Dr. Robert Gifford: It's complicated!

Gifford, R. (2011). The dragons of inaction: Psychological barriers that limit climate change mitigation and adaptation. American Psychologist, 66(4), 290-302. doi: 10.1037/a0023566

University of Victoria psychology professor Bob Gifford's Dragons of Inaction have been snarling around the edge of my consciousness for some years now. And I still find his analysis incredibly appealing: it's complicated.

As he said yesterday during a presentation in Dr. Renee Lertzman's class in the Royal Roads Masters in Environmental Education and Communication program, it is facile to imagine a humanity populated by boorish and indifferent people disregarding climate change because they simply don't care about the fate of the world. Rather, Gifford identifies 33 "Dragons of Inaction," (mostly) psychological barriers that just get in our way. These dragons he breaks into seven "Genera" - including: limited cognition, ideologies, comparisons with others, sunk costs, discredence, perceived risks and limited behavior.

There are a few things about this analysis I find interesting. First, Gifford identifies a dragon barrier even for the boorish and indifferent types who go out of the way to defeat the pollution control on their four-by-fours and run with a little oil in their gas, just for the pleasure of belching black smoke on the "Greenies." These people are wrestling with the you-can't-make-me dragon Reactance, which is good to know in that it sets up the conversation starter: If I can't make you, how might I entice you?

Second, and more broadly, Gifford takes a helpful step away from the failed strategy of shouting frightening warnings from the rooftops; it's embarrassing to note how long too long the environmental community has defaulted to that long-debunked methodology.

But third, it's fascinating that a psychologist would paint 33 shiny dragons without actually dipping into the emotional palette. What about fear? What about people who look away because they have a gut understanding of how horrifying the future may be and they just can't - or don't want to - face it?

Optimistically, Gifford says he started with just seven dragons and he is now up to 33 and counting. Well, Bob, fear, anxiety, denial? Time to count a few more.

Dot Earth Gets One Right

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/shrinking-the-climate-problem/?_r=1

I'm no particular fan of Andy Revkin. I've seen him report "news" that privileged the community of professional climate change deniers (with particular favor being shown to the likes of Pat Michaels). But I have to accord him a large dose of respect for his consistent commitment to new and interesting material in the enviro-conversation.
Case in point: He gives nice room here to Renee Lertzman and, by extension, to a significant and potentially transformative psychoanalytical interpretation of the car crash that is modern climate conversation and policy-making. This is worthy journalism in the old style - with the questions to the fore and the reporter out of the way, leaving the subject to bring us the new.

Lertzman and Norgaard

Lertzman, R (2011). Interview with Kari Norgaard, Ecopsychology. 3(1)

 
"I have been highlighting in my work three central emotions raised by climate change: fear, helplessness, and guilt," Kari Norgaard tells Renee Lertzman, in what turns out to be a nicely expository conversation.

As someone who has been too committed to recruiting-by-shouting - to acting as a new age Cassandra trying to startle people out of their torpor or stupor of whatever was keeping them in apparent climate paralysis, it's almost embarrassing to see so clearly an explanation that I understood in my gut but never acted upon: people really, really don't want to think about it.

As Norgaard says: "The scale of change that climate scientists are describing evokes a level of fear that is very profound, very significant, and much bigger than just thinking about the ozone hole—which we were able to respond to pretty effectively and fairly quickly through the Montreal Protocol."

(Interesting reference here: the Montreal Protocol was one of the greatest negotiated solutions in the history of international diplomacy on earth; how can we get back to that useful place?)

Returning to the theme, Norgaard says, "If you have a lot of guilt or fear and yet your emotion norms do not allow for that to be expressed, then it is very difficult to do anything with that and it becomes particularly paralyzing."

And also, "It seems to me that a big piece of what is so paralyzing for people is the sense that they are alone in actually taking climate change seriously, which in turn makes them further convinced that there is nothing really that can be done. One can look at various studies of what motivates social change or what causes people to change behavior. But certainly having a group of people around you who are doing something can make people feel more empowered"

I'm finding a pattern here, and while this let's-get-together-and-bake-a-solution prescription sounded lame when Mary Pipher said it in The Green Boat, it sounds practical - and adequate - here. Adequate, at least, in that it amounts to a realistic recommendation that recognizes the potential depth of human despair and the height of the mountain that we have to climb - a journey that will take much longer if we continue to gambol about the foothills in isolated paralysis, imagining that closing our eyes will make the problem go away. Norgaard - and Pipher, as well, for that matter, are settling on a better solution - even if it is very modest in scope.

