25 Mar 2014
Transition Athelney links five villages on or bordering the Somerset Levels. At the February meeting of our organising group we were asking ourselves what contribution we could possibly make in response to the disruption and suffering caused by the prolonged flooding. An answer presented itself a few days later when a member of T.A. who is a local councillor with a lifetime’s knowledge and experience of land management in Somerset, gave me a draft document to read.
He was gathering local views on his detailed proposals for remedial action. He was also asking for T.A’s endorsement of this document, for submission to the County Council’s consultation process, ahead of its feedback to DEFRA. My friend’s document highlighted the complexity and interconnectedness of the issues affecting us. Weighing their relative importance is a demanding task, even before cost and funding sources, special interest and political factors enter the picture.
Upstream, midstream and downstream river catchment, land management and intensive farming, protecting homes vs food production, the growth of our County town (Taunton), dredging and drainage, the tidal range of the Bristol Channel, all have to be considered. The roles and perspectives of central and local government, the Environment Agency, Internal Drainage Board and environmental or wildlife organisations also feature prominently. One of the report’s aims was to address muddle and conflict between these agencies and the danger of local voices being drowned out by them.
The document revealed an impressive grasp of all these issues. Its proposed remedies to soil erosion (one source of the silt problem) and rapid run-off into the upper reaches of our County’s rivers include reforestation and hedge renewal. They make good sense and draw on the example of Pontbren, as highlighted by George Monbiot and others. But despite the depth and breadth of this analysis, three linked factors concerned me. One was that I felt too much credence was being given to the scapegoating of the Environment Agency. The second was a dearth of reference to climate change and how it loads the dice towards extreme weather.
I asked him about his fleeting mention of climate change and reference to its impacts as a future prospect, rather than a current and escalating reality. He was agreeable to changing the latter point, but was wary of increasing the overall emphasis on climate change, for fear of putting people off, and not having the document taken seriously!
The Environment Agency is widely seen as having a confused agenda, with ecological considerations being given undue prominence, at the expense of human needs. I am not qualified to judge how well or badly the E.A. reconciles these criteria, but what I do pick up is a perception (fanned of course by elements in the media) that it’s an either/or matter, rather than a set of perspectives which must be integrated because, as Tony Juniper puts it, the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of planetary ecology.
The third thing which troubled me in the document was something which again reflected widely held views and feelings. This was that local people find the prospect of the Levels reverting to marshland “completely unacceptable”. This phrase reminded me of COIN’s illustrated report Moving Stories, which documents the plight of those caught up in climate related migration in places as far flung as the Arctic and Indonesia, China and the Sahel. How “acceptable” is the situation of all these people? Presumably, feelings of fear, anger and helplessness make it harder for people to look at their predicament from a global perspective, even when the data are readily available.
This may not matter all that much when we are discussing adaptation, but it gives few grounds for optimism to those of us who hope that weather disasters will serve as a wake up call to assist mitigation measures. This was illustrated in a BBC television programme on 4th February, when people from one of our flooded hamlets were interviewed, then shown a report explaining climate change, including the fact that several decades of further heating are now locked into the system. The extreme weather implications were spelt out clearly. This section was followed by further interviews, but I saw no evidence that climate change had entered people’s narratives, at least at a conscious level.
On a more positive note, T.A’s involvement in the report did increase its engagement with climate change in a way that spans mitigation and adaptation. The river Parrett (into which the Tone, which gives its name to Taunton, flows) is tidal, well into the Levels. I had not heard anyone locally talking much about sea level rise as a key factor. Dredging, whilst still an emotive issue, is now widely recognised to be no magic bullet. A sluice in Bridgwater bay has been mooted, but it is currently hard to see where the funding would come from and the benefits beyond Bridgwater itself would be limited. The report now advocates exploring the feasibility of a tidal lagoon (as is now proposed for Swansea bay). This could attract private funding, by virtue of projected revenue from electricity generation.
That BBC cross-referencing was good, even if it did not find immediately fertile ground here. On the same day, Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, spoke in London of the “merciless” process of climate change and the urgent need to remove fossil fuel subsidies and to price carbon emissions effectively. Our Chancellor clearly wasn’t listening, but hopefully others were. We should not wait for those in the merciless firing line to join the dots, but the number of people in the rich world who find themselves directly facing it, along with millions in places less well known to us, is growing. Perhaps it’s not too late for the cries of distress from within (and on) our own shores to coalesce with the warnings from climate science and help to concentrate the minds of our policy makers.
Somerset’s inland sea can seem beautiful, though not to those whose houses, land and roads have been inundated. As the water is pumped away and the fields begin to dry out, we begin to get wafts from the rotting vegetation, reminders of the stench which hit us after the flood of Summer 2012. There is an obvious parallel with the stink of political and economic business as usual. Somerset County Council’s report, which the T.A. contribution had a hand in shaping, makes frequent reference to “resilience”. Does this signal a promising shift in thinking along lines advocated by Transition, a helplessness in the face of future disasters, or is it merely empty language, a few vain drops of perfume, to mask the signs of social and environmental decay?
