where fossil fuel infrastructure is going, in those communities backyards?
Katharine Wilkinson: And I think it speaks to a failure in large part by white environmentalism to understand the climate crisis, not just as a standalone problem, but as a manifestation of a system that is generating lots of crises that we face. And if we're just thinking, as you're saying Nikayla, about just the forest or just the water, or just a particular species, we're not getting the bigger picture.
Nikayla Jefferson: Yeah. I mean, I agree with that too. Before we save a local endangered bird, we need to protect our own people and ensure their survival in our environment. We got to address things like the fracking walls that are next to schools. And then you have things like trucks that blow through these communities and blow exhausts and people have to breathe that in.
Leah Stokes: You're right Nikayla. I mean, these things end up manifesting in facts like black children having asthma rates two times as high as white children. And I think it also means that when we talk about climate grief, it's a different thing in the black community. It's in some ways a bigger thing.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah. So what Nikayla does, black climate grief look like to you?
Nikayla Jefferson: It can look like a lot of things, but for me, apparently it looks like having a panic attack at the gym. It can also look like taking some climate action.
Nikayla Jefferson: So during my panic attack, I called my mom because that's who you call and she talked me through it. But on the walk home, I decided that if I was going to be emotionally consumed by the climate crisis, I needed the people in power to see the emotional toll that this crisis takes on young black people. So I went home and I Googled city hall, I went to Michaels and I bought some art supplies for my declare a climate emergency poster. And then I took this poster and I sat in the lobby of the city council for seven days. I talked to the elected officials and their staff, and I gave public comment that brought the room to tears. And I did it all for climate change. And in the end I wrote the final declaration of a climate emergency that was passed in San Diego.
Nikayla Jefferson: Because I am deep in depression and grief, and I cannot sit idle by and watch my future slide into the sea. I decided to sit on your lobby floor because you all offer something we desperately need: hope. Give us hope, give us a reason to plan, a reason to have a family and invest in the future. I want to apply, propose a love, stress, and dream in the next 10 years. Give us something to hold on to because we ask ourselves if we will live as long as our parents, I ask you all to declare a climate emergency and pass a green new deal because it represents hope at a time we've struggled to find the strength, a light in the darkness. Thank you.
Katharine Wilkinson: So you're taking this incredible action in San Diego Nikayla, and like what's happening with the grief as you're doing this work, as you're sitting in the lobby or writing the declaration? Like are you feeling it differently? Are you harnessing it?
Nikayla Jefferson: When I first rode the elevator up, I felt paralyzed by my fear and my grief. But then over the course of this week, I felt it melt away because for the first time, this pain that was welled up inside of me, I could show someone and I literally showed them. Every time they left their office, they would have to see me like actually crying on their floor about climate change. So this whole action, it really helped me move through the grieving process and see that there is an actionable pathway to use my climate grief and have some sort of outcome.
Leah Stokes: Yeah, it takes an emotion and turns it into something meaningful and purposeful and kind of driven.
Katharine Wilkinson: It really reminds me of this quote that we have in All We Can Save from Audrey Lord, that "Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge." And it feels like in this case Nikayla, your feelings were also your most genuine path to action and your best means of actually moving other people to action.
Nikayla Jefferson: Yeah. I had the chance to talk to someone that feels a similar way to me and also uses her emotions and turns them into action.
Jacqueline Patterson: My name is Jackie Patterson. I live in Baltimore with the senior director of the environmental and climate justice program at the NAACP.
Nikayla Jefferson: Jackie has been with the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for the last 10 years. She's an activist and a researcher working at the intersection of women's rights and racial justice. And she's worked with women on climate issues and developing countries around the world. And here in the US too.
Jacqueline Patterson: When I started to do this work around environmental and climate justice, it just struck me that when I would be in kind of traditional environmental spaces, how so often I was the only person of color, definitely the only black person that was in the room.
