Transcript
Mendel Skulski 0:00
Hey, I'm Mendel.
Adam Huggins 0:02
And I'm Adam. We're the hosts of a podcast called Future Ecologies. And if you've never listened in, don't worry, you're in the right place.
Mendel Skulski 0:11
Yeah. Welcome. We are thrilled to be able to bring you this limited series called Scales of Change.
Adam Huggins 0:18
And just a bit about us. We live in Western Canada in a place called the Salish Sea. Mendel is actually just above the 49th parallel.
Mendel Skulski 0:27
Yep.
Adam Huggins 0:27
And I'm just below it.
Mendel Skulski 0:29
As storytellers we're fascinated by the interplay between the human and more than human worlds.
Adam Huggins 0:36
And if you're already a listener of Future Ecologies, then you've probably noticed that we've never really talked about climate change.
Mendel Skulski 0:48
Well, at least, not directly. And honestly, that's just because we haven't known how.
[Upbeat music]
Mendel Skulski 0:56
The climate crisis is the defining challenge of our lifetimes. A complete existential threat to countless lives on this planet. It colors every topic, every single conversation we have, every waking hour... But what else is there to say about it that hasn't already been written on thousands of cardboard signs, scholarly articles, or intergovernmental reports.
Adam Huggins 1:21
And yet, here we are trying to explore different ways of seeing this world that we share, and radically different ways of inhabiting it. Within the climate crisis, there's just so much that we could be doing at a personal level, a political level, and even through this very platform, so much that we feel we should be doing. And we're pretty sure that at least at times, you feel this way as well.
Mendel Skulski 1:47
Or, basically all the time.
Adam Huggins 1:49
And you're definitely not alone. Still, we're struggling to square that anxiety, this-this feeling that you and I and we just aren't doing enough. With the reality that our individual efforts are mathematically meaningless in the face of this crisis of planetary proportions. And all the while, governments and vested interests, disaster capitalists, they've tried to offload the blame on us as individuals, our consumption habits, saying that if we're just less needy, or if we were a little less greedy.
Mendel Skulski 2:24
Less human.
Adam Huggins 2:25
Then we could make the difference with our individual choices, even as they try to sell us more stuff and keep growing the economy. In this frame, we only register as consumers. At the same time, many activists and theorists, radical thinkers of all stripes, completely dismissed this individualizing logic in favor of a class based or an ecological ideology. Arguing that, only mass movements and revolutionary structural overhaul under intense political pressure accompanied by this global, cultural shift to an ecological worldview, only that's going to get the job done. And in this frame, we only matter insofar as we can be political, or cultural agents. Neither of these theories of change feel quite right to us. And so we've been focusing on stories that feel more tangible, more comprehensible.
Mendel Skulski 3:18
But, whenever we sit down to press record, whatever the topic of the day may be, there's always the specter of climate change, threatening to engulf the entire story. So, we've just avoided it, relegated it to the endnotes. We just didn't have a framework to break it down into manageable pieces.
[Background music fades]
Mendel Skulski 3:38
That is, until we met Robert.
Robert Gifford 3:41
Oh, I'm glad to meet you. Glad to be here.
Adam Huggins 3:43
This is Robert Gifford.
Robert Gifford 3:45
Yes, I've been Professor of Psychology and environmental studies for many years at the University of Victoria.
Adam Huggins 3:51
Robert has created a sort of field guide to the climate crisis. Based around a set of psychological beasts. Which is something that we find particularly appealing as naturalists. As people who are attentive to the life around us. But in this series, the kind of wildlife we're looking for can't be seen.
Mendel Skulski 4:11
That's right. Because we're looking for dragons.
[Sweeping sound followed by background music]
Mendel Skulski 4:18
You can't see their bodies, but you can see their tracks. These are the Dragons of climate inaction. Their habitat is in our minds and this podcast is your field guide.
