Anna Wilder Burns told her story to producer Cat Jaffee for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

My heart just dropped and I was like, 鈥淥h shit. No, no, no, no.鈥� I could kind of tell it was about to happen, but I didn’t wanna believe it. I thought I was doing well. I was always the hardest worker in the room, I was like, Control what you can control. You can control the fact that like no one can deny the fact that you want it more than anybody else, and that you’re more passionate about this sport than anybody else. This was my entire life and identity.

I’m a filmmaker and photographer, a former-athlete-turned-creative. I like finding people in the world who don’t know how cool they are, and I like showing them through film and photo.

I’m 25. I’m a little bit blunt, and I have that kind of East Coast salt.

I grew up in Maine. I was a very outdoorsy kid. But I also was a very, very, very serious gymnast. I trained for five hours a day, five days a week, getting out of school at 3:00 PM, quick sandwich in the car, practice from 3:30 PM to 8:30 PM. Go home, do homework, go to bed, do it all the next day. My dream was to do college gymnastics. I started gymnastics a little bit late, and moved through it really quickly, and so I caught the attention of some schools, but I definitely wasn’t at the caliber that I would need to be to step on the floor my freshman year and compete.

But, I wanted to try anyway. I thought I got a walk-on spot at the University of New Hampshire, and worked my little booty off. I got there on day two, I was, first of all, a nervous wreck obviously. I had practiced one time, they had seen me do stuff one time. And at the beginning of practice, all the girls were all warming up, and I get pulled out of the running line and they’re like, 鈥淎nna, can we come meet you with you in the hallway?鈥�

I’ll never forget how ruthless this was. They pulled me into this side of the gym where everyone could still see me and them. And they told me, 鈥淲e’re so sorry, but we just can’t have you on. You’re just not there.鈥� And then I just remember my ears ringing, like full panic attack, burst into tears, begging, 鈥淐an I just try, can I train on my own? I won’t even train with the team. I’ll do anything. I don’t wanna lose this. I am a gymnast. This is all I know.鈥�

The coach was just like, 鈥淣o, sorry. No, no, no.鈥� Gave me a hug at the end. I was like, Not only did you just cut me, but you decided to do it in front of everybody. Why not just call me to your office three hours ago and make this way less traumatic?

So I called my mom. She drove right down and picked me up and I went home. This is my second day of freshman year of college. I’m literally on my couch at home wondering, What the hell am I gonna do?

I ended up deciding to say, 鈥淪crew you鈥� to those coaches and see if I could train on my own and get to where I need to be to then re-tryout in the Spring. But in the meantime, it was really hard socially because obviously when you’re a D-1 athlete, your team is your family on campus. And so I really wanted to still be involved with the team, especially if I was gonna be on it hopefully the next year. So funny enough, I used to make these GoPro videos of my friends, doing gymnastics, kind of like a ski edit. So I made gymnastics edits, and one of them ended up going semi-viral on YouTube. My Olympian heroes shared it, and so seniors on my team saw that video and were like, 鈥淲ait, can you make videos for the team?鈥�

I was like, Well, yeah, I know how to edit a video. And I had just gotten a camera that could record video and not just photo. And so a week after I had gotten cut from the team, I was at the first like exhibition of the gymnastics team at my school filming.

Other teams started to notice, the soccer team would be like, 鈥淎nna, can you come to our game and film our game and make a highlight video?鈥� And I was like, 鈥淪ure, yeah.鈥� It was so much fun. I was meeting all these people, making friends, still training. As time went on, I just started to burn out. I was tired. I wasn’t eating enough, wasn’t fueling my body correctly, and I kind of knew that it was over. I went and had a final meeting with the UNH coaches to be like, 鈥淢aybe I impressed you enough with my work ethic and the fact that I did this all year, that you give me a chance.鈥� And they said, 鈥淵ou know what? No.鈥�

At that time, the video side was rising, and I was hoping maybe I could turn this into something. I got an email from the school diving coach. 鈥淗ey, we’ve taught a gymnast how to dive before. We heard you’re kind of done, if you don’t wanna not be an athlete, do you want a spot?鈥� And I was like, Oh, I’ve never jumped off a diving board in my life.

Learning to dive was a much less intense training schedule, but still D-1. And because of the fact that I was still in the athletic department, meeting all my athlete friends, and had a less intense training schedule, my sophomore, junior, and senior year I got to do a lot more video work. I got an internship with the athletic department. They let me go and film all these games, and get paid $7 an hour, and make edits. Getting the chances to play with cameras in college, low-stakes, and just tell stories of my fellow athletes, led me to where I am now.

I remember vividly saying, 鈥淚 don’t wanna not be a gymnast anymore. What? How can I not be a gymnast anymore?鈥� And I think it takes a lot of time to find that, it’s not gonna be an immediate thing. It took me a full year to really accept that there were more sides of me. I wish kids knew this more, that if you’re a serious athlete, there’s so much more to you, and there’s so much more that the world needs from you than flipping on a four-inch beam.

Anna Wilder Burns is an award-winning cinematographer, director, and photographer. She combines her passions for the outdoors and athletics to tell inspiring stories spanning adventure, conservation and sports. She’s the director of the 2023 film To Be Frank. To learn more about Anna, visit .

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Jr Rodriguez told his story to producer Cat Jaffee for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

It’s really hot and they’re just like, Wait, when are we gonna get there? And we鈥檙e like, 鈥淚t’s around this bend, and we want everyone to look up at this area.鈥� They see this really big, brown blob. And one kid says, 鈥淲hat’s that big brown blob? It looks like a monster.鈥� We鈥檙e like, 鈥淭hat’s the nest. That’s the bald eagles鈥� nest.鈥� They’re like, 鈥淲hat?鈥�

It’s the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. It’s a very large nest that this pair of bald Eagles has been living in for a long time.

I’m a Mestizo filmmaker and photographer based out of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I am from Houston, Texas. Born and raised. I like to say the Bayou City, it throws people off.

I grew up, on the north side of Houston, pretty poor. I was the first person to graduate college in my family, first-gen. So that’s a pretty big deal that I think not a lot of my close friends even know.

The year was 2015. I was 25. I had scheduled an interview for an environmental conservation organization.

