Rebel Justice
What is justice? Who does it serve? Why should you care?
When we think about justice, we think about it as an abstract, something that happens to someone else, somewhere else. But justice and the law regulate every aspect of our interactions with each other, with organisations, and with the government.
We never think about it until it impacts our lives, or that of someone close.
Our guests are women with lived experience of the justice system whether as victims or women who have committed crimes; or people at the forefront of civic action who put their lives on the line to demand a better world..
We ask them to share their insight into how we might repair a broken and harmful system, with humanity and dignity.
We also speak with people who are in the heart of the justice system creating important change; climate activists, judges, barristers, human rights campaigners, mental health advocates, artists and healers.
Rebel Justice
Episode 57: Privilege, Decolonization, and Active Hope: Addressing Climate Change
Part 1 of 2
What is it like to live with a constant sense of anticipation and fear for the future of our planet?
Our guest for this episode is Linda Aspey, hosted by Susan Pease Banitt. They explore the experience of eco-anxiety, an issue that is silently spreading across our society. We share our personal journeys in grappling with this sense of impending doom and the importance of breaking the silence and acknowledging this mental strain.
Curious about the invisible role media plays in shaping your perception of environmental health?
We unpacked this and more, discussing the subtle ways media contributes to climate change denial and the socially constructed silence surrounding environmental issues. In our conversation, we also explore the absence of rituals and conversations around environmental degradation in Western society and why this matters.
We reflect upon our collective responsibility to wake up and address the existential threat to our environment.
Finally, we turn the spotlight onto privilege, decolonization, anxiety, and the power of active hope and community in responding to climate change. We discuss the impact of privileged communities on indigenous populations, the importance of reconnecting with nature, and the role of active hope and community in combating the overwhelming nature of climate change.
As we navigate these topics, we highlight the need for empathy, connection, and action in creating a more sustainable and just world.
Join us as we journey from anxiety to action, and rediscover our common bond with nature.
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Hello and welcome to the Rebel Justice Podcast. I'm your host, Susan pnet , a licensed clinical social worker, speaking to you from Portland, Oregon in the United States. Our guest for today is Linda Aspe in the uk Linda is a therapist, clinical supervisor, coach, consultant and environmental activist. In recent years, she has focused on leadership and communications in climate psychology, the environment and social justice. She studied at the Oxford School of Climate Change and the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, where she's now an assessor and is a trained carbon ambassador work that reconnects active Hope facilitator and certified climate coach. Linda speaks at and facilitates meetings for local and national climate groups and for the Climate Psychology Alliance, she writes on climate for various magazines, including Coaching at Work Magazine. She is co-editor of Holding the Hope, reviving Psychological and Spiritual Agency in the Face of Climate Change. Welcome, Linda. Hi, Linda. I've really been looking forward to having this conversation with you. I watched several of your talks as a therapist myself and as a trauma therapist myself. Very interested in having you talk about , um, eco anxiety and how you got really involved in bringing that awareness to your community. Yeah,
Speaker 2:Sure. Well, I think it probably started with a personal experience, which , uh, I find a lot of people get involved in this work because they have had a personal experience. Um, I had been aware for many years of a decline in our environment and , um, I heard a radio documentary called The End of a Radio Program about insect decline, in particular butterflies in the Netherlands. And they said a hundred. And in last 130 years , uh, the Netherlands had lost 84% of its butterflies. I don't know why it hit me so hard that day, but I just found myself dri trying to drive the car and find myself absolutely flooded with tears. I had to stop and pull over and I kind of wailed and wailed and just wept. And so when I got home, I spent the whole weekend on the internet trying to find out more, well , how could this be? 84%? How could that be? And I walked around in a state of deep distress for two or three weeks , um, not really sure what to say to anybody 'cause I had that, you know, that that doom me feeling. And I then sort of threw myself into , uh, learning more, threw myself into the science, and , uh, went to various , um, British academic schools to learn about climate science and stuff. But I was still aware that I hadn't really done any processing work, and I discovered Janna Macy's work that reconnect, and that enabled me then to really reach into what was going on and understand most some of my, my , my feelings and understand my despair, really. Mm-Hmm .
