Transcript
[Music, animals vocalising in the forest]
Mendel Skulski 00:10
Our climate is changing. We've known about it for generations, but many of us are just waking up to it now. We all experience it differently, and we bear the burdens unequally. But together, we've jeopardized ourselves along with millions of other species on this planet. The scale of this challenge, its global, apocalyptic potential is staggering. We know how much has to change, but the longer we feel stuck at the starting line, the steeper our path seems to become. The question of climate inaction is the key to our survival. Or rather, the questions of climate inaction are the keys to our survival. Because, just as the climate crisis itself is a constellation of different problems, the actions we must unlock, are as diverse as we are. We're not doomed, but no one's going to save us. What matters most is how we frame the next steps, how we conceive our own potential, and how we find opportunity in our obstacles. And that's why on this podcast, we're looking for dragons. You may not believe in them, but to us, they're very real. While you can't see their bodies, you can see their tracks. These are the dragons of climate inaction. Their habitat is in our minds. And this podcast is your field guide. Welcome to Chapter one: Hope punk.
[Theme song – D7 by Loam Zoku – Composed and produced by Schuyler Lindberg and Y'honatex]
Introduction Voiceover 01:49
This is Scales of Change: a field guide to the Dragons of Climate Inaction. Join us as we learn to spot them in the wild, and discover how they can be disarmed. Produced by Future Ecologies on the traditional territories of the Lekwungen and WSÁNEĆ peoples, with support from the University of Victoria.
[Music ends]
Mendel Skulski 02:19
Thanks for joining us. My name is Mendel. This, is Adam.
Adam Huggins 02:23
Hi!
Mendel Skulski 02:24
And we're your hosts for this series as we explore the world of these dragons, these psychological barriers to climate action.
Adam Huggins 02:32
Well, not just us, but also their principal discover, their collector and taxonomist Robert Gifford.
Robert Gifford 02:40
I'm glad to be here again. Glad to be anywhere. That’s the old Keith Richards line.
Mendel Skulski 02:45
Robert is a professor of psychology and Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria. He's been studying the psychology of environmental resource management for over 35 years, looking for the reasons why we make certain choices. Especially those that pertain to resources held in common. If you haven't already, you can learn more about him and the discovery of these dragons in the introduction to the series.
Adam Huggins 03:11
So far, Robert and his students have identified 38 Dragon species.
[Music]
Adam Huggins 03:16
If you're a nature nerd like us, you'll appreciate that they're grouped into a clear taxonomy. Like a family tree with seven branches. We won't have time to talk in detail about every single dragon. So in each chapter, we're going to look at a different genus, one of those branches on the tree, a cluster of closely related dragons.
Mendel Skulski 03:37
From there, we'll focus on one or two species that we want to highlight and serve up stories and strategies from real world dragon slayers.
Adam Huggins 03:45
Today's genus is limited cognition, or as we've dubbed it in Latin: Artusnoia – which translates to constrained thinking.
Mendel Skulski 03:54
With a little bit of artistic license, sure.
Robert Gifford 03:57
Limited cognition is the genus of dragons that means there's a problem in our thinking one way or another.
Adam Huggins 04:05
This genus is packed with Dragons. As of right now it contains 11 different species.
Robert Gifford 04:11
Limited thinking is, in terms of number of dragons, it's the biggest problem.
Adam Huggins 04:15
The species at the base of this genus is ancient brain, or Artusnoia reptilis.
Robert Gifford 04:22
One source of limited cognition is the fact that we have a physiologically old brain it's not hasn't changed much I'm told for 30,000 years physically. But of course, we're now able to think about a lot of things people couldn't think about back on the savanna, but it's the same physical brain.
Adam Huggins 04:43
I don't have much time personally for arguments about human exceptionalism, like name one behavior that's meant to distinguish us from other living things, and sooner or later, we're going to find another species that engages in it. That said, it does feel safe to suggest that most of our godlike powers have earthly influence stemmed from layers upon layers of culture. Knowledge learned over time, refined and passed on.
Mendel Skulski 05:08
The problems we can solve have become more and more complex, because we have the luxury of mental toolkits honed over thousands of years. But our physiological selves haven't actually evolved much at all. And our actual behavior can default to that ancient, instinctual level, a lot more than certain people care to admit.
Adam Huggins 05:30
Especially when I'm hangry.
Mendel Skulski 05:31
God, it's the worst.
