The books and sports solution to climate change
Not what to read, but why to read. And listen, and watch. And so on.
I had been meaning to do a simple ABC of the media that I consume in my fourth Substack post. But a transatlantic conversation with a valued old colleague of mine, plus a blooming of new articles about the impact of AI and ChatGPT, has led me to write instead about why to consume media in a particular way, and that simple rundown can wait until I get a couple of things written.
One theme our conversation hit upon was how people can end up with a relatively narrow active* (ie not Friends or The Crown) focus for their attention. The overwhelming gravity of the climate issue, plus its complexity, often leads to this in the environmental space.1
Wider trends and context are either missed off altogether or not linked into the core issues. This is one reason why those dramatic charts suggesting that the world is going to be consumed in a fireball of climate warming can lead to the apparent choice of action – and the entire resulting mindset – being sacrifice or doom.
Activists, who gain their latent energy from the fervent belief in their interpretation of issue x, obviously fit into this category. Researchers are also susceptible to this trap, especially if their minds have been trained by doctorate research to over-consider one tiny slice of an issue and beat the living hell out of it.
Trouble is, as I argued in parts one, two and three of my initial Substack series, this means that environmentalism as a whole is still captured by a mindset that is too narrow and inappropriate to the challenges of climate action in 2023 and beyond.
This is obviously bad in terms of the way they communicate what they’re doing. Doom or Apocalypse anybody? Not today thank you. We need broader mindsets, able both to articulate how the clean energy revolution is going to affect us and how we can seize these opportunities, and to communicate this effectively to others so that they are both aware and galvanised.
Part of the solution is to consume media in a different way, but deliberately, so that it affects how you think about the environment.
First of all, you need a conception of deeper time, and of systemic shifts. That’s analytical history in its widest sense2, where a system evolves, changes, is challenged, responds, interacts, responds to opportunities and so on. This might involve societies, polities, economies, organisms, companies, ideas, technologies, institutions, football teams and the like. What’s worked and what hasn’t?
In pure human historical terms there are plenty of examples. The Black Death, famously, killed between a third and a half of Europe’s population, leading to all sorts of impacts in areas like productivity and political rights. Processes of ‘modernisation’ or ‘industrialisation’, such as the Meiji Restoration in Japan or the great leaps made by Singapore following its bitter birth in 1965, are similarly useful. As is the entire world’s varying responses to the end of great empires or the General Crises of the 17th century.
But why stop there? Follow a sports team over time and you’ll gain an understanding of highs and lows, responses to challenges, personnel and tactical adaptations. Look at recruitment, business models, succession planning, the rebuilding after one set of successful players starts to age. How do they calibrate ambition? How do they communicate with fans, especially as ambitions change (sometimes downward). Even a flourishing team, a Guardiola’s Barcelona or Ferguson’s Manchester United, can be instructive. Some have suggested studying rock bands to pick over the comparisons between their challenges and those facing corporations. Build a mental model and see how robust it is.
The other main part of the solution is simply to consume lots of different media. Look for connections, similarities, contrasts. Make a habit of reading bits of a newspaper that you normally skip: the modern dance reviews, or the column about poker. Pick up a book that introduces you to a bit of history or an issue that you’ve never really thought about. Listen to a podcast or watch a program. Go to a concert. Cook a dish using ingredients or techniques that are new. Expose yourself.
This second element is particularly useful in journalism. As I’ve mentioned before, newsrooms can be horribly siloed, whereas events in the real world rarely are. Look at sports reporting. Its bare bones are little more than a results service. But build up context and trajectory and you get something more interesting. Add in elements of the wider world, of business, of society and culture, and suddenly you find out why sports are so elemental in the modern world, why their appeal is way beyond doing something interesting with a ball.
Environmental journalism falls into this trap all too easily, bordered by domain knowledge, abstract science and numbers, and the essentially prophetic nature of climate action. But in this how phase of environmental issues we need a keen understanding of the systemic changes that are needed to meet climate targets by recasting entire modern fossil fuel economies to run on clean energy.
That’s impossible without seeing environmental journalism as something much broader: it’s seeing the environmental essence within other types of story, rather than the institutions and processes and protests that currently constitute so much environmental reporting. It could be about geopolitics, business, society, whatever. Almost everything is an environmental story, and almost every journalist needs to be an environmental journalist. The days of specialists will continue, as there’s so much to make sense of in the more abstruse debates and processes, and communicate to audiences, but they’re the hard core at the centre rather than all-encompassing.
The other reason why this is important has surfaced in the whole AI debate. What on earth do we have to do to stay relevant and employed in the next few decades, as AI applications become more powerful and all-encompassing? Simple: be more human. This useful piece makes the critical argument that an obvious area of development like secretarial and office work can be divided into AI-relevant tasks, and those that are more human. Good secretaries will be more valuable rather than less in the age of AI taking over lots of secretarial tasks.
To continue, technical skills are important, but rather than coding as an end in itself (soon to be eaten by AI), it’s more about linking technology to humans in pursuit of an end. Learning coding might be far less important than an analytical, eyes-wide-open university education that focuses on liberal arts areas such as literature or history.
So there you have it. Whether you’re an environmental journalist or somebody hoping to have a job in 2035, read widely and analytically, look at history, follow a sports team or a favourite band, and plug your brain in. That’s not much of a hill to climb, is it? And it’s a long way from doom or sacrifice.
I’m a journalist, author and think-tank-comms worker. I’ve lived and worked all over the world, and I’m currently in Italy. My free substack is aimed at unpicking a few thoughts about the world of environmental actions/communications/journalism, but I’ll branch out more broadly - probably looking at how to understand countries and places by getting out and walking around them. Get in touch at nicholaswalton99-at-gmail.com, or on Twitter @npw99.
Another area is the EU-Brussels Bubble.
Not just kings and queens and battles.