G’day everyone and welcome to 100 Climate Conversations. I’m Benjamin Law. We’re really grateful to be having this conversation here today on the unceded lands of the Gadigal. First Nations people on this continent and have been sharing knowledge for tens of thousands of years. They constitute the oldest continuing civilisation this planet has ever seen. They’re our first mathematicians, scientists, engineers, agriculturalists, and they mastered how to live on this incredibly fragile continent, which is a feat we’re struggling with now. We’re grateful to Elders, past and present, that we can continue sharing knowledge here of what is and what will always be Aboriginal land.

Today is number 52 of 100 conversations happening every Friday at the Powerhouse museum and online, which presents 100 visionary Australians taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time: climate change. We’re recording here live in the boiler room of the Powerhouse museum. And if you’re unfamiliar with this space, you might be interested in knowing that before it was home to this museum, it was the Ultimo Power Station and it provided power to the tram networks that operated around Sydney. So, it’s in the context of this fossil fuel artefact actually that we shift our focus to the innovations of the net zero revolution.

Our guest today is on a mission to enhance community wellbeing and promote action on climate change through her consultancy work with environmental and community agencies as well as through her private practice as a psychologist in regional Victoria. She specialises in pro-environmental behaviour, coping with climate change, talking with kids and young people about the environment, preparing for natural disasters and psychosocial recovery in the aftermath of a disaster. And we’re so thrilled to have her here joining us here today. Could you please make her feel welcome, Susie Bourke. So much of your work, so much of your life has revolved around a deep care for the environment. So, before we start talking about psychology and headspace, let’s talk a little bit about you and environmental consciousness. Can you pinpoint where your own environmental ethic and ethos actually came from growing up?

Well, I think it must have come when I was a teenager, because I do remember sorting out everybody’s rubbish and putting it in – finding a whole lot of little waste bins and line them up under the kitchen bench and getting my family to be separating things. And this was in the 80s, so it wasn’t something that was necessarily being collected kerbside, I can’t recall. But yes, that I think was one of my early times of becoming aware of the importance of taking responsibility for the stuff that we produce and use.

You were ‘that’ family member weren’t you.

I was.

So, I want to skip forward a little because in the late 90s you move your family to Castlemaine and you help establish an eco-village. What is an eco-village, by the way?

Well, it’s an intentional community in a way. I suppose it’s a piece of land that people are sharing together in some financial and sort of responsible physical way and living together with a shared intention to be ecologically minded, I guess. And so, our particular one was called Fryers Forest just outside of Castlemaine, and it was set up alongside permaculture principles. So, there were 11 lots that families were building their homes, spread out along two to three kilometres, and we were surrounded by 320 acres of bush that we shared. So, we all shared ownership of the common land, but we had a freehold title to an acre where we could build our home.

And day to day how does it work, like in terms of infrastructure? Is it off grid? Are you sharing food? Growing food?

So, we did have a shared orchard, but it being goldfield country, the ground is pretty rocky and hard and there’s not much topsoil outside of Castlemaine. So, we did grow fruit trees. We had some community chickens, but largely each family was sort of building their own home and we were on grid, but we had to treat our own water onsite. So, we would have reabsorption systems or so forth in the gardens. And largely we had composting toilets and we were building our houses usually along passive solar principal, so oriented towards the north to get the sun to heat the home in the winter. But in fact my, my partner at the time was a builder and he always used to call them passive homes, but active humans, because a passive house works with the humans going around and opening things up in the evening to let the cool come in and going around and closing everything and closing the blinds and the shutters on a hot day to keep the sun out. So, it does require this active human to maintain a passive solar house.

Now, we’ve heard a little bit about how you live and how you’ve forged a life in a really interesting, sustainable and alternative way. Tell us a little bit about your work as a psychologist and when you noticed the intersection of climate and psychology coming into your practice.

When I started to do my PhD at La Trobe University, I was working with women with breast cancer and I was looking at coping styles and using a model called the transactional stress and coping model, which in the 80s was a popular model for understanding how people cope with things. And I was largely looking at these two coping strategies, problem-focussed coping and emotion-focussed coping, which I’ll talk about later. But I was always interested in how people, when they’re faced with a life changing or a life-threatening situation, can transform themselves to respond in a really adaptive way, to be able to continue to thrive in their life and to have a rich and full life, even though they’re facing something that they had never thought they would have to cope with.