Speaker 1:So who is that again? I didn't quite catch that name.
Speaker 2:Joan Ey and Chris Johnston's work Active Hope.
Speaker 1:Okay. Active Hope for our listeners
Speaker 2:Coming from her body of work and many others, she's the root teacher of something that's known as the work that reconnects and , um, that's a , a beautiful set of processes and rituals that allows people to feel into their pain instead of avoiding it. Um , and to process it and metabolize it a bit better.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you're really calling people to come out of their denial and their avoidance of what's a very, I think, overwhelming thing for all of us to be part of . So tell me how you think this affects or how you've experienced this affecting clients and just people everyday people walking around.
Speaker 2:Well, it's, it is changing, but still, for most folk it's a subject, as you said, it's overwhelming. They'd rather not think about it. They'd rather not talk about it. There's a guy , um, who's written about , um, socially constructed silence and socially constructed silence is where something becomes so difficult to talk about and it's sort of taboo to talk about it. But if you do talk about it and raise it, you get little signals from people saying, you know, don't go there. Don't , don't raise that. You know, that's a difficult subject. And it's not just climate. There are other things that have socially constructed, silences built around them. But what's very interesting about this is that not only does it make it very hard to talk about it, it also almost , in a way suppresses the thought about it. You don't even think about it. So most people would not rather think about , rather not think about it. So they'd rather carry on their lives. Um, they don't know what they can do. They feel powerless and help helpless anyway. You know , what can little me do against all of this complex wicked problem? Um, so I think a lot of people are just carrying on as normal. There's a , there's a GNA awareness somewhere, and sometimes, as in my case, it doesn't take much to really lift that lid. Right .
Speaker 1:That's what I was thinking about when I heard you tell that story was that it's almost like I , sometimes I think of it as like , um, mental, emotional, static kind of going on in the background all the time, but we're so used to living with it. And it's been, for those of us who were born, you know, a while ago, <laugh> , you know, started with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in the seventies was the first real alarm I remember hearing as a child. But it's hard to live at that level of alarm for long periods of time without it kind of fading into the background.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's, it's unbearable to stay with it. There's , um, a book called Staying with the Trouble. I can't remember the name of the <inaudible> . And it's very, I think it's, it's very hard to stay with it because it also conscious touches on some feelings of real existential threat . And we don't, we don't think about death much, do we in our societies and particularly in the Western society. You know , it's a , it's a taboo subject in itself, so we don't really have the rituals that maybe we would've had in generations ago around death . Um , and we do lots of things to avoid getting old and all those kinds of things and looking old and all of that . So I think it's such an existential threat that, you know, there's that fear of annihilation.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean , it hasn't quite come into our consciousness fully. We're all suffering with this awareness. And some people more than others, obviously people like in Lahaina , uh, Maui or people who are like immediately in the throes of this. Do you think people have to be in crisis before they allow this into their awareness? Or do you think there are other ways to bring this to people's awareness? Well,
Speaker 2:I, I do meet a lot of people who have had this wake up moment, this massive wake up moment. And for me it was actually, it was almost like a physical blow. I was like , I'd been punched and I , I'd lost, I was winded, you know, I just couldn't get my breath back. Uh , so that's for some people, for others, many pe I meet many people who've worked with this stuff for years and there's been a gradual dawning of the enormity of the situation hits them . But a lot of the time, yeah , I think it's very different for different people. And as you've said, maybe it needs a crisis. We, for , for , for many of us in the global north, we haven't knowingly often been impacted by this. Actually we are, we're all breathing filthy air. We're all suffering from a lack of the biodiversity in our environment of which we're part of. So we're , we are actually seeing that, but we don't really notice it enough. And of course there is that baseline shifting baseline thing that I grew up seeing loads of , loads of butterflies on my buds . I see one on two now, and I , I get really excited. My nephews and the children around me, they'll only see one. So their baseline is gonna be very different than mine.