[Theme music – D7 by Loam Zoku – Composed and produced by Schuyler Lindberg and Y'honatex]
Introduction Voiceover 4:30
This is Scales of Change: a field guide to the Dragons of Climate Inaction. Join us as we learn to spot them in the wild, and discover how they can be disarmed. Produced by Future Ecologies on the traditional territories of the Lekwungen and WSÁNEĆpeoples, with support from the University of Victoria.
[Music slowly fades]
Mendel Skulski 5:02
Okay, so, like any useful field guide, this podcast begins with an introduction.
[Media Clip] 5:08
[David Byrne] You may ask yourself, how do I work this?
Mendel Skulski 5:12
Which we've split into three slides.
Adam Huggins 5:15
Naturally.
Mendel Skulski 5:16
The first slide will introduce you to Robert and the Dragons. The second will address the other crisis of planetary proportions that we are currently experiencing and the third will ground us in place and in oral history.
[Click on the projector]
Mendel Skulski 5:31
Adam, is the projector ready to go?
Adam Huggins 5:33
Uh I-I think so.
Mendel Skulski 5:35
Okay. Let's start with slide one.
[Slide starts rolling the projector with a click]
Adam Huggins 5:41
So, the dragons of climate inaction are, in essence Robert's attempt to classify and categorize the many psychological factors that prevent us from addressing the climate crisis. We're going to get Robert to explain them in his own words. But before we do, we want you to understand who Robert is and how he came to be the curator of a collection of Dragons. Because like all species, they didn't just appear out of thin air. In fact, it's likely that they evolved from fish. And to see how that happened. We have to go back in time.
[Slides rolling]
Adam Huggins 6:18
Back to...
Mendel Skulski 6:19
The tail end of the 1980s.
[80's music medley]
[Media Clip] 6:22
[T.V. Host] Thousands of West Germans...
[T.V. host's voice mixes and fades]
Mendel Skulski 6:24
The Berlin Wall is falling down. People are getting together in something called a love shock.
[80's music continues]
[Media Clip] 6:30
[T.V. Host] How do you measure such an astonishing moment in history?
Mendel Skulski 6:34
And out in Western Canada, a young doctor Robert Gifford is creating a micro world called Fish 1.0.
[Splash followed by electronic music]
Adam Huggins 6:44
At this point, the whole discipline of environmental psychology is just leaving adolescence. And researchers are starting to realize the potential of computer simulations.
Robert Gifford 6:55
Yeah, it's a computer, it you know, I-I don't like to use a word game. Other people who do it call it a game. But then what that does is prompt people to-to win. If you play a game you want to win. So we, we, we, we strike that word like mouthwash, wash your mouth out with soap. If anybody uses a word game, it's a microworld, then you're managing this micro world.
[Funky music continues]
Adam Huggins 7:21
Each player in the micro world gets a boat and before they leave port, they have to front some capital. Once they're out on the water, they pay labor and operating costs, and can choose how much to fish… How many fish to take back to port, and when to throw in the towel and head back in.
[Splashes]
Adam Huggins 7:39
If there are any fish left, when all the players returned to port, then the fish spawn and everybody gets to fish another season.
Robert Gifford 7:46
And the fish regenerate like they would in the natural world. And so if people over-fish, there's no fish left and there's people starve and die. Or if they cooperate, the fish can go on and they can get a lot of fish but slowly at a sustainable rate.
Mendel Skulski 8:03
But, behind the scenes the researcher gets to tweak all of these variables. How many fish there are, how much uncertainty the players have about how many fish there are, how quickly the fish respond, and importantly, how much each player knows about what the other players are doing; how many fish they're harvesting, how much money they're making. And depending on how he tweaked these variables, Robert found he got dramatically different outcomes.
Robert Gifford 8:29
And so we've identified about 35 different influences on whether people will be greedy. I call it defection when they're greedy, or cooperative.
Adam Huggins 8:41
These influences and outcomes have revealed all sorts of fascinating aspects of human psychology, in what is called a commons dilemma.
[Resonant music]
Adam Huggins 8:50
Which in a nutshell, is a situation where there are limited resources in an environment populated by humans with potentially infinite appetites. Bounded only by their collective sense of justice and self-preservation. Sound familiar?
