EP 182: Climate Change: Mitigation to Mobilizing | Laureline Simon

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Hi. Welcome to the Radical Responsibility Podcast. This is Fleet Moll, your host. And today I'm having a conversation with Lauraleen Simon, an amazing climate activist with who helps us make the really important distinction between understanding efforts towards climate adaptation or adaptation to climate change and climate mitigation, and the different strategies involved in both, and the mindset involved in both, and how we really need to be working on all these fronts in order to create the change that's going to allow us to pass on a sustainable climate to our children and grandchildren. So a really important conversation with a really knowledgeable activist who's involved at the highest levels of climate change activism. Welcome. Lauralene, how are you?

Hi, Fleet. Thanks. I'm really well and really happy to be here today with you.

Well, we're really excited to have you be part of this summit and for people to learn more about your work at One Resilient Earth. And you're speaking to us from Bonn, Germany today, right?

Exactly.

Great. So we're having a transatlantic conversation here, so I'm going to share a bit of your background, your bio, so our audience can be familiar with your work, and then we'll jump right into the conversation.

All right, yes, with pleasure.

Laureline Simon is the founder and director of One Resilient Earth, an international nonprofit organization dedicated to growing the resilience of individuals, rebuilding communities and restoring ecosystems in response to our climate and biodiversity crises. One Resilient Earth mobilizes a regenerative approach that weaves together arts, science, ancient wisdom and new technologies. Previously, Laureline supported international climate negotiations as part of the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat with a focus on adaptation, knowledge management, loss and damage associated with climate change, and setting up the local communities and indigenous peoples platform with the French Development Agency. She coordinated the financing of large climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation projects in India before leading research program, a research program on climate change adaptation in cities of sub Saharan Africa. She also gained experience with resilience by engaging in post disaster reconstruction projects in both rural and urban India.

With the Indian NGO SEWA or sewa.

So quite a wealth of experience in really beyond the ground reality of.

Both mitigation and adaptation work and resilience building around the reality of human caused climate change and current crises we're in.

So I think hopefully it's becoming more and More obvious to everyone, to all of us, that we are in a climate emergency, that human caused global warming is an existential threat to humanity and life on this planet. And we're seeing severe disruptions around the world. And of course, as always, this impacts the most vulnerable and marginalized of our communities around the world. But it's showing up everywhere in my own country. I mean, the extreme weather, the fires in California, the Vancouver just to the north of us, in Western Canada, extreme floods and extreme fires. I mean, it's really everywhere. And hopefully it's becoming all but impossible to be a climate change denier today. I'm sure there are those.

And most of what we hear about in the public sphere, in the media is what we need to do to mitigate.

The potential disruptions of climate change and get to a carbon neutral economy and so forth to slow down global warming. And obviously this is critical. And it still doesn't seem like we have the political will anywhere near the political will to really make the tough decisions. I remember listening, reading up and following the last COP in meetings in Glasgow and reading that they were arguing not over ending coal use, but how much coal to use, you know, and so it seems like we have a long way to go there. And maybe that's why it's even more important, the work also of adaptation to prepare and build a resilience, to deal with the inevitable disruptions that are coming our way, things that have already been set in motion. And it seems that you're more focused on that side of the equation, the adaptation of resilience side of the equation. So I'm just curious, how did you end up moving in that direction? Why have you chosen to focus your work in that area?

Yeah, well, it's interesting because as for many choices professionally, that there's a part of it that you choose and a part of it that just happens and just happens to be right in alignment with what's important for you. So in my case, when I first started to work on climate change, I was working more on the mitigation side. I had studied development in the past. I had been working in India on reconstruction projects, as you mentioned, in both rural India and, and in urban India and informal settlements. And there was this opportunity with the French Development Agency to help open an office in India, so to do more development with a focus on climate change mitigation. And in the beginning, after the time I had spent in the villages, especially working in situations that were basically humanitarian crisis situation and reconstruction situations, it felt really strange that we would actually focus on limiting emissions of a country that was growing and where there were huge needs in terms of poverty alleviation.

And the more I read about climate change at that time, that was not particularly on my agenda almost 20 years ago, the more I also realized how the populations, as you said, that were the most marginalized and the most high risk were the ones who are going to be the most impacted. And so I could understand why mitigation seemed to be a logical step in terms of trying to reduce emissions so that the most impacted and the most marginalized are not suffering even more from the effects of climate change. But at the same time.

