This is a guest post by David Suzuki. 

The coming year looks bright with the promise of change after a difficult decade for environmentalists and our issues. But even with a new government that quickly moved to gender equity in cabinet, expanded the Ministry of the Environment to include climate change, and offered a bravura performance at the climate talks in Paris, can Canada’s environmentalists close up shop and stop worrying?

Of course not.

The nature of politics includes constant trade-offs, compromises and disagreements. Even with a government sympathetic to environmental issues, we won’t act deeply and quickly enough or prevent new problems because we haven’t addressed the root of our environmental devastation.

The ultimate cause isn’t economic, technological, scientific or even social. It’s psychological.

We see and interact with the world through perceptual lenses, shaped from the moment of conception. Our notions of gender, ethnicity, religion, socio-economic status and the environment we grow up in all limit and create our priorities.

If we were to examine the anatomy of human brains, the circuitry and chemistry of neurons or the structure of our sense organs, nothing would permit us to distinguish gender, ethnicity or religion because we all belong to a single species. But if you were to ask a man and a woman about love, sex or family, answers could be quite disparate.

A Jew and Muslim living in Israel might respond differently to questions about Gaza, the West Bank or Jerusalem. A Catholic and Protestant living in Northern Ireland might hold radically different outlooks about their country’s history. 

We learn how to see the world. That, in turn, determines our priorities and actions.

The world has been overwhelmed by the belief that our species stands at the pinnacle of evolution, endowed with impressive intelligence and able to exploit our surroundings as we see fit. We feel fundamentally disconnected from nature and therefore not responsible for the ecological consequences of our actions.

Even at the 2015 Paris climate conference, the sense of urgency about climate change was dampened by the perceived equal need to protect jobs and to consider the economic costs of aiding vulnerable nations and even ways to continue exploiting fossil fuels, the very agents of the crisis.

We can’t just look at the world as a source of resources to exploit with little or no regard for the consequences.

When many indigenous people refer to the planet as “Mother Earth," they are not speaking romantically, poetically or metaphorically. They mean it literally.

We are of the Earth, every cell in our bodies formed by molecules derived from plants and animals, inflated by water, energized by sunlight captured through photosynthesis and ignited by atmospheric oxygen. 

Years ago, I visited a village perched on the side of an Andean mountain in Peru. People there are taught from childhood that the mountain is an apu, a god, and that as long as that apu casts its shadow on the village, it will determine the destiny of its inhabitants. Compare the way those people will treat that mountain with the way someone in Trail, B.C., will after being told for years the surrounding mountains are rich in gold and silver. 

Is a forest a sacred grove or merely lumber and pulp? Are rivers the veins of the land or sources of power and irrigation? Is soil a community of organisms or simply dirt? Is another species our biological relative or a resource? Is our house a home or just real estate?

Once we learn that our very being, essence, health and happiness depend on Mother Earth, we have no choice but to radically shift the way we treat her. When we spew our toxic wastes and pesticides into the air, water and soil, we poison our mother and ourselves. When we frack our wells, we contaminate the air and water on which we depend. When we clear-cut forests, dump mine tailings into rivers and lakes and convert wilderness into farms or suburbs, we undermine the ability of the biosphere to provide the necessities of life. 

Is this how we treat our source of survival? Until all of society understands this and then acts on that understanding, we will not be able to act fully to protect a future for ourselves.

Image: Lyndsay Esson via Flickr

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This article originally appeared on Alternatives Journal.

“What is it about activists that they can’t even be optimistic for one day after a whole decade?” 

The disgust and disappointment on my 16 year olds face is somewhat heartbreaking as he pours cereal the morning after the Canadian election and surfs the comments on my Facebook page. I can only shake my head sadly and agree with him. 

Wouldn’t it be great to be fueled by hope instead of fear as the late Jack Layton urged us in his letter to the nation? For just a minute could we not take a deep breath and focus on all the things that we know will now change?

My sons have never known a Canada that was not under Stephen Harper's thumb. For the last decade they have listened to their parents shock and outrage over the weakening of our environmental laws, the lack of transparency, the erosion of democracy, the muzzling of scientists, the attack on environmental groups, the disregard for Canada’s constitution.

Along the way we tried to keep hope alive. We painted a picture for them of a Canada that valued evidence based policy. A Canada that led on the world stage to create critical international agreements like the Montreal Protocol. We talked about how lucky we are to live in a democracy and how important it was for us to participate, to organize and to vote. 

Together we watched the election results come in from coast to coast and I watched the hope and optimism on my sons face as he listened to Justin Trudeau’s acceptance speech. “Sunny ways!” We all yelled, half-hysterical and grinning ear to ear. “To the end of the Harper Era!” We cheered as we raised a glass in jubilant toast. 

Our exuberance made the next mornings conversation all that more painful. “Is he really no different?” “Why can’t people ever be hopeful?”

Why not indeed. 

Optimism is a particularly hard place for the activist community. It is by nature a community that draws from the margins: those that question the status quo are often the same people that the status quo doesn’t benefit. There are also those that are simply hard wired to question authority and then there are those who have immersed themselves in climate science and for whom incremental progress or half measures are simply seen as disastrous and even immoral.

In the case of this election and the thorough trouncing of the New Democratic Party there are also those in the activist community who were deeply invested in seeing an NDP or at least a Liberal minority that would give more space for an NDP agenda and with it the potential to strengthen the Liberals position on climate change. 

Let’s be clear — the Liberal Party Platform on climate change currently lacks strong emissions reductions targets at a critical moment in history when it is clear that the United Nations Climate Change Conference discussions are undergoing a dramatic cultural shift. For the first time in over a decade we are seeing a race to the top on climate policy. Countries are committing to aggressive targets and, like China with the announcement of their cap and trade system, they are putting in place real policies to meet those targets.

Canada will have to scramble to catch up after a decade of federal action and there is a considerable amount of fear and cynicism in the activist and scientific community about how our new Liberal government will rise to that challenge. Prime Minster-designate Justin Trudeau’s support for the Keystone pipeline and the cosy relationship between the Liberal campaign chair and Transcanada has not helped create optimism on the climate file. 

