Transcript

Climate change -- the greatest story never told | George Marshall | TEDxWWF

[Applause] So imagine this. I'm sitting down for dinner with a leading expert in biodiversity, one of the world's leading experts actually. And we've been talking about a lot of things. We've been talking in particular about fisheries, the world's oceans, the depletion of the world's fishing stocks, and the waiter comes over with the menu. Oh, that looks nice. I'll have a grilled swordfish, please. He says, and hands the menu back. I'm going, "What?" I don't say anything. Maybe too polite. But a little while later, I'm in a bar after a conference with a man who is a climate scientist. He works uh with uh up in the Arctic measuring um melting rates and the conversation goes as it does towards what are we going to do for our holidays? Well, I say I'm going to be sitting in a damp field in Wales in a tent. He goes, "Oh, well, I love skiing. I'm off on a skiing holiday in South America." He says, I go, "Hang on, hang on. I'm sorry. There's a disconnection here. I mean, you know, in a sustainable world, one planet living, you know that we cannot just go flying off to the corners of the globe when we want to just for our own fun. He says, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, easy there." He says, "I need that holiday." Says, "My work is important and I need a break." Okay. So, see, it's easy when you're in that position, you go, "Haha, it's you." But last month, there I was in in America doing doing my book tour and this animal rights activist comes up to me waving the report. Um I think it was the FAO report that says that the impacts of a western meateing diet is the equivalent per person of driving a small truck. And what do I say? Well, it's a bit hard for me to say anything because my mouth is full of having taken a bite out of the biggest burger you have ever seen. And you better believe this is America, right? So this burger is about size of half a cow. And what do I say? I go I go I was hungry. But I find my I find my composure. I quickly find some clever arguments. Yes. I say, "Well, I I cycle to work. I have a low energy eco home." And I say, "Well, you know, surely in an eco world, we could have a little eco burger every now and then. Surely surely there's a room for a few little weaknesses. I'm doing all of this great work. You see, that's what we all do is we find the stories to back up the disconnection between what we know and what we do. And being clever people or think we're clever people, we find clever stories to back it up. Full of details and facts and figures, but nonetheless stories. Is this is this a problem? Does it really matter? And of course, the answer is yes. It totally matters. Because what we're doing as individuals is no different from what happens on a much much bigger scale with the way that politicians say, "Yes, we totally care about the environment. Look at all of these things we're doing over here." But actually, the stories they tell and the things which excite them are about destructive growth. Or oil company executives who say, "Oh, yes, climate change, that's a serious problem. Look, here's this solar scheme we have over here." But actually the stories they tell each other, the things which make them excited is about the opening up of new oil frontiers. It's these stories we tell each other which contain the element of what I want to talk about tonight. And the question, how is it possible? How do we do this to separate what we know from what we do and from what we care about? This is a key question. It's a key question for us as we move towards one planet living. It's a key question for how we make these connections. It's the key question behind how we make the scientific information we have active. So let's look for the science. So for the last two years, I've been speaking to some of the world's leading psychologists about trying to understand what the connection is. And one of the things that they told me is that the human brain processes information in different ways. The science goes into our analytic brain. This deals in the language of symbols, data, statistics. But there is a second parallel system in our brain built right into the architecture. You can see it with neuro neural imaging. And this moves through emotions, values. It speaks in the language of experience and stories. It's these stories that make the the connection in people's minds. Now this is a problem for the science you know because stories can take on a life of their own because as soon as we get away from the rigors of peer-reviewed science these stories they start to become shaped. They become molded by the values that people have by their own worldviews. As they move between people they grow. They grow mass and they grow shape and they grow form. They become creative and they become something quite different. sometimes, especially on the issue of climate change bearing no relationship to the original science whatsoever. And climate change is particularly prone to this issue because it has so many variables. It is wide open for multiple interpretations. So is climate change here or is it there? Is it now? Is it in the past? Or is it in the future? You see, if you care passionately about climate change, you'd say, "Well, it's here. It's now. it's urgent. We must do something about it. And if you don't care or if the science has somehow not reached you, you have every room to say, you know what, it seems uncertain to me. There's still lots of debate in it. It doesn't seem to be here. It seems to be over there. It's a peculiar fact in the statistics and the surveys that the vast majority of people in the general public believe that climate change is something way, way, way in the future, a major threat for future generations. In fact, in some surveys, more people think that climate change is a threat for future generations than even think that climate change is a major threat. Just think about that. That the way that they can take hold of this information is only when it is pushed way, way far in the distance. Now, what surprised me when I was doing my research is that this kind of creative storytelling, the way that people pick and shape the story around their own values and concerns, also applies in areas that have major climate change impacts, places that are on the front line of extreme weather events. So, we're talking stories. Here's another story. I'm sitting opposite the editor of a small newspaper in a small mid-texan town, but no ordinary no ordinary town. It's a town called Bastrop. And onethird of the whole town, including the house of the editor itself, was burnt down in the largest wildfires in Texum history following the worst drought ever recorded in Texum history. And I say to her, I say, "Why has your newspaper not covered climate change?" She says, "Oh, we would if it was relevant to us here in Bastro County, but we're only a little newspaper. We're a local newspaper and we talk about local issues." Okay. A year later, I'm in New Jersey. This is a few months after Hurricane Sandy demolished huge swaves of the coastal towns of New Jersey. And you can see the damage everywhere you go. Whole areas of towns just turned to to Matchwood. And again, I'm sitting opposite one of the mayors this time of one of these towns. I say this. I say, "Look, you're a great leader, and I have a great idea for you. How about you get together with other mayors up and down the New Jersey seashore and you go to Washington and you have a press conference and you say, "Climate change is real. It's deadly. We're the victims. We're at the front line of attack. We demand action now." See, I'm a campaigner and this sounds like a great idea if you're a