So, that was sort of a theme of what I was interested in when I was doing my PhD. And at the same time, I was at La Trobe University and there were a number of academics there in the psychology department who had collaborated to write a book on conflict resolution and were involved in these training programs to train international diplomats and people at the UN in this particular conflict resolution model. And all of them were involved in a group called Psychologists for Peace. And so, I became a part of that group and went on and spent some time being the national convenor of that group as well. And I’m still involved today. And we would produce materials to teach people how to resolve conflict and reconciliation and build co-operative relationships. And I was – because I was at the same time beginning to live in this eco-village and was interested in community living and was interested in learning about conflict resolution. I saw that many of the solutions to environmental challenges, which is often overconsumption of resources and private ownership of everything that we could actually share could be dealt with or improved by our increased skills of being able to cooperate and share resources.

And so, I was fortunate enough to be invited to work at the Australian Psychological Society with actually one of the authors of that conflict resolution book, Lyn Littlefield, who was then the executive director of the Australian Psychological Society. So, she knew me through my interest in Psychs for Peace and invited me to come work at the Australian Psychological Society in a new team – and I was the first person in this team called – it eventually ended up being the psychology and the public interest team. So, it was a team of people who were using psychology not to individually work with people to improve their wellbeing but looking at how we can improve the conditions that humans live in and work within in order to improve community wellbeing.

We always used to call it being about giving psychology away for free, you know, using psychological knowledge to improve the community. And then I very soon became involved, after the Black Saturday bushfires in the disaster response and always had said, if I was going to work in disasters, I also needed to work in climate change because one of the things that we know is that most extreme weather event disasters are increasing in frequency and intensity because of the rising temperatures on planet. So, I then started looking at a lot of the research around what psychology contributes to our understanding of and solutions to climate change.

Can you tell us about the duty or the responsibility that psychology has in all of this?

Just as we have these degrading environments and ecosystems, we also have a lot of negative impacts that come from climate change and extreme weather disaster aspect of climate change on people’s individual and group and community wellbeing. So, it’s a massive problem, but also it’s not just a problem that can be solved by coming up with infrastructure or technological solutions, because the administration or the rolling out of all of those solutions requires humans to get on board and participate in the rolling out of those solutions. And that’s not an easy thing necessarily, to get humans on board. And in fact, it’s really important that we know how people are thinking and feeling about climate change because the way in which they think and feel about the problem of climate change will have a huge impact on what they then do about it.

And there’s a whole lot of ways that are really unhelpful that we can be thinking about climate change or feeling about climate change that will result in us minimising the problem or denying that it’s really happening or distracting ourselves endlessly with something that doesn’t make us feel so upset or blaming others, you know, in other high emitting countries or blaming politicians or making the problem be solved by other people rather than ourselves. So, there’s a whole lot of ways in which we can actually just back away from the problem. And so, a lot of the work that I’ve been doing is looking at how can we help humans to stay engaged with the problem and then get involved in effective action to do something about the problem.

It’s so interesting what you’re saying, because I imagine when people think of psychology and climate change, the immediate paradigm is a psychologist or a therapist providing a therapeutic response to the stress that we feel around climate change. And that’s certainly a big part of the conversation, it sounds like. But what you’re also saying is that it’s about identifying how we process climate change and also how we can spur ourselves into action. It makes me wonder, like what insights have been found about human behaviour that has contributed to climate change through psychology.

Yes, okay, that’s a lovely question because there’s lots. So, social scientists, which would include psychologists and other people doing that sort of research, have really spent decades studying what are the psychological barriers to humans taking action on environmental threats and what are the things that would enable us to do it. And just as an aside, environmental psychology is a sort of a subsection or a specialty in psychology that looks specifically at humans’ relationship with the environment, how do humans interact with their environment? But of course, environmental psychologists also talk about how do we interact with that broader environment, how do we recycle things or how do we conserve wetlands and things like that? Because that’s all same, but on different topics.

