Communicating about climate change effectively is critical to get people to engage with it productively, according to climate psychologist Renée Lertzman.
First, there has to be an honest acknowledgement that we can not solve climate change alone. The narrative has to be reframed from one of “me” to one of “we.”
Second, we have to have compassion for feeling sadness, anger and anxiety about what is happening to the planet while also focusing on solutions.
Photo credit: Richard Morgenstein
Renée Lertzman, climate psychologist
Communicating about climate change effectively is critical to get people to engage with it productively, according to climate psychologist Renée Lertzman. And right now, communications about climate change are not helping.
People are scared.
Almost three in four people (72%) worldwide are worried that global climate change will harm them personally at some point in their lifetime, according to survey data from the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.
Almost half of young people (45%) say their feelings about climate change negatively impact their daily lives, while 77% say the future is frightening with regard to climate change, according to a survey of 10,000 young people across 10 countries released this month by academics.
That fear needs to be acknowledged and worked through individually in the companies we work for, in local communities, in government and in organizations, says Lertzman. Only after that can we productively discuss how to prepare, adapt and fight.
The following are excerpts of Lertzman’s comments in a videot interview with CNBC. They have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Getting from ‘me’ to ‘we’
There’s some truth in there. In actuality, no one — and I don’t care if you’re the biggest multinational company on the planet — no one actor right now is able to do it all. No one on its own is going to be enough.
What I think this crisis is actually inviting us to step into is a fundamentally different lens, which is really moving from that “me” to “we.” And it’s really stretching our cognitive capacity to think and experience and see ourselves as part of a system and as embedded in the system.
That’s a really significant shift for a lot of us to make. And it’s not something that just happens intellectually. And it’s not something that just happens if you snap your fingers say, “Okay, you know, what, I’m going to now start thinking and feeling and behaving like I’m in a system.” It doesn’t really work that way. It’s a process of continually reminding ourselves and each other that we are in fact joined up and part of a much bigger picture and a much bigger story.
Each one of us is actually — I don’t care who you are — a vital character in that story. We are all protagonists in this story of meeting climate crisis and engaging with climate crisis.
And that reframe is one that we need to just keep coming back to, over and over and over again. This is not just about me. It’s about me in this bigger story.
It’s absolutely essential that we start from a place of really having deep compassion for that feeling of, “nothing I can do will matter.”
So it’s not like we shouldn’t be feeling that or there’s something wrong with us for feeling that our individual actions are not sufficient. Actually, I’m just going to really connect with myself here and say, “You know what, yeah, it’s really painful. It’s really hard.”
Having that feeling is an expression of how deeply I am connected and how deeply I really care about what is happening on the planet.
It is really, really important that we meet our experience — no matter what that experience is, overwhelmed, feeling insignificant, feeling frustrated, feeling angry, feeling numb, feeling checked out — that we meet that experience with, with total compassion.
It’s only from that point that we’re able to move into any kind of meaningful, impactful, creative response, where we’re able to take stock of questions like, “Who am I, where am I? What do I, how do I want to channel this energy, this concern, this care that I have, that’s coming up inside of me, that’s expressing itself?” We have to start from that place.
