Wildfire Smoke -- A Great Opportunity!

“My eyes are stinging a bit from the smoke, but I’ve never seen more clearly.”

Bill McKibben is always poetic in his writing, this time as he describes our current reality with the wildfire smokes pouring in from Canada!

A bad day to be on the east coast of America for sure, but nothing special compared to what so many people in other parts of the world have to experience every single day.

Yet here I am, on the floor with my 7-month-old daughter, looking out at the eerily orange skies of New York, and praying it’ll all be better tomorrow so we can go out and enjoy the park again…

We left San Francisco because I found it emotionally difficult to deal with the wildfires that are becoming so increasingly common on the West Coast, but I didn’t expect East Coast life would come with the exact same reality!

But of course, as the globe continues to warm, unprecedented events are to be expected everywhere. It’s an uncertainty we must learn to live with, while at the same time, use as a needed felt urgency to act!

In my book, I talk a lot about the psychology around climate change and why it has been so hard to bring action around this critical situation we’re facing. One of them is distance — we simply perceive climate change as distant in either time or space and hence, lack the motivators to spark critical action.

Therefore, as these scary events are brought closer to home, we can leverage them to spark awareness and positive change in the people around us!

Photo taken in Downtown Manhattan on July 7th by Rayna Tharani

Here are two parts from the book that I found worth sharing in these special events!

One is on the “Distance” barrier (one of Per Espen Stoknes five barriers for action) which shows how hard it is to feel the urgency on climate change, the other is a tip on how to leverage this barrier to spark more successful climate conversation among our families and friends.

To activate the full journey of empowerment and resilience, get The Climate Optimist Handbook today!

Distance

The second D stands for distance. People need to relate to the concern to act. Whatever it is must touch us on a primitive level. Like most species, we evolved to care for ourselves and our kin first. It’s simply an act of survival. If we don’t feel the threat is imminent and urgent to our and our family’s survival, it is incredibly hard to get motivated to act.

When it comes to climate change, it still feels distant to most of us. As a threat, it’s perceived as something that’s happening to other people in other parts of the world, to other species, or something that will happen in the future. And although we care about other people, animals, and future generations, the sense of personal urgency is not there, hence the difficulty in triggering action.

It does not mean we’re mean, uncaring people. It simply means by nature we are not designed to act on distant threats, especially when we have so much else to worry about in our immediate surroundings.

Talk Local

Just as finding common ground is an important foundation for successfully engaging someone, so is talking about something the person can relate to. In climate conversations, this is even more important than you might think.

For most of us, climate change doesn’t feel like a personal threat. Sure, we all think it’s sad that polar bears are starving and people in other parts of the world are losing their homes. Of course, we care. But it doesn’t matter how much we care; to activate someone, the problem needs to feel relevant and close to home.

Remember that one of Per Espen Stoknes’s 5 Ds (barriers for climate action) is distance. That means we feel like climate change is both geographically and socially distant. It will happen in the future, not right now. It affects people in other countries, not us. This perceived distance prohibits the psychological urgency needed to take action.

By talking about how climate change is affecting your local area, you are much more likely to instill interest in the people around you. And (un)fortunately, finding examples of how our warming climate is affecting life where you live is not hard. All it takes is a few minutes on Google and you have yourself a conversation starter.

Here are more tips for having successful climate conversations

If you are in Canada and directly suffering from these wildfires, my heartfelt prayers go out to you! If you live in regions of the world where air conditions like these are everyday matters, I cannot express enough how sorry I am that is your reality!

All I can hope is that we can find ways to use these recurring wakeup calls as urgent motivators to act! A better world IS better if we choose to believe it, and if we choose to use that belief to create change in our environments and world.

With love and stubborn optimism,

AT