Hi, thank you for coming. Thank you for inviting me. Changing the Climate Change story.
You would think that with the already extreme effects of climate change abounding about us: polar bears drowning; hurricanes more 
intense, if not more frequent, Katrina; glaciers fast vanishing across the Arctic and Alaska; rising waters everywhere, particularly Tuvalu and the Maldives; evidence of desertification in China, Africa, Brazil; smaller and shorter-lasting snow-packs in Andes, Kilimanjaro, California; increased forest fires in the Canadian North woods; changes in animal migration everywhere; disappearing forests from Borneo to the Boreal; and drought and flooding from New Hampshire to the Yangtze.
You would think that with prominent effects as these, and with voices as prominent as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Tony Blair, China’s President Hu and voices all across Africa currently exhorting us to action, warning that climate change is "the greatest environmental challenge of the new century,” you would think that we would be doing more to meet the climate change challenge before us.
Imagine for a moment, if you would, that terrorists, wayward insurgents, or for that matter, aliens, were threatening the kinds of devastation that climate change bodes. Well you can be sure, that were this indeed the work of evildoers, we’d be moving heaven and earth to stop them, remaining steadfast in our vigilance and alarm, furthermore, until we had vanquished them in their inhumanity.
So what, then, is stopping us from similarly vanquishing the effects of climate change that we ourselves are causing?
No alarm. A Stern report here, a NASA report there; occasional headlines that last for a day, no more. Multiple conferences. Oh, we’ve got talking heads, to be sure, and lots of them: but as of yet no collective, consensual global action commensurate with the threat. And whatever alarm that does exist, is coming not from the global populace, but instead from scientists, dignitaries and deans of universities, like Gustave Speth of the renowned Yale School of Forestry and Environment, who is the lead consultant on Final Hour and who recently wrote:
“The world we have known is history.”
It is easy to feel like a character in a bad science fiction novel running down the street shouting, "Don't you see it!" while life goes on, business as usual. Climate changing is the biggest thing to happen here on earth in thousands of years, with incalculable environmental, social and economic costs. And yet, there is no march on Washington. Students are not in the streets; consumers are not rejecting destructive lifestyles that devour fossil fuels; congress is not passing far-reaching legislation yet; presidents of nations are not on television explaining the threat to their respective countries; and entire segments of evening news pass without mention of the climate emergency; and so on. And so on, indeed.
Many who like Gustave Speth urge action await—by way of comparison—a climate change analog to the civil rights movement of the 60s in America, an independence movement, a human rights campaign, seeing in climate challenge parallels some of the greatest social upheavals of our day, which begs the question: why aren’t these marches in the streets materializing? What’s happening? Where is our Martin Luther King, our Lech Walesa, our Tiananmen Square, our climate crisis Gandhi?
There is one final sentence to Dean Speth’s editorial—published recently in the Times, NY Times, by the way--and it is this, paraphrased: ‘that those of us who are caught in the grim story of devastation of climate change, must find each other, and soon.’ That conclusion is doubtless based on the conviction that together we can indeed muster action. Well, I used to think as much, as well. I used to think that activism was just around the corner. I used to think that activism might be the answer. I used to think that we had only need to, only need to find each other in order to kick-start the campaign against climate change. I don’t think that, anymore.
In working on an eight part series on climate change called FINAL HOUR to air on the Discovery Channel in 2008, to an aggregate, unprecedented audience of 1.4 billion people, I have come to believe that the we can’t count on marches in the streets in this particular battle. The simple reason being that activism requires a story, and STORY means there is a protagonist, an antagonist, a hero’s journey which inspires us to go to the dark side on the not so sure bet we’ll wind up better than we were before. From Ulysses to Mohammed, the great cultural stories of mankind all share this particular feature of the hero’s journey. But the climate change story, to date, does not offer us this feature. Thus, it is essentially without the key ingredients to ‘story.’
My first hint of the storylessness of climate change came about a year or so ago when I pitched the idea of a climate change series to one of the American broadcast networks, not, I’m happy to report, Discovery. I will never forget the reaction. “ I want to do a series that tackles climate change,” I marched in there and said. And the response, while wanting to be supportive, was one of utter, utter bewilderment:
“Climate change?” I was asked, “what’s that?”
Now, obviously it was not that the folks at the network didn’t literally know what climate change was—or, you know what, maybe they didn’t come to think of it--because to the extent that climate change presents a challenge to the cultural storytelling facility and machine, which in our days is best represented by the media, these network folks, and by implication, all of us, couldn’t understand what climate change, what it was. That is to say, what it truly meant, because they couldn’t grasp how to tell the story.
Over the past decades, through literary theory, we have been made aware of the relationship between one’s culture and one’s stories. We’ve learned that the stories we tell and live can have a direct, if not defining impact on the survival, and in some instances, even the extinction of one’s culture: Easter Island’s demise, Rome’s fall, and now maybe even America’s own challenges of late on the global stage. All, arguably, can be put to cultural stories which people are holding to, clinging to, despite mounting evidence that such a story-in Rome’s case it was the story of infinite expansion and ‘might makes right’-that these stories are not only counter-productive, but possibly also suicidal. Easter Island depletes its land without succession, even as their people are starving, because the cultural story invites them to do so, and that cultural story was more powerful than the reality of their actual starvation. Why? And this is key I feel:
‘Because people don’t operate on fact, they operate on story.’
