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Environmentalist Jon Waterman visited Alaska and beyond for more than four decades to see first-hand the severe situation of the Arctic climate crisis. He recorded his findings and experiences in his book, Into The Thaw, stressing that there is still hope in saving our warming planet. Jon sits down with Corinna Bellizzi to discuss what must be done to save the Arctic, where global warming happens four times faster than anywhere else on Earth. He also reveals how the climate crisis in this northern region adversely affects not only the wildlife but also the Inuit people, who have called Alaska and the Arctic home for many centuries.

 

About Jonathan Waterman

Jon Waterman has worked as a director of a small press, an editor, a naturalist, a park ranger, a wilderness guide, a photographer, and a filmmaker. 

Among his many publications, Jon’s work has often appeared in The New York Times, Outside, Men’s Journal, Adventure, Climbing, and Sailing World.  His 17 books include In the Shadow of Denali, Kayaking the Vermilion Sea, and Running Dry; he is a frequent grantee of the National Geographic Society.

By taking risks and tackling difficult issues, his work transcends traditional outdoor yarns and has garnered numerous awards, including a Literary Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, three Best Adventure Book Awards from the Banff Book Festival, a National Park Service Special Achievement Award, and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. He lives in Carbondale, Colorado.

 

Guest Website: https://jonathanwaterman.com/

 

Guest Social:

https://www.instagram.com/waterman_jonathan/

https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.waterman.96

 

Show Notes: 

Kayaking The Vermillion Sea - 04:33

Career Journey - 08:58

Polar Caps And The Arctic - 12:30

Trips To Alaska - 24:35

Meeting A Polar Bear - 32:26

Inuit People - 38:21

Climate Grief - 43:41

Closing Words - 47:38

Episode Wrap-Up - 49:09

 

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Diving Deep Into The Arctic Climate Crisis With Jon Waterman

I believe in taking action. Even the small steps are the most important steps and challenging oneself to figure out how you can reduce emissions, whether it's hanging your clothes on the clothesline instead of using the dryer or driving an electric car or semi-electric car or not driving and certainly reducing your time flying. There are so many things that we can do that are taking action and that can reduce our impact that can make us feel that even if our government isn't taking action, at least we as citizens can move to affect slowly change.

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Welcome to the show. Each week, I invite you to care more about a specific issue so that we can create a better world together. As part of my commitment to creating that better, greener world, I'm planting a tree for each new subscriber to my website, CircleB.Co. When you join, you'll be the first to hear about new episodes, exclusive promotions, and more. Join our circle by visiting CircleB.Co. We're going to learn about the reality of our climate crisis with an Arctic perspective.

Joining me is Jon Waterman, a committed environmentalist and outdoor enthusiast who has served as a director of small press, an educator, an editor, a naturalist, a park ranger, a wilderness guide, a photographer, and a filmmaker. His work has often appeared in the New York Times, Outside, Men's Journal, Adventure, Climbing, and Sailing World. His 17 books include In the Shadow of Denali, Kayaking the Vermilion Sea, and Running Dry.

By taking risks and tackling difficult issues, his work has garnered numerous awards, including a literary fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, three Best Adventure Book Awards, and more. He joins me from his home in Carbondale, Colorado, to talk about his most recent book, which I have right here. It's called Into the Thaw: Witnessing Wonder Amid the Arctic Climate Crisis. It's published by Patagonia Press and available everywhere as of November 19th, which is just around the corner and in time for the holidays. With that, I hope you'll join me in welcoming Jon Waterman to the show.

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Welcome.

Thanks for having me. I love your show.

I love having you here. First, I have to say I admire your commitment to our wild and beautiful world. I understand that you were warned by your literary agents in the mid-'90s and by another more recently, not to write environmental books because they, “Don't have good sales potential.” My question to you now is, were they wrong?

Mostly, no, they were correct, but I'm actually glad they did warn me because I needed to know that I was setting out on a path of poverty. There have been few exceptions to that over the years but this is what I do. This is my passion to go out to wild places and take long journeys and then celebrate it through written work.

