Effective Climate Communication

To begin, I was a little confused what the speaker, Kari Norgaard,  was going to be talking about. It turns out it was my favorite speaker that I have attended all year, mainly because I could easily understand all of her points and I really enjoyed all of the points she made and agreed with them. She is a professor at Orgeon University for sociology and environmental studies. I liked how she combined the two studies, because I believe there is a certain way that climate change should be discussed, and the way most people talk about it today is ineffective. She talked about how to effectively and appropriately talk about climate change in the hopes of gaining more people who are willing to aid in the fight against climate change.

Norgaard's first point was to talk about climate change skeptics. The way she described it made me think how ridiculous it is that people don't believe in what is happening to our world and its atmosphere. Then I thought about it more deeply, and realized I'm one of those people. It's not that I don't believe that we are polluting our world, but I do turn away from it and tend to push people away who talk to me about it. She then explained why there are so many people like me, and it relates to cultural relativism. Our culture tends to be lazy and gives up on hope easily. We are resistant to change, and don't like things that threaten our way of life now. It's hard work to make our planet safer environmentally, and we don't like that we have to change the way we even throw away our trash just to fix it.

My favorite point that she brought up was the innappropriate timing of many climate change discussions. When we're in a relaxed setting, closed off from the pressures of the outside world, we don't like to talk about such heavy topics. We want to be able to forget that in 50 years we may not be able to even live on Earth anymore, and forget the struggles of everyday life. That's why when people bring up climate change at a bar, or somewhere relaxed people tend to dismiss the severity of it. I know that when people talk to me about it on a Saturday night out at a frat, I actually walk away from them. So if we change the way we talk about it, more people will join the cause.