OFP Session 2

Catherine: Good morning, thank you for coming. This is the 2nd session in this series of events. Last night we centered our discussion on the scientific aspects of CC. And also between the connection between science and policy. Everybody appreciated the discussion that went on. So even though we’re a small group again, I hope we’ll have a similar exciting, interesting discussion this morning.

This morning I will briefly tell you what will happen and Jeff will remind us of the object of the workshop. And seeing that many people were here last night, we should be brief in repeating- just for the newcomers this morning. This morning we will talk about the social & economic that arise as a result of the climate warming, the Earth warming, and CC over all. And what this brings up to us in terms of effect- how do we react to the news of CC, how do we feel. In denial, apathetic, scared, whatever? We would like to get a feel from the people who are attending the meeting this morning.

This session will be led by 2 persons. The 1st one is Jennifer Wels. She is assistant professor at the California Institute of Integrative Studies. (I’m sorry yesterday I didn’t introduce everybody.) She works on complexity and sustainability and complex systems in general. The other person is Renee Letterman, who is associate faculty in the M.A. program in Environmental Education and Communication at the the Royal Rhodes University. They have prepared a very interesting session, and they will discuss among themselves and also we will see with the participants they will ask for your contribution and your thoughts. Jeff will talk a little bit about the overall objective of the meeting. And then Valerie Mason del Motte. She is a senior scientist in the French Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique- Atomic energy commission in France. She has a research group there and her scientific focus is on a range of questions about CC, and she’s very much interested in communicating about CC in France. So she led the session yesterday and the other person who led was Oran, who is an emeritus professor from the UCSB Bren School of Environmental Science and Management. He is an expert and world leader in international governance and environmental institutions. His work spans both research in collective choices and social institutions. He was the facilitator yesterday and both he and Valerie and Oran will be summarizing what happened yesterday, which, as I said, was rather interesting. Jeff will give us some brief introductory remark, and then we’ll go into the summary.

Jeff: Thanks, Catherine. I’ll make this very brief. The point of this weekend’s sessions is to give all of you an opportunity to participate in a conversation around the issue of CC. This is an issue that’s been around for quite a while, but there’s been continuing difficulty in engaging people’s interest around this issue. Which, for many of us, if you ask scientist that have been studying this, is probably the most important issue that civilization faces in terms of its impact not just on humans but of all life on Earth. So yesterday we heard about the science and the implications, the connections to the decision making processes and communicating science. This morning, as Catherine pointed out, we will engage around what I’ll call the affective and cognitive implications for CC, for society. This afternoon, after looking at those implications, Bonnie and I will lead a session on transformation. To look at how do we move from where we are now to a world where this problem is actually has been addressed or solved in some

creative way. What we hope to do is really talk about the psychological dimensions of this. There are a tremendous number of workshops on the technical solutions to this, the __(?) the political solutions, but very little discussion in the last few years of the psychological and social dimensions of this. Tonight is the Open Forum at the convention centre where Artie and Amy are going to lead a process around the polarity that exists in this issue, and Sunday morning is the reflective part where we look back, and ask the question- where do we go from here, with this work? Those are the objectives. The main objective, I’ll just reiterate, is to provide a space for all of us to consciously reflect on what’s going on around the issue of CC and what are the solutions, how do we move towards a solution to this issue, or solutions. There’s probably clearly not one.

Valerie: So the point was about climate science, and the methods used in climate science to monitor the changes. The different aspects of the climate system, how current changes compare with what we know about past natural changes and how unusual they are. And also the methods that are used to anticipate the behavior of the climate system in the future. And so it was clearly discussed that there are uncertainties linked to the complexity of the system, but also a number of facts that relate human activities to the ongoing changes. There were discussion then on the policy-science relationships, the difficulty in communicating science, sometimes the indifference of the public to this topic, the polarization, the difficulty of having a fair and open debate in this context. The credibility of climate science in relation with climategate and media scandals was also discussed, and their implications for the climate community itself in communicating with the general public and the media.

Catherine: Since we are a participatory audience, is there anyone else that attended yesterday and felt like there was something we should add? No? Ok.

Jennifer: A huge thanks to Catherine and Jeff for coming up with this brilliant idea, and laying the way for it. I think this is an incredibly special opportunity and I suspect with the magnitude of different types of issues involved in CC that we discussed last night and will this morning, that however this plays out this will be an issue that we will be talking about and acting on and transforming our lives around for the rest of our lives. So I see this is a moment, a turning point where it’s become apparent to many that we need to move forward. This is just one beautiful forum, an opportunity to get into that process. I really want to thank the facilitators. A big moment in human history. As Catherine mentioned we are going to open up the topics of social and economic aspects of CC, which are rather vast, and this includes psychological aspects. Social creatures are psychological, along with everything else. I want to just give a quick agenda of what we’ve done for this time together at the 2nd session. So, I’m going to talk for a little bit and give some thoughts, sort of tools, on the social and economic dimensions. Renee is going to give a talk more about the psychological aspects. Renee and I are planning to talk a little bit about our different perspectives and the tensions or aspects that these two perspectives bring forth. But this will be the 1st session. We’d like to have an opportunity for everyone to individually free-write about thoughts and feeling because I think it really brings up a wide range. Even though we’ve all been immersed in it for 10-20 years, it’s an opportunity to go a bit deeper and think more fully about our ideas and experiences. We’re going to work in small groups, getting more into the issues, and then for the last part (we’re going to wrap up and have a restroom break), towards a large group discussion

about some of the issues that will have come up. There will be a lot of time for your participation. On a practical note, I wonder if people have a pen and pencil. If anyone has extra, that might be helpful.

Catherine: Do you want people to intervene?

Jennifer: With this group, I would say, feel free to jump in. Ok, so the work that I’ve been doing has focused on a particular viewpoint that’s come up all across knowledge-production in the last few decades. In academia, throughout very many disciplines. Intriguingly, people have looked more at the way reality is composed of complex, dynamic systems. For me, this lens and this perspective gives an incredible amount of hope for all kinds of issues. Partly because, as we look at the world as complex, and start to see the complexity of different systems in the world, extraordinary brain science that’s come out in the last few years, that the heart is complex, that our body is complex, the way we think, the world, the ecosystems that surround us. To me, it’s a very beautiful view of the world that is a counter-point to our more mundane, daily struggles. So there are many ways I’ve found this perspective potentially helpful to us. The punch-line of my talk is that one of the key aspects, understandings that come out of the trans-disciplinary life as complex systems, is that interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches and views can elucidate more about various kinds of social and economic issues we face, and that those that involve many different systems interacting. So those that involve global environmental issues even more than some sort of everyday mechanical things, really can make good use of this lens. One of the implications is that interdisciplinary/ transdisciplinary approaches and perspectives, is that we’re seeing their value and we’re starting to see it play out on the ground. There are a lot of people who have been experimenting with real policy and actions in recent years, utilizing more integrated approaches. For example, the basis of sustainability, as it was discussed in the early 90s, the Rio conference in 1992, the definition of sustainability was partly the three-legged stool if you remember, that environmental issues have social, technological, economic, ecological- well that’s 4 legs but there are these different components and you can’t really leave them out if you want to get to environmental solutions.

(20:00minutes)

Jennifer: So in a way we’re just circling back around and seeing, maybe that 3 or 4 or now, maybe 10-legged stool it is really significant and people have been in the past 20 years, developing methods of deploying and using that to very effective ends. Elinor Ostrom got the Nobel Prize in Economics partly by seeing that people have been doing this throughout human history. That indigenous groups all over the world naturally have had to integrate different systems into their lives in effective ways to maintain sustainable approaches. So we’ll come back to this point. But I want to just build up a couple pieces to make this clear. Ok, so now I’m going to start with a simple definition. So interdisciplinary research involves bringing together subject matter from different disciplines. Let’s say, sociologists and economists, and maybe a few technologists, people who create technology. And building conceptual models that integrate those different domains. And then using that integrated model as a basis for thinking about policy or solutions or theory. Trans-disciplinary is sometimes defined as transcending disciplines. As starting from a perspective that encompasses various different aspects involved of the whole ensemble of an issue. So it’s an approach that in some ways may transcend the models. It’s

sometimes related to what’s called complex thinking, coming out of France. Edgar Morin is a theorist who has perhaps done more than anybody to develop this as a whole perspective.