I don’t know if you know, but Houston floods. There’s a few seasons in Houston. There’s hot, hotter, and hurricane. So when there’s a hurricane, it’s just dumping. And because these Black and brown neighborhoods don’t have flood mitigation, these bayous swell up and homes get flooded.

This organization would couple federal dollars to establish these flood mitigation banks, which are essentially holes in the ground to store water, during hurricane season. But the other seasons, they double up as parks.

I took this job to try and be a part of a solution in my community.

We took a group of like, God, I wanna say it was like 20 kids, and it’s a lot. I don’t know if you’ve ever worked with kids like that age, middle school, high school range. They’re a lot to handle, people say, like herding cats. I think they’re more like herding different species. Imagine Noah’s arc and it’s you got a goat, you got an elephant, you got a giraffe. They all have their own characteristics, their own way of being. Trying to wrangle them, not only the kids on land, but then you put them on water, we put them on kayaks. You add this element of the bayou having a negative connotation. That’s what we’re taught, as kids. You throw your trash in the bayou, you see carts of trash just floating in the bayou.

A bayou is a meandering stream. It’s not technically a river; it’s usually man-made. It used to have a natural flow, but if you go to Houston, the banks are concrete because they really are just trying to move water out of where people live. There’s not a lot of current, so it’s fairly easy to paddle up the bayou.

We’re going up, and there’s one bend after about a quarter of a mile of paddling. It’s really hot in Houston. This is the hot, hot time. We hear a huge whap. And the kids were like, 鈥淲hat was that?鈥� Somebody yells, 鈥淓nrique just slapped the water!鈥� And Enrique’s like, 鈥淣o, I didn’t.鈥� And then it happens again, slap, and it’s really loud. I’m scared. I’m like, What the hell? What is happening? And I look at my guide like, What’s going on? You know, the old head shake with the big eyes, and he’s like, 鈥淥h, that’s an alligator gar.鈥� And I was like, OK, I know what an alligator gar is.

They can get really big, they have a very large snout, very sharp teeth. If you watch River Monsters, there is an episode about alligator gar.

So I have this thing in my head. I was like, Oh God, this alligator gar is trying to defend its territory because there’s 10, 15 boats in the water. If it’s making that big of a noise, it’s really big.

The kids are kind of freaking out. Just knowing that there is a large predator fish around was very nerve-wracking, and just keeping the kids calm and telling them, 鈥淲e’re in their ecosystem. This is the nature that we wanted. It’s not all majestic, it’s real out here.鈥� And as we’re all gonna calmly turn our boats around to start heading back to our entry point, another kid is like, 鈥淥h my God, look at the bank!鈥� There’s a sunbathing alligator. And the kids just start screaming.

We calmly all start going back to our entry point. Things calm down, and you just hear a lot of laughter. You hear a lot of, 鈥淥h wow, I had no idea. I wonder where else we can see big birds?鈥� I think that’s what I was trying to teach those kids. It’s like right in, not only their backyards, but it’s under the bayou. You’re driving around it all the time. If you just look up, Houston is in the flyway of all these migratory birds. There’s a lot of greenery that exists in Houston, and so because of these bayous there’s a lot of water. That’s nature. Nature is the overgrown lot next to your mom’s house. That’s what I had, and I had the opportunity to try to change their perception of what nature is, because in media they’re gonna show you one specific type of nature and I think the kids in my neighborhood, we have the overgrown lot, and that’s just as good and just as powerful and it’s gonna teach you the same things.

That’s why I came back, because I learned the same thing that the kids did. That nature is in Houston, Texas. It’s in the, people like to say, the inner city. It’s the tree in the neighborhood. Trying to reconcile that within myself because I did feed into the like, go climb the big mountain, go experience this far away place.

And our reality is over here, and it’s not that you shouldn’t chase that, but what we have is equally as valuable.

Junior Rodriguez is a first-generation bilingual, bicultural storyteller, conservationist, and multi-sport athlete, born and raised in the Bayou City. He currently lives in Jackson, Wyoming, where he focuses on creating projects that empower communities to tell their own stories. To learn more about him, visit .

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Pete McBride told his story to producer Cat Jaffee for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

This giant male orca with a six-foot-high dorsal fin, taller than I am, swims at me. We lock eyes, about eight feet away. And I get a thwack.

Most people call me Pedro. My grandfather was born in Guatemala, and I have an affinity for all things Latin culture.
I am a visual storyteller. I also do a lot of public speaking and some writing.

The scene is March 20th, 2020. I was sitting on South Georgia Island, which is the Galapagos of Antarctica, surrounded by 200,000 squawking penguins that were making more noise than you can imagine. Penguins, interestingly, identify their young and their mates through sound, not sight. So they’re trying to stay safe, and they have this amazing little haven and habitat at the bottom of the world.

I had gone down there to be a speaker on a boat, but the minute we got there, we were told we better come back as all ports are closing, the world’s locking down.

So we turned around into what is called the Mount Everest of ocean crossings, and powered into the big 40-foot swells, and went back to the tip of Argentina to then get on planes, trains, and automobiles.

I was getting on my fifth flight to get home where I live in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, and I arrived at Chicago and noticed that I’m the only person in security, in passport control, the whole thing. I’m like, Wow, I knew things had been changing with COVID but suddenly everything came screeching to a halt. And I had been in the middle of nowhere listening to penguins, so I’d kind of missed the memo. So had the penguins.

I’m walking to my gate, and as I’m approaching the gate, I hear the loudspeaker come on. 鈥淧assenger McBride, passenger McBride, please report to Gate 29.鈥� I was like, Oh, great, great they’re gonna tell me they’ve got a voucher for me to stay at the weird, creepy hotel with nobody in it.

I walk over there and the lady looks up and goes, 鈥淧assenger McBride?鈥� I was like, 鈥淵eah, that’s me.鈥� She goes, 鈥淐ongratulations, you will be the only passenger on this flight.鈥�

So I got on the flight, flew back to Colorado, and we went into global pandemic lockdown. It sucked for humans on many levels. But it was an amazing moment for nature because we have created a very noisy planet, wildlife suddenly were like, 鈥淥h my God, I couldn’t hear in that party. How are you doing?鈥�

And that made me really start thinking about it, and collating all my imagery over 20 years, to do a project called Seeing Silence.