Adrian Tait, 20th March 2014
Adrian is Chairman of Transition Athelney and a founder member of the Climate Psychology Alliance.
Read more»
20 Mar 2014
Stand by your newsstands! May 1st sees the relaunch of Transition Free Press following its successful pilot which produced four very popular and high quality papers. The relaunch also represents a shift in emphasis for the paper. I spoke to Alexis Rowell, TFP’s Managing Editor, who told me that in the relaunch issue, “the focus is shifting slightly to include anything that is “Transition-like” without necessarily being Transition. There are all these solutions groups out there, and we would like to join them all up, to expand the focus a bit”. So how can this new and improved TFP be assured of ongoing success? That’s where you come in.
The aim of the pilot was to show that there is demand for a newspaper focusing on the kinds of solutions that are coming through the Transition movement and elsewhere, with each edition of 10,000 copies being distributed, in pre-paid bundles, through Transition initiatives. It is estimated that every copy is read by at least 3 or 4 people, giving the paper a very wide readership.
The production team has recently been complemented by some great new additions. You can meet the whole new and expanded team here. What is clear is that even in a short time, whether as was reflected in the successful crowdfunding appeal or in the response to each issue, TFP has become a much-loved expression of Transition. Here are some quotes from readers:
“Thanks to the article on brewers in TFP, a group called Farnham Hoppers will be growing hops in gardens around Farnham to produce a local pale ale from the harvest. There are about 50 people involved. It’s very exciting.”
Robert Simpson, Transition Farnham
“I save all my TFPs and reread them when I’m a bit down.”
Diana Korchien, Transition Leytonstone
“TFP is an impressive read – it’s full of articles which educate, get you thinking about alternatives, and raise your spirits about the ingenuity of local communities to deliver incredible results.”
Transition Walthamstow website
“[TFP] plants the seed of the idea that a “newspaper” could be a thing of value – for slow enjoyment – that lasts – something that can be kept and passed around – for months!”
Dave Hampton, Transition Town Marlow
So, how to make sure that TFP thrives and becomes the success it is clearly capable of becoming? The model of distributing the paper through Transition initiatives (which if your initiative isn’t doing, please do, you can sign up for here) has, according to Alexis “probably reached its limits”, providing a “good solid base” upon which to expand the paper. Some initiatives distribute a lot of copies. Transition Town Lewes, for example, sell 500 copies, but they are the most proactive in this regard. With that base, the plan now, he continues, is “to ramp it up and go further”.
What will really make a difference is the number of people who sign up to become subscribers, paying £15 a year in advance for four copies. Do you know a friend or relative who might enjoy a subscription to TFP? As Alexis put it, “we’re looking for subscriptions in a big way”. You can subscribe here. It may turn out to be the best investment you ever made. In its short life, TFP has rapidly become something for which there is a great deal of affection. Let’s make sure that it continues to go from strength to strength.
Another way to help is to advertise in TFP. Its very reasonably priced Marketplace ads page offers a maximum of 55 words including contact details for just £35. What better way to reach out to the UK Transition community and beyond? Contact alexis@transitionfreepress.org.uk.
Finally, just kind of as an aside really, at Transition Network’s office, in our toilet, we have a Caption Competition on a regular basis. Here are our favourite entries from the TFP one, of Transition Network’s Trustees all, entirely unstaged, reading TFP:
- The nude centrefold of Peter Lipman lying naked on a pile of gel bike seats met with a mixed reaction
- “Damn! I thought this paper was going to be “Transition-free”. But it’s not…”
- The Rupert Murdoch buy-out had increased circulation but it just wasn’t the same
- As part of the push for more “being” at Board meetings, ‘Musical Statues’ had become a regular feature
- Jeremy Clarkson’s editorial was going down a treat
- The Board’s process of “empathising with the mainstream” involved replicating the conditions of a rush hour commute on the London Underground
- Ben had figured out 3 Across, but he wasn’t letting on.
If you can do any better, and let’s face it, it’s not difficult, do post your caption below. And please, do put whatever weight you can behind making TFP the huge success it so deserves to be.
Read more»
20 Mar 2014
Has the climate debate stalled? Does extreme weather in the UK mean we’re talking about it more or less? When’s a good time to try to make the connections between climate change and floods? And is there anything Inner Transition has to offer to the questions about how and when to have these conversations?
Yesterday the Inner Transition group in Totnes ran a public event called “Weathering Change – a chance to talk about the weather”. We planned the event back in January just as the gales were starting to blow which took out the railway line by the coast, and the lashing rain was starting to build the large sea which still lies over the Somerset Levels. [This picture (left, below) was taken from the train, showing the Levels now more like a sea.]
As the floods and disruption worsened many people I talked to seemed really enthusiastic about the event – and I started to worry about numbers – what to do if forty people come? We offered guidelines for hosting a conversation to the local Transition Streets groups, imagining it might be a conversation others would want to have.
