Lily Cole: Welcome to Who Cares Wins, with me Lily Cole.
Patti Smith: I was working with the Dalai Lama about 20 years ago, and he said the most important thing is our environment. The most important thing is what's happening to our water, what’s happening to our soil, what’s happening to our species and our air.
Jonathan Safran Foer: People know what's going on and they care about what's going on. And yet we're battling inaction, not indifference, but inaction. Having the right attitudes or the right opinions or saying the right thing, we can confuse ourselves and believe that we're participating in a way that we're not actually participating.
Joshua Oppenheimer - Primo Levi writing about the Holocaust said, there may be monsters among us, but they're too few to worry about. What we really have to worry about are ordinary people like us.
Farhana Yamin: It was the first time as a sort of straight-laced policy nerd, I could cry and grieve and say this is happening.
Julia Samuels: Psychologically we talk about a breakdown being a breakthrough.
Wade Davis: The goal of the path of life is not a destination. It's a state of mind.
Lily Cole: At the heart of every issue that intersects with the environment you find contradictions tensions and divergent perspectives, and these issues are complex and changing. Most of us want a happy life and a healthy planet. But many people have different ideas about the right way to travel towards it. In this new podcast series, I'll be sharing parts of my research from my book Who Cares Wins, interviewing some of the leading and conflicting voices in contemporary debates, such as technology, food, gender, politics and looking at how they intersect with our environment.
I see myself a bit like sellotape, ribbon or string holding together divergent voices and sort of asking, ‘who cares who wins?’
In this week's podcast episode, the last of this series, I will explore the mental dimensions of environmentalism, the role our psychological response has in solving the situation or exacerbating it and how we might personally deal with the difficult emotions that arise when we confront the science. Fundamentally asking how can we care when caring feels so difficult? How much should we care? Alongside the rise in awareness of our environmental situation in recent years, there has also been a rise in people experiencing eco anxiety, depression, grief, and solastalgia. On the other hand, many argue that there's also a collective denial going on; a cognitive dissonance that many of us embody in order to function in our daily lives.
In this episode I'll speak to a psychologist and activist and several storytellers about the psychological dimensions of our situation. Does dissonance make us complicit in others suffering? What role does empathy play? How do we care without suffering? And might we find the cause and the cure connected if we discover that the same things we seek from mental health, solve our crisis.
I’ll begin this journey with Patti Smith, the poet and musician, reflecting on what she learned from the Dalai Lama.
Patti Smith: Well, I mean, I've always been concerned since I was a child about our environment, especially growing up in the fifties when plastics came into play in the world. And I was always worried about pollution, even though I didn't quite understand the tremendous impact. And now of course, I believe it's the number one concern of our planet. I think if everyone, all the different factions of the world, if everyone said, okay, there are many different issues we have, but first we have to unite on this one nonpolitical issue, is in our environment; what’s happening to our water, what’s happening to our species, what’s happening to the bee population. Different species are becoming extinct. You go down, the sea is becoming more and more polluted. It's just, it's heartbreaking.
I was working with the Dalai Lama about 20 years ago and there were several of us in a room and were led to ask him questions directly. Adam Yauch from the Beastie Boys, asked him what he thought the number one thing that young people could do for a better world, should we work to save Tibet? And he said, no. He said all of these compared to the biggest issues or self-interest issues, the most important thing is our environment. The most important thing is what's happening to our water. What's happening to our soil. What's happening to our species and our air.
And I think about that all the time. We all have to do what we can, every little small contribution. You know, people think, oh, if I use plastic bottles, that won't matter. Oh, I'm just one person. If I litter or if I don't recycle. But if it was one times one times one, to 100 million, what a change we could make! Unless you get people to rekindle that love and want a clean stream, want their children to breathe clean air, want to smell the sharp salt of the sea, they won't really care.
Lily Cole: So assuming we agree that we should care, what do we do when we do care? How do we act? How powerful are we? How responsible are we? When publishing my book this summer, I spoke alongside the writer, Jonathan Safran Foer, whose new book, We are the Weather, argues that each of us has tremendous power to have an impact in the climate crisis three times a day, by looking at our diets and specifically by eating less animal. And when I read the book, I was struck by his exploration of the psychological aspects of our challenge.
Jonathan Safran Foer: I think one of the things that we often don't talk about, or we just lose sight of is that doing what we need to do to correct the path that we're on, we always think of it as a diminishment. We always think of it as a sacrifice and a series of a series of sacrifices. I'm going to have to eat less. I'm going to have to travel less. I'm going to have to, you know, put solar panels on my house, which is going to cost money. I'm going to have to do this. And what's rarely talked about is, I mean, on the, on the most crass level, the fact that this is going to create many, many, many jobs and invigorate many, many economies, and leave us in a much stronger place than we are now. But on a personal level, I don't know of anything that feels better, really anything in the world than closing the distance between who you are and who you imagine yourself to be.
You know, I don't know anything that feels better than making a decision, even a, a difficult one that does involve some amount of sacrifice, in the interest of your values, in the interest of like your personal aspirations. And anybody who's had any experience with making a change in his or her life based on values knows that it is really joyful. It is not a bad feeling. It is not depressing. So my hope is that as these boulders start to roll down these mountains, we're going to realise that we're left in a much happier place, not just with the healthier planet, but a happier planet.
So much of the problem that we have now is with how we tell these stories. It's actually not really an issue of asking people to change their values. It's not even an issue of informing ignorant people for the most part. And this has been shown out in an awful lot of polling in America. People know what's going on and they care about what's going on. There's no like political group that has a monopoly on caring. There's no age group. There's no racial group, but it's becoming universal. And yet we're battling with inaction, not indifference, but inaction.
