Last week I received this mail from Simon Donner, a climate scientist at University of British Columbia:
‘I came across your site, thanks to links you have to the letter I’d written for desmogblog and to my colleague Michael Oppenheimer‘s work. It is good to see some discussion about the psychology of climate change. You might be interested in a recent paper/essay of mine in the journal Climatic Change about how long-standing traditional or religious beliefs about the separation of earth and sky pose an obstacle for climate change education.’
I was so taken by the originality of his insights, that I asked him to write a guest article for La Marguerite. Here it is:
‘Climate change is so obvious. Where’s the outrage?’, the writer Bill McKibben once wrote. Scientists, environmentalists, politicians, op-ed columnists, you name it, they have tried, some say in vain, to answer that question.
The problem is too long term. There is no direct cause and effect. It is too expensive. Scientists are poor communicators. People don’t want to give up their SUVs. It is Exxon’s fault.
What unites all these answers? An anecdote from the South Pacific, told in a recent essay of mine in the journal Climatic Change, might give a clue:
Each year in the Fijian village of Matacawlevu on the island of the same name, the people hold a festival to celebrate the planting of crops. There is food, music and no shortage of kava. But the most important part of the festival is a church service where the local minister leads the village in prayers for good weather and a strong harvest. According to Fijian religious tradition, a mix of Methodism and animism typical of the South Pacific, proper prayer assures that the rains will come. In the event of a drought, people blame either each other for not being devout, or blame the minister for failing to properly deliver the people’s message. The tradition of the planting festival masks a sophisticated system of land management that has sustained indigenous people in Fiji and across many islands in Polynesia and Melanesia for centuries. In Matacawalevu, the Chief’s decision to sanction planting is based upon years of experience and the advice of a villager trained in agronomy. Crops are rotated and selected land is left fallow to maintain soil fertility. The village’ s agricultural practices follow directly from a deeply held belief that people exert control over land. The weather, however, is up to God.
In virtually every traditional and religious belief system, there is a clear separation between the earth and the sky. The earth is the domain of humans, and the sky is the domain of the gods.
The very notion that we could be influencing or controlling the weather and climate runs counter to thousands of years of belief in a separation between earth and sky. From the essay:
Today, the concept of human-induced climate change may not directly conflict with the everyday religious beliefs of the majority of people in North America or Europe, as it does in many Pacific Islands. Yet doubt about human influence on the climate may be grounded in a more general feeling, a remnant of thousands of years of belief in earth– sky separation, that unspecified forces grander than humans control the climate. Skeptics of climate change have effectively exploited this spiritual uncertainty about human influence on climate by stressing the natural variability in the climate system. For example, organizations discouraging reduction in greenhouse gas emissions often distribute material that focuses on the large forces that alter climate over time…
Whether intentional or not, the argument taps into our pre-existing doubts that humans could disturb the domain of the gods.
This is not an indictment or endorsement of religion, rather a discussion of the separation of earth (the domain of humans) and sky (the domain of the gods) in different traditions and the need for a long view of human history when communicating climate change. I encourage people to read the essay and provide feedback on how we can use these ideas to improve climate change communication efforts. Perhaps we are overlooking the magnitude of the paradigm shift that human-induced climate change truly represents? The essay:
From Galileo to Darwin, science is full of examples where new discoveries challenged traditional beliefs. If history is a guide, it can take decades or centuries for the new science to become the new orthodoxy. The battle over public acceptance of natural selection is still being fought 150 years after the publication of the Darwin’s The Origin of Species. The potential for human-induced climate change may not belong on a list of the most fundamental scientific discoveries of last 500 years. Like those discoveries, however, it does challenge a belief held by virtually all religions and cultures worldwide for thousands of years.
Great post, and great picture. Thank you Simon!
From my perspective, the sky looks BIG and somewhat limitless from down here. And, usually, in many places, it looks and smells OK too.
But, since one of my sons plays basketball, one day I wondered, “if earth were the size of a basketball, how thick would our atmosphere be, comparably speaking?”
If my rough calculation and source are correct, and if earth were the size of a basketball, the vast majority of our atmosphere (by mass) would be within 0.3 (three tenths) millimeters of the basketball’s surface. That’s close! Try it. A person needs fairly steady hands to hold her/his finger that close to the basketball’s surface for very long without touching it.
