GUINEVERE MACLOWRY
Multimedia Journalist
“Want to help the world. Be connected with the Earth. Change the way I live.” These are the words author Katharine Wilkinson scrawled in her journal at the age of sixteen while overlooking a ridge in Pisgah Forest, North Carolina. They are also the words that open the first chapter of her new book, Climate Wayfinding: Healing Ourselves and the Planet We Call Home.
Wilkinson is an author and the founding executive director of The All We Can Save project, a nonprofit that facilitates climate learning and leadership development. She will give a lecture on Climate Wayfinding at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater.
Wilkinson said she has always had an affinity for the more-than-human world. In high school, she spent a semester at an experiential school called The Outdoor Academy in western North Carolina, nestled in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. There, she lived in the woods with a handful of teachers and 25 other students — one of whom was Leah Naomi Green, who will present the Interfaith Lecture at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy.
During her four months at The Outdoor Academy, Wilkinson’s perspective on nature shifted from adoration to activism. Her time in the Blue Ridge Mountains allowed her to live an ecologically conscious lifestyle for the first time, which she said she loved, but she also encountered the ecological wounds of the Southern Appalachians — including clear-cutting in the Pisgah National Forest. After relishing in nature and living “in the flow” of their surroundings for weeks, Wilkinson’s literature and environmental studies teacher took the students on a pivotal hike through the Pisgah National Forest.
“Unbeknownst to us, we were going to arrive out at the top of this ridge onto a fresh clear-cut, and I think that was a moment of my heart really breaking, “ Wilkinson said. “I think when our hearts don’t just break, but they break open, those can be really compass-setting moments, moments of conviction.”
As she reckoned with her own climate awakening, Wilkinson said she found herself the same questions: “What does this information mean? What do I do with it? Where do I go from here? How do I hold all of this?” Wilkinson found a plethora of helpful scientific resources, but none that helped her navigate how to answer these questions; then, she began her work at The All We Can Save Project.
Climate Wayfinding first existed as an experiential learning program before it became a book. The All We Can Save Project has been training educators across the U.S. and Canada to facilitate Climate Wayfinding with their students, with the program now active on 50 college and university campuses. “But even with that facilitator network, we weren’t coming anywhere close to meeting the scale of the need,” Wilkinson said.
Thus, the book version was born. This work “ultimately makes Climate Wayfinding accessible and available much more widely, aspirationally to anybody with internet access and a library card,” Wilkinson said. “There’s so much information, but we are often lacking support for orientation.”
In the first chapter of her book, Wilkinson outlined the three core practices of Climate Wayfinding that readers can use as guides on their own journey: looking inward with care, looking outward with curiosity and looking forward with courage.
“If your heart is breaking about what’s happening to the planet, where do you go with that?” Wilkinson asked. “Who do you talk to? Where do you cry? I think so many people feel deeply isolated in their sadness, their fear, their anger. And those emotions can be such powerful fuel, but not if we just start in the fetal position, holding them alone.”
This, she said, is where Climate Wayfinding seeks to bridge a gap. There is no single intended audience; the book is designed to serve unfamiliar readers and lifelong climate activists alike. An interactive book that asks audiences to pause, reflect, analyze their feelings and gather with others to discuss them, it features essays to provide structure for the lessons, poems and playlists to further highlight the emotions that may arise while reading and includes journaling and group discussion prompts to further the reader’s journey of self-discovery.
The Climate Wayfinding lecture will act as a taste of the book at large, according to Wilkinson. Following a week of impactful climate lectures, Wilkinson said she presumes many listeners may be grappling with the same questions she had before writing the book. She said she hopes audiences will take what resonates and leave what doesn’t, while still maintaining an open mind as “deeper moments of discovery or illumination come where we least expect them,” Wilkinson said.
Wilkinson dedicated the book to the “persistent shimmer of life.” Gratitude sits at the center of all of Wilkinson’s work, she said, and she is constantly “moved by the wow of it all.”
For her, the fact that life has existed for more than 3.8 billion years is a marvel against great odds. And nobody is severed from that history.
“When you have a sense that you are entangled with and a part of all of the rest of life, I think it creates a pull and a sense of calling to be the most generous and generative node of that web that you possibly can be,” Wilkinson said.
