Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: If I had not been in that space of my despair and my grief, I probably would not be able to fully identify with the pain and the grief that I see now in so many of my fellow colleagues working on climate and biodiversity issues.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: I'm Annabel Heseltine. I'm a journalist and broadcaster, and you're very welcome to the second episode of Hope Springs, a new podcast from the Resurgence Trust.
Resurgence is a movement, a magazine, and a manifesto for hope. And in this series, I will be speaking with people working on the front lines of the environmental crisis who have found reasons to be hopeful.
Think of it as a guide to recovery and to discovering a sense of optimism and purpose even in the midst of grave challenges.
And if anyone knows about optimism, it's my second guest, Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rica diplomat and internationally recognized leader on global climate change, who made the 2015 Paris climate agreement possible.
What isn't so well known is that at the time, Christiana was suffering suicidal trauma in the wake of a marital breakdown, or that it was the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, the vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk credited with bringing mindfulness to the west, which enabled her to manage those tricky negotiations.
We talk about how she managed that pain and her work now, supporting young activists, a new kind of collaborative leadership, and how from deep pain grows green shoots of hope.
[00:01:56] Speaker C: Christiana, thank you very much for joining me today.
[00:01:59] Speaker A: Thank you for having me on today.
[00:02:01] Speaker C: Oh, it's my pleasure. I love the title and the subtitle of your book, the future. We choose a stubborn optimist's guide to the Climate Crisis, but with results coming out saying that we hit 1.52% last year, I just wonder how stubbornly optimistic we have to be.
[00:02:20] Speaker A: So, Annabel, I'm sure that at least some, if not all, of your listeners know that there was a recent poll of climate scientists asking them whether they thought that we were actually already incontrovertibly beyond 1.5 as a protective ceiling, as I call it, in temperature rise. And, you know, it was very painful to see that most scientists believe that we are either already breaking through that ceiling or will break through that ceiling. Of course, if you project, that doesn't mean right now, it means if you project into the future. So that's quite sobering to know that scientists who are our guides here are actually, as they themselves say, in despair about this.
What I think important to remember about that is that first scientists are doing their job. That is exactly their job. It is to remind us over and over and over and over again and I think their despair comes from having to remind us so many times about the consequences, about what we are not doing. I think that's the despair that they feel, that they have been warning us for years, for decades, and we are not yet taking the kind of action that is needed. So if scientists are doing their job, who is not doing the job? Well, frankly, it's all the rest of us who are not doing our job yet, because the important thing with news such as the one that we received is to ask the question, okay, here we are confirming the consequences of irresponsible behavior. So now what? That's the important question. The question is, so now what do we do about that? Because I for one, know that I am in pain, I am in grief. I am in a sense of deep loss, about what I see as the impacts on nature and on humanity. And I am sure I'm not the only one.
But the question for me is feeling that pain, feeling that despair, feeling that grief, is that the end of what we're going to do about this, to sit back and wallow in our pain? The answer is absolutely not, because I am unwilling to accept that grief and despair is the end of our efforts. And I would also say that those who are most acutely on the front lines would agree with that because it's their life on the line. So the question now is, what are we going to do about it? And it is very evident that what has to be done is to accelerate what is already happening, which is a very quick energy shift and energy transition that we can go into a little bit later. But just for right now, Annabel, to distinguish between the call and the warnings of scientists and what we ought to.
[00:05:33] Speaker C: Be doing, can we talk about the cops? How did you feel? How satisfied were you with the outcome of COP 28?
[00:05:41] Speaker A: Well, first, let's remember that no cop is ever a solution to everything. They are always build on each other. They build on the previous cop. And there are always steps along the path toward decarbonizing the economy and towards strengthening our adaptation capacity and our resilience. So, you know, it is not fair to take one single cop and judge it according to, you know, the hypothetical question, was this the success we needed or not? And so from that perspective, the last cop was a step in the right direction. It was the first time that we have an illegally binding document of the United nations that every government has agreed to go beyond fossil fuels. Now the question then, of course, is, and how quickly are we going to do that? And so that is the work that still has to be chiseled out. But it was a step in the right direction, especially Annabel, if we consider that that cop took place in a fossil fuel producing and exporting country. So given all of that, I actually come out going, well, it honestly could have been way worse, and it was a step in the right direction.