Of course, there is also the experience of our colleagues south of the border who remind us that without strong public campaigns the Obama administration would never have considered pulling permits for Arctic drilling and certainly would have approved the Keystone pipeline by now. The pull of the oil and gas industry is strong and while we now have the technology to build a cleaner, safer energy system, it is not easy for any elected leader to forego significant short term financial benefits from fossil fuel exploration let alone tell their constituents that the price of electricity and gas needs to go up.

The Liberal campaign slogan during this Federal election was ‘hope and hard work.’  In the coming months we will need a lot of both. Not just from our new government but also from ourselves. 

Let’s allow ourselves to hope. For our children and our health and the health of our communities. Over the past week I have forced myself not to fall into the pit of cynicism and to take a moment everyday to think of one thing that I care about that will change under this new government. It has had the effect of weights being lifted off my shoulders leaving me feel more spacious, more creative and free. 

A decade of attacks on our democracy, on those who can afford it the least and on our environment has left considerable baggage and scars. It will take a while to unpack it all and to trust my own government again. For my children I will try. If we allow ourselves to hope, Prime Minister-designate Justin Trudeau is making it easy for us. 

We aren’t getting platitudes and framing devoid of real promises and content. Within minutes we were getting renewed commitments to a new voting system, an inquiry into the missing and murdered Aboriginal women and an invitation to Green Party leader Elizabeth May and every Premier to attend the Paris Climate Summit as part of a team. We even got a day after press conference where our Prime Minister-designate…answered questions. 

The coming months will not be easy as we begin to establish a new relationship with our government and the international community but I am hopeful that we now have a government that will govern for all of Canadians best interests and not simply for one sector. I am hopeful that we now have a government that will choose science over politics, clean, safe energy systems over business as usual and perhaps even a government that will choose people over polluters. 

Tzeporah Berman BA MES LLD (honoris causa) is an environmental activist, an Adjunct Professor of Environmental Studies at York University, author of This Crazy Time: Living Our Environmental Challenge, published by Knopf Canada and the mother of two boys. 

Image: Flickr

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No one admits to recording Richard Berman’s address to a room full of energy executives in Colorado Springs in June 2014, but it’s an eye-opener.

One unnamed industry executive recorded Berman’s remarks and was offended by them. He provided a copy of the recording and the meeting agenda to the New York Times. DeSmog picked up the story the following day.

If the oil and gas industry is going to prevent environmental opponents from slowing down its efforts to drill in more places, it must be prepared to use dirty tricks, Berman told the executives, whose companies specialize in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

At least four companies with Canadian fracking operations were in Berman’s audience — Devon Energy, Encana Oil and Gas, Ensign Energy Services and Newalta.

“Fear and anger have to be part of the campaign,” he said. “You got to get people fearful of what’s on the table” (what they might lose if environmentalists win) “and then you got to get people angry over the fact they are being misled” (by environmental groups).

Energy executives need to “think of this as an endless war,” he cautioned. “And you have to budget for it,” he warned, as he made a pitch for $3 million to run ads attacking environmentalists in a campaign he calls “Big Green Radicals.”[view:in_this_series=block_1]

Berman is founder and chief executive of Berman and Co., a Washington-based consulting firm that sets up non-profit front groups to attack unions, public-health advocates and consumer, safety, animal welfare and environmental groups.

He admitted that people are always asking him, “How do I know that I won’t be found out as a supporter of what you’re doing?” His reply was designed to reassure. “We run all of this stuff through non-profit organizations that are insulated from having to disclose donors. There is total anonymity. People don’t know who supports us. We’ve been doing this for some 20 years now.”

TransCanada’s Dirty War in Canada

Too bad the Edelman PR agency couldn’t guarantee the same anonymity to its client, TransCanada Corp., in its campaign to discredit critics of its proposed Energy East pipeline from the Alberta oilsands to refineries and export terminals on the Atlantic coast.

Documents released by Greenpeace Canada in November 2014 reveal a plan much more ambitious (and likely many times more costly) than Berman’s Big Green Radicals. But the framing is similar; where Berman says “Think of this as an endless war,” Edelman says “It is critical to play offence … We are running a perpetual campaign.”

The plans call for mobilizing 35,000 supporters (in the works), setting up an online hub (accomplished), extensive advertising (happening), researching the pipeline’s opponents (in the works), and recruiting allies and third-party voices (not known).

A week after the documents were made public, TransCanada cancelled its contract with Edelman, its anonymity blown. It’s not known who took over for Edelman, but someone has to do it — the war must go on.

An Anti-Environment History

The endless war began in 1962 when Bruce Harrison, then “manager of environmental information” for the Manufacturing Chemists Association, masterminded the industry’s campaign to discredit Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s book that raised the alarm that DDT and other pesticides were poisoning wildlife and endangering human health.

In their campaign to discredit Carson, Harrison and his colleagues, PR executives from Shell, DuPont, Dow and Monsanto, used the emerging practice of “crisis management,” which has been described as a mélange of “emotional appeals, scientific misinformation, front groups, extensive mailings to the media and opinion leaders, and the recruitment of doctors and scientists as ‘objective’ third-party defenders of agrichemicals.”

Substitute online hubs, Twitter and Facebook for extensive mailings and you have the blueprint for today’s campaigns.

Everything else remains the same.

Carson died of cancer two years later; Harrison went on to become a general in the endless war as a leading light in anti-environmental PR.

The war crossed the Canadian border in the late 1980s to attack environmentalists who were resisting clear-cut logging of B.C.’s old-growth forests. Inspiration for this ten-year-long campaign, dubbed “War in the Woods,” came from the Bellevue, Washington-based Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, whose name says it all.

The centre was funded by oil, chemical and timber companies, including B.C.-based MacMillan Bloedel, whose logging of pristine old-growth forests on the west coast of Vancouver Island was attracting growing opposition.

