"I Want People to Start Talking About Courage"

Dekila Chungyalpa on building personal and communal resilience in the Anthropocene.

Dear friends,

Dekila Chungyalpa seems made for this exact moment in time. Or that’s what I kept thinking when I spoke with her on the phone recently.

Dekila and the team she leads at UW–Madison’s Loka Initiative just wrapped up the Resilience in the Anthropocene (RITA) Summit, which brought together a wide range of experts, researchers, and leaders to discuss eco-anxiety and climate distress.  

Dekila was raised in Sikkim, in the eastern Himalayas. Her mother was a Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher, and she grew up surrounded by female Buddhist teachers and practitioners. She moved to the United States to study environmental science and then worked for over a decade for the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), one the world’s largest environmental organizations. While there, Dekila designed and ran conservation projects in the Eastern Himalayas and the Mekong Delta. Then, in 2008, she had a meeting with His Holiness the 17th Karmapa, the head of her family's Buddhist Karma Kagyu lineage, and he invited her to create environmental guidelines for Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and nunneries. That work ended up sparking a movement among monks and nuns in the Himalayas, who began to wholeheartedly embrace environmental and climate action as key to their work.

“We ended up having over 50 monasteries and nunneries that do very tangible, measurable environmental and climate projects,” she told me.

That work spurred the creation of a program at WWF called Sacred Earth, which engaged faith leaders and religious institutions all around the world in conservation efforts. And it involved a leap for Dekila: She says she lost respect from some scientists, who saw religion as part of the problem, and she heard from some people in the Himalayas that she should not leave the mainstream environmental world, where she had “climbed the nonprofit corporate ladder,” because she could lose her influence.

“The work I was doing with faith leaders meant that I was delving deeper and deeper into an intellectual rigor that meant I had to keep looking at the decisions the environmental and climate movement was making and see fundamental flaws and areas of tension there,” she told me. “And I could see all the paradoxes of trying to address environmental and climate issues without ever addressing the big elephant in the room, which is capitalism and neoliberalism.”

Soon thereafter, she left WWF as a recipient of a Yale fellowship that allowed her to spend three years talking with faith leaders and culture keepers in Indigenous traditions and asking them what they wanted. The result was the Loka Initiative—a project that works to do the kind of climate resilience building at the heart of the RITA Summit, while also supporting faith leaders and culture keepers more directly. “Our vision is that inner, community, and planetary resilience are interdependent. And you cannot achieve any one of these without working on the other two,” she said.

Here are some excerpts from our conversation:

This summer, we’ve seen an onslaught of extreme weather and possible climate tipping points. How is this hitting you personally? How are you talking about it with faith leaders?

I've been an environmental activist since I was 15. So that's the better part of my life, I'm close to 50 now. And the strongest emotion for me usually is grief. Because the planet has been transformed and will transform in ways that are not just unlivable for human beings, but for all life on Earth. So there's a lot of grief involved in understanding what is being lost. And I feel a great deal of fatigue. I get asked about hope in almost every talk I do, and I'm really fatigued by the question. I want people to start talking about courage. Let's stop waiting for hope to activate us because we need to be in a period where it's courage that's activating us. And having said that, the well of emotion underneath all of that for me is determination. I'm just absolutely, 100 percent undistractedly determined that we need to protect everyone vulnerable as much as we can.

Some people, when they [realize these planetary changes are occurring], want to drop everything and start working on the emergency that's in front of us. It's important that we care and we show up, but I don't think people have to leave what they do because everything is interdependent. Climate change is touching all of us whether we are aware of it or not. It does not matter what social issue you're working on. Or even what financial sector you're working in. It's going to come for all of us. So the question is: How do we build momentum? And how do we support the people who are out there really working full-time on the issue? A lot of it comes back to actual community. We're not going to survive this as individuals.

