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Asher talks to Amy Westervelt (an investigative journalist, podcaster) about the cultural roots and consequences of the climate crisis. Their wide-ranging conversation covers many stop-and-make-you-think ideas about sustainability, racial and gender equality, economic systems, the social contract, and philosophy over a long sweep of history. Amy discusses the mismatch in the need for immediate action to combat climate change with the slower-moving cultural, behavioral and behavioral shifts that could propel such change. For more information and episode notes, visit www.episodenotes.com. Please visit our website
Transcript
Melody Travers
Welcome to Crazy Town. I’m producer Melody Travers. Asher talks with Amy Westervelt, an environmental journalist, about patriarchy, and the cultural roots that led to the climate crisis. We appreciate you tuning in. If you want others to get the Crazy Town experience, please hit the “share episode” button and send it to your community, or drop us five stars. Let’s get on to the show.
Asher Miller
Amy Westervelt is an author, journalist, and podcaster who has done remarkable reporting and storytelling on the energy transition, the climate crisis and the fossil fuel industry. She is the founder of the Critical Frequency Podcast Network and has executive produced more than a dozen podcasts including her own show, “Drilled,” which I highly recommend that you check out if you haven’t already. Amy, welcome to Crazy Town.
Amy Westervelt
Thanks. Thank you for being here.
Asher Miller
Yeah. So I wanted to briefly talk with you about the roots of the climate crisis and sustainability crisis. You partnered witha podcast called, “Scene on Radio,” which is one of my absolute favorites. We’ve actually encouraged folks in the past to listen to the “Seeing White” series in particular.
Amy Westervelt
Yeah.
Asher Miller
And you work with them on a series called, “The Repair,” which explores the cultural roots of the climate crisis, and the deep changes that that we in Western society will need to make. Could you briefly talk about the inspiration for this project? And the overall arc for the season.
Amy Westervelt
Yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, yes, “Scene on Radio” was one of my favorite podcasts long before I ever got the opportunity to work with them. John Biewen reached out to me initially and I was a total fangirl. You want me? He wanted to do a series on the historical roots and consequences of the climate crisis. He wanted it to be based on the three previous seasons, which had been about the roots of racism and the creation of race. And then patriarchy, and then democracy, and why no one’s actually been able to pull off a full democracy yet and why, you know, America hasn’t necessarily delivered on the promises in some of its founding documents. He felt that this was a good place to start talking about climate crisis, and I agree with it. So we began by asking, “Okay, what are the root reasons for this crisis?” How can you create a crisis that is universally felt, but only a few people manage it? How do you end up with a situation like that – where just a small group of people has so much power to dictate how the entire planet is going to move forward?
Asher Miller
Did you discover any surprises during the season?
Amy Westervelt
What surprised you? It seems so absurd now. John was interviewing Christian Felber in Europe at the time. He was asking him questions about economic systems and the need to change. John may have thought that Christian would be anti-capitalism when he went into the interview. He replied, “No, you don’t have to have capitalism.” There’s nothing that says that the core value in capitalism has to be extraction, actually. A capitalist market could value wellbeing and the viability for all life on Earth. We just don’t do it that way. And it was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s true.” I think they’re these understandings that we have that feel really immutable. And it’s great to have those moments where someone just says something that makes you sort of cock your head and go, “Oh yeah, that was just one person’s idea of the system. We don’t have to do it that way.”
Asher Miller
Yes, that’s true that where there is debate about the form of the economic system, you have people challenging the capitalist model, certainly the capitalist model that we have, but you also have economists, in particular those that are steeped in the traditional study of economics, who also define capital and capitalism in the same way, right?
Amy Westervelt
Right.
Asher Miller
So I guess you’re talking about maybe an in-between a bit.
my Westervelt
Right or just – I think Felber’s point was that no matter what system you choose, you have to rethink what you’re going to value in that system. We don’t have an economic system that values the things that make human life possible on Earth. So he was encouraging people to not get so trapped into the “capitalism or socialism” kind of dichotomy and think more about, what would it look like if we rethought what we value in an economy to begin with? The system becomes less important.
