Reflections on Psychology Month, climate change, and the path forward
My name is Eric Bollman, I’m the communications specialist at the Canadian Psychological Association. I am introducing myself here because I don’t normally write from my own perspective – I am usually writing about others, or their work. I thought I would write this final Psychology Month article from a personal perspective, as I have learned a lot over the course of this month and I want to share that – but I also want to make clear that these are personal opinions and perspectives from what I have gleaned. In our weekly Psychology In The News email that I send to membership, this would go under the ‘Blogs and Opinion’ section.
I started writing this piece with the explicit intent to walk the fine line that action on climate change demands – the acknowledgement that it is a crisis that can terrify many, if not most of us, but that framing it positively is the only way to encourage people to get on board in taking action. Upon re-reading what I initially wrote, I realized that despite my stated intent of looking to strike that balance, I had absolutely not done so. In fact, I had spent so much time immersed in the topic of climate change and online disinformation that I didn’t notice the negativity that had seeped into my thought process and permeated most every sentence I wrote, until I stepped away for a few days.
I feel like this is something that happens to many of us, so I hope the personal anecdotes I relate through this final Psychology Month article are helpful and, perhaps even a cautionary tale! What follows are the things I took away from the multitude of conversations I had this month. I present three areas where I think psychology can help the most, and where we can all (psychologists and non-psychologists alike) focus our efforts and attention.
Frame the conversation – and the solutions – in the most positive terms possible
It was clear to me, from the beginning, that the framing of Psychology Month in a positive way around climate change would be difficult. So much so that when I tried, I initially failed to do so. This is the most existential threat we all face right now, and in coming years it will become more chaotic and more catastrophic. It’s objectively terrifying. The more we talk about the climate crisis, and the circumstances that face us now and in the coming years, the more (rightfully) frightened we become.
That said, framing the conversation around climate change as a terrifying one is, generally speaking, not helpful. Doing so produces anxiety, fatalism, and actually discourages people from working toward solutions. Imagine being a child and learning about melting polar ice, disappearing species, sea level rise – and trying to imagine a happy future. As Paul De Luca, a student at the Prime Family Lab at York University says,
“By drawing upon the principles of positive psychology, and focusing on subjective well-being, we can potentially integrate our relationship to the environment to bolster or foster positive mental health outcomes in children and adolescents who I think are probably the most affected by anxiety because it’s their future at stake.”
Paul is right – a focus on subjective well-being can both alleviate distress and anxiety and also bolster pro-environmental behaviours. In her TED Talk, and her conversation with me on the CPA podcast Mind Full, Dr. Jiaying Zhao makes this point over and over. I believe she will make it once more at her upcoming plenary address at the CPA convention in June. There is no reason why pro-environmental behaviours can’t make us happy. Being outside on a bicycle makes people healthier, and as a result happier. Why not integrate that into our daily lives? For many people (me included) getting outside in the summer and tending to a vegetable garden can produce a great sense of peace (and a great crop of peas).
Every person in the world contributes to climate change in some way. There is no way to avoid it all. Every time I get into my car I think about it. When I make the decision between running the dishwasher and washing pots and pans by hand, I’m subconsciously calculating the impact of one versus the other. Thinking about things in this way can overwhelm us – and has overwhelmed me at times. Taking concrete steps that I know are good (maintaining my indoor garden, planning meals so I use up all the vegetables in my fridge) can take me out of a negative headspace while also boosting the health of my family.
These choices we have to make are, I think, best encapsulated by the magnificent TV show The Good Place, where Ted Danson presides over – for lack of a better word – Hell. People are making efforts to be good, and when they die they hope they’ll have been good enough to make it into Heaven – but the complexities of modern life have made it literally impossible for anyone to achieve the proper level of “goodness” and nobody new has been admitted to Heaven for centuries. Danson’s character sums it up –
“Just buying a tomato at a grocery store means that you are unwittingly supporting toxic pesticides, exploiting labour, contributing to global warming. Humans think they’re making one choice, but they’re actually making dozens of choices they don’t even know they’re making.”
There is good news in the struggle against climate change. A decade ago, part of the debate was framed as either you embrace renewable energy but sacrifice the economy and GDP, or you ignore renewables in order to ensure economic growth. Today, those concepts have been decoupled – and renewable energy is an economic driver of its own. Heat pumps, solar panels, and electric vehicles are becoming cheaper and more accessible. Major countries, and companies, have pledged to crack down hard on methane emissions, one of the most effective ways to limit global warming in the coming years. There is reason for optimism!
Holding ourselves to an arbitrary standard makes little sense. We can’t deny ourselves every pleasure for fear of our carbon footprint or impact, or we will become like Michael McKean’s Doug Forcett on The Good Place – living life in a perpetual state of anxiety where our entire world crumbles whenever we accidentally step on a snail. Instead, we can focus on making ourselves happier – and the world better – through actions that we know can do both.