Mendel Skulski 9:06
Unfortunately, over the decades that Robert's been doing the simulation, he's on fish 5.0 at this point. Tragedies of the commons are all too common. But he did tell us this one story.
Robert Gifford 9:18
If you want I'll tell you the little anecdote that usually makes me cry when I when I tell it in my class, but um, one time we are looking at age as a factor from age 4 to 22. And does age matter? But the most amazing one action ever was a group of four year olds in a daycare, three girls sitting, little girls sitting around and they start, they get they get a reward, they get cookies when to trade their-their virtual fish. And they started taking the fish out. This was before the computer, it was using actual like little fish, so physical ones. So, this the three little girls are taking them out as four year olds would, except one of them, you know, the light bulb went off in her head, she knew what was going to happen.
Adam Huggins 10:06
This little girl could see that, at the rate she and her classmates were going, they were going to run out of fish.
Robert Gifford 10:13
And she actually took us some of her own and put them back into the ocean. And in that whole study up to age 22, nobody else except a four year old, put stuff back into the ocean. [Laughs]
Adam Huggins 10:28
Robert published his first paper on fish 1.0 in 1991, and he'd mail you a floppy disk for eight bucks if you wrote to him. In 1992, the Atlantic cod fishery collapsed to less than 1% of previously recorded levels. Putting an end to a fishery that had supported coastal communities, dating back hundreds and even thousands of years.
Mendel Skulski 10:52
Collectively, people just weren't leaving enough fish in the water and no one had thought to start putting any back.
Adam Huggins 11:01
Today, the crisis facing us concerns the one resource we all have in common. The atmosphere around us. And like a big fish from a small pond, Robert has made the leap into the environmental psychology of climate action.
Robert Gifford 11:17
The Dragons of inaction are a series of psychological barriers, justifications, rationalizations, reasons why people could do something for the environment, pro-climate behavior, but are not doing it.
Adam Huggins 11:33
These dragons stand between us and what we need to do to protect our climate, giving future generations a chance to survive and even thrive. You could say that Robert discovered the Dragons. He found them in the wild. Scales and all and put names on them.
[Mysterious music]
Robert Gifford 11:50
Same way as the periodic table. Same way as real species. You know, people discover a new species under a rock somewhere in Indonesia and name it after Miley Cyrus or something, sorry. [Laughing] So, in in in my world I'm still discovering parts of the periodic table, if you will, or the taxonomy of species. In this metaphorical world and it's still developing, there may be dragons that haven't hatched yet.
[Birds calling and frogs croaking]
Mendel Skulski 12:23
Thinking like a taxonomist, he grouped them into seven clusters or genera. Each genus is like a family of closely related species.
Adam Huggins 12:32
Kind of like, uh, buckets for sorting psychologies. These are groups with names like- social comparison, sunk costs, or perceived risks. They each represent separate lineages with different evolutionary histories. Robert gave them common names, and because we're gigantic nerds, we gave them Latin binomials. None of them are named after pop stars.
Mendel Skulski 12:59
I think my personal favorite is Artusnoia aevum, also known as the Dragon of temporal discounting. But there are lots of others. You can explore them in detail, their names, their phylogeny, and their definitions at futureecologies.net/dragons. By this point, Robert has named close to 40 different species.
Robert Gifford 13:22
I mean, I'm a collector, you can see these 60's posters around here and I collected few other things. So this is just another one of my collection. I used to collect coins when I was a kid, and I'm collector by nature, so nothing going on here except a guy who likes to collect things and makes a list. And people add to that list when I give talks. And, you know, at one point, there were seven dragons and another time there was 10 dragons and 18 dragons.
[Music slowly fades]
Mendel Skulski 13:48
We won't have time to go through them all. Instead, for the rest of this series, in each episode we'll zoom in on a different genus, and will tell stories about one or more of its dragon subspecies.
Adam Huggins 13:59
And, most importantly, we're going to explore how we can slay these dragons of inaction.