Speaker 1:Right, exactly. So I wanna come back to this idea of socially constructed silence. And I'm really interested in how much you think that is a sort of an interpersonal cultural phenomenon that's defensive and how much of that might be engineered by powers that be, that are still benefiting from activities on the planet that are causing harm?
Speaker 2:I think you've made a really good point there. Um, socially Construc to Silence was written about by guy called <inaudible> , I believe his name is <inaudible> , some years ago. And I think there are several things at play here. It's like everything, it's complex. First of all, we do get quite mixed messages from media, from advertisers, from polluters. So I've got a great image on my that, I took a screen grab one day and there was a guy doing the weather forecast on an American TV channel, and it showed behind , it was December, 2021. And it showed behind him the whole of North America lit up red practically with the heat. And there were really big words like, you know, extreme weather, unprecedented events , unprecedented dragged fires. So it was very dramatic language. And so you see all of this. And then on the, on the side of the screen was an advertising banner running and it was showing flights from London to Dubai for nine pound , these kind of quite mixed messages, you know, well it's really bad, but is it, you know, so you know, it's only a flight and it's , it's only nine pound . And you know, without realizing the , um, dissonance of that. So we're used to living with a sense of dissonance . I think , um, if you talked about things a lot, you'd actually have to keep addressing the dissonance and addressing dissonance can feel very uncomfortable, but so can actually living with it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Advertisers, I grew up in an advertising household actually with , um, a father who made sure his kids were media savvy, <laugh>. Um, but it's, so if you haven't grown up with like that kind of critical awareness and thinking, it's so hard to see how that dissonance is being like thrown at you constantly. Can people balance out their needs for fun and doing what they wanna do with aligning their behavior in a way that stops the progression of this? I think that's a really tricky piece. What do you think?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you're right. The things we do individually do will make a difference. But of course you need lots and lots and lots and lots of people to put pressure on the systems. So the systems change. So I don't, I don't hold a lot with holding individuals responsible. Yeah . We can all make better choices and I've chosen to make better choices because for me, that's about living my values. 'cause even if one flight won't make a difference, really , um, I have to feel true. I I don't wanna do that. I know that it's causing harm. And , uh, whilst why my one flight in the scheme of things isn't gonna do that, I just have to live with the choices I make. Um, and of course some of the large polluters have put those, those messages out to us that it's all about us changing our message. And even even the word climate change, they should have called it global boiling.
Speaker 1:Uh, in the United States you have this whole dialogue from the Red states saying like, see it was a big snowstorm. The climate's not warming. It feels like , like really just education of understanding what , what it looks like when the climate release starts to change. I'm wondering if you've had success with groups sort of breaking through this denial. Like what are the techniques that people are using in terms of either their counseling or their activism that help with, with surfacing this awareness more?
Speaker 2:I think if I can just for a second before answering that, if I could just talk a bit about the <inaudible> media. Um, they have known for many, many years that we're in this situation. They have known for many years that , uh, climate change is real, it's happening, et cetera. And for many years, certainly in in the uk, they would balance any climate going coming on the TV with the Dier . They thought, you know, for the reasons of, they didn't wanna be biased , they wanted to be seen as impartial. So they allowed that to happen. And also in the uk the media and, and , and I think in America , um, and Australia, you know , where the , where the Murdoch press is, I'm gonna have to name it where Murdoch Press is, they drive the news agenda, they drive the political decisions. We like to think that politics here , um, is influenced by media. 'cause you know, will the paper support what we're saying? The government always asking what will the Daily Mail think? I'm actually seeing a massive shift. And it's actually the media, there's dictating government policy. And so when we slow down on climate, it's normally because somebody in the media, often Murdoch press has got a vested interest because they require us to stay in a sort of state of , um, helplessness in order to control us. I mean , that sounds quite paranoid, but I truly do think that the media have a massive role and some of them should be hanging their heads in shame.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think we could even go as far as saying they have an agenda. I mean the , I don't know about your country or Europe so much, but I've done a pretty deep dive into who owns the media and the United States. And it's mostly bankers, oil companies and other large corporate interests. And , um, the oil companies certainly don't want to see a stop to their business of burning fossil fuels. Right. So we have a inherent disconnect and conflict of interest in our media built in in this country. And I suspect that may be true other places as well.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Absolutely is . And right now the oil companies are actively pursuing more uses of plastic because they're hedging their debt . But if we stop new oil, actually they've gotta find some something to do with all of that oil. They are really actively pursuing continuing their policies that not changing them at all. So anyway, that's me , my political side coming out there. But you did ask, what was it you asked about people
Speaker 1:Bringing people out of their denial and um, almost looking at it through a , a trauma lens. 'cause that's the lens that I've been using for the last 30 years in my work with people. I mean, I've spoken at trauma conferences all over the world. I have written books and done podcasts and I've never, I've never seen a talk on Nico anxiety . I've never been interviewed about it. I mean, I have talked to several of my clients about it, but usually because they bring it . So I just was really struck by that. I thought how it's like a , it's like a blindness in our entire profession in a way.
