Season 2, Episode 15: A Primer On Coping With The East Palestine Event

Climate Change and Happiness

image credit | Aaron Thomas

Season 2, Episode 15: A Primer On Coping With The East Palestine Event

Thomas looked back on his psychological research into technological disasters to help explain why the recent train derailment and chemical disaster in East Palestine, Ohio was so traumatic for that community and so unsettling for observers from afar. These kinds of chemical disasters—with their ominous dark clouds, fearful citizenry, and fish dying in local streams—are very hard to cope with due to their uncertain long-term health risks. These events also tend to divide communities due to issues of human negligence and injustice, as poor and marginalized communities are often unfairly placed in harm’s way. Panu and Thomas showed how the train disaster is a variation of the larger issue of eco-anxiety about chemicals and toxins that besets people worldwide. To understand how the East Palestine event affects our emotions and feelings, it is first necessary to honor some of our basic environmental values (self-protection, concern for others less fortunate, and duty to protect vulnerable species). Listen in to the conversation and find support and connection.

Links

• New York Times (Feb 14, 2023) Health and Environmental Fears Remain After Ohio Derailment and Inferno

• USA Today (Feb 24, 2023), East Palestine train derailment killed more than 43,000 fish and animals, officials say

• As Rail Executives Grow Richer, Train Derailments Have Become Commonplace

• University of Florida: Impacts of Technological Disasters Fact Sheet

• Research on Kärkölä chlorophenol incident in Finland, and 2008 Longitudinal follow-up study

Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

Thomas Doherty: Hello, I am Thomas Doherty.

Panu Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. Our podcast. A show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about the personal side of climate change. And in this podcast, we focus on climate emotions, our climate feelings. And by extension, our coping and how we get through the day. And you can support us at our Patreon. And you can always find us and all of our past episodes of climatechangeandhappiness.com.

Pihkala: Yes. And today, we are also going to speak about climate change – even though we are starting from quite a concrete thing. Namely, trains and what can happen with them. It was just minor news in Finland, but Thomas, you told me about this train disaster in East Palestine in Ohio in the US. And that was quite something when I took a more explicit look at the link you sent me. So what's going on there, Thomas?

Doherty: Well, thanks for asking Panu. Yeah, this is an issue that's, I think, getting more press in the United States because of all the different complexities of it. And I think it's great. It's not a fun topic to get into. It's a really messy topic. But I think in terms of our goals with this podcast of thinking about how we can actually have happiness and wellbeing in this era of climate change, we need to … deal with these kinds of things. And so we know that there was a train derailment in this community on February 3rd. A long train. Just like what happens in the United States. A long train full of different kinds of cars. And we know, unlike other countries, the United States, all the rail is private, so there's private companies that own the trains and own the tracks.

And this particular train derailed in a small community. A rural community that has been economically depressed. It's much like where I grew up in Western New York in Buffalo, New York. A former manufacturing community that's been experiencing hard times. And this train had several cars that were carrying toxic substances. Vinyl chloride, PVC, and various chemicals that I would have to look at my list to see. Butyl acrylate. Isobutylene. Basically industrial chemicals that are toxic to people and to other animals. And as people in the US know, [there was] this massive pile up of cars, and then there was a danger of an explosion. So they had to purposely burn off a lot of these chemicals creating a huge kind of ominous dark cloud over the community.

And it's really insidious. It's a great example of a technological disaster. Because it's the dark cloud. It's the chemicals. It's the mystery of what this means for people in the community. And the ominous things that happen. Fish dying in local streams. Farm animals dying. We can get into more of the psychological manifestations of this. But it's just kind of a mess. And then, of course, it's been polarized by different opportunistic politicians arriving on the scene. And people using it to beat up on each other. The different political parties here. And then the community kind of caught in the middle. And then there's even been conspiracy theories and various things. So it takes us to the dark side of the psyche here in the US and other countries. Are you familiar with things like these chemical spills and train wrecks in Finland? I know, again, another credit to your country, I did realize in my research that Finland has some of the safest train systems in the world. But are you familiar with these things happening nearby to you?

