From Grief to Regeneration
We have it in us to create a more beautiful, regenerative future that allows both humans and nonhumans to flourish. Dr. Sarah Bexell, professor of social work and co-founder of the Center for a Regenerative Future at the University of Denver, joins us. Highlights of our conversation include:
Why captive breeding programs for endangered species are both cruel and ineffective;
How the mental health of both conservation professionals and animal rights activists is deeply impacted by the ongoing suffering of both wild animals and farmed animals;
How ongoing ecological destruction is causing eco-anxiety and eco-distress in students and some of the more effective classroom approaches to address it;
How environmental justice differs from ecological justice and why we need to address both if we hope to create a more just, regenerative future;
How Sarah helps students become aware of the role that human overpopulation plays in humanity’s ecological overshoot and helps make the classroom a comfortable place to discuss it.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Nandita Bajaj (00:00:00):
Hi everyone, this is Nandita. In case you missed our announcement, The Overpopulation Podcast is now OVERSHOOT. As we have increasingly explored themes that go beyond the problem of overpopulation, ranging from pronatalism and economic growth obsession to technological fundamentalism and human supremacy, it is time that the podcast name reflects the full scope of our concerns. We will continue to bring you the same caliber of guests and range of topics, looking at both the drivers of overshoot and pathways out of this predicament. And here's today's guest.
Sarah Bexell (00:00:37):
So sustainable development has been coined as a term since 1987, and we haven't made great progress. And sustainable development is still really predicated on growth that causes less harm. And our premise is really regeneration. And so moving away from sustainability paradigms - less harm, but still growing - to scaling back the human enterprise and regrounding ourselves and allowing Earth and other species to heal so that we can heal ourselves. Humans have it in us to create this regenerative, beautiful, joyous, awe, and wonder-filled existence on Earth that allowed us to flourish for as long as humans have been on the planet.
Alan Ware (00:01:20):
In this episode of OVERSHOOT, we talk with Dr. Sarah Bexell, a deep and compassionate systems thinker and humane educator. Sarah has spent decades working in the fields of wildlife conservation, animal protection, and advancing social and ecological justice.
Nandita Bajaj (00:01:45):
Welcome to OVERSHOOT, where we tackle today's interlocking social and ecological crises driven by human's excessive population and consumption. On this podcast, we explore needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on earth. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware (00:02:12):
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance. With expert guests from wide-ranging disciplines, we examine the forces underlying overshoot - the patriarchal pronatalism that fuels overpopulation, the growth-obsessed economic systems that drive consumerism and social injustice, and the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all of life. And now on to today's guest.
(00:02:51):
Sarah Bexell is clinical professor with the Graduate School of Social Work and faculty director at the Center for a Regenerative Future at the University of Denver, Colorado. She is also a faculty member with the Institute for Humane Education at Antioch University, specializing in supporting animal rights-based doctoral dissertations. She teaches and does research in the areas of animal protection, ecological justice, eco-distress, and regenerative education. And here's our conversation with Sarah.
Nandita Bajaj (00:03:24):
Hi Sarah. Welcome to the podcast. We are so happy to have you here.
Sarah Bexell (00:03:28):
Thank you so much for having me. And hello Nandita and Alan, I'm very excited to join you on the podcast.
Nandita Bajaj (00:03:35):
And Sarah, you're one of the first people I met at the Institute for Humane Education when you were still teaching the animal protection course. And that course was the only course in the program at the time that was making the connection between human population pressures and plummeting animal populations. We have since collaborated on a number of projects at the University of Denver where you all seem to be doing a lot of great things in terms of degrowth, regeneration, conservation, ecocentrism and humane education, all of which resonates so deeply with our work at Population Balance. So though I know you well personally, we're excited to delve into your really impressive professional work today. And Sarah, early in your career, you worked extensively in the area of wildlife conservation, including several years working for giant pandas. You have also expressed frustration with the results of captive breeding programs. What are some of your frustrations based upon?
Sarah Bexell (00:04:42):
Yeah, thanks so much for that question. Yes, over 20 years of my career was really focused sort of on the front lines of species preservation that involved bringing animals back from the brink of extinction. So I worked extensively with golden lion tamarinds from Brazil, black-footed ferrets from the United States and giant pandas from China. And in all of those cases, they're really sort of textbook cases of species being pushed to the brink of extinction due to human overpopulation and of course consumption pressures. And then humans deciding, wow, these are spectacularly beautiful, deeply charismatic animals. And those animals species were cherry picked to be brought back from the brink of extinction. I mean, the most striking example is the black-footed ferret right here from North America ranging in both the United States and Canada and even down into Mexico where they were down to 18 individuals that were pulled into a captive breeding program to pull them back from the brink of extinction.
(00:05:49):
So millions and millions of dollars later, so many professional careers, so much academic and practical research going into bringing these species back from the brink of extinction. In these three cases, we don't have, giant pandas actually are enjoying the greatest numbers of just under probably 2000, maybe. Nobody trusts the numbers of wild giant pandas, but lots of money, lots of expertise poured into this with almost no tangible or sustainable results. And so they are all what we call conservation- dependent species, meaning if we are not actively involved in their conservation and preservation, they would not survive. They would still go extinct if we weren't manipulating them in captivity and if we were not manipulating the land that they live on. And so my frustration in that is that that's clearly not working, yet is still taught in textbooks and taught to future conservation biologists that these are legitimate ways to protect species.
