Key Points
- Climate anxiety & grief
- Existential risks
- Conflict & climate change
It can be confronting to think about one’s own death, let alone the death of humankind. But there is no doubt that climate change is affecting human mortality around the world. Scientists say so, ok?
It’s apt that we might experience both a sense of urgency to do something about it and desperately want to hide under a very large rock. Fortunately, you can still listen to Grave Matters from there, where you’ll find comfort and a new perspective on our planetary fate.
In our penultimate episode, we tackle the science with climate policy expert and communicator, David Spratt. Facing the hard facts about famine, water shortages and wet bulb temperatures forces us to consider death from both a personal and collective point of view. Yet despite a torrent of truth bombs, David hasn’t lost hope and his dedication to climate policy change is truly inspiring.
If we continue down the present path, there is a very big risk that we will just end our civilization. The human species will survive somehow, but we will destroy almost everything we have built up over the last 2000 years.David Spratt, Research Director for Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration
Our second guest, psychotherapist Carolyn Baker, holds our hands as we struggle with some pretty big questions like ‘What is collapse awareness?’, ‘How can we die wisely?’ and ‘Are we OK?’. We all needed a virtual hug after this one and this planetary death doula was there with open arms.
If you’d like to feel better educated and more psychologically equipped for the climate crisis, you won’t want to miss Episode 9 of Grave Matters.
Climate chaos …is an existential issue. It is a matter of life and death. Whether it is imminent or whether it is a long way away …we all need to be preparing for it in some way.Carolyn Baker
Links
Grave Matters is an SBS Audio podcast about death, dying and the people helping us understand both better. Find it in your podcast app such as the SBS Audio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or LiSTNR.
Hosts: Anthony Levin and Nadine J. Cohen
Producer: Jeremy Wilmot
Writers: Anthony Levin and Nadine J. Cohen
Art and design: Karina Aslikyan
SBS team: Max Gosford, Joel Supple, Caroline Gates
Guest: David Spratt, Carolyn Baker
If you'd like to speak to someone, you can reach a counsellor at Beyond Blue at any time, day or night, by calling 1300 22 4636 or visiting . Also, Lifeline offers 24/7 crisis support on 13 11 14, and supports people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. In an emergency call 000.
Transcript
Content Warning: This episode mentions death and other potentially difficult content. Please take care.
Nadine: Anthony Levin, hello.
Anthony: Hello, Nadine Joey Jeremiah Cohen.
Nadine: Yes! Finally, the Zit Remedies!
That's a Degrassi reference for anyone listening who has no idea.
Anthony: Yeah, well, we saved the best til almost last.
So today, Nadine, we are confronting a terrifying question.
Nadine: Oh God.
Anthony: Does the climate crisis foreshadow the death of humankind?
Nadine: Yeah, can we ask something else?
Anthony: I'm afraid not.
I know it sounds pretty hyperbolic, but in an article which was published in a scientific journal called Energies - sounds up my alley - in August 2023, the authors said that by the end of the century, nearly one billion people could die from the climate crisis. That's an eighth of the global population.
Nadine: Awesome.
Anthony: Yeah, I know, it's pretty frightening and you know, those authors are not alone, they're not an outlier. Because as Australian climate scientist Will Steffen said, “We're already deep into the trajectory towards collapse”.
So in this week's show, we're speaking with two guests who are squarely engaged with climate chaos and what it's doing to us. And we ask just how bad will things get? What can we do? And how can we die well in a state of planetary turmoil?
Nadine, are you laughing?
Nadine: It's just awful. It's terrible. What else am I gonna do?
Anthony: Look, in fairness, this is a really difficult subject which forces us to look at death and dying from both a personal but also a collective point of view.
Are you ready?
Nadine: No, not in the slightest.
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Anthony: OK well, our first guest on today's show is David Spratt, Research Director at Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, which is an independent think tank in Melbourne. David is a climate policy and science analyst and the co-author of Climate Code Red: The Case for Emergency Action. His writing has appeared in many publications, including The Guardian, The Age, Crikey and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
David Spratt, welcome to the show. Great to have you.
David: Thank you.
Anthony: David, before we dive in, can you start by telling us a bit about yourself and how you became a climate policy analyst?
David: OK, I'm a baby boomer. Both my parents were science teachers and when I was leaving school they said to me, do anything you like in life but don't become a science teacher, which is ironic because I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life trying to communicate climate change to a lay audience.
