This episode is the start of a mini-series "How Climate Changes Me," partly inspired by a University of Montana "Eco-Melancholia" conference held earlier this year. Our guest, Richard Forbes, is a graduate of the Environmental Science and Natural Resource Journalism master's program at UM. He dives into the relationship between his school work, his life's work, and how he deals with the challenges that bridge the two.

 

Story Transcript

Ashby Kinch:
This is the first of two episodes on “How Climate Changes Me”, a collection of professional and personal insights from graduate students in the humanities researching the impact of climate change on human culture.  Climate change is a topic that science alone cannot fully address. But the humanities have a long history of looking at hard problems from multiple perspectives, so are well-suited to explore the human dimensions of the problem.  

In this two-part series, we’ll hear graduate student voices from Masters programs in Literature and the Environment and Environmental Journalism, exploring hard questions of mental health, climate grief and the drive to find joy and creativity in the face of these trying times. These ideas were partly inspired by a conference at UM called Eco-Melancholia, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities entitled “Re-Imagining Death: Community Conversations on Death, Dying, and Grief.” We thank the NEH for their support.  

This episode features Richard Forbes, who graduated in Spring 2023 from the Masters Program in Environmental Journalism. In the show notes, you can find links to work he's done reporting on the groundbreaking court case Held vs. Montana. In August, District Court Judge Kathy Seeley ruled in favor of the 16 youth plaintiffs, claiming that their constitutional rights to a clean environment were jeopardized by state policy. In the episode, Richard ruminates more broadly on the impact climate change has had on his state of mind, as he seeks to hang on to what he calls an “absurd form of hope.” You’ll also hear the voice of Amelia Liberatore, a graduate of the same program, who produced this series.  

Welcome to Confluence, where the river is always with us!  

Amelia Liberatore:

Welcome to the Confluence podcast min-series, “How Climate Changes Me.” Our first subject is Richard Forbes. He’s a writer, a photographer, and an avid outdoorsman. And to decompress from school, he plays the guitar.

Richard Forbes:

Most of what I'm interested in is what I call, like, the intersection between identity and mental health, and the environment. And so when I say “identity,” it's really open ended. When I say “mental health,” it's really open ended. When I say “the environment,” it's really open-ended.

I'm Richard Forbes. I'm a second-year in the environmental journalism master's program and also a student in the natural resource conflict resolution program.

I’m working on, somehow, horrifically, three different projects at the same time. One is a study of the glaciers of Glacier National Park, and the relationship between humans and glaciers in that space, for which I'm trying to visit all the glaciers in Glacier National Park. I'm really trying to explore like what they mean to people and communities in that space.

I'm also studying a lawsuit where 16 Children are suing the state of Montana for lack of engagement on climate change. It's the first youth-led climate lawsuit to go to trial in the United States. It's a big deal. For that story, initially, it was just trying to understand what it felt like to be a plaintiff in this lawsuit. And it's expanded beyond that to, I think, what it means to be young and confronting these issues and how that both carries with it, like, these shifts of identity, but also balancing empowerment and, and grief.

And then finally, my third project is a needs assessment on a collaborative partnership in the Crown of the Continent region, which stretches from Missoula to Banff. And I’ll be doing this needs assessment to talk to 15 to 17 different collaborative leaders across this area to see what they need in terms of support to help tie this area together. And it's really about, like, what a community is, what the scale is, and how we can support each other in protecting these spaces.

I did a story on this mountaineer once. And she said, whenever she was on the summit in the Cascades, she could see the tapestry of all the memories that had brought her to every other summit in the area. And I'd never had that—my own experience articulated so well. So it's, like, when I'm in the Cascades, I'm moving through a tapestry that like, of relationship with everybody who's been there with me, all the solo trips I've gone on, all the things I've seen. And spent a ton of time in the Glacier National Park area over last summer and have allowed myself to like, start to invest in this area in a similar way. But of course, it's painful too because you see damage being done and you see changes being wrought. I know a lot of people who are articulating to me that like Glacier feels so busy, that it's not worth going anymore for them. Because they love it too much. And it's too hard to see.