(00:06:52):
And I think one of my greatest, and Nandita you know me very well in terms of my animal rights orientation and deep empathy with other species is that of course I've worked with all of these species as they've been in these captive breeding institutions. And they are completely isolated in captive environments from their native habitat, from the ability to actually execute and play out normal social structures and emotional needs. And so what I have learned over many years of involvement is that captive breeding is actually unbearably cruel to the individuals who are trapped, in the name of species preservation, them as individuals are deemed as not important, not worthy of sort of our moral concern. And then I think I'll end with the human hubris that is involved in all of this, that humans we cause the problem. Sure, but that's very downplayed. But then humans come to the rescue of these poor, unintelligent, unwise species and individuals to rescue them from their extinction that we in fact caused.
Nandita Bajaj (00:08:03):
Right. That is so well said, Sarah, especially what you said about the hubris piece. I think what you're pointing to is this blind faith too in science and human ingenuity to address these conservation challenges. I mean, it comes down to this very human supremacist worldview of, as you said, it's okay that some of them are going extinct, but don't worry, we can bring them back. We can use some kind of scientific advancement in DNA replication and de-extinction technology. It's all just really gross and horrific. And a huge part of conservation is to expand protections of wild areas and habitats, which is not possible unless you also address human population growth and expansionism and so many so-called conservationists are not interested in touching human population pressures.
Sarah Bexell (00:09:03):
I agree. And it's interesting when I think back to the beginning. Golden lion tamarinds were the first species I worked intimately with in graduate school and my master's degree in biological anthropology. And to be frank, this was the early nineties, I didn't even realize, I had no idea that we were causing a mass extinction. And I learned in graduate school, I was studying primatology, and I vividly remembered the day that my professor in primate behavior was just going through slides. Yes, the old fashioned clickey slides, but he would show us one single image of these beautiful beings, different primate species, introduce us to the species. And at the end of introducing the species, he would say, and this one's endangered and this one is threatened with extinction. This one has literally been eliminated from the wild. And I was sitting there in my class thinking and looking at my classmates, are you all hearing this?
(00:09:58):
And I was probably all of 23. And I thought, my God, we have to do something about this. We are systematically annihilating these beautiful species who in my pea brain, at least back then, thought they deserve to be there. But I was too young, too immature. I didn't really, I was just shocked. And so when I was first invited into working captive breeding programs with golden lion tamarinds being one of the first, I was like, oh my gosh, sign me up. Sign me up. We have got to do something about this. And jumped in full bore and fully supported all of the science behind captive breeding for reintroduction. So I sat with those monkeys in tiny little cages. That was part of my thesis was just studying their behavior and understanding their social behavior, their needs, their reproductive behaviors. And these were all individuals who were poised to perhaps be returned from Chicago, Illinois all the way back to the coast of Brazil.
(00:11:00):
And they were in tiny little, like if you've ever been to an animal shelter where we keep our dogs and cats before they're adopted out, that's about how big these enclosures were. There was no running water, there were no real trees, nothing. And then we thought, oh, surely they'll be fine and we'll just take them back to Brazil with no skills, no knowledge, no recognition of their own social structures and child rearing practices, and just let them out in the wild. And sure they'll be great. And the majority of those animals die within a couple of months in very, very cruel and painful deaths. So I jumped into the science blindly as a young graduate student thinking I was a part of doing the right thing for them. And it took me a long, probably 20 years to realize this is not working. And it's cruel.
Alan Ware (00:11:49):
Yeah, so that captive breeding is not recognizing their wants and needs, the individual animals. And I thought it was interesting with the black-footed ferret where it's not recognizing the keystone species of the prairie dog and that human expansionism of cattle ranching and the American West is just decimated prairie dogs. So black-footed ferrets have little habitat in that situation. It's a sad story.
Sarah Bexell (00:12:16):
Yes. I'm so glad that I had the opportunity to work with a North American species because I think that was something else that was ingrained in me even as a child, is that wildlife extinction is a problem that happens in exotic faraway places like Kenya and China. It doesn't happen in our backyards. And I am sitting right now as we speak today, on land that should have black-footed ferrets and prairie dogs. I am sitting on the shortgrass prairie of Colorado, and both of those species should be here today, but due to urbanism and, as you said Alan, cattle ranching and a lot of our human expansion across the western United States annihilated prairie dogs because they were seen as the enemy to progress of both agriculture, cattle ranching, and urbanism. And with the annihilation of 88% of the food source of black-footed ferrets, let alone the black-footed ferrets, take over the homes of prairie dogs and utilize their buroughs for shelter and safety. So literally, without protecting prairie dogs, we cannot protect black-footed ferrets.
Nandita Bajaj (00:13:23):
And I remember this conversation that we had with Carl Safina where he was talking about why so many of these captive breeding programs end up not being successful in terms of rewilding, and I appreciated you also made that connection is the lack of enculturation in their own habitats. It's the lack of social skills, the lack of adaptive qualities, the structures, et cetera, and the focus so much on conserving or preserving the species rather than concern for each individual being, but also their family makeup, the social hierarchies and the social communication within those communities. It's completely deemphasized. They're just kind of objectified as, well, if we just get the numbers up and then we put them out somehow magically they're going to know what to do.
Sarah Bexell (00:14:20):
Yeah. I like to give the example sometimes when I'm giving talks about conservation and utility or lack thereof of captive breeding, and it's very much akin to if somebody had a healthy child, had all the right things going for the child, but we put the child into a closet. We brought them food, we kept them warm, we read them stories maybe, and then when they turned 21, opening up the closet and saying, go be free. Go be a human, go find a job, go find a mate, go interact with your peers. And the child would have no idea how to do those things. But we do that to other species and assume that, yeah, like you said, that they're just almost like mechanical windup toys.