Pihkala: Well, it surely is quite different. From my travels in the US I noticed that the trains can be very very long. And Finland so far has just the state railway company, which is pretty good. But then because of the zeitgeist, the times in which we live there's discussion whether that should be privatized. And that's a big discussion. And the experiences from any of the countries where the railroad companies get privatized, they are not exactly encouraging, I think. But this also brings into mind, of course, anxiety and worry. And my research has been dealing more with the sort of, bit more abstract and large scale anxieties and worries. Although I've often made the point, both in writing and in speech, that what we nowadays call eco anxiety can be also related to more particular things and not just climate. So climate anxiety is one big part of eco anxiety.

But this case also reminds us, as you hinted, when we talked about this, that environmental anxiety as a concept seems to originate from things a bit like this anxiety and worry about chemicalization and that sort of thing. So you know that history way better than I do. So what's your thoughts on that?

Doherty: Yeah, I think it's good to talk about it. I'd like to think of this episode as a primer for how to cope with these kinds of issues. Because it's very easy to feel like a victim. And to feel powerless and hopeless. And I think the first step is to really, like with all the issues that we talk about, you know, eco grief, eco depression, eco anxiety. Thinking of them as doorways and not walls. Like they're doorways to pass through. That we can become bigger. And we can learn how to cope with this. So I think [it’s important] having a growth mindset about these things. That we can, in fact, evolve and grow, to be able to cope with these things, and take action to prevent them in the future, is the mindset to start here. And so I would encourage the listeners to really think of this as a primer.

Even though the train derailment might not be as directly linked in people's minds with other climate and environmental issues. It does play into our general pool of worry. As researchers talk about, we have a pool of worry in our mind. And an ambient level of daily stressors that we have to put up with in terms of global consciousness. And so trains are obviously running all the time. And we have 1000 train derailments a year in the United States. And so these are happening all the time. But we can kind of move it out of our mind temporarily until something like this happens. And then it reminds us of reality. So I think we can imagine ways to be our best selves. To be the best person that we can when we deal with this kind of thing. You know, and I know you and I have talked about this.

But you know, when I first, as a psychologist, started studying climate change, I had to look into the disaster psychology literature and the research on disasters in general. And, you know, I learned that, you know, researchers tend to distinguish between natural disasters and technological disasters. Natural disasters happen without necessarily human cause. Technological disasters, like this train derailment, do have some sort of human cause. A human error. Human negligence. Human mistake. Because the trains are meant to be safe. And they're supposed to be regulated. So something went wrong somewhere. And technically someone's responsible for that. And unlike, say, the recent earthquakes in Syria and Turkey, even though they have a human aspect, in terms of maybe poor work, construction rules, or building rules, no one is necessarily to blame for the earthquake itself happening. And so we tend to band together to try to help people and we celebrate the survivors.

But you'll notice the news, there's no celebration in East Palestine. There's no celebration. It's all negative because these technological disasters expose inequality and negligence and corruption and lack of regulation and these sacrifice communities. these marginalized communities. And so unfortunately these technological disasters tend to drive people apart. They separate people based on existing divisions. So the people in East Palestine already feel marginalized. They already feel left out economically. And they're already prone to hating outsiders and not trusting outsiders. And so when an accident like this happens, it just widens those existing divisions and makes everyone feel bad. Promotes distrust. And some of it is realistic because we don't know how these vinyl chlorides are going to affect the water and the wells and we don't know exactly. I haven't seen anyway, direct research on why the fish died. Like what exactly happened from that. So it is very mysterious. And as the news shows, people are worried about their long term health. Their children. Their property. Their property values. So it's right for them to be concerned.

Pihkala: Yeah, definitely. So and, as you say, this has strong elements of environmental justice.

Doherty: Yes.

