The Stubborn Optimist's Guide Revisited — with Christiana Figueres (Rerun)

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4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2021

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

[This episode originally aired May 21, 2020] Internationally-recognized global leader on climate change Christiana Figueres argues that the battle against global threats like climate change begins in our own heads. She became the United Nations’ top climate official, after she had watched the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit collapse “in blood, in screams, in tears.” In the wake of that debacle, Christiana began performing an act of emotional Aikido on herself, her team, and eventually delegates from 196 nations. She called it “stubborn optimism.” It requires a clear and alluring vision of a future that can supplant the dystopian and discouraging vision of what will happen if the world fails to act. It was stubborn optimism, she says, that convinced those nations to sign the first global climate framework, the Paris Agreement. In this episode, we explore how a similar shift in Silicon Valley’s vision could lead 3 billion people to take action for the planet.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Today, on your undivided attention, we are re-releasing an episode in honor of
0:05.0	Earth Day, April 22nd, that we did last year with Cristiana Figueras, who helped
0:10.3	orchestrate the 2015 Paris Climate Accords. One of the reasons I became
0:15.8	personally so interested in how technology was deranging our attention
0:20.0	economy and changing our mental health is I saw that it would make it really
0:24.1	hard to focus our attention and energy on these long-term systemic problems,
0:29.2	like climate change. The second is related to this E.O. Wilson quote, that
0:34.4	our paleolithic brains don't know what to do with God-like problems and
0:39.2	situations of having affected the entire Earth system. Even without technology
0:44.8	or Facebook or social media or an attention economy, it would be hard enough
0:49.3	to keep climate change in our minds in a way that was productive and empowering
0:54.0	in uplifting. If I told you that right now, five of the six biggest fires in
0:59.2	California's recent history happened in 2020. More than the last three years
1:03.1	combined, it that the nation's corn belt lost a third of its top soil, that 40
1:07.6	percent of insect species are declining and the third are endangered, and the
1:10.8	rate of extinction is eight times faster for insects than that of mammals,
1:14.4	birds, and reptiles. If I tell you these facts, notice what does your mind think
1:19.6	to do about it? Our minds are not equipped to deal with problems of this magnitude.
1:24.8	Philosopher Timothy Morton actually calls problems of this kind hyper-objects
1:29.2	because they exceed the scope of human cognition. So then our paleolithic brains
1:33.5	comes up with the next emotion, which is denial or repression. And even if we
1:37.5	care deeply about climate change, it doesn't change the fact that it quickly
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