Cost of Climate Change, Environment

On Climate Change, Peak Oil, Overshoot, and the Importance of Relationships: An Interview with Jon Cooksey

Last week, I sat down on zoom with television showrunner and independent film maker Jon Cooksey to talk about his 2010 film, “How to Boil a Frog”. The film, which also features Rex Weyler, is being screened at Manson’s Hall on Tuesday, July 9, at 7PM. Jon and Rex will be there to participate in discussion after the film.

In the interview, we talked about the events that led to his interest in climate change and ecological overshoot, his long friendship with Rex, and how his thoughts about impacting the future have evolved since making this film.

Maureen: Jon Cooksey, it’s so nice to meet you. 

Jon: Great to meet you.  

Maureen; So, your film, How to Boil a Frog, is going to be shown here on Cortes Island, on Tuesday, July 9th at 7 PM at Manson’s Hall. We’re just going to be chatting about the film and about you, in anticipation of your being here to meet people on Cortes and talk about what  you’ve been doing for the last decade and a half.  

How did you get interested in climate change, overshoot, and all the related issues?  

Jon: Well, I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. I think my outrage is probably multi-generational. My mother certainly had a lot of it. 

My father was in the oil business, as was Rex’s. I remember writing a report on the oil business at age 12 or something, which I assume was not complimentary, because I gave it to him and he told me I was naive and that when I grew up I would understand. At that point, I remember thinking to myself, come back and see me in 30 years and I will be exactly the same.

It absolutely locked me in to being that person. You know, in retrospect, I don’t think I really tripped across it a lot until I was working on my first job as a writer. We were in Virginia at what had five minutes earlier been the Christian Broadcasting Network. But the whole Christian thing was stepping on their ad revenue, so they made it the Family Channel and brought in a couple of heathens from each coast to help write this show, which was a sitcom.

One day our boss came in and he said on the way to work, he’d been listening to some guy on the radio. And it was the first time that personally listening to him, I had ever heard the phrase, “Oh, we have 10 years until [blank] if we don’t do something.” Now I know that guy was John Seed, who was then at the Earth Institute in Australia, and I know that it was 1992 and he was at the Rio Summit. I didn’t know any of those things at the time. So, our boss wanted to do an episode about environmental things, to calm his anxiety.

So, I went off and I read “Earth in the Balance” and a bunch of other books, learned about climate change and deforestation and the ozone hole. And it’s back, hey, it’s a reprise! And I wrote out like a 27-page fact sheet of everything that I had learned and brought it back to the writers. Everybody’s eyes glazed over. And then I wrote a musical episode. It was actually a musical episode.  And I became absolutely persona non grata for two months.  So, they got a friend of mine to write a musical episode that was more on the level of, you know, Comepact Fluorescent Bulbs in 1992.

 And, you know, I’d had a list for the audience of 50 things you can do around the household to stop global warming and stuff. So yeah, none of that was a big hit, but it stuck with me. And I knew enough at that time, this is 1992 and my wife at the time, Ali, and I were thinking about getting pregnant and I knew enough to question whether that was a good idea, whether my child might not forgive me at some point in the future.

But human beings being the marmots that we are, we had a child anyway, and I certainly love her, and it kind of went forward from there.  

When Gore lost the 2000 election, I understood what that meant because I’d read his book. We shifted to a different timeline that wasn’t nearly as good. But I still didn’t do anything about it. I was writing TV and   anytime I tried to do environmental stuff, it just felt kind of preachy, so I never did it. And then Gore’s movie came out.  And I knew everything in it already, because I’d read his book. He’d been talking about that stuff for 15 years already. And, it was like, here’s this funny, but really dire situation, all about climate change. And, by the way, here’s a few things you can do, right?  So, people came away from that pretty depressed.

I was also watching Michael Moore movies. He’s funny, and he gets in people’s faces, and he doesn’t really stop when we would stop.  I was very shy. But, you know, I was thinking I should do something and I have a little bit of time and I have a little bit of money.  Maybe I could spend six months.

So, I went to organizations and said, I don’t know, I write stuff and it makes people laugh and cry, and I put music on it. Is that of any use to anybody? And they were like, for sure, but not to us.  

