When we talk about saving the planet, we employ the narrative of war. Does it only deepen our divisions?

To take on climate change, we need to change our vocabulary

To take on climate change, we need to change our vocabulary

Each dead house fly was worth a quarter, my mom told us kids, but I never earned any money. Every time I cornered a fly, I pictured goo marks left on the wall – spots splayed with tiny black guts and twisted legs. My halfhearted swats gave even the most sluggish fly time to escape.

That I genuinely couldn’t hurt a fly might have been something I picked up in church. I grew up attending a Mennonite congregation in Indiana. We weren’t the bonnet-wearing, buggy-riding sort, but we embraced some traditions, like the Anabaptist teaching of nonviolence. This sometimes expressed itself in an instinct for conflict avoidance.

So I was surprised when violence crept into my speech three years ago when I started working as a journalist covering climate change. Some ancient spirit took hold of me, and I found myself deploying the narrative of war. Carbon tax proposals were “battles” to be fought. Greenhouse gas emissions had to be “slashed”. “Eco-warriors” and “climate hawks” were leading the charge.

Coming from a pacifist background, and obsessed with linguistics, I’ve grown uneasy with the way war shapes our words

I’d adopted the language of the climate movement’s leaders. The only way to overcome climate change inaction, the environmentalist Bill McKibben once wrote, “is to adopt a wartime mentality, rewriting the old mindset that stands in the way of victory”. Hillary Clinton reportedly wanted to equip the White House with “a situation room just for climate change”. Other activists are calling for mobilization against global warming on the scale of the second world war.

The whole “fighting climate change” frame rests on the assumption that opposition is the best way to get things done. But that’s not always the case, as the linguist Deborah Tannen wrote in The Argument Culture: Stopping America’s War of Words in 1998. Military and sports metaphors train us to see everything in terms of conflict – this side versus that side – and that perspective limits our collective imagination about what we can do to fix complex problems.

Coming from a pacifist background, and obsessed with linguistics, I’ve grown uneasy with the way war shapes our words. The thought struck me earlier this year: by pitting one group against another, do war metaphors undermine our ability to address the complex problem of climate change, the biggest global crisis we face? Are there other ways to frame our predicament and convey the sense of urgency that’s needed – without dividing us?

My gut feeling was that talking about climate change as a battle between rivals would ensure our ultimate defeat. But the reality might be more complicated.

War narratives are everywhere, so prevalent that they usually pass unnoticed. Politicians and the media have declared wars on poverty, drugs, obesity, and terror. These wars were declared against concepts, trends, and tricky issues with no simple solutions. And none of them have been won.

Reading Tannen’s book, I saw these metaphors in a new light. There’s a “pervasive warlike culture” in the US that leads us to approach just about any major issue as if it were “a battle or game in which winning or losing is the main concern”, she wrote. That tendency has shaped politics, education, law, and the media.

Hostility is definitely in fashion. Anger spreads faster across social media networks than any other emotion, as studies have shown (and anyone who’s spent more than one minute on Twitter can attest). Cable news has devolved into shouting matches. “Americans on both the left and the right now view their political opponents not as fellow Americans with differing views, but as enemies to be vanquished,” wrote Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld in a recent Atlantic essay.

Here’s the important thing about this war on climate change: we’re losing it. Scientists have sounded the alarm bells for 40 years; the window to address the problem is shrinking; drastic action on greenhouse gas emissions keeps … not happening. The future of humanity is at stake.

It’s an aggressive moral appeal, explicitly trying to arouse an emotional reaction and a commensurate commitment. The enemy is coming. Are you with us?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A study found the language of war was effective in conveying urgency to participants. But does it work for everyone? Photograph: Damian Klamka/Zuma Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

I get that this war message works for some people. In a study published in the journal Environmental Communication last year, participants read one of three articles about the effort to reduce carbon emissions, which was framed as either a “war”, a “race”, or an “issue”. Those who read the war version perceived the most “urgency and risk” and expressed “greater willingness to increase conservation behavior”.

That’s the spirit behind the Climate Mobilization, a group that invokes the war mentality in the service of climate action. The organization’s director, Margaret Klein Salamon, takes inspiration from the history of the second world war.

Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the US had overhauled its economy and society for the war effort. Government spending soared from 30% of the economy in 1941 to 79% at the peak of the war in 1944. With a shared sense of national purpose, people made sacrifices for the common good. They planted victory gardens, bought war bonds, and rallied to produce the tanks, planes, and machine guns needed to fight a global war.

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Klein Salamon said climate change was such an enormous threat to the planet that it demanded similar sacrifices. “That’s really the challenge we face now,” she told me. “Can we achieve the mentality we had as a species that we had [achieved] only exclusively during wartime?”

Her organization has had some success. Cities in California, New Jersey, and Maryland have declared a “climate emergency” and committed to an all-hands-on-deck, wartime-like response. Oakland aims to “reach zero net emissions at emergency speed”.

But what about places where people aren’t deeply concerned about climate change?