I was able to pitch a story and go into the polar night, when the sun doesn’t come above the horizon and get into the very inky, cold, arctic sea in a very thick wetsuit with my cameras and try if I was lucky to see and hear the orca that were coming for their mass migration, because researchers have been telling me that they have been having more conversations with themselves in the water. And that was because all the shipping lanes had gone quiet.

So it’s like one in the afternoon. It’s dark, sunset light, and my cameras barely work. The water temperature is 36 degrees Fahrenheit. This pod we’ve been following very peacefully and not disturbing them. They were relaxed. They were starting to feed on herring. And I see a female below me just sort of hanging, and then I suddenly pull my head up, and above the horizon is a giant dorsal fin coming my way.

I take the biggest breath I can and I dive down with my long flippers, and I’ve got my camera and I’m diving into this abyss of darkness. This giant male orca swims at me and we lock eyes and right as we lock eyes, I get a thwack.

It’s a silent thwack, and my heart just goes thump-thump, and I realize that he is trying to identify me and check me out with his best communication device, which is sonar. Sonar is quiet. But it’s really powerful, especially when it comes from a 25-foot-long, 12-ton orca.

Their brain is 33 percent larger than ours, which is the frontal cortex, which enables them to have sonar and communicate so well. They’re really remarkable, and we don’t know very much about them. But to see that ballet underwater and to hear it, I think we have completely forgotten about that side. We have turned nature into a backdrop for our social media, and we forget how much mother nature actually can say or sing if we stop and listen.

I will make sure I stop and put my cameras down and take a memory photo as I call them. I convince my friends around me to take a moment of silence and listen. It’s amazing how hard it is at first, and then how everyone loves it and talks about it later.

If we can go into our wild places and take back just a little bit of silence, just a little jar of silence that we keep inside our heart or our head, or wherever you need to. I think it’s an important healing metaphor tool to remind us to stop and listen.

Pete McBride has traveled to over 75 countries on assignment for publications including 国产吃瓜黑料, National Geographic, and Esquire. He has produced a number of documentaries and films detailing the rivers of the American Southwest. His most recent book, Seeing Sound, was selected as one of the top photo books of 2021. Learn more about Pete and his petemcbride.com.

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Nicole Coenen told her story to producer Cat Jaffee for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I find chopping wood extremely cathartic and it’s such a good release. It’s such a good stress reliever. Sometimes it can be very stressful, because you get a piece of wood that just won’t split, or has a huge knot down the middle. Eventually, you can develop this sense of almost reading the wood. You know how it’s gonna split. You can feel when the ax hits, you’re like, Oh, OK, just two more swings and I got this.

I live in British Columbia, Canada. I guess I’m the lesbian lumberjack of the internet. I’m also a filmmaker, and work a lot in environmental nonprofits. I am very much an introvert. I live in the middle of nowhere, kind of for a reason.

I grew up in the suburbs in Ontario in a very conservative community, and really struggled with presenting even as a tomboy. I always actually tried to make myself seem weaker than I was, and I wanted to be stronger, but I didn’t think that that was really allowed.

I went to film school, and I really loved talking about queer representation and more diverse representation. Because growing up, I didn’t really have a lot of friends, and I was also really trying to figure out, as we all are, who I was, and when I would watch TV or watch movies, I didn’t really see myself represented very often, if ever. Sometimes even queer sort of traits would be seen as villain-esque or in negative ways. So I think I gravitated towards filmmaking or storytelling in media, as a way to sprinkle a little bit more representation in there.

In August 2020, my partner and I at the time impulsively decided we needed to get out, we needed to move to the mountains. I had never been to BC before, but right when we touched down, I felt like I was home. I felt like this is a place that I’ve been dreaming about, and I felt like in that landscape and in the nature out here, I could express myself a lot more.

Eventually, I got connected with this little group of wood choppers. They’re called the Greenwood Angels. The group itself was mainly comprised of older men and my friend Sarah. So basically a group of older men and two lesbians.

When I first started chopping wood, they should not have given me an ax. My aim was so bad, and it was just flailing all over the place. But there was something so cathartic about chopping wood so that you could warm yourself up for the winter. This group would sustainably harvest trees, and then we’d buck it up into firewood. We’d sell that firewood, and then donate the profits to a community initiative. Not only did it feel good to be outside and be active and bond with the community, but it was doing good as well.

So January 2023, I think it was just a random Thursday, and I remember I was not in a very good head space. I was pretty isolated from friends. So I was on my bed, my dog was beside me, and I was scrolling through TikTok and came across a very iconic wood chopper named Thoren Bradley. I’m sure a lot of folks know of him. And he was splitting a round and I’m like, Hey, I could do that, I split a round like that just this morning. So one of the ways that I get out of a sad state is either go outside or get creative. And so I kind of did both. I went outside and made a spoof of Thoren. It was very impulsive; I just sprung out of bed and I was like, I’m gonna go outside and film this cheesy parody video. I had a black tank top on and just aggressively chopped this little round. I say little now because I’ve definitely chopped bigger ones, but that’s all I had at the time. And posted that.

The reaction was kind of hilarious. People seemed to really like it, and a lot of people asked if I could do it again. And so I did. And did it again and again. And eventually, I kind of became the clich茅 that I was spoofing. But it was great because I was having so much fun with it.

Then I started to also put my own spin on it, and had a lot of fun with it presenting a little bit more in the masculine queer representation. So that was really empowering in a lot of ways.

The comments, especially around women empowerment and queer representation, amplified it even more. The people have been amazing. I was always terrified to post online because sometimes people can be mean. I do absolutely get a lot of mansplaining comments, but it’s also great because every time I do get one of those comments, I get 10 more supportive comments. I’ve actually gotten some comments from moms, saying that their daughters came across my TikTok, showed it to them, and said that they wanted to be strong like me. And that just hit me so hard because it’s funny, this person that I am online is exactly what I wanted when I was growing up. I wish I had representation for a strong, queer, outdoorsy woman and that just did not exist.

Although I will say my content is not really geared towards kids, I think my younger self would be really stoked and really proud. So that makes me really happy.

Nicole Coenen is a videographer, dog mom, and the lesbian lumberjack of the internet. Through her videos, Nicole celebrates LGBTQ+ identity and discusses mental health. She lives on the move in mountain and coastal towns across British Columbia. You can find her @nicole_coenen on and .

