In this conversation, Dr. Faith Kearns, author of Getting to the Heart of Science Communication, debunks a bunch of myths about how communication works to change hearts and minds, including the concept of the “deficit myth”, where audiences are passive and rational, and experts are objective “information provisioners.” What happens when we account for the messiness of actual humans in communicating about wildfire, water, resources, and climate? The punchline is: climate change is not a technical problem to fix. It will require figuring out how to work with humans, and communication is a field of study that can really help us with that.
Shownotes
- Dr. Kearns’ website
- Getting to the Heart of Science Communication book
- High Country News piece on fire at the Grand Canyon
- The concept of “pluralistic ignorance” in climate politics– we perceive others’ concern to be lower than it is, which negatively affects our own willingness to engage
TRANSCRIPT:
KEARNS: I am a person who truly believes that people are good. Going into very rural communities, going into whatever the setting is, right? I am always pleasantly surprised by how wonderful people are.
RAY: Welcome to Climate Magic, where we explore the emotional life of climate politics. I'm your host, Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray, chair of the Environmental Studies department at Cal Poly Humboldt.
Today I speak with Dr. Faith Kearns, author of an award winning book that teaches us how to center emotions in science communication. It's called Getting to the Heart of Science Communication: A Guide to Engagement.
Dr. Kearns has spent decades working directly as a climate practitioner with communities as part of the UC Cooperative Extension Program, and now in rural Arizona on water and climate issues. She writes and talks about water, climate, wildfire and people and has been published in the High Country News, New Republic, On Being, Bay Nature, and more.
She has developed science communication projects at the Ecological Society of America. She's managed a wildfire research and outreach center at UC Berkeley. She bridges science and policy advocacy efforts at the Pew Charitable Trusts, and has led science communication efforts with the California Institute for Water Resources in the UC Division of AG and Natural Resources, or Cooperative. She is currently the Director of Research Communication for the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University.
She and I talked about the stickiness of human communication in dealing with climate change. We explored the ways that scientists are expected to be objective and have no emotion, and how that expectation has really undermined progress on climate.
She talks about her beautiful book, Getting to the Heart of Science Communication, and how important it is to honor people's traumas, experiences with, and personal expertise about nature and climate, and to build trust and relationships instead of just bulldozing in with information you think they need.
If you want to know how you can communicate better to protect democracy and the planet, then this is the episode for you.
Faith, welcome to the show.
KEARNS: Thank you so much for having me, Sarah. I'm excited.
RAY: You're a science communicator. Tell us what that is. What is the field of science or climate communication?
KEARNS: Yeah. So that's a good way to open things.
So science communication to me I have a really broad tent definition.
And the idea is basically communicating scientific or technical information with non-technical audiences. And the thing that I always like to add to that is that's most of us most of the time. Like, I think there can be this general sense that because you're trained in science, somehow you understand all science. And that's absolutely not the case, especially today.
Right? Things are so specialized and so really we're all sort of the recipients of science communication information all the time, which I think is important to say to technically trained people that, you know, you should also be able to judge what feels like good science communication because you get to participate in it from both directions, right? Something like Covid or whatever makes it really clear that, like, I'm an ecologist and not an epidemiologist, right?
So this to me kind of levels the playing field that, you know, we're all sort of participating in this science communication ecosystem for sure.
RAY: Yeah. And one could even say in this moment any kind of expertise-communication, you know, counts, given the attack on expertise in any field.
KEARNS: Yeah. Agreed. Agreed.
RAY: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I love how you say that, that this is not when you think about the field of science communication, you're not just thinking about this in terms of who's doing the communication act, but that we're all in a constant dual role of the recipient of an act and a producer of an act. And this is not, just one, uni-directional, so to speak.
KEARNS: Definitely not.
RAY: I wanted to ask– you write a little bit about objectivity and subjectivity in science. And I just want, you know, again, kind of like a background debate within the science field for a lay audience. What is this tension between science and emotions or this idea of objectivity versus subjectivity?
KEARNS: In terms of thinking about objectivity and subjectivity. You know, there, there again, is this tradition, I guess I would say within the sciences or within academia writ large that, you know, we are the observers, right? Like when you're in, you're sort of wearing your expertise hat, your scientific hat, you're an observer and you're able to be objective about a situation.
And I think that has been challenged in many different ways.
But those conversations and sort of battles, I would say, still continue to this day, which really amazes me because I do think that so many people have accepted that, you know, objectivity is not really even possible.
I mean, I think within the sciences you might have methods and processes that can render things slightly more objective. Right? The processes and things that you go through, can be rote. There's all sorts of things that you do to try to counteract your biases, but at the end of the day, you know, the kinds of questions you ask. How you respond to those, all of those things, are subjective.
And, and I think, yeah.
RAY: How you even interpret data that's coming.
KEARNS: Yeah, totally. I mean, the original question you asked and lots of fields are going through this reckoning. And I would say, you know, particularly journalism, has gone through this and I would say is still in the process as well as like, you know, do we have to do this “Both sides”, do we have to do this, you know, “I'm objective. I'm not being affected by any of the things that I'm writing about.” Right. And so, yeah, I think it's it's to be determined.
But at least from my personal experience and lots of people I know, I think they would never claim to be objective.
