What’s in a name? “Climate Change” has become such a polarized phrase in the United States that even uttering it feels like a political nonstarter. The phrase evokes the paradox of Voldemort: say his name and you’re a pariah. But don’t say his name and you’ll never really be directly addressing the real problem at hand.

However we choose to name it, climate change is perhaps the single greatest problem facing current and future generations. To date, humans have failed to take adequate actions to stave off planetary collapse. A UN report issued this week describes a world of food shortages, floods, sea level rise, extreme weather events, wildfires, and massive coral reef die-offs as soon as 2040 if emissions continue at the current rate. The report concedes that while it is technically possible to change courses, it remains politically unlikely that we will do so. This is largely because climate change has become a deeply politicized topic.

So how do we talk about climate change? I am interested in work that restores/hacks/remixes personal narratives about the shared responsibility we have to each other and to the planet. My work seeks to understand how to hack the devices of environment, economy, security, stability, and health in creating a shared vision for the future of the planet. See my previous post on a possible gathering to facilitate this.

Most climate activists focus on economic, policy or technical “solutions” to global warming. However, these solutions are highly politicized; indeed, it seems the left and the right are telling completely different stories about the future of the planet and our role in it. Furthermore, most of these stories as reactionary and oppositional: liberals don’t want coal; conservatives don’t want a carbon tax. I’m interested in hacking these stories to create generative, affirmative, shared stories about the future of the planet. By creating spaces to lay bare current narratives, can we find the seeds of common ground required to generate a shared sense of planetary stewardship?

For example, entrepreneurs could see climate change as a huge business innovation opportunity while conservatives could support renewables as a strategy for energy independence; the military could focus on climate-induced political instability in foreign countries. Laying bare these stories will allow us to “hack” them and engineer connections where none might have previously existed.

There has been a lot of work evaluating how different frames could boost public support for climate policy. However, these efforts are experiments that simply test reactions to frames presented by researchers. The frames are not generated by those the researchers intend to study. In addition, there are some groups attempting to create new frames and unexpected alliances for climate policy, such as the Young Evangelicals for Climate Action.  The Frameworks Institute works to frame public discourse around key issues by translating academic research into outreach programs. However, I’m interested in a process of co-designing climate discourse by identifying shared values, wishes, and needs among otherwise divergent stakeholders.

Climate change is perhaps the single greatest threat to future generations. To date, humans have failed to take adequate actions to stave off planetary collapse. A UN report issued this week describes a world of food shortages, floods, sea level rise, extreme weather events, wildfires, and massive coral reef die-offs as soon as 2040 if emissions continue at the current rate.

The report concedes that while it is technically possible to change courses, it remains politically unlikely that we will do so. This is largely because climate change has become a deeply politicized topic. I am interested in work that restores our personal narratives about the shared responsibility we have to each other and to the planet. My work seeks to understand what prevents or impedes individuals from sharing a sense of planetary stewardship.

Values

• We design for people and planet. We consider long-term impacts on human and environmental systems, seeking to minimize threats to both. We believe that work that does not support future habitability of Earth undermines all other human efforts on this planet. We believe humans are part of nature, and reject narratives that material human needs cannot be met without destroying the environment.
• We listen with radical humility. We actively listen. We ask respectful questions to understand. We interrogate our own assumptions. We believe everyone is doing the best they can, and seek to understand the choices, beliefs, opinions, and relationships that arise from particular instances of this universal condition.
• We believe the stories we tell today determine the world we create tomorrow. Humans need stories to make sense of themselves, each other, and the natural world. We believe that we create our reality through expectations, intentions and attention. Our designs engage narrative as the key catalyst for social and environmental change.
  1. Corollary: we believe you cannot dismantle old stories without telling new ones. Many of our old stories focus on individualism, consumption, accumulation. These stories have wreaked havoc on our natural ecosystems and climate. However, we cannot dismantle these stories without putting new ones in place that restore our collective responsibility to each other and the planet.
• We work within a space of ever-widening “us” and an ever larger “now.” Climate change affects all beings on this planet. In this context, there is no room for “us versus them.” Our work honors the diversity of human experience, while situating it against a backdrop of shared planetary responsibility. In addition, we recognize that the actions we take now could affect generations to come. As such, we design for both the present and future.
• We practice play as a powerful antidote to paralysis. We support playful, generative designs that resist the temptation of despair.

My convening seeks to showcase American’s personal narratives about climate change. Having worked on climate negotiations, I understand how easy it can be to forget that not everyone shares a sense of urgency to cut emissions. Thus, this convening would attempt to bridge the personal divide between those working on climate negotiations and policies with everyday Americans struggling to make ends meet. The convening would have two parts: an exchange that would couple two (willing and voluntary) participants. The convening might take place in a town with a traditionally carbon-intensive economy, such as one in West Virginia. For the exchange, a “climate wonk” (researcher, negotiator, policy-maker, NGO employee, etc) would spend two weeks getting to know a member of the community (teacher, student, waiter, nurse, contractor, etc) by visiting their homes, getting to know the community, and engaging in thoughtful dialogue.* The second portion of the experiment would bring all the pairs together in a workshop facilitated to help the pairs articulate a shared narrative of the future. When writing the story of the future, what can they both agree on? What kind of world do both want, for themselves and future generations? What are the bare minimum features of a healthy human population and planet? Each pair would craft their story of the future of Earth, which they would jointly deliver to the group.

*NB: this would only “work” if both agreed on the basic facts that climate change is happening and humans are causing it.

