S2 EP5: Why do people become climate activists?

Why invest all that time, energy and emotions – even risk your personal freedom – when the impact of your efforts on the earth’s temperature will be, at best, invisibly small? Paul interviews climate protester Rosie about her motivation to take action - and asks researcher Ans Verkammen (Curtain University, Perth) about the emotions that drive us to speak out and act up for the environment. Paul signs up to protest with Extinction Rebellion.

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Transcript

Becoming a climate activist 

PHJ: Hello and welcome to another episode of Mind Brain and Planet! What leads people to become climate activists? Why invest all that time, energy and emotions – even risking your personal freedom – knowing you’ll never really be able to see the impact of your efforts on the earth’s temperature? Last time, we were looking at how we respond to eco-anxiety – and one way to positively respond is action. So, perhaps it’s unsurprising that many researchers have reported that your eco-anxiety level helps predict whether you’re an eco-activist. Those feelings of anxiety and concern may be part of why people become activists – but there can be a lot of thinking through as well. I asked Rosie, who we met in the last episode, why she had become a climate activist.

Rosie: Hi my name’s Rosie, I’m 21 and I’m a final year student in Sociology and Politics.  Mmm …because it feels to me like the right thing for me personally to do. It feels like sometimes it feels like the least I can do. There's, there's so many reasons for it. In terms of climate activism I feel like when you become educated on something like climate change, I feel like with that knowledge you have a responsibility to act. And that's different ways for different people. You know, people have different roles in the climate movement, but kind of, I fell into a community where activism became accessible to me. And it didn't become, it wasn't in my eyes, it wasn't too much of a strain on my life to make the decision to do this. It kind of came quite naturally. So I just think, this is really bad. This is making me really frustrated and it's making me kind of anxious - like pent up energy.

Rosie: I was say, invited to a march, I'm just gonna go and kind of see what happens, see how I feel. And then after like going to a few marches, I, that feeling of, you know, being in a collective made me really emotional, made me feel really powerful. And it feels really huge when you are like, in that moment, especially when it's the first few times doing it. 

PHJ: So there were positive feelings that attracted you into activism as well?  

Rosie: Yeah, it just feels really powerful and you finally feel like you're putting your energy somewhere and your emotions, your frustration into something physical. I guess another big reason for me was like the unfairness of climate change. I think the, the inequality of how climate change affects people. I think the thing that actually really pushed me to take action the most was learning how my life in, in living in the UK is built up off of the oppression, exploitation, colonialism of, and slavery of like lots of people and countries in the global south….and how that has contributed hugely to climate change and how like, basically everything privileged about my life, everything that I live off has been designed of the huge carbon and emissions that are now contributing to climate change. Meanwhile, the impacts of climate change are affecting the people in the global south the most and have been for a long time whilst we've been enjoying our increasingly consumerist and increasingly privileged lifestyles in the West. And that to me… I can't own these things and live this privileged life without being aware of that and trying to do something about it. It makes me feel really uncomfortable to enjoy this lifestyle without considering and trying to do something about the people who it's affecting. I just think it's just really twisted in my head. It’s really horrendous that that is the case. Like, it just makes me really, really angry and upset and it's just super dystopian.

PHJ: And knowing that each of us are part of that dystopia….

Rosie : Yeah, everything that you see as normal and day to day around you is actually, you know, somebody is suffering for it. And that also realizing that that could easily be me. There's no reason whatsoever why I am here and not somewhere where else, apart from just chance. And that, therefore, it could easily be me. Like it's not, like it’s not anyone's fault, not the people who are being affected, they don't deserve this. It's not their fault. In fact, they haven't contributed to what's happening to them mostly. So yeah, it could be me, it could be my family. And also the fact that it will be me and it will be my family and it will be my friends who are being affected by climate change already, who will be affected by climate change. If I want to have kids, they will be affected by climate change.

PHJ: Our brains have evolved to intertwine emotions and reasoning so closely that neuroscientists doubt whether we should ever consider them as separate – and you can hear that close intertwining of emotions and reasoning in Rosie’s explaining of how and why she became an activist. Emotions are there to inform our reasoning, even if sometimes, we also need to use our reasoning to help regulate them. 

PHJ: Ans Verkammen, a research now based now based in Perth Australia, surveyed  a large group of young people in the UK to find out what sorts of emotions they had in relation to climate, and how involved they were with activism.

Ans: Hello my name is Ans Verkammen, I’m a senior lecturer in the School of Population Health at Curtain University.

PHJ: So Ans, what sort of emotions did you manage to detect amongst your young people that that might be related to them wanting to become activists?

Ans: We asked them about lots of different emotions and, to try to make sense of it, we split the emotions up into categories, if you will, which made sense to us. So we thought about certain emotions as more externalizing, such as anger, frustration, outrage - and other emotions as more internalized, such as fear, sadness, anxiety. We found that the externalizing type of emotions, so feeling frustrated and outraged and angry… those sorts of emotions were more likely to be associated with activism. Similarly, emotions we sort of categorize as approach emotions, which are courage and concern and hope - which are positive emotions - were also linked to activism. Whereas withdrawal such as feeling helpless disconnected or isolated are negatively associated. Which, you know, it makes sense if you're feeling helpless and disconnected from other people, you're not likely to engage in activism. I find the anger and outrage very interesting - and that's been shown in other research since then as well - that those seem to be the best predictors of activism - feeling angry, sort of makes sense. Mm-Hmm.