campaigner. But she sort of looked at me and laughed and she said, "Are you crazy?" I said, "Wouldn't seem like a good idea." She said, "Are you crazy? I'm trying to rebuild my community here. I'm trying to bring in new investment. I want to tell a story of positivity, of hope, of optimism, of how we're going to build something better and stronger out of this. And you want me to go and start telling everybody this is going to happen again? This is the problem with stories. You see, some stories are fundamentally appealing to us and we pick we cherrypick the ones that we like or the ones that speak to our values, the ones we want to tell and some are simply not and we push them away and discard them. And let's face it, who wants to accept some of the bad news and some of the frightening an anxiety-making things say with climate change. And the most compelling story if we look at the things which motivate and move us are stories that contain enemies. Enemies with intention to cause harm. You know, children as young as three years old can tell the difference in experiments between something which is just an accident or something where there's an enemy with the intention to cause harm. And this is a real problem for climate change because there are no clear enemies except maybe us and what we do and we're just putting food on the table. We're just driving our kids to school. We have no intention of causing harm. And this makes it a very hard issue to communicate. And when I open my newspapers today, the newspapers are not talking about fishing or deforestation or climate change. All of the stories in there, the things that are just generating people's attention that grab their focus are about enemies, whether it's Islamic State or whether it's about terrorism or whether maybe it's about some murder case or things which are here and now like Ebola, something immediate. These are things where we go, yes, we pay attention. Now last month, President Obama was standing in front of the United Nations and he was saying climate change is a much bigger threat than all of these things. We need to pay attention to climate change and yes and he said yes climate change climate change is shaping the contours of this coming century. But you see the problem is that the contours are on that far distant hill over there and all of our attention tends to be fixated on what's coming at the next bend in the road. Where are we going from here? And are there enemies there? And so as a campaigner, I try and find ways of telling stories that contain enemies. We all do. It's the fossil fuel industry. It's the oil billionaires who fund disinformation. It's the system. It's corrupt governments. It's capitalism. And I've worked on these issues all my life. And it is true. There are major fights and struggles out there. But I'm also radical. And for me, the most radical thing that I can do these days, the crazy idea I have is I want to spend my time talking to people who are not like me, who have different values. And when I meet these enemies, it's not so clear to me that they're enemies. It seems to be more clear that they're people who cannot make the connection between what they know and what they believe and what they do. And I also am deeply deeply concerned. But in between these two sides, the campaigners on the one side, the clearly negligent, malfent on the other, there are whole swaves of decent and honorable people who somehow have been dropped out of the story. You know, it's a tragedy. It's a disaster that right across the world and especially in the English-speaking countries, conservatives are treating climate change as if the issue is toxic. In America, a denial of climate change, a refusal to accept the science, has become a stronger definition of your politics than any other single issue. The story we've been telling has simply failed to engage many people of center-right politics and they need their own story told by each other about the values which are there which are important for them. You see I think we need new stories. I think we need we need new stories at every level because this isn't an issue that should be pulling us apart of anything. all of these issues, these big environmental crisis, they should be pulling us together. And I see great hope in that because as humans, we have immense capacity for cooperation, for working together to common goals. Because just as we could say we're wired to ignore things, we're also wired to work together in the most extraordinary way. The whole world we live in has been built and constructed out of cooperation and working together. And if we have an enemy, well, maybe that enemy is something which is inside ourselves. Maybe that enemy is in the struggle that we have to make the connection between what we know and what we care about and what we do. Now, there is a a story which cuts across all boundaries and it's a powerful one because it is the story of personal conviction. You know, you don't have to be a a a inside the business world to be moved and excited when a lead a corporate leader says that they've changed what they do, that they've had a personal revelation. They tell the story about how they come to change their business practices and do something new and something different. And you don't have to be an activist not to be excited by the the sight of hundreds of thousands of people marching on the streets of New York or or the people all around the world who lay their lives on the line in order to defend the natural environment. And you'd have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by Yeano and the way that he talked about Hurricane Hayan in the uh the effect it had on his family in the in the Philippines. And you have that power too. I think all of us and you too have an immense capacity to influence the people around us because remember that emotional side of a brain it's constantly looking for signals of what the people around us are saying and doing and that's what we build our own values on. So I ask you, go out into your life and spread your conviction. Hold it up high. Say, "This is what I care about and this is why it's important to me." And show people above all the process by which you got there. Because these things don't just suddenly happen to us. They come through a process of struggle, of uncertainty, sometimes of revelation, sometimes of things which open up new ways of thinking. We have all kinds of inconsistencies. Share those with people. say yes this is not easy but this is how I feel and this is what is important to me and if there are people out there who disagree with you you know what they can disagree and they can argue as much as they like with the science and with the data but they cannot disagree with the fundamental truth of what you think and feel and your rights your fundamental right to hold those views go out and make that difference and I should say as I've been telling a story I've been telling story of conviction of spreading conviction I guess I should have a little a little um you know a postcript to it. So for myself, having written this speech, I have been brought and confronted with the fact that my eating habits are simply not sustainable. Unfortunately, I I love I love what do you say in Brussels? Steo I I love this. I'm going to have to change it. That is going to have to change because I have a disconnection in myself between what I know, what I think about, and what I do. And when I think about making that change, in some ways I feel sad about maybe what I might lose. But I also feel strong. I feel honest. I feel I've made that connection. I feel I have integrity to myself. And I feel powerful. And I'd like you to feel that power, too. Thank you. [Laughter] [Music]