Win the war on trust
As McMaster environmental science Ph.D. student Kyra Simone points out, there has long been a narrative pushed by those who would deny climate change exists – namely, attacking the messenger rather than the message. Calling out hypocrisy from those who are the most vocal about solutions as though that somehow means that what they’re saying on climate must be false. Al Gore flew to a conference! David Suzuki has houses! Greta Thunberg owns clothes! Sure – some of those things can be framed as hypocritical, but none of them makes the message a false one.
This particular kind of disinformation seems relatively recent when it comes to things like vaccination. But it has a long history in the realm of climate change, starting with oil and gas companies funding fraudulent studies decades ago to muddy the waters around the conversation such that no one could tell what was true and what was invented. Presenting those counter-narratives in a ‘scientific’ sort of way is a big reason many people continue to be skeptical of science today – particularly climate science.
We hear a lot about a War On Truth. That the current political climate and online discourse is designed to make Truth subjective – well, that may be true to you, but I have an alternative set of facts. I think really this is a War On Trust. Concerted efforts to delegitimize academic institutions, the media, and experts of all kinds have allowed charlatans and disingenuous public figures to replace the trust people once had in those institutions with trust in them, and in their podcasts and Substacks and supplement brands. These efforts have worked to some degree. Americans now trust what they read on social media more than traditional media. In Canada we’re not there yet. But we’re trending in that direction.
As someone who spends a lot of time on social media – I’m the person who puts out the CPA’s social media content and monitors the trends and responses and direct messages, I probably spend more time on social media than the average person, and (I assume) more than a psychologist would suggest is healthy. Spending time in that space, Twitter especially, is a constant barrage of people and bots who want nothing more than to contradict an expert in the area of their expertise, attack their character, and seek online clout through the most negative means possible. It becomes hard to remember that those people are a very small minority, since those platforms have made that minority the loudest one in our collective history.
I feel like Dr. Katherine Arbuthnott would tell me I’m not seeing this stuff as often as I feel like I do. Which is probably true – I can think of only twenty or so direct examples, but those do occupy an outsized place in my memory bank. She’s evangelical about the fact that we, North American human beings, have been conditioned to trust others too little. That we consistently underestimate the willingness of strangers and even friends to be helpful, to do the right thing, and to put the needs of our collective neighbourhoods and communities above some of our own.
I failed to keep this in mind throughout all of February. It was only when I was about to write an angry response to a bizarrely un-factual and conspiratorial tweet from a well-known Canadian public figure about climate change that I had to stop and take stock of my headspace. I realized I was outside the bounds I had set for myself. So what to do?
We can work on our own media literacy – does this story come from a reputable source? Are we sure the scientist who created the study being referenced is in fact a scientist? And an expert in the field in which the study was conducted? Is the story being hosted on a platform that actually fact-checks?
Another option is to counter the un-factual with the factual. I don’t mean commenting on the meme your Facebook friend shared about Al Gore being rich ergo climate change is not real. As Rachel Salt of Science Up First says, commenting or quote-tweeting or sharing a post so as to debunk it really does little more than amplify the wrong information. She suggests screenshots of the content that can then be addressed without adding to the destructive algorithms that got us here in the first place. Or, just post your own thoughts and your own science and your own content – the more truth there is online, the less able it is to be drowned out by the outsized volume of the clamorous minority.
We can trust that most of the people we know, and most of the people we meet, have a similar level of concern about major issues like climate change. We can believe that any action we take will also be taken by a multitude of others, and that doing this enough times will create the large-scale changes those actions are intended to create. And we can ignore the loudest voices in the room and on the internet, secure in the knowledge that the majority of people feel the way we do, act the way we do, and are moving toward the same goals we are.
They’re just not as loud about it – you might get internet clout for a few days by sharing a theory that Kate Middleton is in fact a Manchurian Candidate-style brainwashed operative installed in the British Royal Family in order to make cheese illegal. You’re less likely to get clout for telling people about your radish garden. And so I, a regular user of the internet, am far more likely to hear about the illegal cheese than I am about your radishes. More’s the pity.
Lean on others
The solutions to climate change are interdisciplinary. That’s a word that usually refers to experts from different spheres working together to advance a science they would not be able to do as effectively on their own. Like that time Amy and Sheldon shared a Nobel Prize on The Big Bang Theory. This is true in terms of the climate crisis as well – one scientific breakthrough builds on another, and one discipline enhances the others merely by virtue of their collaboration.
Witness the young scientists in Dr. Heather Prime’s Prime Family Lab at York University, Paul De Luca and Alex Markwell, integrating climate change into their studies with families and children. They don’t have to do the work of determining whether climate change is a threat, or is real – they can treat that as a fact and take a further scientific step from there. Environmental scientists have done that work over the course of decades, through cuts in funding, official muzzling, and the vocal skepticism referenced earlier that seeks to undo their work.