Alan Ware (00:15:09):
And you've also studied the psychological impacts of wildlife loss on conservation professionals, people who are witnessing close up the effects of what many scientists call the sixth mass extinction. So what are some of those psychological impacts you've found with them, the conservation professionals and also within yourself, because you've worked in the field and you've seen those wildlife losses?
Sarah Bexell (00:15:33):
Yeah, this one's a little bit raw for me because of my involvement in wildlife conservation and witnessing the losses and seeing firsthand the suffering and death of individuals whom I knew and that I loved very much. So that was really what drove me to do this study with two of my graduate students, Katia and Lauren. And what was happening is that we were watching the papers come out about this sort of phenomenon of eco-anxiety, eco-distress, solastalgia, which is a term coined by Glenn Albrecht in Australia about the witnessing and watching of your home environment being destroyed around you and not having any ability to keep your home environment safe and serene and have it still nurture you in the ways that you were used to having your environment nurture you. And then the explosion of research looking at climate change and its impact on mental health, especially of young people.
(00:16:34):
And Lauren and Katya and I were like, well, this is interesting that folks are looking at climate change, but the biodiversity crisis is also unfolding and does that have a mental health ramification for us as a species? And then we thought, well, who might know this best? Who might be sort of the front runners in experiencing any of these mental health crises? And we thought there's at least two populations that immediately came to our minds. That would be indigenous peoples who still live close to and are interdependent with other species in their home environments. And then those folks who are trained in wildlife biology and wildlife conservation. And I knew from my own experience that it took an extremely heavy toll on me. I will never be the same person I was growing up, the happy-go-lucky, silly, fun, due to all of the things that I have witnessed at the hands of my own species.
(00:17:31):
And so we took a deep dive with six wildlife professionals who have worked all over the world, and what we found is deep and profound grief and despair, feeling isolated, feeling rejected even by family members who didn't want to have those conversations, by partners and even by their profession, which is probably going to sound shocking to a lot of people. But traditional wildlife biology, and I think it's changing and I think it's evolving and so many more, if I may say, women are getting involved in wildlife conservation. And we're bringing our hearts into the work, not just our knowledge of ground truthing and statistics and species counts and whatnot, but that recognition of the sentient of the species that we work with. And we allow ourselves to fall in love with those animals that we study. But I think the training that most students receive is that that's not part of our work.
(00:18:32):
That's not science. That isn't going to help us achieve our conservation goals. Check your feelings at the door, get out in the field and anesthetize those animals, trap those animals, put pit tags in the backs of those animals. I could go on and on with the litany of things that we do in the name of conservation that is actually unbelievably distressing and cruel to those animals. And so the mental health ramifications are profound and they are not supported by the profession and they're not supported by general society. And loss of those species is just mere collateral damage in humans' pursuits of growth and prosperity. And then what is a wildlife biologist to do but a cry alone, drink alone, you name it. These are the things that are happening to our wildlife biologists.
Alan Ware (00:19:27):
I thought the concept you talk about of disenfranchised grief - grief that's not recognized by society in a broad way, and in this case, as you said, not even within other conservation professionals who are just doing the count, the species count or the ecosystem and more of a statistical sort of approach. You're currently working on a paper titled "Bearing Witness: Animal Sentience and Impact on Mental Health of Animal Rights Involved Individuals and Community". So that's another realm of people dealing directly with animals and seeing the impact of what we do to them. What motivated you to analyze the mental health impacts of people advocating for animal rights?
Sarah Bexell (00:20:12):
Yeah, again, personal experience. I've been vegetarian since I was probably 20 and vegan since 2004, and been involved really from an education perspective in animal rights for a very long time. I guess I couldn't call myself an activist. I'm not at protests and demonstrations and those kinds of things, but through education, and as Nandita said earlier, that's how we met was through some of my quote activism in that space. But any of us who are involved in animal rights are bearing witness either firsthand, going into factory farms or laboratories or in my case was witnessing the death of wildlife. And so I knew that firsthand. And then I'll share with you a quick story about an experience I had with my students a few years ago. We have several of farmed animal sanctuaries here in the state of Colorado, and I took one of my classes to one of these sanctuaries for farmed animals who had been rescued.
(00:21:12):
And upon the end of our field trip, the manager of this sanctuary pulled me aside, coming from a department of social work and in confidence said, Hey, I'm not asking for myself. I'm asking for my staff and for my colleagues, but we're not okay. We really, really are suffering here with severe depression, severe grief, and it's unending. It's unending. It's not like a grief when we lose a loved one and with years, months we can move past that loss. And when we're talking about something like the animal rights community, we can't get past it because there's always another animal's life on the line. There's always another billion animals' lives on the line, and it just feels relentless. You can't ever escape that grief, that sadness, that despair. And how do we cope with that?
(00:22:05):
Then another thing I just need to mention is that a lot of folks involved in animal protection have chosen careers that don't make them a lot of money, but their heart and their minds are so in it they're willing to take an incredibly low salary. Sometimes they don't even have insurance benefits to do that work, and then they don't have access to mental health resources. And so ever since that manager pulled me aside, I'm like, oh my God, I've got to do something for this community. My dream is to create mental health resources for folks in the animal rights community who typically are shunned by society because society would rather not face the fact that their breakfast - eggs, bacon, a glass of milk - causes untold levels of cruelty, not only to the animals, but the people and the humans and the environments that sustain those animals for their very short lives.
Nandita Bajaj (00:23:03):
That would be such a welcome set of resources to help the animal rights community. And like you said earlier, this work must be and can only really be done by someone from within the community who gets the firsthand experience of this type of grief and trauma. And you have years, decades of living with that.