Speaker: Wouldn’t you say that trans-disciplinary also means beyond the academy, not necessarily arising from within academia at all. ---- approach that starts in society?

Jennifer: That’s a really intriguing question! Absolutely, it’s just funny to me because right now I’m in an academy, to think oh well it’s going on in my academy, but absolutely. I think problem-centered is a really great word, or solution centered. Sometimes people talk about case-centered. If you start with the issue in the world, say, we want to have a CC action plan for Portland, Oregon, then a trans-disciplinary approach will say, we almost have to open our thinking in all of those dimensions in order to approach the issue of CC in Portland, Oregon. So it sort of opens up our thinking to multi-stakeholder, participatory perspectives. Ok, so, systems and complex systems have been defined in different ways over the last decades. Systems theories were especially developed between the 1920s and the 1970s. And then there were inklings of complex systems, theories, starting with people like Ludwig van Bertalanffy and others. And really flourishing both in the natural sciences at Santa Fe Institute and as well at many other institutes around the world. And also in social theory and post-modernism and in philosophy of science and in other areas. Complex dynamics theories have really been flourishing, developing from 1980, 1982 to today. So for the last 30yrs. And this particular definition was from Melanie Mitchell, coming from the Santa Fe Institute, from the natural sciences. There are similar definitions from contemporary post-modernist theorists where the words might be a little different. But I think this is a helpful definition to get at the core of what we think about now when we think of complex systems as trans-disciplinary, meaning that in biology, in economics, in system dynamics, we see these same patterns playing out and it can be helpful for conceptualizing the way we look at the world. So she has distilled this most recently as a complex system is: a system in which large networks of components with no central control and simple rules of operation then give rise to complex collective behaviors, more sophisticated information processing, and adaptation via learning or evolution. So this sentence is very very rich, there’s a lot packed into that one sentence that we could talk about for days or years, so it’s scraping the surface. In order to give a little more sense of this and how it is meaningful and significant in different areas of our lives, I just have 2 more slides. Just to give a taste of it.

This is the 1st half of looking at this definition in more depth. One way to grapple with more complex systems, which are, well, complex, I’ve taken out 6 main aspects of them. Six main qualities that you find all across these complex systems. The 1st are nonlinearity, feedbacks, and networks. And all 3 of these are all over our public media, our public discourse, and academic and scientific and knowledge production. A fascinating time over the past years for all 6 of these terms. So what I’m doing here is just saying if nonlinearity is an aspect or quality of complex systems in all of these different aspects of our lives, what does that mean for sustainability. For example, the social and economic dimensions of CC, in this case. And some of the implications are, well if systems are nonlinear, meaning that as the scientists were outlining last night, there are positive feedbacks and negative feedbacks involved. And positive feedbacks are defined as changes that take place in a looping fashion, that augments impacts. So sort of the poster child when scientists were 1st looking at CC, the poster child of positive feedbacks in the media was the ice-albedo effects. And someone had mentioned this last night, the white surface will

reflect more light and the dark surface will absorb more light. So as the ice in the Northern and polar regions melts, the color transforms from white to dark blue or dark green, and that create a positive feedback loop in which more and more warmth is held at the surface and not radiated back into space. So that’s just one example and it actually brings up all these aspects of complex systems. So it might be helpful just to define a network- a very simple concept, in a way. All it is is a system with links of feedbacks between different nodes in a system. For example in an ecosystem, there are all different sorts of animals, and the animals eat each other, and so the animals are the nodes and the links are these biotic interactions of who eats whom.

Jackie: I’m new to this. So non-linear, you’re saying, ice melts and causes ice to melt faster. Why is that non-linear? That seems logically linear.

Jennifer: Great question, yeah, there are a lot of different aspects in here. It’s a lot to think about.

Speaker: You can understand the process very linearly, but the arithmetic that’s going on is non-linear.

[inaudible]

Jennifer: Are there any other questions about these 3 first principles and their role in CC?

[inaudible questions]

Jennifer: Ok, so let’s say there are non-linear aspects of different systems. The production of cars and the impacts of burning fossil fuels over time. If you don’t have a static system and you don’t have linear dynamics over time, then it helps to take into account the full life-cycle of different components because you tend to capture more of the non-linearity understanding in your planning, if that makes sense.

Speaker: Can you talk about scale? Is that one of the…

Jennifer: That’s definitely one of the parts of the immediate framework of complex dynamic systems. But there’s so much that’s part of the framework that I don’t know if we’ll get to every part, but we can if that interests you.

Speaker: I think it’s really important politically and socially, because of that- does my action even matter? That question and debate, and that’s why I’d love to hear what you think about it.

Jennifer: That’s a very great point. I think that various pieces of this directly lead to and illuminate the question of the individual role, and the way to look at that. So, we’ll come back to that. Ok, let me go to the last 3, but I want to just say one thing 1st. I think it’s good to take a step back because there’s so many details in all of this. What does the complex dynamics system perspective do in a practical way for thinking about sustainability? I think there are 2 things. On the one hand, this framework helps to explain and understand what’s going on in the world, because what’s going on in the world is complex system dynamics. So it helps to understand and see the world. It helps particularly to see the interdependence of all these social dynamics. It helps to see that social, technological, economic, and psychological issues are all integral to how CC has come about, why it’s coming about, how and why it’s

evolving, and how we can be involved. So 1st, complexity theories help to see what’s happening in the world in terms of the interdependence of all these social systems (social, economic, technological, psychological, biological, financial, etc.). Secondly, therefore, help to illuminate approaches and solutions. And particularly, one of the points that I’ve been working with, is that a lot of people have been coming the conclusion, a lot of people are on to this perspective, and have been saying ok, well if this is true, then let’s directly implement approaches that integrate these different areas, let’s call is synergistic approaches. So one thing that I’ve been doing is looking at different synergistic approaches that have been used, then analyzing the results and saying which ones have been working, where does it fail. It’s extremely ambitious if you think about it, to really do this for CC, because CC entails so much of these different areas. So if you really want to do use synergistic approaches, it’s inherently very ambitious. What I’ve done is I’ve got a few examples that maybe we can talk about further in the conversation that are concrete examples of the past 10yrs looking at energy systems. And the implementation, looking at where it’s succeeded and where it’s failed. So looking at how this has actually played out in European renewable vs. fossil fuel energy markets is the example I chose because it’s a good example of social, economic, and energy systems. But I don’t want to go for too long so I just want to go over the basis of this and then pass it to Renee because I think it’s really important that we get to the psychological side as well.

Speaker: Can I just make one comment- way back at the beginning of the use of digital computers for academic research, I’m suffering a jet-lag moment- this well known group wrote a paper called the Counter-intuitive behavior of social systems in the 70s. The whole point was, they asked the question, why is it that every time a policy program that addresses something like urban decay fails, it seems logical. And the answer was that we tend to think linearly. We tend to say, cause, effect. You know, we’ve got this problem, let’s put money in, we’ll rejuvenate the city, and then we’re surprised when it doesn’t work. The whole point about computers is that you can connect together all these nodes that you talked about. The computer then explores that it’s not linear, and when we do this, yes that happens, but then this happens and this happens and this happens which we didn’t think of, and we get these unexpected circumstances. And what they were able to show was why these programs fail. And once you understood it, it was obvious to see, you pour money in, it attracts an infinite number of people to the center, you can never keep up with problem that you’re just further creating. And that’s the power, it seems to me, of these complex systems. Our brains aren’t wired up to handle these problems but constructing computer models can deal with it and illustrate.