RAY: Yeah, well, there are two things I want to pull out of there. This kind of like, like repulsion about emotion and what it does to truth, like emotion somehow gets in the way of truth. And so I want to have you pull on that a little bit.
Not just about “scientists need to be objective,” but what's wrong with emotion? Also, this kind of like, you know, like you were saying about the news media, this kind of a pretense of objectivity by having two sides or something or not being biased and, and the sort of slippery slope or this sort of what in academia we call relativism, right? The slippery slope of, well, if we decide that there's no such thing as objectivity, then everything is equally true.
We're now, enjoying the results of that logic in this kind of posed fact, post-truth moment, truth social, all these kinds of things, sort of claiming truth. And in fact, when they're the most extremely biased ever.
Right? So this ability to claim truth only happens when you've, kind of eliminated the grounds for any truth and objectivity to begin with.
So do we want to claw back some objectivity?
KEARNS: I mean, I.
RAY: So there's two questions there.
We can, like, go wherever you want, but, you know, you got me going, you know? Yeah.
KEARNS: No, I'll start with the objectivity, you know, sort of piece first and then we can move into the emotions. But I think where I've landed on objectivity is more around transparency.
So I don't, I don't think of objectivity as being truth or not truth.
That's sort of a I don't know, it doesn't factor into that discussion for me. I think what factors in more being transparent about your positionality, you know, and not again, another academic term, but this idea that, like, you are a person situated in a time and a place and, and a body and all of those things and that does inform your worldview. And it's wild to think otherwise.
You know, where I sit definitely affects everything , how I interpret the world, what I find problematic, what I don't. Right. And so being transparent about that is what I think is more of the answer to the objectivity problem.
Like, in my own mind, I do not subscribe to the idea that objectivity equals truth, because, well, we can get into that, right? Because it leads right into the next piece and sort of where I started with the book, which is just that, you know, subjective, slash your emotional world is just as real and valid as any other world out there.
And that was where I the impetus in many ways for the book I ended up writing came from was just this idea that, you know, scientists and, and the people we were working with… Right. Because I come from a very, community engaged background, worked in UC cooperative extension system forever.
And what I was finding over and over again was that scientists in particular, the scientific enterprise, wanted to view themselves as objective and then view, quote unquote, audiences as rational.
And if you attended a community meeting about, say, wildfire or water quality in California or probably anywhere in the world, you would realize that emotion rules the day.
There is no way of saying that isn't what happens. People get very heated. People cry, people yell, people. You know? So what I was trying to say was not whether emotion should or shouldn't be present, but simply that it is.
And so pretending otherwise was, I think, getting in the way of doing kind of science communication, climate communication work because wishing for a world in which people are rational and objective is wishing for a totally different world absent of humanity, right. Like it's just not a thing. So I think that.
RAY: Oh, you mean AI. So we can have that!
KEARNS: Yeah, I get, I guess I don't know, but I.
RAY: I just jokingly I'm joking.
KEARNS: I know, so I think that's, you know, to me that's that's where, you know, where I am with it is like we better deal with people's emotions. And I think we see that today more than ever.
You know that in many ways, I wish that what I had been thinking about and writing about for the past ten, 15, 20 years was not relevant any longer. But unfortunately, it’s even more relevant.
RAY: Well, that kind of flight, I mean, I joked about, I but, this kind of, prior to that or prior to our current moment, one could just say, oh, we need to correct the notion that we are rational humans and make sure that we acknowledge the fact that we're emotional humans and the decisions that we make and the way we behave in the world, and how we do things at the collective and individual level, are really emotional more than they are rational.
That's one thing. But then to say that we are fleeing from the human in into an AI world is actually, you know, kind of where we are. And so you're right, your work is even more relevant.
And we are even at a more scary precipice of that, one could say.
KEARNS: I would say so, yeah.
RAY: So how are scientists feeling about climate change? The people studying this stuff?
KEARNS: Yeah.
RAY: How are folks feeling about it who are in your milieu, who you're, you know, trying to work with all the time?
KEARNS: The scientific community has obviously gone through a reckoning around emotions in the last probably decade. I mean, I think we started to see a lot of expression of emotion from climate scientists around 2015, plus or minus a couple of years. And, you know, there are tons of articles out there about how climate scientists feel, books as well.
I think there are people who are depressed and feel a little bit more on the nihilistic side. I think there are people who are depressed but may be feeling hopeful, or want to feel hopeful, like there is a big discourse about whether we're hopeful or not within the climate world, climate people, climate workers. Right. That's a sort of, it's been a constant discussion for quite some time.
It's been an interesting couple of years. I've encountered more and more people who are doing climate work who aren't coming at it from science. They're coming at it from all sorts of realms. Right? They're coming at it from business. They're coming at it from their background in nonprofits, but they want to do climate work. And so I think, you know, that's a really interesting and important indicator about the general sense of how important climate change is and how many people need to be working on it.
RAY: Well, would you say that's a sign of success of climate communication that they've got –somehow it's been successful to get more people involved from all the sectors. I mean, that wasn't that what climate scientists were saying at the very beginning? We need everyone involved in all the sectors and so that if that's actually what's happening, that's that's a sign of communication success, I mean.