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Frank Paine told his story to producer Cat Jaffee for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

A panic attack for me is what I imagine a heart attack would be. Pounding heartbeat, a numbness in the face and hands, shooting pains in your chest. It feels like it’s going to be the end. It feels like you’re going to not be able to breathe, you’re not going to be able to carry on.

It doesn’t seem like there’s anything that you can consciously do to stop it. You can’t tell yourself I’m okay. You can’t tell yourself, I’m 40 years old, and I’m not having a heart attack. That can’t be the case. And I’m a surfer, I’ve got a great heart.

Frank Paine. That’s my given name. I didn’t come up with that name myself. But of course it has been the butt of more jokes than you can imagine.

As I get older, it gets more difficult to describe myself. I have a big mustache. I kind of look like a cowboy. I’m not exactly the surfer-looking person you might imagine. Kind of bushy, old, and gray. I think I have a pretty valuable sense of humor.

I’m from Hermosa Beach, California. Been surfing for around 60 years. It’s kind of what I do. It’s part of the community that I belong to. A great, great bunch of folks. It’s a beautiful thing.

I suffered from agoraphobia, which is a Greek term for literally, 鈥渇ear of the marketplace,鈥� and fear of being out in the open and being out with people who you do not consider safe. And that was very crippling. It was the kind of thing that really defined me for a great long time.

I first learned about agoraphobia when I would try to go on a surf trip or try to move around without a safe person, and realized that I’d suddenly become panicked and have a panic attack.

I think a defining moment was when I was traveling to Sacramento as part of my job and had a full blown panic attack driving back. I just felt that it was the end; that I was not going to be able to move any further, that I was now trapped in this prison of agoraphobia.

It started out with that Sacramento incident when I was driving, and then minor attacks throughout that time. Trouble going to work, trouble leaving the house, making a lot of excuses for why I couldn’t do things. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to go to New York. Why would anybody want to go to New York? New York’s a fabulous place. Everyone should visit.

I think the turnaround for me was that I had a family at the beach. I had a family with the people I surfed with, and they were concerned about me. They didn’t want me to feel bad. They wanted me to feel comfortable. They wanted me to know that, hey, if we go to Santa Barbara, you’re going to be okay. Redondo to Santa Barbara is probably an hour and a half. I mean, it’s not the end of the world, but they created safe barriers for me and taught me that I could finally relax. And that I didn’t have to have these intrusive thoughts that suggested I was going to die or my heart was going to stop.

As I stumbled along through this journey, as the community became richer, deeper, that was very helpful for me. That was really the thing that turned it around.

I started coaching surfing at the local high school with a friend who was a safe person. I had gone to Redondo High School, my alma mater, and a few years ago the coach from Redondo High School asked me if I’d like to be his assistant. Said, 鈥淚’d love to.鈥� It makes a nice completion of this circle. And I was already in my sixties and I said, 鈥淵ou know I don’t know how long I can do this.鈥� But I started going to the beach in Hermosa, and I started one by one. It was very exciting, and very comforting and welcoming.

It’s the knowing that we all have each other’s backs, and that makes it sound more critical than it really is. But out in the water, things can go terribly wrong. And it is comforting to know that people are with you, understand what can happen, and are there to help you out.

As a recovering agoraphobic, I would say, as difficult as it is, you have to be authentic and say, 鈥淚’m really in a bad place right now.鈥� Seek out the kind of attention you need, whether it’s medical or personal or whatever. I think you will find that there are people waiting to help you.

I think that’s very powerful.

Frank Paine is a 73-year-old surfer and the star of a new film , directed by Anna Wilder Burns. Frank is a local surf legend at Hermosa Beach, California. Through overcoming his agoraphobia with his community of surfers, Frank has traveled throughout California to Mexico, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. To learn more about Frank, follow on Instagram.

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Bill McKibben told his story to producer Cat Jaffee for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

The thing you first notice most is just the alternating deep chills and fever so intense that I can remember holding my arm out and watching the sweat pour off my finger at the end of my arm, the way you’d watch water pour off a gutter in a thunderstorm.

I’m a writer and an environmental activist. I wrote the first book about what we now call climate change, and I founded the first big global movements to try and do something about it.

I started writing for money at the age of 14, covering high school sports for the local town newspaper, 25 cents a column inch. And in college, all I did was work for the newspaper there. My father was a newspaper man. And so I imbibed those values of neutrality and objectivity.

I was at the New Yorker, and I started writing the book that became The End of Nature. I started in on it in part because I thought that this science around climate, which was just beginning to emerge, was the most interesting and potentially the biggest story in the world. But halfway through it, it also became clear to me that I cared very much about the outcome.

It’s not that I’m any less objective or honest or accurate as a reporter than I ever was, but I do care how it all comes out. And as the years went on, that morphed into becoming an activist around these questions, too.

Part of it was writing the book, and part of it was the fact that I was living up in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, the great wilderness of the American East, bigger than Glacier, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite combined. A remarkable place, very sparsely populated, and I was completely falling in love with that wilderness at the same time that I was doing all that early reporting on climate change. As a result, it hit me all the harder because, and this was the thesis of the book in certain ways, my understanding all of a sudden that no matter how wild this place was, it really wasn’t going to escape from human influence.

After I wrote The End of Nature, I took a reporting trip to Bangladesh. Bangladesh is a beautiful country, but a place under assault by climate. The Bay of Bengal is rising fast. The Brahmaputra depends on the flow of water out of the Himalayas, and long-term prospects are dubious. But while I was there, they were having an acute problem, the first big outbreak of dengue fever, a mosquito-borne disease that’s the poster child for climate illness. Lots and lots of people were dying, people were freaking out. Big pictures of drawings of this mosquito on the front page of the newspaper.

I was spending a lot of time in the slums. So eventually, I got bit by the wrong mosquito, and I was as sick as I had ever been. But, I was strong and healthy and well fed going in, so I didn’t die. I remember being at the big armory that they were using as a clinic in downtown Dhaka with thousands of people out on cots, just stretched out and shivering from this tropical disease. And I remember thinking, Well, A) I feel wretched, and B) this is so unfair.

