Infectious Intimations
Creating clear, cross-cultural climate communications
This is the end of a trilogy of notes on climate change communications. Parts I and II can be found at their respective links.
I think that there is too much attention paid to the impacts of climate change.
“What? You work in solar, you studied sustainability in college, and you’re a long-haired hippie. How can you say that?”
It’s not what you think. I still don’t buy plastic water bottles. I still am ~25% trail mix by weight. Patagonia is still my favorite company. In short, I still care deeply about the environment and future threats to it (and the people and animals that live in it). It’s just that I think that the immediate-term impacts of environmental degradation are scary enough that we can justify stopping them without having to appeal to the very real, very serious impending long-term impacts of climate change.1
In closing this series of notes, I’d like to examine something quite simple: the value of purity. The sanctity/degradation Moral Foundation is one that I normally disregard in moral decision-making relative to questions of harm or equality. To be more in line with my usual line of thinking, I could find some studies on global health benefits or contingent valuation of pristine nature, but that isn’t the point of this note; in fact, this is where I and others like me often fail in communicating about climate change.
Instead, I’d like to speak toward the everyday sentiments that make me care about the problems we are facing. Because if I’m being honest, the “Mr. Optimizer” part of my brain is not always turned on, as much as I might wish it was (/s). The thoughts that really drive me to care on a day-to-day basis are much more personal than IPCC reports or ecosystem services valuations.
Remember the early weeks of the first COVID lockdowns? Around the world, emissions and pollution dropped precipitously. Overnight, the canals of Venice were clearer than its citizens had ever seen them; cities like Delhi and Los Angeles shrugged off their normal blankets of smog revealing blue skies, mountains, and stars; highways around the world were empty at the normal rush hour; the world became a De Chirico painting.
Public health and economic considerations aside: Is there value in denizens of L.A. being able to see the Sierra Nevada, or city-dwellers being able to see the stars? I think the answer is yes. This forced pause of the global machine gave us a glimpse of both the resiliency of nature as well as what we are missing out on in what would be a better world.
I’ve struggled with the following idea a lot recently: my utilitarian moral framework does not leave room for any intrinsic value of nature. Nature possesses, according to utilitarianism, only instrumental value. Nature is valuable to the extent it contributes to the maximization of utility or satisfaction of preferences. You can—and I do—make very strong arguments in favor of environmental actions based on instrumental value alone, especially if you extend the sphere of moral consideration beyond humans to other sentient beings, or even further. But sometimes, at the edge cases, I’m left with a sour taste in my mouth.
The sour taste stems from my wanting to value nature intrinsically, as an end in itself. To me, the extinction of a species feels more significant than its contribution to its ecosystem and genetic biodiversity and human viewing pleasure alone. When I see the below video, it pisses me off beyond the pure aesthetic value of the rock feature that was destroyed; I feel like these men have committed a kind of historical transgression against millions of years of natural processes.
Either my emotional reaction is irrational, or my ethics are wrong. Because I believe that the utilitarian ethic is going to lead to the best world, I am okay with admitting that my emotional desire for intrinsic value isn’t rational. But I’m also okay with admitting that when I’m out in the backcountry, the thought that keeps me from tossing a banana peel into the woods is, at least initially, about the purity of nature, and only secondarily one about how long it takes to decompose. I’m also okay with admitting that if I’m frustrated at work, sometimes looking up at the picture of the Grand Tetons next to my desk does a lot more to motivate me to keep looking for solutions than thinking about marginal avoided tons of CO2 from solar installations.
Fortunately for my utilitarian ethics, the value of smogless skies or crystal-clear waterways does extend beyond the aesthetic into the instrumental. As we’ve discussed, motivated reasoning and politicization of science mean it’s harder to rally activists against the invisible threats of dissolved lead in water or bioaccumulation of mercury in fish than it is the crusade against plastic straws, even if the invisible threats matter MUCH more than the visible ones. Littered straws are easier to localize than lead in water; I’ve seen countless discarded straws strewn on the ground or in rivers but never once have I seen lead in water!
I agree with President Trump and Outside magazine, who both said, “I do think we have bigger problems than plastic straws.” But, if we can pair up visible consequences, even if they’re kind of dumb, with invisible problems, we can make better progress against the most impactful areas of environmental degradation.
The plastic straw crusade was unequivocally dumb, but it did cause plastic waste to enter the national conversation. Perhaps, for example, emphasizing the beauty of being able to see the mountains from L.A. will increase support for environmental policy, while its citizens experience higher life expectancy from reduced air pollution.
I wrote months ago about how the essence of art is sincere communication. Silent Spring, one of the most influential environmental books of all time, turned an invisible problem visible by crafting the image of the once-vibrant spring, silenced by overzealous pesticide use. This strategy was so successful that it launched the modern environmental movement. The environmental problems we face today require the same quality of sincere, clear, individual communication to create infectious changemaking.
Thousands of words later (“brevity is the soul of wit” … this doesn’t bode well for my wit), I’m not confident on any recommendation I could make to improve communication around climate change.
Maybe speaking in moral pidgin is a better way to reach across the moral aisle. Maybe improving global epistemology and trust in the scientific method will lead to people creating more accurate maps of the territory of reality. Maybe localization of impacts will cause people to take threats seriously before it’s too late. Maybe we can make attach invisible problems to some of their more salient consequences. I think it’s some blend of these ideas, and many more.
But what I can say with certainty is that I care about this issue and I hope you do too.
To extend the linguistic and cultural metaphor one more time, I think that good art has the ability to communicate across the cultural misunderstandings that plague conversations surrounding climate change. Real art is often universal.
Assuming the solution to our problems is art is naïve; “Money, demographics, institutions, and pure power still rule.” With that said, though, art’s ability to communicate emotion infectiously may be able to change minds like raw statistics cannot. And once there is enough emotional buy-in to the threat of climate change there will unavoidable pressure for decision-makers to deploy those resources of realpolitik to combat it.
For context, estimates for annual deaths from air pollution alone range from 4 to 8 million people per year (as high as 18% of global deaths!). Meanwhile, this paper suggests we can expect 83 million excess deaths due to climate change by 2100. This represents a monumental toll in human life, one that is easy for people to ignore because they discount the future and huge numbers are hard to process. This estimate of lives lost is separate from the also-monumental economic impacts we can expect to face, as well as the suffering to hundreds of millions of other displaced and adversely-impacted people.