PHJ : Certainly does - anger as an energising motivator I can see that.  I mean hope is an interesting one – you mentioned that. I can imagine if you were really hopeful and thinking that this was going to be sorted out that could be a demotivation?

Ans: That's an interesting perspective. I think about it as more as like active hope, this idea of putting trust in each other and other, I guess, more powerful actors that can make change. If you maintain that hope that not, you know, people around you and people in power will do the right thing, you may want to come on board. I think it's an interesting one, and it's definitely in the last couple of years, there's been a lot of interest in this emotion of hope. And a lot of researchers are advocating for interventions with young people that are really focused on, on hope and on, on trust and on collective action where we put trust in each other. And I think that, and that's come out in some of the recent conversations that we've had with young people in Australia now about that sort of banding together and that collective action giving people hope and that sort of sustains their activism as well. And I think that makes sense to me. But there is an element of, I guess, that more passive hope of, of just ‘oh, someone else will sort it out’ and that may not be so productive or so adaptive. I think you're right in that.

PHJ: So, when we seek to change the world through activism, we’re also expressing ourselves emotionally and externalising and perhaps escaping the internalising of emotions such as frustration. But also this is about gaining access to some of those positive emotions such as hope – and hope is important for mental wellbeing – but how does hope work?

PHJ: In previous episodes, we’ve come across the Ventral medial prefrontal cortex (or VMPFC), as a part of the brain that is crucially involved with our emotions, such as our imagined emotional response in future situations – our affective foresight in other words – such as when Rosie was imagining the effects of climate change on her friends and family in the future. It’s been found that spontaneous brain activity in this region – i.e. when we’re not pursuing any particular task – associates with the anxiety we’re experiencing. However, when researchers in China looked at the brains of a large cohort of high school students, those who reported a higher degree of hope showed spontaneous activations in their VMPFC were operating more protectively against anxiety. In other words, hope may help our brain protect itself from the potentially negative effects of our concern, though the imagining of more positive futures.

PHJ: Rosie’s thoughts about her own privilege appeared to have fed into her reasoning – and that  reminds me that Ans found in here research that higher SES was associated with higher concern for the climate. So I asked whether this connection between SES and climate distress provided any clues as to why those who are disadvantaged, at least in Western societies, are less likely to become climate activists? The higher your socioeconomic status, the more distressed you're gonna be about climate. I mean, is this something to do with the, the prevalence of middle-class white people in climate activism?

Ans: Yes, I think so. I mean that there's this idea that it is a privilege to care about climate change to some extent. If you're dealing with lots of other challenges, problems, threats, issues in your life, the very, it's almost like an intangible thing, climate change. There's still psychological distance. It may still seem quite far away for people in the UK at least. It's not an immediate threat. It's not something you need to deal with immediately if you've got lots of other things going on. Perhaps if you have the privilege of being comfortable, you have the time and the space and the head space to worry about climate change. I'm hypothesizing here. We've talked about, like my colleagues and I have talked about this. We don't know that that's necessarily true and mm-hmm. I think the interesting thing when we did this study, this was actually done at the time when COVID was still very much happening and we were kind of interested to understand a little bit more about whether people still cared about climate change when COVID was happening. 'Cause there was a lot going on. And there's this idea of this finite pool of worry is: you've got a lot going on and you just don't have the head space to worry about climate change. But that didn't turn out to be the case. People were able to worry about multiple things at the same time which is… I'm laughing 'cause it is kind of sad and sad and it's challenging, but that didn’t turn out to be the case. Just because you have a worry in another domain in your life doesn't necessarily mean you stop caring about climate change. So it may be a quite a complex picture. 

PHJ: Well of course one way for me to find out more about activism is to actually do some. So I’ve decided to join my local Extinction Rebellion group here in Bristol and find out more about the experience of becoming an activist – why people do it and what it feels like. They meet in a local church hall, so I’m going to set off now and hopefully makes some new friends….It’s a cold, rainy and dark winter’s evening but so I’ll need find my bicycle lights and get my waterproofs on…. But one thing I’ve already been told is that there’s often some great food just before the meetings kick off - so I’m looking forward to that.

Just locking up my bike – it’s always a bit of a thing walking into a group of new people – so I’m slightly nervous – but also really interested to meet everyone…

Hi, it’s Paul yes that’s right….

PHJ: Meeting over…lovely people – and so resourceful – very broad range of skills . I have to say – if I was stranded on a desert island and found my companions were from Extinction Rebellion I’d be quite pleased – because they’d know how to get self-organised fairly quickly. So….we are planning some sort of stunt for Lost Species Day – remembering all the animals that have already been made extinct by people. I’ve been asked to find or construct some sort of cymbal - as in one that crashes when you hit it – and I have to take receipt of some black robes. I think we’re planning a sort of funerial procession but a lot more noisy?

Find out how I get on in the next episode, when we’ll be asking the question: Is the experience of being an activist good for you?