We Can Create A Better World
But to do so we must focus on where we want to go, not where we’ve been.
“Always remember: your focus determines your reality.” — George Lucas —
Sometimes I feel like I’m wrung out like a dish rag, that I’ve squeezed every ounce of myself into my work and there’s nothing left to give. When this happens I’ve learned that I need to get quiet for a little while to re-charge and re-generate. That’s where I’m at right now. Slowing everything down for a few days.
This week has been a lot. My body feels heavy and sluggish. And so does my mind. So I’m just being gentle with myself right now. Doing what I can but not more than that. Nourishing my mind, body and soul. It’s the only way I can keep doing what I do.
My work is intense. I work on one of the most political issues in one of the most political processes in the world: the global climate regime. Earlier this week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out with its latest report which finds that there is still time to act to limit global average warming to 1.5°C but we’re running out of time to turn this ship around.
I’ve known that for a long, long time. We all have. Global warming was predicted in 1856 by Eunice Newton Foote, an amateur scientist and women’s rights activist. And yet, here we are more than a century and a half later.
The issue that I work on, Loss and Damage, focuses on the other end of climate change: how it manifests on the ground. This includes economic impacts such as a reduction in GDP, lost livelihoods, lost production and agricultural yields, damage to infrastructure and so on.
It also includes the range of impacts that cannot be measured in economic terms (called non-economic loss and damage) such as loss of culture, language and social ties and the mental and psychological impacts of change — not to mention the repercussions for human health and the ecosystems and biodiversity therein that sustain life on Earth.
Loss and Damage is issue in which everything that has gone wrong and is going wrong in the world comes together to manifest in profound injustice for the most vulnerable people, communities and countries.
I now have a front row seat to watch the dynamics I learned about in grad school unfold each and every day. Colonialism continues to manifest in power imbalances between countries in the global North and South.
A capitalist system built on the legacy of colonialism and fueled by its exploits. Millions of Earth’s inhabitants chasing after things they don’t need while millions more don’t have their basic needs met.
Destruction of ecosystems to provide the raw materials to make it all possible. Species lost forever and many more of the precipice of extinction.
Inequality on all fronts.
Politics gone mad.
The list goes on and on.
Sometimes it’s just too much. The heaviness of all of that can weigh me down. Get me down.
To maintain my sanity and ensure that I am healthy in mind, body and spirit to keep doing the work that I do, I have to curate my experience in the world very deliberately. Not just on a daily basis but on an hourly basis.
I curate my Twitter feed and do not linger on social media. I neither watch nor read the news. The news is a slice of the very worst of what’s going on in the world. I don’t need more of that in my life. What’s more, it leaves out everything going right in the world. And there is so much going right.
Every week I read positive news stories which I find uplifting and hopeful. I listen to inspiring podcasts and music that makes me happy. I read books and watch movies that have happy endings. I have a long-standing gratitude practice and I bask in the good of everything going right in my life.
In short, I deliberately feed my sub-conscious good things. It helps me stay optimistic. But it also teaches my reticular activating system (RAS) to focus on the positive. And that’s critical. Because the more you focus on good things, the more good things you’ll see.
In the lead up to COP 26 in Glasgow I wrote a blog on why I was optimistic about the outcome in the face of so much adversity. Focusing on the good helped me get through it. And then a crazy thing happened: after decades of developing countries pushing for more focus on Loss and Damage, it blew up.
Am I saying I am personally responsible for the outcome? Definitely not. But something strange happened when my colleagues and I started focusing on where we wanted to go, not where we have been. Finally the world was paying attention and more funding was available for work on Loss and Damage and efforts to address loss and damage.
Was it enough? Not even close. But it was a start. And we took it and ran with it.
We started focusing even more on the good. In the lead-up to COP 27 in Sharm el-Sheikh I wrote another blog explaining why I was even more optimistic. This time my expectations were re-calibrated and I anticipated even more. It all came to fruition.
Is it enough? Heck, no.
As I write a meeting is being convened in Egypt to discuss the fund on Loss and Damage established at COP 27. What should it do? Where should it sit? How should it be governed? And so on.
