Rebel Justice - changing the way you see justice
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Rebel Justice - changing the way you see justice
E 58: Breaking the Silence: Linda Aspey on Navigating Eco-Anxiety for a Sustainable Future
Meet Linda Aspey, a prolific voice in the realm of climate psychology, who's using her own experience with eco-anxiety to drive crucial discussions around climate change. Stirred by an overwhelming sense of concern and despair over the state of our planet, Linda has become an influential figure in raising awareness about the psychological impacts of climate change. Join Linda and leading trauma psychologist Susan Pease Banitt as they unpac the socially constructed silence surrounding this issue and underscore the significance of confronting and processing eco-anxiety as a catalyst for a more sustainable future.
In the throes of the pandemic, the younger generation’s fears over climate change have only intensified, creating a potent cocktail of helplessness and anxiety. We dig into this crisis, examining the role media plays in shaping public perception and governmental policies, and the glaring omission of climate change issues within the therapy profession.
Linda offers valuable insights on utilizing privilege and guilt as agents for positive change and provides practical steps towards building a more equitable and sustainable world.
Tune in for a profound conversation that not only sheds light on the psychological implications of climate change but also inspires us to break the silence and take action.
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Hello and welcome to the Rebel Justice Podcast. I'm your host, susan Pease-Bannett, a licensed clinical social worker, speaking to you from Portland, oregon in the United States. Our guest for today is Linda Aspie.
Speaker 1: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 is 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 Ork 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 eco-anxiety and how you got really involved in bringing that awareness to your community.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. Well, I think it probably started with a personal experience, which I find a lot of people get involved in this work because they have had a personal experience. I had been aware for many years of a decline in our environment. I heard a radio documentary called the End of a Radio Programme about insect decline, in particular butterflies, in the Netherlands. They said in the last 130 years the Netherlands had lost 84% of its butterflies.
Speaker 2:I don't know why it hit me so hard that day, but I just found myself trying to drive the car and find myself absolutely flooded with tears. I had to stop and pull over and I wailed and wailed and just wept. 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? I walked around in a state of deep distress for two or three weeks I'm not really sure what to say to anybody, because I had that doomy feeling. I then threw myself into learning more, threw myself into the science and went to various 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 Joanna Macy's work that reconnect and that enabled me then to really reach into what was going on and understand some of my feelings and understand my despair really.
Speaker 1:So who did that? Again, I didn't quite catch that name.
Speaker 2:Joanna Macy and Chris Johnson's were active hope, okay, active hope for listeners. Coming from her body of work and many others. She's the rude teacher of something that's known as the work that reconnects, and that's a beautiful set of processes and rituals that allows people to feel into their pain instead of avoiding it, and process it and metabolise 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 changing, but still for most folks 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 who's written about socially constructed silence, and socially constructed silence is where something becomes so difficult to talk about and it's sort of a good way 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 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.
Speaker 2:But what's very interesting about this is that not only does it make it very hard to talk about it, it also almost you know what is the thought about it. You don't even think about it. So most people would not rather think about it, rather not think about it, so they'd rather carry on their lives. They don't know what they can do. They feel powerless and helpless. Anyway, what can little mean do against all of this complex, wicked problem? So I think a lot of people are just carrying on as normal. There's a gnawing awareness somewhere and sometimes, as in my case, it doesn't take much to really lift that lid.
Speaker 1:That's what I was thinking about when I heard you tell that story was that it's almost like sometimes I think of it as like 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. You know, started with Rachel Carson's. Silent Spring in the 70s 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 is. It's unbearable to stay with it. There's a book called Staying with the Trouble I can't remember anything off the map and it's very. I think it's very hard to stay with it because it also touches on some feelings of real existential threat. And we don't think about death much do we in our societies, particularly in the West Society. You know it's a taboo subject in itself. So we don't really have the rituals that maybe we would have had in generations to go around death and we do lots of things but we're 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, 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?
Speaker 2:Well, 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 like punched and I lost. I was winded, you know. I just couldn't get my breath back up. So that's for some people. For others, 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.
Speaker 2:But a lot of the time, I think it's very different for different people and, as you've said, maybe it needs a crisis 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 suffering from a lack of the biodiversity in our environment of which we're part of. So we are actually seeing that, but we don't really know. Is it enough? And, of course, there is that baseline shifting baseline thing that I grew up seeing loads and loads of butterflies on my buddlers. I see one or two now and I get really excited. My nephews and the children around me, they'll only see one, so their baseline is going to be very different than mine, right?
Speaker 1:exactly so I want to 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. Socially constructed silence was written about by a guy called Evillata Bebrenveil I believe his name's been named 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.
Speaker 2:I took a screen grab one day and there was a guy doing the weather forecasts on an American TV channel and it showed behind it was December 2021 and it showed behind him the whole of North America lit that red practically with the heat, and there were really big words, like you know extreme weather, unprecedented events, unprecedented heat drives 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 was only a flight and it's it was only nine pound and you know, without realizing that, the dissonance of that. We're used to living with a sense of dissonance. I think if you talked about things a lot, you'd actually have to keep addressing the dissonance and addressing this, and it's can feel very uncomfortable, but so can actually living with it yeah, advertisers.
Speaker 1:I grew up in an advertising household, actually, with a father who made sure his kids were media savvy, 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 want to 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? Yeah, I think you're right.
