The case for ‘hope punk’ when talking about climate change: ‘To be hopeless is to be uninformed’

It’s not naïve to be hopeful about climate change. To the contrary, it’s the only responsible attitude.

Written by Catherine Clifford

It’s not naïve to be hopeful about climate change. To the contrary, it’s the only responsible attitude.

So says Elin Kelsey, a climate change communication scholar, educator and author.

Kelsey has a PhD in environmental policy and works on communications projects that affect engagement in environmental efforts. She is also an adjunct faculty member of the University of Victoria School of Environmental Studies, a children’s book author, and the author of “Hope Matters: Why Changing the Way We Think Is Critical to Solving the Environmental Crisis,” a book for adults.

CNBC spoke to Kelsey, 60, on the phone for a series on managing and responding productively to anxiety about climate change.

The following are excerpts of Kelsey’s conversation with CNBC. They have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Focus on evidence-based solutions

What we’re seeing all over the world is a real rise in people’s concern about climate change, and their desire to do something about it and their deep feelings of helplessness and hopelessness that nothing can be done.

That becomes a critical issue, in my opinion, for engagement.

I would argue that we fuel that sense of helplessness and hopelessness inadvertently by rising alarms about these very honest and important and urgent global issues because almost all the news we hear about the environment is in a problem identification and not a solutions orientation.

We come away with the feeling that nothing is happening and that it’s too late.

I’m also a children’s book writer. And so I often find myself with very young children talking about these issues. And I started to realize that we put things like ratings on movies or on on scenes of violence in films and say, “This is not appropriate for a young child.”

And yet, there’s nothing seemingly wrong with walking into a classroom and telling a child that Earth is ruined, or showing them the doomsday clock going down with climate change predictions. We just have not been sensitive enough about the emotional landscape for young children.

That gloom-and-doom narrative is being fed by the very real issues that we face and by the fact that we only hear about problems almost predominantly.

One part that we can really shift, and that needs to shift, is we also need to be talking about evidence-based solutions. That’s why it’s exciting to me to see the birth of fields like solutions journalism (that are looking just as rigorously at solutions as how appropriate they are in particular settings and which parts of them might be transferable or amplified or tailored) as they are looking at problems.

Continue reading the full article here.

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The case for ‘hope punk’ when talking about climate change: ‘To be hopeless is to be uninformed’

The case for ‘hope punk’ when talking about climate change: ‘To be hopeless is to be uninformed’

It’s not naïve to be hopeful about climate change. To the contrary, it’s the only responsible attitude.

Focus on evidence-based solutions