Nikayla Jefferson: And even when Jackie got the gig she has now, a big climate leadership position with one of the most established, prominent organizations that has been elevating the voice of black Americans for decades. It was like the more things changed, the more they stayed exactly the same. Case in point, this one time she was running a big meeting of prominent sustainability experts. She was standing at the entrance, waiting for the elevator.
Jacqueline Patterson: This family walked up and tried to hand me the pencil that they used when they were doing the activities, because they thought, even though I was wearing like a full length kind of semiformal dress, they'd somehow thought that I was the security guard who was staffing the little stand that I was standing next to.
Nikayla Jefferson: So is an experience that a lot of black people face. It's the moralizing. And it's just one small example of the kind of day-to-day racism that we face. I asked her how she channels this kind of experience. I have found through organizing that my story is my most effective tool as an organizer. So I'm wondering if there has been a moment where you've used your story to convince someone.
Jacqueline Patterson: Yes. There's definitely been times when I have used my story or aspects of my story. I talk about my dad who died of pulmonary fibrosis, which is usually tied to exposure of some kind of toxins and usually tied to smoking. My dad never smoked a day in his life. And also met another person in Henderson, Indiana whose wife died of lung disease. She lived two blocks away from a coal fire power plant and had never smoked a day in her life either. And so I am able to tie my story with other people's stories to say that his experience is linked with other people's experience and it's actually a pattern in our communities.
Nikayla Jefferson: I feel like that's the story of being black in America. I mean the past 400 years, being treated as a tool of capitalism and your body and your labor is for profit for another, for a white man. So I feel like black people, black communities, particularly are more able to deal with the climate crisis because of this story that's in our DNA.
Jacqueline Patterson: I definitely agree, as messed up as that is, I agree. I think that having been brought over as cargo in the hulls of ships, and having been ripped away from our families, and our legacies, and our generational wealth to then come over and become the generational wealth of other people has taught us a lot about surviving and about making a way out of no way and about perspective. And so the weathering that we've gone through, and as you say, what's in our DNA from that weathering, definitely makes us more resilient and makes us able to kind of keep things in perspective in a different way. And that weathering in the soul, and the body of the hearts, it might not show as much on the outside, as kind of weeping and gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands. But it's still impactful, and it's still harmful and it's still just kind of coping due to repeated and deep trauma.
Katharine Wilkinson: It seems like this goes back to the point you were making about climate being really deeply personal to black people.
Nikayla Jefferson: Yeah. I mean, it is a very personal issue. Climate change, it affects every part of our lives and for black people, it's a disproportionate impact.
Leah Stokes: So how has climate change touched your life personally?
Nikayla Jefferson: For me, a lot of it goes back to wildfires. It goes back to the Cedar fire on my seventh birthday. It goes back to Thomas. Remember that one Leah in 2018? That was my junior year of UCSB. And over the summer I drove the state from top to bottom through 600 wildfires. And it's right now in the east of the city, a wildfire blackens and burns, and it chars my familiar until it's foreign. My familiar is the home state of California. I've spent my whole life in the state. I've visited every beach along the coast. I've hiked every national park, pink dawn on sierra granite and the rise of the redwoods along the rugged coast. It defined my idea of beauty. But as much as my inner Lord Byron loves the landscape of the state, what pulled me out of climate denial and into climate action is not the loss of land, but the loss of lives.
Nikayla Jefferson: And here I find my family and my community. The consequences of climate change hit me the hardest when I think about my brother, he's 12, he has dreams of the future and little asthmatic lungs too. Ash from the wildfires, it embeds in his lungs and it makes him wheeze and struggled to breathe. And that's just an immediate right now consequence of the crisis. It hits me hardest when I think about the life that he has ahead of him, a worst level of the existential uncertainty I feel, and how just between the oldest and the youngest of Gen Z, so much of the state and my memories of it will be lost to wildfire.
Leah Stokes: Wow. I mean, that's so true. And I've only lived in this state for five years, much less time than you have Nikayla, but I've seen so much devastation from wildfires and it's not hard to see climate change in California.