I knew enough about climate and energy to know that 180 million people in Bangladesh had produced essentially no carbon at all, a minor rounding error in the global tables. Whereas we Americans have produced about 25 percent of all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If there were 4,000 people in beds in that armory, a thousand of them were on us. And when I came home from that trip and recovered from dengue, I really was more inclined to feel the urgency of actually doing something. That’s when we began organizing the kind of protests and things that eventually led to 350.org.

The first thing that I organized was a march across the state of Vermont where I live now. We walked for five days up the west side of the state, slept in farm fields at night. By the time we got to Burlington, there were about a thousand of us marching, which in Vermont, is a lot of people. And the next day in the newspaper it said that thousand people was probably the biggest demonstration that had yet taken place in the US about climate change.

This would’ve been 2006, and reading that, it became clear to me why we were losing this fight. We had the super structure of a movement, Al Gore, some scientists, some policy people. We just didn’t have the movement part, and so that’s what we started trying to fill in.

Within a year or two, with seven college kids, we’d launched . Within a year or so after that, we’d had our first big Global Day of Action, which was the kind of coming out party for a global climate movement: 5,100 demonstrations in 181 countries. One of the most beautiful was in Bangladesh, which when I saw the pictures coming across the internet, meant a lot to me.

I had no idea how big it was all going to grow as we started doing it. Right now, we’re organizing old people like me, and many of them have spent 65 or 70 years not doing things, and they find it very liberating to be able to now.

My advice would be to trust your moral instinct and take seriously the fact that we’re called to do something about the things that are wrong in the world around us. But it really helps if there’s some other people to do it with. Don’t try to do all this by yourself. It’s a recipe for ineffectiveness, but also a recipe for burnout and despair.

Though there are plenty of things an individual can do around their house and the contours of their lives, the most important thing an individual can do is be less of an individual and join together with others in movements large enough to actually make a difference.

Bill McKibben is an author, educator and environmentalist. He wrote The End of Nature in 1989, and in the years since, he’s won the Gandhi Peace Prize, received 20 honorary degrees, and he’s had a new species of woodland gnat named in his honor. He co-founded , and his most recent project is , which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate and justice. You can find out more about him at .

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Nalini Nadkarni told her story to producer Cat Jaffee for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

There were these three faces of my female graduate students looking at me with extremely grave concern. I knew that something big had happened to me, and to my body, and to my life at that time, at that moment. And I looked around at the stumps that were surrounding me and I thought, Wow, they look a lot like tombstones.

It was a moment of there’s gonna be a before this fall, and there’s gonna be an after this fall, and I didn’t know what that after would be.

I use mountain climbing techniques to get to the top of trees to study the plants that live up in the treetops. I’m a small brown woman. I love life. I love people. I love solitude, and I love my connection to nature, especially trees. I think they’re the most magnificent beings on earth.

It was early in the morning in the Olympic rainforest on the extreme west coast of Washington State. The trees are very old, they’re very big, and they’re covered with moss and lichens.

I was there with three graduate students of mine. And my students were very excited because they hadn’t climbed before, but I’ve climbed trees for the last 45 years, carrying out research on the ecological importance of canopy-dwelling plants and animals in rainforests.

We always take great care where we put our lines, and we want to make sure that the rope goes over at least two branches. We had it all spread out, and then I set off on climbing one of these big trees. They were about 200 feet tall with big, spreading limbs.

I put on my harness and clonked it shut. I checked my carabiners, I checked all of the gear, and I started ascending the rope. I was about 50 feet off the ground, I was getting to the branch I wanted to get onto to set up the plots that I was going to set up, and I threw my leg over the branch.

I’m a scientist, so I’m always thinking about plots and study design and so forth, but I’m also a person who loves trees. So that moment of being alone in the canopy is always a special one. Not just like, Oh, what scientific thing am I gonna describe or define or discover, but who is this tree and who am I to this tree and what is this tree to me?

I was just sort of thinking about those things, almost like a spiritual connection for that moment. And I leaned forward on my rope, which was holding my weight. Then suddenly, there was no tension in the line, and I found myself hurtling off the branch and fell 50 feet to the forest floor. And you think that because that is one of the densest forests in the world, that I would’ve hit some of the branches that would’ve slowed my fall. But I fell, as my graduate students later said, like a silent sack of sand, and just landed on the ground.

I was unconscious for about seven minutes, and then when I awoke, I was lying on my back looking up at the canopy instead of down at the forest floor.

I really didn’t know anything until two days later when I woke up in the ICU of Harborview Medical Center, which luckily has this fabulous trauma center.

I knew what the before was of being this successful academic professor, and publishing papers, and getting proposals, and having graduate students, and giving public lectures, and being a National Geographic explorer, and getting academic rewards. That was me then, but I had no idea what was gonna be me in the future.

I had exploded five vertebrae, broken nine ribs, broken my pelvis in three places, lacerated my lung, and broken my fibula.

But I got great medical care and within a day my daughter, my son, and my husband came to Seattle and were by my side really for all of my early recovery.

Over the weeks, my graduate students visited me. I had all kinds of friends who visited me, colleagues came, and I realized that one of the most critical things in recovery. Whether it’s an accident like mine was, or whether it’s the loss of your pet, or whether it’s a heart attack of your neighbor, or whether it’s a broken engagement, what matters most is the web of relationships that you have that carries you through.

There would be times I’d be in a grocery store and somebody would come up to me and I was wearing that stupid collar and limping around, and this woman would say, 鈥淲ell, oh my gosh, it looks like you’ve had a terrible accident.鈥� And I’d go, 鈥淵es, yes, I certainly did.鈥� And she’d say, 鈥淲ell, let me tell you about my terrible accident.鈥�

And at first I thought, Oh my God, I don’t need to hear about any more trauma. But what I realized finally was that I did need to hear about her trauma. I did need to hear about her accident, because it made me realize I wasn’t the only one who had experienced something that had stopped them, that had made them ask, 鈥淲hat was I before, and what will I be in the future?鈥�

So I started listening and seeking out those encounters, because I realized, although I couldn’t fix them and they couldn’t fix me, what we could do for each other was hear each other and listen and sympathize and empathize as well as we could.

