Do we really need more climate awareness? MAYBE IT’S SOMETHING ELSE WE LACK.
The scenes of Maui’s wildfires have been devastating. There’s a sense of fondness and familiarity many Americans have for Lahaina, and a strong sense of loss accompanies its destruction. As homes, businesses, and parcels of nature have gone up in flames, it also feels as though happy memories from past visits alongside Native Hawaiian history and culture are also being scorched.
This represents one of those moments where the climate crisis hits an especially resonant emotional note. These feelings of grief and anger can be catalysts of action, which is why some hope it serves as the wake-up call for more swift action.
In the wake of these fires, the Los Angeles times ran an op-ed claiming that if the Maui fires don’t wake up Americans to the climate emergency, nothing will.
It’s a bold statement, but I don’t know if it’s accurate to think one big emergency that nobody can ignore will be the tipping point for action.
After all, it was just a couple months ago where the east coast was registering some of the worst air quality scores in the world. Out of the ordinary wildfires swept through the heavily populated northeast, darkening skies and making it hazardous to walk outside.
This is where most of the country’s economic and political institutions are located. How do you ignore that?
And for us West Coasters, remember 2020 and those orange skies? I particularly can’t forget the apocalyptic image of a baseball game being played in front of cardboard fans due to Covid as the sky above the stadium is a stark orange.
There’s another wake up call. Right near the world’s hubs for entertainment and technology.
But I don’t think an alarmingly ominous wake up call like these examples is what we’ve been missing.
In fact, 2020 and the pandemic are also an example of how an emergency and heightened attention don’t always generate an effective and coordinated response. Sometimes that attention is enough to make things that once seemed obvious into controversies, and I think the climate scene has had enough of that.
No… the problem isn’t a lack of awareness.
I don’t even think it’s a lack of urgency. An entire generation, if not two, on the whole experiences climate anxiety as a part of everyday life. The population of the U.S. in denial of climate change is below 10%, a number that would likely be nonexistent if it weren’t for things being politicized the way they are.
So what’s getting in the way?
I think some of the more underrated barriers to effective climate action is ignorance towards solutions and a felt lack of efficacy. In my TED Talk, I referenced these briefly as distance and despair. And here’s what I mean:
Ignorance towards solutions: So much of our climate coverage is focused on effects and projections. I recently watched a full hour block of climate reporting, where reporters showed us scenes of heat-related disruptions from Greece to Arizona to Southeast Asia. Whenever we weren’t seeing a new location facing a heatwave, we were seeing a scientist unpack their graphs showing what we’re in for in the near future.
It’s great that climate can get an hour long block of coverage now, but you know what was drastically missing? Solutions. If I didn’t actively work in the arena of climate solutions, I probably wouldn’t be aware that there are so many that are actively available and ready to scale. I wouldn’t be aware that in places where they have been implemented, they’ve saved money and lowered emissions and that they’ve actually resulted in some good progress. Shout out to my peeps at Project Drawdown for unpacking these solutions so effectively for years.
We often don’t act because we feel helpless. Seeing solutions, over and over, helps us feel less helpless. It also nudges those in a position of power to actually implement those solutions rather than ignoring them.
A felt lack of efficacy. In other words, your ordinary person doesn’t feel like there’s much they can do to make a meaningful impact.
It’s easy to be a critic, especially when it comes to climate action. The history of environmentalism is full of things that were once pushed as miracle solutions. Recycling, tree planting, carbon offsetting, and so on. Eventually, we found that each of these examples were more complicated than they seemed at first. They could potentially do more harm than good, and often failed to live up to their potential.
It’s a good thing that people today are more willing to put proposed solutions under scrutiny, but a side effect has been a surge in cynicism. It’s hard to come up with a game-plan to do something about climate change when you’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop. To find out why the approach you took was actually problematic.
On top of that, there’s an extremely strong consciousness around how little power and influence the ordinary person holds in comparison to, say, a multinational corporation or a municipal government.
That said, I think storytelling with a focus on solutions helps to lower this barrier as well. Because there are plenty of stories that remind us of how our actions, even as ordinary people, can help shift norms. There are few things as powerful as normalizing a behavior, and as these behaviors shift, the institutions with power must respond. After all, ecology reminds us that none of our actions take place in a vacuum. Even the smallest of actors can shift the trajectory of an entire ecosystem.
If the tragic scenes from Maui, or anywhere else, have stirred up a level of climate concern that wasn’t there before, use that. Know that there are solutions and that finding your own opportunity to advance any one of them does have a meaningful impact.
Know that we don’t need another wake up call to take action. We have the solutions. We have the efficacy. We just need to act.