Adam Huggins 05:33
Other dragons in this genus include spatial and temporal discounting.
Mendel Skulski 05:38
Treating the climate crisis as something that happens too far away, or too far in the future to care about.
Adam Huggins 05:44
Environmental numbness.
Mendel Skulski 05:46
That is becoming desensitized to the endless stream of climate content,
Adam Huggins 05:51
and confirmation bias.
Mendel Skulski 05:53
Paying attention only to the information about the climate that you already agree with.
Adam Huggins 05:58
These dragons are easy to spot and call out. But the species we really want to zoom in on for this episode are two of the most pernicious dragons. Perhaps the species that blocked more climate action than any of the others. The twin dragons of perceived behavioral control and perceived self-efficacy.
Robert Gifford 06:16
So as the name suggests, perceived behavioral control or the lack of it, is a dragon causes people to say there's really nothing I can do to really change.
Mendel Skulski 06:28
We're calling this dragon Artusnoia impotens, which means just what it sounds like a feeling of being impotent, powerless to make changes. This dragon like many that we'll discuss, also operates at community, national and even international scales. When movements and leaders take for granted that certain kinds of structural change are just not practical or possible. Even if we decided to try,
Adam Huggins 06:55
which rarely happens.
Robert Gifford 06:57
A perceived lack of self-efficacy on the other hand is when I think that even if I do change my habits, it just won't matter. I'm still only one person. Why bother trying, to it'll just be a drop in the bucket. So, I fall back into my bad habits again.
Mendel Skulski 07:17
And this dragon is Artusnoia parvoperitia, which translates to trivial ability. Together, perceived behavioral control and perceived lack of self-efficacy are both serious obstacles for climate action. If I don't believe I can change, I'm clearly not going to try. And if I don't believe that my own efforts will make any real difference, I have little reason to challenge my comfortable habits.
Adam Huggins 07:44
The thing to remember is that both of these dragons have the word perceived in their name. They're both about how we judge our own abilities, and the roles we can play. And these judgments in turn, depend on our understanding of scale. So let's zoom way out for a second, shall we?
[Music morphs]
Nicholas de Pencier 08:06
My name is Nicholas de Pencier, and I'm the cinematographer and co-director of a project called Anthropocene, the human epoch.
Mendel Skulski 08:16
If you haven't seen it, the film Anthropocene is a tour of some of humanity's biggest interventions into the surface of our planet. Its imagery is disturbing, and at the same time, eerily beautiful. It includes shots of idyllic German countryside
[Industrial soundscape]
Mendel Skulski 08:33
being scraped away by Titanic machines mining for lignite coal, a marble quarry in Italy, literally erasing a mountainside and colorful, alien lithium evaporation ponds in the high desert of Chile.
[Soundscape fades out]
Mendel Skulski 08:49
Nicholas worked on Anthropocene alongside his partner, Director Jennifer Baichwal and renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky.
Nicholas de Pencier 08:58
The philosophy was not so much to try and intellectualize or rely on facts and figures, but to really have the images and the sound carry the weight of the storytelling. And the hope is that I think a lot of us know from what we read and how we consume news. We know a lot of these things in some part of our brain. But if we can be taken to these places in a more experiential way, that the learning or the raising of consciousness is potentially deeper and more emotional and more visceral.
Adam Huggins 09:49
Part of what Anthropocene lays clear is the scale of our collective impact, both of our demand and our refuse. The most vivid examples of how our behavior literally moves mountains.
Mendel Skulski 10:02
And for most of us, those mountains are usually out of sight, over the horizon.
Nicholas de Pencier 10:07
Edward Burtynsky has this I think, beautiful image from 30 plus years, especially of filming extraction industries, taking photographs of big mines and, and he says: for every time we build something up, so in a city, our skyscrapers and this incredible architecture,
[Pensive, melancholic music]
Nicholas de Pencier 10:29
people forget that for everything we build up, there's an equivalent hole in the ground somewhere, there's a there's a negative space, and we need to be aware of those places. So, yes, we need to look at our immediate environment. But we also need to conceptualize the effect on nature that we often don't see. And we need to work to do better to make all of those practices more sustainable because those places aren't so far away in a global village anymore.
Mendel Skulski 11:03
The irony is that even though these monumental landscapes of creation and destruction were produced by us, people, just like you and I, operating collectively, it's easy to feel insignificant.