Nadine: My mum was also a teacher and was determined that I not be one too.
So we're gonna dive right into the hard bits now. We already know that climate change can be deadly, and not just for humans. How are we in Australia likely to be affected by this?
David: Well, if you think about it, Australia is already a hot, dry continent, which is not a good start. Some scientists say it's the most vulnerable continent. Climate change in Australia is actually happening quicker than was projected. Professor David Karoly says that the extremes, which is what really matters, the really hot days and the really big floods, are now tracking worse than the projected cases for the 2030s.
So, it's really coming upon us. Let's talk about heat. The projections are we are going to go from the current level of warming, which is a bit over one degree on the present political path, to around three degrees. So that's two degrees more.
And Australian scientists from the University of NSW looked at the figures and said if the global average warming is two degrees, it's about three degrees on land. But if you're getting less rain as well, for example in South-West WA and in South-Eastern Australia, two degrees can mean four or five. And they said that means five or six degrees in summer average temperatures in regions that are dry, and that the individual heat days could be six or eight degrees hotter.
Anthony: I think that's a really important point for our listeners to understand, which is that when they hear news reports about one-and-a-half or two degrees, it has this kind of anchoring effect on us psychologically, thinking that, well, that's what we're really looking at. But in fact, just to reemphasize, that's the average and in many parts you're saying of Australia, there may well be places which are much hotter than that up to five degrees.
David: Yeah, we're talking about heat that is beyond the human capacity to survive, which is a combination of the heat and the humidity. Because the more humid it is, the more difficult it is for the body to sweat and reduce heat. And there's a figure you can get to where the body simply can't survive because it's it's going to cook.
And you know, the projections are by mid-century, there will be, you know, large parts of the world where people will be potentially experiencing that sort of heat. And it then really comes down to your capacity to survive it, which is in many ways a function of your economic capacity. So in Australia, we're relatively well off, but in poorer parts of the world, the exposure, the vulnerability to these events is going to be much greater.
So the impacts of climate change are highly inequitable, and it's not richer societies like ours who are gonna cop it most first.
Anthony: That's right and I think that's another point that's important to understand is how climate change amplifies and in fact is caused by existing global inequalities.
David: Yeah, I mean, there are many examples we can look at. I was just watching the news about Sudan last night and in Western Sudan is a place called Darfur, which had a terrible war between 2003 and 2011 and Ban Ki-moon, who was the United Nations Secretary-General at that time, described it as the first climate change war.
Because sub-Saharan Africa, not only Sudan but Chad and Niger and Mali, all the way across is dry and as a consequence of that, in Darfur, there were land disputes between herders in the north and people who engage in sedentary agriculture in the South. And there was an ethnic difference and that turned into an awful conflict with three million people displaced and up to 400,000 people dead.
Anthony: I mean, a lot of people will respond to that and say, well, you know, Australia is nothing like Darfur and our democratic institutions are strong and we're an affluent country and we should be able to withstand the brunt of climate change.
But there is a Nexus here between state security and stability and climate disasters. Can you tease that out a bit for us?
David: Well, I mean, I think we are not as isolated and self-sufficient as we would want to believe. We are in a globally integrated system which is across everything now from social media and the Internet to finance systems, food supplies and just-in-time production and so on.
And climate change is a global hazard and if you look at other global hazards like COVID or financial collapse, you know, they inflicted Australia really quickly. So we're not isolated. It's not the 14th century in that the plague’s in Wales but hasn't got to Scotland yet. I mean, we’ve got, it’s a minor way but we've got a lot of cost-of-living pressures due to increased food prices in Australia, in part driven by the war in Ukraine which is a long way away.
So I mean, climate change will wreak havoc over the Australian landscape. The seas will rise inevitably. I mean, it's a shock for people to understand that in the long run, and I mean it can be hundreds of thousands of years, but in the long run, every one degree of warming will result in a 10 to 20-metre sea level rise.
Anthony: I mean, that is a shocking statistic or fact to try and understand.
David: Yeah, I mean that's mind-boggling. We have had episodes in recent history, in the last 20,000 years of three, four, five metres a century, when ice sheets are melting, and Australians are perturbing the climate faster and faster than before.
