Combating the climate crisis through community
how many of you
have heard the story of the beach
covered by starfish
so the story goes that one day after
high tide
thousands of starfish have been washed
up on the beach and they’re all starting
to die
one young woman goes down to the beach
picks up a starfish
and puts it back in the ocean then she
grabs another
throwing it back to the waves time
passes
and she returns starfish after starfish
to the ocean
but the beach is miles long and she’s
barely even
cleared the area around herself a
bemused passerby
stops her and says why are you doing
this
there are thousands of starfish here you
can’t save them all
what difference can you make in reply
the woman picks up another starfish
throws it into the sea
and she says i made a difference
to that one
i love this story it’s a great fable
about the importance of taking
individual responsibility
and the impact that we can have by doing
our bit to make the world a better place
and we
know that the problems society face
today the climate crisis
systemic racism a global pandemic
they’re huge and we live in a society
which stresses the importance of
individual actions
and it’s true we all need to do our bit
reduce our carbon footprint challenge
racism when we see it
hands face space but i don’t know about
you
but sometimes i can’t help but agree
with the passerby
some of the global challenges that we
face are just too huge to be overcome
by any one individual
but i wonder how different
would that story have been if the young
woman had persuaded the passer boy
by to join her they could have saved
twice as many starfish
better yet what if she’d gone back to
the nearby town and persuaded
others in her community to do the same
well they could have cleared the whole
beach
and that’s the power of individual
actions when they take place
in the context of community and in fact
we don’t need to write a new fable to
demonstrate this
power of community there are real life
examples
let me paint a picture for you so cast
your mind back
to the starfish beach but instead of
starfish scattered across
the sand imagine plastic and garbage
and instead of an idyllic scattering
imagine
that in some places the garbage is five
and a half
feet deep this is versova beach
in mumbai in 2015.
and i don’t know about you but when i
hear stories like this
i feel a weight in my stomach because of
the seemingly irreversible damage
humans are doing to our environment
but a young lawyer moved to the area
at about the same time in 2015 and
similarly shocked
by the devastation set about clearing up
the beach
but when he realized he couldn’t do it
alone unlike the young woman
he went and gathered volunteers from his
community to come and help
and over two years together they
recovered the beach
and now it’s an area of natural beauty
benefiting the community
making the seemingly impossible possible
that’s the power of community action
because the truth is that individual
actions are most
powerful when they happen in the context
of community
i’m part of a community called people
power and we’re a collective
whose mission is to make the planet a
more sustainable place
and we recognize that tackling problems
such as the climate crisis
is only possible in the context of
community
i’m going to share with you three
elements of community
that i’ve picked up on through my work
with people power that can help us
face global challenges empowerment
influence and resilience
and i’m also going to share with you
what i think
is the secret ingredient that underlies
every successful community
hopefully by the end i will have
persuaded you that you should join
forces with your community to save your
starfish
and the environment that they live in
so firstly empowerment well making
choices for the lofty purpose of
tackling global challenges
like the climate crisis can feel futile
like a single drop of water in the ocean
and that can have really negative
effects on our psyche
in fact a national yougov poll last year
showed that 70 of young people
experience anxiety about climate change
but engaging in community has been shown
to reduce
anxiety and in a diverse setting it
increases the motivation people have
to learn about and act to prevent
climate change
and this makes sense if you think about
it because humans are social animals
which of you doesn’t run faster or
longer
because you have someone running beside
you
we can empower and be empowered by those
around us
because we’re made to feel less alone
and because we can learn from each other
so one example from my life
is when my husband and i decided to
reduce the meat content of our diet
and we did this because about 15 percent
of global greenhouse gas emissions comes
from meat and dairy
to put that in more context a typical
barbecue
has the same carbon footprint as an
80-mile car journey
that’s 8-0 anyway so we became
flexitarian and it was a big change
to our diet we had to find new meals to
cook
experiment with meat alternatives and we
didn’t always remember or get it right
changing our habits was hard and this
isn’t specific to us forming new habits
as
individuals can take between half a
month
and nine months which is a long time
and it can be a dispiriting process and
i’m sure that you can appreciate that
if you like me have ever made a new
year’s resolution
that doesn’t last past january 9th
and that’s before you even take into
account the feeling of futility
that accompanies making an individual
change in the face of global catastrophe
but our community empowered us we have
friends who are also trying to improve
their sustainability
and some of whom were already vegetarian
or vegan
so we didn’t feel so alone and we also
shared ideas and approaches between
ourselves
like new meal ideas or the best places
to buy our favorite meat alternative
and that made things practically easier
as well
because we felt part of something
suddenly what as an
individual seemed like a drop of water
in the ocean in the context of community
became a tidal wave of change
one important caveat that i want to
mention
regarding empowerment is diversity
much of the empowerment we get from
community comes from this idea exchange
and this is most effective when the
ideas being exchanged are varied
coming from a variety of different
perspectives
so the usefulness of a community in
empowering us
is proportional to the diversity of the
perspectives
represented within it a slightly trite
demonstration of this might be
that if our friends had only been
recommending us meal ideas from one type
of cuisine say
french cuisine we might have quickly got
on board and it would have been harder
to maintain our motivation more
