Power Struggle
Improving the energy dialogue in Canada (and beyond) through honest, non-partisan, and fact- based conversations.
The energy conversation is personal: it’s in our homes, in our hands, and now, it’s in our ears. Power Struggle invites you to listen in on honest, non-partisan, and fact-based conversations between host Stewart Muir and the leaders and thinkers designing modern energy.
Watch videos at https://www.youtube.com/@PowerStrugglePod
Power Struggle
Energy, The Environment, and Polarization // Dr. Emily Huddart
Host Stewart Muir speaks with Emily Huddart Kennedy, Professor and Associate Head at the University of British Columbia and author of Ecotypes: Five Ways of Caring About the Environment.
Emily explores the complex relationships people have with the environment, uncovering how these complex relationships manifest in everyday life.
Reach out to us with thoughts, questions, or ideas at info@powerstruggle.ca
Linkedin
Instagram
Facebook
Twitter
🎧 For audio versions of our podcast visit powerstruggle.ca and listen on the go in your favourite podcast app!
Video available on Power Struggle’s YouTube! https://www.youtube.com/@PowerStrugglePod
Emily Huddard-Kennedy is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, canada. Her research focuses on environmental sociology, exploring topics like motivations for sustainable consumption, how environmental concerns relate to social inequities, and the relationships between environmental concerns, behaviors and impacts. She recently authored a book titled Ecotypes Five Ways of Caring About the Environment, published by Princeton University Press in 2022. The book outlines five archetypal relationships people have with the environment, ranging from highly engaged to indifferent. Emily welcome.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Thank you.
Stewart Muir:What got you interested in writing about ecotypes?
Emily Huddart Kennedy:So how long do we have?
Stewart Muir:All the time you need.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:I really this is the book that I've always wanted to write. I grew up camping and spending a lot of time in nature, and when it came time to go to university I decided to go into forestry. I'd worked to UBC where I did my undergrad. There's sort of almost like the sorting hat in Harry Potter You're sort of sorted into different streams, and I was kind of a hippie and so they sorted me into the forest conservation stream.
Stewart Muir:The hippie stream.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:The hippie stream Exactly.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:I was also needed to earn money, and so I would take these conservation classes from September until April and then go work in the forest industry from May until August, for different companies, different jobs.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:And one of the things I was really struck with was this contrast between the forest industry workers that I spent the summers with, who, you know, knew a great deal about birds and forests, and you know, they worked in the forest industry and also cared very deeply about the environment, and they saw my you know UBC forestry brethren as ignorant hippies who didn't know very much about the environment, you know, who wanted to save the trees but didn't actually understand how forests work. And then I would go to UBC and hear about the greedy, selfish loggers who didn't care about the environment. And so I was really struck at the extent to which these two groups, who cared so deeply about the environment, were really polarized in their orientation toward one another, and that it was based on this fundamental, in my view, misunderstanding, misrecognition of the way that different people care about the environment. So fast forward to 2014,. I had my first job in Washington, and I thought this is a great time to explore these dynamics. Washington is where my field of environmental sociology started.
Stewart Muir:Washington State.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Washington State, and it began really with this idea that there are conservative relationships to the environment and liberal relationships to the environment, and conservative relationships are fundamentally exploitative and liberal relationships are fundamentally protective. And I wanted to complicate that and look at the ways that each of us have elements of our relationship to the environment that are exploitative or consumptive and protective or appreciative. We all do just because of the systems that we live within. So that is what set me on the process of making this book.
Stewart Muir:Would it be fair to say that there was a lot more going on behind the stereotypes than maybe was commonly thought?
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Yeah, exactly, I think you know the early experience that I had in the forest industry and UBC also sort of illustrates how much is going on. You know people are doing their best People have. The environment is one facet of people's complicated lives. Our economic relationship to the environment is going to shape the extent to which we want to protect it or use it. Our experience, sort of what I would call like our epistemic nearness, like the closeness that we are to what we see as sort of a pure environment nearness, like the closeness that we are to what we see as sort of a pure environment, is going to shape the extent to which we think it's in crisis or can be fixed.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:And I really wanted to understand how it is that we can both consume, like as individuals, but, as you know, as a society as well. You know we consume in day to day life and we are like rates of consumption are unsustainable in terms of measures, of carrying capacity, you know, planetary level, and yet levels of environmental concern are very high. And so how can these two things hold true? How is it possible that people are you know, whether it's an institution or a household really caring about and really concerned about impact on the planet and yet we also have this like massive rising impact.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:And then I think that the element of doing that work in Alberta and in Edmonton in some ways, you know, edmonton to Vancouver is sort of akin to like the forest industry town to UBC, and so you know, I also felt like when I would come back I'm from BC, and when I would come back to family they'd be like oh no, I'm so sorry you're in Edmonton, but I also have half my family that is from Alberta. So I think just being conscious of the fact that that place means a great deal to people and just maligning that place after having not even been there, I think is a. So I'm hoping that we can get to this in the questions, but I think that there's a lot going on in our relationship to energy in the environment that is really bound up with culture and identity and social status in ways that are really complex and fascinating.
Stewart Muir:You just mentioned your family. I couldn't help but notice that you dedicated the book to your grandparents. Who were they to receive this accolade? What did they teach you?
