HOW TO BEGIN THE CONVERSATION
I’ve heard a lot of good talks, lectures, and even sermons in my life. They’ve taught me things I didn’t know and given me ideas that I want to remember and apply to my life. While I listen, the ideas seem crystal clear. But when I go home and try to implement those changes in real life, I often draw a blank.
It feels like the ballroom dance class I signed up for with my friends in university. While the instructor was explaining the steps, the cha-cha seemed so straightforward. But five minutes later, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out which foot went where… and someone was standing on one of them anyways.
I don’t want this book to be like those sermons or dance class. So if you’re feeling like this all made sense while you read it, but when you tried to put some of these ideas into action, your ideas slipped away like the greased watermelon we used to play water tag with at summer camp, this section is for you. Here’s where to put your foot next.
You’ve probably already done step one. As you’ve been reading, you’ve thought of at least one or two people you could talk to who aren’t Dismissive. It might be a colleague, a tennis partner, an old friend, someone in your congregation, a fellow parent at the PTA, or even a family member.I You’ve identified what you have in common: a value you both share, an activity you both enjoy, an aspect of your life you have in common. (If you need more ideas, go back to Chapters 2 and 3.)
The second step is to prepare. As the microbiologist Louis Pasteur, who created some of the first vaccines, said, “chance favors the prepared mind.” And by reading this book, you’ve already done a lot of preparation. You’ve read dozens of examples of how climate change is affecting things we all care about, here and now, and real-world solutions that people at every level, from kids to presidents, are doing every day. You know the good stuff and you’re ready to share it.
Talking about climate change is an important thing to do with almost anyone you know, and I’d recommend starting with one or more people you feel comfortable with. But if you want to have even more of an impact, consider a conversation with a decision-maker: your local government representative, the principal of your child’s school, your office manager, an administrator at your university, a leader at your church, the owner of your gym or yoga studio—anyone who can make concrete decisions regarding energy or other resource use on a larger scale than you can.
If you’re gearing up to have a conversation with a decision-maker to advocate for a specific action or change, preparing takes on extra significance. You don’t only want to identify something that they genuinely care about—their financial bottom line, their reputation, or taking care of their constituents—you also want to come armed with possible solutions. There’s little point talking about a problem with a decision-maker if you don’t have a proposal for how to fix it. They may not accept your solution, but at least it will start the ball rolling in the right direction and show that you’re not just criticizing, you’re interested in partnering with them on genuine, practical change.
Figure out what your school or your congregation might care about: maybe reducing the budget would be a good foundation for inspiring change. An energy audit could save money and reduce their carbon footprint at the same time. If you’re asking your organization or university or city to commit to a climate goal, you probably want to know what others have done (comparisons with fierce rivals tend to work well) and whether there is a specific agreement they could sign or program they could join with others like them. If you’re talking to your business about how you want to integrate sustainability into its supply chain, look for other companies that have already done this and succeeded. How did it impact their reputation, and their bottom line? If you’re talking to a politician—well, you might not believe it, but they are human, too. Find out what are their top priorities and be prepared to show why the solution you’re proposing fits right in. Consider who or what could make a practical change, and what would motivate them to do so. Their reason might be totally different than what motivates you, and that’s okay. As Tom taught me, we don’t have to agree on why, just what.
The third step is, don’t be too attached to the outcome. Set reasonable expectations of what you can and can’t achieve. You’re not trying to convert anyone to a new religion, or even change their mind; that’s not your responsibility. Your goal is to simply open the door, to start the conversation, to practice talking about what you care about and listen to what someone else cares about, too. In other words, you can plant a seed, you can fertilize and water it, but no matter how hard you try, you can’t will it to grow. That’s not within your power. As the Greek philosopher Epictetus said, “The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control.”
HOW TO HAVE THE CONVERSATION
Now you’ve stepped up to the edge of the diving board, it’s time to jump in. Think about how you’re going to hit the water or begin the conversation. A question is usually a safe bet. You might ask an open-ended question about what they think or feel. You could offer a scale, like Howard did with people in the park: “From 1 to 10, what do you think about X?” Or you could start with an interesting fact. As you now know, our brains are attracted to new information, so “Did you know X?” or “Have you heard about X?” is a good beginning, too. You could also, depending on how well you know the person, share how you feel: “I’m worried about X because Y.” And you could talk about something good: “I’m excited about X” or “You wouldn’t believe what I just heard.”
