There’s a curious paradox at the heart of climate change. Despite scientists asserting the need for urgent action and the widespread acceptance of the reality of climate change by people worldwide, it is a subject that we tend not to talk about with friends, family or colleagues. Just six per cent of the British public say they discuss climate change often, whereas approaching half (44 per cent) do so at most rarely. Likewise, two-thirds of Americans rarely or never discuss the subject.

Perhaps we are too fearful of appearing worthy or hectoring to express our concerns, or maybe the issues seem too complex and overwhelming. Or we have grown tired of seeing polar bears floating on melting icebergs. Whatever the reasons for our reticence, however, it is hard to see how a global impetus for public engagement and action can be realised if it remains out of bounds for discussion by all but an interested few.

The Paris summit meant climate change was headline news for a week or two. Perhaps you did find yourself reflecting on the unusual weather or the fate of low-lying Pacific nations. But now that Christmas has come and gone, are you still worrying about these things? The discussion can’t tail off from here – after Paris, we need public conversation about climate change more than ever before. Whether you think the agreement was a resounding success or are troubled by its limitations, it is clear that the hard work still lies ahead.

“It is hard to see how a global impetus for public engagement and action can be realised if it remains out of bounds for discussion by all but an interested few.”

Amid the focus in news reports on compromises struck and the commitment to keep temperatures rises “well below” 2C, one aspect of the process has received less attention. The role of civil society, never more vocal than at the Paris talks, will be crucial for words to become action.

As protesters took to the streets in the final hours of the negotiations, inside the sprawling complex north of Paris, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon called on grassroots organisations to keep up the pressure on governments to act, arguing that “active engagement” was required from across society in order to hold governments to account. Adjoined to the sealed-off buildings housing the international delegates, the Climate Generations hall provided the space for organisations and individuals from across the world to make their voices heard.

This should be seen as more than the usual rhetoric and well-meaning outreach accompanying a fleeting international limelight. Article 12 of the Paris Agreement affirms that its signatories commit to climate change education, increased public awareness, and public participation in order to achieve its aims. We can be sure that organisations such as Greenpeace and 350.org need no encouragement to do just this. But what of the wider public and their role in the process? Are we ready to play our part?

Meeting the 2C target will require an unprecedented level of disruptive change. This won’t be achieved unless we embark upon a process of meaningful public dialogue to work out our collective response. In doing so, we will inevitably encounter the old disagreements about climate change, but this is all the more reason to talk openly about the many challenges that remain.

Perhaps most significantly, and for the first time in human history, the Paris talks have led to a unanimously-endorsed policy position which appears completely at odds with continued fossil fuel dominance: the world aims to be “net zero” in emissions of carbon dioxide by the end of the century.

“Meeting the 2C target won’t be achieved unless we embark upon a process of meaningful public dialogue to work out our collective response.”

But despite the rush to celebrate the end of the fossil fuel era, the truth is likely to be more complicated. In addition to this “net zero” target, there are precisely zero mentions of fossil fuels in the final Paris text, and zero indications of how the production of fossil fuels (as opposed to the emissions they cause) will be curtailed by leaving most of these in the ground.

Have we even begun to imagine how this can be achieved, to consider the implications for changing the ways in which millions of people live? How do we, as citizens, want this to be done? None of the options currently available are straightforward or palatable to many – whether through reducing our consumption, or at the system level through an acceleration of renewable energy, nuclear power, or the use of (still speculative) carbon extraction technologies.

The conversations that are necessary as we attempt to restructure our societies – if we attempt to do so – are where the real discussion on climate change is now required. This will not result in neat texts endorsed by all, but will instead give rise to disputes grounded in different values, and played out in the familiar fight between conservatives and progressives. Finding common ground on these more contentious topics is where the energies of climate campaigners and communicators are best placed now that the skeleton of a more sustainable world has been assembled.

First published by The Conversation

The post After Paris, we need a public discussion on climate change appeared first on Positive News.

If you began a sentence with the phrase “what inspires me is…,” what words might naturally follow? I often use this sentence completion process when I’m teaching about the psychology of inspiration. One day, I was intrigued when many on my course gave the answer “Mike”. Who was Mike? And what had he done to have such impact on this group? I was keen to find out more.