I was sitting watching some Michael Moore movie and it got to the end and I thought, Oh, thank God. Thank God Michael Moore is out there saving the world, right? And I thought, here I am. I’m actually making a movie. I’m actually doing something, and I still want to delegate to the hero. I still want to abdicate my responsibility to this guy, who I perceive to be infinitely more capable than I will ever be, right?

So, it was like, so everybody feels that way, right? Everybody wants to abdicate to some other saviour organization or person or whatever that will make everything okay.  

I spent about a year reading myself into a stupor of despair every night. I was just reading, you know, all the dark things, mostly about climate change.  Then I met some guys at DeSmog Blog, which was a funded blog to fight climate denial.  And I thought, okay, you know, I’ll do their movie. It’ll be a funny satirical how-to on how corporations can cook the planet. That was where the title, “How to Boil a Frog”, came from. 

So, I started down that road. At this point I was pretty deeply into it, I was talking about it a lot. It was affecting my ex-wife, and the therapist we were seeing at the time said, could I introduce you to my neighbour?  Her neighbor was Rex.  And so I met Rex.  

I didn’t know anything about complex systems, and what I learned from Rex is this climate change thing is just a piece of the puzzle. This is why it seems so insoluble, because it’s like snot. If you have the flu, snot is not your problem. It is a problem, and it is inconvenient, but if you drink a gallon of whiskey to get rid of your snot, then you may also drive drunk and kill yourself. So, there’s a lot of blow-back from trying to treat any particular symptom, and so Rex kind of sent me on a course to understanding it.

That expanded the movie. The movie went from being a movie about fighting back against climate denial to more broadly being about a systemic global problem. Here are symptoms, some of them you’re familiar with, but not used to hearing that they are all part of the same problem. 

This actual problem, not the symptoms, is driven by overpopulation and consumption in the first world, not by all the people in the developing world who have insignificant carbon footprints. And that means it’s tough. 

What are you personally going to do that is going to address a global systemic problem, that you want to do, and that is meaningful? Those are not questions that most environmental organizations can answer. They give stuff to do, and it might be meaningful, but it’s not anything anybody wants to do, or it might be something people really want to do, but it has absolutely no meaning in the scale of great things.

So, the second half of the movie becomes examples of what one busy overworked person with lots of other responsibilities can do to tackle a global systemic problem that is meaningful and that they will want to do. 

That’s sort of the evolution of how the frog came to be.  

Maureen: Can you tell me about the frog? How did you pick Lou as your mascot? 

Lou the frog. Yeah, we had the analogy originally and, the joke of, this is how corporations are going to boil us all alive.

We had various versions of the poster with the pot and the world on fire. The website is just, it’s a carnival, which was what it had to be. You know, this was the most depressing subject matter in the world, so it had to be a comedy.  We literally tried to make it a fun house of things to explore. And in there somewhere we talked about a mascot.

We went through a few different versions and then came up with Lou and Lou was almost perfect. You know, I needed to put myself in the movie because I needed a useful idiot and it was me. I was free, right? So I put myself in as the useful idiot. And I had sort of developed this smirk and I said, can you just take his mouth up just a little bit? So, Lou developed this smirk, this knowing smirk. He’s not laughing at you, but he’s in on the joke, and he’s kind of welcoming you to be in on the joke. 

I think that’s super important because, you know, over time, he sort of represented the other end of the abyss, that people are afraid to know. They’re afraid to let themselves know what they already know. Everybody knows everything. I don’t think the facts are irrelevant, but everybody knows everything already. People are just afraid to let themselves feel what they feel about what they know, because they’re afraid they’ll never come back up again. 

Once you tip over, you go into the abyss, and you’re down there for like six months, three years, not allowed to talk to anybody while you’re down there except other people down there, and eventually the sun keeps coming up and you’re like, well, fuck it. I might as well get up and do something, right? And then you’re on the other side. Then there’re all these people that think it’s hilarious. I mean, it’s tragic and it’s terrifying, but it’s also funny. And Rex is the main proponent of that. “Without a sense of humour, it’s just not funny anymore,” he will often say.

So, Lou became that welcoming symbol of “when you know, you know”  and sure the odds are terrible. Big deal. I was sitting in Rex’s backyard actually with one of my mentors and all these old hippies were just running around having the greatest time, like all these old Greenpeace people, right?  I was studying peak oil. I was just in the pit of despair.  And I said, how can these people be happy? They must know everything.  I said, how can you be happy? And my friend said, well, I love a puzzle, and this is the greatest puzzle ever, how we’re going to figure this out. And I thought, yeah, I love the puzzle too. And I think that’s what’s on the other side of the abyss. It’s like, okay, that was depressing, but we’re gonna do something.  We’re certainly gonna do something. 

