Below is an email interview with Bill Hare, CEO & Senior Scientist at Climate Analytics
You can follow Bill on Twitter – @BillHareClimate
1. When did you first hear about climate change, and how? What was the Australian Conservation Foundation’s early position on it?
I heard about rising CO2 concentrations and climate change in high school from a geography teacher in the early 1970s.
What woke me up to it as a significant problem was an academic at University of Western Australia gave me a paper in nature in 1978 to look at. At first, I was sceptical, but the more I looked into it the more I became convinced it – fossil fuel CO2 induced climate warming – was a serious problem.
When I first joined the Australian Conservation Foundation climate change was not a theme. Stratospheric ozone depletion was an emerging problem, and I was pretty heavily briefed by CSIRO scientist at the time, notably Barrie Pittock. He also brought to my attention, a number of international publications on rising concern about global warming.
By the late 1980s, there were calls for a 20% reduction in C02 emissions by 2005 (the Toronto target). If I recall correctly the ACF lined up behind those calls in various submissions and press commentary.
At the same time, we were also calling for a phase out of chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone-depleting substances to combat stratospheric ozone depletion.
2. Australian policy elites first started to have their attention properly drawn to the issue almost 30 years ago, in 1986, with the public following in 1988.
Yes, there was the 1987 CSIRO conference, and that I think marks the beginning of formal attention to this issue
I had a paper at this conference with my colleague at the time Helen Quilligan
Since then, there have been fierce battles over even the most elementary of policy instruments (carbon pricing and support for renewables).
Yes, and at the level of macroeconomic policy, the view by the late 1980s in Australia was that the country had a lot to benefit from exporting coal and other resources to North East Asia, including China.
This became quite a dominant view and provided a justification of much of what happened in the 1990s and beyond.
Hawke in responding to this report, recognised the environmental challenges that would come from a massive expansion of and made the claim that
“And let me make this point. My Government does not accept the simplistic dichotomy – development or the protection of the environment. We must have both. And our record shows that we can have both.”
The ecologically sustainable development process that he set up however, failed to substantially impact the direction and scale of environmental protection in Australia. Paul Keating had a little interest in this when he assumed the role of prime minister and there’s process became completely moribund, under pressure from the resource development lobby and relevant agencies of government.
Climate policy was essentially non-existent, and opposition to action inside government federally was widespread and intensive.
One fairly standard academic view is that this is what you’d expect of a country with enormous fossil fuel reserves and a powerful mining industry.
That is very fatalistic view. Is that what had to be? I’m not so sure – ecological modernisation, under the umbrella of the Ecologic development process was aimed at industrial power. I don’t think it had to end up the way it did.
Looking back at this period, I don’t think the extent of capture of the political parties by the fossil fuel industry was anywhere near as advanced as it is now.
Is that too fatalistic? Does that let the politicians, other business and civil society off the hook?
I think it lets politicians off the hook and does not properly contextualise the rapacious behaviour of Australia is mining, resources industry and fossil fuel industry. I think the Murdoch press played a very significant and destructive roll in all this over the last 20 or 30 years.
It’s hard to comment on the role of civil society.
(And if this academic view is not a good explanation, what is a better one?)
I don’t know how ground breaking it is to describe the blinding obvious in retrospect.
It might have helped if a lot more academics has spoken up about the adverse direction of Australia on climate action over the years.
3. Without getting bogged down, what could and should have been done differently,
Well, it depends on ones view of history. Is it historically determined that in 2013 Australia elected a government that would repeal groundbreaking climate legislation and policies and start a decade of denial?
If this legislation has not been repealed, then I think we would be in a substantially different place. Then we are now, probably one somewhat behind the European Union, but with a range of different policy instruments in place that could be improved.
and – crucially – what could and should ‘campaigners’ (broadly defined so as to include renewables companies etc) do differently in the short-to-medium term to try to accelerate policy and technology change towards something that might be considered adequate.
Well, there are a number of things that need to be focused on, and these include working to establish the right long-term policy frameworks, fearlessly hold government to account on their policies and actions, continue the campaign to convince people of the wisdom and benefits of climate policy action, make sure people understand the risks coming from global warming and to upgrade communication efforts in this area.
It is very important that NGOs and academics are fully independent of government and special or pecuniary interests, particularly in the Australian context interest in offsets. Unfortunately, there seems to be quite a pattern of interest that may conflict.
It is also very important that NGOs are brave and fearless, and do not concern themselves overly with the health of the Labour Party internally, nor prioritise, access to ministers over, maintaining a strong and consistent position on the right things to do. In the end, and my experience, mature government will listen even if I don’t like the message they are at first.
4. Personal question – where do you get your hope/tenacity from? (If it’s a special Amazon delivery, what’s the URL for that!!)
