Yeah.
We're going to.
Yeah.
Even hearing his name.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Welcome to my talk now for those who have been waiting for that.
Welcome everyone.
I'd like to say that we're very pleased to have Dr. Karen O'Brien with us today.
This is our third talk in the PSI Climate Series this semester.
Let me just tell you a little bit about Dr. O'Brien.
She's a professor in the Department of Sociology and Human Geography.
She's an internationally recognized expert on climate change and society with a focus
on themes of climate change impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation.
She's currently leading an Norwegian Research Council project called Adaptation Connects,
which stands for, let's see if I get this right, combining all the new knowledge to
enable conscious transformation to sustainability.
She has served as a lead author for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Reports and participated,
I believe, in several other ones in addition to that over the years.
She's been on the Future Earth Transition Team and Science Committee for between 2012
and 2017.
She's author of a number of books, most recently a book entitled You Matter More Than You Think,
a new book called System Social Change for a Thriving World in 2021, and also Climate
Change in Society, Transforming the Future and Adaptive Challenge of Climate Change in
2015.
In addition to all that, she's co-founder and partner of an Oslo-based company called
C-Change, which is dedicated to helping both individuals and organizations in developing
a new perspective and gaining more knowledge about transformations to sustainability.
Without further ado, her title of her talk will be Climate Change and Transformations
to Sustainability, You Matter More Than You Think.
Dr. Ramanan.
Great.
Thank you.
Thank you for coming today.
And I want to, as mentioned, talk about really the climate challenge and how we meet it right
here and right now.
I've been working for about 35 years or so on climate change and climate change impacts
vulnerability and adaptation, what it means for human security, what it means for ecosystems,
et cetera.
And it becomes very clear that we are at a moment where we actually have to transform
ourselves and our societies at a rate, scale, speed and depth that has never been done before.
So it's a real pleasure to be here and talking to people in psychology who are working with
climate change, because I think that is the adaptive challenge that we need to understand.
And I'm going to go through a little bit on.
Let's see.
It worked before.
I'm going to just give a little introduction so we're all on that same page of what the
crisis is that we're facing and then talk a little bit about my research and then go
into a framework I've been using over the last 15 years or so called the three spheres
of transformation and how we can apply that to scaling transformations, which puts people
as the solutions rather than just technologies and behavioral changes, et cetera.
So I just want to acknowledge that this is really climate change.
We're in the decade that matters.
And some of the artwork that I show you will be from this book, You Matter More Than You
Think, which was a collaboration with Norwegian artist Tone Bjørdan.
So all of this is from this decade matters.
And it really recognizes that if we listen to the science and if we trust what science
is saying that we actually do not have a long time to sit there and try to respond.
We have to do things differently.
We have to think differently.
We have to act differently.
We have to literally be different.
And when we read the newspapers every single day, these times we see the unprecedented
environmental extreme events such as wildfires, catastrophes all over the world.
20 years ago, people would think like, oh, this is about Bangladesh.
This is about the Pacific Islands.
But it really is about everywhere.
And we're seeing that complacency is really eroding everywhere.
As we see even countries like Norway are vulnerable to climate change.
We also see a widening gap in the global population between the rich and the poor and who's vulnerable.
So there's a social justice dimension to climate change and how we respond to it.
I think that's really important.
Likewise, we can't separate climate change from biodiversity loss and many of the other
environmental challenges and the 17 sustainable development goals that we have today.
We failed to meet any of the targets for biodiversity in 2020.
And in December, the countries of the world came together, put up the global biodiversity
framework, which is very ambitious and also very voluntary.
So we really do need to actually link them.
And I think that's one of the positive things is that people are starting to see that climate
change and biodiversity have to go together.
But we're failing both with climate change and biodiversity loss.
And I think that's a real concern.
And it's not only that we're failing, but it's actually we're failing even worse because
we're starting to see that other crises like the war in Ukraine is starting to, you know,
is doing having counterintuitive consequences with raising the price of oil, making it more
popular to invest in oil and continue the investments in this.
So there's a lot of influences in the political economy in governance.
They're facing this.
But I think, you know, what it comes down to is the science of systems change.
And many scientists who are most concerned about is this that the world is on the brink
of what they call tipping points, climate tipping points where we will go to irreversible
impacts because of changes in the Greenland ice sheet, the drying of the Amazon forest,
changes in ocean circulations, etc.
And basically they're saying that with one point one degrees global heating, which we've
already experienced now, five dangerous tipping points may be passed.
So this is really frightening.
This is really like this is the idea that we are in this crisis.
And I think many of the people in this room already are very aware of it.
But I think, you know, how do we actually put that into this context?
And there's been for the last 75 years an iconic clock called the Doomsday Clock.
And it was part it came out in the Cold War, but maybe about 15 years ago, they added climate
change into that.
And last year, January 20th, they set the Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds to midnight.
And they said without swift and focused action, truly catastrophic events, events that could
end civilization as we know it are more likely.
When the clock stands at 100 seconds to midnight, we are all threatened.
The moment is both perilous and unsustainable.
And the time to act is now.
And I should just say, I was born in the Cold War.
And when I was born, it was 12 minutes to midnight.
When I started studying climate change in 1988, it was six minutes to midnight.
And this was last year before the war in Ukraine.
And this year, they put it at 90 seconds to midnight.
So this is really unprecedented danger.
And something that we haven't really embodied and taken into, you know, I think that, you
know, business as usual, life as usual kind of goes on.
But how do we actually grasp the things?
And many people we were talking about, you know, people are starting to feel very disempowered,
feeling like, oh, you know, deep adaptation.
We have to accept society's collapse.
We have to kind of do this.
And we start to see that there's a whole new literature on climate anxiety, climate grief,
climate trauma, a whole new typology of trauma that we have never seen before, because it
isn't just the effects of climate change that are traumatizing.
That it's the whole phenomenon that is traumatizing us.
So how do we actually handle this in society?
And I know that many of you are working with mental health issues and climate change among
young people, but also among all of society.
How do we address these types of challenges?
And that brings me to research at the University.
And I'm interested in research, but I'm also interested in practice.
So I'll move into that, because I think research as usual isn't going to be enough when we're
in the decade that matters.
And that means we have to actually think about how do we have that difference?
And so this is the first line of my most recent article on practical approaches to
scaling transformations.
And it really is like, what do we do now?
How many of you saw the movie Don't Look Up?
Yeah, many of us are like, don't look up.
It's like, oh, you know, we do look up and we do wonder, you know, how can we do this?
And I also looked up and was like, oh, how, you know, what is it that we can do?
We often feel very small.
We often feel very like ineffective in terms of making changes that will go to scale.
And many of us, I think, really feel like, do I actually matter?
Does my research matter?
Does my food choices matter?
Is anything that I'm doing really mattering?
And I think that that's where we need to ask very different questions.