And so, Per Espen Stoknes is this Norwegian environmental psychologist and he talked about the five Ds, which were the five things that are barriers for humans actually taking effective action on it. And they would doom, dissonance and distance and identity, which isn’t really isn’t really a D, but he was cheating a little bit and one more which will come to me as I start to talk about them. And so, the idea of doom is that humans will react with shock when we first hear about something like environmental threats. But then we very quickly become habituated to hearing a disastrous story and we sort of get a little bit numbed in time through repetition. And so, in that way, we can sort of back away or slide away from thinking too much about the doom.

And that also sounds like it bleeds into distance as well. It’s all the way over there.

Yes, exactly. Yes, that’s right. And so, climate change or the climate threat is distant in a whole number of ways. So, very often we see that the problem is in other countries or with other people living in climates sensitive – by the ocean where they’re getting tidal surges and things like that. Not right where we are. It’s sort of distance in time as well; we often think that the worst effects are going to be in the future, whereas we know that climate effects and impacts are happening right now in disastrous ways to people.

It’s distant in that it’s an invisible gas, so we actually can’t see carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere just with our eyes. So, it’s kind of distant in that way, and it’s often distant socially in that we think that maybe it’s not our responsibility, but it’s the big polluters or the governments or the countries that are the high emitters, which is us actually, who should be doing something about it. So, it’s distance in a number of different ways. And always when we see a problem as distant to us, we don’t think it’s as much our responsibility to do anything about it than if we consider that a problem is here now and for sure, then we’re much more likely to see that this is something that we are responsible for and we should do something about. And so, distance is a big problem.

And as you talk about distance, it makes me think of the dissonance that you’re also referring to, because over there is still our planet as well. And when we’re presented with the data and the evidence, there is that dissonance of not actually, I don’t know, feeling that it’s palpable somehow, but what accounts for that?

Yes, yes. And so, in dissonance Per talks about these two types of dissonance, one being cognitive and one being social. So, cognitive dissonance is when we know something is the case, like driving our cars or flying in planes creates carbon dioxide and other emissions that heats the planet. But our behaviour is doing those things that we know are polluting. And sometimes, often, it’s actually easier to change our thinking that it is to change our behaviour because if we still are needing to drive our cars and burn fossil fuels or whatever, because we can’t afford other options or because there aren’t public transport options near us or whatever, so we’re still doing that.

It’s very uncomfortable to have this dissonance between what we know, which is this is actually overheated the planet and is causing a whole lot of other consequential problems – but I’m still doing it. So, it’s easy to change your thinking and go maybe, I don’t know, maybe it’s not so bad, or maybe it’s not really my problem. I’m generally a good and clean, healthy living person in other aspects of my life, so I think perhaps I get a free pass on this one or, you know, my emissions aren’t as high as other people in my city. So, really they should be doing more or, you know, it’s a big producer – anyway there’s lots of reasons why we can – how we can convince ourselves not to worry so much about it.

I mean that sounds quite disastrous on the individual level, but for the people governing us and for the people creating policy, it sounds like the psychological behaviours, they’re not immune to it and therefore they’re creating further dissonance, further concepts of distance that affect everyone else.

Yes, yes, that’s true. And the social dissonance is when our connection with other people wanting to be the same and do the same and feel and think the same as the people that we are closest to is a very strong impulse or urge in humans. And if we’re believing something, we’re learning about climate change in the problems. But the people that we really connected to don’t seem to be acting in line with what we’re learning, there is a risk that we will still want to stay close and connected to them and might stop thinking so much along those lines and be more inclined to want to continue to be like the people that we are closest to. And that’s what social dissonance is. And so, that’s another risk that we have.

And are you partly also talking about that other D of identity that you identified there?

Yes, exactly. Thank you. You’re very good. Yes. So, identity is the other one where identity trumps facts. So, if something’s going to clash with our identity, then we’re more inclined to ignore the facts and keep our identity than we are acting in line with facts if you want. Which is why we know that just giving people more information about things doesn’t actually necessarily lead to them to change their behaviour because identity and the group that you might identify with is so strong. And so, ideologies become a big part of this. And so, I mean very often there [are] debates in the literature about right wing versus left wing ideologies or small government versus big government.

So, a small government ideology would be one where you don’t want the government telling you what to do. And if that’s your ideology and a good climate solution would be for the government to put taxes on carbon emitting things, you might be disinclined to vote for that or support that because your ideology, which is part of your identity, is trumping the fact that actually that would be a really good thing to do for reducing our overall carbon.