One has to have hope, and as soon as one becomes cynical it’s time to leave the field. Surprising as it might seem, I get a lot of energy from the science of this issue. Yes, the news is very depressing, but if one focuses on what can be done and how fast then one can see a way forward. In addition, the massive role out of renewables, electric vehicles and batteries has to give rise to hope that we can bend the curve fast enough. At the end of the day, the problem is too serious to give up and to serious to surrender hope
The latest interview with a reader of All Our Yesterdays. If you want to do an interview, or want to nominate someone to be interviewed, let me know via drmarchudson@gmail.com
1. Who are you and what do you “do” around climate change campaigning (can answer both ‘personally’ and professionally
Hi, thanks for asking. I’m an OBGYN and began reading about the climate crisis in 2008 –the year my twins were born. I lived in Southern California from 2010 until 2021 and during that time I saw marked changes in the landscape and hydrology in the area, and very few people talking about it. In 2020 the Bobcat fire raged behind my house and for weeks we were told to be ready to evacuate, the air quality was horrific and we truly couldn’t even walk outside save for essential transport, like going to work or the grocery store. The fire eventually burned 115k acres and it really scared me, physically and mentally. I had been working the majority of my career as a physician on issues around gender equity, and I realized that there was a necessary intersection between women’s and maternal health equity, reproductive justice, and the climate crisis, and decided to focus my efforts in my spare time learning about how temperature affects preterm births, how wildfire affects lung function, how phthalates in plastics affect birth weight, preterm birth, and cancer, and many other consequences to living in a society dependent on fossil fuel, whether as energy or as consumer products, and that both were having profound effects on human health. Another doctor and I started OBGYNs for Sustainable Future focused on assisting the medical field to decarbonize and study the intersection of the climate and fossil fuel crisis and human and maternal health.
2. When and how did you first hear about climate change and when and how did it move from an “ooh, that sounds bad” to “holy fucking SHIT”
Great question, I used to have nightmares when I lived in California, that I would get into the shower and no water would come out. And I had that dream over and over again. I remember in 2006 hearing about climate change and drought on the NPR show Marketplace, but it was far off. The first time I started thinking about in a serious way was about 15 years ago – it was an article about ocean acidification, and I remember thinking that based on the math, the Great Barrier Reef would be nearly dead by the time my kids graduated high school, nor would I spend the jet fuel, CO2, to go see it. And that was a revelation: that things in this world will disappear soon, in our lifetimes, due to our consumptive extractivist lifestyles and our absent understanding of ecology. I’ve been reading more and more since that article, listening, learning. Now I lecture on the topic of climate change and health. The question is: how many people have felt the terror of all that we are poised to lose? I would argue not enough. Not a fraction of enough.
3. What can we learn from the long long history of unsuccessful campaigning and scientific warnings (a theme of All Our Yesterdays). What do campaigners/activists/concerned citizens need to do differently?
Another excellent question. I do think talking to people (friends, neighbors, colleagues) helps. I know I feel reenergized especially when I speak to others that understand the severity of the situation. Call us doomers, call us climate realists, I don’t care what the label is, I care that people understand the science and are willing to speak openly about the implications of the science. To be sure children and young adults may need some protection from the catastrophe unfolding, but adults? Nah. It makes me furious when I see smart people downplay the severity in the name of keeping the public calm. Like we’re children? If civil society is going to break when they understand what is inevitable, then that society wasn’t built to endure, which, I would argue, our society is very fragile and not built to endure. Would you not tell a patient whose MRI shows invasive cancer that she doesn’t have cancer? No, you wouldn’t, that would be paternalistic. I think civil disobedience helps, and I have given hundreds of dollars to Climate Defiance for their work, I think it’s impactful. I think the media could do a much better job, as we saw media coverage of the crisis in the U.S. was down in 2023, the hottest year in 125,000. Make that make sense? We need more stories connecting the world of Dune and that of Earth, what would a world devoid of plants and water mean, and how many people could it support? Spoiler, not many! I think the language of degrowth needs to get louder. People need to be shown that an economy (maybe 1/10000000th of the size) could exist without extraction.
4. What projects/events have you got coming up in the near future that you want to give a shout out to.
I am doing a local talk at a library in April. I’m interviewing an expert on the connection between phthalate exposure and preterm birth, among other ills when we eat, breathe and are constantly ingesting plastic. I’m also working on an editorial, that may become a book, about how essential it is to equate climate justice and reproductive justice. Contraception and education are imperative so that women and girls have the ability to choose if and when they want to have a child in this crisis. People say, “but having a child is an act of hope,” but hope can’t feed you when crops fail due to drought and floods. The patriarchy, a system that has operated for 10,000+ years, cannot continue. We cannot continue to subjugate women and girls to a system that has forced or encouraged them to have children for the church, for the state, for capitalism, for tribal government and systems. Reproductive justice is climate justice. Women and girls’ bodies are not anyone’s to write a personal or societal agenda on. People complaining that society will collapse if women stop having children… who will support the old people? If the system can’t support elders because too much is siphoned off in profits for a tiny minority, then the problem is the system, not women. A universal income would go a long way to supporting the elderly. But we can’t have universal income because then how would Mark Zuckerberg afford a 300 million yacht. The top 1% in the world own 30% of the world’s wealth. That is a system designed to collapse. Not the problem of women and girls to fix for ya’ll. I want to give a shout out to Nandita Bajaj at Population Balance. I’ve been taking a course through Antioch University with her and others and I’ve learned a lot of about capitalism, forced birth, pronatalism, speciesism, ecocide and what it would mean to downsize in order that natural ecosystems can flourish alongside human flourishing.
1. Who are you, what do you do and how/when did you become aware of climate change specifically?
I’m Ben King, born in South Derbyshire 50 years ago, and I probably first heard about changing climates during my undergraduate Environmental Science degree at Stirling University (1991-95). During my soil erosion PhD research at Exeter University (1995-1998) I made no mention of climate change and I don’t remember much focus on the issues. My awareness grew through engagement with other scientists and teachers on Twitter from around 2010. Since then I have done my best to self-educate and also to impart an understanding of climate change to the thousands of students I have taught at Churston Ferrers Grammar School – especially since my involvement with EduCCate Global since 2019.