Jennifer: That’s a very interesting topic. I think it’s a very hard one to answer because, yes, and- yes that’s a huge part of what’s going on in climate sciences, I love to hear from the modelers about their perspectives on the value of these. There was a photo last night that Karen showed of all the massive computers used to run climate models. But a lot of social theorists would also say, yes, and, with CC, because it does involve economic and financial and social and psychological and political issues, if you don’t include a deep and adequate of human power dynamics, oppressions, injustice, economic exploitation, and these other dimensions, you’ll never get where you need to get by having massive computers churning away. In fact, if you want to look at the large picture, there’s always sort of a cost

benefit and the computers do use a large amount of energy. You know, we have to keep broadening our perspective to take into account these ironies and these perplexities that are involved.

So, with that, maybe I’ll try to wrap up my part so we can move on, and we can always come back to one of these particular points in a little bit if there’s not another burning issue right now. I can see that the framework is just too big for my little talk, so I’m not going to go into detail on everything, just very briefly, for me, hierarchical structures are intriguing. A nice way to picture it is a set of Russian dolls. And this is part of our reality too, life is networked, and composed of hierarchies. What Arthur Koestler called a Holon, where a cell is part of an organ, is part of a human body, is part of biological system. So this is important and enlightening for how we think of soci-ecological issues also. These last 2 are very important and I won’t talk about them hardly at all because I think we don’t understand them very well yet, but when we talk about transition from systems theory to complexity, what complexity theorists have really contributed are these last 2 points. There’s an aspect of life that’s hard to get at but that involves emergence, that a system self-organizes and transforms from within. Somehow the DNA programs itself. Somehow, the fetus turns into a baby. And that’s very profound. So I won’t go too far that, but maybe just 2 quick points. It shows us the significance of learning. And this for me is a very helpful, hopeful thing about complexity theory when we think about large, very challenging environmental issues. That humans are capable of learning and adaptation and change. And that’s a fundamental aspect of the human being. There’s a lot about us and the way we live and think that gets in the way of this unfortunately. But we are capable of change, and once we start to see things that way, and really get past the really heavy, scientific revolution view, of life as static, and really start to see our own power as change agents, that can really go a long way towards changing society. So I’m going far too long, so I’ll just take any last questions or comments about this last point.

Jeff: I was thinking about last night and comments around what the poles show. And it was stated that actually, indeed a significant percentage of people in this country do want to do something about CC. But the other pole that wasn’t mentioned was that when you ask people to prioritize, how important this issue is compared to other issues, it’s usually at the bottom of the list- it’s number 30 out of 30 issues. Of course, number 1 is economic security, high up there is also employment, national defense, and a whole list of other things. But I think what this framework brings to bear on that issue is that when you look at that list of 20 or 30 prioritized issues, they’re interdependent. The global crisis and the economy is integrally tied to energy. Food is integrally tied to economics and CC. CC, actually, if you look at this list of 30 priorities, you could find a role for CC in each one of those aspects. So I think raising awareness around the interdependence of all of these issues- it’s not a linear process, you don’t tick one off and move to the next priority, and tick the next one off, and finally get down to working on CC. If you can see it as in a more holistic, interdependent form, then you’d being to approach the problem in a very different way. And that’s what I think this framework brings, that view.

Jennifer: I hope everyone heard that, because I think that really goes beyond what I said to really pull together my main point, and this perspective, from my humble perspective. Any other questions?

Speaker: I just, it was exciting those final points you were making about change, and we were laughing here because process-work is all about change and our resistances to change, and it’s just such a core

problem and opportunity. And so, I was just excited thinking about what you were talking about and complexity theory, this topic is great.

Jennifer: Thank you. Well let’s get into the deep, gnarly human mind and soul and emotions.

Renee: So, my name is Renee Lerztman, basically, what I’m interested in is a parallel systems approach to the psyche and the psychological dimensions of CC and sustainability. I’m just going to say a few things, I’m not going to speak very long because I want to open things up and get you all talking and thinking. What comes up to me, what’s sort of the elephant in the room, with regards to CC overall, tends to be anxiety. And related to anxiety is also loss, and this relates to change. So when we appreciate that, if we could just say generally that sustainability is about change, which I think we intuitively know, but we don’t necessarily dig deeper into what that really means in terms of what change is, and how we facilitate and support and foster change. Then we find ourselves in a place where we get fixated on behavior change, and behavior change, I would argue, is not necessarily a systemic approach at all, behavior change tends to come out of a very linear, engineering / scientific model of the psyche and cognition. And that neglects the whole picture. So what I’m interested in as a psycho-social researcher, and a communications professional, I’m interested in what that whole picture is. Which includes how we manage and experience these issues. Not so much what are our opinions about them, what are our attitudes, or even our beliefs about CC. I’m far more interested in the level of experience, how do we make sense of these issues, and the domain of meaning. Where I’m coming from and what I’m advocating for is a meaning-centered approach- that change is about meaning change. When we situate change in the context of meaning, it actually becomes very different from behavior change like how do we get people to turn their lights or stop idling at the stop light, because we’re not actually yet really delving into how we engage in practices that we know on some level are damaging. And at the same time we are engaging in because they fulfill and meet needs and desires that we have to manage our sense of safety, security, and anxiety, to perhaps ward off feelings of loss, disruption, distress, and so on. And so my intentions really, is to try to bring that into our discourse and our work in a way that’s almost natural. So that it’s sort of not a big deal to talk about anxiety, to talk about loss, or to talk about sadness because it’s just sort of part of the terrain. But what we can do as practitioners and as communicators and educators is really become far more sophisticated about what that means. And this is specifically where partnering, collaborating, dialoguing, with those who work with people- clinical psychologists or people who do the process work here at the institute, people who are actually working with people. And I’m a little deliberate when I say that, there’s an implicit critique there, because a lot of what we see right now about behavior change and the psychology of sustainability, frankly it’s not coming from clinical practitioner people, it’s coming from behavioral economics, it’s coming from scientists, planners, basically anyone right now who’s engaged in these issues (and I don’t mean to diss anyone- we need all hands on deck, and we need all thoughtfulness). But what we’re seeing right now, when it comes to really understanding the human dimension, the psychological dimension, we’re hearing a real chorus of pundits and opinions that I believe really lack some insight and savvy and sophistication about what is really going on for us with regards to how people manage anxiety, loss, what this means in terms of defense mechanisms, what this means about the unconscious. And also not only seeing this as an individual process, but also seeing this as a social process. There are starting to be

some people coming out. Kari Norgaard is one, who wrote a wonderful book called Living in Denial, and Kari is one of the people who’s not a psychologist, she’s very open about that, she’s a sociologist who stumbled into psychology because she was doing a research study on how CC was being negotiated in Norway. Negotiated meaning articulated, made sense of, addressed, not addressed, the whole picture. She found herself in this terrain of reading up on clinical psychology, trauma. And she didn’t mean to go there but that’s where she ended up going. And her main take-away is that denial is socially produced- that denial is social. And that’s a huge piece right there in our thinking. To start shifting away thinking that the psychological from the individual to being individual and social. Which is why I am a psycho-social researcher, which is a recognition that we can never totally reduce one from the other. And I think that this has a lot of resonance with the orientation that you’re bringing in with this recognition of complex systems. To connect with what Jenny was saying. And this leads into a discussion which I think we’ll have in a few minutes. For me what this raises is- and I know there are some clinically oriented folk in the room who I’d like to hear from- what does this mean in terms of our capacity to actually apply and engage more of a systems, complexity approach. I teach courses on this in communication and leadership, and it’s very very hot right now. Especially the concept of resilience. And how resilience relates to systems theory and complexity theory. And what comes up over and over again to me is that no one’s really talking about what kind of psychological, emotional , even cognitive capacities are required to go there and without that it feels really like a la-la-land. And some people have this capacity, but a lot of people don’t. The missing piece precisely has to do with how do we tolerate uncertainty. How do we tolerate ambiguity, paradox, and contradiction in ourselves and in the world around us. With sustainability and CC you don’t have to look far to encounter the contradiction and the paradox we’re living in driving a flying yet having awareness. And it’s potentially very splitting. That’s actually the essence of where we need to go- how we manage that splitting is actually profound. How we manage the splitting is the difference between going into denial, going into projection, going into polarization, or the capacity to actually hold and retain multiple existing, competing truths and realities and experiences. In psycho-analysis the term for that is the depressive position. Not necessarily meaning you’re depressed, but it’s this capacity we have to depress our ability to freak out when it comes to dealing with uncertainty. And it goes back to object relation theory when you realize some fundamental truths about you mother, she’s there and she’s not there and a sign of psychological maturity is to integrate that, so that you can tolerate when there’s an absence and when there’s a return. In my mind, this is where we really need to be going. Which is a real open question. This is the area for I’m working in, and I don’t necessarily have the answers though I can look at what some folks coming out of clinical psychology, which I admit I find the most exciting area right now, very marginal and very quiet, but it’s starting to come out more and more, hearing from people, how you we support the change process. But then as far as I’m concerned, CC has a whole existential level going on, where it’s not necessarily about change management (like our organization is laying off a bunch of people) not to minimize that. We’re talking about existentially charged issues. That’s where I think we need to taking our work to another level that’s unchartered right now. And I can mention a few people who are starting to do this work. There’s a British psycho-therapist and activist, Rosemary Randall in Cambridge, UK. Who has written some papers on loss, and we’re going to be spinning our circles in terms of trying to get people to shift their behaviors. Probably a lot of us are familiar with Joanna Macy’s work. Which is really fundamentally recognizing the need to come together, and interact and interface. So I think that we haven’t yet