Emily Huddart Kennedy:That's such a great question. Both my grandparents were from Alberta. My grandma grew up on a farm outside of Stettler and my grandpa grew up in Edmonton and they, you know they were politically conservative. We disagreed on almost every you know every election. We would have these like quite fierce debates. But I lived with them in high school. My grandpa built his own solar panels. They, you know fruit trees, a really active garden. They were very, you know, world War II era. They saved everything they conserved every rubber band.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:And they were just, you know, they were really tolerant of my years of finger wagging and telling them that their you know, their car was a gas guzzler and modeled that the way in which you can have a very unfamiliar relationship to the environment. That's just as meaningful.
Stewart Muir:Sounds like they were very important in your life over many years. Your book is called Ecotypes and you've talked about five ways, so five ecotypes. What are those ecotypes?
Emily Huddart Kennedy:It's going to be a little bit helpful, I think, if I can explain the foundation of the ecotypes.
Stewart Muir:Yeah, let's start with that.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Okay.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:So the way I did this book is I started out by interviewing people and asking them. You know, when I say environment, what comes to mind, and I would sort of take note not just what they said but also the affect and the emotion in how they would answer the question. And so the sort of first layer that I noticed varied was like the intensity with which people talked about it, you know, was their answer like I don't know green things, or was their answer like I think about this spot in the forest where the sun shines through and there's, you know, was their answer really visceral and emotional, and so that is this element that I call affinity. Then I also noticed that when I asked people about environmental issues that they'd experienced, there was also this variation in people saying. There was also this variation in people saying, yeah, that's like we are facing this calamity, this is a catastrophe, this is the most urgent thing that we are facing, whether that's air pollution, water pollution, climate change. And then people who were like the environment's fine, It'll be here long after we're gone, it's resilient.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:And so the second theme is this theme of severity. The third theme was this extent to which people felt a moral responsibility to reduce their own impact on the environment. And that ranged from people who were like, yes, I've oriented my whole lifestyle around trying to reduce how much I consume, to people who were like it's completely irrelevant, it doesn't matter what I do. And then the last theme was this theme of efficacy, or how capable people felt of acting on that. So those four themes gave rise to the five ecotypes.
Stewart Muir:And this was in Washington state. That's right. Urban or rural, urban and rural.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Left-leaning, right-leaning, resource-dependent, amenity-rich.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Right, and just so people understand your approach what Resource dependent, amenity, rich, right, and just so people understand your approach, what, like anyone who lives in the state would have an equal and roughly known chance of being selected to participate in the study?
Emily Huddart Kennedy:And then I did knock on every nth house. So I took the sort of total number of houses within the census subdivision and knocked on every third house or every fourth house, depending on the total number of houses in the area, because I was looking for a sample size, like a particular sample size. I really looked. The sort of orienting question was what is the place of the environment in people's lives? And it really wasn't until I was analyzing all of the qualitative data and preparing to put the survey out into the field that I noticed those four dimensions of affinity, severity, morality. I'd noticed efficacy early on, because that was a surprising thing. Usually, when we think about people's relationship to the environment, we think about an intensity of concern, but we don't think about people's own sense of their agency or capacity to act as something that could attenuate concern, and so that was quite a significant finding.
Stewart Muir:So you didn't go out to underpin your biases, because you already knew what the ecotypes were. You didn't know what they were Exactly. That's really cool.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Yeah, and then I didn't know what the ecotypes were when I was doing the interviews. Then I created survey measures. I did quite a few iterations of the survey you can kind of test surveys with cheap online convenience samples and then I paid for an expensive representative sample which covered all 50 states in the US and I created three questions to measure each of those four dimensions and then I used what's called a cluster analysis, which is a statistical technique that sorts your cases. So each one of the people who answered the survey it sorts them into like clusters and so that created these five clusters and when I looked at sort of variation of affinity, severity, morality and efficacy over those clusters, it created these five clusters that mapped onto the five ecotypes.
Stewart Muir:What are those ecotypes and how do those come together? As you studied the data?
Emily Huddart Kennedy:The eco-engaged is the group that is high on all of those measures. Affinity they would describe the environment in really emotional language. They had a high level of interest in environmental issues. Severity they thought that the environmental crisis is urgent. And severe. Morality they felt this strong sense of responsibility to do something. And efficacy they felt that they were doing a good job.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:The next ecotype same on the first three the self-effacing, but low on efficacy they felt like they actually weren't doing enough and that they often felt this really deep sense of shame and sadness as a result of feeling like they weren't living up to their own expectations. The next category would be the fatalists so high on the idea that they were interested in the environment that things are really not in good shape, but they did not feel like individuals or they in particular were responsible at all. They felt like that it's not an individual question, it's a systemic question. The next category is the optimists, who have this strong affinity for the environment but really don't feel like we are facing a crisis, whether that's because they believe that we can solve the crisis through technology or whether they believe that the crisis itself has been exaggerated. Technology or whether they believe that the crisis itself has been exaggerated.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:And then the last category is the indifferent, and it is the smallest group, you know, it's like less than 10% of my survey sample, and they were the people who had a like a lower level of interest in the environment at all, and then low on all of those other dimensions. And so, again, the ecotype isn't really meant to be prescriptive or to like completely accurately describe, you know, the entirety of a person, and so there's going to be variation in how people sort of manifest those foundations of affinity, severity, morality and efficacy. But yeah, I think that's the great thing about scholarly work is it's not done. Then someone builds on it and improves it.