Speaker 2: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. I guess we can all make better choices. And I've chosen to make better choices because for me that's about living my values, because even if one flight won't make a difference, really I have to feel true, I don't do that, I know that it's causing harm and whilst my one flight, in the scheme of things, isn't going to do that, I just have to live with the choices I make.
Speaker 1: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 in the United States you have this whole dialogue from the red state saying like see, it was a big snowstorm, the climate's not warming, 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 media. They have known for many, many years that we're in this situation. They have known for many years that climate change is real, it's happening, etc. And for many years, certainly in the UK, they would balance any climate science coming on the TV with a dark denier. They thought, you know, for the reasons of they didn't want to be biased, they wanted to be seen as impartial, so they allowed that to happen.
Speaker 2:And also in the UK, the media and I think in America and Australia you know whether Murdoch press is I'm going to 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 is influenced by media because, you know, will they pay for support what we're saying? The government always asking what would the Daily Mail think? I'm actually seeing a massive shift and it's actually the media that'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 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, I don't know about your country or Europe so much, but I've done a pretty deep dive into who owns the media in the United States, and it's mostly bankers, oil companies and other large corporate interests. And the oil companies certainly don't want to see a stop to their business of burning fossil fuels, right. So we had an 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. And right now the oil companies are actively pursuing more uses of plastic because they're hedging their bets that if we stop new oil, actually they've got to find something to do with all of that oil. They are really actively pursuing, continuing their policies, that not changing at all. So anyway, that's my political side coming out there. But you did ask what was it? You asked about people.
Speaker 1:People out of their denial and almost looking at it through a trauma lens, because 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 eco-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 blindness in our entire profession in a way.
Speaker 2:There's a magazine 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. Because, 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, climate, biodiversity loss and the trauma that we are world, that we're 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 being killed and we're not seeing it as that Well, maybe we are, we are. We're seeing it as an existential level that all we love and know is being destroyed and that's overwhelming, unbearable. It's not surprising we're finding it very hard to talk about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and what? Who is talking about it here is? Do you know who Marianne Williamson is?
Speaker 2:I 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 in the way you just did and saying they're killing us. Like they're killing us, it's everything's being poisoned and it's just a very 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:No, it very much depends. There are large swathes 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 and extremely concerned Caroline Hickman and Bath University. Another author's Brit Ray, who you may know of.
Speaker 2:In the States, they did a very large study of 10,000 young people across 10 countries back in 22, may 22, I think it was and they surveyed young people between the ages of 16 and 25 on their views on climate and the environment and what was going on, and the resounding majority were worried about it.
Speaker 2:I think it was nearly a third said they had serious concerns about whether or not to have children. I didn't grow up wondering whether or not these things would happen in my life in the same way that they did. A large number said they had very little faith in leadership. They felt very let down by leadership and over 60% agreed with the statement that he managed to do. I mean, that's an extraordinary thing for a young person to grow up with. 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 home, we couldn't hug, we couldn't kiss.
Speaker 1:This is the world that they are growing up in and they don't have the sort of cac guide optimism. I think that older people had the luxury of having however false it was, we were growing up. They are very clear eyed about this, but 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.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. They don't know what to do about it. They can feel helpless and it can evoke sorts of feelings from that helpless to hedonism is all going to go. I might as well just enjoy now. I don't know who can blame them, and I meet parents who are extremely they're just so torn. For example, I met somebody who she traveled the world as a young person. She'd had an amazing couple of years just touring the world and hip-hop and stuff and getting on planes and she said I want my kids to have the same, but I'm worried all the time about a what they'll catch when they go somewhere, because there's so many virus right 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. They'll worry about their well-being. I said I feel bad about putting them on a plane, but I want them to have what I had. So it's the time of real dilemma for a lot of people.
Speaker 1:It really is. My practice 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 us and I've really struggled with how much do I tell people what I know, because it's so devastating. It's like that moment you had with the butterflies. Like I've had colleagues and people that have had that moment with these clients of like, oh my gosh, there's a whole world going on here. We saw that with Black Lives Matter too. You know it was like there's a whole world going on here that white people didn't know about.
Speaker 1: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 we have the super glad of information, 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 diet 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 word wisdom, because I think that's some Daniel Schmacktenberg said recently on a podcast with Nate Hagen human intelligence unbound by wisdom is the cause of our problems. Because we're very intelligent, we've invented lots of stuff and we've made lots of stuff with the regretative, but we've not actually bound it up with wisdom. So I think that for me, I think my turning point, a turning point for me, was understanding the work that we connects 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 you've mentioned, 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, wherever they are in the world.
Speaker 2:And so there are some that say, hey, hey, you're you rich white woman to be getting anxious, or 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, because I often do get people coming, young people, saying I shouldn't feel anxious because I've got so much.
Speaker 2:You know, I feel guilty. I mean, humans are very good at layering emotions, aren't we? We can feel guilty about feeling guilty. 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 have we done as a society? What have we partly, you know, responsible for creating, not with that, not with malevolence, but what systems that we're in that are going to 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 focus therapist and coach, linda Aspie. Join us next time when Linda talks to us about the impacts 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 at theviewmackorguk 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 Aspie as our guest. It was hosted by Susan P's Banett and edited by Charlotte White. Social media by Courtney Mudd.