KEARNS: I think a sign of communication success. And probably not to give too much credit to the communication side, to just say that the challenges of climate change are really apparent to people these days. Right? Like, I live in Arizona and luckily we've had not a super hot summer, but last year it was just relentless days and Phoenix above 100, 110, nights that were in the 90s, things like that. And so I think the more people experience those kinds of things, you know, their feelings about the urgency of climate change are escalating.
RAY: You obviously saw that there was something missing in the field of climate communication. All these people think that we're all rational creatures, but we're really not. Tell us about Getting to the Heart of Climate Communication. Your book. Why did you write it? What was missing?
KEARNS: Sure. So, I mean, I can start a little bit with the origin story because I think it will resonate with folks in. Yeah. Which is just basically that in, you know, around 2005 or so, I was working at a wildfire research center at UC Berkeley, and we were, I think it was 2007. We were up in Mendocino County for a fire safety demonstration day, a thing that happens at fairgrounds where you kind of go out, show people how their roofs can burn down or how, you know, their gutter can burn or their deck can burn.
And as part of that day, I was there with a couple colleagues. We had sort of given a couple talks at this community meeting, and I could feel in the room, it was kind of this big fairgrounds warehouse. I could feel as the technical talks went on, that something was very amiss in the room. And I didn't know what it was.
And, you know, I was 30, I was not very long out of graduate school. So this was a very formative experience for me. I was really lucky because for some reason, I ended up talking to this guy sitting next to me after these technical presentations, and he was practically in tears and he just basically told me in words I would use today, but he didn't, and I didn't have at the time, that our work and the presentation of it had retraumatized him, because guess what had happened that we paid no attention to at that time. That community had just experienced a wildfire a couple months before that. And, you know, given where we were in communication and sort of scientific presentation in that time frame, we're talking really 20 years ago at this point, and where we were in the wildfire conversation in California, it just didn't even occur to any of us– me– who's probably the only person that would have occurred to really think about the effect of going into a community and talking about all these things that you could do to prevent your home from burning and a wildfire to a town that had just been through a wildfire, without us acknowledging that fire had happened without, you know, just. And so what he essentially told me was the way that presentation had come across, it felt blaming and shaming, almost. Because it was like, oh, we should have been prepared in all of these ways, which is our fault. Yeah. So it certainly wasn't our intention to do that at all.
But, you know, that was when I really started to go, wow, okay. If we're going to be working on this kind of stuff, we actually need a different sort of container for it. And, you know, just to be real, like from through my own experience, I had entered a pretty deep psychotherapy process in graduate school. And so I was about seven years into that in a deeply relational, sort of deeply psychoanalytic process.
And so, you know, I think it started to really occur to me at that time like, oh, this is trauma, you know, and this is how trauma is showing up around this issue. And again, this is very normative today. But 20 years ago, it wasn't even ten years ago, it really was a difficult thing to talk about in a lot of spaces.
It's really only become in the last few years that it's like acceptable really to talk about, you know. And so I spent some years just kind of doing a lot of writing and journaling and trying to figure out what I was experiencing professionally.
So that was really what it emerged from, was like, okay– if you are somebody who is working on these deeply emotional, often contentious, because I also work on water issues in Arizona now, but a long time in California, I had worked on fisheries issues– all of these things are deeply personal, deeply emotional, involve often a lot of conflict and often a lot of trauma. And those were tools that the science communication world … it was nowhere to be found. There was nothing. People had this. There was just nothing. Right.
And so I ended up kind of talking to, I did a bunch of reading and it started honestly with the medical literature and reading about how doctors cope with really emotional encounters with patients, and that was one of the only places I could find anything that felt resonant with my own experiences.
And so I just started doing a lot of that kind of thing. I, you know, eventually moved into a more psychotherapy kind of lens. I started doing a bunch to learn how to listen better, because I think that was the other big part of science communication. Like nobody ever talked about listening. It was just like how to give a better talk, how to, you know, like how to give your messages and not and actually the sort of messaging, framing was always like, here's your three points. Deliver them, deliver them, deliver them. Do not veer off message. Right. Which for the kind of work I was doing was just like, that does not work. You know, that might work on a CNN interview, I guess. But, you know, it certainly falls apart the second you're in an actual relating conversation with another human being.
So that was really where it came from.
And then I started delving a lot into just other what I would say are practice-based fields, and that was where the real difference came out, was there was a lot of literature about practitioner work and how it's different than researcher work.
Right. And so lawyers– also practitioners. Right. Like any of these psychotherapists– also practitioners, it's where the sort of rubber meets the road of the theoretical side. Right. And so I ended up kind of having to take that practitioner work and then sort of theorize it in some ways.
RAY: Yeah. The other way around. Yeah.
KEARNS: Yeah, yeah. It was really just, it was really just like, to do my work every day. I needed a different set of tools, and I ended up having to make those up myself.
RAY: And that was what the book was. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I love it. I just I mean, that whole story is so powerful, even in my own classrooms, which is where I think of as a practitioner space for me. Right? My students and even in the classroom. This is kind of like the models of communication that they're absorbing from the world around them. And that I've absorbed from the world around me.
Is that kind of CNN model, like you say, your arguments until your righteousness, and your credibility overwhelm anybody else's ability to disagree or respond, and then you've won.