[Resonant electric music]
Adam Huggins 14:07
As individuals, communities, and late stage capitalist settler-colonial nation states. How we can recognize and defeat the psychological barriers holding us back.
Robert Gifford 14:19
A psychological barrier sounds polite, or you can be less polite and say rationalizations.
Mendel Skulski 14:25
When our intellectual convictions bump up against our comfortable way of life, it's a whole lot easier to change what we think, than to change what we do. So from the perspective of a psychologist, like Robert,
Robert Gifford 14:37
The whole reason for the existence of the notion of dragons is to understand the gap between good intentions, most people now have good intentions toward the climate and environment, but they are not doing everything that they really should do or even that they think they should do! So they use the dragons as, as a hindrance or as, as a reason or excuse not to do it.
Mendel Skulski 15:02
And he likes to sum all this up in a quote from Robert Heinlein.
Robert Gifford 15:05
Do you know who he is? The, uh, he was sort of the leading science fiction writer in the US in the 20th century. In back in 1953 he said, using old fashioned language, "Man is not a rational animal. He's a rationalizing animal." And uh this is kind of the key quotation underlying the notion of the of the Dragons.
Mendel Skulski 15:31
To put it bluntly, most of the time, we don't make rational choices. We rationalize the choices we've already made. Which is why we say that these Dragons are real.
Robert Gifford 15:42
There's absolutely a reality. I mean, we do surveys all the time and we say, um, you drive to UVic, why do you drive to UVic? And I get a dragon.
[Bottle pop]
Adam Huggins 15:51
UVic refers to the University of Victoria, where Robert teaches and leads the environment, social and personality lab. And that Dragon is one that he calls CGA.
Robert Gifford 16:03
And you say, what do you mean CGA? And I say CGA is my acronym for conflicting goals and aspirations. That is, uh, I drive to work because I want to get here on time, or because I have to drop off my kids. And so, if you want to know what is the reality of a Dragon, it's when it comes out of somebody's mouth. That's, that's about as real as it gets for Dragons. The proof is in the verbalization of a reason why I don't do something... that it's not more real than that. But that seems pretty real to me.
Adam Huggins 16:37
This particular Dragon of conflicting goals and aspirations erodes the notion that, us humans just need more education, more information to make the right decisions from a climate perspective. Other dragons we'll be exploring in this series described psychological realities like optimism bias.
Mendel Skulski 16:55
Which is when we assume everything will work out fine. So there's no need for us to get involved.
Adam Huggins 17:01
And reactance.
Mendel Skulski 17:03
Which is when we do the opposite of what we're told to do.
Adam Huggins 17:06
And so many more. We all have different priorities and allegiances, roles in our communities. And we're all grappling with the interaction between our own life circumstances, and the Dragons of inaction.
Mendel Skulski 17:18
To overcome these dragons the first step is knowing that they're there. We have to learn to recognize their presence, and name them. And that's why we've made this series for you.
Adam Huggins 17:29
And we're lucky to have help from a whole slate of amazing guests.
Mendel Skulski 17:33
We'll take you from the Salish Sea to the Amazon. And we'll hear from filmmakers, artists, land defenders, journalists, indigenous elders, and even a number of Robert's students who are taking this research out into the world and making waves.
[Resonant music]
Adam Huggins 17:49
We want each episode of this series to offer something different for individuals, for community leaders. And for those of you who may actually have access to some levers of power in organizations or governments. We're pretty sure that if you're still listening right now, you already take the climate crisis and your own role in it very seriously. So we offer this series as a field guide for you. A way to see the Dragons all around us.
[Upbeat electronic music]
Robert Gifford 18:19
If you like we could use a medical model. We need to make a diagnosis before we can offer a cure, and every case may be a little different.
[Click on the projector]
Mendel Skulski 18:27
And that brings us nicely to slide number two.
[Slides rolling]
Adam Huggins 18:31
Just give me a sec, it's jammed.