Even if some new bus rapid transit systems or new tramways are being built on metros are being built in India, which is the type of projects we are funding, you know that there is no direct link to the fact that floodings are going to stop or are going to be less lethal or are going to have less impact locally. So there was always a part of me that was thinking in a way about those women and children I had spent some time with in villages or people working in informal and living in informal settlements around big cities that were the most exposed when there was flooding, particularly because usually the informal settlements are in floatable zones and because the people living in the Ketch Desert already living in conditions that are so hard for them that any increase in temperature makes it unlivable. And so, although of course, we need to reduce emission, that we also need to deal with the populations that are the most impacted and that are going to be the worst hits, although, as you said, everybody's going to be hit in one way or another in the decades to come. And so when there was this opportunity that opened up at the research department to work more specifically on climate change adaptation, I took it at that point, and I really wanted to see what could be done on climate change adaptation in terms of building resilience so that no matter what happens in terms of emission increases, there are still plans in place, still preparation that's being done so that the populations that are the most vulnerable are not suffering.

Ever more from the increasing impacts of climate change. So that was what, what really drove me. The fact that I had worked on the ground, I would say, and the possibility to understand better vulnerability and to have an ability to work directly with populations that otherwise would have been not necessarily considered the priority, if the priority was just about reducing emission.

It seems to be one of the real conundrums for.

For our global society that, you know, in the industrialized north has Basically created this problem of climate change and global warming. And yet now we're at a position where we see, as countries in the global south industrialize, especially India, and then we see what's happening with rainforest destruction in Brazil and so forth. You know, we're calling on them to change their ways when they're just trying to develop and deal with extreme poverty and resource their people and of course, huge population populations. And so, yeah, it's like we're in a position in a global north of not really having the moral authority to go tell other people what to do in this area. And yet we do have a global need. I mean, on some level, at some point, these existential threats are going to, again, in terms of climate, are going to have to be part of the UN Security Council, things that they deal with. I mean, these are going to be global issues that are going to not only result in severe climate disruption, but potentially political disruptions and all kinds of potentially catastrophic human problems. So what does resilience billing look like for adaptation? Is it about helping individuals become more resilient? I mean, there's a project by the Rockefeller, funded in part by the Rockefeller foundation, called 100 Resilient Cities. And I know that was mostly about disaster response. I don't know if they've shifted that around climate adaptation or not. But helping cities, when we think about cities trying to have the infrastructure to deal with disasters. So what does resilience building look like for climate adaptation?

Well, the words of climate adaptation and climate resilience are often used a bit interchangeably. So, I mean, it's depending on who using it. They're making more of a distinction between resilience to both climate change and a number of disasters that are happening, or not necessarily any distinction with the idea of climate adaptation.

So adapting to climate change, again, if you look at the UN text or the practices of large organizations or through large projects like the one funded by the Rockefeller foundation that you mentioned, usually means working on decreasing the vulnerability of population to the impacts of climate change. And the vulnerability depends on the exposure to a specific risk, climate risk. So depending on each location, you'll have different risks to take into account, the sensitivity of the population group to that specific risk and then the ability to cope or the resources that the population has to cope with the impact. It can be financial resources, of course, but also social resources, cultural resources. So a number of resources at stake.

When it comes to coping. And when you look at climate adaptation or climate resilience, I would say.

The way it is presented and the type of policy recommendations that come with it, including from the UN Climate Change Secretariat. There is a focus specifically on communities and on ecosystem. There is little focus on building resilience at the individual level. Were working of course on like bigger masses, I would say. And so, and the Rockefeller foundation was working with cities, which is a very valuable scale to look at climate change adaptation because you've got the unity of the, of governance at the city level. You have the ability to coordinate with other bodies and other jurisdictions like all the levels of governance to go beyond the city. But the city seems like a very good scale to work at usually when you work on resilience.

But when you work at the city level, you're unlikely to treat each case, each individual, one by one. And that's why there is this focus on communities or neighborhoods and focus on the overall environment or the ecosystem in which we are out and the bioregional or the watershed basin that is involved. But what I've seen in my work and what I feel is important, I mean, what I've seen through dialogues, what I feel is important in my work is this individual level. Because unless we look at the resilience or like the obstacles to being resilient at the individual level, it's going to be difficult to actually build the resilience at a community level. And I'm just going to give you one example. So right now we're supporting a project in Uganda in a refugee settlement. We're supporting a refugee led organization that's doing amazing work with training in permaculture and regenerative agriculture and are doing reforestation. They're called the Ramwancha World foundation and they're working essentially with young women.