explored the potential of what I call social platforms. Which is really a fancy way of saying when you get people together in conversation and talking about what we’re feeling and thinking. That something really powerful and magical can happen there. I think that your work really relates to design thinking which is now really fascinating to me. My friend runs the Buckminster Fuller center, called the design science lab. That’s an example of where we might be seeing a context of where people might actually be supported and trained to think more systemically. And yet I don’t see that work as having enough for me of the emotionally piece, which is literally how do we hold ourselves, how can we contain ourselves in the face of, in the encounter of the unknowable, and the uncertain, and the unpredictable which is at the heart of this work that you’re talking about. So I think I’ll leave it at that for now.

Chris: Can I just say that I really really respond strongly to that, I agree with everything you just said. And it’s interesting how ideas come of age. It’s not just Ro Randall in the UK, but there’s a group of clinical psycho-analysts who got very charged up about CC, and they’ve written a fabulous book called Engaging with Climate Change it will be another 4 months before it finally comes out.

Renee: I’m actually in that book, and that book was based on an event- were you at that event? In London, the Institute of Psychoanalysis had an event.

Chris: It was fabulous. This seems to me as at the root of how we begin to make progress in this problem. At that event- it’s the only event I’ve been to where I spent a lot of time lying flat on the floor with my eyes closed, and I really recommend it.

Speaker: Sorry I’m coming in late and maybe this is a fundamental type of question, but I just am wondering why the field of psycho-analysis and climatology, what is relationship there, why is there this link between those two disciplines.

Jeff: Well, I think Renee articulated that, it’s because the implications of CC produce tremendous amounts of affect, feelings of loss and anxiety, stress. I used to give a climate talk that was all climate science and after 10yrs of doing that, I realized I was traumatizing my audience. What I do now, and it’s part of my clinical psychology training, is I give 20 minutes of the science of climate. And then I stop and I ask the question- how is everyone feeling. And usually there’s silence, and then one brave soul will raise their hand, and then others, feelings that are experienced in the room are hopelessness, helplessness, anger, fear, these very primitive basic emotional responses, that are absolutely natural. And that’s one of the things I talk about as we go around the room. Because if you go to a textbook on trauma, most of them are there. What we’re doing and hearing with the science of CC, is we are putting ourselves in a traumatic state. Without acknowledging it, so that part of the talk is, oh let’s acknowledge it. It’s not like we’re going to make it go away, but we just want to hold it and experience and openly admit that we’re all feeling these feelings. If you are feeling anything- yes, numbness is one of the experiences. And one of the classic, one time a woman told me that during my presentation, she just spaced out. She dissociated. Which is another classic trauma response. And then how do we modulate all of those feelings, defense mechanisms. The ones that you went through. That’s what’s going on in the unconscious. We cannot, we have to modulate the anxiety and all the other feelings. We have these

naturally built in processes that are there to help us through these feelings. Now, the problem is that they also prevent us from moving into solutions unless we work with those feelings.

Jennifer: I wanted just to thanks you for giving a great overview about what is happening in the academic world. There is also grass-roots initiatives that parallel this development. For example, the growing transition town movement, which has over, almost 1,000 cities and towns in the world which have focused on CC plans for their towns. And they explicitly contained, since their beginning in 2002, an inter-transition aspect to it. It’s called “heart and soul” or inter-transition or whatever, so actually the public, travelling along in an intuitive way, has come to the same point where the academic world is happening, so there might need to be some acknowledgement of not only professional people doing this.

Renee: Yes, right. I do mention transition often, and it’s actually the only activist community I know of that actually acknowledges the emotional piece of what we’re doing.

Jennifer: So shall we have sort of a talk about the articulation of our 2 views? Perhaps, and then get to the free-writing part. Because I think we’re bringing up a whole lot of different material and I want to leave lots of time for audience discussion.

Renee: Well, I guess as I mentioned, one of my concerns about the emphasis on the orientation and the approach you’re bringing in, is whether it adequately attends to the affective. By affect I mean- it’s not really the same as emotional. Affect is sort of a visceral, felt, potentially unconscious but felt energetic experience. So affect could be a sense of, you know when you suck your breath in, or it could be a sense of anxiety or fear. For me, dealing with the material you’re engaging with can potentially bring up really affective responses. With regards to feeling overwhelmed, or uncertainty, or ambiguity. So I’m curious how you’ve encountered that in your work.

Jennifer: Ok, well, it might start to sound like a cop out if I keep repeating it, but one of my core mantras is this yes, and. But I think you’re bringing up a really important paradox about that, which is the approach we need to take intellectually is also extremely hard psychologically. So how do you reconcile that. So 1st of all I would say, all of these approaches are interrelated and compatible. They all should be included. I don’t see complexity theory in any way as eschewing psychology; I think it includes psychology as an aspect, one of the core aspects of our immediate experience. One question then, that you raise, is how do you actually do that? How do you put those pieces together? One visual that I like, something that I sort of imagine is that there is this incredibly enlightened, sort of cosmic being that’s sort of out there in space and looking down on Earth, at everything that’s happening, at all these different dimensions- social, economic, psychological, technological aspects of global change, a huge part of which right now is CC and how we’re reacting to it. And so this incredibly wise cosmic being would have a perspective on all these issues you raise, like the splitting, etc. But I think one of the things that that enlightened being would be aware of is that all these aspects are significant, you can’t eschew them. So just to give one example- we’re looking at this perspective of relatively comfortable people in a materially wealthy society. When I 1st hear the psychological perspective, I think ok that’s a very middle class concern. If you’re starving- I think of people in Somalia, in the 1990s there was a lot of famines,

there was a major famine, and then in 2011 there was a major famine. It was interesting to see how the mainstream news spoke about it. A lot of the papers said something like- the famine is caused by several consecutive failed rainy seasons, a conflict (meaning a devastating war), a ban on agencies delivering food aid in rebel held areas, etc. Now if you go back to the 1990s, the US, when we were feeling wealthy, actually spent multiple billions of dollars to send 25,000 American troops into Somalia to beat back the rebel forces, to get food to starving Somalians. In 2011, we weren’t feeling so wealthy and that didn’t really take place, and many 10s of thousands of people perished, and 4 million were in severe misery. I don’t want to go too far, and I think my main point here is just that one of the things, psychology and complexity are both really significant in getting this. And an enlightened being would say yes, people are suffering all over the planet in different ways. So one little piece that complexity theory can bring to this, is, let’s frame the Somalia famine a different way. A guy I knew in college, who’s written a book about CC, Christian Parenti, The Tropic of Chaos, wrote the famine in Somalia was predicted long ago by community members, people living in Somalia. They predicted it (back to that issue of uncertainty and prediction), and they call the causes of it a combination of war, CC, and largely the embracement of bad policy, particularly free-market policies by regional governments. That meant regional governments withdrawing support for pastoralists who had for many centuries maintained on and off, relatively sustainable systems. There are different ways to look at this, and different people would interpret what’s going on in slightly different ways, different people frame the causes in different ways. One piece that complexity might bring is to facilitate and illuminate that kind of understanding. So sorry that was a bit long, I say yes, and. They’re both very important.