Stewart Muir:So you found these five ecotypes after all of your work. Also, you found examples, living examples of people living in houses in the town, cities and country of Washington State who are actually those ecotypes, almost embodiment of that. Can you talk about what these types are and some of the people you encountered who were the embodiment of that? Can you talk about what these types are and some of the people you encountered who were the embodiment?
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Yeah, of course. So if we think about the eco-engaged, one of the quintessential examples is someone that I'll call Eileen. I use pseudonyms throughout to protect people's identity but Eileen works as an environmental educator.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:She drives a hybrid car, her and her husband are vegetarian and they're working on becoming vegan. When I ask her you know who comes to mind when you think of an environmentalist she says I think of myself. It is the defining value of my life, it's what I've structured my entire life around. So Eileen is very proud of her impact on the environment and really captures that eco-engaged ecotype. The next quintessential example would be Cheryl of the self-effacing. So, cheryl, when I asked her, what do you think about when you think about your relationship to the environment, she said oh, it's just one way that I'm not measuring up Like it's just another way that I'm failing. And she really felt like there was this gap between what she wanted to be like as an ecological ideal and what she was like, and that really captures this feeling of the self-effacing.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:A quintessential optimist would be Bill. He loves hunting and fishing. When I asked him about his you know what he thinks about with the environment he really sounded like a poet. He was describing shafts of light reflecting off the water and he was describing this one place. He always goes fishing, but he's very skeptical that climate change is happening. He's very confident that human ingenuity will be able to get us out of any crisis that we're in. And he also knows he's like I see these streams that I fish in. I know that actually things are getting better. We're improving fuel standards, the air is getting cleaner, the water is getting cleaner. Things are actually improving.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:For a quintessential fatalist, I would say Ted is a good example. He described the mollification of America. He's like it's irrelevant what I do as an individual. We've just become this nation of consumers. Corporations really have a stranglehold on government and that's why we have environmental problems, because we don't have a functioning democracy, because we don't have a functioning democracy. And then maybe a quintessential indifferent would be Amber, who has three kids. She's a single mom. She's like yeah, I would love to ride my bike to work and garden, but I have to drop three kids off at three different places and pack their lunches and I don't have time to do a vegetable garden. And I kind of resent those stay-at-home moms with their tote bags of farmer's market produce looking down on me.
Stewart Muir:As we sit here, the next couple of months are going to be all Republican, Democrat, democrat, republican all the time. For those following US news, which we do a lot of in Canada, that's a polarization. In Canada we have the basic polarization of conservatives and liberals, although outsiders sometimes wonder how different those two things are, because they're not really necessarily always that different, but still it's a polarization. You've found these five types. Is there a polarization that just sort of fits right on top of that? You know, this one, you've got all the liberals or the NDP voters, and this other one on the other extreme, you've got. Is that a thing?
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Yeah, that's such a great question and you've also sort of pre-issaged my next project, but I'll just stick with this project for now. So the eco-engaged and the self-effacing were much more likely to be politically liberal and the other three groups were more likely to be conservative. So that would be the optimists, the fatalists and the indifferent. But then within each of those, within the liberals, the eco-engaged were much more likely to have high levels of education, high income and also to have been raised in households where people recycled and grew food in a garden and talked about environmental issues. So they had this sort of familiarity, cultural familiarity, with environmentalism, whereas the self-effacing didn't. And then, among the conservative ecotypes, the optimists tended to grow up in environmentally active households. They tended to be more educated, have higher incomes, whereas the fatalists tended to be more working class, less education, and the indifferent really tended to be older and rural.
Stewart Muir:Would you say those are things you expected to find in a sense, and that you would expect to find if you applied this modeling elsewhere.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:There's quite a bit of known in the literature on liberal relationships to the environment, so the idea of eco-engaged is very familiar to me. I spent my dissertation studying people who would probably identify as eco-engaged and I think, while the self-effacing hasn't necessarily been identified before, this idea of sort of like a do-gooder liberal who doesn't feel like they're doing enough is a very familiar cultural archetype. It was the more surprising findings were really with the conservative ecotypes. I think that the sense within the literature is that there are liberal ecotypes or relationships to the environment, and there are conservatives who are either pro-stewardship or climate deniers, and I think that that framing really simplifies what I think is a more complex landscape, which is what I've hoped to draw attention to by highlighting variation within the optimist relationship to the environment, for instance, highlighting the fatalist relationship, which isn't something that had been identified in previous research, and identifying that even within the indifferent relationship to the environment, there isn't an opposition to the environment. There's just a feeling that it isn't. You know, there's not a strong identification.
Stewart Muir:How much of all of this has to do with the sense of personal agency in this big world. How much of a difference can I really make as one person? Is that a theme?
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Yeah, that's exactly what that theme of efficacy is intended to pick up. And so we can see that, say the eco-engaged and the optimists, both have a very high level of self-efficacy or agency. They feel like they are competent people who can, you know, wake up in the morning and make stuff happen, whereas the fatalists and the self-effacing and the indifferent had a much lower level of agency.
