The 'Neurospicy' Call to Work Toward Climate Solutions

Solitaire Townsend moderated the Neurospicy Solutionists Gathering at the Solutions House event space (Credit: Lauren Farkas)

Unique climate challenges are emerging around the world, and unique minds are emerging to address them.

On Sept. 23, Solutions House, an annual Climate Week pop-up in Chelsea, held its first meeting for neurodivergent activists. The Neurospicy Solutionists Gathering welcomed about 100 attendees into the “lower-lighting, stim-friendly, eye-contact optional” space to discuss why their particular strengths draw them to climate change.

“How amazing if neurodivergence becomes part of the solution,” said Solitaire Townsend, moderator and sustainability expert. Townsend, who was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder in June, is the co-founder of Futerra, a sustainable development agency that hosts Solutions House.

Townsend said that she has noticed high neurodivergent representation in climate activism and sustainability-focused careers: according to a LinkedIn poll, 57% of 246 respondents who work in these fields identify as neurodivergent. Research on this intersection is limited, but Townsend presented three possible reasons for it.

Many neurodivergent minds recognize patterns, Townsend said. That talent “is absolutely crucial when it comes to solutions to climate change itself, because it means that we can see some of the emerging patterns in the problem,” she said, as well as “some emerging patterns in the solution.”

Additionally, she said neurodivergent people are highly empathetic, especially for those who are “other to us, in terms of their geography, their life experience, their race, their gender, their age, their humanness.”

Her own empathy even extends to inanimate objects. “I say sorry to chairs I bump into,” Townsend said.

Finally, neurodivergent people often struggle to understand the rules of society. Those who “don’t seem to have that programming where you just get why things are the way they are” Townsend said, that in many ways, it’s all made up.

“Our economic systems, social systems, the market, politics, hierarchy. We invented all of it.” With that recognition comes the power to change it, she said.

Erin Roberts, who attended the panel and runs an international climate change response initiative called the Loss and Damage Collaboration, said Townsend’s points resonated with her.

“Neurotypicals will tell me all the reasons why something can’t work,” she said to the group. “I am not seeing all the challenges and variables that they see.”

Another strength, Roberts said, is her heart, which drives her work to provide global support to diverse communities affected by climate change.

The Neurospicy Solutionists Gathering also featured a video dial-in by Rhonda J. Moore, a project officer at the National Institutes of Health who studies the effects of climate change on mental health. After receiving Autism and ADHD diagnoses three years ago, Moore said she discovered a gap in research on mental health in neurodivergent populations.

She said the strengths that she, Townsend, and other “neurospicy solutionists” possess also mean they are particularly vulnerable to burnout—something she herself has experienced.

“I was absolutely depressed and had a lot of anxiety,” Moore said. Her recovery process, which included hospitalization, led her to start work on a book to explore the experiences and perspectives of neurodivergent populations grappling with climate change.

“I just got diagnosed with ADHD,” said attendee Jorge Vega Matos, who said he too has suffered from burnout. After Hurricane María in 2017, Vega Matos organized a mutual aid network so that Puerto Ricans could communicate during the island-wide blackout. “I’m grateful that this kind of chaotic-minded approach to information gathering and filtering really kicked in,” he said.

“Human beings face a lot of extreme events, and ADHD people often are good in extreme events,” Townsend said in response, referring to a growing body of research around the evolutionary advantages of ADHD. The Sultan Lab for Mental Health Informatics at Columbia University, for example, says that many ADHD individuals display “impulsivity and quick adaptability,” which enable “rapid decision-making and immediate action.”

Townsend said she hopes to see even more neurodiversity in climate activism. “When we show what we bring politically, socially and environmentally, there is some openness from society in hearing about other ways,” she said. “In hearing the creativity and the inventiveness and the ideas of what the world might be.”

In 2019, environmental activist Greta Thunberg made another round of headlines, not for publicly confronting world leaders or receiving a Nobel Peace Prize nomination but for revealing the secret weapon that she believes has helped her accomplish the rest.

“I have Asperger’s syndrome and that means I’m sometimes a bit different from the norm,” she wrote on Instagram. “And—given the right circumstances—being different is a superpower. ”