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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

Peterson Toscano

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What Renovating My Website Taught Me About Climate Change

Oblique view of wall mixed media installation at Atlanta's Center for Civil and Human Rights
2014 (c) Keisha E. McKenzie

You may have noticed some radical changes to this site in the last month.

Yes, I’m renovating! Please excuse the dust.

Last winter, I reviewed all of my web spaces, culled a few, downgraded others, and created an upgrade plan for this one. I literally drew out several new pages with fine-tip Sharpies and hand-lettered captions, set some goals for the site, and revised the content structure.

But I didn’t implement the upgrade plan.

“Stay in your lane” can be a noble excuse for inaction.

I didn’t implement the plan because I didn’t think I was qualified to. I thought it would be too technically complicated for the time I had to spend. And I figured it’d be smarter to outsource the project and focus on the communication and development work that was making me money. I know what it’s like to train for years in an area and then watch a total naif try to out-expert you. I didn’t want to be that naif.

So for much of last year, I swept up around the site’s edges, maintained the installed software—something I taught myself 2 years ago—and periodically wondered if the universe would send me someone else to create the new site. I have several friends and friends-of-friends who are trained web developers, and it seemed wise to call on their expertise.

The specialists know, right?

Around mid-year, I asked one of these specialists to take on the job, not as a freebie but as a paid project. But specialists are busy specializing and nothing else happened after “Yes, I’ll get back to you.”

This January, I dusted off my old drawings, reminded myself of why the reboot would a good idea, yet still didn’t implement it. Friends suggested new developers and I followed up with a referral from a client. But that second developer also failed to respond.

“I can do this myself with time,” I now told Facebook. “I don’t want to do it myself, which is why I’m looking for a developer to do it for me.” I also decided that if I couldn’t find someone by March, I’d spend the budget on myself.

Well.

I didn’t contract with someone, and I didn’t wait until March after all. Instead I did my own work and my reward is the budget I would have used to pay a specialist. A very merry unbirthday to me.

“If you want a job well-done, do it yourself” only works in some conditions.

When I was a child, I learned the phrase “If you want a job well-done, do it yourself.” The adults around me set it to a catchy tune and it also involved whistling. I haven’t heard it for years but it bubbled past my lips several times once I decided to take action to improve my site.

I bought into the Genesis Framework and StudioPress, selected two themes for comparison, narrowed down to one based on a features analysis, installed it, compared the demo site to my designs, added new widgets and plug-ins, researched how-tos, and did with reasonable ease what just a few weeks beforehand I’d hoped that someone else, anyone else, would have done on my behalf.

We can, many of us, do a lot more by ourselves than we think we can. When we’re looking at well-defined, concrete problems, it’s usually not that hard, and the only variable is time. Either the plug-in installs properly or it doesn’t. Either the site loads or it doesn’t. Change the default color. Shuffle the menu order. Upload new sidebar text.

When problems are more complex, ill-defined, or wicked, even the most intrepid individual will flounder.

I shared the classic definition of “wicked problems” in December: when we’re talking about wicked problems,

  • issues are “nested or consequent to other problems”
  • information is “not well-defined”
  • decision-makers don’t “share common values”
  • piecemeal approaches “change the system and [produce] unexpected outcomes deemed worse than the initial concern” and
  • “the problem [is] either difficult or impossible to solve.” (Churchman, 1967)

Climate change is a wicked problem in every possible sense. It’s global, but affects different global regions in different ways and to different degrees—literally. It’s rooted in scientific processes and engineering outcomes, but is also the child of several thick socio-political problems: uneven resource distribution, multi-generational poverty, markets of privatized profit and shared risk, technology developed without long-term human impact assessments, scapegoating, marginalization, and various forms of racism. Along the way, it also intersects with problems like emergency planning, disaster mitigation, political scapegoating, food production and distribution, water and waste management, and urban and suburban design.

No single person, no matter how brilliant, trained, or determined, could resolve the human- and other bio-impacts of climate change on their own. No one would have the right to. The challenge is too big. Too complicated. Spans too much territory. Affects too many people.

In these cases, we can’t outsource action to the specialists, and we can’t throw up our hands and do it alone.

We have to work with others.

The frontline of the People's Climate March (2014) | Photo credit: NYC Environmental Justice Alliance
The frontline of the People’s Climate March (2014) | Photo credit: NYC Environmental Justice Alliance

About 10 years ago, I was working in a civil engineering ethics program when two of my colleagues asked me to work with them on an environmental rhetoric project. We were in West Texas at the time, a region of the US that’s suffering from a shrinking water table, an expanding population, and strong values-based resistance to environmental science. (Climate scientist Dr. Katherine Hayhoe talks about these regional concerns in Years of Living Dangerously.)

