Adulting in Turbulent Times
An update on the last few years
Hi! I’m Ana, and I’m hungry.
Namely, hungry for climate action (and for good food, always). I’m a climate activist, trained chef, and climate-aware therapist in the making.
If you are interested in my work around climate resilience, this is the best place to follow along. Moving forward, I’ll use this newsletter to share updates, resources, event announcements, and more. I’d love to have you with me.
This week, I’m sharing about a recent conversation I had on the Climate One podcast. It’s been a few years since I’ve posted in this space, and recently, I’ve struggled to find the words to describe how much I’ve changed and learned since a wildfire hit my hometown. I’m grateful that Greg and the rest of the brilliant Climate One team have helped me share this piece of my story.
More below. I hope you enjoy. Thank you for being here.
Ana on Climate Resilience with Climate One
On September 7, 2021, a devastating wildfire hit my hometown in Northern California, and my family lost our home. I was 25 years old then and still just trying to find my footing in the world when suddenly, I felt completely untethered, lost, and grief-stricken.
Immediately after the fire, I threw myself into climate advocacy - part of which was launching this newsletter - but I couldn’t sustain that level of output. Back then, I had a tremendous sense of urgency, but within a few months after the fire, I was running on fumes and couldn’t continue. I was experiencing deep burnout and the onset of what would turn out to be a significant and lengthy battle with depression, anxiety, and passive suicidal ideation.* (**Please take care while listening. I love you. We need you. To get support, text HOME to 74174 to get support anytime from a trained crisis counselor).
It’s been a long road, but now, three years later, I’m filled with a tremendous sense of hope, purpose, and peace. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Greg Dalton and Ariana Brouchus at Climate One to discuss this period in my life - I’d love for you to listen in.
Also, here are links to some of the resources and good things mentioned in the podcast.
📖 Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against "The Apocalypse" by Emily Raboteau
🎧 Rekindling our Relationship with Wildfire Climate One podcast episode
💡 Ana’s Medium article, My house burned in a wildfire. Here’s what I need from you.
📖 Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World
By Katharine Hayhoe
🧑🌾 Climate Farm School (I can’t recommend this in-person experience highly enough. They partner with regenerative farms across the U.S. and abroad).
💡 “These times are urgent, let’s slow down” Quote and broader reflection from Bayo Akomolafe.
🎨 Experience two future Californias at The Nature Conservancy's art installation in Golden Gate Park.
📖 You’ll hear me say that I hope so much hope for all we can save - this is the inspiration behind that.
🧠 Climate and Mind website from Andrew Bryant and other awesome volunteers in the climate mental health field.
I’ve also included a copy of the episode transcript below. You can listen to the episode at the links provided, or anywhere you get your podcasts. (My part starts around the 20-minute mark, but I absolutely encourage you to listen to the entire episode. Each of the guest segments is so rich and important.)
Looking ahead…
Near the end of our conversation, Greg asked about how I see myself in the near future. I said, “Putting my climate optimist futurist hat on, I picture a future where we're on the right path, and I can play a role in people feeling their way through this and tuning into more of their purpose and power and community and just all being a lot better for it.” In the spirit of climate futurism, I’m excited to attend the Hollywood Climate Summit this week - including a “climate futures worldbuilding workshop” hosted by one of my heroes, adrienne maree brown, and other folks I’m excited to learn from. We’ll learn how to “combine the future visions we dream of with the scientific facts we've learned to generate a joyful reimagining of the near-future.”
If you’re interested, you can tune into the summit programming this week for free virtually, or give me a shout if you’re also planning to join in person - I’d love to connect with you.
Podcast Transcript & Audio Links 🎧:
Alana Casanova-Burgess: Today on Climate One – we’re talking about adulting in turbulent times.
Coming up, a wildfire destroyed a young woman’s home. Recovering from that loss set her on a new path.
Ana Alanis: I have so much hope for what we can achieve together, for everything that we can save, knowing that a part of it is also mourning our losses and tending to our fears.
Alana Casanova-Burgess: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.
We’ll be right back.
Ariana Brocious: Please help us get people talking more about climate by sharing this episode with a friend. And we’d love to know what you think of the show. Please give us a rating or review. You can do it right now on your device – and it really helps people find the show. Thanks!
This is Climate One. I’m Ariana Brocious. On last week’s show, we talked about wildfire resilience. That’s a term that encompasses a lot of things, but at its core is about learning to live with fire, understanding it as a natural and essential part of our landscape, in spite of the utter destruction it can leave in its wake. As part of that episode, we heard from Ana Alanis, who told us about losing her family home in northern California to the River Complex Fire in 2021. She described the experience of gathering special belongings from her house as the fire approached.
