Season 4, Episode 23: On Transformational Resilience with Bob Doppelt

Climate Change and Happiness

image credit | Robin Canfield

Thomas and Panu met with long-time environmental and mental health advocate Bob Doppelt. Bob talked about his personal story beginning with landscape and river system conservation and moving into sustainability and leadership education. Bob also spoke of his recent activities working with the International Transformational Resilience Coalition on ways that communities can connect and adapt in the face of climate disruptions. Bob's latest work focuses on the idea of “community is medicine.” As happens when like-minded people come together, Thomas and Bob found that they had a number of mutual connections in the Oregon white water rafting community. Join us for an inspiring conversation.

Links

• Bob Doppelt

• Transformational Resilience (book)

• The International Transformational Resilience Coalition

• David Pollack: What is Transformational Resilience and how does it apply to the mental health and public health responses to the impacts of climate change?

Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

Introduction voice: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness (CC&H), an international podcast that explores the personal side of climate change. Your feelings, what the crisis means to you, and how to cope and thrive. And now, your hosts, Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala.

Thomas Doherty: Well hello, I’m Thomas Doherty.

Panu Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. This is our podcast, a show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change and other environmental issues. And you know what they say when you pick on one thing in the universe, it's hitched to everything else. So, climate environmental issues include your family, politics, economics, your life, your spirituality. So, all this stuff. And we really enjoy having conversations with people around the world. And I'm really honored to have a guest today. A person that I've actually never met but we have a lot of shared contacts in the past as often happens. So, I'd like you to meet our guest.

Doppelt: Hello, I’m Bob Doppelt. I coordinate the International Transformational Resilience Coalition. I'm happy to be here today.

Doherty: Yeah, and we were just chatting before we started. Now, I used to work as a river guide and an outdoor guide in Oregon. And I knew Bob had been a river guide too and it turns out we know some of the same people and some of my mentors he had worked with. It's a small world in sustainability and climate sometimes, and we cross paths. So that's already a nice connection we're having. And I'm really interested in actually hearing about Bob's current work and all the things he's doing. Panu, do you want to get us started?

Pihkala: Warmly welcome, Bob, also on my behalf. Pleasure to meet you. We have been presenting in some of the same lecture series, but we haven't actually talked with each other, so this is a pleasure. I started working on eco-anxiety and eco-emotions around 2008 or 2009, and then in a more concentrated manner after 2015. And during that period, I was very happy when I found your book from 2016 called Transformational Resilience. Terms such as eco-anxiety existed. They were not as popular as they were later on, but I was really surprised how wide-ranging that book was already, including both individual methods for calming down your nervous system when there's too much stress and lots of things around community and social relations and resources. So, I was very grateful for that, and it's actually had some influence in Finland also, but before going into details, and listeners, we will open up the concept of transformational resilience, it would be very nice to hear something about your personal journey. How did you become so invested in these matters related to environmental issues and human psychology and community resilience?

Doppelt: Well, thank you both and nice to meet you both. Even though it's not in person yet. But I've sort of, like many of us in life, go in a fishtail kind of experience through life. I've been a river guide all my life, including in high school, and had always had a strong connection to the outdoors. But in doing that, one of the things I did when I was very young, I was hired at age 21, after college, to run an outdoor treatment program for 30 kids. Here are 30 kids, now take them around the country and do rock climbing, backpacking, river running, and don't kill anybody. That was sort of the message I got from the director, but we did it, and it went well. So, it was early on that I had an experience of having to work with people who were in stressful situations and in the outdoors. And it was a very interesting learning experience.

So, I ended up going to grad school both in counseling psychology and in environmental science. My first actual professional experience, I worked as a counselor with troubled youth and their families. And after a number of years there, I realized that I didn't have enough understanding of what many of these kids were going through to really help them. I was trained in Adlerian counseling and Dreikurs family therapy and this didn't help many of the kids that I was dealing with, and we can get into that later. I got burned out because of that, so I went back into the environmental field. Then ended up, after many years, running the Climate Leadership Initiative at the University of Oregon, which was one of the very first social science based ethical assistance research programs in the US. So, we ran around helping organizations, state governments, country governments and others develop their first climate action plans. We went to southeast Florida and helped organize the Southeast Florida Climate Resiliency Compact which brought together the largest metro area in Florida, Miami-Dade and Broward counties to prepare for sea level rise, storm surges, and other impacts. Then, Superstorm Sandy came along which you might remember. I guess 12 years ago. We saw mental health impacts in the northeast of the US such as New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, but it skirted along the coast of Florida, and we saw the same impacts here. The other people in the climate field didn’t see that or if they did, they didn’t care much because it wasn’t their background. But because of my background in mental health, I saw those impacts and I knew they were going to get way worse because the climate emergency was going to get way worse. That led me to form the ITRC, the International Transformation of Resilience Coalition, to try to combine these two fields now 11 years ago.