And the questions that I've been very interested in, in my own research over the last decade
or 15 years or so, is how do we transform at the scope, scale, speed and depth that is called for
to meet the SDGs and the Paris Agreement?
And it's not whether we can do it, because that, you know, you get yes, no, and you get all these
different opinions, but how?
How do we transform?
And for that, we need an integrative approach.
We need to have all the disciplines and all the knowledge coming together to work on that.
But not just any transformations, OK?
How do we do this in an ethical, equitable and sustainable manner?
Because there's nothing worse than, you know, like having someone come in with their solution,
geoengineering the atmosphere or whatever and saying, this is how we transform.
So there's a quality of the transformations we're interested in.
And that brings us to some real philosophical questions about what is the relationship between individual change,
collective change and systems change?
When I change, do we change?
The sisters change. How do we see that?
And my biggest question is this, you know, are we actually underestimating our individual and collective capacity
for social change by being based on a paradigm, you know, our way of thinking where I separate myself from you,
I separate myself from nature, you know, this atomistic reductionist deterministic view that has pervaded science and society.
So this is very much like what I have been working on in the Adaptation Connects project,
which you probably the first one who actually said what it stands for.
Adaptation Connects is looking at the relationship between adaptation and transformation,
recognizing that we can adapt to a one degree warmer world, a two degree warmer world, a three degree warmer world,
and a four degree warmer world. Maybe, you know, there's limits, there's barriers and things.
But the biggest adaptation that we can do right now is adapt to the very idea that we are transforming global systems and the climate system.
And that, I think, is when we start to see that, we transform economic systems, political systems,
we start to kind of switch that paradigm.
So we know that we matter when it comes to our thriving and flying and things like that at a collective scale.
But we haven't absorbed that we matter as we change as individuals and as collectives.
So we're looking at conditions or we have been looking at the project is coming to a close,
but how creativity, collaboration, empowerment, flexibility, especially of narratives,
how all of these contribute to that capacity and potential for transformations.
And there's been different projects, coffee connects, travel connects, education connects and art connects.
And I won't go through that, but I just want to highlight some of the my PhD students work on it.
And what we're really trying to do is move beyond this mechanistic paradigm where it's like leverage points.
We need to heave ho, change the world, because what we're talking about is not just one problem, but many problems.
It's climate change, it's biodiversity losses, freshwater use, the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles and so on.
But it's also social equity, gender equality, health, food, water, et cetera.
So we're trying to you know, we need the entry points for actually large scale systems change in a way that is different.
And if we just keep thinking that we have to do, you know, leverage these changes without recognizing that we are the leverage points,
you know, that that that we actually can make that difference.
So so the work is really focused under the guise of adaptation focuses on the how of transformation from an integrative perspective.
In other words, recognizing the social dimensions and the deeper human dimensions that are involved in this as far as systems.
So one of my students was looking at an indigenous community in southwest Alaska and their relationship between individual and collective leadership,
the simultaneous leadership of how what I do and what we do is one in the same.
And that's been a beautiful example of how a community of 70 or 80 people is small but mighty.
They've had an enormous impact on the Pebble Copper Mine, on salmon fishery.
And they are really they're being looked at.
You know, they're influencing indigenous groups all over the world with the work that they do.
Likewise, another PhD student who's now at University of British Columbia was looking at shared meaning in the antithesis and how to are looking at adult development.
How does meaning making differ even within communities and cooperatives of coffee producers in Guatemala?
How does that connect to the whole global value change and how does that actually influence adaptation of coffee to climate change?
Others have been, have been looking at embodied approaches, art, music, dance,
you know, how do we get our effective bodies involved in this and her projects on climate odyssey in Portugal,
you know, really engage people differently, not just as, you know, cognitive in your heads,
but in their bodies and engaging in a kind of ongoing inquiry into climate change.
Another student working with a values based, not a specialty coffee producer in Burundi,
one of the poorest countries in the world where people were hesitating to even take care of coffee plants because they associated with the authoritarian government.
There's no reason for them to. But when a company came in and really treated people with dignity, respect and everything,
then suddenly it transformed those systems. So all of these, and, you know, going back to embodying relations, right, relations.
It's not just with indigenous groups, but how do we create spaces, include self reflexivity, listen deeply and be in action in a different way.
And I think all of these bring out different lessons on how the how of transformation.
And in my own work, teaching climate change in an environment and society for undergraduate course here,
we realized that we didn't actually have the textbook that we needed.
And my longtime collaborator at Rutgers University, Robin Lashenko, teaches a very similar course, sometimes on the same days at the same time.
So we wrote a textbook that really brought in beliefs, values, worldviews, emotions, all of these things that we think are really important.
We published it in 2019 and it's already out of date.
So we're working on the second edition now because now Greta Thunberg came up. Climate anxiety, climate grief have become such bigger issues.
There's so much that have changed in three years and hundreds and thousands of new articles and things.
So so the question then is like, wow, what is it that we you know, how do we actually have to keep up to date?
And I think that goes for all of our teaching.
You know, every new group that comes and starts at the university has been here and the bar is raised a lot for us.
And for me, it's been it's really important.
Also, many of the people who are using this book in their classrooms, they said we want more on transformations.
Extend chapter 10, you know, bring it in early and things not just on the last day of the course or anything.
So so we've learned a lot on that. And this book, You Matter More Than You Think, really was a inquiry that I opened up based on,
you know, recognising that there is a quantum social science out there where the methods,
the metaphors and the meanings of quantum physics are being used in international relations, in psychology, decision making,
game theory, all sorts of things. And I just wanted to ask, OK, what would this mean for climate change?
What does it mean to look at social change, not as this connected, you know, like is a very Newtonian things in the universe?
But if we actually looked at ourselves as related and entangled, what would that mean for how we approach change?
So all of this kind of just to sum up the research, I was currently a co-chair of the IFBES,
which is the Intergovernmental Science Policy Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystems Services, the Naturkanale in Norwegian.
The governments of the world have asked for an assessment of transformative change.
And so I'm meeting 100 authors on this and we're really digging into the how of transformation,
but also the visions, the values, the barriers and obstacles and the actions.
So it's really it's exciting because I think it really brings in the importance of actually taking climate change and biodiversity loss seriously,
but more than that, taking transformation seriously.
And that brings me then to three spheres of transformation.
I'm just going to take a sip of water because I realize I talk like...
And the three spheres of transformation is an approach that I started working on a number of years ago.
I'll talk a little bit about the background when I talk about scaling,
but recognizing that transformation refers to a physical and or qualitative change in form, structure and meaning making,
is this idea that it's not just one thing.
And it's exemplified in the metamorphosis of a caterpillar to a butterfly.
It changes its form. It changes the structure in the cells breakdown and reform and everything.
But it also changes meaning making because the butterfly sees a very different world than the caterpillar, if we can imagine that.