Norgaard on Norway: Heads in the snow, even when there IS no snow

Norgaard, K. (2012). The everyday denial of climate change. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. July 5, 2012. http://thebulletin.org/everyday-denial-climate-change

"We have no experience with a narrative of potential extinction."

  - Robert Jay Lifton and Richard Falk in their 1982 book, Indefensible Weapons: The Political and Psychological Case against Nuclearism,

So, there's the problem! Instead of getting really serious about contemplating the end of humanity, the old white men who ran the Cold War during the 20th century decided to back the 'f' off. And now we face an even-up odds of destroying the planet's human habitability and we have no good reference point for how to have the discussion. As a parent of children - from whom I always tried to keep the worst images of human suffering - I have to think that's a good thing.

Yet we are left with a challenge of how to sensibly manage bad new, and threatening conditions, when human habit is to turn away, to deny, to blame others, or to just slide into the middle of the herd and hope that, if someone falls, it will be a weak member stumbling about on the periphery.

That latter reference to the tactics of herding animals is the only part of this that does NOT come from Norgaard, whose insights in this regard have been profound. From her research in Norway, she has tracked people's effort, "to avoid emotions of guilt, fear, and helplessness." But while that sounds somehow cowardly when rendered out of context, the psychoanalyst would have to advice that finding some way to back safely away from those emotions is an important talent in a happy life.

But Norgaard finds that people don't cope, they deny, but they do so carefully and unconsciously: "... for most people, who do genuinely care about the planet, denial takes the form of avoidance rather than rejection. People avoid disturbing information in order to sidestep unpleasant emotions and to maintain positive conceptions of individual and national identity."

And they do so because, well, the whole thing is overwhelming: "Part of what makes people feel helpless is an assessment of this very serious problem in a context where nobody else is acting, and political actions appear to be socially unacceptable or politically unfeasible."

No wonder they choose denial. The alternative looks very like despair.

To which Norgaard offers a solution, of sorts: "Working together may, over time, create the supportive environment that is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for people to face greater fears about the future and engage in large-scale social change."

That would be good.

In my own defence ...

Cramer, P. (2006). Protecting the self: Defense mechanisms in action. New York, NY: The Guilford Press, Chapter 1 eBook 

I am finding the early definitions  of the defences to be less than resonant. "I didn't break it," MAY be interpreted as denial, or it may be a strategic lie from a daughter who knows her mother can be played. And the king who kills the messenger is indulging both in denial and, perhaps, projection. But the projection part is also easily explained as the immature temper tantrum of someone who is faced with evidence that would upset their defence of denial.

Coping versus defence mechanisms = conscious vs unconscious. Defence change an internal state irrespective of reality

The "behavioral" bone is connected to the "systems" bone

Lertzman, R. (2013). Engaging with climate change: A field guide to how we think about engagement (pp. 38). San Francisco, CA: Skoll Global Threats Fund.

Specialized information is a prize, and a curse. If you learn everything there is to know about the liver, you become increasingly competent at treating the liver and increasingly likely to imagine all the pathologies that may affect a human patient as being linked, in one way or the other, to the liver. You run the risk of forgetting that the liver is part of a system and that a pathology, apparently centred in the liver, may in fact be emanating from the brain (where the patient is making the decision to drink unhealthy amounts of alcohol).
Such, it seems, is the problem and opportunity of breaking out four orientations to engagement (socio-cultural, emotional, behavioral and systems). It's helpful to look at them individually and explicitly. But then you must hurry to put them back together (hence Map 1) to remind yourself that they are deeply and irrevocably interconnected. The bottom line being that there is seldom a single "cure" to a systemic condition (not even a "systems" cure.)

Meek Richard's First Post

This, for the sake of it, is a test.