And the struggle has been to find good ways to talk about it. And I think Lily did a really, really excellent job of finding a good way to talk about these things, whose book I think is really wonderful. And it strikes an almost impossible balance of being both rigorous and also really accessible. And even in certain ways, despite how intimidating the subject is, it’s sort of fun to read it out. Does that make sense?
In terms of optimism I don't even know that I interrogate my own feelings that much anymore. Sometimes I can't help but feel really pessimistic. One of the points that I tried to make in my book is that we ask maybe more questions about our feelings than we do about our actions. And sometimes our feelings can conceal inaction, you know, having the right attitudes or the right opinions or saying the right thing in the right situation. Being armed with the right information. We can confuse ourselves and believe that we're participating in a way that we're not actually participating.
LC: So I set up an analogy at the beginning of the book using the kind of old fable, which is, it turns out not true when you Google it, but there was a story told many times, it's familiar. If you put a frog in boiling water and it jumps out, we put a frog in warming water and you slowly warm it to boil and it will stay until it dies. And I always thought that was a kind of perfect metaphor for the way that we're living, as we get more and more information that tells us, we are essentially an existential threat, threatening our own existence, that we have all of these crises around the corner, and yet we don't change our behaviour really very much. That's one of my things I loved about ‘We are the weather’ is you talk about the kind of collective spell of disbelief. The idea that we, we think we believe the information, but we obviously don't actually believe it because if we actually believed it, we would take action.
JSF: I think that that's part of it. I think also to like extend the frog metaphor, I would jump out of boiling water were I in it obviously, but whatever it is that I say, however, it is, I want to see myself or how other people see me, I might actually be perfectly willing to boil other people. And I think that's one of the things that we're now contending with in terms of climate change. It's one of the things that COVID has maybe shed a different kind of light on, is that there are issues with belief and collective disbelief. But maybe in a sense we have it, right. Like we collectively believe that we are safe. And most of the people who say that actually are safe from climate change. The issue is that people whose lives are already at risk halfway around the world and who don't have the same kind of access to vehicles for storytelling, and certainly people who live in the future.
So, you know, we responded in this really unprecedented way to COVID. And it's interesting to question why. Why is it that entire economies shut down and borders closed in response to something that we know actually far less about than we know about climate change and whose stakes are obviously smaller.
I think the answer is because we felt ourselves in the boiling water. People acted out of personal fear. If Boris Johnson had said, we need to close down the English economy, otherwise people in Bangladesh are going to get coronavirus, my guess is that's unlikely that the economy would be shut down. If Boris Johnson said, and we can include Trump here too, because Lord knows we're not any better, “You need to wash your hands, scrupulously. Otherwise people in Bangladesh are going to get coronavirus”. I don't think most Americans would wash their hands scrupulously because it would then require an empathic leap. Which, you know, it's a tragedy that it's hard to make, but it seems to be hard to make for most people, not for bad people, for most people.
And climate change requires an empathic leap because it's radically unlikely that anybody who's watching this is going to die of climate change, even though people are already dying of climate change. So how do we connect our actions and inactions with people who aren't us, you know, when the effects are happening to people who aren't us and that’s a very, very difficult leap to make.
LC: I think it's a very valid perception and I agree that the perception that people like us are not going to die of climate change is probably part of the reason why there's been so little action, especially from countries like developed countries in the global North. But actually I think it's a fallacy because you already see the last four out of the last five years in England are the hottest on record in the world. Like where is that trajectory going? Covid arguably is a climate change impact. Most scientists, the WHO have come out and said that infectious diseases that humans have are zoonotic they're caused by diseases, jumping from animals to humans as a direct consequences for humanity's relationship with the natural world.
The fact that there’s less and less wild space and the way that we intensively industrialised animal agriculture. So I would argue that you don't see climate change as just climate change, you know, you see it as the environment and the environment being a holistic system that has many, many, many, many factors that actually what COVID has illustrated is that we're not, even the wealthy countries, are not kind of able to protect themselves from fundamentally the fragility of these systems.
JSF: I agree. Maybe what I should should've said is the way you put it, which is the perception of personal safety. I think that there can be a danger in all of this, because it becomes so fraught with emotion and so fraught with personal insecurity, like fears of being called out, fears of being hypocritical, fears of there being a distance between the people that we describe ourselves as being, or think of ourselves as being and the people that we actually are. And that those fears lead us to conclusions that are, or to places that are where we're no longer even referring to the environment. We’re referring to ourselves and our own psychological life.
LC: So how do we make an empathetic leap to other people alive today to future generations, even to our future selves?
What can we learn from communities who are already on the frontline of the crisis? I spoke with Joshua Oppenheimer, the filmmaker who was twice Oscar nominated for his documentaries, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, which tried to understand the psychology behind the genocide in Indonesia. Joshua has now shifted his lens to the climate crisis through two film projects.
Joshua Oppenheimer: I’ve been developing a film project with a community in the North of Greenland. This is a tiny community that, the world through which they travel and exist, it’s melting away and it's disappearing and they're kind of evermore isolated in this outpost. And it appears at first blush like it's wilderness. You think of it more as Greenland as wilderness, but it's more visibly scarred by human activity all over the planet, really, but certainly to the South of it, than anywhere else. And to see also the same version of geological time and human time.
There's a Fjord behind the village that since this woman was 20 and she's now 40, the teacher in that village, this is basically a short period of this woman's life. But in this short period, this Fjord has opened by 10 miles. There's like a 10 mile bay that has emerged in a period of a human being's life, where she has barely changed visibly. Time has brought no change to her body while it has opened a 10 mile long fjord behind her.
Lily Cole: I write about this concept of solastalgia and I think it comes Greenland originally. It was a neologism that was made up to kind of capture the emotions of environmental grief and loss.
JO: Homesickness for when you can't go home anymore.
LC: Yeah, exactly. How many years have you been going though to that community?