That have been displaced because they're refugees in Uganda. So they come from different countries in East Africa. They've been displaced and many of them have support from sexual and gender based violence as a result of that displacement. And in a traditional climate change adaptation project, that issue would not be necessarily addressed. They've seen as like out of scope, as an important issue, but out of scope.

But if you really want to help build the resilience of those women of the beneficiaries of the project, it's such a big elephant in the room that you cannot deny it or you cannot put it aside, is going to determine so much of the relationship they can build to the space they're in to one another. Whenever there's going to be some support done for entrepreneurship and venturing outside of the refugee camp. This is a reality that needs to be taken into account. And it implies their own life as survivors, but it implies the community they're in and the host community they interact with. So if we really want to build resilience to climate change, we need to start with resilience at the individual level. Looking at the history of people and looking at the impacts that climate change will also have on their own emotional and mental health, for instance. That's another dimension that we can address.

Yeah, absolutely. We actually have several of our presenters today are focused on the mental health and climate anxiety issues.

Yeah, I think this is incredibly important, what you're talking about. You know, of course, our summit is really about every aspect and dimension of resilience, individual, collective, systemic, and so forth. And my own work personally and experience has been a lot around supporting people in healing trauma and becoming more resilient. And while I think we need to spread resilience as far and wide and as deep as we can, I do think on some level it comes down to individuals. And I almost feel like we need to really support, you know, developing sort of super resilient individuals or something, because if things begin to fall apart, there's going to be. People will be able to come over and kind of raise the flag and say, gather here. There's safety here. We're creating community here. Right. We're come together. Right. And that's going to require people with tremendous resilience and strength to do that. And, you know, another thing, we have one of our presenters today, Chris Brookfield, did a lot of work around micro lending, micro financing in India and other places. And. And in his experience, on the ground, working not only in India, but in. In the Andes and South America and Mexico and other areas, working with what he. You referenced informal communities. I think he talks about edge communities, very unresourced.

Communities that are very vulnerable. He said he always saw that there were a lot of things that were working in these communities, that they had their own market dynamics and they had their own community dynamics that worked. They had systems, they had informal systems that really worked and that a lot of his work was helping to identify and then actualize, rather than trying to come in and impose some solution from the outside, but actually to find what's indigenous within these edge communities and then give them more support to help them actualize that. I'm wondering if that resonates with the kind of work you're doing and seeing.

Yeah, totally.

Yes, for sure. And I was also reflecting when I told the story pretty quickly of the work I had been doing in India.

And then the desire I had to support some more, that it could be seen or it can be understood as this desire that, okay, we know best or we're going to help. And I think, yeah, what I didn't come very really well. So it's good that they've got this opportunity to do that. Is that the whole experience for me of working in India already with the NGO Siva was that.

I really felt I didn't know anything. That was something that came up, like, really strongly. I had been studying development and I was spending time in those rural areas or in these informal settlements. And my daily experience was just about realizing how little I knew and how much I had to understand to the point that I was barely speaking. I mean, most of the time I was really in observer mode, trying to understand a bit of Gujarati.

And just try to see what was being done by the woman of the Indian NGO working.

With the other woman in the villages or in the trade union.

And so it was a very humbling process of realizing how much all my conceptual knowledge of what development should look like was absolutely useless. And that.

It was a bit of a confirmation for me because I had assumed it might be, but it really was.

And so any kind of work that I've been involved in later was more about transferring resources to communities that have the ability to do more on channeling resources or contacts. Because unfortunately, the Global South, Global north border is such that many of the financial resources are with us and the needs.

Are in the communities. So, yeah, the way we engage with communities is right now as one region, RSS only through invitation. So we don't look for communities to support if they find us and they feel that what we do is relevant to them. We try and support and we try and catalyze support the best we can, but always in response to their needs and their strategies and whatever resonates.

And we're learning a lot in the process.

And a lot of the projects we're supporting is actually, to me, going to help us better design climate change adaptation or climate resilience projects in the north, because there is more knowledge of.

Dealing with scarce resources. There is oftentimes more creativity in the communities we support.

