EDUCATION - The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast

Climate Change, Mental Health & Fighting for a Better Future - Highlights - CHARLIE HERTZOG YOUNG

“There's a whole section in my book about tips and advice. One of the ways that I try to maintain a feeling of safety while also not collapsing into a state of passivity, and it's taken a very long time for me to learn this, but it’s being forgiving with myself. One of the people who I write about a lot in the book is Jennifer Uchandu, a Nigerian climate activist and mental health activist who sets up an organization called The Eco-Anxiety in Africa Project. She talks about needing to remind herself constantly. Her test is not whether she's doing enough, it's whether she's doing her best. And doing her best doesn't mean doing as much as she possibly can, it means having the right balance of self care and action. Recently I've been really struggling with insomnia because I've still got quite bad nerve pain from my surgeries. And it sounds so simple and I used to get annoyed at these things, but just breathing. You know, deep breathing and kind of breathing into my back. Spending time in nature is also helpful. It can be quite hard for me because my mobility isn't always great on my prosthetics or if I'm in a wheelchair, but I swim a lot. And I draw a lot. One of the things that's been really amazing is that over the last few years, me and my friends have gotten into the habit of calling one another as first points of contact, not just in crisis, but if we've had a tricky day.”

Duration:: 17m
Broadcast on:: 19 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

The planet’s well-being unites us all, from ecosystems to societies, global systems to individual health. How is planetary health linked to mental health?

Charlie Hertzog Young is a researcher, writer and award-winning activist. He identifies as a “proudly mad bipolar double amputee” and has worked for the New Economics Foundation, the Royal Society of Arts, the Good Law Project, the Four Day Week Campaign and the Centre for Progressive Change, as well as the UK Labour Party under three consecutive leaders. Charlie has spoken at the LSE, the UN and the World Economic Forum. He studied at Harvard, SOAS and Schumacher College and has written for The Ecologist, The Independent, Novara Media, Open Democracy and The Guardian. He is the author of Spinning Out: Climate Change, Mental Health and Fighting for a Better Future.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Your book Spinning Out is a beautiful exploration and elucidation of the links between the climate crisis, mental health and social change. Reading your book is an uplifting experience and one I'd recommend to anyone interested in finding agency. As a young, leading climate change activist, you emerged from, as you describe in your book, a month long coma with some powerful realizations about the way climate chaos fuels mental health problems and why our information culture isn't adequately set up to support people in the distress which you write about so eloquently in your book. Can you take us back to that day in 2019 when you were consumed by anxiety and despair and things became too much to bear?

CHARLIE HERTZOG YOUNG

I've been a climate activist since I was about 12 years old. It began with a deep passion for wildlife. I started taking up litter and telling off my schoolmates, eventually I set up a green council when I was about 13 or 14. As I learned more and more about the climate crisis and how sprawling and interconnected it was, not just with nature, but with the oppression that exists within human society, I started getting more involved and impassioned, getting involved in protests, marches. When I was about 15 years old, I helped shut down an airport for a night. I eventually started going to the UN climate talks. I went to Davos and it started to become my everything. I felt like I was doing something meaningful about the crisis, but also felt a sense of deep despair and loss, both from the perspective of the impending collapse of the biosphere and also a deep dislocation from the dominant culture and the consensus reality. I felt like no one else was feeling the sense of urgency and emergency that I felt. I started to get incredibly anxious. In 2019, when I was 27, I jumped off a six storey building. My memory has blacked it out, but I spent a month in a coma and woke up having lost both of my legs. The five years since have been one of not just physical and mental recovery, but also trying to untangle the messy web of causality as to how and why it was that I lost my mind in the way I did. I try to find some of the gifts in that madness, what it was pointing towards in terms of the unbalance of the ecosphere and how human civilization has begun to operate completely out of step with the ecosphere.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Yes, it’s really important to hear those ways that you connect. I wanted to go back a little bit too, because there are gifts that come with a heightened sense of awareness of impending danger that is almost primal. As you say, madness can be visionary. And when you write about those visions, of being stalked by a wolf, it’s a foreboding, almost like a warning of impending danger. As you know, many Indigenous societies have dream theories and interpretations that reveal a philosophical order about the nature of the universe, and visions within many cultures are taken very seriously. Visions are seen as actually real. There's a reason for them. And, it made me reflect a lot about, if you pull back, to that time you saw a wild wolf stalking you in the street. This is a kind of metaphor for how we're treating the ecosphere, and the rest of the creatures that we share this planet with. It really calls into question who is more mad. Is it the kind of collective blindness that refuses to see the way we are behaving towards rest of the creatures we share the world with and pretending that our disrespect for the very planet that provides us with food, water, and shelter can go on being abused and sucked dry. Like the 300 million years it took for fossil fuels to form in the Earth has been depleted by humans in under 200 years.