Katharine Wilkinson: And you capture Nikayla, I think, like the tenderness of this moment, so well. And of course, sadly, it's not just wildfires, we've got a cocktail of natural disasters that are hitting black communities across this country and beyond.
Nikayla Jefferson: That's exactly right. And the second person I spoke to is someone who knows intimately the perils of a warming climate, but she lives in a completely different part of the country, contending with a completely different kind of disaster.
Princella Talley: I guess blurry is the only word I could use because everything's moving, you got this wind and this water, and it's like you look, but you're scared about the windows breaking so you back away.
Nikayla Jefferson: That's Princella Talley describing what it's like to live through Hurricane Rita, a category three storm that struck Louisiana in 2005.
Princella Talley: I don't know. It's so hard to describe, but that's the best way I could put it into words. It was like looking at a blur in real time.
Nikayla Jefferson: Princella is a black woman from Pineville, Louisiana, about midway up the state. Her mom is from Pineville And so are her grandparents. How far back does your family go in Pineville?
Princella Talley: Oh, wow. Since forever, we are pretty much grounded here. We have family here. We had a lot of family in California as well, but I mean, we are stone cold Louisianians.
Nikayla Jefferson: Princella was young when Rita struck, it was the first storm she remembers and she'll always carry it with her.
Princella Talley: Really stuck to me. And I think part of what it was, was the noise of it. Because I had never heard like a noise like that, where you just hear these trees like snap, crackle and pop. And it was surreal and it was frightening, but it was like, you want to look outside and see what's happening, but you know you're not supposed to. It just felt like being in a whole different world and it's something that I can't forget, even if I tried to.
Nikayla Jefferson: In that same year, just a month earlier, an even more devastating storm battered the state.
Speaker 6: The scene is nothing short of apocalyptic. 80% of New Orleans, including much of downtown is underwater. The Big Easy's famous Canal Street living up to its name, and rising waters will now force officials to evacuate the shelter at the Superdome. Katrina's departure was just the beginning of the misery.
Speaker 7: I didn't think it was over, but I didn't think it would come to this.
Speaker 6: But it has come to this. People are now living in parking garages, others picked up what they could and moved to higher ground on the interstate. Refugees in their own hometown.
Speaker 8: We're not able to get up and just go. We don't have transportation. I mean we're living paycheck to paycheck. I mean it isn't like we're just able to get up and just leave.
Nikayla Jefferson: It's impossible to understand the social justice implications of hurricanes in Louisiana, without understanding Katrina. Princella happened to be out of the state, but she vividly remembers the trauma of calling her friends and her family, checking in to see whether people were okay. 800,000 people lost their homes and nearly 2,000 people died. It caused a mass migration in the state. Some people in her community moved away and they never moved back because there was no real home to move back to because they had lost everything.
Leah Stokes: And the people that did stay, they faced all kinds of barriers to getting help. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, they pretty infamously dropped the ball on their whole response in the direct aftermath of the storm. There was inadequate training amongst FEMA executive, supply chain problems and there were even reports of FEMA officials blocking aid from other private resources.
Nikayla Jefferson: Yeah and Jackie said that the institutional racism embedded into the Katrina response has carried over even further than that. She worked in disaster recovery after Katrina and she saw the racism in all kinds of the decisions that were made.
Jacqueline Patterson: The Army Corps of engineers, deciding which levies are going to be reinforced post-Katrina based on a formula that apply points to each levy based on what the economic impact would be if that levy was breached. So it literally institutionalizes the notion that people who can afford to be inundated the least are the ones who are going to get the least protection. And the least and the last.
Nikayla Jefferson: It's been 15 years since that record breaking 2005 hurricane season. So when Princella heard that Hurricane Laura, one of this season's storms was coming up the coast, it triggered a kind of deep dread.
Princella Talley: Because if someone had asked me before Laura, how I would feel about it? Oh, it's okay. I've been in storms before. I should be fine, but that's not true. It's always scary, it's always painful, and it always triggers something in you that's full of uncertainty, and fear and just hoping that you're going to live.