It doesn’t sound like Australia is immune to those identity politics when it comes to climate, but I imagine the heat would be quite turned up if we were having this conversation in the United States, for instance. Hey, we’re increasingly hearing terms like climate anxiety and eco anxiety. And given your work as a psychologist, how increasingly common are those feelings and are those behaviours presenting to you and your clients?

Well, I’m probably not a normal sample of psychologists because people will often come to me because they know that I am a climate aware psychologist and so I would probably go –

So, it’s 100 per cent.

So, I probably get more people presenting with their grief and distress about climate change. But in the literature, we do know that there are high numbers of people who are expressing great concern and distress about climate change.

And outside of the numbers, what about the intensity of that distress? Has that increased as climate change and its effects increased?

Well, yes. So anecdotally, in my experience from the people that I see, yes, that it has increased and in the literature that increases as well. And of course, it increases every time we sample people. And that makes sense because we know that the problems of climate change are getting worse every year. So, it makes sense that our distress would be increasing.

And in an Australia Institute Climate of the Nation report in our first year of COVID, even at a time when we were going through this most extraordinary global pandemic and we were experiencing these extraordinary lockdowns and constrictions on our life, and GDP was down by 7 per cent. Even then, people’s anxiety and distress about climate change was at an all-time high. And if people had actually had a personal, direct experience of something that they would attribute to climate change, their level of concern was even higher. So that would go up to about 88 per cent of a sample population. So, these are really high numbers of people experiencing this distress and you used before the word ‘eco anxiety’ and there is a number of terms like that. And one of the words that I hear used with great effectiveness is ‘climate distress’ as a catchall for the grief and the anger and the guilt and the –

And the doom.

And the doom and the anxiety. So, distress is kind of a good word that that covers all of that. And there’s often a question of whether, you know, are there particular groups in our community who are more susceptible or who have higher anxiety. There’s also questions about, is this normal or is this pathological? And really, I mean, my personal opinion, but also what I read in the literature is that this climate distress is really rational and appropriate and deserved, given –

I was about to say that because when you when you ask, is this normal or pathological, I imagine the argument could easily be made that the distress is completely justified. And if anything, more people should be feeling the distress that these people are feeling. What’s your take on that?

Yes, I completely agree. And I remember reading this great line in an article once which said, ‘Well, it’s only pathological in the way that a family picnicking on a railway line in front of an incoming train could be considered to be pathological,’ i.e., it’s not pathological to be concerned and distressed about the impacts of climate change now and into the future.

So, then where does that leave a psychologist and what are their responsibilities when encountering this distress? Because distress, whether justified or not, is still distress. How do you help people process that distress?

Okay. So, there’s a couple of models that I use. So, one of them is that transactional stress and coping model as talking about before. So, where I talked about this being this problem and emotion-focussed coping strategies for dealing with stress. But in the last 10 or so years, an environmental psychologist, Maria Ojala in Sweden has started looking at this model and understanding how young people are coping with climate distress. And she found that there were these two motion and problem, but also a third meaning-focussed coping strategies that young people were using or are using. And so, that has given rise to much more interest in these three distinct but related and all very useful and adaptive coping strategies. So, emotion-focussed coping strategies is what we do when we’re doing something to deal with the emotion that is causing us the distress. Often that’s things like making room for the feeling, accepting the feeling, seeing the feeling as completely normal. Understanding that feelings are travellers, not residents. They want to move through us rather than stay in us.

No feeling is final.

Yes, exactly. Yes. And so, that might involve things like chatting to somebody who’s sympathetic or caring and sharing your concerns with them or having a massage to relax your body physically to help in that way, or spending time in nature, in the very nature that you might be concerned about and trying to protect. Moving your body. Moving your body is one of the best ways in which we teach people to deal with uncomfortable feelings. Singing, doing creative things to help to sort of lower your cortisol, your stress hormones and release endorphins and to feel better about things. So, this would be all the emotion-focussed coping strategies.