In fact just 8 people turned up, most already involved with Inner Transition. We had a rich and deeply connecting evening talking about how the weather has impacted us practically as well as at a feeling level. As has happened for me before, hearing others and having a space outside my daily life to be heard, enabled me to reach a deeper sense of how much feeling the changing weather brings up.
We also spoke about how we manage our responses in order to go on living. I could let myself feel how much anger I have at the destructive behaviour of our politicians and business “leaders” that I just don’t get in touch with – if I let all the anger through and tried to act on it I would burn out really fast. We acknowledged that we also live in a state of denial some of the time, carrying our lives on as usual.
Last week I was invited to be part of the conversations at a conference called “Breaking the Deadlock: why the climate debate has stalled”. It brought together academics and researchers, “practitioners” – those involved on the ground of public engagement around climate change, and a couple of people involved in energy policy from the UK and Scottish governments. The aim of the conference was to look at whether “psychosocial approaches” can help move the debate on, starting with the interesting question of what kind of thing a human being is.
Underneath most ideas about our world are implicit assumptions about what humans are like and how we behave – and they often reflect our own inaccurate self perception. Two common misperceptions I’ve come across:
In classical economics humans are assumed to be totally rational, so that when they have full knowledge of a (supposedly perfect and fair) marketplace they will make rational choices. While the economic theory relies on this corporations and advertisers make good use of the fact that people are much more swayed by their emotions, identity, aspirations and aversions, and use this effectively to sell us stuff.
The second example is in movements for change which assume that once people get information they will take action based on a rational analysis of that information. “If I show you a film about peak oil or climate change you’ll join Transition to do something about the problem.” Many people who pioneer Transition may well be like this – when I heard about peak oil put together with climate change I changed the direction of my life. But I can see that for most people this isn’t how it works – there’s a long inner process between hearing information that can be shocking and overwhelming, making sense of it, and coming to some new way of acting in the world.
Here is one person’s definition of a psycho-social approach, and the insights it provides about how humans really work:
- Our inner worlds are powerfully determined by emotions and the need to manage them, including defending against things which feel overwhelming.
- We construct our inner world and understand the outer world through narratives and stories.
- Humans are inconsistent and contradictory rather than rational and consistent.
- Our sense of self and our behaviour is largely influenced by our social context and its norms, frames and values.
It was great to meet up with other “practitioner” organisations, including the Climate Psychology Alliance, Climate Outreach Information Network (COIN, who are developing an event to help places affected by flooding talk about what’s happened and link it to Climate Change) and Carbon Conversations.
Carbon Conversations designed an in depth process supported by a trained facilitator and workbook to give information and explore responses to Climate Change in facilitated small groups. Thousands have been through the process, and after the small number who came to the Weathering Change event I wonder whether we really need a smaller trusted group to open this emotional territory.
I read an article by Carbon Conversations founder Ro Randall several years ago, which described its focus on the process of loss, to help people work through the “Tasks of Mourning” as defined by psychologist J Worden from his model of loss. These include
- acknowledging the reality of the loss,
- working through grief,
- creating a new identity in the changed circumstances,
- and redirecting the energy of the old attachment to new relationships.
Looking at my own process I can see that the third task alone involved changing my work, living in a different place, starting a new relationship, renegotiating all my friendships – some of which I’ve lost as well as new ones I’ve found – and learning totally new skills like growing organic veg. All of this happened without a single gram of carbon being saved. It took a lot of time and internal energy. But it’s the foundation for all the changes in the way that I now live.
At the conference I could feel my disappointment that those working with limited models sometimes think that their way is the best. I’ve found that any model you use shows you a different facet of the whole picture. If we focus on loss and grief we may forget that actually the system we’re losing is in many ways more like a self destructive addiction than a beloved friend. Yes it’s supported life for many countries and many people, but only through huge destruction of our natural world, of many other cultures, and the creation of huge inequality. So an addiction lens helps us to see something else – that the end of the industrial growth system potentially has huge benefits if we can find a different system that’s rooted in something more healthy.
I found it really helpful that one of the key speakers at the conference gave us a much more complete overview of ways of understanding and taking action in the world. [It looked to me very like Wilber’s four quadrants, which I’ve also used to help teach a complete and integrated understanding of healthy and destructive human systems.] The four quadrants can roughly be defined as inner / outer and individual / collective. Here’s an abbreviated version of the model:
The Quadrant Approach To Engagement (Renee Lertzman, PhD)
|
Emotional experience
Feelings, construction of meaning, defence mechanisms, denial, narrative, empathy, dialogue, motivational interviewing
Activities: conversation / support groups, qualitative research, workshops, leadership development, arts
|
Behavioural
Movitiations, reasoning, probabilities, levers and drivers, cognitive processes, rationality, triggers, shift, switch, incentives, proactive change, quantitative research
Activities; Behaviour change programmes, energy efficiency, utlitities, transport (incentives / taxes), employee engagement
|
|
Socio-cultural –
World views, ethics, ideologies, beliefs, messaging, frames and values based engagement
Activities: faith based programmes, public opinion polls
Contexts: marketing, political messaging, policy segmentation,
|
Systems
Collaboration, design, social practices, systems thinking, resilience, infrastructure, solutions focus
Social innovation projects, pu blic / private partnerships, community based projects, participatory design, piloting
Activities; Resource issues (regional / watershed),
|
Renee, who brought this model suggested that these different modes of engagement tend to operate only within their own set of systems which then limits and weakens their practice, since the reality is that humans are operating in all four quadrants all the time. This strongly reflects what I’ve seen particularly in the two major movements for positive change that I’ve been involved with. In the personal growth movement the focus starts with personal inner experience – “The change starts with what’s inside me, to make positive change in the world I need to heal myself first”. Political and environmental change movements take the opposite view: “We can only act within the systems around us – the systems need to change before people can change”
For me this is a classic case of the need for “both / and” – arguments about which of these is more true are a waste of time. I think it’s part of the rare potential of Transition (some have told me that for them it’s a defining distinction which makes Transition worth giving time to) is that we attempt – despite difficulties – to include both ways of creating change.
