Saving Ourselves: Dana R. Fisher
In the inaugural episode of "We Are Not Doomed," host Jonah Geil-Neufeld introduces Dana R. Fisher, a professor at American University and director of the Center for Environment, Community, and Equity. Fisher discusses her new book, "Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action". Fisher emphasizes the need for personal experiences and emotional engagement to motivate people to take action against climate change, highlighting the concept of the "AnthroShift," which involves reorienting societal priorities towards environmental protection.
The conversation delves into Fisher's background, including her early work in environmental lobbying and policy, and her eventual shift to sociology and academia. Fisher elaborates on her belief that significant systemic changes, similar to those seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, are necessary to address the climate crisis. She stresses that while individual actions are important, the focus should be on larger systemic changes in energy use, transportation, and other societal functions. Fisher remains optimistic about the potential for people-powered movements to drive these changes, despite the significant challenges ahead.
Main Topics:
Introduction and Guest Background (00:00 - 01:30): Introduction of Dana R. Fisher and her work.
Defining Apocalyptic Optimism (01:37 - 05:30): Discussion on what it means to be an "apocalyptic optimist" and the potential for climate disasters to spur societal change.
Academic Journey and Professional Background (05:36 - 10:30): Fisher's transition from environmental policy to academia and her early career experiences.
Current Role and Research Focus (10:30 - 14:30): Fisher's work at American University and the Center for Environment, Community, and Equity.
The Anthro Shift Theory (15:00 - 18:00): Explanation of the Anthro Shift theory and its implications for societal change in response to environmental challenges.
Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic (18:00 - 20:00): Insights on how the pandemic can inform strategies for addressing the climate crisis.
Links:
Transcript:
Dana R. Fisher (00:00):
This is not about the polar bears anymore. It's about personal experiences, and that's the kind of thing that will motivate the emotion, the anger, and it'll also motivate people to take action. And that's kind of the process that I talk about saving ourselves because that is what's going to trigger people to start to push back against power the way we need to.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (00:21):
Hello everyone, and welcome to the very first episode of We Are Not Doomed, a new podcast about climate optimism [00:00:30] from Puddle Creative. We are a full service podcast production agency. And I'm Jonah Geil-Neufeld, the executive producer. Today. Our guest is Dana R Fisher. She's a professor at American University in Washington, DC and the director there of the Center for Environment Community and Equity. And her new book is called Saving Ourselves from Climate Shocks to Climate Action. We talk all about her new book and her journey from environmental policy work to teaching [00:01:00] sociology to interviewing people on the forefront of climate protests in the United States. We talk about personal stories of climate impact, the importance of civic activism and the potential for societal change through what she calls Anthro Shift. She also describes herself as an apocalyptic optimist, and we start by talking about what that means. I hope you enjoy the interview. Give us a follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or [00:01:30] wherever you find your podcasts. Here's our interview.
(01:37):
I want to ask you to define apocalyptic optimist, but first I want to sort of take a stab at it and see from what I picked up in the article, see what you think. So to me it was about that it's probably going to take some sort of large scale catastrophic climate disaster to spur us as a globe as a society [00:02:00] into making a drastic shift. And you talked about the Covid Pandemic as an example of that. Overnight we changed our ways, right? And it is something that is possible, but it takes that global pandemic to make it happen. So the apocalypse part is that there's going to be stuff in the future that is worse than we've seen to this point already, but the optimistic part of that is those disasters could catalyze a large [00:02:30] scale shift from the status quo, which is more of trickling changes that maybe aren't enough.
Dana R. Fisher (02:39):
That's a very good summary. I mean, the only thing I would say that's slightly different from that is that I think it's really unrealistic. There's going to be one large disaster that works really nicely in a disaster movie, but in reality, if we look at the way the climate crisis is playing out and the way that the world is separated out, we're going to end up with this a bunch of smaller but not insignificant disasters. [00:03:00] For example, what happened in Pakistan last year where a third of the whole population got flooded out and lost access to their homes for a period of time, stuff like that. I mean, the West Coast of the United States may see atmospheric rivers that are out of control while the East coast of the United States may see tornadoes. We've had tornado warnings lately, which is also unexpected. So things like that where we'll see these disasters and the research tells us, and this is the Natural Science research [00:03:30] Show, not what I do, but I was a part of the IPCC and I have a lot of respect for my natural science colleagues.