HERTZOG YOUNG

Yeah, I mean there's that old saying, “blessed are the cracked for they shall let in the light.” For a lot of people like myself, I think it's true that losing your mind can be a proportionate response to the climate crisis. Those of us with mental health issues are often branded as being in our own world. But paradoxically, being in our own world can actually be a result of being more connected to the outside world rather than less. And in the context of climate change, it may be fairer to describe people who fail to develop psychological symptoms as being in their own separate anthropocentric world, inattentive to the experiences of the billions of other human and nonhuman beings on the planet, unaffected by looming existential catastrophe. There are layers and layers of insulation made up of civilizational narratives that dislocate many people from climate chaos and those whose psyches buckle upon contact with this reality are the ones deemed mad. But this pathologizing is a defense mechanism employed by the civilized or by the dominant culture, which ends up subjugating those of us whose minds stray from accepted norms. There are lots of studies that show that certain forms of psychosis are actually a form of meaning-making for communities that feel like they have no sense of purpose. We've had generations and generations of trauma visited upon the human species by picking apart communities and our intimate relationships with nature. Especially since the 80s, picking apart our inability to even consider ourselves as part of society in a meaningful sense. That kind of pulling apart means that we're locked in quite individual and atomized spaces, where when something as massive as climate change starts to happen, people feel both responsible for it, and completely unable to do anything about it. That's not me saying that being depressed is the only objective kind of indicator for reality, but it's quite easy for the human species to underestimate or discount quite how significantly dangerous our situation is and people with depression are more able to see that with eyes unclouded by biases.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

We do deny reality and the climate emergency, justifying our bad behavior by telling ourselves, “Oh, we survived this and that, so we'll survive this, too.” Of course, with climate change, it's completely non-linear. It goes up to a certain point and then, out of nowhere, a year's worth of rain falls in a day bringing flooding to your front door. Wildfires break out suddenly. These extreme climate events are a wake-up call, but it's often too late to do anything if you lose your home. So it’s really about rethinking capitalism and our extractivist relationship to the planet.

I spend a long time, as you do, I know, talking with students and teachers and unlike in the past where we'd talk about career paths or being anxious about exams and job choices or the future of work, students today are concerned about this underlying fear of the future because they can see that it's just overshadowing everything. The storms and the heat waves and the flooding and all these things you've described. I think that all young people would benefit from reading your book because you have been at the front lines since your early teens. But how do you feel we can overcome the apathy and inaction that is going on today?

HERTZOG YOUNG

I think it's very easy for this stuff to be paralyzing. I used to be in a space where I felt that as soon as I wasn't devastatingly ill, I had to hurl myself back at the problem of climate change or something to do with new economics or a new kind of politics. I would end up very quickly burning out. While I do think that it's deeply important for us to engage with these issues, it's really important that we engage with them in a way that isn't trying to approach them with an internal sense of emergency. I often get letters from people who have read my book or one of my articles saying, thank you for naming not just the phenomenon of eco anxiety, but some of the interiority of it, and saying that they feel seen. It's quite upsetting that it's not something people tend to feel safe just having as a normal topic of conversation. People are worried that they'll bring down the mood and so that puts us in these silos and that's a real problem. Only by opening up can we start to build a deeper sense of connection and potentially collective action. Another problem is that eco anxiety is often considered to be a predominantly Global North issue. In researching my book and speaking to people in the Global South, I did a lot of my work in Pakistan looking at the impacts of the floods. The WHO estimated that one in five people affected by things like massive flooding, hurricanes, heat waves, or droughts, are likely to experience some kind of severe mental health impact. Speaking to doctors in Pakistan, that number is often far higher. It's just not seen as a mental health issue because it's often interpreted as inevitable suffering. It's an extension of the kind of othering that is already visited upon the Global South that people's psychological distress doesn't count, because obviously people will be having a hard time if they've experienced a natural disaster. So organizations like the WHO fly in to deliver medication and then helicopter out again. And local doctors say it's no solution at all. You've got to be working with communities, asking people what their needs are, what their pillars of care were prior to a natural disaster, and how to try and restore those again.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Yeah. It’s terrible the way that is. Some people are expected to just take that burden of suffering like it's an act of God, when it's an act of our abuse of this planet. I've had conversations with people like Bertrand Piccard who has said we have to put it aside. He's not denying the eco anxiety, but says you have to work within the capitalist systems to give people the solutions so that then they don't have that despair too. So I think we have to not deny that it's there, but then also provide those solutions. And I hope that all these solutions come up at the speed they need to take place.