Doherty: Yeah, this is great. Either for young people or for people that are new in some sort of climate or sustainability, it's important to realize this is not new at all. People have been in some form of environmental sustainability for 50 years, in the modern sense of the term and certainly climate. Now someone who grew up in Oregon, I talk in the book I'm working on about the emergence of the modern environmental movement. Much of it took place on the West Coast and in places like Oregon and Eugene. So, this idea of having a climate resilience plan isn’t new. It was like 30 years ago that people were talking about this. It wasn't just yesterday. So, it's really great to talk with you. It gives a sense of the breadth and distance and depth of this kind of program. A lot of people were surprised by Sandy, but you were already involved and could see it coming. All these experiences like Sandy, Lahaina, the LA fires, and Ashley. These are all tipping point wakeup call experiences. I think Sandy's unique, and we could talk maybe more about that because it mobilized the New York intelligentsia, the New York therapists. The people that wouldn't necessarily be the Oregonian river guide types. It brought them into the mix of this so that's really a sad way to do it, but it is what's been happening. It's probably what's the case. Each disaster kind of folding in a new subculture of people into this work. Would you say that's a fair statement?

Doppelt: Yeah, I think as is often the case with humans is that it's only a crisis that gets us to think differently, change our minds, etc. And this issue is so overwhelming to most people, they can't get their heads around it. So, we deal with the next crisis by trying to respond to it, and then we move on. We don't think about what's actually happening over the long term and what's needed because we're going to have more and more disasters. And just as importantly with the climate crisis, we call it the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis, because it's way more than an atmospheric crisis. We're degrading ecological systems and we're exterminating biodiversity worldwide that feeds back to increased temperatures and dysregulates the atmospheric climate system even more, which of course then feeds back and has more ecological and biological impact. So, it’s a real interactive process. Even the most destructive impacts go far beyond disasters, these extreme weather events. And that's what people haven't quite wrapped their heads around. It’s activating cascading disruptions to the ecological, social, and economic systems people rely on for food, water, shelter, jobs, health, income. And we often can't connect it with the climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis. But even now, rising food prices in the US, that people are so mad about, are not all caused by, but a significant part is droughts that are impacting food, reducing the ability of farmers to produce food, etc. So, it's creating all sorts of stresses. And then on top of that, or connected to that, are these acute disasters that come in and harm and destroy people. And that is really what we really need to prepare for. That's what my organization is trying to help people prepare for and communities prepare for. Otherwise, we just sit around and try to react to the next disaster and help people through mental health first aid afterwards. And that's important, but that's not the solution at all.

Pihkala: Yeah, that's a real systemic approach to these issues. Could you share with the listeners what are some of the practical methods in that kind of work?

Doppelt: Yeah, good question. So as people think about it, when there is a disaster, what normally happens? People come together who don't know each other, might not even like each other, and they help each other out. They provide food and shelter or practical assistance. They go rescue somebody from a situation and they set up food shelters for people to come and get food when their home's ruined or something. That's called the community cohesion phase of a disaster or the honeymoon phase. So, we help people realize and think about if they’ve been assisted by that or participated in that in some way and if they could see that kind of mutual aid network becoming long-term and permanent. That's really what we're focused on. We are focused on helping communities and neighborhoods form what we call Transformational Resilience Coordinating Networks, TRNCs. They are these mutual aid networks. The difference is the mutual aid networks usually get established and then disappear a month, two months, whenever after disaster ends. People go back and put their own lives back together and they leave.

The climate ecosystem biodiversity crisis is going to get far worse, actually in rapid order, and it's going to continue for decades. We need to establish the social infrastructure in communities that can support that community cohesion phase over the long term. That's what the Transformation Resilience Coordinating Networks are and as part of that, they need to help people learn different kinds of resilience skills and engage in different kinds of resilience activities. I can dive into that in a second. But that's really what we're trying to do. And I'll just also say that we've been working on this for quite a while. We have TRCNs, they call themselves something different, in many parts of the U.S and Canada and other places. The UN High-Level Climate Champion Race to Resilience Initiative found out about our work over a year ago and invited us to become a partner. So, we're now working internationally on this through the UN Race to Resilience Initiative and finding that different countries, different nations, different communities struggle with different issues than we do in western communities and higher income areas.