Leading the counter-attack were the centre’s Allan Gottlieb and Ron Arnold. Gottlieb was a fundraiser for conservative causes while Arnold was the strategist, like Rick Berman adept at setting up front groups. They created the “wise use movement,” a medley of industry groups held together by two principles: private property rights should have primacy over the public interest, and access to public lands for resource use and exploitation should be unrestricted.

Arnold liked “wise use” as a label for the movement: it is short and fits into a newspaper headline, and it is ambiguous enough to mean just about anything. But behind the soothing ambiguity is the iron fist. In his book, Ecology Wars, Arnold wrote, “Our goal is to destroy, to eradicate the environmental movement” — total war, in other words.

In 1988, Gottlieb and Arnold brought 250 groups to Reno, Nevada, to start a movement that would oppose the environmental movement. MacMillan Bloedel flew some executives and the mayors of Port Alberni and Port McNeil to the conference to listen to speeches about how to do battle with “preservationists.”

As Arnold told the timber industry:

“The public is completely convinced that when you speak as an industry, you are speaking out of nothing but self-interest. The pro-industry citizen activist group is the answer to these problems. It can be an effective and convincing advocate for your industry. It can utilize powerful archetypes such as the sanctity of the family, the virtue of the close-knit community, the natural wisdom of the rural dweller… And it can turn the public against your enemies… I think you’ll find it one of your wisest investments over time.”

He recommended that Canadian timber executives organize grass-roots organizations that could be “an effective and convincing advocate for your industry.”

“Screw The Environment. We Need Jobs”

The executives and mayors went back to B.C. with a plan to draw the residents of resource towns into the fray. A year after the Reno Wise Use conference, a “coalition of people whose livelihoods depend on trees” held a provincial conference to launch a grassroots campaign to oppose the environmental campaign. Logger Mike Morton, an alderman in Ucluelet, a Vancouver Island logging town, stepped up as a spokesman.

Morton became chairman of Share the Clayoquot Society and the following year, executive director of Share BC, an umbrella organization for 22 local “share our forest” and “share our resources” groups (“share” meaning preserve a small portion of the land and “manage” the rest) set up by the forest industry.

Forest executives were able to turn the disaffection of rural and resource industry workers, farmers and small business people into anti-environmental sentiment. Woodworkers were losing their jobs, but not because of the actions of environmentalists. They needed to look to their employers, who were replacing thousands of workers with automated equipment and exporting raw logs instead of processing them in the province.

Environmental opposition built to a climax in the summer of 1993, when 850 people were arrested for blockading a road used by MacMillan Bloedel in its logging operations in Clayoquot Sound. It was billed as the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history.

Eight months later, in March 1994, 20,000 woodworkers and residents of timber-dependent towns massed on the B.C. legislature lawn to decry a B.C. government-commissioned land-use proposal for Vancouver Island that would protect 13 percent of the island’s land base. “Screw the Environment. We Need Jobs,” their signs read.

Labeled the “yellow ribbon campaign,” it was Share’s crowning achievement.

After eight years leading Share, Mike Morton had a new job as director of communications for the BC Liberal caucus. When the Liberals under Gordon Campbell won the 2001 election, Morton became director of communications for the premier, a post he retained after Christy Clark became premier.

By then the war in the woods was over but the war in the Alberta oilsands and in B.C.'s mines was well underway. 

Image Credit: Screenshot of an image of environmentalist Bill McKibben from a "Big Green Radicals" video by the Richard Berman-connected Enviromental Policy Alliance

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

In his recent book Harperism: How Stephen Harper and His Think Tank Colleagues have Transformed Canada, author and adjunct SFU professor Donald Gutstein outlines a battle being waged in Canada for the “climate of ideas.”

The Prime Minister is often thought of as a lone wolf, “the rogue conservative who marches to his own drummer.” But it’s not so, argues Gutstein. Harper is merely “one side of an ideological coin.”

The flipside is the network of key influencers — politicians, industry titans, think tanks, journalists — who work to advance not just Harper’s agenda, but the agenda of neoliberalism that serves powerful private interests, Gutstein says.

According to Gutstein, public sentiment in Canada — around things like environmental policy, free-market orthodoxy and the collection of taxes — is strongly influenced by a cadre of like-minded individuals and organizations who work in conjunction to, for example, sway public opinion on implementing a carbon tax or funding the arts.

The overall effect of this strategy has been the emergence of Harperism, a political style ruled by market logic and economic freedom. What has been lost along the way is robust democratic participation in Canadian decision-making, checks and balances, scientific integrity and the influence of civil society groups, Gutstein argues.

I recently spoke with Gutstein about attacks on environmental groups in Canada and asked him to explain how he sees this factoring into the broader political landscape.

Q: How do you see oil and gas interests, free-market think tanks and the Conservative government banding together to “neutralize,” as you say in your book, environmental opposition?

A: Harper and the think tanks rarely get together but they do work together in a very well understood way. The think tanks are working over a long period of time to change the climate of ideas. They can’t force us to think differently but they cast doubt on the motivation of environmental groups — ‘where do you get your funding?” — these questions are up in the air.

That makes it easier for Harper to do something: attack them, cut off their funding or ignore them. It makes it easier to happen today than it was 10 years ago. I do think environmental groups’ reputations have been sullied or tarnished by this constant work on them.

The articles, the op-ed pieces, the news stories with quotes from the think tanks — all this eventually changes the climate of ideas about environmentalism.

Q: I really like this idea in your book of transforming the “climate of ideas.” It sheds a light on how democracy works, or the way that opinions or perspectives are formed within a democratic setting. Things like the credibility of environmental organizations are really up for grabs in the media. You see grand claims being made, often without substantiation, that could damage the reputation of an environmental organization. I think it was Mark Twain who said ‘a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.’ How do you see this strategy of casting doubt and changing the climate of ideas at work in our democracy?

A: I’d probably need to think more about this question, but one example springs to mind: when Ezra Levant was doing his Ethical Oil campaign he would write op-eds in the Toronto Sun attacking Greenpeace, but the Toronto Sun would never give any space to Greenpeace to say what they are really about or to respond to Levant’s wild charges.