Adam Huggins 11:15
You can look at these images and just feel dwarfed by the scale of the damage. Like, how can what I do have any impact on that. But the fact remains together, we can and do move mountains all the time.
Mendel Skulski 11:31
The beauty of the images from the Anthropocene is that how we react to them can tell us a lot about ourselves, our relationship to scale, and to another tricky concept, Hope.
Robert Gifford 11:43
Well, I think we need to have optimism and hope or we might as well just give up right now. So that's how I motivate myself is, to say, well, no matter what the eventual outcome is, at least we tried. We are trying.
[Music fades out]
Adam Huggins 11:54
Okay, uh timeout.
Mendel Skulski 11:58
Okay.
Adam Huggins 12:03
So, for me, coming from the United States, one of the many disappointments of the Obama years was our lack of serious progress on the climate crisis. And that, among other things has made me really suspicious of the idea of hope.
Mendel Skulski 12:20
Was that?
Adam Huggins 12:21
Well, his campaign was all about hope. Right? But I'll never forget Earth Day 2010 when he made this unfortunate announcement.
Media clip 12:29
[President Obama] Some of the press may be wondering why we are announcing offshore drilling in a hangar at Andrews Air Force Base. Well, if there's any doubt about the leadership that our military is showing, you just need to look at this F-18 fighter. The Army and Marine Corps have been testing this vehicle on a mixture of biofuels and this Navy fighter jet, appropriately called the Green Hornet, will be flown for the first time in just a few days on Earth Day.
Mendel Skulski 13:05
That sends chills up my spine. Uh, I can see how this collision between the military industrial complex and greenwashed biofuels could kind of poison the idea of hope for you.
Adam Huggins 13:18
I mean, like, I get it, right, to believe in our own abilities to change our behavior, and actually have an impact. I guess we need
[Quirky, upbeat music]
Adam Huggins 13:29
something like hope. I guess I've just become a little jaded or cynical. But we are making this series right. So, I feel like it's maybe the time is ripe for hoping to have a little mediation or something.
Mendel Skulski 13:45
[Laughs] Well, I've got just the mediator for you. She brightened my day, and I'm sure she'll brighten yours too.
Elin Kelsey 13:54
My name is Elin Kelsey, and I'm a person who works very much on hope and the environment.
Mendel Skulski 13:59
Elin is an author, scholar and environmental educator. And when she's talking about hope, she's not saying that we should ignore all the bad in the world and only think about what makes us feel good,
Adam Huggins 14:11
Right? That perspective would be actually another dragon in this genus, optimism bias. Like, if you think things are gonna work out fine no matter what, then it's yet another reason not to take action.
Mendel Skulski 14:24
Right? Instead, Elin is looking for realistic strategies for change.
Elin Kelsey 14:29
And we're at a point in our planet and in our history, where the thing we want most is for people to be highly engaged. I think we have two things going on that cause us a lot of challenges. One is that most of the ways that people hear about the environment, whether it's at a global scale, or at a, you know, what's happening around the corner is through the media. The vast majority of what we hear about the environment in the media is problems. So we hear about crisises and then on top of that, in many of the scientific journals, which good environmental journalists would go to, the vast majority of abstracts and papers that we have access to are problem oriented. And so we've got this real focus on identifying problems around the environment, which is critical and important work. But it means that we're highly skewed towards only hearing about problems and solutions we hear very little about, though I would say we're in the midst of a big change around that.
Mendel Skulski 15:27
Social media has only made this worse because the algorithms favor content that provokes an emotional response and inflames tensions. We are exposed to certain media, certain messages, we internalize it, we share it with others. And we might forget that other points of view even exist. Back in 2010, the same year as your Obama clip, Elin had a manuscript for a children's book called 'Not your typical book' about the environment.
Elin Kelsey 15:56
And even though I'd published lots of books, it was the hardest book I've ever tried to get published. And that's because different publishers all said to me, if it's hopeful it must not be about the environment, which really, as a researcher was incredibly edifying because it reminded me that this is a narrative that that is so entrenched, we don't even recognize it.
[Music fades out]
Mendel Skulski 16:17
And for Elin, it's not just about the endless stream of examples of the world falling apart in front of our eyes, depressing projections from scientists warning us about just how dire things are and how much worse they may become. It's about how we frame the next steps.
