Talking Across the Great Divide
Many people with many different perspectives need to learn to talk to each other about the climate. About the energy transition now underway off fossil fuels. And most importantly, about the potential for a broader social and economic transition away from perpetual growth.
As badly as we need action, talk must come first. Otherwise, we risk losing sight of that broader transformation. We risk falling for the line that all we need to do is quit injecting CO2 and methane into the atmosphere, and things can go “back to normal.” It’s the line from Big Oil, Big Banking, Big Media, Big Everything. It’s an argument that appeals mainly to the winners under globalized capitalism.
But necessary as decarbonizing is, focusing on that alone won’t make everything fine. Getting rid of the compulsion to grow the economy is as important as getting rid of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). In fact, it’s a necessary prerequisite for getting rid of emissions quickly enough to limit climate change to anything like tolerable levels. It’s also necessary for saving the Earth and all its inhabitants from broader degradation — from dead soil, dead oceans, dead species. From killing ourselves and others with war and poisons.
Talking about all this across social divides is necessary because people in “flyover” country who were not clear winners under global capitalism tend to be the ones who feel most acutely just how far off track everything has gotten. The “elites” need to hold respectful conversations with people of other perspectives not just to persuade them, but to learn from them. All of us might even come to some common realizations, such as acceptance that “experts” know a lot, but also that they don’t know everything, and they aren’t the only ones who know anything.
What Does Change Mean?
High up my own list of those to be conversed with by people like me are Americans who voted for Barack Obama’s platform of change and then switched to Donald Trump. Do they want forward-looking, foundational change — the sort Obama failed in the end to provide? Or just a way back to the old ways — the sort Trump failed to provide? Or are they so busy juggling multiple jobs, childcare, and other responsibilities that they don’t have time or mental energy to know what they want?
What they do seem to intuit is that something is very, very wrong and things should be different than they are now, under the all-pervasive Center.
The cast of characters is different in Europe. The dynamic of switchability between right and left against an increasingly defensive center is pretty much the same.
Being the winners from globalized capitalism, the people who do most of the talking about climate often don’t get the bigger problems. They see that the climate is changing. They accept “the science.” They may buy an EV and/or put up solar panels — or buy credits so that solar gets built on somebody else’s farm. But otherwise, life can go on and, for them, that’s a good thing. But it isn’t a good thing for the Earth, the less well-off people on it, or the non-human animals and plants that inhabit it — and at some level, more good liberal people know this than admit it.
This is a moment of volatility. The climate is getting worse. That we know for sure. One of the multiple things we fear is that human society and politics will also get worse. More violent, and more disrespectful of an Earth that is already rebelling against our disrespect. Alternatively, human society and politics could get better. People could develop respect for each other, the planet, and its non-human inhabitants. What modes of communication and community would flow from that is unknown and would probably differ from place to place. But they would surely be better than we have now.
But how and where does this sharing and learning conversation even start? How do we cross the vast political chasm created by disrespect, resentment, and anger to rediscover points of shared morality, joy, sorrow, and fear that can form a foundation for a new human reality?
Enough of Sacrifice
One change I’d like to see in the way we talk about climate change is to get rid of the idea that it’s all about “sacrifice.” The changes we need are not changes for the worse, not for the most part or for most of us, anyhow. To say they are is to tacitly accept the advertising-fueled notion that globalized capitalism with its focus on consumption as the path to happiness is the best way to live and that it’s worth working like crazy all the time to get and stay on that consumerist path.
If we slowed down long enough to think about it, the lives most people live aren’t good enough that the necessity to change should be mourned much even in the overworked, tension-ridden upper echelons of the over-developed world. For everybody else, capitalism — and especially the neoliberal variety of the last 40 years — has been the stuff of which “deaths of despair” are made in the West, and deaths of easily preventable illnesses, violence, and starvation are made in the Global South.
The people out there who think something is very wrong are very right. Telling them that they have a lot to lose from fighting climate change is certifiably a bad message to send to people who don’t have a lot to lose at all. Its lack of appeal is certifiable in voting results.
It’s also inaccurate. A lot of people have a lot to gain from change.
