A poem. V'ahavta by Aurora Levins Morales. Say these words when you lie down and when you rise up, when you go out and when you return. In times of mourning and in times of joy. Inscribe them on your doorposts, embroider them on your garments, tattoo them on [...]
Black Lives Matter! I can't breathe. George Floyd. No justice/no peace. Defund the police. Protestors. Looters. Riots. Law and order. Activism is not terrorism. Movements and causes rise and fall based on the language they use. Not only the current events, but the climate and environmental movements as well. [...]
"Do you want to eat your peas with a fork or a knife?" is a well known false choice that parents use with kids. In either choice, hopefully, they will eat their peas. False choices are a particular type of frame. They are used a lot with both climate [...]
The death toll does matter, but I want to tell you a story. When I was a kid, my father stopped to get gas at a country station. I saw an old man sitting in the shade outside. He was dressed in a torn hunting vest and ragged clothes. [...]
I get a hundred climate emails a day. Most of them are issues-based. For example, I recently read that the Trump administration has rolled back, or in the process of rolling back 108 environmental/climate regulations. Each of these is an issue in itself. All of these rollbacks combined are [...]
We need some good news during this period of national chaos. There were three news stories this week that could be missed during the pandemic, but together they signal the moment of convergence for clean low cost renewable energy. Convergence means the merging of distinct things. In this case, [...]
I am captivated by maps. They possess some magical pull on my imagination. Names take on a mystical significance with the rhythm of their syllables; the Serengeti, Ngorongoro, Kyoto and the Cauca. This could just be a romantic reflection, but I am curious about our human attraction to horizons. [...]
As climate communicators, we are all struggling with three main questions during the pandemic. The first is when is an appropriate time to restart our messaging. The second is what messages work best during these times. The third is which audience targets yield the biggest benefits. A number of [...]
I’d just finished giving testimony to an administrative law judge on why a new dirty tar sands pipeline was a bad idea. It is the climate equivalent of putting 40 black smoking coal plants in my state. There was a group of Union Local 49 guys in yellow t-shirts [...]
Remember when some kid told you that tennis balls had poison gas in them, and if you cut them open you would die? This became a widespread belief, or credo among my childhood friends. A credo may have some elements of truth, or sound true, or it can be [...]
