Something new

Hello!

I haven’t posted on this blog since 2018. Here’s a small map of where I went.

I also have outlines drafted in the back end for four other blog posts that were meant to go up in 2018, which I have no memory of, so fleshing those out should be fun! If any of you can tell me what I planned to write when the outlines just say things like “morality, etc” and “accustomed to stress??” please help.

I’m back here because I’m taking a course, and this blog post is an assignment! And also I like you, etc.

Climate rage and redirection

As you can see from the map above, I am deep in the swamp of climate grief, and I’m hoping one good way to manage that might be to use my skills in service of climate action. Since February this year I have been fellowshipping, seeking out mentorship, finding volunteer opportunities, taking online courses, listening to meditations on imposter syndrome, hoarding information, joining every optimistic work-on-climate Slack channel I can get my sweaty little hands on, and generally trying to take in so much new information that I can feel my brain hyperventilating up there in my skull. Relaxing stuff.

Most recently, that stuff has included Terra.do’s Becoming a Climate Designer course. So much of this has been a solo endeavour, making it too easy to doomscroll for long periods without having an actual conversation with another human being - not great. (One notable exception there was the Climatebase fellowship, during which I had so many wonderful “get-to-know-you” video chats that I don’t even hate the Zoom interface anymore.)

After so much asynchronous learning, this Terra.do course has been a much-needed shock to the system. I didn’t know how badly I needed live conversations with other designers who care about this, who are also learning. The assignments so far have pushed me to think harder about the roles I could play in the climate space and understand the lens through which I am viewing the world.

The assignment you’re currently reading asks me to creatively teach someone something new - something I’ve learned in the climate swamp so far. So you are the someone, and here is the something.

How do we get better at talking with one another about climate change?

Something I’ve been mulling over since the beginning of the year has been this: how are we getting our climate conversations so wrong? In general, thanks to the powerful compartmentalising force of social media, we seem further apart than we’ve ever been, so unlikely to understand one another. (A brilliant and original observation, to be sure.) But still, it blows my mind. How have we ended up on a spectrum where some groups of people have dedicated their whole lives to working on the climate crisis, while on the other hand people really struggle to believe it’s even happening, or that humans are behind it? And how, somewhere in the middle, do we have so many people who believe in climate change and its devastating impacts, but have jumped directly to believing that it’s too late for us to do anything about it? Playing with Yale’s Climate Opinion Maps is a strange, sometimes disconcerting journey into the human brain.

I am a fervent fan of finding the logic and data behind things, but the older I get, the more I think that my desire to understand the way things work is underpinned by profound anxiety. If I understand the logical way things are the way they are, then I can find the broken things in the system and make the right changes, like troubleshooting a bit of code. But that tinkering doesn’t work on climate conversations, (at least not on its own) because humans are complex, unpredictable, illogical creatures, and you can’t just throw a bunch of data at them.

By the same token, people have their own deep, private beliefs and motivations, so you can’t use blanket emotional appeals to compel them to care, either - not every person cares about the same things, and people can be pretty perceptive when someone on the “other side” is trying to emotionally manipulate them. And they don’t like it.

As I’ve had to grapple with accepting (very begrudgingly) that it’s not enough to hold up an IPCC report in one hand and a picture of an unhappy polar bear in the other, I keep coming back to Mister Rogers.

Fred Rogers, Cunning Rhetorical Mastermind

More specifically, I keep coming back to this video by YouTuber Will Schoder, analysing Mister Rogers’s testimony before the U.S. Senate in 1969, which secured $20 million in funding for PBS. In the video, Schoder unpacks how Rogers managed to enter a conversation with a person who was combative and bristling against his cause, and win that person over completely.

The video covers three modes of persuasion (originally discussed by Aristotle and Scottish philosopher David Hume) - ethos, pathos and logos - which together can deliver a more effective argument than any of the three can offer on their own. I’ll summarise them a little below, but what I’m really excited about are the small examples of each one I’ve found in climate spaces over the last few weeks.

