How do we navigate the profound emotional landscape triggered by environmental degradation, move beyond despair, and cultivate resilience and hope to mobilize meaningful action in the face of an urgent need for ecological transformation?

Krista Tippett is a Peabody Award-winning broadcaster, a National Humanities Medalist, and a New York Times bestselling author. She hosts On Being, a podcast that explores what it means to be human.

In the episode “Ecological Hope, and Spiritual Evolution,” Tippet discusses finding hope and turning it into action with Christiana Figueres, who was Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change from 2010-2016, and is known as the powerhouse who made the 2015 Paris Agreement possible.

Following is an excerpt from the transcript of that conversation.

Krista Tippett will join us for a featured session at Bioneers 2024. Learn how to see her, along with hundreds of inspirational leaders, researchers, and activists.

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Krista Tippett: In the world in which I was born, and maybe you, too, the weather was the stuff of small talk. The seasons of the year were the underlay of planting and harvesting food that nourishes and fuels our bodies, of course. But seasons have also been the very mundane, predictable rhythm of our days and our lives. Now, the loss of seasons as we knew them, the loss of storms as we knew to navigate them, is an experience we are all sharing in all the places we inhabit and love. This is closer to home than every fight we have about climate and the science around it, the meaning of it. We feel this in our bodies, the young among us most keenly. It leads some of us to those fights and some of us to retreat within, overwhelmed.

My guest today is the exuberant and mighty Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres. She has, as much as anyone alive on the planet right now, has felt that overwhelm and stepped into service. She is a most eloquent articulater — both of the grief that we feel and must allow to bind us to each other, and what she sees as a spiritual evolution the natural world is calling us to. If you have wondered how to keep hope alive amidst a thousand reasons to despair; if you are ready to take your despair as fuel — intrigued by the idea of stepping into love as a way to stepping into service, and open to immediate realities of abundance and regeneration — this conversation is for you.

I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.

Christiana Figueres was Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change from 2010 to 2016 and is known as the powerhouse who made the 2015 Paris Agreement possible, in which 195 nations worked with their wildly diverse conditions and points of view on the what and the when and the why and yet made commitments in service of our hurting planet and the future of humanity. She spoke to me from her home in Costa Rica.

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Tippett: I want to talk about the new generations, because this is also something very much on your heart, and you’re in a relationship and a dialogue with this very understandable despair and grief that I think younger people really feel in their bodies, more consciously perhaps, than older people.

But one of the moves I see them making is claiming joy. And claiming an abundance of relationship, and community, where it is to be found. And insisting on knowing what they love, and on being attentive to beauty wherever it is to be found. Also — and I want to use this word — as “fuel” for the hard, hard work that is ours to do.

Figueres: Yes. So true, so true. That intentional cultivating of a mind of love and joy is so critical to our personal resilience, to our personal regeneration, to our personal agency, to our capacity to engage. It’s just a sine qua non. Without it, there is no capacity to engage in a positive manner, in a constructive manner, in a transformational manner with anything outside ourselves. It just isn’t.

And so the more young and not-so-young people realize that yes, we are at a very deeply painful moment in the history of this planet and of human evolution, and that we can either succumb to that, or we can use that, as you say, as fuel. We can use that to intentionally decide that we’re going to stand up. Using the depth of the pain to root us so that we’re not swayed by the wind. Use it to root us in our determination to do everything for a better world, not just for us, but for generations to come, Krista.

And that’s the piece that I don’t think that we have very clear yet. Whatever we’re doing over the next seven years, and this is no Latin American exaggeration, whatever we do over the next seven years is really going to determine the quality of life on this planet for generations to come. Hence the alarm clock.

This is an alarm clock. It’s an alarm clock about speed and scale, but it’s also an alarm clock about quality of mind — as you say, cultivating the mind of love and joy.

Tippett: And that our love for this planet, and for the beauty that’s around us, and the places we come from — that that is as much a motivator as what we have to fight.

I watched you at an event at TED in Scotland. And I wish we could spend about an hour talking about that, and we can’t. But it was very moving. You ended up very expertly leading a panel on which there was the CEO of Shell Oil. And then a young woman who was carrying her pain and letting that pain into the room and also expressing her difficulty at being on a panel with the CEO of Shell and…

Figueres: Her anger, is what I would say.

