Who should I be talking with?

A message from President & CEO Dr. Max Holmes

Here’s a reality that I share with many in the climate community—the people I talk with most often about climate change tend to be people who already see it the way I do. They also tend to be people who I agree with on a variety of other issues, including those that have little or nothing to do with climate change. We validate one another, rehash the same arguments, and, I suspect, grow less persuasive to those outside the circle.

The fundamental science is settled: climate change is real, we’re the cause, and it is serious. Science is the foundation upon which Woodwell stands, and we won’t concede an inch on it. But how we communicate and who we communicate with is another issue. I’m increasingly convinced we can and must do a better job talking with people who come from different backgrounds and have different perspectives to accelerate progress on climate solutions.

So I’ve been seeking out people with a range of views, and I plan to increasingly do so. I’ve talked with the climate director at a major oil company, with the founders of a company studying whether we can cool the planet by putting particles in the stratosphere, and with religious conservatives and evangelicals who want climate action—all who are in many ways on the fringes of the climate community.

My mandate at Woodwell is climate change and climate solutions, and I won’t turn away anyone who wants climate progress because we may disagree on other issues, particularly those that have little to do with climate. If you want to tackle climate change, and do it in a just and equitable way, I don’t need you to share the rest of my politics. Climate change did not start out as a liberal issue, and it should not exclusively be one. Climate change impacts all life on our planet. When we let climate action get bundled with a broader ideological package, we hand half the country a reason to tune out, and we make the problem harder to solve for everyone. I don’t want Woodwell to reinforce that divide, even by accident. The cause is too important to be anyone’s partisan property.

I know some of you will read this uneasily. Some will worry that I’m giving a platform to some of the very interests that spent decades muddying the water. I take that worry seriously. It’s why I welcome the discussion about where to draw the lines. But I firmly believe that trying to understand someone is different than endorsing them, and listening is not surrender.

Preaching to the choir has its place. The choir needs tending, and even the convinced must be moved from belief to action. But the bigger task is to broaden the choir, to bring in voices that have never felt at home in it before. That is why I want more diverse voices in our monthly Woodwell Climate Conversations and other discussions we host—not to relitigate the physics, but to widen the range of vantage points on what we do about it. I’d rather Woodwell be the place where hard conversations happen than the place where comfortable ones repeat.

So I’ll keep asking myself the question, and I’ll ask it of you: who should I be talking with?

Onward,