I’m kind of back to physically doing what I was able to do. But I’ve changed a lot internally, I think. And part of that was due to my relationships, because when I was lying on that bed in the hospital and thinking, Oh my God, what if I never write another grant proposal again, what I didn’t realize was that my friends, my colleagues, and my family didn’t care a dime about whether I would ever write another paper, they just wanted to get me back. And that was this huge lesson for me. Because pretty much all my adult life I’ve been on what I think of as riding this bright red arrow that will take me higher and faster and better with more achievements and more accomplishments, so that people will think, Oh my God, she’s really hot, she’s really worthwhile.

But then you’re lying in a hospital bed, and you can’t even stand up by yourself, and people are still saying, We love you, then you start believing it.

So for me, the big moment was not the fall, it was the discovery that my value as a person was not what I achieved.

Even though it’s been seven years since I fell out of that tree, that moment of the fall is far longer than a moment. I remember when I was lying on that forest floor thinking this is the moment of before and after. And that moment of that fall was a moment, but I’ve seen how its impact has expanded. Its momentness has expanded to every single minute, every single moment of the way that I’m living my life now. And so when I meet someone who’s had a disturbance of some kind, yes, you have to take in the hard parts of that, but there are some generative things about that, and you’re gonna be arriving not at the original state you were, and you’re not gonna be at the disturbed state that you were. You’re not gonna be crumpled on the forest floor, but you’re never gonna get back to that original state, and that’s OK.

You’re gonna come back to some third state, and it’s neither the original nor the disturbed. And it’s neither better nor worse than either of those. It’s just different. And if we can embrace that and accept that and look to that as a time of growth, a time of shift and of change that would not have otherwise happened, then I think we can see the disturbances that are inevitable. Unpredictable, but inevitable in our lives.

I鈥檓 a better person because of it. So I have to, in some ways, thank that rope that failed, that brought me from the canopy to the forest floor. Now, I’m walking again in the new world that I find myself in.

Nalini Nadkarni is a professor of biology at the University of Utah. She’s a mother, a wife, and a researcher. She’s known as the Queen of Canopy Research and is the author of . You can learn more about Nalini at her website, .

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Timmy O鈥橬eill told his story to producer Cat Jaffee for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

It hit me so hard that I’m tearing up now just thinking about it. Because it was such a painful thing to hear. I remember really inconsolably weeping on the phone and then hanging up and going back to bed, and of course not being able to sleep, just wondering what would become of my brother.

I got two nicknames when I first got into climbing. One was YST, because there was another guy climbing in Joshua Tree called YSD for Young Strong Dave, but mine was for Young Stupid Timmy. I really loved risk, and that’s because of how we were raised鈥擨’m one of seven kids in a family of kayakers. So at an early age, we were able to do really risky rivers and participate in rowdy experiences in whitewater. That informed my way forward.

I grew up right outside of West Philadelphia in a large Irish Catholic family. Seven kids in ours, seven kids next to that, seven kids next to that. It was like basically growing up in a rabbit hutch.

Sean is my oldest brother. He was a unique kid in that he had the chemistry set and the erector set growing up. He was that classic bespeckled, curly-haired, wiry, little nerdy boy. He would really do a deep dive into the intellectual aspects of life, which was really impactful for me because he could demonstrate and define and explicate these wild ideas that I would take later and really run with when I moved out west and became a climber.

I was climbing in Joshua Tree, and I was actually working at a job site and didn’t own a car. I didn’t own many things. Summer in Joshua Tree is unmercifully, boiling hot. And I get this call, it’s nighttime, and I remember my mom saying, 鈥淕et ready. I have bad news.鈥� I hadn’t had much bad news in my life up until this point, so it was like losing my innocence. I remember it really clearly. She said, 鈥淵our brother isn’t dead, but he’s paralyzed from the waist down.鈥�

He had jumped off a bridge for fun that was quite high, because we grew up jumping off of bridges together as a family. He happened to break his spine at the T-12, which is where your thoracic meets your lumbar, right about at your belly button. He would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

He went through rehab. He learned to be in his wheelchair. And it would be maybe a couple years later that I was home for Christmas, and I wrote out a gift certificate to Sean that was good for one ascent of El Capitan with me. I didn’t know if we would ever do it. I hadn’t climbed El Cap myself yet, but I wanted to put something out there for him that would inspire him and inspire me.

Our first climb we did was Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. It’s the nation’s first National Monument, in fact. We drove there from Philadelphia, and it was like the great American road trip. Here we are, two brothers, and we’re just driving across the country in new terrain for both of us. Sean had never climbed at this point. We figure out at the base how to do this. So we take duct tape and newspaper and create these pads around Sean’s lower extremities to preserve them. And then we figure out how to do the pull-ups up the rope.

We spent a day going up and down the Durrance route on Devil’s Tower. It was amazing, because we didn’t know what was gonna happen, but that was the point鈥攖hat we would have this experience and find out.

Then we did Castleton, and then we did a couple of other climbs, and then eventually we went to El Capitan. We spent seven days living above the ground, and it was beautiful because you’re all experiencing a disability on a wall because you can’t move very much. You’re all tethered. You have to be really careful about how it is you navigate. So there was a sort of immediate equality between us.

Sean’s climb definitely changed his life forever, and mine. Suddenly I had this body of information that others wanted to experience, and others wanted to trade in, and I started doing more and more of these climbs, until we formed an organization called Paradox Sports. It is an organization that does adaptive climbing clinics, adaptive climbing programming, and adaptive climbing training. It certifies gyms and groups. We basically created a body of information that could enable and empower other people to have that experience.

As a result of my brother Sean’s paralysis, I think it underscores for me that discomfort is inherent in life. And if you can grow accustomed to it and trade in it, then you’re much more capable of dealing with it with yourself, and then you’re much more capable to assist somebody with their own.

Sean gave me the permission to feel OK about his paralysis. By him helping me understand that I can’t stop him from being paralyzed, but what I can stop is feeling bad about him being paralyzed, I could shift the way that I see it and release him and I from grief.

