Writing Advice. Climate Tribes.
Thinking on different cultures re: climate. My holiday goose recipe. Margaret Atwood’s writing advice.
Thinking about Climate Tribes, Nadia Asparouhouva
My holiday goose recipe, 50 minutes cooking time
Margaret Atwood’s writing advice
My death performance-lecture
Links (end): NYT on Russia ⦾ The End Poem in public domain ⦾ UK trim regulations on new power grids ⦾ Learnings from vaccinating California project ⦾ Climate entrepreneurs ⦾ a fusion science breakthrough (but still cautious on energy implications) ⦾ concrete ⦾
I’m performing Thinking Bigly: How We Die on 12 Jan 2023.
What’s the best way for Ben to die? Help Ben with death admin. Shape his story. Plan his funeral. An interactive performance where you help Ben have his best death*. (*Ben doesn’t die in the show).
Time: 7pm, 12 Jan 2023.
Venue: Theatre Deli, Leadenhall Street, London
Book - pay what you like - at this link here. I think it will sell out, so if you are minded to come do book. (Some people are having trouble booking, but I think this is an issue with accepting cookies, so clear your cache and try again if this is you)
There will be an after-party if you like - or if you can’t make the 7pm slot or have been before, 8.15pm onward. RSVP for party here.
If you’d like to answer and check out the pre-show survey, see link here: https://forms.gle/2u71yj9rFgtHBa297
The poll last week I asked:
The majority of people have not seen anyone die. I think 100 years ago the answer would have been very different. Even 50 years ago I suspect most people would have seen death. This is one (of the really good) reasons why death seems to surprise us more in rich nations than before.
In thinking back on this year, I ponder about what surprised me. There has been a fair amount including the Russia-Ukraine war. Thinking back to the start of the year were you surprised the Russia-Ukraine war happened?
Mostly this week I have been pondering Climate Tribes.
I am also in the very early stages of thinking about a climate “mega-game”. If this is intriguing to you, get in touch.
One aspect of the Bigly climate mega-game as currently envisaged is that people play as part of a “tribe”.
Sustainability professor and thinker Cary Krosinsky developed, many years ago, a concept of the 7 tribes of “Sustainable Investing” (actually when Cary had this framework first come around the terms Socially Responsible Investing was common, in a way that it is not now). Cary notes the tribes:
Values First
Value First
Impact Investing
Thematic Investing
Integration
Shareholder Engagement and Advocacy
Minimum Standards
(You should check out his substack and previous sustainability books, link end)
I’ve found this a useful way of thinking about the area.
My recent podcast guest, Nadia Asparouhova, (link end) has written a long essay thinking about people’s attitudes to climate. Nadia has placed these various thinkers into “the tribes of climate”.
(As an aside, there is a pleasing quality to my ear of the tribes of climate, rather than climate tribes.)
The whole essay is worth contemplating. (link end)
She writes:
Initially, I started with the idea that climate was an attractive industry for “doomer” types, and I painted their motivations monolithically. I was searching for the one weird reason that was causing hordes of people to drop what they were doing and march, hypnotically, towards the same problem space.
What I found instead is that while the media still portrays climate as a simple question of beliefs, the climate field has long moved on to diversified solutions. Whether one believes in climate change is no longer the interesting question; now it’s “What do you think is the right approach?”
Pass through the asteroid belt of climate doomerism, and the universe expands into a rich panoply of different climate tribes. People who work in and around climate don’t all believe the same things. Instead, they inhabit a parallel, mirror world that looks a lot like the non-climate world. Just like in the regular world, there are factions, politics, and competing belief systems.
For example, I did not find that people who are interested in climate fall cleanly along a certain political line of thinking, or even a shared set of values or goals. Climate is frequently coded as a left-leaning issue, but there are also centrist and right-leaning people who operate in different factions.
Nor do climate people all agree on the right solutions to pursue. In some cases, they believe other tribes are actively harmful to their cause. The enemy, in their minds, aren’t climate deniers, as we might have seen a decade or two ago – they’re other people working in climate.
