What if the Climate Movement Allowed Itself to Feel?
An interview with Kritee (Kanko) for the Climate Consciousness Summit 2024.
The seven-day Climate Consciousness Summit 2024 starts today! Register for free here to see interviews with more than 30 amazing speakers and daily live sessions, which I’ll be co-hosting with Kosha Joubert and Sonita Mbah.
“My beloved, intelligent colleagues collectively are not seeing that what human beings need is love and belonging and connection and care and healing,” — climate scientist Kritee (Kanko), speaking to the Climate Consciousness Summit 2024.
Resonant World #116
When at last I had a chance to speak with Kritee (whose dharma name is Kanko), it all came together.
The reason I do collective trauma work.
The reason I want my comrades in the climate movement to embrace collective trauma work.
The reason why everything in the world seems so stuck.
And the new potentials that open up when we create spaces together to allow ourselves to actually feel.
To allow the full force of our grief, our rage, our shame, our sadness, and our fear to move through us, free from the conditioning that keeps us so polite and locked down.
Only then — when we’ve had the courage to face what lives inside of us — can we access clarity on what’s actually ours to do.
Because to act wisely, we first have to reckon with the unique ways in which individual, ancestral and collective trauma lives in our mind-body system.
Filtering our perceptions.
Clouding our emotions.
Tensing our bodies.
Distorting our thought processes.
And a million other unconscious impacts besides.
That’s the work we’re being called into at this time.
After speaking to Kritee for an hour, I had no doubt that she’s among those who can show us how.
Kritee told me:
“My favourite phrase here is that ‘we are all walking around with trauma’ — and it’s like traumatized bodies with layers of makeup — and then make money in this hyper-individualistic, capitalist world to try to cover our layers of grief with more cars, bigger houses, more consumption.
“So that trauma and that shame, that inadequacy, that comes from not having taken care of each other’s pain, is driving us to embrace a system that is killing our Mother Earth. So this trauma healing work is essential.”
Walking the Talk
Born and raised in India by a single mother in the family of a visionary lawyer and Gandhian freedom fighter, Kritee moved to the United States more than 20 years ago to start her scientific research on environmental science. Her roles have expanded from climate scientist to include meditation teacher, Buddhist Zen priest, and grief-rage ceremony leader — placing her firmly at the intersection of the climate movement and the global trauma healing movement, the niche I’ve also tentatively begun to consider home.
It so happened that Kritee was the last of eight guests I interviewed for the Climate Consciousness Summit 2024, staged by the Pocket Project in partnership with the nonprofit climate news service DeSmog, where I work as an editor. (The videos of these conversations with leading climate justice advocates, healing practitioners and Indigenous leaders will go online starting today, and you can access them all by registering for the free summit here).
It was perhaps no coincidence that it had been Zhiwa Woodbury (@Tham Zhiwa, creator of THE DHARMA BEAT), whose work on climate trauma is a foundational influence on Resonant World, who suggested I reach out to Kritee. (Resonant World#1: ‘Climate Trauma’.)
Her Zen practice (Kanko means ‘cold light’ in Japanese) and work as a grief ceremony leader has equipped Kritee with a powerful combination of the kinds of protocols and spiritual resources needed to do collective healing work.
But just as importantly, she’s living in alignment with her values — unshirking in following her calling, even when it isn’t comfortable. (Resonant World#35: Should I Stay? Or Should I Go?)
As a climate scientist, Kritee had worked at the Environmental Defense Fund, a very large and well-known nonprofit in the United States.
But she quit after recognising the limits of the climate movement’s tendency to view the crisis primarily in terms of carbon emissions.
Kritee told me:
“My beloved, intelligent colleagues collectively are not seeing that what human beings need is love and belonging and connection and care and healing. It’s like they have ensnared us — these hyper-capitalist systems of hyper-individualism. It’s toxic. What I feel is that the climate movement is very much being led still — even though there have been changes — from a very Eurocentric lens.
