Gen Z Climate Being
Rachel Moszkowicz, Podcast Creator
The podcast series is not about landing anywhere in particular, but rather about sharing our climate worlds together. Gen Z climate stories matter immensely. Asking questions together matters. Climate change is made up of stories that shape stories. Conversation and storytelling allows for emotionality and affective response to be at the center; “the way we relate to one another, the way we envisage our position among other species, the way we move, eat, and construct our sense of identity. And this human fabric cannot be grasped simply through statistics, figures, and graphs. It is also, fundamentally, about emotions and affectivity.” (Knops, 2021). At the core of the episodes that comprise the “Gen Z Climate Being” podcast is the awareness that “climate change is not just ‘out there’ but threaded through our everyday worlds” (Verlie, 2022).
Knops, L. (2021, March 3). The new climate change activism is emotional, and it’s a good thing. The Loop. https://theloop.ecpr.eu/the-new-climate-change-activism-is- emotional-and-its-a-good-thing/
Verlie, B. (2022). Learning to live with climate change : from anxiety to transformation. Routledge.
“My Hope Has Claws” : Olivia Vesovich
Bio: Olivia Vesovich is a passionate climate activist and artist who is dedicated to international climate justice. She is a plaintiff in Held v. MT, the first successful youth-led climate lawsuit in the US. The plaintiffs argued that the state’s fossil fuel-based energy system violates their constitutional rights to a clean environment, dignity, safety, and equal protection.
In my first episode, I am in conversation with Olivia Vesovich. Olivia frames climate change as the fight of our lives to create a stable climate system, proclaiming that “everything I’ve ever loved is going to have claws in it or claw marks left in it as it leaves.” Olivia contends that the world is being destroyed by industry and capitalism and by racism and by misogyny, explicit systems of the climate story. My conversation with Olivia opened me to reconsider what hope means and looks like and the ways that grief can co-exist with love, and despair can reside with hope. I see this in Olivia’s art that is one of the greatest expressions of Olivia’s climate advocacy. In this I am reminded of Johanna Macy’s concept of active hope (Macy & Johnstone, 2020). Active hope was certainly catalyzed in Olivia’s fight as a plaintiff in the nation’s first constitutional climate trial, Held v. Montana.
My personal takeaways from this episode are needing moments of rest to have moments of growth, having hope with claws, balancing escapism and visionary building, knowing your values based on what and who you are connected to, meaningful connections based from being fully yourself, and the practice of art as climate expression and story. Key questions from this episode are: Who would I be if climate change didn’t exist? What if instead of clinging to the past, we cling to the future we want? If hope comes from creation, what does this creation look like?
Watch the video interview here.
Learning with Lahaina: Laurel Tamayo
Bio: Laurel is passionate about communicating the climate crisis through film & TV. She directed an independent short documentary called Healing Lahaina, a deeply personal film covering her family’s experience with the 2023 Lahaina wildfire, climate change, and community resilience. She was recognized in the Forbes list of 68 Climate Leaders Changing the Film and TV Industry and is currently in the Harvard Executive Education Program working on her Nonprofit Leadership certificate, where she was awarded the Bacon Climate Leadership scholarship.
Laurel recounts how in 2022 her yearly return to Kaanapali beach in Hawaii was different. The sand was so hot it burned her feet. Her plastic coffee cup melted and morphed into the sand. She realized her plans to take her future kids and grandchildren back to this beautiful place may not be a reality anymore. A year later, the deadliest wildfire in modern US history hit the town of Lahaina. The home of Laurel’s grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins burned. Climate trauma became a part of Laurel’s experience and the recognition and embodiment that there is a wide and changeable range of climate emotions as well as climate possibilities. Laurel talks about how often we see a binary of utopian or dystopian climate futures. Sad and scary things are ahead but also the potential of beautiful resilient creations. Collapse and community gardens can exist together in so many ways and forms. The Lahaina fire affected Laurel in many ways, catalyzing her to make the film “Healing Lahaina”. In this conversation, we talk about the ongoing trauma of disasters, generational ripples, the hardship of being physically removed from a disaster affecting the place and people you love.
A key takeaway from this conversation is the ways that mental and physical health are connected, how attending to mental health in response to climate is essential. How climate joy is present too. For Laurel this means being outside more, birdwatching, and the success of her film and the community it has created.
A Forever Going Marathon: Natalie Heller
Bio: Natalie is a current sophomore at university studying environmental studies. She loves to be outdoors; hike, snorkel, scuba dive, camp and go backpacking. Natalie has always been an activist for mental health and a youth climate activist so when the two met it was a natural interest of hers.
Natalie grew up around a lot of climate initiatives like plastic bag bans and paper straws, living in San Francisco but the realities of living in a climate changing world hit when she saw something she loved being directly affected. Every year Natalie would snorkel, visiting the coral reefs. She began to notice less diversity of fish. The coral looked different. During her senior year of high school, her thinking transformed from climate change being a “threat that needs to be solved now” to “it’s a threat, but it needs to be solved for every generation to come”. This came with the realization that climate work is a lifetime thing, more of a forever going marathon than a sprint to sustain all the future generations. Doing the work of climate and trying to be a teenager came with burnout and a process of finding how to be in the movement of climate activism while also living life as a teenager moving into adulthood. We touch on the interesting differences between the presence and role that climate played in our lives growing up versus that of our parents. What is it like to grow curiosity and knowledge about something that will affect your children their whole lives and dealing with their physical and emotional response to it while you are in the messiness of your own climate awareness? Other highlights in this episode include thinking about the ways external structures inform our internal values, knowledge and way we interact with the world. How our climate education can be different and dependent on the perspectives and framings of individual teachers.