So all the readers knew about Greenpeace was what they read from Ezra Levant.

The way the media frame stories, who they give voices to — that has a lot to do with what ideas gain in credibility and get a more positive or more negative tarnish to it.

That’s just one example, but it’s a bigger picture.

I appreciate that things have changed quite a bit because of Twitter, Facebook and the internet, but I think that the corporate media still play a defining role in determining which ideas get promoted, and which ideas are ignored.

I love that quote…“If the media don’t report on an issue, it might as well not exist.” I think that’s so profound. It’s the other side of asking: which ideas do they promote, and how do they spin them, which things are credible and which are not?

I think the media still play an important role…even on the Internet. So much of what is on Facebook and Twitter are responses or commentaries to what’s in the media.

Q: Do you see certain individuals being deployed as ‘ambassadors’ of anti-environmental or free-market ideas?

A: Oh sure. That’s a long-standing strategy. Just this morning someone contacted me about an article I wrote on Rabble about John Luik, who was a frontman for the tobacco industry. He wrote all these books and papers and was secretly funded by the tobacco industry for years and years.

He’s the model. There are lots of people like this that operate as individuals. [Luik] even did work — wrote a book — for the Fraser Institute criticizing the need to regulate second-hand smoke. Individuals exist as individual personalities and in a way they can seem more credible.

Q: Do you see individuals like blogger Vivian Krause in this kind of light? She appeared on the scene as this independent researcher just asking questions on the Internet and in no time she was thrust into the national spotlight and given some of our most prominent media platforms. On her resume she even credits herself with initiating the Canada Revenue Agency investigation and audits of Canada’s environmental charities. It seems she’s become a ‘rising star’ because her narrative served the interests and needs of the Harper government and the fossil fuel industry. Do you see her falling into the typical pattern of how individuals are deployed to serve certain interests?

A: There are hundreds of millions of bloggers, so why did she rise to the top? She’s getting op-eds in the news media and it’s interesting to look at that.

She writes for the National Post, which is the most amenable to this kind of corporate propaganda. The Financial Post, which is just the business section of the National Post, is edited by Terrance Corcoran and he’s for a long time gone after ‘junk science’ and has attacked Greenpeace and the environmental movement for decades. So that would be a really good home for her.

[Krause] wouldn’t have really gotten anywhere unless corporate media and some of the industry groups started seeing the benefit of having her.

If she can take away from the harm they’re doing to the environment and move it to the supposedly nasty things that the energy industry’s critics are up to then that really gets the heat off them to a large extent.

She would be playing a pretty significant role for them.

Q: What do you anticipate happening in Canada over the next year as we move into the next federal election?

A: Well that’s an interesting one. Harper has so many files open, from the one on the First Nations property ownership act, trying to transform First Nations [reserves] into private property, but that’s sort of on hold. He moved forward on it to a point. And then the attacks on environmentalists have gone so far…it’s hard to know what he’ll focus on.

They’ve set the narrative for the next election with income-sharing and the child tax benefits.

…

If Stephen Harper is voted back in it will be unimaginable, the plans he has ready to go.

If the Harper Conservatives did get back in, it’s incremental, he would move to deregulate new areas, remove the significance of scientific information. He would find places here and there.

He would probably boost the ability of environment Canada to do financial costing of ecosystem services.

It’s never going to be a huge move, it’s always going to be these small steps, but they all add up eventually into something huge. 

Image Credit: Prime Minister's Photo Gallery

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Over the past few years, I’ve been fortunate to participate in discussions about climate change threats and environmental issues with people across private, public, governmental, and research sectors. Whether at an island retreat in Puget Sound, a corporate conference at a resort or in the halls of our esteemed universities, the same questions get asked: How can we get people to care more? How do we motivate people? What’s it going to take?

What if these are the wrong questions to be asking?

Let’s consider this question by first reconsidering the context.

Environmental issues can generate huge anxieties that make them hard for many people to contemplate. Climate change in particular taps into all sorts of cognitive dissonances and feelings of guilt, leaving many people feeling overwhelmed about their role in the problem and solution. This anxiety is often managed through an array of brilliant (usually unconscious) strategies, often both privately and socially, that help us avoid pain, discomfort and conflicts.

Assuming we can agree on these things, the questions we should be asking are: How can our well-established insights into loss and cognitive dissonance guide new approaches to reaching people? How can our understanding of the way anxiety impacts our psyche and conduct inform the way we engage, message and campaign for a more sustainable future?

Psychology and sustainability may seem like strange bedfellows but more than 100 years of psychoanalytic research reveals a lot about how people use unconscious processes to manage anxiety. If I am feeling rather down about the prognosis of our planet, I like to ask myself: “What would a good therapist do?” Does a therapist berate the patient for being scared, reticent or a bit stuck? Does a therapist offer cash incentives for changing behaviors? (I hope not.) One of the first things a (good) therapist does is create what’s called a sense of safety and containment. They can do this by acknowledging their patient’s conflict, suffering and struggle, by helping the patient feel “seen”. Then – and only then – do they form an alliance with the patient to work together in a collaborative, participatory way towards change.

How this translates into engaging people more widely and creatively can be surprising. For starters, acknowledging that people use unconscious strategies for managing anxiety changes the ways we consider (and research) how people think and feel about our world. Analysis needs to go beneath the surface to explore where people feel stuck in conflict and anxious. Second, a psychoanalytic paradigm asks not whether people care or not but focuses onwhere care may exist but may not have permission to be expressed.

This approach can infuse our engagement work, whether in research or strategy, with a mood of curiosity as opposed to frustration and irritation at how wasteful, greedy and short-sighted societies can be. And this mood of curiosity and inquiry can lead us into some unexpected behavior change strategies – particularly through conversation.

The power of conversation may be the most profound insight we can gain from those on the frontlines of the therapeutic professions. Conversation changes people. As Rosemary Randall’s development of Carbon Conversations demonstrates, it’s very simple – if we want people to change, we have to listen to them. Humans are designed to learn, be changed and process information in the act of conversing. In this context, engagement can move beyond the creation of “Green Teams” and champions, into a far more dynamic evolution that creates contexts for creative participation. This means letting go of some control and being open to seeing what emerges when we invite people to contribute (a concept usefully offered by British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott) and exercise their agency.