Nikayla Jefferson: Princella said that there are a few things everyone in her community in Louisiana knows to do when they hear a storm coming. Take it seriously, know where your resources are and make sure your phone is charged. But even a prepared person isn't really prepared if they don't have the money to evacuate or support themselves through the difficult time.
Princella Talley: It's amazing to me how people really don't realize the recovery following a storm looks different when you have these financial constraints on you. Like food going bed, it's not like, oh, when the storm passes, I'll go buy more food. It's going to take time.
Katharine Wilkinson: Princella's words remind me of this poem by Patricia Smith called Man on The TV Say, and it's imagining a newscaster during Katrina saying go evacuate. And you imagine that he's a white newscaster saying this to black communities. And she has this line. "Aha, like our body's got wheels and gas, like at the end of that running, there's an open door with dry and song inside." And it just captures the rawness of an impossible situation that people face when a storm is coming. So I'm curious Nikayla, how did Princella and her family fare as Hurricane Laura hit?
Nikayla Jefferson: Princella lost power on day one of the storm. And she ended up being out of powerful over a week. And by day two, all of her fresh food had gone bad. She drove around her neighborhood, which was now just a tangle of down power lines, just so she could sit in her car for as long as she could with the air conditioning. It was just so hot outside.
Princella Talley: And so then by the third or fourth day, I remember having a conversation with my mom and she was like, I wish we could just move away, but why don't I ever leave here?
Nikayla Jefferson: Princella partnered with her local church in the storm's aftermath, donating things like food, medication, toilet paper. She even brought ice water directly to people's doors, a luxury for households who had been days without power.
Princella Talley: People cried because they were just at home with nothing. We were out of power for about ... Like some areas, they were out of power for about three days, some nine, some longer than that. Just to have someone come to your house and give you ice and water was a big deal. And we provided supplies to 75 families. We did that because we knew no one was coming and we knew we had to figure it out ourselves.
Leah Stokes: I'm curious Nikayla about whether Princella had anything to say about whether or not other people in her community are making this connection between climate change and these storms. Do people sort of think of hurricanes as a climate justice issue?
Nikayla Jefferson: Yes she did talk about that actually. Pineville is a pretty conservative leaning place. They voted for Trump in November. So it's not exactly an easy place to talk about climate, but Princella is a bit of an outlier in her community. She works for the Citizens' Climate Lobby and she's a fellow at Yale in climate communication. She's like a real climate person so she's comfortable raising the issue now.
Princella Talley: There's always been that sense of like, keep your head down. You don't want to make people mad. You'll end up what? Fired from a job. You'll end up with all these like punishments and slaps on the hand.
Nikayla Jefferson: Her advice? Don't talk like a climate person. Talk like your mom.
Princella Talley: That's where I start getting the most like interest and inspiration because it's never like these long speeches I give. It's always like, oh yeah, we need to do something about the weather and our impact on it because you know what happened at this person's house. And then people are like, oh yeah, you're right. And I'm like, oh, maybe that's all I had to say, but I tend to like go into more of those technical terms, the deeper I get into the space. And I don't see that happening with her.
Leah Stokes: I feel like Princella's experience here is just such a strong lesson for the climate movement that starting with people's lived reality really works. And it's not surprising because for so many black Americans, climate impacts, fossil fuel impacts these aren't theoretical. They are lived experiences.
Katharine Wilkinson: Turns out that smacking people with facts is not always the best way forward. Although what's interesting when we think about lived reality, we start to see that show up in facts. We see it in polling data that 57% of black Americans are concerned or alarmed about climate change. That number is 49% for white Americans and it jumps up to 69% for LatinX Americans. So naturally if you're facing this reality more intimately day in and day out, you're going to be more concerned.
