Building Climate Momentum

Unleashing our collective potential to drive change

The Overwhelming Negativity in the Media

I don’t know about you, but I find mainstream media difficult to watch and read these days. It seems that they don’t much care about the overall message they’re telling their viewers, so long as they’re getting the views that boost their ratings. Without a doubt, emotional content will always attract plenty of views. Hence, we’re bombarded with scenes and stories of murder, kidnapping, abuse, and harassment of groups of people that show us the worst of what humans are capable of.

However, the negative emotional content doesn’t end there. We’re also now more regularly shown scenes of environmental catastrophes (that are becoming more regular thanks to climate change) and people struggling to survive. We see the massive corruption in our political systems and the equally disturbing dysfunction of our economic systems on full display as if we’re watching some awful reality show — except that is our reality.

What I find especially troublesome is the talk around the climate crisis as more studies are published every day that detail the many different ways that the climate is responding to our collective destruction of the environment, and the media is now happily publishing these stories with little thought of how people might react to them.

It’s not that we should shy away from the scary science or the very real impacts of the climate crisis that are before us, but it needs to be balanced — and I would argue — dominated by the positive changes that are happening all around us that sometimes get very little attention.

What Is Climate Momentum?

I had the great pleasure of meeting with some leaders in the environmental movement yesterday including esteemed author and activist, Rebecca Solnit, and one of the things we discussed was how we can build something that Rebecca has termed “climate momentum”, i.e., the shifting of perspectives and mindsets in a positive direction as well as the progress we’re making to address the climate crisis.

One of my greatest fears with the climate crisis is that if we fail to act quickly and purposefully towards building a sustainable future, then certain climate feedbacks may start to engage (and some already have) and lead to an exponential increase in the heating of our planet making mitigation efforts very difficult, if not impossible. In my view, one of the best ways to counteract this potential scenario is to get as many people as engaged in the solutions to the crisis and build climate momentum that becomes exponential in itself, in terms of people and progress.

In other words, we need something that matches the scale of the crisis.

Think building that kind of momentum will never happen?

All one has to do is look back in history at the massive mobilization of capital, resources, and people in an incredibly short time frame to build an economy that would support the war efforts during World War II to understand that this is possible. If we can transform our economy for war, we can damn well do it to preserve our habitable planet.

How Do We Build Momentum?

In order to build this kind of momentum, we need to stop bombarding people with negativity that leads to despondency and apathy, and rather show them the power of what can happen when groups of people stand up for what they believe in (i.e. we need to inspire people to act).

I can speak from personal experience coming from an apathetic place not too long ago where I felt there wasn’t much we could do to stop what was already unfolding, but was later inspired by the work of the Sunrise Movement and other environmental groups that showed me what was possible when we challenge the status quo.

In fact, the status quo has only ever changed when enough people demanded that it should.

Now, rather than focusing as much on all the destruction and dire scientific predictions, I focus on how many regular people get involved in the climate movement every day or how much the energy infrastructure is moving towards renewables as the economics become more favorable or how even Republican politicians in the U.S. are beginning to seem like they care about protecting the environment and coming up with their own plans to address the climate crisis.

These are the kind of news stories that don’t always get as much attention but are equally as important, and none of them would be happening without people somewhere in the world pushing their leaders to act and holding them accountable.

When people see that a group of young teens from the Sunrise Movement can shift the entire political discussion around climate change and push for a Green New Deal — that now has more than 80% approval among registered voters and 94 House co-sponsors — you can bet that they’re going to get excited and want to help in some way.

Tapping Into Our Biological Needs

Many people across the U.S. and around the world have a sense that the current arrangements of society aren’t working to their benefit and are naturally distraught as a result. There’s a great sense of injustice, whether it’s economic injustice, environmental injustice, or racial injustice, yet there’s also a sense of general helplessness as these entrenched systems of injustice seem near impossible to overcome.

But there’s another sense that is perhaps more powerful than any of those — our sense of belonging. Matthew Lieberman states in his book, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, “To the extent that we can characterize evolution as designing our modern brains, this is what our brains are wired for: reaching out to and interacting with others.” We are biologically wired to be social creatures who crave social interaction and have a need to belong to something bigger than ourselves (regardless of whether you’re an introvert or extrovert).

I believe this is the key to building positive momentum and a movement that is so strong it becomes an unstoppable force, because it runs deeper than our values and beliefs; it taps into our evolutionary roots. This is also why a focus on negativity and disaster will fail in building climate momentum, because what are people supposed to gravitate towards and become a part of if that’s all we have to offer?

Great movements and great leaders throughout history have fulfilled people’s urge to belong by inspiring them and giving them something to fight for.

There is massive untapped potential out there from people who want to work on something bigger than themselves, but don’t quite know how or who don’t have the resources. It is our job as movement leaders to show them the progress the movement is making, how each action can lead to positive outcomes, to provide the tools and education for getting involved, and to inspire them to become leaders themselves.

We do have many of the technological solutions to address the climate crisis, but without the proper momentum, we will fail when it comes to implementation, especially given the tight time window in which we have to act.

The good news is the climate momentum has never been stronger. Now, we have to ensure that momentum continues to build from the smallest towns to the largest cities. We must bring in everyone from every walk of life and show them why their lives will be better if they ally with us rather than fight against us. In doing so, we will begin to form a collective vision for what our world can become rather than what we might lose. From there, it will become a matter of our collective willpower driving further momentum to make that vision a reality.

“As weather becomes ever more disruptive, and awareness and concern increase, the movement to reverse the climate crisis will likely become the largest movement in the history of humankind.” — Paul Hawken¹

References:

1. Paul Hawken. (2021). Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation. Penguin Random House LLC.

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