(03:36):
It says that that's going to happen more frequently and be more severe because of the growing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So as long as those don't go down, which they're not, and then not projected to, unless we change what we're doing, which we haven't enough, that's what's happening. And so that's where we're going in terms of the experience and that's that apocalyptic part. And it is true that in that [00:04:00] world, there are going to be people who are going to be harmed and probably lives will be lost. Hopefully there won't be that many, but it will also, and this is where my part, my social science comes in, it will motivate people to rise up and push back. And the only big question in my mind, and this is why I'm an optimist and not a pessimist, is the only question in my mind is how far down that road we have to go to mobilize enough people to push back hard enough to make these changes.
(04:28):
Unfortunately, the changes [00:04:30] that we need to make are bigger than the covid changes. Even though we all made drastic changes to respond to covid, the changes won't be as drastic individually necessarily, but they will be quite drastic systemically at a societal level. When we think about where most of our electricity is coming from, where all our energy comes from, how we use transit, what we eat, how we fly, how materials move around the globe. I mean, all of that has to change. [00:05:00] And every time I getting on the beltway here in Washington DC and looking at all the cars and seeing how few of them are electric, and that's with all these huge incentives and the idea that we're going to get to the point where most cars are not burning fossil fuels, that one's a tough one. That's going to take a big shift. It's not just maybe the government could start giving 'em away. That's the apocalyptic optimistic perspective. But I do have, I still continue to have full faith that people powered [00:05:30] can save the day. We can do it. I believe we will do it. The sooner we do it, the better.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (05:36):
So let's back up and just kind of give an introduction to who you are a little bit.
Dana R. Fisher (05:41):
Eight months ago I moved to American University and at American, I'm a professor in the School of International Service, and I also am the director of the Center for Environment Community and Equity, which is a university-wide center. I am trained as a sociologist. I do social science, but [00:06:00] I teach in the School of International Service.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (06:02):
What does the School of International Service mean?
Dana R. Fisher (06:05):
Well, it's actually, that's a very good question. I only learned about this recently. So a lot of times policy schools include both international policy and domestic policy or public administration. At American, they're separated out. And the international component actually has been focused very much on service. We have very large scale program that is designed to support people who want to go into the Peace Corps, and [00:06:30] that actually has been a growing motivation for the way that the program expanded and was built. We have our own school and it's focused specifically on service, and it happens to be also the home to a lot of, I have a lot of colleagues doing work on environment of all sorts. So it works very nicely and a lot of my work is around now, I'm working on actually national service and particularly looking at what's going to become or becoming the American Climate Core. So it's kind of interesting because I'm in a school of international service, [00:07:00] I'm studying national service, so not international as much, although I do do international work, but not a lot of my work is focused more in the United States right now.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (07:09):
Oh, got it. And then what does being the director of the Center for Environment Community inequity mean?
Dana R. Fisher (07:16):
Well, it means that I spend a lot of my time developing interdisciplinary projects across faculty. So our center is actually, I'm very proud of the center is I believe the first center in the United States that specifically [00:07:30] is around environment and justice together. It was new and was introduced during covid, and I was brought in as the first director, but it means that I'm running a center that is building out educational capacity to train people at both the graduate and undergraduate level to think about environment, community and equity combined and bundled together. And I'm also working with faculty and [00:08:00] a squad of postdocs to build out research that specifically is focused again on looking at environment, community and equity together. But my job is to build interdisciplinary teams of scholars, most of whom are on the American University campus to help us create more capacity. Anybody who's interested should check out our clearinghouse, which is cece.american.edu, which we just launched not too long ago. But so we're doing a lot of work around [00:08:30] all sorts of issues around climate justice and equity, not just climate.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (08:34):
So how did you get started researching and working in the environment, climate arena, and then how did that lead into your book Saving Ourselves?