Asher Miller
Yeah, it does seem like we’re seeing more of a shift. It’s been around for a while now that different things can be measured. But quite marginal. It does seem that it’s become more of a question.
Amy Westervelt
Yeah.
Asher Miller
Well, so in Crazy Town, we spend a lot of time lamenting how… I mean, part of the reason we called it Crazy Town was just that a lot of the way that we live, and by we I should be clear, right? Those of us who live in advanced economies, primarily. It is truly crazy how we live.
Amy Westervelt
Right.
Asher Miller
And it’s constantly being reinforced, you know. Participation is essential or we will be completely unsatisfied. In this season of the podcast where we’re exploring unknown or underappreciated moments in human history that we see as “watershed” moments that helped us drive to the craziness that we’re in. And some of them can be sort of silly, but are emblematic of a kind of world that we built. My view for a long time, having done done this work for over a decade now, particularly looking at the energy part of the picture, was that the sustainability crisis — the source of it was the advent of the fossil fuel age. It was like winning the lottery. We all went crazy for a while, just like lottery winners. I’ve been on my own journey, I think, over recent years, trying to dig more deeply and seeing, for example, that colonization has played a really big role prior to the fossil fuel age. Certain belief systems, economic systems, and ways of being are pre-existing fossil fuels, especially in Europe. In a sense, fossil fuels supercharged them. People have spoken about other energy transitions in the past, such as the transition from hunter-gatherers and farmers to agriculture. Sherry Mitchell, my friend, points out that the exploitation of brides was one of the earliest forms. When you think about it — and you’ve talked about this quite a bit — the exploitation of people and the planet. She also points out the following: . .
Amy Westervelt
Right. It’s like, if you can look at people as a resource that you can extract and commodify, which happens, yes. In the case with women, with brides. Then, eventually, only Africans with the slave trading. You can still trace the slave trade back to the time before the North Atlantic slave exchange. So I think, I don’t know, the idea of human beings as commodities. . . I don’t know, I think if you can get to that, then you can have a pretty extractive approach to every aspect of your life, I guess.
Asher Miller
Yeah. Yes. I do know they did a whole series on patriarchy. But I wanted to talk to you, because you touched base on this a little bit in a conversation you had with John – it might have even been the first episode of your series, talking about patriarchy and how it relates. And specifically, looking at the ecological crisis that we’re in. I’m just curious about how you would connect those two things, and that history a little bit, and how that shaped where we are now.
Amy Westervelt
Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a way that the sort of commodification and dehumanization of women really ties into how humans were evolving to see nature in general at that point. You mentioned watershed moments. What I remember most is the shift from natural to mechanistic views of the world, where everything, including water, oil, and people, are just cogs in a machine. This view of the world and how it works is key to enlightenment. That is a positive direction. And you know, I’m not at all arguing that organized religion has been good to women for much of the course of human history, but this mechanistic view adds this whole layer to it, of, “Oh, I can just sort of swap in these things that I need to get to where I need to go.” And I think that really sets us on this course of thinking about people and natural resources as inputs and outputs, and losing the sense of web-of-life that existed before that. And I get hesitant talking about this stuff because I don’t at all want people to think that I’m anti-science. But I do think that that shift in perspective really triggers a whole bunch of other things that you wouldn’t necessarily associate with. Oh, the scientific approach, and such things. This mechanistic view is the basis for many laws we have today. So when you get into environmental law, for example, it’s very much about resources as commodities. And even natural resource management is mostly done with this view of, “How do we manage this resource so that it continues to benefit the economy, so that it continues to benefit humans?” Versus, “How do we live in harmony with this ecosystem that we are a part of and connected to?”
Asher Miller
Science was used to justify beliefs that pre-dated the Enlightenment, referring to the topic of science and the role it played in the Enlightenment. We’ve already talked about race. The Catholic Church was the real promotor of the idea of a racial difference. In some ways, it was a religious idea. But it’s not like when science took over, it did away with that belief system.