And then the second category would be the problem-focussed coping strategies. So, these are the things that you do to tackle the problem that is causing the stress. So, that would be your climate actions. The things that you can do with your legs and your arms and your words to help reduce the threat of climate change. So, that might be lobbying, might be writing to politicians, it might be ringing politicians, it might be going on rallies, it might be taking legal action against coal mines. It’s all of these strategies that people are using. And that’s one of the techniques that we’ve seen young people using a lot to deal with their distress about climate change has been, you know, their involvement in the climate strikes and political advocacy, but also, you know, suing the government for fossil fuel subsidies and giving green lights to coal stations and things like that.

So, one of the things to help overcome that sense of being overwhelmed – that it’s one person against this megastructure of the planet collapsing – is to actually start identifying the ways that you can mobilise. But also, what I hear is take action within a community as well and feel that connection with other similar minded people.

Yes, exactly.

You wrote the Climate Change Empowerment Handbook for the Australian Psychological Society that described psychological strategies to tackle climate change, and there’s an acronym here, ACTIVATE, I’ll lead us through it very quickly, because obviously a lot of letters, but ACTIVATE stands for: Acknowledge feelings, Create social norms, Talk about it, Inspire positive visions, Evaluate it, Act, Time is now, Engage with nature. I’m really interested in how you developed that model.

I had been reading a lot of the literature, as I was saying about the research into psychology and looking at the barriers and then the enablers of people getting engaged and staying engaged. And I just kept reading it and working it and working out how many – could we get it down to a few simple strategies and came up with those eight. It’s been a really good run, a really good run. So, I was quite pleased with coming up with it. And then luckily, we found an acronym because it’s much easier for me to remember what they are when people ask me about it. Now you rescued me there, but I think I could have done it. And so, one of them in there, the action one which was the second A – yes I always make the point when I’m talking about that, about the importance of it being both individual behaviour, plus also those community behaviours that you were just talking about then and that both are important.

But the group actions are actually even more important in some way because A, when you do something together with a group, you’re going to have a bigger impact than if you just do something as an individual. Plus, I read this quote somewhere once recently, that a narcissistic focus on the self is never a healthy thing anyway, so moving away from the individual behaviours to the group behaviours is always a good thing. Plus, you get the emotional-focussed coping impact of being together with a group of people who share concerns. So, you don’t feel that you’re alone and isolated and you can have a sense of hopefulness.

And that brings me to then the third of the strategies that meaning-focussed coping strategies, which is about the things that we do with our thinking. So, we’ve got the emotion, which is to do with our emotions, our feelings, and then the action, which is to do with our actions, the things that we do with our arms and our legs and our mouths. And then the meaning focus coping, which is what we do with the way in which we think about the problem of climate change. And this was the one that Maria Ojala had found young people were using as a very effective strategy.

So, that would include things that generate a feeling of hopefulness. So, it might be looking around at all the other millions of people on the planet who are deeply concerned about the environment and doing something about climate change to take action on climate change or solve environmental problems. It also might be about looking into the past at other wicked problems like apartheid or slavery or trying to get the women the vote and seeing how big social problems have been solved by the concerted efforts over a sustained period of time, often led by grass roots actors that have eventually led to significant policy changes and transformations for the better on a global scale. So, those are great stories to give us hope for us being also able to do this in response to the climate crisis.

And then another one would be looking to the positives of a low carbon world or a zero-carbon economy. So, to be able to imagine – this gets away from that doom problem that I was talking to you about before. So, being able to consider all of the other benefits that would come from living in a – without using so many resources on the planet. So, eating lower on the food chain, a healthier diet, and using more active transport, using bikes and walking more than sitting immobile and in fossil fuel burning mobiles and things like that. These are all sort of positives of a climate altered world.

But another one of these, which I’ve been most interested in is also the pathway towards a low carbon future, being a pathway of great imagination and sort of innovation through coming up with ways of living together on the planet in a sustainable way that we aren’t doing yet. And Naomi Klein, who’s a Canadian science writer and journalist, says there are no non-radical options left when it comes to dealing with the climate crisis. So that’s like, great. We really have to get cleverer and use our imaginations.

If you were to throw words like hopefulness out and psychology and the climate crisis without any context, I imagine a lot of people would just make the assumption that what you’re talking about is a passive individual process. But what I’m hearing is that it has to be active for solutions to be found, but also for your own personal benefit. And it needs to be a group project as well. Is that fair to say?

