Louisiana National Guard – Wildfire response by The National Guard. Used under CC BY 2.0.
Despite increasing signs of a climate in crisis, false information about this scientific reality continues to drive decision-making at the highest level, particularly in countries which have recently taken a turn towards authoritarianism. Who is spreading this false information, and how can we confront it? To find out more about this, Dr Maria Armoudian speaks to professors Eve Darian-Smith, of the University of California, Irvine; and Stuart McNaughton, of the University of Auckland.
Transcript:
Maria Armoudian: Hello and welcome to Sustain, a project of Ngā Ara Whetū: The Centre for Climate, Biodiversity and Society, I’m Maria Armoudian. The scientific consensus is that we are facing ecological collapse. We have surpassed six of nine planetary boundaries, and mis- and disinformation are driving ignorance-fueled decisions that are having catastrophic effects on our environment and beyond. What are the costs of the spread of this malinformation? Who is spreading it? For what end? And are there ways to overcome this in service to humanity?
Maria Armoudian: We are joined by two experts. Distinguished professor Eve Darian-Smith is chair of Global Studies and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She’s the author of several books, including Global Burning: Rising Anti-Democracy and The Climate Crisis. Professor Stuart McNaughton at the University of Auckland also joins us. He is former chief science advisor to the Ministry of Education. Among his projects has been a study on equipping young people to sort fact from fiction in schools.
Maria Armoudian: Welcome to Sustain. It’s great to have you both here with us, two esteemed experts on these topics. Eve Darian-Smith, I want to start with you, because of this book that you’ve done that looks at this connection between the rise in authoritarianism, the anti-environmental regulations that are going on and what is behind that. What are the factors that are leading to this all over the world?
Eve Darian-Smith: I wrote a book in 2022, which unfortunately has become even more relevant in the current moment, exploring wildfires and bushfires around the world. I was taking a Global Studies perspective, a big picture perspective, trying to connect these catastrophic bushfires in Australia in 2019 and early 2020, huge bushfires in the Amazon jungle, mostly in Brazil, and then the big huge fires in the western part of the United States. When you encounter a bushfire, it’s a very localised, horrific event. It’s very traumatic. I wanted to say that these fires themselves are all occurring around the same time, and what connects them? What is the connection, rather than the local horror and terror of wildfires.
Eve Darian-Smith: What is actually going on that we can talk about in a much more political landscape? At the time, the three countries were led by far-right extremist governments. We had Bolsonaro in Brazil at the time, Morrison in Australia and the first term of the Trump administration. All three extremist leaders were very, very active in pulling back environmental regulations, dismantling conversations around the climate catastrophe, literally fueled by the power of big oil money in particular.
Eve Darian-Smith: Not just oil, agribusiness in Latin America was featured, but it’s really driven by huge big oil multinational companies giving the campaign funds for these far-right leaders to come to the fore to take office in a transactional way, giving tax cuts and so on, making leases open to mining in areas that hadn’t been allowed before. It’s happening all around the world. It’s escalating again. This was just one moment three or four years ago, but we can see that this is actually now around the world. The global lean towards authoritarianism is much, much more evident in the last four or five years, and the rolling back of environmental regulations is a common factor and feature in all these governments.
Maria Armoudian: Is it that they don’t understand the science? Is it that they just don’t care about the reality? One of your papers talked about how, even in the campaigns, nobody was mentioning climate change. Meanwhile, Hawai’i burns, Canada burns, Oklahoma burns. You’ve mentioned the three big ones before, but what’s going on with that?
Eve Darian-Smith: I think people on the ground actually do really care about the climate emergency. It’s hard to ignore, people are having to navigate wildfires and droughts and floods and lack of food and so on. The climate emergency is really impacting everybody. Of course, it disproportionately impacts marginalised communities and poorer communities. But it is something that no one can deny. Politicians are not stupid, they are very aware of the climate emergency, but no one actually wants to take responsibility, because it would actually require an aggressive regulatory framework that is against the best interests of big business and big oil.