A full 30% still don’t think it’s a thing, despite the overwhelming scientific consensus behind it. And Americans who accept the obvious generally prefer to avoid the subject. Is war rhetoric the right way to bring a divided nation together?

My sister once got into a heated argument with my uncle about the Iraq war in 2003. Pacifism is a core Anabaptist belief, my sister argued, so how could you be a Mennonite and support a war? She vividly remembers him saying, “If you don’t believe in good and evil, well, I’ve seen the other side …” in reference to a near-death experience. That may have been the point when we stopped talking politics with the extended family. It felt like arguing would only make family get-togethers more awkward while accomplishing nothing.

The good news is that there’s a way to break through seemingly intractable disputes

Psychologists call this sort of fruitless argument an “intractable conflict”. An us-versus-them narrative turns people away from logic and into the realm of emotion and values. As the conflict drags on without resolution, partisans become increasingly bewildered by the other side’s beliefs and actions.

A recent study showed how two-sided narratives drive public opinion on climate change. Psychologists from the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Colorado at Boulder found that most Republicans believed climate change was real, but didn’t support policies to address the problem simply because they thought Democrats did. Climate change, in other words, has been packaged together with issues such as immigration and gun control, and positions have turned into symbols of opposing sides. Why? “The study suggested that the discrepancies were likely the result of a media landscape that emphasized conflict,” Newsweek reported.

So all those headlines I’d been writing about pipeline fights and carbon tax battles could have been making things worse. Labeling people “climate hawks” or “deniers” only reinforced divisions. I wondered whether the act of picking an enemy – even an abstract one, like climate change – inevitably made enemies of other people.

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In the search for an opponent, climate activists have landed on several suspects: climate deniers. Reluctant politicians. Capitalism. The blame points in every direction.

It reminds me of something I noticed in high school, listening to my classmates yell insults at rival teams during football games.While they called it “school spirit”, I deemed it “zip-code loyalty”: we had been pitted against one another by outside forces, and we really weren’t different from the supposed “enemy”.

The good news is that there’s a way to break through seemingly intractable disputes. As the journalist Amanda Ripley wrote, the key is not to avoid conflict, but to complicate it.

Ripley pointed to a study hatched at the Difficult Conversations Laboratory at Columbia University, where researchers sat down people who disagreed with each other in a windowless room, then recorded their uncomfortable exchanges. Participants with opposing views on abortion, gun control, or other hot-button issues were paired together and asked to write a joint statement on the subject in 20 minutes.

“Over time,” Ripley wrote, “the researchers noticed a key difference between the terrible and non-terrible conversations: the better conversations looked like a constellation of feelings and points, rather than a tug of war.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People march at the UN climate conference, COP24, in Katowice, Poland, this month. Photograph: Omar Marques/SOPA Images/REX/Shutterstock

What the participants read before the conversation made a difference. Some were handed an article that presented only two sides to a polarizing argument. Others read a more nuanced version that focused on the complexity of the debate and considered several points of view. Surprise, surprise: people who read the more complex story beforehand were more likely to come up with better ideas for their joint statement and leave more satisfied with the experience.

Hundreds of other studies have shown that the best way to get people to stop demonizing each other is to introduce them to the actual human beings they disagree with. A few months ago, I happened to meet a retired Chevron executive. Considering how often I write about politics and the evils of oil money, our conversation could have gone very badly. It didn’t. I mentioned my work as an environmental journalist, but we mostly talked about food, travel, and family.

In a similar vein, labor and environmental groups that often squabbled over issues in the past have come together to start talking climate policy. At the Colorado Climate, Jobs, and Justice Summit this fall, union members who work in the fossil fuel industry shared their perspectives on taking care of communities who depend on the industry.

“For many in the environmental community, it was the first time they had heard those stories,” wrote Dennis Dougherty, executive director of the Colorado AFL-CIO, in a column in the Denver Post. “And in turn, it was the first time many workers got to interact face-to-face with folks from the environmental movement and learn how diverse and compassionate its members could be.”

As for getting rid of war metaphors themselves, well, it’s not easy. “I don’t know if it’s possible to express the kind of action that’s needed in peaceful terms,” Bhikkhu Bodhi, a Buddhist monk and climate advocate, told me.

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It’s certainly going to require some imagination. Perhaps Earth is running a fever, and we need some wind-turbine ibuprofen to bring down the heat. Or maybe it’s a sinking boat, and instead of scooping water out, our crew needs to patch the hole where it’s rushing in.

Whatever you choose, I’m putting down my metaphorical weapons and fighting for … no, adopting more peaceful metaphors. And instead of turning differences into fights, I could frame the climate discussion in positive terms – discussing how a shift to renewable energy creates jobs, for example.

Charles Eisenstein, author of Climate: A New Story, agreed that framing an important problem like climate change as a fight stokes partisanship.

“There is a time and a place for resolving problems by fighting,” he told me, “but it’s kind of taken over everything.”

This story originally appeared in Grist