JO: For over three years. And now you can see the glaciers retreat and you see formations of ice just disappear. The last time I was there with was the summer of 2019, it was the hottest temperature they had ever experienced. And there were sort of forest fires or peat fires in Southern Greenland.
LC: A lot of people don't realise that global warming accelerates towards the polls.
JO: There’s four degrees centigrade warming in Greenland versus less than two in the world as a whole.
When I was a child my and my parents were going through a divorce I would sort of hide from the chaos and the arguing by sitting actually in the toilet, I must admit with an atlas that was by the toilet. And I was fascinated by the ice cap in Greenland. And there's one little village there called Savissivik. I always wanted to go to that village, and I was not going to do that unless there was a good reason. And then I met someone from the neighbouring village and was thinking of doing something. What could I develop about global warming that would really show how this was sort of a warning for all of us, for an entire community is destroyed by that.
And that's why I started going up there for this, because I have this fascination with ice and the glaciers, since as long as I can remember. I would really take notice if the ice disappeared. Now, there were these arches of ice and ice covered up peninsulas that were connected only by ice to the mainland. But summer two years later, these peninsulas were no longer peninsulas at all. They were islands and the breakup of the ice, which in that community means, there's no snowmobiles up there, but, and as the ice breaks up, and if it's late to form, people travel by dogs that over the ice, there's no roads from village to village.
In this small community, people are just stuck waiting for the ice to get thick enough to carry their dogs. And this past year, probably the person who will be at the centre of the film, his whole dog team fell through the ice and drowned. So he was without eighteen dogs because the ice was just rotten. It's because of the sea water and the oceans take a long time to warm.
So the other thing that has horrified me reading about this, about this oceans are so vast that they take about 40 years to catch up to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. So the warming of the oceans that is rotting the ice there now is actually, its a carbon emissions up to 1980s. So if we stopped emitting now we would still have the next 40 years of carbon. Of course some carbon will be removed by trees and plants, but we would still see warming for decades.
LC: Yeah. This is what a lot of climate scientists talk about is that there's locked in warming that we haven't even experienced yet. That's why it's so dangerous because we don't know the tipping points and we don't know the feedback loop. What are their responses and reactions? How were they emotionally experiencing it?
JO: I think it’s horrifying. It’s this community that is pretty much built on subsistence hunting and fishing. It's what they know. And it's what they've always done. And the idea that they don't know what world they're preparing their children for, I think it's really difficult. And that whatever world that is, if it's not in that village or if the skills, that the hunting skills that people are teaching their kids in that village, are not going to be applicable because the world is so drastically changed, that they also have the sense of their home is being tremendously, temporary and precarious.
But it's a place where they've been forever for as long as they're folklore, it gives them a kind of record of where they were and that sense of grief about, how can I be a parent to my children, when the world that I'm preparing them for is being destroyed.
LC: I rewatched the act of killing last night and hadn't seen it in quite a few years. And for me, the power of that film is the fact that these people are not psychopaths and actually understanding them and trying to not have empathy is a hard word, but almost have empathy or insight into why people make those choices, is why that film is so beyond being kind of beautiful, and riveting, why it's so powerful. Was that part of your intention?
JO: I don't think empathy is too strong a word. I think actually it's not strong enough. I think compassion is the right word. I can have compassion for Anwar without sympathising with what he did. I can even have sympathy for him as a human being, given how he's destroyed himself and what he must live with. Compassion and sympathy are things that one must earn - that other human beings have to earn either by virtue of who they are ethnically or racially or sexually, or by virtue of their class or education or by virtue of their deeds. I think that we owe compassion and sympathy to all of human beings, no matter how monstrous their actions.
Primo Levi writing about the Holocaust said, there may be monsters among us, but there are too few to worry about. What we really have to worry about are ordinary people like us. And I think that is the only hopeful position, because if the perpetrators are monsters, then what can we do but try and somehow identify them and corral them, neutralise them somehow. And then we become the monsters. But the optimistic views that everyone, the most greedy, the most selfish, the most self-absorbed narcissistic person is actually a human being like us. And worthy of our compassion. Because only by trying to understand how people make those choices, do we have any possibility of preventing these things from happening, of building societies where these things that happen all too often, actually one day become unthinkable.
LC: I wanted to ask you also about cognitive dissonance because it's something I've been exploring a bit in terms of the climate crisis. There's really beautiful book, if you haven't read it called, We are the Weather, by Jonathan Safran Foer, where he very poetically kind of makes the argument that none of us really believe what's happening. And he, in a way, subverts that to say that it may turn out many years from now that the climate deniers, you know, who were often kind of painted as the baddies in a way, that the climate deniers are the good guys, because they were just ignorant. Whereas the people who believed it, but didn't change, they’re the ones who were actually doing something evil in a way.
JO: It’s a minor thing, but I don't really believe that the climate deniers, most of the climate deniers, are free of this cognitive dissonance. I think the denial is their particular way of coping with their own powerlessness or rationalising their own interests or their own inertia that they don't want to make change or they feel powerless to make change.
LC: Yeah. No, that's a good point. That's a good point. But yeah, I was thinking that about that when watching the film again, The Act of Killing, because I feel like what you're exploring a lot in that film is cognitive dissonance. Is this spell, this kind of illusion that the community is under of rationalising and accepting, and even maybe celebrating that past. And then it, through the course of your work in that film, it feels like you start to reveal that that's a facade and that that isn't actually that truth. Do you feel like there was a kind of cognitive dissonance that allowed those horrors to continue?