I was approached by Melanie Harwood of eduCCate Global (via Twitter) in 2019 and she encouraged me and thousands of teachers across the World to take the accredited United Nations courses on Climate Change and to push for whole-school change; this led to my school TLR position as Co-Lead for Sustainability and I also talked (via Zoom) at the COP26 Climate Change conference. Since then, I appeared on local TV with my Year 11s, and I have presented to various interested groups in Devon, from Totnes Town Council, Torbay Council, our local river catchment management group, Devon Youth Parliament and a group of amateur astronomers. My involvement with eduCCate Global also led to a BBC Radio Devon interview, about Climate Change Teachers. Great to get the word out there!
2. What’s been your experience of Climate Twitter- what is useful, what is not so useful….
Climate Twitter is very useful to me, in keeping up to speed with the facts and in tagging resources for my GCSE and A-level lessons in particular. Also for my regular lunchtime Sustainability Club at CFGS. We recently joined-up with another local school and local film-maker Les Veale to show his short film based on Climate Futures and to hold a live Q & A session with George Monbiot.
3. You teach young people – what is your sense of their thoughts, and (how) have their views on climate change evolved over the years you’ve been paying attention?
Most of the children I teach really care about C C, but they feel helpless. In fact, when we study climate change, many of them struggle to focus on the issue; I put this down to their feelings of anxiousness and powerlessness. I therefore focus on positive framing and how everyone can make a positive influence in the World. I am very proud of some of our most active Sustainable Leaders, who have campaigned for reducing meat consumption, for more efficient lighting at school, and many of our younger students have worked with my fellow Sustainability Lead, Jo Parkes, to organise pre-loved Clothes Sales, raising money for environmental charities.
4. Tuba? When? How?
Tuba playing started for me at the age of eight. For over 40 years it has been a brilliant companion and a way for me to switch-off from my academic studies and my teaching. It’s a wonderful way to meet people and it has given me some amazing opportunities.
The weekly interviews resume! A couple of weeks ago I met a wonderful person at a very good public meeting. She kindly agreed to answer some questions…
a) Who are you? Where were you born, where did you grow up and when did you first start to think that there were serious environmental problems ahead? Was it a book, a TV show, a friend?
I am a baby boomer, born in 1947 in Adelaide.
b) When did you first become aware of the climate element of the environmental problems, and how.
I had assumed that one day I might have a child or two, but when a colleague introduced me to books he was using as resources to teach geography in 1971, I started reading them: The Club of Rome’s ‘The Limits to Growth’ and ‘The Population Bomb’ amongst them. Paul Erlich visited South Australia around that time and has been several times since on speaking tours and, each time, I have been to hear him. He is utterly inspiring, and he was absolutely correct in his predictions in the late 1960s, for which he was derided at the time.
c) You mentioned that you chose not to have children because of the population crisis. That must have struck a lot of people as crazy, back then. What sorts of responses did you get. Given that you were only a woman, in an intensely patriarchal society, presumably a lot of the responses involved telling you you’d change your mind, that you were being hysterical etc etc?
I subsequently married the above mentioned colleague and we decided that, knowing what we knew, it would be irresponsible of us to make more people. At that time the ZPG movement was quite strong in South Australia, and we hoped that it might result in some sensible population policies from our government. It didn’t!. It fizzled. And since then I have been gob-smacked to go to environmental rallies where I see youngish couples trailing a swarm of children behind them. Don’t they understand that you can’t have a small footprint if you make more feet?! Several of our friends also realised, in the 70s and 80s, that population was a serious issue, but all of them eventually bred, leaving us on our own to bear the comments and criticism, such as being labelled selfish!!!!! Personally, I can’t think of an unselfish reason for having children. In fact, we both joined a short course being run by a woman doing research for her PhD on ‘voluntary child-free couples’. Most of the participants said they would probably have children, many of them saying they wanted to have someone to look after them in their old age!!!! They deserve to have their children migrate to the moon!
d) We don’t seem to have made a lot of progress, as a species, on these problems. What do you think are the reasons for that, and what is there that we could/should still do differently?
No. We haven’t made a lot of progress on population. I have had people say things like: ‘What difference can one person make?’ I saw a wonderful little cartoon a few years ago, showing a large crowd of people, each with an individual thought bubble above their head with the words ‘what can one person do?’
Movements like GetUp have started to shift awareness in certain sections of the population and created a movement in which we can pool our energy and resources to make a difference (so much so that Murdoch’s media have run relentless campaigns to bad-mouth us). I have also tried to explain to my friends, when asked where I’m going for my next holiday, that I haven’t had a passport for over 20 years and I don’t fly because it’s not good for the environment, to which some have replied: ‘I’m not giving up my OS holidays!’ However, they are all keen to look at my newly acquired Hyundai Ioniq 5 EV, and that is a great introduction to the whole subject of trying to save the planet.
e) anything else you’d like to say.
It seems to me that the problem is so big that people can’t relate to it personally, or understand that a small change in their habits could make a contribution. When the east coast of Australia burned so fiercely in 2019, 2020 and 2021, and then flooded devastatingly, it woke up a lot of people. We’re going to see a lot more of those events. The most recent federal election was really encouraging in that so many ‘safe’ Liberal seats were lost to independent candidates standing for the environment. So it’s not all doom and gloom, although I’m glad that I’m not likely to be around for more than another 20 years, but I fear for future generations.
