If you feel a bit of climatic fatality, and who is not these days, a column recently in the Washington Post could sacrifice a certain relief.
The research suggests that writing letters for the future “can be one of the most powerful ways to inspire support for climate action, and among the few to work in the political division,” writes Michael J. Core in the Washington Post.
Coren tells Trisha Shrum’s experience, a doctoral student who has been writing a letter to her daughter in the future as a way of helping herself with climate fear. Something click.
Inspired by his experience, he changed his doctoral dissertation to discover that others could be similarly, and, he writes Coren, “helps social scientists to decipher the code in what inspires people to take climatic measures”:
To prove his theories, Shrum asked almost 2,000 people from the 50 states to write an essay or a letter to a family member in the future about the risks of climate change. A third control group wrote about their daily routines. Participants could donate any amount of a potential bonus of $ 20 to a charity organization that plant trees focused on global warming.
The results, published in the climatic magazine reviewed by pairs in 2021, and backed in follow -up experiments, showed that although writing about the climate risk did not change anyone’s perception of the climate, he did. Donations between letters and essays increased by 11 percent in relation to the control group, a relatively large effect on social sciences.
Now, Shrum leads a non -profit called Dartomorrow, who has inspired thousands of creating letters, ponds and illustrations aimed at dealing with their anxiety and motivating them to take action.
Environmentalists and ecological people have fought for a long time with the weight of climate change and environmental destruction. Many prominent conservationists have recognized that it can be difficult to stay optimistic, and that, echoing Shrum, anxiety can be a powerful impulse to act.
“I think that today’s current impulse in the environment is really out of a sense of real despair, particularly among young people, because these young people will have the worst,” said the CEO of Conservation International M. Sanjayan, in 2019. “” The opportunities to do something about [the problem] They are quickly reducing. “
While it is difficult to stay optimistic, says Sanjayan, it is imperative not to give in to despair.
“If the course, there are times that I feel despair, he told PBS in 2023.” But despair did not eradicate the scourge of smallpox, and did not develop a vaccine against the coronavirus in just months. Despair did not build railroads that cover whole continents, nor take advantage of the electricity of the wind, the sun and the water. Hope, ingenuity and perseverance did those things. We know exactly what we should do: the only thing that can stop ourselves is ours.
Read more here.
Bruno Vander Velde is the managing director of narration of stories at Conservation International. Why read more stories like this? Register to obtain updates by email. In addition, please support our critical work.