Nobody knows, you know how fast the sea levels will rise. I mean interesting, the US Pentagon, the military have two scenarios of one metre and two metres against which they're playing everything. If you think about two metres around Sydney Harbour or up any river valley, any illuvial river valley, the large cities, Brisbane Airport will be underwater.
I mean, it doesn't take much in terms of heat or flood or sea level rise and inundation to destroy a lot of infrastructure which is fundamental to the operation of a complex and integrated economy like ours.
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Anthony: Do you think based on what you've been saying that we're likely to see more deaths in Australia from climate change?
David: Look, I'm not gonna put a number on it because that's a dangerous thing. I mean, the problem with climate change is that we are now in a climate hotter - and going to get a lot hotter because of the amount of fossil fuels that have been burned - than modern humans have ever previously experienced.
So we are now conducting an experiment for which there's no previous data in our lived experience as a human society. How will it play out? I mean, the effects are compounding and cascading. It's not simple.
Australians will, for a while, survive better than others because we have the economic resources and the capacity and the air conditioners and so on to hang in there for longer than others will. But inevitably more people will die in floods and fires. I mean, we can adapt, but in the end, I think the heat will imperil Australia's food production. I mean, I remember going to a conference maybe 10 years ago where a person from the CSIRO said if things don't go well by 2050, Australia might have trouble growing enough wheat for our own domestic demand.
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Nadine: So staying on the topic of conflict, most people remember the Arab Spring of late 2020 as an era of uprisings, beginning with protests in, I think, Tunisia, and spreading to Cairo, Tripoli, Damascus and other parts of the Maghreb?
It's not talked about very much, but what is the connection between the Arab Spring and climate change and why is it important that we as a global community understand this?
David: Well, I think there were many causes of the Arab Spring, including the not-very democratic nature of most of the regimes across North Africa and the Middle East. But I think what is fundamental is that it in many ways was a climate-induced uprising.
And by that, I mean in the period just before the Arab Spring, there were huge wildfires in Russia, particularly in the wheat-growing areas and in fact, Putin issued an order that there should be no wheat exports from Russia for the rest of the year and Russia is one of the great wheat exporters.
There was also drought in China, which affected its wheat prices, and there was a global shortage of wheat, such that the spot price on the international market for wheat trebled really quickly.
Now countries in the Middle East and North Africa are the most dependent of almost all countries in the world on wheat imports and when the price tripled, people simply couldn't pay for it. I mean, in Egypt, for example, you know an average person was spending, a family was spending a third of their income on food and when the price of wheat tripled, there's the food budget gone and nothing for anything else.
So, the wheat shortage basically led to riots which got worse and worse. They had a particular impact in Egypt, which led to the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and then they're overseeing the military coup and that still goes on. But it ran across the Middle East and took a particular form, I think, in Syria.
In Syria, I think there were two things coinciding. There was the Arab Spring, which fired up the political imagination of people living under a not terribly democratic government. There were internal contradictions I think, the government was trying to wind down fuel subsidies and there was an epochal drought in eastern Syria which had displaced one million or 1.5 million people who had moved into the cities.
At the same time, there were 1.5 million people who'd fled Iraq because of the war there in those same cities so it really drove up the prices of rents, and there's a lot of social dislocation.
So climate change in its various ways - the drought, the Arab Spring, the wheat crisis in Russia and China, then collided in this spectacular civil war, which basically displaced half the population of Syria. And the war in Syria is still ongoing 12 years later.
***
Anthony: In 2019, you co-wrote a report for Breakthrough, which is the National Centre for Climate Restoration, which said quote “Climate change now represents a near to mid-term existential threat to human civilisation”. What does that mean exactly?
David: This is a contested term. There's a whole body of work on existential risks and there's not just climate change, nuclear weapons is one. Increasingly, the people who analyse existential risks talk about artificial intelligence perhaps being another; pandemics, another; an asteroid, another. And what they have in common, it's an event that would permanently and drastically curtail society's development such that it might never recover.
So we're not talking about the end of the human species. That's, you know, I think a step too far. But that human society, I mean human civilisation, is defined as, you know, the area of fixed settlement of the last 10,000 years. The societies that we live in will not survive in a recognisable form.
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Nadine (VO): While David's definition of existential threat is helpful, others in the field, like American geographer Professor Jared Diamond, prefer to use the term collapse.
Diamond defines this as a drastic decrease in human population size, which can involve political, economic and social complexity over a considerable area for an extended time.