Who are you, when did you first think of climate change “wow, this could be seriously bad news”?
I’m a nearly retired woman, who used to do web design and owned social media quote sites.
I’ve been aware of the Climate problem since the late 1970’s. My father was a Civil Engineer who worked for the government and he designed some of the first solar panels on government buildings in Canada *old style rubber tubing, and so there were discussions about energy conservation and sustainability in my family home. I remember writing an essay in high school on the destruction of the Amazon Rainforest. I became a “mostly vegan” in the 1980’s because I believed our agricultural systems were not sustainable. I would tell people that and I’d get a blank stare, but now it is understood to be the truth.
I went to University to study Nutrition and Biochemistry at Guelph and I was very interested in aspects of food production relating to veganism. It had a very good agricultural college and I was what they call an “Aggie” – as the food and nutrition program was part of that. I left University at the end of my 3rd year to raise my child and never went back. She had special needs and I wanted to be with her all the time growing up. I wanted to focus on her.
It hit me how bad it had become, the Climate Emergency, when I came on Twitter in 2016, I started reading more articles from independent journalists. When they called Code Red at the UN I started to read even more – started following more and more of the scientists and activists and then it really hit me. The thought was that this is “way out of control” and if I didn’t really understand – others didn’t yet know.
2. When did you start gaining expertise in memes/image making, and when did you decide to ‘specialise’ in climate emergency stuff?
When I was raising my daughter I started studying on my own web design and graphics. It was at first a hobby. For fun I created an ecard site for people connecting online – many romantic greeting cards and pop culture cards such as Austin Powers.. I got noticed by one of our big papers and got suddenly very popular and I just kind of went with it. I designed myspace layouts and had quote sites. I made a bit of money of the ads and I also worked the retail trade as a manager.
I had not made graphics for about a decade until I came on Twitter. First I was meme’ing the fascism in the States. Like many, Trump’s election threw me into a state where I seemed to need to know what was going on. How did this happen? Is the world really this far gone? I joined Twitter the day after he got elected. Then I realized it wasn’t the real big issue here. That yes, the fascism is of course horrifying but it has nothing on the Climate Emergency, so I switched gears.
3. What are some of your memes that you’re proudest of and why (technical difficulty, the impact they had etc).
I’m highly critical of my design work – honestly. I’m the first to say I’m a self-taught hack and I do “borrow” some imagery. If you see a crazy collage though with people on top of melting icebergs – that’s all mine. I make those when I just want to go somewhere calm. They are kind of like my knitting. A lot of work but the actual work is quite relaxing.
I just hope I honor the people and truth I meme. And I hope it helps people understand that might not know how bad it is and keep the narrative alive on Twitter and other places about what we are actually facing here.
What memes I find popular are when the scientists speak out about how bad it is. Those seem to be some of my most popular memes. I think I see an even greater increase in popularity lately. It’s a hard paradigm shift to go from believing a lot of the propaganda out there and then getting to the real truth about it. It isn’t like people don’t know there is a problem but when they see the “rates of change” and find out things like the models don’t include feedbacks and such – a lot of people are probably surprised like I once was. When they realize it is true they want to share. I think it’s important we still keep sharing as we hopefully continue to get more active out in the world with protest.
I do personally love to do digital portraits of activists and journalists etc. I follow. Some of the scientists are surprised to be meme’d and I’m thinking – oh my God you are heroes to the world. They should be our celebrities. Same with the activists. Scientists are becoming more and more active – I love this. We need to lift up their voices because main media won’t. . People who are organizing protest like Roger Hallam , those are the voices I love to meme for example as well. . Anybody who speaks the truth I might meme. You don’t have to be famous. I’m really impressed by the wisdom and hearts of people who really want to help and have taken the time to understand. My heart aches somedays at how hard we are all trying. I can sometimes break down in the middle of a meme, or reading a tweet.
4. What advice would you give other meme-makers?
I wouldn’t. Because I’m not professionally trained. I used to hang in a graphics room with a bunch of professional designers and they gave me some advice, but then I never seem to follow it. I guess I’m just stubborn. But anyone CAN make a meme and for free. I’m working on a cheap ASUS computer and I use a site called pixlr.com . It’s free! If you like to play with words – all you need is a background.
5. What is the number one thing that (Australian?) politicians don’t understand about climate change?
Oh I’m of the mind that the politicians know just as much as we do , even more sometimes. I don’t think any of them are dullards. I just think they are ambitious. I think they are just in the “game of politics” – that power is their thing . I’m with Greta and many others that politicians are not going to save us. They service corporate power. This is the bane and tragedy of neoliberal politics for decades where we’ve let the market economy trump science and nature and human well being and here we are. “Fire, famine, toil and flood. Plastic in a baby’s blood.”
6. What next for you (and anything else you’d like to say).
I have no idea what’s next. I’ve never had a plan here. I just go from day to day. Sometimes things go awry and I think – oh this could be it, I might not be able to continue. But a miracle always seems to come and I do want to continue. I want to get involved more locally and with protests. That’s one of my goals.