For someone who doesn’t work in climate, trying to figure out which opportunities to pursue – carbon removal, renewables, energy storage and transmission – is a dizzying array of options, with no way to sort or rank their importance. But it seems to me that climate is better understood not as a singular list of technology and policy action items, but as an assortment of climate tribes. Tribes tell us why these opportunities are interesting and help us make better predictions about how they will unfold.
To understand climate better, I slurped up hundreds of thousands of words’ worth of blog posts, podcasts, interviews, articles, and tweets (my notes alone are over 80,000 words) – paying less attention to object-level discussions, and more to the rhetoric being used to describe one’s goals and motivations. I looked for cleavages between values, language and narratives. I then followed up this research with a handful of conversations with those who work in climate, across different tribes, to further refine and “stress test” my characterizations.
I then judge Nadia observes a central a deep insight which owes more to social anthropology or humanity studies:
[ Climate thinkers ]... advocate that we “separate science from fiction” when discussing climate and focus on the facts. I share the sentiments of both Crichton and Shellenberger regarding the value of doomer narratives, but I also wonder whether the “science versus religion” narrative is still relevant in today’s landscape. [2] Crichton himself stated that he thinks “you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form.”
If religious tendencies cannot be repressed from our collective psyches, why not start with the premise that climate is a religion, then try to understand it on those terms? Instead of insisting that we “stick to science” or only focus on technology, we can instead evaluate climate opportunities through the lens of tribal values.
[My bold]
One of the fascinating observations I have about the “Crit Rat” or critical rationalist community - and you can hear some of this in the podcast with Aella (link end) - is their obsession with “rationality” but this obsession is to my mind - a very human and cultural obsession. Even being part of the Crib Rat tribe is part cultural.
Second, Gillian Tett has written about the anthropology lens on the business world, which always conveys some of these cultural insights. (I blogged on this in 2018, link end).
One (the 4th) Tett lesson is:
A fourth lesson is that it pays if people can periodically try to reimagine the taxonomies they use to reorganize the world, or even experiment with alternatives.
(This is in part what Nadia achieves)
Tett goes on to argue:
First, anthropologists tend to take a bottom-up view of life. They usually get out of their offices and experience life on the ground, trying to understand micro-level patterns to make sense of the macro picture.
Second, they listen and look with an open mind and try to see how all the different pieces of a social group or system interconnect. They tend to be flies on the wall.
Third, because anthropologists try to look at the totality of what they see, they end up examining the parts of life that people do not want to talk about, because they are considered taboo, dull, or boring. They are fascinated by social silences.
Fourth, they listen carefully to what people say about their life, and then compare it to what people actually do. Anthropologists are obsessed with the gap between rhetoric and reality.
Fifth, anthropologists often compare different societies and cultures and systems. A key reason they do this is because comparison can help illuminate the underlying patterns of different social groups. That is useful when looking at another culture. It is also invaluable if we want to understand our own society. When we immerse ourselves in another world, we not only learn about the “other” but can look back on our own lives with fresh eyes and a clearer perspective. We become insider-outsiders.
The sixth and most important point about anthropology, though, is that the discipline celebrates the idea that there is more than one valid way for humans to live.
I note the third point - is one aspect behind by Bigly death show.
Third, many people believe in ideas such as witchcraft and ESP. 1 in 5 American (2005 survey) in witches and 4 in 10 (!) in ESP. (Gallup poll)
These type of ideas - like religion and spiritual beliefs - are part of the human condition. Or, it seems likely that ideas like this have been part of a large number of humans collective belief systems for a very long time and also today.
These belief systems do not immediately square with physical science of our understood natural laws, or many concepts under rationality.
But they seem to be very present now, and how all of recorded human history - so it would be a mistake to try and understand humans and climate without understanding the human beliefs, culture and ideas behind human thinking.
Nadia labels the climate tribes of today:
And here:
In table form.
Now, I have minor quibbles on exact labels - as I tend to think of de-growthers as a whole tribe themselves rather than a subculture/tribe. But that might be a UK/ EU perspective and indeed in a US context perhaps they fit under the classic “environmentalist” label as Nadia has them.