Pihkala: Eco justice issues. And that's something to be kept in mind. And something again, which is worse in the US than in Finland, but we have our share of that also. And part of that is related to how the Sami people, the indigenous people in the North of Scandinavian, Nordic countries are treated. But also in urban areas. When I'm teaching courses at the University of Helsinki, which I sometimes do, I often show the students some video material about environmental racism. And they are very surprised about, you know, the role of the zip code in the US predicting health and life issues. And that sort of thing. So it seems that we are dealing with quite deeply ingrained issues.
Doherty: Yeah. And just so listeners are clear about the idea of, you know, zip code, you know, predicts lifespan. So depending on where you live in the US, you know, we can kind of predict someone's lifespan just on their community and the level of prosperity and health and economic development in their community. And so yes, we've got all of that happening here. So one way to think about this from a more growthful perspective is: it's a teachable moment. It's an opportunity for us to stop and to breathe. And to collect our nervous system. And remind ourselves of our values. Again, this is the process I use with people.

When I'm working on this, we stop. We collect ourselves. We give ourselves the benefit of a growth mindset. And we remind ourselves of our values. People are concerned about this, because their values are threatened. Values of natural balance. The natural order of things. The rights of people. The rights of other species. Everyone across the political spectrum wants a safe and healthy life for themselves. That's a common human goal. It doesn't matter if you're a billionaire, or just making it through the day. Everyone wants to be safe and happy. And so, you know, these values are all toxified we could say or threatened when something like this happens.

So, you know, there's an empowerment in understanding how our minds work. And how our emotion systems work. And we realize, oh, my values are under threat. You know, things that I hold dear are under threat. And then, of course, we can start to think about, okay, where do I get my information? How do I educate myself? Have I been doing my doom scrolling on the news? And realizing that the news, the various news sources are sometimes biased. And there's a lot of static among the different perspectives, because there's so much mystery in some of the outcomes. And then we can decide whether we want to get into this further and educate ourselves about this. And what level we want to become active in this. And that is an existential decision. Right?

We haven't quite talked about that in our podcast directly. But you know, it's described in your recent research and papers. You know, there's a distancing. A healthy distancing about how much do we want to take on of this? And can we take a break? Right? So again, we're, if listeners can imagine coming from a center. Coming from a place of control and choice. That's a place to start. It's just the other technological disaster aspects that are helpful to remind ourselves. You know, we talked about the social justice issues and the mystery of these chemical things. An earthquake is devastating, but it's not mysterious. We know what happens. It shakes the ground. Buildings collapse. Then it stops. And then we rebuild. So it's relatively simple to understand for our human minds.

But the spilling of a chemical that's never existed in history, into the environment. We actually don't know what's going to happen with that chemical. We literally do not know. And so it's very mysterious. And it's hard to cope with. And there's a post mortem, where people are seeking who's responsible. And they're wanting to place blame. And then they look back on warning signs. And of course, it's incredible with this train, if you look into it, someone was able to find some security footage from a nearby factory that showed the train going by in the dark of the night. And you could see the flames coming off of the wheels. You know, as it rolled by. So we were amazingly able to track what happened with this wreck. Even though there's a diffusion of responsibility.

People can have physiological symptoms just from stress. So, in the news, talks about residents having rashes and various other mysterious physical symptoms. And they're not sure if they're from the chemicals. But the insidious thing is that just from stress alone, we can develop rashes. So some of these symptoms that people are having are psychological symptoms. They're real. And they are suffering, but they aren't necessarily associated with the chemicals. And it's really hard to tell the difference.

Pihkala: Yeah. It's very tricky when there's this uncertainty element and invisibility included. And this also reminded me of the risk perception research around climate change. Folks like Paul Slovic, for example, and George Marshall, in his book about climate communication he is discussing this and interviewing Slovic. And the difficulty with climate change being that it's often so invisible. And even the weather impacts, there's certain ambiguity, and then different people can try to find different elements from their personal histories and link those weather events with that. But with technology, if there's something new coming, which then can be pinpointed, then it's a lot easier for people to react. And it brings in an object. And perhaps also a sort of visible enemy if you want to oppose that. So there's this unknown risk or dread risk, as Slovic calls some of these very serious risks. And radiation is one of those. So there's some links with this climate change psychology here also.