JO: I think that very, very much so. Now I'm working on a film, actually about a musical issue. No, about a very wealthy family in a bunker, that the father was an oil executive, and he has built this bunker for his family. It's about how we're actually walking toward the abyss with our eyes wide open, but our hearts shut. When you look at the cognitive dissonance in The Act of Killing, it's interesting. I think that my point is that it's not merely the celebration of the genocide by the perpetrators and by the politicians is a lie. It’s dissonant with what they know in their hearts, but that it's a defensive lie. I think that's a really interesting vicious cycle.
What interests me is that if you celebrate a wrongdoing defensively to protect yourself from guilt, to run away from regret, to escape the potential torment of regret, then actually it's not coming from an inhuman place. It's actually coming from the same human morality in the sense that guilt is painful. Guilt hurts us. It's not because we are psychopaths or we don't feel guilt or we're merely selfish, but to protect ourselves from guilt, we justify the things we do that are wrong so that we can live with them. And then once you do that, that demands like with any lie, the first thing you do is deny it.
And then you double down like any lie demands that you harden your position. A good illustration of it is I've always imagined as how Anwar in The Act of Killing didn’t start as a killer. One day he was asked to kill his first person and he was cajoled and pressured into doing it and having done it felt sick with guilt, was nauseous. Anwar has a weak stomach. You can see in the film, went home, had nightmares, was miserable. Came back the next day pale and unwell because he was maybe afraid not to. And his commander said, ‘you don't look too good. Are you all right?’ And he said, ‘I don't know. I'm not feeling so well’.
And the man, his name was Roshimon, actually patted him on the back and said, ‘no, no, what you did was great. It was the right thing to do. And it was, and you actually are helping to save our nation’. And gave him all sorts of reasons, justifying what he did and Anwar clung to those reasons because they allowed him to live with himself. But then the next time when Roshiman tells him now kill this room full of 10 people, he faces a terrible choice. Either he does it and continues to tell himself it's the right thing to do. Or he says no, but admits it was wrong the first time.
This is I think for many of us, the experience of cognitive dissonance. We can tell ourselves stories that allow us in extreme cases to live with ourselves and maybe more often just to feel comfortable with our lives. To be able to get on with it, to be able to wake up in the morning and feel like our life is not completely insane. And I think that there's, that's part of the cognitive dissonance around climate change. Even those of us who know, who do believe fully in the catastrophe that's unfolding right now, somehow the scale of it, our awareness of the enormity of change that's required very, very quick, yesterday, to even bring this thing under control, our sense that whatever we do in our own personal lives to alter our patterns of consumption really, will be truly a drop in the ocean.
I think we settle into a kind of unconscious disbelief. We believe in a way, but we don't believe in our hearts so that we can carry on. And I think that's a really interesting kind of cognitive dissonance that, that will allow us to commit collective suicide. I think what we really need to do with that sense of disempowerment is to come together and empower ourselves through collective action.
LC: I mean, I have, I even have tears in my eyes now, and I'm somebody who's been looking at the data for 15 years and watching what's going on very closely and trying my best to help in small ways with, with how I can, and in terms of dealing with this situation. And yet still, I recognise that most days of my life I'm living in a state of disbelief. I think that the shift that's required is maybe it's so big that it's hard to truly believe.
JO: Also our institutions, our industry, our transport, our supply chains are set up in such a way that just by existing, we are complicit.
LC: Everything wants you to be normal. It's so easy to be in a state of disbelief because all the media, all the advertising, all the messaging, everything, like the collective psychology averaging, the normal is itself in a state of disbelief. You know, that everything is fine. Just keep, keep carrying on everything's going to be fine.
JO: It reminds me of Pascal's idea of performativity of faith. That I believe. And that is what’s his wager. And it's like by participating, we believe this is not really happening by going through daily life, by feeding ourselves clothing, ourselves, surviving through a system that rests not only on the suffering of others in sweatshops and the destruction of natural habitat, but which also through fossil fuel emissions, methane gas emission, that could render our planet uninhabitable. But simply by living, we are actually performing our disbelief in the climate change around us because we are complicit in our daily quotidian activities. I fear that sometimes the idea that we can make lifestyle changes as a means of contributing, becomes close to a kind of spiritual self salvation.
And my fear is that sometimes we do things like we cut out meat as I have done. What I'm afraid of is that the comfort that that gives me actually fuels that disbelief the sense that, well, I am doing my part and that helps me get through the day. When so much more is needed.
LC: I think a lot of people do that with carbon offsetting. They justify flying because they carbon offset. Most environmentalists I know, would say you need to carbon offset and reduce flying. Like we've we can't cancel one out with the other. George Monbiot compares it to indulgences in the middle ages, you know, where you, you literally pay for your sins and that'd be a way of, I guess, washing them away.
JO: It’s certainly my fear.
LC: How are you exploring cognitive dissonance in your film, at the end?
JO: It’s just as in The Act of Killing, I explore cognitive dissonance through Anwar’s confrontation with his own regrets, physical and bodily there. I think here it's the same. All the stories they've told themselves that brought them to where they are, and that led them to participate in the destruction of the world really, as they face their regrets, the message is that by that point, when we've rendered the world all but uninhabitable and we’re huddled away and hiding, what really keeps them in that bunker also is fear and guilt.
LC: And have you done research on real life versions of that scenario, i.e. people who are building bunkers?
JO: I was developing a film about a very politically powerful and wealthy family that was shopping for a bunker. And it was while shopping for that bunker, traveling with them to look at this bunker made me think it could have been out buying a fancy car or a vacation home. There was so much, they couldn't say, I mean, they just were not looking at what they were really doing. And actually there was a connection to fossil fuel also within the family as well.
LC: Is that a big industry, you know, are there lots of bunkers being bought and sold?
JO: It is. And I think with the coronavirus pandemic it has surged. There's many billionaires and people with hundreds of millions of dollars will have built very luxurious bunkers that we'll never see. And we'll never quite know how they're constructed, but there's a bunker in Kansas called the survival condo, which is built in a former nuclear missile silo, that is sort of an inverted underground skyscraper, that I visited and it was pretty luxurious, 15,000 square foot luxury apartments, the pool.
