Katharine Wilkinson

Dr. Katharine K. Wilkinson is an American writer, teacher, climate change activist, and executive director and co-founder of The All We Can Save Project, a climate leadership organization. She co-hosts the podcast A Matter of Degrees with Leah Stokes. Previously, Wilkinson served as editor-in-chief of The Drawdown Review at Project Drawdown and was the senior writer for The New York Times bestseller Drawdown, which documents the "what is possible" approach for addressing climate change. Time named her one of 15 "women who will save the world" in 2019

Quotes

• I think about the feminine as the life-giving energy that circulates through the world. It’s an appreciation for interdependence and the connectedness of all things. It’s about working with the living systems of the planet rather than trying to conquer or wrangle them. The Feminist Climate Renaissance is not a revolution or a takeover or a war, but rather an upwelling of a better way to do climate-oriented work.
  • Welcome to the Feminist Climate Renaissance Grist (September 22, 2020)

• I got sort of politicized around environmental issues broadly in high school and kind of carried that student activism into my undergraduate years. And I remember at some point ... I want to say, maybe my second year or so in college, I realized that if I wanted to work on environmental issues, that probably meant working on climate change. I learned a lot from a friend of mine in college, Billy Parish, who really got the youth climate movement going. He was kind of my entry point.
  • How 2 women are changing the face of the climate change movement Today Show (April 22, 2021)

"Here's a Way to Fight Climate Change: Empower Women" (2018)

"Here's a Way to Fight Climate Change: Empower Women", Wired (December 3, 2018)

• GENDER AND CLIMATE are inextricably linked

• There's greater risk of displacement, higher odds of being injured or killed during a natural disaster. Prolonged drought can precipitate early marriage, as families contend with scarcity. Floods can force last-resort prostitution as women struggle to make ends meet. These dynamics are most acute under conditions of poverty.

• In my experience, to have eyes wide open is to hold a broken heart every day.

• To address climate change, we must make gender equity a reality. And in the face of a seemingly impossible challenge, women and girls are a fierce source of possibility.

• Women are the primary farmers of the world,”They produce 60 to 80 percent of the food in lower-income countries.

• Instead of clear-cutting new land, why not work to make the existing farms run by women more efficient? “Close that gap and farm yields rise by 20 to 30 percent.

• Support women smallholders, realize higher yields, avoid deforestation, and sustain the life-giving power of forests.

• If women’s farms yielded as much on average as farmers run by men across the world, it would stop approximately 2 billion tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere between now and 2050. “That’s on par with the impact household recycling can have globally.

• Curbing growth of our human population is a side effect,” she says---one that would reduce global emissions.

• More than 130 million women worldwide are denied access to school. Yet the more education a woman attains, the fewer children she has. From a conservation perspective, empowering women to have smaller families is an objectively positive outcome. “The right to go to school effects how many human beings live on this planet.

• Gender equity is on par with wind turbines and solar panels and forests,” Wilkinson says, adding, “This does not mean women and girls are responsible for fixing everything. But we probably will.

"What Could Possibly Go Right? Episode 50 Katharine Wilkinson" (2021)

"What Could Possibly Go Right? Episode 50 Katharine Wilkinson", Resilience (July 27, 2021)

• The acknowledgment of how much has been and will be lost in our current systems, but still showing up for the work of what we can save in “this hard and magnificent moment”

• That “at our very best, we as human beings are active and generative collaborators with lifeforce… in these relationships of reciprocity and almost play with the planet’s living systems.”

• The “different kind of leadership that women are bringing in droves on climate”

• That dialog about solutions is often about scale and speed; yet, we would benefit from considering solutions at depth with “heart-centered wisdom” and love as a powerful leverage point

• The value of “making our hearts public”, bringing feelings and stories into climate conversation.

• That what could go right is “in the onslaught of the quest for power and profit and prestige, that maybe these things could actually be replaced with care and courage and connection and community and creativity.

• I think it’s part of why I’ve really chosen to focus on communication of various stripes and culture-making of various stripes as at least a good chunk of what I do professionally, and what I do on on climate, because I think that whether it’s poetry, whether it is film, any number of mediums can take us to a place that we might otherwise feel antsy about or resistant to. And we kind of settle in around story. There’s something, I don’t know whether it reminds us of childhood in some cases, whether it feels like some kind of ancient practice in some cases, but I think it helps us see differently. It helps us feel into different experiences, different scenarios.

"The Climate Crisis Is Worse for Women. Here’s Why." (2021)

"The Climate Crisis Is Worse for Women. Here’s Why.", The New York Times ( August 24,2021)

• If you’re going to be a feminist on a hot planet, you have to be a climate feminist.

• The climate crisis is not gender-equal or gender-neutral.

• I think a lot about how we welcome in people who are committed feminists but have not seen themselves as climate feminists or have felt like the climate space is not super welcoming. Like, if you don’t have a Ph.D. in atmospheric science, then thanks, we don’t need you. And of course, that couldn’t be couldn’t be further from the truth. If you’re going to be a feminist on a hot planet, you have to be a climate feminist.

External links

• KATHARINE K. WILKINSON