Transcriber: Rachel Batchelor Reviewer: Peter Van de Ven
It was my 21st birthday, but not the usual,
no partying or raising hell, no,
I was volunteering at a disaster relief center
in Waveland, Mississippi, after Hurricane Katrina,
one of the deadliest storms in U.S. history.
I saw destruction on a scale I never could have imagined:
homes picked up and dropped on railroad tracks,
blocks away;
cars flipped upside down in what used to be somebody’s living room.
One woman told me how she had tried to leave,
but a thief had siphoned her car's gas right out of its tank at the last minute.
She was forced to spend the night in her bathtub,
pulling a mattress over herself as the waters rose around her.
Scientists say that hurricane Katrina was made worse by warming waters.
But I saw what that meant to the destruction of an entire town,
to people’s lives.
For the first time in my life, I saw the personal face of climate change.
Unfortunately, it wouldn't be the last.
A few years after Katrina,
I flew to Alaska
and became a commercial Bering Sea crab fisherman,
one of the most dangerous jobs in the world.
Winter in Alaska is rough:
ice, wind, freezing rain, stinging your face raw.
I had to take handfuls of ibuprofen just so I could bend my fingers.
We worked so hard,
but despite the best efforts of lifelong fishermen on my crew,
we just couldn't seem to catch enough fish to break even.
So in a last ditch effort,
we transitioned the boat over to a form of long lining,
even more dangerous than crab fishing.
And we sailed further out than we had gone all year.
After days of no sleep, pushed to the limit,
we ran headfirst at full speed into a rock
that ripped a hole in the front of the boat.
Everything flew from the walls. I was knocked out of my bunk.
It felt like we had been hit by a freight train.
I scrambled to get on deck.
I thought for sure we were going in the water.
We would later learn that if we had gone just a couple more feet over that rock,
it would have punctured our engine room
and sent us all to the bottom of the ocean
in a matter of minutes.
As it was, our boat was totaled, our season was over.
I spent a total of three seasons commercial fishing in Alaska,
and what I saw up there connected me to a rapidly changing ocean and climate.
Like many fishermen,
I know that climate change is shifting fish migration patterns
all over the world.
It was this shift
that was one of the reasons why we sailed so far out
and pushed ourselves so hard and into disaster.
But the biggest lesson I took from both Katrina and Alaska
was the humbling realization of just how small my life is,
compared to the unforgiving natural world around me.
Put another way,
my life’s experiences have shown me time and again
that the earth doesn’t care about us.
This is just a simple truth about the objectivity of nature,
but it is also a very important point for us to keep in mind
so that we can reframe how we think about climate change
and reframe our messaging tactics and approach to climate solutions.
I went from Alaska
into the world of political campaigning,
oddly enough,
and then into climate advocacy and ocean conservation,
which makes more sense.
I now work in a profession that many might view
as dedicated to “saving the earth,”
but what I’ve come to realize in my career
is that we’re not in a climate crisis;
we are in a humanity crisis.
Truly, solving climate change is not about saving the earth;
it’s about saving our place within nature before it’s too late.
We are starting to understand this point more and more
as endless facts & figures and dramatic images show us
what climate change is doing to our society.
Despite all of this, we know we have a long way to go
when it comes to solving climate change, right?
I believe we never will solve climate change
until we first address
two very different but equally important problems.
Problem number one:
the problem of belief, of issue identification.
Last year,
the Pew Research Center conducted a poll
that showed that 57% of American adults
believed that climate change was affecting their local community.
This is technically a majority,
but the partisan breakdown tells the full story.
This poll clearly shows
just how many Americans still do not feel personally connected
to the impact that climate change is having in their lives
and to their communities.
The second problem:
the problem of message, of tactics.
Many who do passionately care about climate change
view the issue like this:
fire and brimstone on one side, garden of eden on the other,
with a human hand holding the entire world in its palm.
What does this image say to you?
That we have the power to save the earth.
That the fate of nature is literally in our hands, right?
I am here today to say
that the earth does not care about being saved,
and I'm here to show how this approach misses the point anyway.
Because it’s us,
all of us here today, you and me,
we are the ones who truly care about lasting into the future,
and we are the only ones who can do anything about which path we take.
I don’t mean to be critical of decades of important climate advocacy
that have built a solid foundation
and led to a certain amount of global action.
But as the polling clearly shows,
many still feel disconnected from this issue,
and no amount of beating people over the head
with “Save the Planet” messages or images of polar bears
is going to change that if it hasn’t already.
These decades-old climate rallying cries no longer work in our hyper-partisan world
and there is evidence to show that images like these
have become polarizing themselves.
Our path forward now as climate advocates
has to build upon the great work that’s come before us
but expand the ceiling of public support beyond just the true believers.
We have to show people why it’s within their own self-interest
to take action on climate change,
that this truly is a human crisis
and not just something that’s based on environmentalism
or an idea of what’s good for the planet.
We can do all of these things
and address the dual challenges of issue identification and message,
but we first have to reframe our climate conversations
in three very important ways.
Number one: Let’s once and for all
reject “world is burning” narratives.
Despite the terrible reports of natural destruction
coming in from around the world each day,
we have to still allow for a hopeful future.
I do global environmental advocacy,
and I see how “world on fire” messages can be disempowering and lead to apathy
if it causes people to believe
that the issue is too large for them to solve,
that there’s nothing they can do.
And the policies we’re working towards from the Paris Agreement on down
provide an optimistic vision of the future,
of clean-air, clean-water, clean-energy revolution
that builds millions of jobs
and dramatically improves our standard of living
for generations to come.
This is what we’re fighting for!
So with hope for the future in mind,
let’s - number two - reject division
and the efforts by those who would seek to divide us.
The biggest thing that will thwart our ability to solve climate change
is not the scale of the fast approaching disaster;
it’s the division that we do to ourselves.
So we must build a unifying activism
that brings different ideas and perspectives,
different communities together.
This is hard work,
but we can make it a little easier on ourselves
if we use the messages and tactics that have broader appeal.
Because if half the country
can’t see what climate change personally means to them
in their lives and in their communities,
then the policies that all of us need
will never follow.
Which brings me to my third and final point.
This,
this is the key to the connection,
the question we need everybody to be asking themselves:
What does climate change personally mean to you?
You’ve heard some of my climate stories today,
knowing my story has turned me into the advocate that I am today.
I now see the impacts of climate change everywhere I look.
But I want you for a moment to think about your life,
all the people you know and love, all the places you’ve been.
How has climate change impacted your life? How has it changed your life?
Knowing your story and asking others this question to help them see theirs
can help make those intimate connections
to an issue that may still seem so far away or abstract to so many.
This is all issue advocacy 101.
And I’ve seen it work time and again
by making an issue more hopeful and inspiring,
more humanistic,
by building those direct personal connections.
This is a time-tested playbook,
and it’s how we build political support way beyond just 57%
to the point of universal public buy-in
for all of the policies we so desperately need.
Look, saving the world is a great idea,
but it’s actually us who need the saving.
If we take these simple steps and reframe our climate conversations,
I know we can unite
against the biggest threat to our survival we have ever faced.
And I can promise you
that this is something the earth will care about
and will show us.
Because if we do these things,
the earth will allow us to continue to live here.
Thank you.
(Applause)