Renee: I guess I’m not seeing it as a separation; I’m more interested in the psychological dimension of engaging with complexity thinking and approaches what that actually means. That it’s not just a cognitive experience. It’s not just something you learn, but there’s a whole affective, emotional piece to that, which I think you address somewhat. That when you do engage in this, it does have an effect on our emotional register in some way. I’m more interested in, can we advocate, and is this useful as a lens without acknowledging what it may bring up for people on an emotional level. I don’t know if there’s anyone in the room who has anything to add to that.

Jeff: For me, this is what I see, clinical psychology versus academic psychology. Our cognitive research. Many other forms of psychology exist, but this is a fundamental one. If you go to graduate school in psychology, at some point you’re going to have made the decision to become a clinician or to become a research psychologist. And that’s where I’m seeing this dialogue is between research psychology and clinical psychology. And how do you hold those two, or how do you interweave those two around this issue of complexity and CC.

Catherine: From personal experience, about working on complex systems and bringing it to psychology, to frustration, and whatever feelings come up. I was working on climate in the 1990s, and it was such an exciting time, you know after the Rio Summit, the Framework Convention for CC, all this excitement. And some groups of us, a group of started looking at teaching, and at the science that would help us understand CC. We called that science Earth System Science. And we started thinking, how can we teach about the Earth as a system. And we got funded by NASA to do some thinking about it. And 20 years later (1st I’m not teaching about Earth System Science any more, I’m teaching about CC), because I’ve felt

really frustrated that we don’t have the tools and we don’t have the brain maybe, ready for dealing with it. We can analyze the different elements (and I teach about systems science also, like you do, and all the different elements, the interconnectivity, the adaptability), but I find it very very difficult to convey the message of systems thinking to students. You can give examples, but the framework is very very difficult to convey. We don’t have the mathematical tools, we can do the forward problem, that is we can take small elements and see how complex things come out of the interaction between said elements. But when we have a complex system, we don’t know how to disentangle it, to see which elements have been interacting. We do that with models, but when you look at the data, it’s very hard to say what has happened. And it’s very frustrating as a practitioner of system science, I don’t want to say fear, but I’m at a loss, because I don’t have the tools. My brain is not capable, and I don’t see the tools existing around.

Renee: Imagine though, if there were tools available from clinically oriented people, I’m not a clinicial, I’m a researcher. Imagine if there were tools available we could actually find ways to help make some traction. I think that would be really powerful.

Catherine: I agree with you, that’s why I organized this meeting, because I think that’s the only way out, that’s the only hope, that we will do it through psychological approach.

Jennifer: I’m just curious about how we should proceed in terms of time because so many people are raising their hands now.

Speaker: This is going to sound really stupid, because I don’t really… what I hear is the human psyche is part of a complex system, it shouldn’t be studied, it shouldn’t be seen as… When you were saying I talk to the public and feelings come up, it almost seems as if they are outside of the system, something extra. So are we looking to understand the effect of the human psyche on CC? I’m really glad this doesn’t sound crazy. Because that’s what I was thinking, that we were talking about human generated CC. So that must be, not just how much we buy, how much gas we use, how we organize our economies, but also how think and feel. Is that included in the models?

Crowd: No.

Speaker: Could it be?

Jeff: People are thinking about it. How would you include this? There’s a whole area called integrated assessment models for putting economics in, social systems, and the last piece that people are saying, how would you put psychology in.

Speaker: But I’m also thinking of Hopi rain dances, belief systems that are seriously different from ours, where you change weather patterns from psychic alignment, you change the climate.

Chris: If we all had the same view as Tibetan Buddhist monks, we wouldn’t have a problem. I was just trying to pick on this theme of the end-to-end view of this complex system. I don’t want to paralyze everybody, but it’s the truth of what we’re confronted with. We have 7 billion people on the planet- that’s a lot of people. Just to bring things into view, the predictions are, quite optimistic predictions, that

there will be another 2 billion in the next 30 to 50 years. That’s 2,000 cities of 1 million people in the next 30 year. I don’t think I’ll still be alive, but a lot of people in the room will be. Of the 7 billion at present, 1 ½ billion don’t have access to electricity at all, and 1 ½ billion go to bed each night, as we’’re speaking, very hungry. Now, this Maslow view- you know the hierarchy of human needs- if you’re down at the bottom, I have no electricity and my kids are starving, you’re not going to be interest in reducing your carbon emissions or your damage to the planet is zero, because you’re driven to survive. It’s your comment about the middle class view of this, which is what we’re tending to fall into in this room. The middle class. There has been a great deal of work done by business, government, and people. We heard about transition towns movement, we know that there have been many initiatives in the past 10yrs that have made the situation less worse than otherwise would have been. It’s very hard to come up with how much less carbon we have emitted as a result of that, but it would have been a lot worse. But that’s been swept away by the tide of people sandwiched in between the currently affluent and the currently very poor, aspiring to transition from one place to the other. Those 2 billion people, if we have any ethical value at all, we should be helping transition from where they are to where we are. So the problem that we face over the next 30 – 50yrs is how to do that without totally wrecking the planet. And that’s the end view. As soon as you confront that, it becomes incredibly overwhelming. But actually that’s the biggest elephant in the room, that’s what we’re actually addressing, and that’s what the combination of these two presentations is nibbling away at.

Jennifer: I’d like to say something very briefly about that. The best thing I’ve seen about that, I went to see someone I went to grad school with, who’s now in Georgia, Paul Baer, who wrote the Greenhouse Development Rights Framework. He gets to kind of the root of that and talks about the Gordian knot of addressing all of those dimensions together. And I think you’re absolutely right, it creates this cognitive, oh my god, this is so huge.

Speaker: Let me just make 2 points about complex systems. One is that the Earth systems as a complex systems is now, in some fundamental sense, human dominated. Or at least human action is a very major driving force. And I think that in evolutionary terms, they have a hard time in terms of that. That is to acknowledge at some fundamental level that human action is a key or fundamental driving force. And so there’s a need to make some very profound transition in terms of who we are, and what our position in the system is. We’ve come a long way from hunter-gatherer situation, which by the way dominates 98% of human experience, in which the system was dominant, and we were trying somehow or other to make a living within the context of the system being dominant. And so we need a very profound sort of transition. The 2nd point is in respect to complex and dynamic systems. They are very much characterized by emergent properties. And emergent properties are to some significant degree, unpredictable. Especially when you move out of the Holocene, which was 10,000yrs of fairly stable, fairly benign conditions, which is the entire experience of modern civilization, into a world which is considerably less predictable, and considerably more subject to surprises of one kind or another. And this means we have to learn ways of living with uncertainty. And that’s a very hard challenge for human beings as we’ve evolved over the last 50 – 100,000yrs, to find ourselves in a situation where uncertainty and surprise is the normal condition. And where we probably can’t change that in the sense of exherting control to

make things fully predictable. So the challenge is for us to find was to coexist with uncertainty, and not to collapse with the ability to function in a system of that kind.