Dana R. Fisher (08:47):
So when I was in college, I was in East Asian studies and an environmental studies major. So I had a joint major and I came out and wanted to change the world. So I came to Washington DC [00:09:00] and this was early on in the Clinton administration. The first one, I wanted to work in the environment and I thought, oh, I'm smart. I have an undergraduate degree. I'm going to be great in the environment. So I ended up having a number of different jobs in DC my first year trying to find my way. I did try lobbying on what was, well, it's still called the clean energy budget, but this was before people were talking about climate change really in a general way and what people who wanted to work on climate were working on [00:09:30] energy and were specifically working on the appropriations process to get more money for clean energy investment, which now is standard, but back then it was kind of crazy.
(09:39):
So I did some of that. I was the youngest person on the team, which meant that I was sent to lobby, you want to lobby everybody, but I got to lobby people like Orrin Hatch, the serious Republicans who had no interest whatsoever in clean energy, but they wanted to be able to say they lobbied everybody. So that I would get sent to that. And as you can imagine, it was [00:10:00] really not, I didn't feel like I was getting to use much of my personal skills or what I thought I was good at to go talk to people who were never going to say yes. And it was a slog. And I realized that that was not really what I was meant to do. I ended up working for an environmental think tank doing security and sustainable development work, which focused a lot in Asia because I was that East Asian studies environmental studies.
(10:22):
So I got to do a little of that and had my boss tell me that without a PhD I could never run my own projects. So off I went to get my PhD [00:10:30] because screw that. So I went and did my PhD and I was advised that I needed a discipline because if I ever wanted to be in academia, I had learned from my advisor in college that is really hard with an environmental studies PhD. So I decided to go get a PhD in discipline and was advised that sociology was a really good place to do that. At the time, university of Wisconsin Madison had a number of really well-known scholars who were [00:11:00] leading the field in doing environmental sociology. All that being said, somewhere along the way I always figured I would go back to the policy world and do kind of more applied stuff, but I fell in love with sociology, which was very strange and completely unexpected.
(11:15):
And I realized that research is my superpower and bringing data to power is kind of my challenge and what I aim to do, and that I can do that quite well by arming myself with empirical tools and findings from empirical [00:11:30] research that's done defensively and rigorously. So when I was trying to figure out what to do for my dissertation, climate change was getting a lot more attention. So we were in the period right around when the Kyoto Protocol was written at that point. So I ended up getting funding from the National Science Foundation to do an international project looking at the US Japan, the Netherlands, and how they were responding to this effort to regulate CO2 emissions at the international level. And so that ended up being my dissertation [00:12:00] and basically that kind of put me on this path to do work that was around, I mean, in a lot of ways it builds on everything.
(12:07):
It built on looking at clean energy, it built on doing policymaking. And I have tended in my career to bounce back and forth between studying the policymaking process and studying activism because activism has historically been like civil society has historically been kind of a low lying pressure maker in the arena in terms of decision-making around climate [00:12:30] and environmental policy more generally, but specifically around climate. And that's really changed recently in the past, I'd say 10, 15 years, we've seen the climate movement really build up. We've seen it play a bigger role in applying pressure to decision makers, and we've also seen decision making not really do what's needed around climate change. So all of that led to my being asked to be a contributing author on the most recent governmental panel on climate change assessment [00:13:00] report. So that's the un scientific assessment that basically informs the international arena and governments about the state of the science.
(13:07):
And so I was very lucky to be invited to contribute to working group three, which is the working group on mitigation. I was specifically asked to write about civic activism and engagement as a new part to the assessment and the people who were running my chapter were, it was wonderful and impressive of them to be able to get that onto the agenda because the IPCC [00:13:30] was originally designed by natural scientists and atmospheric scientists who don't really have a sense of activism engagement or the role that civil society plays. So it was impressive that they got it on, and then I was really honored to be asked to do it. So I spent a bunch of time working on that. We finished during covid, and that experience led me to want to write saving ourselves because it became clear to me that the thing that I thought would really, the [00:14:00] data could set us free, and if we do the science and we do it perfectly and we write it up in a way that's accessible, the world will change and the policymakers will hear us.