Leah Stokes: Yeah. And even in some research that I've done with [Parrish Berquist 00:00:27:19] and [Madel Miltenberger 00:27:20], we find that Hispanic and black Americans are the most supportive of ideas like the green new deal. And I think that the climate movement broadly has woken up to these facts this year. They have started to understand that climate justice is racial justice and I'm sure Nikayla, you've had a front row seat to this transformation. And so how is this change happened?
Nikayla Jefferson: That was something I spoke about with Princella too. How do we stop tokenizing black involvement in the climate movement and get back to a place where we aren't just there to check a box or make white people feel good about themselves? How do we harness our grief and resilience to make the climate movement stronger? I think the white environmental movement kind of had this moment back in June after George Floyd died. And it was like a moment of reckoning in the environmental community. And I mean, you had the Sierra Club put out a statement that they stand with black lives. That was really unexpected. I think that's just a sign that things are adapting and changing. And these old white environmentalists are more open to their ideas about inclusion and diversity and what climate change really means. These views that they hold, they're changing. Do you see that at all?
Princella Talley: I do see that. I think on the flip side of that, what's concerned me is that it had to be something so extreme that they had to see to start coming to terms with that. When it's like, you could've listened to us a long time ago, but it's like, why do things have to come to a head in this way? But at least the change is starting and it's always rubbed me a bit wrong when we do have older white environmentalists or people in power saying, this is what we'll do and communities of color will benefit from it. Well, how do you know? Like you don't even know that, you're not part of that community. So when you're telling me that and I see no team behind you, that supports that, that looks like me, or that's advocating for that, that looks like me, then we have some sort of conflict happening.
Princella Talley: It's an internal conflict of I'm not sure exactly what your motives are. Maybe you do really want to help, but if you don't have the understanding there, you may actually just be helping yourself while you're convincing yourself you're helping us.
Nikayla Jefferson: Yeah. I feel like this lack of diversity within the climate movement is one of the biggest weaknesses. And I've thought a lot about how to address this issue and how to make it more inclusive. Because like you're saying, like if you have a bunch of white people advocating for policy and they take it into communities of color, the people that live there are going to regard it with some kind of suspicion, like who are you? Why are you here? Do you have our best interest at heart? Like considering history, probably not. So I guess I just don't really know what to do about that.
Princella Talley: I agree with you. And for me, it's so interesting, that fine line, and it should be there because rightfully what will happen if you have "my best interests at heart," and then it hits a point where you don't need me anymore and then those interests go away. You don't just need me as a number or a person of color. And so I guess the best way I've navigated through that is just by being really brutally honest, that this is not how it should be and I'm not a person to look at as, oh you being that one black woman in the room shows that things are changing. It's like no. Incorrect. I'm here, but I'm hoping that a lot more of us would be here because just me in the room, standing out this way is a problem in itself. And I say that, and I'm not apologetic about it. And I think that helps because it's addressing the need and it's addressing the lack that's still there and I'm not going to use my presence to justify that things are getting better when they should be way farther along.
Nikayla Jefferson: Yeah, for me, it's like, I think about the effects of climate change and knowing that communities of color will be impacted the most. So we have to be the ones to lead the policy here because in the end it's going to affect us the most. I think it's an issue with time and resources and accessibility for why more people of color aren't in the climate movement. But then I also think there's this tension historically where environmentalism has been so white, but I don't really consider this to be an environmental issue. I mean, I think it's a justice issue.
Princella Talley: Yeah. Yeah, totally. And that makes me think again about funding and putting money into communities that need it because the more financial support that's there, the more people can actually advocate for things that matter to them that they wouldn't have the time to otherwise. It's sort of like when you speak about justice, let's say we divest from fossil fuels, we invest in clean energy. Well, are we going to also invest in job placement programs and things that don't favor elitism and really does support that just transition? And I just think the mark is missed so often and often, usually by white people with good intentions where it's like, if we do this one thing, it fixes it all. But there's so many layers and so many complexities, and you're not going to have a lot of people show up the way they could, if you don't support them in ways that can help improve their lifestyles as a whole.