Here’s why this inclusive approach is important. People who only see the personal inner quadrant can get stuck in their personal journey. Is it helpful that there are people with great inner peace and even accessing states of enlightenment if their personal practice includes unsustainable consumption of carbon through flying to workshops or particular diets? Surely at some point there has to be a connection between our inner practice and the needs of our community and the ecological systems that support life, or we’re living our own individual version of separation and denial.
And on the other hand, many social and political movements have ended up either burnt out, or split apart by conflict because they didn’t have the inner insights and process skills to deal with their own their unconscious process – which will naturally include unhealthy dynamics around power and privilege which permeate all of us however deep our aspiration to cooperation or equality.
So the strongest and most lasting movements will be those which truly practise inclusivity – by rising to challenge of understanding the different worldviews and language of those who focus on other quadrants, and who can truly embody the quality of peace and resilience that comes from valuing diversity.
A final word about Happiness!
A nice coincidence is that today, Thursday 20th March is International Happiness day. I’m not sure if the timing is deliberate, but on this day you can listen for free to a discussion between Hilary Prentice – who first dreamt up Inner Transition in Totnes – discussing exactly question. Starting from the perspective of why self awareness and inner disciplines are invaluable for activists – but I imagine also acknowledging that the bridge needs to go both ways.
My final meeting in London was with Mark Williamson from Action for Happiness, part of a growing movement that aims to make Happiness a political priority, the thing governments should focus on growing rather than our material or financial economy. I’m planning to write more about this, but the work that underpins the Happiness movement is key to Transition because it explains how it is possible to create energy descent – a steady, major reduction in our use of energy and resources – while creating a better way of living.
The key to this lies once again in understanding what a human being really is and what makes us happy. Increasing evidence shows that this does not come from material possessions or consumption beyond having our basic subsistence needs met – but rather from things like having happy, close, loving relationships, meaningful and connected work, and knowing that those around us are also in a state of well being.
Have a happy day of happiness!!
Read more»
20 Mar 2014
COIN, the Climate Outreach and Information Network, recently published a great report called After the floods: communicating climate change around extreme weather, which set out to explore our “complex attitudes to climate change and extreme weather events”. Why do extreme weather events not necessarily mean that people “get” climate change? How should Transition initiatives in communities hit by extreme weather talk about climate change with their neighbours? These are just some of the vital questions we explored with George Marshall, COIN’s founder, in a long and fascinating interview.
I went to Dawlish the other day, where the railway line was washed into the sea recently, and the town took a complete pasting. I met an old man there who’d lived in Dawlish for many years and we sat and looked out over the town together and I asked him about the storm. He said, “it’s the worst storm I’ve ever seen, I’ve never seen anything like it.” I said “so do you make any link between what you saw that night and climate change?” He said, “oh I don’t believe in climate change.” He said, “do you?” and I said “I do, very much so.” He said, “well I do believe that since the beginning of the industrial revolution we’ve poured huge amounts of gases and pollutants into the atmosphere and that that has changed the climate, but I don’t believe in climate change.” Can you explain that?
I can counter that with another quote. I have a book coming out later this year on the psychology of climate change. I started with a quote from Leon Frankfurter who was a high court judge in the US. He was given a presentation by a man who first hand had seen the clearing of the Warsaw ghetto by the Nazis during the Second World War and the herding of Jews into concentration camps. He reported all of this to Judge Frankfurter who was a Jew himself and Frankfurter said “I cannot believe you.” So the guy said “are you crazy, this is an eyewitness testimony.” But Judge Frankfurter says “No, I’m not saying he’s lying. I said I simply cannot believe him and these are different things.” This was interesting from a Supreme Court judge.
I think what your guy in Dawlish was saying the same. He’s saying two things, that he can accept the abstract sense of it but he cannot accept or believe in the moral or personal or emotional implications of it. In other words, when he sees the destruction which is that knowledge manifested, he can’t accept it. I think psychologically we can do this very well, quite consciously. There are things that we know that when we’re asked about it we say “I know that”, but we hold back from accepting or recognising that belief.