And there is also the presence of indigenous peoples, knowledge systems and practices that we can learn from if we have the, again, the humility and the respect that's necessary. And if we put the texts in place well enough so that we. We become. How can I say that, Worthy of receiving that knowledge.

Yeah, I think that is so important. I had a privilege of working in doing work in Rwanda for several years. And we were doing bearing witness and peace building work and reconciliation work of post genocide there and also colleagues with projects up in Uganda. And it was so.

I was so grateful that somehow, you know.

I've been trained in a model within a global organization I'm part of called the Zen Peacemakers that we always try to operate from a place of not knowing, bearing witness from not knowing, and let wisdom based action come from that. And I'm so grateful I came into Rwanda that way. And, and I feel like we're, you know, I felt at that time that in the west or in the global north, we're going to be coming to places like Rwanda to learn how to do peacemaking because they've been doing it ever since the genocide in 1996 in an unbelievably difficult situation there. And yet, you know, the wisdom and the knowledge of a lot of what we need has actually been held forever in these indigenous communities, but also learned in real time in more recent decades and years in some of these.

Less resourced places in the world and places that have suffered tremendous suffering. My friends who are working in Uganda talked about how the Ugandans would tell the NGOs there, stop coming here to fix us. If you want to come here to be with us and learn and work together, that's fine, but stop coming in here to try to fix us with your, your, your Western ideas or your Northern ideas.

I know you talk about your work one resilient earth in terms of being both regenerative and, and transdisciplinary. Could you, could you talk about that a little bit?

Yes, I. The way we define resilience as regenerative, according to us, is.

A way to break away from a more traditional definition of resilience where it's a lot about bouncing back to this past state or the state that has been disturbed or upset in different ways. And with a regenerative approach, we really want to emphasize the fact that any action we may be taking to build resilience does not aim at giving people the ability or the capabilities to get back to where they were before, but actually is meant to help restore themselves or their communities or their ecosystem in a way that it's actually in a livelier or healthier state than it was beforehand. And so you can take actions to build your own resilience in a kind of preventative way, like before anything has happened, which is the best way to do it, or you can do it after something has happened as a Disaster, for instance. But in both cases, the idea is to look at how can we do better than it was before? Like, what were the issues before that were actually creating some weaknesses of vulnerability that could be addressed in a more radical way. So looking really at the roots of this vulnerability, so that once you're resilience is enhanced to actually living in a better state, where you feel more healthy, more creative, more safe and less vulnerable in a very deep way. So that's for the regenerative part and on the transdisciplinary part, it has to do with our approach, where we weave together art, science, ancient wisdom and new technologies with can seem like absolutely opposite, and which still is for many people, like, how can you work with art and science? And how does it make sense? For many people, arts and science makes sense as long as you use arts to create beautiful images or to communicate about the science. But when you try and put them on an equal footing and really develop projects where you're interested in both the perspective brought in by the artist and the perspectives brought in by the scientist, then for some it becomes a bit difficult to manage. And we've done a project, for instance, with the University of Bonn two years ago, that was an art science lecture series on ecology and the metamorphosis of modern society. So where we had lectures given by social scientists that were juxtaposed with artworks from different artists, essentially women artists, and there were a few indigenous artists.

So for each theme we had a lecture and artworks that were juxtaposed. And then at the end we had a very open conversation with artists and also community organizers.

And scientists together, so that we could actually discuss all the dimensions of the topics.

And we used art in that framework, both for grounding in a way, so ensuring that the people who are part of the lecture series were not connecting to the topic only through their mind, but also through their emotions, and also in order to boost creativity, because by having fun with the artworks, to echo some of the questions that were being asked, or to provide a different source perspective through artworks and the questions that were being asked. There was also the possibility to come up with totally new research questions and practical questions for the audience on the different things that were being addressed. So that's one I would say, like the different science, I could explain also the link between modern science and indigenous peoples knowledge systems and how we can actually work in looking at those different ways of knowing and what they can bring to discussing a question. And then there is also the dimension of transdisciplinarity in the fact that we have lots of open conversations and open dialogues where there is no, how can I say that like the voices of everyone is valued equally. No matter if that one person has a PhD and the other doesn't. In the end we're just talking together about the same problems or if we facilitate dialogue. It's important to us that everybody feels valued and included in the conversation.