I have often been told things like if you want to be a teacher, you're not going to necessarily make the money. If you're looking to be an author, you won't necessarily be living the good life unless you happen to be so lucky as to become a multiple New York Times bestseller, and typically that's from the fiction world. When you start to dive into more of the non-fiction space, it's even more challenging and especially when you don't always have the best news to share. It seems like the only books that can really create that foundational wealth come from self-help or fiction. I don't know if you've been told the same.

I certainly have. For this particular book, I think it's important to acknowledge that the news isn't great from the Arctic or from the rest of the world when it comes to a climate crisis, but I have always celebrated the wonder. The subtitle of the book, in fact, is Witnessing Wonder. There's still much beauty to behold in the far north.

Kayaking The Vermillion Sea

I wanted to start our conversation with a bit of a journey through some of your earlier work so people can get to know that perspective and what brought you to this more recent piece. You have this book, Kayaking the Vermilion Sea, and it was reviewed by the Washington Post as a rich book, one whose gifts linger long after its rating. Perhaps it isn't the happiest of books, but evidence-based reporting on environmental issues typically aren't. What makes this book one of your most important works and why are you proud of it?

Thank you for that question. Thank you for acknowledging that. I had some lovely reviews. Of course, that did not translate to sales, but it was an important book because it was part of a path for me, a path to report what I'd seen rather than painting the lighter side of things. There is a lot of beauty and joy in that book, but it also chronicles the devastation of a sea and the ruination of my marriage simultaneously. I think it was an important book also because it was honest and forthright. For me, it was the beginning of a course. I had published books before that, but not really focusing on environmental issues so much as I did in that 30.

Quite the history. You mentioned that it fed the development of a course.

I can say that the book led me to another project that I did nearly twenty years later because I started in the Sea of Cortez and paddled from the northern part of the Baja Peninsula in Mexico down to the Cape. I was intrigued about the Delta of the Colorado River, which ends in the northern Sea of Cortez. I took another journey twenty years later from the source of the Colorado River all the way to the sea. There was connectivity for me with those two projects to thoroughly document a huge region.

Was this part of the National Geographic Society grant to support your work? I think that was paddling the Colorado River from the source to the sea. Is that the connected work?

Yeah. I created a tremendous amount of media. I did two books. The first book was called Running Dry, published by the National Geographic Society and I received a grant for them. We created a couple of films. I wrote another book about the Colorado River. We just caught a wave of media attention when there wasn't so much media attention on the Colorado River. After that point, there are all kinds of nonprofits that started up and I think people really listened to it.

We had a photo exhibit that toured the country about this diminishing river. Here we are a dozen years later after I did that project, people are really wondering what happened. What happened is that conservation has not really been initiated, and the river is in an even worse state than it used to be. For me, it was a great project. It was a real education. It entered a boot. I spent five months on the river paddling 1,450 miles. The sad part about it was having to walk the last 90 miles because the river no longer reaches the sea.

Career Journey

Much of the water that we get here in California for farming is essentially taken from the Colorado River. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about your inspiration to go on that journey in the beginning and perhaps some of what you learned along the way.

We had a vegetable garden in a hoop house and we tried to adjudicate our well water and learned that we could not have that hoop house with a vegetable garden because the water was already spoken for downriver on the Colorado River. I was astonished by that. I actually went in front of a committee to try to get the rights to use the water in my own well on my own property and could not.

I determined to learn everything I could about water rights and about the river and where it came from. I got a grant from the National Geographic that allowed me to spend the next year researching and traveling and photographing and filming the river. Learning everything I could from interviewing Native Americans to all different landowners along the river. Visiting managers of water rights. Taking the elevator down to the bottom of the Glen Canyon Dam and running various rapids hither and yon.

It was quite an adventure, quite a learning experience. I suppose I could have worked the rest of my life. I could be working now on these river issues because they're so complex. I did develop somewhat of an expertise, but I was interested in doing other things and have moved on since then. I think the river is still in a dire state and the feds are about to take matters into their own hands if the states cannot decide what to do.

I know some of that has involved conversations around rerouting sections of the river where the dams get potentially dismantled because there are some issues around that. It seems to be there's no end when we try to manipulate all of the water flow from something like the Rockies to the sea and to farmlands all over California. Even Los Angeles County is served by part of this as well, aquifers that offshoot from this. Much of the water that we see here even gets used for things like watering golf courses.

