When Luther College students Laura Proescholdt and Amy Thor first watched An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's documentary about climate change, they realized that their generation would face major environmental issues. And they wanted to do something about it, but what?
“A lot of classes are all about the gloom and doom, but not many focus on solutions,” explains Thor.
Thor and Proescholdt have recently released a podcast called Hope and Climate Change where they dig into the psychology of hope as it applies to caring about environmental problems. During this Talk of Iowa interview, host Charity Nebbe talks with Proescholdt and Thor, who both study at Luther College.
In the podcast, they talked with fellow students, activist and scientists from around the state and found that they weren’t along in their struggle to find hope.
“I took a lot of comfort in that I wasn’t going through it alone. Talking to the other activists, people who had been involved in the fields for their entire lives and seeing that they struggled with those things, but also that they found a way to perceive through, that was really helpful,” says Proescholdt.
“From a strictly science perspective I suppose it’s kind of easy to look at that problem and see how small a snapshot it is in the history of the earth and the future of the earth, but it also for me in my life it’s pretty scary,” said Thor.
Are you a nature lover who sometimes finds yourself overwhelmed with the problems we face? Listen to the podcast here.