Yeah. To me, arts have such an amazing capacity for dissolving the boundaries between us. It accesses that place in us where we can connect with our hearts. And it's so powerful in that way. And you know, this blending of ancestral wisdom and modern science, I mean clearly, you know, a lot of the problems have been created by science and. But we're clearly going to have to use science for solutions as well. But there's that famous, you know, quote from Einstein that you can't solve a problem with the same mindset that created it. And one way is to get out of that mindset, I'm sure, is the arts. Right. And that we need this shift.

Our amazing cognitive abilities have gotten way ahead of us. Right. Disconnected from our bodies, disconnected from the heart. And therefore we've used this cognitive creativity to create a level of.

Scientific progress that's had so much collateral damage, that hasn't been stayed grounded in the heart. So it seems so important to use the arch to bring us back into the heart. I really love that. And also what you said about this regenerative approach to resilience, I think it's so important and a lot of people are, you know, that traditional bounce back idea. We have a resilience, the rubber band approach. Right. But some people say, well, we need to actually bounce forward or you know, there's the idea of post traumatic growth and so forth. And a lot of my work has been in the criminal justice system and restorative justice is such a wonderful model compared to retributive justice, but it still can restoring to what was, what was often is not acceptable or certainly not good. So I've always loved the model of transformative justice, which comes more from New Zealand and Australia and a bit from Canada where it's looking deep into the causes and conditions out of which conflicts and harm and things arise in the first place and be equally invested.

In the healing of everyone involved, even the so called offender, because we really want things to change. We have to take that deeper preventative. And from, from the perspective of transformative justice, when there's a harm or a crime or an incident, it's not just seen as a specific thing, but it's the world communicating to us that there's a need for change, healing, and transformation. So it's actually an opportunity for transformation. So I love that regenerative idea that while we're. And even maybe in a bigger global, something that could give us a little more of a positive mindset or a bit of hope is that, yeah, we're in this really tough situation and this is a huge opportunity for transformation because it seems like something has to really get our attention before we're willing to do the work. Right. So actually, even though we may be facing this real existential threat and real terrible human suffering at the same time, there's a huge opportunity for transformation and growth here.

Totally. And that's, to me, is far more motivating and gives far more hope. When people talk about the opportunities that come with climate change, and sometimes they have such a narrow vision of opportunities, so they're going to talk about business opportunities, of developing renewable energies. Some people even find opportunities with, like, the impacts of climate change. Well, you know, this coast is going to be a bit warmer, so it's going to be better for tourism. But, like, this is such a narrow vision of opportunity. If you really want to find an opportunity in this huge existential crisis we're in. Is this opportunity for transformation that you're talking about. It's this opportunity to say, you know, we've got so little to lose. Like, this is so bad already if we could actually do something to really change the way we're living, to really change the way we connect to one another, our relationship. Yeah. To other human beings, to other living beings, to time and to space, in a way that we address some of the root causes of so many of the issues we're facing today, so many of the injustices that are there and the lack of community that we're feeling and the isolation that so many of us are living, lack of creativity in the work that we have. If we could use this huge crisis as an opportunity to really get out of our ways in a positive way, then maybe we would have done something good out of it, because the other opportunities make no sense to me.

So one way you've articulated that deep transformation is decolonizing the future. Could you say a little bit about what you mean by that?

Sure, yeah. And there are many ways to understand that sentence, I think, but one of them that is that people may relate to quite rapidly is when you think about the future, the first image that comes to you about the future is usually very much in some kind of a continuity of a number of visions of progress, of technology development.

And if you're on the optimistic side, so you'll see, like, huge cities, maybe going to Mars, flying cars. If you're on a more dystopian side or more pessimistic side, you may also see the continuation of today's society, but, you know, with the impacts of climate change and ecological crisis in the background. So it's going to be much more dystopian. Maybe you've got, like, masses of climate refugees coming around, cities that are somehow in disarray, things that are broken, violence all over the place. But in both cases, somehow it's been a lot of an extrapolation of the world that, you know, you've just made it somehow better, according oftentimes to some kind of technological vision of the future, like technology is better or you've made it worse. But in both cases.

There is a kind of a past dependency in your vision of the future from what you know from the present, and a number of values that you think are either positive or negative according to what has been taught to us since industrial revolution. That is itself grounded in colonization.

In the sense of the relationships that we have to nature and to one another.