That’s a good summary, yes. And that Norwegian environmental psychologist, Per Espen Stoknes, he did a lot of study also on the different types of hope. And he’s got these four categories of hope, one of which he says is the best one for dealing with the climate crisis. And so, he’s got these two versions of optimism and these two visions of scepticism. So, optimism he’s got a passive optimism, which is sort of like that Pollyanna type of hope. Look, things will be okay, we just need to –

Let’s just manifest.

Yes, that’s right. So, that’s Pollyanna hope. But then there was a passive optimism. Then there’s active optimism, which is kind of like a heroic hope. You know, we can do this. But the trouble with optimism is that it’s sometimes quite hard to make a good case for optimism where the climate is concerned, which is a bit of a sad thing to have to say. But anyway.

The data is grim.

Yes, the data is grim. So, then we move over to scepticism. He’s got an active and a passive form of scepticism, so passive scepticism is kind of like stoic hope. It’s the like, we can rebuild. So, after you have these massive bushfires and communities have been wiped out, well, that’s what’s going to happen. It’s going to keep happening. We’re going to have keep having these extreme weather event disasters, but we can rebuild. And so, passive scepticism is also problematic because you’re not actually doing something to go, actually no, that’s not good enough. We don’t want to just sit by and have to just get better at rebuilding quicker after catastrophic events –

Waiting for it to happen. But you’re waiting for it with a stiff upper lip.

Yes, exactly. Stoic. And then the other one is the active scepticism. This is the one we want to know more about. And so, this often gets called active hope. And active hope is sort of grounded in the reality of, yes, things are looking pretty bad, and a positive outcome is not necessarily guaranteed, but standing by and doing nothing about it is unacceptable. And so, we are just going to get up and we’re going to keep working towards building a better world because there is no other alternative but to do that. And so, it’s grounded in the reality, but it’s energetic, it’s active, it’s an active hope, and it requires strong inner strength muscles, which are those skills I was talking about before, about being able to manage and make room for uncomfortable feelings rather than go, oh, that’s a terribly uncomfortable feeling. I’m not going to think about that thing that just cause that uncomfortable feeling anymore.

But instead to go, I’m got to think about these things and it’s very uncomfortable and I’m just going to get better at being able to make room for these uncomfortable feelings. And these feelings will move on. And then I’ll get up and I’ll go and do the next most important thing that I can do in this reality that I now completely know that I’m living in, which is the climate crisis and my and our collective responsibility to make every decision we, make made in the understanding that we need to be reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Active hope is such a fascinating concept, and I wonder when it comes to survivors of bushfires, say, we’ve spoken to some in this series who’ve described preparing their homes and land before natural disasters. What does active hope look like in that context, and can we prepare ourselves psychologically? How can we, should we be?

When we’re working with people who’ve been through an extreme weather event disaster, we often are getting communities to understand the concepts of psychological first aid, which are really important skills of restoring safety and connection and communication and hope. And that’s always been the hardest one to communicate or to teach people in communities, to be able to teach to survivors or affected people, because it can so easily sound a little bit glib.

But really, it’s about being able to remember that the future always forks. And there are we don’t know what the outcome is going to be and there are always better and worse paths ahead. And that now is not the time to give up. And in fact, it will never be the time to give up. And the thing with working on the climate crisis or responding to climate change is that everything that we do, it never is a time to give up because the things that we do today increase the possibility of protecting us from worse things in the future. There’s never a time where we could ever go, well, ‘We’ve completely stuffed it up, so we might as well just give up,’ because we can always be preventing future harm. And of course, you can see in the way that I’m talking that there’s a problem then that I’m not talking about the future, which puts the problem of climate change into the future, which is outside our circle of immediate responsibility, where we’re much more active. So, there’s that tension as well.

But while we’re talking about the future, let’s talk about kids, because kids especially have been susceptible to climate anxiety. They are thinking actively about their future and whether they have one. And I guess the most famous example is the climate anxiety that Greta Thunberg felt that propelled her into action. How are you seeing kids and young people being affected by climate change psychologically?