Did you think there’s an element to it as well which is somehow that even by now the words “climate change” have become so loaded that somebody who’s very conservative, even though they may agree with climate change, as soon as they use the words ‘climate change’ somehow they feel they’ve put themselves in a box with ‘that lot’?
Absolutely. It’s very clear that that happens. In cognitive linguistics, they talk about ‘the language of framing’ which a lot of people are now familiar with. Within a terminology of framing you understand that certain words become what we call frames. That is to say that when the words are used they bring into play a whole very wide range of values and attitudes and cultural shapes, and climate change is definitely that, as is ‘global warming’ of course, which is a parallel phrase but actually has its own slightly different separate meaning.
It’s very clear that for many people, particularly people who are conservative, particularly people who are older, they can accept the content of climate science. Many of the people who say they don’t believe in climate change are well educated scientifically but they will not accept the full meaning of it.
When there’s a really big climate/extreme weather event like Hurricane Sandy or what we’ve seen here over the last few weeks, often you hear people saying “what will it take to make people realise that climate change is happening?” But your work suggests that that’s really the wrong question, doesn’t it?
No, I think it’s very much the right question. Let’s go back a step and say, what are the processes by which we form socially held beliefs. I’m aware, by the way, that that word ‘belief’ is a dangerous word. You’ve used it already in our conversation. Let’s just say that the word belief is itself a frame, that when people say “I believe” or don’t believe, that this is a word that has an association with religious faith.
So let’s recognise that there is a process of belief that’s happening here but let’s call it conviction, that’s the word I prefer to use. We can say ”what is the process by which people form their convictions?” There are a lot of things that we know, but we’re not entirely convinced of them and we hold that information at bay.
Information’s a primary cause of that. Scientific information of course is a very important direction towards conviction, but really the convictions are formed by the people around us. Let’s just say that there is a truth that is an objective truth, which might be formed by the data, and then there is a social truth or a social fact. But we depend on both when we form our convictions, so we can say that it’s quite possible for people like your guy in Dawlish to accept the scientific fact but not to accept the social fact.
We need to put the two together. That means, therefore, that what makes it possible for people to accept these things is very clear evidence of a social fact, that’s to say that the people around, the people they know in their networks, their family, friends and community are actively seen to hold this attitude and conviction.
The problem we have with climate change is they don’t. Some people actively refute it. Many people won’t hold it at all, they won’t publicly accept it and they won’t talk about it. We get into a difficult situation where in opinion polls we ask people “do you believe in climate change?” We also have opinion polls saying “do you think that the extreme weather is related to climate change?” By and large you’ll find that the majority of people will say yes on both counts.
The problem is, of course, that that’s the answer that they give when they’re asked by someone in the street. That does not mean that’s the conviction that they wear and share openly within their peer groups.
The answer to your question is that we have to get people talking about it, and talking about it as a social fact. Something that’s real within socially held conviction, something which is really out there and talked about in the same way that maybe the economy is talked about. It is something which people openly have views on. Those views can be conflicting views too. There’s nothing wrong with having a situation where you have people saying “well I accept this” or “I don’t accept this”. I think the big danger is that conversation doesn’t happen at all. In the absence of that, it just becomes a set of data, information and facts which people can keep squirrelled away in the intellectual part of their brain without it infecting their emotional part which is the part which makes them want to do something.
Incidentally, just to point out, again going back to your guy in Dawlish, we can do that because we do have separate parts of our brain that perform in different ways. We have parallel processes within our brains and one process deals with the analysis of data. The other deals with the emotional implications of data and the sense of threat, and that these processes work in parallel but can also be kept quite separate.
When we receive our information from the scientific source, we can actively collude with those different processes by making sure that we keep it over there in our scientific part where we go, well that’s interesting, and not allow it to come over into our emotional social side which might compel us to take action. Obviously the answer to how we get people to take action is we have to get it to cross over.
In the paper that you just published, you wrote about how victims of extreme weather episodes are not necessarily more likely to associate those with climate change than non-victims. Why is that? What’s the psychology of that?
Let’s just say that the basis for that is some social research, although this is a relatively new area for social research, but also personal experience of going and talking to people. I did a string of interviews, over 20 interviews in two areas of America that had been severely affected by climate change. One was in Bastrop in Texas which had a combination of extreme drought followed by the most devastating wildfires in Texan history. Devastating by a tenfold order of magnitude compared to anything previously. Then I did a string of interviews up and down the coast of New Jersey where there are astonishing levels of damage from Sandy. I was there six months after and still there were whole towns smashed to matchsticks. It was incredible.
Interviewing people there, it was very interesting that people would not necessarily make the connection. And strange also when you think, well hang on, this is what scientists have been talking about for the last 20 years. So for 20 years, scientists have been saying that climate change will bring more severe weather events, possibly more and severe storms although there’s a bit of uncertainty around that. Certainly more severe droughts and wildfires. So when something comes along which is off the scale in terms of your previous experience which conforms to that, you would think that you would at least pay some heed to it.