What all of this amounts to is a radical reframe, a shift from a focus on motivating, persuading, cajoling and gamifying to inviting, enabling, facilitating and supporting. This is about giving people permission to care. As deeply social beings, we need some permission, we need to feel safe. Now, more than any other time, we need to start practicing a new form of engagement that presumes there is more care than can be contained – it just needs some help being channeled.

This article originally appeared on Climate Access.

Image Credit: Mark Stevens via Flickr

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“Speak the truth, but not to punish.”

These are the words the famous Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh told DeSmogBlog and DeSmog Canada founder, president and contributor James Hoggan one afternoon in a conversation about environmental advocacy and the collapse of productive public discourse.

Over the course of three years James (Jim) Hoggan has engaged the minds of communications specialists, philosophers, leading public intellectuals and spiritual leaders while writing a book designed to address the bewildering question: “why, when we know so much about the global environmental crisis, are we doing so little?”

Hoggan recently recounted some of the insights he has gained into this question when he spoke at the Walrus Talks “The Art of Conversation.”

He begins with the basic axiom shared by cognitive scientist Dan Kahan, “just as you can pollute the natural environment, you can pollute public conversations.” From that the logic follows – if we’re serious about resolving our environmental problems, we are going to have to attend equally to the state of our public discourse.

In Canada, says Hoggan, we face particular challenges when it comes to polluted pubic conversations, especially with the heightened tenor of rhetoric regarding environmentalism and energy issues surrounding the oilsands and proposed pipelines.

"The ethical oil, foreign funded radicals campaign," he says, "has made Canadians less able to weigh facts honestly, disagree constructively, and think things through collectively."

You can watch a short video of Hoggan’s talk on The Walrus, or read the transcript below:

Good evening, I’m Jim Hoggan. I wanted to start by saying I’m not speaking here as the chair of the David Suzuki Foundation, but as the author of a book that I’m writing called The Polluted Public Square.

In this book I’m on a personal journey to learn from public intellectuals. I travel from Oxford, to Harvard, to Yale to MIT; I had tea with the expert on public trust in the House of Lords dining room; I spent a week with the Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh; I traveled to the Himalayas to interview the Dalai Lama. So I’ve spent three years on this journey. Originally I thought I was writing a book for other people, but I realized as I was going through this that I was actually writing a book for myself.

The book is about this question of public conversations and the state of public discourse. And the specific question I asked all of these people, was “why is it, in spite of all this scientific evidence, from experts in atmospheric, marine and life sciences, are we doing so little to fix these big environmental problems that we’re creating? And why isn’t public discourse on the environment more data driven? Why are we listening to each other shout rather than listening to what the evidence is trying to tell us?"

One of the first interviews I did was with a Yale Law School cognitive scientist named Dr. Dan Kahan. He had part of the answer for me. He said, “just as you can pollute the natural environment, you can pollute public conversations.”

He said that healthy public discourse is a public good that is every bit as important as the natural environment; that we should be willing to protect, consciously protect, the state and the health of public discourse; and that we were in Canada and the United States suffering from he called a ‘social pathology.’

And this kind of healthy public discourse, or healthy attitude to public discourse, is certainly something that we’re not paying much attention to in Canada these days.

In 2012 – let me take you back to something the Conservative government would probably rather we all forgot about – in early 2012 some folks in the oil and gas industry launched a PR campaign with this message: ethical oil is like fair trade coffee. It’s like conflict-free diamonds. It’s morally superior.

In 2012 the oil and gas industry worked closely with the Conservative government to convince Canadians that British Columbians who opposed tankers on the coast of B.C. were extremists working for American business interests.

Now, environmental activists have been polluting the public square for a long time: they’ve called the oilsands heroin, they’ve called it blood oil, they’ve called oil companies environmental criminals engaged in crimes against humanity.

Now who would have thought that this level of rhetoric could be raised any higher? But it was.

Senator Mike Duffy called B.C. charities “un-Canadian.” The minister of environment accused them of money laundering. The PMO called them “foreign funded radicals.” Senator Don Plett said, where would environmentalists draw the line on who they receive money from? Would they take money from Al-Qaeda? The Taliban? Hamas?

So in 2012, as Terry Glavin put it, suddenly we had sleeper cells of Ducks Unlimited popping up across Canada.

Now I’m not suggesting equivalency here. These environmentalists have the evidence of climate change on their side. They’re arguing against the inaction from an industry that’s in a lot of trouble as the world realizes that their product is changing the climate. And they haven’t done a very good job of handing that trouble.

I met a guy in Harlem at a coffee shop. His name is Jason Stanley and he writes for the New York Times and teaches philosophy of language and a class in democracy and propaganda at Yale. And he said that when oil from Fort McMurray is called ‘ethical oil,’ or coal from West Virginia is called ‘clean coal,’ it’s difficult to have a real discussion about the pros and cons. He explained that these kinds of improbable assertions, where words are misappropriated and their meanings twisted, are not so much about making substantial claims, but they’re about silencing.

He called them linguistic strategies for stealing the voices of others.

He said Fox News engages in silencing when it describes itself ‘fair and balanced’ to an audience that is perfectly aware that it is neither. The effect is to suggest that there’s not such thing as fair and balanced. That there’s no possibility of balanced news, only propaganda.

Canada’s public square is polluted with a toxic form of rhetoric that insinuates that there are no facts, there is no objectivity, and that everyone is trying to manipulate you for their own interests. Our belief in sincerity and objectivity itself is under attack. So when everything is mislabeled and you can’t trust anything that anyone says, why bother with the public square?

The American linguist Deborah Tannen puts it this way: when you hear a ruckus outside your house at night, you open the window to see what’s going on. But if there’s a ruckus every night, you close the shutters and ignore it.