Elin Kelsey 16:33
I'm not saying don't worry, but I'm saying it's not that no one's done anything. We also have this starting line fallacy where you know, it sounds as if because we always talk about the future. If we do this, then that will happen. I think we need to talk in the present and the past. Because we've done that and people are doing this, then this is what is likely to unfold.
Mendel Skulski 16:54
The starting line fallacy is a pervasive trope in climate change reporting. Headlines that read,
Media clip 17:00
[News reporter] "We have 10 years to limit climate change catastrophe", warns United Nations.
Mendel Skulski 17:06
Messages that express all of the urgency, but also make it seem like we're all still sitting on our hands.
Adam Huggins 17:13
Somebody do something!
Mendel Skulski 17:14
That's not to say that we couldn't be doing more. But by making it sound like we're always at the starting line of a race that just keeps getting longer. It only serves to deepen our eco-anxiety. And for most people, it frankly doesn't help.
Adam Huggins 17:30
It actually reminds me of Zeno's paradox.
Mendel Skulski 17:33
What's that?
Adam Huggins 17:34
Are you down for a little bit of a tangent?
Mendel Skulski 17:36
Sure, lay it on me.
Adam Huggins 17:37
All right. Zeno of Elea was a Greek philosopher who posited a series of mind splitting paradoxes. But the one that's most relevant to the starting line fallacy is this. Let's say you, Mendel, are staring at a giant red mushroom, heretofore unknown to science, somewhere off in the distance.
Mendel Skulski 17:58
[Laughs]
[8-bit chiptunes]
Mendel Skulski 17:59
Okay, so basically, I'm Mario in this hypothetical situation?
Adam Huggins 18:04
Why not?
Mendel Skulski 18:04
Okay.
Adam Huggins 18:05
So, magical mycophage that you are, you start running towards the mushroom. Now, would you grant that to get to the mushroom of your desires, you first have to run halfway there.
Mendel Skulski 18:18
Yes. Yeah, that makes sense. That seems clear at all.
Adam Huggins 18:22
Right. So you get halfway there. Great.
Mendel Skulski 18:26
Yeah. Can't wait, drooling over this mushroom.
Adam Huggins 18:29
Okay. Now, you're at the halfway point, would you grant that as before, you have to once again travel halfway between where you're now standing, and where the mushroom actually is to be able to eventually get there.
Mendel Skulski 18:42
Oh, I can see where this is going.
Adam Huggins 18:45
Exactly. In Zeno's paradox, you'll never actually make it to the mushroom of your dreams. Because, before you can get there, you always have to go half the distance between where you are and where it is.
Mendel Skulski 18:58
That is so profoundly frustrating.
Adam Huggins 18:59
It makes you want to not start running at all, right, when the goalpost keeps moving. But of course, you can refute this paradox by just stepping outside and running to the nearest woodland, and grabbing a mushroom. No problem, right? So I can see what Elin is saying, that this starting line fallacy not only prevents us from thinking that we can make it to the goal, and therefore trying to make it to the goal, but also noticing the progress that we've already made, and are currently making.
Elin Kelsey 19:34
There's all these innovations that are actively happening. And I think what's really important is to look at these as trends, what trends are already in place that we can amplify and are amplifying that have a positive impact, rather than make it sound like what should we do? How inspiring is that's not very inspiring.
Mendel Skulski 19:54
So where can we look for inspiration? The answer is in bright spots.
[Music ends with a bitcrunch]
Elin Kelsey 20:03
Yeah, so bright spots. In fact, I think it's a term that I first came upon it in the humanitarian world foreign aid workers, for example, or those who are working in highly impoverished areas would look at, where are places doing better than they should have? Like, rather than looking and saying, we know that hunger, malnutrition is a huge problem in this area, you would know that that's the case and understand the broad societal issues that are contributing to that. At the same time, you might say, but where are the places where people are actually healthier than they shouldn't be compared to other people? What are they doing? What are they doing differently? So by studying bright spots, you have the capacity to see what enhances something, rather than to continuously look at what's contributing to its demise.
[Music]
Adam Huggins 20:52
This keys into a whole theory of design called biomimicry. Basically, that nature has had 3.8 billion years to prototype, test, and refine life forms to thrive in practically any environment. If we want to solve a design problem, we can just look for an organism that has a similar problem in nature, and see how we can copy it. So much for human exceptionalism, right?