Stewart Muir:I'm reusing this bread clip, so I'm doing my bit, which is better than that. Schlub down the street.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:So often, when I would present this research to academic audiences, they would say well, yeah, I mean, but the eco-engaged are doing all of the things that we should do, and so, from a material standpoint, it is a good relationship to the environment. And yet, with the carbon footprint analysis which is admittedly not, you know, it's a very coarse measurement tool the eco-engaged have among the highest carbon footprints, and actually the self-effacing, who feel like they don't do enough, have the lowest of the carbon footprints. Really, that's just because carbon footprint is so strongly correlated with income, and so the eco-engaged and the optimists, who tend to be higher income, also fly a lot more, have larger houses, more houses, more cars, and so I think that it was surprising to the extent that it surprises others, but it's, I think, still an intuitive finding, because, regardless of how many bread clips you save, if you take 10 flights a year, you are going to have a large carbon footprint.
Stewart Muir:So that's an interesting phenomenon the ones in your five categories who think they're the most environmentalists are actually the least environmentalist in their behavior.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:I actually asked a question that said do you think, or that your impact on the environment is higher than, equal to, or lower than, the average American household? And the eco-engaged were the most likely to say that they thought that their impact was lower than the average, but it was actually higher. And I think it's really important to approach that finding with a lot of empathy, because I think that we have been really told this cultural script that you can really modify and reduce your impact on the environment if you buy organic food or use a hybrid car or there's this sort of set, you know carrier groceries in a cloth bag and these people are doing all of those things. It's just that, from a very coarse measure of how much carbon we're putting out into the atmosphere, those things are culturally significant but materially not as significant.
Stewart Muir:This is some powerful and confounding knowledge. When you first saw this begin to surface, what were your thoughts and emotions about it? Because it seems to run counter to some of the expectations.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:So I had done a study when I lived in Alberta that was looking at the relationship between environmental values, pro-environmental behaviors which are those things like recycling, you know, cycling, et cetera and carbon footprint. And in that earlier study I found again that the wealthiest households had the highest carbon footprint. And so I think my emotional journey was more then. At the time I was doing everything. I had given up flying, I was taking the train to visit family, I didn't have a car, I was cycling through Edmonton winters, which I can tell you is no fun, I mean kind of fun, but not comfortable. I was buying local food, so my family was eating only whatever fruit was in season, really minimizing meat consumption, doing a lot. And then I started this study and my family was like no, what?
Stewart Muir:are we going to have to give up next?
Emily Huddart Kennedy:And then I found these results and, first of all, putting them in the context of overall emissions, where the residential sector at the time was only about 13% of Canada's emissions, and then within that 13%, looking at these wealthy households that have these outsized carbon footprints, I actually had the opposite impact on me. It really made me feel like my power and agency as someone who cares very deeply about the environment isn't in my capacity to give up things. It could be for others, but for me it didn't feel as meaningful anymore. So I felt more angry at systems and felt like I wanted to get involved in more cultural discussions about environmentalism and political systems.
Stewart Muir:You know, emily, in my career I've met a lot of foresters, like you all over the map in terms of beliefs. But one thing I found with foresters and other resource professionals is the belief that they're following a practice, a code of conduct, a discipline of applying their knowledge to the task at hand, whatever that may be in the way that is best for the environment. Then think of themselves very much as environmentalists. I wonder in the taxonomy if that's a way to describe your five categories whether such a person might fall into a category where they feel, hey, wait a minute, I'm being shortchanged by the analysis here. I really care about the environment. My way of doing it is by ensuring that the impacts are mitigated and it's the best it can be so that the things that humanity is demanding and is going to get whether it's from some unsustainable practice or the thing I'm doing Do you see this popping up in your conversations?
Emily Huddart Kennedy:That's a great question, and there's two things I want to draw attention to. So if I forget one because I'm rambling on the first, one remind me.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:So this is where I promised we were going to talk about status. I didn't know a lot about the literature on status before I started this project and I only got into that literature inductively. So I started noticing these status dynamics and was like well, what you know? What have researchers found, we?
Emily Huddart Kennedy:If you think about status, you can think about political, economic and cultural status, and I don't think that one's relationship to the environment is very strongly tied to political status, less so with economic status, but very strongly with cultural status. So I think that we have this hierarchy of environmentalism that puts the eco-engaged at the top, and what that means is that for groups that are accepting of that position so the self-effacing, for instance, are like yeah, you eco-engaged are at the top, you're doing all the things I wish I could do, you guys are the best, and so they have a lower place in the hierarchy, but they're still accepted within the hierarchy because they accept the logic of the hierarchy. The optimists, by contrast, have this very oppositional relationship to the eco-engaged because in other areas of their life they are not low status people. They are probably well well respected in their communities. They tend to, they wake up every morning and they have this high sense of agency. So to sort of have this socially constructed cultural hierarchy that puts them low down, I think creates a lot of anger and resentment. And so I think that part of the answer to your question is that conservative ecotypes have ended up being lower in the status hierarchy again for reasons I can get into if we want to, and that that creates a great deal of resentment.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:So the second part is why is it that, say, someone working in the mining sector would be like ease up people I'm trying to do my best over here. Or a forester is like why are you protesting? We're doing really good work here, and I think that the way that I've made sense of that is that, from a material standpoint, most of our measures of I'm not sure if you're familiar with the work on planetary boundaries, but it's really a way to measure the health of the entire biosphere, and on numerous planetary boundaries we are in a state of overshoot. We've either used too much of the system or we've contaminated too much of the system, and so we can look at a material level and we can be like yes, many of Earth's systems are facing negative impacts from human activities, and yet I think that we're trying to exist in this paradox of seeing that there are these negative impacts on the environment and yet feeling like I wake up in the morning.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:You know, I do my best. I get through my day from point A to point B. Life unfolds fairly regularly. How can these two things exist? And I think that there's a real tendency to point the finger at what is unknown. So for some people it's like it's the government policy. They're doing a bad job with the policy. Actually, the federal government has created a massive amount of policy since 2016. A lot of it really proactive. Or people could point the finger at industry and say you know, like industry is just doing a terrible job here and overlooking the technological innovations and the you know, new training and new systems that have been put into place, because we're all trying to make sense of how it is that we're doing our best and there is still an ecological catastrophe, whether or not you see it as a catastrophe.
