Climate Connections: Using curiosity to Move beyond polarity

Shanti Devins  

The holiday season is fast approaching, including myriad opportunities for climate conversations with friends and relatives. Simply talking about climate is one of the most powerful – and underrated - things we can all do to normalize the issue and build cultural support for solutions. But how to go about it, especially around some of today’s hot-button topics, like AI, carbon capture and nuclear power? 

One tool is especially useful in finding common ground: curiosity.

Our community was fortunate to have several grounding discussions around how to start building a bridge across polarizing issues during Missoula’s third-annual Climate Solutions Week. During a live taping of A New Angle on October 4*, Amy Martin, the founder and executive producer of Threshold, sat down with award-winning local author Christopher Preston to talk about the intersection of ethics and climate science – and why it’s critical we proceed with curiosity. To illustrate this point, Martin and Preston turned our attention to recent progress made in understanding the communication habits of animals.

While visiting Kenya, Martin was able to spend time with elephant-communication expert Dr. Joyce Poole, who shared that there’s still so much we’re learning about these complex animals. For example, elephants may be listening simultaneously with their ears and feet, via vibrations moving through the soil, understanding each other in a way that goes beyond human senses. 

These findings are helping deepen our respect of elephants’ culture and complex communication, which in turn helps catalyze efforts to protect them and their habitat. Several successful conservation efforts would not have progressed in the same way if we had remained stuck in our certainty of humans’ superiority of intellect and connection. (Check out Martin’s two-part episode on elephants here.)

Similarly, Preston shared an anecdote about Dutch linguist Leonie Cornips and her work exploring the complex communication of cows. It turns out, cows have an elaborate greeting ritual and integrate their physical environment into their communications, creating different “dialects” between herds. Researchers are curious if deepening our understanding of how animals communicate, especially ones often dismissed as inferior, could help us learn how to “inhabit the planet more sustainably.” (Check out Preston’s article on cow language in the BBC here.)

These anecdotes drive home the complexity of our natural world – and how much we still have to learn. By proceeding with curiosity and setting aside our preconceived notions, we open the door to possibilities we never would have discovered otherwise. The same curiosity should be applied to climate solutions, Martin and Preston urged.

Let’s return to the polarizing climate “solutions” – or “problems” – that seem to be all over the news these days: AI, carbon capture, and nuclear energy. Though they offer certain benefits, there is good reason for skepticism about these technologies. But staying rooted firmly in an all-or-nothing approach to any of these technologies won’t move us forward; so how can we remain authentic to our values while also challenging our preconceived notions? In other words … what might we discover if we slow down and really listen to cows?

Take AI. Building experts are employing AI to rapidly analyze a structure’s energy efficiency shortfalls and offer solutions, which they claim “could make the second-largest impact on reducing carbon emissions over the next decade.” But the increased energy demand, currently too often powered by dirty energy, intense water use, and fossil-fuel-industry employment of the technology have steep environmental consequences. How can we acknowledge and appreciate the boons of AI while also demanding it be deployed responsibly and sustainably?

Or what about carbon capture efforts? It’s true that if we are to stay below catastrophic warming, we must remove carbon from the atmosphere in addition to eliminating fossil fuel emissions. (Preston has also taken a deep dive into the world of carbon capture and we encourage you to check out his article here!) However, because fossil fuel companies are using carbon capture to justify continued extraction, the questions arise: is this technology just a distraction from accelerating the transition to clean energy? Or can we invoke curiosity as to how we might amplify necessary carbon capture efforts while also cutting emissions?

Finally, (for today), nuclear energy. Nuclear is touted for its potential to provide energy that’s not weather dependent and is demand responsive. But it remains vastly more expensive and time-consuming to install compared with solar, wind and battery storage. There’s also the issue of where to dispose of nuclear waste, with Indigenous and BIPOC communities wary of bearing the environmental burden, in addition to concerns that nuclear energy byproducts may be used for weapons development. 

If nuclear is going to play a role in our clean energy future, how do we ensure impacted communities are at the table and that it doesn’t become a distraction from the cheap, reliable clean energy that’s more readily available today? (The Montana Environmental Information Center hosted an informative panel on nuclear energy during Climate Solutions Week here.)

Just this short foray into these three hot topics of AI, carbon capture and nuclear energy (we didn’t even get to mineral extraction or Montana’s electricity mix) brings home that we live in a complex world that begs us to be curious instead of focusing on dichotomy. There is still so much we do not know and fully dismissing or embracing a proposed climate solution is often an unhelpful oversimplification.

At Climate Smart Missoula, we have committed to holding curiosity as one of our core values – and it’s hard! As climate leaders in Missoula, we are working to embrace the nuances, lead by example, and acknowledge that we will always have new things to learn. We also already have lots of climate solutions figured out and we’re confident and ready to plug you into them here and now (yay solar, trees and electrification!!!). It’s okay that we don’t have all the solutions totally figured out; we can – and must – embrace and accelerate the ones we do have. We also must discern the difference between the distraction of disinformation and greenwashing, and the distraction of remaining stuck in polarity.

In a deeply polarized nation, we can look to scientists, educators and amazing researchers like Martin and Preston for inspiration to ask more questions, to listen more deeply, and to walk back toward each other. By entering our upcoming conversations with curiosity, we’ll very likely find we want the same thing: a healthy environment and a vibrant, livable future for ourselves and our descendants. 

*The recorded conversation between Amy Martin and Christopher Preston will air on A New Angle and MTPR this December.

Shanti Devins is the Program Director at Climate Smart Missoula. Climate Smart Missoula brings this Climate Connections column to you two Fridays of every month. Learn more about our work and sign up for our e-newsletter at missoulaclimate.org.