And so so like how do we capture that, you know, that kind of the holistic approach to transformations?
But transformations also has a more like intrinsic and deeper way.
And Monica Sharma, who I've been working with on these three spheres of transformation over the last years,
she talks about transformation as the powerful unleashing of human potential to commit, care and affect change for a better life.
And I think this is something that many of us working in these issues recognize that, you know,
we're at one point one degrees where, you know, we are where we're at in 2023, but we can do better.
And I think many people realize that, you know, like there is a huge difference between one point five and one point eight and two degrees and three degrees and four degrees.
And that everything we do now is actually going to have this, this have an impact on future generations, on current generations.
So this idea of transformation as being something deeper is really important as well.
So the three spheres of transformation that we work on are the common, the practical, political and personal.
But I'm going to walk you through them because I think, you know, what I want to get across is these are all, you know, they're all connected.
They're not three separate spheres. But again, I worked on these with Monica Sharma,
who had been working in the United Nations on as the director of leadership and capacity development,
figuring out how to scale out HIV AIDS treatments and women's health treatments all over the world.
And I'll talk about how I approached her, but when I heard about her, I said, I have a problem in climate change and could I work with you?
And I went and yeah, we've been working together since then.
But the idea here is that the practical sphere, the bullseye, the center, this is where most of our attention is focused.
It's on the behavioral changes, the technical response of everything that we can measure.
And it's the one hundred and sixty nine targets of the sustainable development goals.
It's the number of solar panels, the number of bicycles on the streets.
It's, you know, it's everything that a number of girls in school, everything that we can actually say this, we need to change.
And this is where probably ninety five percent of our energy is going into finding practical solutions that will give us measurable outcomes.
And it's really important. But it's also, as I showed you in the beginning, we're failing.
We have all these targets and goals and things like that. And we are not bending the curves.
We are not actually meeting any of these things.
And so what's wrong with something obviously doing more of the same and coming up with another, you know, the SDG 2040 targets and things like that isn't going to help.
And that's often because we're ignoring the political sphere.
And we call it political because it's it's how we organize society collectively.
It's the systems and the structures. It's the social and cultural norms.
It's the rules. It's the regulations, the incentives, the infrastructures, everything that is about, you know,
how do we organize our society collectively to actually facilitate or hinder changes in the practical sphere?
So it might be easy to say, like, oh, everyone should ride a bicycle.
But when I go to visit my mother in Florida, there are no bike lanes.
There's no infrastructure. It becomes very difficult without that enabling environment there.
And in the political sphere, that's often where we get polarization.
That's where we get, you know, like the conflicts where it takes us decades to get to a voluntary agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
And it's also where we get social movements. We get Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, people who see other opportunities and want something different.
So so the political sphere is extremely important, as we all know, because that is where the boundary conditions for social change will happen.
But again, voluntary agreements aren't going to get us to bending any codes in the next 10 years.
And we need to take into account the personal sphere and the personal sphere.
We consider the individual and share the collective beliefs, values, worldviews and paradigms that actually influence how we see systems.
What our goals are in the practical sphere, how we relate to each other.
Do I see myself as having any influence on these systems or not?
What is my, you know, like my my view of the world that I engage in?
And I'll talk a little bit more about this because I think it's important also for psychology, because that is like your sphere of influence.
But when I present this to climate scientists, they'll go, yes, yes, you're absolutely right, Karen.
We need to change people's beliefs, values, worldviews and paradigms.
They're like, oh, well, it's like, you know, it really is.
You know, how many of you have ever tried to change someone else's beliefs?
Yeah. It doesn't usually work too well or too well.
I usually get pushed back and everything. And that is where, you know, instead of turning people into objects to be changed, we say, well, how do you actually get that?
People, you know, subjects of change in their own life.
And so you have self-determination theory and all sorts of things.
There isn't everything in psychology.
But the point that I really want to get across is that these three spheres are not separate.
You know, they're not. Yes, I work in the personal sphere, I work in the political sphere, I work in the practical sphere.
But they're all we always are.
You know, there are dimensions of how we are, what we do, what we see.
So every politician, every person working on energy infrastructure, et cetera, is seeing the world in a particular way.
And I want to just go through a little bit of these.
I don't know how many of you have heard of Danella Meadows' seminal paper on leverage points, places to intervene in a system.
She was a systems thinker who was part of the Club of Rome and really brilliant.
And this is something that she just at the end of a conference, she's like, these are the places to intervene in a system.
And she said that, you know, the constants, parameters and numbers and the size of the buffer,
the things that we give 99 percent of our attention to are often pushing systems in the wrong direction.
And so, you know, just like that is whether it's in subsidies or tax rates or all these things that we spend hours debating is often like having very little impact.
It's a much higher impact comes when we start to look at the systemic factors of the feedback loops, the flows, the information flows,
the rules of the system and not the least the power to influence the rules of the system.
So that has a lot more influence on everything else there.
But what I'm interested in the work is this top one, the highest leverage points, which she calls the goals of the systems,
the mindset or paradigm from which the system arises. And the highest one is the power to transcend paradigms.
I was just laughing and saying, like, these are all our best beliefs on the future.
And I think that where we're at right now in 2023, we should be working with the highest leverage points.
And I think many people are actually in that. But ironically, as I said before, the whole idea of leverage points is very mechanistic.
So to actually transcend that paradigm and then look at ourselves differently, it's it's very confusing.
So I want to just look at the mindsets of paradigms from which the system arises as an entry point.
And I think that beliefs is one of the first things that we can look at to say that, you know,
often people are doing climate change, you're not believing climate change.
You know, that's that has important implications. But a lot of it is to understand our relationship to the climate system.
But do you believe you matter? Do you believe you can make a difference is equally important in terms of moving things forward.
And the belief is an acceptance that something exists or is true, especially something without proof.
Like our best bets on things and beliefs play important roles in perceiving a current situation like climate change and identifying appropriate actions.
When I'm predicting the effects of those actions, our beliefs are really very visible.
And the reason I stress this is because, you know, we read in the paper these things and studies.
This was in 2017, a headline that said the planet has just a five percent chance of reaching the climate goal by the end of this century.
The two degree climate goal, it was like a one percent chance for the one point five degrees.
Yeah, that doesn't make you feel very optimistic about the future, you know, like, oh, my gosh, we can't, you know, like good luck and everything.
But as a researcher, here's a way to get it.
What's the research behind this?
And if you actually look at the integrated assessment modelers and their assumptions and you go to the very end of the article,
you see that their forecasting model does not explicitly incorporate future legislation that could change future emissions.
It's based on past emissions, which is extrapolating the past into the future.
We have also not accounted for the possibility that decreasing prices for alternative energy
could cause us cause a sudden massive shift to alternative energy.
That would be speculative.
So in the name of not being speculative, they're actually cutting out a lot of possibility and potential.