Stewart Muir:So how do these beliefs contribute to the social divisiveness?
Emily Huddart Kennedy:I think they contribute to social divisiveness because we can think about these ecotypes as individuals. For the simplicity of argument's sake, if you have an optimist who works in the forest industry and an eco-engaged who works in downtown Vancouver and those two people are blaming each other, the optimist is saying it's you, you're up in your condo, you never even spend time in nature, you don't know what you're talking about. It's you that's the problem. And the downtown condo person is saying it's you, you wake up every morning and you pillage the environment and that's how your livelihood is funded. It's this individualization of what is a structural problem, and so I think that it creates divisiveness because, rather than looking at broader systems whether it's economic systems or political systems, trade relationships, really complex things we're assuming that, at the fundamental level, is this human deficiency, and I think that's because we're struggling to make sense of good intention and pretty rough impacts.
Stewart Muir:So I'm wondering, maybe as a question I would say, what is the role for institutions in our lives, like governments, like universities that seem in some cases to be very divided places themselves these days, and also companies and industries that are constantly facing you know, the kind of things you've described, but lots of different organizations. What is the role for them in what you've developed?
Emily Huddart Kennedy:What is the role for them in what you've developed? Yeah, so I have been really fortunate to have the opportunity to talk about level of concern and an impact. Then it means that there's something in between that needs to be adjusted. If we have, for instance, a community that has a really acute water quality problem, there's a high level of water pollution, but everybody in the community cares about the environment and wants maybe there's a technological solution, maybe there's some, maybe there's a policy that could be developed. So I think that there's a way to identify the systems that get between people's intentions and the outcomes.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:The other way that I see this project developing and the project that I'm starting now is looking at polarization, but really what we would think about as more like animosity as opposed to ideological polarization, because actually in Canada we have very low levels of ideological polarization over energy and environment topics.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Most people tend to agree.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:One of the things that I think often surprises groups, whether it's left versus right, rural versus urban, is that the group that is sort of more of the climate activist group tends to overstate how much climate activists are willing to do to keep it in the ground, for instance, and the group that is more pro-fossil fuels overstates the amount to which pro-fossil fuels people are, say, anti-renewables.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:So actually on a lot of these measures we're so much closer than we think we are. This is a concept that's called pluralistic ignorance, and it's this idea not that people are ignorant, but this idea that one of the reasons why we dislike and distrust one another is because we actually don't understand that we're much closer than we think we are. So one of the reasons that I'm doing this work on polarization is because there isn't much work on what's called affective polarization. People also call it partisan hostility. So it's really this idea of like, disliking and distrusting another group. It's obviously rooted in political polarization, so disliking and distrusting one another, and it hasn't really been applied to the context of energy and the environment.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:So I don't have a great deal of findings because it's new, but I will find out, but from the existing literature that doesn't look at climate change and one of the studies that was a real inspiration for the project I'm working on asked people how do you feel toward whatever your in-group is Other liberals, for instance, what's the thermometer rating?
Emily Huddart Kennedy:How do you feel toward the out-group, conservatives, for instance? And then it's the difference between those two, or partisan hostility is really just the extent to which you like, trust or dislike, distrust the other. So in this experiment that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which is a super rigorous journal, it was an experiment where people were asked to answer those questions and then they were asked questions about what they thought the other side's beliefs were about really hot button topics gun control, immigration, for instance and then they were like you know what do you think people in your in-group, how do you think they would answer? How do you think people in the out-group would answer? And then when they corrected that and they said actually you know what you thought, that this is how people in your in-group answered it and this is how the out group would answer. But actually look at how much closer you are when they corrected that and then asked those thermometer questions again. Do you want to guess what happened?
Stewart Muir:Tell me.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:People had much lower level of partisan hostility. They still liked their in-group, but they were much more neutral or even positive toward the out-group. And so I think, if we take that to the energy and environment context, we can think about the way in which to draw on ecotypes. We do all care about the environment. It doesn't show up in the same way, it doesn't look the same way, but if we can correct that misunderstanding, then we have the opportunity to reduce that affective polarization, which I think in Canada we actually have a very good likelihood of doing, because in terms of beliefs about energy, the environment, we're actually very moderate and we tend to agree far more than we think we do.
Stewart Muir:So for those who might feel that in these times, with social media and the heat around that and memes flying around and names being called, you're actually saying hey, don't worry, you know. Well, maybe you should worry, but it's not as bad as you think it is.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Yeah, and I think the risk is that if we're told things are bad and then we calibrate our life to act as though things are bad, so if we're told the other side is terrible and they hate you and we start to actually, you know, modify how we feel about the other side based on that, then things could worsen. But I think that we are not at a very intensely polarized state yet in Canada, and so I think we have a really meaningful chance to disrupt that pathway.
