As the world continues to warm, we must take whatever steps we can to slow down and then stop that process. And although we as individuals can definitely take worthwhile steps, we can achieve greater success if more of us participate. Luckily, we can influence other people to take social, political, and corporate-related steps through effective communication. Sometimes, especially with regard to our lifestyle choices, that happens as a sort of “keeping up with the Joneses” imitation. Just as important is what we say about those choices to our friends and neighbors; we’ll describe this more below.
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Here are a few examples of how people affect each other:
- A Cardiff University School of Psychology survey showed that half of the respondents who knew someone who had given up flying because of climate change decided to fly less as a result.
- A Pennsylvania state study demonstrated that people who ride their bikes or walk to work influence their peers to do the same.
- When meat-eaters are accompanied by vegetarians and have a choice of eating dishes with or without meat, they’re more likely to choose a vegetarian dish, a Max Planck Institute study claims. What’s more, this probability increases as the number of vegetarians accompanying the meat eaters increases.
A New York University School of Business study in California found that households were more likely to install solar panels in neighborhoods that already had them, and that the rate of installation increases with more and more installations, creating a chain reaction that added up to a significant increase in solar adoption.
Photo by Edgar Castrejon via Unsplash.com
Photo by Edgar Castrejon via Unsplash.com
We can also help our neighbors to develop more climate-friendly diets. Many of them are used to eating meat and might not be ready or willing to give it up. In many cases, they may not know what the alternatives taste like, giving us an excellent opportunity to nudge their diet through communication. Consider giving them a chance to try meatless dishes at a vegan tasting party! You could also offer some vegan dishes at your dinner parties and barbecues, and let people know that what they’re enjoying is meatless.
Even if we’re not yet willing to give up eating meat, we could at least acquire it from a local butcher who is willing to talk about how the animals were raised. You’ll get a fresher product, have a sense of whether the animals were grass-fed and not given growth hormones, and the meat will probably have traveled less, reducing the greenhouse gasses tied to transportation emissions. Invite your friends, family and neighbors to dinner, and when they ask where you got your steaks from, tell them about a local butcher who considers the environment in their products.
Real Change
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As you can see, there are lots of steps we can take to communicate with our neighbors in order to help them discover more sustainable lifestyles. Even more exciting, when we influence our neighbors, they can influence others, spreading out in a ripple effect. Once enough people have been influenced, the community can reach a tipping point, in which a majority of people transition to the new, more sustainable lifestyle. That tipping point can be closer than we think: a study published in Nature and reviewed in Psychology Today claims that with only 25 per cent of a population, a minority perspective was able to overturn the majority.
Once you get to that point, you can create real change. According to the authors of a 2021 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,
“Governments are motivated to take radical action on climate if they feel they have voter permission to do so, technology innovators are motivated to invest in green technologies if they feel those technologies are acceptable to the public, and corporations are motivated to switch to more green policies and processes to the extent that they will be rewarded by consumers. Furthermore, through well-established processes of normative [normal, easy to predict] influence, people’s individual actions can have effects on their peers; multiplier effects that can ultimately trigger tipping points that create collective change.”
Facing Risks
So communicating with our friends and neighbors about steps we can take to fight climate change through communications and action is extremely important. How we do so is described more below. But, first, getting
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other people to change their habits or invest in new technology isn’t always easy; it takes time, and there can be social and financial risks.
For example, posting yard or window signs is another form of communication, and it may have a social risk, especially if your neighbors feel your sign identifies you as a member of a different group with different beliefs. However, it can also give courage to neighbors who agree with you to be more active and to make their actions and values more visible.
If we’re considering the idea of being the first person in a neighborhood to put solar panels on our roofs, we’re taking a financial risk. Does the company we choose make a reliable product? Will it actually be cost-effective? If someone else we personally know has already done it, we could talk to them about their experience and ask if they thought it was worth it, but if we’re the first in our circle, there’s no one to ask for their perspective. So we have to decide whether we’re willing to make a leap.
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Trying to get others to switch to a plant-based diet, or to at least eat less meat, is another example of communication with a possible social risk. A 2022 study from the University of Groningen noted that depending on how vegans and vegetarians frame their eating choices, they may be ostracized by their peers. If they say they don’t want to eat meat because they don’t want to make animals suffer or because they don’t want their eating habits to contribute to global warming (see “Review on the Burger Effect: Burger Industry and Climate Change” for more information), their family and friends may feel judged and, instead of changing their habits, they may not only reject the view of the vegetarian/vegan, but feel annoyed or irritated with the person. One study found that “people may defy norm messages and act in opposition to them if they feel lectured or infantilized.” As a result, some people may choose to disguise the true reasons for their choices, saying things like “I just don’t like the taste of meat.”
