So, saving money on energy bills, car insurance and petrol money : that’s a pleasure response you get right away. Splashing out on a vintage dress or scouring jumble sales for bargains, is way cooler than picking up the newest high-street must-haves. A spot of gardening will chill most anyone out.
Illustration by Anna Wadham
But leaving the air conditioning quietly whirring is all too easy, once the temptation is there. And flying home for christmas can’t be put off forever. And that monster of a car is safer for the child inside, right? And what’s a few plastic bags from Tesco to the planet? And won’t ‘they’ straighten it all up anyway, with some whizzy tech and a bit of a sort-out? And China’s three biggest power firms emit more CO2 than Britain, so why should I stint myself? (see the comments thread here for more of the same)
Rosemary Randall is a psychiatrist who’s wondered about all this, and why we think and feel it.
Rosemary is the founder of Cambridge Carbon Footprint, a support group whose members want to reduce their environmental impact. She has also started the practice of Carbon Conversations which were recommended by the Guardian’s Manchester Report, and already show some promising results: ‘A typical participant makes an immediate saving of a tonne of CO2 a year and develops plans to reduce emissions by 50% in 2–5 years.’
A ‘Carbon Conversation’ with Rosemary is a course of six sessions, coming up with a plan to reduce the harm our everyday actions cause, and looking a little at the attitudes and reasons that mean we act in a harmful way at all. Now, I’m not suggesting that everyone needs carbon therapy, and nor does she. But it is interesting to wonder a little at why (mostly) shopping feels good, or why environmentalists are so reflexively caricatured as earnest bearded moralists.
Illustration by Helene Guyot
So, what if we think about mother earth (Gaia, Ceres, Demeter, Frig, Astarte…) as more of a mother than we’d care to casually admit? The four basic environmentally-unfriendly lines we use (according to Rosemary) are ‘I need…’, ‘Why should I…(they’re not)’, ‘Whistling in the dark’ (they’ll sort it out), and ‘I want…’. These are the attitudes of the child who’s learnt to exploit a caring nature, the sibling who’s wary of unfair play or giving up anything they don’t have to, the child or young person happy to forget any responsibility, and the masculine exploitative need to be his own man and assert power by simply taking. So when faced with the need to fly to visit family, or the unwillingness to give up meat when no one else will, or the confidence in a strong leader or some uni science lab, or the simple taking of what’s owed – should we see essentially childish attitudes?
And what of the people who tell us such unwelcome things? Does anyone who comes along to take away the toys get labelled a spoilsport? And how do they react to it? There’s a bunch of repression and guilt in the environmental movement – read something like Leo Hicks’ articles in the Guardian, where he goes on about how he’s trying to live a less ecologically-damaging lifestyle, and getting up on the high horse rules : it’s not easy being green, but it’s the right thing to do. The climate evangelist is quite happy to prescribe things that don’t sound fun to do, safe in the feeling that they’re right, and ever more negative about an issue where everyone is doing something wrong, and nothing will ever be enough. Or there’s the (often young) enthusiast who cannot but burn out in face of an insoluble problem. Or the climate hero – beloved of Greenpeace press releases – who adventures across the earth and sea to abseil down a whaling boat : though it’s clear that there’s loads of hard campaigning work and a tiny bit of terrifying adventure really involved, for us sat back home it helps with a little guilt to know that those few brave souls are out there.
Illustration by Sachiko
Rosemary Randall wrote what she thinks about Climate Change and what it might have to do with psychotherapy in an article called A New Climate for Psychotherapy? which covers all this and more with more detail and rigour than I could manage. She’s also involved with Identity campaigning, which is part of WWF-UK’s Strategies for Change. Strategies for Change is all about general attitudes and how and why to change them.
I read a great column by Johann Hari in The Independent the other day, here, which glances at a couple of the moods we just looked at, and asks a little what we can do. Go check it out. And Kate Soper deals with how we relate to nature in a fascinating, if really quite heavy, way in her book, What is Nature?
Whoah – before this gets completely away from me and becomes a reading list not a blog post, let me wrap up. You can try going along to one of the Carbon Conversations if you want to hear for yourself. But anyway, if it’s important to change what we do, it might be important to understand why we do it. And if we can get happy on brilliant, creative, lively responses (see many examples) with energy and sympathy, well that’ll do nicely.
Tags:
carbon conversations, ecopsychology, gaia, manchester report, nature