Stewart Muir:So, since one of our national sports not the hockey one is the other one comparing ourselves to Americans, how polarized are we compared to Americans?
Emily Huddart Kennedy:We are much less polarized. There isn't a great deal of research on affective polarization, but there was a recent study that came out 2023, looking at ideological polarization in Canada using the I think it's called the Canadian National Election Survey, which is like census data. It's really high quality data and showed that, regardless of how we measure it, we really aren't that politically polarized. We do have some regional polarization, but it's nowhere near the degree of polarization that we see really making headlines even headlines in Canada, I think. So often we see these headlines about, like you know, the country is polarized, liberals and conservatives are polarized, but if you look beneath and you really read, there's not a strong data foundation to make that argument. It's usually anecdotes.
Stewart Muir:Do we really feel that polarized? I mean, if you go to the grocery store, are you walking down the aisle pushing your cart thinking that person I probably really hate that person looks okay. I don't feel like I'm thinking that at the grocery store and I hope others aren't, but are we?
Emily Huddart Kennedy:I think that one of the ways so if we the thermometer measure is a bit crude, but if we break down what polarization really looks like and feels like, there's sort of these three dimensions One is this tendency to other, the second is an aversion and the third is what's called moralization. So the tendency to other is this idea to be like oh, that's this person and they don't have anything in common with me. So I think we do see elements of that right, maybe even with BC and Alberta, or with resource workers and knowledge workers. I think we do have a tendency to be like oh, those people are different and they wouldn't understand me and I don't understand them.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:But the aversion piece is really interesting and important. You can say that someone is different but that doesn't mean you don't want to be friends with them or you wouldn't want to move next door to them. And I think that that piece isn't as intense in Canada as it is in the US, where we don't have quite so segregated neighborhoods with political conservatives here and political liberals here. And then the moralization piece I think is starting this idea that my group is the morally correct one and that group is the morally bankrupt one. But I don't think that it's really sort of hit a fever pitch.
Stewart Muir:You know, it's not as much of a problem polarization as maybe it is somewhere else, but someone has asked you to study it and you're applying your mind to it, so it's enough of a problem for that. You're applying your mind to it, so it's enough of a problem for that. Do you see where this could lead in terms of you emerging with something that's going to be handed off and you're going to be able to say here you go, here's what you need to do to reduce the frictions in this situation, or the polarizations, so stay tuned on that.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Suspense. I have a multi-year project, and so this is year one, and right now, as we're speaking, my survey data is coming in. And then, in year two, we'll start interviewing people across the country about their thoughts on energy, environment issues. And then we're going to identify people in those interviews that are as far apart as possible and then bring them together for focus groups over a nature-based activity and try to identify strategies not to get people to agree on substantive issues, but to be able to reduce that aversion, moralization and othering, to be able to sort of engage in perspective taking, understand why someone else's viewpoints are what they are, why it makes sense for them in their life. And that is because there's this strong base of evidence that shows that when we can do that, we increase our trust and our willingness to compromise, which are really key foundations to a functioning democracy. So then, what I would do with that data? I'd come back on this podcast, and as many podcasts as possible, and get the word out.
Stewart Muir:I live in Vancouver. I grew up in Vancouver. I lived around the world while I was going through my life, but I always came back here and for quite a few years Vancouver has marketed itself as the greenest city, like we're the greenest city in the world, because there's a desire to live that slogan. Delivery on that hasn't been all that great. I feel as if there's a lot of what you would call in your ecotypes eco-engaged who are at Whole Foods or Whole Paycheck, as it's also known, who are getting that organic good stuff to feed their family, healthy food, and they're driving the Tesla home or maybe they're biking home, but their consumption doesn't necessarily match their image of themselves. And I sort of feel Vancouver is kind of an ecotype of eco-engaged city. Red Deer would be a different ecotype. I mean, if cities were ecotypes, what do you think Red Deer would be in Alberta?
Stewart Muir:I don't want to get the Chamber of Commerce Red Deer right into you. Yeah, no, this is fun.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:I think that Red Deer would be Optimist, slash, indifferent.
Stewart Muir:Okay, and Toronto.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Eco-Engaged.
Stewart Muir:Same as Vancouver.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Obviously I have no data for this, Just a gut instinct.
Stewart Muir:Yeah, yeah. So let's cross the border too. Let's not just include Canada. Okay, let's look at the fifth one on the list. The Indifferent Is let's cross the border too. Let's not just include Canada. Okay, let's look at the fifth one on the list, the indifferent. Is there an eco-indifferent city somewhere in North America that springs to mind?
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Oh yeah, let's see like Milwaukee, okay, maybe.
Stewart Muir:Yeah, I've been through Milwaukee. There's a lot of remediation work to be done there in terms of the industrial past. What about fatalist?
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Yeah, maybe Detroit.
Stewart Muir:Oh yeah, okay, I can totally see that, but they're coming back, but it'll take time to do that. What we don't have is an optimist city in North America.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Maybe Houston.
Stewart Muir:Houston Providing energy, but believing that they can make that energy use more environmental.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Yeah, okay. Well, maybe Edmonton's an optimist city Calgary, edmonton.