In 2009, Sean and I were in Anchorage, Alaska. We had just climbed in the Ruth Gorge in the Alaska deep wilderness, and we had a successful trip. Sean rolled back into the hotel room we were sharing and he goes, 鈥淗ey Tim, what’s up?鈥� I go, 鈥淗ey Sean.鈥� He goes, 鈥淗ow you feeling?鈥� And I say, 鈥淚’m doing OK.鈥� You know, I was a little depressed about something. And I go, 鈥淗ow are you doing?鈥� And he goes, 鈥淚’m doing well. And I believe that.鈥� And it was a fundamental shift for me when he said, 鈥淎nd I believe that.鈥� You get to choose how you feel about how you’re feeling.

If you could shift yourself to say, 鈥淚’m OK with it, and I believe it,鈥� that was the biggest takeaway, and I apply that to my life all the time. Because life is already so hard and seemingly against you, why would I aid and abet that? So I’m gonna let myself off. And not get out of jail for free, and turn my head away from it, and act like it doesn’t exist, but on the contrary, I’m gonna take a deeper look into it, understand my role, and then give myself the ability to have grace and acceptance.

Timmy O’Neill is a climber, father, husband, and the executive director of the . He’s also the co-founder and former executive director of , a nonprofit that integrates individuals with disabilities into outdoor recreation. You can learn more about Timmy at .

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Pippa Ehrlich told her story to producer Cat Jaffee for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I came off three years of making the film, and then into the crazy success of the film. Screenings and interviews at ten o’clock at night, two o’clock in the morning. I think things just got really out of control, and I had very little interest in doing work, because I was just too tired. It just felt too overwhelming. And your confidence takes a massive battering because things that were easy before become incredibly, incredibly difficult.

I’m a filmmaker and journalist based in Cape Town, South Africa.

I just love being in the water. And even as a little kid, my gran said that when I鈥檇 get stressed out and difficult to deal with, she just used to put me in the bath.

I spent three years of my life working on this film called My Octopus Teacher. It was not an easy concept to sell, because it’s the story of a man who befriends an octopus underwater in a kelp forest. He meets this little octopus and then, every single day, he goes back to the space that she lives in, and he spends time with her and he learns about her world.

While I was working on My Octopus Teacher, I was diving literally every single day for three or four years. Craig, who was the subject of the film and my co-collaborator, and I really made the film together on a very ordinary iMac.

I could start working at 8:00 AM and work until 2:00 AM very, very easily, and not even feel tired the next day. And that really was the main focus of my life, and it had become this incredible foundation that I’d built myself up on.

We never dreamed that the project would get that successful, and we were in no way prepared for what that success would mean. Suddenly, I found myself living on Zoom, going from interview to panel discussion, to talk, to online awards ceremony. I just started to live in this virtual Zoom space, all through COVID.

And then the whirlwind of flying to the Oscars. And eventually coming back from all of that and being deeply, deeply grateful that the film had resonated in the way that it had. But also feeling a bit lost and overwhelmed and totally and utterly burned out.

Whereas I was used to being able to look at the weather and say, OK, I’m gonna go diving at this time. The thing that had been a major priority for me suddenly dropped all the way to the back of the list. It feels like a level of exhaustion to the point where if I wrote one email, I’d have to go to bed for two or three hours afterwards.

If you are in a really, really bad space, then that’s what you will start to see in the world around you.

I remember going to the beach one day, it’s my favorite beach, but when we went out that day, the whole thing was just covered in noodles. Noodles are these little tiny, tiny pieces of plastic. Every plastic thing starts off as a noodle. Some ship had overturned in the ocean. For over a year, we had people sitting on the beach all over Cape Town collecting these noodles. Anyway, when you’re in a really bad head space, that’s the kind of thing you start to see more of.

And then this amazing opportunity materialized.

Craig, his wife Swati, and I were all invited to this incredible place. It’s a research station in the middle of nowhere in the Indian Ocean, on an island called D鈥橝rros. The research station is managed by the Save Our Seas Foundation. I got on my phone and called every single person that I had an appointment with and I just emptied out my entire diary.

You fly out from Mah茅, which is the capital of the Seychelles. You get in this tiny plane and you fly straight across the ocean. They’re these little tiny dots of islands underneath you. They have to run up and down and make sure that there are no giant tortoises on the airstrip because that’s obviously very dangerous for the plane and very dangerous for the tortoise. They’re like living dinosaurs, hundreds and hundreds of kilos.

The minute I set foot on that island, I just felt completely different. This place is so special because it’s been protected for a very long time, I think since the 鈥�70s, and it’s so remote that going to D鈥橝rros is like going back in time.

You are living in this marine Jurassic Park, and there are tornadoes of birds flying above your head. Giant frigate birds that look and sound like pterodactyls. Everything under the water and on the land and in the air is functioning in balance, the way that it would’ve been hundreds of years ago. You literally walk off the shore in D鈥橝rros, put your head under the sea in this perfect blue ocean, and you feel like you are in an animated movie about coral. There are not just one or two turtles, there are hundreds of turtles. Then you swim out a little bit further, and if you feel your skin starting to sting a bit, there’s plankton in the water, there’s a really good chance that they’ll be manta rays.

We actually went on a boat and there were literally about 15 huge manta rays feeding up and down and swimming around the boat. We jumped in the water. Then it started to rain. And it was like they just got so excited, and there is something really magical about being in the ocean when it’s raining. I could feel in the animals that they were equally excited. Just swerving around, and coming straight up, and watching me with one eye. Then moving their wingtip over the top of my head, and swirling underneath, and turning upside down, and showing me their belly. It was just this experience that reignited that sense of enthusiasm and excitement for life.

To be brought back to the core thing that motivates you, which is this deep love of nature, and knowledge that healthy places are really what we need for healthy people. If there could be more spaces like that on our planet, then that’s something that is worth waking up in the morning and working really, really hard to be part of.

When you come back from paradise, and you can’t just walk off the beach and swim with turtles and manta rays, you need something else that’s accessible. I started this morning ritual of waking up, and sitting there by myself, meditating and doing some breath work and listening to the birds. Just having this very, very calm moment at the start of my day.

It’s really hard to stop, and I think sometimes that’s why we burn ourselves out so badly. Because no matter how tired we are, the thought of stopping is just too terrifying. But finding just some quiet time in your day, every day, preferably in the morning, to just make sure that your heart and your mind are a reasonably centered space is something that everyone can do. Then when you go about your day and you make decisions from that place rather than from a really, really busy or stressed or overwhelmed place, you generally make much better decisions, and particularly decisions that are much better for you and your well-being.