Jennifer: Maybe just a brief comment on that. I think that’s a core point that really ties together our 2 talks. Sometimes the way I put it is, unfortunately, we’re discovering 2 things at once. We were stuck in this modernist, early scientific revolution view for so long, as our kind of primary mode of thinking, even though parts of our thinking have been changing all throughout the 20th century and even before. But very suddenly, because of all the nonlinear processes around us, we’re discovering 2 things at us. One is that we have incredible powers of destruction. And we’ve already done a lot of it. And the 2nd thing is that, at the same time as a species (and maybe it’s too late, we’re passing thresholds...) we’re getting this 2nd lesson of emergence. Which is that we have incredible power to change. If you look back on the history of societies, there have been moments where we’ve made radical changes to the entire structures of our societies. Technological…

Renee: I guess my feeling is that that’s absolutely true, and that’s sort of the mantra that we hear in sustainability. I’m not at all putting it down. It’s really emphasizing our human ingenuity and our capacity to change and to grow. What we’re still missing and what we’re still not wanting to look at, is precisely what it means to support and cultivate the capacity for tolerating and meeting uncertainty constructively. Because that’s actually what’s at the core of what you’ve just articulated, and I think we know intuitively, is that uncertainty is a whole lot of stuff. That unless we can skillfully navigate it, we will be screwed.

Jennifer: I totally agree. And that’s it, navigating these 2 things at once is a psychological blow of immense proportions.

Renee: We need to have space for that blow, or else that can go and spiral into incredible misanthropic kind of guilt, you know, we’re fucked.

Jennifer: One of the things that helps me when I start feeling like I’m spiraling, is that I imagine I’m sitting there with one of those people in Somalia, in 2011, you see photos of people incredibly skinny lying on the ground. They would say, maybe instead of buying a Prius you need to buy a bicycle. It changes the reference points, it changes the whole discussion radically. And that helps me deal with the psychological impact I feel. Because it helps me deal with the different kinds of changes that might matter more to more people in the world including us in 20yrs or so.

Valerie: I wanted to comment on this debate. And I think in our rich countries we have grown up for a few generations with the illusion that we can control environment. We heat in winter, we cool in summer, we spend a lot of energy for that. The price to pay now is that we effect the global environment. The implications are huge. What we call “natural disasters,” they could be manmade. So it has huge implications on the way we see these connections between what we do and what are the impacts. I’m a paleoclimatologist, I work on long timescales. The human being is ancient, it emerged during the ice ages. We know good adaptation strategies, like migration. And I believe that our brain, this old brain, that’s the brain of a predator, and a very strong one. Thinking of how to act against this old predator brain, I really think the only way to counter that is through empathy. Empathy between

different countries, empathy also between different generations. I would like to hear your view on the empathy versus predator conflict, maybe.

Speaker: I’m thinking about psychology. I identify with the predator, I think. In the sense of, well I don’t want to change, I want what I want. Maybe there’s all that fear of loss, ambiguity, etc. But I’m not even there, and I’m into psychology, I’m an activist, I’m not stupid, but I’m basically thinking, I do what I do. I take planes, I drive a car, I pay my taxes. I give my donations, sometimes I buy used clothes, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I care, sometimes I don’t. So I think about myself, and how do I change? I think that’s why I’m saying in the moment I feel guilty, but I don’t care, I don’t want to change. I grew up in America, individualism is a huge part of how I grew up and how we all grew up. I grew up in the academic system, I’m right you’re wrong, that’s a huge part of me also. I’m dedicated to my own belief systems. Anyways, all I’m wondering about, which you’re trying to address, and I really appreciate that, is, me times billions. I’m getting hopeless actually, I just needed to say it.

Jennifer: Thank you so much. I think many of us really feel that in some way or another and I really appreciate you bringing that out into the discussion.

Jeff: I just want to follow up on Valerie’s comment. And this actually is moving into this afternoon, in terms of the transformations that are going to be required for us to get out of this problem. And I also think empathy must play a central role to that solution pathway. You know, clinically, there’s a study that’s done every 10yrs, it’s been going on for 30 or 40yrs, and the question is, what’s the most important aspect of the therapeutic process in healing the client. And of course, if you go out, there are hundreds of different approaches, theories, books filled with approaches, techniques. But decade after decade, the same thing is found to play the most important role in the therapeutic process, and it is the empathic connection that is developed between the therapist and the client. That is, bar none, the key to therapeutic process. Technique, methods, theory, are secondary. And so, what we now know from neuroscience is why this is happening. But the point is, it’s our ability to connect with others, and to care about others that heals all of us. For me, there is the connection between us as human beings. But there’s also that empathic connection, or lack thereof, to the Earth itself, or other forms of life on Earth. Which has been really transformed. We’re no longer in that sort of relationship that we were in for thousands of years. That’s also something that needs to be healed. And before that’s healed, it’s going to be really tough to solve this problem. For me, it’s the human ability to care about each other that’s at the essence of solving this problem. There’s the hope.

Renee: Thanks. Can I say something. This raises the question for me around, and there’s quite a lot of discussion right now how empathy can be developed and cultivated and encouraged, can we teach empathy, it’s a really happening piece right now, and I guess for me my feeling is that that’s one of the key offerings that clinical psychology does give us. I’ve been experimenting with how that would look outside of a clinical setting. How that would look in the environmental campaign. Because I kind of see a profound failure to practice empathy, the environmental movement has alienated thousands and millions of people by not empathizing properly with what this experience, information actually means for us. So I’m experimenting and thinking about what it would mean to take that and translate that to a non clinical setting. So let’s imagine a campaign that actually says what the therapist says to the patient,

which is acknowledgement. So it’s like yeah, I bet you’re feeling really overwhelmed right now. You can’t know, because how can you actually know how thousands of millions of people are thinking. But what would happen if we took some risks and actually said, you know what, this is hard. I’m just thinking about, in terms of scale, how can we scale up this, because I don’t think we’re going to be in a place where everyone is caring about everyone else in the near future, right? I don’t see it. Socially, culturally, there has to be a lot to support that.

Speaker: I just wanted to offer, I’m not a historian, but if anyone is here, I’d be interested in your thoughts, but this is almost a moment where charismatic leadership can just kind of change the trajectory of human thought. I was struck by a comment last night, I think Jeff said, I think we’re in the terrain of changing paradigms, and I think that’s where we seem to be waiting. And I’m looking for analogs in history where we’ve seen these shifts, and as I said I’m not a historian, and I’m hard pressed to think of them. I’m thinking from hunter-gatherer to industrial revolution, you have these enlightenment moments, there’s a lot of these things and I don’t know if we’ve harvested those well to really understand the elements that make these shifts occur. I’m sure there’s an ideational component, I’m sure there’s a technological, but when do we get those moments, and when do we have the ingredients, which I think we do around this issue, to really make those moments in a more deliberate way. And maybe this is where the complexity and all the other things come together.

Jeff: For me, the example I think of is the Civil Rights movement. I mean, think about it. Rosa Parks decides one day not to go to the back of the bus. That’s the point, that’s the tipping point, in a socially complex, non-linear system. So a, an individual decides no, today I’m not going to sit in the back of the bus. And it ignites. Today, if somebody had a cell phone on that bus, it would have been on Youtube and it would have been viral in a day or two. And that, by the way, is how technology can spread information a rate which probably none of us could have foreseen years ago. When I start to feel the hopelessness or the despair, I start to look at cases in history. I’m old enough, I walked to thinking, well, is somebody going to press the button today. Is this the day somebody pushes the button. When you got to school, it drills by getting under your desk or going down into the bomb shelters, and that’s the anxiety our generation lived with every day. Nuclear annihilation. It didn’t happen yet, but the chances of it happening have been vastly diminished. These are the points in history where social transformation can occur.

Speaker: Can we not, and I think people are trying, orchestrate these moments in a much more deliberate way.

Speaker: What are the distinctions between these types of historical analogies that are within social systems and how that might apply to the social-ecological systems which are really different in many ways.

Jennifer: Absolutely. I think we should take a break just for a couple moments just because this session is almost over, and in our last 40 minutes we can maybe just highlight a few points and wrap up a discussion. Just a few minutes for a stretch break or a bathroom break if needed.

Break

Jennifer: I think there’s still a couple of people in the hall, but what I wanted to suggest for this last part is that maybe we can hear from people who haven’t spoken as much, sort of wasn’t able to exress their full point. I think Howard, I felt like you didn’t get your full share of time. Anyone who didn’t get a chance to just up on one of the many theme from this morning, it would be wonderful to hear your voices, before we conclude.

