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Adam here again, back with my second blog post. On Monday, March 23rd, 2026, Ariel Burgess facilitated an “Eco-Resiliency Gathering " with a group of about 15 attendees (including Laura and I) at the Deborah Rawson Memorial Library in Jericho. YouTube Video HERE. Ariel opened the Gathering by asking us to take a moment to close our eyes, or look at the floor, and check in with ourselves—ask ourselves how we were feeling emotionally and physically. Did we have a crazy day? Did we want a nap? And asked us to try to identify an emotion or feeling. She followed that by introducing us to the Climate Emotions Wheel (see below), developed from the work of Panu Pihkala, a professor of environmental theology at the University of Helsinki. She asked us to pick an emotion from the wheel that matched how we were feeling.  As you can see, the Red group encompasses emotions of Anger, Purple is Sadness, Green represents Fear, and finally, Blue is Positivity. Ariel asked how many of us were in each category. There were three people in the Red, four from Purple, five or six in Green, and three in Blue. We began the night relatively evenly distributed and would return to this Wheel throughout the Gathering.
Before going further, Ariel introduced herself, explaining that she currently teaches interdisciplinary environmental courses at Champlain College. Her passion lies in eco-psychology and climate resilience, and she holds a Doctorate in the field. Ariel believes that the roots of the ecological and climate crises are largely psychological problems, but also that the solutions can be psychological as well. So, what is eco resilience? Ariel defined it as “our emotional, psychological, and spiritual resilience in the context of ecological destruction and climate change.” This is about flexibility and growth, not the rubber band kind of resilience, as we might talk about an ecosystem snapping back to baseline after a disruption, like a storm that knocks over many trees. But our baseline is not stable; things are changing. With that in mind, Ariel compared this to Leslie Davenport’s (a well-known climate psychologist) term “emotional resiliency,” meaning the “ability to remain present, open-minded, and empathic in the face of increasing stress” because of the changing climate. She explained that we should care so that we don’t get overwhelmed by negative emotions or experience the ongoing changes as trauma, specifically climate trauma, as described by Zhiwa Woodbury, which can push us outside our ability to respond, because the problem feels too big. Ariel introduced a method to prevent that trauma, while making progress on the climate, called titrating. We had been practicing it throughout the night in the form of discussing hard or difficult parts of the climate crisis and then coming back together as a group to discuss our changing emotional states. Titrating is about tackling difficult things a little bit at a time, and then doing things we enjoy, including being in community, to recharge. The climate crisis will be there when we’re ready to go back to it. Along those lines is also the concept of the “window of resilience,’ or window of tolerance. We want to remain within this window for our best psychological functioning. We don’t want to go too low, where we might get depressed and experience flight, and we don’t want to go too high, where we might encounter fight. If our arousal state is too low, we want to bring it up by engaging in energetic activities like dancing or playing sports. And if our arousal state is too high, we want to bring it down by engaging in calming activities like meditating or bird watching. At the end of the evening, we completed an activity. Everyone partnered up (Ariel and I partnered up). The first partner would continuously speak for 5 minutes, talking about what life is like in the present moment and what they’re doing to address the climate crisis, while the second partner would listen from the perspective of a descendant far in the future. For the last five minutes, the other partner would talk as a descendant, responding to their ancestor. After this activity, we checked in and found that more people had moved into the blue quadrant of the Climate Emotions Wheel, towards positivity, hope, and gratitude. With that, Ariel left us with some parting words:
Thanks for a great gathering, Ariel! Comments are closed.
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