For Climate Action, Community Trumps Politics
The cardinal sin, there wasn’t enough butter on the popcorn. The sodium combined with the sweat from the 40 other people crammed into the curiously small theater made me a little less empathetic. It was the director's turn to answer. “What inspired your film?” She told the audience about how she'd scaled a 100 foot tall tree, risking her life so the disgruntled lumberjacks below couldn’t cut. She’d hoped to show how nature was breathing all around us. Perched at the edge of the forest's canopy, she could at least feel its breeze.
She exuded poise and confidence as her pink pony tails swung with each emphasis. Her story, a new chapter in the rich history of environmental activism in Northern California. Despite a compelling delivery, her voice was sucked up by the walls of NYC’s Big Apple Film Festival. The crowd timid from hundred feet beneath the ground in the heart of America's concrete jungle.
The audience felt as if they were simultaneously trying to figure out how they can support this girl and why they don’t trust her. The environmentalist was losing sight of the crowd before ever leaving the ground.
The question was passed onto the next filmmaker, a powerful, clearly seasoned, female producer, dedicated to uncovering the truth of one of the greatest injustices she’d ever seen. Her client had created stuffed crust pizza, then Pizza Hut stole it. The team was hell-bent in reclaiming his greasy epiphany and bringing back honor to their family. The front row was petrified. Hands shot up probing how this could happen and how they could get involved.
Climate had been falling off the political agenda long before Trump was re-elected. Americans who thought the issue “is a really big problem” went from 47% in July 2021 to 36% in May 2024. Covid stole the attention and the narrative of individual sacrifice left its toll. The IRA’s magnitude– the most consequential piece of U.S climate legislation in history – meant further government investment on that scale was politically infeasible before the bill's reconciliation ten years later. The good news is our engagement with climate change goes far beyond politics, and will continue to do so.
Solving the climate crisis looks different to everyone,
and that’s a good thing
I can assure you the front row cares about climate change. Combing through the audience, each one could even care in their own way. Two aisles back was a wall street type sweating through his suit, where in 2022 ESG assets were worth $30 trillion and by 2030, were projected to account for more than 25% of total global assets managed. It’d be of no surprise if the woman on the far left went home to her NYC fire escape, cigarette in hand, and finally finished writing her climate fiction novel—better known as Cli-Fi—or her substack where climate is now one of the most popular categories.
The lady distracted, yet competently checking her notifications, was clearly an entrepreneur vying for investment where 21 cents of every venture capital dollar is now going towards a climate related solution. The stoic man in the all black looked like a shoe in to join DJs for climate action. Then there was the peacock looking fellow who has definitely cracked the freelance design lifestyle, potentially with the help of the global Climate Designers community.
The discussion around how to protect our earth has been expanding for more than hundred years. From conservationists with the Sierra Club and National Geographic pushing for the creation of national parks in the 1910s, to environmentalism switching the focus to advocacy, consumption and economic growth. By 1970 Earth Day and the EPA were formed. From there the story got a new antagonist, it was fossil fuels vs the world. The oil companies tried to buy time by reframing the discussion as a moral and individualist debate but people quickly caught on.
In today's state of pluralism there’s no one right approach. You can engage in climate in a way that makes sense to you. Moving on from scarcity and sacrifice as the only solution, meant a whole new set of people could relate. Increasingly for every interest and industry, New York trope or not, there is a climate version.
There’s still calls from the top to redesign the markets but so far capitalism hasn’t quite been toppled as much as supplemented. The passionate and pragmatic are changing the rules, one line at a time. Instead of a climate revolution, progress is looking more like a backyard BBQ. Now are the debates between solutions, but those debates are where progress happens.
The Climate Community Buffet and How to Choose
Your solution to climate is dependent on what you see the priority is. There’s now a pro and de-growth argument to climate, spot for the a techno-optimist and luddite, the decarb bro and the high fashion girlie. The young evangelical, new mom, and next atlanta hip-hop star.
Nadia Asparouhova elegantly reflects on climate change’s many tribes; “It is a striking example of the general sociological trend towards fragmented cultural narratives – even the end of humanity, it turns out, is a subjective experience.”
We can be “alarmed” about climate change and still not know how to channel it. Through a cauldron of personal beliefs, information, and social norms we decide what’s important and find community that aligns with our way of seeing the world. Conviction on climate is often held socially. But around like minded individuals, the discussion begins to shift from what you believe to what to do about it. From there, action can begin to fit more easily into our lives.
For the first time in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, they acknowledged the cultural and community aspects of climate change: “Just like infrastructures, social and cultural processes can ‘lock-in’ societies to carbon-intensive patterns of service delivery. They also offer potential levers to change normative ideas and social practices in order to achieve extensive emissions cuts.” While the effort put into cultural change might be harder to quantify than new hardware, the two are dependent on each other.
In other words, changing a social norm can be just as powerful as an energy source. We know this, a story from your aunt about her newfound financial security after she swapped her technician job to be a solar energy installer will always be more impactful than a stat about solar adoption rates. This is why so many new perspectives on how to solve the climate crisis can be so powerful, a wider audience begins to see themselves in the issue. When pinning a story against a fact, the story always wins, and community is where stories are shared.
To see where climate action is going, look at where community is growing the most. Here you’ll find new social norms and identities more powerful than any legislation. When put together, you begin to see the culture change at a societal scale. With the right community, one day we may be able to relate to our earth in the same visceral and greasy way we do cheese in crust.