Pippa Ehrlich is a journalist and filmmaker specializing in stories about conservation, science, and the relationship between people and the natural world. She is the co-director of My Octopus Teacher, South Africa’s first Netflix original documentary, and currently works for the Sea Change Project. You can learn about Pippa’s work at .

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Robert Moor told his story to producer Cat Jaffee for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I had this moment of horror where I thought, It is only ten in the morning on my first day of herding sheep, and I have already failed as much as a person can fail. I have lost every single sheep that was entrusted to me. And of course, this made me feel terrible.

I’m the author of On Trails: An Exploration, and I’m working on a book about trees. One of the funny things about me is that even though I wrote a book about trails, I have a terrible sense of direction. I get lost very easily. Thankfully, my husband has a great sense of direction, so whenever we go anywhere, he’s the one who navigates, and I’m sort of along for the ride. But this does tend to get me into trouble when I’m on my own.

Back in 2014, I was writing this book about trails, and I knew I wanted to include a chapter about animals. I wanted something about the way the animals move through the world as individuals, and especially as groups. And I thought that the most archetypal herd animal is the sheep.

As soon as that thought occurred to me, I remembered a group called the Black Mesa Indigenous Support Network. What the Black Mesa Indigenous Support Network tries to do is send volunteers out to help elderly couples herd these sheep.

The Navajo have a deep attachment to their sheep. When a child is born, that child’s umbilical cord is buried in the corral where the sheep live.

That whole world of human-animal relationships was fairly alien to me. At this point in my life, I was a 30-year-old freelance magazine writer. I was obviously not a professional shepherd, or even someone who’d spent much time around animals. And I’d never spent much time in the desert, so it was a forbidding place to me.

So that’s what I did. I said, 鈥淚’d love to come out and herd these sheep for three weeks and learn what I can about sheep.鈥�

A few months later, I was introduced to my host family. It was a couple named Harry and Bessie Begay. They were in their late seventies or early eighties. They spoke almost no English at all; mostly they spoke Din茅, the language of the Navajo. And I, of course, did not speak any Din茅. And so we had a hard time communicating. But, it was clear to me through their actions what my responsibilities were, which were to keep the sheep alive, basically. Taking the sheep through the fields so they could eat the grass and drink some water, and come home. That was supposed to be my day.

It really wasn’t too hard at first, because it seemed that the sheep knew where they were going, and they had a natural instinct to stay together. There were about 30 or 40 of them. And I was walking along as quickly as I could, trying to keep up with them, trying to keep them together. The problem started when at a certain point the sheep began to divide into two groups.

One went uphill towards the top of this kind of mesa, and the other stayed where they were. I had not accounted for the fact that the sheep might divide into two groups. I didn’t know what to do. They were wandering apart and there was only one of me.

I was running back and forth, back and forth, between them, until eventually I somehow managed to lose all of the sheep. Not just one group, but both groups. My heart was racing. My eyes were darting around in all directions. I felt that I had a cat’s tongue growing in my mouth. It was so, so dry, and everything was spiky, and just roasted in the sun. I think all of that added to my feeling of panic when things went wrong because there was this dream-like quality about the landscape.

One of the funny things about the feeling of true panic is that your senses get sort of blown wide open鈥攜ou’re seeing everything, but you’re not thinking about it very clearly. I had this feeling of wanting to be able to leap out of my skin. To be able to change what was happening in some sort of superhuman way.

Especially with technology, we forget that there are hard limits on what we can do and what we can control. I think many people have also experienced the sensation of having lost something, and then you want to be able to hit command-F; you’re so used to your computer, you think, I can just search some sort of metadata and find this thing, but you can’t. The only way is to comb through the landscape, foot by foot, trying to look for it.

So at a certain point that morning, a blue pickup truck pulls up, and inside are Harry and Bessie Begay. I think they’d been trailing behind me, sort of half suspecting this to happen. And I have to tell them that the sheep are gone. In fact, they couldn’t understand what I was saying. So Bessie pulled out a small, flip phone from this woven pouch she wore around her neck, and she called her daughter, and I had to tell the daughter, 鈥淚 lost the sheep, the sheep are gone.鈥� And then the daughter told Bessie and she got this stricken look on her face. I felt terrible.

So the rest of that morning, we roamed around in the pickup truck trying to find the sheep. But we couldn’t find them. So we returned home, we had lunch, and then Harry went out on his own with his horse, and fortunately managed to find half of the sheep. So he came back with half of the group, then a few hours later, we got into the pickup truck again. We drove out to a nearby windmill, which pulls water out of the ground where the sheep liked to have their water each day. This was supposed to be my end point that day.

I hadn’t known it because I’d never seen it before, but that was where I was supposed to be driving the sheep to. And lo and behold, there is the other half of the group of sheep. They had found their way to that windmill without my help, and were sort of patiently waiting to be picked up with this very innocent expression on their faces.

So, we brought the sheep home that day. I managed to wrestle them back into the corral, and as the sun was setting, I sat and wrote in my journal, and thought, How can I prevent this from happening again? I can鈥檛 keep losing these sheep.

There is an impulse that we have when something starts to go wrong to panic, and we’re not panicking so much about the present situation, as what we imagine the situation will be. You feel this intense drumbeat of anxiety and this desire to do something, this desire to be able to fix it. I think one of the ways that we manifest that desire is by imagining worst case scenarios, imagining various futures, because at least that gives us some sense of control.

A couple of lessons occurred to me at that point. One I鈥檝e carried with me the rest of my life is, Don鈥檛 freak out, until it鈥檚 time to freak out.

The next day I went out with the sheep again, and I simply did the best I could. I stuck with them, and I managed to keep them all together. And, day by day, I learned to read their desires and what they wanted, what they needed.

So though my downfall had been very swift, my way back out of it was gradual. And I think that’s the way it is with a lot of things in life. I think that movies like to portray instantaneous resolutions, but in fact oftentimes it’s very slow. It鈥檚 almost imperceptible the way that we make ourselves better and fix the problems that we cause.

Robert Moor is a writer living in Half Moon Bay, British Columbia. He’s the author of On Trails: An Exploration, and is currently working on the final chapter of his new book, In Trees. You can learn more about him at .

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