Tippett: …her anger, and her intolerance of, that we are at this point. And with the participation of powerful, powerful places. And I will say, also, that I could see this CEO really being present and thinking and wanting to be responsive.

But what I watched you do — and I’m driving to this because I think you can do this also for everybody who’s going to be listening to this across time and space, and I felt like you, yourself, had been on this trajectory of understanding that this was something you needed to invoke — is just inviting everyone on that panel and everyone in that room to stand before the loss and the grief, and let that pain itself be some of the connective tissue across these differences. If nothing else, that we share.

Figueres: Exactly, exactly. So just for correctness, it’s the former CEO of Shell, because he is no longer CEO. But the case still stands. The more radical conversation, if you will, was the one between, as you say, the former Shell CEO and the young activist, who spoke and acted out of deep pain, anger, blaming, all of which is completely justified.

And then, all of a sudden, almost literally threw herself off the stage onto the shoulders of her colleagues that were waiting for her. It was quite a dramatic moment. It was quite a traumatic moment. Because there we were, with the pain and the trauma of years right on stage in front of us.

And what I did not want to occur was for the audience to divide itself up in, “Which of these two points of view am I going to support? Am I going to support the Shell CEO, because we have a whole bunch of corporates in the room who think that X, Y, Z? Or am I going to support the very eloquent climate activists because Shell has to be blamed and shamed?”

So what I did not want is for the audience to fall into that simplistic division between what all of us think is what is right and what is wrong. And I wanted to keep everyone in their own pain. Because we all have the pain. Every single one of us, no matter what, we have this pain because we are aware of the loss that we are witnessing. So I did call for everyone to take a moment, breathe, and get into the pain. And avoid the immediate blame and shame. Because that is where we would’ve gone very quickly.

Now fast-forward, Krista. How moving was it for me that just a few weeks ago, we held a retreat in Plum Village in France for climate activists and climate leaders who seek to find better ways to manage their emotions, and to be grounded in their emotions so that they can act from a deeper sense without having to just react, right?

So get away from the fight, flight, freeze, to much more of a grounded, clean action. How moving for me was it, that that very climate activist who threw herself off of stage came to that retreat with most of those young people who were waiting for her there, and held her, and then they marched out? Most of them came to this retreat. How moving was that for me?

And the fact that after six days of really intensive study of the Dharma teachings, but more than anything, intensive digging into self and into the pain, and learning how to turn the pain into strength, how moving was it for me that these young people emerged transformed — recommitted to continue to working on climate change from a space of possibility, and love, and joy? Honestly, long time since I have felt so much gratitude for the power of these teachings.

Tippett: I sense that — so there’s that. And also, I hear you saying in your writing and in your speaking: Do not give up on people. Do not give up on — this language, even, of climate denier. That’s a label, and that’s a drama in our midst. But to me it’s just another side of, again, we all feel the disarray and the disrepair of our natural world, of which we are part, in our bodies. And whether that’s at the level of awareness or not, we’ve had different ways of responding to that same fear. And you say: Don’t give up on climate deniers. Again, I hate the label. I feel like the people you’re really impatient with are people who are making a choice to be indifferent.

Figueres: Indifferent. Yes. So true. That’s the piece that I really — ooh — I really have to extend my compassion to an extent that — I’m not quite there yet — to people who are indifferent. How can you be indifferent? How can you be indifferent to everything that we’re witnessing today? That’s the piece that I have — Yes, you have identified very well. I have a very hard time.

Tippett: Well, and this can be subtle as well. Because it can be — and I am going to say I fall into this, too — is it can be, “Well, it’s just all over anyway.” Just, there’s news as we’re speaking, and this same news will recur that the ice melting in the Antarctic is much, it’s happening at a much more rapid pace than was once thought. And so what we’re calling indifference can just be a resignation, which feels itself to care, but can’t care anymore. So it’s complex. It’s as complex as we are.

