by Lowell Bliss
The Harris Poll conducted a survey last December which reports that “American adults said climate change was the number one issue facing society.” This was encouraging news for us exhausted climate activists as we deboarded our planes from Madrid, just returning from the failed COP25 climate summit, contemplating a crucial COP26 scheduled for November 2020 when the Paris Climate Agreement would go into full effect. We had a lot of work to do in the next twelve months, but it was nice to know that so many Americans shared our concern. We would be employed (in all the best meanings of that word.)
Then COVID-19 happened. COP26 got postponed for an entire year. Activist events—like the Stop the Money Pipeline protest, April 26—were cancelled altogether. Most of us were pretty much used to working from home anyway, except maybe not with having school-aged kids underfoot during office hours. Our annual budgets were generally covered, so missed paychecks weren’t an immediate threat. Nonetheless, we are mission driven. Our workplace is the gathering, the conversation, the face-to-face exchange of human energy. Our raison d’etre is an incarnated love embedded in actual eco-systems. In other words, cyberspace can have avatars, but not incarnations. Zoom is not the biosphere. Most importantly of all, our currency is focussed attention, concern and compassion—and here’s where the latest Harris Poll has some troubling news.
In an article yesterday describing an exclusive poll for Fortune Magazine, Harris Poll CEO Will Johnson asks:
“Battered by pandemic and economic collapse, do Americans have the capacity to care about the environment? Not so much, judging by a national poll we just conducted.”
From December, climate change has dropped to second to last on a list of a dozen concerns facing society. (It remains ahead of only overpopulation, a perennial loser on these polls, as is.) COVID-19 and the recession are of course the top concerns which have re-ordered priorities. The poll itself has not yet been released in detail—Fortune, I suppose, who paid for the poll is in control of what and when to release—but I imagine that following the George Floyd killing, racism has also raced to the top of America’s attention. What is most startingly from the poll however is that these three huge concerns didn’t simply nudge climate change down a few spots into fourth place. No, instead, climate change was shoved; it has plummeted down to next-to-last place. Johnson himself admits: “I was personally surprised and discouraged to discover that our devotion to the world around us is flagging.”
That our devotion to the world around us is flagging is just one interpretation. As with any data, multiple interpretations are possible, including the one that wonders whether the Harris Poll is faulty.[i] In the next few days, in small installments, I want to explore various interpretations of this poll, such as how society seems to have limited capacity to handle “end of the world” scenarios anyway, and how listing things and prioritizing things (and debating those prioritizations) are just one of the ways we seek to control the uncontrollable. Today however, I simply want to explore a personal revelation: namely, that this may help explain why I have been feeling like I’m part of the COVID-related unemployment statistics, even though I am not.
At the beginning of the pandemic in Canada, my oldest daughter lost her job at a florist shop and moved in with us for the duration of the stay-at-home orders. I’ve had other friends and family members who have been furloughed, who have been offered early retirement, who no longer find their small business viable, or who just plain don’t have a job to return to. My son graduated from Teachers College last week, and while he has returned to a landscaping gig he’s had, it runs out in October, and meanwhile he wonders whether a local school district will hire him for the fall semester. Meanwhile, in the US, Congress and the White House duke it about added unemployment benefits. Nonetheless, as any unemployed person can tell you, the paycheck is only one piece of the puzzle. Florists, teachers, restaurateurs, university profs—we are all, to various degrees, mission driven. We want to make a contribution to a better world. What happens when that opportunity is taken away from us?
Since March, I don’t feel like I’ve had many “goods and services” to deliver to our “economy” as a climate activist. (I’m using business terms here.) Sure, I’ve written a blog post or two, I’ve kept some associations alive through Zoom meetings and small joint projects (one of which involved helping choose a new logo for an Anglican climate justice group.) At the beginning of the shut down, I tried taking a different tack—namely to consciously put my climate activism on hold and respond to the immediate crisis by volunteering for pandemic-related work: I developed and facilitated a quick response consultation program for global health workers, but we had only four clients during the three months of my commitment; I filled out a volunteer profile on a Canadian government website, but since I lacked the qualifications of a health care professional or a contact tracer, no one called me back. Two weeks ago, I felt so low that I wrote this poem:
Punching the Clock During a Pandemic
Some mornings,
I climb the stairs to my office,
Sit down at my computer,
And pretend to work.
Actually, what I pretend is that my work makes a contribution,
That it makes a difference.
That’s not every morning. It’s some mornings. Truth be told, in the months of June and July, it was many mornings, particularly when Ontario was re-opening into Stages Two and Three, but I found no commensurate re-opening in my vision, my ministry, my work life, my soul. The Harris Poll suggests that I’ve lost my customer base (to continue to speak in business terms.) And I don’t blame my constituency or my target market. Climate change proceeds apace. It even generated some big headlines recently:
· Canada’s last intact ice shelf collapses due to warming.
· 2020 may be the world’s warmest year on record, even without an El Niño
· NOAA’s new hurricane outlook shows so many storms, we may have to turn to the Greek alphabet
· Kiribati's president's plans to raise islands in fight against sea-level rise
But admittedly, when I encounter these headlines in my news feed, I still find myself gravitating first to Dr. Fauci’s latest report about the coronavirus every time. In other words, I could write something about climate change, but if my readers are anything like me nowadays, I’m not sure they would ever get around to reading it. I’m not sure they necessary should. In other words, I bless the attention that the world is giving to the pandemic, the recession, and to systemic racism.
But regardless of how “unemployed” I might feel as a climate activist, I do have some decisions to make, because as the climate change headlines indicate, climate change is not slowing down. I am still mission driven. I must still work in faithful gratitude for my ministry donors (of which my pay check is only one basis for my gratitude). The work of the moment is to figure out how to do effective climate activism in this new context, and the first step it seems to me is to realize that ours is not a new context at all. Ask any biologist who has studied bats, any epidemiologists who has studied viruses. . . Ask any unemployed coal miner who has feared eviction from his house. . . Ask any survivor of lynchings, oppressions, and systemic racism. . . The context for creation care hasn’t changed since in the beginning, when we were told by our Creator God to bless and flourish, till and keep, subdue and rule in godly stewardship. The context never really changes. I’m the one who needs to change.
Coming Next: “Tell Prioritization: ‘You, Go to Hol-ism!”
[i] One interpretation is that this Harris Poll is faulty. Harris Poll, formerly Harris Insight and Analytics, has been around since 1963 and generally receives good on-line reviews. In terms of their political polling, FiveThirtyEight gives it a “C” grade with a +1.3 Mean Reverted Bias toward Republicans. Since Harris Poll and Fortune have yet to release the current poll and describe its methodology, we are only given statements like this from Johnson: “We asked a panel of U.S. adults a series of questions about today’s most crucial issues, environmental policy options, and their own behavior.” As for Fortune magazine, one media bias website writes: “While Fortune does not always have a favorable view of President Trump, they always have a favorable view of business interests and limited government. When it comes to science, Fortune supports the consensus of scientists on issues such as climate change.”