So the three of us—a philosopher, a science rhetorician, and a technical communicator—started to explore how people’s values influenced their approach to the environment. “Creation care” wasn’t yet hot, but I did discover that my denomination had published two position statements promoting responsible human engagement with the rest of the natural world. And they were quite pointed statements too.

I quoted from those statements last weekend during a panel workshop with Peterson Toscano (Climate Stew), J Mase III, and Rev. Nancy Wilson (Metropolitan Community Churches) at the 2015 Creating Change conference in Denver, CO.

We talked about the knowledge, skills, and competencies that LGBTQ people have developed over the years:

  • the power to push through stubborn political and religious denial and the many deaths that silence and complicity can bring
  • the ability to self-educate, build solidarity movements, and strengthen humane care networks that support the most vulnerable
  • knowledge of how to base sustainable action on healthy self-affirmation rather than fear
  • attunement to justice, access, structures of privilege and oppression, and what it takes to include and mobilize the whole of a community, not just the favored, moneyed few; and
  • concern for people beyond our cliques: pandemics, genocides, and super-storms have no respect for geopolitical borders, and so-called fictive kinship (what we call “chosen family”) saves our lives and boosts our well-being whether we’re in the midst of crisis or not.

We asked the other people in the room who they called on for support during crisis, and what motivated them to care about climate change. They found it much easier to respond to the first question than the second, and there may be a lesson in that.

People move people: people respond to others and people need others. “Who I’d call if I needed help evacuating my town” isn’t an abstract question. It’s a high-risk scenario, and may be scary to think about, but it’s also quite easy to answer because it forces us to imagine the faces of our friends and those we care about.

Over the last few years, climate change activists have moved away from featuring fluffy and carnivorous polar bears because we live and choose how to live with our families, friends, and fellow humans in mind. It’s people who motivate us—for better or worse—and when we see the “human side” of an issue, that’s when it becomes real to us.

I’m not sorry I went ahead and did my website update myself: I strengthened my confidence and stretched myself. I have no less respect for the specialists who can do this work faster or more fluidly. And yet it reminded me that the independence that works well at the level of the simple or linear problem may be a massive liability on complex issues, and on the things that matter most, I can’t afford to go it alone. None of us can.

Lately, there haven’t been many rewards for people who work across borders and social boundaries for the good of all people—but whether the topic is police violence or climate change, that’s precisely what we’ll need much more of.

“To change everything, we need everyone.” —350.org

That’s absolutely right.

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The Change We Want Is Not Inevitable

Today, several US states have observed Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. The annual commemoration usually means anodyne reflections on love driving out hate, a corporate-friendly and mostly un-challenging King, and wholesale disregard of the fact that he died only because his countrymen and government considered him a threat.

But hashtags like #MLKAlsoSaid and #ReclaimMLK are providing a counter-narrative, with contributions from the speeches and writings that haven’t made the soundbite cut on TV or radio this week. This time last year, I wrote about being driven to act by internal conviction and hope, not by anticipated results or outcomes.

Today, I came across a transcript of one of King’s last speeches, given at Ohio Northern University in January 1968. King is absolutely clear on how “racism” breaks down into tangible and resolvable obstacles to the ability of Black Americans to inhabit the freedom that’s their birthright: police brutality, bias violence and vandalism, justice miscarriages, disproportionate poverty, substandard housing, and both un- and under-employment.

“There are all too many people who say that only time can solve the problem. They feel that there is something miraculous in the very flow of time that will cure all evils, and I’ve heard it a great deal. There are always those who will sincerely say to me and our allies in the white community and those of us who work in civil rights that we are pushing things too fast. They have a way of saying this: ‘Be patient, and just be nice and continue to pray and in a hundred or two hundred years the problem will work itself out because only time can solve the problem.’

“I think that there is an answer to that myth, and it is that time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. I’m sad to say that I’m absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the extreme rightists of our nation, the reactionaries of our nation have often used time much more effectively than the forces of good will. It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people who sit around and say, ‘Wait on time.’ Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. Without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So it is necessary to help time and to realize that the time is always ripe to do right.” —Martin Luther King, Jr., at Ohio Northern University, January 11, 1968 (emphasis added)

Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability.

This morning I chatted with Peterson Toscano, the actor and principal writer behind the hopeful climate change podcast Climate Stew. Thanks to our reading of Merchants of Doubt (Oreskes/Conway) and Don’t Even Think About It (Marshall), we have an ongoing discussion about whether the climate movement benefits from debating economic doctrines like market regulation, subsidies, and which fuel sources to reduce or jettison. Must all of these debates be settled before we can take action? Can we afford “to wait?”