Eve Darian-Smith: I think it’s not through any lack of knowledge at all. It’s an explicit, instrumental, kind of politics. In my writing and research, I often talk about necropolitics. This is the concept that builds on the work of Foucalt and biopolitics, but it’s often associated with a theorist out of Africa called Achille Mbembe and his book on necropolitics talks explicitly about the capitalist logics of profits over people which have existed for hundreds of years, since we’ve had capitalism. But how, in the current moment, it’s become very, very explicit that certain populations should be sacrificed, in a sense, for the ability for big corporations to make money. It’s an explicit theoretical framework that points to that horrifying element of capitalist exploitation, both of humans and other natural resources.
Maria Armoudian: Devastating. Stuart McNaughton, let’s bring you in. You’ve been engaged in education and have been studying misinformation, including with climate, but it’s widespread, including these anti-democratic sentiments and Covid. What are you finding among young people?
Stuart McNaughton: That’s a good question. We don’t have very good data, I should say that right at the beginning, we do exist in a somewhat of an evidence vacuum here. But what we know, and I’m going to talk about Aotearoa New Zealand mostly, but I can make some comments more globally as far as we’re concerned. Nationally, when you look at our curriculum monitoring data and some of the international comparisons that we contribute to, I would have to say that our 15-year-olds, for example, don’t rate very highly on science knowledge in general, but particularly on environmental science.
Stuart McNaughton: There are some areas where you wouldn’t expect our 15-year-olds to have a great deal of knowledge about climate change, and nuclear waste, which is one of the items in one of the tests. But in terms of sustainability items, water shortages, greenhouse gas effects, the percentage of 15-year-olds who know stuff about this and can explain it varies between about 40% and about 75% of the cohort, depending on a particular area. What I find most concerning, but then that becomes a positive, is that there’s a relationship between knowing more and pessimism that has been found across the countries, and it’s present here as well. The more you know, the more you worry.
Stuart McNaughton: However, we also know that if there’s some agency associated with doing stuff, if our kids report cleaning up the local mangrove areas or doing stuff, even picking up litter, it contributes to a way of thinking about the world which suggests that you can do stuff about this. You can have agency. The negative is there about the relationship with pessimism, but the positive is there, particularly about some being able to act.
Stuart McNaughton: And that leads into the second part of your question, which I might pause a minute, because I’d be keen to ask Eve a question, before I talk about the educational response to this. Is there evidence from those examples of the bushfires of what we in our report called polluted information? That is, a lot of conspiracy theorising, a lot of misinformation. You said that politicians are not dumb, and I agree with that, absolutely, but they can be quite strategic about what they say and do.
Eve Darian-Smith: I can only really tell from the position of the United States. A fantastic book came out that looked at education and looked at textbooks used in high schools, and showed that actually, in the last decade, information, as little as it was about climate change and what brings on the climate change and burning of fossil fuels and so on, it wasn’t very well-written about in mainstream high school textbooks, but the information that was there ten years ago has now been stripped out. In the United States, the textbook industry is really owned by about three or four companies.
Eve Darian-Smith: You’ve got this intellectual and educational divide, where textbooks going to Republican-led states basically have no information, none at all, about the climate and the textbooks going to the left-leaning states, the Democrats, are. So, the polarization on all sorts of issues in the United States, which is another conversation altogether, but climate change is part of that very much at the very basic level in the primary and high school level, where they don’t even get exposed to the ideas.
Stuart McNaughton: That’s very interesting. I learned about the significance of textbooks a long time ago, and it was reinforced by something that’s quite contemporary. In the last 24 hours, all the data, all the reports on the Kennedy assassination have been released, and Kennedy was shot, at least by one person, from the Dallas Book Depository, where the books for that state were deposited before they went into the schools. The point being, if you got that state’s contract, and if you got California’s state contract, you’re a billionaire, or you made a lot of money. So the control over knowledge is part of this.
Eve Darian-Smith: Absolutely. The control over knowledge, and politicians know that you have to get a kid at a young age and you just strip those conversations out of the classroom. The counter to that, there’s been some recent studies I know of in the United States that show that kindergarten, primary school, little kids, if they do talk about climate change and encourage the sense of agency, like going and picking up rubbish or something, it lowers their worry level that they actually feel that they can be part of the solution, as naive as that may be.