Figueres: Well, is it? Is it? We just talked a little while ago about self-fulfilling prophecies. So if we say it’s all over anyway, and we really stand in that “reality,” then we actually will create that reality. Then it will be over anyway. And that’s the choice. That’s the piece, Krista. This is a choice. It’s a choice of attitude. It’s a choice of mindset. It’s a choice of thought. It’s a choice of words and narratives and actions. It’s a choice. It’s a daily choice. So yes, of course the easy thing is to go, “Well, it’s too late anyway. Bye.” Hello? Really? Is that the way? For those people who take that, I just wonder, how are they going to answer their grandchildren’s questions, “What did you do?” All our grandchildren will be asking us, “What did you do?” And everyone is going to have to answer that question, “What did you do?” Because nobody can say, “I didn’t know.” Nobody can say that anymore.

Tippett: Not anymore.

Figueres: My parents could say that. But my generation cannot say that anymore. So the question that we have to get ready for, and that is already being asked by many young people to their parents is, “What did you do?”

Tippett: You said at one point that it is the nature of evolution, that is the nature of this world, the way it works, that creatures are constantly adapting, that the environment is constantly evolving, that we as well as other creatures are constantly adapting to the environment. And that is the nature of vitality and the conditions of our time. You use this language of “exponential curves.” Our world is on so many exponential curves. The natural world is on so many exponential curves. As you say also, the possibilities for very new realities are also on exponential curves. But that’s ongoing. It’s not realized. It’s not visible. It’s not the dominant story yet.

Figueres: Correct.

Tippett: And it is hard. It is hard for us as creatures to live with this kind of uncertainty. It’s very challenging at a physiological as well as a spiritual level. But I don’t know. I guess I’m kind of ending up circling back to where we started. In your book The Future We Choose, you have 10, are they actions?

Figueres: Yeah.

Tippett: And the first one is still, it’s a thought action. It is, “Let Go of the Old World,” which sounds so massive. But I think — I want you to talk about how that is a beginning, and how that can be a beginning, a step, a step, an action in and of itself.

Figueres: Yeah. “Let Go of the Old World” is actually, now that I think about it a little bit more, it’s almost like a funny invitation, because the old world is gone anyway. And so what’s the point of hanging on to something that has already gone by?

Tippett: But that’s what we do. That’s what we do.

Figueres: But that’s what we do. I know, but we have to laugh at ourselves that we do that, Krista, because it makes absolutely no sense. It makes no sense. And when we understand that everything is in constant change, when we understand that we have — if there is anything that is certain, it’s uncertainty. If there’s anything that is permanent, it is the reality of impermanence. Everything in our lives.

Tippett: But we structure our lives to be in denial and to push that back.

Figueres: I know. Yes.

Tippett: We feel like that’s our power.

Figueres: I know. How funny is that? You have to see that with a sense of humor. The fact that we know that everything is in constant change. You and I are not the same people when we started this conversation. I certainly am not the same person as yesterday, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Our relationships change. Everything changes all the time. The world is changing all the time.

And so we’re in constant flux and constant uncertainty. The past has passed. We can’t do anything about it. The future, we cannot really guarantee. We can try to influence it for the best and for good, but we can’t really control it. So I think there’s a heavy dose of humility here to understand that the past is gone, the future is uncontrollable, we don’t know where things will go. We have to be able to develop that muscle. It’s the muscular capacity to understand that we are in constant sway, in constant uncertainty, and have the humility to truly, deeply, deeply know. We don’t know how it will go. We have all kinds of scientific projections and predictions, and that’s science. But let’s not confuse the map with the territory. That’s the map. We don’t really know what the territory is. We don’t know how — for sure, for certain, we don’t know how it will go, because for one thing, it’ll depend a lot on what we do.

But in the meantime, the question that is most important for me is: How do I want to be in the meantime? How do I want to turn up in the world in the meantime? During the time that I’m here, which is a blink in the history of 4.5 billion years of this planet. We are here as a blink. What kind of a blink do we want to be? Who do I want to be? How do I want to turn up in the world? The answer to that question does not guarantee any success or any achievement, but it does influence the direction that we move in.

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From On Being with Krista Tippett, “Christiana Figueres: Ecological Hope and Spiritual Evolution“, Nov 9, 2023, used with permission.