“And it’s looking at just a very small sliver of issues — almost like the tip of the iceberg is the climate crisis. But we are not looking at all these other things that are swirling in our global, national, local systems that have both created the issues and are maintaining the climate crisis, and our mental health crisis. Our sense of deep loneliness, and lack of belonging, are a huge part of where we are, and the mainstream climate movement had just stopped feeling satisfying.
“Even though a part of me that loves equations and wants to work with data and analyse things, was very happy, it was not fulfilling. I needed to be in the rubble and hold my people, hug my people, grieve and rage with them.”
‘A Genuine Relationship of Care’
Just as we can all recall how a book, chanced upon at the right moment, changed our life, the right conversation can have a similarly profound effect.
Speaking to Kritee had that threshold quality for me — the field that emerged between us acting like a psychoactive substance.
In my imagination, our exchange assumed a kind of holographic quality — with interpenetrating layers of entangled meaning yielding new insights when held up to the light and viewed from different angles; a conversation I would have to listen to many times to integrate the full spectrum of the transmission I received.
I won’t attempt to capture all the ground we covered here — because I invite you to tune in to the summit and feel into the energy for yourself.
But I will mention briefly that we began to touch into ancestral realms in an unexpected way — presencing my great grandfather John William Brown, who served as a private and (briefly) as a lance-corporal in the British Army in India from 1892 to 1899. (And would later re-enlist to fight in the First World War).
There was a moment of connection that deepened as we both acknowledged our heritage from opposing sides of Britain’s colonial project — me a descendant of a footsoldier in the imperial army; Kritee from a family inspired by Gandhi.
Kritee said:
“For you and I to enter a genuine relationship of care, a genuine sense of solidarity, what needs to happen is that we both get to work on our own ancestral resilience as well as ancestral traumas.
“Cultures of care will not get built unless you and I have worked on our different layers of trauma. And then what do we do in real friendships? ‘I'm sorry, friend, I hurt you. I’m sorry my ancestors hurt your ancestors.’ And how do we build up together? And in that friendship, it’s not a question of what is politically correct.
“So I feel like sometimes we get stuck in a lot of political correctness: change the name of this place; erect a memorial; give money. Those are all appearances. What is happening at the real level? Is real healing happening? The layers of wounds that our lineages carry have sometimes become so frozen, so they feel endless, that we are afraid to touch it.”
Indigenization
A theme that surfaced throughout our conversation was Kritee’s emphasis on “indigenization” — a term she uses to capture both an understanding that Indigenous peoples hold knowledge needed to bring humans and nature back into balance; and the need to approach individual trauma work through a systems lens.1
“My caveat — a crucial one — is that I see some people doing trauma healing work without the lens of indigenization. I feel like it can cause a lot of harm,” Kritee said.
“There is a way in which we can do trauma healing work which is still very individualistic, and it’s not connecting to the elements. It’s not connected to the pain of Earth. And it’s like saying, ‘oh, to do trauma healing for Black and Brown people, everyone should live the way a white American lives. But that will mean we need seven Earths, right? It’s like we need systems-level thinking.”
There is — ultimately — no separation between my personal experience of trauma, and the systems that continue to generate trauma — because we’re all expressions of one unified reality.
“This is my humble frame: that trauma healing without a deeper understanding of planetary boundaries is not going to land us anywhere. And not just planetary boundaries, but being able to think at systems level in the context of local watersheds and local ecosystems.
“It’s very crucial for me, because I have seen so many trauma therapists or other people talking about trauma healing, but not getting out of the mainstream economic structures and warmongering systems that continue to perpetuate trauma.”
I loved our conversation — including a brief surprise appearance by a special guest about halfway through, which our video editor saw fit to include in the final cut.
You can watch the video by registering for the summit here.
And do consider tuning in to our live summit opening session at 1700 CET / 1600 GMT / 1100 Eastern / 0800 Pacific today Friday November 15.
