I started this newsletter hoping to connect some dots between the crises we’re facing.
This includes connecting the crises we experience personally — like anxiety, burnout, and precarity — with those we think of as existing at a more macro or global level, like the converging trends of planetary destabilization.
No big deal.
In the first edition, I reflected on my travels from Greenpeace through Bay Street, and how “in the age of global warming and precarity, I’ve been working through burnout for much of my adult life”.
The response I’ve gotten to that first newsletter tells me that I’m not alone in feeling this way.
I’m not surprised.
Amid overlapping crises, creeping uncertainty, growing instability, and existential risk, it would be pretty weird not to feel some type of way, even if we have a hard time describing those feelings.
And we make this all so much worse, I pointed out, by ignoring these overlapping crises, perpetuating a culture of silence around them, and gaslighting ourselves and each other by pretending the status quo is okay — and that we’re okay with it.
Instead, I wrote, “we have to work through our feelings about this collective trauma.”
We should be brutally honest about the complex threats we’re facing, connect deeply with ourselves and our communities, and be empowered through the collective purpose we must embrace in this moment — to dramatically change course for the better.
In the second edition, I observed:
This moment in history requires us to be at our best — but it also pushes us into brain fog, depression, and anxious avoidance while we try to manage the daily necessities of work (if we’re lucky), finances, family, and keeping our health on modestly stable footing.
If we’re going to adequately respond to the collective crises we face, we’re going to have to get a lot better at taking care of ourselves and each other.
Now, I promise this isn’t a very short anthology of greatest hits. Here’s the point — it turns out that I’m really on to something.
I was recently invited to speak on a podcast hosted by Benjamin Miller, a fellow alum of UofT Law who recently wrote a fascinating-looking book on strategic communications in the non-profit sector (available for pre-order here).
Benjamin asked me on to talk about my experiences and views on climate communications
In preparation, I decided to pick up “Facing the Climate Emergency”, by Margaret Klein Salamon, a clinical psychologist from New York who joined the growing ranks of “climate warriors” after Hurricane Sandy.
Her book is amazing. It was very exciting to read.
Salamon’s psychological expertise and the decades of research she draws on validated what I’ve been chewing on and trying to communicate here — namely that our personal and planetary crises are inextricably linked, and that we can’t solve one without the other.
So — I’ve decided to do a two-parter, adapted from some of the thoughts I shared about all this with Benjamin on his podcast (the episode hasn’t been posted yet, but once it is you’ll be able to listen here).
Here’s Part I, in which I reflect on my experience communicating about climate change, the term “climate emergency”, and Salamon’s excellent book.
Stay tuned for Part II, on the barriers to effective climate communication and how we should be talking about *waves hands* all this.
Question 1: What has your experience been communicating about climate change?
I’ve written about climate change academically, and like many people I’ve had lots of conversations with friends, family, and coworkers over the years, although certainly not enough.
My most intense and direct experience communicating with the public at large was during the 3 years I worked as a street canvasser, which was my first role at Greenpeace.
“Hey, got a minute to talk about climate change?” Yeah, that was me.
I feel like the context was different then.
This was around 2004, two years before Al Gore tried to tell the public An Inconvenient Truth. So some people still hadn’t really heard of global warming.
And to the extent that they had, the media environment was perhaps even more distorted than it is today, due to the multi-decade, multi-billion dollar disinformation campaign conducted by the fossil fuel industry (also check out the Drilled podcast for an engaging dive into this history).
So when I started talking about the climate, people didn’t necessarily grasp the urgency or severity of the crisis.
I think that’s changed in the intervening years.
Today, everyone knows about climate change. There’s still denial and inaction, but I think this is now less about repressed information and more about repressed emotion.
As our planet has heated up, we’ve traded a culture of relative ignorance for a culture of relative silence.
A recent poll by the Canadian Nuclear Association (CNA) showed that despite the pandemic, 1/3 of Canadians rank global warming as the “number one extremely serious issue Canada faces”, and 88% report being personally impacted by climate change.
57% said they’ve been “significantly impacted”, which is similar to the percentage reporting that unemployment and the economy have significantly impacted them or their loved ones. And 78% said they are very concerned about the impacts on future generations.
So in many ways, I think politicians and the legacy media are not only lagging the science, they’re really lagging the public as well.
The public are concerned and want action (although, with apologies to the CNA, nuclear power is likely too expensive and ponderous to help).
And we kind of know this, right?
I’m sure you’ve had conversations with people who will say “yeah, we’re probably screwed” and kind of shut down, or “it stresses me out too much to think about.”
Our friends, our neighbours, and our loved ones are really worried about our unfolding planetary emergency (if you’re reading this, I’m guessing you are too), and our leaders aren’t sufficiently acknowledging or speaking to these entirely reasonable fears.
Indeed, few of us are.
This tells me that many employers are lagging their workers as well.
People in (home) offices, factories, and boardrooms across the country — and around the world — are rightfully anxious and want to see meaningful acknowledgement and leadership around the planetary crisis.
We know deep down that business-as-usual cannot be sustained, but we’ve created a culture of silence to try to protect ourselves from that truth.
This culture of silence encourages us to compartmentalize the planetary emergency and repress the emotions it provokes.
It’s a desperate attempt to sustain the illusion of normalcy.
In my experience, there’s also been a tendency to intellectualize our collective emergency. I’ve been guilty of this too.
Although climate-related statistics and other facts are important, they can also function as non-threatening abstractions.
In other words, intellectualizing the climate emergency can function as another psychological defense mechanism — another form of denial.