Doherty: Yeah. And that's where we can use this pragmatically. This is the kind of thing I'm talking about in my writing and in this book project that I'm working on. You know, how do we use some of these situations to our benefit? What researchers have found is that, you know, we get numb to large numbers, right? So 1000 train derailments, that seems like a lot, but it actually leads us to more habituate to it. Oh, well, there's 1000 of them. So you kind of get used to the large numbers. So we get numbed unfortunately, to you know, 1000s or millions of people. We get numb to the number of climate refugees. You know, the statistics. We get numb to large statistics, whereas individual personal stories really still activate us. And make things more meaningful for us. So that's part of the opportunity with an issue like the Palestine trail derailment, is that it's an opportunity to see a real story in real time with real people. And actually we're less numb to it. And paradoxically, that's a good thing. Because we want to be able to feel. And numbness isn't our friend.

So, you know, maybe that's why this is a teachable moment. That it might potentially lead to better regulation of these trains, if we can push through the moment. And that's where the politics come in. And the action because there is a moment, a window. As we know from politics, there's a certain window of opportunity when the public is open to do things. And if we can act we can put some simple regulations in place. Labeling trains better so the communities know what chemicals. Because this train wasn't even labeled as toxic. So some of the toxic train protection rules wouldn't even have been at play. But, you know, this is an opportunity to tighten up the rules and regulations. It doesn't mean we have to nationalize and, you know, take away the private companies rights in this case, but it does require some logical rules and regulations. So there's an opportunity here.

If listeners are inspired, they can see what's happening in their states. And try to be involved in that because there's a window. But what will happen as we know, unfortunately, is that corporate lobbyists and people that are working toward purely promotion of profit will immediately try to fight against the regulation. And try to delay. Try to hold off. Try to stop the legislators from making the regulations until the public forgets. And they move on. The same thing that's happened obviously with climate change. The delayism. So this moves us into the realm of politics here.

Pihkala: Yeah. That's very true. And vigilance is a concept which could be discussed more in the eco emotion and climate emotion discourse, also. Some sort of eco vigilance, you know. The ability to stay sort of alert. Not too alert, but you pay attention. And you collectively try to take care that different norms are being followed. And very often, it requires wake up calls every now and then.

Doherty: Yeah vigilance. Yes. You know, like Churchill said, you know, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Right? So the price of, you know, ecological sustainability is eternal vigilance. Because we have to stay on this. So anyway, it's not that we're forcing listeners to go into action. But we're saying one direction is action. And looking at your state and community. I know in Washington state, they tried to regulate some of these trains. And then the federal government stopped it because it was seen as suppressing the market and suppressing profits. And so this takes us into the whole economic system. I know Portland, my city, is trying to regulate the trains. We have our own issue. So even if listeners just looked at what trains move through their communities, that would be a start. Portland has to deal with coal trains moving through and various things here. The same kind of issues. And I know states of Idaho and other states are actually trying to fight the city of Portland regulations because they're saying it hurts their economy.

Right. So you know, that's where it gets messy. We have to get into the politics if we actually want to make change. Now, not everyone needs to do that. But someone needs to do that. And if we're not doing it, at least we can talk to our legislators or maybe contribute to a group that is working on this kind of thing. But again, it comes down to the choices that we make about what our values are and what issues we want to take on. Because we can't take on everything.

Pihkala: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, this also reminds me of a case in early personal history in the 1980s. The community where I grew up, we talked about this a bit in some of our very early episodes of this podcast, it had a medium size sawmill. And that was a big part of the economy of the whole little town. And then in the 80s, it became apparent that a chemical called chlorophenol had leaked into the ground water. And people had been drinking that for a while. And the Ministry of the Environment had just been established in Finland, like just some time ago. And that was the first complex eco social case for the whole Ministry of the Environment in Finland. And that turned out to be a big learning experience.