Once you’ve hit the water, so to speak, the most important thing to do at that point is to listen. Listen, and then—as climate communicator Karin Kirk advocates—keep listening, because the longer you listen, the more you’ll understand. As psychologist Tania Israel explains in her book, Beyond Your Bubble,
“For successful dialogue you need to try to understand people and help them feel safe and understood.… When people feel confronted or attacked, they shut down and become even more committed to polarized views.… Being respectful means not dismissing their views, values, or experiences.”
Keep your ears pricked for things you can agree with and reinforce. And when you respond, do so empathetically. See if you can repeat back to them what they’ve said to you, emphasizing your points of agreement. Psychologist Renée Lertzman calls this process “attunement,” literally tuning ourselves to our own and to each other’s emotions, experiences, and perspectives. Stay tuned to how well you’re connecting in the moment, too, she says, so you can course-correct as necessary. As Jonathan Haidt says, “You can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.… If you really want to change someone’s mind in a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own. Empathy is an antidote to righteousness.”
HOW TO END THE CONVERSATION
This leads right to the next step, which is: know when to stop. If your emotions are rising to where you can’t engage respectfully anymore, or you sense yourself trying to push back or judge the other person, or they’re doing the same to you, it’s time to move on or, if necessary, gracefully retreat. Remember, you’re just trying to open the door, not convince someone to renovate their house—and you’re certainly not trying to renovate it for them.
You’re not quite done yet. The final step is this: learn from your conversation. Reflect on what you heard. As Climate Outreach’s helpful manual, Talking Climate, says, every climate change conversation you have is valuable. “See the experience as a way to learn about how others think about climate change, about the topic itself—and about how to have a good conversation. Every climate exchange is a small experiment!” Keep going, they say, and keep connected.
Despite our daily frustrations, we know that in this increasingly polarized, divided, and fractured world, there’s still far more that connects
us than divides us. So whoever you are, wherever you live, look for opportunities to have a conversation. Be confident you can make a difference: you can, even if you never see or hear the results yourself. You don’t know what consequences your conversation could have, now or down the road. Prepare with information on how it matters and what real solutions look like. Decide to do it: make a commitment to have a conversation and carry through. Listen, empathize, and learn from the experience. And if something works well, far beyond what you imagined—or if it fails even more spectacularly than my conversation with Tom and you’d like to share that—tell me about it! I’d love to hear your story.
I. Be warned that family members can be the toughest conversations, because of the decades of baggage we tend to carry around! Like Howard in the park, maybe consider a few less personal conversations first.
22 FINDING HOPE AND COURAGE
“It is a magnificent thing to be alive in a moment that matters so much.”
KATHARINE WILKINSON, TED TALK
“Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.”
ATTRIBUTED TO ST. AUGUSTINE
“What gives you hope?”
I hear this question from senior citizens worried about the world they’re leaving their grandchildren, and from young moms wondering whether they should have brought a new life into this world. I hear it from fellow scientists, frustrated as their message falls on deaf ears, and from activists, worn out from years of advocacy with few visible results. I hear it from nearly anyone who reads the news these days, because the headlines do not give us hope: nearly everywhere we look, climate is changing faster or to a greater extent than previously thought. Ice sheets are melting. Sea level is rising. There are stronger hurricanes, out of control wildfires, record-breaking droughts—and don’t even get me started on the politicization of basic facts and our seeming inability to treat with respect anyone we disagree with. Is it possible to find hope, in the midst of all of this?
* * *
Rick Lindroth is an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. We met in the early 2000s, when we were both working on an assessment of climate change impacts on ecosystems in the Great Lakes region. Since then, I’ve gotten to know him much better, spoken at his church, which is similar to the one I attend, and shared concerns and frustrations regarding the state of our fellow believers, the science, and the world.
It’s easy to see that Rick and his family don’t live a life of conspicuous consumption. “We have what I call the ‘Camry standard’ for purchasing things,” he says, referencing a reliable, mid-range model of car: “Get good quality items, but not those with all the bells and whistles.” They live simply. “We were reducing our environmental footprint before people knew what a carbon footprint was,” he says.
One of the most important things that people can do is to decide where they live in relation to where they work. Rick’s family chose to live in a more expensive neighborhood, which has allowed him to walk or bike the two miles to his office year-round over the past thirty years. Until he and his wife had two teenage daughters, they did not buy a second car. They spent the better part of twenty-five years making their fifty-year-old home more energy-efficient as they could afford to do so—installing insulation, buying high-efficiency appliances, and putting in new windows. “We hardly ever use air-conditioning,” says Rick. “We heat in the winter to 64°F during the day, and turn the furnace off at night. People who come to our house know to dress warm if it’s winter or in shorts if it’s summer.”