Intellectualizing can be a way to ‘protect’ ourselves from fully acknowledging the emotions that get stirred up when we think about the destabilization of the planetary systems we rely on — the systems on which our entire edifice of culture and civilization has been built.
Thus, with climate change communication, I increasingly think the real stumbling block for people is an emotional one.
And this stumbling block is tied to our leaders’ abject failure to sufficiently engage not only with planetary systems science, but also with its profound emotional implications.
So we end up with this big disconnect:
On the one hand, there’s what science is telling us and what many people read and observe and feel about the insane, cataclysmic trajectory we’re on — from desertification to global fisheries collapse to mass extinction to sea level rise.
And on the other hand, the behavioural and discursive responses from political leadership, from business leadership, and from each other have overwhelmingly functioned to protect the status quo and shut down emotions in a way that’s completely out of touch with physical reality.
In short, we’re hiding ourselves away from the weighty truth of these overlapping crises, and we’re not acting like they’re real.
Question 2: What do you think of the expression “climate emergency”?
There’ve been a number of rhetorical re-framings over the years. These are not mutually exclusive.
“Global warming” used to be the default term, for example, but “climate change” became more widely used to reflect the diverse & nuanced effects that global average temperature rise has in different places at different times.
Also, many increasingly find “global heating” more accurate than “global warming”, since “heating” better captures the dangerous urgency of our predicament.
So “climate emergency” follows in this tradition of rhetorically capturing different facets of the same phenomenon.
Thus, global heating is causing incredibly rapid climate change, and this constitutes a planet-wide climate emergency for human civilization and every other species with whom we share the planet.
However, many folks have yet to experience global heating as an emergency in the same way that they might with a single housefire or flood. It’s different in scale and temporal scope.
Global heating is a long emergency in a way that’s somewhat analogous to the calamity of extended wartime or state failure. It doesn’t just create loss in the present — it also obliterates the possible futures we‘ve long taken for granted.
However, a long, worsening, collective crisis like this pushes against the atomized immediacy of life that many of us are used to (rinse, work, buy, sleep, repeat) and against the already-foresaken futures that many of us are still dutifully toiling towards.
It’s important to emphasize, however, that many people have and do already experience climate change as an emergency.
If you live in drought and fire-stricken California, or atop the Arctic’s thawing permafrost, or in Honduras, which just got walloped with back to back category 4 & 5 hurricanes, displacing hundreds of thousands of people this month, or if you’re watching your state sink into the sea like Kiribati, you know you’re in an emergency.
I think our leaders and the legacy media have failed us by failing to connect these dots and by not acting accordingly.
I think we’re being gaslit.
Without corresponding action, the word “emergency” can be reduced to an empty signifier.
There’s a clinical psychologist named Margaret Salamon, who became a “climate warrior” after Hurricane Sandy. She has a terrific book called “Facing the Climate Emergency”.
Salamon draws on years of psychological research and points out that emergency responses have a strong social dimension.
In other words, when we hear an emergency signal, we try to figure out how concerned we should be by watching the actions and communications of those around us, especially leaders.
And she talks about a well-observed psychological phenomenon called pluralistic ignorance, which helps describe how when people — especially leaders — react passively to an emergency, pretty much everyone else will to.
Unfortunately, we’ve had a decades-long disinformation campaign pushed through media, politics, and business — through society’s leaders — with people saying “it’s not happening”, or “it’s natural” or “humans play a small part” or “scientists aren’t sure” or “it’s too complicated” or “it’s too costly” or “technology will save us” or “we have a plan” and then not following through.
And this is all self-serving nonsense that vainly tries to protect the status quo from the uncompromising reality of physics and to protect our minds from the emotional implications of the rapid changes we’re making to our planetary home.
So on the one hand, people read about what’s happening, they feel it and see it, and they hear the warnings from national science academies and so on.
Maybe they hear the specific words “climate emergency.”
As Salamon writes, this is like the fire alarm and an evacuation announcement sounding in your office building.
But then you look around and no-one’s running — everyone’s just kind of sheepishly looking at each other or pretending not to notice or rolling their eyes with exhausted frustration.
And then some senior person comes around and says “hey, I think Dave from Accounting just burnt something in the toaster-oven again, no need to be alarmist, we’ll buy a bigger one next week. Just keep your head down, you can keep working.”
And so we do — even as smoke fills the room.
So the big problem is not that the emergency signal is broken — although the fossil fuel industry has done its best to muffle and distract from it, and too many politicians are still downplaying or denying the emergency.
But the real problem is that we haven’t had the corresponding emergency action from the leaders we’re looking to for guidance.
Their actions, instead, speak a thousand soothing words, communicating that things are fine and we can continue on as normal, perhaps with a bit of tinkering at the edges.
Never mind all that “emergency” talk — their actions say “this is fine.”
So we find ourselves in this gaslit situation that leaves people feeling very anxious and uncertain and overwhelmed — and therefore feeling avoidant and even dissociative — and this is a lot of we tend to construe as denial and inaction.
Ok that’s it for Part I — stay tuned for Part II, coming soon!
How are we feeling so far? Am I on to something?
Do you agree there’s a culture of silence around the climate crisis, overlapping with the broader culture of silence around our mental health?
How have you seen this play out in your workplace, among your friends, and in your own internal dialogue?
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts, so let me know in the comments.
And if you know someone who might appreciate this newsletter, please share it — I’d love to reach a wider audience!
Until then — stay safe and be well.
Aladdin