HERTZOG YOUNG

One of the most promising and surprisingly effective on the first try solutions that I came across while looking at this stuff was from a doctor Dr. Asma Humayun who works in Pakistan. Prior to the flooding, she was already working on a massive nested mental health and psychosocial support program. What they were doing was, within a month, they managed to train a thousand people in psychological first aid in the community. People who were not just doctors and nurses, but also teachers, social workers, people who had high contact with people in the community. They trained people to look out for psychological distress, learn how to respond with mental health first aid, and also look after their own mental health. That network of a thousand people then linked in through an app that was very low bandwidth so it could work even when there wasn't good internet so they could link in with people who were slightly more trained to provide people with the care that they needed. So an area of 1 million people that previously only had one psychiatrist was fully networked with a nested system where people were not only able to get support, but also able to build their own networks of support and new practices of support. That has now been taken on by the Pakistani government and is potentially going to be mapped out across the nation as some kind of iterative feedback response for communities to build on that already existing resilience and that already existing knowledge, rather than just relying on these very brittle old systems of having one specialized person with a massive, massive population of people who have really high needs and usually never even go to a psychiatrist because they wouldn't think that they get help or that their condition is something that could be alleviated. One of the really surprising outputs is that 50 percent of people who are referred to services and use them came back, which is an astronomically high proportion in this field. So it's one example of how you can work within a capitalist system, but also start to bake in community resilience and empower communities to do things together.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

I think that that's so important to hear. Often in these moments of crisis, we’re lucky to be around this community of friends, but sometimes they don't occur when we're close to those that we trust and we feel safe with. Maybe the racing thoughts come at an unexpected moment. What are some of those ways that you can pull back from that, so you can be gentle on your mind and not focus on what lies ahead?

HERTZOG YOUNG

There's a whole section in my book about tips and advice. Not just of mine, but of many people who are similar to me and have been doing this stuff for a long time. One of the ways that I try to maintain a feeling of safety while also not collapsing into a state of passivity, and it's taken a very long time for me to learn this, but it’s being forgiving with myself. One of the people who I write about a lot in the book is Jennifer Uchandu, a Nigerian climate activist and mental health activist who sets up an organization called The Eco-Anxiety in Africa Project. She talks about needing to remind herself constantly. Her test is not whether she's doing enough, it's whether she's doing her best. And doing her best doesn't mean doing as much as she possibly can, it means having the right balance of self care and action. Recently I've been really struggling with insomnia because I've still got quite bad nerve pain from my surgeries. And it sounds so simple and I used to get annoyed at these things, but just breathing. You know, deep breathing and kind of breathing into my back. Spending time in nature is also helpful. It can be quite hard for me because my mobility isn't always great on my prosthetics or if I'm in a wheelchair, but I swim a lot. And I draw a lot. One of the things that's been really amazing is that over the last few years, me and my friends have gotten into the habit of calling one another as first points of contact, not just in crisis, but if we've had a tricky day.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

I don't believe in the silver bullet of AI or technology that will solve all these problems, but I have mixed feelings and perhaps you do too. I just wonder about your reflections on AI in terms of helping us balance the energy grid or solve the climate crisis. We also know that it consumes a lot of energy, so how do we navigate those risks and potential benefits?

