👋 Hi, everybody! We’re back with another installment in our Ask a Climate Therapist series. In today’s column, leading climate-aware therapist Leslie Davenport tackles a question from a young engineer, wondering how they can hold onto their vision for change and avoid becoming a cog in the machine. 

It’s something I think anyone in any industry can relate to — how do you avoid growing accustomed to the status quo, and instead keep cultivating your creativity and drive to change it? As always, Leslie’s got some practical and caring advice. 

Speaking of which — we’ve been running this column for several months now, and we would love to know what you think. Have the questions, and advice, resonated with you? Would you like to see more of this in Looking Forward, or beyond? Please share your thoughts in this brief survey, or feel free to reply to this email with feedback. 

We’ve also got news today about Indigenous land stewardship, pollution monitoring, and even the climate story behind the ever-green Reflecting Pool.

This post originally appeared in Grist’s weekly solutions newsletter, Looking Forward. Not on our list yet? Subscribe here to get it in your inbox every Friday.

Ask a Climate Therapist: How do I avoid getting trapped in the system I hope to change?

Collage of a person in a hard had looking out toward an upward sloping road

Grist / Getty Images

Dear Leslie,

I work as a civil engineer, and I want to change the way roadway projects are seen, from constant expansion to holistic community-led improvement — but I feel like I don’t have enough traction as an entry-level employee. I am scared I will get sucked into the system as it is now and never effect the change I envision. How do I make sure I don’t fall into this trap? 

— A Worried Engineer

[Do you have a question you’d like to see Leslie address in a future column? Submit it here.]

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Dear Worried Engineer,

While it might not feel like it, your concern is an asset: It signals that you’re aware of how systems suppress creativity and reward business as usual. You’re right that as an entry-level worker, you may need to take the long view and build credibility before you can shift your organization’s culture and policies. This approach is called strategic patience — an intentional practice you draw on while you’re working toward values-based change. (It’s completely different from capitulation, which involves rationalizing a particular story so you can feel OK about your workplace or industry as it is.) 

Think of this as a time for reconnaissance and field research on your part. Keep your eyes wide open to the specific challenges you think your organization needs to overcome in order to adopt the more holistic, community-based approach that you want to see in action — and write about it, to help keep yourself on track and hone your ideas about how to transform some of the established practices in your field. 

The “trap” that you want to avoid also has a name: bureaucratic absorption, the gradual process by which people who enter systems intending to change them are instead changed by them. So, how can you avoid falling into that? 

Most climate psychology tools focus on increasing the resilience of our emotions, thoughts, and nervous system. That will always be foundational, but it’s not enough here. Because bureaucratic absorption works by dulling creativity, part of how you resist its pull is by intentionally cultivating creativity.  

For you as an engineer, this might look like reconnecting with the original impulse and innate skills that drew you to this work: your problem-solving imagination, your ability to plan forward, and your ideas about what a road can do for a community rather than to it. 

And keep your creativity growing by deliberately engaging with fields outside your own — art, history, fiction — to keep your imagination from narrowing into only what’s technically feasible under today’s constraints. 

You might also try building a “what if” habit: a small, regular practice of asking speculative questions with no immediate utility, almost like calisthenics for the creative mind.

Finding or creating a community of like-minded people inside or outside the workplace is also one of the most robust psychological strategies for keeping your values front and center. That could include joining climate-aware professional networks, seeking out mentors who’ve navigated similar frustrations, or forging a friendship with one or more trusted colleagues. This is exactly how social change has always occurred: by people who kept each other honest and imaginative.

Finally, don’t forget that your workplace exists within a changing world. Community-oriented approaches are gaining ground in urban planning, policy, and climate adaptation, which means that the window for this kind of creative thinking may be opening rather than closing. Keep an eye out for stories that inspire you — and ones you could share with leaders at your organization — that model the kind of work you want to do.

In this with you,
Leslie

Ask a Climate Therapist is a special series from Grist, tackling your burning questions about climate change and mental health with licensed therapist Leslie Davenport. Do you have a question you’d like to see Leslie address in a future column? Submit it here.

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📚 And one more thing

If you haven’t yet signed up for the next Looking Forward book club, go ahead and smash that RSVP button! We’ll be gathering on Wednesday, July 29, to discuss Climate Wayfinding: Healing Ourselves and the Planet We Call Home, by Katharine K. Wilkinson. As we make our way through the book over the next few weeks, and the many interesting questions, prompts, and exercises it contains, I’m sending out some companion emails to get our collective wheels turning. RSVP to join in.

In other news

And finally, looking forward to …

… drabbles! If reading Leslie’s advice above got you thinking about other small ways to nurture your own creativity and vision, may I offer up the humble drabble as an exercise to do just that. I find that writing them scratches my brain almost in the same way a puzzle does — a puzzle where the goal is to put words together (100, to be exact) to add up to a little vignette of a better future. 

Many newsletter readers who have written and shared their own drabbles tell me the same. One reader, Jenna Riedl, let me know that she’s been inspired to write daily drabbles for the past two months now. “Usually they’re more journaling than climate fiction,” Jenna told me, “but it’s good practice for the creative work, too.”

This drabble is from Jenna, titled “Public.” I’d be absolutely delighted if you’d consider writing your own, and sharing it with me.

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We bring the babies today, plop them like precious potato sacks. They roll over the quilted sleeves of Nana’s dress as Bess pulls out the sandwiches. “Thank you for wrangling my offspring,” she huffs, waving to a family sitting by the sand trap. “Hey Auntie,” the littles shout, “Is it true that you put up those signs?” They point to the small white signs nailed to each fencepost. I know the words on each sign by heart, the days of town halls and stamped paper that scraped each letter into being. Course Open to Public on Sundays.

It’s a start.

— a drabble by Jenna Riedl

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A drabble is a 100-word piece of fiction — in this case, offering a tiny glimpse of what a clean, green, just future might look like. Want to try writing your own (and see it featured in a future newsletter)? We would love to hear from you! Please send us your visions for our climate future, in drabble form, at lookingforward@grist.org

👋 See you next week!