Stewart Muir:Yeah Well, you know, when I see optimist on the page I think, oh, that's good, optimist, I'm an optimist. But then when I read deeper into it, there's sort of a flip side of optimism, like can you really deliver that? Or are you just, you know, stupidly optimistic.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Not stupidly optimistic. It depends on what you pay attention to. I think that you know there's a real tendency. I think even when we describe, you know, the eco-engaged, I think part of being at the top of a cultural hierarchy means that you are really subject to accusations of hypocrisy, because if you're at the top of a hierarchy, you're essentially especially a cultural or a moral hierarchy. You're kind of implicitly saying my way is the best way, or that's the way, I think, how people interpret it. And so it's. There's a real tendency to be like no, it's not, your way is not the best way. And I'll prove these inconsistencies you know you're a vegetarian but you have a leather belt. Or you know you showed up at this act, this protest, but what's your kayak made from?
Emily Huddart Kennedy:I think the problem with that, whether it were at the level of a city or of an individual, is again we're falling into that trap of pointing the finger at an individual rather than a system, and so I think that the yeah, the issue is that, and the core message is really people are trying, and I think that if someone is trying, they're going to hold paycheck and they're driving their Tesla. They are trying, and when we demean people for trying. We really create the conditions for polarization. But I think that if we are waiting for perfection, nobody will ever meet that, whether it's a city or a country, or an individual or a politician or a political party, and I think we really are in that. You know, perfect is the enemy of the good situation.
Stewart Muir:You know, I'm really happy. I live in a place that wants to be the greenest city and I think that's a great thing to aspire to. At the same time not so much about just Vancouver, I think every place, you know maybe, has different aspirations and they reflect the culture of the moment of the people, and they are what they are. We were talking about aspirational policies. Yes, we want to achieve this, so we're going to put these laws and systems in place to ensure we get there, but then, as we get nearer to that date, it's almost like a time bomb. I'm setting that. I'm feeling good now. I'm getting a vote, a dividend today, and I'm feeling great today Down the road.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:I think that when we think about policymakers first of all, you know if I wake up in the morning and I'm like, oh, I'm going to, I have this goal for the day, you know it's half. You know, just as many times as I meet the goal, I don't meet the goal. Partly that's because I'm calibrating. So I think we've talked before about how, in an ideal world, policymakers are compromising when they need to, and so in some there are times where we have an ambitious policy and then circumstances change. Where we have an ambitious policy and then circumstances change, a pandemic happens, the economy collapses, interest rates go up, we have things that are unpredictable, happen, and so there is, I think, some nobility in setting a goal, because that goal sets a signal to other actors in society that this is a direction that we're moving. It doesn't mean that that's exactly where we're going to get to that date. That time Maybe it'll be 2057. But if we look at the emissions, for instance, over time we are decreasing, even while we're growing our economy and our population. That's sort of this mythical decoupling. And so it's not a full decoupling, because every dollar spent in the economy still has an environmental impact and I don't know if that's something that we can feasibly think about ever fully decoupling, but we do have this general trajectory.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:So that's one thing I would say is policymakers aren't perfect.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:They're dealing with imperfect information, they're dealing with unpredictable environments and they often have to compromise with industry, civil society, other political parties, a lot of variables and a lot of different institutions with different goals. I think we could probably look at a wide number of companies that have set targets and then don't meet those targets, and we can have a real number of companies that have set targets and then don't meet those targets and we can have a real understanding of why that is. Ultimately, they want to keep people employed, make a profit. There's all of these competing priorities. I think the significant thing that I would say to your nascent cynic is that there is an intention and that I think that the more cynical we are, the more, as civil society, the more likely we are to give up on policy and give up on institutional leaders, and I don't think that that is a recipe for success either. I think leaning in and engaging and continuing to expect good things and become more engaged, as opposed to just sort of a critic from the sidelines, is a more meaningful path.
Stewart Muir:On Power Struggle. One of our founding ideas is around the so-called energy trilemma, which is really a simple idea, which is that energy in our lives is expected to be affordable, available and environmentally efficient, and that triangle is pretty paradoxical and difficult to achieve. Where do you put yourself into this trilemma?
Emily Huddart Kennedy:I mean, I think that here, in the Canadian context, we're incredibly fortunate that we have a lot of energy, we it is available. We actually have some of the cheapest you know, per kilowatt hour pricing of any place in North America among the cheapest and so I think we are really fortunate in the sense that we turn on the light and the light turns on, we don't have brownouts. I think that the downside of that is that we don't often think about systems when they work really smoothly. You know, if we turn on the light and it didn't turn on, then we would start thinking well, wait, what's going on? So I think that that can give us a sense that energy is, and has always been and always will be readily available.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Obviously it's affordable, but it's not affordable for everyone, and fuel poverty is a, you know, significant issue and I think in BC and in Canada I think that we have done a lot to. You know, bc has a large hydropower industry and so we've got pretty good emissions from our electricity system. But I think that there are troubling trends. I don't think that we've invested enough in renewables. I think, as we see climate models predicting more drought, that is going to have an impact on the generation of hydroelectric power, which is complicated, that's happening.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:And so I think that one of the core examples that we would often debate in university was around nuclear, and so I remember talking to an energy specialist who said we can have renewables, fossil fuels and nuclear. We can take out one of them, but we can't take out two of them. And so I think that unless we're really going to decrease our energy consumption which would mean probably less availability, less comfort then we do constantly need more energy sources. So in my perfect world we would not burn fossil fuels because it's not good for the climate. But I think that that is really compromising on quality of life and standard of living and that makes it not a perfect world, because that's compromising something that's too big to compromise. So I'm glad I don't have to make these decisions. I think they're really challenging. There's no perfect solution. There's sort of losses on all sides, and we are really fortunate at this moment in time to be in a place with so much energy and such reliable and relatively affordable energy.