Mendel Skulski 21:16
Yeah, I mean, there are classic examples like modeling the shape of wind turbine blades on the fins of humpback whales,
[Whale song]
Mendel Skulski 21:24
or the nose of a bullet train after a Kingfisher
[Bird calls]
Mendel Skulski 21:29
Both of these inspirations reduce air turbulence and increase efficiency. But we can use these positive examples. This kind of solutions based thinking in all sorts of ways besides product design, for instance, finding ways to save one of the poster children of climate change doom, coral reefs. Elin brought up the work of an environmental scientist by the name of Joshua sinner, who asked
Elin Kelsey 21:53
Where are areas where coral reefs are doing better than they should be? And so by doing that, he was able to show that local ownership makes a huge difference. So if you have a say in what happens around that reef, then even though you may be a reef, very close to them, a million people, you know, a kilometer away from you, you still tend to do better. And so what I think is so exciting about bright spots is it makes a lot of sense because then you can say, Oh, we should look for these kinds of qualities or when we're bringing in policy changes. It tells you what you want to enhance, rather than continuing to tell you what's broken about something.
Mendel Skulski 22:33
Our perception of the world and our capacity within it all boils down to narrative, all communication and storytelling. Storytelling is the frame. The questions we ask, and the questions we omit, the choice of words. Reality is infinitely complex. And by definition, any attempt to condense it into a mental image leaves some truths behind, which I think as podcast editors, we can appreciate.
Adam Huggins 22:58
Totally. This actually reminds me of a book I read by ecological philosopher Timothy Morton. He notes that we simply cannot think, let alone talk without telling stories.
Adam Huggins 23:12
But for some reason, those of us who tell stories about the natural world have been telling largely the same story over and over again, one that you could compare to a post traumatic flashback.
[Spooky ambient music]
Adam Huggins 23:25
It's like, we're addicted to this story that leaves us feeling terrified and disempowered. But we can become more conscious of our stories, and consider how we tell them without sugarcoating things.
Elin Kelsey 23:37
I've been enjoying lately this idea of hopepunk. Do you know this term?
Nicholas de Pencier 23:41
Hopepunk?
[Punk drum break]
Mendel Skulski 23:51
In pop culture, books, music, and movies, we're used to breaking things into genres.
Adam Huggins 23:57
And depending on your proclivities you might prefer to split things into lots of tiny, hyper specific categories, or lump them into bigger groups.
Mendel Skulski 24:05
Ah yes, the classic taxonomists debate, the lumpers versus the splitters. Anyhow, for the purposes of this podcast, we're going to paint with a broad brush and offer you three ways of imagining the world. Hope Punk, Noble Bright, and Grim Dark.
Elin Kelsey 24:24
So Grim Dark is pretty self-explanatory, very highly dystopian, you know, everything's really wrecked and, and for many years, we've got lots of Grim Dark popular media to enjoy.
Adam Huggins 24:35
This includes Mad Max, Blade Runner, Westworld, and most climate change reporting. It's a delicious genre, but only to a point. Grimdark is a narrative style that runs the risk of propagating climate fatalism, dejection and apathy, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
[Music transitions to saccharine synthesizers]
Elin Kelsey 24:53
And then there's Noble Bright, and Noble Bright is I think of it a lot like fairy tales, like some hero comes in and saves us. And I think a number of people have positioned Greta Thunberg in that Noble Bright narrative whether whether or not she chooses to be put there. But you know this this single person who comes in and kind of leads us out of trouble.
Mendel Skulski 25:15
Noble Bright is the rose tinted flipside. It externalizes responsibility and lays a trap of optimism bias, because after all, you can just pin the future on a heroic leader.
Adam Huggins 25:27
You know, like Elon Musk.
Mendel Skulski 25:31
[Laughs] Well, in his case, it would also be the Dragon of Technosalvation, which we're going to explore it in the next episode.
Adam Huggins 25:38
You know it, it suddenly strikes me that Grimes and Elon Musk are kind of like a Grim Dark / Noble Bright power couple.
Mendel Skulski 25:45
[Laughs] Anyways, the point is that when you're counting on a savior, there's no reason for you to get involved. But then there's Hope Punk.
[Music transitions to dance track]
Elin Kelsey 25:55
Well, Hope Punk is the idea that regardless of how wrecked something is, or how bad something might be, you just act in the right way, you know, in the best way that you can and we collectively do that. And I think we're in a period of Hope Punk – I see a lot of Hope Punk around and I want to be really clear I'm not denying the severity of these issues and I when you talk about hope people think you don't know [Laughs]. I really know. But it's saying even in the face of what I know. I'm going to act in the best way I can.