Sarah Bexell (00:23:29):
Yeah. When the woman first asked me as we were leaving that sanctuary, I went back to my colleagues and told them about it, and we all were at a loss. We're like, oh my gosh, there really aren't any resources. Therapists aren't going to understand where these folks are coming from. Not that I don't think that some traditional therapists who are not in the animal rights world couldn't be beneficial because I think that there would be. But I think that for true understanding and relatability, you have to have sort of that therapeutic trust and bond with your therapist and on the part of somebody who had been traumatized by what humans do to other species, if the person asking them those questions is participating in the harms, how can you actually create that therapeutic bond and trust if you know your therapist is part of causing the harm?
Nandita Bajaj (00:24:22):
And that happened with you right when you were working abroad on these conservation issues and you came back with so much anxiety and your own therapist kind of belittle your fears.
Sarah Bexell (00:24:34):
With that experience, I was very much belittled in my fear and my sadness and my grief, and also I think because this particular person, I don't know that she had had the ability to have a relationship with another species, with another individual, I should say. And I think a lot of the relationships that humans have because of urbanization and modernity, our relationships are very surface level with other species. And sometimes the only intimate sort of relationship we have with another species is with a domesticated dog, a domesticated cat, and hopefully it's a great relationship. But somebody showing up at your door that has intense relationships with giant pandas and golden lion tamarind species that most people never even have the opportunity to see, let alone have a relationship with, it's just too far away from their sort of realm of experience and knowledge. And then I think a lot, going back to sort of the charismatic animals that humans have chosen to resurrect from the brink of extinction, a lot of times in the media, those individuals of those species, they're really are portrayed almost as caricatures of themselves.
(00:25:49):
I can speak most about giant pandas. Everybody thinks of them as bumbling, silly, goofy oafs and don't know them for beautiful, brilliant masters of their own habitat, masters of their social systems that have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. But then when we see them in the media, they're silly, they're goofy, they're eating a birthday cake at a zoo, and they aren't appreciated for truly who they are, for their wisdom, their grace, their ability to adapt and be resilient. And so I think it's hard for a therapist that hasn't had those experiences to provide comfort for somebody who has.
Alan Ware (00:26:34):
Yeah. You also teach a course in the master's of social work at the University of Denver about environmental change impacts and resilient strategies for mental health for students. What are some of the impacts you're seeing on their mental health of climate change and ecological distress in general?
Sarah Bexell (00:26:53):
Yeah, I want to give a shout out to my colleague Kristen Greenwald, and she's actually the instructor for that course. Kristen also had an undergraduate degree in environmental studies and then came for a master's in social work with us with the direct purpose of being a clinical social worker to address these issues of eco-anxiety, eco-distress. And almost half of the course is allowing our students actually to address their own eco-anxiety, their own eco-distress. A lot of the work that has to be done first is with a student's own trauma, their own grief, their own despair, because we can't really be good interventionists if our stuff is as present in the therapeutic room or focus group as that of our clients. And so she spends a lot of the time in her course allowing our students to process and deal with their own anxiety and grief, and then moves into teaching them different intervention strategies for folks who might show up in their therapy rooms in the future with different levels of eco-distress, eco-grief, eco- despair.
(00:28:02):
And I also just want to say that these are not diagnosable or maladaptive mental health issues. These are actually highly adaptive manifestations in the human brain, because it would be more diagnosable for a person to not have these fears. If we were not afraid of global collapse right now, that would be really a pathology. But what we're starting to see emerge are very adaptive responses to the crumbling of our only home, the destruction of our only home, our only safe water, our only safe air, our only ability to grow food. So these are adaptive responses on the parts of our students, and then many of them want to go on to also provide therapeutic settings for folks experiencing this. We're in the process right now of proposing a new certificate to really deeply specialize in this, and it will be called Mental Health for Ecological Resilience and Adaptation. And so we're moving beyond sustainability and already into how do we build resilience, because it's happening and it's only going to get worse. So we can't pretend that it's not going to, and an adaptation. We can't fix these problems. We as a species have to learn how to adapt. So it's exploding in need and we're scrambling right now in the mental health field to catch up and be ready.
Alan Ware (00:29:34):
Yeah, that's a deep area. We'll have to be more psychologically resilient in the face of all this. I'm sure the young students you have and some that I've talked to are quite amazed that this just kind of denial of something enormous coming at them throughout their hopefully long lives is getting so little attention. So there's that element too, of a cultural denial as a young person and looking at it and thinking, I think this is really important, but why are the older people in power treating it like it's really not? There's got to be some dissonance there.
Sarah Bexell (00:30:10):
We hear this time and time again, students come to us in tears because of what they're having to learn, whether it's a geography course, a biology course, a social work course, a business course about the state of the natural environment. And even all of us as faculty, I've had to learn the hard way to be what we call a trauma-informed educator, because I have to admit, when I first started in higher education, I was just literally a fire hose of information about what is happening to the planet with no filters, no buffers, and then I send my students out the door without a time for them to process, to grieve, to sit and wonder what does this mean for my life, let alone clients that they want to serve in the future. And so with politicians refusing to talk about some of the most pressing needs that our young people have, it is demoralizing to our young people to have some of their biggest fears completely and utterly disregarded.
Nandita Bajaj (00:31:17):
And Sarah, you've conducted research serving K to 12 teachers who wish to dedicate more time to environmental education, yet feel constrained by the time pressures of traditional curriculum and testing requirements. What do you think schools need to do to move environmental education beyond these expendable add-ons to become something more integral to the curriculum?
