This episode contains content about suicide. If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental health crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting “988.”
Editor’s Note: This season, Grounding is collaborating with Mountain Journal, examining how climate change is affecting our landscapes, our brains and our lives. MTPR’s second season of its “Grounding” podcast is exploring the idea of dissonance—the psychological discomfort of reconciling the climate crisis with our daily lives—and is talking to experts from Missoula to Helsinki to help listeners put words to what they’re experiencing. With its “Faces of Climate” series, Mountain Journal is giving readers a closer profile of these experts and their work in navigating climate change.
Listen to “Grounding” on Montana Public Radio for more on climate change and mental health, and find the “Faces of Climate” profiles of the experts from “Grounding” on Mountain Journal, along with other “faces” in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
The official end of the Holocene is debated. But according to Peter McDonough, director of the Climate Change Studies Program at the University of Montana, a relatively agreed upon end was 1989.
Those who experienced the Holocene, like McDonough and host Sarah Aronson—a climate-aware psychologist and Montana Public Radio host—knew snow days and frigid temperatures. They also knew a climate epoch that wasn’t completely dominated by human interference.
Students in McDonough’s classes at UM though—especially the more traditional, 18-22-year-olds—are in a different category.
“When I learned about the word Anthropocene and learned about what that meant, it’s kind of a scary concept, that we have now entered the age where human actions and human development have so dramatically changed our environment and our earth systems that it had to be renamed? It’s a scary thing to think about going up against that,” said Michael Jump, one of McDonough’s students.
In May of 2025, the Clark Fork River running through the middle of Missoula, Montana was high and quiet, in its typical cycle of spring runoff. But the silence would foreshadow an eerie turn of events when weeks later, with almost no rainfall, the river level dropped and a giant algae bloom coated the river bottom.
By mid-June it became a topic of daily conversation in town, “The river is bright green!” One night after work, on a 90-degree day, Aronson stopped at the river to cool off. As she dunked in about 14 inches of water, her hands gripped fistfuls of coarse algae.
“It was disgusting,” she said.
Between a brown Christmas and a green June, Montana is changing. While these phenomena have always existed, they are becoming more frequent and intense, part of a trend called “climate weirding.”
In this episode of Grounding season two, Aronson talks to McDonough, his students, and another educator at the intersection of climate change and mental health at UM, Jen Robohm, about the dissonance of climate change. Dissonance is the psychological tension when our thoughts, beliefs, behaviors and values conflict. It can look like grabbing a straw, driving an hour to a ski hill, or taking an airplane to see loved ones. It's the tension between what it takes to participate in daily life while holding an awareness that almost all of our actions are tied to climate change.
This season, Aronson explores this friction in order to better understand the times we’re living in, and how to live well in spite of these compounding stressors. Though there might end up being more questions than answers this season, it’s clear that the answer to the central question, “Are we alone?” is unequivocally, “no.”
In this episode:
Peter McDonough (pictured in the middle panel, above): director of the Climate Change Studies Program at UM, who discusses the need for bringing a mental health component to the program;
Jen Robohm (right panel): licensed clinical psychologist and professor of the climate change and mental health course at the University of Montana;
And students, left to right, Vivi Ostheimer, Lauren Schulte and Michael Jump (left panel).
Listen to episode one, “1989 (Sarah’s Version),” via the link above, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts.
