Meeting People Where They Are

Here's the good news and the bad news about climate change all in one statement:  it touches pretty much everything.  Why is that good news?!?  Because it gives us a lot of opportunity to connect with people.  As we've already seen, even people who care about climate change might not identify it as their top priority (in daily life or at the polls).  However, there is something that they really care about - and chances are, climate change may impact it.  

I'll give you a personal example.  Remember Tom Butler, our hog farmer friend in North Carolina?  Tom wasn't the only farmer I worked with.  I had hog farmers in North Carolina and dairy farmers in New York who were all implementing those same lagoon cover digesters on their farms to manage manure and earn some carbon credit revenue on the side.  And to be perfectly honest with you, I had more than one farmer (definitely NOT Tom!) tell me that they didn't believe in climate change, but they were happy to cash carbon credit checks from people who did.  And while I didn't say this to them, what I thought was, "Well, good news - the atmosphere doesn't care why you've reduced emissions, just that you have!"  Those farmers weren't just in it for the carbon credit revenue - I promise you, it wasn't that much.  However, those lagoon cover digesters served a lot of other important functions for them.  Many of them found their farms increasingly encroached on by development and as it turns out, though we all enjoy food, many people don't like the way farms smell and they complain about it a lot.  The odor control offered by the lagoon covers was very beneficial to some of those farmers.  Others, including Tom, really enjoyed the peace of mind from not worrying about a hurricane parking over the farm and flooding the open air lagoons over their tops anymore - the water quality nightmare that stems from that was quite the headache.  Others needed a new strategy to successfully manage their manure.  So, in all of these cases, we were doing something that benefited the climate but we were often doing it for other reasons.  The climate is fine with that.  

So while it's absolutely important that we try to educate people about the science of climate change and why it matters for people (not polar bears), we need to recognize that it can't be everyone's priority.  But those of us who do view it as a priority have a unique and important opportunity to integrate climate solutions with our families', friends', and neighbors' top priorities.  Instead of asking people to come to you, meet them where they are.  I like to think of it as coming through the back door to address climate change by focusing first on how we make our communities better places to live.  It helps us zoom in without so much of the mess.