Well, again, if we look at the academic literature, there are, I reckon, two main things that young people are distressed about. One is the climate crisis and the other is government inaction. And a study that was done by Hickman and colleagues a couple of years ago that surveyed 10,000 children across the global north and the global south. So, a large cohort of young people, the numbers were pretty similar, those high numbers of children that were very or extremely concerned and high numbers of children that felt betrayed by the government. So, that’s a source of anxiety as well. And in fact, that’s kind of one of the worst types of anxiety that we can have, is when the very people that we expect to be looking after us and protecting us are actually not doing the things that they ought to be doing. And so, I’m talking there about the enormous importance of as young people’s adults and leaders, and that also including government, to be really seen to be being active in the climate space.

And so, Greta’s strike was a beautiful example of problem-focussed coping where she went and got busy by trying to speak to her politicians to draw attention to that. And then it was picked up with such enthusiasm from children all around the world in such a short amount of time. And my daughter was one of the three kids in Castlemaine who began the school strikes in Australia, and it was no difficulty at all for them to talk to their friends, get a large group of kids to turn up at their local politicians and sit out there in the street, in the sun and wait for a meeting with the politician that was never given to them. But they did get a meeting with the then opposition sitting member. And so, some of them were just participating in those collective group actions. But many of them have also been getting very politically engaged and active.

It’s one of the – it’s one of the four skills that we know are really important for helping children to thrive in a climate altered world. So, I’ve done a lot of work with developmental psychologist Ann Sanson, who is one of my colleagues, an Australian developmental psychologist, and her work has been in looking at what are the things that young people, children and young people need and can learn skills and attributes that will help them to thrive as adults. And there’s a set of individual skills, things like emotion regulation – that’s back to that same thing, about learning how to cope with uncomfortable feelings – and then there’s interpersonal skills being able to negotiate with people and conflict resolution. Those skills that I was talking about before as well. And then community engagement. So, being connected with your school community is one of the big predictors, which is kind of great because often it’s a group of school kids who are leaving their school together, connected with the school, but leaving the school often with the blessing of their teachers to go and participate in some of those big public rallies. Those things are great for predicting and influencing young people’s positive development. And the last one is their civic engagement. So, their capacity to be engaged politically, to be talking – going to their mayor, talking to their mayor, talking to the local members of parliament, travelling far and wide to do those sorts of things or just writing letters and things like that.

And what other conversations should adults, parents, guardians, people in kids’ lives be having with young people to make them feel supported? And what should we be doing as well to show that they are supported?

So, going with them, if they’re wanting to go out and to participate in some of those public rallies, I mean, of course that’s changed a lot during the Covid lockdowns. But that’s a very important show of support and respect of the young people’s concerns. Believing them when they talk about their concerns, giving them space to be able to talk about their feelings, getting active yourself, whether you are with or without them. I can’t overstate the importance of that enough as a way of reassuring young people that the world is going to be looked after. But also, ultimately helping them to see that the world is an amazing and wonderful place and that people are generally, engaged and caring and wanting to help to make the world a better place and helping them to feel that life is worth living. Those are sort of the most important messages that we try to get parents to communicate to children at all ages.

And getting out to nature as well. That last bit of the ACTIVATE model sounds important too.

Yes, that’s right. With all of the psychological and physiological benefits that come from spending time in nature.

You’ve also spoken about the importance of trying to find and showcase the roles of heroes and helpers in face of disaster. Can you tell us about that?

Yes. So, that’s an example of that meaning-focussed coping, where you start to help people to look around and see all the other millions of people around the world who are doing good things. So, to feel like things are not hopeless and that you’re not helpless is to know that there is a whole lot of people who share your deep concerns, who are just like you so that you don’t feel like you’re an alien or that you don’t fit in, or you don’t belong. So, that helps with that feeling of connection in terms of your values and what you care about, but also to give you a sense of hopefulness that you don’t have to do it all yourself. There are millions of people who are also doing this thing, and then that can help young people to be also finding groups that they can belong to and connect to where they can get a real sense of solidarity.

But the heroes and the helpers is also a term that we often use when we’re talking with how to support children in the aftermath of a disaster. And that doesn’t have to be an extreme weather event disaster, that it might also be after community violence as well when parents go, oh my goodness, what on earth, how am I going to help my child here? So, looking for the heroes and helpers and helping them to just orient themselves positively towards what good can come out of something that’s disastrous.

We’ve been talking a little bit about doom, but the antidote to that is that active hope that has a prism of scepticism through there as well, but actually thrusts you into action. When you personally are feeling that doom or the gloom despair, you read the data that’s happening that shows the climate crisis in its full colours, what spurs you into active hope? What are the pep talks you’re giving yourself throughout all of this?