KEARNS: Yeah, yeah. And I will say, you know, I think that is a great example because when it comes to science communication, a lot of the science communication work used to be especially done by teachers, by university professors. And so they 100% exported that teaching model to science communication practice. At the same time that even in the classroom, people were going, this model doesn't work right.
RAY: This deficit model, is what you call the deficit model. Yeah, yeah. Yes. And can you say, can you say what that is a little bit. I mean in both the classroom and in, in community spaces with, with so-called experts.
KEARNS: So the idea, right, is that people are in deficit. They don't have information. And if they just had that information they would do the right thing. Whatever the right thing is. Right.
Like, and sometimes people would be really specific about what the right thing was. But a lot of times it was just this like, “let me provide information in such a way that it hopefully leads you to some conclusion that I maybe have, but I don't want to like actually say it to you.”
But, you know, the basic idea was, was very much this idea that you're, you know, you're in a classroom setting and you're delivering information and the learner, the listener, is in a passive role, is just sitting there, is completely free of preconceived notions, other forms of information, other sources of information. Right.
That was the other thing that was so interesting about that model. Was it's almost like the blank slate learner, which again, I think, you know, for what I do, again, there is absolutely no way to think people come to you as a blank slate when you're talking about water issues in the western U.S. or wildfire. People have so many other ideas and other people that they're hearing from.
So, you know, in every direction that sort of teaching and deficit model approach, doesn't seem to really be working for anyone, although, like, you know, I still think there is room for information delivery, like information is clearly important.
We're finding out every day, how harmful it is to not have it. I don't like to deemphasize how important information is. It's just not a good theory of change on its own. Right. There's got to be something else.
RAY: I love that. I sometimes wonder with my students when they come in the room and they want to be educators or they want to be in communication fields, that they come in with that deficit model, like if just people would know more and I can be the medium through which people would know more. But the psychology part of it, or the human part of it, or the relational part of it, as you described it, is way messier than that.
KEARNS: And, you know, I want to say about the information deficit and information provision, it's really hard. I mean, I have to fight it in myself every day, right? Like because I think part of it is that the tools and the way that we have learned to work, it's really, really hard to get outside of that, you know, to do the type of communication work that I'm talking about is risky. It requires a lot of support, and we don't always have… It's slow. We don't have the set up to do it.
I mean, that's why I am such a huge fan of the cooperative extension system. Even though it has its own challenges. But the idea at least, is that you've got people who are embedded, technically trained, embedded in communities, part of a community. And you know that you really are in conversation and in relationship with people.
And again, that approach to me came from my own psychotherapy process. I've never changed so much in my freaking life. As I did through, I won't say how many, but a very long time of psychotherapy, and it was because of my relationship with my therapist that was the transformative container. Nothing else could have happened outside of that relationship that we developed. So many hard things happened within that container.
And so I started to really ask myself, like, you know, what would it take to have that type of transformation within a different context?
And I still, you know, struggle with what that really means and what that really looks like, because therapy is such a specific process.
But I do think there are lots of pieces around listening around, working with conflict, around thinking about trauma, all of those things that can come into play in thinking about how to reframe what we think of as teaching work, communication work, information transfer work, outreach, knowledge production, all of those things, you know, that they don't happen.
RAY: Social movements.
KEARNS: All of it. They don't happen outside the human relationships. Period. And those are messy.
RAY: Yeah. I think that the messiness is what has people fleeing from them. Right. And that's why we're getting therapy in, in our AI and whatever. There's positives to that, I don't want to knock that, but I do, I do I love what you're saying here about the messiness factor and how we have to take it slow. And I do think that this is like when we think about what in a moment of AI, does education still have to offer people?
Why would you, so go to education, whether it's K through 12 or higher education or anything. Well, it's just sort of like learning this messy work stuff, you know? And I sometimes think that, you know, the unlearning that I have to do to, like you said, every day, it's a struggle.
Every day I'm in a situation with my students where I'm thinking, is my job here to teach them something? Or is my job to create the conditions for them to have relationships with each other and that is a radically different task. And if you're thinking in like your setting where you're described, you know, this technician, how to prevent fires from consuming your house workshop at the Cooperative Extension event.
Right. Like you think about these settings where like, is my job here to teach this group something? Or is my job here to have a relationship with them and to build trust? It means that your communication approach is going to be completely different. And I think that we are at a moment, a threshold moment, that you're calling us to. It's beautiful to say, let's shift what we're doing here.
KEARNS: Yeah. I mean, I think you have to do both, right? You really have to do both. I mean, I can speak to holding my own workshops, right? Training workshops on this kind of material where I have to do both. I have to find the way to be present and in relationship, and only go as far as a particular group could go.
I mean, I could tell a very interesting story about working with a group of technical folks on trauma informed communication and how much work it took to bring that group together, because half of them were very interested and the other half was repelled.
And I actually had to stop halfway, not even halfway. If I'm lukcy, I was 15 or 20 minutes into an hour and a half long, you know, set of talking and doing, things. And it was actually that the group that I had to try to unite, I had to do it by sort of stopping everybody and just saying, what is going on in this room right now? How do you guys want to proceed? Because what I'm doing right now isn't working.