Ana Alanis: I do remember looking around, leaving up to the fire, um, just walking around the property and just looking around almost like it was somebody, like someone you loved at the hospital and you really hope they're going to pull through. But just in case they don't, you give them one more loving look, And you tell them one more time just how much they mean to you.
Ariana Brocious: While her family was unharmed by the blaze, the house and almost everything in it was gone. For Alanis, the years that followed were filled with grief, even thoughts of suicide – but eventually led her to a new career path. So, as we hear more about that on today’s show, please take care while listening.
Now let’s pick up her conversation with Greg Dalton, at the point just after the fire.
Greg Dalton: This is the fall of 2021. You are in your early twenties, just adulting. You're about kind of leaving this home. And then you go back to it.
Ana Alanis: Really forced out of the nest.
Greg Dalton: Yeah. Burned out of the nest. And then, you went back and so what did you see?
Ana Alanis: I mean, it was kind of funny deja vu. You were driving up and you see the same trees and road you've seen a million times before. And then there was just this one turn in the highway where the view changed and the trees opened up more and everything was gone. It was just burnt trees and sticks and my house was melted and it was quiet and eerie because all the animals had burned and I remember what really struck me is the rocks were all still in the same place. A lot had changed too, because right after the fire, there was heavy rain and because the roots had burned, there was massive flooding. So there were logs thrown around and the river had changed position. So much of it was disorienting. The destruction was horrible and really disorienting. And parts of it still felt familiar, which was comforting and awful because I know what it was supposed to look like.
Greg Dalton: And you say that after that you got into the superwoman thing and you tried to take care of everybody. We were working together at the same organization, the Commonwealth Club, should say that. And then you realized you weren't okay. and then you poured yourself into a new job. How did you work through that grief?
Ana Alanis: So right after the fire, the first trip up to Coffee Creek that was under the premise of getting to share my story with a news organization. So I felt like a journalist going back and was taking pictures and photos and recording myself and was writing stories about how I was feeling. And that felt really productive, and healing for me. A lot of people were asking how I was doing and it was kind of born out of that. I wanted them to know that, let them know the updates, like GoFundMe goal had been met. We were safe, we're okay. And I kind of realized the next stage of what I wanted people to do as they were checking on us and thinking about us was to talk about climate change and reflect with me about places that they loved and kind of in that way help me shoulder the loss and the pain of it.
Greg Dalton: What I'm hearing is, yes, feel for me and pity me, and do something about it. You wanted to turn that into reflection and action.
Ana Alanis: And it felt like there was an appetite for it. People were truly reeling for us. It was horrible. And once our physical needs were met and people were still thinking of us, that was the prompt that came naturally to me to offer to people. Feel with me - my loss, but your potential loss. And then together, maybe we can mourn and work together to save everything that we still can.
Greg Dalton: And so you wrote in Medium, “What do I need now? I need you to talk about climate change, what you want. To fight to save what you may have already lost, what gives you hope in the wake of the climate crisis, and what confuses or scares you most.”
Ana Alanis: Yeah, I don't know if at that point I'd found Katharine Hayhoe's book, Saving Us. I know, I think, um, I know I found it around that time, but it felt really powerful to feel like in that moment where I felt so raw and broken and vulnerable all that I felt able to do was maybe talk about how I was feeling. And it felt really nice to feel like that was, or hear external affirmation from Katharine Hayhoe’s book, that that was valuable. And from the response from other people, getting back to your question of that kind of fed this feeling like that, that lifted my, my energy and my spirits. So I was making sure my parents were okay. Does everyone have therapy? Is the GoFundMe goal doing well? And thanking donors and trying to find a new job related to climate. And I was just really going, going. I tried to start a newsletter talking about how we were doing. Like I wanted to keep going. It really brought me so much peace and solace and purpose until I just….was sputtering and like a car running out of gas. Sorry to use a fossil fuel. But I just was guh guh guh. I was anxious, having nightmares. I was feeling inept or unwilling to take care of myself. I was being a good little codependent and trying to just, is my partner okay? Is my boss okay? Looking at everyone but myself. and then the reality check was when I started to think, um, that maybe everyone would be better off if I wasn't around anymore.
Greg Dalton: Whoa.
Ana Alanis: And that thought was so not me. and really jolted me. So I reassessed, I shared with my close family and friends how I was feeling. I dialed back from work again, went on antidepressants for a little bit, and got back into my body with yoga and some somatic therapy.