We live in a society that values individual self-interests or has elevated individual self-interest, not just as a virtue, but as the engine upon which everything rests. Individual self-interest and I should say optimism. I mean, that's the other thing, capitalism is built on optimism because the system of credit is built on optimism. You wouldn't loan someone money to start a business, in hope that they could pay it back with interest, if you didn't think tomorrow would in general be better than today. So just by participating in the market economy, as the scholar says, we’re kind of performing our disbelief in the catastrophe that we’re approaching, and that we’re bringing upon ourselves.
LC: Do you think optimism then is a problem in the sense that it's also performative?
JO: It depends what it motivates. If optimism motivates collective action, if it motivates civil disobedience, if it motivates, I mean, it's optimism that motivates Greta Thunberg. It's the belief that change is possible. It's optimism, plus a rediscovery of the importance of collective activism, true activism and political activism. I remember when I was at, I guess in high school, when George W. Bush his father, the first George Herbert Walker Bush was president. I mean, he came to president promising to cut back collective solutions to our problems in favour of what he called a thousand points of light. It was, that's of course what Thatcher was saying when she said there's no such thing as society.
We are all completely interdependent. In fact, the distinctions between us are artificial. Our individuality is actually perhaps a myth. There's this wonderful book, The Lives of a Cell. It has this wonderful analogy. It talks about termites and how termites build these incredibly designed nests with geometrically and brilliantly engineered gothic, soaring, arches, and pointed arches. And they do it without having any idea what they're doing.
And the writer Lewis, he says that the human analog to that is language. That's the project that we're continually creating unconsciously and innovating and renovating and reinventing unconsciously. All of us together. And it is what allows us to know ourselves and each other. And to tell us the stories about the world that allow us to come together for collective projects, whether it’s the market economy and the status quo or the alternatives that we need to act, that actually you've dedicated your adult life into trying to realise and to demonstrate and to pilot.
LC: Interestingly communication has in it, the word ‘muni’, which is also in community and comes from the Latin for gift. And that's something I've always been interested in, is the idea that you build community through gifts. Anthropologists mostly agree that the earliest human way of relating was through the gift economy i.e. like tribal societies would all give basically to one another and therefore receive from one another. And it was through the gifts that at you would established community.
It's interesting when you apply that analogy to communication that it's the gift of language for the most part, we share it. We share our words, right? Y
JO: Munificence has it as well I suppose.
LC: Yeah. Well done. Yeah.
JO: That’s interesting too, that the collective is a gift.
LC: I think community is one of my reasons for optimism. It's something I spend a lot of time in the book, looking at both in terms of what we can learn from indigenous communities and also how community operates in our own contemporary world. And it's one of the places I hold the most hope. I think that, you know, it's, it's obvious, right? We're like we're human, we're human creatures i.e animals on a planet that are co-dependent with not just other members of our species, but also other species.
And so, remembering that, remembering our needs for belonging, our need for community, with other human beings, and I would argue also with other species and the ecosystem, I think is such an essential part of reestablishing, not just balance and sustainability, but also I think happiness and meaning and the, you know, the positive reasons for being alive.
LC: That’s beautiful. That’s faith right? I think faith is an important word. Your faith in our better angels and our possibility to do good and to bring change and your activation of that as much as you can, through how you live and your humility, when we cannot confront the limitations of how we can realise change, is really inspiring.
And I think that humility is probably what protects one against cognitive dissonance. It's actually the ability to accept isn't it. We're talking about like saying, okay, there is a way in which I am complicit every day. And I think just like Anwar’s celebration in The Act of Killing, of his crimes is born of defensiveness, I think that kind of disbelief creeps in upon us in part, when we don't accept, when we can’t reconcile ourselves with the fact that there's aspects of our lives, that will be complicit. And if we can accept that or acknowledge it, then maybe we can actually imagine the scarier and more difficult things we need to do to make a real difference.
LC: This is my friend, Joshua. This is Wylde!
JO: Wylde, you’re all grown up since I last saw you. Wylde I last saw you when you were a toddler. I was chasing you around the British museum. You’re five?
Wylde: Today, my friend called Jonny jumped from a wall and knocked his tooth. So he had to see a dentist today.
JO: Oh, that’s terrible.
LC: Not good.
JO: Wylde, I'm so happy to see you. I'll let you guys go, but I want to see you more and more and more.
Lily Cole: What happens to individuals when they embrace the science? When they think of future generations, when they think of others, when they really, really care? How does the mental health of activists often fair?
I spoke again with Farhana Yamin, the environmental lawyer turned activist you may remember from episode four. Farhana co-authored multiple UN IPCC reports, worked at multiple UN COP meetings on climate change, and then she fell into a deep depression, forcing her to withdraw from her work.
Farhana Yamin: After we got the Paris agreement to reference 1.5 as a safer level, an effort which had taken the best part of 10 years because the small islands I'd represented had been putting forward the 1.5 degree threshold since 2009, I felt really, really depressed because so many progressive countries, the bigger environmental NGOs, especially the one in the States, said there's no way we're going to do that. That's too difficult. Let’s at least just aim for two.
And it was completely rejecting the science because it was saying all of those millions and millions of people who would be affected, all those vulnerable ecosystems that would be affected below two degrees, which the science had then proved, were sort of irrelevant. We should just carry on sort of saying that was just too tricky and difficult for us to achieve. The fact that people were on our side, our allies were saying, let's just give ourselves an easier target. And it really shocked me and upset me. And it was like, no, this is what we agreed. This was part of the sacred bargain that the small islands and multiple countries also came to.