Speaker 2:So there's another thing in the u in the UK for one of the therapy bodies. And you could open that magazine and you would imagine you were living in a parallel universe. 'cause unless I or a handful of other people write about climate, nothing gets mentioned. It's just not mentioned. There's no conferences, there's no continual professional development, CPD, there's no training courses. Even the trauma conferences don't use anything to do with the environment. The climate biodiversity loss and the trauma that we , our world that we are part of, that we've co-created, that we breathe and that we eat and the food and all that . It's like this part of us is , is being killed and we're not seeing it as that . Well maybe we are , we are , we're seeing it , it at an existential level that all we love and know is being destroyed. And that's overwhelming, unbearable. It's not, it's not surprising. We're finding it very hard to talk about.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Know who is talking about it here is , do you know who Maryanne Williamson is? I
Speaker 2:Know the name, but I don't know her .
Speaker 1:She's trying to get herself into the debates for running for a democratic candidate. And she is the only person speaking about climate change and the way you just did and saying they're killing us. Like they're killing us. It's everything's being poisoned. And um, it's just a very , um, talking about an inconvenient truth. This is like an unbearable truth. However, what I'm finding here is that the young people, people under 30 especially, but people under 35 I'd say are very aware of this and are very mad about it. They kind of don't know what to do with their rage about it right now. They need some leadership. But are you finding that too?
Speaker 2:It very much depends. Um, there are large sways of young people that I meet that haven't registered it . And yet there are . And then on the other side, there are several young people, many, many young people who are extremely aware , aware and extremely concerned. And Caroline Hickman and Bath University and other authors, Britt Ray , who you may know of in the States , they did a very large study of 10,000 young people across 10 countries , um, back in 22, may 22 I think it was. And they surveyed young people between the ages of 16 and 20 on their views on climate and the environment and what was going on. And the resounding majority were worried about it. I think it was nearly a third said they had serious concerns about whether or not to have children. You know, I didn't grow up wondering whether or not these things were happening in my life. You know, in the same way that they do, A large number said they had very little faith in leadership. They felt very let down by leadership. And over 60% agreed with a statement that humanity was doomed. I mean, that's an extraordinary thing for a young person to grow up with, you know? And, and this is all coming to the fore as we've been living through the Covid pandemic. So they've seen this existential threat where numbers of people were dying, where life was completely halted, where we were imprisoned, where we couldn't do the things that people normally do to comfort each other. We couldn't hold hands, we couldn't hug, we couldn't kiss.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is the world that they are growing up in and they don't have the sort of cockeyed optimism. I think that older people , um, had the luxury of having however false it was, we were growing up there very clear-eyed about this. But it then I think we get into an area of learned helplessness and feeling just when you're 25 or 28, like you don't know what to do about it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2:Absolutely. They dunno what to do about it. They can feel helpless. Um , and it can , it can evoke all sorts of feelings from that helpless to hedonism is all gonna go, I might as well just enjoy now. Who can blame them? And I , I meet parents , um, who are extremely, ah , they're just so torn. For example, I met somebody who, she'd traveled the world as a young person. She'd had an amazing couple of years just touring the world and hitching and stuff and getting on planes and , and she said, I want my kids to have the same, but I'm , I'm worried all the time about a, what they'll catch when they go somewhere. And 'cause there's so many viruses out there now because of what we've been doing by going into places in nature and treating animals so appallingly and putting them in confined spaces and taking them out of their habitat . So I'm worried about them. Like , I worry about their, their wellbeing. I said , and I feel bad about putting them on a plane, but I want them to have what I had. So it's, it's a time of real dilemma for a lot of people.
