Three Things I've Learned from Claire O'Rourke, author of Together We Can

Listen to our conversation with Claire over at the reMAKERS

‘Together we can.’

Even better: together we already are, according to campaigner and climate communicator Claire O’Rourke, who’s just released a new book about ‘everyday Australians doing amazing things to give our planet a future.’

I’ve known Claire for many years in different campaigning contexts, and I’ve been reflecting a lot on her book and the conversation she had with Millie for our reMAKERS podcast (Millie graciously stepped in to host solo while I was sick).

Hers is an ambitious assignment: talking about climate change for those of us who are freaked out, acknowledging the hard parts, but choosing to focus on the good stuff in a way that doesn’t feel like the fluffy puppy story at the end of an otherwise ‘we’re all doomed’ news broadcast. That Claire manages to thread this needle with depth and sincerity, as well as vulnerability, smarts and science – is a rare achievement.

As Claire says on the reMAKERS, “It’s looking for glimmers of light... I think we spend a lot of time focusing on catastrophe and crisis. We should look at it. We should hold it in one hand, but then we also need to hold possibility and creativity and solutions in the other. A really difficult thing for the human brain to do but we need to give it a crack.”

So with that in mind, here’s a taster of just three things I’ve learned from Claire O’Rourke:

1. Not all climate tipping points are bad.

I don’t know about you, but when I hear ‘tipping point’ in relation to climate change I tend to imagine a giant iceberg melting into the sea and a George Clooney disaster movie rolled into one. But as Claire explains, a tipping point is merely when you reach a cascading effect of change; and not all climate tipping points spell doom.

There are, in fact, many positive climate tipping points we’re also witnessing in real time. She describes this ‘light-bulb moment’ of listening to climate scientist and Emeritus Professor Will Steffen talk about being optimistic regarding the tipping points society can create, because we don’t live in a linear world (echoing the wisdom of Kelly O’Shanassy in an earlier podcast: “the future is not a linear extension of the past”).

Right now, we’re beginning to witness the compounding effect of positive climate tipping points in finance, technology and democracy. Yes, the old fossil fuel order and their associated industries are hanging on hard (hello the car industry behaving like Big Tobacco) .

But there’s also an abundance of big money for climate solutions, incredible technologies disrupting the old and innovation accelerating transformation in everything from agriculture to building materials, plastics, EVs, food waste and more. Finally, on a democratic note, a key majority of the population are now concerned about climate. At the last election in Australia we delivered a climate-oriented Parliament like never before, which is already getting results and will continue to push for ambition from within the chamber.

Claire talks about how this convergence of technology, economics, politics and community sentiment is creating “multiple, cascading tipping points through many systems,” to the point that we’re now “tripping over” stories of transformation in real time.

Hallelujah.

2. We’re not meant to carry the weight of climate grief alone, but talking about it is harder than we admit.

I’m not exactly new to this idea. I have friends and peers who have sought professional counselling for climate grief. I remember my own, younger brother becoming anxious and depressed when he first learned about climate change at school and my heart breaking for him and so many others of his generation. I’ve read books that go into this topic. I’ve seen psychologists like Margaret Klein Salamon speak on stage about it.

Mostly, I was accustomed to thinking of action, ideally in connection with other people, as the antidote to this form of paralysing climate grief and anxiety. (In the words of Ann Porcino, “hope is not something you sit on the couch and feel”.)

But if I’m honest, in my heart of hearts I still believed that someone like me should be able to carry the weight of existential climate angst alone regardless; just suck it up and carry on.

So there was something that cut through in the simplicity and truth of these words from Claire: “Holding the whole challenge of climate change by yourself is impossible. Of course it’s impossible. It’s a global challenge. It’s a global issue.”

Oh yeah, of course.

Not only that, but Claire gets under our skin to talk about why it’s so hard to go there:

“Talking about climate change and how you feel about climate change is a gigantic taboo,” she explains in her interview. “It can be a taboo in one sense because you might be worried that people don’t have the same views, and you’re kind of exposing yourself and being quite vulnerable. So there’s that kind of piece of it. But then there’s the other piece about, for people who have privilege and hold privilege, which I see that I do, ‘do we have any right to talk about that anyway?’ Because there are people who are far worse off than us.”

So very true. Who are we to be sad, when there are people who’ve lost or will lose their homes, towns, entire island nations and ways of life? Who are we to be afraid, when we have relative wealth and privilege to protect us and help us weather the storms?

