(Not that one. Or that one)
There’s a word that’s been playing on my thoughts for the past few months, popping up like a road-block and disturbing my workflow: seemingly benign but apparently ubiquitous in circles that I tend to roll around in.
The word is ‘Climate’
I’ve noticed an increasing dependence on this word—detached from it’s usual pairing as ‘climate change’—frequently used on it’s own and as a prefix to unrelated words. Terms like ‘climate conversation’, ‘climate anxiety’, ‘the climate space’, and as a catchall term, like ‘working in climate’ or ‘talking about climate’. I’ve even seen posts about how to have a ‘climate career’.
While terms like this have been used for a while now among activists, academics and policy people, seeing it seep more and more into public communications is worrying to me.
‘Climate Change’
By now we might assume that most people understand climate change, or at least the broad strokes of the problem, but I think this assumption is misguided. As a follower of many environmental and activist accounts online, I’m submerged (at times drowning) in posts about ‘climate issues’. There’s an understanding that in following you’ve already achieved the level of literacy on the subject required to understand the posts.
But outside, in real life, people aren’t regularly referring to the climate or climate change. People use generic terms like ‘eco’ and ‘green’ to refer to anything from the topic of recycling to a person’s traits (“he’s quite ‘eco’, y’know?” “She’s very, sort-of, green…”). The dial hasn’t shifted much from when I was a kid in the nineties, when everyone was talking about aluminium cans and the Ozone Layer.
I think for lots of people the term ‘climate change’ is simply another topic on the list of priorities referred to in a YouGov poll (usually somewhere below ‘the economy’ and above ‘housing’). We struggle to make the leap from a siloed issue of more or less importance than other societal woes, to understanding that climate change is integral to everything, from how our economy functions to the security of our housing to our energy bills and even mental health. It is all-encompassing. “The Climate” is literally everything. Language fails us.
Insider language
As groups of people who coalesce around an issue or interest, we develop shorthand to refer to parts of it. We see this in the tech sector all the time. Terms like ‘Algorithm’ and ‘Artificial Intelligence’ begin as technical terms with a specific meaning and dissipate into culture to become catch-all terms for however apps harvest and regurgitate our personal data right now.
Now, as queasy as I am to acknowledge it, there is something that can be described as the Climate Sector: the broad collection of non-profits, institutions, academics, consultants etc who make a living talking, thinking about, researching and communicating around the issue of climate change. I count myself grateful to be part of this, while remaining uneasy about the professionalisation of activism.
As this sector establishes itself, it becomes expedient to use shortcuts in our language. We all know what we mean when we say ‘climate’ so let’s jettison the redundant suffixes shall we? We’ve now gone through so many of them that we’re actually just tired of deciding which one is correct. Are we in the midst of a Climate Crisis, or declaring a Climate Emergency? Is Climate Change enough, or are we witnessing Climate Breakdown?
So we simply say ‘climate’ and hope everyone will broadly know what we’re talking about.
Except, when I think of ‘climate’, loads of other things come to mind: local weather, or fancy climate-control air conditioning functions, or the temperature and humidity on a given day in a given place. My parents love to talk about the micro-climate where they live on the South West coast. One of my main associations with the word is the ‘political climate’ of today’s culture wars, or the ‘climate of fear’ we hear of during the Cold War.
Saying what we mean
I’m not trying to be pedantic, and I’m definitely not criticising those who work in this area. Finding the right language is a challenge we’re all reaching to overcome.
I’m not sure exactly how, but I know we need to say what we mean. What is ‘climate anxiety’? It’s the worrying we all do about the future, for our kids, our wildlife, and for our own prospects and quality of life. Do we need to ‘start a climate-conversation’ or talk about our dependence on fossil fuels and what our lives might be like without car ownership? When we call for “climate action” what actions do we actually want and who do we want to do them?
As a fan of brevity I’m reticent to say we should use more words, but sometimes we have to explain what we mean, not by defining our special terms, or making explainer graphics, but by being specific, right there in the text.
We become averse to specificity because these things are hard to confront. It’s hard to tell people that their lifestyle has to radically change, and to recognise that while we might envision a better, more balanced, connected and fulfilled life, it will be interpreted my most people as a massive and unfair sacrifice. It’s easier to abstract the problem.
When we’re specific we face these issues, and go some way towards processing them, helping people understand the inequality and power structures at their root. When we’re generic and broad we only speak to people with the prerequisite knowledge of what the words mean. It’s fine to talk about ‘addressing climate anxiety’ to a funder or partner who’s well versed in the subject, but when we use this language in public-facing communication, we risk coming off as pretentious, or out-of-touch, or just generally inscrutable.
The challenge is challenging
I say all this while understanding the difficulty of language. We use these terms to communicate quickly and concisely, in a world where attention is in short supply. We want people to know immediately “this is about climate change” while we need them to know climate change is about everything. It’s also been useful to differentiate climate change from environmental conservation, but ironically in the effort to communicate something more existential, the terms we use have become more abstract. We need to inspire without overwhelming, to invite and not deter.
So what I’m pitching isn’t a complete shift in language, just that we check ourselves before we, to put it crudely, disappear up our own arses. No-one will be able to connect with us up there.
I’d love to know what other people working on this think. Am I fixating on the use of this word or is it really something of a blind spot? I could be way behind the conversation on this. Let me know in the comments or feel free to DM me!
Podcast corner
Here’s an interesting conversation adjacent to this topic, including a suggested framework for communicating along shared values, real villains and solidarity:
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