It didn't go too well to begin with. There wasn't enough skills of negotiation. And it got quite heated between the sawmill who tried to deny responsibility and people were of course, scared, you know. There's this unknown risk. And also a dread element. And that sort of thing. But eventually that case led into better practices and better legislation. And finally, also for this small town of Kärkölä, they reached an agreement about cleaning up the chemical things and reached some also agreements with this sawmill and that sort of thing. But it was a very long process. And as a kid I've also been drinking some chlorophenol, but luckily apparently, it didn't cause much trouble in my body. There was some increase in cancer rates in town, but it was very difficult to prove scientifically the cause and effect. So that's, of course, often a very tricky thing in these kinds of contaminations. But I really appreciate you, Thomas, sort of speaking about these opportunities for learning and change and action which these moments also bring.

Doherty: Yeah. So again, it's, we need to stop and just have grief for this situation. It's a sad situation. It's a troubling situation. People are injured. Animals have died. A community is impacted. So that's normal. It's normal to feel sad here. But we also have other emotions that we can, we can move through. I mean, so again, the coping steps are to remind ourselves, this is an ecological issue. It's linked to our system. You know, it's linked to all different aspects of our natural world. And the economy and politics. And looking at our feelings as we're talking about. And realize that we can decide what we want to feel. We can also feel curious. We can feel patient. We can feel, you know, angry. We can feel inspired.

A missing step is actually looking at our own impacts. Like how is this issue actually literally affecting me in East Palestine. You know, when I did the research years ago on climate change, we identified the emotional impacts. Even if you're not in the location where the event is happening, you can still feel impacted by it. Even if you're 1000s of miles away, and those chemicals aren't literally coming to you at all, you still feel bad. And that is exactly what's happening here with this Palestine, that we don't even realize it. It's just happening, ‘wow, I'm upset by something that I only know about through the news.’ But then we can start to think about our values. And the people we want to be. And then we can decide if we want to particularly take action on this issue or other issues. Because we can't take action on everything. So, there are some steps, as you know, that we can cope and break it down for people. So it is an opportunity.

Pihkala: Yeah, exactly. And once again, the balancing act between not staying totally away and being exposed to these particularizing media stories. Which, again, can arouse empathy or righteous, moral outrage in us. And we need that to act, but then also, not to follow these very lively particularizing stories all the time. Because then there's the problem of compassion, fatigue and those kinds of effects. So once again, coming also back to this. The tricky but very necessary balance.

Doherty: Yeah. Because, I mean, there's a quote from my insight meditation timer app that I get a nice quote every day when I try to do my meditation. And there's a quote I saw recently from Pema Chödrön, a spiritual teacher, you know, “fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.” It was a profound quote. And I thought about, you know, our fear and our concerns are because we're touching on the truth.

These events, like the East Palestine derailment, remind us of the truth of the world. The truth of our world. The truth of our systems. The truth of our economy. The truth of our technology. And it is scary. And it's painful. But do we want to live in truth? Or do we want to live in numbing and denial? That's the choice. I think most people would choose, even though it's difficult to want to live in the truth. And so that's the existential start here. Easy to say, harder to do. Because as you said our minds do want to get too much truth is hard to handle. Interbeing and being connected with nature opens us up to this dark ecology of pain and loss. Our hearts are wired for this so we have to be open to it. There's something noble about that I think. Something heroic.

Pihkala: Yeah, in all colors and shades we are connected with everything around us. And the borders can be quite porous, but any way this could lead into also a quite metaphysical discussion as you know. The “structure of being” -type of thoughts. But I think we need to leave that for another session. It's been fascinating to sit with you, Thomas with East Palestine. And trying to stay open to reality. So thanks for the episode once again.

Doherty: Thank you, Panu. Yes and to anyone who's listening and to the people. If you're in East Palestine we're with you and we're aware of the situation and we're feeling with you. So we wish you all well our listeners. And thinking about how you're going to channel things into action. Panu and I part of our action is doing this podcast for you. That's something that both of us feel good about in terms of taking daily action and bearing witness. So you all be well. And Panu, you have a good evening.

Pihkala: Take care everyone.

Doherty: The Climate Change and Happiness podcast is a self funded volunteer effort, please support us so we can keep bringing you messages of coping and thriving. See the donate page at climatechangeandhappiness.com.