But I think what is interesting is not just that people don’t necessarily accept it, but they don’t even talk about it. There is an absence of conversation in these areas about the weather, that what they’ve experienced is connected to climate change. So whether people accept it’s climate change or not, they’re not talking about it with each other. The reason for this is complex and I have to say that is a big question. It’s one we need to answer. I have my theories.
One thing that’s clear is that when people go through a major extreme weather event, it brings them together, especially if it’s a short-lived one. If it’s a long, protracted one like a major drought it can wear people down, but if it’s a single one like Hurricane Sandy or flooding and so on, people often feel a very strong sense of social unity. Especially in our rather fragmented communities, that can be very validating for people.
That means they can concentrate on things that bring them together, their shared values, their sense of common identity. It also means they’re very wary of everything that might potentially draw them apart, and climate change is that kind of issue. I’d say even more in the states than here. The kind of thing that people avoid talking about within their own families because they know their Uncle Bob is a climate sceptic and they don’t want to have a row over the Christmas pudding, that kind of thing. I think people actively try not to talk about it.
But there’s another thing as well. If you are caught in a major event, if your house has been flooded, you have major concerns with just clearing it out, rebuilding it, especially if the house has burnt down or been smashed apart. Rebuilding your life so you have immediate short term concerns which push out from longer term ones. Then let’s face it, if you are making the decision to invest again in your life, to rebuild your life, the last thing you want to consider is the possibility that this is the start of a major shift that will bring not just more of these events but even more intense ones.
Who on earth wants to hear that? I think there’s a real danger that when people reinvest in their lives, they are reinvesting in a narrative that things are normal and that this was a freak accident and that things will go back to the way they were before. In other words, through their action and their spending, and their desire to believe, people become over-optimistic about the future and what might happen.
We know very well that people who have been through personal accidents often come out with a reinforced sense of their own immunity, and an artificially reduced sense of the probability of something happening again. That’s entirely possible with these major events, but that is compounded by their refusal to accept that actually the odds are shifting. Not only are people not prepared to accept that this is something that might come again, but they’re certainly unwilling to accept that the odds are shifting such that these events will be happening more and more.
If people listening to this who are involved with Transition groups in places that have been affected by the extreme weather recently, the last thing they want is to come across with any told-you-so sort of vibe. What’s the most skilful way to introduce the possibility to people, or is it just best not to go there?
I think that’s the key question. I think the temptation is not to go there. The temptation which I think is reinforced quite strongly through our social interactions is that it’s inappropriate to talk about climate change with people who have been devastated by an extreme weather event. I remember just through Facebook, my wife putting out some comments around the flooding or around Hurricane Sandy and getting some very clear signals from her Facebook friends that it was not appropriate and that somehow it’s almost exploitative to talk about that. This is not the right time. The question is of course, if this is not the right time now then when is the right time exactly?
Therefore the temptation is not to talk about it at all – I think we need to resist that temptation. But the first thing we need to say is we need to tread very, very carefully here. These emotions are raw and people are very upset. We need to find a way of doing it. I’d suggest to people that they try it out carefully and compare notes and use this experience of what’s happened over this winter as a way to test things out. Hopefully we at COIN can work with the Transition groups to try out and share our experiences and test in the real world what might work or might not work.
The answer is we don’t entirely know, but there are some pointers. One of the things we know does not work is to parachute into an affected community as politically ideologically motivated outsiders and try and make those links. We strongly advise environmental organisations for example to not do that, to resist the temptation to run broadcast campaigns saying “da daah, it’s climate change, we told you”. I think that’s potentially quite counterproductive.
At a community level like Transition groups however, you’re in a much stronger position. You are at least speaking from a shared level of experience. I think that’s very important. I think that the most trusted communicators will be people who are seen as being part of the community and people who have themselves been affected. To say, putting it up front, talking about your own experience and what has happened. I think one way to clearly do it, and this has been shown to work quite well in the States has been to talk about this within the adaptation and resilience and preparedness agenda. I think that Transition is very much on the right line with this.
Rather than saying “it’s climate change and it’s our fault”, I think people can make those connections themselves if they’re willing to face it. I don’t really need to spell it out. I think we can say we need to recognise that there is a change underway and we need to pull together and be prepared for that to happen increasingly. How can we be strong as a community? Also, of course, because communities come together so strongly often around these events, we can validate ourselves and we can feel good, recognise actually that there were things that we did in the course of these events which are very positive, but they’re signs that we’re stronger than we thought; that we can pull together in ways which are really worthwhile.
The act of pulling together and the act of individual care and concern and heroism and altruism that people show is something that builds barriers across political and social boundaries. I think that’s something to really put up front, to say, we did really well here. There were some really powerful things that happened in our community around this event which showed how strong we are or how strong we can be, and let’s recognise and prepare for stuff coming in the future.
It’s very important to resist the temptation towards the protection of the individual property. There’s a temptation on this to say, I’m protecting myself, I’m making my house flood-proof. Obviously people do that, and that’s fine, but I think the emphasis has to be on how we can protect ourselves collectively. What can we do to pull together? Particularly what can we do in the case of future events, recognising that they might happen, to protect the vulnerable. People who might be old, people who might be disabled. It might be hard for them to get out of their homes. How can we offer protection and services, community support services lined up for them, maybe an emergency phone tree or a network which snaps into gear when it’s needed.