Nadia has great work finding examples and brief beliefs for all the various tribes she outlines.
This then - in its own way - a super piece of anthropology.
Here is her snap shot on a few parameters:
This idea of various tribes, we are working for in terms of our climate game. Clarifying what each tribes might have to offer as a piece to the solution.
The two cents I might add are:
How do these various climate tribes think they will best act? Via individual agency, corporates, non-profits, civil society, governments, or supra-national (eg UN).
It seems to me that different tribes lean to different policy / action levers to further their beliefs. But also that the use of “agency” or “policy” can vary within a tribe. Some will use “protest art” as a lever for policy, others will use policy direct; some others still will go and found a start-up.
This happens in the academic circle too. Mazacutto argues for the “entrepreneurial state” - state led innovation.
Second, I wonder about the tribe of:
Climate Deniers, or, in the main I think of them as Climate contrarians.
Deniers have negative connotations. But like with some of those who distrust vaccines, on occasion, the causal roots might have some substance.
Eg on vaccines, certain minority groups were unfairly tested on in history and suffered, this lead to some historic distrust.
Certain climate contrarians simply distrust climate models. Some of those contrarians believe we should work on climate precisely because the models are untrustworthy (cf. Taleb and precautionary principle thinking).
But, I think you should take seriously the climate contrarians who do not believe in climate change or also do not believe in mand-made climate change.
In the US, 5% do not believe climate change is happening and about 15% do not believe in man-made climate change. That is approx 1 in 5 of the US population together. (Survey by Yale Climate Communication and Meta)
In UK (and similarly to Germany, France), 3% do not believe climate change is happening and another 7% do not believe in man-made climate change. That is 1 in 10 approximately across Europe (also, Higher in South America and other regions).
While outside the scope of Nadia’s original essay, I think it is worth contemplating what this tribe (call them deniers or contrarians) believe about the world and what they want to achieve. Many of them in poorer nations simply want some form of economic growth (and I suspect the same would be said of many of the American contrarians/deniers as well)
We started toying with this idea in Thinking Bigly: How to Save the World. Our climate Bigly piece (with David Finnigan).
We make the point that there are different pieces of the puzzle and that in a large wicked problem it’s going to be too large for any one group to handle it all.
Furthermore, that it might be OK that this is the way…
You can find your tribe, or re-shape parts of your tribe’s narrative around what you feel is true from other tribes.
You can play your part as a member of your tribe.
And some of us can bring tribes together to work on areas where we can be collaborative or outline the areas where tribes will go it alone.
I will end with the Nadia’s closing remarks:
Tribalism is often depicted as a bad thing, especially in the context of climate. Some people claim that such divisiveness politicized climate science; that it brought us to a global stalemate; that climate solutions require us to set aside our differences and work together to resolve an existential threat. I find this framing to be totally unrealistic. There is no unified “we” in climate, any more than there is in the normal world, and pretending otherwise is exactly what keeps us trapped in these failed coordination games.
The idea that we are headed towards an inevitable disaster, or that we must focus our efforts on global negotiations between state actors, are perspectives that belong to specific climate tribes. They don’t speak for everyone, and dissenters should feel free to reject or reshape that language. By the end of this research, I was surprised to find that I actually do have more of a stance on climate than I realized; I just needed to find a tribe that spoke to me.
Why do climate tribes matter? Tribes can help people find each other more quickly by communicating values instead of agendas. “Let’s switch to nuclear energy” doesn’t sound very intriguing to someone who’s not interested in climate at all. “Let’s stop talking about scarcity and instead talk about abundance, starting with our energy needs,” however, might make them perk up their ears. (This rhymes with my conception of idea machines: a modern approach to turning ideas into outcomes by starting with a community, which only develops an agenda downstream of its values.)
Secondly, tribes are a better way of forecasting what the future looks like. By understanding climate efforts as distinct, dynamic networks of talent and funding, driven by a shared set of values, we can better understand the potential of the ideas they advocate for, as well as their risks and shortcomings. To use a simple example, the funding for climate tech versus eco-globalism comes from two very different places. In analyzing the long-term viability of climate work, we ought to consider not just macro conditions that might affect all tribes (such as the price of specific technologies), but also the risks associated with specific funding sources, which might lead one tribe to falter, while another one thrives.
