Introduction from Alliance President and Co-Founder Terry Gips: The Alliance has been blessed to be co-founded and chaired by one of the world’s greatest systems thinkers, soil scientists and therapists, Dr. Stuart Hill, former McGill University professor, Canadian dean of organic agriculture and now Emeritus Professor of Social Ecology at the University of Western Sydney in Australia.
Stu has continued to play a key role as a member of our Dream Team and underscoring the importance of addressing human ways of being and whole systems thinking in order to solve the greatest challenges of our time. Here he shares his enlightening perspective on how we can address the climate crisis.
By Alliance Co-Founder,Former Board Chair and Dream Team Member Stuart B. Hill
As well as maintaining my mental and physical flexibility (at 82), I keep busy with two main projects. They are both designed to address what I consider is missing in what is being done to address our climate and other environmental challenges. They both involve me sharing my ecological and psychological understandings and practices.
Ecological Understandings
Back in the 1960s I did the first whole ecosystem study by an individual; and twenty years later I was a psychotherapist for a royal family.
Limitations of Current Climate Crisis Conversations
Every day I hear, see and read things that deeply disappoint me. This is because I’m aware that key things are missing from the understanding about the issue, and from what’s being recommended for solving the problem.
Most discussions fail to recognise the issue’s historical roots, and the ecological and psychological causes of the problem. How to prevent the problem is rarely mentioned, and the need for personal change is never mentioned.
After looking up information about the person being interviewed or quoted, and about their project and associated organisation, I write them, providing respectful, constructive, feedback, and share my ideas, with supportive documentation. I call this my Every-Day Project.
Most initiatives share the same deficiencies and inadequate proposals for action. They are usually focused on reactive, back-end, curative approaches, based on single, magic bullet interventions, like pesticides, which always have negative side-effects.
What are needed are problem-preventing, front-end, whole-system design approaches. Also, most proposals argue for more studies, which postpone action, and often only lead to more of these studies (what I call monitoring our extinction research).
Thus, despite the extensive knowledge that we have about climate change, environmental degradation and species loss, very little progress has been, and is being, made.
The Every-Day Project Highlights the Need for Whole-System Design Approaches
To illustrate my Every-Day Project, I will share my communication with the person I listened to being interviewed on the radio last week. It was about the work a professor at a local University was doing on urban wilding (encouraging wildlife in cities).
Although it was interesting, because it was only focussed on above-ground warm-bodied animals, I felt moved to share some of my work on the life in the soil. This is where most animals on land live. They are also the main animals that are maintaining the health of these environments.
Dear XXX
Great work you (and your colleagues) are doing on Urban Rewilding.
In the mid-1960s I studied the life in a tropical cave, with ¼ million bats of a dozen species, plus many other above-ground animals.
However, as in all terrestrial environments, I found that most of the life in the cave was living, out-of-sight, in the guano/soil – it was so dynamic that it was respiring, on a weight-for-weight-basis, the same as the domestic cat.
So, terrestrial rewilding also needs to include programs for supporting the life in the soil.
Collegially and Supportively, Stuart (phone #)
From Telling the Truth Leading to More of the Same to Bold Lies Uncovering Real Solutions
An example of using my psychological understandings and practices in enabling environmental change involved offering a workshop, twenty years ago, for two hundred rancher families, on how to redesign their operations to make them ecologically sustainable.
After introducing the topic, I asked them, in pairs, to take turns saying what they would do to achieve this. I then asked for volunteers to share what they had imagined. I was deeply disappointed with all of their proposals, such as just installing a solar collector on a lake. Despite this being a good thing to do, I judged such initiatives to be at the shallow-end of the pool.
So, without having planned to do this, I asked them to go back into their pairs and to take turns to boldly lie about what they had done (that they had actually not done) to make their whole operation completely ecologically sustainable.
The noise in the room was deafening, and it was difficult to get their attention to pause from this process. I realised that I must have tapped into something that was significantly different from the previous process.
I then invited volunteers to share their lies. Everything they shared was amazing. For example, the solar collector guy said, “Twenty years ago I put a nature strip through my 200,000-hectare property, and I’ve been monitoring the bird species ever since. I’ve now got two hundred species of birds.”