HERTZOG YOUNG

I think that certain kinds of AI can be really helpful for, as you say, balancing the grid or by relieving humans of certain kinds of manual repetitive labor arduous labor, so long as that actually transfers into people having more time. The economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that we've had enough of a rise in productivity that we could be working 15 hour weeks and have the same amount as people had decades ago. However, because of the structure of the economic system, that productivity rise has not transferred into more free time. I'm slightly scared about utopian visions about AI freeing humans from work, because I don't think we have enough of a social and political infrastructure to actually reap most of the gains if that were to happen. I think deeper down, I'm concerned because we call it “artificial intelligence,” but we don't even know what organic intelligence is. We have a very limited and very brittle understanding of what intelligence is, what the mind is, and we see this first hand over and over again in medical circles. There's a very circuit-based treatment of the human mind, and mental health issues are often treated as a glitch. When we've got a deeply flawed and frankly quite infantile understanding of what intelligence is, we're going to build something that is not in any way linked in healthfully with the ecosystem. I do think that there are some useful, utilitarian, appropriate uses of it, but they should be really kept limited. I'm worried that AI will serve those interests that have already subjugated and dominated because of the kinds of intelligence it chooses to put central to its way of operating. There's also a certain amount of arrogance implicit in the way that AI is talked about, that it is somehow, not just superior to any single human mind, but it's come from a superior kind of human mind. I think it's the same kind of human mind that has got us into the problems that we've already experienced. And the same kind of thinking is unlikely to be able to solve those issues.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Exactly. Let's not duplicate our mistakes through another hyper-industrialized system. And just so in closing, on a optimistic note, as you think about the future, the future of education, the importance of the arts, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember?

HERTZOG YOUNG

I think I'll answer it from a slightly different tack, which is the thing that was most important to me as a young person in learning about these issues, but also feeling a modicum of safety and direction, helping me really pursue the things I was curious about, and have a more intimate relationship with my values. The thing that was important to me was having mentors. And I would really recommend that young people take a bit of a risk and ask people they want to learn from whether they can spend time with them and listen to their stories to learn from their experiences. I think one of the most promising things is rebuilding intergenerational relationships. This fight is one that has been going on for generations upon generations. It is a fight that is as old as human civilization. And so one of the main things I'd like young people to know is that they don't have to reinvent the wheel. They can reach out to those that they want to emulate and trust those relationships.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producers on this episode were Sophie Garnier and Daniela Cordovez Flores. One Planet Podcast & The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk. Associate Text Editor was Nadia Lam. Additional production support by Katie Foster.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).