As Paul and Alex build on climate science, McMaster PhD student and Science Up First contributor Kyra Simone is creating new climate science based on decades of environmental work, and setting the stage for breakthroughs in dozens of fields for decades to come. Psychologists are combining their specialties at University of British Columbia, where Canada Research Chair in Behavioural Sustainability Dr. Jiaying Zhao has partnered with happiness researcher Dr. Elizabeth Dunn to find ways to encourage behaviours that will both help the environment and increase happiness.
In community action, emergency room doctor Dr. Kyle Merritt has partnered with many other healthcare professionals to form Doctors and Nurses for Planetary Health in Nelson, B.C. Psychologist Dr. Todd Kettner is also a member, and they learn together about ways they can make their own jobs and practices more climate-friendly (anaesthetic gases are a major contributor to global warming!) As a group, they consult with city officials on ways to improve sustainability through infrastructure projects and municipal policies.
The Environmental Psychology Section of the CPA is a section that does not specifically look at environmental issues, per se – as in pollution and emissions and disappearing sea ice – they look at peoples’ behaviour in relation to their environments. That includes physical built environments like their homes, offices, or the streets and blocks they go through on their commute. It also includes natural spaces like parks, forests, or waterways. This year they decided to create a working group to bring together psychologists of all types to work together on climate solutions. Dr. Phoenix Gillis took the first step , Section Chair Dr. Lindsay McCunn quickly got on board, and the meetings have been lively, informative, and well-attended.
Their initiative could produce some great results, with the variety of expertise psychologists bring to the table. Industrial/Organizational psychologists, who study human behaviour in the workplace, collaborate with Environmental psychologists to design climate-friendly offices where people are happier to come to work. Clinical psychologists whose patients are expressing anxiety about this existential threat can work with Social and Personality psychologists to come up with concrete actions that can increase sustainability while lessening the dread people feel.
I am the person responsible for the Psychology Month initiative at the CPA. Which meant that this year I sat with the impacts of climate disasters, the missed targets of the past several decades, and the existential dread – mostly alone. I needed someone else to point out my increasing negativity, to which I had been largely oblivious. In this case it was my wife Jen who made an offhand comment about it which elicited in me a moment of clarity. I have spoken with so many wonderful people, dozens of them, over the past four months in preparation for this campaign, but by the end I missed or forgot several of the lessons that I myself was trying to impart this month.
We can all reach out to someone we know to get on board with their work, to get them on board with ours, or to get the ball rolling on something new. We can trust that the people to whom we reach out will more often than not be of a like mind on climate change, and will embrace the chance to act. Collaboration makes us happier, and the steps we take in tandem lessen our trepidation and anxiety when it comes to existential threats.
Postscript: the Earth is a collaborator too
After finishing this article, I had one more conversation this month that I think might add a fourth area for consideration. I spoke with Kohkom Beverly Keeshig-Soonias, an Anishinaabekwe psychologist and member of the Chippewas of Nawash First Nation. We were speaking about land acknowledgements – the reason we do them and the meaning behind them.
Indigenous people have been doing land acknowledgements for thousands of years. It is only recently, in the spirit of Truth and Reconciliation, that they have invited the rest of us to join them in doing so. A land acknowledgement is much more than simply pointing out that Ottawa is the ancestral home of the Haudenosaunee, and that settlers and colonialism displaced them forcefully decades or centuries ago.
A land acknowledgement is a verbal, or written, expression of the understanding that not only did the Indigenous people live on this land before Europeans arrived, they had a relationship with that land. It’s an acknowledgement that, even though that land might now have a golf course or a Jean Coutu or the CN Tower on it, the relationship between the people and the land remains ongoing.
Kohkom Beverly speaks about land as a partner, the other half of a relationship that feeds both of you. The land provides you with food, water, and shelter. The air you breathe and the sustenance you require to stay alive. In return, you provide the Earth with what she needs. You maintain the soil, you help get water to the plants and plants to the animals and you treat her, the land, as an equal partner in a relationship that benefits you both.
It is only when we start to see the land as a thing, as inanimate, that we are able to use it, to extract resources for our own gain at the Earth’s detriment. The Indigenous people who were caretakers of the land for thousands of years, and are still caretakers of the land, would never act this way. To do so would be to abuse a partner, to ignore a relationship, to exploit a family member.
And so perhaps the final way we can approach the issue of climate change is to look at the Earth, and the environment, and the very land on which we stand, in a different way. Not as a thing we’re trying to help, or as a victim to whom we’re trying to atone for the harm we’ve done. But instead as a collaborator and an entity with whom we have a relationship. A partner with whom we are working to improve the circumstances for us both.
We have a long way to go, but we always go further together.