I'm tired of hearing from people who have been crowned as experts and not seeing BIPOC women and women from the Global South [included]. So my very honest motivation for creating the RITA summit was to say, "We're going to listen to the people who have been dealing with this for decades, if not centuries. People who come from communities that have been bearing the fallout of [environmental injustice] for a very long time." And I think all of that really comes back to my determination to protect what I can, and who I can, as much as possible given what's coming.

And one way to think about it is about our proximity to vulnerability and suffering. It's possible for all of us to experience fear and anxiety and distress and grief about the climate. But some people are in closer proximity to physical suffering, and that means that their emotional reactions are just going to be much deeper, much more in crisis mode than ours. [So I want more people to] have enough compassion to decenter ourselves to protect them.

You’ve spoken about the potential that the faith community has to impact, to potentially protect, to really support climate dialogues in a lot of parts of the world. Can you speak to why that work is important?

Over 80 percent of the human population subscribes to religion. The second wealthiest property owner in the world is the Catholic Church. Religions own 8 percent of all habitable land, at least 50 percent of all schools worldwide are run by religious groups. There are concrete reasons why we need to think of faith as a collective stakeholder group. When we look at the fossil fuel divestment movement, for example, one third of all divestment so far has been by faith leaders and faith institutions. These are major stakeholder groups that [the environmental movement] has ignored because it’s uncomfortable with what they stand for—other than a few voices like Bill McKibben and Katharine Hayhoe, who was a wonderful friend and advisor for LOKA.

But then there’s this other part to it, too, which is that loneliness has been declared by the Surgeon General of the U.S. as a major epidemic. And we are constantly bemoaning the loss of third spaces in public spheres. We no longer have places where people can congregate and build community that is not about consumerism. And so to me, there is really a deeper conversation that can be had with faith leaders where they are contributing something to the secular and science worlds.

First, faith leaders can be masters of the language of hope and joy. Second, they are experts at building community. I'm not talking about judging what kind of community, but the strategy of being able to build community. Third, they offer resilience. Because if you're in their in-group, then you essentially have something larger than yourself and your nuclear family to fall back on, right?

The LOKA initiative’s project to work with evangelical leaders in the U.S. has been very successful. We bring in 20 to 25 faith leaders every year, and then essentially have these closed-door dialogues with UW–Madison scientists. We often have climate skeptics and climate questioners in the room, and they get to ask every question. We have these dialogues where we're breaking down barriers, we're not othering the other group, and we're just having heartfelt dialogues. And then we stay with that group for the rest of the year as a support base for them as they decide what they want to do on these issues. It was a deliberate decision for me not to other these leaders because it has been done to me so much—in the best and in the worst ways.

And sometimes we joke, because it’s like, “What is this Himalayan Buddhist girl doing trying to bring them together?” But I think this is the work that needs to happen, because unfortunately we don't have a peace and conflict reconciliation program in the U.S. and we desperately need that as a nation. We don't have spaces where we can talk about white guilt, right? We don't have spaces where we can break down white supremacy, transform it, and make reparations. Those are all things that have to happen for us to heal as a nation. And as long as we're busy being part of the othering process, we're never going to get to what needs to get resolved.

The evangelical work is the project of ours that gets the most pushback. [Its opponents point to] hate speech and terrorism, but I'm not interested in reaching the far right and I am not capable of reaching the far right. I can reach the people in the middle who are unsure or feel unmotivated, demoralized, and alone, however. So many of these pastors say, "I'm completely alone. I really want to work on climate change but I don't know how to shift my congregation or my superior." And so, are we really just going to give up on people who agree with us, but are stuck?  

I’ve had some similar experiences meeting with Midwestern farmers who have very different world views than I do. There’s often more common ground than I realize and really listening to one another can be helpful.

One thing I should add is that I can do this work because I'm white adjacent. I’m not perceived as "threatening" to a lot of people. I'm small and Himalayan, and I can move around in a lot of identities. And when I talk about being open-minded and not othering people, I don't mean when you are in a situation of active harm. I really mean more for those of us who are in positions where we can build things differently. I’m using whatever privilege I have, and whatever rooms I'm invited into, to essentially make sure that the people who are most vulnerable are resourced and protected. And I'm so grateful to be able to work in the margins of the environmental and climate movements, because evolution happens in the margins.