The ethical oil, foreign funded radicals campaign has made Canadians less able to weigh facts honestly, disagree constructively, and think things through collectively.

Now how you clean up the public square – my book is 120,000 words – that’s a big question for a seven-minute speech.

But let me say this: “I’m right, your wrong. Let me tell you what you should think” is not a great communications strategy.

Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt told me that, and also said it doesn’t work because we all think we’re right. Haidt argues that people are divided by politics and religion, not because some people are good and others are evil, but because our minds were designed for ‘groupish righteousness.’ Morality binds and blinds us. Our righteousness minds were developed by evolution to unite us into teams, divide us against other teams, and blind us to the truth. Haidt suggests we step outside the self-righteousness of what he calls our moral matrix, and look to the Dalai Lama to see the power of moral humility and that we take the time to understand the values and worldviews of people we strongly disagree with.

I also interviewed Ted-prize winner Karen Armstrong who developed the charter for compassion. She put it this way: we must speak out against injustice, but not in a way that causes more hatred. She told me, remember what St. Paul said: charity takes no delight in the wrongdoing of others.

So my time’s up, but I just want to say one more thing. Since the 60s I’ve been reading Eastern philosophy and following particularly Zen Buddhism. So a little while ago David Suzuki and I were lucky enough to spend an afternoon with the famous Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. And he kept saying to David, people don’t need to know more about destroying the planet. They already know they’re destroying the planet. You need to deal with the despair. So I kept listening to him and it sounded to me like he was saying we should go meditated.

So I said to him, “in Canada, Canadians expect the David Suzuki Foundation to speak up on behalf of the environment. You’re not saying we shouldn’t be activists?”

It’s hard, I’ve been trying to think of how I could describe the way he looked at me. But it was with this kind of silence and deepness that I can’t remember having anyone look at me like that before. So he looked at me and he said, “speak the truth but not to punish.”

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Do I contradict myself? 

Very well then I contradict myself, 

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

The ‘I’ in this passage — from section 51 of Song of Myself, by poet Walt Whitman — stands as a reference to the erratic and self-contradictory ways in which people think and act out their lives.

Whitman is drawing attention to an everyday experience that defines the human condition — people do not, and cannot, live pure and ascetic lives. In saying ‘I contain multitudes,’ what Whitman is really highlighting is that we all contain multitudes, a mess of perspectives and sentiments that leave us in a state of perpetual hypocrisy.

So say it with me now — we are all hypocrites.

The way in which we think, act, feel and live is wrought with self-denial, contradiction and inconsistency. In a recent piece, I highlighted how various logical fallacies work as psychological flaws that twist and distort our decision-making abilities, making it virtually impossible for someone to make a truly unbiased and impartial choice about anything.

What’s more, because so much of our thought processes are subconscious, our internal contradictions and irregularities rarely register at a more conscious level. And thus our unwillingness to realize this means we tend to think everyone is a hypocrite but us.

According to Why Everyone (Else) Is A Hypocrite, by evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban, the reason we seem unwilling to make an effort to realize our inherent irrationalities is because in Western society, a flattering self-image is directly correlated with personal rewards such as greater senses of emotional stability, motivation and perseverance.

So instead of a more self-reflexive populace that understands everyone — including oneself — is full of contradictions, and more importantly, that it’s entirely natural to have some analytical imperfections, we’ve become a society of self-denial, where a person’s opinions can be easily discredited unless they practice an impossibly monastic lifestyle.

These beliefs create a delusional world. A world where the status quo can never really change because people are expected to actively practice everything they preach, even though, as Kurzban notes, the human mind — my mind, your mind — is modular, and as such, consists of a large number of specialized parts, each of which, because they are separated from one another, can simultaneously hold mutually contradictory views.

Take environmentalism. Challenging fracking practices, protesting a pipeline, objecting to further developments in the oilsands — like clockwork, activists who take these kinds of actions are immediately levelled with accusations of hypocrisy based on the tenuous notion that an environmentalists’ own reliance on fossil fuels means their protests against the practices of the oil and gas industries are akin to the tired old idiom of the pot calling the kettle black.

After all, as political economist Robert Reich stresses in his book Supercapitalism, trying to live the perfect green lifestyle in an economic system that is structurally designed to produce waste, overconsumption and fossil fuel dependence as predictably as it produces inequality, job insecurity and unrequited exploitation, is an indisputably impossible task.

As such, the notion that environmentalists — such as Neil Young for example — have no right to criticize oilsands developments, pipelines or fracking because they ‘choose’ to heat their homes and drive cars is downright nonsensical. By the empty rhetoric of this argument, not a single Canadian citizen could legitimately engage in any form of critical public discourse because to an extent, we all benefit from the system we are critiquing.

We live in a society where it is impossible to live a functional lifestyle and not consume products made from petro-chemicals every single day — electronics, fabrics, painkillers, food additives, cosmetics, fabrics, cleaning supplies, building materials, the list goes on.

More than ever, it is precisely because it is incredibly difficult to survive outside of our wasteful, exploitative and fossil fuel-obsessed system that we need environmentalists and other activists — yes, even if they own a cellphone and wear cheaply manufactured clothing — advocating for alternative means of production and modes of consumption.

Because if the prerequisite for a legitimate criticism is a complete and utter distancing from the object of which we are critiquing, than fossil fuels, the economy and politics are all off limits. Moreover, students can’t confront the administration of their university because it determines their grades. Workers can’t question the management of their company because it signs their paychecks. Christians can’t challenge interpretations of the Bible because they ascribe to the religion. Married people can’t oppose sexism because marriage was originally an institution of patriarchy and female subordination.

But many of us do these things anyway, don’t we?

Many of us question the very government that provides us with healthcare, the very economic system that fills the supermarket, the companies that pay us, the universities that grade us, the religions that save us, the patriarchies that subjugate us, and yes, the very fossil fuels that provide us with the countless resources society needs to function. 

Due to our very nature and the inescapable realities of the market, our political system and our reliance on fossil fuels, speaking up is always hypocritical. And as such, we need to be mindful of the fact that more often than not, charges of ‘hypocrisy’ brought against those trying to think beyond our current system tend to be nothing but attempts by those in power to keep us from challenging their ascendancy.