What We Can Gain
Think back to the Gilets Jaunes protest movement in France in 2018–19. Although high gasoline taxes provided the spark, they weren’t the big, underlying problem shouted out so loudly and persistently by this massive self-organizing movement of people mainly from rural and far-out suburban France — from the French equivalent of flyover country. Their protest was about foundational things stemming from depopulation and impoverishment of the countryside in aid of agribusiness and urbanization. Most of all, perhaps, it was about disrespect — analogous to the disrespect the Earth seems to feel.
These are people who have everything to gain from climate-aiding moves such as better, cheaper public transit in the suburbs and countryside. Such as smaller-scale, more localized farming and baking. Most of all, from talking and knowing they’re being heard. From being respected.
Or think of the people described by Bloomberg as opposing the Mountain Valley Pipeline, beloved by Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, that will carry natural gas near or through their property in West Virginia and southern Virginia. There will be no help for them, because the pipeline is almost finished under a Manchin-sponsored tradeoff for needed clean energy programs. Programs I support. But their concerns shouldn’t have been tossed aside. They’re still the kind of people who need to be onboard to change the way things work, so things like this don’t keep happening.
None of this is to say that there won’t be sorrow connected to climate change. For all of us. Perhaps especially for those who live beyond the inner urban reaches and remain in contact with plant and animal species that seem destined to disappear and seasonal phenomena that will be altered and unpredictable. And those who face injury or death of family and friends in storms and other violent weather events. The times ahead will not be easy or fun. But these are the results of the exploitative lives we humans have been living — not the changes we need to make.
Having fewer individual cars, less stuff generally, and spending more time and money closer to home are not things that should be presented as huge sacrifices for ordinary people — or even for the winners of the capitalist sweepstakes of the last two centuries. It’s not sacrifice, it’s sanity.
How to Start Talking?
Start slowly, no matter how convinced you are that speed is essential to save the climate. That’s a variant on a bit of the advice from an exceptional young woman, Chloe Maxmin, who went straight from campaigning for divestment in fossil fuels at Harvard to running for the Maine US state legislature as a Democrat in a solidly Republican rural district that had never elected a Democrat. She won. She went on to win a state Senate seat two years later from the Republican leader of the state Senate, during Covid shutdowns.
Her strategy was going door to door — or reaching out personally to constituents in other ways during lockdown — and ignoring Democratic Party admonitions to focus on voters who already shared her views. She talked a lot to lots of very different kinds of people. She also listened, and learned.
“An essential part of the culture of living and organizing in rural America is slowing down and building relationships. It is the touchstone on which our future — and all hope of transforming how we relate to politics and one another — depends,” Maxmin and her campaign manager in both elections, Canyon Woodward, write in their book Dirt Road Revival: How to Rebuild Rural Politics and Why Our Future Depends on It. “To show up, look someone in the eye, and shake their hand is to plant the seeds of possibility and connection. It’s also what is lacking in today’s politics,” they add.
Now they’re trying to spread the Dirtroad Organizing message across other parts of the US, including with those folks in West Virginia pipeline country.
Use stories to make points, rather than relying solely on science or experts. Science is vital to understanding the causes and consequences of events unfolding in the physical world. It doesn’t and shouldn’t be expected to determine political behavior. For that, we need values and principles. Values and principles, in turn, are the stuff of which stories can be made that bring people together.
In his 2017 book Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for An Age of Crisis, British writer and environmental activist George Monbiot starts with the “two most successful political stories” of the 20th and early 21 centuries. The neoliberal one, in which the “collectivizing tendencies of the over-mighty state” create disorder that can be overcome only by “the redeeming power of the market.” Humans in this story are essentially selfish and act best in their individual self-interest.
The other is a story in which disorder results from the “self-seeking behavior of an unrestrained elite” and can be cured by ordinary people “uniting to defend their common interest.” Humans in this version have an unmatched capacity for “altruism and reciprocity” that has been suppressed by “an ideology of extreme individualism and competition” but is waiting to be liberated.
It’s a story that bears notable resemblances to the one Maxmin told to her rural Maine constituents and to one I related in this earlier piece in Medium. Notice that it doesn’t criticize or belittle people. On the contrary, it appeals to values and principles on which the very great bulk of humanity can agree.
It’s a story waiting to be uncovered by conversation, somewhere beyond the great divide.