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Anthony: I mean, we've touched on this, but you've described some of those existential risks posed by the climate crisis as plausible worst-case scenarios. What are they and what are we getting wrong in preparing for?
David: There’s this area called risk analysis, which I didn't know much about, but it's sort of, you know, it sounds like accountants, insurance companies, doesn't it? But it's actually really important because it's thinking about what could happen and what would be the consequences and what you need to do to prevent that.
And say, for example, the safety of bridges or car seats or fences around children's pools or aeroplanes, we have a really low tolerance for failure. So in all sorts of engineering, it's minute percentages of 1%. You know we're 99.999% sure that the plane's going to take off and land and that's because we don't want the disaster.
So when risks are existential, that is if the risk manifests, modern society won't be here, or the effects will be overwhelming, you want a really low chance of it happening. So what the question you've got to ask is, what's the plausible worst thing that can happen? And what do we have to do to prevent it?
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Anthony (VO): In all this talk of a climate crisis, you might have heard of so-called tipping points and maybe, like us, you don't fully understand how they work. Tipping points are critical thresholds in our environmental system which, if crossed, can change irreversibly, often with disastrous results. And back in 2019, a group of scientists published a paper saying that climate tipping points are just too risky to bet against.
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David:
They said yes, the risks are existential and this is a climate emergency. One of the leaders of that group is a really interesting man called Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who set up and was the director of the Potsdam Institute in Germany for many years. A great scientist and also politically really well connected.
He said if we continue down the present path, there is a very big risk that we will just end our civilisation. The human species will survive somehow, but we will destroy almost everything we have built up over the last 2000 years, which was pretty direct and he said I'm telling you that we're putting our kids onto a global school bus that will, with 98% probability, end in a deadly crash.
So you know, the scientists who really get it, like Will Steffen and Shellnhuber and so on, have been saying this loud and clear.
Nadine: Do you think it's too late to stop the threat we're now facing?
David: I don't think it is too late. I mean Will Steffen said several years ago that we should make climate the number one priority of politics and economics, and we're just not doing that. We're just treating it as another issue, you know, as if we can negotiate with the laws of physics and chemistry and have a deal between the Liberals and the opposition and the Greens and do a bit and not enough and nudge, nudge, wink wink, and yeah, we should do more and, you know, the scientists tell us that but, you know, this is real politic…
I mean, there are circumstances in this society where we do actually try and deal with an overwhelming threat and I think if we did that, we’ve basically got the tools to stop the worst of the death and destruction.
I remember about 10 years ago being at a conference at the University of Melbourne, and it was ironically called Four Degrees Hotter, it was a conference about what the world might look like. And one of the presenters was talking about this and asked the audience to put up their hand if they thought their children's or grandchildren's life would be better than the one they'd lived. And I think maybe three people in 300 or 400 did.
So I mean, I think that represents a certain understanding that things are unravelling.
Nadine: So what do you think needs to be communicated immediately so people can understand our predicament and take action?
David: I think it actually requires, and I know this is a bit of a cliche, it actually requires leadership. So in terms of how we can communicate this, all the experts say that when risks are existential, you gotta be brutally honest about them.
I mean, if you think about, for example, health promotion or health communication, which I think is a really sort of good metaphor, if you think about the AIDS campaign or more recently, COVID, what happened was that the authorities went out and were really brutally honest: Smoke and you're likely to die. Then there is but, here is a path that you can take: if you stop smoking your lungs actually repair pretty quickly, and you can have a good life. And here's the way to get from the problem to the answer: ring the quitline. I mean, that's a very simple version, but there is, you know, brutal honesty about the problem, a solution and an efficacious path.
And it's true of all these things. With nuclear weapons, we don't sort of go oh well, they're not so bad, you know, we can adjust to this.
Anthony: I can adjust to my skin melting off.
David: Yes or we can adjust to COVID, though we seem to be getting a bit into a dangerous territory there which we didn’t early on. But in climate change, we’re going yes, we can adjust to this, you know we can, we wouldn't want to interrupt the economy.
So we won't do what we need to do but you know, technology will provide solutions.
Nadine: I assume that by the AIDS campaign, you're referring to the TV ads showing the Grim Reaper knocking down bowling pins? In hindsight, I mean, they were very problematic, but they're nonetheless seared into my brain and I imagine the brain of anyone over a certain age at the time.