[Projector stuttering]
Mendel Skulski 18:39
[Laughs]
Adam Huggins 18:39
No, I uh,
[Projector still stuttering]
Mendel Skulski 18:40
Got it?
Adam Huggins 18:41
Okay, here goes.
[Slide starts rolling with a click]
Adam Huggins 18:45
These days, a medical metaphor seems particularly apt. Truth be told, we started producing this series well before the covid-19 pandemic, put us all on a planetary timeout and we're feeling The weight of all the information and misinformation and pain going around right now. There have been lots of interesting parallels drawn between the climate crisis and this pandemic, and the global response to it.
Mendel Skulski 19:13
Or lack thereof. Some of the lessons this virus is teaching us are too important to ignore. But in general, we're going to try to keep the Coronavirus conversation to a minimum in this series. For the same reason we've avoided talking climate on future ecologies. It threatens to consume everything.
Adam Huggins 19:31
That being said, um, I want to share with you right up front how this pandemic has actually transformed my thinking on this topic. Is that alright?
Mendel Skulski 19:41
Well, we said we were going to keep it to a minimum.
Adam Huggins 19:44
All right [Laughing] I'll try. So I come to the climate crisis from this school of thought that most of us are making the best decisions we can for ourselves, right? Within our given circumstances, at least most of the time.
Mendel Skulski 19:57
Sure. We hope.
Adam Huggins 19:58
[Laughs] Exactly and that under present circumstances, that means we're all destroying our biosphere together.
Mendel Skulski 20:06
[Sighs] Yeah.
Adam Huggins 20:09
Which points to the need for a complete system's overhaul. Right? A transformation of our cultures and power structures.
Mendel Skulski 20:16
That follows.
Adam Huggins 20:17
That is if we want a snowball's chance in hell of minimizing climate driven suffering. So, I guess that's, that's my bias, right? And at first glance, Robert's psychological approach, and the theory of change behind it feels potentially individualizing and isolating to me.
Mendel Skulski 20:37
I don't disagree.
Adam Huggins 20:38
And for me, that's the risk of having this conversation in this moment. And I want to be upfront about that. It's not a totally comfortable conversation for me.
Mendel Skulski 20:48
Or me, but how has the virus shifted your thinking?
Adam Huggins 20:52
Well, the coronavirus has caused the kind of global response that so many of us have been trying to capitalize on climate For decades, right?
Mendel Skulski 21:01
Yeah.
Adam Huggins 21:02
And don't get me wrong. Governments and existing power structures, they've played a pretty important role in coordinating, and in some cases enforcing this response to COVID-19. But I don't think that most of us are staying home. And so many of us at the cost of our jobs and and family and social connections, ambitions, mental health. I just don't think we're doing it because our governments are telling us to, for the most part.
Mendel Skulski 21:27
Um, I-I actually want to push back on that for a second... I think we've seen levels of action from the media and governments on COVID that we've never seen on climate.
Adam Huggins 21:37
I-I mean, yes and no, right. I think the media have actually focused a lot of attention on the climate crisis over the last few years especially. And governments have been having climate summits in passing legislation for decades, right? I'd argue that one of the major differences between COVID and climate is that almost everyone, including politicians and business leaders and community leaders, but also normal people, we've all recognized the risks posed by the Coronavirus. And we've all taken some action in our own lives.
Mendel Skulski 22:10
Sure. Yeah. I mean, we're definitely starting to see some erosion in that consensus as this whole thing drags on. I mean, especially from the business sector. But I-I'll grant you that the international response that we've seen to COVID would be impossible... if the vast majority of us weren't getting with the program.
Adam Huggins 22:32
Yeah, I mean, we can we can get into the weeds on whether people are following leadership or whether leadership follows people. But I there hasn't been a whole lot of clear and consistent leadership, even? Especially in North America, and I'm blown away by how we've basically shut the entire global economy down. And I think we've done that because the vast majority of us recognize that changing our own personal behavior of our own volition is the only way to address this issue.