When you see that reality and then how people, like yourself, who you have a well that's on your property that is fed by the Colorado River and you're not able to access that, it seems like there's an overreach here. From beyond that, you even think about things like the Native American peoples, the tribes that are affected by the river running dry for stretches of the land, and how that impacts their culture and their practices from just a societal perspective is also really damaging. We're just over-manipulating it.

We're playing God with nature and we've learned a hundred years later after the first dams were built that it doesn't work. You cannot engineer nature that way.

 

Polar Caps And The Arctic

To get into this perspective when we talk about, let's say, getting into the thought of it, we can acknowledge that our polar caps have been and are melting. Your book essentially chronicles many of the challenges that we face as a result. You've explored a lot of this region long ago in the past and then going back years later to see the difference. What is your perspective, like a 30,000-foot view, having done this work, having produced this book, and having had some time to reflect backward? Where do you think we are today? Is there a chance that we can turn the clock back on these climate issues?

Essentially, we cannot stop climate change. We can only minimize its impacts at this point. I think it's important to realize that we've got a linguistic issue here. For the last couple of decades, since it's come to public attention, we've called it climate change but it's really not simply change. It's a crisis. The Guardian newspaper out of England decided years ago to no longer refer to it as climate change, and they refer to it as a climate crisis.

I wish that the other news media in the United States would follow suit because it doesn't underscore the severity of the situation. You look at what happened, the flooding in Spain or this hurricane Helene and all the water that it dumped in the south. Never mind what's happening in the Arctic where it's truly climate proportions there. It is a crisis, plain and simple.

It just makes me feel like I have to pause and reflect just from that simple statement on how the weather has changed here in California. I have experienced evacuation from forest fires. They were never that close to my home. I was lucky. To be in a situation where suddenly we have a thunderstorm of lightning storm of epic proportions that set our dry forests aflame from so many strikes that hit the ground and hit the trees to then result in almost immediate evacuations from much of the forested spaces around Santa Cruz County.

To see that the homes burned to the ground even some of my prior guests, including the author of The Blue Mind. It was so dramatic. Also to see that we're now getting all of our water at once. You have atmospheric rivers coming through, and that water comes from somewhere else and is just dumped here all at once leading to literal catastrophes that we can barely manage our way out of.

I'm not much of an expert on world events, nor on policy but I do know that in spite of what is a crisis, there are ways that we can all take action. Through taking action, in turn, one can have hope about being part of the solution rather than part of the problem. I'm not an expert on those ways to take action, but I certainly suggest in my book how people can do that. I refer them to the United Nations website where there's a how-to take action, whether as simple as voting, certainly speaking out or just looking at our day-to-day life in order to reduce emissions.

By taking action, we can have hope about being part of the solution rather than the problem.

Through doing these simple things, if people were to perform these sorts of actions, not only could they alleviate some of the sense of grief that we all have with the climate crisis, but they could feel some hope and see the ways that we can minimize the impacts. What I like to talk about is the wonders and the beauties of the Arctic in spite of these radical changes sweeping across the North, not only the natural wonders but the culture, and the people who live there. That's what my book is about, witnessing wonder.

Part of the wonder, quite frankly, is these massive changes. If you can hold up my book again, that cover of my book is in fact a thermocarse that we're staring at with our mouths agape because this is one of the many things that is changing in the Arctic. I wanted to just take, if I may, the opportunity to explain why there is such a crisis in the Arctic as opposed to what's going on, for instance, in the lower 48. The Arctic now has all the same sorts of climate change-caused crises that we see in the lower 48, such as wildfires and floods.

In addition to that, there won't be a viewer listening that hasn't heard about the diminishing sea ice. We all know about that. That cover of my book shows another phenomenon that's rarely discussed, and that is the thawing of the permafrost, which is creating these on hillsides and mountainsides. In many places sloughing away as the ground melts underneath, like frozen spinach left out on the counter.

I've even seen some of the rivers have turned rust-colored because the minerals in that soil are changing the composition of rivers and that then impacts salmon populations because they cannot breathe in the water when that happens.

These thermocars are causing one bit of damage to the watersheds because they're releasing all this mud and silt into these clear rivers. At the same time, the thawing of the permafrost is releasing these minerals. Just in the last few years, very recent that researchers have discovered that these rivers in northwestern Alaska are turning fluorescent orange, which is probably iron released by this ancient permafrost under the ground. Of course, this is wreaking havoc on important aquatic life in the fish, let alone for the Iñupiat, people who need fresh water.