You know, they don't include cultural shifts in world views.
They don't include Gettysburg and the Lope Lea and all the others who are actively engaged in, you know, climate meetings and things.
And I think that that could be very dangerous.
So when I ask climate scientists that, you know, off the record,
I was like, can we limit, you know, we're telling everybody that we need to limit climate change to 1.5.
Do we really believe it?
And if I ask them, we're like, well, it's already too late.
We should have started 30 years ago.
We should have started, you know, like this is, you know, where, you know, yeah, look at the data.
We're never going to be able to do it without carbon capture and storage and negative
emissions, et cetera.
And then there's so much like, no, no, no, no, no.
People will never change.
Their sample base might be very small, like their uncles or their cousin things.
But like, oh, no, no, no, people, people never change.
Some people will, you know, in a very like economic thing,
say the payoff for renewables will never exceed fossil fuels.
It's such a great hydrocarbons are so fantastic and we'll never get beyond that.
Or some people say the model say it's impossible and the models are always right.
If you look back at all the models in the future and things, everyone finds their evidence based.
Some people just say, oh, it's all natural variability anyway.
You know, the climate has always changed.
20 million years ago, the place to see using thermal maximum, it was five degrees warmer.
And then you remind them that that was over like 20,000 years rather than 100 years.
The things but and some people say we can adapt to anything.
No problem. You know, we're still here.
Maybe, you know, some people will go away.
But but there's also then some who say that, yes, of course we can.
We can reverse global warming.
And this is like the project drawdown approach where they look not just at,
you know, 10, 20, 30 different solutions, but hundreds of solutions.
And then when we start to think of people as solutions to climate change,
we start to see other opportunities.
And that brings us then to values, because I'm probably all of you are familiar
with Shalom Schwartz's circumflex of values that, you know, like all values
with different motivations, conservation, openness to change, self transcendent
and self enhancement and values are so important because it's what matters to us,
what we think of as important in particular contexts.
And we start to see that in the political sphere, what we're finding is it's really
value conflicts that we're facing, that, you know, like someone's idea of security
and someone's idea of self direction are against each other.
And when we and I'm going to talk a little bit about, you know, putting the three
spheres into practice through values, because we, you know, like what is important
and who decides whose values count on deciding the future?
It's a hugely political question, but also very practical as well.
And then we get to world views.
You know, how do I see the world?
And we kind of think that world views are very fixed in things,
but they actually can change over time.
And, you know, I have so many different dimensions, you know, ranging from who am I?
What am I aware of? What's significant to me?
What should I do? How should we interact?
What do I need? You know, how do I feel?
What's attractive to me?
Also, where do I draw the line between us and other?
And, you know, spiritually, what is of ultimate concern?
And each of these together kind of gives each of us a particular vantage point
on the world, a view of the world that may not be the same.
And it may not be the same, which means you have a very big perspective.
And some might really know their patch of land,
their perspective.
But the point I want to make is that each of us are looking at the world
through particular lenses that have filters, that have blind spots.
And that goes back to Danella Meadows,
is like that, you know, that we all have these blind spots,
that we're not seeing things.
And for me, in my research, I'm very much interested in like,
what will future generations, you know, sitting here at University of Oslo
look back and go like, oh, they didn't see that, you know,
they couldn't see that they were connected.
They couldn't see they were in time.
But oh, there was a relational term that they just ignored that.
And, you know, so I want to see like, how can we look at our own blind spots?
And that means we need to look at our own paradigms.
And Meadows writes that, you know, paradigms are the sources of systems
from them, from shared social agreements about the nature of realities,
from systems, goals and information flows, feedback, stocks, flows
and everything else about systems.
So our shared patterns of thinking, how we know it's how we approach science,
but it's also how we organize society.
And right now, you know, we're still very much linked to an enlightenment
worldview and a very mechanistic paradigm, atomistic, deterministic,
reductionist, materialist paradigm that governs the world
because it's been very successful in, you know, the
the great acceleration that we've seen of
in in terms of modernity, et cetera.
But in this, we just draw a very like a line in the sand
between me and you and us and others in society and the environment
and humans and nature.
So we're kind of like making this division between us
because, you know, it's actually work, but it's also fragmented society.
It's polarized.
It's created a world where we don't see ourselves in others.
We don't treat nature as if it's of any value.
And, you know, we see I just read about like birds falling from the sky
because of avian flu.
And so we don't necessarily, you know, like have that
that relationship with nature because it's other.
And David Bohm back in 1980 in his book Homeless and the Implicit Order,
he talks a lot about the dangers of fragmentation.
He says what is primarily needed is a growing realization
of the extremely great danger of going on with a fragmentary process of thought.
So our paradigms, our process of thought, then is, you know,
is actually killing us, you know, just to be quite blunt about it.
But there are also many other worldviews.
There's many other paradigms and cosmologies.
Many indigenous groups take a very relational perspective, wisdom,
traditions, et cetera, where they value lived experience and by meaning
subjectivity, consciousness, interbeing and spirituality.
And so this relational perspective, it's it's becoming it's it's
it's there. It's always been there.
But there's we're seeing like that.
We're we're actually each of them has very different views.
And just to illustrate, this is, you know, what I grew up with
when I was studying Earth System Science, you know, the wiring diagram
of how things are related and you see that human activities are just
you know, kind of input and output here.
And soil development is at the center of everything.
But if we take this and put an enlivenment perspective on it,
we start to see that this is all flows.
And so this is Thomas's rendition of this.
But it's it's flows. It's it's energy.
It's things that were not separate from the soil.
We're not separate from ecosystems.
Things that we would have to really start to think very differently
about how we approach this.
And so from a relational perspective, relationships matter.
And I emphasize this in the matter book because it's really, you know,
how things are connected, not just how, but the type
and the quality of the connections are so important.
And this really is like, how do we relate to ourselves, to each other,
to nature, to systems, to the future and so on?
And because we've really adopted a classical relationship
where we see ourselves as separate things is out there.
It's not very surprising that we get the results that we're seeing right now.
So how do we go beyond that?
And in the book, I also focus on, you know, the importance of metaphors,
the importance of language, the importance of meaning and entanglement itself is
in a classical sense, it's just like being like twisted together.
But in a quantum sense, it's a whole like a whole different way
of thinking about reality in a non-local way.
And so it's about correlation or correlation rather than causation or causality.
And some of the people, paraphysicist and feminist philosopher
Karen Barad has really emphasized that, you know, quantum entanglement
is a uniquely quantum mechanical phenomenon.
But it's really there is no classical equivalent to the nature of reality
is entangled.
And social scientists are looking at that through language,
through meaning making, through values, how we are entangled with each other
and especially language as a way to entangle our understanding of meaning making.
And so that then brings me, you know, like, OK, if we understand
these different spheres of transformation, so what?
You know, how do we actually move and use this not just as a framework
of understanding, but as a framework for action?
