Tag Archives: global warming

Climate Justice and Sustainability Advocacy

The chief curator (me) at EarthSayers.tv, Voices of Sustainability, has created a new channel addressing Climate Justice. The impetus for doing so arose out of a study by the Yale yale Program for Climate Change Communication. They conduct scientific research on public climate change knowledge, attitudes, policy preferences, and behavior, and the underlying psychological, cultural, and political factors that influence them. Of particular interest was their audience research, Global Warming’s Six Americas. A must read.

For climate change communicators I assume that this study formed the foundation for your present programs and campaigns. However, for those of us sustainability advocates with an environmental, social, and economic bent the Yale Program research may have been missed given the information overload that climatographer Mark Trexler addressed in his whitepaper, The Problem of Infinite Information in Corporate Climate Change Decision-Making.

Initially, these are the voices we are advancing on the topic of Climate Justice with more to come. Start with Linda Haydock of the Inter-community Peace & Justice Center’s What is Climate Justice? Continue on with Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and former imgres United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on “Climate Change as a Human Rights Issue” and Julia Olson of Our Children’s Trust on “Securing the Legal Right to a Stable Climate.” If you parent or work with the more youthful among us, especially millennials, you might want to listen to the conversation between Dr. James Hansen and his grand daughter, Sophie Kivlehan on ” Young Peoples Burden.”

There are other voices to include Pope Francis, M.E. Tucker, David Korten, Anthony Leiserowitz, Tim Brennan and HH Dalai Lama.

“Most Americans say global warming is personally important to them, but don’t talk or hear about it much.” Yale Program Climate Note of September 29, 2016

I can’t do much about the talking part, but I can improve on the number of people, like you, hearing about it. It’s up to you to re-frame the conversation around climate change to climate justice and talk with your family, friends, and work colleagues.

“More than half of those who are interested in global warming or think the issue is important “rarely” or “never” talk about it with family and friends (57% and 54% respectively).”

Ruth Ann Barrett, Sustainability Advocate, October 7, 2016, Portland, Oregon.

P.S. What sparked my interest was the Yale Program report, Faith, Morality, and the Environment: Portraits of Global Warming’s Six America’s which led to an EarthSayers’ initiative, Faith and Climate Justice. More on Faith and Climate Justice in my next blog post.

Picture Earth Right Now

I was reminded of this 1946 photograph of Earth, the first photo from beyond the atmosphere when I curated one of the latest views of Earth, a NASA Goddard visualization entitled, One Year on Earth as Seen from 1 Million Miles, (2:46) noting how far we’ve come from that grainy black and white photograph taken nearly 70 years ago to the breathtaking visualizations of today.

We are getting to know more about our Mother Earth from “out there” and heart hopefully it translates to a better understanding and love “in here” nothing short of a change in consciousness, a move from head to heart guided by the Laws of Nature.

There are many such visualizations on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel and I have curated those I found most interesting and added them to EarthSayers.tv, the Voices of Sustainability including this video, The ‘Voice’ of our Earth. (4 minutes)

“Our Universe Is Not Silent~Although space is a vacuum, this does not mean there is no sound in space. Sound does exist as electromagnetic vibrations. The specially designed instruments on board the Voyager and other probes, picked up and recorded these vibrations, all within the range of human hearing (20-20,000 cycles per second).” – NASA Space Recordings Of Earth, Published on Aug 13, 2011.

The NASA Goddard visualizations also capture changes to our Earth that make it difficult if not impossible to ignore the effects of global warming to include this recent video, Earth’s Long-term Warming Trend, 1880-2015 (30 seconds) which shows temperature changes from 1880 to 2015 as a rolling five-year average. Orange colors represent temperatures that are warmer than the 1951-80 baseline average, and blues represent temperatures cooler than the baseline.

Many of these visualizations are enormously popular on YouTube such as the One Year on Earth video mentioned above with over 1.6M views. The number of views for videos addressing global warming suggest our citizens, unlike some elected officials, are active in the learning cycle. An example is another recent video, NASA Sees Temperatures Rise and Sea Ice Shrink -Climate Trends 2016 (47 seconds) published a week ago with over 68,000 views. This news story is what we should be talking about in all sustainability conversations – even informal talk about the weather one hears over cocktails and around the dinner table if we are to increase awareness and change behaviors.

“Each of the first six months of 2016 set a record as the warmest respective month globally in the modern temperature record, which dates to 1880.” – NASA Goddard

Ruth Ann Barrett, Sustainability Advocate, July 29, 2016, Portland, Oregon.

Inspiration from Three Leaders of Sustainability

This is the time of year I often return to those EarthSayers, the voices of sustainability, that have inspired me. The voices of our citizens who offer me helpful solid advice for weathering the storms of war, global warming, economic instability, injustice, and disasters of all kinds while keeping focused on identifying and promoting those among us who are sustainability leaders. Here are three such leaders on EarthSayers.tv that I want to share with you.

The 2009 video by John Marshall Roberts is entitled, Inspiring Sustainability in Skeptics, and he does address skepticism and the challenge of communicators to be more effective, but he begins by advising us to tap into the present with a sense of awe in order to create radical change and commit “to redesigning our society so it can last over time.” Six minutes in length, these are words that stick.

In October I had the opportunity to interview Annie Leonard best known for her Story of Stuff Project. This series of videos woke up many of us to not only mindless consumption, but to the story of bottled water, cap and trade, cosmetics and, in 2013, The Story of Solutions. It explores how we can move our economy in a more sustainable and just direction, a huge task, but possible if we focus on game changing solutions rather than just a “better way to play the old game of more.” In my eyes Annie Leonard is a sustainability champion so we created an EarthSayers.tv special collection. You can see her work and interviews in one place on EarthSayers.tv and return to them for inspiration and motivation. Here is my interview of Annie entitled, On Being Biased.