Doherty: Yeah, this is great. It's like Paradise Built in Hell from Rebecca Solnit. In a crisis is opportunity in the sense that we can really build back better, and we can actually harness all the positive honeymoon phase human connections that come about in disasters because they do have this leveling effect temporarily. You didn't say it, but I think being proactive about this helps us to get ahead of disaster capitalism and some of the breakdowns. I don't know that you get into that directly, but I see you as standing in the way of that negative stuff happening.

Doppelt: Yeah, we do actually get into a bit. We don't label that. I will say that Rebecca's work didn't talk about what happens after the community cohesion phase. And that's really what's important. Then you go into what we call the disillusionment phase because people have to go back and put their own lives back together so that cohesion and that community support no longer exists. And that can last for months or years and that's the disillusionment phase. That's when most of the mental health and psychosocial problems emerge. That's why we need to establish this social infrastructure over the long term, because we don't want that disillusionment phase. We want that support to be there.

And what we also find is that one of the things driving much of this is the social isolation and loneliness that people feel in western and higher income nations that is very toxic today and is getting worse with social media and other kinds of things. This brings people together and creates the social connections, the social cohesion and social efficacy needed to address these common problems. And it has to happen, or it has to start in the communities. And what we find is when communities come together or neighborhoods come together to do this, it takes a while, and you normally wouldn't like each other or they have different political views, but they create the political power to push for change at a higher level. And that's really key. But we don't talk about that being the goal, initially. First, help each other out so that people will help you and you can help others. And when you help others out, you often find new meaning and purpose in your life, you feel good about what you do, you have meaning, and that's what helps prevent mental health problems or heal them when they emerge.

Pihkala: Yeah, that is impressive and so important. And at some point, in our conversation, I do want to go into this topic of meaning and purpose, which I also think is highly, highly essential. And listeners, you may be familiar with the resilience concept and some of the criticism against it. I think it's a valid concept, but some of the main criticism is that if only people return to a previous state of affairs, that will not be enough. And this transformational resilience that Bob is talking about by name goes beyond that. So, it points to growth in these processes. I hear that when you talk about these issues, but do you want to say something more about this transformation aspect?

Doppelt: Yeah, that's a very good point, thank you. When we first started the ITRC, now 11 years ago, we had a team of about 12 people who came together to try to form it. And we had about 30 to 40 emails flying back and forth between people trying to come up with the name. Because what we were really talking about is a post-traumatic growth, in used psychology terms, or adversity-based growth. We thought that was too wonky for the general public, so we called it transformational resilience. But, after many emails trying to come up with a nice name, what this really means is that what's happening with the climate emergency is that our way of life and how people live and what they do is being challenged. Our economic model is being challenged. We're seeing the push back on that now in the U.S.

In other words, what the climate emergency does to many people is it shatters their core views, their deeply held assumptions and beliefs about the way the world operates and their role in it. That's a classic definition of trauma. That's what trauma is about and that's only going to get worse as the climate emergency worsens and we'll have greater push back against it then. Oh no, it's not really happening or whatever. But what transformational resilience means to us and what we teach and what we help communities engage in is how to use adversities to not just bounce back to where you were. For many people, it wasn't a very good place in the first place. Why do you want to bounce back to that? And especially the way we live, our high consumption rates, our high fossil fuel rates, etc., are all not helpful to bounce back to. So how do we use the adversities to find new sources of meaning, purpose, and hope in life that actually increase our sense of well-being and the well-being of others well beyond what it was before. Because it wasn't all that healthy before for many people, and certainly not for the natural environment. So that's what we mean by transformation resilience. How do we use this experience that is just going to continue and grow worse to actually catalyze really fundamental individual, collective, economic and other kinds of changes.

Doherty: Yeah, this is all really great. And we're going to put some links in the show notes to the networks that Bob is talking about because I think people might want to get involved. And this is a global initiative that Bob's involved in. It's systemic and that's what's challenging about the terms because like I say in this project I'm working on, when you're thinking big, you're not thinking big enough, right? We always have to keep realizing there's another level and another level and not get too concrete. Systemically, if you help in one small area of your life or in someone's life, then it filters into other areas. And if we draw down carbon in one part of the atmosphere, it helps the whole atmosphere. So, underneath all this, I think there's a systemic insight that that is one of the foundational and juicy parts of this. Bob, how did you get involved in systems thinking? Because that seems to have animated all of your stuff going back. Do you have a story about that or how that came into your life?

