ATLANTA — Katharine K. Wilkinson, an author originally from Atlanta, published a book titled "Climate Wayfinding" last month. The book contains poetry, art, essays, playlists, and personal reflections structured into active chapters.

Wilkinson said the book is intended to guide readers on their individual climate journeys. "It's not just another climate book that talks to you, but it is a book that can actually walk with you on your own path of exploration wherever you are in your own climate journey," she said. The book encourages readers to discuss central questions and themes within small groups. Wilkinson stated, "Climate Wayfinding began as a program and it is now a book, and at its simplest, it is a series of frameworks and practices for looking inward with care, looking outward with curiosity and looking forward with courage." She added, "As a program, that takes the shape of an experiential learning journey that uses a bunch of different modalities from group work to guided meditation, free writing, creative mapping exercises, that help us explore, discern and ultimately synthesize some clarity about the path ahead and our own contributions in this time."

Wilkinson emphasized the importance of pausing and reflecting. "I know from my own experience that those moments of taking the time to pause, to breathe, to reflect, are often very brief in the grand sweep of our lives and all the doing that we do, but they can play this enormously powerful kind of direction setting, compass setting role, and often are the thing that help us get through that overwhelm, that paralysis, the depth of the ache that we might be feeling that can either keep us frozen or frittering, or dispersed in so many different directions," she said. She holds a doctorate in geography and environment from Oxford.

Wilkinson co-hosts the climate podcast "A Matter of Degrees." She also co-edited the 2020 anthology "All We Can Save," which features essays from 60 women on the climate movement. She stated that her entry point into this work was grief. "In many ways, grief was the entry point for me into this work," Wilkinson said. "And so I think I've never known what it means to be engaged, environmentally without feeling that sense of grief. It's been decades of work to figure out how to not just have my heart broken, but broken open, and how to make that grief not be something that just sends me into the fetal position, but actually becomes a source of guidance and motivation to keep doing this work."