Finally, the most important thing about climate tribes is that they shift the conversation from passive, “true-believer” narratives towards active, action-oriented ones. I couldn’t help but notice that the aforementioned YPCCC climate typology is inherently passive. [4] “How worried are you about climate change?” is a very different question from “What do you believe is the right approach?” Again, this was a reasonable way to categorize public sentiment in 2008, when the goal really was about getting people to care about this topic, but today, we’ve moved past the evangelism phase and into the building phase. One can be “alarmed” about climate change, as a third of American adults apparently are, and not do anything about it. But you can’t be in a climate tribe without having an opinion about solutions.
I have found Margaret Atwood has a substack/blog. It’s always fun to read a writer’s advice. Often not to be taken entirely seriously (I have blogged on Zadie Smith, Phillip Pullman, style guides, and Ursula K Le Guin as some advice; Zadie’s is not entirely serious I think.) Atwood writes:
WHAT IS A WORK OF ART AS IT RELATES TO A NOVEL?
All works of art involve patterns, made of repetitions with variations. Novels are works of art made out of words. With repetitions and variations.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN SPECIFICALLY?
Structure. (The arrangement of time, among other things.) What happens when? Linear arrangement? Flashbacks? Start in the middle? Circular (start at the end, circle back?) Begin with a corpse and then say how it got to be one? Simultaneous narration by several characters? A dead person narrates? Lots of ways of structuring and arranging time.
Texture. At the level of the sentence, the paragraph, the page. Avoiding clumsy obviously unintended repetitions, long-winded explanations, mawkish figures of speech. Etc. Texture includes also the “voice” of the novel. Who’s telling it? Do they swear a lot? Etc.
Character. Do we believe these people would do and say this? A character in a book is: What they say. What they do. What they think and feel. What other characters say and do in relation to them. What the author may tell us, if an omniscient author is present. That’s all you got.
Plot: What happens. Also: suspense. If we can predict everything ahead of time, we lose interest.
Overall tone. What is the mode? (i.e. the musical key). Keys can be varied within a novel but one should at least be conscious of them. Ironic? Romantic? Tragic? Comic? A mix?
SHOULD A NOVEL INSTRUCT OR ENTERTAIN?
(People have been asking that since classical Greece.)
Both, if possible, I think.
Too much instruction and it’s a sermon. Only entertainment and it’s a beach read.If too much instruction, it may belong in a non-fiction book. But when push comes to shove, folks choose entertainment, yes? Not saying it’s good, but….
Her substance is here and I suspect will continue to entertain…
For 15 years or more, we’ve been having roast goose over winter holidays. Our goose works on the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipes. And I’d like to explode the myth of long cooking times for goose.
Our goose takes 50 minutes. Yes that’s less than an hour, with then a 30 minute rest period.
The trick is to cut off the legs and cook them separately (and/or differently, see above). Otherwise you can not achieve the correct amount of cooking for both the legs and the breast at the same time. I confit the legs in goose fat, or a roast another day is good too.
Harold McGee (of On Food and Cooking fame – a must have cooking book) discusses the dry breast / properly cooked leg problem on a roast turkey (even bigger problem than on a goose) in his NYT column here
McGee concludes although cooking the breast / legs separately results in better moisture because roast turkey is a whole bird celebration, better to roast it as best you can and then rehydrate the turkey breasts (sliced thinly) in a nice gravy – and forget about brining.
Happy holidays for those of you on holiday.
Newsletter links:
Podcast with Nadia and me here (transcript/video/pod).
Podcast with Aella here.
Gillian Tett blog: https://www.thendobetter.com/investing/2018/8/1/breaking-silos
More Links:
NYT on Russia (unsure quite how true this is, but seems quite true)
The End Poem in public domain
UK trim regulations on new power grids
Learnings from vaccinating California project
Climate entrepreneurs
A science breakthrough (but still cautious on energy implications)
Concrete
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