Greg Dalton: How did you pull through?
Ana Alanis: I think it was things like learning how to balance the urgency that is working in climate. The whole experience, of course, gave me this feeling of urgency, like the worst has happened, and feeling like I had to go as fast as possible while also having to reckon with the fact that going nonstop was hurting me and was going to take me out of the fight.
Greg Dalton: You felt like you had to do more and go faster. And then you realize maybe I need to do less and go slower.
Ana Alanis: I heard this quote, “These times are urgent. Let's slow down.”
Greg Dalton: Yeah. I’ve heard something like that. It's very Eastern Buddhist or something like, yeah, in times of crisis, you need to calmly look around and think rather than. Go faster and maybe erratically. And at one point you, you kind of found your tribe and you found a particular group of people in a school that was a turning point, it seems.
Ana Alanis: It was, so part of the slowing down was I think really taking the time to tend to myself and get to know myself and my interests and really give space and support to myself in that way. And one of the twists and turns on that journey led me to Climate Farm School, which was a wonderful group of professionals from across industries who all came together to live on a regenerative farm for a week to hear from farmers in Sebastopol, learn about transforming our food system. And I felt so energized and alive, meeting all of these wonderful people and realizing they were lending all of their unique talents to this fight that means the whole world to me, fighting for a sustainable future. And I felt like we really had to have a chance, like that was really a moment where I just looked around at everyone and felt like we can do this. And then it just inspired me to want to delve more into climate mental health and maybe take some of my learnings of struggling with depression and grief and anxiety and urgency in this time and take some of those lessons. And maybe you pay it forward to support other people working in climate or impacted by climate.
Greg Dalton: And you're about to start a master's program at UCLA and how are you going to take that to UCLA in your graduate studies?
Ana Alanis: Yes, so I'm going to infuse climate into all of it. It's a master's in social work, so on the other side of it. I will be a trained mental health professional and also have training in policy creation and advocacy. And my throughline in all of this is climate resilience. I want to know how to be a mental health practitioner that can support people like myself, communities like myself, and climate professionals who are really in this, supporting rural low income communities and other land based populations like farmers, fisher people and indigenous communities. And then in addition to that direct one on one mental health support, I am hoping that those experiences will continue to inform the work that I do as a climate activist, advocating for climate resilient policies like disaster preparedness plans, making tangible progress on climate action plans, pushing for food sovereignty in L.A., supporting urban regenerative farmers, et cetera, et cetera. There are so many wonderful opportunities for climate resilience. And it's like I visualize a bunch of individual soldiers in a fight. And if I can kind of like, support the troops as they're going out, that sounds good to me.
Greg Dalton: Yeah, it sounds like you do something we talk a lot about on the show, which is work at the individual level and also with a systemic vision in mind. So what have you, looking back, you're burned out of your childhood home, now you're going on to graduate studies to kind of at the intersection of climate mental health and disaster preparedness. What have you gained from your life being scorched by wildfire? Not something you'd ever want or wish, but as the suffering brought you some strength in surprising ways.
Ana Alanis: Absolutely. It brought me transformation. It's been really powerful to have gone through this experience and to be able, to connect with other people who have maybe gone through what I have or are really afraid that they're going to experience what I have and are feeling anxious or lost, depressed, out of sorts. And to be able to sit in front of them and show that I'm still standing, and that I have so much hope. I have so much hope for what we can achieve together, for everything that we can save, knowing that a part of it is also mourning our losses and tending to our fears. And it feels like a superpower to now be able to help some people along their journey.
Greg Dalton: So your home burned when you were in your early twenties. When you were in your early thirties, what's your vision? What would you like to look back on this time? And you've gone to graduate school, you're helping on climate policy. Maybe you're a clinician. What's the early thirties on a look back at this?
Ana Alanis: That's a lovely question. My first thought for it is I was just walking through Golden Gate Park the other day, and I saw this really cool art installation where it was showing mile markers, but time and when you walked through, front to back, it was time markers, but bad things like 2035 was when the last species of this bird went extinct, something something else horrible. But then when you walk backwards, it was all these good possibilities, like how, like a different planet, alternate future. So I think putting my climate optimist futurist hat on, I picture a future where we're on the right path and I can have played a role in people feeling their way through this and tuning into more of their purpose and power and community and just all being a lot better for it.
Greg Dalton: Well, thanks for sharing on your story of grief and resilience and shifting your life and finding strength out of it. Thank you.
Ana Alanis: Thanks, Greg.
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