Can you say more about the conversation that you’re helping facilitate between those in the faith world and those in the mental health world around climate grief and climate anxiety?

In 2019, we gathered 60 faith leaders, cultural keepers of indigenous tradition, scientists, and experts in the room for about four days, and they helped me design the Loka Initiative. And in that meeting one of my friends who used to be the Senior Vice President of Climate Change for the WWF, Lou Leonard, was supposed to give a talk, but he ended up dropping all of his talking points. Instead he  shared what he had personally experienced after attending the [UN Climate summit] in 2009 in Copenhagen, and how much despair he was carrying. He ended by telling faith leaders, “If there is one thing you can help us with, it's to address the fact that those of us who are in the environmental and climate movement are all in emotional crisis.” And we had another very famous climate scientist in the room who echoed him and she said, "I have no hope left."

That was the first time I sat up and asked myself: “Why do I keep going? And how is it that I came out of that hopelessness and that despair?” Because Lou and I had very parallel experiences in 2009. And I realized it was because the Karmapa had given me a meditation to address what I was experiencing. And that meditation had helped me a great deal to work through my grief, my rage, and my sorrow, and to skillfully use those emotions and turn them into action.

And simultaneously, what I was finding was that people were always given mindfulness as a technique to address the psychological trauma related to the environmental and climate crisis. And I knew as the daughter of a Buddhist leader that mindfulness is not a practice that is given universally to everybody equally; it's given to specific people at specific points in their life. But there are tons of other practices that are given when you are experiencing trauma. For instance, if you are a person who has experienced sexual violence, you're almost always given purification and empowerment [practices] instead.

When Lou and I talked about our emotions, faith leaders in the room just immediately started recommending different practices. And I knew then that one of the things LOKA would be really invested in doing would be drawing from wisdom traditions from all around the world to address the healing that needs to happen for us. First, the regulation of our emotions and the healing of our trauma. And then second, we will need empowerment because it is going to get rough. How are we going to show up? How are we going to embody the spiritual principles we subscribe to?

LOKA is housed at UW’s Center for Healthy Minds, which was founded by Richie Davidson, the neuroscientist who proved that meditation literally changes the neuroplasticity of the brain. So I have access to all of these amazing neuroscientists and psychologists, and I'm making full use of them and essentially looking at and testing different practices from different wisdom traditions. So everything from land-based healing, to the power of prayer, to the power of writing out your own personal prayer...a whole variety of practices to address these two things: the individual trauma healing that needs to happen, and the activation and embodiment of our values.

Watch a guided meditation with Dekila here.

Climate news you may have missed

The value of anger

A recent study looked at anger as a motivator for climate action in Norway and found that it was a much stronger indicator of collective action and support for policies that would reduce fossil fuel emissions than sadness or fear were. The latter emotions were more likely to serve as motivators for individual action, on the other hand.

I thought about the motivating power of anger as multiple outlets reported on the infuriating fact that global fossil fuel subsidies hit a record $7 trillion this year—14 years after the 20 most powerful countries in the developed world pledged to begin eliminating the subsidies. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), that’s more than twice what the world spends on education. And yet, it’s also far from common knowledge, which makes me wonder: How many more people might feel inspired to take some kind of action if it was?

We are the penguins, the penguins are us

Thanks to “March of the Penguins” and other similar footage, images of male emperor penguins huddling together for warmth, waddling around balancing massive eggs on their feet, and tending their fuzzy gray chicks are implanted in my psyche. So when the sea ice melted before this year’s chicks had developed their waterproof feathers, causing an estimated 10,000 young birds to drown in four West Antarctica penguin colonies, it got to me. There are an estimated 61 colonies across the continent, but that number may soon shrink: some scientists have estimated the penguins’ population could be nearly cut in half by 2050, as ice is melting much earlier in the year. But it’s just not our emotional loss; aquatic ecosystems are also deeply impacted when megafauna like emperor penguins, whales, sharks, and sea turtles begin to shrink in numbers and other species’ populations are thrown out of balance.

