Tag Archives: climate

Climate Change and Everything Else

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Throughout my experience participating in the Our Climate Action group, I have acquired new skills that enhanced my learning. My project members and I participated in multiple listening sessions run by other fellows from the Our Climate activists explaining the Evergreen New Deal:  a comprehensive climate change reform policy that will introduce greener solutions to current predicaments. All of this exposure to the bits and bolts of how our state and country runs in regards to introducing laws and regulations has added to my sense of citizenship and provided me with a clearer path to contribution. Before this experience, I felt like I was staring at the system from a distance, and it was too entangled in itself for me to get involved.

One interactive portion of our activism involved spreading a survey to Washingtonians under the age of 30 focused on collecting opinions on what prominent complications must immediately be addressed in our direct environment here in the state. During role in lobbying to Tina Orwall, spreading the voices of concerned residents, I especially made an emphasis on how COVID-19 should not get in the way of climate change policy because the underprivileged community is affected negatively by both COVID and climate change, and these two issues interacting creates an even bigger obstacle.

Climate change is obviously a complicated interconnected system woven through everything from our bodies interaction to the weather, to how our climate changes drastically in the atmosphere. There’s an undeniable chain of consequences between our climate and food. For example, “As reserves are depleted, changes in production would have a bigger impact on the price of food….Scientists have warned hotter temperatures and more erratic rainfall could increase the frequency and intensity of droughts (Reuters).” Droughts will affect how much food is yielded and therefore affect how people will be able to sustain themselves globally. Learning about connections between climate change and the food system, as well as climate change and COVID-19, it was easy for me to realize that underprivileged communities are not only affected by certain disadvantages individually, but also how all those disadvantages come together and create increased adverse challenges. This is why climate change needs to be addressed among the other issues, taking out one factor of damage out at a time, we can salvage what, and who, we are hurting and destroying.

Please watch this short animation on how climate change interacts with the causes and consequences of other global dilemmas:

Collective Action and Change: A Reflection

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2020 has been exhausting. Between murder hornets, escalating tensions among adversarial countries, a global pandemic, and racism, it’s getting harder and harder to see the light at the end of the tunnel – and the year isn’t even half over yet.

As tempestuous as the world seems right now though, I’ve gained levity in working with my Citizens’ Climate Lobby action group, to lobby for the passage of the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act. I’ve built on my collaborative work skills and gleamed valuable insight into the process of collective action and deliberation, and had the chance to work with a diverse coalition of people from across the country and the globe to relate the knowledge we gained in the course to the real world. This work has given me hope that systematic change is possible through collective action.

Citizens' Climate Lobby - take action on climate change solutions

Citizens’ Climate Lobby, via https://citizensclimatelobby.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/CCL-Logo.gif

Group work has, no doubt, been complicated by the fact that we’re living through a global pandemic. However, my group mates and I made the best of a difficult situation and flexibly scheduled our weekly Zoom and Whatsapp meetings. Arranging a time for a videoconference that worked for people in Washington State, Ohio, and France was not easy, but we made do. To ensure equal distribution of work, we collectively decided to finish one training per person, per week, and then summarize that training for the rest of the group.

Our work for CCL builds upon Michael Maniates policy prescription in “Individualization”. Rather than plant trees or ride our bikes to work, we will be lobbying for systemic change in policy. Our work will necessarily invoke systems thinking in this way. By considering the inputs and outputs of the act, as well as its potential downstream effects (both economic and environmental), we’ve taken a holistic approach to the understanding the act, systems thinking in essence.

Citizens' Climate Lobby | Our preferred climate change legislation

via https://citizensclimatelobby.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/eicda-2019-benefits.png

Ultimately, I’ve walked away from this experience with a feeling that I can make a material difference in the world. Although my lobby session isn’t until June 17th, I am confident in my abilities to persuade my member of Congress, and look forward to being a force for real good in the world – something that I could not have accomplished without the hard work of my group mates, and the volunteers at CCL.

Rain, Thibault, Rachel, Alan, and Jess: thanks for a great quarter.

– Dakota

The Collective is Made of Individuals (Re: Contemplating Climate Complexity)

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I’m writing in response to Aisling’s post about contemplation, numbness, and the idea that our individual efforts do nothing other than make our personal selves feel better. I’m here to argue against that last point.

She is correct that, numerically speaking, one person doing something isn’t going to matter on a global scale. One person not eating beef isn’t going to eliminate the emissions produced by those cows. One person not getting their driver’s license isn’t going to be noticed by any politician or lobbyist. One person buying fair trade isn’t going to make trade fair.

It takes policy. It takes systemic change. It takes corporate and governmental action. But you know what makes up those corporations and governments? Individual humans. You know what makes up those masses of tens of thousands of protesters? Individual humans. You know what began the Organic Farm Movement in western culture? Individuals. You know who began to advocate women’s rights in the United States? Individual women. And together, those individuals had and have a voice. They have strength. Together, their individual actions created a tidal wave that started an international movement, that changed long-standing laws and discrimination, that brought us to where we are today because if each of those individuals said, “my choices and my voice don’t do anything, so why bother?” then it would have been a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think we often forget no massive change has happened wide-scale out of nowhere. It grows.

I want to be clear that I’m not saying everyone has the ability to speak and act equally: that’s a part of our inherently exploitative society. But those who have the ability and knowledge shouldn’t be silent because others can’t speak. If anything, we owe it to those who are disadvantaged and silenced to fight for a better future for us all. As a whole, we are not powerless.