[MUSIC PLAYING] You're listening to highlights from One Planet podcast interview with Charlie Hertz, a young climate change activist, and author, spinning out. This podcast is supported by the Jan Myshalski Foundation. I've been a climate activist since I was about 12 years old in different versions, obviously, because there's only so much you can do it 12. But I always had a very deep connection to nature and this deep, in built sense, that something in the way we lived was out of balance with the way that the Earth wanted us to. So it began with a deep passion for wildlife. As I learned more and more about the climate crisis and how sprawling interconnected it was not just with nature, but with human flourishing and with so much of the oppression that exists within human society, I started doing more and more involved and impassioned actions. So I started getting involved in protests, marches. It started to become my everything, both in a really exhilarating way where I felt like I was involved in doing something meaningful about the crisis, but also a sense of deep despair and loss, both from the perspective of the impending collapse of the biosphere, as I saw it, and also a deep dislocation from the dominant culture and the consensus reality feeling that nobody else really got it. I started to get incredibly anxious and that built and played out in lots of deeply confusing ways over a period of years until in 2019, when I was 27, I jumped off a six-story building. And I can't tell you a great deal about that day because I've blacked it out. My memory is blacked out just from sheer brute trauma. But I then spent a month in a coma and woke up having lost both of my legs. And the time since then, the five years since, has mostly been one of not just physical and mental recovery, but also trying to untangle the messy web of causality as to how and why it was that I lost my mind and the way I did. I mean, there's that old saying, blessed are the cracks where they let in the light. And for a lot of people like myself, I think it's really true that losing your mind can be a proportionate response to the climate crisis. And those of us with mental health issues are often branded as being in our own world. We may seem distant or unaware or unattached to our surroundings. We might instead have a vacant or overzealous other-worldiness. Either way, it appears to leave us unreachable. And paradoxically, being in our own world can actually be a result of being more connected to the outside world rather than less. People who fail to develop psychological symptoms as being in our own separate anthropocentric world inattentive to the experiences, as you say, of the billions of other human and non-human beings on the planet, unaffected by looming existential catastrophe. There are layers and layers of insulation made up of civilizational narratives that dislocate many people from climate chaos. And there are lots of studies that show, not that, in my opinion, we need studies to prove these things, because many cultures have known them for a long time. But there are lots of studies that show that certain forms of psychosis are actually a form of meaning-making for communities that are lost. And by lost, I mean, feel like they have no sense of purpose. We've had generations and generations of trauma visited upon the human species by picking apart communities or intimate relationships with nature. And more recently, especially since the '80s, picking apart our inability to even consider ourselves as part of society in a meaningful sense. And that kind of pulling apart means that we're locked in quite individual and atomized spaces, where when something as massive as climate change starts to happen, people feel both responsible for it and completely unable to do anything about it. And so I think certain kinds of madness, like psychosis, are entirely appropriate to try and likely dream, find symbols and signals and compass points for us to find our way collectively out of it again. I used to be in a space where as soon as I felt kind of devastatingly ill, I had to hurl myself back at the problem of climate change, or something to do with new economics, or something to do with the new kind of politics. And I would end up very quickly burning out, getting myself up against despair. While I do think that it's deeply, deeply important for us to engage with these issues, it's really important that we engage with them in a way that isn't trying to approach them with an internal sense of emergency. And that said, there is a very well understood, multi-generational knowledge that it is only by addressing these issues ourselves, that we can start to resolve some of the trauma that they've caused in our own being. So one of the biggest issues I've found talking to people about this, and it was a huge surprise to me, was that almost everyone that I raised this with has some version of what people often call eco-anxiety or climate anxiety. And even though it's very much in popular culture, it's not something that people will discuss with people they're close to, they don't like to bring it out 'cause they feel like they're gonna kill the mood. But I think one of the other things is that people still have this sense that if it's a mental health issue that's caused by their feelings about climate change, it doesn't count as an actual problem. Do you know what I mean? And that's very much an issue in the global North, having this sense that a problem that's as distant as climate change, potentially geographically, but also in terms of the future, you know, being like pre-traumatic stress almost for what might happen to us, doesn't seem like something worth taking seriously, either for the person feeling it or for the people that they want to talk to about it. And I think that only by opening up and discussing it tenderly with one another, can we start to build a deeper sense of connection and also solidarity and potentially collective action through the visualization that everybody's got a version of it. And when I was trying to get the book written initially, it was quite hard to have sections on the global South because people would consider, if there's a massive drought, people have to move. Of course, there's going to be suffering. And so it's seen as natural suffering or inevitable suffering. And in my eyes and in the eyes of many of the people I spoke to about this, it's an extension of the kind of othering that is already visited upon the global South because it says that people's mental health issues, people psychological distress don't count as depression, as PTSD, as anxiety, because, you know, obviously people will be sad or upset by having a hard time if they've experienced a natural disaster. And that maps on to what's often the inevitable response from organizations like the WHO, which is to fly in and to deliver antidepressants or, you know, some form of medication and then helicopter out again. And local doctors that are there working on the ground with people say that that's not just a sticking plaster solution, it's no solution at all, because if people's entire network of support has evaporated, you've got to be working with communities, we could respond to a massive mental health crisis arising from climate impacts by just investing loads of money and training new psychiatrists and dotting them about a community with, let's be honest, quite a rigid old school biomedical understanding of what mental health issues are, or we could build an ecosystem of care, right? Where people who are the community members are trained and can start to learn, not just learn mental health first aid from biomedical literature, which is useful, but also teach psychiatrists, psychologists and teach social workers and community care workers. Well, I'd actually never heard the term five years ago, but post-traumatic growth is this belief that some practitioners have, that after a traumatic event, it's possible for people to not just recover and come back to the position that were in before the trauma, but actually grow through it and find a much more