And that shifted everything. But it requires, I mean, I could only do it at this stage in my career. For one thing. Right? So I'm, I'm what I guess at this point has gone past mid-career and probably into a more senior position. I'm, you know, in my early 50s and I couldn't have done this kind of work. It's incredibly skillful work.
RAY: And vulnerable. Right. It takes vulnerability. And yeah, sometimes it requires some, I don't know if power is the right word, but some, you know, sense of gravitas or credibility to be able to be vulnerable in a kind of setting like that, where it could undermine your entire project.
KEARNS: And to have people take you seriously while you're doing it right, to have enough. That you're able to do that. Yeah. Which is also not just resting on laurels. It's also literally doing that relationship building work in that setting. You know, and so it's both like I'm giving information, but it's highly experiential. And the people there have to be ready for it. So it's a dance.
RAY: I'm struck by what you're saying about the kind of credibility of the communicator with the where you're going there is so much reminding me of teaching.
KEARNS: You're talking makes so much sense to me. Just because, like I said, all this early second work was professors. And so of course, they were going to, you know, use their teaching approaches.
RAY: So that leads me to another question. And I'm going to get there in a second, which because it's been like lurking in the back of my mind as you've been talking, one of the questions I get all the time in my classes when I'm talking about the emotional side of communication and this all this stuff about relationships being so important. And our purpose here is to relate. I have this chapter in my own book that's called “Be Less Right and More in Relationship.” I have come to an awareness about this through your work and through, you know, my own experiences in the classroom and watching people flail and divide and divide and divide around climate and climate justice and the climate deniers.
So, you know, it seems to me like there's a lot of diagnosis here around relationship being a primary precondition or a infrastructure required in order for there to be transformation around climate change, around any kind of science. So what would you say to that student who's in the middle of learning all this and says to me, how do I get people to change on climate?
KEARNS: Yeah. Are you asking me to answer that question or.
RAY: I know, I mean what do you say to somebody who says that. Right. Because I'm.
KEARNS: Hard.
RAY: You know, I mean, I think we mostly are walking around saying we got to change everybody's minds.
KEARNS: I never say that. But, but yes, I think that.
RAY: Not you.
KEARNS: I just don't because I, because I do think because the unlearning process is so important, even the way we talk to ourselves in our own heads has to reflect the change that we kind of want to make. Right? And so there's all sorts of words that I try not to use like “audience.”
Right. But it's very, very hard because the normative science communication literature in conversation refers to a lot of things that I completely, fundamentally think are not where we need to be.
So I will say on the issue of sort of how do we get people to change, right? So this goes to the heart, I think, of where some of the challenges can be. And I just had this conversation with a colleague I really respect about a week ago where we were talking about behavior change.
Right. And so I think for a lot of people who don't per se, specialize in the kinds of things you and I specialize in, behavior change is a really tempting place to go.
And, and I think a lot of people who don't know very much about psychology and particularly psycho, you know, the more therapeutic practice side, the clinician side of things, will encounter psychology literature, particularly academics. And the first thing that they'll start to think is behavior change is where it's all at, especially if you've been coming to this work in the last decade or two, when there was a parallel focus very much on incentivizing and nudging and, you know, all that literature that existed exists around social marketing and this, that and the other. And what those things are trying to do to my mind, right. It's like a cognitive behavioral therapy type approach where you really are just going, this behavior is problematic, and I want to change it.
And that for me holds a lot of problems because it goes back to this objectivity piece and it goes back to this idea that, like, I am an objective observer who can decide what everybody else needs to be doing, and particularly you need to change your behavior around X, Y, or Z.
So you know, to me that is an incredibly limiting look at human psychology. And I think it's yeah, we've wasted a lot of time in that space.
Sorry to anybody who does that work, but that just is how I feel. I mean, I think there probably are places where it's useful. But I think we're also seeing the limits of it already. Right? Like, there was so much behavior change focus around changing your light bulbs and recycling and all these things. And the people who did that, did that, right. And now we're in a much stickier place where I couldn't even identify a behavior that somebody needs to, I don't even know. Like I just find that whole framework so limiting.
I don't even know how else to say it. So I think the richness to me is that there's a whole sort of psychoanalytic field out there that is much more challenging, particularly for scientific types, to want to take up because it's messy, you know, and it get it can get into metaphysics, it can get into all sorts of stuff. Right? You're in the muck and you're wandering around in your own brain. Right. And so that feels a little scary because with behavior change, we want to think we know what the outcome of that thing is. Right. So it's like “you do this and X will happen. And that's what I think needs to happen.”
Well that's a scary position to be in. I actually don't even want to be the person telling somebody that. And again, I learn that from my own psychotherapy process. There were times when I just wanted to be told what to do, and that was where the learning came from in multiple ways. Right. And where I came up with my own solutions to things.
And that's where I think, I really think that, you know, where at least where I'm happiest working is not so much in the like, “I know what you need to do to make the world a better place.” It's like, how can we talk about what's happening and come to our own conclusions together about whatever that thing is? So I think there's, you know, again, it's harder, it's messier. It means you have to take yourself out of that objective observer stance, which is very, very hard.
RAY: It's very paternalistic. Right. Like, I know what's best. And I'm going to try to create the conditions for you to behave in a way like you're some mouse in a, in a cage or a rat in an experiment where I'm just going to put the, you know, right rewards and punishments and around each different corner to train some sort of behavior out of you.