Nicholas de Pencier 26:31
I love it. I love it's such a great concept.
Adam Huggins 26:34
Right? There are like practically limitless genres of punk. I've heard of Solar Punk and Eco Punk. At its core punk is just about a do it yourself attitude, right?
Mendel Skulski 26:46
Or the less isolating, do it together. Hope Punk is about strong, resilient, self-reliant communities. It's about taking a clear eyed look at the wreckage and seeing the opportunities to build something better. Finding those bright spots and growing them. Take, for example, the ocean.
[Dance track ends]
Adam Huggins 27:06
Not usually what I think of when it comes to bright spots.
Mendel Skulski 27:09
Yeah. And that's exactly why in 2014, Elin, along with a small group of others, started the #oceanoptimism so that people could share their own stories of hope and recovery.
Elin Kelsey 27:21
Our intention is not just to change the narrative, although I think that's very important, especially around eco-anxiety and things like that. But also because good things should be copied. And if you don't know about them, then you start at ground zero. So, one of the things that makes me very sad is that I because I'm a children's book writer too, I'm often in situations with a very young child telling me the first time they discover the impact of plastic bags on sea turtles, for example. And it's heartbreaking because they think they're the first person to discover this and they know how terrible it is because I think young children have very strong empathy to other species typically, and because it's a terrible thing, you know, and they call it a terrible thing. But what I really wish is that they knew, for example, that we are in this period of time of massive global movement against single use plastic bags like shifts are really happening.
Mendel Skulski 28:24
#oceanoptimism was an immediate success. Millions of people were hungry for messages that went beyond the doom and gloom stories that went beyond preachy calls to save the whales or other appeals divorced from time and specificity. They could show exactly which whales are actually doing okay, and offer some clues as to why.
Adam Huggins 28:44
Right. So in this case, breaking a broad generalization down into specific cases really helps. Which is great because all of us live in specific places with specific circumstances.
Mendel Skulski 28:57
Yeah, it quickly spun off into more general movements like Earth optimism, which was actually then adopted as a guiding principle of the Smithsonian Institute.
Elin Kelsey 29:06
And I would say as someone who's worked in environmental communications for a long time, we were actively using fear and shame and guilt. But what's emerging much more now is things like pride really matter. And I think pride is very tied to self-efficacy. When you feel like we have collectively done something, it reminds us of our capacity to act, you know, we know that hope is a self-perpetuating cycle. So if you do things that are hopeful, you actually see the outcome of your actions and that makes you more hopeful. Unfortunately, hopelessness is the same self-perpetuating thing so.
[Pensive bells – Fast Motion by Greg Davis]
Adam Huggins 29:40
So, for these dragons of perceived behavioral control, and perceived self-efficacy, it's not so much that we can defeat them and banish them from our minds, probably always be there, it's more like we can co-op them, right? We we can turn them around and bring them on side.
Mendel Skulski 29:59
Yeah.
Adam Huggins 29:59
Because they are part of this feedback loop. And our internal narrative determines which way it spins. So, using a Hope Punk lens, we can even confront the most massive scars on the planet with resolve. Through this lens, the Anthropocene is actually a testament to our ability to make huge changes in the world in incredibly short spans of time, for better or for worse.
Nicholas de Pencier 30:24
I absolutely agree. The incredible human ingenuity that has got us to this place of undisputed dominance on the planet where we really have taken over nature. I mean, humans now change all of the Earth's systems more than the natural forces. That's an incredible collective act of engineering and acting and building as a species. That same ingenuity now has to get us out of our most pressing crises.
Mendel Skulski 30:58
Our collective capacity is undeniable, especially when it's steered by those big macroeconomic forces like consumer demand. But it begs the question, where do we put our focus? On a groundswell of individual and community actions, or on the political machine to regulate and incentivize
[Music fades out]
Nicholas de Pencier 31:19
Individual action is only going to go so far and working towards tipping points in collective action absolutely has to be the goal. And that's why something like a podcast or a film
Adam Huggins 31:33
or a hashtag
Nicholas de Pencier 31:34
that are in the sort of mass media realm can be great touchstones and moments hopefully to bring people together. These things can be rallying points for community building and shared experience, you know, a podcast that people share on set, you've got to listen to this. You got to listen to this. And then there's a community there of people who have had that, that shared experience who can work together right and that cooperation, I'm sure is integral to moving forward.
