Climate Action: Silence is Deadly
First Take: “Climate Hushing” is Climate Silencing
“Climate Hushing?” This Framing Really Sucks
In so many areas of life, silence can be deadly. If we don’t talk about a problem, it can even lead to death.
Unfortunately, that’s also true of climate change.
There are some fairly new terms floating around these days: “green hushing” and “climate hushing.”
I don’t really like these terms or this framing at all. It makes what we are speaking up about sound so trivial.
Or like we are children being shushed by a parent or adult for talking when we shouldn’t be.
Hush-hush.
Screw that.
We’re dealing with the greatest moral and societal challenge of our time.
The Climate Silencers Are Hope-Stealers
My friends, what we’re talking about is silencing discussion about a problem — the climate crisis — that is deadly and will become more so. And those doing the silencing, many of them motivated by greed, are the powerful who share in the guilt. Other Climate Silencers do so out of fear that talking about it will bring unwanted change or persecution or both from those with more power.
So greed, power, and fear.
Well, the powerful Climate Silencers and the fear they induce will not muffle our voices.
This is a pernicious, deadly form of hope-stealing. In our Intro Series I briefly discussed what I considered then to be the five major hope-stealing personas:
Doomsters
Pessimizers
Fatalists
Deniers
Grifters.
Now I see I must add a sixth:
Silencers.
So now they are The Hope-Stealing Six.
I call them personas because they don’t have to be permanent; one can put them on and take them off, shed them like old outgrown skin.
The silencers are hope-stealing incarnate. But they don’t have to be. They can shed that rotten persona.
Climate Silencing Is Real, Self-Silencing the Goal
The Hush-Hush framing may be bad, but the climate silencing it points to is real. I’m not going to rehash their silencing success.
Instead, I’m focusing on what we need to understand in order to do something about it.
The goal of the Climate Silencers is to get us to self-silence. They make examples of people and businesses and institutions who speak the truth and do the truth to intimidate the rest of us into silence. And then anyone who speaks up will be easy to spot and smack down.
So in this atmosphere of intimidation people shut down and shut up.
Break The Silence With Truth, Denial With Action
This silence is not just silence. It can be a form of denial.
One can deny the problem itself — which, of course, in the case of climate denial is to deny the science, to deny the impacts, deny the facts, deny your own frikkin eyes.
But silence also can bring the denial of action, their ultimate goal.
Well, Climate Silencers can take this hushing, shushing BS and stick it where the sun don’t shine. That’s exactly where it belongs — with all the other putrid crap trying to prevent our power from seeing the light of day.
That’s because the sunlight is on our side. Our powerful message, our power in finding one another and joining together grows stronger in the light of day, while theirs grows weaker.
And, of course, the Sun is literally our power source for clean energy as opposed to the dug up decayed death their fossils spew into the air we and our loved ones breathe. We’re sick of the Big Producers of Polluting Products fowling our air with old dead sh*t that ends up in our lungs.
We meet this challenge with truth and action. But we must be smart about it.
Wise as a Serpent, Innocent as a Dove
Much of the silencing is focused on businesses. But the attacks of the Climate Silencers are public and meant to make everyone afraid. It is not just businesses that are going silent.
So how do we change this dynamic?
We grow and improve The Climate Movement.
We let ourselves be guided by our Movement Value of wisdom.
To stand up to the bullies we do so with our forms of power: moral power and people power. We do so by being strong together, united in the rightness of our cause.
There’s an old saying: Be wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove.
Let’s be smart about this. Let’s be wise as a serpent and overcome fear by being strong together. Let’s be innocent as a dove and counter lies with the truth and justice.
Our Movement Value of wisdom counsels us to understand that countering the powerful Climate Silencers right now doesn’t have to be splashy. You don’t necessarily have to make yourself a target. It’s best to stand up by standing with our Climate Movement Artist-Athlete teammates.
Breaking our self-silencing and growing The Climate Movement starts with talking with friends and family. As I posted recently, we don’t know how strong the support for climate action is — and it is hurting us. The Climate Movement is stalled and around the world our perceptions are skewed. This fosters silence. Yet the truth is we are in the majority — over 80% in many countries and 59% in the US!
Unfortunately, with this underestimation of our real strength and the active intimidation by the Climate Silencers many of us are not talking with family and friends telling them how important climate action is to us. In the US only 21% are doing so. We must boost this to 80%!
So to break the Climate Silencer spell, to thwart the intimidators and the bullies we simply begin talking to friendlies — people who love us, people who like us, people we trust. We break the silence, we overcome the denial of action with action.
Being wise as a serpent, it can be a covert operation and a very local affair. In the beginning we don’t have to make a big show. Just build your little love/like team right under their noses. Create a Climate Action Team to support one another. (See upcoming Subseries!) Find ways together to overcome the denial of action by doing stuff together.
In this way we build our strength from the ground up on our Fields of Action, getting ourselves in shape for when it is strategic to go big and go public, a time when we can be splashy together.
We won’t fight fire with fire. We don’t have to become a bully to overcome one. We will be innocent as a dove and overcome Climate Silencers with our moral and people power, by becoming big and broad and active enough, our first Movement characteristic/imperative/goal, and by living in and living out our 10 Movement Values of love, justice, beauty, freedom, creativity, wisdom, pragmatism, non-violence, sustainability, and success.
Break the climate silence with your friends and family by inviting them to become a part of the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world. Invite them to join with you in creating a Climate Action Team. We are coming together to make the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful and our future come faster, one filled with justice and joy. We are the hope we’ve been waiting for. Join us!
If you are new here, check out our Intro Series. If you like this post, please “like,” comment, and share. And thanks for all you’re doing.