Sarah Bexell (00:31:41):
Yeah, thanks Nandita, and as a teacher yourself, the rigors and expectations of public school systems. I've worked in environmental education off and on for my entire career, and no matter where I was working, mostly it was nonprofits, we were always seen as sort of the field trip and the fun thing that kids get to do for one day of the year or even a half day of the year. And it was an add-on, something sort of nice that students could experience. And what we've been working on, several colleagues and I for many, many years is how do we get our K through 12 systems in the States, how do we get them seeing the integration of environmental concerns into the curriculum as truly integrated and a part of how and what our young people learn instead of this add-on, this one more thing we're going to ask of teachers or Oh gosh, we have to rent buses and buses are really expensive and we have to take a whole day off and we have to get substitute teachers, this litany of difficulties to engage in learning about the natural world.
(00:32:53):
And now we're at a crisis point where we literally, in the words of David Orr, who's considered one of the leading sustainability education experts in the world, says that we still educate our young people as if there is no planetary emergency. And he said that in 2004, I believe, twenty years ago, and that crisis has only escalated catastrophically. Whereas we have students who have experienced wildfire, massive floods, hurricanes, and they're coming to school with no support, no education about what just happened to them and their family home and their entire communities. And so we did this research because we know that there are some teachers really trying hard to do this work in the face of common core curriculum and standardized testing and all of the things upon things upon things that teachers are expected to do in the classroom. And what we found is a lot of these teachers are doing what we call a complimentary curriculum using eco-mindedness and alignment thinking.
(00:33:57):
So it's not asking them to carve another hour out of their day or to plan that expensive field trip in the spring when it's finally nice and warm to be outside, but that it is a way of being in the classroom, of modeling environmental care and concern, of modeling love for each other, for us all to love each other enough in hopes that we all have a safe, and as Alan said earlier, a long life ahead of us. So it is helping our teachers to feel safe talking about these things because of course, this is yet one more thing that has been politicized in just in the past decade or so. And what we also found in our research is that if teachers don't address it in the classroom, the students ask for it. They want to know these things. I hear about climate change on the news, Ms. Smith, are we going to learn about that?
(00:34:49):
I heard about the wildfire two towns over. Are we going to talk about that? Our young people want to have answers. They want to be prepared, they want to understand, but the common core curriculum is not meeting them where they're at. And so this alignment thinking or an eco-mindedness can prepare a teacher to sort of weave these things in very naturally into what they already have to teach - whether that's math, whether that's social studies, whether that's science as the easy low hanging fruit, into English lessons, into the literature that is chosen to be in the classroom or not.
Nandita Bajaj (00:35:22):
And that of course requires training the teachers to embody some of those principles before they bring them into the classroom. So I'm thinking of my own experience as a high school teacher. I taught both in the public and private school boards, and I did not have an ecocentric worldview when I was a teacher. I was trained in the physics and maths. And as a teacher of science or math, you're expected to teach general science to grade 9 and 10 students, which include concepts like ecology and climate change. And there is such a hyper focus on the hard sciences within our school systems - the physics, bio, chemistry - everything else is considered soft and not as important. And so both ecology and climate change within my own teaching curriculum, not only were short shrift in terms of the content, but also in terms of the time that we gave to those courses. I remember when we were teaching about ecology, it was all of this classification and objectification of nature where we talk about trophic levels and food webs and identification of species with no emphasis on the richness of their individual lives and their cultures and their interactions with each other. Is that part of the environmental education curriculum is helping teachers to become better prepared to bring that into the classroom for the young people?
Sarah Bexell (00:36:57):
Yes. I could give lots of examples from my past, but I'll just say I have not been warmly received in higher education schools of education to offer courses in environmental education. So we're going rogue and we are creating, through the Center for a Regenerative Future, a certificate that will be available online. It will be both sync and async learning and regenerative education. And so, whereas we won't be integrated into a school of education, at least we will be offering it through a university, but then we won't be giving them lesson plans. We will be really providing what we would call a transformative educational experience. And one of the courses will actually be on bioregionalism. We want them to feel attached to place. That place attachment is something else that we could talk about probably for hours - that many of us, especially in the western world, we've lost it because we move around all the time.
(00:37:58):
I myself, I'm from Illinois, that is my place, but I find myself displaced in this new ecosystem that I have a really hard time attaching to. And what we want children to do is be allowed to attach to this place, fall in love with the place, who else is supposed to live here other than humans? What kinds of trees? What kinds of grasses, what kinds of shrubs, what kinds of berries and nuts grow here? We teach children more about gorillas in Africa than we teach them about the animals that live right outside their back door. And so we want place-based deep attachment and we want, I think what you were alluding to too Nandita, is that the emotional part of this learning needs to be emphasized as much as the scientific or sort of that classification that we do tend to do, especially in the natural sciences. That's boring and that's dry and doesn't create an emotional attachment. And we want children to be able to feel that, but we have to equip teachers so that they can do that with their students. So yes, we hope that that certificate will be September of 2025, but I'll keep you posted
Alan Ware (00:39:12):
Yeah, to get children more place-based when I've heard that they recognize more corporate logos by far than plants where they live, trees where they live. There are some encouraging things like outdoor preschools, which I guess have doubled since 2017. They're now 800 of them in the US and kids have more sustained attention, concentration, all kinds of benefits. The typical classroom is so human-centric. You could just inject a little bit of egocentrism and that would be huge, like having a school garden and doing your science measurements, just all kinds of amazing learning could come. We also interviewed Suprabha Seshan, who runs a sanctuary in India. And she has kids come there for sometimes from a few days to a couple of months. And these are mainly urban kids who are very used to electronic distractions in their phones, and they're grossed out by the leeches and the mud. But then after a few days or a couple weeks, for some of them, they're loving it. They're really in touch with the natural world, with the creatures, the beings, they're paying attention. You have to pay attention to understand something to then love something. If you never pay attention to it, you're never going to love it. And we just don't have children paying attention to the ecology around them.