The Mike in question was Mike Feingold, a permaculture teacher in Bristol. He’d recently given the group a slideshow revealing how a ravaged landscape, which looked like the surface of Mars, had become transformed through permaculture intervention into an abundant and productive forest. When the impact of human activity so often turns forests into deserts, it was deeply inspiring, and reassuring, to see this process in reverse.

Inspiring examples give us a glimpse that something else is possible. They provide a new reference point that ups our bar when considering what we might do. As we learn by watching others, one of the biggest influences on human behaviour is what we see other people do. Unfortunately, our tendency to follow the example of role models can also work in a negative way, as the following experiment illustrates.

“If all we see is people carrying on as if nothing is wrong, that becomes a reference point that influences our response”

Social psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley recruited volunteers for their research and asked them to fill out a questionnaire while they waited in a room. While they worked, smoke started trickling in through a vent in the wall. If a volunteer was in the room by themselves, it didn’t take long before they raised the alarm. But if several people were in the room together, they’d look to see how others responded before doing anything themselves. In some groups, two people had been instructed to ignore the smoke and carry on with their questionnaires. When volunteers saw others filling in their forms even as the room filled with smoke, they’d be much more likely to do this too. Many carried on writing even when the room was so smoky it was difficult to see.

This experiment can serve as a metaphor for responses to world problems. When we become aware of disturbing information, we’re likely to look around to see how others respond. If all we see is people carrying on as if nothing is wrong, that becomes a reference point that influences our response. How important it is then to look out for and notice responses that are creative, constructive and inspired. And how important too is the work of Positive News in bringing such responses to our attention.

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There’s one more step we need to take though if we want inspiration to spread. We need to pass it on. One way of doing this is by having conversations where we hear each other describe what we find inspiring. Another approach is to remember that whatever people see us doing can become a reference point for them. When they see us acknowledging concerns and responding in a constructive way, they’re more likely to as well.

So to become inspired, focus your attention on what you find inspiring. If initially you can’t find anything, begin the quest of searching it out. When you find something, you can help inspiration grow by following the examples you’re impressed by. Inspiration is an energy we can open to and a direction we move in. When we follow its trail, we help others move this way too.

Chris Johnstone is author of Find Your Power and co-author of Active Hope.

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While working in the belly of corporate communications some years ago, I stumbled across a storytelling night at Amsterdam’s Mezrab cultural centre. Nude model drawing classes and the Mahabharata in Dutch were also on the menu, but it was the storytelling that caught my eye, hosted on an open stage by an Iranian storyteller by the name of Sahand Sahbedivani.

Even through the candlelight and the smoke, the rapt attention on the faces of the audience made it clear that they loved the stories of human drama they were hearing, which was the opposite of my experience in my work. Despite the fact that I was working extremely hard to get the company’s stories more attention, they rarely ignited anything like this response in the public’s imagination. The difference between a profit-making organisation and an alternative arts event was obvious but intriguing. Why did storytelling at Mezrab succeed while corporate communications generally fell flat? The answers are relevant to anyone who has a story to tell, and nowhere is that more important than in the field of social change.

Today, storytelling is wildly popular. It’s seen as the key to succeeding in business, strengthening organisational culture, and drumming up support for advocacy and campaigns. But why is that? The first reason is obvious: climate change, inequality, violence and other challenges can’t be solved by doing more of the same. We need new narratives that connect with people’s deepest motivations and promote more radical action. Stories engage people at every level – not just in their minds but in their emotions, values and imaginations, which are the drivers of real change. So if we want to transform society, we must learn to tell – and listen to – a new set of stories about the world we want to create.

“Stories engage people at every level – not just in their minds but in their emotions, values and imaginations”

So far so good, but what actually makes for a good story in this sense? That’s where my visits to Mezrab were so instructive. For one thing, the storytellers that got the most attention were not necessarily the funniest or wittiest. Instead, they were the ones that were most prepared to put their skin in the game, to state something that was uncomfortably close to how they saw the world. This radical subjectivity – perhaps the basis of all great art – is a crucial lesson for anyone who wants to communicate a complex topic. When we allow our own insights to organise the telling of a story, we give a more compelling account of events. Why? Because our deepest values are closest to what we share with others.