Mendel Skulski 23:03
Right? So we've already managed to overcome The, The what? The pangolins of COVID inaction? [Laughs] What I think you're saying is there is proof that we can do this.
Adam Huggins 23:16
Exactly. If we can do this, then addressing the climate crisis may depend on understanding why at a psychological level, we've taken the Coronavirus so much more seriously. And then, you know, putting those lessons to work in our movements.
[Click on the projector]
Adam Huggins 23:35
So, just before we go, we have one last slide
Mendel Skulski 23:39
and one more important voice to introduce.
[Slides rolling in the projector]
Adam Huggins 23:45
You might have noticed that our theme song for this series includes a land acknowledgement. This is something that a number of you are probably already familiar with. And others of you might think that it's just another wave of Political correctness, the new decorum of public speaking?
Mendel Skulski 24:03
Well, I, I would say it is, and for good reason. But, a land acknowledgement could just be a procedural rote gesture. Or you could use it as a call to reconnect with the land around you, wherever that may be, to remember its long history, and the people that shaped it.
kQwa’st’not Charlene George 24:23
So, thank you for acknowledging the beautiful [speaking in SENĆOŦEN], the sacred [speaking in SENĆOŦEN] that we're on here today. But I think the part that was missing is that not only are we having human relatives, but we have all of the other relatives that are here and um deserve to be acknowledged. [speaking in SENĆOŦEN]
Adam Huggins 24:41
You might catch us using phrases like 'the more than human world', and that's because clearly, what we do as humans matters... but we like to remember that we're not the only players in the game. There's also the fish.
[Mystic music follows]
Adam Huggins 24:54
One of our key motivations as podcasters is to express that kind of ecocentrism; a relational way of seeing the world. And to remember that, we're a piece of a much larger and more complicated whole.
Mendel Skulski 25:06
For me personally, it's a realization that I can come to over and over, and it only gets richer.
Adam Huggins 25:13
And I think that brings us to another side of why we're talking about these Dragons... there's more to be done than just to name them and sort them like a-a butterfly collector.
Mendel Skulski 25:24
Yeah, no offense to modern lepidopterists.
Adam Huggins 25:27
Understanding the Dragons means more than just intellectualizing them. It's just as important, maybe even more important to understand them at an intuitive, emotional level.
kQwa’st’not Charlene George 25:38
Many [thanks in SENĆOŦEN] for inviting me to come and sit with you today. So my [word for name in SENĆOŦEN] is kQwa'st'not, and I’m T’sou-ke. I am honored that I carry this name. The one that carried before me was my great grandma. So, as Western society has its practice that if it's uncomfortable for yourself tongue that you would pronounce a name. They're going to give you something that's comfortable. So when I was born, they gave me the name Charlene.
Mendel Skulski 26:11
kQwa'st'not Charlene George is a cultural guide and an artist. One of her recent pieces is an immense interactive, community driven digital mural, language archive and learning tool called 'Seeing Through Watchers' Eyes'. For those of you not from Vancouver Island, T’sou-ke is one of more than two dozen Coast Salish First Nations indigenous peoples that have lived in this part of the world since time immemorial.
kQwa’st’not Charlene George 26:38
So, we have a number of beautiful, um, 'stories' is such a small word to use to describe these beautiful teachings that we have about how to be good people. So, so many of them talk about mistakes or learning or Dragons to slay, that different beings have gone through.
Adam Huggins 27:04
Some stories have been with us for a long, long time. And dragon stories are among them. Stories shape, who we are, how we think, and in turn, how we shape the world. The more stories we have to draw upon, the more tools we have at our disposal to adapt our thinking.
kQwa’st’not Charlene George 27:24
Because we have a very beautiful opportunity to embrace change. And if we look at the gifts that all the different beings have, we have such a wealth of answers that we could look at, for how to guide us. So, not only do we have responsibilities and gifts, but we could look at them as uh, we have tasks to overcome. And so my cousin always uses the analogy of Dragons. Yeah, you got to slay those dragons, honey because those are what's holding you back. So it's-it's about the things that might have come intergenerationally to you that you are now responsible. Because every action, thought, feeling, decision, you pass on to your grandbabies like and their generation's grandbabies and it keeps on going on. So we can choose, if we're going to pass on all goodness, or are we going to pass on the dragons? Are we going to pass on the hurts? Are we going to pass on the lessons to learn?