Amy Westervelt
Right. Science has added legitimacy. You will see that there were many highly respected and powerful philosophers who were more progressive than most left-leaning people you will meet today. But there were also people who went, “Oh, perfect. Now, we can categorize people so that they seem very detached from feelings, emotions or opinions or ego. We can just say it’s sort of this dry, pragmatic approach,” which became really dangerous.
Asher Miller
Taking it further back, you talked about the shift in terms of the belief system of our relationship with nature, the sort of animistic view, into –
Amy Westervelt
Animistic! That’s the word I was looking for.
Asher Miller
Yeah, to one that’s like… I don’t know how familiar you are with Marvin Harris? We talk about him maybe too much on this podcast because there’s this theory of cultural materialism which argues that it’s actually changes in our relationship to what he called infrastructure. And that is not roads and bridges; it’s energy, the natural environment, how we relate with it. It’s changes in those things that lead to changes in our political systems, how we operate with one another, and also our belief systems. It’s kind of compelling to think – and I think history is much more messy and muddy than this – but a shift to agriculture, people have argued, leads us to look to the sky for rain and sun and a belief in sky gods. Versus, understanding that every rock, plant, and being is somehow dependent on each other in some sense. And I’m just curious if you share the view that one thing can lead to also then thinking like, well. . . You create hierarchies in societies, and more complex societies, where women are considered subordinate to men. Then other people are subordinate to them. And I’m just curious what your take on that would be?
Amy Westervelt
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that’s super interesting. And I think there’s a ton of evidence for that throughout history. For example, when you get to agriculture, people look to the sky for sky gods or other things like this, but labor becomes even more important.
Asher Miller
Yeah.
Amy Westervelt
This creates a clear incentive for slavery. I know John has gotten into this in great detail in some of the previous seasons of “Seeing White,” but that the greatest driver for racism and slavery in the U.S. was just the need for more agricultural labor, and the need for agricultural labor that couldn’t leave and that wouldn’t be too expensive. That, to me, is the thing that I obsess about the most on the climate question — just that all of these things are so intertwined. And therefore, when people look at the climate question, and they think, “Oh, we just need to replace this one energy source with this other energy source,” I think we run the risk of really perpetuating false solutions. You can also continue on the same path, which may have some positive effect on one issue of emissions but will cause a whole new set of problems down the road. I believe we need another enlightenment in which people really reflect on what we value as individuals and rethink the social contracts. And, I don’t know, just how we want to live on a much broader scale than just, “Do we want to use batteries? Or do we want to use oil?”
Asher Miller
Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more. There’s even questions about how sustainable that is. Certainly on the trajectory of growth that we’ve been on, and especially, if we think about addressing the inequality issues in the world, and in this country the idea that those of us who have been privileged and benefited from this extractive, exploitative economic system wouldn’t have to change what we do in order for others to also benefit. Seems a bit delusional.
Amy Westervelt
It’s totally delusional! It’s totally delusional. I feel like there’s a real blocker in people’s minds where the word privilege has become very triggering for people.
Asher Miller
Yeah.
Amy Westervelt
Right? Everything is supposedly a meritocracy. How dare they accuse me of not having earned or being deserving for everything I have? But that’s not what it’s about. The majority of Americans have benefited from fossil-fuel extraction. But there’s still enormous disparities just within our own borders, nevermind the fact that the U.S. is the largest contributor to historical emissions, which means that we are 100% the big driver of the climate crisis. So I don’t know, it’s weird. I feel like the way that it gets talked about a lot, too, is very guilt-and-punishment, and sacrifice, and all of this kind of thing. It could be responsibility, strength and moral fortitude. And those things aren’t even separate from the dominant religions in the world. Every religion has a component that encourages people care about their community, the common good, and all that stuff. So I don’t know. I feel like my greatest belief in the U.S. is that our obsession with individualism is the root of all this. Every single problem I’ve ever looked into eventually gets back to that. If we want to solve the major problems facing us, this is a fundamental shift in society that we must make. Because no matter what, we are locked into a certain amount of warming, and we’re already seeing the impacts of that. You need strong community fabric when extreme weather events occur, such as fires, hurricanes, floods, etc. And we don’t have that at all in this country.