And the exploitation of the Earth as resources and of other human beings as resources. So just becoming aware that our visions of the future are usually extrapolation or projections based on a certain continuity opens up the possibility of maybe having different visions of the future that would not be aligned with this kind of colonial continuity, and allows us also to maybe question why we think this way in one way or another, and why we often believe that it's not just a vision, it's just the way the future is going to be. So oftentimes there is also this idea that we, when we think about the future, it becomes the future to us, so that actually the future does not exist, but we. We have a vision of the future that is the future to us. And so by realizing where those visions come from, how much they were, somehow we're conditioned to look at the future a certain way and how much we tend to believe that those visions are the future. There is the possibility to, well, come up with different visions of the future and to understand those visions as visions, not as realities according to which we should make plans. And that's something that's important, especially for people working on climate change, I feel, because most of the people who work on climate change know about the projections and most of the work that we do on climate Change is related to different projections in terms of CO2 emission growth and how it's going to affect.

Different variables being crop production to biodiversity, rising diseases. But those, again, are projections based on what we know today, if things continue basically according to certain scenarios. We've got a few variations in scenarios, but there are projections. Again, they are not the future. The future is the result of all the actions that we bring together today as a collective.

And realizing this, realizing the power of divisions in creating a future, realizing the fact that we could come up with very different visions of the future that would certainly translate into different realities at some point, is a way to help decolonize the future. And then we can also go one step further and think about the fact that we could maybe try and live in the present without having a vision of the future. Because that would be the one that that would be like the last, the least.

Intrusive way of dealing with the future. Like, we would not be colonizing the future conceptually, would not be getting there in any way, would not even try to, but would be really working from, you know, on the basis of values and intuition and permanent conversations with different parties involved without a pretty fine vision of where we want to go and how we should work towards that. And I have no idea if we can do this in practice, but I find it the most fascinating thing in terms of really becoming comfortable with emergence and the possibility to constantly innovate.

Yeah, that's a really fascinating, profound and deep question. Whether human beings, as human beings, we can live in the present without needing to envision. You know, many have described us as teleological human beings. We can only step into. That's what we can envision or visualize. So that's getting pretty down to the DNA of who we are. But yes, I think that idea, you know, we have Otto Swarmer on the summit who talks about leading from an emergent future. Like, you know, so letting, you know, instead of us projecting our vision, being called into what. What. What wants to emerge. Right. It's tapping into a different intelligence altogether. So I think there's a profound, deep question. And even before that, the more the first part you described, even if we are going to be envisioning a future, in a way we think about things, I think the need to recognize that we have a lot of conditioning in us, that it's just a human condition where any species, we have this biological imperative for survival. And so that influences a lot of things. We also are conscious beings and have the capacity to transcend that, but to the extent that we haven't has led to all this extractive, exploitative, colonizing kind of mindsets. And if we don't change that, then we're just going to replicate that at whatever level. Even if we envision this great technological solution, it's just going to replicate that mindset. And so in order to change, to recognize we have that conditioning and we can't, wishful thinking isn't going to make it go away. So I know you also talk about the need both.

To be in a process of learning and also a process of unlearning.

And.

And you talk about the importance of creating diverse learning communities. So I wonder if you could talk about that parallel process of unlearning and then learning and learning in community.

Sure, yeah. And it's directly related to this.

To this ability to start understanding our own biases and conditioning, as you mentioned.

Yeah. I think with this.

As we become aware, first of all, of how we use the future, for instance, and all the biases we have in the assumptions that we make about the future, which to me has happened a lot through a capability called futures literacy. I don't know if you're familiar with this approach, but it's a futures literacy. Yeah, it's been developed by Rio Miller at UNESCO. And it's a very fun, I mean, there's like a whole process, I would say, thought process you go through. And it's a very interesting way, working with a group to try and deconstruct your different visions of the future.

And start becoming aware of your assumptions and how they tie into the biases that you have, the conditioning that you have. And so the first step towards the unlearning is first to identify, I would say, the biases and the conditioning. And it's much easier to do it in a group than to do it on your own. And I would say the more diverse group, the easier it's going to be to realize the biases, because in the group, you tend to somehow confirm each other's biases by all having the same. But if you're in a very diverse group, you're going to have very unusual comments or ways of looking at things or experiences that are really going to help you question what you thought was normal or what you thought was obvious or was common knowledge. And.