Hence, “Climate change, Paul. What’s that?” Think about it. Frame climate change in your own minds and I’ll bet one of two thing happens instantly: either you run down a long list of climate change events, disasters or predictions, just like I myself did at the start, or alternatively, you imagine, your imagination wills a green world into being that conquers our fossil fuel addiction and maybe makes us all a little bit richer in the process as well. The eco-green world, ‘green washing,’ is that story, and that too is the order of the day. But in terms of climate change, so in terms of climate change, when we imagine the story now, it is either to hell in a hand basket, or heaven in a sow’s purse.
Its either a disaster movie, or a rags-to-riches tale, both of which are stories, both of which are stories, mind you, but the sorry fact is that neither genre of story, disaster or rags-to-riches, is an appropriate vehicle to understand or appreciate climate change. And yet, these are the only two types of stories that have emerged, to date, from our cultural wellspring, and that is precisely why, in my view, we’re in the kind of mess we are in. Everyone that we approach with Final Hour, our experts number some two hundred and fifty at this point, every single expert, before they join the show, has to be convinced that this is not going to be that disaster movie. Everyone immediately assumes that this is a disaster show, and with comparisons of “The Day After Tomorrow,” we have to fight from the get go.
You see, global warming with its slow disasters can’t compete with Terminator in its bells and whistles and special effects, and certainly can’t come close to promising the instant gratification of fast and complete triumph that such genres ultimately depend on for their appeal. And as for the rags-to- riches option, well this plays to precisely the consumer mindset that created and currently perpetuates the climate change crisis in the first place. And while that, while the greening story might be helpful to initiate action, and get people excited about the possibilities climate change holds for us economically, it’s hardly a long term cultural story with legs. For that story, the rags-to-riches story, is only as good as long as the money lasts, and climate change comes with no such guarantee. So in this genre too, the American dream genre, the Horatio Alger genre, if you will, the climate change story, is hardly winning in its appeal, which by the way, in my view, is why re-branding and renaming climate change (‘atmospheric death,’ ‘climate crisis,’ call it what you will) hasn’t served us very well to date either.
Einstein said you can’t solve a problem from the same mindset that created it, which is to say it is utterly impossible, in my view, to make the climate change story happen by spinning it any more than humanity was spun on a sun-centered universe or a round earth at the dawn of another age. Sorely, it’s not possible to brand climate change and make it stick any more than we could re-brand a sun-centered universe to make the moon’s secular view of the universe once holds. Yet, we know that the Copernican view, that is the sun-centered view, actually did take hold, obviously. But how did that happen? Well, it didn’t, in Copernicus’s lifetime, or in Galileo’s lifetime. Both died in obscurity. So how did it happen? It didn’t until the likes of Shakespeare got a hold of it and Washington Irving, after that. It didn’t take root until the storytellers came to the issue. And so it is my view that climate change, too, can’t and won’t take hold until we have a story that we can tell for the phenomenon. A story that we can tell about its solutions that makes sense, which is to say until we figure out a way to experience climate change in terms of a heroes journey.
So, what shape then, must the climate change story take in light of this? Not a list of devastations, not a pitch for false hope, and not a story, by the way, pitting those who doubt climate change against those who don’t in an ugly battle to the finish, the hero being whoever is right. That is a story, incidentally, it’s a good guy-bad guy story, we all know it all too well. And it’s satisfying enough that when it comes for the good guy-bad guy story to be appropriate for the climate change story, which can and must be about healing the planet, if it’s in fact to be a climate change story, it’s utterly useless. Being as it is, a story that divides us, when we need more than anything, a story that brings us together.
Which means Final Hour has first to armor people on all sides of this issue. It has to speak the truth that all of us, nay-sayers and advocates alike are in this together, and all of us, in our own ways, either in our naive optimism about the future or our fatalism about the future, are frightened. And no one knows what happens next, or where in the world we are going. So Final Hour is a story in which nay-sayers are not the only antagonists, and it’s not a story in which scientists and advocates are the protagonists, leaving us with what? A paradigm shift that can capture the climate change phenomenon at long last, which means a story in which nature, herself, speaking through climate change becomes the protagonist. And climate change, and climate change is here to return nature to her rightful place from which she never should have been removed in the first place. Climate change, the protagonist; climate change, the hero: pushing, cajoling, warning, and finally, if need be dragging us kicking and screaming to the brave new world which awaits us, and doing all she can to take us there.
And so if we are locked into any pitched battle to the finish, it’s a battle, it’s a battle not with climate change herself, and a battle not among ourselves, but a battle with a lifestyle. Our lifestyle, our collective lifestyle, and our collective cultural assumptions that go with that lifestyle, that with each passing decade, like with Easter Island, becomes increasingly incongruent with the realities that climate change, and the nexus of issues with which she has allied, namely energy and poverty, to mention two, are waking us to.
And here’s the flourish: climate change doesn’t get to be the hero for the duration of all the episodes either. At some point, having heeded her warnings and realities, in Final Hour, the hero’s baton is in fact bestowed upon us, and returned to us, and at that point, we begin, at the point where we begin to come to terms with what now needs to be done, and we are finally embarking on a committed journey to this brave new world, which had been pressing at us through the century. A glorious journey, and by glorious, I don’t mean a jubilant journey, rather I mean a joyous one. The kind of journey that comes when we are asked to jump off a high cliff, with no guarantees of safety, and a hand that pulls from behind and says: “I don’t know what’s down there either, but I know we have to jump. So I will do it if you will, and I’ll tell you what, how about if I take your hand, and you take mine, and we do it together.”
I like to imagine Final Hour as one of those hands coming from behind, reaching out to 1.4 billion people, a story that has in its heart, the attention, if not the promise of telling the climate change story that invites us to journey together to this particular brand of joy. Thanks.