Eve Darian-Smith: But for little people, that’s really, really important, and at least it’s a conversation that’s being had, as they’re actually having to install air conditioners because they can’t sit in their classrooms any longer because of the climate emergency and rising temperatures. It connects to their daily experience with a conversation that’s safe and secure and makes them feel good. So there is hope that, if we can get that conversation amongst little ones, that there would be a different kind of attitude.
Maria Armoudian: It seems, however, that this partial necropolitics, I think misinformation is probably a euphemism, it’s probably propaganda, by the extractive industries. What we’re seeing is this attempt to control knowledge, including through these social media networks now with what’s happening with Donald Trump and demanding that the social media networks let the right-wing rise and squish the science. It’s clearly anti-intellectual, it’s clearly anti-science, and now they’re coming after the universities.
Stuart McNaughton: Before we wave a flag of surrender here, I’ve been reading about the Columbia and Penn State examples over the last 24 hours. But I do want to pick up on something that Eve said, because I come from optimistic sciences, developmental and educational. Your point about the young ones, if I were to go back to one part of Maria’s question earlier about what an educational response to this might look like, we certainly know from the Finnish example that it has to be a life course.
Stuart McNaughton: Finland very early on adopted, as I just said, a life course approach to upskilling the population around what I tend to call polluted information. A near neighbor was influencing elections, Russia on the doorstep, meddling with politics. That being the case, Finland, as they have done in many educational areas actually, they’re sort of the darling of the educational landscape, decided to have an integrated, coherent, life course approach to this, which includes post-school and older, elderly, educational sites all connected around the issue of, what technically you would call media and information literacy. Being able to understand and approach information and know whether it’s accurate, what the source is, and be able to have a critical stance to that information, you can do it in early childhood.
Stuart McNaughton: The roots are there. I agree with that. That’s the Finland example. Now, it’s true in educational sciences generally that we, this was going to sound parochial and off the topic somewhat, but we work hard to get funding to do the nitty gritty research that’s needed. Social science research in particular is a bit vulnerable at the minute. But in the Finnish example, there aren’t that many large-scale studies of, has it worked? There are a couple more case studies of comparisons between Finnish schools and schools in the United States, and it appears that this approach in which the government is mandating a curriculum and providing resources for teaching capability, linking up the libraries, linking up the information sources that people can work on, is likely to work. We should be doing that in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Maria Armoudian: I suppose then the issue goes back to the politics, because for a government to do that, they have to not be wedded to the destructiveness of corporations, which according to your research Eve, they are in many places.
Eve Darian-Smith: Absolutely. That’s sort of the conversation that I really, really appreciate here. The connection of the climate emergency, what we can think about mitigating the impacts and linking directly to politics that are increasingly far-right and extremist. Education is incredibly important. Scientific knowledge and science is absolutely critical. We’re seeing it being rolled back with the defunding right across the United States at an incredible pace. No one actually thought within two or three or four weeks that this second Trump administration would have the impact it is having.
Eve Darian-Smith: Today in my campus, across the ten-campus University California system back in the States, there is a rally that, for the first time, is bringing out the chemists and the engineers and those people who have hidden behind their lab coats. They are coming out and saying, for the first time, yeah, I can’t even do my research now. For the last four years or so, the censorship of higher education and the attack on knowledge production is really centered on the humanities and social science faculties and scholars who are being very critical of the far-right. But now it’s actually bled, and that’s the good thing, that the concern is absolutely now across all of these major campuses, Columbia being the obvious one. But Penn itself, this morning, the University of Pennsylvania also got stripped for diversity initiatives, and another 183 are too. This is happening at all the big fancy, elite universities in the United States. It has different impacts there because it’s very much about money at the 3000 or so smaller regional unis and colleges.