David: I remember when the Grim Reaper campaign came out, people said oh, too big and over the top, people will turn off. But they didn't and you and everybody remembers. You say Grim Reaper and everybody 30 years later, 40 years later says oh, AIDS campaign. So it did work and it was really upfront about the threat.
So I think it's the same thing here, but it's it's not gonna be easy. It's going to be disruptive. Disruption is now inevitable and that's what I think our leadership can't get to. We have a choice of two disruptions, our physical climate disruption that will bring civilization crashing down or a disruption to the normal, you know, business-as-usual form of politics in order to deal with the threat.
In the Second World War, and I mean, I know wars are bad examples in some ways, but you know they're useful in others. Even places like Australia and the US devoted 35% of their economy in resources to deal with what they thought was an overwhelming threat. 30-35%. We’re not even within one or 2% at the moment. We're actually not taking the problem seriously.
So I think we need the conversation saying the kids are going off the bus and if you can't establish that, you're not going to get to a solution that's necessary.
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Nadine (VO): When it comes to talking about climate change, the statistics can be overwhelming. We asked David if he thinks hearing such big numbers could lead to climate fatalism - the idea that if people think we have no chance anyway, they won't bother making changes.
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David: Look I think big numbers have an effect. I remember when some scientists a few years ago said, and I think James Lovelock was one of them, said if we get to four degrees, we'll be lucky to have 500 million people left on the planet. And I've never forgotten that just like I've never forgotten the Grim Reaper.
And we're not talking about 50 or 70 years in the future, we're talking the the the next 20-30 years. We are going to be at two degrees in the 2040s and three degrees probably 2060 or 2070, the way things are going.
Let me give you another example. Recently, Chatham House, which is the premier national security think tank in the UK, partly funded by the UK government, did what's called a climate and security risk assessment, a really forthright document. And in the end, living and death and climate change is about food and water and they said that basically unless we radically reduce our emissions in the next 10 years, global demand for food will be up 50% but crop productivity could be down by 30%.
And you've had a UN report out recently saying that globally there could be a 30% water shortfall by 2030. We're poisoning the future and that's the only way I can think about it. I think with climate change, you know, a lot more people, if we go on this present path will face food shortages and water shortages and starvation and conflict and conflict that spreads and you know, terrible outcomes.
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Anthony (VO): David doesn't have children of his own but we discussed how thinking about future generations might move us to take action in the present.
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David: I had a really sort of visceral experience of that some years ago when my book came out and I was speaking at one of those book events, you know, a conversation with the author in Canberra. It was, I think, the night before the first National Climate Action Summit, and we're in a book shop and it's all quite crowded, maybe 60 or 80 people there.
And it got to the end of the author chat and the person interviewing me, Tim Hollo, said just finally, David, this is tough stuff, how do you deal with it? And I just thought for a moment and I said, well look, maybe it's a bit easier for me because I don't have children. I said it slowly and I just looked at the audience and you could see tears welling up in, you know, half the people in the room. So you know, that taught me a lot.
I don't spend that much time thinking about my own death. I'm more preoccupied with what we can do to stop climate change wreaking death on an unimaginable scale.
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Nadine (VO): As we come to grips with the realities of the climate crisis, we're having all the feelings, so it seems perfectly sensible to find a therapist who knows a thing or two about climate grief, leaning into uncertainty and how we can live and die well in our state of collapse.
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Anthony: Our second guest today is retired psychotherapist Carolyn Baker. She was a professor of psychology and history for 10 years but these days Carolyn embraces the title Collapse Chaplain. Her mission is to help people become more resilient to climate chaos. She's written a whopping 17 books and her latest is fittingly called Apocalypse Anytime.
Carolyn Baker, welcome to Grave Matters. Great to have you on the show.
Carolyn: Thank you for having me, it's a pleasure to be here.
Anthony: Carolyn, we're gonna dive in. You were a psychotherapist in private practice for 11 years. What kind of clients were you seeing?
Carolyn: Well at that time it was in the 1980s and ‘90s and I wasn't collapse aware, nor were most other humans. I was deeply influenced by the work of Carl Jung in my own therapy and in the way I worked with my clients and those were just mostly, you know, your average client who was trying to grow and expand in their lives. Some survivors of abuse, some survivors of trauma.