Ethos

Ethos can be described as an appeal to character. It signals that the speaker is a reasonable person with good intent. In Will Schoder’s video, he points out how Fred Rogers remained polite and civil even in the face of hostility.

Ethos in climate

One interesting example I’ve seen of ethos in the climate space is a Princeton study (covered here by Forbes, with a delightfully clickbaity title) which suggests that the public is “more likely to support systemic action, […] if those advocating it have a low carbon footprint”. People want to see evidence that the person advocating for large scale climate action has also taken action in their own life - in other words, that they are behaving authentically and in good faith.

Another lovely example of ethos in action is Earthling Ed’s “Debate a Vegan” video series - while Ed Winters advocates primarily for veganism as an ethical stance, he has previously spoken on the environmental benefits of plant-rich diets (for which the evidence is very strong). I love watching these videos because Ed subverts the stereotype of the angry, combative vegan at every turn, taking every opportunity to ask questions, engage in good faith and take a genuine interest in the other person’s perspective.

Pathos

Pathos is an appeal to emotion. It can often use vivid, imaginative language to trigger an emotional response in the listener. In climate spaces, we most often see pathos used in a negative context, in the hope that fear or outrage will encourage people to act. These days, I’m a bigger fan of appeals to positive emotion.

Pathos in climate

An idea that’s not new, but new to me, is solarpunk - an artistic and political movement which hurls itself at radical optimism and imagines an abundant, just and equitable world on the other side of the climate crisis. It takes on nihilism and climate doomerism by inviting us to lean into collective joy and imagination.

A less punk but more digestible look at pathos is the comedy song “Drop in the Ocean” by musical duo Harry and Chris, framed as a conversation between a person living in the present day and his great-great-great-great grandson. While it simplifies some issues in the name of lightheartedness, the song takes us down the same path as solarpunk, inviting us to imagine a joyful future made possible by human ingenuity and collective action.

Logos

Logos is the appeal to reason - sold facts and data, my fave. Science is always pushing for better ways to measure and understand climate, but as Mister Rogers has showed us, that might not always be enough.

One area of science that I have become obsessed with over the last few months is attribution science, a relatively new field that concerns itself with drawing clear connections between extreme weather events and anthropogenic climate change. This could fill such an important gap in ongoing conversations about humanity’s climate impact - non-scientists like me will often accept the scientific consensus that extreme weather and climate are related, but we’re fuzzy on the details, which makes it hard to win people over.

I also love this application of logos because of what it means for pathos - people may not engage with the data but we do care about the safety of ourselves and our loved ones. Being able to draw a much clearer line between climate data and the very personal human cost of an unexpected heatwave (possibly even while that heatwave is still in the news cycle) has the potential to bring so many people off the fence and into the conversation.

Well, THAT was awfully long, have we arrived at the point or what?

One of the things that I love about this approach to debate and persuasion is that while there is a level of careful planning and structure involved, it doesn’t feel manipulative to me. Activating ethos, pathos and logos in your approach to another human requires a deep, authentic interest in discovering what’s important to them and what you have in common. It calls for a level of empathy that sometimes feels rare in climate spaces.

The sense of urgency that many of us feel about the climate crisis has pushed us to feel impatient and frustrated with people - “why are we still having these conversations? The science is in!”. I especially experience a specific level of incandescent rage when I hear arguments that centre profit and call for gradual transition when the planet is burning, and maybe those are conversations I should let others take on. But as I push deeper into the climate grief swamp (in hope of reaching the mythical firefly swarm of climate optimism and solutions-based thinking) (horrendous writing, soz) I am trying really hard to have mindful conversations about these things, with empathy and human understanding at their core.

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If you enjoyed the approach I took with the illustrations in this post, please check out “Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout” by Lauren Redniss - I have been reading it and her incredible artwork has seeped into my brain.