It doesn’t help to think of ourselves as individuals struggling for our individual goals. We have to see a broader human narrative that we’re part of. And we have to see how our inner lives and the external reality of our planet are linked because it’s too easy to just say, environmental problems are out there. It’s someone else who’s like making the problems and we’re all good because we recycle, right? It doesn’t help to externalize environmental issues to being out there and someone else’s problem. We have to think and recognize that it’s not only our actions that shape the world, but it’s our beliefs that shape our actions.
So it doesn’t matter how many positive actions we take to combat climate change if all they’re doing is staying at the action level and they’re never changing our beliefs, they’re never addressing the fact that everyone feels alienated and isolated and hopeless. If we don’t address that, if we don’t create a worldview where people actually feel a sense of connection, then just having the externals isn’t going to get us there.
I’m going to just illustrate this in closing with a very simple activity I do with my students. And at this point you’re probably realizing like I talk fast, I’m all over the place I grew up in Brooklyn. So if some of this is too much, just let it go and just find the one thing that resonated with you today. But I want to illustrate it because I think that for all of us that are interacting with young people in our lives, it’s so important to have concrete resources to guide them through the conversations about how do we have a perspective on the environment that’s not just depressing. I do this activity with my class where I ask them what are the root causes of extinction in their mind. And they very quickly brainstorm a bunch of things that they consider kind of negative about society.
So they usually say, well, we exploit the environment and our economic system fosters that and then there’s inequality, which also fosters disparate use of resources. And so then what we do is we keep going down. We say, well, what are the root causes of those root causes? What are the root causes until you can’t go down any further? And usually the students come to a smaller set of adjectives that really capture what they feel like are the root causes of the biodiversity crisis. And they’re not big things like climate change, overexploitation, they’re simple human fears, greed, fear, isolation, confusion. And then what they do is they look down at those root causes and take, okay, we’re talking about extinction because we’re in a biology class, but what else do those same root causes have a symptoms on our planet and they immediately list out all of the other things that are really challenging that we’re confronting as a society, global warming, social economic inequalities, all of these symptoms coming from the same roots.
And so then we really go into what do the students have as a direct relationship with these root causes and are there ways that they can explore action to address those root causes? That doesn’t just come from I’m fighting against climate change. I’m fighting against extinction. I’m fighting against racial injustice but rather what are you planting the seeds for?
If you take those negative root consequences and you flip them, there is an incredible statement about what we collectively care about. What we collectively care about. We know what it is. We care about connection. We care about inspiration. We care about so many things that we could invest in and letting this students get out of a fight or flight, we have to fight climate change mentality into a worldview where their job is to foster their deepest values is really inspiring because what happens is then when you ask them, well, what are some actions you could take? They don’t only say the normal things. They start with that like, oh, I could buy biodegradable cat litter. I could use fewer disposable mugs. I could collect rainwater. But when you start connecting the internal and the external in this way and the personal to the collective in this way, this is a five minute exercise. They brainstorm these in five minutes and I just popped them in here because it seemed fun.
They start coming up with really interesting things that feel much more alive and more personal. I could walk barefoot. Maybe that would just help me feel more connected. I could talk to my garbage and talk to it about like, why am I producing so much? And is it okay? And like what could I cut down on instead of just being like, I’m a terrible person. I shouldn’t be using single use plastics. It’s like, hey, plastic, where’d you come from? They start getting creative.
One of them talked about how she could instead of being stressed out because when she gets stressed she wants to take a hot bath but then she feels so guilty about the water she’s using, she’s like I could ask the water permission to use it. And then I’m coming into a different relationship with the resources. I’m coming into a true relationship. And then they start coming up with things that really link their inner world with the environmental questions of the day.
Why do I think factory farmers are the bad guys when I don’t really take a deeper look at the ways I could be more generous in my daily life. Why do I think that my friends are worthy of forgiveness but I’m not. You start getting into territory within five minutes that doesn’t seem environmental at all. It just seems human. It just seems like it’s time for us to address how to be human in a more beautiful and empowered way and doing little exercises like this with young people, it takes huge problems like the biodiversity crisis or climate change. And it takes it away from just being intractable weight and it brings it in to being something that we care about and that we can address through empowered feelings, not only empowered action.
So my question that I’d like to leave you with is what if the Anthropocene, which is the term we use to describe this period of geological and human history, what if it wasn’t a time period where what it meant to be human was totally crappy when humans were defined by being greedy, exploitative and destructive. What if instead this was a time period where we really learned how to be human in a new way, where we really learned how to take our place in the incredible web of life that we need and that is what gave us life on this planet and that’s already happening. It’s happening around the world but my proposal is that it’s not going to happen externally unless we also do the work internally, unless we really think about how could we take the idea of interconnectedness out of our heads and into our hearts?
And so I feel like the story of humans where we really figure out what it means to have hope even during a hopeless time? What it means to confront an abyss personally and collectively with wisdom and courage? What it means to really start honoring the other life forms on this planet in a deep way? I think that’s a story worth telling. And the only way we can tell that story is by living it, is by figuring out how to live from a new story because we don’t get to live from the old story and then all of a sudden find ourself in some great new world. We actually have to change the story while we’re living it. We have to create the new story through living in a new way.
So if there’s anything that sparked your interest in this conversation today, I’ll just throw out a couple ways that you might be interested in following up. I know that they mentioned at the beginning that ours was a small segment in a bigger movie about endangered species that you can just get a free seven day Discovery Plus subscription and cancel it if you want. But it was a fun movie that looked at endangered species solutions around the world, that’s on Discovery Plus.
