A news reporter’s failed joke contains a pearl of wisdom. Surviving WW3, our climate civil war, requires us to stop thinking of the environment as an ‘…and finally’ news item.
Weaving separate strands into complex narratives is part of the storyteller’s craft – but so too is regularly drawing your audience’s attention to the big picture. When it comes to climate news reporting, we could all do with a lot more dot-connecting, and a lot less ‘silo-ing’.
A joke falls flat
If you’re not one of the millions who’ve seen the Dalai Lama ‘make me one with everything’ video since it started doing the rounds in 2011, here’s a summary.
An Australian TV personality/morning news presenter lands an interview with the Dalai Lama. Unable to repress his larrikin irreverence, he tells the Dalai Lama a joke about the Dalai Lama.
Leaning forward, speaking slowly, arm outstretched, smiling with full eye contact, he tells the Dalai Lama ‘The Dalai Lama walks into a pizza shop, and says ‘Can you make me one with everything?’.
The Dalai Lama doesn’t get it.
The spiritual leader of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism does his best to understand. He looks at his interviewer, then to his translators, for enlightenment.
Born Tenzin Gyatso in 1935, in a yakshed in a remote part of Tibet, the 14th Dalai Lama was one of sixteen children of an impoverished, illiterate family. We can’t know if the infant Tenzin knew he was the reincarnation of Gendün Drubpa, who a Ming warlord in 1578 posthumously awarded the title ‘Holiness Knowing Everything Vajradhara Dalai Lama’.
Maybe the newborn knew his fate would include, 76 years later, being told a gag by a minor Australian TV personality. If so, this vision didn’t stretch to knowing that for native English speakers ‘one with everything’ can mean both nirvana and ‘all the pizza toppings you have’.
As off-camera translators attempt to explain the joke to his Holiness, his interviewer holds his head in his hands, saying ‘I knew that wouldn’t work’, while peeking at the camera.
The combination of the religious leader’s genial bafflement, and the cheeky interviewer’s theatrical embarrassment, have made the clip a viral cringe classic.
The clip introduced both personalities to a global online audience. The clip has become a meme for spectacular poor judgement. We won’t mention the geopolitics implicit in the Dalai Lama’s exile since he fled to India in 1959, or discuss the etiquette of interviewing religious leaders.
That’s not why we mention this video clip in the context of ecological sustainability.
We’re all in it together
This clip’s lesson for environmental activists and sustainability advocates is, ironically, more literal.
‘Being one with everything’ is a crude, but accurate, expression of anything holistic, from religion and homeopathy to ecology and cosmology.
‘One with everything’ may be cod-spiritual, but the notion of universal interconnectivity underpins all forms of environmentalism. Hippy-dippy tree-huggers, climate science professors, and everyone in between, may have different ways of expressing the notion, but all concur that Nature is both complex and interconnected.
Life on Earth’s complexity can itself be expressed in simple or complex terms.
Hollywood screenwriters can boil it down to four words. When a dinosaur theme-park goes wrong in Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum’s told-you-so scientist marvels how:
‘life finds a way’
The compilers of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports use more scientific language to describe the real-world version of the same thing.
The climate science, ecologist, chemistry and physics experts deploy polysyllabic strings of Latinate vocabulary, to precisely document and model our actual human-induced environmental disaster.
Alternative punchlines
The reams of scientific language and data-laden appendices found in IPCC reports, however, express the same fundamental truth:
- Mess with nature, expect unpredictable results
Even if humans usually fail to act on this insight, we’ve always known this corollary of our ‘one with everything’ connectedness.
Cavemen made marks on caves to thank the Gods for a successful hunt. Farmers still pray for rain. Any form of religious or spiritual belief, ancient or modern, mainstream or cult, is defined by its privileged access to the super-natural. They all acknowledge the universal truths, that:
- everything is connected
- humans are woefully ignorant about those connections
- the consequences of interfering with this complex system are beyond our understanding or control
That Australian TV presenter probably didn’t have this in mind when attempting his Dalai Lama joke. Nevertheless, Buddhism is just one religion that acknowledges human impotence in the face of God/Nature’s ineffable workings.
Buddhists aspire to be ‘one with everything’ because it recognises our place in this unimaginably complex universe.
To understand this is to struggle against our instincts for self-importance. It requires humility, acceptance of our human frailty. Enlightenment requires us to recognise our arrogance in thinking we’re in control of this world of infinitely complex interconnections.
Such stories are woven through human history:
- Slaves holding laurel wreaths above Roman caesars parading their triumphs, whispered ‘Memento Mori’ (“remember you are mortal”) in their ears.
- Generations of Japanese emperors, venerated as living Gods, lived as puppets of their shoguns.
- Romantic poets warned us of the fate of Ozymandius.
Given this, why are we so reluctant to acknowledge this universal truth when it comes to telling stories about climate change?
The storytelling challenge
Chaos theory expresses the workings of nature via advanced mathematics. Put simply, it describes how:
a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.