And if we are to move our economy there is one game changing concept called the circular economy which is being primarily defined and implemented by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. I met Ellen MacArthur just after she completed her single handed sail around the world and before she found her calling to “rethink the future” and become a game changer. In this 2011 interview by Jon Snow I find find her energy and self assuredness catching. Visit the Circular Economy special collection to view videos that define and explain the Circular Economy along with individuals in business adopting the framework.

I could go on and cite more of the EarthSayers who inspire and motivate me in my work as a sustainability advocate, such as Roz Savage on Taking Responsibility; Aveda President, Dominique Conseil on Changing Our Habits; Kind and Generous by singer Natalie Merchant; Recognizing the Great Mystery by Mayan Elder Flordemayo; and Wendell Berry reading his poem on Hope, but you need to take time to find the voices that speak to your needs when you visit EarthSayers.tv.

EarthSayers.tv content is curated for relevancy and quality so as to save you time searching for the hundreds of sustainability leaders who are citizens from all walks of life speaking on behalf of Mother Earth and her peoples. They will inspire and motivate you I promise.

Warmly and with best wishes for 2015,
Ruth Ann Barrett, Sustainability Advocate, December 30, 2014 from Portland, Oregon.

Sustainability and Web Search: Low Interest

This post is not about low interest on the part of our citizens searching on the Web for information about global warming, climate change, and sustainability, but low interest on the part of content producers towards Web search and how it is related to citizens searching, but not finding vital information on these and other sustainability-related issues.

Today’s New York Times article on Yahoo’s efforts to use search data to create search-generated content calls out a little known growth industry around the Web and highlights what every educator needs to know.

“Search-generated content has been growing on the Internet, as evidenced by the success of companies like Associated Content, which Yahoo recently bought, and Demand Media, which has used freelance writers to create an online library of more than a million instructional articles.”

Compare this to the old school educators and social activists who blanch at the phrase, content generation, and hold steady to the practices of print, and you will begin to understand why our citizens don’t get answers to their basic questions about global warming, climate change, sustainability or even about our oceans and water pollution.

It starts and ends with interest.

Yahoo and advertisers have a big interest in being in the top organic search results on key search terms because supplying relevant information when a person is in the buying cycle is a basic tenet of marketing success. Indeed, a recent article in DM News suggests Search Engine Optimization (part of what we are talking about) was once overlooked, but have realized it “doesn’t strain their budgets” and improved analytics make it “easy to understand the relationship between natural search rankings and revenue.”

Those in the business of education or those who would benefit the most from an informed public have shown very little interest.

The power of the Web has been highly commercialized largely because it is a buying machine. But it is also a learning and training machine, yet it just may be that to meet searchers needs is just too crass of a reason to create content that explains important concepts and issues and may interfere with the editorial and research freedom to publish what is important and what is not and to use language such as “eco-economics” and avoid prosperity in favor of ROI. Yahoo points out (you really need to read the NYTimes article) to its journalistic detractors: “The information is valuable because editors can integrate it into their decision making. It’s an asset. It’s a totally amazing and useful tool that we have at Yahoo. But it does not lead Yahoo editorial content.” A tool.

In other words, how can it not be crucial to understand that although there are 28M webpages out there on the subject of “global warming” less than 170,000 of them are titled to appear in top rankings (and thus be seen) to a search on the term, global warming, and even less on the question what is global warming? Yet there is significant search on this term, more on this term than on sustainability or climate change.

This chart (1) from Google Insights gives you a general idea of the popularity, if you will, of the three terms in relationship to each other. You can use the chart below to get some feel for search traffic on these terms which come from a snapshot (1%) of the search traffic over a years period of time using software called, WordTracker. For nearly every sustainability-related topic that I looked at, the search on “what is” or “definition of” was relatively high and the number of Web pages with a title that grabs was low. This is a great opportunity for organizations with a cause to gain traction with searchers out there who are entering or are in the learning cycle. In the hundreds of video programs we have reviewed for inclusion in our sustainability collection on EarthSayers.tv, the voices of sustainability, the titles reflect a general disconnect from what the video actually covers, choosing in some cases to emphasize the name of the person answering the question, what is sustainability, or the event at which the person attended and was recorded. These are just two examples of hundreds.

But first to change things, the educators and proponents of sustainability have to know and understand the capability of SEO and search engine marketing. Indeed, from my own experience, a greater interest in the Web would be a starting point for many of our leaders addressing environmental, social, cultural or economic sustainability, followed by increasing their (1) personal, (2) professional, (3) organizational, and (4) cause presence (brand) on the Web in all four categories, and take a crash course on SEO so they can better align their language and messaging with their objectives and audience. SEO by the way is complicated and is a learning experience for even the most seasoned of marketing professionals.

This is my agenda.

If you invite me to participate in a meeting around sustainability, this is what I am going to talk about; if you want me to increase your revenue for a sustainable product or service, this is what I am going to talk about and help you achieve; and if you ask me how to increase your membership, this is what I am going to talk about and make suggestions around. If you ask me about sustainability, I’ll probably refer you to one of the hundreds voices of sustainability found at EarthSayers.tv.

P.S. I included Walmart in the following chart to give an idea of corporate-related efforts to be in the top rankings, mostly using paid search, but increasingly using organic search more effectively.

Note: (1)

The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. They don’t represent absolute search volume numbers, because the data is normalized and presented on a scale from 0-100