6. Anything else?
No. I just want people to keep going to try to fight to save life. Everything matters in this moment. Follow the science. Understand the science of our survival. Let’s build up our resistance and create some change. Keep telling the hard truths out there
Below is an interview with Ro Randall, a psycho-analyst who has worked on climate issues extensively. She is one of the authors of a new “Living with the Climate Crisis” project, which will be launched on Monday 17th April. The transcript below has been lightly edited/airbrushed…
Marc 0:10
Great. So the first thing Rosemary, is what’s happening on Monday, the 17th of April, the launch?
Rosemary
Monday, the 17th of April is the launch of a new project called “Living with the Climate Crisis,” which I’ve been involved with as one of the main authors. And so, I’m a psychotherapist and I’ve been involved in the climate movement for about 20 years. And my interest has always been in what my profession can bring to the movement, that it doesn’t otherwise have. And primarily, that’s paying attention to how people feel when they engage with what is actually happening to the climate. Because in general, people’s experiences range through all kinds of feelings and distress:,anger, fear, desperation, despair, shock, grief, rage, anxiety.
You can go on, you can name a whole gamut of emotion. And very often, when you’re caught up in the urgency of action, those emotions get swept to one side. They go a bit under the carpet, and maybe it doesn’t feel possible to pay attention to them.
And so what this project is doing is promoting the establishment of groups, led by skilled facilitators, where people can take the time to do three things.
And the first is to look at what they’re feeling and to speak about the feelings that they’re having. And to try to find some resolution, some kind of resting place out of the grief, and the despair and the shock and all of the rest of it – a great range of feelings, I think.
The second is to learn a bit more about what is possible to do across a very broad spectrum of action. And there’s a focus partly on how to communicate better, that’s a big chunk of it, around climate – whether you’re speaking to your family and your close friends, or whether you’re speaking to a public meeting.
And the third bit of it is this sense of looking at the climate movement as an ecosystem, which requires all kinds of different people to be in it, and all kinds of different activities to be going on in it. And so the third part of these groups is looking at, what is it that you can do that is going to be sustainable, that you’re going to be able to be in for a long, long term? And that’s likely to be a mix of different things. And it’s likely to change as time goes on. And so the groups are looking at those kinds of issues. And our hope is that people will be able to come to these and use them in the communities that they’re already part of. We want this to be a locally-based activity rather than an online one. Although obviously, we’re holding the launch online because we reach more people that way.
So that’s essentially what the project’s about.
Marc
Thank you. And it emerged or, is a continuation of work that I know that you’ve been doing since 2007, with “Carbon Conversations.” So how does this work reflect on the successes and failures of Carbon Conversations? And what does it do that Carbon Conversations didn’t or couldn’t do?
Rosemary 4:15
In 2007, when we started the carbon conversations project, we were in the middle of a period of increased government commitment to action on climate change. Government was preparing the Climate Change Bill, which became the Climate Change Act. There was quite a lot of money around in local authorities and coming from government sources to promote community activity about climate change. And although, like all activists, I saw what the government was doing as inadequate, it was there. And it felt like the role for a community organisations was to work with our local communities and get people to understand the basics of what life needed to look like in a much lower carbon society, and to help people take the steps in that direction that they could in their own lives.
So the Carbon Conversations project brought people together to talk about the emotions associated with these major changes that we hoped were coming, and to start acting. And we created materials that could be used by just about anybody, with a short bit of training. Those groups were taken up nationally, and then internationally as a model of how to bring people together in communities.
But so much has changed since then. And so much needs to change because we have seen, since the failure of the Copenhagen negotiations in 2009 and the advent of a Conservative government, such backtracking on climate issues, that people coming to the climate movement now are facing different issues from those that were being faced then. Some issues are the same, some are more intense. And so we’ve been realizing for a time that the Carbon Conversations project had really run its course. It was a good thing in its time, but the materials were out of date, they weren’t dealing with the issues that were troubling people. And so we began to talk about what we could do instead.
In the new project, we’ve drawn together material from different workshops that we’ve run over the years, into a kind of coherent whole, that addresses these three questions I was talking about earlier; how do we cope with the feelings? How do we talk about this very difficult issue? How do we make our action sustainable?
And that’s what we came together to do with Rebecca Nestor, who’s been around in the climate movement for a long time herself, mostly in community action, and is an organisational consultant. And my third colleague is Daniela Fernandez-Catherall, who is a community psychologist with a lot of experience of working psychologically in the community, away from the consulting room, and engaging diverse groups in community action.
So it’s a shift of emphasis away from the carbon reduction aspects of climate issues, and into something which has much more focus on the well-being of activists and their capacities to continue to deliver in very difficult circumstances.
Marc
Thank you. So we’ve talked about the past, let’s talk about the future. Let’s say it’s Wednesday the 17th of April, 2024. And it’s a year after the launch of “Living with Climate Crisis,” what’s changed? Who has been using the materials? And what sort of feedback have you been getting about the materials? And how have you responded to that feedback?
Rosemary 9:21
I’m hoping that there will be groups running in a number of places in the UK. We know that we’ve got groups starting in the places where Daniela and myself and Rebecca are based. We’ve also got some people we know who are going to be using it in Wales. And we’re hoping to see gradually more people using it in different places. Also, over this coming year we’re going to be offering some more in depth introductory workshops, which will be done online for people who wish to facilitate the groups
We’re doing one for some people in Canada shortly. And we’ve got another one for people in the UK coming up in April. And we anticipate doing more of those.