Because, I’m stressing that, because we know from the values work that’s been done, particularly by people like Tom Crompton at WWF who’s done great work on this, that if we reinforce people’s sense of collective and caring values, that we make people more willing to accept the fact that we need to pull together in the face of a common threat. In other words, through reinforcing our sense of pride and identity and caring for each other, we lay the foundation for being able to feed in those arguments about climate change.
Just to end on this point, saying this is why I’m stressing to start by talking about the positive experiences of how we pulled together. To say that it’s clear from a lot of research that people are far more receptive to challenging arguments like climate change if it’s in a context where their values and their sense of their own identity has already been validated.
But what they are not receptive to is a direct challenge that therefore brings up all of their defences, “don’t tell me what to do” and “who are you anyway”, “you’re a hypocrite” and all of that.
It’s been very interesting to see the response to Nigel Lawson’s appearance on the radio and how the climate sceptics at a time when you thought they would climb off under a rock and take a long hard look at themselves, have actually been coming out and talking about it and getting quite a lot of publicity over the last few weeks. I read recently, there’s a video I watched by Naomi Oreskes who wrote Merchants of Doubt, and she does an interview there with a guy called Nick Minchin who’s an Australian climate sceptic. She says to him:
“It makes me wonder if the reason you want to reject the science is that it has consequences. It has consequences for us about how we live our lives, how we run our economy, what our taxation policies are. I think what you don’t like are the implications, the political, social and economic implications. But what you’ve done along with a lot of other people is to say, let’s shift the debate, let’s argue about the science. Let’s keep the debate about the science going, because as long as we argue about the science we don’t get to the question of what that means for us politically, socially or economically.”
This time, how people have still gone back to arguing about the science just seems completely ridiculous. Is there any sense of how we input into that process to move it on more to the policy?
The problem we always had with the floods is that no scientist is going to be prepared to come out during the floods or any climate event immediately afterwards and say, “aha, that’s climate change”. Of course, they should be saying, well this is a pattern consistent with climate change. This sense of uncertainty tends to pervade the debate.
I’d go back again to what I was saying earlier about how there are scientific facts and socially held facts. If people in their own minds see that there is an association between an extreme weather event and climate change, that becomes the fact that they hold. Similarly, if people in their own minds come to think that all of the scientists are conspiring in order to get larger, fatter, government grants for their research, which of course is this outrageous and ludicrous lie which is paraded by some of these professional deniers, they will believe that. These views can become deeply entrenched and very immovable.
But of course the thing which moves them is not arguing directly with them about this not being true, or this is the evidence. It’s actually going back to this idea of socially constructed facts. What will shift a climate change denier, not the professional ones of course but the general public, is citing the evidence that people like themselves who share their values happen to believe in it and happen to accept it.
The big problem we have, I think, in terms of the issue is that Naomi is correct there. Many people, particularly of Conservative or free market values are deeply suspicious of the solutions. And of course the people who are keenest on the solutions and therefore the ones who hold climate change most readily are their sworn political enemies.
The entire thing becomes polarised around political lines. The way to shift this is to have more and more people of Conservative values being seen to openly hold on to the science and to say, yes, we want to be part of discussion and debate about what the solutions are, which I think might be a very useful debate.
There’s nothing, by the way, intrinsically in Conservativism that would say that Conservatives cannot make personal sacrifices or pull together in the face of a threat. In fact, you can certainly believe that if climate change was being caused by North Korea, that the Conservatives would be on the front line saying “we’ll do whatever is necessary to stop this threat or anything similar”. In fact there’s no doubt in my mind that if climate change was going to be caused by a meteorite that Conservatives would be right on top of it.
But there’s nothing intrinsically in it. It’s the way that these threats speak to people’s world views. Even the most hardcore Libertarians, going right back to the writings of Friedrich Hayek after the Second World War, would recognise that you sometimes need to pull together and you need to maybe interfere with the free market in the interest of facing a collective threat. The question is, how does that threat come to be perceived, and again I go back to that sense that threats are perceived not through the data but through the public perception of them.
I will say something, by the way, about this whole climate change denial thing, which I think Naomi is touching on there, which is important. People hold attitudes on climate change because of their values and their world views and their politics. Not because they’re necessarily bribed to do so. There’s a common view, especially amongst environmental campaigners, that all this denial stuff is a huge public relations scam generated by fossil fuel money.
Whilst it’s certainly true that some of the oil companies have been utterly reprehensible for funding what has been sometimes very professional misinformation campaigns, the reason that the vast majority of people do not believe in climate change is because it’s a direct challenge to their sense of the world and how the world is. And because they personally really do not like or trust the people who seem to be most eagerly telling them about it. But it’s not just about corruption.
