Summary: How to cope with climate despair. UK psychotherapist & co-founder of Carbon Conversations, Rosemary Randall. Then a practical alternative to industrial food: learn to dehydrate in season with traditional cooking expert Wardeh Harmon. Radio Ecoshock 130417 1 hour. Listen to/download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB) Listen to/download my interview with Wardeh Harmon on food dehydration (23 min) in CD Quality or Lo-Fi Listen to/download the Rosemary Randall interview on coping with climate change (29 min) NEW MUSIC THIS WEEK Our music this week is another tune from the Australian band Formidable Vegetable Sound System. From the album "Permaculture: A Rhymer's Manual" this is "Limits". LISTEN TO THIS RADIO ECOSHOCK SHOW RIGHT NOW! ROSEMARY RANDALL: COPING WITH AWFUL CLIMATE KNOWLEDGE What if you woke up one morning and realized humans really have changed the world's climate? We show no signs of stopping this unfolding catastrophe. Maybe you already see it, and cannot bear knowing. We need help. And a pioneering psychotherapist from Britain says we can help each other. Starting in 2005, Rosemary Randall was was part of a team founding a movement called "Carbon Conversations". We have a conversation with her now on Radio Ecoshock. You can find "Ro" Randall's blog here. The Carbon Conversations organization has become widespread. It links up people who want to talk about climate change, and puts them into six meet-ups which use the ideas from psychotherapy to talk through their fears and emotions. But it doesn't stop there. Each person develops their own plan to reduce their carbon emissions. It's a movement that needs to happen big-time in North America, and all over the world. Rosemary Randall tells us about her pivotal paper "Loss and climate change: the cost of parallel narratives" found here. The "parallel narratives" is best explained by Rosemary in our interview, but in a nutshell: media and scientists paint an awful picture of what will happen in the future due to climate change; meanwhile we try to live "normal" lives, ignoring the fact that climate change is not a future event, but is already happening now. This disconnection between our every day lives and the awful future actually reduces our motivation to make the large changes necessary (or at least fits in with our comfortable carbon lives?). So when we focus on the Arctic melting by 2020, or the end of coral by 2050, that may also be a form of denial that cripples real action. Climate damage is happening right now! Please listen to the interview to get a better explanation from Rosemary. It's important stuff and all too true. I can't tell you how many times friends and listeners have fallen back on the model of coping with the ultimate loss of death, developed by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. Does that work well for the end of a loved and stable climate? Randall says "no". the Kubler-Ross formula was developed for people who were dying. We need a way to handle the burden of knowing, while we keep on living. So Randall finds more help from a formula developed by William Worden, among others. J. William Worden wrote the book "Grief Counselling and Grief Therapy" where he outlined "the four tasks of mourning". Randall has adapted them for dealing with climate change, where we mourn disappearing species, changed places, lost stability of weather, sea level, and so on. I'd like to pass on two things from that paper. First, we have this helpful table of four steps, each of which can go positive or negative, depending on our choices. Table 1. The tasks of grief. Adapted from Worden (1983) 1. The task : Accepting the reality of the loss, first intellectually and then emotionally. Possible negative responses Denial of the: - facts of the loss; - meaning of the loss; - irreversibility of the loss. 2 The task: Working through the painful emotions of grief (despair, fear, guilt, anger, shame, sadness, yearning, disorganisation). Possible negative responses