Trouble in the Amazon

This multimedia piece about the scientists working to track the changes in the Amazon is well worth your time, even though it’s not easy to read. It deflated some of the optimism I’ve felt since Lula replaced Bolsonaro and deforestation rates dropped considerably, because it turns out a great deal of damage has already been done, and that damage may have permanently altered the Amazon’s ability to serve as a carbon sink. But the description and photos of the researchers who fly over the forest every two weeks to measure the emissions in the air are worth immersing yourself in because they might—at least briefly!—make you feel like you’re there. And the more often we can experience a place without actually traveling there (such as when “March of the Penguins” allowed viewers to visit the ice shelf where the emperor penguins raise their young), the more invested more of us might become in protecting those places.

Groundwater on the brink

I’m used to thinking about groundwater in California as an escalating emergency, as farms and cities pump much more water than they’re adding to the state’s underground stores, and the ground is literally sinking in some parts of the Central Valley. But these New York Times maps helped me understand that the problem extends to nearly every state in the nation: “Americans are squandering their inheritance,” the piece reads. It’s only because groundwater accumulated for many thousands of years that the situation is not more dire—yet. And while the Times piece is focused on the problem, it is possible to slow down the quantity of water that gets drawn by farming in a way that keeps roots in the ground continuously, treats the soil like a sponge, and holds on to rainwater much longer. There are a growing number of farmers, ranchers, and land managers working to add more water than they take, including this network of regenerative poultry farmers in Minnesota I wrote about last month.

No fire this time

Regarding this week’s events at Burning Man, I wanted to point to two things: 1) The climate protesters who blocked the road and caused traffic jams early in the week weren’t just trying to get general climate attention, they had a series of important specific asks for attendees and organizers that included banning private jets. According to Vox, 90 percent of the event’s carbon footprint comes from travel to and from Black Rock City, and we can guess that Chris Rock and Diplo did not spend hours in that traffic getting there. Over 2,000 private flights arrived at the temporary desert airport last year, and these flights aren’t just ostentatious, they’re around 10 times more carbon intensive than flights on commercial planes. 2) The part of the Nevada desert where Burning Man takes place every year is called the Great Basin in part because water doesn’t ever drain easily when it rains. As the climate changes, more rain is expected to fall there more often, making it essentially untenable for massive events. Designer, social justice activist, and former Burning Man camp host Favianna Rodriguez put it well when she said, “We need to completely reimagine this gathering because it is no longer sustainable.”

On the brighter side

1. The Biden administration has announced that it plans to cancel seven oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) that were issued in 2020. “The proposal would prohibit any new leasing in 10.6 million acres, which is more than 40 percent of the reserve,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland told reporters on Wednesday.

2. An Indigenous-owned logging company that created a fire-prevention zone around a town using prescribed burning in 2021 in British Columbia is being recognized for preventing the spread of yet another wildfire this year and once again saving homes and lives.

3. In the United Kingdom lawmakers are a debating a bill that would require new homes to include “swift bricks” or hollow bricks that provides a home for birds like house martin, starlings, and migratory swifts, whose population has declined rapidly in recent years.

4. A small pack of gray wolves have reappeared in Sequoia National Monument after more than 100 years away. According to the LA Times, “their presence is vital to restoring the rhythms of life among countless other animal and plant species that evolved with them.”

5. After a 40-year legal battle, a Louisiana-based oil and gas company has agreed to retire its lease in the Badger Two-Medicine region of northwest Montana, the spiritual homeland of the Blackfeet Tribe.

The Visual

The Sky Island Alliance is conducting a fascinating study intended to document the abundant wildlife living along 30 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. I recommend perusing their collection of photos taken by 65 cameras on both sides of the border over the last 3.5 years.

Thanks for reading and take care,

Twilight

Top banner by Mara Greenaway.