Eve Darian-Smith: They’re just anxious that they won’t be able to offer classes that actually engage their students, and certainly won’t be able to help diversify the student bodies with all these initiatives being stripped out. All to say that we, at least in the United States, are really facing an extraordinarily rapid escalation of the attack on both knowledge producers in the higher education sector, but across all of these federal bureaucratic agencies. Picking up on the misinformation/disinformation/propaganda, it’s actually of a very Orwellian nature because these memos that are coming out of the white House have listed, literally, words that can no longer be put on the platforms of government bureaucratic agencies.
Eve Darian-Smith: You’ve got climate emergency, you’ve got climate crisis, you’ve got equity, you’ve got gender. The words go on and on and on, and everyone is capitulating. You cannot use bias. You cannot use stereotype. You cannot use systemic. You can’t use climate science. The federal government doesn’t actually necessarily have the power to strip these words from everyone’s documents and research, but everyone is starting to do so in this capitulatory fashion, which is absolutely horrific. Instead of fighting it, all the universities are being told, take out this research, take down your websites.
Maria Armoudian: Or you lose all federal funding
Eve Darian-Smith: As a university we’ll lose all federal funding and so you might as well try and appease the Trump administration. It’s very, very scary.
Stuart McNaughton: I was thinking, as you were going through that litany, which is a horrible state of affairs, and it looks like it’s going to get worse. I was thinking about what we can do in Aotearoa New Zealand. As I say, I’m the optimist and I want to know what I can do, and what I can do is contribute to the educational response. I was thinking about some recent work that I was involved in with colleagues at Victoria University on trust and institutions. Obviously, that’s a two way thing, right? We can talk about the levers, the drivers of trust from the point of view of the citizen.
Stuart McNaughton: You can also talk about the drivers of trust from the point of view of the institutions, making that seemingly obvious point that the degree to which a citizen is listened to, and the degree to which that citizen believes that the institution, be it the government or local government, is using evidence to make good decisions, are two of the big drivers of of trust. We can do something about that in education. The evidence part of this is through the media information literacy work that I described. But also I’ve always thought, and it’s in our report, the report by Juliet Gerard and myself and Melinda Webber, that we’ve got to think of two sorts of sets of skills. One is what we’ve been talking about, the media and the information literacy part. But I also want to talk about the citizenship skills.
Maria Armoudian: Including the positive emotions and social skills.
Stuart McNaughton: The reason I say that is because, in many areas I work in, when I was an advisor, you see people quickly becoming polarized around an issue. I think, in no particular order, we’re all susceptible to confirmation bias and disconfirmation bias and motivated reasoning. We’re all prone to want to work in communities and live in communities, and share information that is consistent with your community. Given all of that, I do think we’ve got to build skills that enable children to be able to see the other person’s point of view and perspective.
Stuart McNaughton: Not necessarily agree with it at all, it would be a hard ask to understand President Trump’s position. But if you take my point, unless we have good ways of reasoning together, collectively, with good ways of sharing the evidence and being able to see why and how somebody might take the position they do, even though you don’t agree with it. I want to reduce the polarization, because it’s only through that reduction that we can get a collective response to these things.
Maria Armoudian: Are there methods that you have found that work? What are those?
Stuart McNaughton: We can talk about this at a classroom level or a school level or a societal level. But as far as the classroom, school level is concerned, there are techniques, instructional moves that you can make. There’s a wonderful set of studies partly coming out of the states we’ve built on this around argumentation, or collaborative reasoning. You set up some really provocative issues to discuss. The original one that colleagues in the States used was about reintroducing wolves into a particular area, and then all the ramifications of this, economic sustainability, etc. But we’ve done the same sort of thing, and you can build ways of arguing, although my kids and grandkids, when they were small, said we shouldn’t argue.
Maria Armoudian: This is a kind of deliberative democracy?
Stuart McNaughton: Correct. Other colleagues work in those sorts of areas about citizenship education. Given my background, given my focus, I want to talk about, almost the cognitive and affective ways of doing that. There are ways to do it, the citizenship thing and there are ways to do the critical analysis. We did a prototypical game in which there was a digital platform in which there was a terrible event, an event in which a planet is going to be destroyed. We use some NASA models of this, and what you have to do in the game is build a team to solve the problem. But the object of the exercise is to know, who in the team, what information they bring to the team that you can trust, figuring out the credibility of a source, understanding the information, whether it’s believable and whether it’s accurate is part of the game. You’re not teaching it directly, but it’s a byproduct of the game.