The permafrost thaw is one of the most amazing things going on in the Arctic that has radically changed and is changing the place. There's another phenomenon called the greening of the Arctic, which is part of all this feedback loop. It's like a chain of dominoes and the sea ice begins melting and it then in turn causes shrubs to move north as the land warms and these shrubs in turn warm the earth and the permafrost thaws. We had this whole cycle, all these dominoes being knocked over with these warming temperatures. The Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the rest of the earth. That's why I refer to it as a crisis in my book.

 

I've had a prior guest on here who had Paula DiPerna. She did work. Her book is called Pricing the Priceless. It's all about pricing the environment and things like CO2 in the atmosphere and things along those lines. She also referred to her work with Jacques Cousteau, who referred to Antarctica as the world's refrigerator and was successful in preventing us as in humanity, multiple different governments from choosing to do things like baby drill in Antarctica to get to minerals or oil because it's not inhabited.

We can go ahead and just use this as a treasure trove of resources. He was successful in getting them to think about this as the world's refrigerator and how important it was to our global ecosystems to preserve that. Now we have a lot of that sea ice melting and it's doing irreparable harm in that way because of the fact that now we have less reflection happening from our polar caps. At a certain point, that flywheel gets spinning and we're just going to see increasing warming.

I think everyone at this point has also seen videos of polar bears trying to hunt and being unsuccessful because the polar caps have retreated too quickly for them to really be able to persist through the winter wonderland that they're so accustomed to. I really would love to talk about a resource perspective of how we can make a difference and how we can potentially even just slow this dramatic change so that even some of those larger-bodied species, maybe they can adapt and change as opposed to just dwindling out of existence.

The polar bear certainly is the iconic species of the North and it certainly has been portrayed worldwide in the media. It is just one of many species that are at risk. I think that the Inuit people like to say the Inuit and the Inupiat of Alaska like to say, “What about us? What about our culture?” It's not just a species like the polar bear, but it's also this ancient culture. Arguably the oldest culture in North America, that is at risk of endangerment.

There are roughly 260,000 people that live in the North American Arctic. In Alaska alone, where there are some 60,000 people north of the Arctic Circle. There are 37 villages in danger of being flooded or just destroyed in these times of climate change. Of course, the polar bear is at risk, but so are many other species, and so are the people. It's just the entire biosphere of the north.

Trips To Alaska

To your point, ways of life just shifting dramatically. Your book, one of the things I love about it is that it is a documentarian perspective. Like you are taking us on a journey.  You share pictures from the past and present. There are even some maps and hikes that you detail, like a short walk over the Brooks Range. I wondered if you could tell the story here. I'm sorry, I'm trying to show people. This is essentially offered on page 70 to 171. It's a snapshot of this particular part of Alaska, the northwest side.

I have to tell a little bit of a story to explain that. I first went to the Arctic in 1983 and I was astonished by what I saw there. The thousands of caribou found a wolf den with five pups, where we watched a grizzly eating a caribou and the experience changed my life. I quit my job as a Park Service Ranger. On that first trip, I was on a Park Service Exchange patrol. I started going to that place repeatedly, the gates of the Arctic National Park and was a guide on the river there, the Noatak River. I was so intrigued with the North that I continued exploring other places.

I hadn't returned to the Noatak for many years. In fact, 37 years later I went back to the no attack. I took my fifteen-year-old son with me. That was in 2021. I was equally astonished that year by the changes in this place that I knew so well from a younger life. In 100 miles of river, my son and I only saw one caribou. The river was flooded. We could not find a campsite because the river had run over the banks on either side. There was brush in places where I hadn't remembered brush in the past. I determined after we left with the support of Patagonia, I returned to the Arctic in 2022.

Being knuckleheads, instead of flying into the headwaters of the Noatak, we carried pack rafts over the mountains, over the Brooks Range, and to find the first water of the Noatak. We walked the river until there was enough water in it. That short arduous walk, fortunately, was truncated by blowing up our pack rafts. We spent the next month paddling to the sea and documenting, investigating what had so astonished me the previous year. That is the heart and soul of the book, along with observations from 40 years worth of travel in the North.

