THE UNSEEN practical help at last for climate emergency key workers
If you’ve come to be reading this, you will probably be doing so in the expectation that I will be writing about climate change, The Carbon Buddy Manual, and propagation. So, I need to ask you to stick with me while I appear to wander off target initially. Be assured, I’ll get there in the end!
Before I officially became classified as “elderly” I used to ply my profession as an organisational psychologist. Given that most people rarely if ever come across the breed, I’m often asked “what on earth did you actually DO”. I reply cryptically with something like “I made the invisible visible”. What I mean by this is that it is not always obvious why things are not working. All I and my clients knew was that the organisation, or team, or boss and staff member were not functioning effectively. Worse, they couldn’t seem to find a way to improve things. They were stuck.
In these circumstances, the problems lie hidden beneath the surface and have to be teased out. It was my job as counsellor and diagnostician to help them do that. Neither are the solutions always obvious. A mixture of knowledge, creativity, persistence, resources, planning and sometimes a dose of luck all help to shape a way out of the problem. It was my job to be the catalyst, the spark that helped them to coax a workable solution into life.
This idea of making the invisible visible came back to me when I heard the Pope (or rather his translator) on the radio talking about “The Unseen”. For him these were the people all around the world who struggle for their everyday existence and who fall off our radar. Closer to home, recent seismic events from Brexit to Covid 19, have actually served to bring some of these groups in our western societies back onto the radar. The invisible have, at least for the moment and we hope for ever, become more visible.
Our Covid 19 response, a real, serious and highly threatening global emergency, has made visible huge cohorts of key workers who have been unseen by virtue of being taken for granted. We have been forcibly reminded not only how many of them there are, but how much our civilisation is dependent on their skills and their singular character traits. These are people who for most of the time, work quietly, purposefully and powerfully in the background getting on with stuff, DOING stuff that stops the whole societal machine from disintegrating and grinding to a halt.
And now I get to my point. Whilst the climate crisis has understandably been pushed off the agenda during the pandemic, it has not gone away, nor will it go away. We know that the climate emergency response has to be scaled up exponentially in two ways. Firstly, in terms of the number of people actively working on driving down their personal pollution. And secondly the nature of the response also has to be much more effective. By that I mean that the actions we take have to have a larger and crucially speedier impact than hitherto. Time is short. We need to see results….and quickly.
These thoughts lead me to ask the question “who are the keyworkers in our response to this other real, serious global threat, the climate emergency?” Whilst the UN is orchestrating high level collaboration between nations, and governments are beginning albeit in a stuttering and disconnected way, to articulate relevant policies, these actions are rather remote for our climate crisis front line workers. Even this week’s amazing online London Climate Action Week (LCAW) has little to offer this target audience. High level policy responses, important though they are, are blind to the needs of our climate emergency key workers. They remain invisible, taken for granted and struggling, while the policy makers talk. They are ordinary citizens these frontline key workers in the climate emergency. Millions of ordinary citizens. These are people who are unlikely to protest on the streets or attend meetings of activists or experts. They prefer to work quietly, purposefully and powerfully in the background getting on with stuff. They want to DO practical stuff, not shout, argue or debate. But when they come to try to do stuff, they hit a host of invisible barriers to climate action. They quickly get stuck. So they give up. Which begs the question, what really helps to turn these disabling feelings of powerlessness into excitement, positive thinking, a sense of urgency and effective action?
Recognise the syndrome? I’ve been working hard for ten years now on finding ways to take climate action, to drive down my own personal pollution. I know quite a lot about those unseen barriers, practical, technical, psychological, behavioural, financial at first hand. We will not get the exponential scaling up of climate action, unless we can find ways to bust these barriers faced by individuals. Yes national collaboration is important, yes the right policies are important, but the real traction has to come from those millions of ordinary citizens making substantial cuts in their carbon footprints….and quickly. Helping them remove those barriers is what The Carbon Buddy Project is about. My starting point is to provide a unique step by step guide in the form of The Carbon Buddy Manual. It’s practical, it's beautifully designed, and it’s a good read too. It is the spark. Please buy copies and persuade others to do so! This purchase could be your first step, your first small investment in leaving a viable lifestyle behind for future generations.
