Climate Changes at Every Stage - Guests: Gail Hochachka and Terri O’Fallon

“All of us – researchers, practitioners and activists – are all looking for what it means to meet the call for transformative change. If we can bring in developmental psychology as one of the knowledge sets, I think we’re going to have some really exciting times ahead.” – Gail Hochachka Can developmental psychology help us respond more effectively to climate change? My guests, Terri O’Fallon and Gail Hochachka, say yes. In this episode, we discuss Gail’s Ph.D. project at the University of Oslo, where she has utilized Terri’s STAGES model to gain insight into how people at various developmental stages make meaning about climate change. Her findings, using data drawn from populations in El Salvador and Guatemala, show how multiple levels of meaning appear within the traditional, modern and postmodern worldviews. Traditional, conformist meanings are concrete, atomistic and related to the present and recent past. Modern, expert and achiever meanings are more abstract, involving cause-and-effect logic, with time extending to the future and past. Postmodern, pluralist meanings demonstrate contextual, network-thinking, and are the most forward and backward-looking in time. Gail’s findings were published in the prestigious, peer-reviewed journal Global Environmental Change, and have gained significant positive attention. You can read the article here. In this episode, we also hear from Terri about how climate change is viewed at the integral stages of Teal and Turquoise. I hope you will be inspired, as I was, to learn how these two pioneering women are creating a new “basic science” of understanding perspectives that will help humanity adapt and indeed transform in response to our climate challenge.