Thursday 30th January found me in Glossop, catching up with an old (in every sense) friend. And then being one of the old white men in front a sizeable audience. I enjoyed myself, not (I hope) at the expense of 30 people, but in collaboration with them
The event was the latest Curiosity Club in Glossop, organised by the redoubtable Jonathan Atkinson (another old friend). It had moved from the Glossop Community Bookshop to a bigger venue – the Labour Club- thanks to the big name attractions, i.e. me, and also some guy called Kevin Anderson (also an old friend).
Jonathan very generously allowed me to basically front-seat and back-seat, facilitate. In a longer blog I will explain what I did, why I did it, how I did it, but that’s for the facilitation geeks.
For now, suffice to say that after Jonathan’s intro we had an explicit two minute “talk to the person next to you, ideally someone you don’t know, about who you are, why you came.”
I then spoke for about 20 minutes on the history of climate change, from 1824, to 2015
This took in in Frenchmen, Americans, Swedes, Brits, Margaret Thatcher, (boo hiss, this was hosted at the Labor club, after all), and culminating with the 2015 Paris Agreement. The audio and transcript of this will go up in due course. In the meantime – check out All Our Yesterdays, my climate histories project. Bluesky is @allouryesterdays.bsky.social).
Kevin overlapped this time period, but basically was laying out just how much carbon dioxide we have put into the atmosphere, just how little “carbon budget” we have left and what the consequences of our past and present failures will now be. There was a lot of new material alongside the old hits, over the course of an hour.
Towards the end of his presentation, people were beginning to chime in with questions so when we went into QandA, I got everyone to collaborate for a couple of minutes on turning half a question to a whole question, or a five sentence question into a two sentence question. I then chose to initially restrict it to people who had not yet spoken, (and then over to people who did that.)
First question was, both entirely predictably and entirely sensibly was
I just want to ask, What can we do? What would you recommend we do?“
Here, because this is my blog, is my answer to that.
marc hudson 3:59
Okay, so the first question is, what can we do? I’ll go first. I’ll keep this short. I have hours of opinions on this.
Number one is, don’t see yourself as isolated, even if you feel it. You on your own can’t do much, but you as part of a small group can. The problem with small groups is they often spiral into like hopeless, little despairing cults. So you have to find other people who are on the same wavelength as you.
You have to choose winnable goals, even if that’s a bit reformist, and you have to expect to be condescended and ignored by politicians and civil servants
And I speak as someone who tried to get Manchester City Council to act on climate change for I think it was almost 20 years, and you can get them to make promises. They will pledge Net Zero, they will pledge with some pleasure, and will be very grateful to you for giving them the opportunity to make headline-grabbing pledges.
When you persist via letters to the newspaper or Freedom of Information Act requests, and you say to them, “hang on, you made this promise, and you took all the credit, and here we are, a year later, and you’re not even making the policy, let alone implementing it,” you will become the spawn of Satan, and they will character assassinate you.
They will ignore you, they will smear you, and they will find other people who are more pliable.
And that doesn’t sound very inspiring to you, but if you are going to get together with other people and try and change things, that’s what you have to expect. And it’s not a Labour thing, it’s not a Liberal Democrat thing, it’s not a Conservative thing, and it’s probably not even a Green Party thing. I’ve not spoken to any activists in private or Bristol, but I suspect the dynamic is the same, because it’s not just the political party in charge. It’s the culture of the civil service as well.
And I haven’t even talked about doing stuff with business.
But if you go into it blind, and if you go into it thinking, “Oh, well, you know, we’ll have a march, we’ll have a petition, and everything will be fine,” you will burn yourself out in six months, and you burning yourself out will send a signal to other people who are thinking about getting involved, not to bother. So that will be worse than useless.
Does that help?
The Q and A was recorded and I have run it through transcription software and will then tidy it up. An annotated transcript the audio and will go up (1) This will take a little while, and I’ll also transcribe and annotate both my talk and Kevin’s talk. When those things are live, the links will appear in the appropriate place on this blog post.
The stamina of the attendees was impressive. We were still going after two hours. Explaining the “peak end” effect, I got everyone to give the speakers, organisers and themselves a round of applause and then urged them to find someone else, that they didn’t know, to talk to.
Lots of people stuck around to ask questions and to talk among themselves, because I had and I think the “coercive mingling” that I insisted upon helped that process slightly.
All in all, I got to do my two things – talk about how much we have known for so long (the whole point of All Our Yesterdays) AND to show that with some relatively easy tricks, a public event can be a genuine Meeting, instead of a Listening.
I would be super-keen to hear from anyone who was there what they thought (and yes, even if they thought the facilitation was overbearing/cloying/self-aggrandising whatever).
Footnotes
(1) The voices of the people who asked questions substituted out for their privacy, since they knew they were being recorded, but they didn’t ever get told what the material would be used for, and it would have had a chilling effect anyway, because some people might have chosen not to be appearing on the internet, even without their names,)
marchudson.net 
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