A green and white hand-lettered sign reads "We all need a healthy climate." The word "People" and the names of non-human species surround this text.
“We all need a healthy climate.” At Columbus Circle, NYC.
In their own way and for their own reasons, market advocates like The Economist are now proposing an end to fossil fuel subsidies—an outcome long proposed by traditional environmentalists who’ve worried that governments around the world have propped up an unsustainable fuel source and thus undercut the development of new and cleaner technologies and distribution infrastructure.

If these newer proposals find good soil among decision-makers who’ve been resistant to other arguments, then as infuriating as that turn might be, we’ll still benefit from it. We’ll benefit because this crisis isn’t a partisan one. Climate change affects us all of us in different ways, and so will the process of mitigating the worst impacts and adjusting to a new, more sustainable normal. Most of us aren’t just entangled with fossil fuel production by direct use; we’re also enmeshed with it because whole swathes of our lives are dependent on them too. Fossil fuels run the internet companies’ giant data and server complexes, and fuel the trucks that our food companies use to move our fresh vegetables from farmland to grocery stores every day. We can’t radically reshape our relationship to these products without radically reshaping our lives.

So disrupting the prime place of fossil fuels means whole-life disruption. But most of us find whole-life disruption frightening and repulsive. Denial can mitigate our discomfort with change, at least for a time, and yet when it comes to the Earth staying habitable and hospitable for our kind of life, time is the very thing we don’t have.

During our workshop at the Creating Change conference in Colorado next month, Peterson, Nancy Wilson, J Mase III, and I will guide a room of people into reflection on how we can face up to the ecological challenge in front of us without detouring into denial and without losing either hope or humor.

I’ll share more about our session in a few weeks!

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Reader Review 12: Systems and Progress

The Reader Review series was a 2014 experiment in rounding up of some of the most thoughtful or provocative articles and videos I came across online. I’m still deciding whether to continue it in 2015, but either way, this will be the last edition of the year.

Thank you for reading along with me!

Brentin Mock draws a firm and clear connection between air pollution and state violence:
Why do Americans’ perspectives vary so much?

Grist: “Why environmentalists should support the Black Lives Matter protests” (Brentin Mock)

The Grist has a wonderful writer in environmental justice activist Brentin Mock. In his latest column, Mock reflects on his own health, the Eric Garner case, and why environmentalists should recognize their stake in the protests against police brutality and racial inequity. Mock’s point on air quality disparities is one I learned about this March thanks to a Mother Jones article on controversial research that correlated air pollutants with race and class.

What I’m pleased about it is that Brentin isn’t the only writer to draw connections between climate action and racial justice concerns. The climate coalition 350.org published a similar case earlier this year in an article titled “Why the Climate Movement Must Stand with Ferguson.” Peterson Toscano, a performance artist who has been touring the country performing his one-man play on climate action, hope, and human resilience, also highlighted Brentin’s article on his podcast site earlier this week.

By the way, if you’re not yet subscribed to Peterson’s weekly podcast, Climate Stew, you’re missing out on a real treat: vivid characters and some powerful glimpses of our collective future. “Climate Stew,” Peterson says, “takes a serious look at global warming, but won’t scare the snot out of you. I want to give people space to think about the roles we’ll play in the new world that’s coming, how we will come together and what it’ll take to keep this a safe planet for humans, coffee, and pasta, not just for polar bears.”

And how about that #TortureReport? I can’t bear to read it.

Christine Amanpour, via Twitter
Christiane Amanpour on #TortureReport, via Twitter

I’m pretty close to oversaturated with stories of abuse, state violence whether local or federal, and non-accountability for human harm. I watched the Eric Garner video once, and that was once too many for me.

Yesterday morning it struck me that the common link between public executions, town picnics at lynchings, ISIS beheading videos, the Janae/Ray Rice photographs and recording, and the Garner photographs and video is our willingness to re-witness the moment of violence over and over and over again with no higher value than objectifying fascination.

I don’t want to participate in that. And that’s why although I couldn’t help but hear about the release of the report on US torture via the CIA, I haven’t gone that step further to read the full report for myself.

But I’ll refer you to a few people who have:

“The first question I asked when I saw the Abu Ghraib pictures was, ‘My god, where were the doctors when all this was going on? How did the government turn off the protests from the medical system?’ What I discovered instead was that the doctors and psychologists were built into the interrogational abuses. So it wasn’t a matter of turning off their protests, it was a matter of a structured system of complicity.” —Dr. Stephen Miles, Doctors Who Torture

I did notice which band of activists had been more or less silent about local torture via police #BlackLivesMatter but threw itself into full outrage over federal torture via the Agency in #TortureReport. And I found that baffling given the issues and stakes were the same, just expressed at different levels of government.

CREW’s Daniel Schuman asked, “Why isn’t the debate about the damage US torture created, not the concerns about its occurring becoming public?” Good question, Daniel.