[00:06:54] Speaker C: And what is your feelings about COP 29? What do you think will be on the main agenda for that?
[00:06:59] Speaker A: Well, the incoming presidency has already said that their main topic is going to be finance, that they will work toward a higher goal of finance, especially to support developing countries. They obviously, they cannot reduce the entire cop to that one topic, but they're absolutely right in making it a central topic because much of the transition depends on the timely finance.
[00:07:26] Speaker C: You have said before that you felt that this was the cop that was really going to test the feasibility of us actually holding temperature increases at 1.5. And if that was the main agenda, how is your feeling about that right now?
[00:07:39] Speaker A: Anything that I say is just sort of reading tea leaves. It is according to the cop presidency again, and I have to say finance is very much the enabling factor to be able to transition at speed and scale. And so we shouldn't think about finance in a separate silo pillar and temperature ceilings completely separate from that. The fact is that those are very, very intimately interlinked. And so the fact that there will be a new goal of international finance negotiated, especially for developing countries, is absolutely key to enable the protection of temperature, because it is abundantly clear has always been that it is the industrialized countries who bear the historical responsibility for having unleashed the entire process that has led to the global warming that we're witnessing now. And it is the developing countries that are historically not responsible for that. That especially the emerging developing countries are assuming year on year more responsibility because of the growth of their economy is absolutely true. But that still does not negate the historical responsibility of the global north. And it also doesn't negate what is abundantly clear, which is that countries of the south not only bear much less responsibility, but they also have less capacity, both financial resources as well as every other kind of resource, to deal with the burden that has been inflicted upon them. In addition to the fact that their top number one priority has to be to lift their populations out of poverty. Now, the long term interlinkage between those topics is that they will not be able to lift their people out of poverty if climate change proceeds along these very, very scary paths. So the north south relationship is a very important relationship to which, frankly, we haven't lived up to.
[00:09:57] Speaker C: I would like to take you back to the 2015 Paris treaty and to look a little bit behind what was going on and what happened as a result. Bringing 195 different countries to the table was a phenomenal, phenomenal achievement. And I know that it was not an easy time for you, and I've always been struck by the way you have. You know, you're a phenomenal negotiator. You're out there, you're talking, but you're also able and brave enough and courageous to. To be honest about who you are as a person and what you have dealt with. So perhaps I could ask you to talk to me a little about what happened during 2015.
[00:10:41] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. And let me just pick up that last statement, Annabel, because I just think it's so important that all of us recognize that we're just human beings. That's all we are. And we are all prone to very, very similar human emotional challenges. And so I just think that it's helpful to stay in touch with that in order to be able to touch that vulnerable part of humanity in everyone else. The moment that we go into our head with all of these statistics and whatever else, and we try to have a conversation with another person just from our head, as though that were disconnected from our heart, that conversation, if we have different opinions about things, would just end up in disagreement at best and conflict at worst. But to your question. Yes. So, in 2013, I had a marital crisis that was completely unexpected. That caught me completely by surprise. And because it was such a stark contrast to the marital relationship and the marital conditions that I thought I had been in, they led me to start feeling quite suicidal. And I was able to separate work for myself because I didn't think it would be helpful for me to turn up at work with those feelings and with those intentions. And so I did separate and cry myself to sleep for a whole year, and then get up the next morning and put on my big smile and go to work.
But that separation, that contrast between, let's call it the day me and the night me, got to a point that it was no longer sustainable.
Anybody who's had these feelings and these impulses, these ideations, has their own particular form. Mine happened to be about a train. I have no idea why.
And I did become very scared about getting on a train, which was complicated because I used the train to get into the office every morning. And so that was really difficult. And I also used a long distance train to do all of the work that I had to do within Europe. So it was most unfortunate that I chose that type of scenario. And I had to put in place several sort of mitigation protective measures to keep myself within a reasonable sense, not real safety, but a reasonable sense of safety. But fast forward when that contrast became completely unsustainable, I was incredibly blessed to be led by the forces of the universe, or whatever, however you want to call it, to discover the teachings of Zen master Thaegnathan, who is a Zen master from Vietnam, who has eleven Zen buddhist monasteries around the world. And one happened to be very close to the place where I was living in Germany. And so, without knowing anything about Buddhism at all, I went and I stayed first for several days, and then as I went back to work, I spent many weekends there as well, continuing my study. And I have been a student of Thai, as we call him when he becomes our teacher. I've been a student of Thai since then, so going into eleven years now. And it has really changed my life. And I'm in a position now of being able to share the teachings with many climate activists, many of them young, others not so young, or with climate thought leaders or people working on global biodiversity issues. So many people who. Just to loop back to where we started here, Annabel, so many people who are today in despair, in grief, you know, with this deep sense of loss of what we're losing. And I'm so grateful, because if I had not been in that space of my despair and my grief, I probably would not be able to fully identify with the pain and the grief that I see now in so many of my fellow colleagues working on climate and biodiversity issues. Had I not had that experience, I would have heard their pain and it would have gone to my head and I would have intellectualized it. But now it goes straight to my heart.
