Is Fighting Climate Change like going to the Gym?
by Tim Thonhauser-Röhrich
Have you worked out lately?
Fighting climate change is a lot like going to the gym. At first, you’re motivated by the data. With your health, you’ve stepped on the scale. With the climate, maybe you’ve watched Johan Rockström’s excellent seven-minute video, 10 years to transform the future of humanity. You feel the urgency to make a change. You join the gym — both the physical one and the climate gym, like LFCA.
But then, despite your valiant efforts, the scale doesn’t budge. You turn on the news and hear one depressing story after another about the inevitability of climate change. It starts getting to you. You wonder if you can really make any difference at all.
Maybe you have climate anxiety — a real and natural phenomenon. Maybe you’ve even seen a climate psychologist. Or you’re one in the four in five 23-year-olds who aren’t planning on having children because of climate change.
But just like giving up on exercise, consuming only negative stories won’t help. Science shows us that while the facts about climate change catalyze us to action, desiring a bright future is the key to sustaining it.
As humans, we’re actually hard-wired to be optimistic about the future. Dr Deepika Chopra has 12 tactics on how to live a positive life. One of them is, surround yourself with positive news — and that’s what we are going to do in this newsletter.
This article was first published in the weekly FightBack Newsletter. Subscribe here for regular inspiration on impactful corporate innovation.