Sarah Bexell (00:40:35):
I love your conversation of preschools, because one of our participants in the study that we were just talking about with K through 12 teachers, one of the teachers that we interviewed for that now has gone off and has established his own outdoor preschool and is working with our state legislature to make it basically acceptable to have outdoor preschools in the state of Colorado. You would think in Colorado we're kind of famous for our outdoor activities and whatnot, that that would be something really easy. But Ryan has had to fight quite hard to be able to establish an outdoor preschool. And it's of course it's safety concerns that parents and political officials are worried about, but he has succeeded and he has one of our first outdoor preschools.
Alan Ware (00:41:20):
You've also done research showing that many teachers think environmental justice should be more a part of environmental education. How would you define environmental justice the way they're teaching it, and why has it been largely absent from traditional environmental education?
Sarah Bexell (00:41:37):
Yeah, just to keep it super simple, environmental justice is making sure that all people are protected from environmental bads and have access to environmental goods. I love your question about why hasn't it been integrated? And I think there's at least two things. I think one reason it hasn't been included in traditional sort of environmental education is in many ways, who has been teaching environmental education, and a lot of it has been privileged folks, usually white folks. And these are folks that never had to endure environmental racism or environmental injustices. I'll speak for myself. That's always the safest. I was protected from environmental bads as a kid. I'm sure I was subjected to some stuff, but in general, my neighborhood was safe and there wasn't factories smoke stacks spewing horrible things into my air, and I could slosh through the creeks and not worry about environmental runoff.
(00:42:37):
I was a lucky kid. I wasn't a rich kid, but I was protected from most environmental bads. And so it wouldn't have even crossed my mind that that needed to be something integrated from sort of a justice and equity piece in my environmental education practice. So I think that's part of it. I'll just say again, speak for myself. My ability to live in a safe environment is dependent upon other people having to suffer horrifically right here in Colorado, and then in other parts of the country where we're drilling for cobalt or coltan, the things that we put in our phones or for fossil fuels to heat my home or to cool my home. It's a dawning and a reckoning, I think, for folks who often are put in places of having that privileged knowledge to be an educator, to then realize, oh my gosh, I am a huge part of the problem. And so sweeping it under the rug might be easier than saying, yeah, I buy cheap stuff at Target too, and I caused harm to somebody on the other side of the planet so that I could have this throwaway garment or something like that.
Alan Ware (00:43:51):
It does remind me in our standard economics, those are negative externalities, the pollution, the toxic cancer alley. And then if you can afford to get away from them, pay for the house to get away from the negative externalities, you're fine. And then you just have to hope that the state regulates those negative externalities so that you aren't harmed. But if you don't have power in the system to influence the state to regulate them, which a lot of poor people don't, they have to endure toxicity and pollution at levels that other people can escape from. Only the richest can get away from it. So I like that you said at the beginning, the ability for everybody to, what was it, enjoy the...
Sarah Bexell (00:44:33):
Environmental goods.
Alan Ware (00:44:35):
Yeah, the environmental goods
Sarah Bexell (00:44:37):
And be protected from the environmental bads.
Nandita Bajaj (00:44:40):
And it's been heartening to see across different educational institutions and even nonprofit work, we're seeing more and more awareness about environmental justice. Even within animal rights community, there's a lot more understanding of, well, where are these factory farms located? It's not just harms to the animals. It's also the most marginalized communities that are suffering from it. And a lot of people also conflate environmental justice with ecological justice. And we know that environmental justice is a form of social justice, is human-related justice, but ecological justice is about the broader rights and justice of how we relate to nature and being able to elevate the rights and wellbeing of nonhumans as well as the rest of nature. And we appreciate how you've helped differentiate the two. And you've also helped develop an ecological justice practice curriculum for master of social work students at the University of Denver. Given that you teach in social work and there's so much emphasis on social justice in that field, how do you help differentiate the two types of justice, environmental versus ecological, for your students? And how do you emphasize the need for advancing ecological justice as much as we have begun advancing environmental justice?
Sarah Bexell (00:46:12):
Thanks for that question. So on day one of my courses, I define and differentiate these two terms. And then environmental justice is so critically important. We have to pay so much more attention to this. At the same time, the emphasis in environmental justice is really for the protection of human beings. And again, I can't emphasize enough, oh my gosh, do we have a lot of work to do in that regard? As you said, Nandita, ecological justice broadens that out to justice towards all living beings and the abiotic components of this wondrous planet that we live on, abiotic meaning the non-living components like sunlight and rocks and minerals. So eco-justice is allowing for moral concern of all, and that can be something that might feel daunting and even awkward. And I think one of the things that we face occasionally is some pushback like, wait a second, our priority, our prerogative, is to protect human lives, make sure that all humans are safe and secure.
(00:47:27):
We don't have time and bandwidth to include other species, oh my gosh, or the whole earth in our realm of concern and practice. And what we've really had to work on and is really helping people with that true ecological or ecocentric worldview. I have to spend a couple of weeks in one of my courses just on very basic ecological and biological terms that maybe a lot of my students haven't had since they were in primary school. Maybe they had a dose of it in middle school or high school, but maybe they chose a different science and didn't study ecology or biology. And if they did, I'm sure it was all from a very anthropocentric sort of approach. And so we spend an entire module on what I call ecosystem functionings. Most of the literature would call them ecosystem services, but ecosystem functionings I use because ecosystem services makes it sound like the earth is out there and ecosystems are out there to serve humanity, end of story, wash our hands of that.
