For many people, the climate crisis is a source of anxiety. This is especially true for younger generations.
A Greenpeace study released this year found nearly 80 per cent of children aged 6 to 12 were worried about climate change. Other studies have shown worries about climate change affect young people’s mental health, daily lives and functioning.
This reaction is not hard to understand, says environmentalist Elin Kelsey, author of Hope Matters: Why Changing the Way We Think Is Critical to Solving the Environmental Crisis.
But Kelsey, who gave the plenary evening address at the Our Whole Society conference in Winnipeg on June 16, says climate anxiety should not be the whole story. There is also reason to hope.
The problem is that the media mainly reports on the detrimental effects of climate change, while ignoring the many ways people around the world are addressing it and finding solutions, she says.
“Less than three per cent of media stories about climate change even include a mention of a solution,” said Kelsey, who is also an adjunct professor at Royal Roads University in Victoria, B.C.
For her, the climate crisis is as much a “crisis of hope” as it is about the actual challenges posed by a changing climate.
When people feel hopeless, they feel disempowered, she says. But when they are offered solutions, it can counter cynicism and apathy.
This approach does not mean ignoring the negative effects of climate change, she says. “We can tell those stories, but we don’t need to stop there.”
“We should also look for stories about where things are moving in a positive direction.”
For Kelsey, solutions journalism — which identifies problems but also illuminates how people are working to address those challenges — can be an antidote because it can “move us in good directions.”
She cited several examples of solutions journalism, such as Project Drawdown, a leading resource for climate solutions; Gapminder, which corrects misinformation about issues like climate change; and The Beacon, a weekly newsletter featuring stories on climate progress, solutions and actions.
Kelsey also noted there have been many positive developments to address climate change, including record levels of interest in clean energy, a booming second-hand clothing movement and a global mass movement toward using public transit.
These stories counter what Kelsey calls the “starting line fallacy” — that nothing has been done and that people need to begin at zero to address the climate crisis.
“All kinds of things have been going on for decades. But if you think that everything’s wrecked, and it’s too late to change, then it’s hard to care about it.”
While she does not minimize the nature of the climate crisis, she says she chooses to be hopeful. “It’s a choice,” she said. “Hope is not complacent. It is a powerful political act.”
‘Actions on the ground’
Canadian international human rights lawyer Payam Akhavan presented a slightly different message earlier that day.
“Humankind is moving in the wrong direction,” Akhavan said in the conference’s opening plenary session.
The world is facing an onslaught of rage that is imperiling a “vision for a shared humanity,” he said.
But in keeping with the conference’s thematic focus on hope, Akhavan also noted he sees hope in “actions on the ground.”
In the face of climate change, what is needed is “trans political action,” he said. The world is now at a point where “we have no choice but to set aside differences to survive.”
In Akhavan’s view, spirituality is also important. “We must show compassion and concern for others,” said Akhavan, who is himself a member of the Baha’i community.
A “spiritual revolution,” as he called it, can inoculate societies against the “corrosive forces” that threaten democracies around the world as people “feel the pain of others” and find “joy in serving others.”
This service to others is also a way to “save our own souls,” Akhavan said.
“We have only one planet and we are only one people,” he concluded. “Our existence depends on us living in harmony.”
The theme of the Our Whole Society Conference, which is sponsored by the Canadian Interfaith Conversation, was Fostering Hope in a Divided World.
The “climate crisis” was invented by The Club of Rome. The Club is dedicated to promoting a one-world government run on the principle of technocracy. “Trust the Experts”has always been the core for acceptance of technocracy since issues overwhelm most people. First it was called “AGW (anthropogenic global warming)”. But the general public does not understand scientific parlance so the term was dumbed down to “global warming” But that term was open to ridicule and so the issue has been renamed “climate change” because that just sciency enough to impress the public even if they don’t understand it.
People believe that the role of the news media is to inform. That’s simply not true. The role of the media is to provide a platform for paid advertising. Every media outlet is out to make a profit, and the way to do that is to secure an audience and retain it. That means giving the audience what it wants. Until the advent of yellow journalism there were few newspapers that made money because people did not care about the general news. But, give them a lurid story and they bought the paper and read the ads. AGW and all of it’s related scary stuff is lurid content driving readership. Once a website has a following of concerned people it’s not about to run a story about how they were incorrect in previous articles. That drives readers away and hurts profits. So, the propaganda aspect is about having an audience hooked and reeling them in on a daily basis.
For the past 2 decades or more Global Warming/Climate Change has preoccupied every aspect of my daily living and has influenced how I live my life! Information that I have heard and read has made it quite clear that this issue is critical to the survival of humanity and that little is being done to fix it! As indicated, there is hope and taking a positive attitude towards the issue can be helpful! I sure hope so!