An Interview with Rosemary Randall and Andy Brown

Rosemary Randall and Andy Brown are the originators of the award-winning Carbon Conversations project, and have recently launched their new book In Time for Tomorrow?. Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine said “This lovely handbook covers it all…it reckons honestly with the psychological impacts of a crisis that is far too easy for many of us to deny in our everyday lives”.

Despite the urgency of climate change, most people close their eyes, turn away and hope that someone else will sort it out. Psychotherapist Rosemary Randall and engineer Andy Brown brought their unusual combination of psychological and technical skills together and set out to discover why.

“As a psychotherapist, I’ve spent my life helping people face their deepest fears and conflicts,” says Rosemary, “and I was sure that was relevant somehow.” “Engineering and science give us the tools to tackle the problem,” says Andy “but they’re no use if we can’t get people to listen and act.”

The pair formed hundreds of small groups across the country where they created a safe and welcoming space, encouraged people to ask searching questions about their lifestyles and climate change, and provided them with the information they needed to make real changes. “It turns out that many of the barriers to fixing climate change are really about our fears, our aspirations and our sense of aloneness,” says Rosemary.

In Time for Tomorrow? offers practical ways to help us face one the most uncomfortable truths of our time – that we are responsible for climate change and that our lives need to change as a result.

Ro and Andy were recently on Arran, and the Voice caught up with them on holiday in Kildonan.

Ro and Andy, thank you for talking with the Voice. Can I begin by asking how you first became involved in this work?
Ro: Eleven years ago I was speaking at a conference about the psychological concept of disavowal: the psychological process that allow us to know something in one part of the mind but act in the rest of our lives as if this isn’t true. This seemed a useful idea in helping to think about how and why we avoid facing up to the reality of climate change.
Andy: Ro’s talk made a lot of sense to me, since as an engineer I couldn’t understand why our responses to climate change seemed so irrational.
Ro: At that time CAT (The Centre for Alternative Technology, in Wales) was developing a carbon footprint calculator for individual lifestyles. Andy and I realised that we could combine the psychological and the technical in helping people to explore their everyday carbon usage. This led to the Carbon Conversations Project, in which folk meet in supportive, facilitated groups to look at how they can make changes in their lifestyles in order to reduce their carbon footprints.

Why is it so difficult for people to change their behaviour and reduce their carbon footprints, given what we all now know about climate change?
Andy: Well, for one thing, it requires us to make technical choices e.g. what sort of car should I choose next? Often the advice is conflicting, and no individual benefit might be seen for a long time.
Ro: Also, the unthinking use of carbon is so built into society and all of our systems, that to keep this in awareness involves going against the flow, and challenging social norms (e.g. giving up flying for holidays). This feels difficult and risky, so we use the unconscious defence mechanisms of splitting, projection and disavowal instead, to defend ourselves against the anxiety of knowing that we are both causing, and doing little to ameliorate, climate change.

Where is the project at now?
Ro: It feels that as there is more public knowledge of climate change today, so anxiety has increased and people have become even more defensive in order to cope – attitudes have hardened, in effect – so the focus now is much more on just how to talk about all this, given the immediate defensiveness of folk. For example, people often say that because they recycle their household rubbish, it’s fine for them to take cruises or fly to Spain. How to open up a non-defensive discussion of the relative importance of different elements of our lifestyles? Certainly it can’t be done without sensitive consideration of the psychological processes involved in this.

How do each of you avoid disillusionment and burn-out, given the reaction of most people to climate change, of “closing their eyes and turning away”?
Andy: It’s very hard, and we don’t have an answer! Certainly we have had to step back at times.
Ro: I’ve recently been researching how climate scientists, and climate change activists, cope. There are different ways, with differing degrees of effectiveness.

How do you think the future is going to look?
Ro: I’m pessimistic. Our responses to climate change will be too little, too late, and there may be civil disturbances (as well as natural ones, of course) and increasing restrictions on civil liberties, I fear.
Andy: And that seems characteristic of the politics of today generally – look at how we are responding to the refugee situation. So many of our structures and processes seem to make effective, timely, and humane responses impossible. Nevertheless, we will continue to try to make a difference.

Following on from Ro and Andy’s visit, it is intended that ACLI, the Arran Community Land Initiative, will host some talks and activities using the Carbon Conversations framework at different venues around the island in the coming months. Watch this space!