Stuart McNaughton: But, my last point, you don’t get rid of the teacher under those circumstances. In fact, the teacher has a really important role to bookend things, to make an instructional environment in which kids know what this is about, and you do the feedback and debriefing at the end, hence the metaphor of bookends. You can do this at the level of particular sorts of instruction. But to go back to Finland, you’ve got to have a societal coherence. The levers we have in our areas is the curriculum. Interestingly, we’ve had a strength in this area in English. In some of the OECD comparisons, our 15-year-olds in English classrooms come out quite highly. In the critical analysis of text, for obvious reasons, our English department here would know how to do that really well. Not so much in science, probably less so in math, etc. But the curriculum refresh that is going on, which is a bit like the book production. We always struggle over curriculum specifications.
Stuart McNaughton: Nevertheless, in English 0 to 6, which is the first one out, there is a quite strong set of statements around being able to critically appraise information, so it’s still there in the English curriculum, and it’s also there in maths, although you’ve got to look for it. It’s in probability and statistics, certainly in Aotearoa New Zealand’s histories. The reason I’m going through this is because one of the pieces of evidence we have is that, if you’re going to do stuff on social-emotional skills or certain sorts of reasoning skills, you can’t leave it siloed in one curriculum area. You’ve got to build it across the curriculum areas, because that’s the only way you’re going to get it transferred out of the school.
Maria Armoudian: You also asked a question in one of your papers about, what people can do? What can everyday people do? What’s your response to this?
Eve Darian-Smith: I wish I had a solution that would make everyone feel happy. I don’t, but when I’m in front of my classes of 80 students at the university, I have to walk a tightrope, because I don’t want to depress them so that they’re in my office crying, going what can I do? But I also don’t want to be superficial, that you can change the world. They’re very intelligent young people. I always say that you can do a lot of things. You can be talking at the local level. You can be cleaning up your beaches. You can be helping kids at the kindergarten, you can be talking to your council members.
Eve Darian-Smith: You can be joining all sorts of environmental groups that are national and transnational. When they’re thinking about their future careers, I think whatever young people go into when they leave university, it’s very important for them to think that they are collectively responsible for some aspect of the climate and their engagement with the climate. Going back to that really fascinating conversation about citizen skills and emotional skills and the wolves. If you replace wolves with the climate and the world in which every single person is necessarily engaged in. You can’t get on your rocket with Elon Musk to Mars. None of us are going to get on that rocket, even if you wanted to.
Eve Darian-Smith: That, to me, is the common solidarity point of, whether you’re a kid studying mathematics or engineering or history, it’s within that context of, we are all on this planet and that we are actually all collectively responsible. There’s some commonality across different perspectives or positions or interests. That is a pushback against the very exploitative capitalist regime that we’re currently facing.
Maria Armoudian: I wonder, you mentioned in your report about potential new platforms that are not controlled by monopolies. It sounds like a hard task. There are some, there’s Bluesky, for example, I don’t know if it’s really all that effective or if it’s still too siloed. But did you and your ministry colleagues develop that idea out at all?
Stuart McNaughton: What we did find is that a national response, or regulatory response, or legislative response is very mixed. It’s held by different agencies. There was quite a lot of discussion about how agencies could move together around, not so much censorship, which opens a whole other can of worms, but regulation. I know this is going on in Europe as we speak. I don’t really have a good answer to your question. I really don’t. To go back to a point I made earlier, the national response needs to include all of that, all of the above, thinking about the platforms that could be relatively safe.
Maria Armoudian: You could put warning labels on them and codes of conduct.
Stuart McNaughton: Yes, but we also have to enable those skills at an individual level. So, collective level in the classroom, that sense of responsibility. There’s quite an interesting hypothesis that cognitive psychologists use around social media. You’ve probably come across this, it’s called the disinhibition hypothesis. It’s the idea that there’s a virtual you and a real you, and a virtual other and a real other. That distancing means that many of the social mores and ways of being a citizen, face to face, can be undermined. There’s a lot to do here in terms of enabling kids.