Markets

Architecture/Code

Norms

Law

Fight overwork and economic oppression. We might overwork as a cause of loneliness in the US, where 85.8 percent of men and 66.5 percent of females work more than 40 hours per week. Americans often struggle to make ends meet – working long hours or multiple jobs – let alone to spend free time with family and friends. We might introduce a law setting the maximum length of the work week. (Fwiw, at least 134 countries have laws setting the maximum length of the work week; the U.S. does not.) Let’s shorten the damn work week, raise minimum wage, and provide people a basic level of economic security so they can spend spare time and financial resources on shared connection.

Require doctor support. If we frame loneliness as a “health epidemic,” one can imagine medical interventions to identify and intervene when the problem of loneliness arises.  We could mandate that primary care physicians inquire not just about a patient’s physical health, but mental health, including loneliness. Federal government could mandate better coverage for mental health counseling, since therapists could help patients identify possible paths to overcoming loneliness. 

Markets

Target parents with campaigns about the benefits of nature and play. Perhaps pediatricians could be encouraged to enquire about time outside during children’s visits. These campaigns might encourage efforts to monitor time spent outside, and raise public concern about the issues and civic engagement with current laws that unintentionally threaten recess (see below).

While I do not have a personal connection to Rainforest Connection, the highly-publicized project provides fertile ground for analysis.

Rainforest Connection (RFCx) has an ambitious mission: stop illegal deforestation, and in doing so, combat climate change. “If we can help people in the forest enforce the rules that are there, we can have an impact,” CEO Topher White explains, “It might be the cheapest, fastest way to fight climate change.”

To achieve their mission, White designed a system of solar-powered cellphones installed deep within the tropical forests of Peru, Ecuador, Brazil and Cameroon. Automated algorithms process audio from these cellphones to detect sounds of chainsaws in real-time and send text messages to local communities to alert them about nearby activity.

Rainforest Foundation frames deforestation as a metaphysical problem: local people just don’t know when and where it’s happening. “It [is not] that the rangers [don’t] care; they just [can’t] hear the chainsaw whirring less than a half-mile away,” White claims. After all, we all know the thought experiment: if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

If stopping deforestation were a matter of information asymmetry, we would have solved it long ago.* However, the root problem is much larger in scope: consumer demand for agricultural products like beef, palm oil and soy drive over 70% of deforestation in the tropics. Kit-kat bars destroy orangutan habitat in Borneo; increase demand for precious metals in consumer electronics drive mines into the forests of Congo.Global market forces make the opportunity costs of conservation too high. Simply knowing that it’s happening won’t shift this calculus.

Poverty and urban expansion also threaten forests. Deforestation is upheld as a development strategy in many countries, such as Liberia, PNG, and Myanmar, which experienced wholescale leasing of remaining forests by government to private agribusiness and logging companies. Leading researchers on the topic have found that “powerful actors with a stake in deforestation often figure out how to get their way – whether using the rules to their advantage, or going around them.”

Deforestation is a complex eco-social-economic issue without a quick techno-fix. In this context, acoustic sensors are like smoke alarms without a fire brigade: they can help you know when and where a problem exists, but they can’t help put the fire out, or prevent arsonists from burning down your house in the first place.

Of course we all need fire alarms. But we also need phones to call the fire department – and we need them respond to our pleas, quickly. Based on my experiences working in Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Indonesia and Uganda, even when locals know where illegal deforestation might be occurring – and they often do – myriad factors prevent “immediate intervention”: they lack the vehicles and fuel to travel long distances for investigations. They face threats to their livelihoods; in 2017, more than 197 environmental activists and defenders were murdered – a number that has been increasing in recent years. Their reports are ignored by courts and relevant legal authorities. Loggers are never fined; ranchers are never jailed.

No doubt White has good intentions and a laudable goal. However, one smells traces of Courtney Martin’s “Seductive Reductionism of Solving Other People’s problems” in his life trajectory:

It would have seemed absurd for anyone to suggest, back when he was a nerdy kid attending a San Francisco prep school … that Topher White was destined to spend his days traipsing through the trees… He spent his 20s as a peripatetic vagabond, dabbling as a hired hand at various Silicon Valley start-ups, dancing in a touring Neil Young rock opera, and building elaborate Rube Goldberg contraptions at Dennis Hopper’s New Mexico estate.

Then, in 2011 … he took a side trip to Borneo to volunteer at a gibbon reserve…. and then baffled when, on a leisure hike, he came across a group of men illegally cutting down a tree.

White is a brilliant technologist doing what technologists do best: deploying gadgets at scale. Western readers love the story of a Silicon-Valley do-gooder, so perhaps it is no surprise that press about RFCx obscures the real agents of change – local people – by focusing on the genius of the creator or the ingenuity of the device. But while the technology itself scales, the complex governance, economic, normative and legal issues driving deforestation manifest locally – and are perhaps best navigated by an Ecuadorian, Peruvian, Brazilian or Cameroonian affected by these dynamics.

Given its simplistic diagnosis of the problem, RFCx makes for easy critique. But, being a relatively new project, RFCx might yet yield results; more data are required to understand its effects and potential unintended consequences over time. But in the absence of more meaningful interventions that address immediate barriers to acting on deforestation, as well as the root economic drivers, I remain skeptical. RFCx is like a very TED-friendly fire alarm, ringing while the house burns down around us.

*NB: my previous project, Global Forest Watch, also frames deforestation as a metaphysical problem: if we just give people real-time deforestation data from satellites, they will act.