KEARNS: Right. And I think people can relate to this thinking about, you know, say, going to a medical doctor and sort of being told that, you know, again, by an objective observer. Right. So there are doctors increasingly who are trained in relational, you know, patient-centered or relationship centered work. You can tell when you go to one, it's a very different experience than when you go to one who's much more in the subjective observer stance, where they just look at you and they say, “here's your weight on a piece of paper, you know, do x, y, and Z, and that's that's it. You change your behavior. I said, so, so you do it. And if it doesn't work, that’s your fault.”
RAY: Like you're obviously deficit, you didn't have this information. Now you do. So you know I wash my hands of responsibility.
KEARNS: And so you can see you know that's a really easy example to understand.
But I think the scary part of some of the climate communication or science communication work that's very focused in that same way around behavior change runs the risk of doing that same kind of alienation, misdiagnosing the problem, turning patients away because it's so alienating. Yeah. So I, I just think there's a more robust way to think about human psychology.
And, you know, I would frame the way I think about things as probably, you know, if I were to be able to develop my own field, that would be around sort of humanistic science communication or humanistic climate communication, because I think that's really what we're talking about, is making sure that we keep the humanity of both the practitioner and the people that they're working with in mind at all times.
RAY: And this has also sort of to do with consent, doesn't it? There's like a consent to it. Right? I consent to changing my mind.
KEARNS: Yes. And I think all of those things are they all go together. Right. Like consent culture– all these things that we're able to talk about these days can make it very clear, what we've been doing wrong. And then I think the challenge a lot of times now is around institutional setups and just the limitations that we have around the ways that we communicate in terms of social media, the way our institutions are set up to support or not support us, how risky this kind of work can be.
One thing that I haven't talked a lot about is just that, you know, again, from teaching, I think you'll recognize this, right? Like how I get treated as a scientist and science communicator is totally different than another colleague. Right? So this idea, I think of, of being an objective observer type is only available to some people anyway, you know, I mean.
RAY: Depending on the context. Yeah, yeah.
KEARNS: Depending on the context.
RAY: Different people in different contexts. Yeah. It's very positionality based. It's very audience based and context based. Yeah. Yeah, I, I really do appreciate that too. I was thinking about you in the setting or having, being at a place in your career and therefore you had that kind of command of the room, but you know, at a very younger place in a career, perhaps a white man might be able to command that room, you know, took you getting into your 50s to have the gravitas, you know, I mean, just as an example.
I was thinking about that, as you were saying, that I'm like, I wonder how a white man would have had that earlier. Depending on how we show up and how we're read in a situation, our communication approach or ability or capacity, our trust, our earning of trust to even do a communication event.
These things are all very, very, like you said, sticky, messy and contextual. And very much depending on who we are in a given historical and social moment.
Yeah. I love that you brought that up too.
My feeling is that this humanistic approach, this relational approach, this slowing it down and dealing with the mess of transformation, and not being paternalistic. These ideas really kind of come from more sort of social movements and justice movements where they've been thinking about these kinds of communication processes and where are the containers required to do that and that the communication itself needs to be focused on not just the outcomes or the content or the ends.
That is stuff that I think people who are in social movement spaces have been thinking about for a long time, and have a lot of wisdom around and written books on, you know. And that the climate or the scientific or technical space is starting to figure that out, in large part thanks to translators like your book that's doing that bridging work between movement stuff and climate technocratic stuff.
And I'm just wondering, does it enable us to do more justice oriented work, climate justice oriented work to bring this emotion-centered methodology or strategy or whatever you wanna call it, to our climate and environment, to work.
KEARNS: Yeah, I definitely think so, because I think, you know, again, a lot of feeling involved in a lot of these issues. Right. And if you're not open to that, I think it can really limit, you know, if you're super focused on objective scientific information provision as being climate communication, you are not going to be open to hearing the other ways that climate change is affecting people's lives and might be important, or the way that climate change is socially situated, the way that it affects us all very, very differently depending on where we are, how much money we have.
Oh, you know, all of these things, gender, sexuality, all of these things come into play. And I think, you know, if you are just focused on what can be scientifically proven, there's no way to incorporate all that other stuff.
And yet it again, going back to my fire example, like it's very clear, like how people felt about the fire was incredibly crucial to talking about that fire.
It went against what we were trying to do to only presented as a technical issue, because I don't, you know, our goal was not to just like, cause nothing to happen. It was really to kind of say it was, you know, in a lot of ways to empower people. But by not taking their subjective experience seriously, we just, we lost the plot.
RAY: Yeah, did the opposite. Yeah. We all yeah. Well, it’s such an incredible, like you come in with its intention to empower by disseminating information that you think will empower because you're making assumptions about the audience. And then it has the opposite effect.
Beautiful. I, I'm thinking of what you're saying when you just said something about, if you come into a room with this idea of being objective science with information to provide you and you don't read the room, so to speak, you can have this undermining effect. But I do want to then ask you to talk about, in this day and age, so many communities can't even use, say, or talk about the word climate without it being alienating, without being divisive, without it threatening their social standing.
Like you said, everyone's experiencing climate change in these communities in their own ways. And increasingly because of the kind of political baggage around the term, are not even using the word climate to describe it.