Maureen: I remember Joanna Macy talking in the 1990s about climate change and collapse and she said, what an exciting time to be alive.  

Jon: Yeah, it is. It is literally an exciting time.  

Maureen: Yeah, and that kind of wondering which way is it going to go. 

It’s not going that well, actually.  Since your film in 2010, a lot of things have gotten worse. There are a lot more people, consumption has increased, carbon emissions have increased, things have gotten worse. Do you still feel like humour is working for you? 

Jon: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you’re funny, or you like being funny, then that’s its own reward. But, you know, I think at the time, I thought nobody’s going to want to watch this movie. It’s way too depressing, so I have to make it funny to lower people’s defenses.  

This is a discussion that I really want to have with people after the movie, understanding that you can’t actually fix anything in a complex system because it affects everything else in the complex system. So, everything’s always shifting.  Opportunities have dropped off the map year by year.  A lot of things that might have worked in the 1980s were no longer workable solutions. 

Now, much more than then, it’s about reinforcing community. You know, how best to create friendship, get together and eat, drink, and have some laughs. If humans are pretty good at one thing after a million years, it’s laughing in the face of darkness. 

Maureen: I was wondering about humor—is humour working for you. I was thinking about you personally, because it is too much to carry.

When I was making the movie I had to learn. I was going through the abyss and I, you know, I damaged some people along the way because I wasn’t ready yet. You have to be on the other side. You have to process that emotionally and reach the place where you can live with it. Not necessarily resolve it, right? It’s always there and you don’t want to just live in that. You, want to have your life, right? If I was just, you know, come over here with me and be miserable, then nobody would want to follow my example, right?

I have to set an example of saying, yeah, I know. I let myself know. There’s nothing you can say to me that will surprise me, because I’ve read it all, or even if I haven’t read it, I know already. Yes, I didn’t know that particular fact about that particular fish, but I know about the oceans, and I understand the gist of where things are going, and it is possible to know that stuff and also have a beautiful life, and also want things for your children. Having said that, what it took to balance that then was less than it takes now. 

And so for me, there have definitely been milestones of a particular aspect of the problem getting particularly worse. Or recognizing that something is part of overshoot that one would not necessarily associate with overshoot. You know, like what’s happening politically in the US. Mammals all sense the habitat is in danger. We just have this weird forebrain thing that we evolved that makes us think about thinking. And once you do that… You know, we’re like ants on an anthill with an ant level of understanding, and the anthill is on fire and also being run over by a four-by-four.

We are now splintering, with our ant understanding, trying to explain from our little point of view, where we are on this burning anthill, what’s going on. Our opinions become the source of conflict, when the fact is, all we could do as ants is stand back and say, this is unknowable.  That is, this is so much more complicated than I can possibly conceive, but I understand that we are all in this together and we need to find out something practical and work on it together so that we can have the best life that we can have on our Ant Hill.

I’ve had to adjust periodically, you know, I don’t know that there’s a bottom floor to despair. I think the more time goes on, the more floors the elevator discovers. And there’s nothing to do about that except embrace it. That’s all you can do. That’s all I can do, is just to say, okay. So, yeah, periodically, I just have to withdraw for a little bit and just embrace that sadness. It’s just sort of the refresher course on the abyss, I guess. 

Maureen: So you said we have to, as we’re ants on this hill, recognize at some point that we’re all in this together. One of the things that you mentioned in your movie is a change of heart and how necessary that is for all the rest of these things to happen. Also, you mentioned what’s happening in the US, really what’s happening all over the world. This kind of drawing inward and other-ing of refugees and immigrants. It’s pretty dangerous. It feels like our hearts aren’t changing. 

Jon: Yeah, well, I was looking for practical solutions that you can do, and I would talk to quite science-y people, or quite business-y people, but periodically, people would just start talking about their feelings.  They had started to value something differently.  So I wanted to capture that and I put it in the middle because I didn’t really know what to do with it. 