I also just finished writing a textbook, Global Change Biology. I certainly don’t think that average person wants to read a call college textbook, but it goes into a lot of these themes in more detail. And the last thing I wanted to mention for those of you that have a connection to campus is that I’m also serving as the faculty director of a huge new initiative at UC Berkeley called Berkeley Discovery. And what we’re trying to do is take this idea of what is the new empowered story look like for individuals in a community and bring it into the undergraduate education experience.
We’re trying to completely redesign how the undergraduate experience at Berkeley turns into more of a journey for students that are mentored on an individual path. Students will still have majors, they’ll still take courses, but they’re going to be exposed to an entirely different landscape of learning. And we’re really excited about this. This is just a quote from the chancellor, “Discovery will be the foundation of the Berkeley experience and really the fabric of what we do.” And so that’s a way that even though it doesn’t have to do with the environmental movement in particular for those of you that are engaged on campus, if you’d like to hear more about that, feel free to get in touch. It’s a really exciting time to be thinking about how we tell new and more empowered stories to young people. And I’ll just leave you with my email address in case folks have thoughts that they’d like to reflect after our conversation today. And thank you so much for being here today and being part of this lifelong learning community.
Susan Hoffman: Bree, let me be the first to thank you for an extraordinary talk. We were fully expecting science and we are surprised and delighted by the philosophy and by the attention to worldview which I believe most of our members would be solidly behind you. And the fact that we’ve got an existential threat, all of us, and we do have to see not only our role in it, but also as you suggest how we can make for better solutions and a path forward. As you know, one of the things that OLLI does is intergenerational dialogues and climate change was the first one that we had. And we discovered that it helped the undergraduates to hear from OLLI members who had been living and had experience living with the science and with a fear and on more than one student’s perspective, it helped. It helped to know we’re in this for the long run.
And I think I really appreciate the fact that you are a scientist who is interested in communicating. I think that’s been one of the things that we lost some moments around Copenhagen when the energy scientists could not relay the science well enough so that the average person could understand it. And I think you have taken us to a whole new place with how you’re thinking in this worldview. I’m looking at the chat and I imagine that… Let’s see what’s happening. Everybody is saying pretty much this is pretty extraordinary. Isn’t the extra… One of the questions. I’m sorry. Bree, go ahead.
Bree Rosenblum: I absolutely think that the policy is necessary. There’s no question. What I’m noticing is if the people making the policy don’t actually feel connected to the deeper reason, like if it’s all still a fight and relying on human ingenuity to save the day then there’s a way that the policy matters, but is a little hollow. I’m envisioning a world where it’s not that we don’t have policy change but that the policy change has a deeper foundation because the people that are engaging in policy change are doing it from a deeper place of interconnection and a deeper sense of collective… What I notice because I have a lot of friends and colleagues and I myself work in the policy arena. So it’s not that I don’t think that is worthwhile, but what I notice is that most of my students that are in environmental sciences that want to go onto policy are going into policy with the mentality that it’s a fight, going into policy with the mentality that we have to stop the bad guys. And that, that mentality itself is part of the poison that’s in our social waters right now.
And so it’s not to say we don’t need policy. It’s not to say we don’t need regulation. It’s not to say we don’t need innovation, but I think that where it comes from matters. And I think if we train a next generation of policy makers who aren’t coming at it as like I’m in a fight to save the world, but are in it because they deeply care and want to a honor a whole new vision of what it could look like to be in a human society that act actually lives in harmony with the planet, it just feels like there’s an energy that matters. So pro policy but would love to see it coming from a place of more connection.
Susan Hoffman: Sure. Thank you for that. That’s a really important expansion. One of the thoughts you’re talking about taking the science to the ground to the people who certainly, the park rangers, the others but is there examples in your field and others you’re knowledgeable about where crowdsourcing has been an important aspect? Can you speak to that issue?
Bree Rosenblum: Yeah, for sure. There’s some really exciting examples of crowdsourcing and biodiversity conservation. Right now most of them are on the financing side. There’s not a lot of examples of intellectual crowdsourcing and I can pass them along to, but there’s a few great examples of crowdsourcing funding for conservation action. And the reason why that’s so powerful and important is, and I see a note in the chat about a distributed approach. If you think about how we want to empower local communities to engage in conservation in meaningful ways and how a lot of conservation policy work has been very top down in the Western part of the world. And crowdsourcing can be a really effective way of supporting local and indigenous efforts towards biodiversity conservation and really removing the power structure of only having regulation as a mechanism for biodiversity conservation, but really empowering local communities to think about what they want to do, how they want to do it, and then bringing in funding from all over the world to make that happen and not just wait for huge international NGOs to decide that it’s a priority.
Susan Hoffman: Great. Thank you. I apologize. Other great comments. Alan Gould, is it ironic that people who strive to be stewards of the planet have a view that humans are at the pinnacle of creation and can care for the lower species?
Bree Rosenblum: Totally. Totally ironic. And something that I think about. Yeah.
Susan Hoffman: I think of that bumper sticker that’s on one of my family member’s trucks: “I didn’t get to the top of the food chain to eat.” Anyway.
Bree Rosenblum: I think about it a lot because it’s been one of the things I’ve had addressed most directly in my own practice as a scientist and as an educator is all of the implicit arrogance that is embedded in the way that my culture approaches conservation and spend many years really in that question of like what is an approach that is founded on humility look like as a scientist where you are actually engaging with what needs to be engaged and bringing your intelligence to it but not in this colonizing way of assuming that like we’ve got be the steward, it’s like, no, we have to be part of, we have to participate with wisdom in this incredible life support system that’s already here. So I appreciate that comment from Alan very much. Yeah.