Hi. This is Paul Zellizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on our favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to have positive impact through a values based business. Thank you so much. Today, your guest is me, Paul Zellizer, the founder of Awarepreneurs, one of the longest running social entrepreneur podcasts in the world, and a business coach for social entrepreneurs for 17 years.

And today, we're gonna do something a little different. Our topic is climate despair sucks, how to find purpose in the chaos. So I've been getting emails and talking to people in person about climate despair, and it's a very poignant moment as I'm recording this. It's January 20th here in the US. And I'm thinking about the juxtaposition. We have a new president coming, a returning president coming to the US, Donald Trump, and this administration is climate deniers. They don't think climate change is real or it's made up by the liberals for whatever agenda. And at the same time here in the US, it's also Martin Luther King Day, who's one of the more recognized activist nonviolent change makers in US history.

And I'm just sitting with that. Wow, what a juxtaposition. And as I was thinking about today and doing this month's solo episode, I do one solo episode a month. I was thinking, like, how do I respond to the community that I am grateful to be connected to and am somewhat of a leader for? And I wanna give you an example of a couple of the kinds of conversations I'm having, who I'm hearing from, who's really struggling with climate despair or, you know, on the edge of climate despair. And then in this episode, I wanna give a helpful mindset that I think can help mitigate or even be an antidote to despair, and then we're gonna talk about 4 strategies and wrap it up. So let's talk about who's struggling and why. I am really blessed because of this podcast and because I'm pretty recognized as a social entrepreneur leader in the climate space. Young people are reaching out.

That's particularly true in the past few months. Recently, myself and Steve Spencer here in New Mexico, we were handed an incredible group that is now branded as NM Climate. And it's in a very robust meetup here of bringing together climate founders and sustainability leaders and people who are leaders in our big institutions in New Mexico who are really focused on how do we really be a force for good in the climate space. And to be a leader of NM Climate, given what's happening in New Mexico right now, it's an honor, and it just means I'm quite visible in climate discussions. So one group of people who are reaching out to me are young people. What I'm hearing is, you know, rising sense of just hopelessness, looking out what's going on in the world. They're starting to get them contained, but we've been dealing with the fires in Los Angeles, very, very public event in climate. Most science based people believe climate change has had a significant impact in that unprecedented fire in Southern California, those unprecedented fires in Southern California.