(14:10):
I was trying to think about my next project and it just became really clear that what I should be doing is writing to the general public, which is not to say, I mean I still write for peer reviewed journals, but I do less of that and now I'm really focusing my attention on getting this message out to the general public because the general public is where people power comes from. They [00:14:30] don't read the journal Sociological Theory, and therefore if I want them to know what's going on, I need to write to them. And so that's why stating ourselves is different. It was written for people, and it was written for people who care about the future, they care about their kids and what world the kids are going to inherit and understanding what we really need to do to save ourselves from the climate crisis.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (14:51):
So saving ourselves. I don't know if the term anthro shift is in the book, but that's another thing I was going to ask you about in terms of what that means.
Dana R. Fisher (15:00):
[00:15:00] So the antho shift is in the book, and actually the anthro shift was originally a theory that I wrote with Andrew Jorgenson that got published in 2019 in the Journal Sociological Theory and a good 25 people or so read it actually maybe a little more. But anyway, it didn't make it into the general popular vernacular in the theory actually was driven by the need for us to think a little more clearly about the relationship between society and the natural environment and how social change happens [00:15:30] around the environment. And basically the theory itself builds off of this idea that society is made up of different sectors. We have the state, which is our government, the market, which is like businesses, and then we have civil society, which is everybody else who tries to work either individually or collectively to play a role in society. And they have kind of a pattern about how they work with one another.
(15:51):
And sometimes that pattern works out where it's more focused on environmental protection and sometimes it's less so and more focused on economic growth. And [00:16:00] an answer shift is basically about shifting the priorities of those different actors to be more environmentally protective. And in the theory, we basically talk about what you need to do to shake up the system, so the system reorients to focus more on environmental protection. So once we start to experience disaster or pandemic, it can be too late, but it's the risk of it. And actually that's why the pandemic is such a good example is that the [00:16:30] world shut down, all these things changed, not because everybody got sick, but because we were afraid we would get sick or we were afraid we would give this illness to our kids, to our parents, and the effects of that, the personal effects of that.
(16:41):
So the world shut down and an shift was about how the world reoriented because of this risk and what we were willing to change. And also the way that the government and the market received a lot of pressure to change. So the government provided a lot more support to everyday people and to businesses. [00:17:00] Businesses we're less kind of focused on the bottom line of making money and more on protecting their workers, et cetera. But one of the things that we know about the Android shift is, which means that changes can happen, but it can also shift back. And that's what we experienced with the pandemic where I've been giving a lot of talks for the book tour. There's almost never, or maybe never been more than two people in the audience wearing a mask, even though Covid continues, right? We shifted back, people are on planes, people don't wear [00:17:30] masks on planes mostly, et cetera and so forth.
(17:32):
So we're back to where we were before mostly, and that's the challenge of the answer shift. So within the book, I talk about learning from the pandemic, since we know that the type of systemic changes that are needed to address the climate crisis are big, right? It's not just about flipping a switch, it's about changing the whole way that we deal with energy and use energy and what are the sources of energy in our societies? That's a big, big shift that's required. [00:18:00] More importantly even is the folks who currently hold power around energy, which is the fossil fuel interests, have privileged access to power and the resources that fuel 'em, right? So they get access, subsidized access to our natural resources, and they also, thanks to their campaign contributions, have privileged access to power so that we know that Democrats who say they care about climate change, if you look at their voting behavior, if they take fossil fuel money, they vote for fossil fuel interests, even if they say they care about climate change.