“reject, refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle.”: Elissa Teles Munoz
Bio: Elissa Teles Munoz is the K-12 Programming Manager for Climate Mental Health Network, a youth mentor and ally, climate education specialist, and project manager. At Climate Mental Health Network, Elissa manages partnerships to engage educators across the country and coordinates a multi-phase project to support middle school teachers in addressing climate emotions.
Elissa learned about climate change for the first time at the age of seven in 2007. In hearing climate change described by her mom, she conjured an image of street lights and everything melting Salvador Dali style. It made her anxious and panicked. Her mom was so sorry she even brought it up. Elissa kept that moment in her back pocket ever since. We talk through Elissa’s formation of her relationship to climate, how she was not connected to the outdoors growing up and did not appreciate the intrinsic value of the natural world until much later on in her life. High school, as for others in this series, was a developmental moment in her climate evolution. This was the era of the first Trump administration and of the Dakota pipeline. At the time, Elissa cared far more about anthropogenic issues, seeing environment and human issues as mutually exclusive. Elissa talks about gun control being the pressing issue of her time, having grown up in Connecticut where a mass shooting took place. Not yet understanding the intersectional nature of climate, Elissa could not comprehend why her friend chose not to be outspoken about school shootings but rather about a tree that the town wanted to cut down because the roots were blocking the road. It was in college that Elissa came to understand climate change in terms of racial justice, intergenerational justice and interspecies justice. Elissa believes that climate change is “not just the carbon cycle that you learn in science class. It is the manifestation of all systems of oppression that human beings and beyond endure.” It wasn’t gun control versus cutting down a tree but all part of a tangled system of injustice. This conversation pushes us to consider what grounds us into our climate values and how we can reimagine the rhetoric of turning climate emotions into action, of making anxiety productive? Elissa’s critique is that this alleviation may be temporary especially when understood as a single action and especially when the action does not lead to a desired result (ie voting in the 2024 US election). Elissa recalls a panic attack she had in front of a teacher, which was not productive in our usual understanding but which was helpful for her. In essence, “band-aid solutions on a really deeply rooted grief”, do not seem to work or move us towards something different. “When you are grieving something that you can’t even put into words, then how can you turn it into action and call it a day?”
This conversation inspires the following questions: What does a relationship to nature mean for you? What is your own definition of environment and what and who informs it? In what ways can we reject convenience? Do our own values align with the stories we are told?
Permaculture Heart-Mind-Body: Bonita Eloise Ford
Bio: Bonita Eloise Ford is an author and educator who supports people in addressing and responding to eco/climate breakdown. Her book “Embers of Hope: Embracing Life in an Age of Ecological Destruction and Climate Chaos” was listed as one of the “Top 20+ best all-time permaculture books by women.” Her new book, “Climate Care,” is set for publication in spring 2027. Bonita is currently Climate Mental Health Network’s Gen Z Program Lead and she has led groups around the world for over 20 years.
For Bonita, climate is so much more than parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere or 1.5, 2, or 3 degrees. She has a deep realization of the social repercussions of climate and how these numbers translate to people, communities and land being affected. In the past decade, climate has become central to Bonita’s life. She explains how “The climate space has become my living room.” For Bonita’s life and climate journey, permaculture has always been at the center. Bonita talks about permaculture as ecological design that looks at living systems as teachers to inform decision making processes whether in designing a garden or curriculum, an event or meeting. Permaculture is not just for physical landscape but also social design. For Bonita, permaculture was her first “doorway or invitation to listen to the land” and to be in community with the more than human world. We talk about the integration of activism with spiritual life, maintaining a mental health practice that involves daily walks and singing to beavers and the ways that there does not have to be a distinction between doing self-care and trying to protect an ecosystem. I see these as being really beneficial lessons for Gen Z climate beings. She is humbled and determined to create safe spaces for younger activists.
My takeaway quote: “I still deeply believe it’s possible to live in meaningful ways and to experience joy and well-being even as we are doing our best to meet unraveling and collapse with honesty and try to support one another and hold each other up.”
Springtime Energy: Olivia, Laurel, Natalie, Bonita
The final installment of the “Gen Z Climate Being” podcast series is a group conversation, bringing together all but one of my guests to practice collective visioning of the world we want. I begin the episode with asking what climate emotions are present for us. The conversation is rooted in the following questions: What do we want our present to look like? What do we want our climate futures to look like? What does that look like at a systems level for you? What does that feel like? How can we create the conditions of our blooming to be loving stewards of the future and healers of the past? What do we want to move towards? How do we both live into the fullness of our own being and lives while also connecting outwardly in a way that is generative?
Resources mentioned in this podcast series:
Metamorphosis: Climate Fiction for a Better Future, Introduced by Sheree Renée Thomas, Edited by Grist
What If We Get it Right?: Visions of Climate Futures by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
It’s Not Just You: How to Navigate Eco-Anxiety and the Climate Crisis by Tori Tsui
Teach for Climate Justice: A Vision for Transforming Education by Tom Roderick
https://montanafreepress.org/
2025/05/29/plaintiffs-from- landmark-held-case-file- constitutional-climate-case- against-trump-federal- agencies/