Action on climate, environmental justice begins with emphathy and dialogue

Excerpts from my interview with Mitchell Beer for The Energy Mix (September 2020)

The Mix: How do we pause to deal with deep environmental justice issues when we’re on such a tight timeline to get climate change under control, and how can we ever get that job done without pausing to deal with the deeper issues?

Sitnick: It comes down to what are our actual values, and why we’re trying to stop climate change. The answer to that question is something we take for granted, actually. I don’t think most of us are trying to solve climate change because we’re really worried about ice caps, or because we need the species of lemur that will go extinct in the Amazon if we don’t. We’re driven to solve climate change because we want to survive as a species on this planet. All those banners that say ‘save the planet’? The planet will be just fine. The planet has gone through the works. The planet will survive this, but we likely would not, us and a whole lot of other species.

So if we care about humanity, we act on climate change. But if we care about humanity, we also act on climate change in a way that preserves our humanity, and that means preserving all of humanity.

Preserving our humanity means being humane. Genocide is not humane. Choosing who gets to live and who gets to die based on an accident of birth isn’t humane. So, sure, the other way to solve climate change is like that old axiom, if you want to lose 20 pounds, go ahead and cut off your head. You would get the outcome, but you wouldn’t survive it.

Early in the pandemic, there were stories about how magnificent it was that nature was coming back because people had gone away, and I remember thinking this was absolutely the wrong message, the wrong time to be saying this. Do we want to create in peoples’ minds the idea that human suffering is required to solve the climate crisis? Because if that’s the message we want to share, we might as well dig our own graves and jump in. No one is going to choose that. It just won’t work.

The Mix: Major segments of the climate community have been trying to reach out to historically marginalized communities, and realizing that the first step is to set aside your own assumptions and listen. Is that approach a template for building a wider base of support for climate action, even with people we don’t think of as marginalized?

Sitnick: Oh, 100%, and that’s where I started. When I talk about audience-centred communications, that’s what I mean. You start from where people are, not from where you want them to be or wish they were. We always want to change peoples’ priorities from what they are and get them to agree with us that climate change is the most important thing. But that’s difficult. We’re setting ourselves up for failure, and it’s completely unnecessary.

I don’t care whether somebody believes climate change is the most important thing as long as they’re acting on it for their own reasons. So the question I want to ask is, what is the way into it? What’s the opportunity here? What if it isn’t about solving what I think the problem is, but getting at what they think the problem might be?

The Energy Mix: Is there anything you’d like to add?

Sitnick: If there’s one really important thing I hope people take away from this conversation, it’s that we cannot solve the challenge of climate change without a deep commitment to empathy, not just to communications, but to dialogue. These have to be conversations. It is time, this is the moment, that we in the environmental community see ourselves as inextricably connected to anyone who is working for a more just and humane world.