(18:30):
[00:18:30] And as such, the type of answer shift that's needed is very large because we need both to feel severe and durable risk that will make us be willing to make the changes needed and those changes, then we need to pressure our government and the business sector to push them through. So that's the whole motivation for the kind of change that's needed is an anthro shift that comes from a disaster and a disaster that could be [00:19:00] a pandemic, but a more dangerous pandemic than covid or these climate shots, which is what I talk about in the book, and that's probably the most likely we will see it, is that climate shock will hit and the general public will feel the experience of climate change personally, not like the polar bears in a different part of the world. Although now back when I started this, we were all worried about the polar bears. Now the polar bears are starving, but we're also worried about our friends and neighbors, but we persist. So anyway, the ant shift is all [00:19:30] about getting everyday people to push back against power, and that can motivate the kinds of reorientation that can lead to a society that is willing to address the problem, but it has to be big enough for it to be durable or else we won't address the climate crisis in a sufficient way.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (19:47):
Yeah, there's this sort of viewpoint of climate change sometimes from where we are in the world and our socioeconomic status of you got to worry about the polar bears and that it's not affecting [00:20:00] us yet. But I think another thing that might be shifting is that people do now have stories of climate change affecting their lives directly. Has climate change affected you personally?
Dana R. Fisher (20:12):
It affected me. Let's see. I have a couple of personal climate stories. So I used to, a while ago I worked at Columbia University. When I did, we had a house on the Delaware River, partially because my daughter was afraid of grass. Literally if you put her near grass, my little New York City baby, she [00:20:30] literally would scream and be terrified. And so I was like, we have to do something about this. So we had a place on the Delaware River in New Jersey in Hunterdon County, and we started getting three years in a row. We got 500 ear floods, which was pretty cool. There was that human interference there because of the dam getting really full up higher and they had to release it into the roof. So that was a while ago. Since then, I refused to ever live anywhere this down in a floodplain or near a floodplain because we originally bought the house.
(20:59):
It wasn't a floodplain, [00:21:00] and then it became a floodplain as is happening to people all over the country and around the world now, right? Yeah. More recently, last summer, I'm sitting in my house, in my house office right now and down the street we had an extreme weather event last summer, and it wasn't even a derecho or a tornado or anything of that, but then it was just severe wind and a house around the corner from my house. It was split in half by a tree, literally split in half. I mean, and it's amazing. So the people have moved away and they've just left the house behind. [00:21:30] In addition to my personal anecdote, I survey people the protests. That's one of the ways I collect my data. So I surveyed people at the March 10 fossil fuels last September in New York City, which was before the UN meetings, and it was the largest climate protest that had happened since Biden took office, but also since January 6th, which is important because that affected the way people protest in the United States quite substantially.
(21:53):
So one of the things I asked is if they have personally experienced climate shocks, and I didn't say climate shocks because people dunno what that is. [00:22:00] Instead, I said, have you, in the past six months, have you experienced any of the following? The questions were wildfire, smoke from wildfire, sea level rise are flooding, extreme heat, extreme storms. It was a list like that. So 86% of the people in the crowd had experienced wildfire or smoke, which makes sense. The whole East coast was in wildfire smoke all last summer, but also 85% said they had experienced extreme heat, and then around 30% said that [00:22:30] they had experienced sea level rise or flooding, and this was before New York City last fall. You may recall those crazy images of the subway, like with water flooding down because they had this extreme weather event. This was before that something, it was really remarkable.
(22:43):
So this is not about the polar bears anymore, it's about personal experiences, and that's the kind of thing that will motivate the emotion, the anger, and it'll also motivate people to take action. That's kind of the process that I talk about saving ourselves because that [00:23:00] is what's going to trigger people to start to push back against power the way we need to. And what we know from the answer shift is that when there is this kind of mobilization and pressure from the general public against the state and the market against power, it opens up this window of opportunity when there's a disaster that if people in power know that if they do not change what's going on, they will either lose power, lose legitimacy, or things will get a lot worse. And so that window of opportunity is part of the whole process.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (23:29):
Yeah, I mean [00:23:30] that's part of the reason for me starting this podcast. So my son was born in August of 2020, so middle of the pandemic, and we live in Portland, Oregon, so he's born in August, and then one month later there was horrible, horrible smoke for multiple days, and a QI for a couple days was 200, 300 in the city, and we lived in this two bedroom apartment that wasn't very well insulated. And for one night we [00:24:00] slept in the basement, and then eventually we drove to Seattle because the A QI was better there.