Well, first of all, I might have a bit of a cry.

That’s legitimate.

That’s very legitimate. Yes. Releases endorphins, releases – lowers your cortisol, endorphins go up. It’s good to have a good cry.

We encourage it.

Yes. And in fact, there’s this lovely knowledge or understanding that psychologists have around what sort of a cry is the best sort of cry to have and apparently the most effective sort of cry, is one where you just get out of your thinking, and you just watch what it feels like in your body to be crying. Where the crying is coming from. What it feels like. The feeling of the snot and the tears and all of that. That’s a very efficient way of being able to have a good cathartic cry without just spinning your wheels. And, oh I just can’t believe that this terrible thing is going to happen. So, that would be one.

Okay. Good first step.

And then also before I’ve gone on to the active hope, it would be to talk to my partner or friends about how I’m feeling to have them go, ‘There, there, you’re completely normal to be feeling this. And yes, it is hard, isn’t it? And I feel the same.’ And, you know, to have that sort of empathic, normalising validating conversation. So, those would be my first two steps. Then personally good bit of distraction’s good.

What are your distractions?

Well, I have a family, so my distractions would often be my family. But also interestingly, just connecting with other people about their concerns. I mean, I’ve got the advantage that I’m a psychologist, so I’ve got plenty of people who can talk to me about their concerns, and I can empathically listen to them.

But also, interestingly, being able to do that and listen to somebody else and just be in a deep and connected conversation, actually physiologically has an enormously important impact on reducing your stress because it means that you’re not being chased by a lion. So, if stress equals being chased by a lion in our evolutionary past, being able to have a conversation with you Ben means that there is clearly no lion threatening us because we wouldn’t be doing this. We would be running as fast as we could or hiding under the chair or something. And so, that shows your body that actually you’re safe and that right now in the here and now you are safe.

And so, I suppose the other thing then would be I use acceptance and commitment therapy a lot in my individual work. And also, when I’m running workshops with people, it’s a mindfulness based cognitive therapy for working with people with anxiety and climate anxiety. There’s lots of us who use ACT to help people work with their climate distress. And a large part of that is – I use a triangle when I’m describing this model to people – one of it’s about the opening up to thoughts and feelings, which I’ve been talking a lot about. And another one is the being in the present moment. And so, that’s the mindfulness thing. And the reality is that the present moment is usually fine. It’s usually way better actually than a lot of the present moments that you might be imagining or thinking about.

And so, that’s also that same thing with engaging with nature. If you can go out and you can spend some time in nature in the here and now and realise that right in this moment actually everything’s fine, the butterflies are fine, and the tree is fine. And to just be able to enjoy that present moment, that’s an enormously important part of the work. And then the other part of the triangle is do what matters. So, we’re back to the doing things with your legs and your arms and your words. And so, once you’ve made room for your thoughts and feelings, spent some time in the present moment just to ground yourself, then you can get back to the energy of doing the things that matter. And the things that matter are the things that are underpinned by your core values. And so, if one of your core values is sustainability, then acting in line with that value, whatever your values are and whatever your values are, it’s fine because they are all valuable.

But when you act in line with your values, that’s when you have a rich and fulfilling life. That’s what gives meaning to you, to your life. And that’s active hope. That’s the best that we can do. In the reality that we’re in we’re holding the climate crisis as part of that reality. We’re acting in line with our values, which might be sustainability or whatever, and that’s what we do.

Susie this has been such a lovely conversation. I almost just want to grab your hands and cry with you now, but in a good way. I knew this is going to be good because you are a psychologist and I feel like I’ve been in therapy, but in the best possible way. Thank you so much. Could you please all join me in thanking our wonderful guest today, Susie Burke. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Ben.

If you want to follow the program online, listen or watch conversations with climate leaders, including climate philanthropist Simon Holmes à Court, City of Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore, visionary inventor and waste expert Veena Sahajwalla and Dark Emu author Bruce Pascoe. All you have to do is go and subscribe to the podcast 100 Climate Conversations. You’ll find the archives there as well, and you’ll also find details about how to join us for a live conversation. That’s all at 100ClimateConversations.com. Thank you so much.

This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.