And that time in my life was foundational in terms of how I view the world today and how I work with folks in coaching, mentoring and spiritual counselling today. A key aspect of Jungian psychology is working with the human shadow. Shadow work is a huge part of living and dying wisely.
Anthony: You mentioned that at this stage of your career and your life, you weren't collapse aware. So what was it that triggered your interest in climate change?
Carolyn: Well, back in 2007, I saw a wonderful video which anyone can watch on YouTube for free called What a Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire. And as I watched that, I realised that the many different concerns that I had as an activist really boiled down to one problem, and that is the collapse of industrial civilisation.
It was then that the work of Bill McKibben was coming into focus, as well as Naomi Klein and others. We were getting scientific research from James Hansen and other practitioners.
And then there were specific disasters, like the Deepwater Horizon fire in the United States, countless wildfires, Arctic and Antarctic ice melt, Elizabeth Colbert's book, The Sixth Extinction.
All of those just began to inform the way that I was looking at the world and climate catastrophe in particular.
Nadine: Carolyn, it's clear from, I mean, public discourse, social media, and maybe climate protests, that young people are voicing their deeply felt climate anxiety. But are people of different ages also coming to you for help?
Carolyn All ages, and the older folks are going to need something different from the younger folks. I try to really nurture the desire and the passion that younger folks have for doing something. I try to help them be realistic so that they're not spending their lives trying to save the world or stop the inevitable. But I really encourage them to serve and to mitigate and to make a difference wherever they can and certainly, they're going to have different needs and a different focus than people that are maybe in their 70s or 80s and facing the end of their lives anyway.
Nadine: But possibly concerned about the younger generations that they're leaving behind?
Carolyn: Exactly, and those folks almost all have children and grandchildren that they're very concerned about, and so I really work with their grief about that.
Anthony: In a book that you published in 2022 entitled Undaunted: Living Fiercely into Climate Meltdown in an Authoritarian World, you describe yourself as a Collapse Chaplain. What do you mean by that?
Carolyn Well, what I mean by that is that climate chaos, climate catastrophe is an existential issue. It is a matter of life and death, whether it is imminent or whether it is a long way away, and we all need to be preparing for it in some way, just as if we were in hospice and preparing for our own demise consciously.
And there are a lot of hospice chaplains in the world, and so I consider myself, in a sense, a hospice chaplain for the collapse of industrial civilization and the collapse of our ecosystems. And I have my own collapse chaplains for me. I think we all need them. We all need them to accompany us on this journey.
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Anthony (VO): It occurred to me that Carolyn is kind of like a death doula for the planet. So what does a role like that entail?
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Carolyn: Well, first of all, it would entail informing yourself about what is actually happening in our world and the global crisis overall, and then responding to that by doing one's own inner work. You know, the psycho-spiritual work that needs to be done so that we can navigate the crisis and/or succumb graciously to our death.
Anthony: I find this idea of planetary hospice really fascinating and thought-provoking because it's also a bit scary. Can you tell our listeners why do you believe we're facing climate collapse?
Carolyn: Well, I don't think we have to look very far into the science to see that we've passed the point of no return. And what I have seen in the last couple of weeks are numerous headlines about, you know it's too late to stop the melting in the Arctic. It's too late to stop the rise of temperatures. And a lot of people don't like to look at this. But I think that we need to be very realistic and really face up to what is really happening.
Anthony: Yes, and I totally get that. But I've also heard some people say that talk of civilisational collapse or even human extinction is pretty hyperbolic and that our focus should be on mitigation and adaptation efforts instead. How do you respond to that?
Carolyn: I don't separate any of those. I think that all of those are very important to be involved with - mitigate where we can, adapt as much as possible and realise that in the long-term, we are probably facing at least potential extinction, an extinction of a large part of life on Earth. I do believe that there will probably be pockets of survivors but I don't see this as an either/or. I think that our response must include all of the things that you mentioned.
Nadine: You worked, as we've talked about, you worked for many years as a psychotherapist, and you acknowledge in your work that denial is a defence mechanism that serves to prevent overwhelm. And we know this for countless reasons across history and our own personal lives.
Later you say that few among us choose to contemplate their own death and even fewer choose to contemplate the death of their descendants. Is it possible that as a species, we're not equipped psychologically at all to process and grieve our own extinction?
