Creatively countering tl;dr (too long; didn’t read)
“Deep reading is always about connection: connecting what we know to what we read, what we read to what we feel, what we feel to what we think, and how we think to how we live out our lives in a connected world.”
~Maryanne Wolf, author of Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World
In a post on August 12th in the aftermath of the Lahaina fire on Maui, I wrote about MIT's Climate Action Through Education program, the place-based curriculum they're launching later this month (stay tuned for details), and the Digital Climate Primer which will provide the keystone of the curriculum.
And I followed this with a suggestion:
Consider inviting a few friends or family members to go through the MIT Climate Primer together—think of it as a variation on a book club. Take a few chapters a week.
The primer is organized in 11 chapters so it lends itself well to a book club approach. But my primary motivation in making this particular suggestion is to encourage people to grow a practice of discussing climate science and the climate crisis with family and friends.
As Twilight Greenaway wrote about in The Window where she shares news and information about the climate crisis:
In March, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication’s massive survey on American beliefs and attitudes about climate crisis found that 66 percent of the respondents were at least somewhat worried about global warming (and this number has likely risen in the last five months of climate extremes). At the same time, most Americans said they rarely or never discuss global warming with family and friends. Only 5 percent said they discuss it often. [My bold]
This silence has very real repercussions—especially when it comes to influencing lawmakers’ willingness to act…
I am revisiting my August 12 post for a few reasons. I'm continually working on personal strategies for engaging creatively and effectively with the massive flows of content through my days—strategies to deal with the tl;dr (or tl;d listen/watch) automatic response that all too easily happens when I loose track of my strategies. And I am guessing you may be thinking about this too.
Let's take the Digital Climate Primer as an example. I want to work my way through the Climate Primer, a resource I'm recommending to others. I did move through Chapters 1 and 2 immediately. But then I got swept up in the new content flows and did not circle back there until today. Reengaging the Primer, I am reminded that I'm committed to reading all 11 chapters, and completing it in a way that whatever I learn from the process remains available to me.
I could solve this by scheduling 30-minute sessions on my calendar to show up—what author Maryanne Wolf refers to as “reallocating time” for deep reading. This strategy serves me well during the week when I come across longform articles, podcasts, video presentations that I really want to read, listen to, or watch but definitely have no time for in the moment I encounter them.
But with a resource that's as deep and important as the Climate Primer, I want to consider and respond to the results of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication’s survey from April 18 to May 1, 2023. We clearly have work to do in learning how to talk about climate in our families and with friends. I think working through the Primer with a few friends and/or family members using a “book club” format could be a supportive step in that direction.
(The survey, “Climate Change in the American Mind: Beliefs & Attitudes, Spring 2023” is 97 pages, but you can read the executive summary which is 2 pages of bullet points organized for easy review. The data is encouraging. For example, “Americans who think global warming is happening outnumber those who think it is not happening by a ratio of nearly 5 to 1. About three in four Americans (74%) think global warming is happening. By contrast, only 15% of Americans think global warming is not happening. Eleven percent say they don’t know if global warming is happening.”)
NOTE: if you have young children, or if you work with young children, working through the Primer with other parents or educators can help you in discovering how others are meeting younger children where they're at and helping to answer their questions.
Yale Climate Connections shares this short document with audio: Tips for talking to kids about climate change.
Anya Kamenetz, author of The Golden Hour on Substack, put this set of suggestions together for NPR after she had an encounter with her then-seven-year-old daughter that took her by surprise: Climate change is here. These 6 tips can help you talk to kids about it.
Wired magazine offers: How to Talk to Children about Climate Change with suggestions tailored for every age group. The author Emma Pattee writes, “Before you engage in a conversation with your child, it's important to deal with your own fear and lack of knowledge around the climate crisis.” Pattee also contributed this Wired article, Where Parents Can Get Help with Climate Anxiety—it’s filled with excellent resources including books, mental health support, conversations, and community.
For children under six, Pattee draws from the work of Leslie Davenport, a therapist and author of a workbook for kids on climate change: “Davenport suggests cultivating a love of nature through seasons, plant cycles, beauty, play, and teaching basic responsibility of caring for life.”
In my own life and work, I emphasize the practice: Nature as Default—Grow your sense of place.
From the MDL archives
You may find these posts especially supportive this week. Both offer suggestions for growing your sense of place, wherever you are.
Make nature your default browser
Something very different from a few months ago…and yet, the same
In the Wilds
Explore the abundance of educational resources on the NOAA website, especially the GOES satellite views. The image at the top of this post is from the geostationary satellite giving a continual view of the US Pacific Coast from approximately 22,300 miles above Earth.
Deep reading, climate science, nature as default, and the practice of conversation will be themes I’ll return to again and again here in The Interconnect.
Thanks for reading. Be well.