Even this definition-for-dummies is a bit technical for most non-mathematicians. Fortunately, chaos theoreticians with a penchant for storytelling have come up with an accessible metaphor for us mortals.
Even a child can grasp the concept of ‘the butterfly effect’.
A butterfly flaps its wings, setting in motion a chain of events that result in a tornado on the other side of the world.
This is good storytelling. By skipping the mathematical equations, ‘the butterfly effect’ reveals the pearl of truth, expressed in everyday language.
The storytelling challenge of expressing complex science simply is a key weapon in the most critical war in human history.
The war to end all wars
WWIII, arguably, kicked off in 1977. That was the year the Exxon board read a report by its in-house science team. The report concluded:
- The Greenhouse Effect was real
- Exxon and other oil companies were making it worse
- Exxon could prosper mightily becoming an energy company and switching to renewables
Instead, the Exxon board suppressed the report, disbanded the team, swore them to secrecy, and started a decades-long misinformation campaign to continue business as usual.
Think of it as a sneak attack that meant most people only recently realised there’s a war on.
Who’s winning?
- Pre-industrial levels of greenhouse gases were steady at 280 parts per million (ppm).
- By 1977, it was 333ppm
- In 2025 it’s 430 and rising
WW3 climate war
WW3 is being fought between humans and humans.
The battleground determining the future of our species is the chemical composition of our atmosphere.
Ppm concentration is a scorecard to determine who’s winning, measuring the heating effect as we choose to envelop our only home in a thicker blanket of greenhouse gases.
The weapons are fossil fuels, trees, algae, plankton etc..
But mainly Stories.
Those that profit from our fossil fuel addiction tell stories to convince us we should continue business as usual, even though they know its disastrous consequences.
The simpler these stories are, the better. Different stories are deployed to maximum effect on different types of people. Basic categories in Big Oil’s story arsenal include:
- Denial: climate change doesn’t exist
- Delusion: climate change exists, but it’s nothing to do with us
- Deflection: liberty to lie is more important than climate change
- Despair: climate change is real, but we can’t do anything about it
Within these categories, specific stories are further tailored to deter carbon reduction in specific areas of human activity involving burning hydrocarbons. Some examples:
- Transport: Electric vehicles (EV) range anxiety
- Homes: Heat pumps are noisy
- Plastics: Recycling plastics is ‘green’
- Food: Induction hobs are puny, as are vegetarians
- Energy: Wind turbines kill birds/are ugly. Solar panels don’t work in the dark
- Evidence: Scientists aren’t 100% certain
Big Oil knows these stories are disingenuous, but pushes them because they justify inaction. Inaction sets in motion their own ‘butterfly effect’, based on behavioural psychology rather than physics. It goes like this:
- Humans fear change.
- We’re pre-disposed to believe stories that justify inaction.
- Inaction means we keep burning fossil fuels.
- So we add more carbon to the atmosphere.
- Amplified greenhouse effect means a hotter planet.
To put it another way, an even more unpredictable future, where flocks of dragons, rather than butterflies, flap their giant wings.
The peculiar nature of this war is that while it’s easy to identify the warriors at the extremes (Big Oil vs. Climate Activists), it’s actually mainly being fought within individual humans.
To use the oft-quoted closing words of Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address as US President, it pits us against the ‘better angels of our nature’.
Lincoln was referring to slavery, but in truth we’re all in a constant battle between our better angels (urging us to fly less, eat less meat and take public transport, for the greater good) and our worse angels (excusing us not to, for our short-term selfish good).
The battleground is the No Man’s Land of the gap between what we know we should do, and what we want to do.
WW3 is the war of cognitive dissonance, fought with competing narratives, each making us the hero of our own story.
Science and storytelling
Here’s an early skirmish in the WW3 climate war, which took place in a Wiltshire village pub, a few years before Exxon asked its science team to investigate whether their products were changing our climate.
The story emerged in a recent biography of polymath maverick inventor/scientist James Lovelock.
In a corner of the Bell Inn, Bowerchalke, Lovelock debated his own storytelling dilemma, with two drinking buddies.
What, he asked old William and young Terry, should he call his hypothesis, based on decades of original research, that Earth is a self-regulating living organism?
He laid out the pros and cons:
- Snappy title: Pros: wider audience and more impact. Cons: misinterpretation, deliberate or not, and being trivialised.
- Scientific title: Pros: professional gravitas and credibility. Cons: risks obscurity and neglect.
Both drinking buddies urged him to go snappy.
Old William, a retired local schoolteacher, even suggested a name – the mother god of Greek mythology.
Young Terry, an aspiring writer, loved this name, and urged Lovelock to trust his novelist’s instinct and adopt it.
So, now you know the role that Nobel Literature Laureate William Golding, and best-selling novelist Terry Pratchett, played in determining the title of Lovelock’s 1975 groundbreaking New Scientist article:
The Quest for Gaia.
Climate in the news
They say variety is the spice of life, which might explain why we insist on labelling news items with different topics: politics, diplomacy, religion, culture, sport etc.