I don’t think many people know how comparatively thin our atmosphere is. The sky looks almost limitless from down here. But, in truth, it’s thin. Not that far away, space! I agree that a substantial paradigm shift is needed.
If I remember correctly, near the beginning of “An Inconvenient Truth”, Mr. Gore mentions that our atmosphere is very thin. But, in the visuals, the atmosphere is not shown to scale, as thin as it really is, if I remember right. Humans, of course, are very visual beings. Often, what we see matters more than what we hear. So, I’m not so sure that, even after seeing the movie, most people realize how thin our atmosphere really is. I doubt the concept has “sunk in.”
If anyone out there has the time and info, please double-check my rough calculation. Think of earth as an NBA-size basketball. How thick would the atmosphere be (for example, so that 90% of the atmosphere by mass would be within a given distance from the surface)? My calc suggests the thickness is about 0.3 mm.
If so, we may want to start carrying around basketballs to show people?!
“ . . . but all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones.”
- George Orwell, 1984
I think his own cultural background from the US causes him to overestimate the difficulty of change. For example,
“The battle over public acceptance of natural selection is still being fought 150 years after the publication of the Darwin’s The Origin of Species.”
Evolution vs creationism is simply not a significant issue in any Western country other than the US. If it were a matter of some archetype sort of idea deep in all humans, the level of resistance to new ideas, whether evolution, emancipation of women and minorities, climate change or whatever, would be about the same in every country. And yet we find that some ideas are resisted in some countries but not in others (eg evolution in the US), and a country which is open to one idea is closed to others (eg Norway being relatively feminist but a real energy hog).
I think it’s cultural rather than archetypal, and thus actions are more easily changed than Donner suggests. For example, while the position of African-Americans may still be bad in the US, it’s rather changed from the 1950s when white men could still lynch and murder black men with a degree of impunity. The racist core to the culture did not change, but the behaviour did, and much of the racism has been severely toned down since then.
Great guest article, I couldn’t agree more. Climate change is real and currently impacting many indigenous peoples around the world – and not just at the poles, but everywhere via drought, floods, temperature changes, etc. There is a strong belief in Western culture between the separation of the temenos and profanus, and I can see how Simon Donner relates it directly to the sky-earth and climate change. I just hope we can begin to take action before it is too late for many indigenous groups. Thanks for the article.
Kyle,
Thanks for offering your counterpoint. Maybe it is a mix of things? Hence the value of exploring many different perspectives . . .
Jeff,
I love that image of the basketball and thin layer. . . maybe your children can play around with it and create video for MTV Switch?
Indigenous People’s Activist,
I went on your blog. Thanks for being a voice for the indigenous people.
That is a very original, very unique idea. I hadn’t looked at things from that perspective before!
Of course, I love astronomy, which changes my perspective. For someone like me, it’s easy to imagine that the tiny mites living on a speck of dust changing the composition of the veil of gas clinging to it. I wonder if there’s any correlation.
Simon, see what came out of your article! So much of the climate change discourse gets stuck in the same old rhetoric . . .
Kiashu makes a good point that the western world, outside of the US, long ago stopped debating Darwin. However, it has been 150 years. Widespread acceptance of evolution that did not happen until decades after the publication of Origin of the Species and still hasn’t happened in parts of the world. The shift in attitude took time.
That’s the point of the analogy with climate change. Human-induced climate change also counters traditional belief and requires a shift in thinking. Therefore it was naive for us to expect climate change to be quickly accepted or widely accepted by many cultures, including in many cases, our own, without address the conflict with traditional belief.
Where I go with this discussion is a behaviorist approach, that says that core beliefs may not be changed directly, but instead one can choose to intervene at the behavior level. Change behaviors, and then hopefully thoughts/beliefs may slowly change over time.
A new case study: a recent TV interview about the “conservative” position on climate change, in which former US congressional leader Tom Delay said it was arrogant to think man could change the climate.
More here:
http://simondonner.blogspot.com/2008/02/tom-delay-and-believing-in-climate.html
Thanks Simon for completing this thread. I agree, there is nothing rational about the ‘conservatives’ position, on the environment, and a number of other issues for that matter. ‘Faith’ is getting in the way of reason and good judgment here . . .