Asher Miller
It’s unnatural, that constant pushing for individualism. This is not how we evolved as species. We are a social animal. And I think we’ve disconnected people from that in order to participate in a transactional economy and replace meaning or relationships with things. It also feeds the emptiness people feel. It’s interesting, though, you talked to John a little bit about this shift that also happened millennia ago around thinking that life was fated and preordained to feeling like people had agency of some kind. This allowed people to feel that they could profit. There’s a lot of freedom that came with that, but then there’s a freedom to exploit as well.
Amy Westervelt
Yes.
Asher Miller
And it’s not like you or I would argue that our belief system should be that our entire lives are fated, or preordained from before birth or something.
Amy Westervelt
No. I’m not arguing for return to the Dark Ages. But surely there’s a happy medium here. I would just add in social contracts from other countries, where there is some personal freedom and the ability for people with exceptional skills or talent to take advantage of that, or any other. A general sense that you need to give up a little of that to benefit from a healthy and sustainable society, which is the whole basis of any social agreement. This is what most philosophers agree with, even libertarian thinkers from the U.S. I am annoyed by the fact that people quote all of the Enlightenment philosophers out of context. But if we go back to how property was first created, which I think, is another really, really significant turning point.
Asher Miller
Yeah.
Amy Westervelt
The U.S. determined how property was defined. When England and Western Europe first began to talk about private property, it was always with a caveat that you had the right to leave as much or as little land as the commons. That balance was always there. And it’s a uniquely American idea to chuck that balance out the window.
Asher Miller
Yeah, you’re teasing an upcoming episode that we have on the commons.
Amy Westervelt
Oh, and are you doing one with property?
Asher Miller
Yeah, because you’re right. This shift is profound, according to me.
Amy Westervelt
Extremely profound. America took a lot of John Locke’s ideas, which was basically that land has no value unless humans put their labor into it. It is agriculture and extraction that give land its value. This idea is deeply ingrained in U.S. property law. As does… we are the ones that got rid of the idea that water and minerals and things like that remain the property of the government or the public, or the commons, or whatever. That creates huge problems, right? Because if you look at, okay… I want to drill a well on my land for gas or oil. And then I can profit from that while also ruining a water source… It becomes really complicated really quickly. But that’s also what fuels the oil boom. It’s that you have all of these independent wildcatters that can grab a tiny bit of land and try to get rich. This also ties in with the American individualism concept. You see this in the early 1900’s, just all of these things colliding at once.
Asher Miller
Yeah. The incentive structure should be able to place more emphasis on the short term than the long term.
Amy Westervelt
That’s right.
Asher Miller
I would like to leave it at that. Sorry.
Asher Miller
I am sorry. We talked a little bit about how it’s necessary when you see the climate crisis as, in effect, a symptom — a symptom that could do us in if we’re honest. It is a symptom of larger system dynamics and it really comes down to cultural norms. So recognizing that that’s what’s required, but at the same time, you’ve done all this reporting. You study it, I’m sure, exhaustively, the nature of the climate crisis. The emergency that we’re in is so dire and requires this dramatic near-term response. So how do you square those things — the need for this urgent, immediate response, and a cultural shift that frankly is going to be generational?
Amy Westervelt
Okay. I’m ready.
Amy Westervelt
I believe we should have walked and chewed gum. It’s not like anyone is suggesting that we not do short-term things to try to save as many people and places as possible while we think about these other things. But my answer to that is that we’ve essentially spent the last 30 to 40 years ignoring the big cultural drivers altogether. And that hasn’t worked either.
Asher Miller
I agree. I agree.
Amy Westervelt
So I think this whole idea — and I find this to be really perplexing about the climate movement — that there is this constant debate about whether we should focus on energy or on culture. And it’s like, yeah, both. Both are necessary. Unfortunately, that means we will likely have quite some of what the IPCC called today, maladaptation attempts. These efforts are ostensibly made to address climate changes but end up worsening the problem and creating new ones. We’re going to continue to have that problem until we solve for the cultural problem. But I think the solution can’t be, “Everybody stop what you’re doing on climate until we figure out how we want to function as a society,” because that’s just not an option available to us right now.