Speaker: Well, you know, Renee mentioned that sustainability and environmental work has often fallen into this trap of cheerleading, and trying to provide the easy way out, changing light bulbs or whatever. I just question, when we look at historical analogies around civil rights or other positive examples that we might look at. I just want to raise the question that that might not be apt. And social-ecological questions might be fundamentally different from other social questions such as war or interpersonal social relationships. I just wanted to make sure we put that on the table. How? Well, the uncertainties are so much greater. We have these psychological factors as part of our comprehension and part of our conversation about everything that’s going on around climate. And we also must admit that with social-ecological interactions, those with nature, that this is at the core of everything that philosophy has been about. The climate situation is forcing us to reflect on the role of humans in nature in a way that is fundamental to our being, that in some ways is a scale level different, or in addition to the challenges, as big as they have been, among humans.

Renee: I just want to respond that I 100% agree, and one of the things I say when I’m opening up a talk is to say that climate is about existential issues, and they are of a totally different order than what we’ve encountered before in terms of our temptation to look for historical antecedents to mobilization that we can learn bits and pieces from examples about mobilization, but we are looking at something which is at a profoundly different order, which is precisely why I think it’s important that we become more sophisticated in our understanding of fear and anxiety and uncertainty. Because I think it goes to our ontological and epistemic levels which is questioning how do we know what we know, and what does is mean to be. And I think that’s precisely what’s at stake with CC and sustainability. And that’s my critique of sustainability. It’s not to say that we don’t need positive inspiration, because we know that humans do respond to inspiration, and we know that innovation is really juicy and sexy and critical. But when we actually dissociate why we’re actually doing this in the 1st place, which is the bad stuff, the horrific stuff, then I believe that there’s an unconscious associate which is always going to drag us down because we’re not able to fully reconcile with that. So this is my critique of the positive rah-rah, is that as long as we’re missing out. And that’s the question that comes up, and I don’t know what it looks like, I have some ideas of what it looks like, which is perhaps a light touch to say yeah, we’re doing this because of that. Not to say we have to dwell on that and force people to have to stay at pictures of oil-drenched birds. There’s a skillfulness involved, where at least we’re recognizing what we already know to be the case. This is where the psychological perspective can be profoundly helpful. The challenge that I’m finding is culturally, the cultural challenge within sustainability, and the work that you’ve been involved with, people are very solutions-oriented, and very practically oriented, don’t want to hear about this stuff. And may not even recognize that there’s a need for it. And that’s my challenge and where I’m really stuck, struggling.

Jennifer: Can I jump in?

Renee: I think Howard wanted to respond.

Jennifer: I know, but I think it’s really important to respond. Again, yes, and. One of the lessons from the talk last night was that things are also happening on the ground. So is it possible for us, and I throw this out as a challenge, because I know for myself I feel like this is necessary but it’s an open question for each person. I feel like we need to be doing activism and knowledge-building and deep democracy discussions and psychological awareness of our feelings all at the same time, but CC, there is this positive feedback aspect that changes are occurring quickly. A flipside of the global situation is to look at the issue of responsibility. Yes we have a responsibility to have a deep coping with our own psychological state, but the psychological distress from people who are already being displaces, the 1/3, the millions of Pakistanis and Australians who were displaced by floods. Hundreds of thousands of people throughout Texas and Russia, all over the world, people have been suffering from extreme weather over the past few years, they had their psychological distress too. For me it’s really a question of yes, and, we need to move ahead. And with that I’d like to really again, we’d love to hear from anyone who hasn’t spoken yet to get any last points in the room.

Speaker: Carl Jung said the root cause of all mental illness is an unwillingness to feel legitimate suffering, which I think includes the kinds of suffering and mental illnesses which I think we have to change, relate to, what you’re saying. Related to that, research from one of the institutes at Stanford University has shown that fundraising that focuses on pictures of oil-drenched birds and starving babies isn’t effective anymore. People just click their mouse and send that image away. What’s more effective is images of people who are doing something that’s actually helping them make a change. And that’s great because they also alleviate the uncomfortable feeling, like at least I’ve done something. Which is complicated, as people mentioned with Priuses, which has come up several times. But there’s research on the economics of those kinds of decisions, that people will spend a few hundreds of dollars more for a more efficient car. But they’ll spend thousands more if it’s a status symbol, if it looks different. So, we’re not really there in terms of investing in stuff. One more thing. This just appeared on the website on the website of the Heartland people yesterday. And it’s really effective in terms of the message it gets across. In terms of a role, it’s a powerful role. And in some ways I want to retain empathy for the people who put this message out which is challenging sometimes. “CC itself is already in the process of definitively rebutting climate alarmists who think human use of fossil fuel is causing ultimately catastrophic global warming.” And they’re referring to the conference they just had. “The conference featured serious natural science contrary to the political science you hear from government-financed global warming alarmists seeking to justify a widely expanded regulatory and taxation powers for government bodies.” And this is powerfully effective communications. Science-based information and facts is not powerfully effective communications, unfortunately.

Speaker: What is effective, what you’re saying?

Speaker: It might be that things that are more positively-oriented are more effective, that actually help alleviate people’s feelings, as much as it is complicated because we also need to be able to be more open to those feelings. To be open to make sustainable change, but at the same time we need to make

them go away, because those are the messages that most of us are going to hook onto. They’re the easier messages.

Jennifer: Maybe it’s a shame that I didn’t get to the positive examples of the places where some of these synergistic approaches are working. Other people who haven’t spoken yet?

Jeff: I just wanted to respond- Stanford… I think a better way to say it is a delivery of scientific information is necessary. It’s not sufficient to make transformation happen, but it is necessary.

Alexander: I just wanted to appreciate actually, I think there’s like, from what I’m feeling there’s a tension happening between a side that says, this the way to make change, and no this is the way to make change. And I somehow feel like all of the different ways are important to make change, and I want to appreciate all of the different ways. We have different ways of coping, we have different talents we bring to the table, so I think that maybe the point is, maybe to come together, to make change together, instead of figuring out which way is more important. Renee, you started to say something a while back there, I think, about addressing people and how it’s hard. And I imagined there was an add on the TV that said something like, we’re struggling, it’s hard, let’s come together. And to me, I respond to that. And maybe this is what we’re also saying, in the moment maybe I’m doing the same thing. But at the same time it’s hard to respond intellectually to the really awful things that are happening. To bring in the feeling, it’s horrifying, it’s painful, I’m at a loss, someone just hold my hand or give me a hug or something. And I think that’s the sort of thing, in a way, maybe that’s the gift of this, that we’re going to come together in a way, a global community somehow.

Renee: I think it takes a lot of courage to make that happen. It’s my fantasy to see a massive campaign like that. If anyone has any ideas or connections to big add firms. I think it’s a huge risk, but at the same time, it feels to me, again going back to what Jeff said, you’re a client in a consulting room, you’re dealing with addiction, a partner has just died, you’re dealing with some really horrible stuff. What’s the 1st thing that the therapist does, they listen and acknowledge. And then there’s the piece that comes after acknowledgement, which is what you said, which is that we will work on this together. And it seems so bizarre, to take from that clinical, therapeutic moment, and see how it can be extended beyond that. And it’s my dream that we can do that. But it takes a risk, because we don’t actually know, I don’t really know what you’re actually feeling. I just have to empathize in some imprecise way and see what lands.

Chris: I’ll be very brief. Just 2 points. Talking to behavioral scientists, in my institution, they tell me that behavioral change can often be forced by legislation, and then people rationalize it afterwards. For example, seatbelt legislation, or anti-smoking legislation. Now, I agree that the timing has to be right for it, this sort of mood music has to be right for it, but persuading people rationally that they should recycle is not the way you do it. You introduce laws and regulations or what have you. I know this is antithetical to the neoliberal freedom whatever. And then afterwards, people will tell you why they’re doing it, but they would not have done it in the 1st place. So there are ways that you can cut through some of this it seems. There’s a very interesting article, I can’t remember the author now, analyzing the way journalists take this very abstract issue of climate science or CC, and write articles that people read.