It’s about stuff which speaks very much to people’s values. And of course, the reality which is that none of us really, in our hearts, ought to accept that this thing is happening. Nobody really wants to believe it. We’re all very keen to find reasons that it’s not happening, and I’d say maybe for people who are Conservative or people who are doubtful of environmentalism, that’s somewhat easier for them to do because they’re starting from a position of being doubtful of the people who are telling them.
My last question is, the thing that we’re looking at this month is living with climate change. What’s your sense of the next 20 years or so? What’s our experience of that going to be, both in the outer world but also for us internally, how are we going to experience that, do you think?
I’m fascinated by this question. I don’t think there’s any clear direction. I think we can maybe predict that there are certain pathways. One thing we know, as I said earlier, is that people do have a remarkable capacity to put on one side and to compartmentalise things they don’t really want to deal with. I think we have to recognise that this skill is deeper than we recognise.
Those of us who work on climate change really like to believe that there is some revelatory moment, when the lights go on in people’s heads. Some point when they read something or hear something or some major storm hits and they go “aha, yes, now I get it!” For some people there is. I think we should really be encouraging people to have that kind of moment. But I also think it’s pretty clear that people can keep that at bay for a very long time. I fear that for some people, that might be so long until they realise what’s going on that they get into a very different state.
All of these are going to be fighting themselves out by the way, it’s not as if everybody follows one pathway. Different people are going to respond in different ways. There’s clearly going to be one direction in which people just do not accept it. Not that they deny it.
I will say that there are people who right to the very end will deny stuff, but I think there’s a more dangerous form which is that people, as the psychotherapists call it, ‘disavow’: they know it but they don’t know it, they keep it on one side. I think we can therefore expect a continuation of what in COIN we’ve been calling ‘climate silence’, this condition of socially constructed silence where we don’t talk about it and that people roll their eyes and go “oh, here we go again”, “this is so depressing”, and so on.
There are other forms of response where people, as a way of avoiding it, go deeper and deeper into avoidance processes. I’m afraid, and I’m inclined to predict this, that there will be a tendency in the short term for people maybe to go deeper into consumption, to go deeper into short term pleasure activities, to have a bit of that ‘live for today because you never know you might get hit by a bus’ kind of attitude.
I anticipate that there will be an ever growing and ever more vocal group of people who say “no, wake up”. But I don’t think that there will be any real change on climate change without a very strong and vocal popular movement and I’m reassured to see that that’s starting to pick up weight, I think that that can grow.
There is evidence that social change can happen extremely rapidly. We’ve just seen what’s happened in Ukraine for example, there’s stuff flashing up all around the world. This is clearly a time of major political tectonic shifts. We’ve seen over the last few years that there has been change coming from popular movements on a scale which has been quite exceptional, so I’m feeling reasonably optimistic.
But there are other paths too where people accept that there is a problem but go into aberrant coping mechanisms. One form of that is to actually seek to give power to people to make decisions on their behalf, and this is well supported historically. We can always fear that people will respond in the worst possible way. Unfortunately it may be very well versed people who have said for years “we don’t want the government to interfere in our lives” but can just very readily switch over to going to a war mode and giving a great deal of power to governments to take control.
There are other aberrant forms whereby people don’t deal with the problem at all but they process their sense of anxiety in other ways, for example through conflict, through warfare, through scapegoating, through turning inwards.
All of these patterns have been mapped out for us by the way that we’ve responded in the past to collective and personal conflicts. It’s our responsibility as social change activists, as I think we are, to look at and anticipate those and to really try and make sure that we steer this whole thing in a direction towards positive coping mechanisms where we recognise and we face up to things and we deal with them; but we also anticipate that we might go slipping off in any number of aberrant directions because climate change in the end is not one of those problems like North Korea where you can say “all we have to do is pull together and fight this thing”. We are all participants in it. We cannot objectify what goes on, we have to find a way of pulling together.
I will say in answer to that that therefore the solutions always lie in ways of talking, ways to behave that would involve pulling people together. Drawing people together rather than pulling people apart, which is I think something we need to be very careful with in climate change movements, that we always seek to try and build those movements across boundaries rather than on the basis of it being us versus you.
And just to say there’s also the wild cards. The thing we don’t know is what is actually going to happen with the climate. We really don’t know, and having spoken to a lot of the climate scientists on this, as you have, the overwhelming feeling is that they don’t really know what’s going to happen as the North Pole goes and that huge reflective ice mirror disappears. We don’t know. Some of what’s happened over this last winter really has people scratching their heads. They can see how it’s acting out but it’s not really how they thought that things would work.
So we have got the uncertainty on this that things might move extremely fast. I still remain optimistic that this problem is hitting us at a time when we are exceptionally well connected, well informed, well educated, when there is an exceptional level of international co-operation. I’m not saying it’s good, I’m just saying it’s exceptional. We don’t have a Cold War which is running at the moment. Despite all of these national snipings, we do seem to have the capacity, more than any time in the past, to pull together. So I guess I’m reasonably optimistic that things might turn out alright. But we’re going to have to push it and prod it.
George Marshall’s book Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change is published in September.
Read more»