You know, in this situation, creeping fascism, the algorithm driven splintering of people into their opinions in a social media context that makes people identify with their opinions, to the point that their opinions are what they are. So clearly, if you change your mind, you die, and you’re not going to change your mind.  That’s the process, right? That’s what’s algorithmically driven.  And it’s building on something in us. We pick a thing and we stick with it. But the tribal aspect of it has changed. Your tribe is people you don’t meet, you don’t live with, you don’t have to argue with, they’re not your cousin. They’re some other dude who lives 5, 000 miles away who has the same shard of opinion that you have.

So, we become more splintered and the stress of this  progression is an invitation for us to become more splintered and work together less. That’s the irony, right?  Clearly this train is going over the cliff, and it’s being driven by a certain set of values.  We are going to have to question those values, and in particular, we’re going to have to question the harm that we do to others. It means valuing things differently, and stepping back from the disagreements, as ideologically justified as they might be, and saying, what are we going to do together to make sure our ship doesn’t sink? 

And that’s a very practical question.  We need food, shelter, and housing. We need to be able to protect ourselves from extreme cold and extreme heat and eat and drink. Everything after that is somewhat optional. That’s a bold statement. You know, I’m not sitting in a cave right now.  I’m talking on a computer in a nice, controlled house with paintings on the wall. I want all that stuff too. Sure. Everybody does. 

I was reading Rex’s book because he was my deity, right? So I read all his books.  He has a book he wrote called “Blood of the Land” and it was about indigenous people. In this book, it quotes, I think, a Lakota chief, and he says, “If you want to save the world, stop flying around trying to save the world, and stay home and take care of your own piece of ground.”  I believe that’s a word for word quote. It was sort of seared in my mind. And of course, I didn’t take that advice. I continued to fly around trying to save the world. It remains unsaved, I think, unless something’s happened while we’ve been talking. But it stuck with me, right? As the breadth of the problem got worse, as it has since Rex was in the basement with the other Greenpeace members in 1972, it was like, okay, yeah, I’m going to take care of my own piece of ground.

It is simplistic to say, well, if we all stayed home and took care of our own little piece of ground, then the world might be okay because we wouldn’t be off somewhere else killing people or, you know, extracting minerals or blah, blah, blah. True, I guess. We might be over certain tipping points anyway, but we’d still be minding our own business. You know, we’d be confronting each other at the supermarket, having to take responsibility for our opinions and how mean we were when we said that thing, right? And that’s community.  It is community, and I don’t think we can function outside of that level.

Maureen: You’ve mentioned a couple of times that you have heroes, and I do think we’re all kind of looking for leadership, right? We’re really looking for good leadership. I think people are really floundering, even people who know what’s going on and want desperately to do something. They’re looking for leadership. I don’t know where that might be coming from, but I hope it’s on its way. Do you see any glimmers of good leaders in our community?

Jon: Well, at the end of the movie, I tried to pick a few heroes because I wanted to convey to people, look, you’re the hero, you are the one you’ve been waiting for, right? So, I was like, well, who am I going to pick that a global audience might actually see and have some level of agreement on? Am I going to pick Gandhi, who exploited young women? Am I going to pick Martin Luther King, who had affairs? Am I going to pick Mother Teresa, who wasn’t so good on abortion? Who am I going to pick?  It was quite difficult. 

That’s how I ended up with Wayne Gretzky, I couldn’t think of a third person, and my editor finally said, how about Wayne Gretzky, everybody likes him. It’s like, okay, that’s funny.

It’s quite difficult because, wow, people are flawed, right? We’re not hiring heroes for their personal habits or because they are any more consistent than we are.  We are hiring them because they inspire us to take action. 

You know, my worry is always that we’re hiring them so we can abdicate taking action. And if that’s true, then we should go shoot all of our heroes and then we’ll have to do something ourselves. 

Anyway, I was lucky. I mean, I got Rex Weyler. I got next to somebody who, you know, knew, who had been there since the beginning, who had the charts from Limits to Growth on the wall of the church basement in 1972, who’d given it a lot of serious thought. 

That was just luck, right? And he also happens to be a great man. I’m sure he has some guillotines and I’m sure he’s been an asshole somewhere along the line, but I haven’t discovered it yet. And that’ll be very comforting when I do, because I want to know what his feet of clay are. Maybe we’ll find out after the movie, we’ll drill down, see if we can find his flaws… 

That is what I would encourage people to find—somebody you know who you want to emulate.  