Dana R. Fisher (24:06):
I mean, climate refugees we're already seeing. One of the things we didn't talk about is that this whole process of climate change and the way that changing climate is leading to more climate shots is that it's going to lead to all this social conflicts, including people moving around like migration driven by a climate. We call it climate migration, which will lead to climate refugees, but I mean that'll be either migration within [00:24:30] countries like what you did and yours was temporary, but also we're seeing a lot of the people who are coming to the United States, they're being motivated to travel north because they're trying to get away from climate change and the effects of climate change, which also will lead to other types of social conflict because, well, we don't handle migration super great these days and it's just going to get bigger and more challenging.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (24:56):
We've talked a little bit about the optimism, but kind of on a day-to-day basis, what [00:25:00] makes you hopeful for the future and what makes you stay optimistic?
Dana R. Fisher (25:03):
I think the thing that makes me optimistic is when I was doing research for this book, I spent a lot of time talking to folks who had joined what I call the climate activist Vanguard. Those are the people who are already engaged and doing work around mobilizing for the climate. They're trying to pressure the government around the climate. They're doing all sorts of activities. And first of all, the diversity of ways that everyday people are trying to do something [00:25:30] about climate change is so inspiring. I mean, we have family members who are working on electrifying buses or getting electric buses in their communities or putting solar panels on their schools or creating more permeable surfaces in parking lots in their communities, at the libraries, stuff like that. But then there's also the people who are working around elections to you get climate champions elected who do not take fossil fuel money, [00:26:00] which as we know can really lead to voting behaviors that you wouldn't expect and can be damaging to the climate and to the community or people who are just pushing back to power by really pushing for more climate decisions and more climate policies coming out of the Biden administration, coming out of the Congress, coming out of the state.
(26:23):
All of those things together make me hopeful. I have to say that this semester I taught a class called Activism in the Environment, and [00:26:30] it was a little different. So I'm teaching it to here, I'm not teaching it to sociology students. I've in the past taught social movements to PhD students and mostly sociologists. And so now that I'm at the School of International Service, I teach to mostly master's with a few PhD students, and these are folks who want to go into the nonprofit sector and they make me, my students make me so hopeful. I mean, they're very well aware of what they're inheriting, and they're very frustrated by the way the system currently works, but they are ready [00:27:00] to do what it takes to push for and do the work for the kinds of changes that are needed. And that makes me hopeful because that's where we got to go.
(27:10):
But the other thing that makes me really hopeful is all these older people, because we constantly are talking about the young people, and young people are great. I love 'em. I'm very supportive of young people. I've been a fan of all the different ways young people have started to get more politically engaged because historically, young people aren't so good at that, and they're so much better than they were when [00:27:30] I was a kid. But what's even more inspiring to me is all these older people who are coming in as elders and want to help to mentor young people. And in many cases, when I'm looking at folks who are engaging in disruptive activism, they are the first ones there on the line willing to put themselves on the line and show young people how it's done and also step up for young people. And that is so inspiring. It's completely unfair that we're going to have to see more of that and that we're going to expect that of young and old people [00:28:00] before we get to the other side of the climate crisis. But I'm inspired that people are willing to do that, and I hope we can all learn, and I hope that I can continue to learn from these people who have so much bravery and are so willing to do the work that's needed.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (28:16):
That's a really great point and a great note to end on. Thank you so much, Dana, for taking the time to be on the podcast. Congratulations, and thank you for your book. Thanks for putting that out in the world and doing all the work that you do.
Dana R. Fisher (28:29):
Thank you [00:28:30] for having me. This is great. I'm so excited about the podcast.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (28:33):
Yay. Me too. Thank you for listening to We Are Not Doomed. I'm Jonah Guile Neufeld with Puddle Creative. To find more episodes of the podcast, go to We Are Not doomed.com. You can find us on Spotify, apple Podcast, or your favorite podcast app. Until next time, have a great week.