We will be offering monthly support sessions for people using the materials, which will also take place online.
We’re planning on a meeting next September, which we hope will be a face-to-face meeting where people who have been beginning to use it can come together to share experiences.
We’re hoping that people will be taking the materials and using them in a lot of different ways. We’re quite explicit that we want people to adapt what we’re suggesting to their particular circumstances and the audiences they’re working with. And it’s very important to us to acknowledge that these materials have come out of our experience in some groups, that these may be a starting point, not an end point, that people may take one part of what we’ve suggested, and not another.
And we’re hoping that people who come from the psychological professions and associated professions, anybody really who’s got good facilitation skills, will feel that this is something which they can do as a contribution to the climate movement.
So we’re hoping to see groups happening, we’re hoping to see people being supported, and that support work is all being done through the Climate Psychology Alliance, which is sponsoring and supporting the project. And we’re hoping that it will take on a life of its own.
Alastair McIntosh, the Scottish writer and activist, kindly did an interview last month, the first for my “Groundhog Day or End of Days” project (see here).
You can (and in my opinion should!) read the transcript here, but here’s a few clips to whet your appetite.
And then I started to notice, you know, when I got involved with some CND type stuff, and so on, I noticed that every one of these campaigns would have a kind of half-life and it would rise very sharply and everybody would be saying, “Oh, this time we’re gonna do it. This time. We’re going to force the government’s hand, or whatever.. This is the big one. This is the breakthrough.”
And you know what? Kingdom never come. Not in that worldly sense of “thy kingdom come by” thy community come, thy opening up the way be done on earth as it is in heaven. Because it reaches a point of an apparent breakthrough and then it collapses.
So I learned that if I wasn’t going to become disillusioned whenever this happened, I had to anticipate it. And I frequently, my writing uses the metaphor of a surfer – that a surfer swims out and doesn’t waste time and energy grabbing every little wave that comes their way. The Surfer swims out. And I’ve never done it but I’ve watched my son doing it. And will maybe hang around for up to an hour, hoping for the perfect wave to come. And then surf in on the chosen wave.
and
marc hudson 45:27
You’ve kind of answered the question just there but I’ll ask it anyway. Besides burning out and selling out, then what other problems does this boom and bust cycle create?
Alastair McIntosh 45:43
It also creates false premises. So XR, have a big thing “Tell the truth.” But you’re not actually telling the truth when you’re misleading people as to how activism works. And I take XR as a presenting case, but it’s the case much more widely. It’s the case in politics. It’s all over this…
and
It leads to false hope. Which leads to the wrong kind of disillusionment. I say this because in my first book on climate change, Hell and High Water, that came out in 2008. I recommend what the Victorian Scottish preacher Oswald Chambers calls “The discipline of disillusionment.” Where he says we must become disillusioned. We must strip away our illusions of false hope in order to touch a deeper truth from which we can work realistically. So this is, what we’re talking about the activist world is not a disciplined disillusionment, it’s an indisciplined disillusionment that leaves people cast out as flotsam and jetsam on the beach. Sometimes quite psychologically damaged as you’re probably aware.
The latest All Our Yesterdays interview, with Leon/@AkanKwaku, who definitely deserves a follow from you. Here’s his profile pick and his Twitter banner is to die for (see foot of this post!)
1) Who are you (where born, where grew up) and when did you start thinking “hmm environmental problems are here and getting worse”
My name is Leon, born and raised in Birmingham minus the accent, in a place called Handsworth. I first started thinking about environmental problems when I was quite young, probable aged 8-9. I think for me it started when I moved to Sweden back in 2007, children are taught from an early age about the importance of the environment, recycling is seen as a resource not rubbish.
2) Obviously environmental problems do not exist in isolation – how do you think they tie with other questions – inequality and, especially, racial injustice and oppression? What are some of your favourite thinkers and doers on these questions?
Everything is linked if you look at the parts of the earth which are left in a deliberate underdeveloped state. These are often countries which has majority black and brown populations, they are resource rich, western companies and governments have not interest in helping these countries to become modern, this will then increase the costs they now access the resources they want.
3) If you could have the undivided attention of everyone who says they are concerned about climate change, for just a couple of minutes, what would you say?
Discussions around regulating the media, make them accountable.
Make politicians accountable
Reform police and discuss ending the friendly relationship between them and politicians.
I would discuss the dismantling and reforming the political, economic and legislative landscape
4) What are, in your opinion, the biggest barriers to closer and better collaboration between people of good will who are coming from different places (race, class, gender, able-bodied status, age – you choose which)? Can you point to good work being done to bridge these barriers that deserves a shout-out and could be replicated/enlarged?
Education alone isn’t enough, we need to rid ourselves and private schools, fund all schools adequately, training and skill based jobs and ensure people from disadvantaged backgrounds get an opportunity to access some of the best positions in society
5) What next for you?
I have built a 15k following on Twitter by calling out this government’s hypocrisy, maybe a video blog, podcast?
6) Anything else you’d like to say.
We need serious change, we need people who not scared to speak the truth.
Cracking interview with Dr Jenna Ashton (aka @heritagemcr) about feminism, archives, etc.