I really couldn't deal with so many reports that were coming out saying we're at one degree already, we’re going to miss the 1.5 target and let's just move on and deal with this consequence. And I felt, I really couldn't look at all the small Island leaders in the eye and say the COPs gonna fix it. And most of the developing countries were yet again, blamed for setting impossible ambitious goals or not being realistic enough. So yeah, it's the usual tale.
LC: How long did that depression last?
FY: It was, I sort of had to take most nearly all of 2018 off. I stepped back from most of my professional work. I didn't take any more funding. I stopped being part of that whole sort of climate policy community. I stopped working for the small island states directly. So I felt like my body shut down and it wasn't able to function in many of those UN tight spaces, and with my old friends and colleagues who were still doing great work, but also not able to stand back and say, yes, we failed and we haven't really achieved what we set out to. And yes, Paris has some really fundamental problems right now. Because they were so sort of committed to, to saying for the sake of funding, for themselves, ‘Oh, Paris is great. Let's all be optimistic. Let's just keep going.’
And I felt like, no, you have, you have to sort of acknowledge where you are and that's why, that thing, ‘tell the truth’ was so compelling to me. Well, another one of XRs things, let's tell the truth about where we really are. And it hurts to say we haven't really achieved what we set out to achieve. And Paris isn't working. The business community is absolutely not on board.
Even two years ago I went and did an eight month Nature connection course. I did lots and lots of wildlife nature, connection work. So I felt, yeah, I needed to just get away and nature was my medicine. I spent lots of time walking, I developed practices like gratitude, appreciation and just tuning into a different timeframe and a different way of being, and settling myself and dealing with the cutthroat politics globally, as well as individually, as you try and sort of thrive in this world.
And it was a very bleak time as a Muslim being in this country as well. And as a migrant. From 2016, we had the Brexit election. So for me feeling the hostility, you know, towards foreigners, towards immigrants, towards migrants, towards refugees, we were sort of demonised. And I, I felt like, goodness, I felt like I loved England more than England loved me.
So for a number of different reasons, it was, it was kind of a difficult period, and it was only the time that helped heal that sense of grieving and loss and frustration and channeling some of that frustration in non-violent direct action. I really only came back when the IPCC report was published in October 2018 in on The 1.5 Report and then Extinction Rebellion staged this Die In and arrests in parliament square, and I thought, wow, that is the right response to this report.
There is something sort of unstoppable that's happened. And that, that outpouring of anger hurt, truth-telling, the use of our bodies and nonviolent direct action, the young people rising up has compelled politicians to act in a way that wasn't happening before before then.
So I feel a bit more encouraged by that kind of action work. The UK is a great example because changing our national law, The Climate Change Act, to go from 80% reductions by 2050 to net zero by 2050, that proposal to change our law had been sitting there after Paris for like three and a half years and the government had done nothing and it was just not a priority. So it was only through the protests of the young people and through XRs protests that that legislative change actually came about in May of 2019, just two months after the rebellion.
LC: Have you experienced a sense of like grieving the loss of nature and of wildlife and the kind of different species that we may have already lost?
FY: For me, there was a whole mixture of different griefs. And again, one of the most compelling things I found about XR was this truth telling about the scale of the sixth mass extinction. And we had funerals, that was one of the key theatrical things. We had funerals for nature and having a coffin that I marched behind in Downing street, a whole march was a funeral march for me, was really important.
It was the first time as a sort of straight-laced policy nerd, I could cry and grieve and say this is happening. And so I think that sense, not just for me of climate anxiety, but actual grief for the life that was lost, the ecosystems that were destroyed, that we're never going to adapt our way out. And we didn't have to all just kind of be cheery and go into this whole optimism, you know, using this optimism framing, we're not talking about the grief and the loss and they were not, and are still not talking about the immense loss of life and disruption and the things that cannot be solved by battery storage and Elon Musk and renewables.
That is a fantastic story, but we're not bringing back huge parts of the dead ocean, the coral reefs, the wildfires that decimate millions and millions of animals. Those are never coming back. We're never refreezing. We're not pulling back the ocean circulation or the ocean acidification, that's not going to happen. So all for me, those things were as important to acknowledge and scream about and cry about and truth tell about as the story of the march of renewables and the success of electrification.
For me, that was a really important reason also for stepping back from that community and my friends in that community. Cause I felt like, I want you to also say this. I know that renewables are cheaper and now, you’re going to do that, but as I said, battery storage, micro grids, renewable electrification isn't going to bring back large parts of the dead planet and it isn't going to solve the existential crisis or survival for small island. So please be honest about it. Please be honest about it. Say in the same breath.
You know, I still, you know Lily, I’m sick of it. I really am sick of that optimistic strand, and never acknowledging the limits to human ingenuity. So yeah, I would like that acknowledged. I would like as much, if not more, start off with humongous loss and damage that was utterly predictable. That is not a shock. It is not a surprise. It is what the scientists were predicting those 30 years ago, those 10 years ago, those 15 years ago, every single report has been confirmed, affirmed, and actually like things are happening faster.
LC: There’s more to come right?
FY: Yeah. There's more to come and there's no way that human ingenuity is going to deal with that.
LC: When you consider how the reality of our environmental situation negatively impacts many of the people directly engaged with dealing with it, it’s almost no wonder that cognitive dissonance and even climate denial abound, but is it possible to care without falling into depression or anxiety?
What are the tools we can use to better navigate this time? I spoke with a psychologist, Julia Samuels about her clinical experience of eco grief and eco anxiety and how she recommends dealing with it.
Have you seen a direct increase in the number of clients you have expressing versions of eco anxiety?