Asher Miller
Yeah, I do think we’re seeing progress on a certain level in terms of intersectionality. Certainly, we’re seeing it in terms of climate justice. You can go further. It takes deep education and asking people difficult questions. And going back into history a little bit to understand why we got here, which is why I appreciate so much the work that you’ve done — the season you did with “Scene on Radio” and the broader work that they’ve done. I think without understanding how we got here, it’s really hard to know where to go in the future.
Amy Westervelt
Totally. And we have to realize that the vast majority of people don’t have the time and energy to learn and read and think about these things because they’re so busy just surviving. Because we live within a very extractive society. So that’s where I get really annoyed when I see people who do have the time and the relative privilege to be able to do that being really obstinate about refusing to do it. Because it’s going to require those of us who do have the time to look at this stuff and try to share it in a way that is accessible to people. Because people are trying to put food on the tables and have bills to pay. I don’t want that to sound patronizing, because I really hate it when people say things like, “Oh, well, the poor don’t have time to think about these…” Every human being thinks about these things. It’s just that some of us have the luxury of time to really dig into it, and not all of us do. It’s a responsibility for those who have the time and desire to tackle this issue and make it a priority to continue that conversation as much as possible. But I agree with your sentiments. In the last ten years, the climate movement has become more interconnected. And I think that we’re seeing benefits from that in the form of better solutions and policies. Because I reject the idea of checkbox diversity being beneficial. The benefit of having a variety of opinions in your group is that it leads to better solutions. That’s it. It’s not so that you can have a great multi-culti picture on your brochure. It’s because that’s how you get to better solutions. I do believe we are starting to see this. Some people may still be experiencing growing pains and feeling that there are new discussions they are being required to have. And we’re taking our eyes off of the goal of energy transition, or whatever. But I think overall, it’s a net good, and it’s a noticeable shift, and a positive one.
Asher Miller
Yeah, I think you’re right. Listeners of our podcasts, and your podcasts, are those who have at least the privilege of having the time and the ability to do so. And so I would say it’s incumbent on us and on them to dig deeper to understand the roots of the climate crisis and the other issues that we face. And maybe even be at the forefront in thinking about systemic solutions. And, most importantly, learning from others.
Amy Westervelt
Yes. I mean, you mentioned Sherrie Mitchell before, who’s brilliant on this stuff. And there are several – and you’re finally starting to see the international climate organizations embracing indigenous communities and indigenous approaches to things. I would love to see this happen in a more tangible way than a tokenizing one. Maybe with land back.
Asher Miller
Yes, put your money where you mouth is.
Amy Westervelt
Exactly, exactly. If you’re gonna name the stolen land that you’re on, then you need to make the next step and think about returning that land. But anyway, I keep seeing that in all kinds of climate things, where people will have a ceremonial acknowledgement of the land that they’re on, which is great. But then yeah, okay, why can’t we have the conversation about the next step from there? But I do think that learning from indigenous communities and even learning from… You know, I also co-host a podcast called “Hot Take” with Mary Annaïse Heglar, who’s a great writer and thinker on climate justice issues. She constantly reminds me of the parallels between climate activism and civil rights movement. And how when people ask her, “How do you keep going even though it’s so depressing and all that stuff?” She’s like, “Well, you know, I come from a long line of civil rights activists, and there weren’t a lot of wins in that place for a long time.” So yeah, learning from the resiliency of other movements and other people who have tried to work on these big generational shifts and thinking too, I think, is important.
Asher Miller
Yeah. Thanks for your time. I appreciate your time. I can’t stress enough or encourage people enough to check out “The Repair” on “Scene on Radio” and also all the other great podcasts you guys have at the Critical Frequency Podcast Network. Amy, I am so grateful. It was a great pleasure.
Amy Westervelt
We are grateful.
Melody Travers
That’s our show. We are grateful that you joined us in Crazy Town. This program is offered by Post Carbon Institute. More information is available at postcarbon.org.