Elin Kelsey 32:03
There's a whole politics around encouraging people to think that their individual actions don't matter. So there's research that shows that cumulatively, our individual actions make a huge difference. But there's concern that if we focus on individual action, then we might let off the large climate emitters, you know, they'll show 35 companies that are the highest emitters. And we don't want to let them off the hook. So people say don't focus on individual action, because we want people to focus over here. My view is we can focus on both. And there's lots of evidence that we are focusing on both
Adam Huggins 32:40
To Robert, this is clear as day, at least clear as the days since car exhaust started to be regulated several decades back.
Mendel Skulski 32:48
Or clear as the days of COVID when there's no cars on the street.
Adam Huggins 32:52
Right. [Laughs]
Robert Gifford 32:54
There's no comparison to what people are trying to do now with what they were trying to do 10, 15, 20 years ago. So, many people are already doing much more than they used to.
Elin Kelsey 33:05
So if we know we're part of this, then we're much more likely to perpetuate with it and to not have that feeling of self-efficacy. Like, what it doesn't matter if I choose to eat plants, because everybody else is eating meat or, you know, if we know things are shifting, then we have more choice. I mean, there's way more choices now for plant based eating.
Mendel Skulski 33:26
Seeing that language shift is fascinating to me. I mean, it seems kind of trivial
Mendel Skulski 33:32
compared to everything else we've discussed, but I've noticed that a lot of coffee shops have started highlighting their plant based beverages, rather than calling them dairy free. It's a small thing, but it adds up. I mean, who doesn't drink coffee?
[Drum beat in background]
Adam Huggins 33:48
I don't drink coffee.
Mendel Skulski 33:49
[Laughs] Oh right.
Adam Huggins 33:50
But I do see the bright spot there.
Elin Kelsey 33:52
It's prideful, right. It's positioning something as a positive rather than something in opposition to something else. I think our language and the metaphors we use and the narratives we tell how we speak about things has a tremendous impact on whether or not we feel something can be done.
Robert Gifford 34:11
Well, I think we need to have optimism and hope or we might as well just give up right now. So that's how I motivate myself is to say, well, no matter what the eventual outcome is, at least, we tried. We are trying.
Elin Kelsey 34:28
You know, there's not one story and we're always stronger when we have as much diversity in the stories we're telling about the world as the diversity of life on Earth.
[Song breaks into triumphant 80s style synthesizers]
Mendel Skulski 34:42
This has been chapter one of Scales of Change, a field guide to the dragons of climate inaction. We'll be back next week with chapter two: Technosalvation.
Adam Huggins 34:53
Whether or not we can avoid climate collapse is still an open question. But we know for sure one thing is inevitable: Change.
Mendel Skulski 35:06
Scales of Change is a production of Future Ecologies with support from the University of Victoria.
Adam Huggins 35:11
In this chapter, you heard Robert Gifford, Nicolas de Pencier, Elin Kelsey, Simone Miller,
Mendel Skulski 35:18
my dad David,
Adam Huggins 35:19
myself, Adam Huggins
Mendel Skulski 35:21
and me, Mendel Skulski. Special thanks to Suzanne Ahearne, Anne MacLaurin, Nadia Tavazzani, Helen Bucknell, and Carlie Macfie. Besides discovering the dragons of inaction, Robert Gifford is literally the author of the textbook: Environmental Psychology, Principles and Practice.
Adam Huggins 35:42
Nicholas de Pencier is the cinematographer behind the film Anthropocene, the Human Epoch from mercury films,
Mendel Skulski 35:49
and Elin Kelsey is the author of books for adults,
Adam Huggins 35:52
such as Watching Giants: the Secret Lives of Whales,
Mendel Skulski 35:55
as well as books for kids such as Wild ideas: let nature inspire your thinking.
Adam Huggins 36:01
Composition for this episode is by Vincent van Haaff. Our dragons theme is by Loam Zoku. Other musical contributors include IKSRE, Greg Davis, and Wizwars.
Mendel Skulski 36:12
And finally, thank you to Alexandra Roland for coining the term Hope Punk. You can tweet at us or follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Future Ecologies. To learn more about each one of the Dragons of Inaction, go to futureecologies.net/dragons. Okay, that's it for this one. See you next week.
[music ends]
Transcribed by https://otter.ai and edited by Neetash Mraj