Carolyn:
Well, I think we're very equipped to grieve and I think that doing conscious grief work would help us to prepare for a hospice situation. I think that's true across the board, as you see, people with terminal illnesses, if they're willing to do the grief work and the emotional work that is connected with the end of life, then it is much easier for them to open to the final consequences.
Nadine: I think that's interesting because what we're looking at a lot in this series is that people don't want to face their own deaths, that people are in denial that it even happens and don't wanna talk about it. And so I can, like, completely understand how that on such a mass scale, like our refusal to reckon with our own mortality, you know, makes it very problematic to deal with the mortality of the human species as a whole.
Carolyn: Well, I don't think it's wise to confront people immediately with oh, you know what? I'm gonna die, you know.
Anthony: That’s not your opener.
Nadine: I’m making T-shirts.
Carolyn: It's very important to offer the science and then I think the next step is to say, OK, so how do we feel about that? Well, most people feel sad. Many people feel angry; many people feel scared.
So the way I opened my book Undaunted was with a chapter entitled ‘Emotions are Allies; They're Not the Enemy’. So we begin to develop some familiarity with our emotions, particularly the emotion of grief. Who does not confront their grief when they look at what we are using in the ecosystems?
And then we nurture that grief; we give people permission to feel that grief. We allow them to see how feeling that grief begins to heal them and also opens up channels for connection with other people and a deeper connection with nature.
And ultimately what I see with everyone I do grief work with is an increase in experiencing joy. Because grief and joy travel together. Mary Oliver says We shake with grief, we shake with joy. What a time these two have, housed in the same body.
What I know from personal experience and from working with many, many clients who have done and are doing grief work, is that doing conscious grief work unlocks the door to joy and meaning and purpose in our lives.
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Anthony (VO): Carolyn emphasised that despite our dark predicament, we all have a choice.
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Carolyn: We all have the opportunity to say how do I want this to be? Who do I want with me? What would make me more comfortable and alleviate my suffering? Are there people that I need to make amends to? Do I need to spend more time in nature? What do I most need and what really matters to me? What has the most meaning in my life?
And so in that conscious way, to begin to prepare for an awake demise.
Nadine: We usually ask this question last, but now kind of seems like the perfect time. Anthony?
Anthony: Yeah, absolutely. Let's do it.
Nadine: So, Carolyn, what is a good death or dying wisely to you?
Carolyn: Well, I've had an opportunity to think about that because I'm a two-time breast cancer survivor. Fortunately, I'm healthy today and 12 years out from my last bout with it, but I have thought about that. And as I slip away, I'm going to see life much differently than I've ever seen it before because I'm moving steadily to crossing in between two worlds, and I don't know what's on the other side, but I'm open. I'm allowing myself to be open to this, and making it as merciful for myself and others as I possibly can.
***
Anthony: You write in your books that what people are really craving is guidance to navigate the minefield of emotions that come up and are associated with the climate crisis.
Carolyn: Yes.
Anthony: What would you say to people they should start doing to try to move in that direction?
Carolyn: Well, one of the things that is helpful, not for everyone but for a lot of people, is journaling and really giving themselves a little bit of time each day, even if it's maybe 10 minutes, to reflect on their feelings.
I would also support people in any form of meditation that calls them and I also invite people to look at their dreams and tell me their dreams when they remember them so that we can talk about that.
And then to sort of get a little bit of psychological history in terms of the permission or lack of permission that they have had in their lives to feel their feelings. And what are these feelings for them? And very much how do you experience them in your body?
Nadine: That sounds like the therapy I've had for 20 years.
***
Carolyn: The thing we haven't talked about is trauma.
One of the things that I like to point out to folks is that we need to stop acting like we're victims in the constant tragedy of climate change as if somehow this has never happened to people before.
And I like to point out that many thousands of humans before we ever arrived on the planet experienced a kind of collapse or extinction. Many collapse-aware people seem shocked that this is happening and they almost feel entitled to have it not happen. But I remind folks that no matter what era we live in, life is fatal.
I often encounter folks who, conversely, become or they are obsessed with collapse and immerse themselves in collapse porn, as I call it. Always looking for the next impending climate tragedy and worrying about how they're going to quote-unquote protect their family. And what I'm now realising is that this obsession is directly connected with the trauma that people have experienced and need to heal.
Collapse is triggering to the nervous system and to previous trauma in our lives. And we, you know, we have more resources now for trauma healing than we've ever had in the history of our species. So let's utilise those tools. Let's heal this trauma even as we look climate change, climate catastrophe squarely in the eyes.