But there’s an environmental cost to such deception: “If [vegetarians and vegans] indeed choose not to express their meat-free preferences (e.g. a vegetarian shying away from ordering a vegan dish during a dinner with colleagues), this may cause the general public to underestimate the proportion of people who have adopted a plant-based diet or have an interest in doing so.” That underestimation, in turn, could lead to fewer discussions about how meat-eating is connected to global warming, and if we’re not talking about it, it’s less likely that we are going to change people’s viewpoints in the time we need to to fight climate change (see this Scientific American article on how short that is).
Your Actions Can Speak As Loud as Words
Your climate-related lifestyle decisions, such as putting solar panels on your roof and biking to work, can visually “communicate” your values to your neighbors, and are therefore extremely important. If you’re willing to take action and change your life, your commitment “speaks” loudly about your values, even without your needing to actively communicate to anyone or to request that they imitate them. People see you and other neighbors’ actions and learn.
Other examples:
- Composting
- Adopting a vegan or vegetarian diet
- Hanging laundry outside to dry
- Purchasing an electric leaf-blower, or just raking leaves
- Planting native species or a vegetable garden in the front lawn
You can find many more ideas here!
Good News in Actively Influencing Friends and Family
A paper published by the Yale Program on Climate Communication in 2019 tells us that
“…people learn important facts about climate change through discussion with friends and family. Specifically, discussing climate change with friends and family led to enhanced understanding of the extent of scientific agreement about human-caused climate change. In turn, better understanding of the scientific agreement led to increased belief that climate change is happening and is human-caused and to increased worry about it.”
But How Can We Communicate Effectively?
It’s wise to be honest with ourselves that communicating our concerns about climate change to our circle of friends, family and neighbors can be difficult, though necessary. A good starting point before we attempt that, according to Dr. Renee Lertzman, Royal Roads University, is to focus on ourselves. In a Ted Talk, Lertzman tells us that because climate change can be so overwhelming, it can push us past our threshold of how much stress we can handle. If we’re past that threshold, our communication skills might not be at their best:
“…on one hand, we might go into a sort of collapse, what’s called a chaotic response, which looks like depression, despair, kind of a shutting down. And on the other side of this window is a more rigid response: denial, anger, rigid.”
Neither is optimal for having a rational discussion about global warming with someone who might not want to hear that they need to change.
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It’s also wise to remember that others may be having the same depressed or angry reaction. We might think they don’t believe in climate change, or they don’t care, but they may just be overwhelmed. Lertzman says:
“…it looks like people don’t care, it looks like apathy. And so a lot of folks who are seeing the urgency of the situation are like, “We’ve got to motivate you. We’ve got to get you psyched.” And we become cheerleaders for solutions. Or like, “Here’s the facts, this is happening, wake up.” And these things are actually not inherently bad, because we need solutions and we need to face the facts. But inadvertently, this can backfire and lead to more numbing and inaction….”
So Lertzman advises that we first make sure that we’re in control of our own reactions to such an overwhelming concept, and to recognize that although our concerns are valid, we must also have compassion for what others may be going through. We need to be attuned to ourselves and to those around us before we attempt to have these crucial conversations.
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But then what should that conversation look like? Dr. Katherine Hayhoe, Texas Tech University, has further advice in a video from Yale Climate Connections. She says we need to find something we share with the people we’re trying to talk to, a shared concern over something that will potentially be harmed or destroyed by climate change (what doesn’t that include?), and then talk about our concern about what will happen, rather than what they should do. A shared concern, rather than a judgment, is easier to listen to, and therefore more likely to be considered.
This dovetails with what Dr. Sarah Meyer, University of Washington, tells us in the same video — that the way many people learn is not through having dry facts presented to them, but through stories with emotion. “People respond to emotion; they don’t respond to facts,” she says. Climate change is scary. We can talk about that, and about what we’re afraid of losing, and then listen with empathy to how our friends and neighbors respond.
