Are you a (climate) realist yet?

Would you say you’re a realist?

According to Oxford Dictionaries, that would be ‘A person who accepts a situation as it is and is prepared to deal with it accordingly’.

On 30th June 2020, I took part in the Climate Coalition’s virtual lobby. I spent an hour on Zoom with my MP and around twenty other constituents, talking about climate reality and climate solutions.

The reality in 2020 is that we have already seriously destabilised our climate (the one that keeps us alive) and we have major work to do to buy ourselves time to

• adapt and survive
• restore as much stability as we can.

BUT the reality in 2020 is also that there are endless impactful ways to do this work – regenerative land management, fossil fuel divestment, retrofitting, community wealth building, expansion of renewables, lobbying and protest, policymaking…

The list goes on.

This means there is climate work for all of us, and that everyone can excel at some part of it. On some counts we just tweak our activities a little and we’ve done our bit. At other times we need to change our whole career, or way of life, to wind up on the right side of history.

A realist accepts all of this. And a realist who cares does the work. Don’t we all have reasons to care? Self-preservation, love for our children, love of nature… That list is a long one too.

Talking the walk

But beyond the why, we also need to know how. As George Marshall of Climate Outreach has said, under climate change ‘language has a lot of heavy lifting to do’. Education, discussion and effective sharing of wide-ranging expertise are more important than ever.

That’s why I choose to focus on written materials that explore social and environmental solutions of all stripes. I research, write and edit for a broad range of clients, enhancing their pitches and press releases, working documents and websites, as they move from ideas to implementation.

It’s very easy to be despondent at the challenges ahead, and dealing with these feelings is all part of the task. But let’s not stop there when there is so much more we can do – let’s be realists in action.

You’ll find more information about my services here, and I’d love to hear from you if you think better written resources could help you do more good at work.