Stuart McNaughton: I’ll make another point. This, again, illustrates my optimism. I draw on improvement sciences as well, and what I know is that you want to look for where the strengths are in a system, at whatever level of granularity that might be. We do have some strength in the system. There is an agency like Netsafe. They might not do quite what we’re talking about here, but you could build on that. That’s a quasi-government agency. There is the library system, let’s protect the libraries just by the way. School libraries and national libraries, they’re a critical part of this. That’s a wonderful strength to build on, but with cuts to public servants and things like that, they may be vulnerable. So, look for strengths and figure out how you can build on them.
Maria Armoudian: Back to you Eve for a minute, because one of your other comments in your papers was around framing and your argument was, we have to stop framing for bankers. You added on to that, you didn’t say just bankers, but the idea is that we are sort of self-censoring in a way. How can we frame for effectiveness?
Eve Darian-Smith: It’s a very good question. A lot of communications specialists talk a lot about framing. And in the political landscape in particular, I think it’s picking up what some of the comments that have come before. It’s about building to the strengths of commonality, solidarity, and framing it, that we are a collective society, that we are not just little individuals that get on to the virtual world after hours and lose ourselves in some sort of place that doesn’t have a reality that we are actually working and living and breathing in.
Stuart McNaughton: We live in societies, communities large and small, and that is one narrative that I think is being deliberately stripped back, and that we need to frame a collective response of solidarity, be it across unions, in the labour force or across schools, different kinds of schools, different libraries, different ways in which people come together. I don’t have an easy solution either. But I do think that the politicians are very clever about framing in a certain way. We ordinary people on the ground are not really good about thinking about the framing scenarios that we would respond to as a collective.
Maria Armoudian: There’s a sense of building an identity, and in some cases, people’s policy preferences actually come from their identities, not the other way around. People don’t become, say, Republican Party or National Party, or whatever it is, based on their policy preferences. They adopt the policy preferences based on, well, I’m a National voter or I’m a Republican, and therefore I deny climate change or whatever that happens to be.
Eve Darian-Smith: That’s a complicated two-way street that I don’t know enough about. But it’s very important to point out that that’s where the nexus is of, how you could change the conversation.
Stuart McNaughton: Let me try something out, between the two of you, I’ve been thinking about this over the last while, going back to the polarisation issue, that running an oppositional narrative is not as effective as running a counter-narrative, in the sense of a positive. This is a narrative that we could collectively agree to rather than just saying, you’re wrong.
Maria Armoudian: There are organizations that work on this, something in the US called Braver Angels, that try to bring people together to find the common ground between them. There had been organizations that went into war-torn countries. One was called the Search for Common Ground and they used media actually, to have people try to see each side’s perspective and then find the common ground. There are certainly ways to do this, and I often thought of just something as simple as, we refuse to be divided, some statement.
Eve Darian-Smith: I’m thinking of Canada and its immediately different political landscape coming together against the Trump administration and galvanising people that were going to vote differently in the recent election, because there’s a common opposition.
Maria Armoudian: But if we could make the problem the common opposition rather than the person, like climate change, if we could make that the common enemy rather than a person.
Eve Darian-Smith: Or a political stance
Maria Armoudian: Or ideology. Last words Eve?
Eve Darian-Smith: Solidarity. Collective spirit, and everything you said Maria.
Stuart McNaughton: Yes. I’m with Maria on this one. My final comment is that talk like this is really important, across our disciplines. I’ve learned things today that I didn’t know. Like your reference to necroeconomics and necropolitics. That’s a strident, almost, but certainly evocative concept isn’t it. So yes, thank you. I appreciate collegial talk like this because as I say, we need to learn from each other. That’s my point.
Maria Armoudian: Well, thank you both so much for joining us here on the Sustain podcast.
The views expressed in this podcast reflect that of the speaker’s, and are not necessarily the views of The Big Q.