Maureen: Maybe there’s a distinction between a hero and a leader. In some ways, it seems like people want someone to tell them what to do, you know, to tell them what the path forward is. In a way, you’ve taken that on with your film. You’ve taken on a role of leadership, helping people figure out what they can do. 

I know some of the things that come up in the movie might have changed now. Some of the things you might recommend. If you were making that film now and you were going to pick things that a person can do individually to make a difference, maybe your list would be different. Have you thought about that?  

Jon: Well, I knew that I was making a one-size-fits-all sort of emotional experience. I knew it had to be a synthesis of information and that made it more timeless. There are layers of commitment, right?  You know, boycotts are easy. If everybody understands a boycott, here’s the worst corporation in the world. Go for it. Super easy, right? 

Maureen: That’s the one corporation that you would pick. 

Jon: Oh yeah, still the most evil corporation in the world. I mean, Google’s working on it, just by trying not to be evil. They’re, they’re trying hard to catch up, but Exxon’s been in the lead for a long time. 

Then some lifestyle changes that vary from super easy to kind of philosophically challenging. And then there was the change of heart, which I put in the middle because I didn’t know where else to put it.

And then there was activism. I had a great role model, right? And then there is, if all else fails, we’ve got to live smaller, and try to talk about how that could be awesome instead of hair shirt denialism, self-abnegation. 

I think it was Rex that pointed out that people don’t change until like the 10th time they hear something. They don’t even hear it till the 10th time and he said somebody’s got to be number three So if you’re number three and they’re like whatever dude and they blow you off, it’s like, yay I was number three, somebody had to be number three.

Maureen: Okay. The other question I wondered about was, in the movie, you highlighted an action around BC Hydro and I just wondered if you have any thoughts about who your next target might be. Maybe you’ve had other targets since then, but I wonder if you have any thoughts about what’s next.

Well, for me, that was the beginning, right? I needed a thing. I needed to become an activist to be the useful idiot, right? And so I was kind of looking for something. And then I saw this article. It was like, Oh my God, I’m going to have to call a stranger on the phone and talk to them. And that was really a huge deal for me. And so that’s the road that we went down.  

In the end it’s relationships, right? You can have all the plans in the world. Pick a goal. Sure. Any goal. Goals are great. Have one. But understand, you will never get there. And in fact, if you get to the end of the process and you still want that goal, it hasn’t worked. Because the system has not changed. The system will be changed, you will be changed, and what will do that change is relationships.  

So anyway, the pipelines became the next project and that went on for quite some time. Won on the Northern Gateway, lost on the Kinder Morgan pipeline, for reasons that were bigger than anything we could have done anything about, that had more to do with international treaties than any failure of activism.

And since then, it’s become more local. Not that we wouldn’t, if we see an opportunity, do something that will work at scale. Regenerative agriculture globally is a possibility. Carbon sequestration through regenerative agriculture could take a huge, huge bite.

And there are tools available now that weren’t available then—blockchain monitoring and creating income streams to farmers through micro payments.  None of those words would have had any meaning 10 years ago. As long as the electricity stays on, those things are possible.

So we do look for those kinds of opportunities, things that could work at scale, but at the same time, definitely working in the local level as well. For me now, my first thought is, how will this bring people together?  Would we win? Not important. 

I still think about the DoomerDating.com URL idea I’ve talked to my daughter about. I said, We should develop this because you kind of need a place to go and meet the partner for the end of the world, right? Somebody that’s kind of on your wavelength. 

Having a single principle, a guiding principle makes things simple in a world that is more complicated than complex. Complex is stable, complicated is fragile and prone to shatter. My principle is that I am trying to be of service in creating more community and specifically better friendships. From my perspective, we’re going into the biggest fender bender in human history and it’s going to make a big difference if we’re friends. So that’s sort of my leading principle. 

Maureen: You talked about going through the abyss as you were making the film and it seems like what you’re saying you’ve come around to is the importance of relationship. Individual relationships, community, larger community, and even that change of heart kind of sense of oneness that was described in the film. So I think that’s a beautiful way to evolve through the journey of despair and coming out the other side. 

Jon: Well, it is an avenue that is always open to us, even when the electricity goes out. So, it has that going for it.

Maureen: I’m looking forward to meeting you next week. 

Jon: Yeah, me too. 

Maureen: And thank you so much for taking the time to do this.

All graphics submitted.

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