Katharine Wilkinson: I love what you all touch on in this conversation Nikayla because climate solutions are not some kind of magic fairy dust that gets us to a more equal and more just future. We have to pay attention to how we move climate action forward, paying attention to who benefits and who decides and how drawbacks get mitigated. And that depends on people having the support and the funding to be at the table to shape those things in the first place.
Leah Stokes: Yeah, I feel like we saw this play out in Georgia with the election, which I know Katharine lives in Georgia and saw this up close. But it's like if we actually give resources to organizing in communities of color, like we can transform politics, we can make changes. And I think the same thing has to be happening in the climate movement. We have to think about what groups are we funding, where are resources flowing, how are we even financing those groups to allow them to use their own voices to fight the fossil fuel system.
Katharine Wilkinson: But there's an incredible imbalance in climate philanthropy today. I mean, there's incredible work that's being done by the Hive Fund and others to try to right that ship. But most climate funding goes to efforts run by white men. And we see smaller grassroots groups led by women of color that are doing really transformational work that may just be getting a pittance from foundations that could support this work to such a greater degree.
Nikayla Jefferson: I feel like there's no one better to solve the issues in their community than people who actually live in the community. And they're not these white men that had these environmental organizations, they're these small grassroots community efforts that are truly fighting for themselves. And I feel like we really need to pivot away from this writing a big blank check to these national environmental organizations and focus on building local community power. It also seeds the ground for potential political power shifts. Like what we did see in Georgia, Georgia flipped blue, not because the Democratic party went in there a month before and made some phone calls, but it was because local grassroots organizations worked for years to build that kind of power.
Leah Stokes: And Nikayla, I know you've been doing exactly this kind of organizing in San Diego for the last couple of years.
Nikayla Jefferson: Yeah. I've been hard at work here in San Diego. I was one of the founders of My Sunrise [inaudible 00:36:28] here. And over the past year, not only just working in this election, but also working to build local community power because outside of voting in an election, community power matters. It matters when COVID hits and we need money for mutual aid funds. It matters when we want to show up in the streets for black lives, it's important to have these networks of community in place so that when your community is suffering, that there are people who are willing and able to respond.
Katharine Wilkinson: And it feels to me actually like the climate movement, the white climate movement has a lot to learn from black communities about how to do this well.
Nikayla Jefferson: The climate crisis isn't something we can get through individually. It's going to require a massive coordinated and collective effort, not just to survive. But to get to a place where we're able to live meaningful, happy lives again. And climate grief really has a key part in this process. The longer we stay in denial, the longer it takes for us to reach this place of acceptance, where we can admit that our way of life is unsustainable and it's harmful. And in the next world, we need to feel it, we need to build a world with people at the center and we need to build it with empathy.
Leah Stokes: A Matter of Degrees is co-hosted by me, Leah Stokes.
Katharine Wilkinson: And by me, Katharine Wilkinson. Very special thanks to Nikayla Jefferson for guest hosting the show this week.
Leah Stokes: We are a production of Postscript Audio.
Katharine Wilkinson: Jamie Kaiser, Sydney Bartone and Stephen Lacey produce the show.
Leah Stokes: Sean Marquand edited, mixed and composed our theme song.
Katharine Wilkinson: Additional music came from Blue Dot Sessions.
Leah Stokes: The [inaudible 00:38:26] was designed by Karl Spurzem.
Katharine Wilkinson: Our website was designed by Caroline Hadilaksono.
Leah Stokes: A special thanks to the funders and supporters who made this show possible. The Hewlett Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropy, The 11th Hour Project, UC Santa Barbara and others.
Katharine Wilkinson: You can subscribe on Spotify, Apple, Google Podcasts, or any other place. You get your shows. Or go to our website degreespod.com.
Leah Stokes: And you can follow both of us, the pod and our production team on Twitter. You'll find our accounts on the website and in the show notes.
Katharine Wilkinson: Stay with us as we tell more stories for the climate curious.