And you can't get a federal grant anymore if you use that word to, to help you if you wanted it to.
So I'm, I'm curious, this is maybe my own little kind of rabbit hole I want to go down with you, but I'm very curious. And I prepared this question for you because I thought you'd have something very smart to help me think through this about, which is what do we do in those contexts? Do we as communicators trying to support or provide information or to heal trauma or whatever it is that's going on with the experts in the room? There's and I put experts in quote marks because of course, everybody's an expert in the room. But there's this kind of erasure or unnaming of climate that might have to happen in order for that relationship building to occur. And is that a worthwhile cost to pay?
KEARNS: Yeah. I mean, I think that is $1 million question. That's really hard to answer at this moment. Just because so much is at play. Right? Like we are in a…
RAY: In the middle of it.
KEARNS: Yeah. I mean we are in a very tumultuous time. And you know, the one thing I can say is that this is kind of wild to think about. But in 2016, I was working for UC Cooperative Extension at the time. Some colleagues and I decided really to go full bore on talking about climate change after probably at least 20 years of not using the term.
So for people who don't know, a cooperative extension is, you know, part of the land grant system of the US. And because it is a sort of socially embedded institution where, you know, you have folks who work for the university system in every county, there's a lot of diversity in terms of the way that people think about issues like climate change.
And so what people had really done was to step back from that terminology and to kind of, you know, use what, say, a farmer or rancher might become more comfortable with, which in California at the time was the farthest you'd people would want to go was “climate weirding.” You know, and so you could kind of, you know, and that was like this way of kind of saying, yeah, “I acknowledge something's happening, but I'm not going to call it climate change.” Yeah. And so there was, there was an acknowledgment that things were changing, but there was, you know, that whole thing about that, I guess, is still with us is really around what do you do about it, was where things would start to get charged and so people would be okay talking about, yeah, natural climate variability or this, that or the other. But climate weirding was what the generally thought, the sort of ranching farming community was comfortable with.
And so we went through this process to actually really go like, wow, we, you know, let's ask people what they're feeling challenged about, as like an educator, in terms of dealing with climate change.
And we actually ended up reintroducing climate change into the UC Cooperative Extension sort of lexicon. And we did it through a couple of peer reviewed papers, you know, which at the time was what it required. And I'm talking this was not very long ago. This was 2016.
And so I am very worried that, well, I'm not in so many ways where we're in a very regressive phase right now. And this is one area in which we're regressing very rapidly to something that didn't change all that long ago. Right. Like, I think the comfort with talking about climate change for lots of academics in variable spaces has got easier for a little while and now it's going to get, it is harder again. And I think I mean my experiences have been deeply confused. Again, living in a state like Arizona and, you know, depending on which hat I'm wearing when I'm doing something, I have to be quite careful about it.
And part of that, you know, and this is something we haven't gotten into totally. But this is where relational work is really hard because you can kind of do this relationship-first thing. Right. And, and I try to do that as much as I possibly can. But there are times where that really a relationship is not available, right?
Like it's just not.
RAY: Or there's harm. Yeah.
KEARNS: It's just not available for whatever reason. You know, either I can't engage in it, somebody else can't engage in it. And so what, you know, what do you do in the, in the absence of that, of that ability, you know, when people are really, really so deeply confrontational about a terminology, are deeply, deeply unbelieving.
My sense is that's a very small number of people. In the end, I think we tend to overemphasize it. We always have. My, you know, my day to day experience. I live in a very red, extremely red rural county. I live in an unincorporated area, so I am not one of many like me around me. And yet, you know, I move through the world in such a way, I'm always talking to my neighbors. I'm always, you know, and I think we underestimate what people are able to take, especially again, within, within the context of a existing relationship.
So I think this work is like, so important right now. And so hard and scary. Right. Because we're, you know, again, like we're entering into this like deep surveillance state. We don't know when we're engaging in conversations with strangers where those might go or engaging in conversations online where those might go, and, you know, a big part of what I talk about in the book, too, is literally just the labor, the emotional labor, and an actual just labor of science communication and kind of who it's falling to at this point.
The field is becoming increasingly feminized, like you would see, you know, teaching, nursing all these traditional sort of fields. And I think as the work has gotten less technical and more messy, it is falling on, you know, people who identify as female, non-binary to, to do what is considered this very emotional work.
And that in itself is a whole gendered ball of wax.
Right? But it is again, I just, you know, I'm a very pragmatic person. So I would just say it's happening. That is what's happening. Perhaps it shouldn't be. But it is.
And so and we, you know, there are probably ways we should be trying to fight that, but, you know, and, and so at the same time that work is getting riskier in the sense that, you know, people are doing this work, are largely not tenured faculty.
It largely is a practitioner community that's doing it. It's largely female. And it falls on you often to do the hardest and riskiest communication, the most emotional, the most potential political risk.
I could tell many stories of the risky positions that I have been put in. And so it's, you know, I like I just want for people to understand that, you know, this is, it's hard and it's scary and it's slow. And we've reentered a time where it's, you know, to me, we don't even have a parallel for the time we're in right now. I think there are pieces from history certainly, that we could draw on. But this particular set up is, you know, it's novel, you know, in terms of the information that exisst, and just, you know, just all these things that are different than they were.