[00:15:30] Speaker C: So when I heard you talking about this, I was really struck by the serendipity. You have credited thich Natan with teaching you, a way of listening and talking, which you believe was something to do with the success of the Paris treaty and also an understanding about what it is to be a victim and how that is not helpful for anybody. And you can translate that straight back to the global south.
[00:15:59] Speaker A: Yes. That phenomenon that I think most people participate in, somehow we have all inherited an ancestral participation in this victim perpetrator dynamic is very much a part of our experience. In my case, I realized that I had my whole life thought of myself as a victim and acted out of my victimhood, whether it was as a young girl to my parents, or to men who were completely disrespectful, or in my marriage. The list goes on and on and on. And I realized first for myself how debilitating that is because it robs me of my energy, but it is also accusatory because the moment that I put myself in the victim space, I am, by definition accusing someone else of being a perpetrator. And you can see how that dynamic works indefinitely because then that accusation of person x being a perpetrator, that person will immediately defend themselves and go like, no, no, no, I'm not perpetrating against you. It's because you, last week, last month, last year, last century, whatever you perpetrated against me, and I'm the victim here. And you can see that that goes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and in history. And we're seeing this now so painfully in Gaza, that victim perpetrator chain goes back centuries without ever any of us actually being able to establish who is the real victim and who is the real perpetrator, because we are both at the same time.
And so it was very helpful for me to realize that for myself and be able to get some light into that very dark tunnel that I had dug myself into. But it also was incredibly helpful as I was witnessing the dynamic of north and south, because the south usually comes to these negotiations very much under a victim mentality and makes its interventions out of a victim mentality in a victim space. And then, of course, the north defends itself and says, no, no, no, no, you know, we're not the perpetrators. The fact is that you are now increasing your emissions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so the only way to begin to get a handle on that is to look at it inside of us and begin to put that distance and begin to refuse to play the role of either the victim or the perpetrator, but rather to bring balance into the situation personally. The big aha for me was that as I did that, I began to see the dynamic between global north and global south begin to soften and willingness on both sides to find literally legal language that bridged that divide.
[00:19:20] Speaker C: We were about to start talking about the trauma that everybody is in in this world at the moment and what we're living with and, and how we deal with this. And I wonder how you think we should deal with this. What is your advice and what is your insight with all the work that you've done and the many, many people that you have met?
[00:19:40] Speaker A: Well, first, Annabel, could I just share that? I think it's a little bit dangerous that we have now stretched the word trauma to include everything that has ever happened to anyone. And I don't think that that's helpful, because the more you stretch it over so many different events and conditions, the less meaning it has. So I think we should be careful about that. But also, you know, without stretching the rubber band too much. I, like anybody else, I have had my share of traumas. And what I have grown to understand is that the actual trauma is not what occurs, is not the event, is not what happens to us.
The trauma starts when we have an unmindful reaction to what happens. And therein lies the difference, because we will all have, quote, unquote, traumatic experiences in our life. And you can, you know, define which ones are traumatic for you and which ones aren't. And there are many people who have had really, truly, deeply, deeply traumatizing experiences. So I don't want to minimize that.
But the important thing, if we want to move forward is precisely not to stay as a victim to that, but rather to really begin to understand that we have a choice in how we react to things that happen in the quote unquote, external world. We have a choice inside our internal world, how to respond to the external world instead of simply reacting. And the challenge here is to not immediately react out of our automatic, but pause, take a breath, and be really mindful about, okay, how do I want to act right now with this situation that I'm in? How can I bring more mindfulness to it? Am I sure that I listened properly? Should I ask the person to say it again?