Then with a twinkle in his eye he added, “This morning, when I went out to monitor my birds, I saw one of those miniature dinosaurs coming out of my nature strip.”
I knew immediately that I needed to use this difference to enable them to actually implement significant actions. Realising that their lies were connected to things in their subconscious, I asked them to return to their pairs and brainstorm things that they had actually done that had any relationship with their lies. All of them had.
The dinosaur man had put a wind break between two of his paddocks, and had been observing the birds in the trees, and he had thought that if he had been one of those birds he would appreciate more than one row of trees, and some supportive undergrowth. And he had been wondering how he might provide this.
I then asked them to brainstorm what might help them take the next step from what they had actually done (from his single row of trees) towards their lie (to his full nature strip), and how they would actually carry out this action.
I also asked them what might get in the way of doing this, and how they might get around or remove such barriers. All of the participants had already taken similar small steps towards their lies, even if it was just thinking about what those steps might be.
Finally, they each made a 100% commitment to taking their next meaningful step, and also identified a friend who would support them and hold them to their commitment.
Our Core Selves and Adaptive Selves
Reflecting on what had happened, and what made the lying process much more effective than just brainstorming what they might do, I realised that we are all made up of two types of selves. We all have a core self, which is the self we start out with at conception. It has the potential to develop into a self that is spontaneous, aware, empowered, with its focus being primarily in the present, collaborative, and eventually with clear values and visions.
We also all have many, what I call, adaptive or compensatory selves. These were all gradually established to enable us to survive all the things that really hurt us (traumas), which all of us have experienced. Some of these we no longer remember, and some we are in denial about them having happened. Denial is another protective, adaptive process, which helps keep our mind off painful memories.
We are most affected by the traumas that we experienced before seven to eleven. Before that age we mostly function from our core self. After that age we mostly function from our adaptive selves. One can see when this switch occurred. Our eyes change from being bright to dull, and our facial expressions from being fully alive to ‘half dead’.
Our Core Selves Hold Our Personal Truths
The characteristics of adaptive selves are the opposite of core selves. They can be recognised as patterned behaviours that, to varying extents, are unaware, disempowered, and distracted by past and future thoughts, competitive, with confused and compromised visions and values, and being overly self-focussed or others-focussed (the common obsessive ‘helping’ pattern).
When I asked the ranchers to boldly lie, because it was just a lie, paradoxically, it was their core self that thought and spoke, connected to what they, deep down, would really like to do, and to what they could actually commit to do.
In the first brainstorming exercise, their adaptive selves were doing the thinking and speaking, choosing to say things that they could say in front of their neighbours, family and friends, or what might impress others.
All such utterances are disconnected from any real commitment to implementation. Hence the ineffectiveness of all other approaches to enabling meaningful change. This is why most change projects only achieve token and unsustained change, before they invariably are abandoned, with new studies being proposed.
I remember learning that the armed forces in the USA had made over two hundred films to teach soldiers how to clean their teeth, when follow through from the first film was all that was needed, not yet another film!
Addressing Climate Change from Our Core Selves
The relevance of all of this for enabling us to genuinely and effectively address climate change and all of our other environmental challenges, is to find ways to only ever communicate from and between our core selves, and never from and between our adaptive selves.
I now imagine climate change activists, environmentalists, politicians, and in fact all others, boldly lying about what they have successfully done. I call this approach my Lying to Save the World Project.
About Stuart B. Hill
Emeritus Professor and former Foundation Chair of Social Ecology at the University of Western Sydney, Stuart B Hill has published over 350 papers and reports. His latest books are:
- Ecological Pioneers: A Social History of Australian Ecological Thought and Action (with Martin Mulligan; Cambridge UP, 2001)
- Learning for Sustainable Living: Psychology of Ecological Transformation (with Werner Sattmann-Frese; Lulu, 2008)
- Social Ecology: Applying Ecological Understanding to our Lives and our Planet (with David Wright and Catherine Camden-Pratt [Eds.]; Hawthorn, 2011)
- Social Ecology and Education: Transforming Worldviews and Practices (with David Wright [Eds.]; Routledge, 2021)
Some of his presentations and more about him can be found on his website: https://stuartbhill.com/