RAY: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm glad I'm glad you named that because I, I often hear a dismissive argument from, maybe elders, but not always elders, people who say this is no different. It's sort of that same kind of argument that this “climate always changes. You know, people are always having troubles. You know what? What's different about this trouble?” And yeah, it is there's some novelty to it that I think is important to name.
I appreciate that. We could go down a whole other rabbit hole about why that is so, but I'll just put a pin in that one in the spirit of letting you go soon here.
That was very powerful. And it had my heart really heavy listening to that and also, with, with deep gratitude for your work and also empathy for, for the labor.
KEARNS: Thank you. I would say the same to you. I think professors are in the same position.
RAY: You made me think about. Yeah, you did make me think about the assumptions I make about my students and Yeah. It's helpful. It's really helpful. It's messy work and it's slow work and, and there's that wonderful quote, you know, “move at the speed of trust” and wow in this moment how difficult it is to build trust. We have lost so much trust. I mean there's a whole Robert Putnam's idea of bowling alone and all of the ways that social infrastructure has been summarily and deliberately, dismantled to individualize us and to divide us and to make us lonely.
Because as long as we're all in our little islands of misery and burnout, we are not likely to organize and change the system and have that transformation.
So this sort of moving at the speed of trust, you know, against that Sisyphean boulder to, you know, like everything is against social trust right now.
So it's just like, okay, how do we build that trust first before we move anywhere?
Oh my gosh. This sort of impatience and frustration that comes with that I'm just I'm just having all those feels right now.
So along those lines, this is kind of like we're moving towards the end here. What is your advice for those of us wishing to communicate better so that we can save democracy and the planet? Yeah.
KEARNS: I mean, I think it is a little bit slow down, take a breath. Right. And, the thing that I always fall back to, is that I, I am a person who truly believes that people are good, you know, and people can have philosophical differences about that.
But my experience of the world, you know, just again, very pragmatic, my experience of the world again, going into very rural communities, going into, whatever the setting is, right. I am always pleasantly surprised by how wonderful people are, and we can get really caught up in thinking that's not true because one person disrupted or one person doesn't care or one, you know, and I think we give much too much weight to the one negative over the 30 positives. And that's why I've always had a challenge around like preaching to the choir, because I think the choir is huge. And if we would just take each other seriously, we would be unstoppable. And that's really, truly, truly what I believe and what I experience when I am around people is just that, you know, I don't know what it is.
I don't know if it's a particularly just American thing, but we tend to defer to the one person who disagrees versus the 100 who agree. And so I you know, I just try and I try to think about that, you know, and the people will say, nobody cares about water issues, nobody cares about climate. And yet when I just go out and I say I work on water issues, it doesn't matter if I am in France, it doesn't matter if I am in my own backyard in rural Arizona, people immediately want to start talking about water.
They want to talk about these things, you know? And so I think there's a mismatch between kind of the discourse on the rhetoric and our daily experiences.
And I think this is a time to really stay tied to our daily experiences with people in real life.
And I'm not I, I love social media. I love being online, you know, some sometimes more than others. So it's not that I don't think that's valuable, but I think right now, being in person with people, convening people however you can, you know, being open to people actually be much more flexible than you think they are when you get around some of the just divisive wording and things like that.
I actually, I do actually believe in us. I really, I really do.
RAY: I love what you're saying about, this. It reminds me of the research, and I'm not going to get the data numbers right, but there's something like, let's say 65% of Americans care about climate change, but, of those surveyed, they think that only 25% of Americans care about climate change. And so to your point about– we think about the negative and not the positive, we perceive that people don't care about issues much, much less. You know, let me put this another way.
Our perception of people's concern about issues is a lot worse than their actual real concern about the issues. And the consequences of this are very material and important and real.
If we perceive that people are evil and don't care or at the very worst, just, you know, our very best are just neutral on climate change, we're less likely to talk to them about it. We're less likely to bring it up. We're afraid of conflict, so we just don't even go there.
But if we assume, oh, this person's probably in that 67% of people who care, that is going to make me much more likely to talk to them about it, to connect over it, to maybe even do something together or join forces or something.
So what you're saying resonates with that research too, this tool, the advice you give people is to assume the best in each other because it helps us connect and build back that trust. I love it. So thank you for that.
That's a beautiful point. And on the last question I have for you is, what are you working on next? How can people follow you?
KEARNS: I work in a water program at Arizona State University, and I am constantly writing about water issues in Arizona. I just had a piece in High Country News about the fires at the Grand Canyon and how they are affecting water infrastructure. So in addition to all my communication work, I actually am a communication practitioner. And actually my day to day life is creating communication projects and also doing a lot of community engaged work around ground water. So I'm very easy to find on the internet.
RAY: Thank you so much, Faith, I love that. Thank you for uplifting us a little bit, giving us a little bit more tools to think about how important our communication is for living in this and navigating this frightening time. So thank you.
KEARNS: Thank you for having me. Thank you for doing what you do.
RAY: You just heard my conversation about humanizing science communication with Dr. Faith Kearns, author of Getting to the Heart of Science Communication. Shownotes for this episode can be found at khsu.org. You can listen to more Climate Magic wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray and thanks for listening to Climate Magic.