And I think that's something where, you know, like
we might have the best understanding of why we didn't transform,
but what do we do to do, you know, to do differently?
And that brings me to talk a little bit about fractals or self
similar patterns that repeat at all scales.
But going back to meeting Monica Sharma,
I read an article that she had someone sent me an article
that you should read this, Karen.
OK, sure. And her personal
the planetary transformation article in a magazine called Cosmos.
You know, it was really summarizing her work in decades
at the United Nations, working with HIV, AIDS, et cetera.
And she emphasized that we have the technology and the resources.
So what is missing?
And her answer was wisdom in action.
And I read the article and she talked about wisdom
is sourcing action from the deepest place within ourselves
and generating appropriate action for meeting challenges.
Challenges, evidence indicates that sourcing action for wisdom works.
Well, like, OK, interesting.
So I contacted her and I was like, OK, let's you know, let's talk
and started to work with her on this idea of, you know,
how do we link the person with kind of go away from local to global
or, you know, top down and bottom up and start thinking of ourselves
as these like fractals of change that are creating patterns
that are self similar, regardless of scale, you know, a scale.
So we see fractals, you know, connect them in geometry and algebra.
And you can also see them in nature.
In mathematics, fractals are, you know, they continue forever in nature.
They they're you know, they only they stop at a certain point
to have the biggest leaves in the world.
But the idea that you can have social fractals,
you can create patterns in cities, you can take patterns in the environment
that how we are with each other actually creates new patterns.
So it's a it's a shift in that paradigm to think in different ways.
And in one of his work is really
about basing them in universal values.
And universal values are values that are intrinsic or inherent to everyone's.
Even if they don't recognize equality, but you can't say that I, you know,
equality or dignity is important to me, but it doesn't count for you.
It doesn't count for you. It's all inclusive.
So there are intrinsic characteristics that connect humans and natures
in a coherent, acausal way.
It's very much like I've been looking at the literature on universal values
and we have Schwartz's universal values of people who actually see, you know,
like these values, you know, like the the values that apply,
that they care about everything, but not everyone does.
And in the United Nations language, it really is this acausal space.
And I think it's kind of like part of like that, that recognition of that oneness.
And and the sustainable development goals is that these universal values
enable SDGs to be truly transformative by placing the person
and their inherent dignity at the heart of development efforts,
empowering all people to become active partners in this endeavor.
So with my research, we can try to figure out, like, OK,
how do we actually, you know, actualize this?
And it means then that like that idea of agency, fractal agency,
you enter the sphere through the values and principles that you that are important
for you. And this is where I'm moving from a framework
for understanding into a framework for action.
We start to and this is something we've been doing through some change
we've been doing through, you know, like in work, doing some of the best authors
and the things is like, how do we actually figure out, you know,
what is important to us and all others?
What needs to shift in that political sphere?
And what is it was measurable results that we want to see?
So it's a it's about designing for systems, changing cultural change
based on values.
And it's a little bit like, oh, how does that work?
But it is actually taking concrete actions every day here and now
and now to create these like new patterns that are not scalar.
I think how I am with my family is very much how I am with, you know,
like my colleagues is very much how I am with the best author team,
which is how you like that.
We're always having multiple spheres of influence.
And so if you think of this as a fractal and you think about like everybody
in this room, you know, being able to like aligning as
as as a whole and that everybody else at the university
and everybody else at all universities that, you know, we're
it's not about doing the same thing everywhere as a cookie cutter approach,
but it's in every individual context when we act from values
that apply to the whole and really think about like, you know, again,
you know, equity and justice and fairness and dignity
that we start to actually create different types of patterns.
And this is where I think we you know, I was just at a conference
with the investor community, venture capitalists,
and we did a little workshop with them to really deepen that space.
And it had a phenomenal impact on them feeling like this matters.
I never thought.
And I think that touching that space and I think psychology is really important
here is because climate science is really like going right for cognition
and everything.
But to be you take that full approach, we have to actually start to think about,
you know, how do we show up differently?
And this is, you know, inspired by the powers of 10 framework.
But you can see that the individual, you know, the ten to the zero zero
is related to family and friends and personal networks and communities
and villages and neighborhoods and better communities all the way up to the global
or all homo sapiens, whoever, you know, we are changing the whole every moment.
And so that idea that we are in this kind of spiral fractal is is,
you know, like what we do actually does matter, not just through our actions,
but from the stories we tell through our language, through
I think this gives a very positive way of thinking about it.
But I also recognize that we don't have time for this.
Karen, paradigm shifts will take forever.
And, you know, like we need to actually, you know, we need to do things.
And there's this idea that beliefs, values and worldviews
and paradigms take forever to change.
And, oh, man, it's been like hundreds of years and thousands of years
before it actually changes.
And then people are like, well, it's just going to be structures.
They're going to take decades up to 100 years and things.
But technologies and behaviors, we can just, you know, we can focus on
and switch those in 10 years or 20 years and thing.
And the idea behind here is that these are not separate.
So, you know, when we look at all of them, the outcomes, it's what we do
right here and right now and tomorrow and the next day and the next day.
And it's really like bringing that 2030 agenda,
you know, which is now less than 10 years away, right here and right now.
And putting that into practice and creating different patterns all the time.
And I think that for me, that transformation isn't about just,
you know, like that transformation out there, but it is actually,
you know, challenging ourselves.
How do how do we show up differently?
And that means that, you know, we're always actually,
you know, influencing the future.
We're always having an impact.
We're always mattering in the moment.
And that's a paradigm shift that I think we're, you know,
we're not necessarily, you know, giving young people.
They're not necessarily having this idea of agency
and their own capacity to make a difference in the world.
And for me, it's like if we underestimate our collective capacity
for social change, and, you know, I think quantum social change
really is based on our inherent connections.
It's it's nonlocal, nonlinear.
And it really recognizes that, you know, social change can happen
much faster than we think.
So, you know, at the end of the day, I think that if we want to get to this world,
that a world that functions for all species and all life,
you know, like mattering more than we have to really get it at a deep level
that, you know, I and you, we matter more than we think.
So with that, I'm happy to just take any questions
or open up a discussion for the for like how to get back.
So open the floor up for questions and comments.
When we're talking about change and everything, it was
doing the effort to adapt the change to this, to the environment, to the society.
We have to make society adapt to the change.
It's like like the we have to adapt, make the change,
make the change, adapt the old environment to do on the environment.
But we need to make change the environment to adapt to the change we want to make.
I think I guess if I understand you correct, I would go to the to the latter,
because like Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
Warren, you can read it through climate change lenses.
He talks about the well-adapted individual suits the oppressor's needs.
You know, we just adapt and adapt.
And I kind of, you know, I felt this when I was like working in El Salvador.
You can tell the farmer, you need to adapt to one degree warmer world.
No, not to two degree warmer.