They can’t assume that anybody out there in their readership has the collateral knowledge to really understand all of the nuances and all of the technicalities, but what they start with is they say, all of my readership has got emotions. This piece of analysis pars a whole load of media coverage and said, let’s look for the hooks. And there were 5 hooks, there were nostalgia, hope, fear, collectivism, and something else. But as soon as you had that pattern, you could read any article and go oh here comes the nostalgic bit. So the journalists either intuitively or explicitly, knowingly, formed the narrative that would key into people’s emotions. Now, they weren’t trying to change behavior, they were simply trying to get people to read their article. What worries me about that is that that becomes a powerful technique. But then there’s an ethical issue that you tend to veer towards propaganda if you intend to exploit that understanding. So, there’s another layer here, the ethics. If you begin to understand what goes on in people’s heads, you need to have a very good understanding of your own ethical position. If you’ve got that power, before you begin to exploit it.

Speaker: Thank you. I just wanted to respond earlier to what Jeff was talking about in terms of the key is our ability to care for others, our empathy. Because that’s an enormous shift for North American culture, European culture, and so on. Particularly the North American, it’s a shift from the individual to the communal. It’s an enormous shift. But I wanted to add an even bigger one. Because sometimes when you add a bigger one, it’s simpler to see the smaller one. The even bigger one is, we need to develop our ability to care for nature, to care for the Earth. I’m very happy to see that we have a dog in our group this morning. And maybe we could listen to the dog at some point. Because I think North American culture, generally, is enormously anthropocentric. The major religion, in North America and Europe, is an anthropocentric religion. It also happens to be male centered, but that’s another issue. But we need to somehow get an enormous cultural leap that will take us out of our focus on us as homo sapiens. Because if we don’t do that, we won’t survive. That’s not a new thing, that’s an old thing, because we know how to do it. It is part of us. We are part of the system we’re talking about. We’re not separate. That’s an absolutely key thing to come back to, that we care for the Earth.

Speaker: I just wanted to unpack a little bit what you said earlier about I believe Renee, what you said earlier about advocating for change in a way that acknowledges compassionately people’s feelings. As a member of the environmental movement, I find it a bit difficult because there is not one therapeutic stance, in a therapeutic relationship with your client. One is empathy and acknowledgement, the other is confrontation. And so if you imagine that your client is one who abused his child, you would use both in a judicious mixture. So, in the global environment, we don’t have that cop-art. We missed that. So the environmental movement, I agree with you, has overemphasized the confrontation. But I’m also worried that we may over-emphasize the other side, they need to be balanced.

Heline: I had a big reaction earlier on, and I couldn’t get into the conversation to share it, so I just want to say something about it now, thinking we could come back to it in the afternoon session. I had a big reaction actually when Chris spoke about the millions of people who were coming. I couldn’t understand exactly what was being said, but in my body I felt kind of angry and agitated. Seeing as we’re trying to bring in the affective levels of conversation, I wanted to say as a meta-comment that often when we’re speaking in public or we’re having these debates, there’s more than one message coming, there’s the content level of what we’re saying, and then there’s something else, that might be something like, oh

my god this is so bad, if we don’t do something about it right away. And then on the other side, because that message isn’t actually identified with, there’s a physical reaction and the conversation actually can’t proceed. There’s these levels. I love what this session has brought in, just acknowledging in a public practice how difficult it is in a public forum to bring your whole self in- your emotional reactions in a way that’s transparent and kind of vulnerable. Having a reaction like that, I didn’t know what it meant, I didn’t know what the other person really said, how could I bring it in, I didn’t really understand it. Something about vulnerability to me is really important. In the background of the anxiety and the denial. That we’re embodied creatures and we’re dependent on each other and the environment, that we’re dependent on that. Someone says something and I have a reaction, I care about it, just all of that is part of the complexity and I love that we’re starting to talk about it.

Catherine: If you could summarize the main points so we could bring that to the next session.

Jennifer: I’ve been taking notes on the highlights and there are so many… I’ll talk about a few. Ok, a couple of key points that I had mentioned. One is that I wanted to bring to the conversation gives us a few lessons. One is that by seeing and admitting to the great complexity of issues and specifically how they’re interdependent on each other, how we can’t neglect any of them. On the one hand, it can help us look at some aspects of systems-wide approaches. And that might mean not just that each individual person can do that in their head but we might have to work towards more collaboration, trans-disciplinary discussion. Not that everyone has to be a trans-disciplinary scholar, but many one in ten to be a trans-disciplinary person, and thinker, and that we have to really figure out a way to work with this. Renee really brought to the table the deep significance of knowing ourselves at this moment. The deep significance of coping, sharing, and you know, dealing with the psychological aspects of these issues we are facing. There were so many really wonderful points from the audience. One is that human action is at the core and that’s what we need to grapple with. At this point in history that’s something we’ve acknowledged and complexity theories help bring this to light. We have incredible power, in a way that we were in denial about for hundreds of years in our previous world view. But at the same time we’re really getting the lesson that we also have incredible power to change. People brought up the key point of empathy, that empathy is really the key point to this process. And, people started to talk about some of the difficulties, and I think we really got to a sophisticated place in this conversation. People really mentioned specifics towards the end Chris brought up the idea of Gordian knots and some policy and actions and ideas have started looking at ways to cut through them, these synergistic solutions that I’ve been exploring. One of the last points on what caring is, the gentleman in the back mentioned that caring is partly a shift from the individual to the communal, and that would impact the way we look at psychology as part of all of this. That we have to shift from our anthropocentric religion and world view to an eco-centric one that incorporates the reality of all species and life outside of ourselves, that gets beyond narcissism. And finally people brought up the point of using psychological approaches using empathy and confrontational approaches, I’m curious about what that might mean politically, etc. as well as psychologically. Population, and our feeling about population. I think it’s beautiful that we ended on the final note of our human vulnerability and how this might enlighten our thinking and actions on the future.

Renee: The only thing I would mention that stood out to me personally was this idea of how psychological insight. And when I say psychological I really do mean clinically psychological insight can be leveraged and presented in a way that would be a resource for those who are working in, Catherine mentioned her experience teaching Earth Science, or teaching systems, that’s sort of something that I was picking up on personally, that there might be something there, and hearing Jeff’s comments, and it’s very encouraging to me to think about that. And staying open to what that might look like. Since none of us really know what that might look like. How psychological resources and insight, specifically out of clinical context, can be surfaced, translated, and leveraged, in ways that are potentially of service for those who are working in education and policy and so forth.

Catherine: I want to thank the facilitators for letting us talk so much. And thank everyone for coming and invite you to come back this afternoon. I’m originally disappointed to see 20 people in the room, but then the discussion is so rich, that maybe it was the right number. I wanted to make a comment on what I’m hearing from both sessions, yesterday and today. It feels like what we are looking at is a form of courage we need to have as a society to look at what the issues are, and really start facing them. Facing our fears, where the issues are. And working on them really thoroughly, and not be afraid. As Chris was saying yesterday, we have enough information now to act. And that’s what we need to do. Whatever, whichever way we find to get the action done. And that’s personally why I wanted to have this meeting, to get something moving, and to relate it to system complexity, I’m really hoping that something will emerge out of this. I’m really hoping that we are setting something in motion where we will have an emerging process, an emerging phenomenon that will happen. We don’t have to sit in the back of the bus, we don’t have to burn ourselves, like the Tunisian vendor who initiated what happened in Tunisia and all of North Africa, Egypt. These are the little things that make things happen. So hopefully something will happen here, maybe not this time, maybe another time. And I think the key thing is to have courage maybe that we need to be vulnerable in public, vulnerable as a society. To accept that we have this vulnerability and let people know. It’s scary to do that with your therapist but it’s even scarier to do it in public. And we are hearing people who are trying to do that here. So I think it’s very encouraging. I personally need a lot of encouragement and hop these days, I feel a little depressed by the science. So thank you and see you again this afternoon.