Doppelt: That's an interesting question. I don't remember. It was many years ago. I think it was because I was in the environmental field, and you learn systems thinking even if it's not called that. Then I just started going to some workshops and found out how to describe it more graphically or specifically. But, let me just say one other thing in terms of terms. We work with different groups in many different continents, and you have to use different terms, different phrases that resonate and make sense to the culture and demographics of the age groups that you're working with. And we often find that we don't know what we're doing initially. And we have to share different phrases and ask people to share with us how they see these issues. That's how we learn the way that makes the most sense. You have to resonate with what is already there. Scientific facts and figures mean nothing to most people. It's their mental models. It's their assumptions of how the way the world works and how they work. That's what they see the world through. You have to try to understand that as much as possible.

Doherty: It reminds me of SustyVibes. We spoke with Jennifer Uchendu in Nigeria and their term of sustainable vibration, SustyVibes, which if they're not already familiar with your work, there'd be a good contact. That's helpful for all of us to realize. We have to be a cosmopolitan like you. We have to be able to speak different languages, go into different communities and kind of when in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Pihkala: Yeah, exactly so and regardless of various terms and various styles of life, there is still the lived experience of being alive in this strange time of global warming and biodiversity loss and all the other things. And I strongly resonate with this task of trying to listen and understand and connect with other people's experiences and then try to find ways towards increased transformational resilience or transilience which is a word that some scholars suggested a couple of years ago. Adversarial growth or post-traumatic growth has also been one of my interests and I've done an analysis of the traditional categorization of that and then comparing that to people's experiences amidst environmental issues and environmental emotions. So, I've benefited from your work Bob on that project also, but I do want to talk about the very practical resilience skills which you mentioned. So, could you share some of those practical skills and methods that the coalition uses?

Doppelt: Yeah again, thank you for that question. The most important skill is really a process, and that is to build social connections across geographic lines, economic lines, racial lines in the community. And when you do that and we help different community groups learn how to do that, we also help encourage them to help people learn what we call presencing skills, which are self-regulation and co-regulation skills. Skills to calm your body, mind, and emotions and skills to help others do the same that you interact with, that's co-regulation. And once people have calmed their nervous system, we don't usually talk about it that much in those terms, then they practice what we call purposing skills. So presencing and purposing. And purposing is how do you find new meaning, purpose, and hope in these adversities. What can you do? And most of the time, that involves rising above your own interest and trying to help others and help the natural environment. But the starting point often, not always, when we're working with community groups is to build those social connections. So there's programs that do that by holding potlucks for neighbors and having people just get together and get to meet them. The San Francisco neighborhood empowers program, which now they defunded it, which was too bad, was very successful. They would shut off entire streets in urban San Francisco and bring tables out and put tables in the middle and have potlucks. People on high rises would come down and share that. And then after they did that a couple of times, then they'd form a resilience network, a coordinating network, a steering committee of neighbors that wanted to do it. And they'd develop a resilience plan for the community, and they'd share it with everybody. It was a very, very successful program.

There's many other examples of ways in which communities and neighborhoods can build those social connections. And as doing that, then you add these presencing and purposing skills. If you have a meeting, say let's just take a brief, what we call a resilience pause, but each group can call it something different. Let's just take a moment to calm ourselves. And there's a wide variety of age and culturally appropriate presencing skills that you can use. Sometimes it's breath-based, sometimes it's feeling the sensations in your body, sometimes it's just telling jokes and laughing often. Lots of different ways. You connect the different skills together and you help people understand that you have to stay calm and learn how to find meaning in life given all these other adversities that are going on. That's what purposing is. And I can get into purposing skills too if you want to know about that.

Doherty: That's pretty practical, Panu. Did that answer your question?

Pihkala: Yeah, that's exactly the level of detail and practicality I was hoping for. And if you want to say a bit about the purposing skills, I think that would also be fascinating.