I wanted to page through and I was sharing a picture here from I think one of those kayaks. They are inflatable kayaks. You're able to pack them in more easily.

They're pack rafts. They weigh about nine pounds. We carried those over the Brooks Range. That picture was of my companion, Chris Korbulic, who is arguably one of the best whitewater kayakers in the world. Incredibly experienced guy. That was another one of my big mistakes on this trip was to travel with such an incredible athlete who happened to be 30 years younger than me. I was trying to keep it in sight for our month's journey.

You referred to him as, I think, a kayaking ninja in the book. Just so people can get a view of the terrain, and the pictures throughout this book, I really love the work that Patagonia does to bring the visual story to life in the printing of these books. Like the thoughtful inclusion of really incredible photographs to really help you along that journey.

That's Chris posing for his sponsor there but you can see that there's a lot of wildfire haze there and there never used to be wildfires in the Arctic. That summer, three million acres burned across Alaska and it took us a few days.

Permafrost was ignited too and kept burning underground. They didn't know where it was going to erupt.

Has happened in other parts of the Arctic, yes. Peat under the ground.

Peat, not permafrost, sorry.

Chris Whitewater Ninja Companion is also a very talented photographer. He and I were just constantly shooting pictures. If one of us hadn't been a photographer, we would have driven the other crazy. Chris has an incredible eye. He usually accompanies other kayakers that don't have cameras. He's made many films, but he's never in the films. He doesn't get any of the credit for these incredible first ascents he's done around the world, in dozens of countries, these are just torrents that he's run in his kayak that have never been run before. After he films, these other guys running the river who he's made somewhat famous, then he has to jump in and run the river, but he never gets any of the credit heaped upon his companions.

I have to say, the thing that I used to be a subscriber to Outside magazine. That was one of the few magazines that I kept getting in print for years. In my earlier life, I subscribed to National Geographic, as our household did when I was a child, and that was one of the ways in which I learned about the world outside of the town that I lived in. I got the sense that your book was taking all of the best of some of the articles that I've read over the years and outside and putting them into book format.

I think if our listeners enjoy that style of work, you're going to love the book because it is. It's broken into these sections that enable you to come on the journey with you and to really hear the perspective of that. You can only gain through time and experience. I have a personal connection to a lot of our scuba diving spots around the globe. I've dived in Hawaii for the last twenty years. I've dived in the Channel Islands and Southern California like the Santa Barbara area and throughout the Monterey Bay and because of that time, I've seen how our ecosystems change underwater.

I've seen where coral reefs used to flourish and now how some of them are bleached out. I've seen the recovery in other spots. I've also seen how the infiltration of another species can change an environment in our underwater world. I only have that knowledge and that firsthand experience because I've been there doing it for twenty years.

Meeting A Polar Bear

You have been able to encapsulate that and put that into this book format I think is commendable. I would love to offer you the opportunity to tell another story from the book that you feel helps it stand out and get people a perspective. Perhaps even though environmental books may not be the hottest sellers, this one can do just a little bit better and more people can consider buying this as perhaps a holiday gift for their friends or family.

Thank you for that. I had many amazing experiences. Some of the most seminal experiences of my life. One of the things that I recount briefly in the book is this journey that I took across the Arctic, mostly alone from the Pacific to the Atlantic tides, which is much of the Northwest Passage, in order to just learn more about Inuit culture as well as to push myself in a way I'd never been challenged before, to spend huge amounts of time alone in order that I become more attuned to the land and the seascape. One of my goals on that journey was to meet a polar bear. I know this sounds silly or perhaps even brazen or foolish.

I'm guessing you had bear spray with you.

The Inuit told me at one point, for one 500-mile section of the journey, I ran into some Inuit hunters and they told me that a polar bear was following me. I hadn't seen any people for eight days at that point. I was really glad to be with these people and I spent the night camp with them. They're really curious about me. I gained many insights because I often paddled into hunting camps and villages alone in a kayak, which is their mythical tool. They invented it. They asked me, “What do you do if you run into a polar bear?”