(00:48:35):
Ecosystem functionings means we as humans need the Earth to be able to function in a healthy manner in order for humans to be safe and to be well, not filthy rich, but to be safe and to be well, and to be secure that they will have that future that Alan asked us to think about earlier. And so ecosystem functions are things like living and non-living components of our environment - cleaning the water for us, purifying our air for us, growing beautiful fruits for us. And again, I'm doing it. I'm being anthropocentric - for us, for us, for us, right? We're all working so hard to change our language. So ecosystem functionings, having both living and non-living components, being healthy, thriving, that is the only way for social workers to keep their clients healthy and safe. So it's not an either/or. It's not that we're choosing to prioritize the health of other species and the health of the environment over the health of humans. We're helping our social work students recognize that without all of those entities thriving, that is the only way for our clients to be safe and secure and hopefully live to be a natural human lifespan.
Nandita Bajaj (00:49:55):
That's excellent because so much of this divide, oh, if you're advancing ecological justice, somehow it's coming at the expense of social justice. And that chasm is really based on this structural worldview that is very much created - that we are separate from nature, that we are not totally interdependent, not totally connected, and part of nature. And it is kind of this human hierarchical place of like, well, we got to take care of human needs first, and then if we have time and resources, then we can put some of that in nature, especially the nature that we want or the species that we like. Just divide it up into these little mechanical pieces. But I think part of that chasm also just comes from some past policies that did prioritize certain natural areas for a certain few privileged at the expense of more marginalized communities such as indigenous people who were removed from their own ancestral lands in order to conserve or preserve that land. And I am appreciating more and more, because of this focus on environmental justice, there is a greater appreciation that while a lot of indigenous communities for millennia have actually balance the two. They were at the helm of ecological justice. And so reclaiming some of those elements I think is such an important part of being able to advance ecological justice without getting lost in this fight of who's more important and recognizing that there is no social justice without ecological justice,right?
Sarah Bexell (00:51:46):
Exactly. Beautifully said, Nandita.
Alan Ware (00:51:49):
And we greatly appreciate that you've been outspoken about acknowledging the role of human population pressures on ecosystems, nonhuman animals, but it can be a sensitive topic to bring up as we know. What approaches have you used bringing the issue up within your classrooms?
Sarah Bexell (00:52:07):
I think one is just allowing students to see a few of the statistics. We don't need to, as I used to, feed them with the fire hose of information. I also invite Nandita to come to my classes, which has always been an incredible experience for them, life-changing. All of my students after Nandita comes say, wow, my whole worldview was changed in a one hour presentation by the great Nandita Bajaj. Yeah, it's so true. It's so true. But I think one of the things that's so interesting is that I used to be utterly terrified to talk about this topic. And now if I didn't talk about it, I think my students would trust me less, would not respect me as much if we just buried it under the rug as if it wasn't a problem. Young people are a lot more attuned to and understanding that this is a grave problem and a grave injustice to both the human world and the rest of this amazing planet.
(00:53:12):
So we usually just start with a few statistics, and then there's usually a lull. And then students are like, she's giving us permission to talk about this in a safe space. And then the conversation can come from them more than the sage on the stage professor saying, you know, this is kind of problematic, maybe we should take a look at this, to them talking about their fears. I've had so many students say, oh my gosh, thank you for letting us talk about this. Because I try to talk to my parents about whether I should have children or not. And again, it's like the whole therapist conversation we had earlier. Parents saying, oh my gosh, you're being ridiculous. Of course you want to have children. And it's every year, every course where at least one student expresses this. And then we also have students that are like, oh my gosh, my whole life I've dreamed of having children. Well, we don't not talk about that either. We talk about both and how might we keep a child born today safe? And so I think it's just allowing people to have the full conversation. And Nandita, I mean, you created the course on this topic, which I got to participate, where people are allowed to have these conversations instead of people being too afraid to even have that conversation. So it is a part of my curriculum, but it is an opening of the door versus here's one reading, let's move on, kind of issue.
Nandita Bajaj (00:54:48):
That's so heartening to hear that students are actually wanting to have this conversation more and more, and that you said they won't trust you if you don't have it. Because our experience of talking to a lot of academics within institutions where they are comfortable talking about population, but they're part of institutions where demography or any talk of population has really been censored at an institutional level, they would quietly invite me to their classroom and we would have a discussion. But at a school level, there's a lot of pushback. And part of the conversation goes back to what we just said. There's so much emphasis now on environmental justice within a lot of progressive institutions that ecological justice, which depends on scaling back the human enterprise, pulling back on population, reforming our economies, changing the consumption patterns, changing the land use and agricultural patterns. All of those involve large scale system changes. And I think a lot of people and students seem still uncomfortable with the conversation.
Sarah Bexell (00:56:03):
Yeah, and I appreciate all that you've said, and I should just say that the students that I teach are all graduate students. It's just a different level of life experience, maturity, ability to synthesize learning. And I'll just be honest too. I wouldn't say that all professors are talking about this. And I would guess that the majority at my university would be scared to talk about it. And I think I just had to face very early on in my academic work, even when I was an undergrad, that this was a problem and I had to figure out how to broach the topic, because not talking about it was such a severe injustice to all the people, all the animals, to this beautiful Earth that I love. And so I haven't always done it well or eloquently, and maybe I've probably caused some trouble in my trying to approach this, but it's why I admire your work so much because you're inviting people in to talk about something that is truly a difficult and painful issue for us to face.