But maybe it’s not the Suffering Olympics and you don’t have to qualify. Maybe it’s just about being human, aware and afraid. Maybe we need each other more than we care to admit, even the strong ones, because this truly is a global challenge and no one can hold it alone.

There are many, many more excellent points in this chapter and conversation, so I really encourage everyone to have a read and/or tune in. (Brené Brown fans: she draws a lot on Brené’s wisdom about how we ‘armour up’ rather than lean into the vulnerability of it all.)

I’ll just leave you with a final quote – a passage from her book talking about the climate grief support group she started to attend virtually during lockdown, having previously resisted the whole idea:

“I was as surprised as anyone about how much I really needed this space. My protective cover-all of activity (‘don’t you know how busy I am saving the world and keeping up with all the important life stuff?’) was shed for two-hour sessions on those precious Sundays, and over time I found myself looking forward to the conversations, a moment of collective presence amid the Covid-inspired micro-green-growing and bagel-making frenzy we were using to distract ourselves from our fears of the future.” -Claire O’Rourke, Together We Can, page 38.

3. Individual behaviour change might actually be more worthwhile than I previously thought.

Okay, this is one I’m still grappling with, to be honest. I don’t know whether Claire’s completely changed my mind, but she’s cracked open a bigger door for me.

When it comes to thinking about the value of individual behaviour change in relation to climate action (ie, changing the proverbial lightbulb, biking instead of driving, cutting back on plastics, etc), my objections had been two-fold:

First, that individual behaviour change is a giant delay and distract tactic by the fossil fuel companies. I’ve written about the carbon footprint as a distraction, for example, invented by a public relations company working for BP. The goal was to keep us focused on our individual good-or-bad behaviour rather than looking up. (And for a long time, it worked. We brought our own keep cups but forgot, or didn’t know how, to hold the big companies and government leaders accountable.)

Second, that we have limited time and energy. Change takes work and willpower. If we exhaust it all trying to make personal better choices within flawed systems, we might feel more virtuous as individuals, but we’re still despairing about the world at large because we know things are not transforming fast enough at scale. I’d assumed it was simply better to focus the bulk of our energies upstream, which I explain here.

Claire gets it. But an activist and campaigner who has also become an expert in behavioural change, she’s dived deeper than most into the genuine value of individual action, and she can talk with authority about this being a both/and rather than either/or scenario.

“When you work in advocacy it’s all about systemic change,” Claire says. “But I’ve learned that small individual action is great. Behaviour change research and behaviour change economics tell us that what it does is start pathways. We call it ‘spillover effects’. Private environment actions are often pathways to collective change.”

So disrupting our usual behaviour in one area of life spills over into other areas. Drive less today, vote differently tomorrow. And not only that, but by visibly changing our behaviour, we’re altering the bigger social norms of the groups we’re part of, even if we’re not celebrities being watched by millions. (Ever had a friend go sober, take up exercise, start investing in shares or be open about seeing a therapist and think, ‘maybe I should do that?’)

“Behaviour change spreads really quickly when you’ve got people in one network creating a behaviour change that creates a new social norm also being in another network,” says Claire. “That’s where you see leap-frogging behaviour change. So yeah, you need celebrities to spread information, but the most powerful people are on the periphery of different social networks.”

Definitely a reminder that everything, as always, is nuanced. We need the big systemic change, but that involves and invites many levers. Maybe the spillover effect means that instead of exhausting our ‘change muscle’, we build and multiply it?

There is a whole (hydrogen-powered) truckload of insights from Together We Can and our reMAKERS podcast chat that I could keep going on about. For now, I encourage everyone to check out the full interview and book, and I offer my gratitude and admiration to the author.

Life is hard, and beautiful. Climate change is a wicked problem, and just maybe, a profound gift. I’m still freaked out about climate change, but I no longer fear that ‘together we can’ is just a nice slogan.

Three Things I've Learned from Claire O'Rourke, author of Together We Can

1. Not all climate tipping points are bad.

2. We’re not meant to carry the weight of climate grief alone, but talking about it is harder than we admit.

But maybe it’s not the Suffering Olympics and you don’t have to qualify. Maybe it’s just about being human, aware and afraid. Maybe we need each other more than we care to admit, even the strong ones, because this truly is a global challenge and no one can hold it alone.

3. Individual behaviour change might actually be more worthwhile than I previously thought.

For the full interview and show notes, click here or find the reMAKERS wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also buy Claire’s book here.

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