Expanding the circle
In order to get enough people on board to make the kind of change needed for the climate crisis, we need to communicate (both actively, as in directly talking to people, and passively, through our actions) in such a way that ideas spread as a ripple effect, with the people you talk to influencing others, and those people influencing an ever-widening group. In that way, we’re more likely to reach a tipping point where people interested and committed to taking meaningful steps that will lower our global emissions quickly go from a minority to a majority. It’s possible that you can start such a ripple effect by taking a step and mentioning it to someone, then hoping that act will ripple outward. But we can go farther to make a ripple effect more likely. To do that, we need to take a few well-considered steps:
- First, remember Lertzman’s advice about becoming attuned to our own emotional reactions before trying to communicate with others.
- Second, consider educating, respectfully, the people you talk to about the need for compassion when sharing ideas with others. Any of us can be overwhelmed, and it’s possible that being overwhelmed can look like apathy or anger.
- Remember also to share Meyer’s advice: people respond better to concern and common interests that will eventually be harmed by climate change than they do to cold facts.
Those steps are a great way to help our circle create a ripple effect that will spread outward to larger and larger groups. But is there a way to push past the people we know to communicate with other people in our communities?
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Yes, there is, but we have to take steps to get to know each other before we can start having those climate conversations. And we also have to realize that the current atmosphere in some regions can make initial, important conversations seem impossible; as soon as we mention some of the issues that are most important to us, we give away which camp we’re in, and conversations are shut down.
Nevertheless, neighbors will work with neighbors toward specific, common goals (again, shared values). There are usually smaller communities within any locality, such as churches, parents’ groups, and gardening groups that present opportunities to talk with our neighbors about climate change. Where those communities don’t exist, we can initiate them. Community-based sustainability initiatives (CBSIs) that guide our transition towards a low-carbon society include community gardens, garden sharing, solidarity purchasing groups, tool libraries, and book clubs.
Here are some inspiring CBSI examples from GlobalGiving, Climate Outreach and The Wilderness Society :
- An Achuar Indigenous woman showed local farmers they could replace unsustainable slash and burn practices with more environmentally friendly approaches — chacras integrales.
- Community organization Tulele Peisa developed a plan for raising awareness for the necessity of permanent relocation of some Carteret Islands residents to locations less impacted by climate change, and they planned the actual relocation as well.
- Dr. Rosanna Esparza learned that if she wanted accurate measurements of local pollution levels, she had to pay for the local monitors. So she did, and she worked with the University of Washington and California’s Public Health Institute as well as the environmental organization Earthworks to set up those monitors in people’s homes and to film the local Chevron Cahn processing plant with infrared (FLIR) cameras, leading to the levying of a penalty against Chevron Cahn.
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Improve our listening skills
It’s also important to remember that we need to listen to each other, and we need to make it obvious that we’re listening and that we are appreciative of another person’s needs when they’re expressed. We can use some of the information we learn from each other to discover common goals so that we can work towards the ideas we all agree on, and try to expand our agreements, and, hopefully, our actions.
We can learn some of these communication skills from union organizers. The American Federation of Teachers talks about the importance of listening before attempting to ask people to make any changes to their lives:
We most often concern ourselves with honing how we speak to communicate, but not enough time is devoted to listening—active listening—as a communication skill. In organizing conversation the general rule of thumb is that the organizer should be listening 70 percent of the time and speaking 30 percent of the time. Why?
- The organizer needs to do this much listening in to order to learn enough about the person and his or her issues, concerns, etc. To organize effectively, the organizer needs to know how to “connect” this person’s self interest with the work of the union.
- By listening well, the organizer communicates that the union values what people have to say/their experiences and cares about individual issues and concerns.
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And in organizing conversations, we don’t just listen, we actively listen.
- Active listening–vs. passive or casual listening–makes two-way communication possible.
- It is the type of listening through which the organizer attempts to gather the feelings as well as the facts expressed in the message.
- It is the type of listening in which the organizer attempts to gather visual as well as verbal cues that build better understanding of the message.
- It is the type of listening in which the organizer attempts to control the natural tendency to respond to a message before the message is clearly understood.
- It is the type of listening that also communicates because it acknowledges the worth of the person doing the talking and thereby builds trust and emotional connections.
Like other communication skills, active listening must be practiced in order to be learned. (more information about these techniques here.
If we’re intentional and compassionate in our communications and the way we listen, we have a far better chance of spreading the message of useful and crucial climate steps to a wider and wider audience and eventually creating the level of change we need.
Let’s get started.
Contributors: Mark Stewart, Annette Olson
Funded by Wikimedia Foundation via the project WikiCred in January 2023, grant 2