seriously
evidence shows that a lack of diversity
within a community
can prevent openness to learning about
the climate crisis
so to create truly empowering
communities
we must value and nurture diversity
now i quickly want to bring us back to
the starfish story at the beginning
was that young woman making the biggest
difference that she possibly could
well i would argue that no she wasn’t
because
she wasn’t harnessing the second power
of community that i want to discuss
the power of influence
making climate positive choices within
our communities
should be regenerative it shouldn’t stop
with us
by talking about our choices we can
influence the choices of those around us
gradually changing the cultural norm so
for example over the years my husband
and i have discussed our food
choices with friends and family not with
a bullhorn
on a street corner not overtly
evangelizing or anything
just chilled out conversations about our
choices
and the reasons for them and we’re
starting to see the effects of those
conversations
like ripples moving through our
communities
influencing the choices of those around
us
so for example this valentine’s day my
dad brought
a vegetarian wellington instead of a
beef wellington to celebrate
with my mum when my mom was telling me
about this
she said she thinks it is partly because
of the steady influence of our
flexitarianism
over the past few years despite the fact
that perhaps it would have been more
romantic if the meal hadn’t come out of
the packet
so it wasn’t the direct result of any
one thing
that i said or did but the drip drip of
my husband and i
and others within our community changing
our lifestyles to mitigate climate
change
is shifting the cultural norm in a
positive direction
and this makes it easier and more normal
for people like my dad
to make climate positive choices too
so let’s all talk to each other about
our climate positive choices
because it really does make a difference
the third element of community that we
can harness
to help us tackle global challenges is
resilience
now it’s no revelation to say that
communities have greater capacity than
individuals
but because of this communities are more
resilient to disruption
and as part of an empathic community we
can help
individuals to face and overcome
challenges
so for example in the run-up to the uk
lockdown the first uk lockdown
my now husband lost his living situation
he lost his home because his living
landlord was
seriously concerned about the additional
risk of infection
posed by living with a teacher who was
going in and out of school
luckily even but before my husband asked
for support
our church community offered him a place
to live
and this was hugely meaningful to him
practically of course because
he didn’t have to find a new place to
live both while teaching
and during a rising pandemic but also
emotionally
because he was made to feel welcome and
loved and valued
because he was lucky enough to be part
of an empathic
community the impact of disruption on
him
was significantly reduced compared to if
he had
faced the disruption alone
now i’m going to come on to that secret
ingredient that underlies
every successful community and i’ve
given you a couple of clues there
because i used the word
empathic a couple of times i think
an essential feature to a resilient
influential empowering community is
empathy so the church community for
example displayed empathy
by identifying the instability of
micah’s living situation
and the impact on him even before he was
evicted in fact
and then providing a solution
so let’s talk a bit more about what
empathy is
and the different components of it
empathy is to understand or to feel with
someone
and there are two components one is
cognitive empathy
and this is perspective taking or
empathy by thought
it involves logically putting yourself
in a person’s place
and thinking about the reasons behind
their actions
the other component is emotional empathy
and this is feeling the emotions
alongside someone
so say your friend is hurt and you feel
sad
not you feel sorry for them you feel sad
yourself because you’re
mirroring their emotion but there are
downsides to these two components if
they’re used
alone on their own cognitive empathy
can be used badly to manipulate people i
mean even torturers
have to use this type of empathy to
understand how their subject is going to
respond to a particular torture method
on the other hand emotional empathy on
its own has a bad side too
so in the example before if you got so
overwhelmed by that
empathic emotion of sadness at the your
your friend being hurt that you started
crying
and then your friend has to comfort you
even though they were the ones
who was originally hurt well then the
emotional empathy
hasn’t been useful at all because now
you just have two people who are upset
instead of one the best kind of empathy
combines these two component components
into compassionate empathy
compassionate empathy is understanding
someone’s perspective
and their emotions and then taking
action to help
and compassionate empathy is an
essential attribute of a supportive
community
idea exchange to help overcome barriers
to climate positive behavior change
is only effective if the community
involved
is sensitive to the particular situation
of each individual or group and then
gives personalized advice
so for example i have a friend who has a
disorder
unfortunately that results in iron
deficiency
and she’s under doctor’s orders to eat
red meat
twice a week if i tried to persuade her
to become vegetarian to reduce her
carbon footprint
but was not empathic to her particular
challenges
then i would alienate her instead of
empowering her
i mean who among us would change their
behavior at the urging of someone who
doesn’t seem to be listening to us or
interested in our particular situation
so compassionate empathy really is an
underlying
principle of every successful community
so what does all of this mean for you
when thinking about making a difference
to the climate crisis
well yes absolutely make those
individual climate positive choices
reduce your meat consumption set up a
compost buy a bike
take personal responsibility
but just don’t stop there go further
engage with your communities maybe you
do want to do something like
joining an environmental community like
people power
but for a lot of us engaging with our
community can just mean
talking with and sharing ideas with our
friends and families
about our climate positive choices and
supporting them to make their own
climate positive choices
but we need to do all of this with
empathy
so that we can reach a greener future
faster together
thank you for listening