Well, no, not to three degree.
And so we want people to be well-adapted without adapting to the very,
you know, challenging those, you know, like why are we changing the climate
at this rate? Who is?
And I coming from Norway, where we're still investing in oil.
Who am I to tell a farmer that they have to adapt or move or things?
So I think that, you know, like it's it's like we aren't separate
from the environment.
So as we adapt, the environment changes, the environment changes us.
So it's not a it's not this separate thing.
But to always think that what does this all mean in practice?
And I think it's that practice of inquiry and asking questions and
it's just going like, wait a minute, you know, what is that?
The truth is.
And yeah, so well-adapted, being too well-adapted can be dangerous.
Yeah, very exciting, very interesting, stimulating.
I read your book and listened to a few of your talks, and it's like,
you know, through Karen Barad and, you know, quantum sort of paradigm shift,
you would say that sometimes a sense that it's almost like
it's like a secular language for speaking about
more spiritual realities that have been talked about by various
Western traditions over the years.
And, you know, then when you show up this sense of this
these nested holographic, miraculous, it really challenges
this question of separation
with skin encapsulated gene producing, you know, our larger
dogmas. And also, I think we have this pairing very strong in psychology
that, you know, that we have this individual sitting in front of us
that has some problem inside their brains.
And that this can be a very, like a view of the individual that can be
really disempowering, because it's like there's something wrong with you.
But actually, we need to see more and more of that.
You know, we have a culture, we have a society that is not really,
you know, let alone sustainable for nature, but it's not really
that sustainable for human hearts, souls, human nervous systems.
And so I think, you know, also for psychologists, future psychologists
and so forth, to really bring that also into the encounter with the
individual, to see that we're also being tremendously impacted by this
collective situation, crisis, kind of transformation, the metamorphosis
that we're going through. And that it could be also, you know,
strengthening the self-efficacy of the individual, you know, contrasting
with others, you know, learn helplessness, right?
Like, who is this atom?
Yeah.
You know, but that actually, as you work on yourself, and you know,
you see the impact that the larger network that you're participating
in, this larger network, this culture has impacted you in this
detrimental way, so you can contribute to larger shift.
That is, you know, like, the old tradition, they talk about love,
compassion, and that this is not just a human emotion inside the brain
or something, it's actually something, it's like a natural force.
Yeah, yeah, no, I very much agree with that. And I think that, you
know, like that relationship, because I was very fascinated by
like reading, you know, Carlo Rovelli's Seven Greek Lessons on
Physics, which is like, you know, a million seller at every airport
and everything, and his last chapter on humans, he pretty much,
you know, and he's written books like, no, it is not what it seems
as the amazing quantum universe and everything, but then it's like
humans are headed for extinction, because we're ignoring climate
change, and no references, not anything. And so I actually like
started this book, I'm like, I'm going to respond to that, because,
you know, there's a social sciences, humanities, we actually, you
know, there's a whole like, it doesn't have to be headed for
extinction, you know, like, now, and, and I think that that doing
it in this, you know, that science itself is telling us what and
I've had the, you know, privilege of with this biodiversity on the
transformative change assessment, it's on the nature panel takes
indigenous and local knowledge very seriously. So we have a lot
of meetings and things and you see, we're actually saying the
same thing in different languages in different ways. But I think
you're exactly right that when we, when we take partial responses,
and when we separate ourselves, you know, like it is where people
with the head, heart, hands, you know, like in a holistic way, you
know, it's just so much more powerful. And I see that every
single day in how people show up differently, you know, like, it
doesn't take a lot to create a, you know, to speak, speak from a
different space and, you know, things. So I, you know, I think
that that unleashing that potential of transformation, you
know, the other definition, it will lead to changes in form,
structure and meeting making in the practical, political and
personal spheres and things, but it has to start somewhere. And,
you know, there's so much, so many people are saying the same
things in so many different ways. And I think I see that, like,
my colleague, Andrea, will be coming in, probably talking
about effective adaptation, things. It's like, it's like,
there's so much on this, and yet the dominant paradigm still is
very, you know, it's a technocratic techno managerial
one that we just need to, you know, very much in that
practical sphere, and it's taking it as a technical problem,
rather than an adaptive challenge where we have to shift.
So,
can I just add one more question? What do you think about, you
know, Gaia hypothesis? You know, like, because, I mean, I
feel like somehow we're still catching up with this tremendous
discovery of the earth from outer space, you know, that
happens in the 1950s, 1960s, you know, and the counterculture
revolution came up with that. We are one community. And like,
this is, and maybe this is a living organism, that we are
somehow, part of its self-regulating process of
transformation.
Yeah, yeah, I did my PhD on atmosphere bias for
interactions between tropical forests and climate change. And
then, you know, I was very much into the James Lovelocks, you
know, these different feedbacks in the Gaia hypothesis. And then
I just kind of parked that all in my Gaia books and everything.
But when I was writing, I looked to Alexander Wendt, the
political scientist who came up with quantum social theory, and
I was like, dear Alex, what does this mean for climate
change? And he's very thoughtful. He was like, I think
what I'm trying to say is like, we are one quantum social
organism. I was like, interesting. And that's what
really started me on this thing. Okay, let's look into that. What
does that mean? What would that look like in practice? And I
think that that idea that we don't, you know, we see
ourselves as separate from nature, and you see it, you
know, like, there's nothing, nothing sacred about like,
raising the Amazon forest. There's nothing, you know, like
we just treat water, we treat ourselves and, and, and the
whole world is, is, and that brings me back to, you know,
like, that self efficacy and the futurist Buckminster Fuller
once said that, you know, the future of the world were up to
me, how would I be? What would I do? And encourage people to
treat their lives as an experiment. And I think that's
where we're all being called for now is to like, okay, what's
the biggest impact I can have in my sphere of influence and
beyond in the next 10 years? And even with something like we
didn't like, oh, not me today. And I don't want to, but then
it's like, no, no, actually, we will be remembered in the
future for what we did today. And I think that's something
that like, and many of the people I know working on these
issues in like, we talked about when we were talking about
climate anxiety before. And I think many people who are
working on this have a deep sense of grief. And I've been
working for decades and just this is not where we want to be
going. I think that shift is, it's already there. And it's
just occupying the paradigm.
I had a question in terms of the choice of words, again. Because
you talk about adaptation and transformation, and to me they
have two quite different connotations. But one thing
that you said, the first question, it's about
adaptation, and the well adapted individual is...
Seeing the professor's needs, the literacy needs or whatever.
I thought that was very interesting. That kind of also
puts into how I maybe thought about adaption myself,
adaptation. And because it sounds kind of weak, in a way.
It's like you're giving up something. Because transformation
sounds a bit more positive. And then if you talk about
resilience, then that is, I associate that a bit more with
resistance to change, but it doesn't necessarily have to be
that way. So I guess my question is, is that something that you
have considered, like the choice of words that you use when you
are discussing this topic?