So, in part I'm doing this glacier project because I struggle with climate grief. And the concept that glaciers are melting is horrific and deeply upsetting to me. And changing the way that our natural systems work. And from the outside, from a distance, it's quite easy to feel just totally overwhelmed by that. Like, to sit in this gray-walled room, it’s audio-proofed, and imagine a glacier and watching it in my head kind of like trickling away: That's a tragedy. But the thing is, when you're out in the landscape, moving toward glaciers, or across them, or sitting on them, or just being present with them, it doesn't feel like only a loss. It feels like a lot more complicated than that.

To me, like, being outdoors and alone is a really sacred place that helps me get a handle on how I'm feeling.

I grew up in the suburbs, a lot of strip malls, about 20, 30 minutes outside of Philadelphia. When I was 11 or 12, we went out to Oregon, to the Bend area and went to the Three Sisters Wilderness. And I remember that the scope of the landscape, kind of, how far you could see, hundreds of miles. And I just remember this deep feeling of like spaciousness that I just didn't feel at home. And home was not great. And so, I wanted this feeling of spaciousness. And I found that outdoors, in the mountains, in particular.

And I finished school and did eight months of ecology research in the mountains of Colorado, counting leaves on aspen trees. And pretty much lost my mind because it was so, so alone—just counting leaves endlessly. The only time I was actually lighting up was when I was telling people about the work I was doing. Because it was all in service of climate models. But actually I didn't want to do the work at all, I just wanted to tell people about it. And so after that, I was like, I don't think I'm cut out to be a research scientist. So I transitioned more towards outdoor guiding in the hopes that I could somehow like, show people how to relate to the world in a different way, and inspire them like individually and personally.

Ultimately I realized, like, people didn't want as much of the stewardship stuff as I was trying to give them. They want to learn the skills I was teaching, like how to rock climb, and didn't necessarily want the spiel on “Leave No Trace.”

And I think I came to school and in part to try to engage with this, like, recreational overuse that I saw. But I recognized that it was not necessarily due to anything other than people trying to heal themselves outdoors, which is what I was trying to do with it as well. And so I came to school to like ask those questions.

Grad school has always been complex and difficult. But the thing that I think does make it different right now, to me, is that it's not just that we have a couple of different, like, scary things happening in the world. It’s that every single one of our structures is melting down. And to be going to grad school in the face of this, is like the most absurd form of hope.

A lot of what I feel like is required of me right now in this moment is setting boundaries. ‘Cause I could just take too many classes just fall apart emotionally and then hypothetically be learning something. But I'm not sure I'd be learning what I want to learn, which is like balance and health and healthy engagement with the work that I want to do.

If I were to graduate grad school, just knowing that I could tank myself for two years, and that that was the way that I had found quote unquote, like, success or, like, value, I'm not sure that's what I want to learn from here. I'd much rather learn that no matter what pressure I can be under, I can take care of myself. Because all grad school really is, is an invitation to explore what you care about more deeply. That's it. And it's also a specific structure of how people have done that in the past. But you get to decide how you engage with that structure. And you have to, in the same way that you have to decide how you engage with the structure of the world as it is. We need to reprioritize things pretty dramatically.

How soft could you be with yourself through that hard time? How much could you forgive yourself for when you didn't do exactly how you wanted to? How could you ask for help when you needed it? Who showed up? And then how did you show up for them?

For so long, my mental health came from spending time only in the mountains, which meant I was pretty tied to them. I still am. I try to get out at least twice a week, which has been hard during grad school.

[Richard in archival tape: Woo! Wow!]

But, but there needs to be a way to, like, connect that back to home a little bit better. And I think the biggest thing is to trust that other people in your life may be able to hold these things with you. And so, it’s not, for me, enough to just go run and try to get through my feelings by running. Because it turns out that when I stop running, they come back. And it’s not enough to talk about these things because when I stop talking about them, they come back. But I think it’s a balancing act between the embodied experience of working with these emotions and the verbal experience of working with these emotions. And that’s what I talk about when I’m talking about spaciousness. It's: take what feels like there's not enough and put more time into it.