Business is only now learning that telling a good story requires authenticity, as if bewildered by the discovery of truth. Storytelling in social movements is more advanced. In fact for those who work for social justice, the problem has not been making up good stories, but getting people to listen to the ones they have already. This can be especially hard when movements are very broad, and when the issues they deal with are so large in scope. But my storytelling sessions taught me another lesson that’s useful in this context: even when the issues are large and complex, we feel compelled to listen when we ourselves are included in the storyline.

The danger of much current rhetoric is that justified frustration at injustice comes across in torrents of abuse. The parlous state of the economy, for example, is not just the fault of the bankers and politicians who have overspent, it’s also something that involves all of us on a daily basis in our roles as consumers and producers, employers and employees, shareholders and borrowers. When anyone is marginalised or demonised in this context, they are less likely to be part of the solution, even if they have the power to make change.

The Mezrab storytellers were successful because they and their audience felt united with each other at some level, even if they might disagree on the surface. In myth, drastic opposites are often reconciled through elaborate plots and casts of characters. We can do the same in our own stories by not alienating the people we need to talk to or persuade. Michael Margolis, a San Francisco-based ‘story architect,’ makes this point elegantly by asking that our stories of social change become love stories. His argument is that undermining belief systems – a necessary step in social change – requires an emphasis on shared values and commonality. These shared values can then be used to show when, why and how some people aren’t living up to them in practice.

Stressing unity between divergent interests has often been the basis of effective change – look no further than the genesis of the European Union after the second world war. A more local example came in the wake of the killing of British soldier Lee Rigby by two self-proclaimed Muslims in Woolwich, southeast London, in 2013. This event outraged the far-right English Defence League (EDL) who organised a protest outside a mosque in York. Knowing of this plan and anticipating violence, members of the mosque invited the protestors in for tea and biscuits. In the discussion that followed, both parties realised that they had a common interest in ending extremist violence. The protestors’ anger was successfully defused, and the day ended in an impromptu game of football.

“Storytellers that got the most attention were not necessarily the funniest or wittiest; they were the ones prepared to state something that was uncomfortably close to how they saw the world”

The leader of the mosque, Mohamed El-Gomati, initiated a dialogue to identify elements of a shared culture among members of both the EDL and the mosque. We can do the same with our own stories. Whenever there’s a situation in which we’re tempted to label one group as ‘the other’, telling a story that reveals shared values aids in the creation of new communities. The narrative ceases to be the property of one side’s rightness over another side’s error. Instead it becomes a story of co-creation and mutual responsibility.

Identifying common value is attractive, not just to those with whom we want to communicate directly, but also to other listeners who have to be part of the conversation. Focusing on commonality puts everyone in a stronger position to undermine belief systems and lay out new possibilities for social change. That, at least, is something I learned from corporate communications.

Where the business community excels is in its story of possibilities. After all, branding is simply an exercise in creating the idea that something is valuable, so that others will buy into it – in this case literally. Where these ideas about value are already present – as in social movements – much of the job is done, but not all. In addition to telling stories that inspire people’s imagination, movements can also activate their energies for action by including a greater sense of concrete possibilities in the stories they want to tell. And that requires something of a ‘gear-shift’ in conversations about the nature of radical action.

Myth, says says teacher and author Martin Shaw, is not just about awakening a past that is forgotten; it’s also about describing the possibilities of the present. Values – as the core of all good stories – can lay the foundations for social transformation by simultaneously undermining beliefs and retaining some continuity, so that people are not immobilised by the changes taking place around them. When stories are deeply grounded in values, they can communicate a vision and not merely a picture of the realities we face.

These visions – as enablers of action – are necessary to the path of social and political change. Those on the political left are often criticised for pointing out the problems rather than presenting some solutions. By identifying the values that underpin our activities and weaving them into a story of how the world might look, we will become more effective at opening hearts and minds to accommodate a positive future.

This article was first published by Open Democracy. For more content like this see Open Democracy’s Transformation section

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