Yeah, we struggled with that a lot in terms of because
adaptation has always been hijacked by the climate
community of adapting to the impacts. And there's no doubt
that we have to adapt to the impacts. We need to raise
bridges, we need to change... There's so many things. But that
when we start to study the limits to adaptation, including
our own physiological limits, that we cannot be outside when
our wet bulb temperature is above 30, whatever, seven
degrees or 50 degrees or something. There'll be times
when we're still expecting people to go and work on
construction sites when it's 52 degrees or pick strawberries or
whatever, buy fruit for us when it's in that... There are so
many limits to adaptation that the adaptation to climate
change then becomes a yes, and we also need to adapt to the
idea from this bigger species perspective, where we start
to think about, wow, this whole way of organizing society
isn't working for us right now. It's not inclusive, it doesn't
benefit everyone. And I feel that, you know, living in a
country like Norway, that we are very complacent here, that we
just think that like, oh, it's not going to affect us as much
as others and things. But I think we haven't seen... We
haven't seen anything yet with 1.1 degrees. And, you know,
if you look at what the models are predicting for a two degree,
three degree, four degree warmer world, it's like, it's not
going to benefit anyone. So the use of the words and resilience
also gets treated as resilient to what, you know, are we keeping
the capitalist system, you know, or is it at this planetarium
scale that we want resilient for all of life. And so each word
can be interpreted in many different ways. And, you know,
transformation, we are going to be transformed one way or the
other, the climate is transforming us, can we do this
deliberately and consciously, so that we can have a world where
we all thrive. So it's, and that's where my language matters
so much, and words matter, we need to be very precise. So
thank you.
I also have a question regarding words. You matter more than you
think. It is a bit from the individualistic perspective.
We matter more than you think.
Yeah, yeah. And look, I kind of go through that we don't
actually have the language for the I, we, it's a, you know,
like that, that unified place where you and you know, like,
you are not you, you are we and everything we don't. So I just
kind of bracketed the I, we but you know, like, a psychiatrist
Daniel Siegel calls it we, in his recent book, Interconnected,
he's working on the mindful brain, etc. And Tyson
McCortan, an Indigenous from Australia, talks about an us
too, and everything. So our words are very much reflective
of the way we, you know, like, our language reflects our mental
patterns and things. And so yeah, you matter more than you
think is like that. But it's really like talking to you that
you and then to matter is also it's being significant, but it's
also being substantial. So there are many different like angles
of these words. And when you get to like, I and you are not
separate, it's like, oh, I matter more than you think at
all. So I, we matter more than you think. So it goes into that,
you know, like, just in an inquiry into like, what are all
our subject pronouns actually meaning? And yeah, and yeah,
again, like words matter. And I did have it in the original, I
we matter more than you think.
I just have a follow up question to what David was saying. And I
think it's a really interesting speculation, not only from the
perspective of what words are important, but also how
inclusive we want to be in our climate debates. So let's say if
we think about living and working and thinking about
sanitation and mitigation in religious societies, probably
like the pitching words in this way, it matters more. But what
if you think about like, you know, most of the world that's
actually suffering much harsher with climate change, for that
language is not I, it's really very collectivistic, it's very
holistic, it's very inclusive. So I think when like, you know,
we think about developing language, maybe we also need to
be inclusive of the art which is actually being shattered by
climate change at the moment. So I give you just one little
example, we have been working in some of the communities in Kenya
and Pakistan. And it's so interesting, when you look at
the narratives and interviews and everything that we've
passed, right? There are no words like I, or my house was
here, many times, like our house, our community, our
country. So I think it's also like, you know, debate from
top down, like, you know, countries that also have a
huge climate impact, and then also their individualistic
narratives, which essentially become very exclusive. So yeah,
it's just a thought. And what do you think about that?
Yeah, yeah, I think it's in that same essential thing, like the
one that we're the ones who are going to change, you know, we're
the high emitters, we are the ones that are having the biggest
impact. Much of the world has a very little footprint in things
and many of the, like, it's been, it has been colonialism,
it's been extractivism, it's been all these things that are
have disrupted many ways of living and things. So it is
like, like, why? And I think that's one reason why the white
relations, like there's so many communities that are living with
white relations and things, but not on the unmet or not met, you
know, since how do we change that? And how do we language it
for an audience that relates to a separate? And so it goes into
those ideas of like, how do you skillfully and it goes back to
the idea of how do you get people to really have that
experience of nature not being separate? And, but also that
there's a few, you know, what's happening to people in, you
know, that are being displaced because of that. And it's very
frustrating as well, because you know, we just kind of think that
anyone who's experiencing climate change will kind of
forget it. But there's an agnostic adaptation as well,
especially in the United States, where people are, you know,
writing to fund, they want funds for being moved from Staten
Island or from their island off the coast of Virginia or
something like that, but it's not climate change. And so
those ideas of how we make sense of the world and how we
communicate with people who don't share our worldview, who
don't share our understandings, the things that to me in that
political sphere is really challenging. My daughter is
here, and I know that she'll be just in the US and Florida
where climate change is not a big issue. It's like my reality
check, because you tend to think we're moving to Florida.
I'm trying to grapple with the concept of climate change for
a while. I was counting the wrong line. I heard that it was
created by oil companies by like BP Oil or some of them I don't
know which one of them was to sort of individualize the fight
for against climate change. So that you under emphasize the
personal sphere and the practical in the world that the
political is ignored. So how do you sort of grapple with that as
well? Like the double edged swordness of individualizing
climate change?
Absolutely. Yeah. I've been doing this with my classes. And
then, you know, through sea change, we've been doing this
through sea challenges, an experiment with change where you
make one small change, and then look at that as an object. And
the point there isn't to actually reduce your carbon
footprint, because that doesn't matter, you know, but if you
don't eat meat or something, then you have to think, you
know, first, like, we're very practical logistics and habits
like, oh, my God, what am I going to do? What kind of
muckpuck am I going to make this year? Things like that. But
then you also get into the basic social and cultural norms. So
how do people treat you differently? If you can say,
like, I'm sorry, I'm not going to your barbecue, you know, you
bring your own food or something. And you start to
like, Oh, I had one student from Germany who was picking up trash
at the train station, and she said, I was treated like a bad
lady. And I really felt you know, like that, if you get out
of here, I don't need them. And it brings up things. But then
you also start to look at systems and structures. You
know, it's very easy here, you have vegan wraps, how easy is it
to be you know, have a plant based diet here, if you're in
another context, there's nothing there. So you have to be aware
of those, like what needs to be in place for change to happen.