And as this meeting unfolds in a comfortable meeting space in Luxor, loss and damage from climate change impacts continue to escalate, hitting the most vulnerable communities and countries the hardest. Just yesterday the President of Malawi appealed for more humanitarian aid to help his country recover from a recent cyclone that left 500 people dead and 500,000 displaced among manifold other impacts, both economic and non-economic in nature.
Okay, so this is where we are. But it’s not where we need to stay. Because the thing is I believe with every fibre of my being that we can turn this ship around. And I’m not alone.
Last week in a beautiful piece published in the Washington Post writer and activist Rebecca Solnit proposed that addressing climate change could propel us to create a much better world:
Much of the reluctance to do what climate change requires comes from the assumption that it means trading abundance for austerity, and trading all our stuff and conveniences for less stuff, less convenience. But what if it meant giving up things we’re well rid of, from deadly emissions to nagging feelings of doom and complicity in destruction? What if the austerity is how we live now — and the abundance could be what is to come?
Solnit argues that, by all measures other than the accumulation of money and the goods it can buy, those of us living in so-called affluent societies are impoverished in the true measures of well-being: a sense of security, social connectedness and mental and physical health.
There is good news though, a lot of it, according to Solnit. She urges us to look around us at everything going right in the world. She writes that when she looks around the world she sees that far more people are aware of how deeply we are connected to nature. Many more people understand that our future is very much tied to the health of nature. And as she looks around, Solnit sees people re-thinking how they work and how they live:
I see farmers who consider not just crops and profit but the sustainability of the wild things and waterways and nature around them — who work the land for this year’s harvest and for the long-term well-being of the whole. I see the resurgence of Indigenous power and vision in climate protests, but also in ideas about food, time and values. I see champions for the oceans and their denizens, for the forests, for the whole miraculously beautiful biosphere.
Our job is, according to Solnit, is to scale up these projects and initiatives and to embrace the values that inspire them. But to do so, we need a shift in perspective to one that sees climate change as an opportunity to create a much better world.
We need a new way of imagining what it means to be wealthy. To define wealth and abundance in terms of joy, connection to ourselves, others and to nature, to eat good food produced ethically and sustainably and I would add also to laugh often. These are the qualities that would or will define what a well lived life looks like in the world we want, the world we can create.
I recently started reading Your Money Or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez. It has helped me confront the fact that I too am guilty of accumulating too much stuff. And even though the stuff I accumulate is “eco-friendly” or “sustainable” it’s still stuff, much of which I don’t need. I’m contemplating what a simpler life might look like and putting more time and energy into experiences.
We can turn this ship around. We can. But to do so we will need to do some soul searching, both as individuals and as a collective. What are we running towards? What are we running away from? What are we clinging to? Solnit argues that to respond to the climate crisis we need to summon and cultivate:
a sense of meaning, of deep connection and generosity, of being truly alive in the face of uncertainty. Of joy. This is the kind of abundance we need to meet the climate crisis, to make many, or even most, lives better. It is the opposite of moral injury; it is moral beauty. A thing we needn’t acquire, because we already have it in us.
I find that, the more I get quiet, the more I can contemplate what that might look like. For me, and for the world. And what I need to do to move towards it. That requires letting go of some of what I’ve known. But it hasn’t been serving me or the world. Letting go of the accumulation of stuff is freeing. Living a simpler life is freedom.
I get that it’s scary for many of us to let go of all we’ve known. I do. But this reality we’re clinging to with all our might? It’s not working for us. We all know that. And as author André Gide said:
[We] cannot discover new oceans unless [we] have the courage to lose sight of the shore.
We are not alone on this journey. We can let go of the shore and move toward the world we want together. That’s part of the beauty that we’ll find in forging more connections to each other and to the world around us. And by focusing on everything going right in the world, we’ll create even more of that.
You can find our more about Not Too Late, an organization recently launched by Rebecca Solnit to support both newcomers and those who have been long engaged in the climate movement here. For more on my work with young climate leaders from the global South find me here. For more on my work on global climate policy find me here.