Nadine: Is there something in the fact that climate collapse is an active trauma, it's an ongoing trauma? You know, trauma is so often like this happened to me in the past and it's caused problems for me throughout my life and this is, well, there's no resolution to this trauma.
Carolyn: Right, yeah. It's like the current trauma of climate collapse is stirring up older traumas. And older traumas tend to feed into the trauma we're feeling currently. And so they kind of get all meshed up together and then very quickly, we get into these existential issues around life and death. You know, we have to tease those things apart lovingly and with great compassion.
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Anthony (VO): As we talked about the poetic entanglements of life and death, Carolyn circled back to the idea of a good death by sharing with us a West African proverb.
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Carolyn: When death finds you, may it find you fully alive.
Nadine: Yeah, that's great.
Anthony: I feel that that is a kind of thread that keeps coming up when we are talking to people on this show - that fundamentally, even though we might at first blush and think oh a conversation about death and dying, that's morbid. Well, obviously. But actually, it always ends up being kind of life-affirming and reminding us how we need to live our life to the fullest and what it is that we need to do to make that happen.
It's again one of those funny kinds of paradoxes in this space, or maybe not even a paradox, just like a tension that exists there that we have to feel into.
Carolyn: Well, I think it's the other side, you know, it's like as we deeply open our eyes and our attention and our hearts to death, then we find the other side of that, which is the preciousness of life.
Nadine: I'm thinking of the laughter that sometimes came in the hospice. You know, both Anthony and I have had parents in hospice care and grandparents in hospice care and you think it's going to be this horrible place and it's not a great place, I don't want to go there, but there was joy.
And also to me, and I've written about this - when my grandmother was in the hospice in 2010, the hospice had two cats and the cats were called Morphine and Dexamethasone. And that to me always symbolises the laughter that you can find and the joy that you can find in these tragedies, and a hospice doesn't have to be the worst place on Earth, it can be a place where people are experiencing their last, you know, moments of joy or their last moments of their relative’s joy.
Carolyn: And if we don't let ourselves go to that grief, then we miss that.
Anthony: I completely agree. I can remember one day turning up to see my mum at the hospice and just by pure coincidence or synchronicity, we were both wearing exactly the same colours, except in reverse, so she had on a pink T-shirt and grey leggings, and I had on a grey T-shirt and pink shorts.
Nadine: A beautiful outfit.
Anthony: And we just looked like we had coordinated our clothes that day but we hadn't spoken. And I came into the room and we both looked at each other and we just burst out laughing.
Anthony: Carolyn, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. There have been at least several epiphanies during this conversation, and I hope that our listeners feel the same.
And it's just been wonderful hearing about the work that you've been doing and also listening to the insights that you've shared. So thank you.
Carolyn: Thank you so much for having me and I bless you and wish you well in your work.
***
Anthony: Nadine, that was a lot, but strangely, I feel OK. How are you? Are you Googling collapse porn?
Nadine: No, I swear I'm not.
Anthony: Sprung.
Nadine: *Erases Google history*
Look, I'm not feeling OK, but like maybe I'll get there. It's just that there's never any good news about this, ever.
Anthony: No, actually, I feel like I'm still processing a lot of my feelings working through those stages of grief.
Nadine: It's like, I can't, I just can't. That’s all I can say. I just can't.
Anthony: Well, all we can really say is thanks again to our guests, David Spratt and Carolyn Baker.
In our next and final episode in the series, we speak with inimitable musician and spiritual seeker Ben Lee about ayahuasca, losing a parent and writing songs about death.
Ben: You know, you get to the airport and you're too late for the plane and you've missed it by five minutes. Do you have a total panic attack or do you reassess and make a new decision? And you experience a death that was a death of that plan and I think that's practising dying.
If this episode has raised issues for you and you'd like to seek mental health support, you can contact Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636 or visit .
Also, Embrace Multicultural Mental Health supports people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Visit for 24/7.
For crisis support, call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or in an emergency, please call 000.
Grave Matters is an SBS podcast, written and hosted by Anthony Levin and Nadine J. Cohen and produced by Jeremy Wilmot. The SBS team is Carolyn Gates, Joel Supple and Max Gosford. If you'd like to get in touch, e-mail [email protected].
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