Last Friday (little over a week ago), we had a meeting with my Moral Ambition project team, like we do every week. At some point, a member of our team mentioned that she is going to a conference in Paris the following week with her startup and she has an extra ticket. Next thing I know, I am running home to pack my stuff, shooting messages in all directions to clear my calendar, calling a friend in Paris to ask if I could come and stay with him for a few nights.
And so, all thanks to my amazing friends, family and professors who helped me, I found myself at the Grand Palais in Paris on Monday, walking into a huge climate conference for 40,000 people, with a ticket that allowed me to reach out to other participants and book meetings with them. It felt surreal. Now I am back to share my thoughts on these few days. But in short: The event gave me so much.
.HEIC)
Hope for the future
In many of the talks I listened to, one idea kept coming up: we need to try a more hopeful approach to climate action. The climate movement began by being loud about what is wrong with the current system, and about the cost of inaction—painting catastrophic pictures of the future if we don’t cut emissions. This has motivated some people to act, but the masses are still not moving. In a live podcast session by Michael Mezz, Rob Hopkins formulated this pretty clearly: "Everyone who's going to get it, has got it now."
Hopkins emphasizes in his book How to Fall in Love with the Future that it is time to try a more "positive" approach to motivate people. Currently, many people feel completely powerless. They might agree that things are messed up, but say, "There is nothing I can do, so I'm not even trying."
Instead of saying, "There will be floods and storms and fires, a complete catastrophe, an unlivable planet if we don't do anything", we could say: "If we act now, we will have a more peaceful, cooler, thriving society in a few years. There will be more birdsong, more grass, more trees, more safety. We will have cleaner air to breathe. We can still make this happen - so shall we act now?"
Hopkins argues that this might be much more effective. He says we need to give people their future back.
In the audience of Hopkin's talk, I met a psychotherapist who works with young climate activists experiencing burnout. He said that one of the main drivers for burnout for young activists is how bleak the future feels - knowing the science on climate change tipping points, and seeing no action from world leaders, or the masses. A woman next to me, also an aspiring psychotherapist, added that a key pillar of human wellbeing is the sense that we can influence our own future. When that is taken away, it’s no wonder we become unwell.
I find Rob Hopkins' message very interesting. On the one hand I really do think most people haven't got the faintest idea of how serious the situation with climate change is. (The tipping points.) It feels obvious to me that if only they knew, they would surely do something, so we just need to make people more aware. But as we've seen, it is not working! At the same time, I recognise the weight of knowing so much - the feeling of my future as an uncertain black hole. This is why collective, hopeful imagination is starting to feel more and more crucial to me. It could be a powerful tool for the climate movement.
Because at the end of the day, how can we create change, if we are not able to imagine it first? I believe it really matters what we think is possible.
There were many talks that embodied this hopeful, yet realistic (not naïve) narrative. Kate Raworth gave an amazing circus-style performance—it was so good—to show how the finance world and nature are inherently in conflict. There was also a very entertaining, good-natured debate on whether green growth is a myth, during which I was fangirling over Luisa Neubauer (she’s an amazing speaker!) and Kate Raworth, while also being reminded that the question of green growth vs. degrowth isn’t black-and-white (although I still think green growth is a myth). Being able to laugh and have fun while still engaging with this very important topic felt somehow liberating. And I think it really brought people together.
By protecting and spreading a hopeful narrative of the future, we might also protect democracy. Hopkins pointed out that fascism works by painting the future as bleak and dangerous, and claiming that the fascists are the only ones who will protect you from it. Hearing and believing this, people will believe in their leader like in God - this is exactly what is happening in the US. According to Hopkins, we can counteract this by painting a picture of the future that is full of opportunities. "Make people fall in love with the future - create nostalgia for the future." To me, this feels like a radical thought. But maybe we're on to something here. At least, it is something that has not yet been tried.