[Resonant choral music] Black and Purple by IKSRE
Mendel Skulski 28:29
You could look at this just as your personal journey, or as the challenge we all face together. And after all, the big changes we make as a society are prefigured by all the little changes we make in our own lives.
Charlene George 28:44
If we venture behind our eyes, regardless of how we are doing in our transformation, if we are able to see that part that's behind the eyes, we will always do much better... because then we're standing and looking inward. And my-my cousin said with the Dragons, first part is you got to stand and look inside. Because that's the biggest part of being a warrior is looking at your own self.
[Music intensifies]
Mendel Skulski 29:25
So, we hope you join us and all of our amazing guests, as we look within taking a tour of these Dragons of climate inaction. First up, the genus of limited cognition, also known –
Adam Huggins 29:41
to us –
Mendel Skulski 29:42
just to us, as Artusnoia. We'll meet a pair of the most pernicious dragons, how we can perceive our own ability to change, and whether those changes even matter. Spoiler alert, we can and they do.
Adam Huggins 29:56
You can hear that next week in chapter one. Hope Punk.
Mendel Skulski 30:01
There are two ways to hear this series. You can subscribe to Scales of Change on whatever podcast app you use, and get each chapter a day early.
Adam Huggins 30:09
Or you can subscribe to Future Ecologies, our regular show. These episodes will appear there as well.
Mendel Skulski 30:16
Actually, you should subscribe to both. That's Scales of Change and Future Ecologies, and you can help bring the series to the world. Help us climb the podcast charts and reach new listeners everywhere. Throw us five stars and please leave us a review.
Adam Huggins 30:32
Tell your friends, hell, tell your neighbors, your colleagues. We're here to help take the climate conversation past shame, past despair and exhaustion. Whether or not we can avoid climate collapse is still an open question, but we know for sure one thing is inevitable: Change.
[Music intestifies]
Mendel Skulski 30:53
Scales of Change is a production of Future Ecologies with support from the University of Victoria.
Adam Huggins 31:00
In this episode, you heard Robert Gifford, kQwa'st'not Charlene George, Simone Miller, myself, Adam Huggins.
Mendel Skulski 31:09
And me, Mendel Skulski. Special thanks to Suzanne Ahearn, Ann MacLaurin, Simone Miller,
Adam Huggins 31:15
Ilana Fonariov
Mendel Skulski 31:16
And Levi Wilson.
Adam Huggins 31:18
Besides discovering the dragons of inaction, Robert Gifford is literally the author of the textbook, Environmental Psychology: Principles and Practice
Mendel Skulski 31:26
And kQwa'st'not is the creator and compiler of an immense, interactive artwork and teaching tool combining Coast Salish language, visual art, and many, many stories available online from the Sierra Club. It's called 'Seeing Through Watchers' Eyes'.
Adam Huggins 31:43
Composition for this series is by Vincent van Haaff and Loam Zoku.
Mendel Skulski 31:48
Our theme song is by Loam Zoku
Adam Huggins 31:50
Other music for this episode was provided by Anor Andros, IKSRE, Greg Davis, and Sunfish Moon Light.
Mendel Skulski 31:58
You can tweet at us or follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Future Ecologies or send an email to Scales of Change at futureecologies.net.
Adam Huggins 32:08
To learn more about each one of the Dragons of Inaction, go to, futureecologies.net/dragons.
Mendel Skulski 32:14
And if you want to support the work that we do, join our community at patreon.com/futureecologies.
Adam Huggins 32:21
Alright, that's all for now!
Mendel Skulski 32:22
Bye. We'll be back next week. Talk to you soon!
[Music slowly fades]
Transcribed by https://otter.ai and edited by Madhurima Basak