I pulled out my first line of defense which was a spring-loaded device that fired a flare into the air. Elder just shook his head about that. I pulled out an air horn. The elder scratched his head and thought, “My God.” I'm sitting with the elder's family in their tent. I pulled out my piece to resist ounce, which was not a gun, I didn't have a gun. It was a can of bear spray and I placed it on the table. Everyone just looked at the elder because the elder is always the spokesperson for a group of hunters. The elder just shook his head and pointed a shaky finger to that can of bear spray.

He said, “That just pissed the polar bear off.” At any rate, I wanted to see a polar bear and I saw several at a distance. One disappeared on a stormy day. I didn't know if it was swimming after me under the water. They're magnificent swimmers. I knew that I couldn't out-paddle. The Northernmost Inuit referred to them which means literally the one who gives power. It's one of the reasons I wanted to see a polar bear because it was a mythical animal to the original Inuit culture.

They believed it could fly through the stars and into the afterworld. I didn't quite know where to finish my journey. I'd made it out into the Atlantic tides. I rounded a point and suddenly a polar bear jumped off an iceberg and started swimming after me. I immediately did the most knuckleheaded thing I could have done. I tried to paddle away from it and quickly realized that was a mistake because I couldn't have out-paddled it. There are such amazing swimmers. I turned and faced the polar bear and tried to send it all my respect. It worked. The polar bear stopped swimming after me and clambered out on the iceberg. I gave it a bow and then turned around. That was the end of my trip. I had my meeting with a polar bear, the one who gives power.

I’ve often wondered on that particular perspective to like what I would do if I encountered a very large bear in the wild. They're larger even than grizzlies. I think the grizzly is among the most iconic, especially for the people in the lower 48 because we have the Dakota and Yellowstone, where they abound. Polar bears are something to behold.

No, the polar bear is more of a curious animal. Of course, if it's hungry, it would chase after you, particularly if you perform like I did, like prey, flee from it. The grizzly bears are actually much more aggressive. These grizzly bears in the far north, unlike the salmon-eating bears in southern Alaska, they're not fat. They're small, and they're totally omnivorous. They'll eat a boot, or they'll eat a box of laundry soap. They'll eat anything. They will chase off polar bears. I had them repeatedly chase me, but they're not great swimmers, so it's easy to out-paddle them.

Inuit People

What an interesting perspective. If you had one moment that you'd like to perhaps relive from the experience of the last several decades of spending time up in the Arctic that you could go back to, what would it be?

Relevant to what we can do and relevant to this book, some of the most powerful moments I had were with the people of the North. They're Inuit in Canada and Inupiat in Alaska, which means both words mean the people. Those were some of my most powerful moments. I learned so much from them. On the last trip, I asked what we could do about the climate crisis to a villager in No Attack Village. He said very gently, these are people that had their language taken away from them 100 years ago by Christian missionaries.

Their language is a beautiful thing. Some of the elders still speak it. It's a language that has these precise nuances that describe wildlife in the land and the sea in a way that the English language cannot do without several paragraphs. Anyways, very gently, he said, “Perhaps the people down south could reduce their emissions.” He didn't say it spitefully. He just his life is changing and in drastic ways. It's also a snapshot of the dilemma that faces indigenous people around the world. It's these people who live in low-lying areas and in the Arctic that are going to be most impacted by the climate crisis. Perhaps we could reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

People who live in low-lying areas will be impacted the most by the climate crisis.

Meanwhile, we have more contracts for drilling oil than ever before. There aren't really strong signs of slowing things like fracking and oil procurement. Energy independence is top of mind and this voting season. Unfortunately, we live in a world that has polarized the discussion around climate change and made it political. I'm an advocate for the environment through and through. I don't see how the right or the left are served by a vernacular that makes us a politicized issue. I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment that we need to have some form of climate justice for people around the globe who are impacted by this. It is the biggest challenge of our lifetimes.

On that note for repatriation or climate justice, there is a bill in the Senate called one of its names was the Alaskan Village Relocation Act, which would appropriate federal funds for the more than three dozen different Alaskan villages that are in danger of being subsumed or destroyed by the climate crisis. One of many things that need to happen.

I was unaware of that particular piece. The Alaskan Village Relocation Act is what you've said?

I believe that's what it's called, yeah. If that's not exactly it, there's nothing else with that.