meaningful way of existing. I managed to talk into lots of practitioners, talking to lots of people who've been through similar things, find a few facets of what can prime us for post-traumatic growth. And one of them is cognitive flexibility. So the willingness and the ability and the capacity to accept new versions of ourselves and new understandings of the world, which is a very difficult thing to do when you're in this high-provisioned state of post-traumatic stress. So feeling safe is deeply important, and one of the most important things for that is having safe relationships and feeling like we can trust other people and other people trust us. So I think that a lot of us have a bit of a gap in ourselves, a kind of spiritual void that's often caused by not feeling like we're in step with the rest of society, because we can see living catastrophe or that we can see generalized apathy in the context of something that's deeply important to us, whether that's climate change or the biosphere, or just generally a lack of meaning in the way that we live at the moment. I've found that having had something pretty extreme and traumatic happen to me has forced me to dig quite deep and bind again what it is that I see as important in my life. And for me, this is just my own feeling. But for me, it's trying to be on the side of nature and human flourishing in the face of a civilization and a global economic system that does seem intent on destroying the ecosphere and intent on destroying human flourishing. But one of the ways that I try and maintain the feeling of safety while also not collapsing into a state of passivity, then it's taken a very long time for me to learn this, but is being forgiving with myself. And one of the people who I write about a lot in the book, Jennifer Shandu, who is a Nigerian environmental health activist who sets up an organization called the Econ Anxiety in Africa Project. She talks about needing to remind herself constantly. Her test is not whether she's doing enough, it's whether she's doing her best. And doing her best doesn't mean doing as much as she possibly can. It means having the right balance, self-care and action. So it changes all the time 'cause I find different things helpful at different times. I think that having Labour back and power opens up a lot of opportunities. But I also feel like we cannot be complacent about this. We can't be complacent about the fact that Labour won a massive majority in the House of Commons, but they barely increased their vote share at all. So some people are talking about it as a sand castle majority 'cause their popular support is actually very low. We also saw the rise of the Green Party, which I think is a really promising thing. They increased their seats from one to four. I think denial is something that I've thought of out for years, obviously. But I do think that a lot of the rise of the far right, the rise of the alt-right, that kind of fury, is very often, this might seem like an outlandish claim, but it's very often displaced fear about climate change and about the general systemic unraveling of the world. So I've found the most effective way to speak to people who don't believe that climate change is the thing, is to listen and not to listen in order to find something, to contradict them on, but to listen and to try and get to the root of why it is that they feel that way. Well, I mean, we could have spent the whole episode talking about this 'cause I have a lot of half-baked opinions about this stuff, but I think that certain kinds of AI can be really helpful for, as you say, balancing the grid or by relieving humans of certain kinds of manual, repetitive or arduous labor. So long as that actually transfers into people having more time, they do think that there are some useful utilitarian, appropriate uses of it, but they should be really boundary and kept limited. But I think a lot of the growth of human dominance over the ecosystem and the dominance of a certain kind of human life over many other kinds of human life. I'm worried that AI will serve those interests that have already subjugated and dominated because of the kinds of intelligence it chooses to put central to as we have operating. And that is cutting things up in smaller pieces in order to understand the better, rather than looking at the genuine, interacted whole. It take a bit of courage, actually, to just decide to slow down, sit down, think, admit our mistakes and experiment with different ways of being, like different structures for societies, different varieties for economies, for instance. I think deeper down, I'm concerned, because we call it artificial intelligence, but we don't even know what organic intelligence is. We have a very limited and very brittle understanding of what intelligence is, what the mind. We now see the mind almost like it's a circuit board and not only does that have really significant negative consequences for people with mental health issues and the othering of large groups of people, it's also just a deeply broken and inaccurate model of the mind. So, you know, very, very, very little. And some people talk about there being three major aspects of mind. One is individual psychology in your physiology. One is in your social network, your social system. We're hyper-social beings. And the other is how it connects to the ecosphere, what flows in and out of our bodies and in and out of our minds. And that's a two-way relationship in all of those cases. And so if we as a society are building what we're calling artificial intelligence, when we've got a deeply flawed and frankly quite infantile understanding of what intelligence is, then we're going to build something that is not in any way linked in healthfully with the ecosystem that we exist in and depend on, let alone human society. I would say AI is undeniably incredibly clever, but it's very clever in a very particular kind of quantitative left-brain way. And there are many other ways of being that the people who are designing artificial intelligence software tend not to prioritize or even see or think. And there are all kinds of tacit knowledges and human cultures all around the globe that couldn't even make their way into something that relies on that kind of infrastructure. The thing that was important to me was having mentors. And I would really recommend that young people take a bit of a risk and ask people that they want to learn from, whether they can spend time with them and do things with them and listen to their stories and learn from their experiences. I think one of the most promising things is rebuilding into generational relationships. And this fight is one that has been going on for generations upon generations. It is a fight that is as old as human civilization. And so I think when you ask, what is it you'd like young people to know and preserve? I think one of the main things I'd like them to know is that they don't have to reinvent the wheel. So to reach out to those that they want to emulate and be like and trust this relationships. And this is just the beginning of part three, which is about taking collective action. There is a spectacular and fortuitous set of feedback loops that turn engaged action into a powerful therapeutic method. This is not a utilitarian transaction. We're helping others or doing good just makes us feel better. It is a reciprocal arrangement like the management of a comment. And it is about finding purpose and meaning by joining communities of care. It is also about creativity, the opportunity to align our talents with our ethics and creating enclaves in which we can more fully explore who it is we want to be. Together, we try to build the relationships we've always wanted out of new practices and priorities. This leads to meaningful impactful action. It is fertile territory for the birth of new worlds. - We hope you've enjoyed this program and listening to the highlights of this podcast. If you'd like to get involved in one planet podcast or learn more about environmental projects, click on the subscribe button. Thank you for listening. (gentle music)