Nandita Bajaj (00:57:04):
And Sarah, one of the more exciting new developments at the University of Denver that you've mentioned a few times today is this think tank that is focused on efforts to scale back the human enterprise called the Center for a Regenerative Future. And you are the faculty director of this new center. And you've mentioned in passing that the center was formally focused on sustainability, and you've since changed the focus to regeneration. Can you speak to the need for that transition from sustainability to a focus on regeneration?
Sarah Bexell (00:57:42):
Yeah, we're really excited about it. And it's not that we don't want sustainable initiatives to continue to happen at our university. Things like solar panels need to be implemented. And in my thinking, I see those hope and dream that those are stopgap measures on our way to a regenerative future. But as probably a lot of your listeners are familiar, sustainable development has been coined as a term since 1987, and we haven't made great progress. And sustainable development is still really predicated on growth that causes less harm. But that growth imperative is still, when we say development, at least in the English language, that's still an embedded part of that terminology. And our premise is really, I mean, we look at degrowth, we look at wellbeing economies, we look at steady state economies. We're not married to one particular sort of new model moving forward, but we are very wedded to and excited about regeneration.
(00:58:44):
And so moving away from sustainability paradigms - less harm but still growing - to scaling back the human enterprise. And very importantly, I think the part of this that I'm most excited about is we desperately need to allow the Earth and other species to heal. And until we can allow the Earth by scaling back and giving, whether it's half-Earth, E.O. Wilson's work, or Eric Dinerstein's work on 30% of the Earth by 2030, we have to allow Earth to heal so that we can allow human relationships and human social structures to heal and be able to thrive. And I hope someday for, and this is really me getting dreamy, but for humans, other species and Earth to truly flourish together. And that's going to be only made possible if we allow the Earth to heal, which regenerative paradigms are founded on.
Alan Ware (00:59:39):
So we appreciate that you've got the honest realism or practical idealism that you mentioned, when you're talking about the Center. We come across so much ungrounded, wishful thinking, whether it's technology will save us, renewable energy, some new technology in so many of the discussions of the polycrisis. So what does honest realism, practical idealism look like to you, and how do you impart that to some of your students who might be quite thoroughly trained or used to a very technology type of paradigm?
Sarah Bexell (01:00:14):
Yeah, in terms of honest realism, one of the things, and our students are coming to us with that inkling, they know it. It's a niggling in their brain that things are not right and their future is not what society has been telling them it's going to be. So that honest realism is being honest with them that their future is going to be hard, that there are going to be losses, and that there's going to be tremendous pain and tremendous suffering, and not all of us are going to make it. It's not a future of cell phones and trips to Europe, and it's going to be regrounding ourselves and allowing Earth to heal so that we can heal ourselves. And that's going to look like not having all of the creature comforts. At the same time, that doesn't mean our lives have to be horrible. We've been so conditioned to think that binge watching Netflix or Hulu or whatever's popular today, that is the way to relax and to enjoy and to feel comfortable and safe and secure.
(01:01:17):
There are so many ways that over hundreds of thousands of years, humans have created ways of sharing and being together and being joyous and having community and having relationships and being in awe and wonder of this planet. We have thrown away so many other ways of finding safety and security, awe and wonder and joy at the expense of destroying all those old things. I still hold desperately to my idealistic nature, and I truly think that we can. Humans have it in us to create this regenerative, beautiful, joyous, awe, and wonder-filled existence on Earth. I'm not going to let that go. We can do it. If we can create an iPhone, we can create that reality that allowed us to flourish for as long as humans have been on the planet. But we have to, going back to that resilience and adaptation, we have to adapt to different ways of enjoying our lives, and not just drink from the fire hose of social media and advertising that that's the only way to be happy and find joy in your life, but truly use this wondrous brain that humans have evolved to find joy in comforts and social structures and whatnot that are constructive instead of destructive.
Alan Ware (01:02:43):
Right. These shifting baselines of we forget what we've lost the connection to other people given the loneliness epidemic and the mental health crises we're seeing and the disconnection from nature. And then we feel we have to say, we're in the best of all possible worlds. Oh, we have this great medical care and we live longer, and we've got these great gadgets, so it's better than it's ever been, and we don't want to go back to pain dentistry and the Stone Age, or there's this dichotomy between now versus total pain and suffering. But actually there's so much we've lost that could be much less stimulation, much less novelty in kind of an electronic sort of way, but a slower drip sort of enjoyment of natural settings and natural creatures and human interaction. So I'm there with you in your practical idealism, and I appreciate it.
Nandita Bajaj (01:03:39):
I like your analogy of slow drip, Alan, and it's also a really wonderful place to wrap up this conversation. We know you have to go, Sarah, so thank you so much for being with us today. This was such an incredible conversation. We covered so much ground and you brought so much of your heart to this work, which is what has made this work so valuable, being able to work with you in this area. Thank you for all you do, Sarah, and we are so excited about our continued collaborative efforts together.
Sarah Bexell (01:04:14):
Thank you so much, Nandita and Alan. It's been absolute joy to spend the morning with both of you, and thank you for all of the important work that you both do to share all of this wisdom that you both have through the podcast.
Alan Ware (01:04:28):
Thank you.
Nandita Bajaj (01:04:28):
Thank you.
Alan Ware (01:04:28):
That's all for this edition of Overshoot. Visit population balance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site or by emailing us at podcast@populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and hope that you'll consider a one-time or recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj (01:04:59):
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for helping us all shrink toward abundance.