If we understand hypocrisy as the inevitable consequence of questioning practices and policies so dominant that it’s nearly impossible to function without participating in them, then hypo-critical thought is vital if society is to move beyond the status quo. After all, how, for instance, can we begin to imagine a future beyond fossil fuels if each attempt to question their primacy invokes cries of hypocrisy from the titans of the resource industry?

The answer is simple: we can’t — and that’s just the way Big Oil wants it to stay.

So the next time someone accuses you of being a hypocrite for criticizing the inescapable structures of society from within, remember every government reformed, social injustice abolished, inequality rebalanced and environmentally destructive practice eradicated has been made possible by people who were willing to act on thoughts that were at one time deemed contradictory to the status quo.

Image: Kinder Morgan pipeline protest, Burnaby 2014. Photo: Mark Klotz via Flickr

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This post is the second in a series. Read part one at Learning from the Opposition, Part 1.

So far we’ve covered two of the main sources of opposition to meaningful action on climate change: the corporation and the state. Although it can be tempting to take this analysis and blame greedy CEOs or corrupt politicians, the problem runs deeper than having the wrong personalities in power. Regardless of who sits in the boardroom or sleeps at 24 Sussex Drive, corporations and governments will always do what is necessary to keep global capitalism functioning—unless they’re compelled to do otherwise.

Our political leaders and captains of industry will only recognize the social and ecological limits of economic growth if the environmental movement makes them impossible to ignore.

While scientists can be muzzled and the facts on climate change can be obscured by industry PR campaigns, mass movements are not easily dismissed. The key question is how to increase the size and strength of the environmental movement. In the hopes of contributing to a movement growth strategy, it’s worth looking at some common criticisms of environmentalists to see what’s standing in the way of bigger numbers.

The best place to gauge popular discontent with any progressive social or political cause is the online comments section of a conservative newspaper like the National Post. For anyone who has spent time drifting through the arguments that accumulate there, the charges leveled against environmentalists will be familiar: they’re hysterical doomsayers, deluded idealists and insufferable elitists. 

Granted, these criticisms tend to rely on slander over substance. But behind the insults are some recurring themes that reflect genuine political discontents worth paying attention to. Below are four categories reflecting some of the most common complaints against the environmental movement, and a few thoughts on how to overcome them.

Catastrophism

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Perhaps the most common accusation is that environmentalists are prophets of doom on endless repeat. Each new threat to the rainforest, each new discovery of a pollutant in the water supply, or each new set of projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is announced as a clear sign of the impending total collapse of planetary life support systems.

The problem is that no matter how true these warnings are, the apocalypse has yet to arrive. Particularly for Canadians in urban areas who are insulated from the impacts of pollution, environmental degradation and climate change, few of the dire predictions lead to any perceptible changes. The continuation of normal life works like a daily rebuttal to the threat of catastrophe.

This in turn causes greens to rely on a kind of I-told-you-so strategy: eventually the world truly will become unsuitable for human habitation, and then we’ll have been proven right. But smug satisfaction is cold comfort on a warming planet. 

The trick here is that climate change is every bit as urgent as it’s made out to be. The task then is to find a way to articulate that urgency in a way that drives people to action rather than apathy. The facts about what kind of world we’re facing after a 2-degree average temperature increase should not be glossed over or made more palatable. Instead, they should be presented in a way that avoids pointing fingers and builds solidarity across social divisions. 

Old-Fashioned Elitism

Another obstacle preventing the growth of the environmental movement is the perception that environmentalists are urban snobs who don’t understand where the gas in their cars comes from. This particular trope is a familiar import from our neighbours to the South, where the culture wars have come to function as a stand-in for genuine politics. Democrats are said to be latte-sipping devotees of fine dining, while Republicans work hard, watch NASCAR and repent on Sundays.

The cultural contours are similar in Canada. Too often the social vision of the environmental movement rests on an easy demonization of those who fall outside of the typical environmentalist constituency of highly educated urbanites. The blame for carbon emissions gets placed on suburban commuters or workers in resource industries, while downtown paper pushers in air-conditioned offices imagine themselves to have already gone green.

Rather than a personal issue of modifying a few consumption habits, climate change needs to be seen as a systemic problem to be solved collectively. That means articulating a politics that speaks to people in logging towns and office towers alike, while recognizing that we’re all implicated in a social and economic order that runs on fossil fuels.

Self-Loathing Naturalism

Another unflattering picture of environmentalists is that of the idealist in despair who sees the human species as a cancer spreading across the Earth and destroying everything in its path. This view is usually accompanied by a kind of soft nihilistic longing for the destruction of urban civilization and a return to something more like a subsistence lifestyle.

This perspective rests on a strange foundation that imagines nature without humans existing in a perfect state of finely tuned equilibrium. It sees technology, the development of agriculture and the construction of cities as crass violations of the natural order. But aside from gnashing our teeth and cursing our fate, it offers little guidance on how to respond to the climate crisis.

A more useful response to environmental degradation locates the problem not with humans per se, but rather with an economic system that reduces the natural world to commodities in the pursuit of profit. By championing a vision of economic organization that responds to human needs rather than the dictates of private profitability, the environmental movement stands a better chance of appealing to those who don’t see the human condition as an affront to nature.

Accidental Austerity

Finally, the last complaint on the list is directed at those who advocate for voluntary reductions in personal consumption as the way forward. As the cliché has it, this call tends to broadcast most loudly from those with expensive phones, sleek hybrids and a taste for local organic delicacies.

For those living in the gentrified districts of major urban centers, such tasteful restraint in consumption habits is relatively attainable—provided one can afford it. But for low-income families, reduced consumption is just another way of saying not getting enough to eat.

Without a clear understanding of inequality and differential access to consumer goods and social services, this kind of degrowth politics can sound an awful lot like austerity—that is, cuts imposed on those who can least afford them. The environmental movement is at its best when it calls not only for reductions in consumption, but also the redistribution of wealth and power with the aim of creating a green and just society. 