To be alone, and quiet, I think that's a revolutionary act in the world that we live in now, which is like a constant cacophony of there's not enough time, and there's not enough anything. It's all about scarcity. And the simple act of saying: “I'm going to gate off this 10 minutes, and nothing's gonna go inside of it.” It's, like, a small insurrection to meditate, or to take time out of your day to be slow with a friend. Eat a good meal and not scarf it down, because you gotta work. Just starting to kind of stretch at the boundaries of the time that we're told we don't have. And I can, at any point, just say: “You know what, world? I do have time.”

How did I behave in relation to my work? How did I care for myself in my work, and the people I came across in my day? Did I do that well? Cool, it's a good day. If I did badly, let's try that again.

And I get stuff done in direct proportion to how well I treat myself. I can't determine my value by whether or not I've finished this project or publish it. In large part, because every time I’ve published anything, it actually hasn't felt like what I hoped it would. It didn't actually do anything. But the individual experiences of working with people, interviewing them, and then sitting in front of a draft and trying to make sense of the world that way. And then bringing that back to my community, I think that's the, I think that's the outcomes that I can hold on to and value and say ‘thank you’ for.

And if you can do that through grad school, in relation to your work, you've done it. And that's where empowerment comes from and agency comes from. If you're willing to recognize that every single little transformation actually goes somewhere. Even if you can't see where it's going yet. That's how I think you can learn how to engage with this work and be okay in this world. You just have to make peace with the fact that if you can just live a day-to-day life that’s in line with your values, you'll see transformations in hindsight that were really valuable. But they don't feel like that in the moment. They often feel quite painful. And scary.

Our system is designed to, in many ways, let us pretend that certainty is possible. It doesn't make any sense at all. It's like not how the world works. Uncertainty is always around us. That's inherently painful. And if we don't, as a society, look at that, and, like, accept that and look at it and learn how to metabolize that into ourselves and into our stories, we're going through life backwards, or, or even worse, like, hurting ourselves as we do it. I, personally, would prefer to look at the uncertainty and make way for it, myself.

I do want to normalize that these conversations and these feelings are healthy. Like, the idea of climate grief, or climate anger, or climate anxiety: these are moral emotions. It's immoral, what we're doing to the environment. The feeling that it's bad is a healthy thing to feel.

Everyone is experiencing these things. Grad students may be putting themselves into the fray of it, into the thick of it, in a very academic way, and therefore suffering in very particular ways. But I'm, I'm being impacted by climate change quite minimally, compared to many others. And will likely be impacted less than others, because of the privilege and position that I have.

But what I want to push back on in my own narrative of what I've even just described is like this concept of a “loss narrative”. That that things are getting worse. I mean, you can find loss narratives anywhere you look. I mean, not to be super grim. But, it's like, we're all dying. So you can look at every human experience as a loss narrative: that you're just losing, always. And that’s one way you can look at it. But obviously, no one wants to look at the world that way.

Last September or October, I was reading all these poems by this poet, Ross Gay, who I love. In part, because I think he gave me permission to understand what it felt like to hold love and grief at the same time. And I've been thinking a lot about the concept of hospice. I think about my aunt dying and what it was like to sit with her as she died. And there was so much joy for the person she was and who she was becoming as she's dying. And that's the type of narrative I'm trying to get at, is that like, if you feel these simple narratives of loss, challenge those. Because I think it's really hard to be motivated by a loss narrative.

There are ways to hold this type of grief and complexity. There’s a concept called “trauma stewardship,” because it is traumatic, to feel these things. I want to be clear, it's traumatic to be alive, so it's not like, I'm doing anything crazy. But it's traumatic to come face-to-face with these concepts. And, and what that requires of us is that we're careful with ourselves, and, and do a very deliberate job of creating spaces for us to heal and be safe. So that we can keep engaging with these spaces.

I believe pretty strongly that curiosity and play are antidotes to depression. They don't fix it. But they’re ways to get at it and change your relationship with it. If you can be curious, it’s a whole different mindset.  

Metabolizing these experiences, allowing experiences and emotions to move through you and support each other in those things: that's gonna be necessary, no matter what happens. If things go well, and we manage to fix this, there's going to be grief about how we got here. If things don't go well, and the climate keeps kind of sliding off this cliff, there's gonna be a lot of grief there, too. Even if we manage to fix things, I'm guessing the ways that we fix things are going to cause us grief. There's going to be a loss. But it's okay, life's about losing. Make it safe to lose.