MINDSETS FOR SURVIVING THE CLIMATE CRISIS
By Megan Light,
October 2020
The climate crisis is overwhelming. It’s an issue that touches every person living on the planet now, and every person to come; it affects every animal, every plant, every forest & every ocean. The problem is big. And it’s so deeply embedded within political, social, economic, & financial systems that it can seem redundant to place too much importance on individual action.
Yet, this is fundamentally irresponsible. Corporations, governments, & capitalism as a whole is widely to blame for this current state of crisis, but paradoxically, systemic change is a deeply personal endeavour. We need both systemic transformation and individual behavioural change.
In ‘The Future We Choose’ Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac detail three mindsets that hold the transformative power, and provide the intentional direction, we need to combat the climate crisis. While presiding over the Paris Agreement, one of the most successful international agreements of all time, they learnt that when you cannot control the complex landscape of the challenge, the most powerful thing you can do is change how you behave in that landscape. Use yourself as a catalyst for overall change. The actions we pursue are largely defined by the mindset we cultivate in advance of the doing, and we have to change how we think and fundamentally who we perceive ourselves to be in order to open the space for transformation. No one is irrelevant.
Stubborn Optimism
Optimism is the force that enables you to create a new reality, it empowers you and drives your desire to engage, to contribute, and to make a difference. Aptly described by Vaclav Havel as a ‘state of mind, not a state of the world’, optimism is about being able to intentionally identify and prescribe the desired future, so as to actively pull it closer. Recognising that another future is possible, though not promised, is the force that enables you to create a new reality. The habits, practices, and technologies of the past will simply result in the compounding and worsening of ecological demise and human suffering.
And optimism needs to be the starting point. Christiana and Tom demonstrate that through the years of building the Paris Agreement, it was a deep rooted optimism, a belief of the possibility of a better world, that was necessary to get them through the most difficult tasks.
Optimism is not soft, it is gritty. When all the news on the climate crisis is bombarding you with impending doom, having the ability and strength to work towards something better is a mindset you have to cultivate, and it doesn’t come easy. But we cannot afford the fatalism of impossibility. Our only option is to turn our full attention to the immediate actions we can undertake to change the direction.
Endless Abundance
The climate crisis is the ultimate scarcity. And when faced with this, our only viable option is collaboration. A shift towards a mindset of creating abundance does not negate the limitations of a carbon economy; instead, it gives every country a wealth of positive individual and collective reasons to stay within the limit. The realisation of abundance is not an illusory increase in physical resources, but rather an awareness of a broad array of ways to satisfy needs and wants so that everyone is content.
A fair outcome will never be viable as long as we pursue it from a mindset of scarcity and competition. The Paris Agreement was so successful because is was based on a different paradigm. By requiring states to make Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), the Agreement encouraged the shared pursuit of the benefits of emissions reductions for individual nations as well as for the collective: a new model beyond zero sum. It recognised the responsibility of every nation, for its own enlightened self interest as well as for the benefit of the planet as whole. The mindset shifted away from competition and towards shared winning.
Ecosystems operate from the very principle of abundance, and we can also add creativity, solidarity, innovation, and many other abundant human attributes available to us, endlessly.
Our attitude does not change the facts, but it does make a massive difference in the nature of our experience. When faced with the ultimate scarcity, we must realise that we all win or lose together, the new zero-sum.
Radical regeneration
A regenerative mindset bridges the gap between how nature works (regeneration) and how humans have organised our lives (extraction). As a species, we have become used to the one-way transaction of getting, often losing sight of the void that our taking has created. But our planet can no longer support this one-directional growth. Moving away from extracting and depleting, we must concentrate on another element of human nature: our capacity to support regeneration. We must work together to replenish what we use and make sure plenty remains for tomorrow.
This starts with caring for ourselves and others, and connecting with nature. It’s good for you and it’s good for the planet. First, identify what replenishes you and your soul, and do it regularly and intentionally. Your second responsibility is to reaffirm and strengthen the regenerative capacity you already display with family and friends. The third responsibility is nature itself.
Ecosystems are inherently regenerative, and when we remove the pressures we have wielded, nature tends to return to health. But this regeneration of nature now needs to be intentional, planned, and well-executed at scale. We have to shift our action compass from self-centric to nature aligned, and realise that ourselves, our very physical survival depends on it.
This article was adapted from the book The Future We Choose by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac. You can buy it here.
© 2020 Climate Just Collective