Before the report was released, I wrote about the way the United States has instrumentalized human life and bodily integrity, considering state assaults “acceptable trades” in the course of statecraft and order-keeping. The observation only became more salient once activists began posting excerpts and footnotes from the CIA record.

But on Twitter I also raised the question of addressing the federal expression of violence and dismissing its local counterpart. Who benefits, I asked, from our addressing only one level of analysis and our reticence to draw connections across the levels of our system?

My guess is that the system has adapted to cynicism about it at federal level: we easily joke about a sluggish Congress and shrug about bought-and-paid-for legislators. These jokes and shrugs do not motivate deep change. The macro level of the system expects participant distrust and accounts for it.

But local engagement is much more threatening. This is the level at which most of us live our lives; most of us don’t get to work in Congress, the executive, or the judiciary. Most of us live our lives at the level of the supermarket, the cinema, the children’s schools, the city council, and our doctor’s office. When citizens engage governance at these levels, and when activists block activity at these levels, it is much harder to pretend that life is normal and all is well.

My hope is that those who get a taste for impact at the local level will begin to shift their cynicism about whether ordinary people can influence the other levels of our society.

If you want to learn more about analyzing several levels of a complex problem at once, read these examples.

In 1967, systems scientist C. West Churchman popularized the definition of “wicked problems”: problems in social systems where definitions were “ill-formulated,” where issues were nested or consequent to other problems, where information was not well-defined, where decision-makers did not share common values, where piecemeal approaches changed the system and produced unexpected outcomes deemed worse than the initial concern, and where the problem was either difficult or impossible to solve.

If that doesn’t describe recurring social questions like immigration, economic stability, policing strategy, climate change, and asymmetrical war, I don’t know what does.

So take a look at two articles. The first, an editorial from Elsevier’s Landscape and Urban Planning Journal, reviews the literature on wicked problems, notes that we seem to be co-evolving with wickedness or complexity in our environment, and highlights the AAA approach to these kinds of problems: awareness, acceptance, and adaptation. The second, a recent conference paper, is a careful example of multi-level systemic analysis applied to Mexico’s drug trade. The author maps the problem’s precipitating factors and the result looks like a hornet’s nest. That is entirely appropriate!

This is the kind of analysis that people who intend to produce deep change need to do, do early, and do often. There’s no dodging complexity by blocking out three-fourths of the realities involved and oversimplifying the remainder.

If you want deep change, you need deep perspective.

Also read or listen to these links.

  • Henry Giroux tracing state violence over the last 60 years. (TruthDig)
  • Tony Robbins on the interview tour for his new book on priorities and investing for results – this is a 2-part interview with Tim Ferriss. Read the comments on Amazon before you buy.
  • Nafeez Ahmed describing the DOD’s Minerva Research Initiative, which includes “strategic” study of Twitter accounts and social contagion. (London Guardian)
  • Chris Bragg about one of the attorneys who used to help disclose corporate influence in government and who now helps companies cover their tracks.
  • Forbes reviews Ed Catmull’s book about building Pixar and making peace with mistakes, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. My favorite quote: “Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new… If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it.”

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Watch Disruption and Listen to Climate Stew

If you have 53 minutes today or at any time this week, you have the time to watch 350.org’s film, Disruption. It’s captioned in English.

“DISRUPTION” – a film by KELLY NYKS & JARED P. SCOTT from Watch Disruption on Vimeo.

“Climate change exacerbates every kind of social injustice that faith communities have fought against for centuries.” —Rev. Fletcher Harper, Executive Director for Green Faith (@greenfaithworld)

My Response

What I like about Disruption: it foregrounds the broad spectrum of people engaged with climate justice right now.
What I don’t like: the soundtrack is very thriller-ish. And I don’t think it’s needed (I don’t think fear is a sound motivator anyway).

The visual editing of Disruption clarifies the significance and stakes well enough. I’m all for emotional impact, I just don’t think fear and anxiety are viable emotions to build a long-term change movement on.
The US alone has spent the last 13 years in perma-fear. What have we been able to accomplish in that time? I don’t see point in adding to it.

I agree that the time for talk is over, that it’s time for personal, community, local governmental, national, and international action. And I’d like to contribute not only to the disruption of apathy but also to the disruption of fear-based engagement. I hope we can do both.

“We didn’t want to leave it to world leaders: their track record isn’t very good in dealing with this question.” —Bill McKibben (@billmckibben), co-founder of 350.org (@350)

Since we can’t expect elected/selected political leaders to abandon fear as strategy, it’s going to fall to us.

Think you’re up for it? Check out the new Climate Stew podcast for a light-spirited look at how to engage without fear.

"It's not just about the environment. It's about the community. It's about public health. It's about jobs. It's about justice." —Eddie Bautista, NY Environmental Justice Alliance
Eddie Bautista (NY Environmental Justice Alliance) on the wider significance of climate change. Image via Twitter.