By JEFF EPSTEIN
[email protected]
SPRINGFIELD, Vt. — Climate change can seem like an enormous subject. It can feel overwhelming to persons not already engaged in the issue to try to learn about it and decide their own point of view and what to do about it.
It is largely those individuals — in addition to people already engaged — that local farmer and activist Laurel Green tries to reach when she gives workshops on global warming and climate change, sponsored in part by the Pachamama Alliance. She is one facilitator among many, and she led one such workshop Wednesday evening in the Springfield Library.
The Pachamama Alliance is a nonprofit, tax-exempt 501 (c) 3 group seeks to be allied with indigenous tribes of the Amazonian rainforest. It has created a templated, formatted workshop to disseminate information structured around Pachamama’s Drawdown Initiative.
Drawdown is one of the many terms people may not be familiar with: in the context of global warming, it means the point in time when the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere begins to decline on a year-to-year basis. It is the principal goal of global agreements like the Paris Accord.
The content of Wednesday’s workshop, attended by roughly a dozen people, largely consisted of evidentiary statements about global warming, and how accumulations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes climate change in various forms.
Much of the information was delivered in a series of video segments by a man named Paul Hawken. Hawken is the founder of Project Drawdown, a climate change mitigation effort.
Given the basic need to decrease concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Hawken presented 80 different “solutions” to mitigate the problem. While renewable energy such as solar and wind power were on the list of solutions, so were some that surprised the workshop participants.
The top-ranked solution for reversing global warming, Hawken said, is refrigerant management. Specifically, avoiding leaks of freon or other gases in refrigeration systems by careful installation, maintenance, and deinstallation of them.
Another is reducing food waste. Food goes into landfills, as does the packaging it comes in.
Educating girls is another on the list, because educated women make smarter choices for themselves and their families, including reproduction. Or, as Hawken put it in the video, “more resources into fewer children.”
But there are 80 of these solutions on the list, and Hawken maintains “you cannot achieve drawdown unless you do it all.”
After each video segment, Green instructed the audience to break into groups for a short period of discussion about what they had just seen. The format is strict: these breakout groups are timed, with alarms beeping often. The first breakout was five minutes. At the second alarm, for example, Green announced, “That’s the end of the second minute.”
This is done, Green explained to a reporter after the workshop, because a lot of information has to go into each two-hour workshop. It is typical for the breakout groups to engage in lively discussion, but it has to be controlled lest time run out, she said.
So Green hustled everyone back to the main group and handed out a paper document with all the solutions listed. She asked participants to check the solutions they are already doing, and circle items they would like to learn more about. Then it was time for another video segment from Hawken.
Hawken said collaboration was important, but that collaboration included listening to the deniers of climate change. He may have explained this more, but suddenly the video stopped and it was time for another timed breakout group.
Not all the video segments were from Hawken. One was from a man named Will Grant, who suggested starting with oneself in terms of implementing solutions, and then influencing your family, your friends, and your community.
The breakout after Grant was one-to-one. Apparently, each person was supposed to talk in turn —“Time to switch and have the other person talk,” Green said when the timer beeped — but most people seemed to just have a conversation, as they did during other breakouts.
“30 seconds!”
At zero, people did not suddenly stop talking. It took a minute or two for the participants to wind down and face forward for the next segment.
At the end of the workshop, Green solicited comments, provided they were only one word. (Green said some of her workshops — she has done eight so far — have been up to 30 people.)
As the evaluation forms were handed around, the participants seemed very interested an engaged with what they had learned.
The goal of this and other similar workshops is to build a social coalition of action to make the solutions effective, and that implies rapid replication of the workshop format. Having a templated format may also make it easier for the community facilitator, in this case Green, to lead them.
The workshop did teach the evidence-based information, and not in a heavy-handed way. On the other hand, budding engagement and conversations were truncated by the beep. Perhaps the beeps were an allegory of what those who deal with climate change will tell you, that unless enough action is taken soon enough, time will run out one way or the other.
As your daily newspaper, we are committed to providing you with important local news coverage for Sullivan County and the surrounding areas.