Stewart Muir:That's for sure, Emily. You're a university researcher and author. You're also a teacher. You've had young people coming through your classrooms your whole career. What changes have you seen in the attitudes on your topics of interest over the time you've been teaching?
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Great question. When I first started teaching, I felt like all of my students were basically eco-engaged and they were so confident that going to the farmer's market or buying you know a metal straw was going to be this great solution. And I felt like I was constantly there as this dour voice of gloom and I was like this will never work. This is not a solid strategy and increasingly I would say that the majority of my students would fit in the fatalist camp, and I really feel like I played a role in that and I don't think I'll explain, but I think that there's a lot lost.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:I think that in trying to make people convinced of the way in which a political economic system locks us into environmentally unsustainable outcomes leaves people feeling completely powerless, because what can I do to reinvent a political system? And so I think that we have this rise of well-educated fatalists who have a very deep knowledge of how political systems work. They're critical you know this idea of no ethical consumption under capitalism. They're really mindful of the limitations of the whole foods marketplace, but they feel very powerless and I think a lot of them really. Their cynicism manifests in despair and lack of engagement, so I think that that is the sort of unnerving trend that I see.
Stewart Muir:Unnerving, to say the least. Let me read it back the definition of fatalists. Unnerving, to say the least. Let me read it back the definition of fatalists pessimistic about environmental decline, believing that corporations and governments hold the power which leads them to feel little personal responsibility for adopting environmentally friendly behaviors. And this is the uptrend for the late adolescents, young adults coming to your classroom.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Right, and I think that, while this isn't the case across the board also, we see lower voter turnout in people sort of 18 to 34. So I think it's not just that people aren't going to the farmer's market or making an ethical consumption choice. They're often sort of withdrawing from political change more broadly.
Stewart Muir:So what happened to? I'm going to university to change the world.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:I think that we in universities wanted to empower a systemic thinking but in doing so disempowered the capacity for individual action and individuals to change those systems, and I think that's really the work that we need this sort of bridging. Yes, these systems can play this very powerful role in our life, but systems change. I mean, you just have to look at your own lifespan to think about the way that our technological system changes, our transportation system has changed, systems change all the time and systems are nothing more really than individuals making decisions. So we do have a great deal of power and agency, but I don't think we have very solid theories, or even sort of working theories, of how to put that agency into practice.
Stewart Muir:With Power Struggle, the podcast, I really felt there is a struggle there, whether it's one involving polarizations or struggles within ourselves or outside of ourselves, and there might be someone listening and thinking please give me one thing I can do in my work tomorrow, because I have a really hard job. What would you give someone today?
Emily Huddart Kennedy:So it might seem very small, but I think you know you talked earlier about how we might be at the grocery store and we don't think, oh, I hate you.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:But I think that we do often silence conversations because we think, oh, I don't want to disagree.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:I think that one thing that we can all do is to have the courage to have that conversation, whether it's about environment, or maybe someone works in another field that they feel is polarized.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:But I think that the more that our sense of what cultural discourse is is tied to what is happening on social media, the more likely we are to see the landscape as polarized. I think that the more conversations we can open up, the more we can see how much common ground we have. And then in those conversations, if someone says something that seems wildly off to you, or maybe you even feel this sort of aversion within you to not react but to respond with curiosity Like, oh, wow, you know, I've actually never thought about it from that perspective. Can you tell me more about that? And I think that if people understand that you're not going to, you know, be like, oh, you're such a hypocrite, or oh, you're ignorant, or, you know, really dehumanize and stigmatize you for your beliefs, but instead just want to understand your beliefs. I think that's a really core foundation of a functioning society.
Stewart Muir:And when that is a two-way street. That's when humans can connect the way we're meant to.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:And I think we all enjoy that connection and that's what we look for and I think, ultimately, that's why I think we'll defeat polarization, because it feels bad. It doesn't actually feel good to hate. It feels a lot better to love and it feels so much better to see what we have in common with other species or other people than it does to be really focused on this sort of in-group, out-group in-group out-group.
Stewart Muir:Emily, today you've brought us back in your career to explain how you got to do your amazing book Ecotypes Five Ways of Caring About the Environment, by Emily Huddart Kennedy, who's right here, and I got my copy on Amazon and anyone can, and I hope people who find it interesting would do that. I'd like to end on one note. Here's a question I've just been dying to ask you. If you had to create a dating app based on the five ecotypes, what would be the most hilarious match you could come up with?
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Oh, dating app of ecotypes. I think the eco engaged in the optimists would be a pretty fun match. Okay, I'm just picturing some guy in camo and some woman on a bicycle with a bag full of veggies.
Stewart Muir:I'm liking this. This could be a reality show, not just an app, we're onto something. Well, that's great. Emily Hedder-Kennedy, thanks so much for coming on to the Power Struggle podcast. Your book Ecotypes Five Ways of Caring About the Environment Great read.
Emily Huddart Kennedy:Thank you so much, stuart, great to be here.
Stewart Muir:Thank you.
