For Those Who Wish We’d Talk About Climate Change More

(Source: Unsplash.)

There are a lot of people who wish we would talk about climate change more than we do. Especially during election years, when sensibilities become even more partisanly tuned, it’s one of those issues that signals to some people (correctly or not) where an organization’s sensitivities lie on a broad number of issues. Many people want that affirmation. The fact that we don’t focus on climate as a driving passion is a turn off, even a deal killer, for some.

Strong Towns is a bottom-up revolution calling for bottom-up action. It is difficult to detangle the conversation on how to respond to climate change from the corresponding top-down political agenda that accompanies it. Like it or not, the national conversation on climate change is coded for people who are not only comfortable with broad, aggressive, top-down action, they demand it.

For example, I was a recently a guest on the Volts podcast where the host, David Roberts, asked me this question (time stamp 1:06:48):

Do you see bottom-up reform in cities moving fast enough, or being dramatic enough, to get a handle on greenhouse gas emissions? I can envision a lot of good things coming out of bottom-up [action], but it's real hard for me to envision climate change coming under control without some centralized, top-down action. 

The question is framed as an either/or—two mutually exclusive paths. Of course, it doesn’t necessarily need to be, but I answered the question in that way. Here’s my reply: 

Let me make this a fair question. So, we have Option A, which is some type of a top-down action to address climate change. And we have Option B, which is a bottom-up action to address climate change. And Option A and Option B are in a race against each other to see who can get to where we need to be.

What I would suggest to you is that Option A has zero chance, or near zero chance, of getting to the finish line. People can argue with that and say, “If we just got an overwhelming number of people elected…”

Look, the most dedicated-to-[addressing]-climate-change president that has ever been has just done a gas tax holiday. We're not at some tipping point where people are serious about it. 

People ask me: What's the number one strategy we can do at the local level to build a strong town? I’m like, one, go out and plant trees. Street trees are the lowest-cost, highest-returning investment that can be made. 

Two, get people walking and biking. Build a culture of biking and a culture of walking. Three, fill your parking lots with stuff. Get rid of parking lots and fill them with things.

Now, you tell me, if your strategy is to get the right people elected, they need to have the guts to pass the right package, to do the right stuff, so that we get some action on climate change… Or, we can make a bottom-up choice to emphasize communities that plant trees, get people walking, and get rid of parking—which one is going to be further along the race a decade from now?

I don’t even think it’s close.

As it relates to Strong Towns, the climate change issue is difficult to talk about because it is so heavily coded for top-down action. That coding crowds out—and often negates—serious conversations about bottom-up strategies, particularly approaches that would have greater impact while also having broader political appeal. See the question above: either/or, mutually exclusive. It is difficult to detangle what part of this is a political strategy to motivate people to vote for a specific national team and which part is a genuine policy strategy to pass important legislation. The conversation becomes even more problematic when bad federal infrastructure legislation is marketed as climate action. 

(Source: Unsplash.)

There seems to be a growing awareness among many climate activists that the instinct to centralize power into fewer hands (in government and in the private sector) is what led prior generations to centralize the electric grid around large, coal-burning power plants, build a national highway system that focused primarily on suburban transportation instead of interstate travel, and offshore our dirtiest industries to countries that lack our sensibilities on the environment.

The awareness is growing, but the instinct to centralize power remains. That instinct is problematic for our conversation and, in my opinion, a barrier to action on climate change and environmental issues more broadly.

For example, there is no way we are going to experience meaningful changes in federal transportation policy without broad, bottom-up support for a new approach. There's a reason why most of the national advocates for better transportation policy come out of working in local government. And what do they tend to advocate for? Listening more to local communities. Focusing on block-level needs. You know, a bottom-up, Strong Towns approach.

A meaningful transition on transportation policy will only happen from the bottom up. This is especially true because it's so tightly connected to zoning, economic development, and other hyper-local activities. That's not true across all sectors. For example, reforming agriculture policy is a major part of climate action, but it’s not something we work on at Strong Towns. That’s okay.

Ultimately, my core message to those who want Strong Towns to focus on climate advocacy is this: We will all be a lot better off, and make a ton more progress on shared objectives, if more of us focused locally most of the time, and did that with large, generous hearts. Yet, increasingly, we are prompted to focus on big national fights. We are called to take our energy and inject it—along with the language, framing, and (increasingly) anger, animosity, and antagonism of a nationalized debate—into our local conversations. This is most unhelpful in changing people’s hearts, not to mention counterproductive if the goal is to move our neighbors to action.

Maybe you care about Strong Towns because of climate change. That's great. You are welcome here, but we don't want to create a litmus test that everyone has to share the exact same motivations. We should never make it a prerequisite that we all agree on federal policy or who should represent us in Congress in order to do something helpful to our neighborhood. The urgent struggles we have right in front of us require us to work together. Let’s make those relationships our top priority.

There are lots of climate organizations out there. Climate change is the problem they're taking on. When what they want to work on overlaps with what we work on (and that happens a lot), we're happy to partner, but climate change is not our mission. Do the policies we support happen to reduce emissions? They do, and dramatically so, but our focus is on fixing a broken development pattern. 

There are numerous benefits of a Strong Towns approach that have attracted people from across the political spectrum for all sorts of different reasons. Let's focus on that shared transformative goal, one that will help all of us build stronger communities, rather than our differing motivations.

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