And then what choices do I have? Because it's not that we always have just one choice, which is to react out of our past. That's just not true.
It takes much more discipline, for sure. And it takes the discipline, the same discipline that we have to have when we go to the gym, right? So this is the same training, the mental and the emotional muscles, to react in a different way.
[00:22:32] Speaker C: In many ways, we are our thoughts, and we do have the choice to change those thoughts. And then we live in a different way. And in doing so, we invite in different things that happen. Can we talk about nature? And could you tell me first about your own passion, your own connection with nature and where that started and how it was that you became so inspired to become the global leader you have become?
[00:22:59] Speaker A: Well, I can definitely tell you about my love of nature started when I was a very young girl. And I've told the story many times of how my parents, who are or were politicians in Costa Rica, took us on their political campaigns. And one of the places that they took us was to one of the many beautiful national parks in Costa Rica, Monte Verde. And I was privileged to see a golden toad that has since become extinct. And I just fell in love with it. It was just absolutely, absolutely the most magnificent thing that I had seen. And then when I was a mother of two young girls, I wanted them to see this amazing creature that had made me fall in love. You know, I wanted to take them. And the very sad part of it is that they had become extinct. They, in fact, became extinct precisely in the years in which my daughters were being born. So that was really, really sad for me. And I had no idea what had happened. And I started asking scientists, how did this happen? It was a species that was endemic here to this park, doesn't exist anywhere else. It went extinct. And they began to say, they suspect that it was temperature of the surface where they live, on the surface of the forest. They were killed by disease caused by the rising temperature. And so that's where I started my journey into global warming and climate change. And, you know, voila. Here we are, many years later. But perhaps even more, even more than that story. Annabel, how important it is for us to continue to use nature as we resource ourselves. Those of us who work on these issues and many others who work on other equally challenging issues do reach points of despair and grief and pain and sorrow. And it is exactly in those moments in which nature can be our greatest teacher and our greatest healer. I live in Costa Rica now. I'm grateful for that. And I live in nature. And, you know, my neighbors are the red macaws and the large iguanas who happen to decide that everything that I plant in the garden is just for their enjoyment. But I just find it so important to be able to learn from nature. And I'm constantly trying to deepen my understanding of nature. I just took a biomimicry course from the Biomimicry Institute founded by Janine Benius to understand, how does nature function? How does it transport water? How does it regulate temperatures? How does it reproduce? And it's just so fascinating, and even more fascinating is the fact that we think that nature is out there and that we are in here. And so that separation between humans and nature is the first that we really have to disarm there, because we are not apart from, but a part of nature. And the more that we understand that and the more that we strengthen that.
[00:26:28] Speaker C: The better we are and to redefine our relationship with nature to understand that we are not superior, that in fact, a friend of mine used the most beautiful word. She said, nature will one day just shiver us off. She can get rid of us and she will survive without us. It's really a question of whether we want to stay here and whether we want to work with nature. Because I believe that the time for us to dominate, to think that we have the arrogance that we can dominate nature, is just long gone. But how can we get beyond to people who aren't receptive? I think that's a great challenge.
[00:27:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I think preaching is not, in my experience, just not quite.
It's not quite the way to get to people. You know, what I think is fun, Annabel, is when I'm with a person who has made some comments that I go like, hmm, this person is really not aware of anything of nature, that I look for an opportunity. Even if we're like, I don't know, in a conference center or in a hotel lobby and there's one planned, I look for an opportunity to go and take one little leaf and bring it over to that person and hold it in the palm of my hand and describe this leaf and go like, have you ever noticed how amazing leaves are? Check this out. And then I go and I describe the leaf and I go, like, put your finger on this and feel this leaf. And at first, they're looking at me like, she has gone completely lulu. Okay. But more often than not, you see that something just goes like, click. And they go like, oh, wow, I had never seen that.
That's the thing. We are so busy with our humanness that we don't take the time to see that which is right around us and hugging us and embracing us and feeding us and giving us air and water. And so just to make that click for people to understand, like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not so far away from this as I thought I was.
[00:28:40] Speaker C: I much enjoyed your mini series on your podcast, global optimism, our story of nature from. From rupture to reconnection. And I thought Isabelle Cavalier, your co producer, she talked about the disconnect and how we don't need to reinvent. I think it comes back to this very centered, meditative thing of remembering who we are.
