Charting Our Path Forward with Dr. Katharine Wilkinson

A grounded, hopeful roadmap for navigating climate emotions and choosing to move forward.

Climate change. For many of us, it hums in the background of daily life. For those attuned to the natural world, it can feel constant, impossible to ignore.

And with that awareness comes a complicated emotional landscape: grief for what’s already been lost, anxiety about what’s ahead, frustration at the gap between knowing and doing. We can see the solutions, yet the impacts keep unfolding in real time. So the question becomes less about what we know and more about how we live with it. How do we hold all of that and transform it into something constructive? How do we move from overwhelm to agency?

In our latest episode, we’re joined by Dr. Katharine Wilkinson, writer, teacher, and one of the most influential voices shaping the modern climate movement. Her work spans from co-editing the bestselling All We Can Save to contributing to Drawdown and hosting the podcast A Matter of Degrees. In her newest book, Climate Wayfinding: Healing Ourselves and the Planet We Call Home, she offers something we don’t often make space for in climate discourse: a framework not just for solutions, but for orientation.

Because before we can act, we have to find our footing.

Climate Wayfinding weaves together personal narrative, a wide array of voices from across the climate community, and the steadying force of poetry and art. Instead of rushing past the emotional weight of this moment, it invites us to move through it, to find clarity not in certainty, but in direction.

Joining us as guest co-host is Steve Nygren, founder of Serenbe and author of Start In Your Own Backyard: Transforming Where You Live with Radical Common Sense. For decades, Steve has been reimagining what it looks like to live in deeper relationship with nature, building a model for community that’s rooted in connection, walkability, and ecological responsibility. His perspective brings the conversation out of the abstract and into the lived, reminding us that place still matters and that change often starts closer than we think.

Together, we explore what it means to shift from awareness to agency, the role of community in navigating uncertainty, and why intergenerational collaboration may be one of our most powerful tools moving forward.

There’s no single roadmap out of the climate crisis. But there are ways to begin. And sometimes, the most important first step is choosing to pick up a compass, orient yourself, and simply move forward.