Yesterday I put up a post on Blue Sky that was a quote (generated by Google Translate and then tidied) from a recent article, in German, about why the “climate movement” is on its arse.
The quote did “well”. It’s this
“I am convinced that the decline and numerical implosion of the climate movement is essentially due to the fact that participating in our activities (demos, camps, actions, etc.) makes most people feel not good, strong, included, but bad , weak and marginalized.”
And I just want to reflect on that a bit more.
For various reasons (biographical, psychological, who cares) I can be familiar with the feeling of new people at meetings. I know, viscerally, what it’s like to not know anyone, to not know what is going on. When I organise meetings, I try to design and facilitate them to be welcoming and re-assuring (I fail in this often, of course) so that the so-called ‘newbies’ can feel welcomed, or at least oriented.
Mostly though, the organisers of events I used to go to were either oblivious, indifferent or actively hostile to making meetings less scary and off-putting. I have blogged and blogged and blogged (endlessly) about this and why it is a Bad Thing. To no effect whatsoever.
The problem is this. Organisers by definition are known and know each other. They rarely if ever feel “unseen” in a meeting, and if they do, they fob it off as a one-off. They are busy, relatively unskilled, and so go for the default setting of meetings (or, worse, mangle the techniques that could work to break down isolation). And they rarely if ever get detailed feedback from people who didn’t have a good time (by definition almost). So they live in a bubble of their praxis being “okay”, and can always find other things to blame for their failures. It’s a mix of information deficit and “hermeneutical insufficiency” TM.
To be clear, there are several killer reasons why the climate movement is toast and has been for ages. Each on their own is fatal. The meetings thing is only one of the killers. You could “fix” that, and still be unsuccessful. Or to speak in the appropriate (past) tense – you could have fixed that and you would still have been unsuccessful.
Some posts (a very very small selection)
- We’ve got to stop meeting like this (the Conversation – contains stuff about ego-fodder, clap clinic etc)
- Standard Public Meeting Syndrome (from 2021)
- Cher, Incentive Structures and Our Inevitable Doom
- Decruitment, sarcasm and the social niceties.me
- Meetings, gatherings or… “fodderings”?
Songs
And it never occurred to me, but presumably Billy Field was giving Cold Chisel a shout out?
Billy Field “You weren’t in love with me”
I’m standing on the outside
I don’t know where I’m going to
But I do know just one thing
I know that it is over with you
But still you’ll never get it right….
marchudson.net 
Marc, the lack of any noticeable action on Environment Degradation one facet of which is ‘climate change”, is two fold. 1) the general public are not prepared to give up for their children and 2) politicians, are not prepared to put their jobs on the line, by antagonising the electorate.
Only when we take our last drink of clean water and our last gasp of clean air, will we realise we’ve left it too late.