1. Who are you, and how did you come to be an historian?
I am a Lecturer in Heritage Studies and arts-led researcher, in the Dept. of Art History & Cultural Practices, University of Manchester. I’m also Research Lead for Creative and Civic Futures with our “Creative Manchester” platform, and an Associate Member of the Sustainable Consumption Institute. My work largely focuses on place-based community cultural practices and expression, along with evolving (I hope!) feminist theory and methods. As an artist, curator, and producer, I consider artmaking as a process for thinking and analysis (to misquote Mieke Bal, 2022).
It’s funny you describe me as an historian. I never think of myself as an “historian”, but a strange scholarly combination, working across the sociological, historical, visual, material, spatial, ecological. I’ve always wanted to connect the contemporary with the historical and understand things politically. I finally discovered this was called “cultural studies”, so I guess that’s where I have landed now, with a critical angle on all-things “heritage” practice and discourse.
My background education is mostly in the arts; at A Level I took all arts subjects across literature, language, performance, and film (much to the dismay of my science and sociology teachers). At Uni (I took all three degrees, BA (Hons), MA, PhD at Uni of Manchester, not being able to afford to travel elsewhere, and with other family and work commitments), I first took a combined degree across Drama, Literary Studies, Art History, and Classical Civilisation. It was a running joke that I had the longest degree title of any student graduating in my year. But I didn’t want to drop any subjects after A Levels, and I also didn’t know what I wanted to “specialize” in. So, a combined degree fulfilled that. It was horribly organised and combined students were badly supported; we didn’t belong to any one department, so we were pushed around and ignored quite a bit. It’s funny that interdisciplinarity is such a “thing” now. We were doing it via the combined programme, but we didn’t have the lingo or the zeitgeist. I loved it. I could pick and choose the modules I wanted to take and mix it up into a wonderful artsy-soup. I discovered a love of (and knack for) art history and visual studies [AHVS] (which wasn’t available during school), with a focus on feminist and social practices. I took my MA (FT) and PhD (PT) in AHVS. My PhD analysed childhoods through the lens of contemporary sculpture. It was described by the examiners as not a very “traditional” art history PhD, as it brought together visual arts, sociology, spatial theories, and psychoanalysis. To me, it seemed the most obvious thing in the world to use the visual and plastic arts to make sense of socio-psychological experiences given they emerged within a cultural context. Within a cultural studies dept. or school of art this wouldn’t have been at all odd.
Anyway, since 2018 I have been back at that same department as an employee, working mostly with colleagues in the “cultural practices” side of things or with academics in other arts and science disciplines.
So am I an historian? Kind of. “Historian” always seems such a grand title and as if you should have a very precise and defined period of expertise. I don’t have that. But historical methods are important to all scholarship and practice. I always thought it odd the separation between what I would call “straight” history (with a capital H) and “queer” history (aka art history). It still exists; the two disciplines don’t seem to talk to each other. At some point during my education (and also lived experience) feminist activists, histories, and practices helped me fuse all these disparate academic parts together with my concern for social justice issues. Feminism exists on the edges, in the gaps, defies the binaries. Feminism is also hopeful. It can see a way through the quagmire.
I have a parallel story of work and everyday life that intersects with my uni education and academic development that was/is as equally important as the learning undertaken in the Ivory Towers, but that’s for another interview.
2. Why do we need a feminist analysis and practice around archives and archiving? (Imagine I am asking that in my best Daily Mail voice, muttering about woke Corbynista stalinist social justice warriors)
Archives are part of structures of power and oppression. This is not a “woke-snowflake” interpretation, but a fact acknowledged by archivists and archival science. Archives are not neutral or objective containers of artefacts and documents but, like museums, have evolved through a process of careful (or not so careful) construction – led by the “victors” and those with power. Feminist practices seek to redress or expose structures of power relating to sex and gender (and its intersectional issues), and to evidence and promote differently gendered or sexed experiences and materialisations that have been oppressed or eradicated via oppressive patriarchal systems. Importantly, feminist practices are not just concerned with the historical record, but feed back into our contemporary cultural and social systems, reimagining, shaping, and enacting societies that are fair, equitable, and just. Feminism in the archives makes space for evidencing the marginalised and oppressed; it also enables the documenting and evidencing of its own heritage (feminism as heritage). Where women’s rights are still under threat (along with wider LGBTQ+ peoples), and our bodies are at risk from violence, poverty, and ill-health, feminist analysis and practices are required across all areas of cultural production and its materialisation and systems.
Since 2016 I have been focusing on feminist archival and curatorial practices as methodologies, working with numerous archives and collections, archivists, artists, and women’s organisations to explore these issues through practice and publishing.
In 2017 I published “The Feminists are Cackling in the Archive: A Manifesto for Feminist Archiving (or disruption)” with Feminist Review (download here). It was an invited submission, following an event on archiving women’s performance practice. The Manifesto brings together all the things I still try to do: working collaboratively with people, develop new forms via creative practice, publish varied and interesting pieces that embody the practice (not merely representative or dissemination), and work through serious issues playfully.
3. Are women still being written out of the history? If so, how, and what should people (including ‘male allies’ – because, you know, ultimately everything has to be about them) be doing about that?
First, start by reading (and citing) all the great feminist work that is being done to diversify histories and contemporary accounts of women’s experiences and practices. Second, support women-led initiatives and research aiming to “cackle” and disrupt the record (including providing the funding and infrastructure.) Third, get on and disseminate that work. Fourth, pay women decent wages across all sectors so they are not struggling to survive. Fifth , stop killing women (ideally, this should be first). Sixth, just because she’s a woman with power doesn’t mean she’s a feminist and cares about other marginalised or at-risk women (see various examples in current Conservative Government). But, stories of those women are as equally important to evidence, to remind us that social justice is the work of feminist practice, not simply putting women into powerful positions.
