Why I started this
Hi! I just wanted to use this page to write a little bit about why I started this newsletter. Because, you may be shocked to discover, it’s more complicated than you might have thought.
Adding to the mountain
There is a lot of information out there about climate change, and a thought that definitely went through my head in this project’s conception was “why add to the mountain?” But by the end of the first draft of the first edition I was quite confident I was filling a niche no-one else had quite hit.
Lets start with the obvious: I think Climate Change is really important. However, it doesn’t take much to realise that not everyone can have Climate Change as their primary issue; there are a plethora of problems to deal with and people need to address all of them. People also need to work jobs where Climate Change is not priority number one. This really is not complicated to justify: the world we’re trying to create will need all varieties of people, including politicians and doctors and teachers.
The thing is though, I still feel everyone should be informed about Climate Change and when I saw that people here weren’t even aware of IPCC reports and the like I wanted to change that. The thing is, people are generally happy to talk about Climate with me, so, I figured, the fault probably does not lie with them. We are all very busy, so I wanted to create a newsletter that was concise and right in people’s inboxes which would give people a good summary of the latest events globally and locally. I also wanted to provide lots of further reading, watching and listening so that people could engage further with whatever barrier to entry they found the lowest. It’s always important to maintain hope in a crisis like this, because without it we certainly aren’t going to deal with it. Realising this, I definitely wanted to maintain hope throughout the newsletters and a good way to do that was to focus on local successes which people could relate to or see the impact of.
Starting conversations
So there’s a lot that goes into this newsletter: I want to get the important facts across quickly, I want to give lots of further ways to engage, and I want to maintain hope. Really, I want people who read these go out to their friends, family and teachers and start conversations with them. That is in a way the ultimate goal, because the more we talk about this crisis especially to people with power the faster we can change the things. Here’s a simple example: if parents care more about the Climate and voice their concerns to Wincoll, the school will care more soon enough, after all, the parents are paying. Other things matter too: talking to a member of staff, even if they can’t change anything directly, can get them thinking and that can trickle up when they start asking their seniors questions. You see how this works?
That’s a lot of wishy washy stuff about changing things simply by talking about them, but individual action often does make a bigger difference than we realise. While the direct numbers might be disheartening when people see someone who goes vegetarian or who stops cutting their lawn or who waters their plants with rain water (the list goes on) that can have a real effect on how much they think about Climate too. It’s all about raising the awareness of the severity of this crisis to as many people as possible and breaking past barriers of hopelessness and despair. The ultimate method of raising awareness is, probably, activism and activism is one thing that I am aiming to slowly grow on people with this newsletter. Who knows, but maybe one or two people who read this will go on to become Climate activists in part because of this and that would be pretty awesome.
We can do this. So let’s do it!
With love and rage,
Oscar Mitcham