Speaker 1:It really is. Um, my practice , um, has been very focused the last several years on very extreme forms of trauma, ritual abuse and mind control, which is also something that people are in general denial about. And it's kind of, you know, again, it's like the danger that's all around this. And I've really struggled with how much do I tell people what I know <laugh>, because it's so devastating. It's like that moment you had with the butterflies. Like I've had colleagues and, and people that I've had that moment with these clients of like, oh my gosh, there's a whole world going on here. Think we saw that with , um, black Lives Matter too. You know, it was like there's a whole world going on here that white people didn't know about. I was trying to explain to younger people, like when we're growing up, information was so scarce, you know, I had my Encyclopedia Britannica, but there was nothing in there about systemic racism. Right. So it's like, how did you learn about those things, you know, when you were young. Now we almost have the opposite problem where if the super glut of information , um, which I think can also lend itself to a kind of paralysis of like, there's so much information, how do I apply it? And that's, that's been my big thing. I've been talking to people about, especially older people, like with your children is like, yes, they have all the facts, they have all the dire information, but they don't have the wisdom of how to apply it. And I feel like maybe that's where we come in. So I wonder if you could talk about what are these sort of tools of application that can be used with this awareness?
Speaker 2:I love how you use the word wisdom, because I think that's , um, um, Daniel Achtenberg has said recently on a podcast with Nate Hagans, human intelligence, Unbound by wisdom is the cause of our problems. 'cause we're very intelligent. We've invented lots of stuff and we've made lots of stuff. We've been very creative , but we've not actually bound it up with wisdom. So I, I think that , um, for me, I think my turning point, a turning point for me was understanding the work that reconnects a lot more and also doing a lot of work on decolonizing my mind. I began to realize as I saw the world around me being destroyed and us destroying it and things that I loved being destroyed. I kept reading. I was really hungry for knowledge as as, as you've mentioned. Um, but it just really occurred to me that this climate change is racism. It's racism , it's systemic, a systemic injustice. And of course we know that it impacts the most vulnerable, the most disadvantaged people on any level , um, wherever they are in the world. And so there are some that say, Hey, hey, who are you rich white woman to be, you know, getting anxious or, you know, rich white kids to be getting anxious, privileged white kids. Who are we? And I think, well, we have to understand this in order for society to change , we don't need to feel guilty about feeling anxious. So I think that's the first thing. 'cause I often do get people coming, young people saying, I shouldn't feel anxious 'cause I've got so much, you know, I feel guilty. I mean, humans are very good at layering emotions, aren't we? We can feel guilty about feeling guilty, <laugh> . So I think what we can do is we can , we can open our hearts to some tough learning and we have to be able to look at this squarely in the eye and say, okay, what, what , what have we , what have we done as a society? What have we partly , you know , been responsible for creating? Not with that , not with Malevolence, but what , what , what are systems that we're in that are gonna, that have to change in order for us to shift? And one of those biggest things we have to do is we have to focus on equality much, much more than we ever have done.
Speaker 3:And that concludes the first part of our insightful interview with climate focused therapist and Coach Linda Asby . Join us next time when Linda talks to us about the impact of climate anxiety on young people and what we can do to get involved to take action ourselves and get some agency back over. Our futures. Rebel Justice Podcast is produced by The View Magazine. You can subscribe to the view@theviewmag.org.uk and follow us on our social media. We are Rebel Justice on x , formerly Twitter and the View Magazine on Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook. This episode featured Linda Asby as our guest. It was hosted by Susan Pease bonnet and edited by Charlotte White Social Media, by Courtney Mudd .