We received a dire warning a few weeks back in the form of the Sixth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC tends to be dense, fact driven and intense, even in their Headline Statements. As the keeper of the data for on-going climate change, IPCC scientists tend to be cautious and thoughtful even as they scream at the frog to get the hell out of the rapidly heating water.
I had intended to boil it down for Frog Blog readers, but I will rely on climate change communication expert John Cook who previously said it succinctly using ten words:
It’s real, it’s us, experts agree, it’s bad, there’s hope.
The Frog Blog did not acknowledge this critical event. The definitive statement from science on the state of the most profound existential crisis in modern human history appears, and two scientists committed to exploring the nuances of climate science say nothing.
I have spoken with Jon, but will not speak for Jon. For myself, even with the usual ADD-related barriers to sitting down and focusing, I have not been able to draft any coherent blog-ready sentences, despite having a fair-sized pile of good ideas. It has been frustrating.
I don’t consider myself a “real” writer, rather I feel I have a voice that can add to Jon’s focus in this “site created by a scientist to seek truth and act on the climate crisis”. I keep waiting for the words to flow, but nothing gets published. Truly a mental block.
But my view has transformed in the past few weeks through a discussion with an accomplished science writer and another with a high school colleague who has recently started blogging in a disciplined and effective way. Both gave me advice that prompted this post – and which I hope will sustain me for many more.
Before addressing “why we write”, let’s explore some of the reasons why I haven’t written recently:
Too busy. Yep, we are all too busy.
Too distracted. Welcome to life in a global pandemic and the unraveling of the representative democracy in the US. A great deal to do, see, and think about. Poor excuse as the world burns and floods.
I write for work. I spend my day sitting and writing proposals and editing the words of others. I am much more at ease standing and talking – writing and editing uses up a substantial portion of my extroversion energy. A barrier to overcome, for sure.
I mostly write like a scientist. I was taught to write about science using a process to that keeps the experimenter out of the write-up of the experiment through the use of the third person passive voice. “This was done”. “That was accomplished”. Not very compelling for a blog and a bit of inertia to overcome sometimes. But with practice…?
I tend to seek perfection and a big impact. I had a colleague at work who was a prolific inventor, but had impossibly high standards for the quality of work that he deemed suitable to file a patent. He only wanted to file the “big one” and many of his “smaller” ideas remained in his notebooks. I think a little of that manifests in me as a desire to only create posts with profound insight.
No one reads what I write anyway. We are all immersed in information and points of view. Add mine to your TBR pile, if I am lucky. Otherwise it is chirping crickets. The question before me is what do I expect. Not sure. Anyway, I haven’t written all that much, so I have no standing to use this as a barrier to future contribution.
It just doesn’t matter. OK here we have a problem. Finding your voice when writing about climate change, especially in light of the new IPCC report, is daunting. Motivation to write about climate change thins once you reach the conclusion that it is unlikely that any one individual can make much of a difference in the unfolding calamity.
It causes me pain. Climate (or ecological) grief is real. It can have a powerful impact on emotions. Grief is painful, and wading through it, overcoming it, or putting it aside to write dispassionately about the science of climate change is a challenge. [Since this is a post written to prompt future posts, I am promising a deeper exploration of climate grief sometime soon].
So I have been struggling. No one is listening and it is too damn hard. But a few weeks back I met someone who just gets up and writes every day: an accomplished science journalist with an impressive collection of published articles, who had just delivered a new manuscript for a book on sewers to an editor a couple of days before she arrived in Minnesota. [I will post a link when the book is published – it is likely to be compelling, what with all the poop and fat blobs].
I talked to her about the personal barriers I have in writing routinely about the climate, and we compared strategies (agreeing that the Pomodoro Technique was effective). She then provided a simple insight that was (for me), profound:
You have to budget time for “hobby writing”
Weirdly, I had never considered writing for this blog as a hobby. Of course it is. Somehow I was thinking about it more in terms of ikigai “a Japanese concept referring to something that gives a person a sense of purpose, a reason for living”.
I think I was spending too much time on the right side of the ikigai Venn diagram, in the “what the world needs” circle. Looking to provide the big idea or elusive deep insight as I am so inclined.
Upon reflection it appears that what I am seeking is more likely found somewhere around the passion/mission intersection on the ikagai diagram (which overall seeks to define total work/life balance). More “I really like doing it” and “I hope to be good at it” and less “It’s what the world needs” is the needed adjustment to my approach
So… my hobby is writing about climate change. In this context, it has the hallmarks of a satisfying hobby, and as long as I keep the spirit and focus of The Frog Blog as guardrails, I think it will satisfy my desire to contribute a unique point of view. [Maybe occasionally say something profound?]
But the barriers to the actual writing of it remain. Where to get the discipline to practice (and hopefully get better at) this hobby?
This week, in the spirit of chance favoring the prepared mind (à la Pasteur) I struck up a online conversation with a high school colleague who just started a blog that I enjoy reading. I have not seen him for a very long time, I don’t know him that well, and we only exchanged a few posts, but he provided the needed strategy for discipline. It may Bloggers 101, but it made surprisingly good sense to me:
Set yourself a weekly word count (mine is 1500), publish it come hell or high water, whether anyone reads it or not, and don’t stop revising a post till it doesn’t suck.
So, there it is… the plan. Write about climate change as a hobby knowing that I have something to say – (at least) 1500 words published weekly come hell or high water. Exploring the complexities and depth of the 5 ideas embodied in these 10 words – it’s real, it’s us, experts agree, it’s bad, there’s hope – that is why we write.
If this post seems more about me and less about the climate, it is. I am writing this for myself as an investment. I needed to just write something. And these are the words that showed up. Thanks to two chance encounters with writers giving me insight that I processed with my prepared mind, I have arrived back to The Frog Blog with a renewed sense of purpose.
Thanks for reading. See you again next week.
#rescuethatfrog