[00:29:03] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. It's not inventing anything. It is, as you say, coming back to who we are and who we have always been. The feeling is like, huh, that's interesting. I was in a forest, and then I took this long detour around something, and now I'm back.
[00:29:24] Speaker C: Einstein said that in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity. And I think rather than dwelling on the negative, depressing, trauma side of things, it's also important to look at the positives. And I'd love to hear from you what you see as the opportunities that this crisis of nature presents for us.
[00:29:49] Speaker A: Well, the opportunity is actually staring us in the face. We used to think maybe 2030 years ago, when sustainability was the thing we used to think like, ah, yes, okay, what we have to do is relieve the pressure that we put on nature and optimize the use of resources in order to stay within certain boundaries of use. And that has a place for sure. But the fact is that since it's taken us so long to understand sustainability, we've gone beyond many boundaries right now, many planetary boundaries. And so both the need, the urgency and the opportunity here is to really step into regeneration and to understand that it is now our responsibility to intentionally interact with ecosystems in a way that restores their original resilience, their original carrying capacity, which we have severely impaired. So it's not just standing away from, it's not putting a little picket fence around and admiring. It's actually going in there, getting our hands dirty and respectful, restoring the resilience that nature used to have before our impression there to do that with soils, with forests, with rivers, with ocean, with lakes, with, you know, all ecosystems.
[00:31:28] Speaker C: I loved your book, and I loved, in particular, the way you painted a world that we can achieve, and we still can. The scientists are telling us we still can, and we know we can. But perhaps you could talk a little bit about where could we go if we do get this right.
[00:31:46] Speaker A: Well, where we could go is to begin with, a much more fair world, that whole. That is more inclusive and, yeah, with much more social justice, which is honestly what is most important to me. But also a world that is just healthier with less pollution, a world that is more efficient if that's the way you think, with energy sources that are cleaner, cheaper, higher performing, a world that has much more energy security because we're all producing our energy domestically. A world that, you know, it's a fantastic world that is not utopia, that is actually quite achievable and around the corner, if we do our job well, that is an amazing gift that we have because we can do it. You know, if that had happened to us maybe 5100 years ago, we probably wouldn't have known how to do that. But now we know that we have to do it and we know that we can do it. And we have the technologies and the policies and the finance to do it. And that's just an incredible gift. To be able, you know, to say that we were part of the regeneration generation is just amazing, because we certainly.
[00:33:08] Speaker C: Don'T want to be the ones apologizing.
[00:33:10] Speaker A: No, that's too painful.
[00:33:11] Speaker C: Christiana, I. Can I just take you down a little path, which I've been thinking about, and you can stop me if you think it's rubbish, but it strikes me that there is a resilience that comes out of trauma, that it's been demonstrated many times over in the individual, in yourself, in other people who have gone on to do amazing things, interviewed many people who've gone on to be amazing, do amazing things. And so often there is a trauma in their past. It could be the death of a parent at a very young age or something. And it makes me think, well, if this is what happens with the individual, is this perhaps an opportunity right now for something as a collective that could produce something incredible in the future?
[00:34:02] Speaker A: Absolutely. I do think that that is the case. And I will give you a little analogy. I live here in Costa Rica, and we're at the end of the dry season. It's been an amazingly dry, hot season, and we've had more spontaneous forest fires than we've ever had. In fact, we're going to have to ration electricity, because all our electricity is renewable, and most of it is hydro, and we don't have enough water, so we're gonna have to ration electricity. But I have been away for three weeks, and I just came home yesterday.
And when I went away, the mountains behind my home were on fire.
And my friends and neighbors here, as I was gone, sent me the photographs of what was left after the fire. And it was charred. Trees, shrubs, all brown. It was very impactful.
And as I came home yesterday, everything was sprouting into green again.
Why? Because it started to rain two days ago.
Two days ago it started to rain. And all of that, even the little trees that we all thought were dead and burned, they had, like, little leaves, and the grass is beginning to come up. And I thought, wow, now this is a lesson from nature. Again. Again, if you take it at a personal level, right. I could easily portray my personal marital disaster as a fire that burned me down to the ground.
Clearly, that is a really good analogy for what I thought. I thought, you know, I am burned down to the ground. I cannot sustain myself.
And then what has happened since then is that I've been able to pick myself up and emerge with little shoots of green that are still growing that are, in fact, quite different to many things that were there before.