As a scientist, he is not very hopeful about the way the climate is going. “I don’t think that humankind will wake up sufficiently to the magnitude of the challenges that face us in a timely enough fashion to mitigate many of these enormous cataclysmic causes of suffering,” he says.
At the same time, he is not altogether without hope. The rapid transformation of technology toward low carbon solutions, including renewable energy and low-carbon-emitting vehicles; the social activism that has escalated over the past year or two; and corporations that have independently stepped up and said, “Well, if the politicians aren’t going to lead at least our company will”—all these give him some grounds for optimism.
He is also appreciative of and hopeful about the capacity of humankind—our nature, our creativity, our resilience, our ingenuity—to come up with solutions that are applicable and doable. “And I’m hopeful because of people like my kids,” he says, “who are taking this seriously.”
WHAT GIVES US HOPE
I’ve turned this question around and asked hundreds of people throughout the world what gives them hope: and it turns out, Rick is right. As humans, our hope is based on the idea of a future, and for most of us, the next generation embodies that future. I’ve asked people to explain what they mean by their answer, and most are very clear. All the kids taking action—through school strikes for climate, suing the federal government for the right to their future, winning science fairs for inventing algae biofuels and five-dollar water filters—are inspiring. But our hope isn’t based on an expectation that they will fix it for us. Rather, we want to fix it for them. If there is no future, then who are we fighting to save the world for?
P. D. James’s book The Children of Men chronicles the despair of a human race that can no longer bear children. Society has collapsed after a flu epidemic and plague has swept across the world. Refugee crises and hopelessness abound. As one of the characters says, “It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all too soon, the very words ‘justice,’ ‘compassion,’ ‘society,’ ‘struggle,’ ‘evil,’ would be unheard echoes on an empty air.”
In a beautiful essay called “The Concession to Climate Change I Will Not Make,” Columbia Law School professor Jedediah Britton-Purdy shares his hope, the other side of this coin: to teach his son to marvel at the natural world before he realizes it is in peril. “When the thought of climate doom arrives, I hope it will arrive in a mind already prepared by curiosity and pleasure to know why this world is worth fighting to preserve,” he writes. And eighteen-year-old Hannah Alper agrees. She’s from Toronto, like me, and has been blogging about this issue since she was nine years old. “No matter how young you are, you can make a difference and you can be the change,” she says.
WHAT HOPE IS NOT
There’s a lot of false hope and fatalism out there, the idea that someone or something, nature or God or fate, will solve this problem for us without the need for human action. Both of these make us less likely to act, or to support others who do, because we feel like nothing matters.
I often hear this from other Christians. “God is in control,” they say piously, “so shouldn’t we just leave it in his hands?” Each time I wonder, haven’t they read what the Bible says about reaping what you sow? God never promised to rescue us humans from the results of our bad decisions. Quite the opposite: the book of Proverbs warns, “Whoever sows injustice will reap calamity,” and Hosea says, even more to the point, “for they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” Consequences aren’t a punishment for sin, as some televangelists hasten to claim every time a disaster strikes. They’re the simple consequence of the fact that we are all subject to the rules of physics. If humans increase heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, the planet warms. Pretending we can defy physics by putting our heads in the sand or cultivating a positive attitude will merely keep us slightly happier until (and more surprised when) the axe falls.
Complacency and misplaced optimism are another form of false hope, and it’s a bias that we humans are particularly vulnerable to, no matter who we are or where we live. Research has found we especially underestimate unfamiliar risks (and climate change is definitely that!) and optimistically assume we have more control over circumstances than we typically do. As Tali Sharot expla
ins in her book The Optimism Bias, “we expect things to turn out better than they wind up being. People hugely underestimate their chances of getting divorced, losing their job or being diagnosed with cancer; envision themselves achieving more than their peers; and overestimate their likely life span (sometimes by 20 years or more).”
False hopes spring from our defense mechanisms. We employ them to deny and distract ourselves from a problem we feel helpless to face, or bad news we don’t want to hear, like delaying going to the doctor when we anticipate a negative diagnosis. But while these false hopes might ease our mind short-term, they do nothing to erase the fears that still roil in the back of our brains.
That’s why true hope must begin by recognizing the risk and understanding what’s at stake. Rational hope accepts that success is not inevitable, or even entirely probable. It takes courage to do that, but when we are doubtful, when the odds are low and success is possible rather than probable, it’s that courage and hope that carry us forward. Real hope also provides a vision of a future that we want to live in, where energy is abundant and available to all, where the economy is stable, where we have the resources we need, where our lives are not worse but better than they are today. It’s a hope that is aware of all the others who are already working to make that future happen, and a hope that understands why we’re doing this.
Saving Us Page 24