Where People Are: Hope and Fear
02/06/10 05:01
How do you engage ordinary people in the need to prepare for climate change? This is a problem the environmental movement has struggled with for a long time. My particular area of focus — climate change adaptation — is new enough that trying to describe what we do in this field can take more time than more people have patience for, much less trying to show how the field is relevant to their lives and their children’s lives.
Given the amount of travel I do, I suspect the answer is not the same everywhere. Culture and history play a critical role in how people relate to the environment — especially their local environment. Given two trips to China in the past month, I’ve been wondering in particular about how to reach people in a nation with 1.4 billion humans.
I think I’ve recently received some interesting insights from a friend. Although I’ve traveled to China only five or six times over the past three years, I have a few good friends in China — as good as I have anywhere else. Most of them are people I’ve worked with professionally and our relationship has expanded and grown over time.
One of these is named Y. He left the NGO where I work for another non-profit about a year ago. He also travels frequently, and I was afraid that this visit to China would mark the third trip I’ve made in a year where I would miss seeing him. Perhaps like many men, we have not been good at maintaining our friendship actively by email. But on arriving in Shanghai, I was meeting some colleagues for dinner. The elevator suddenly opened, and there Y was. We both had huge smiles. Chance meetings in a city of 25 million people are a source of real joy.
I had to make a trip the following day for some medical treatment and would have about two hours where I was just sitting — would you like to come along, Y? We could visit at length. He agreed.
So the next day, we had a great conversation and caught up on a lot of changes in the past year. And of course our talk turned to work. He had left for a non-profit where he runs field sessions in a beautiful, wild region of China, helping them to reconnect with nature and envision more positive impacts on our environment. Y is a powerful communicator through photos, video, and words. I finally asked, Why had he left?
Y grew very serious. The people of China are facing terrible environmental problems. The air is not clean, the water isn’t safe to drink, and fast, unthoughtful development is destroying the ecological integrity of many places in China. We need to talk to the people of China about the environment through their concerns. Will they have clean milk? Will there be forests for their children? Will everyone live in cities in 20 years? Will special animals only live in zoos?
I nodded. China is a great, powerful country, and Y was speaking both from pride and frustration. The US has had many similar issues. Perhaps our great environmental crisis politically came in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Since then, the environmental movement has struggled to connect to people.
Three or four days earlier, I had been in another city in China running a workshop with colleagues, and the issue of communicating climate adaptation had come up there as well. A key topic was how we talk about the future: should we try to frighten people about avoiding terrible dangers, or should we motivate people to change through hope?
Most of the people were Chinese. They said, Fear is a powerful tool in our culture. We must frighten them, then say we have the correct answers. That we have hope to quench the fear.
I nodded, saying I think there is no clear answer today. My personal view is that your approach of what motivates the public here in China is very different than what now works in North America or western Europe. The environmental movement has long used fear. For too long. And now the environmental movement sounds very shrill and negative. Many people no longer listen to us.
An Australian friend was there too. Now working in China, she specializes in communicating environmental issues to the public. I’m still learning about China, but I believe Australia is like the U.S. Hope is our best, perhaps only tool now. I agreed with her. She and I went off to have a beer to commiserate.
Back in Shanghai, I had dinner with a well-known western environmentalist, very famous in his way. He has written many books and given many hundreds of talks. He effectively typifies the approach of fear to environmental issues, which to me often sounds like the message of a punishing god: repent now, or be damned forever! I have found some of his writings quite depressing. Philosophically, he comes from the perspective of the eighteenth century English economist Thomas Malthus, who warned about shortages and crashes. In spirit, he also has much in common with another British philosopher named Hobbes, who wrote that life for most humans was “nasty, brutish, and short.” Neither Hobbes nor Malthus were famous for delivering hopeful messaging.
We sat with a variety of people working on natural resource management in China, almost all of whom were new to him. As the only other westerner at the table, during quiet parts of the dinner I described the work of many of the people around the table — positive, hopeful, powerful work. Many of them working at the top of their fields in China, Asia, or even globally. He nodded quietly. He asked a few questions. One came over to toast him, and he said, Keep up the good work — John has been telling me about you. My Chinese colleague beamed proudly.
When this famous environmentalist asked me about my work, I gave a brief overview. He became very serious: Can you really see impacts from climate change already? Of yes! I said. I gave some examples from China and Nepal since they were fresh in my mind. He seemed surprised, perhaps horrified. I wondered if like many people he believes that climate change is not having strong impacts now and was mostly about shifts for the future.