And then in the very personal space, some of our assumptions
come out, like, oh, I remember when we never, you know, we have
a vegan Christmas dinner, and people will people, and it's
often like what happens is the stories through telling it is
the students, what amazed me was that when it's not the finger
pointing, like you should do this, their parents have like,
why, why is food waste a problem? And then they would
start to do the research themselves. And so they could
actually come up and say, why, you know, like, organic drapes
from Chile are worse than apple from Moscow or something like
that. So there's really that much engage with change. And I
think you're very right that we when we limit ourselves for a
carbon footprint, whereas we're still investing in oil, we're
still organizing our society around fossil fuels, it is very
and that goes into, you know, like flight shaming and things
and stuff. Oh, my gosh, I should never move. I shouldn't breathe.
I shouldn't have a pet, everything. But then it's like,
where is you know, how do we have gigatons of influence? And
I think that's where, you know, it's to get to that both end
where I can have to minimize my carbon footprint as much as I
can, or by use flows by, you know, things to fence them, but
also how do we have the biggest impact? So I think being aware
of that is important, but not to dismiss it, because you do have
an impact among your friends, your family, or, and as the
demand for, you know, trains and, you know, plant based
science and things grows, it does have a systemic effect. So
it's not like, I think just moving away from the either or
thing, but also calling out the being very aware of when
someone just forces being used to perpetuate business as usual,
that shifting things.
Other questions?
I wonder what you think about the opposites, you know, the
forces that go against they also have practicals.
I think those forces create fragments, they might create a
fractal like, you know, like, we're so good, we have electric
cars and all this, but at some point, we're going for oil. And
that is actually not creating a fractal in the universe, it kind
of divides us from the countries that so I think there's a lot of
it's not to be confused with, you know, like these kind of
like, smart cities and all these things where people are putting
their, you know, their, their cookie cutter things on
Starbucks, and, you know, like, recreating these things, but,
but I think that, like, we can convince ourselves, this is a
fractal and everything like that. But the minute we exclude
other people from it, when you see that in so many cases,
that's, we're working for, you know, like, women's rights, but
not indigenous rights, or, you know, the intersectionality to
this. And so to get a world that works for everybody is going to
take, like, I think that coherence and the integrity of
fractals, rather than things that look kind of nice and
fragmented at some point. And that's where, going back to
David Bowens, it's fragmented thinking, but also, and it's,
you know, I can say all this, but it's really hard in practice,
you know, like, because we always just go, who are these
people? Where'd they come? You know, like, and, you know, that
urgency that we feel is, you know, just like shake up
everything. But, um, but I think that that, I think, it's a good,
a really good, I think, something to maybe illustrate in
future research, you know, that fragments and fractals.
Because fragments, fractals are beautiful, fragments are not.
I just, I, because you talk about universal values. And
that's, to me, that's quite new. I don't, I didn't quite catch
that. And it seems like you had two different kinds of
definitions of it, descriptions of it.
Yeah, that's something that I was in my research group, we've
been having a lot of trouble talking about universal values,
because from a, like, from the values perspective, it's like
universal values are one, you know, like, when you actually
care about what's good for everyone, but not everyone has
that. And I think in Monica's, Sharma's approach, and maybe
from the UN, you know, the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, and things like that, it does not say that everybody
is, has, you know, the right to, you know, so that we all have an
inherent right to freedom, it's intrinsic in us, and equity is
intrinsic to all of us, that we are kind of wired for that, for
equity, and everything, and that you can't have an equal world
when, I just said, including matters of this half of the
world, but not that half of the world, or this generation, but
not the future, and things. And so it is that, you know, like,
I think, I'm not sure if universal values is the best,
like, language for it, say, that, you know, it's that
inherent, innate oneness that is, you know, as that a causal
space that, you know, if we have that, like, there's something
that we kind of know that we are connected from many different
religious traditions and experiential types of things,
but, but it's a really good question. And that's where, you
know, I was expecting that the viewers would be like, oh, you
can't say this, but we didn't get that. We get reviewers in
these days in general. So yeah.
So you've been talking about the politics is like the kind of
thing that's above the practical, and we're thinking
about leverage points, and about these practicals. And what did
you say? If we are thinking political, then we usually like
thinking on a national level, and on, I don't know, when
politics are implemented, it's super hard to implement that
specifically. But we have to think that different areas are
differently affected, and that some mechanism would work, for
example, in cities, but they definitely will not work in
other areas. And if you would make like more individualistic
or more pointed politics, that would also kind of like maybe
need to more fracturing or to more disengagement between
different areas. So to more in and out groups, or to more like
different groupings. And what do you think about that when we
talk about that political?
I think when I think of the political, it's not just like
the voting and things like that. And it is on that how we
organize society, who is included, who is excluded. And
the political could be who gets to eat first, when there's a
food shortage or something like that. Is it women and children
excluded or things? So I think it's very, and I think what I
like about the quantum social theory is that it's very
context specific. And I thought also, it's like, you know,
like practicals are always going to be different. So it's going
to look different in a community from the Amazon, from a
community on the west coast of Norway, everything. But when we
align with certain volumes, then you would question, like,
who's included, who's not included, and why I think
opening up that inquiry, rather than telling people, but it's
very easy for me to go and judge everyone else. But you can
actually, why is not included? Why isn't that it's kind of
like opening up that space for thinking differently about
things. But, but I feel like the messiness of it, I think, is
inherent in that question of just like that we are wires to,
you know, to be tried. But we, in times of crisis, we shrink
or we grow. And right now, many people are just really
shrinking, excluding anything from everyone. That's, yeah,
that's, that's that deep challenge that we're facing. How
do we move forward in, you know, we've, again, we haven't seen
anything yet in terms of climate impacts, more to come over the
next decades, regardless of what we do for mitigation right now,
just because so much heat is in the ocean, so much, you know,
this is gonna, it's, you know, it's kind of like baked into the
system. So really, we're in for this long game. And to be able to
do that, we're going to have to be, you know, there's nothing
like magical about what's going to happen, but it is like
happening. But there are also millions of people who are
working from this in different ways and open to that. And I
didn't add this, you know, that, you know, when you look at
social change, it doesn't take 51%, 99%. It's really, you know,
it's a nonlinear process. And they say, 10%, 12%, you know,
15% of the, you know, the critical mass studies, very
context specific, but they just show that we don't need
everybody to change because we need, you know, some people like
just, you know, studying on beliefs, saying it's about 10%
of people who strongly believe, and that can go further, you
know, it can be a tea party or a QAlong person, and you can see
that that can have a big impact too. So how do we actually get
the beliefs that are, or you know, like, get that social
critical mass that actually does care about the whole species?
I'll try to get this off my watch a little bit, but the
people who are postpartum who have many, many questions later
in the session, we will be
conditioning how they feel and how you actually look at our
world, who feels good in the society. So I encourage you all
you mentioned about how do we, at the heart of what we're
doing, we probably should try to extend each other's
wisdom at this point in time.
So many good reasons for tr Jill to answer that question.
And for us, to try our hardest to engage people at the most