We hope to see you there!
Kritee (Kanko) Bio
Kritee (dharma name Kanko) was born and raised in India by a single mother in the family of a visionary lawyer and Gandhian freedom fighter who taught her to speak up for love and justice. She came to the United States at the turn of the century to start her scientific research on environmental science. Today, she holds the titles and credentials of a Climate Scientist-Educator, meditation teacher, Buddhist Zen priest, grief ceremony leader. She is founding spiritual teacher of Boundless in Motion and a co-founder of Rocky Mountain Ecodharma Retreat Center, two nonprofit organizations based in Boulder (Colorado).
Should I Stay, or Should I Go? One-Day Workshop
On Saturday, December 7, climate psychologist Steffi Bednarek and I will be hosting a day-long-workshop in London for a small group of professionals who feel conflicted over their company’s response to the climate crisis. Tickets are selling so please do book early to be sure of a place. Hope to see you there!
I write Resonant World in my spare time from my work as an editor at nonprofit climate news service DeSmog. Support from readers is a huge boost — and that includes forwarding, sharing, or commenting in response to my posts. Any variety of coffee most gratefully accepted! Thank you for reading.
Tham Zhiwa has written widely on this theme, see for example his 2022 paper Becoming Indigenous to Earth and much more at THE DHARMA BEAT.
Thank you two so much for this heartfelt convo. I've been thinking a lot lately about the Fisher King myth, which I conclude with in my most recent paper: "The symbolic significance of the Holy Grail in this story has to do with a sickness that is on the land. Camelot is an impoverished place, as captured eloquently in the “broken images” of T.S. Elliot’s “Wasteland” (where he poignantly poses the question: “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout?”). In his first visit to the palace, Perceval fails in his quest to obtain the grail. It is years before he gets a chance at redemption, and wiser this time he succeeds. The sickness is lifted from the land. How? Simply by asking the Fisher King the right question: 'What ails thee?'
In a very real sense, this question marks an evolutionary leap in human intelligence when the
word “trauma” ceases to refer solely to physical injury, as it originally meant in Greek, and
instead takes on a new dimension of psychological injury - the way we understand trauma today.
The King is unable to heal because the psychological wound that he carries, masked by the
physical wound, has yet to be acknowledged, let alone addressed. Once it is brought into the
light of awareness by Perceval, and perhaps for the first time acknowledged by the King himself,
healing becomes possible, and almost magically commences. The wasteland itself is regenerated
- thus recognizing the direct connection that exists between human trauma and environmental
injury." https://www.academia.edu/125461505/Gaia_Psychology_A_Positive_Psychology_Reset_for_an_Ecological_Future
Thank you for this interview and exploration, Matthew. I feel touched and resonant with what you both shared. It occurred to me around your surprise visitor, that that experience might be feedback to your inquiry in that moment? Part of my dream practice is to begin looking at everyday life as if it were a dream and also as a feedback mechanism to intention or inquiry. So, if I had been inquiring around resistance that I felt to participating in a grief ritual (even though I am often around people grieving in my work and I am not a stranger to deep process work) and a young female child walked into the room/into the conversation, I might take that as feedback around , the young feminine might need to be brought back into the conversation because she needs something and it’s related to my ability to grieve. So, it might be about reclaiming the young feminine child within myself? Or maybe something about the young feminine within needing the attention of an attuned father within? (Which your young one received in that moment.) Then I begin to think collectively, and how that might be feedback as a collective about needing to restore relationship to the feminine and the relationship to feelings and emoting that comes with that. Also, maybe weaving in, what is the collective masculine relationship to the collective young feminine as it relates to relaxing into grief rituals and processes? The fact that the feminine was very young interests me? Maybe saying something about the innocence of a child needed to meet the grief? Or maybe that’s the age at which our inner feminine is arrested as a collective? Or maybe it might be speaking in a myriad of ways yet to be discovered the more we process what arises?