Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth

How to Live with Care and Purpose in an Endangered World

By: Kate Schapira

Narrated by: Helen Laser

Climate anxiety is real—and this practical, accessible guide helps address it on personal, relational, and structural levels, from the founder of the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth.

Summer after summer is the hottest on record. People’s homes are flooding, burning, blowing away. We live with the loss, pain, and grief of what’s happened, and anxiety for what might happen next, as the systems in which we live are increasingly strained. Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth addresses our collective concerns with empathy, grace, and practical strategies to help us all envision a viable future. By moving through your personal and general climate anxiety, frustration, helplessness and grief, you can move toward a sense of shared purpose and community care. You’ll find actionable steps for connecting with others, identifying and activating community abundance, matching your skills with organized climate activism, and imagining a radically more livable future in order to bring it into being. Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth meets you where you are, not sugarcoating the realities of this growing crisis, but offering practical strategies for meeting a climate-changed present and future with emotional honesty and communal support.

In 2014, when Kate Schapira first set up a Climate Anxiety Counseling booth in her hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, far fewer people were talking about climate change and its attendant anxiety, leaving those who couldn’t ignore climate change and the forces that cause it feeling frantic and alone. Seeking a way to reach out and connect, Schapira set up a Peanuts-style "The Doctor Is In" booth to talk about climate change with her community. Ten years and over 1200 conversations later, Schapira channels all she’s learned into an accessible, understandable, and aware guide for processing climate anxiety and connecting with others to carry out real change in your life and in your community.

©2024 Kate Schapira (P)2024 Hachette Go

Critic reviews

“This is a grounded, no BS, guide for how to move through climate anxiety and grief into action. Necessary, clear-eyed, and compassion-filled, it helped me become a fuller member of my many communities.”—Elizabeth Rush, Author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore and The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth

“Going beyond the lessons themselves, Schapira offers thoughtful questions and engaging practices to help us embody the personal and collective transformation needed in these climate changed times.”—LaUra Schmidt, Founder of Good Grief Network and author of How to Live in a Chaotic Climate: 10 Steps to Reconnect with Ourselves, Our Communities, and Our Planet

“Brimming with practical strategies to engage your heart, mind, and body in the work of climate justice, this book is a roll-up-your-sleeves resource for finding purpose, community, and even joy in uncertain times. Schapira’s superpower is her rich experience working with activists, mental health experts, and frontline communities, and here, she distills the resulting wisdom in a guidebook that is equal parts balm and ballast for the work ahead.”—Author of A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet, Sarah Jaquette Ray