Be The Change, Not The Conversation

In the last few days I have been at a conference called ‘Be The Change’ in London. Speakers included the activist George Monbiot, the Deputy Mayor of London, Richard Reed from Innocent smoothies, and Prof. CS Kiang (a specialist in air quality and climate change in China) as well as climate scientists and representatives of “Ethical Business”.

It’s been going for several years, and was not started exclusively to discuss climate change, but it dominated the agenda this year.

And what did it achieve? What was the result of listening to all these people? Well not a lot. The main outcome of this meeting will be people going home, happy that they heard what they wanted to hear. Happy that speakers said we need action as soon as possible, we need to reduce our power usage, we need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and we need to make people aware of the extent of the problem.

But nobody decided to do anything. How about agreeing as a group to do something? How about deciding what we want to happen instead of telling each other things we already know?

The only way that this conference will have helped, will be if people are so frustrated by the impotence of the 3-day meeting, that they go home thinking ‘I can do better than that! – I’m going to DO something’. Maybe that was the idea all along.

Conferences and meetings such as this one are laboured by two main problems.

Firstly, everyone that comes to these conferences knows what the problem is. They know how desperate the situation is, so what’s the point of telling them again? Too often these meetings descend into self-congratulatory back-slapping, and an ‘us against them’ atmosphere, with people saying and thinking “Why aren’t people listening?! – Those bastards are ruining our planet!”

The reason that people aren’t listening is that we aren’t telling them. We’re too busy telling each other how terrible it is – usually talking to people who already know about the issue. “We’re so wonderful – we know that the world is buggered!”

Secondly, much of the conversation and many of the people interested in climate change have come out of the main Green and Environmentalist groups. And these groups include a few loonies. At any meeting like this it is only a matter of time before a nutter asks a question like
“Don’t you think we need to start by getting rid of capitalism?”….or……..

“We need to get people to admit that having more material possessions is not going to make them happier”……or even…..

“I believe the world is good, and if we could just get rid of all the pain and suffering then……” Oh dear oh dear.

The movement against climate change needs to be able to remove itself from the well-meaning, lovingly pathetic people that can’t wait to use climate change to try and get the world to go back to free love and peace and smoking lots of weed. There is a place for this approach in addressing a very small section of society, but unless we can separate ourselves from these people it is going to make it more difficult to explain to society at large the problem we face, without even a hint of an I-told-you-so attitude.

If you would like to follow this up a bit, Mark Lynas has recently written an article partially on this problem of too much discussion and analysis and not enough action. It can be found if you click here.