Julia Samuels: Yes. And so have all the helplines; MIND, all the support helplines, Samaritans. Only in the last I think three to five years probably, as awareness has grown. What people say is that it’s not a diagnosis of a disorder, it’s a realistic human response to ongoing events. I also work with living losses, which are experienced like grief, someone doesn't die, but it's a loss of something that you believed in or hope for or a relationship that you had.
And often the pain is the agent of change. Pain is the thing that wakes you up to recognise this new reality that you didn't want and you didn't choose, but when you feel comfortable and you feel happy and at ease, you don't have any requirement to shift your perspective or change your view or change your behaviour because you're in your comfort zone.
So anxiety is the first bodily signal that wakes us up to know that something isn't right. That we have to look and see what it is. I mean, we're wired to have a negative bias to look for danger. The great thing about young people is they're much more emotionally intelligent and much more emotionally vocal, and that's incredibly powerful. And once you're aware of something and you've voiced it, that is the first step to change and you can't have change without that.
LC: That’s interesting. You say we're wired towards the negative. Would you elaborate on that a little bit?
JS: So from the sort of early man we know from evolutionary biology, that two things are really interesting. One is that we don't survive alone so that we need, we need people, people need people to survive and people need people to be safe and to connect to others. So that's a fundamental need. But also we are wired to look for danger to see if there's a tiger coming to see that we're safe, because that is how we evolutionarily survived in the Savannah or early times. And that's still in our DNA.
LC: And do you think that has the potential then to distort our sense of fear around issues like climate change, for example, like apocalyptic senses?
JS: Often people who feel anxious, it is a perceived anxiety from what they're telling themselves. So they've conflated a feeling with a fact. The complexity, I think with your question, is I don't think many people argue the truth of climate change and of fears for our future, of its impact certainly for my grandchildren, even if not my children. So it's a realistic one if that makes sense, which is very different from a self perpetuating one. It's not the way someone is thinking about it or perceiving it. It's recognising there is something difficult out there and we need to respond to it. The anxiety is information that we need to take seriously.
LC: Do you think that this people on the other end of the spectrum who are living in denial because it's too difficult to accept the reality?
JS: Definitely. It's a very uncomfortable reality. It's an inconvenient truth as Al Gore said. I don't know if you can ever square the circle of what we need to do and what we can do. Like the man in your book who saw the oil pouring into the Bay in San Francisco. He never got in a car again for 22 years. I mean that for me, that would be too big a leap, but people on that spectrum have to make lots of choices, don’t they.
LC: Yeah. And interestingly, I mean, he's a good example. Mark Boyle’s another good example. He's a friend who’s lived without any modern technology for the last three years, because he believes it’s antithetical to a sustainable vision, even green tech. What's interesting is that I think in both those examples, they would argue, John Francis and Mark Boyle that it made them happier, because they felt more at peace with themselves. And it's certainly something that I know I've struggled with is that by not being fully authentic to what I feel is going on environmentally and the kind of level of commitment that it demands, I then end up often feeling very guilty or conflicted or…
JS: Shamed
LC: And shamed, yeah. And then when I do make choices that are more in line with what feels right to do, I do find a sense of peace.
JS: I mean, I think that's completely right. We know psychologically that how we behave, how we speak, how we show ourselves, the choices we make when they're congruent internally with ourselves and what we show externally and what we do, then we're much more aligned and much more at peace and much calmer.
I think each of us needs to be at peace with our own ethical responsibility and moral imagination of what we individually can do to be at peace with ourselves.
LC: There’s something I explore the very end of the book. I feel like there’s a potential like circle whereby the disrespect we've been showing collectively to nature or the environment is causing the kind of existential threat of the climate crisis. But arguably it's also causing a lot of unhappiness through feeling disconnected and that the symptom and the cure may be connected.
JS: I mean, there's a lot of research about ecotherapy. I think walking and talking as a family, as a couple, with friends is one of the most cathartic things that you can do. I think again, evolutionary biology shows that we belong in nature. We find our resting place in nature. So even people who are born and brought up in urban cities who made to begin with feel uncomfortable in nature, their cortisol levels drop in nature. So their levels of stress drops. So nature is our kind of natural home.
I think the big thing is, is this, apart from evolutionary biology, is that we need each other so that as one person you make your own decisions that you can live with and you can be proud of yourself, but we need to do it as a community. And the research is robust throughout the world. The single biggest indicator of wellbeing, health, and happiness outcomes is love and connection to others.
And of course having enough financial security is a big lens on that. If you have a lot of financial problems and difficulties, it's much more difficult to have good sustainable relationships because you're so frightened all the time. And there's so much using up your energy. But when we look back at our lives, it is always our relationships that matter to us most.
LC: Have you heard of the collective psychology project?
JS: No.
LC: I came across it in my research. It's quite an interesting concept, arguing that a problem with psychology generally for recent decades is that it's very, self-focused, individual focused and that whilst we need to do a lot of psychological work, we need to do it in community because the shifts that are required are collective.
JS: I completely agree. I mean, I think it's come full circle in a way, but now I think family systems therapy like taking one unhappy member of a family out of a family, them having therapy and then putting them back in the family doesn't necessarily fix the problem because maybe the person that's unhappy is acting out a systemic problem in the whole family system. And you could argue that with us in society, in communities. And loneliness is the equivalent to smoking 30 cigarettes a day on your health.
And I think COVID was a terrible thing, but one of the surprising consequences was neighbourhoods, where people met neighbours, where they dropped food off for people who had to shield, where they had a call list of people they telephoned, where they stood on doorsteps and spoke to people they'd never spoken to before, and connected in a way they never had before. And I think some people worked extra hard, but a lot of people slowed down and felt a connection with themselves and their families and their communities and nature, the spring, in a way that they never had before, because they were always kind of on a rush.