Even though you’d think that in WW3, climate change would be the only story.
It’s hard to imagine higher stakes. Things that will be determined by our action, or inaction, in effective carbon drawdown include:
- The fate of our species
- Our children and grandchildren’s futures
- The short-term (in cosmic terms) composition of our planet’s atmosphere
- The future of all life on Earth
Yet climate change, and humanity’s struggle to kick our 200-year-old fossil fuel addiction, is constantly relegated to a separate, constrained, low status. Why?
Let’s start by answering the easier question of ‘How?’
The news equation
Every minute around the world, news editors rank the relative importance of news items.
The items may change from hour to hour, but the process doesn’t.
- At the top, the heavy stories: important, urgent, significant, meaningful
- At the bottom, the light stories: trivial, marginal, entertaining, amusing
In recent years, news organisations have created dedicated reporters and departments to cover climate change. Stories from these Environment reporters vie for attention with all the other departments.
Very occasionally, ‘environmental’ stories lead the news, usually at the conclusion of annual COP conferences.
More often, they float in the middle. News editors tend to rate climate stories as:
- Significant enough to make the news
- Important enough to be granted their own category, like Sports, Religion or Weather.
- Not important enough to trump the usual political crisis/‘natural’ disaster ‘top’ leads
- Serious enough not to be relegated to the ‘…and finally’ slot.
The ‘…and finally’ slot is news jargon for the final item, designed to lift your spirits. It’s usually occupied by waterskiing dogs and heart-warming charitable acts.
Or by amusing clips, like the Dalai Lama ‘make me one with everything’ interview.
Climate reporting’s real problem
The battle between the forces of Inaction/Lies/Fake News, and Action/Truth/Real News, is increasingly being played out in the Wild West of social media platforms.
These corporate-owned behemoths exist to deliver shareholder value. Until they’re regulated as news publishers, rather than as content platforms, it’s safe to assume they will continue to be driven by the same forces that created them, mainly:
- Whatever their algorithms deduce engages, shocks or infuriates us
- The wishes of their advertisers
- The whims of their owners
Old media news organizations may have lost some of their influence, but they still drive the news agenda. In turn, this news agenda drives political pressure. Political pressure, whether in democracies or autocracies, is supposed to lead to changes in government regulation.
Yet the biggest problem is not that media organisations ignore climate issues. We may have been slow to realise WW3 was taking place around us, but no longer.
The problem, rather, is the way our news bulletins still isolate ‘climate stories’ as somehow separate from everything else. Placing climate news in its own silo may be the worst kind of category error.
It encourages complacency. It creates the illusion that our collective decisions on carbon drawdown are unrelated to everything else. Day after day, this cognitive dissonance is being amplified, and normalised.
How often have you heard news anchors solemnly thank their Climate Correspondent, or Environment Editor for their story about some boring conference involving people in suits talking in scientific, technical or political jargon, before ‘moving on’ to an apparently unrelated story like:
- Wars featuring oil-producing nations
- Economic stories driven by oil prices
- Fires, floods, storms and famines exacerbated by rising temperatures
- Refugee crises caused by people fleeing climate crises
- Sports events featuring teams owned by sportwashing petro-states
Yet these stories don’t mention words like ‘climate’, ‘environment’, or ‘green’.
Leave that to the Climate Reporter. Different department.
The real punchline
Golding and Pratchett’s lobbying, in the snug of The Bell Inn, for Lovelock to name his theory after the Greek mother goddess, proved right in the way they predicted.
The name caught on. ‘Gaia theory’, or the ‘Gaia hypothesis’, did indeed grab global headlines. Tick.
But calling it Gaia, instead of ‘a synergistic homeostatic earth science theory of complex systems’ also had the downsides they predicted.
By appearing in mainstream media headlines, Gaia theory attracted trivialisation and misinterpretation.
Calling it ‘Gaia’ gave scientists invested in the status quo an easy line of attack. It made it easier for them to ignore Lovelock’s scientific evidence, and dismiss his theory as hippy woo. Meanwhile, hippies duly embraced it as proof of their woo. Cartoonists, comedians and satirical commentators who didn’t understand the science, relished exposing all these faultlines and contradictions.
But the thing about science, facts and atmospheric physics is that they’re impervious to satire. Stories bounce off them.
Decades of scientific experimentation and observation have confirmed the Gaia hypothesis. Lovelock’s fundamental insight is now elevated from hypothesis into a reliable theoretical foundation for a wide range of earth science disciplines.
All of which confirm the reality of human-induced climate change, despite the well-funded counter-offensive of Big Oil’s nothing-to-see-here stories.
And all of which can be summarized as:
We are one with everything.
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Act now
If you’d like to take action to measurably reduce carbon, including joining the See Through Network, take your pick from the options described here.
None of them promises eternal salvation, or even rewards in this world or the next. On the other hand, none involves giving the See Through Network money.
All are dedicated towards measurable carbon reduction, serving the See Through Goal of Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active.
Not making you one with everything, but seeking to win with everyone.