So seeing how these exercises works best in a group, which I had used already when I was working at the un, but that we do through workshops that we hold regularly with a colleague and friend, Luz, who knows about with futures literacy expert, there is Something extremely exciting about those dynamics. And this capacity to first identify the biases. I think the unlearning takes is painful because you. It was each bias you unlearn, you come to realize how much you were wrong, in a way, how much it has still, like, determined the number of decisions you've made in your life, what all of those implications are for you, your community, people around you, or whatever you thought was right in the past. So there is this kind of pretty painful deconstruction of a number of biases that often have become almost part of your identity. And again, in that case, it's a group makes a lot of sense, because if we go through this kind of learning process together, we can also support one another in. In through the pain or through the discomfort or through the difficulty of unlearning. And then if you want to learn, maybe ways of being in the world, looking at the world, interacting with the world, that could be more relevant and more generative and more positive and more regenerative, too. Then again, like a diverse group is important because oftentimes you're not going to find them necessarily in your vicinity. Sometimes, yes. I mean, if you're going to talk to some members of your community that you've never talked to in the past because you were not necessarily realizing the wealth of experience and knowledge that they have, thinking about elders in the community or people who are working directly with nature, for instance. But then today, we've got this. One of the greatest thing with this technology of being able to communicate with people from all over the world. And so oftentimes just being able to connect with people whose ideas resonate with you, whose artworks resonate with you, who are doing, you know, sharing different ways of looking at the world. That may be uncomfortable in the beginning because. Because if you are really new, but then they are going to help you move maybe to a different understanding of things. And so the relearning process also works great in communities that are open, that are flourishing, that are very diverse. And not to say that.

It'S very easy. I mean, it takes time, it takes resources to do, but it's absolutely necessary. And in this relearning process in community.

There is also the very important aspect of becoming aware of all the relationships that many repair at a deep level. So we're talking about indigenous people's knowledge, for instance. And.

It'S important also to realize that if you really want to be a learning community, we need to put in place everything that's needed to repair the damaged relationship that have that other result of colonization that are the result of lack of acknowledgment and actual action, you know, for restitution or reparations that are needed. So it's not just going to be a very easy necessary exchange of knowledge. That has to be the conditions in place so that there is reciprocity. That to me is also an integral part of this joint learning.

Wow. Yeah. It seems.

From my experience there are many different models of kind of community work. Whether it's Bohmian dialogue or communities of practice, scopex, community building, the theory U work. They've all discovered that the process always works much better. The more diverse the group is, the more diverse you can make the group politically, culturally, ethically, racially, you get much better results. Yeah.

That'S something we should pay attention to. There's some human wisdom there of what works. Absolutely. And I think really important that you brought. It's not just about bringing a diverse group of people together and coming into a shared space as if we're all on equal footing because there is historical.

Trauma and colonization and disadvantagement and, and we, we need to also create a safe space that handles those things as well to then create the space where we can enter into that kind of shared unlearning and learning. Yeah, really, really fascinating approach. So.

You know, I'm wondering even about your journey in this work. The range of how we've all as human beings related to the reality of human caused climate change and global warming over recent decades and even presently is from one extreme still complete denial to some kind of naive optimism about technological fixes to maybe a more cautious optimism about, you know, ways we can come together to find a way to do both the mitigation and adaptation to even, you know, kind of on the other end of like Jim Bendel's work of say, you know, it's kind of too late and we need to really talks about deep adaptation and almost taking like a hospice approach. We are at the end of humanity. And so there's that full spectrum. And often just in when people awaken to the reality of the awareness of climate change, it can bring up a lot of anxiety and fear and grief.

I know for many, many decades Joanna Macy and her work around species loss and species extinction and her work the Council of All Beings process and her the danger of nuclear war and all that, she encouraged people to be willing to go into that grief and that the energy will need for transformation is on the other side of that grieving. I'm wondering what the journey for you has Been like.

Working on these issues for decades and with your colleagues and other activists and how do you take care of yourself and what's the emotional journey and how do we keep ourselves resilient so we don't fall into despair.

Or just go into avoidance because it's too much?

Yeah, it's been a journey. At the personal level, it's not been easy at all.

I started working on climate change when I was about 22, 23 years old, and I was not prepared. I mean, strangely, I had been working on development for a while. It was bad enough already. I remember working on resource depletion and poverty and major.