Doppelt: Yeah, listeners, just think about what gives their life purpose. What do they find meaning in? And many times, most often for most people, it is the connections they have with other people, the relationships. But sometimes it's art, or it's helping animals, or helping other people in the community. It's hard to know. And there's other things. Each person's different. For some people, it's spirituality or religious beliefs. We just ask people to think about what helps them find meaning and you ask people how you find that and how can you connect that source of meaning with what's going on now in this disaster. Or how can you find new sources of meaning. What we often point out and we mostly ask questions is do you find that you learned new skills, that you had more skills than you thought you had or strength that you thought you had when you did that kind of work. They say, I didn't realize I could speak up for myself or whatever. And that's what transformation resilience is really about. It's about helping people understand that they can use adversities as catalysts to learn, grow, and increase their sense of well-being, mostly by just becoming aware of skills and capacities they already have that they haven't been using and then applying that to what's going on in their community and their family life.

Doherty: Yeah, this is great. Listeners, we had an episode recently with my friend Greg Hill, who's much like Bob in doing neat work for a while. We talked about eco-friends where we have these people that we know, and we follow, and they inspire us. So, I got a lot of flavor of this from hearing Bob because even though we haven't actually chatted about this, we tracked very similar thinking over the years. So, it really is validating for me personally to hear your approach because it's similar to how I think about things. I love the presencing and purposing language. That's a key. It's more important than we realize, the language that's flexible enough for people to grab on to. That's not super academic. I'm glad we're talking after I'm writing my book because then I would have to go add a bunch of stuff in. But I do list Bob's program in my resource list. The power of art, the power of spirituality, relationships. What do they say, don't have a meeting, have a party, don't have a meeting, have a potluck. It makes it much more universal and much more human no matter whether you're in Oregon or Africa or Finland.

Pihkala: Indeed so, and we'll put some links to previous podcast episodes. There's one where we discuss various types of meaning in life for example, which is closely related to what Bob was just talking about. We are reaching our usual half an hour length, but I'd like to ask you Bob if you want to share something about what kinds of presencing and proposing skills are important for you personally in this very troubled time? Is it still the river-oriented stuff that has been dear to you for so long? Would you like to share a couple of those that are personally very meaningful?

Doppelt: Yeah, we don't live in a city, we live out in the country because I need nature around us. My wife is the same way. My wife was a veterinary technician for 29 years. So, connection with animals is very much there. But we have a group of friends that we still go rafting with when my arm doesn't hurt me too bad. That's the problem with getting older, that stuff can hurt. But also, for many years, I've practiced meditation and mindfulness. I'm a mindfulness-based stress reduction instructor and I teach part-time at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California. So, I practice those. But most importantly is just finding ways to laugh. We've got a group of friends, we just had dinner again and about once a week we have dinner with a group of and we laugh. We become 12-year-olds and laugh at the silliest things even in the midst of what's going on with the U.S. now and the presidency and we find ways to laugh about it. And I keep doing this work. My wife keeps asking, when am I really going to retire. Well, this is what gives me purpose and meaning.

Let me say one other thing just so we can get it on. If you're interested in forming your own Transformation Resilience Coordinating Network in your neighborhood or community, you can go to our website and use an application to fill out and then we invite you to become part of a community of practice that meets every other week. And there's people from all over the world that join and sometimes we're teaching skills, sometimes we're just having conversations to problem solve with the different groups and communities. We also provide an ongoing educational program about this where they can just sit through a series for a five-week period. They don't have to attend all; they can just get the slides sent to them afterwards. So, there's lots of ways to get involved. You don’t even have to join us. Just think about how you form a mutual aid network in your neighborhood and community. Get your friends together, talk about it, and get a vision together. What are you trying to achieve, what would be different than this happening now, and see if you can get that established because this is what we’re going to need all over the world as the climate emergency worsens. So, I encourage everyone to try to find a way that they can get involved.

Doherty: Yeah, thanks for adding that call to action because that's perfect. We'll put that link on the website. If you're listening to this and this is inspiring to you, go check it out, Transformational Resilience. You could find it pretty easily. And again, it's nice that this is flexible. You can move it in the direction that's good for your community. Well, Bob, I just want to thank you. It's a long time coming to get you on the podcast. I'm so glad that we did. Now we can connect some more and maybe get on the river sometime in the future. We'll say goodbye, listeners. Panu, are you going to get some rest? What's happening at your end there?

Pihkala: Well, what's happening is that the sun has already set in Finland, so time to get some rest and perhaps laugh a bit before that. Thanks, Bob, for all the practical and systemic wisdom you've shared. It's been a great pleasure.

Doppelt: Thank you both for having me and good luck to both of you and all of your listeners.

Doherty: Alright, thanks everyone and everyone be well.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

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