Why? Because the tears of yesterday have become today's rain.
And when that is the case, when our tears become rain on parched soil and on burned forests, there is a new life that springs forth that is perhaps unexpected, renewed, and is quite beautiful. And it is the miracle of life. And so if we take that analogy right from the personnel to the mountains, in the back to the planet, we also can begin to think, huh? Have we actually burned ourselves down to the ground?
And where is the reign that we can bring that is going to bring us back into life?
[00:37:15] Speaker C: That's beautiful. I've got shivers on my arms.
It's hard to move on from that one, really. But I think what I would like to just ask is one thing, because I think it's something that is unique to your views, is about leadership. What do you want from leaders of the future?
[00:37:32] Speaker A: Well, first, I am very excited that leadership is no longer hierarchical or pyramidal. I think the time for a leader of anything up at the top has gone way gone.
And so I just, I am so excited about that, because I have been for a long time, truly convinced that wisdom is collective and that leadership is collective. And I think perhaps because of the complexity of the challenges that we face, that already, by definition, means there is no single individual or group of individuals who actually know what we're supposed to do. It is by harnessing the collective wisdom that we're gonna be able to move forward. So, first, that to recognize that in our political systems are, I think, completely outmoded in the fact that they're structured for individual leaders. And the fact that we have very few good individual leaders around the world is probably, you know, a good test case for the fact that, hmm, maybe that structure isn't quite what we want for the future. And the other piece that I think is important about leadership that is very related to that, is that it is not about showing the way or telling other people what to do. It's about enabling. So, for me, enabling leadership is really important to be able to support those people around us, for them to be the best and highest selves that they know how to be, because that's the way we're going to get collective wisdom and collective leadership, because we have to use what was given to us, but not just from the head, from the heart as well. And, you know, for most people, the distance between the head and the heart is the longest distance they will ever travel.
And I think our lives are about shortening that distance as quickly as possible and being able to bring both energies to every single situation.
[00:39:38] Speaker C: My last question to you as to all of my interviews is what is your hope for the future?
[00:39:45] Speaker A: My hope for the future?
I struggle with the word hope because I think that it's not strong enough. It's like, well, I hope we're going to do this, but maybe we're not.
And so I struggle with that word. Although I have very, very dear friends who use hope and optimism interchangeably. And if we do that, then I'm great.
So where do I find my light? Perhaps is the way that I would like to see that. And I honestly find my light precisely at this incredible intersection between the forest fires and the resurgence of nature as understood as a moment in the evolution of humanity.
The fact that we are slowly but surely understanding that what we have been doing for the past 5000 years is just completely non sustainable and that we not only have to, but we are going to change. And the fact that there are so many people who are doing this, that is what I celebrate so much, Annabel. I mean, every day I find out about more and more people who are in the millions, who are really dedicated to transforming whatever context they work in. And working, perhaps they think separately from each other, but in the big scheme of things, actually, they're all weaving a tapestry and a tapestry for a much better world for all of nature, humans and other than humans.
[00:41:24] Speaker C: Christiana Figueres, thank you so much for your time and thank you so much for coming onto this podcast.
[00:41:30] Speaker A: Thank you, Annabel. Appreciate it.
[00:41:38] Speaker B: To hear more from Christiana, you might like to check out her podcast, outrage and optimism. She's running a five part miniseries, how to live a good life in a climate crisis, covering all important questions like should I fly? Is it okay to eat meat?
And should I have children?
If you enjoyed today's conversation, please leave us a review wherever you're listening and recommend this series to anyone who you think might enjoy it too.
I'll be back in a fortnight talking to the incredibly active young diversity activist, environmentalist, ornithologist, and bird girl blogger, doctor Maya Rose Craig. We'll talk about her foundation, black to nature, bridging gaps across the ages, and how bird watching kept her family together when her mother was struggling with an undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
[00:42:41] Speaker C: Over the course of those weeks, I saw my mum kind of come alive in a way that I hadn't seen her for at least a year or two by that point, and it was incredible.
[00:42:54] Speaker B: This episode was produced by Pete Norton and brought to you by the Resurgence Trust, which is a movement, a magazine, and a manifesto for hope. To find out more about their work, click the link in the show notes of this episode. I'm Annabel Heseltine, and thank you for listening to Hope Springs.