Diseases like hiv, AIDS or malaria. But I remember climate change being like another level, like had no idea. We're basically facing extinction, you know, in a, in a time period that was not very clear for anyone, but that was actually going to have major impact on my life, on the life of my possible children. And, and I remember feeling extremely.

Yeah, worried, anxious, stressed out.

And not knowing how to channel that energy in the beginning at all because I didn't want to. It was at a time where people were not that aware that yet. And I didn't necessarily want my relatives to be weighed down by knowing of it to the same extent as I was because I just didn't really know how to deal with it. And I was one of the lucky ones in the sense that I was working on the topic so I could have this feeling that I was taking action and that my actions in my daily life actually helping in some ways to address the issue.

But there was no. Yeah, I was feeling extremely isolated. There was no support in the workplace. Strangely, like, most people didn't talk about how they felt about the crisis. I mean, they were very focused on their work, engineers, financials. So the emotional part of it was not mentioned at all. I remember in my offices, whether at French Development Agency or even at the un, it was not really a topic how we felt about the crisis. And so it was really hard.

Really, really hard. I mean, I suffered from depression, suicidal ideation, really took it strongly.

And it was in a way, by truly allowing the fear in and despair.

And that I, that I started to feel better about it. I remember at some point not fighting anymore against all those huge emotions and just allowing them to like, flow me over totally and, and go through all the visions that I wanted to keep at bay. So I really went through, like, all the possibilities of how the world could end and what it could look like and how it would all stop.

And there was a Strange calmness. Beyond that, there was this feeling that, okay, yeah, I'm accepting all the possible futures that will come with this crisis. And I'm also fully accepting the fact that I don't have as much control as I wish I would.

And it left me in a position where I was feeling much more calm and I was also feeling like I could really do what matters to me in the sense that there's less responsibility weighing on my shoulder. I was in a way feeling more free to do what really mattered to me now, because worst case scenarios, I would rather die doing something I love. And if I don't like, I die, I would rather do something I love anyway. So it gave me also this strength or this courage to really start this organization and to go for an approach that is different from the others approach, that is transdisciplinary and regenerative.

And also to start adding some.

Events and do some of our work on emotional and mental health and climate change. So we hold like climate workers circle on a weekly basis for people to come and talk about all the emotions and feelings and sensations that they have because of the climate crisis, whether it's in their personal or professional lives, in a space that is as safe as possible, where everything is welcome and we can hear it all. And we were just here to support people to express themselves and listen to what is being expressed. And so we do it for climate workers and we also have a youth climate circle, so for younger people to express themselves freely. And I feel this type of group work, which is pretty basic, I mean, we're just a group of people coming together, listening to one another has been very helpful and transformative for many people who didn't have to go in a way as low as I have been. But they feel supported, they feel, feel held, feel listened to, and.

It builds all the resilience to keep on doing the work in the way.

Wow. Well, thank you so much, Laureen, for sharing. Being willing to share so personally your own journey, it's really encouraging and actually gives a lot of hope. It's very empowering, actually, and that you're modeling this.

So that we can do the work that, that we go through these deep experiences and we can do the work to hold others so maybe they don't have to go to that same depth. But it, but really it still is about feeling. It's about entering into the heart and creating safe spaces where we can really do the harder part of this work.

Because I think we all know that that deep transformation happens when we're willing to feel what we're feeling. We have a society today that's so. Especially in the west, and especially my own country in the US that's so enculturated around not feeling. You know, we have the worst opioid epidemic in history because people don't want to feel right. And somehow we've been inculturated to think, you know, don't. You don't have to feel. And that's like shutting off our humanity and our wisdom. And it is painful to feel. But there's something in psychology called the pain paradox. We instinctually withdraw from pain, avoid pain. But we all know that real transformation's on the other side of being willing to go through and be with it. And you've modeled that so powerfully. And thank you for being a pioneer in this work and for the work you're doing with One Resilient Earth. How can people find out about One Resilient Earth? What's the website there?

It's simple. It's1resilientearth.org so it's pretty easy to find. And we've got all the details about our projects and the work that we're doing. Possibility to support us is there too. So, yeah, don't hesitate to visit the website.

Great. Thank you. I encourage everyone to do so. Thank you very much for your time today. You've been very generous, and we're so happy to have you be part of this summit.

Thank you, Fleet. It was a honor for me to be able to be part of the show. Thank you.

Thank you. Be well.

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