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Deirdre Joyce's avatar

Thank you for your writing. I believe that climate change is a fundamentally a cultural issue rather than a rights and wrongs issue. Its about developing a narrative about change, positive change about the way we live today from a social and cultural perspective and articulating the benefits of a new cultural shift, which is to begin to live within the new climate paradigm. This means adapting and improving our living conditions (think planning for climate resilience), improving our productive practices (think products, innovation and technology) and improving our social relations (think sustainable communities, business relations and education and equality). Effective and responsible resource management (planet, natural resources and their uses) is critical to the to transitioning to new paradigm. Ultimately it is about engaging in climate conversations, taking action at community and political levels and developing awareness of everyday behavior and how it influences our impact on the 'climate dial'. Unfortunately, the urgency of this issue is not yet apparent among the general population, beyond those most directly affected. In the absence of a coherent communications campaign, this cultural shift will be slow and and therefore change will be more painful, costly and unequal across the globe. Despite my concerns expressed here I do believe that it is possible to shift the dial and that human behavior can and will change. The Covid experience has demonstrated that we can make change rapidly if we are asked to through coherent messaging informed by sound behavioral and psychological understandings.

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Peter Tavernise's avatar

I may have mentioned this before, but community of exclusion is the easiest, and therefore most often default mode for humans, because it allows us to forge, and perpetuate, group identity and cohesion with the least amount of effort by setting clear criteria for who is in and who is out.

By contrast, community of inclusion is difficult, messy, and requires personal awareness and interpersonal work that takes time, and that in Western dominant culture is neither taught, nor valued. This is without getting into critiques of Empire, which perpetuates the former at the cost of the latter form of community by its nature.

Agreed that for the climate movement, we cannot afford to have enemies. We are literally all in this together, and we are only going to get out of it by collaborating. No enemies means we can also start significantly de-investing military spending and plowing all that into all the things we need, battery/ energy storage/ carbon capture technologies, etc. along with reshaping our economies to be as local and sustainable as possible. Look at what Costa Rica accomplished abolishing their military and setting their ecosystem and community health & education as the higher values.

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