He looked down, then he leaned in close. Sometimes, he said, it makes you want to give up hope and despair.
Out of habit, I nodded. But I didn’t agree with him. The evidence lay all around him.
I think I’ve recently received some interesting insights from a friend. Although I’ve traveled to China only five or six times over the past three years, I have a few good friends in China — as good as I have anywhere else. Most of them are people I’ve worked with professionally and our relationship has expanded and grown over time.
One of these is named Y. He left the NGO where I work for another non-profit about a year ago. He also travels frequently, and I was afraid that this visit to China would mark the third trip I’ve made in a year where I would miss seeing him. Perhaps like many men, we have not been good at maintaining our friendship actively by email. But on arriving in Shanghai, I was meeting some colleagues for dinner. The elevator suddenly opened, and there Y was. We both had huge smiles. Chance meetings in a city of 25 million people are a source of real joy.
I had to make a trip the following day for some medical treatment and would have about two hours where I was just sitting — would you like to come along, Y? We could visit at length. He agreed.
So the next day, we had a great conversation and caught up on a lot of changes in the past year. And of course our talk turned to work. He had left for a non-profit where he runs field sessions in a beautiful, wild region of China, helping them to reconnect with nature and envision more positive impacts on our environment. Y is a powerful communicator through photos, video, and words. I finally asked, Why had he left?
Y grew very serious. The people of China are facing terrible environmental problems. The air is not clean, the water isn’t safe to drink, and fast, unthoughtful development is destroying the ecological integrity of many places in China. We need to talk to the people of China about the environment through their concerns. Will they have clean milk? Will there be forests for their children? Will everyone live in cities in 20 years? Will special animals only live in zoos?
I nodded. China is a great, powerful country, and Y was speaking both from pride and frustration. The US has had many similar issues. Perhaps our great environmental crisis politically came in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Since then, the environmental movement has struggled to connect to people.
Three or four days earlier, I had been in another city in China running a workshop with colleagues, and the issue of communicating climate adaptation had come up there as well. A key topic was how we talk about the future: should we try to frighten people about avoiding terrible dangers, or should we motivate people to change through hope?
Most of the people were Chinese. They said, Fear is a powerful tool in our culture. We must frighten them, then say we have the correct answers. That we have hope to quench the fear.
I nodded, saying I think there is no clear answer today. My personal view is that your approach of what motivates the public here in China is very different than what now works in North America or western Europe. The environmental movement has long used fear. For too long. And now the environmental movement sounds very shrill and negative. Many people no longer listen to us.
An Australian friend was there too. Now working in China, she specializes in communicating environmental issues to the public. I’m still learning about China, but I believe Australia is like the U.S. Hope is our best, perhaps only tool now. I agreed with her. She and I went off to have a beer to commiserate.
Back in Shanghai, I had dinner with a well-known western environmentalist, very famous in his way. He has written many books and given many hundreds of talks. He effectively typifies the approach of fear to environmental issues, which to me often sounds like the message of a punishing god: repent now, or be damned forever! I have found some of his writings quite depressing. Philosophically, he comes from the perspective of the eighteenth century English economist Thomas Malthus, who warned about shortages and crashes. In spirit, he also has much in common with another British philosopher named Hobbes, who wrote that life for most humans was “nasty, brutish, and short.” Neither Hobbes nor Malthus were famous for delivering hopeful messaging.
We sat with a variety of people working on natural resource management in China, almost all of whom were new to him. As the only other westerner at the table, during quiet parts of the dinner I described the work of many of the people around the table — positive, hopeful, powerful work. Many of them working at the top of their fields in China, Asia, or even globally. He nodded quietly. He asked a few questions. One came over to toast him, and he said, Keep up the good work — John has been telling me about you. My Chinese colleague beamed proudly.
When this famous environmentalist asked me about my work, I gave a brief overview. He became very serious: Can you really see impacts from climate change already? Of yes! I said. I gave some examples from China and Nepal since they were fresh in my mind. He seemed surprised, perhaps horrified. I wondered if like many people he believes that climate change is not having strong impacts now and was mostly about shifts for the future.
He looked down, then he leaned in close. Sometimes, he said, it makes you want to give up hope and despair.
Out of habit, I nodded. But I didn’t agree with him. The evidence lay all around him.
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