HOW TO BUILD BRIDGES, NOT BURN THEM
This evening we hosted a really engaging workshop with Aryanisha Lawes for members of POWER focusing on techniques for connecting with people who don't believe in Climate Change - which is certainly something many of us here at the Power Station can find quite stressful.
Aryanisha is a graduate of Cambridge University, a devoted Buddhist and long-established coach - and she’s brilliant at helping people with this sort of thing.
An excerpt below from a really engaging and thought provoking hour.
"I just think we need to broaden out and also just try and you know, I spent a lot of time visiting people in their homes because I was talking to people in fuel poverty and trying to get them sorted and you know, a lot of people are in financial crisis. and stuff.
This is why it's important to get clear, like when we talk about people who don't believe in climate change, which groups are we talking about at the moment, I often come back to people from very low incomes, who are really struggling financially in discriminated groups. You know, I've got that kind of person in mind when I'm thinking about this. They've just got quite different things that they're concerned about at the moment, they're just worried about how am I going to pay for my heating over winter? They're not worried about consuming less energy. They're like, how do I consume enough so I don't die, like freezing in my own home this year, like that's a real problem for them.
And I think there's a very good book called Why We disagree about climate change by Mike Hulme who was up in the University of East Anglia. I did my third year dissertation a lot around his book, and I loved it. And it's got lots of different ideas, but one of it is like how people's sense of how responsible they are for like future generations. And that, in a way is a kind of religious or spiritual belief that you hold about, do you think that you are, you should be responsible for people in seven generations time, you might have a different view about that. Some people don't feel like they have a choice, but it's like, okay, well, I'm not worried about two generations down the line, I'm just worried about like, surviving, surviving today. I don't have time to talk to you about climate change, because I'm just working out how the hell I'm gonna feed my kids.
Mike Hulme talks about things from these all these different perspectives. Some of its to do with how we view science, others to do with interest, I think was this last chapter was around a different religion, we all have different kinds of philosophies and spiritual, you know, kind of spiritual frameworks of being human and what we think, who we think we're responsible for, do we have moral obligations to people in other countries, for example, or seven generations down the line?
So I think I liked how he approached things. I'm just in a way, I'm just trying to drop in a few ideas into just kind of expand people's ways of thinking."
