Who defines what a 'proper perspective' on climate change is?'
The Prime Minister this week called for ‘proper context and perspective’ on climate change, in response to Greta Thunberg’s condemnation of world leaders for their betrayal of young people: ‘you have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words’.
What exactly is a ‘proper context and perspective’?
Working with complex issues like climate change, we know that there are many perspectives and ways of seeing the issue, across multiple contexts.
There, of course, isn’t just one context or one perspective on climate change, and neither is there just one answer or one solution. Climate change can’t be reduced to one, simple, linear cause and effect relationship.
Our many ways of making sense of the world are shaped through our own conditioning and biases from our culture, education, family, values and life experience. To really make progress on complex social issues we need many perspectives to come together.
Mr Morrison said that he didn’t let his daughters ‘be contorted into one particular view’. But where is the conversation that really allows for the different views and perspectives to be heard together?
We’ve seen on social media how quickly Greta Thunberg’s views are shut down with shameful personal attacks. It’s painful to watch, let alone image how she experiences this.
What would it take for a different type of conversation on what’s needed of all of us, individually and collectively, to meet perhaps our greatest collective challenge? Are we ready for a conversation that includes many perspectives?
The immediacy of the crisis is being acutely and more widely felt. This month the Economist reported that climate change ‘is not a problem that can be put off for a few decades. It is here and now…. delay means that mankind will suffer more harm and face a vastly more costly scramble to make up for lost time’.
We know that for systems to shift the underlying dynamics, such as how power is held and the mental models through which we think, need to shift. Perhaps we are reaching a tipping point, and the work of Greta and many others is shifting where power is held to create space for a different conversation.
The Warm Data Lab process, developed by Nora Bateson, is one example of a process that can hold such a conversation. It provides a trans-contextual conversational structure, where multiple perspectives can shift between the intersecting social, economic and ecological contexts.
Moving away from the binary or linear thinking that often keeps us stuck, this approach fosters and allows for the complexity of the issue to be present across many contexts.
This is one way of increasing the capacity and opportunities to bring multiple voices into the conversation and respond to the heart of the matter.
If you’re interested in exploring Warm Data Labs or other processes that help to make progress on complex issues I’d love to have a conversation, please get in touch!