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Minimizing the worst effects of climate change seems like a goal we should all be able to agree on. If you ask them directly, very few people will come out in favour of increasingly frequent and severe storms, flooding in coastal cities or drought-induced famines. But as the evidence mounts that these things will come to pass unless we leave 80% of remaining proven fossil fuel reserves in the ground, why can’t we agree on the need to act?

The easiest answer is that opposition to transitioning to a low-carbon economy comes from those who stand to benefit the most from staying the course. The most obvious culprits here are oil and gas companies. While the International Energy Agency warns against exceeding an average global temperature increase of 2°, it also predicts that current policies will lead to a 35% increase in global demand for oil by 2035.

With Big Oil already posting record profits, the promise of substantial demand growth means those profits will balloon to unprecedented proportions. Faced with such alluring numbers, leaving oil reserves in the ground is not an attractive prospect for shareholders.

Although they make for easy targets, it’s not just ExxonMobil, Shell and co. that are standing in the way of meaningful action on climate change. As a key global commodity, oil is at the center of the business model not only for oil and gas companies, but also the automobile industry, logistics, plastics and pharmaceuticals, to name but a few.

The decrease in oil production needed to avert climate change’s worst effects would mean a significant cost increase for a basic factor of production across many sectors of the economy. This in turn would lead to serious reductions in profits—not to mention the additional costs for consumers.

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Since corporations are legal entities whose function is to maximize profits for their shareholders, they tend to oppose actions that limit profitability. While corporations depend on the state for their legitimacy and can therefore be compelled to accept reduced profits through regulation, government has its own reluctance about confronting climate change.

Just as corporations are constrained by quarterly profit requirements, governments are limited by the electoral cycle. Simply put, they need to maintain popularity with the electorate in order to stay in power. This leads to a bias in favour of policies with short-term benefits.

Although taking action on climate change is a platform that appeals to Canadians, the government knows it can’t be done without serious economic implications. If a governing party were to spearhead a massive industrial transformation away from fossil fuels, it would be blamed for any ensuing economic difficulties at the polls.

Beyond merely keeping voters happy, governments need to act in accordance with the multitude of rules and norms governing global capitalism. From G20 meetings to bilateral free trade agreements, the global economy rests on commitments from individual states to minimizing trade barriers, reducing regulation and maintaining fiscal discipline.

Charting a course away from fossil fuels within this framework is not impossible, but could encounter significant opposition at the international level. The ongoing financial crisis has already revived old fears of a return to protectionism and competitive currency devaluations. The overwhelming response from the IMF and other international financial institutions has been loud and clear: follow the rules to get back on track to oil-fueled global growth.

Taken together, all this means that the two most powerful institutions in modern society—the corporation and the state—lack the capacity to respond to the unfolding crisis of climate change. If the environmental movement is to be successful in spurring the immediate, drastic action necessary to reduce CO2 emissions, it needs to honestly assess these obstacles.

Institutional forms and economic relationships can be changed. But overcoming the path dependence of a global capitalism built on deeply entrenched principles of endless industrial growth and maximizing profits will take more than voting for the right party or investing in green growth.

The power of environmentalism rests on its ability to grow and sustain itself as a mass movement. In the second installment, we’ll look at some common criticisms of the environmental movement for ideas on how to increase its reach.  

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This is a guest post by Evangeline Lilly, Canadian actress.

For those of you who don’t know me, I am a Canadian actress who has been living abroad in Hawaii for the past ten years. I have been involved in such well-known projects as the television series “Lost”, the indie hit “The Hurt Locker”, the blockbuster film “Real Steel” and the upcoming second and third “Hobbit” films.

To hear Evangeline Lilly tell her story, listen here:

I grew up in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta surrounded on all sides by the never-ending golden fields of wheat that so signify the Canadian prairies. From there my family moved to British Columbia where flat, open plains were replaced with majestic, mountain vistas and beautiful green valleys. Trees, rain, snow, farms, wildlife, snow peaked mountains and insects defined my upbringing.  

From my Grandfather’s homemade cabin in the Gulf Islands to our summers spent camping on the Okanagan Lake, as a Canadian I was always surrounded by natural beauty.

I remember when I was summoned away from Canada. There was a job waiting, it offered a lot of money, and it meant I would move to Hawaii…Hawaii: paradise. If you know anything about my history, you’ll know that that job was my role as “Kate” on the television series Lost and you’ll know that I took it and left Canada…never to move back.  

So now, I have been living in “paradise” for ten years. Do I miss home? Always. Every day that I’m gone. Because, you see, being Canadian is in my bones, it’s an identity that I can’t and don’t want to escape. Tropical beaches with turquoise waters are beautiful, but my heart wells and my soul sings when I see pine tree covered mountains and stretches of interminable deciduous forests.

I am Canadian. I can’t help myself. Beavers, and moose, and bears, and squirrels all make me feel proud. Snow, and ice, and lakes, and rivers are all a part of me. The Rockies, Niagara, the Great North, and Hudson’s Bay are symbols of who I am. Rosy cheeks, frostbite, neighbours, and hard work are all a part of my Canadian identity.

When I think of home, I think of the wilderness. Canada is one of the last natural expanses left on planet earth, but right now, that vestige is being seriously threatened.  

The tar sands in Alberta, the construction of new pipelines, the industrial abuse of clean water, the elimination of environmental laws and mistreatment of First Nations peoples are some of the greatest threats to our identity as Canadians. We are known as harmonious people: living in harmony with ourselves, with the rest of the world, and with nature.  

But our response to these issues has not been in keeping with that reputation. In a time when the world needs to band together in order to learn how to live in harmony with nature, I would have expected Canada to be leading the charge, but we’re not.  

Preserving nature in Canada is not just about Global Warming – it’s about preserving our heritage, our history, and our harmony: our identity.

Will you stand against the damages being done to our wilderness? Will you stand up for nature because as a Canadian, nature has shaped you?  

I am Evangeline Lilly and I am Canadian. What are you?

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