I will find the link and share it with show notes so that people can perhaps help support something to that effect because even if you don't live in Alaska, you have the power to share the information with other people to amplify the message and ultimately ensure that this becomes a part of our greater discussion around what we as individuals and as groups of people can do to support those that are going to be more impacted by these climate issues. You have people living on the waterfront here in California who are saying they feel like the government should help to prevent erosion from happening so they don't lose their beachfront property.

Climate Grief

These people are privileged with multimillion-dollar homes. Perhaps we can send some resources to people who are more troubled than perhaps a multimillionaire living on the coast. I absolutely going to share this intelligence with some people in my community through the podcast and otherwise. I'd love to offer you a moment here as we prepare to wrap. If there was a thought that you wanted to close with as a cap from our conversation or if there was a question I hadn't asked that perhaps you wish I had, you could ask and answer that.

Regarding climate grief, there's no reason for us to feel grief about what's going on. Again, I believe in taking action. Even the small steps are the most important steps and challenging oneself to figure out how you can reduce emissions, whether it's hanging your clothes on the clothesline instead of using the dryer or driving an electric car or semi-electric car or not driving and certainly reducing your time flying. There are so many things that we can do that are taking action and that can reduce our impact can make us feel even if our government isn't taking action, that at least we as citizens can move to affect slowly, change, and minimize.

As you said earlier, you were a bit of a knucklehead trying to climb this mountain with a kayak, but you weren't dropped in by aircraft. Like it was the greener way to go and experience and definitely a story you had to tell after the fact. I personally have taken on the mantle, just working to make more of my vacations outdoor, low-impact vacations. I'm taking up backpacking with my son who is nine. He loves it even if it's only two or three miles in, just having a few nights in the woods with only the things that you can carry on your person.

Communed with nature when you don't have a cell phone or any of this electronic stuff buzzing around you can be an incredible way to appreciate the moment that we have to live in, and appreciate the nature that exists today. Take steps to be a part of that. I just bought an electric car for my husband who drives more than me, so he would not drive our truck that's gas-powered as much as he does.

In my world, I decided to buy that used. An eighteen-month lease turned practically new, was affordable and I'm charging it with solar panels that are on our roof. I'm privileged in that we were able to do that, but I also only spent $15,000 on the car. I say only because it's feasible to do this. You don't have to buy, and I will never own a Tesla, but you don't have to buy a Tesla. You can get something else. I got a Nissan Leaf as a turn-in from its short-term lease, inexpensive as far as a vehicle goes, in great condition, and we're reducing our carbon footprint in that way.

I suspect there's going to be a lot of used Teslas flooding the market soon.

Closing Words

There are a lot of them in my neck of the woods, but I am co-located with Silicon Valley. We're just a bedroom community of Silicon Valley, and they do have a stronghold there. It's become a status symbol, just like the BMWs and Mercedes of my youth. I have been taking a stance against Tesla for some time now. It's the reason I don't have a power wall at my home, even though many of my friends do, but it's just what we do. One day at a time. One foot in front of the other. I think if you can take a few small steps in the right direction, you're doing well. Now, is there an additional resource that you'd like to drive people's attention to, perhaps from the book from the action perspective?

Once again, the United Nations website has a marvelous series of steps on how to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions and to take action.

You have an appendix section at the back of the book that summarizes a lot of this as well. From there you say global actions are needed, how to take action in defending democracy, starting dialogues, and all of these things which I think are very powerful suggestions for making this an active book.

Another important thing on the road to hope and taking action is simply education. I think it's important to educate oneself. Patagonia has several marvelous books, including The Blue Plate or The New Fish. There are many ways that we can gain education and certainly watching your podcast is one of them.

The road to hope and taking action is simply education.

Thank you so much for joining me, Jon. I thoroughly appreciate your time.

Thank you for the work that you do.

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Episode Wrap-Up

What a treat to explore another deep conversation with a Patagonia author. This adds to the repertoire. I think I've got a half dozen in the coffers at this point. Each conversation helps me think differently about our impact on the environment and how we can live a little bit better and a little greener each day. Now, to find out more about Jon Waterman and his new book, Into the Thaw: Witnessing Wonder Amid the Arctic Climate Crisis, visit the links that I provide with show notes. Now I encourage you to visit the blog page for this episode. It includes a video version of this podcast, complete transcripts, and links to the resources and past episodes that we discussed.

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