And there's been this kind of 21st century badge of honour, the busier that I am, the more important I am. And actually that's fed a kind of hole of hunger that can never be sated. And I think the slowness has enabled people to be in touch with themselves, to enable them to be in touch with those that they care most about. When we’re kind of wired, our autonomic system is on fourth gear. You don't adapt, you can't change when you're only in defence mode. So to slow down is how we learn to shift and change. And it's like losing the sort of scales of a skin like a snake. And then you adapt into this new person, this new version of yourself, which then feels more vibrant and more alive. The kind of thesis of my book is that those of us that don't change and don't adapt, have less joy and a success in that.
LC: Rebecca Solnit, I think writes beautifully about this, how from disasters, you often see the best in people, not the worst in people. You see that people respond with kind of care and kindness to one another.
JS: Yeah, loss does create growth. You know, there is this research about post-traumatic growth, that the level of the loss is never denied and has to be acknowledged whatever that is, but it changes people when you have a sort of very intense experience and it changes their perception about what matters. It changes their engagement with the world. And mainly the outcome is that people are more connected with other people. That love matters to them more than anything else. And that extends to their communities.
LC: Aldo Leopold writes about the sense of community that goes beyond the human community, a community with other animals, other species, with wildlife, with nature itself. Do you think that’s an appropriate exploration, if you're interested in community, that we also understand ourselves in the community beyond just the human sphere.
JS: I mean, I don't know if it's the natural world needs us, but we certainly need it. And when we value it and enrich it and engage with it, we reap enormous rewards. I think there's so much connection that we don’t see. And you know when you talked about hope, hope is the alchemy that turns a life around. Hope isn't just a feeling. It is a plan and a belief so that you have a light at the end of the tunnel, the flame that you aim for it. Isn't just a kind of, oops, I wish for this. It’s really something to aim for. And that does change the whole way you see the world.
LC: Do you think that there is an opportunity in the climate crisis for a spiritual, psychological awakening that needed to happen? Do you see any silver lining or hope to the situation?
JS: Psychologically we talk about a breakdown, being a breakthrough. That when we break old habits and ways of being and beliefs that have constricted us and sort of tied us down, we can feel liberated into a new version of ourselves that may feel much more joy, much more capacity to feel joy, more spontaneity, more freedom. And I think getting off of rat run. All the measures for success when they change and match more what we've been talking about to do with connection, to do with working with meaning to, to work with your community, to live in an authentic way with nature and yourself, I think there is very likely to be a much more spiritual light pouring.
Lily Cole: Finally to conclude this episode, I thought I'd go full circle back to Patti Smith's insights and bring in the words of someone who's also traveled in the Dalai Lama's Homeland, the anthropologist Wade Davis, who you met in the last episode, who spoke to me about how we might each try to act upon the crisis with wisdom without despair.
Wade Davis: As a storyteller, you have an obligation to bear witness to the world. And one of the things I've learned both from my travels in Tibet, but also from my own father, my father, wasn't a religious man at all, but he did believe fundamentally in righteousness and evil. And he would just say to you is, you know, like son there's good and evil in the world, take your side and get on with it.
And what he was really saying is don't ever expect to win. You know, the Christian tradition is people are constantly frustrated because at some fundamental level, there's an expectation that if we only do X, Y, and Z well enough, that somehow evil will be vanquished from the world. For better or for worse, Eastern religions don't have that illusion. You know, if you asked, for example, in the middle ages in Europe, the obvious question, if God's all powerful, why does he allow evil to exist in the universe? Well that became a great heresy and you were burned at the stake because it was a question that challenged a very fundamental ideology of the church.
But when Lord Christian was asked that same question by a disciple, why does evil exist in the universe if God's all powerful, he just responded, “to thicken the plot”. In other words, there is good and evil in the world and yeah, one's choice is simply to try your best to walk on the path of righteousness.
I don't mean to sound sanctimonious with that, but it's kind of basically true. And one thing I've learned from the Buddhist Dharma is that the goal of the path of life is not a destination. It's a state of mind, a kind of an animity that allows you like a mountain, not to be shaken by the disappointment or the excitement of events.
That doesn't mean disengagement. It just means that if, for example, as I have fought very hard for, to protect the mountain or for the rights of indigenous people, and I've watched both the mountain torn apart, and the people crushed along with the forest that gave them birth, you know, had I been expecting a victory, maybe I would become embittered and disappointed. But having no expectations and recognising that the fight for the mountain or the fight for the rights of the people that was the path of life. It just means that I can continue to walk that path, turning my attention to the next place where I might be able to adjust in some small way bend the hinge of history.
Lily Cole: So perhaps the journey is as much about caring as it is about winning. I hope this episode has offered you some inspiration for how you might navigate these times with open hearts and minds. How to feel empowered and truthful without feeling overwhelmed. How to stay engaged and proactive without falling prey to depression, anxiety, or despair. I don't claim to have figured out any of these fundamental questions yet myself, but it is a journey I embrace because I want to avoid both denial and depression.
And also because I do not believe we can bring peace and balance to our outer world without also seeking peace and balance within. I always love the ancient adage attributed to Hermes, as above, so below, as within, so without. We may discover that happiness and sustainability are fundamentally connected.
This is the last episode of the series, and I plan to take a break for now, but there are still some key topics and questions I'd like to address. And so I plan to release more next year. If you'd like to tune into those, please subscribe to the series or you can follow me on Instagram @LilyCole, where I'll share future episodes.
Finally, I announced a competition earlier in the series to give away an audio book copy of my book, Who Cares Wins. If you've reviewed the podcast, please send your contact information to penguin through the weblink in the show notes. We will notify the winner directly by December the 17th. I would really genuinely love to hear what you thought of this series so please do rate, review or share it. We don't have any advertising on this podcast. So its distribution depends largely on word of mouth.
Wishing you love, luck and courage and the journey ahead of us all. Thanks for listening. Thanks for caring.