4. What are you working on at present/near future?
Publishing wise, I’m working on an edited collection for Routledge on “Heritage and Gender”, and an experimental authored book for Intellect on “Feminist Co-Production: as a Crochet Textile Playground” (using the work of Japanese artist Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam as a textile metaphor). Practice-wise, I am working in North Manchester (in neighbourhoods with high indices of multiple deprivation) leading an interdisciplinary research project making sense of community resilience under climate change stresses, and exploring the potential of arts practice for supporting social justice. Plus, I’m working on another research project supporting work around riparian treescapes for climate adaptation, land stewardship, and species reintroduction. Now (and in the near future) my work is mostly ecological, a natural progression from feminist cultural work. I also have an adopted archive of an ageing female photographer I want to work on at some point …
5. Anything else you’d like to say.
Amongst the raging at inequalities and injustice, I witness, daily, very ordinary people doing extraordinary things for humanity and other living beings. I hold onto bell hooks’ call for people to practice love and to love each other well. Feminism is hope.
Who are you/what do you do and (how) has climate change impinged on that?
I am Peter Watts, a freelance journalist, editor and author. I mainly write about arts and culture as well as architecture, but I also do a lot of copywriting for brands and companies. It’s the latter area that has mostly been affected by climate change, in the sense that almost every company I deal with now wants to foreground sustainability and highlight their environmental credentials. A couple of years ago, the emphasis was diversity and sustainability but now it is almost entirely about sustainability.
This includes a lot of self-styled “luxury” companies or organisations from across the world that trade solely on providing sustainable products such as very expensive recycled clothing or water bottles made from ocean plastic or a finance company that had developed a tool that measures how banks, insurance brokers and lenders are exposed to climate risk. Then there are all the companies that wish to celebrate carbon-saving efficiencies in traditionally dirty industries, particularly textiles and construction.
I am not always sure how much this focus on sustainability is driven by consumer trends rather than genuine fear for the planet or desire for improvement, but it’s clear that most companies now recognise the need to at least acknowledge some responsibility for the climate and want to be seen to be doing something to reduce their carbon footprint. That is something that wasn’t the case a decade ago.
There is clearly an element of greenwashing in this, but some individuals are extremely passionate, knowledgeable and committed. They recognise the urgency of the situation and believe that business is the best way to create wide-spread change.
2 Famously journalism goes through waves of interest in a topic – often quite short, and without connection to the relative importance of an issue. Where are things, in the UK, with the climate issue, compared to – say – 2018/19.
That’s tricky for me to say as when it comes to news journalism I am very much a consumer like anybody else, so can only really state what anybody might observe. So I think a lot depends on which media you consume – somebody who reads the Guardian will clearly have a different experience to the Daily Telegraph or Daily Mail.
But what seems to have changed is that even the latter newspapers, while still having climate change-denying columnists largely employed to generate rage clicks, now carry almost daily reports that demonstrate to the readers the obvious impact of climate change. So even on the right, there seems to be an acceptance that things are changing, even if there is disagreement on the causes of that change, what the eventual results of it might look like and what needs to be done to stop it.
I think this is relevant when seeing government ministers raging against net zero – even within their own constituencies, these people now represent a minority view, albeit one that unfortunately still has an outsized impact and gets way too much attention. Rather than angrily amplify their views, it might be better to simply ignore them.
I remember the first serious bump in mainstream “green” stories when David Cameron became Conservative leader as that was seen as an issue that might get him elected, so was covered sympathetically by the press. Things then went quiet again as there was no electoral value in sustainability but it started to slowly change with the annual news of unprecedented droughts, floods and fires around the world. Last year’s heatwave in the UK might have been a turning point in this country as it was something everybody could understand lay outside accepted norms and even the most sceptical seemed to accept it wasn’t an isolated event. The weight of evidence was now too large.
I believe that the media’s incredible capacity for collective amnesia will soon completely bury all memories of climate change denial.
I guess the biggest issue is that a lot of this journalism is quite passive – reports on the weather, reports on extreme conditions, reports on climate change reports – rather than stating what needs to be done or clearly outlining the consequences of inaction. You get that in the Guardian obviously but not anywhere else.
3. More broadly, does climate change “come up” in conversations at the school gate/dinner parties “etc”? In what ways?
Yes certainly. It seems to be a background concern for most people I speak to at school gates and in the pub (I don’t think I have ever had a dinner party I am afraid). There’s a lot of hopelessness – “what’s the point?” – and a certain amount of cognitive dissonance – “climate change is terrible and I will talk about that when I fly back from Los Angeles for this one meeting”. The problem is that the issue is so vast, the solutions are so complex or life-limiting, and the implications so terrible, that nobody really wants to delve into it too deeply beyond acknowledging it’s very frightening. I would include myself in this.
4. What are some of your favourite books/films/radio programmes that help you think through the climate issue?
As per the above, I tend to avoid any books, films or radio programmes that are explicitly about climate change. I find factual material to be too depressing and fictitious material too frivolous. I have over the years read books, watched films and played lots and lots of video games about the apocalypse, so I guess that counts. Most of these are about zombies, but I can handle a metaphor.
