Witching for a Warming Planet: Let's Go!

Get in witches and pagans and other woo-woo types, we're going to get some good information and put it to good use. We might even save the planet.

I have always maintained that to begin at the beginning is as wrong a place to start as any other.

So I'm going to start with the end of my career as part of the Big Machine.

I'm coming to you at the end of a career that has spanned more than 30 years, that has included spending more than a decade as an environmental lawyer at some of the largest law firms in the world, almost 20 years in the non-profit world doing culture creation and communication, with the last decade being the leading communications strategist on US Climate Change for two of the largest green groups in the world. I've been "in the game" on environmentalism and climate change for decades, and I've had a front row seat for the whipsaw ride that has been US and International Climate Policy for the last decade. I'll admit that while I'm not special in climate world, I've been part of some pretty cool shit.

I'm also a practicing witch, and while most "credentials" in the pagan and witchcraft worlds are often of the "that and a dollar won't buy you a cup of coffee" variety, (and should be appropriately viewed with a gimlet eye) I still feel that giving you some sense of where I came from is helpful. I serve as a coven leader and High Priesstess in the Church of the Knotted Ash tradition, a small group originating out of Buffalo, New York that I would best describe as "Wicca adjacent" in its practices. What that means as a practical matter is that I've been studying for a while, been found worthy in the eyes of my peers in my tradition, and I work as a community builder and teacher in my local pagan and witchcraft scene. There are lots of folks like me. I'm not overly special as a witch.

When I left my job in climate communications at the end of 2024, I knew that what I wanted to do was find a way to serve the larger community of witches and pagans, and use the knowledge and experience I had in climate world to help those who shared my path and my spiritual community be more effective in their engagement with the climate crisis.

Okay, I'll own it -- that was some first-class buzzword-speak right there. What the hell does it mean to be "more effective in your engagement with the climate crisis?"

Here's the thing -- most ordinary people find climate change an overwhelming idea to think about. There's this planet-scale problem out there that is doing all this crazy stuff to us. It's causing fires and floods and blizzards and hurricanes that kill people and devastate whole landscapes. It's why your homeowner's insurance premiums are going up. It's why there is sea level rise and sunny day flooding and why polar ice caps are getting smaller. It's why growing seasons are changing and fish stocks are migrating from their traditional routes. And while there is talk of solutions, it's very confusing. Are solar panels good or bad? Are electric vehicles good or bad? When people talk about a "price on carbon" what the hell does that mean and who pays that price? And if it's such a problem, why aren't we doing more about it? Am I doing enough about it? Do I need to stop driving my pickup truck? Do I need to stop eating meat? Do I need to dump my condo in the city and move to a permaculture farm in the Dakotas? Seriously, what do I do and is it ever going to be enough?

And then add to this being a witch or a pagan or some other member of the "earth-based spirituality" community of practices, and it gets even worse. When your spiritual practice is grounded in noting and celebrating the earth's natural cycles and systems, what happens to that practice when something is disrupting those systems? There's a natural inclination to want to respond to that disruption. But the very difficult question is -- how the fuck do I do that? Can I do magic to help with global warming? And how do I make that magic effective?

Those are a lot of questions. And I'll say right up front that I don't have easy answers for most of them.

I'll also take a moment here to acknowledge that I am fully aware that I am not the first witch in the world to consider these questions. There are a lot of other folks in this space, many of whom are leading luminaries who've been witching way longer than me. I'm well aware that I am not the only voice in our community taking this on, and that's a good thing.

Because the truth of the matter is -- the climate crisis is a big problem, with many facets to it, and there isn't one solution. It's a pretty reasonable thing to expect that a systemic, planet-wide problem that shows up in so many different ways is going to need a range of systemic, planet-wide solutions that are going to have to be implemented in varying, different ways. It's a set of solutions, not just one. And it's going to take a lot of people, working in a lot of different areas, to get a handle on this thing. We're going to need lots of different people with different expertise and ideas to be successful.

But for all those different people to get started they need to know enough about the problem to be able to figure out where they might start to do something about it.

And this is where I can be helpful. I've pretty much spent the last decade making my living trying to understand, communicate about, and drive impact on the climate crisis. If I don't know something, I probably have met the person who does know it, know who to ask if I haven't, and if I'm persistent enough, I can probably get their email address. (If you know me, you know that persistence is something I'm really good at.) I know a lot about what people and communities can do to move the needle on solutions. And I know enough about magic to help build a body of magical practice that can also help move the needle on solutions. And I can share all of this with you.

You are a vital component of this work and this working.

Because in the end, this has to be a collaboration. I don't know everything. I'm not even close to knowing a fraction of everything. This project has to have a listening ear, has to involve more brains than just my own. Being open to collaboration means that we can pool our knowledge, and that makes us all smarter and more effective. We either solve the climate crisis together as human beings, or we literally die trying as a species. No one person, one country, one industry, one institution is capable of solving this all by itself. If that were true it would have happened already.

That should come as a relief -- no one person can do everything, but everyone can do something. You don't have to do everything or know everything. You just need to do what is yours to do.

The goal here in this space, this project, with this blog and podcast and the accompanying workshops, is to surface good information (not just from my head, but from a lot of different places) so that you can figure out what that is, what you want to do -- magically and mundanely -- to be part of the solution. You might find that you're already doing more than you realized. If that's true, my hope is that as this dialogue and this project continues, you find more and more things you want to do.

One thing that has always struck me about being part of the army of professionals who work on climate change for a living -- the people I call "climate world" -- is that they are, almost always, optimistic about the prospect of eventual success in addressing the climate crisis. They are way more optimistic than my friends who don't live in "climate world." The reason for that, I think, is that the more you learn about all of this, the more you realize that climate change is not some mysterious disease that we've got to find the cure for. Climate change isn't cancer. We know what causes it, and we know how to fix the problem. We already have more than 90 percent of the technology needed to do it.

We know what to do. We have the tools. We just need to decide to do it. And no single person needs to do all of it. Each of us just needs to figure out what's ours to do. My goal here is to help you discover what part of this solution set is yours to do, and get you started on finding the tools (both magical and mundane) to start doing it. And together, we can build a future beyond the gloom and doom and crisis. One thing that people don't realize is that a future where we've solved for climate isn't one of deprivation, it's one of possibility.

If you are a magical practitioner of any stripe you already know how to envision a future full of possibility and then create it. And you know how amazing it can be. And we need that energy applied to our climate problem.

Get in, witches! We're going to take on the climate crisis......

Welcome to Witching for a Warming Planet.